PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (30 page)

He said, “It won’t hurt for you to be the one to submit the resolution. People have memories, you know. They know about the role you played in her career.”

“I hardly had anything to do with her. Anyway, she’s in Paris now. People should forget her.”

“You don’t understand, the entire union is under a microscope. Not just the leadership: the rank and file too. They’re talking about a new censorship regime, closing literary journals, ending foreign travel.”

“Because of a single letter in
Le Monde?”

“It’s the whole international situation. They’re going back through everything that’s been written in the past ten years, looking for divergences from Party views. Suslov’s involved! The pressure’s incredible. The union has to respond in a positive way.”

“Fine, I’ve got no objection to that.”

“Look, Rem, all they’re asking for is a little self-criticism. It’s nothing.”

“For what? For reading her work?”

“For recommending her for publication. You know, write about how your proletarian vigilance had been relaxed, about how you were misled.”

“But
you
published her!”

“I’m also writing a letter of self-criticism. I’m pouring a bucket of shit on my head.”

“And you had an affair with her! You spent a week with her in Tashkent!”

“That’s personal. It had nothing to do with politics,” Anton said. The recollection brightened his smile.

Later that day, the text of Radio Beacon’s attack on Marina Burchatkina was posted in the glassed-in bulletin board in the lobby outside the café. It was signed and ostensibly written by six Heroes of Socialist Labor, members of the mechanics’ union at the Zil Autoworks.

 

In September 1944, as the Red Army pressed on toward central Europe, an ineptly planned uprising by Slovak partisans was countered by the 357th German Infantry Division and the 108th
Panzar
Division. Rushing to the Slovaks’ aid, the Red Army descended from its positions in the Carpathian mountains and met the Germans in and around Krosno. Two days of close fighting ensued. As it advanced into the Dukla Pass, the 38th Red Army’s first Guards Calvary received orders to open a narrow corridor, less than 2000 meters wide, between the villages of Lysa Gura and Gloitse. Leaving behind its heavy weaponry and much of its ammunition, the Soviets passed through a zone raked by machine-gun and mortar fire. My father, a young lieutenant who had won decorations at Lvov, took a sniper’s bullet in the throat. It was not necessarily a mortal wound, members of his company said later, but without quick medical attention he bled to death on the pass’s wooded slopes.

As our government propagandists reminded us, the Soviet people had paid a high price for the liberation of Czechoslovakia. Even among my liberal friends, there were now murmurs that Dubcek had left us no alternative.

Meanwhile, news of Marina Burchatkina had, by way of returning travelers and those who had access to Western media, filtered through to the Rostov mansion.
She had appeared on French TV. From there she went to America. It was said that her publisher offered her a lucrative contract for her next work, a book of political essays. She became romantically linked to a famous Hollywood director.

Every piece of news was treated with ironic contempt by my colleagues, but I kept my silence, trying to identify the precise nature of my loss. I now spent hardly any time at the union, not even in the café. I worked every day at home, when I did any work at all. In the evenings I stayed home too; suddenly, there were no parties, no salons, no encounters with foreign guests. Out at the dacha, I mentioned Marina’s spectacular defection to Lydia, but she shrugged it off. For her, the invasion of Czechoslovakia had more serious consequences: the flow of foreign books into Russia, whether authorized or not, was slowed to a desperate trickle.

I had never told her about Pushkin Square. Now I didn’t tell her that I had been asked to sign another petition, nor that it had been suggested that I sponsor a resolution. The only piece of writing that I produced that autumn was a lengthy and flamboyantly damning letter of self-criticism, which I tore into little pieces and flushed down the toilet.

A few weeks after my encounter with Anton, I was called into Sorokin’s office. He shoved a piece of paper across the desk.

“Read this.”

Marina Burchatkina’s open letter to the Politburo, published all over the world, had been printed on a numbered document that was labeled the property of the
Committee for State Security. I had not heard of anyone who had actually seen the letter, among neither travelers to the West nor the privileged recipients of foreign newspapers. I took a seat and read it, aware that Sorokin was closely reading my face, on which I had pasted a stern, worried expression. I immediately recognized that the letter was no great advance in the literature of political philosophy; it was an absurd amalgam of special pleading and whiffy analysis, to which were tacked irrelevant quotations from Gandhi, Tolstoy, the Czech statesman Jan Masaryk, and Lenin himself, and then John Lennon. When I reached the end (“Comrade Brezhnev, please give peace a chance!”), I said, “It’s vile.”

“I’m relieved to know that you think so. Because some suspicion has been voiced that you might sympathize with these anti-Soviet sentiments.”

“I can’t believe—”

“So why isn’t your name on the union petition?”

“I wasn’t happy with the wording. You know, as a writer, how you hate to put your name on anything that you haven’t written yourself.”

In fact, Sorokin probably didn’t hate it at all, he probably took it as a matter of course. He responded to my well-rehearsed evasion by pressing heavily with his elbows against his desk. His face flushed and his arms trembled as he rose from his seat. By the time he reached his feet, he was breathing heavily. He moved with an unfamiliar, listing limp across the room to a gray gunmetal safe implanted in the wall between two bookcases. He blocked my view of it as he turned the wheel. He removed
something from inside the safe, brought it back to his desk, and laid it carefully before me.

It was Marina’s portrait, encased in a thin crimson border: the cover of
Time
magazine. I recognized that I was not meant to touch it. The picture had been done in oils, and my first thought was that it was not a good likeness, that this was not as I had known her. While the artist had succeeded in making her attractive, he appeared to have added years and hard experience to her beauty. As she gazed up from the cover, her face was drawn and slightly battered. The resolute set of her jaw raised a faint crease along the base of her left temple, her moral fiber made visible.

The gross tangibility of this image gave me pause. I had to concede something to the vision of the artist, even if he were merely a workaday magazine illustrator. Action was character. The actual Marina Burchatkina was not the person that, entangled by desire, I thought I had known. I gazed into the printed eyes, unable to turn away. Sorokin spoke over my shoulder, his voice thick.

“That’s their new heroine, their Joan of Arc. She pours lies and filth on the name of the Soviet people. They won’t rest until the Soviet Union is destroyed.”

I studied the picture, trying to commit it to memory. I thought it was the last thing I would ever know about her.

“No, Brezhnev’s destroying it himself,” I murmured, not bearing to look at Sorokin. “This invasion puts back the political development of our country twenty years. It’s a disaster for my generation.”

This was the first time I had ever articulated this thought. It was not even something I had known I believed. The force of my belief made me dizzy.

Sorokin belched. It came out in a growl.

“Rem, you’re so fucking smart. Tell me then, how did I learn in advance about Pushkin Square?”

I turned to face him. He was leaning on the desk, towering over me.

“I don’t know. From one of the security organs, I suppose.”

“Damn straight I did. But who in the security organs?”

“How would I know? I don’t care. I have no idea how the KGB operates. They must have placed an informer among the demonstrators. I know they have contacts in the union.” I waved vaguely with my hand, not wanting to directly accuse him.

Sorokin continued to stare, his eyes brimming with disgust.

“What?” I said.

He didn’t reply.

“Bullshit,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”

Now Sorokin’s expression turned smug. He enjoyed this, it recalled the literary wars of his youth, against Zamyatin, against Babel, against Akhmatova. The color that had come into his face made him look healthier than he had in years.

“It’s impossible,” I protested. “She was probably one of the ringleaders.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“What’s right?”

“She was a ringleader, she was an agent provocateur.
She smoked out the so-called dissidents. Too bad you didn’t stop Panteleyev. We wanted to keep the union out of it.”

“How can that be! She just defected! She wrote an anti-Soviet letter to
Le Monde!”

“That’s what’s so despicable. Here is someone, a supposedly loyal citizen of the state who, after years of delicate cooperation, suddenly has a so-called ‘crisis of conscience.’ She changes sides, acts the pure innocent, the defender of liberty against the very system that helped bring her to prominence in the first place. She planned this, she knew she was going to defect when she applied for the trip to Paris. She wasn’t coming back. The KGB searched her flat. It was cleaned out, not a single manuscript or notebook or address.”

My voice was no more that a whispered croak: “When did she apply?”

He was distracted by his anger and didn’t answer at once, not understanding the import of my question. I repeated it.

“Last winter. Right after Pushkin Square.” Glaring, he said, “Write your own statement.” He added sarcastically, “I want that you should be satisfied with the wording.”

He returned the magazine to his safe.

The resolution had been circulated among the executive members of the Secretariat several days before the meeting, but had been left unsigned. Anton told me that he offered to sponsor it, but the offer was refused: First
Secretary Fedin demanded a higher-ranking official. Anton said that Sorokin demanded me—“Idiot, she’s in California! What do you care? They can’t touch her!”—but I wasn’t approached again. Indeed, hardly anyone spoke to me that week. Now Anton avoided me as well. I gave off the odor of bodily corruption. At the very last moment an unknown children’s poet was flown in from Irkutsk, presumably on the principle that if rank would not serve, then “the people” would. In the poet’s address, she expressed the indignation of all the Far East writers of children’s literature at Marina Burchatkina’s “betrayal of high principles,” which aimed to “mislead and pervert incorruptible Soviet youth.”

As the evening wore on, the speeches became more hysterical. Marina was called “a prostitute” and “a traitor”; the threat she “and her masters” posed to the Union of Soviets was as great as that of the armies of the Third Reich. I hardly paid attention to the crash and pounding of the rhetorical surf. Instead I took into account the ten hours’ time difference and, assisted by several glasses of whiskey administered shortly before the start of the evening’s program, I saw Marina waking late at her director’s Pacific beach house. She luxuriated for several minutes in the big bed and soft white linen, marveling at the paleness of the light playing against the room’s trim, understated furnishings and fixtures. (At the microphone, someone cried, “Marina Burchatkina, did you receive your thirty pieces of silver?”) Placed in a sunny mood by her surroundings, she rose from the bed, wearing the director’s pajamas, slipped her feet into an ex-wife’s slippers, and summoned one of the servants to serve her
coffee on the terrace. She brought her expensive fountain pen (a gift from the director) and a tablet of writing paper (I assumed she had purchased that on her own) out to the glass café table and, after sipping the coffee and smiling at some seagull swooping over the water in search of its own breakfast, she began her day’s work.

There was an end to the speeches and then the hall was quiet. Sorokin spoke from his place on the dais: “Any more comments?” His gaze passed across the surface of the audience like a spotlight. It avoided me, but I felt its heat just the same. This was my last chance to make amends. Hiding in the third or fourth row, I kept my gaze straight ahead, at a portrait of Gorky on the wall behind the dais, and tried to demonstrate my obliviousness.

After a while a vote was taken. It was unanimous. From exhaustion, even I raised my hand in favor, though the official observers of the vote would have recorded that my arm was not fully extended and by how much. I knew that my friends at the meeting, Anton and the others, who had chosen not to sit with me, would be relieved: a difficult chapter was closed. I sought relief as well, but was instead visited by a strange foreboding.

There was more business at hand, of course, including a report on our accounts, a report about our increased membership, and even a resolution lauding the Czechoslovak writers’ union, which had been brutally reconstituted after the invasion, for its “brave defense of national sovereignty.”

Then the floor was opened to “questions from the floor,” and someone I didn’t know approached the microphone, a hefty dark man in a gray pullover. He identified
himself as a poet-miner from Kemerovo. I idly wondered how many words rhymed with “shovel” and “bituminous.” As I began making a list of rhymes, as I had done with the aid of my father’s dictionary when I was first seized by the idea of becoming a poet myself, I became conscious of the furtive looks again glancing off me from around the hall. The attention was disturbing, but not as much as the furtiveness. The miner predictably encountered difficulty reading his own speech, mispronouncing and replacing many words, but it seemed to be in general praise of the Soviet medical profession.