The Commissariat of Enlightenment (11 page)

Vorobev paused, collecting himself. He continued now almost in a whisper, his hand raised. “And now imagine this, Vladimir Grigoryevich: that as you spoke the Count was at your side, a visible material presence encased within a crystal sarcophagus, bathed in a soft, warm electric light. Hundreds and thousands would come out to attend such a lecture, secure in the knowledge that the uncorrupted body of the incorruptible Count would attend it as well, giving it his full approval.”

Chertkov’s handsome face was sheathed in stone.

“Professor, this is an interesting fantasy, perhaps something to consider in the future.”

Vorobev barked derisively. “Hah! The future!
Tomorrow flies
will lay eggs in his guts!
Diptera! Lucila! Calliphora erythrocephala! Dozens of irreversible processes will take place within the first hour of the Count’s death. The time to ensure the Count’s physical immortality is immediately after the Count has been pronounced dead.”

Any suggestion of condescension now vanished from the chief disciple’s manner. He bit his upper lip before speaking.

“Are you suggesting that such a thing is possible today?”

At that moment, Gribshin, standing off to their side, made a discrete signal to Meyer: a head nod and, at his hip, a little twirl of his index finger. He and Meyer worked very well together. Meyer quietly cranked the cinematograph as Vorobev kneeled at the trunk. It was then that Gribshin spied the Caucasian, standing way down the platform, watching them intently.

“Yes, it’s possible,” Vorobev said, manipulating the snaps on the trunk’s combination lock. “All I ask of you is the patience to witness a brief demonstration. Please understand, this is the fruit of several years’ research. Furthermore, in the last week away from my laboratory I have made even further progress, simply thinking out the problem and enormously refining my procedure. My dear Vladimir Grigoryevich, it must be the country air. It’s only now that I appreciate how important it is to raise the level of certain alkalis in the preserving solution and I’ve also come to understand the significance of not delaying the procedure’s implementation in the minutes immediately after the cessation of life processes. That’s essential.”

Standing more than five meters away, Gribshin was nearly intoxicated by the sharp odor spilling from the half-open trunk.

“What are you doing?” Chertkov asked, stepping back.

Vorobev was reaching into his trunk, peering into it as if into a cave. “I wish to demonstrate my procedure, in order to prove to
you that the Count can be preserved indefinitely—if we’re prepared to act promptly after his expiration.”

“And what are you showing me?”

Vorobev replied by removing from the trunk a large white object, somewhat larger than a rat. It was a human infant, a boy swaddled to the shoulders in a coarse blanket. The child had dark, very fine baby hair and a sharp, adult-shaped nose. His eyes were closed. Vorobev lifted the baby to his chest, as if to warm him and not to wake him. The cinematograph camera continued to turn, though the Pathé men knew now that this footage would never, never be used.

“My God,” whispered Chertkov.

Meyer was affronted as well—Gribshin saw it in his eyes. But he himself remained undisturbed. He felt no kick in the gut, no urge to look away. Indeed, he was seized by a kind of giddiness and could not stop staring at the corpse. It would be only his first.

Vorobev explained, “The infant died as it was being born just twelve hours ago, in this locality. Note the glow in the child’s cheeks: no rouge has been applied. Please, run your fingers here, you can see for yourself that there’s no rouge.” Chertkov remained as he was. Vorobev continued: “The body is cold to the touch, yet its countenance suggests living warmth and animation, and will do so indefinitely. The procedure was executed minutes after its death, allowing me to fully capture the baby’s essence, as if in a photograph.”

“This is monstrous!” Chertkov cried, backing further away. “An obscenity!”

“The future,” Vorobev countered.

The chief disciple scurried back to the stationmaster’s house, fleeing from yet another of the many crackpots who had come to
populate Astapovo in the past week. He stumbled on the steps before disappearing into the house.

Although disgusted, Meyer affected amusement. “Russia,” he said.

Gribshin gazed at the baby, who was still being cradled in Vorobev’s arms. If the baby had survived, he might have lived to the cusp of the next century and would have seen many wondrous things. Gribshin imagined the child growing to manhood though still dead, wrapped in the blanket, his face filling out to fit his nose.

Vorobev did not show any disappointment in Chertkov’s rebuff. His grimace of mockery returned. With dignity and care he returned the specimen to the trunk as if to a crib. He didn’t look at the two Pathé men until he spun the lock. Then he stood, bowed slightly, and departed down the platform.

GRIBSHIN
didn’t return to the old post-house. Throughout the night, in which the freezing sixth of November became the even more frigid seventh (Old Style), the Count’s life teetered at the abyss, though Makovitsky did not say so explicitly in his late evening report. As the cinematography crew kept vigil outside the stationmaster’s house, Meyer was suddenly sparing of his film stock, in anticipation of a riot, a mass demonstration, or some other spectacle the following morning. The mass of visitors to the railway station swelled, florid and impatient. No one left for his bunk. The reporters’ hourly bulletins appeared verbatim on their papers’ front pages. The midnight hours were electrified by a rumor, soon to be confirmed as fact: Chertkov would permit the Countess to see the Count after all.

Gribshin was briefly miffed. The Countess’s visit would make his cinematic legerdemain of the night before true, at least in regards to her entry into the house, and he preferred that it stay an artful fiction. Meanwhile Chertkov maintained his resistance to
Pathé’s cameras. He would allow the Countess into the room where the unconscious Count lay, but no press, so the enduring image left to posterity would remain Gribshin’s.

The interior of the stationmaster’s house was lit all night. As doctors, family members, and the Count’s associates took their turns at his bedside, diffuse forms danced behind the newspapered windows. The crowd on the platform raptly attended them.

Demonstrating his temporal powers, Chertkov summoned the Countess from her railway coach. She pushed past the reporters, the edge of her skirt balled in her fist, and was then unaccountably made to wait hours before she was allowed into the sickroom. Once there, according to reports that freely flowed outside the house, she wept over the Count’s body, she murmured words of endearment, she admonished him for his flight from Yasnaya Polyana and for allowing “criminals” to prevent her from seeing him. Finally she broke down and one of her daughters led her from the room to the house’s unheated porch. She waited there for the next two hours, a huddled, lonely figure.

Most of the onlookers around the porch were representatives of newspapers, mostly photographers seized by desperation, their faces greased with anxiety. Gribshin squeezed among them. He too feared that he was going to miss something. Suddenly he was jostled hard and almost knocked over.

“Sorry,” said Khaitover, the British reporter, who was trying to push ahead. A cold glint in his eye suggested that he was sober and in pain for it. He added, not unkindly, “You’re always in the way.”

Gribshin glared.

“I’ve got to get the last words,” the reporter explained.

“Goethe said, ‘More light.’ That’s taken.”

Khaitover snorted. “More wenches is more bloody like it. What’s the matter with you? Can’t you get inside the house?”

Meyer arrived alongside the two men, carrying a small field camera. He had heard Khaitover. He told Gribshin, “M. Pathé demands a death shot, no matter what. We’ll have to film with the bedroom lamps.”

Yet they remained unable to move ahead. The pre-dawn cold seeped through Gribshin’s coat. Meyer became impatient, swearing in German.

Then something shivered through the crowd. Gribshin knew what it was: a piece of information, even though not a single official word had been spoken yet. He looked at his watch: five minutes past six. His view blocked, he didn’t see Makovitsky emerge from the house, but he heard his whispered, belated announcement. The end had come. The human pressure around Gribshin suddenly lessened. The reporters were rushing off to the telegraph office.

All over the world newspapers would stop their presses and remake their front pages. In Europe and New York, the Count’s death would be served with that morning’s breakfast. In the Imperial’s composing room on Fleet Street, the fourteen-point bold headline type was now being set.

Meyer and Gribshin remained by the door to the house, along with Khaitover. The reporter had written the bulletin announcing the Count’s death in advance and had arranged for a boy to insert the hour of his expiration into the cable and send it off.

“Last words!” he called out to Makovitsky. “What were his last words?”

Makovitsky stared at Khaitover and blinked. He didn’t appear to understand. Hanging his head, he turned back into the house.

“Come on,” Meyer said. “We have to get in.”

The weight of Khaitover’s hands on their backs propelled them into the stationmaster’s house, into the parlor, against a stream of
acolytes and other associates who were leaving, most of them in tears. At Gribshin’s face the heat was as intense as the sun’s.

Also intense was the stench, which reached Gribshin before he entered the teeming living room where the body lay. It was as if the body had been dead now for days, not minutes. Gribshin moved toward his pocket for his handkerchief, but halted once he realized that no one else in the house had removed theirs. They refused to acknowledge the Count’s bodily corruption.

Chertkov stood close to the Count, at his head, where he was engaged in a passionate discussion with a man Gribshin didn’t recognize. Gribshin was startled by how much Chertkov’s appearance had changed overnight. His face was pale and creviced, his eyes were red, his hair was askew. As Chertkov listened to the whispered declarations of the other man, he fell into some kind of half-stupor, only to rouse himself from time to time abruptly. Perhaps, despite the decades of dispute with the Countess over the Count’s legacy, despite the wrangling over posthumous copyrights and royalties, despite the measures he had taken to establish himself as the Count’s spiritual heir, he had never believed the Count would die.

And there was no mistaking now that the Count had died: the sunken face, the bloodless lips. It was already possible to doubt that he had once lived.

The mourners sobbed. Gribshin recognized some of the Count’s sons and daughters. The Countess had been allowed in again and looked angry, pretending or perhaps believing that it was her own parlor that was occupied by uninvited guests. She gazed upon the body and every few minutes crossed herself extravagantly.

Khaitover was petitioning individuals in the room, asking them to describe the Count’s last minutes. Some did so with great emo
tion and detail; posterity would recall the vigor of his death rattle. As the two Pathé men approached the body, Chertkov’s glance lit over them and he grimaced again. The man with whom he was talking gestured at the Count and then at some materials at his side, gauze, and a small pail of wet plaster. Gribshin guessed that the stranger was a sculptor.

Meyer guessed it at the same time.

“You’re making a death mask?” said Meyer to Chertkov, a half-smile beneath the question. “Of course, all the great men of history have left us death masks: Dante, Newton, Napoleon, Lincoln. But I beg you, Vladimir Grigoryevich, is this the entirety of the record that you wish to pass on to our descendants? We’ve entered the twentieth century. The future will gaze upon the Count’s death mask and, with due respect to the artist—” Meyer bowed; the sculptor was Sergei Merkurov, who would later do hundreds of busts of Ilich “—be frustrated by it. Vladimir Grigoryevich, these are modern times in which the Count has chosen to die.”

“Are you also proposing to stuff him?”

Meyer raised his hands and bowed. “Please, I ask only to be allowed to make a cinematograph record of the Count resting in peace. We’ll be very quick about it. In just a few moments his final earthly form will be made an integral part of history.”

Chertkov shook his head wearily. “It would be an insult to his memory and to the devotion of his followers. A photograph of the Count in this condition may even be used by his enemies. We haven’t allowed any pictures to be taken at all.”

“Sir,” Meyer said. “If the Count had wished to leave the world without being photographed, he would have remained at Yasnaya Polyana and died in his own bed. He chose not to. He deliberately joined the world of news and publicity. He fled into the company of international journalists and cinematographers.”

Chertkov shook his head. “He was an old man, distracted by family complications.”

But the chief disciple was wavering, unsteadied by grief. And Meyer was enormously persuasive. Gribshin had seen him once gain entrance to a restricted naval base in Saint Petersburg and, another time, to a private reception in honor of the Empress. For one “scenic description” they had both been admitted into the Moscow Kremlin, which had been left abandoned by the tsars for the past two hundred years. The odor of the rapidly disassembling corpse now added urgency to the cinematographer’s demand.

Chertkov repeated, “No photographs. The death mask will be enough.” He turned to Merkurov. “Please do it now.”

Merkurov applied petroleum jelly to the Count’s face, lay gauze on it, tightly wrapping the Count’s beard, and then covered the gauze with a thin layer of plaster. He worked quickly, smoothing the compound with the tips of his fingers. He pressed it gingerly around the mouth and eyelids. Mesmerized, the four men watched in silence as the plaster hardened.

They hadn’t noticed that a fifth man had joined them.

“A primitive procedure, performed similarly by various South American and Melanesian tribes,” Professor Vorobev declared. He had removed his coat, but still had his black trunk with him. “Particularly the Aztecs and the Irians. There’s some interesting ritual involved. For my own amusement, I’ve assembled in my study a small collection of masks, brought back from the wild by scientific colleagues.”

His eyes flashing, Chertkov interrupted, “This is a private affair.”

“No, it isn’t,” the professor replied brusquely. He poked a manicured finger at the onlookers jostling each other in the parlor. “This affair is as public as a barroom. Mr. Chertkov, I appre
ciate that you don’t wish to preserve the Count’s body, but what you’re doing to it now is a travesty, an insult. The plaster will damage the intramuscular connections; as it adheres to the skin it secretes biologically destructive acids. You’re hastening the Count’s physical decay.”

“He’s dead! There’s nothing more to be done.”

“He’s dead, but there’s no reason to treat his body like a piece of spoiled meat. Show enough respect, Mr. Chertkov, to allow me to prepare his face for the camera. Remove this hideous plaster and I will administer an injection that will at least temporarily preserve his features until pictures can be taken. This is not the use for which I’ve developed my solution, of course, but it will serve. Allow the future one last look at the Count, for God’s sake. With the solution injected, followed by expert massage, I can restore some of the color and animation that was lost in the past hour. That’s my last offer. I can’t imagine your objections.”

Chertkov did not appear to have even heard Vorobev. He continued to gaze upon the Count, whose face was now covered in cement. Merkurov also ignored the professor. The sculptor patted the drying plaster, testing it, looking for breaks and unevenness. Finally he peeled away the mask. The plaster made a little popping noise when it separated from one of the eyes. Stiff and white, with a few grains of material still adhering to it, the face looked as if it had just been disinterred.

Now Gribshin could almost see the stench rising from the body. This was the putrefaction of the internal organs, he supposed. The intensified odor must have shocked Chertkov too. But what had he expected? Chertkov looked away from the body and made a feeble, concessionary wave at Vorobev.

The professor removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He worked quickly, dabbing a handkerchief in the same vase of water
Merkurov had used to moisten his plaster. He wiped the Count’s face and beard, dried them with a hand towel and then prodded and poked his face, testing the resiliency of his skin. From his commodious black trunk—in which the dead infant was still packed, Gribshin presumed—Vorobev withdrew a glass flask containing a quantity of green-yellow liquid through which the light of the room’s lamps shimmered. He also took from the bag about a half dozen hypodermic needles. He rested the equipment on the bedside table on which lay the last book the Count had read, a collection of Montaigne’s essays bound in gray cardboard. Vorobev opened the stopper and carefully pulled the solution into each syringe, which he returned to the table. Once they were filled, he raised them one by one and injected the fluid into the Count’s face: into the lips, under the jaw, into the neck, and under each eye above the zygomatic arch, and then into the cheeks. As Vorobev manipulated the Count’s face to make way for the needles, the dead man’s features assumed a series of grotesque expressions, including those of surprise, despair, and hilarity. Vorobev inserted a pad into the Count’s mouth to stop the needle from going through his cheek. He completed the procedure with three quick jabs to each temple.

Gribshin witnessed the procedure distractedly, while once more peering into the future, a few hours hence. The coffin would be carried out to the train by the Count’s four sons, each of them tall and strong, bowed as ever under the weight of their father, the father who was already being called immortal. The path to the private car would be impassible but for the gendarmes. The peasants would sing church hymns and carry icons and reliquaries. One of their hymns would be “Eternal Memory.” Gribshin realized with a jolt that it was not true, as it was said, that nothing lasted forever; everything did, in the papers and now the moving pictures,
in some minute grain of documentation. Peasants and young men in identical cloth caps would turn toward the camera, their mouths open in wonder, as if at their own reflections. They would cross themselves. They would raise a banner: “Your goodness has not died.”

Here in the stationmaster’s parlor, as Meyer’s field camera turned, the Count’s eyes were closed. His skin had softened, just as Vorobev had promised, and taken on a kind of transparent radiance. The palest shade of pink now dawned upon his cheeks.

Vorobev drew away from the body and gave it one last, appreciative survey. He turned to the men and the other onlookers, his own face sweat-sheened. Speaking more loudly than necessary, as if they were not the only audience, he announced, “Look. No rouge has been applied.”