The Big Green Tent (45 page)

With a graceful flourish, Maria Nikolayevna placed a teacup and a sandwich in front of Boris Ivanovich.

Boris Ivanovich loved his mother-in-law; in her he saw Natasha, but with a more decisive character. In his wife, Natasha, he saw features of his mother-in-law—the first signs of a gentle fullness, small lines around the mouth, and a burgeoning soft pouch under the chin. Good, healthy stock. The generous plumpness of Kustodiev's women, but all the more alluring for it.

Natasha picked up the letter, which had been casually cast aside.

“What is this, Boris?”

Boris made a gesture indicating that walls have ears.

“Well, my dear Natasha, I got that Certificate of Honor after my Sculpture and Modeling Plant entrusted me with the task of manufacturing an object with the code name ‘SL,' in two copies, as a matter of fact. This remarkable object represented, my girl, the sarcophagus of the leader and teacher of all times and peoples, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. And just look at the signatures! The highest authorities express their gratitude to me.”

After this booming announcement, he made an obscene gesture, visible though inaudible, at those very walls.

Maria Nikolayevna smiled. Natasha put her white hands on her still whiter neck.

“What's going to happen now?” she said quietly.

Boris picked up one of the pages of thin gray paper that were heaped about the room in multitudes, and wrote with a pencil:

“He disappeared to an unknown location.”

And on that same piece of paper he drew his usual cartoon of himself—a large head hunched into his shoulders, a short, straggly beard, and a forehead framed by two bald patches on either side.

“Another cup of tea, please, Maria Nikolayevna!” he said, jangling his cup for effect.

Natasha sat rigid in her chair. Maria Nikolayevna went to put the kettle on again.

Boris embraced his wife.

“I knew this would happen. It's all so awful,” she said.

Then she took a pencil and wrote in the margins of the page:

“They're going to arrest you.”

“I'm leaving home in half an hour,” he wrote back. And he drew himself somersaulting down the stairs.

The page was filled. He tore it up and burned it. He waited until the flame burned the entire page, nearly to his fingertips, then dropped the vestiges into the ashtray.

He took a new page and drew himself running down the street. At the top of the page he wrote “Train Station,” and showed it to Natasha and Maria Nikolayevna, who had just come back. His mother-in-law grasped the situation faster than his wife, and nodded.

“Right now,” Boris said.

“Alone?” Natasha said.

Muratov nodded.

Then he started rummaging around in those very walk-in cupboards that Captain Popov had been so eager to inspect, and pulled out a folder, in which he kept exactly what the captain had been looking for.

He took out a sheaf of pages, full of drawings, and went out to the kitchen.

Maria Nikolayevna watched him in silent sympathy.

Muratov pulled a baking sheet out of the oven, put several pieces of the paper on it, and lit a match. Maria Nikolayevna snatched the matches from him.

“How many times have I told you not to interfere in my household duties, Boris Ivanovich.”

He was sitting on his haunches in the middle of the floor, looking up at her. Maria Nikolayevna pushed him out of the way, then squeezed past into the corridor, where she pried up the edge of the worn-out linoleum by the wooden threshold. Boris Ivanovich merely shrugged in amazement.

Deftly and in perfect concert, as though they had been doing this their whole lives, they stuffed all the drawings under the linoleum, then tucked the worn-out edge under the threshold again. Everything was just as it had been before, as though nothing at all had happened. Boris Ivanovich kissed Maria Nikolayevna's cheek gratefully. It would have been a pity to have to burn them.

Then he found some canvas trousers, short in the leg and loose in the waist, in the lower drawer of the dresser. From the cupboard he took out an old straw hat. Both had belonged at one time to his late father-in-law. He did all this without saying a single word.

“He's gone crazy. He's gone crazy,” Natasha said. His mother-in-law, pointing to the telephone—she was as sure as Boris that their apartment was bugged—said in a loud voice: “Boris, shall I make meat patties for your lunch?”

“Meat patties sound good.”

Twenty-five minutes later he left the house. He had shaved off his beard, but left a mustache. He'd cut his hair shorter. He walked through the courtyard, so full of rainwater that he could have floated across in a boat. Broken branches protruded from the giant puddle, like trees after a flood. Boris was lugging a big shopping bag in which he had a change of underwear, a sweater, and his favorite little pillow, as well as all the money he had been able to scrape together.

Sivtsev and Emelyanenko, who had stayed behind to keep watch, were lounging on a little bench in the courtyard, smoking. They were deliberating whether to go and get some beer.

Captain Popov arrived at ten fifteen with the required stamp on the warrant. Natasha Muratov, wife and officially registered tenant of the apartment, opened the door right away this time, and said that her husband had gone to work. Popov threw a furious glance at his blockhead underlings.

“He doesn't have a job!” Popov said. “What kind of work are you talking about?”

“He's an artist. He doesn't have a job, but he has plenty of work. You saw yourself: he worked on Lenin's sarcophagus,” the mother-in-law piped up.

“He was fired after that,” Popov said, offering a belated piece of evidence.

“That's right, he went out to look for a job,” Maria Nikolayevna retorted.

“Wasn't he planning to come home for lunch?” the captain asked.

“Of course.” They'd taken the bait about the meat patties, the damned eavesdroppers. They worked fast! “And he ordered meat patties. We're expecting him home for lunch.”

The captain got down to work. He spared no effort in tackling the mountains of assorted papers. The samizdat were the run-of-the-mill variety that everyone had. The samizdat weren't what Popov was hoping to find, however.

What he was looking for was lying on his own desk in his office in the form of photocopied pages from
Stern
magazine. These were cartoons: gigantic letters spelling “Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” and under them a crowd of people and dogs trying to reach the sacred words. The words themselves were made of sausages: boiled salami, with circles of white fat where they had been sliced. They were strung together with rope, from which dangled a price tag reading “2 rub. 20 kop.”

Another cartoon depicted a mausoleum made of the same kind of salami, with the word
Lenin
written in sausage links.

The third cartoon showed the Volga boatmen from the famous painting by Repin, harnessed together, and pulling, not a barge, but a rocket ship.

The agents had been searching for the malicious cartoonist for a long time, and had discovered him quite by chance. All that remained now was to find the original drawings, sketches, or something similar.

Captain Popov departed late in the evening. He took three bags of samizdat with him. The drawings that Popov had hoped to find were not discovered.

Boris Ivanovich, in the meantime, had taken refuge for the night with an old woman who had been hawking green onions and parsley on the Kimry docks, had sold nothing, but had somehow returned home with a wayfarer who had missed the last boat to Novo-Akatovo. For a ruble she allowed him to spend the night in her barn on a haystack covered with a sheet. At sunrise he washed at the well, and by six in the morning he was on the boat. The old woman was a godsend—she didn't report him.

On the evening of the second day he was sitting in the remote, nearly inaccessible village of Danilovy Gorki, in an old peasant cottage that belonged to his friend Nikolay Mikhailovich, also an artist. He explained the situation to him and asked permission to live there, in their summer hut, or in the bathhouse, for the time being, in the guise of a cousin or some such relative. Nikolay Mikhailovich shook his head and groaned, but didn't refuse him. And so began Boris Ivanovich's life as a fugitive.

Danilovy Gorki wasn't exactly a village, but a small settlement of five houses. One of them was Nikolay Mikhailovich's. Another stood empty, after the death of the owner two years back, and was awaiting a buyer. The owners of the other three hosted vacationers in the summer months. By the end of August, nearly everyone would return to the city.

Nikolay Mikhailovich's mother was from the nobility; his father had been a priest, and was executed in 1937. Thus, he was under no illusions about the relative seriousness of the situation. He said that until September, while there were still many strangers around the settlement, it would be safe to stay there. When the vacationers left, though, every person for five miles could be seen at a glance.

The cottage was full to the rafters. Children, the elderly, two spinster aunts, all manner of dependents and houseguests. Everyone lent a hand, but on a voluntary basis. They were all busy from morning till night, but all free and unencumbered.

For Boris, this country life was a novelty. He was a city man. His grandfather, who had been a serf, had started to work in Sytin's lithography plant after 1883. His father had been a typography engraver: a “proletarian of artistic labor,” as he called himself. He settled in Moscow and lost all ties with his Ryazan relatives.

Boris Ivanovich didn't know much about country life, and was wary of it, but he didn't like the city, either. He had lived in the Zamoskvorechye district, not far from the typography plant, since childhood, and he and his wife moved to Kharitonievsky Lane when they married.

He felt happiest when he was on the Black Sea, and he vacationed in Sochi or in Gagra every year. He had never really seen the countryside before, and now, for the first time, he was discovering the charms of a secluded little village near a large river, among forests and swamps. He was also charmed by the descendants of this family of the nobility. They had never lived in palaces, or caught so much as a whiff of luxury. For half a century, between poverty and indigence, between banishment and prison, those who had survived had been honed and simplified. They no longer knew a single foreign language, but they had preserved some ineffable quality that Boris Ivanovich never managed to pin down.

Nikolay's daughters boiled kasha on the Russian stove, baked pies, worked in the vegetable garden, and washed clothing and linens in the river. The grandsons caught fish, the granddaughters and two aunts picked berries and mushrooms in the forest. All of them sang, drew, and put on children's plays.

Nikolay Mikhailovich's cousin, the vivacious and full-throated Anastasia, came for a three-day visit. From the moment she arrived, she began making eyes at Boris. She turned his head; he was an easy and quick-witted catch. They lost no time about it, and their first night together would have been longer if they hadn't sat around the table singing songs until all hours. And Anastasia sang remarkably well—with a kind of gypsy flair, sonorous and provocative. His own wife was more attractive than this Anastasia, with her small, childlike breasts and long nose, but Boris Ivanovich marveled about her long afterward: this woman, bony and angular, had been like the water of life for him. It was as though he had been cleansed from inside, picked apart bone by bone, ligament by ligament, then reassembled. He couldn't recall when he had ever been such a potent and untiring partner. Anastasia sailed away on a little boat on the fourth day of their romance. She was a doctor, moreover the head of her department, and had to return to duty. The whole family went down to the river to see her off, and when she was still on shore she began singing, “Marusenka Was Washing Her White Feet.” For a long time, she waved her handkerchief from the boat that would take her to the big landing stage, where the regular ferry would pick her up.

She's such a cultured woman; but what a slut!
Boris Ivanovich thought in rapturous bewilderment. He had never in his life met a woman like her.

Nikolay Mikhailovich, as though reading his mind, said quietly:

“It's in Anastasia's blood—her great-grandmother, or great-great … slept with Pushkin.”

On Transfiguration Day the whole household went to church in Kashino. Starting out in the evening, they traveled first by boat, then by bus. It was an exhausting journey. They were cultured, well-educated people—but religious as well. Boris Ivanovich had never met people like this before, either.

“Your way of life is rather anti-Soviet,” he said in amazement.

“No, Boris, it's simply a-Soviet,” Nikolay Mikhailovich replied, laughing.

Boris stared wide-eyed at everything. He watched the rising sun, and the shallow water lapping the sandbars, where the minnows and tadpoles darted to and fro as though they had some great business to attend to. He saw the sandy shore with its empty mussel shells and ornately patterned grasses, which he had noticed on icons, but he hadn't known they really existed in the world. He saw all this, and felt a happy wonder. He and the others tramped into the woods to pick mushrooms, which were sparse in July but much more numerous in August, after the gentle, sweet rains.

Boris Ivanovich turned out to have a passion for hunting mushrooms, and for fishing. He even proved to be adept at peasant labors: he learned to wield an axe like the best of them, helping Nikolay Mikhailovich repair the barn and set the gate upright again.

The days were long, and the evenings, with their endless tea-drinking, were pleasant. The nights passed by in an instant: he would fall asleep and wake up again refreshed, as though no time at all had passed. And Boris Ivanovich felt an unprecedented calm and peace, something he had never known in his Moscow life.