PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (28 page)

Late one December afternoon I lifted the receiver of my office telephone and heard a familiar growl: “Rem, come here at once.”

Sorokin had been in and out of the hospital all year, his pallor deepening to a permanent jaundice, his mass of flesh rising like a loaf of bread and gradually immobilizing him in his office chair. His demeanor was somber and worried and he sometimes seemed distracted. A few weeks earlier I had come to his office with a package, and, to our mutual embarrassment, he hadn’t immediately recognized me. Afterwards he muttered something about my hair getting too fucking long, I looked like a goddam, fucking
khipi.

Now he said, “We have a problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Viktor Panteleyev.” He pronounced each syllable of the man’s name slowly, enunciating it carefully, “Is he a friend of yours?”

Sorokin studied me. Afraid of what I might say if I hesitated, I rushed to answer: “Yes.”

Sorokin made a sound halfway between a grunt and a belch and then said, “He must have lost his mind.”

“Oh my God. What did he do?”

“Nothing yet. Some agitators are planning some kind of protest at Pushkin Square this evening at six. He intends to join them.”

“What kind of protest?”

“What do you think? So-called human rights, I suppose.” He sneered and added in contempt, “Decembrists.” The Decembrists had been a group of army officers whose pro-democracy rebellion in December 1825 was savagely put down by Tsar Nicholas I and bravely exalted by Pushkin.

“Panteleyev’s involved?”

“Apparently. He’s a fool. His participation poses a threat to the entire writers’ union. It puts our loyalty in question. Certain members of the Central Committee already have raised their voices against ideological drift. Too much publication abroad, too many European friends, not enough editorial oversight by Glavlit. I can’t say I disagree. Who has the guts to call himself a Marxist-Leninist writer these days?”

“But Panteleyev’s acting on his own!”

“No one acts on his own. He’s a member of the union. The union gives him the right to publish, to call himself a Soviet writer. It gives him housing and social benefits, annual holidays and health care. He has responsibilities in turn, and one of them is not to bring his fellow writers into disrepute.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mean it that way,” I said lamely. “Look, I’ll call him. I’ll ask him not to attend.” This didn’t sound strong enough. “I’ll stop him.”

Sorokin examined me for a moment and then closed his heavy, warted eyelids.

“Boris Stepanovich, do you need something? Some juice?”

He didn’t open his eyes. “Just take care of it,” he said.

No one answered the telephone at Viktor’s. I let it ring ten times and then called again. Then I went down to the café, hoping to find him quaffing a drink before going out to wreck his life. He wasn’t there of course, it had been years since I had seen him in the café. A few heads turned in my direction. I offered a smile and they quickly looked away. Nearly all the tables had been taken, but the room was unusually quiet. They couldn’t speak of what they most wished to speak. Had I been the last to learn of the demonstration?

It was well past five o’clock, already dark. I went for my coat and took a taxi through the wet, pedestrianchoked streets, not directly to Pushkin Square, but down the boulevard a bit, in the hope that I would be able to intercept Viktor on his way. I stood and looked back to the statue, reverse-shadowed by a layer of fresh snow. Pushkin’s curl-topped head was bowed in contemplation. One hand rested in his gown, the other held a derby at his side. In the dark, I couldn’t read the inscription on the statue’s base, but every schoolchild knew it:

No protesters gathered. Only passersby walked through the wet, lightly falling snow. A bus huffed by in a cloud of lingering, neon blue exhaust. Two babushkas swayed across the pavement, lugging what appeared to be either
a large package of fruit preserves or pickles. There was no such thing as an anti-government demonstration in the Soviet Union, just as they didn’t sell
blini
in the Congo.

I continued to stand there, wondering how Viktor had become embroiled in Sorokin’s fantasies. The snow collected on me while it collected on Pushkin, but my overcoat, bought in London, kept me dry. The other pedestrians were also well dressed in warm cloth coats and good boots. To what else could Russians reasonably aspire? With a minute or so left before six, a tall woman in a long black coat emerged from the static that fell across the evening’s empty screen. She was beautiful. It was Marina.

She carried a shopping bag from which emerged a long piece of
kolbasa.
She didn’t see me at first. When she did, from a distance of about ten meters, recognition spilled across her face like ink tipped from a bottle. She halted, but she didn’t smile. She blinked in confusion, a gesture probably reflected on my own face. Then she resumed her approach, moving briskly.

“You’re on your way home,” I called out, not sure that she would stop again.

She brusquely kissed me twice on the cheeks but continued her motion forward.

“I need to be somewhere.”

“Home?”

“Where are
you
going?” she asked. Our questions carried equal measures of hopefulness. Tentatively, she said, “The same place?”

“Home? Your home?” I replied, trying to banter. “Is that an invitation?”

“I have an appointment,” she said guardedly.

“At 6 P.M.? That’s an unusual time for an appointment.”

“A friend.”

“What friend?” I asked. “Somebody I know? Let’s go for a drink.” We were already crossing the street. I blurted, “Are you going to Pushkin Square?”

She smiled cautiously.

“Listen,” I said. “Don’t go. It’s dangerous.”

Her face clouded over. I tried to block her but she walked around me. I hurried after her and took her arm.

“Listen, Marina, I know what they’ve planned. If
I
know, don’t you think the KGB knows? Everyone knows! You’ve been set up!”

“Good. We want the KGB to know. It’s
against
the KGB! What would the point be if they didn’t know?”

“Marina, where do you think you live? One word from Glavlit and you’ll never be published again! They’ll remove your book from the libraries. They’ll remove
you
from the union—then where would you be? Kaluga? Is that what you want? Don’t you want to be a writer?”

“Leave me alone!”

Her long strides had taken us to the edge of Pushkin Square—“Who do you think you’re going to help!” I cried—and suddenly dozens of people converged upon us. It wasn’t a mere chance eddying of the pedestrian flow. For the most part, they looked like intellectuals, poorly dressed and ineptly coifed, and more than enough were Jews. Marina roughly threw off my arm and rushed to the other side of the statue, disappearing behind a line
of four or five women. They were standing in some kind of formation, pale and almost mortally self-conscious.

And then several things happened in what must have been the space of a minute, though the space seemed even more compressed than that, airless and radiant.

A second hand on some unknown watch lurched into the cleavage of a twelve and the line of women marched to the base of the statue. From a worn plastic shopping bag one of them removed a long roll of white cloth on which something, some slogan, had been painted. This woman was middle-aged, squat, with heavy eyeglasses and a long, nearly simian jaw. Tight-lipped, like a high diver at the edge of the board, she passed one end of the cloth to the last woman on the line. It took a moment for them to shake out the banner; even then, even though I was only a few paces away, I could not read the words. As if in another language, or printed in invisible ink, they refused legibility.

Springing from the soil, it seemed, there were then many men with bulky, grotesquely oversized flashcameras. “They’re here!” someone shouted, and others moaned with surprise and fright. The men wore pale brown raincoats. Each time they squeezed off a picture, darting and spinning around us, they grimaced. As the evening landscape turned stark and two-dimensional, the flashes made a soft popping sound that echoed like something from a childhood memory.

It was then that I glimpsed Viktor, standing distant from the melee, a sign of his own hanging from his neck. He seemed disoriented and uncomprehending,
an actual passerby. I could read his sign: “RESPECT THE CONSTITUTION!”

In these electric moments, I thought of grabbing Viktor and pulling him away, but the thought barely lasted its articulation. I stuffed my face into my coat and turned to run. Then suddenly dozens of more men, most of them in leather jackets, arrived among us, further outnumbering the protesters. They headed for the women carrying the banners, making detours to push and throw punches at other civilians. Someone I never saw thumped me on the back, a terrific, expert blow that knocked the wind from me and brought me to my knees. When I looked up, two black Volgas had arrived, and the women were being roughly shoved into them, held firmly by their necks.

The woman who had unfurled the banner was the last to go. Her shopping bag had burst, scattering onto the pavement some groceries and several pages of typescript. Both the groceries and the typescript were being frantically collected by a man in a leather jacket. The woman was also taken by the neck, but the plainclothesman holding her missed the opening into the back of the car and, quite deliberately I was sure, smashed her face into the doorframe. From where I knelt, I could hear the contest of bone against steel. Steel won. Her eyeglasses flew off her broken face and into the street. They lay there as the car drove off.

More photographs were being taken and more arrests were being made. I didn’t search for either Marina or Viktor. Now I succeeded in getting away, my face covered
by the back of my arm. Fifty meters up Gorky Street I overtook pedestrians oblivious to what had just happened, oblivious to my terror. I bumped against them, a few hurled curses at me, and I continued running through the darkness. Down the stairs of an underground passageway across Gorky, I slipped on some ice and took a tumble. As I fell onto the steps, one of my hands was pulled the wrong way, delivering a sharp jolt to my wrist. When I resumed my flight, cold air whipped around my naked left knee.

I was thoroughly winded by the time I reached the union. I didn’t remove my coat—“Rem Petrovich!” shouted old Darya at the coatcheck—and went straight to my office. I collapsed at my desk and then, with the door closed and the lights off, I wept, spasmodically trying to catch my breath. The tears sluiced down my face and flowed into the mucous pouring from my nose. I tasted the salts of humiliation for the first time since I had left Tomsk.

I don’t know how long I wept. Eventually I removed my handkerchief from my jacket and wiped my face. I was still wearing my coat. I sat in the dark for a while, trying to sort out what had happened, what terrible calamity I had narrowly escaped, or perhaps hadn’t escaped at all. The photographers had been all over the place; would the KGB accept Sorokin’s explanation of my attendance? But now my thoughts departed from the practical and the actual. The moment I had taken flight I comprehended the full measure of the difference between my size and the size of the power that commanded the man who
thumped me on my back. It rendered me insignificant, and all the literary pretensions I possessed—as creator, as an individual whose life was bound to his art, as heir to Pushkin, as, ha ha, the unacknowledged legislator of the world—were rendered negligible. How easily I had fallen to my knees ... And then at some indeterminate time, hours later perhaps, the door to my office opened soundlessly and a shadow passed through it.

The door closed and the office was dark again. A featureless gray form hovered before me, radiating heat. For a long time I remained at my desk, waiting for the form to define itself. Finally I stood, became a form myself, and the two forms swelled toward each other. She too wore her coat. My hands slid beneath it, along the back of a damp, moist blouse. Her body quavered beneath my touch, but not from my touch. It was fear, at least at first. Her hands ran along my sides and pressed me to her. A stray photon drifted into the room and phosphoresced in a tear swelling at the surface of one of her eyes. I made out the smear of her mascara. That was the last thing I observed, because suddenly I was bereft of language, even language with which to think. Not a single word was exchanged between us.

A severe flu descended upon me the following week, and I seemed to be ill the remainder of the winter, which I spent mostly under the blankets, tending to myself. Feverish, congested, and exhausted, I lay in bed brooding about the protest and the events that immediately followed it, but in
these days I could barely phrase two consecutive thoughts. I drank weak tea with honey and dried berries; then tea from lime blossoms. I drank warm milk with honey, then with butter, then with Borzhomi water. I placed mustard plaster on my chest. I hung garlic cloves around my neck and stuffed two of them up my nose. That winter I hardly went in to the office. I was waiting for the next shoe to drop, but the demonstration, although well known throughout the city by some kind of jungle telegraph—not a word about it was set into type—didn’t lead to further arrests. No action was taken against Marina, nor against Viktor. No inquiries were made about my own presence on Pushkin Square that evening.

I saw Marina on a few occasions, but not in a private setting, and neither of us took the opportunity to speak with each other. The glow of celebrity had faded from her face and her eyes had become dull. In these encounters, no matter the liveliness of the company, her expression remained pensive. She didn’t offer me any significant look except, once in the café, a kind, mournful smile. These days she seemed to be carrying something deep within her, like the intimate knowledge of her own mortality. In retrospect, I had perceived this the night of the protest. At no time had our embraces and caresses felt like something that was beginning. It had felt, right to the final shudder, like something ending. What was ending, I didn’t comprehend until later.