The Commissariat of Enlightenment (14 page)

The archpriest didn’t reply, perhaps also surprised by Astapov’s speech. He studied the young man’s face. Astapov could feel the touch of his regard upon him, but he dared not shrink from it.

Finally, the commissar said, “Father, is there a place where we can talk, in the light? The Second Cavalry stands ready to sack Gryaz and make reprisals. Food brigades are on their way from Moscow. I’ve come to avoid violence. As a man of God, you must wish to avoid it as well.”

But the archpriest had drifted away in the direction of the iconostasis. Astapov followed reluctantly, sensing that he had been made to look foolish, at least to Nikitin and the witnessing saints. Gryaz’s archpriest paused at a very small, very dark icon, apparently the image of the Mother of God and the Infant, laid onto a chipped piece of tile. It was surrounded by a cluster of red votive candles.

Astapov tried again: “Please, Father, let us speak frankly. With your cooperation, we may save your people from a terrible fate.”

The priest remained at the tile, rapt, as if he were seeing it for the first time.

Nikitin blurted, “You’ve heard what happened in Kamenka, haven’t you?”

The priest, ignoring Nikitin and his revolver, said to Astapov, “Look at this, my son, and hail God’s glory. There is nothing like her in the province: this is an icon that was not made by human hand. Think about it. Those who have studied our Mother of God with all the available modern techniques have declared that no mortal man could have painted or manufactured her. Can you feel the grandeur of simply being under the same roof as where she rests? She was brought here from Palestine more than 300 years ago and is an especially powerful relic. I have seen her cure many kinds of women’s sicknesses—frigidity, hysteria.”

Astapov couldn’t help it: he was drawn to the icon too. The incense and the gloom were nearly suffocating. His face was burning. Aware that Nikitin was unmoved, he felt momentary kinship with the priest. In Kamenka the priest had been thrashed.

“Father,” said Astapov. “Let me ask you this, a theological question. Is it the relic that holds the miraculous power, or is it the saints that do the holy work themselves?”

The man did not appear to have heard him. He was praying silently, his face luminous. Alongside Astapov, Nikitin smirked.

When the priest finally spoke, his words were preceded by a heavy exhalation. “I’m not a theologian. I can tell you only what I see and what I believe.” There was no defiance in the old man’s speech now. “I’ve seen the relic work the miracles. As for the saints…the deeds of the saints lie beyond a country priest like myself.”

They came to a small stone bench laid into the wall of the church. Some geometric design, a cross probably, was carved into the side of the bench. Astapov reached down and touched it. The rock was as cold as if it were under artificial refrigeration—electricity seemed to run behind the walls of everything in the monastery. Astapov realized that the bench was the crypt in the figure, the final resting place of Saint Svyetoslav of Gryaz. Now his own body was chilled by the initial current of an idea.

He bowed and said, “Thank you for your time, Father. We’ll speak again.”

The afternoon assumed a wasted, garish cast as Astapov and Nikitin left the courtyard. It was still empty of people and their horses reported no interference. The sniper probably remained in the bell tower.

“What do you think, Nikitin? Is it the icon that performs the miracle or is it the saint the icon represents?”

Nikitin said, “Comrade commissar, there must be hundreds of people hiding in the basement. Did you hear them? Like rats copulating.”

They were leaving as they had come, with little haste, in order to demonstrate their disregard. The countryside remained unnaturally still. Astapov was hardly more relieved as the Red positions drew near. It was a poorly disciplined bunch of men who could have just as well been fighting for the Whites, who would have outfitted them with no worse costumes. The Reds’ uniforms were torn and badly patched and the men were unkempt and their beards left uncut. The men had been drinking. Nikitin, whose own uniform was kept neat, pulled even with Astapov.

“Are you religious, Nikitin?”

“I come from a mining town, comrade. We’re raised to dig. We don’t have time for women’s tales.”

“Are you ever moved by religious art? Some of it is quite beautiful, you know. At each stage in an icon’s composition, its artists must stop and pray for guidance. Their purpose is to save man from his fallen corporal state by suffusing the world with divine beauty.”

Their horses walked several paces before Nikitin replied: “I suppose.”

Astapov smiled at the wariness in his companion’s reply. There was good reason for it. Commissars were always coming out from Moscow to grill simple soldiers on matters of doctrine.

He said, “You’re not Party, are you?”

“I would be pleased for you to sponsor me, comrade. After I’ve proven myself, of course.”

Astapov made a breathy, noncommittal noise. In fact, the latest Central Committee directive had called for the urgent, rapid Bolshevisation of the regular army. With his working-class background, Nikitin would make a good candidate. They crossed the bridge and ascended the hill, where Shishko awaited them, his field glasses at his face.

Nikitin made his report at once, describing in great detail the layout of the monastery and the probable placement of the stairs to the lower chambers; he suspected that, given the age of the monastery, at least two subterranean levels lay beneath the church. He estimated the height of the walls and listed every likely ambush on the approach. He recommended that any assault be preceded by artillery, particularly against the south wall and the bell tower.

Astapov interrupted Nikitin. “No,” he said. “The monastery will be taken, but with as little destruction as possible.”

“Fuck the monastery,” Shishko said. He was unimpressed by
his deputy’s powers of observation. All this information obligated him to make strategy, chancing a mistake.

“Move the snipers with directed fire,” Astapov said, aware that he was crossing the lines of his authority. It was a conscientious transgression. The army didn’t understand anything except the seizure of territory and, most lately, losing it. But Ilich had given the Commissariat of Enlightenment the task of conquering the Russian imagination, the only battlefield on which the Soviets could possibly win the civil war and the wars to come. Neither accustomed nor officially empowered to employ the imperative mood, Astapov went on: “Do it. No artillery. The monastery is hardly being defended. Move your men in, in good marching order. Speak to the headman and ask him and the village council or commune or whatever they’ve got to come to the church. Don’t use force, if you can help it.”

“If I can help it?” Shishko made a little huffing sound; for him, it represented laughter. “In the middle of a civil war—”

“The front’s passed. There’s no military threat, only civilian resistance. Comrade commander, summon as many peasants as you can to the church. Have the priest bring up the people from the cellars—and keep them in the church. Not a single relic is to be taken or damaged. Nor shall any harm come to any person in the monastery, except in the case of self-defense. Exercise full restraint, in the name of Soviet power.”

“Trophies were taken in Kamenka.”

“What happened in Kamenka disgraced the Revolution. But not here. We have a direct order to preserve cultural artifacts,” Astapov said. The Enlightenment directive had been issued nearly a year before and was widely ignored as impractical and running counter to the spirit of the military campaign. He added, “Someday a Museum of Superstition will be established in Gryaz.”

“Comrade—” Shishko evidently hated this new honorific; he spoke it through clenched teeth. “—my soldiers haven’t received anything but scrip for months.”

“I’m taking the car to Lomov,” Astapov replied, turning away. “We need electric lamps and a generator. I’ll be back in an hour. Assemble the peasants and wait for me. Avoid using force.”

THE
chauffeur drove hard down the war-rutted highway, scattering refugees and carts. As the car bounced ahead, Astapov scowled at the back of the man’s fleshy, sun-blistered neck. He didn’t like his brutal way with the Thorneycroft, which had been expropriated from a caviar merchant in Astrakhan. The man’s assignment as his chauffeur, however, was beyond appeal. He was very possibly an agent of the Extraordinary Commission.

The reminder that his actions were under scrutiny punctured Astapov’s mood, which had been briefly inflated by the inspiration that had come to him in the church. Now he was rankled by the prospect of returning to the railhead in Lomov, after an unhappy encounter there early this morning. The railhead was where the divisional headquarters had been established and where trains arrived with military, police, and Party cadres directed to solidify Red control of the region. A new Enlightenment train had pulled in late last night, but he hadn’t troubled to examine the staff list. He hadn’t suffered even the most trivial premonition about whom
might have been on the train—a stupid lapse, really, considering his present discomfort.

Yelena Bogdanova had probably passed him more than once this morning on the busy railway platform, where the new arrivals were regrouping before embarking on their assignments. He couldn’t have possibly recognized her right away: her hair was severely shorn, protection against lice. But she hadn’t recognized
him
at all, not even when he finally stepped into her path as he emerged from the Enlightenment office. He recoiled and mumbled her name. She would’ve walked around him if he hadn’t spoken. She turned unhurriedly, hardly slackening her pace. Her eyes were unfocused, a symptom of lingering typhus, perhaps. Typhus had raged through Enlightenment’s ranks all summer. “Comrade…” he began awkwardly, somehow amplifying his coarseness and cruelty. It would have been much better to have let her go. He had been placed in a completely ludicrous situation.

The situation. It had begun with that crude abortion poster in Samara, Borovich’s, which had shocked her so ridiculously and inflamed her tinderbox imagination, and his. Until the moment when she had asked about it, Yelena had remained nearly anonymous among the girl agit-workers who came and went according to Moscow’s whims. Astapov had never before remarked her as attractive or intelligent and he had shared the general perception that she was somewhat rather simple. On these points, nothing had changed, yet she had been transformed: for weeks her upset over the abortion agitprop had reverberated across her face, tightening the skin and defining its muscles. It had all been visible: she was hardly ever not thinking about the poster and the ramifications of desire and sex. She moved with painful other-awareness and accomplished hardly anything useful. Her presence in the
course of the day had become material, inevitably carnal. If she entered the editing room while he was studying some document or film, he would immediately become aware of her step and respiration. He would interrupt his work. Without looking in her direction, he would strain to perceive some other aspect of her physical vitality.

Yet no romance had been conceived or desired or imagined and for weeks they had managed to work side by side, enjoying normal comradely relations. Not a single ambiguous or compromising word had been exchanged. They had conformed to Commissariat policy and the new society’s mores, which demanded propriety and mutual respect. Throughout Soviet Russia men and women were freeing themselves from bourgeois social hypocrisies. At the front lines and in the factories, women overcame their sex’s innate weaknesses—no time for romance! An un-accompanied woman could travel across the Bolshevik-occupied landscape to serve the masses unafraid for her virtue. Enlightenment had done a film about the healthy new attitudes that the Revolution had engendered in Russian women, who had wallowed only recently in a slough of prostitution, syphilis, and degradation.

Concurrently and confusingly, however, sexual licentiousness surged. Army and Party cadres, demoralized by a vicious civil war and revived by the promises of a new society nearly in their grasp, had responded with furious, millennial couplings, not to mention rumored triplings. One evening when Astapov and Yelena worked late in the editing studio, the commissar, considering the many romantic assignations and intrigues going on up and down the ranks at that very moment, proposed that they too have sexual relations. Yelena had been stunned; Astapov realized that he had bungled the thing. This awareness had not made him retreat. Rather, he in
sisted. It was a bewildering, muddled encounter. “Comrade,” she cried as he squeezed the gently raised buds of her breasts and put his lips on the side of her neck. When he removed his heavy wool army trousers, she nearly swooned. Yelena had not only never before been with a man, but she appeared not to understand the basic principles of being with a man. “Comrade comrade comrade comrade,” she repeated, as if these sounds were an intrinsic part of the sex act.

Indeed did he bungle it. They grappled on a worktable in a swelter of misery, and so secure was Yelena in her innocence and ignorance that her maidenhead would not give way. Every rampant thrust brought a howl of pain. Her eyes were open wide, but blind. For Astapov, the barrier was like some veil or door to the truth of something important, and its obduracy was malicious and stupid. He hammered at it. When he was finished, quite joylessly and untidily and still shut out, Yelena let loose a flood of tears. Astapov embraced her and tried to calm her with tender, wordless murmurs, but he sensed that he’d been cheated. That night in his bunk he felt a terrible constriction of his spirit, unexplainable and humiliating, an emptiness that he hadn’t known before. He didn’t see Yelena the following day and then he left Samara, and he hadn’t met her again until this very morning.

During the current campaign around Lomov, even while the forces of reaction threatened to strangle the Revolution in its crib, he had thought of Yelena from time to time, much more often than that in fact, and these shamed, wretched reflections had assumed the cast of professional concern, and he had sought news of her without actually making inquiries. Just once he had mentioned her name, to an Enlightenment worker arriving from Moscow. The man had responded with a single derisive snort. Astapov hadn’t pressed him for an explanation and, later realizing
that he might have somehow confused Yelena’s surname, he wondered whether the man’s derision had correctly applied to her at all.

This morning he had seen her for no more than a few moments. He had been rushing to his car, where Shishko had been waiting and mustering his resentment. Astapov thought to embrace Yelena, at least in a casual, fraternal manner, but stopped short as if at a precipice. He was surprised that she was not with child. This biological impossibility, a virgin birth, had lain submerged in his imagination ever since Samara. A conjectured son had assumed definite baby features recalled from the remote past.

Comrade Astapov had been under enormous strain these past several months.

In those same months Yelena’s face had become lined and roughened by wear. Her eyes had gone dim again, as they had been when she had first come to the Commissariat. Face to face with him on the railway platform, she had vacantly said hello but showed no recollection of his name.

Comrade Astapov had gone soft, unsteeled by the violence and death he had witnessed. Recent events had demanded the loss of life on an imponderable scale. Whether the number of Russian dead concluded in five zeros or six was hotly debated in the domestic and foreign press, but the zeros were merely a human invention, a Babylonian bookkeeping trick. The deaths were made tangible only when you stopped counting them: Velimir Krikalev, the looter summarily executed at the outside wall of a foundry in Tsaritsyn; Sonya Khlebnikova, the red-haired girl who perished unfed in some unheated barracks in Kaluga; Anton Gribshin, who froze to death the previous winter on the Arbat while searching for bread. Anton’s body had been frozen sufficiently to be preserved for several days until it was discovered by the police. The force of
human life was proving to be corrupt, malignant, and contrary to history. Ilich had known all along. Stalin too.

The clothes of the refugees were the dun-gray of sackcloth and in many cases, especially among the children, the articles of clothing were made from sackcloth. Astapov saw “Commissariat of State Supply” stamped on the back of a little boy who was hiking in a dry ditch with two kerchiefed women. One of the women turned in his direction as the Thorneycroft rolled past, scattering small stones, and, as if she had been waiting for him all afternoon, composed her weather-hardened face into a mask of venomous contempt. Near Lomov the commissar caught sight of a man ducking within a stand of birches. Astapov guessed that he was a deserter, a desperate occupation. The man wouldn’t get past the checkpoints unless he kept off the roads, in which case he would probably get lost.

In the course of continental war, revolution, and civil war, countless illiterate soldiers had left the combatant forces and gone off to find their homes without either maps or the ability to read maps. They knew only the names of their dusty villages, which in their absences had assumed innumerable charming rustic virtues and tended to share the same names regardless of how distant they were located from each other. After months of travail, of dodging armies, and eating rats, while being robbed by the strong or being driven to rob the helplessly weak, a deserter would arrive home in Goatville and discover that this Goatville didn’t have the little white church at the end of the crooked lane, or his ma or wife either, and he would have to return to the road, searching again for home nearly at random, discovering yet other Goatvilles that approximated the qualities of his Goatville (pond, mill, cemetery) without actually being home, until he was reconscripted or in some charmless rustic way finally met his death.

For the illiterate hundreds of millions, the twentieth century was an unlit closet of secrets, and of codes and deceits and unspeakable transactions. Men fought and died within it to change unintelligible markings made on concealed maps. Things had changed. War had refracted Goatville into a multitude of trivially unidentical villages. The printed word had cleaved mankind in two, one part canting toward dumb animality. Many of the illiterate recognized the letters of the alphabet, and many could put the letters together and align them into a series of distinct sounds—yet the sounds resisted becoming speech. The peasants heard their own unintelligibility and went off trembling with hatred and grief. Like a membranous barrier, type excluded them from the world of meaning.

The last time he had seen his father had been early in the spring the year before last, shortly after the February revolution, when the Tsar had fled the throne of an empire wracked by war and chaos. The young man, who had filmed some of the dramatic events leading to the abdication, briefly returned to Moscow. His father had sent him a message suggesting that he accompany him to the estate of some distant relations outside the city. It wasn’t clear how the relations were related; he didn’t understand why his widowed father sought his company until he arrived home and witnessed how frail and stooped he had become. Once in a while a severe palsy manifested itself. Anton would stop what he was doing, let it pass and then smile weakly, as if to demonstrate that he took no offense.

Even the carriage was in bad repair, its springs and joints crying out against the abuse they received from the broken road. A shower lashed at the leaky roof. Between jolts and splashes the
young man spoke shyly of his recent adventures, unsure of whether his father approved. He himself was unsure of what he had accomplished beyond staying alive. The war had arrived in 1914 and the youth had been tossed on the current of events like other men. These events had taken him to Crimea and Bessarabia, once to Baku, and another time to Helsinki. He moved between trenches unnoticed, a Pathé field camera on his shoulder. He shot many films, mostly for Russian companies (Meyer had left Moscow in 1912), but the structure of commerce that had provided the means for developing and exhibiting them had collapsed and few ever reached the screen. Now his father’s flaccid responses to his anecdotes—an arrest by the Turks, a momentary encounter with Kerensky—showed that the older man could not comprehend the course of Russia’s defeat in the war nor the political forces vying for the empire’s future. He seemed embarrassed by the condition of the highway.

The distant relations inhabited a small but surprisingly fine estate in a little village near the Moscow River. The two men came in beneath a portico in the front of the house and were escorted to a grand ballroom in the back. They were embraced warmly. Liveried waiters served luncheon in a gilt-and crystal-encrusted dining room that looked out through French doors onto a wide lawn. The rain stopped and the clouds lifted just as they arrived.

Everyone was introduced by given names and patronymics, so that he was offered neither the family name of his red-faced, gray-muttonchopped host nor any evidence of their connection. The hostess spoke to the young man familiarly, in the manner of a great-aunt. She told him he was handsome and charming and that it was high time he found a wife. He smiled without comprehension. Not a word was pronounced about the motherland’s peril. One guest, his name lost in a mumble beneath his mustache, knew
the young man had worked for Pathé and spoke admiringly of the cinema. The cinematographer felt constrained from telling him of the death and destruction recently encompassed within his frame of view. The meal was of the highest quality.

He wanted to say that their prosperity and security was but a dream from which they would soon awaken. He would have liked to awaken them himself. In his travels across the crumbling empire he had come across children malnourished to the point of inanition; even to the point where they could not take what little he offered. At table now he barely tasted the roasts and the wines; his senses were overwhelmed by the spectacle of the men’s greasy faces and the strangled bleats of the women.