PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (24 page)

As the landscape bounced in the distance, I marveled at my spitefulness, which was only delaying my arrival at the kolkhoz. It burned in me like a flame. This man was the Russian peasant as he had been known for centuries, a creature of ignorance and superstition, servility and obstinacy, drunkenness and brutality. Fifty years of communism had hardly touched him any more than the previous efforts to reform and Europeanize our country. What could I say that might eventually move him to some awareness of his primitiveness and of his opportunity to escape it? What could I
write?
There was no guarantee that he even knew how to read.

After a quarter of an hour he succeeded in extricating us. The UAZ’s front wheels rolled onto the pavement. His face was florid as he returned to the truck, but he made no comment. I looked across the borderless fields and imagined that I saw all the Asian continent before me; it held Muscovy with a gun to its head. We approached
the kolkhoz just as night fell. The driver’s stink had surely permeated my clothes, but I wouldn’t have time to change them.

The UAZ entered a large unlit compound in which were located a number of nondescript but well-maintained agricultural buildings, including several stables. Farm equipment stood idle, as if on display. The compound’s most prominent feature was the House of Culture, a white neo-neoclassical structure built from a design used in thousands of kolkhozes, villages, and provincial towns throughout the country. A series of concrete pillars carried the pediment. On it was inscribed a quotation illegible in the dark. I stepped from the machine and walked up to the silent building.

Neither door behind the columns would open. I turned and saw that the UAZ, whose engine had roared like a jet’s all the way from the station, had left soundlessly and that now the compound was completely deserted, without even a chicken scratching in the gravel. The evening was calm and the first stars were visible over the purpling fields. I keenly felt my solitude and, even as the nightmarish thought that I had somehow come on the wrong night or even to the wrong kolkhoz slowly descended upon me, I enjoyed the quiet of the evening. I closed my eyes for a moment.

“Rem Petrovich!”

One of the doors had swung open without apparent human agency. I felt a blast of yeasty warmth and found myself at the back of a brightly lit auditorium. Hundreds of heads were turned in my direction. From nearly every
face radiated a smile of welcome. As if in a trance, I stepped through the portal, past the shadowed, matronly sorceress who had invoked my name and patronymic.

Is there any question why I went on these trips? It was a full house—of readers, those dear, dear, hopeful, faithful readers, their eyes bright, their fingertips hungry for the touch of the page. Kerchiefed and capped heads testified to the universality of the respect with which literature was held in our country. Jackets and taffeta dresses in turn testified to its high honor. I glided down the aisle past rows of fresh-faced young men and cherry-lipped farm girls. Readers, readers all.

At the front of the room, beneath a red banner, a long dais was covered by a white tablecloth on which stood green bottles of mineral water and a vase of pink lilacs. Basmanian and Schenëv were there, along with a writer I didn’t recognize. Another unfamiliar writer, a longlegged girl in her early twenties, stood in front of the table, reading at a battered iron lectern that appeared to date from the early, battered years of collectivization.

Lost in her own text, she was the last in the hall to become aware of my arrival. She was declaiming her words with great feeling and concentration, as if testing their sound against the walls of the auditorium. When she finally sensed the audience’s distraction, she glanced up from the lectern and, with a suddenness that surprised us both, her pair of dark, ovaline eyes found mine. I momentarily faltered in my advance to the dais.

Then she glanced to her side at Anton, who had
displayed his full set of teeth at the moment he had seen me. He said something, the soundless shadow of my name, and then she too showed her teeth—but it was the instant before she turned to him that continues to vibrate outside time. By some trick of the light or of that sadistic joker, chance, we had caught each other unguarded. Now the girl offered me a smile that was both warm and embarrassed.

I approached the front of the hall. “Forgive me for interrupting you,” I whispered. An empty chair waited for me at the end of the dais. I kept my head down, as if not to draw any further attention to myself.

The girl resumed reading. Still waking from the dreamy confusion of my arrival, I gradually settled myself at the table. A tiled mosaic portrait of Lenin on the left wall gazed upon a team of farm workers at harvest on the right. The banner above our heads was stirred by an unaccountable breeze. The girl, big boned like the kolkhoz girls and in a plain brown dress, was reading some prose, either a story or a memoir. I wasn’t yet ready to listen for its meaning, but the sound of her voice was as deep and clear as a cistern, and in it I thought I heard a familiar cadence.

She finished. It was now my turn. I removed a folder of typed pages from my suitcase as the fat, nervous kolkhoz chairman garbled the title of my first novel by way of introduction. I replaced him at the lectern and made a few humorous apologies about my late arrival (while working in the book’s correct title). The audience laughed as easily as breaking a pane of glass, and in the
shards of laughter falling around me I recognized the girl’s, glittering and sharp. And then I decided not to read from my recently published second novel, as I had planned: I would read from my third, still in progress. In the flush of creation, I believed it was the best thing I had ever written. Indeed, I believed it was the best thing
anyone
had ever written. Lately I had been carrying a few completed chapters in my briefcase, not so much to show other people, but as a talisman, a reminder of my talent. I now removed the manuscript from the folder.

Once I began my descent down the first page, I forgot the girl and the rest of the audience. I was the work’s only reader, attentive and discerning, its perfect reader, and I thrilled to its broadcast over the hall’s modest amplification system. The damn thing was brilliant; there were twists of plot and turns of language in it that surprised me as if I were reading it for the first time. When it was over, I looked up and nearly expected to be crushed by admirers.

I wasn’t crushed. The audience remained in its seats and applauded, even enthusiastically, but not as enthusiastically, I thought, as it should have. A twinge of disappointment ran along the left side of my face.

It was only a brief sensation, for the program was ended and, after the kolkhoz chairman, clapping emphatically, shouted his thanks to us, the most appreciative fragments of the audience surged to the front of the hall. Several of the kolkhozniks clutched copies of my novels to be signed. Others crowded around my colleagues, including the girl, who seemed unprepared for
the attention. I watched her while I attended to my readers. She had long, straight black hair and as she stooped to take in the words of her interlocutors, it fell across the side of her face. She scooped the hair away from her eyes, an annoyed but fetching gesture to be repeated several times within the minute.

As I signed the last book, the girl approached me, led by Anton. She was tall and moved with a slight deficit of grace that accentuated her physicality.

“I told you he’d make it,” Anton said triumphantly.

The girl embraced my hands. Hers were warm and fleshy.

Anton said something by way of introduction. I didn’t listen, I was weighing her hands and still considering what had been confessed and exchanged between us. She let my hands go. They remained in the air, buoyed by the remnant heat.

“Rem Petrovich,” she murmured, her speaking voice softer and rounder than the one she had used to read her work. “Thank you for everything. None of this would have happened without you.”

Anton said, “In September we’re publishing two stories and eight poems. They’re going to make an impact, Rem. Everyone at the journal is looking forward to it.”

“Kaluga,” I muttered to myself, the light flicking on at last.

Marina Burchatkina continued to gaze at me with a solar warmth. But then she squeezed Anton’s arm. This caused a corresponding compression around my chest. To think what I had done, the promises I had made, the
lies I had told, the imbroglios in which I had involved myself, the embarrassments I had suffered, and the pain I had visited upon others, only recently, to sleep with girls half as attractive! I had to look away.

There was a banquet later that evening, the second in as many days, accompanied by toasts in praise of ourselves and our literary forebears, and presentations of the local wine and kolkhoz-made cheeses. It was all very nice—the apparently oafish kolkhoz chairman turned out to be a raconteur and a lover of good literature—but all the while I kept my eye on the girl. She seemed preoccupied. So did Basmanian sitting at her left. I suspected that they were playing footsie beneath the linen tablecloth. Later, in my spartan room in the administration building, an acrid, pale yellow cloud lowered upon me.

 

Later that year, I saw Marina and Anton together several times in the union café, once at a concert, and at any number of parties. At one of the parties, Anton momentarily disentangled himself from his protégée and approached me.

“Rem, she’s enchanting. I owe you one.”

“Shit,” I said. “You owe me a
dozen.”

 

That autumn Marina’s work was published in Anton’s journal and I studied it, trying to discern those qualities that I had overlooked in my first reading. I sought to approach her stories and poetry with neither the negative prejudice of having already read and dismissed them nor
the positive one produced by their appearance in print. I was keenly aware that publication adds luster to a work; a manuscript comes to you stark naked.

But true literature always showed. When I was young, I wondered if my stories seemed jejune and awkward only because I was reading them in my own notebook, in my own clumsy, heavy-footed hand. As an experiment, I had copied “The Captain’s Daughter” into my own notebook, hoping to see it diminished. But before I had completed even the first paragraph, I felt Pushkin’s power flowing in a rush through my arm and the clench of my fingertips. The words blazed onto the faintly ruled paper. After the first page, although the results of the experiment were conclusive, I could not resist copying the story to the very end, merely for the pleasure of witnessing the words of a genius emerge from under the nub of my pen.

Conversely, ten-point Pragmatica on heavy stock did not transform Marina’s work into something of significant literary value. As poor as it was, the work was not a particularly freakish inclusion in a literary journal. Every year the journals printed a fair amount of garbage, either for political or personal considerations, or simply through errors of judgment. Although theory held that editors were bound by the decisions of their editorial boards, in practice they could publish whatever they wished, and Goskomizdat guaranteed that a certain number of copies would be printed. (Goskomizdat also set quotas for pulping.) One could usually guess the reasons behind a poor writer’s success. Anton escorted Marina around town all that autumn and winter, basking in the heat of her beauty.
I heard that they were sent together on a “literary youth” junket to Tashkent, her first airplane flight, and never emerged from his hotel room, not even for the gala Uzbek national folk program.

I passed the journal to Lydia and asked her to read Marina’s stories and poems.

“Garbage,” she announced afterwards.

“Thank you,” I said, and kissed her hard on the lips, more emphatically than I had intended to.

She raised her eyebrows.

“Are there any other stories that you would like me to tell you are garbage?”

Later that year, I heard that Marina had submitted a novel to the Sovremennik publishing house, which agreed to bring it out in the spring. Was this Anton’s doing? I hadn’t believed that his influence extended that far. Was she sleeping with someone at Sovremennik? Who? Or was the novel genuinely good? As Lydia contentedly endured her second winter in Peredelkino, I waited for Marina’s first novel with deepening anticipation.

I saw her quite often, at parties and literary affairs, and each time she embraced me warmly. We met in a corridor of the Rostov mansion one evening. Her body pressed against mine a second longer than necessary and I was fully immersed in the nimbus of her perfume.

“Kaluga,” I murmured as she slowly disengaged herself.

“Have you been there?”

“I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“I’ve moved to Moscow, you know.”

There was a rising note of triumph in her voice. It was not easy to get a Moscow residence permit.

“Your own flat?”

“I share it with two girls. But I have my own room. I’m not writing in the pantry anymore.”

“Mmmmm,” I said, pretending to recall her letter only with difficulty. Then I gave up the pretense and ventured, “And not in your pajamas?”

Her face lit at my concession.

“Sometimes I do,” she said.

“They’ll be famous pajamas someday.”

“And you?”

“I wear a shirt and tie when I write. I like to look my best when I meet the Muse. Of course, I’m sure the Muse is pleased with your pajamas.”

“They’re nothing special. You’ll have to judge for yourself.”

When she smiled, her mouth opened, almost carnivorously, it seemed to me. I wondered if she wrote with such heat, by herself, at her desk, in her pajamas. I could hardly bear to look into her face. In the glistening of the saliva on her teeth, I found a world-consuming avidity.

“Sure,” I said, backing away.

“Yes.”