The Big Green Tent (44 page)

It was the purest diamond. And all courtesy of Irina Troitskaya.

By pure coincidence, that very copy of
The Gift
, which had passed from hand to reliable hand and had ended up in his, was confiscated from the professor during a search. Notes he had made during his reading were also found with the book. He had already begun writing an article on the book called “Return to the Homeland.” He didn't manage to finish it. But even these hasty, incomplete notes were seized, to the professor's chagrin.

A scandal ensued, and the professor and his co-author were imprisoned—not for Nabokov, of course, but for their own books, published in the West under pseudonyms. A petition was initiated, heads flew, students were dragged in for questioning. Olga was expelled from the university for signing a letter in defense of the teacher. No one touched Irina Troitskaya. She didn't sign any letters, no one from Olga's circle of friends pointed at her as the source of anti-Soviet agitation.

Irina told her father, belatedly, about her enlightenment mission. Her father did not fear much in life, but he was shaken by this information. Afterward, when everyone involved had been imprisoned, banished, or expelled, he replaced the lost copy with another. This was, however, an American edition. The general revered Nabokov as deeply as the professor did.

The general also duly read the books written by the imprisoned writers. He told his daughter: they're not bad, but they didn't warrant such a fuss. Irina agonized over these events, although she remained unscathed by them. She didn't see Olga anymore, and she regretted her disappearance. Now everyone was friends with Irina, although she no longer brought books with her to the university—her father forbade it.

Irina graduated, and she got an excellent appointment with the Foreign Committee of the Writers' Union. An old comrade of her father's was in charge of the union and fixed her up with the job.

In 1970, Igor Vladimirovich died suddenly of a heart attack. Not long before his death, he caught wind of a rumor that Solzhenitsyn had been nominated for the Nobel Prize. He was agitated by this news.

“What kind of outfit is this Nobel Committee, anyway? They didn't give it to Tolstoy, but they're giving it to Solzhenitsyn?”

After her father's death, Irina fell into a depression: everything made her feel sick, even her wonderful job. Her sister, Lena, lived in Stockholm, where her husband was a cultural attaché in the Soviet Embassy.

It was clear that the decision of the Nobel Committee was going to cause problems for him.

Something remarkable happened to Irina that year. An elegant middle-aged woman spotted her in a crowd and invited her to come in for an audition as a fashion model. The woman turned out to be the country's most famous fashion designer. The invitation lifted Irina's spirits. She went in for the audition, and they took her immediately. There were no tall fashion models at the time; she would be the first.

Thanks to her family's privileged position, Irina Troitskaya was allowed to travel abroad during the first year. She went first to Belgrade, then to Paris, and, finally, to Milan. In Milan she remained, having received an unexpected proposal from a journalist who wrote a fashion column for a provincial newspaper. He was neither handsome nor a millionaire, but they were supremely happy together in southern Italy, near Naples, where he was from. Her Italian husband soon quit both the Communist Party, of which he was a member, and his journalism job, and opened a small restaurant. Later he became mayor of the tiny town they lived in. Irina did not become a Slavist, nor did she become a translator; she never again visited Russia.

The story doesn't end there, however—not for the rest of Irina Troitskaya's family, in any case. The scandal caused by the Nobel Committee would have been impossible for the young diplomat to manage single-handedly; but the foreign ministry liked to apportion blame not to the highest diplomats, but to those who occupied a lower rung. They claimed that Lena's husband hadn't tried hard enough. And then there was Irina's defection! The diplomat, Lena's husband, was put through the wringer for the Nobel Prize—a matter in which he had played no part whatsoever—as well as for Irina's defection and for his own lack of initiative. The young couple with brilliant credentials was recalled home from Sweden.

The unlucky diplomat returned home to Moscow with his family to live in the general's apartment. The children, twin boys, liked Moscow. Lena had soup waiting for her husband every day when he returned from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he was the fifth deputy of the seventh assistant in a department that had been slated for dissolution for twenty years already. His salary was so poor that Lena finally went to teach English at a secondary school. Grandmother Nina, like an ordinary housekeeper, took the children for walks in Chapaev Park, until she came down with pneumonia and died. Everything was worse than one could have imagined possible, until Lena visited a fortune-teller. The fortune-teller was a real character, with a penchant for all things Indian. She instructed Lena to “purify her karma,” but first she told her to clean up her house, in which a great deal of “filth” had accumulated. She recommended that they remodel.

Her husband was extremely dissatisfied. As it was they could hardly make ends meet, and now—remodeling!

To save on expenses, they completed the first stage themselves. To begin with, they removed all the books from Igor Vladimirovich's heavy bookcase before moving it away from the wall. They took the books with leather bindings to an antiquarian bookseller, who gave them a huge sum of money in exchange. He wouldn't accept all the books, however. It turned out that many of the general's books had library or museum stamps in them, and the booksellers wouldn't touch those.

Lena's husband found a large number of anti-Soviet books in the bottom section of the bookcase, including a collection of the works, complete thus far, of that very Nobel laureate who had caused him so much grief.

“Yes, Father collected books,” Lena explained. “He had access to all the books that were seized during searches. Some books were brought from abroad by his friends. He was a great collector: of coins, paper currency, stamps.”

Lena's husband did not occupy as high a position as his late father-in-law had, and couldn't allow such a collection to remain in the house. Late at night they took the dangerous books down to the garbage heap.

The next evening they were tearing off wallpaper when they discovered a safe in the depths of the thick supporting wall. There was no key. They were unable to open it with any household appliances, though it easily slipped out of its niche in the wall. The back of the smallish box turned out to be plywood. They ripped it off and discovered that the safe contained several stacks of old dollars, which still happened to be in circulation, and twenty-five pre-Revolutionary gold coins.

Her husband clutched at his head in consternation—but didn't take the safe down to the garbage heap.

This is where the story of Irina Troitskaya and her family ends.

*   *   *

What will now be related has nothing at all to do with them. Igor Chetverikov's shift at the boiler room ended at eight in the morning. He usually went trash-picking after six in the morning, making his rounds of the nearby garbage heaps. The Sokol district didn't yield much of value. There weren't many old buildings left. The houses in the neighborhood had been resettled just before and just after the war, so the local residents either threw away the Karelian birch and the French bronze before they moved in or had never had them in the first place.

Here, in what was formerly the settlement of Vsesvyatsky, if something did end up in the trash it was usually vestiges and remnants of the petite bourgeoisie. Not long ago he had found a trunk full of mid-nineteenth-century women's clothes. Some of the contents had already been dragged off by some little girls, but Igor managed to salvage a brown frock with a crinoline, a fur wrap, and a girl's school uniform.

This time, what he saw made him gasp. Next to the wooden bin where the residents deposited their household garbage stood some neat piles of
tamizdat
, books in Russian published abroad. Without examining them too closely, he took them to the boiler room and ran to the metro to make a call from a pay phone. Ilya, his former classmate, was still asleep, and answered gruffly:

“Are you nuts? Do you even know what time it is?”

“Come to the boiler room immediately. In a car.”

Ilya knew the boiler room well, since he had been responsible for getting Igor a job there after he had been expelled from the Kurchatov Institute under a cloud.

Half an hour later, Ilya arrived. They loaded the books into the car and drove them to the apartment of another general, who had at one time been enamored not of coins and books, but of old furniture. And he had preferred to live at his dacha, not in his apartment in the city.

Kostya had already left for school. Olga made coffee for the men and sat on the floor to go through the books. She had already read everything there. Among the small volumes she found a Khodasevich with a coffee stain on the cover—a sort of tree, and a road.

“Igor, is your boiler room at Sokol, in the Generals' Building?”

“Yes, why?”

“Oh, no reason. It's just that I read all these books in college. The owner has probably died. He was a general.”

 

THE FUGITIVE

The storm took place at half past two in the morning. It was like an opera or a symphony—with an overture, leitmotifs, and a duet of water and wind. Lightning bolts flew up in columns, accompanied by incessant rumbling and flashes. Then there was an intermission and a second act. Maria Nikolayevna's heart pains, which had plagued her all day, stopped immediately, as did Captain Popov's headache, from which he had been suffering for the past twenty-four hours. He even managed to get some sleep before going to work. The only thing he didn't manage to do was put a stamp on the document. But he could do that later.

At nine o'clock sharp he rang the doorbell. No one opened for a long time; then he heard a commotion behind the door.

“Who's there? Who is it?” a tentative female voice called out.

Finally, the door opened a crack; but the chain was still secured. Sivtsev and Emelyanenko shuffled impatiently from foot to foot. They wanted to get this over and done with. Greenhorns. Popov showed his badge in the narrow space between the door and the door frame. Again, there was a commotion, and the door opened.

The witness, his man at the local housing authority, trotted up.

“Does Boris Ivanovich Muratov live here?”

Right then, Muratov appeared. A hefty fellow, about forty years old, with a beard. Wearing a blue robe that looked like it could be made of velvet.

We don't have robes like that
, Popov thought suspiciously.
It's foreign. Where do they get the stuff?

“Passport, please,” Popov said with absolute civility.

Muratov went into the next room, from which his wife was just emerging. She was a real beauty, of course, also wearing a blue robe! Amazing—two of them, exactly alike!

When Muratov returned, Popov held out the search warrant for his perusal.

“Take a look at this, please,” he said, standing some distance away, still clutching it in his hands.

“May I?” Muratov said, reaching out for it.

But Popov refused to part with it.

“What is there to read? It's a search warrant, you can see that yourself. I'll hold it, and you can read it if you think it's necessary.”

“I can see it's a search warrant. But it isn't stamped.”

“Oh, hell!” Popov grew irate. “That's unimportant. A warrant is a warrant; it'll get its stamp, don't worry about that.”

“First stamp it, then you can enter,” Boris Ivanovich said haughtily.

“If I were you, I'd try being more polite. Having words won't help either of us. Now let me get on with my work, please.”

He moved deeper into the apartment, followed by Sivtsev. Emelyanenko stood in the tiny entrance hall, keeping an eye on the door and the living room.

“One moment, please,” Boris Ivanovich said, going into the smaller room.

Popov knew the layout of three-room apartments like this like the back of his hand. First a tiny entrance hall, then a larger pantry space with built-in wall cupboards where they kept everything. He had seen plenty of them.

He blocked the door so Muratov couldn't enter the larger room. Muratov turned red, moved the captain aside, and went in to rummage through the top drawer of his desk. Popov lost his composure. In this petty struggle, Muratov was right. The warrant, strictly speaking, was invalid.

The captain couldn't admit defeat, however, and barked out:

“Don't touch the drawers! We'll need to look through them.”

But Muratov, apparently, had found what he was looking for. He unfolded a thick piece of paper, yellowed at the edges, bearing an official red letterhead and a profile of the “greatest of the great” leaders.

“My Certificate of Honor.”

The artist thrust the paper at the captain, but at such a distance that he couldn't read anything it said.

Again, Popov's head started to throb.

“What is the meaning of this?”

The wife, blue-eyed, in her blue robe, her face pallid, looked beseechingly at her husband. Maria Nikolayevna, his mother-in-law, poured out tea for them as though nothing at all were happening.

Boris Ivanovich held the paper at a more reasonable distance: the captain could see it, but he couldn't snatch it from him.

“I'll hold it, and you can read it. I'll hold it.”

The captain read it through. The captain heeded it. He turned around to go, his detachment following at his heels. They didn't say a word.

Muratov flung the saving document into a corner.