The Commissariat of Enlightenment (20 page)

He reached for the newspaper. The four pages of
Izvestia
brimmed with news, none of it explicit. Comrade Zinoviev had met with a delegation of coal workers; this meant that he would be blamed for their failure to meet production quotas. A committee of Japanese communists had sent fraternal greetings; this meant Ilich intended to protect Bolshevik interests in the Far East. Astapov began reading Stalin’s speech to the sheet-metal union. The speech’s news was its placement on the upper left-hand side of the page: it announced that the People’s Commissar for Nationalities had elevated himself a tiny but palpable step.

Astapov’s bowl was emptied and the soup’s rich underground odors were replaced by the other smell, the sweet fragrance that was Zhenya’s. But now that he had taken such a strong dose of it, he realized that the scent had not always been part of her or part of the household. Honeyed and spiced, the scent had been introduced only recently, and until now very subtly. Now it cloyed, evoking the memory of a distant chapel in a remote province. Perhaps a flicker of awareness crossed Zhenya’s face. He wondered
whether she herself had just noticed how strong the stink was tonight.

Zhenya saw him fill his nostrils with incense. She blushed. Astapov averted his eyes, so that she wouldn’t see the rage building in them.

And then the rage passed, no more than a reflexive spasm. He had always suspected that she prayed in his absence: he wouldn’t question her about it. He didn’t want to frighten her into stopping a practice about which she had been so admirably discrete. She needed time to discard her superstitions. There was also this: he suspected that the incense was some sort of fertility offering. Zhenya was desperately frustrated. Astapov didn’t believe, of course, in the utility of prayers or incense, but it would have been dangerous for her to blame her barrenness on scientific atheism, even secretly.

He returned to the newspaper and began to read Comrade Stalin’s words, his eyes now dry, stinging. He had difficulty making his way down the first column. The type in
Izvestia
was set small, unevenly, on newsprint that had markedly deteriorated since the paper was published that morning. The words changed places with each other, randomly re-arranging themselves within the long sentences. It was as if the paper were trying to communicate something subversive.

Although her introduction into his life had barely disturbed its daily rhythms, Astapov would think of Zhenya while performing his duties for Enlightenment. He often found himself wondering what she was doing at that precise moment of the day, no more able to answer the question than to specify the concurrent actions
and whereabouts of, say, Georges Clemenceau. Inevitably, when he convened with his colleagues to orchestrate some new agitation and propaganda operation, he came to imagine that she would be its principal recipient: politically unmotivated, uneducated, covert in her relations with authority, recalcitrant, a Russian.

Zhenya had been considered a suitable wife only because her political reliability was presumed hereditary. Her father Stepan was renowned as a great hero of the unsuccessful insurrection in 1905, when he led his fellow bakery workers on a charge against police barricades in the Presnya district. Stepan still carried himself like a revolutionary champion, backslapping the cadres at Party meetings. He was a big-fisted, barrel-chested man who conspired to find occasions to hoist fifty-kilo sacks of flour on his shoulders, just to show that he could do it still. He had become head of the bakers union, widely admired and trusted by the workers—a rare attribute for a Party official. Without being an intellectual, Stepan couldn’t have risen very high in the Party, but he might have gone a bit higher if he hadn’t been so notoriously a libertine. His personal life had been marked by a series of scandals from which he always emerged grinning and freely blushing. Even now in his rounds as the union boss, he was usually accompanied by a fetching female Party worker. Wives and children, save for Zhenya, had vanished into the past.

Astapov found himself uneasy around his father-in-law, fearing that he would be somehow compromised by his risque anecdotes from 1905. These were colorful stories, involving solidarity and sacrifice in the Presnya commune, which had been modeled on the one in Paris. It had been a ball, really, Stepan said, sucking on his pipe and recalling the romantic passions nourished in the bunkers. Of course, he had rallied the workers again in ’17, and had taken part in many Bolshevik conspiracies in the interim. Stepan had
even met Ilich before the Revolution, on one of the leader’s undercover forays into the country while he was officially exiled. But most of all Stepan liked to speak of the women he had loved—revolutionaries, ladies, and bakery girls. He told stories of close escapes from angry husbands and parents, who he consistently portrayed as dim and bourgeois.

Now Astapov smoked while Zhenya slept. From time to time he gazed on Zhenya’s round, doughy figure and imagined that he saw tens of millions. The millions saw Moscow as the capital of world revolution. On this night in early spring the capital could be plausibly likened to a glass of mineral water effervescing with ideas, opinions, fantasies, and grandiosities, some of them his, some of them already authorized by the Politburo. For the past month he had been organizing a vast theatrical parade to be held in May on the Khodinskaya Field; in it, the Fortress of Capitalism would be overcome in battle by the City of the Future. The parade structures were already being built. The plans also called for more than two thousand infantry troops, two hundred cavalry, five aeroplanes with powerful searchlights, armored trains, tanks, cannons, and motorcycles. Gigantic banners would be suspended from dirigibles. There would be flamethrowers and smoke bombs.

Zhenya would be impressed. She would have a front-row seat with the wives of other Enlightenment officials. She would compare the revolution made by her husband with the two conflicts through which she had already lived. Those events had unfolded chaotically, especially for those involved; Astapov suspected that Stepan hadn’t known that the bunker he charged was occupied by gendarmes. Through judicious employment of dry ice and flashing lamps, Astapov’s pageant would make some gesture to the confusion inherent in armed revolution, but it would portray the events leading up to Capitalism’s defeat so vividly that they would
seem preordained—which, Marx and Ilich had proven, they were. In Zhenya’s imagination, the May Day pageant would assume an intimacy and a solidity denied to history.

Astapov didn’t tell Stalin that Soviet agitational propaganda was only a way-station. The Bolsheviks needed to do more than impress Russia’s Zhenyas. The culture of the future would have to combine cinema, wireless, industrial processes, and as-yet-unimagined innovations. It would far surpass the posturings done by today’s individual so-called artists. Future culture would be supra-individual, summoned to existence by the masses and consumed by the masses. Every work of art would suit all men at once, because it would derive from life conditions that all men shared and because the audience would be pre-tested for its response to it. Art would be instantly accessible. It would also be instantly disposable, geared to fulfill the cultural needs of the moment. It would be non-personal, non-neurotic, happy. It would express newly discovered harmonies in the relations between nature, the worker, and the state. In that coming day, art would be truly beautiful in form and spirit.

And humankind, too, would approach divinity. Astapov had unearthed his late father’s letters from Nikolai Fedorov, the Moscow librarian whose unpublished life work had been the development of a theory that promised human immortality. According to Fedorov, science would someday acquire the means to reassemble the atoms of everyone who had ever lived, enabling their resurrection. This “Common Task” was the only project worthy of social revolution. Fedorov had been much admired and the Count himself had once declared, “I’m proud to have lived at the same time as such a man.” Since then Fedorov had been disparaged by Ilich and the Bolsheviks, but certain circles within the Party maintained an active interest in his work. Astapov had
arranged for the manuscript to be studied by a small cell of discreet scientists.

The committee had issued a paper suggesting that, per Fedorov, we may conceive of a living body as a collection of atoms in a concise known order; a dead body represented disorder, or information lost. As the body decayed, more information was dissipated, but not irretrievably. To re-order and re-animate inanimate matter required no more than a sufficient quantity of information about the original animate form, as well as simple micro-manipulative devices to put its atoms back into their correct places. The scientists predicted that imminent advances in computational technology would make it possible to account for and retrieve the dispersed atoms, just as foreseen by Fedorov.

In light of these conclusions, the report had called for intensified female enlightenment, which would emancipate millions of women to operate the immortality project’s requisite myriad batteries of calculating machines. Astapov had carefully read the report and, knowing its release to the Commissariat would be hazardously premature, had scattered its pages at random through diverse unrelated files.

ASTAPOV
walked alone through the Alexander Gardens the following morning, just as the extras were being assembled for Comrade Light’s film about the storming of the Kremlin. A chill wind scoured the city. He kept his greatcoat buckled tight and smoked one cigarette after another to keep warm. In these plague years the gardens had reverted to a sandy lot, every tree and bush stolen for firewood. Dust swirled into his eyes. On the slight rise above the field, Comrade Light, the director who had been kept in the dark, was assembling his equipment and camera operators for the wide crowd view. The “angry workers and peasants” gathered at one end of the space near the roadway. The “police” milled along the foot of the Kremlin wall, some of them expertly swinging their sticks. A few were in fact off-duty police hired for the day.

The film had been Light’s proposal. The Commissariat had extensively debated and finally approved it, with Astapov’s underground, fingerprintless encouragement. After some house-to-house fighting around the city, no great military tactics had been
required to take the Kremlin fortress in 1917, yet the fortress now loomed as the worldwide symbol of Soviet power—this paradox had to be explained and rationalized. No one at the Commissariat liked the working title:
The Kremlin Is Ours.
At the very least, it would need an exclamation mark.

Light was considered a suspect character. He had joined the Bolsheviks many years ago, back when it was a tiny, obscure party: this revealed a non-conformist tendency. Also, he was an intellectual. The director, still a young man with a shock of lustrous black hair and swarthy Cossack features, wrote manifestoes on cinema theory that no one in the Commissariat, save Astapov, had the taste to read. Light declared that drama was the dead, rotting embodiment of the bourgeois social order. He preferred not to employ actors nor anything but the most rudimentary scripts—the director must be surprised by what he saw through his camera and he must communicate that surprise to the proletariat. The proletariat demanded the truth, a truth beyond the surface of events. The “cine-eye” drilled a hole into reality. It “enlarged” the truth. Light hoped to apply Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to the cinema, an aspiration received with some skepticism in the Kremlin, where Einsteinian physics had yet to be subjected to the dialectic and no one, as one cultural commissar observed sagely, knew what the fuck it had to do with the cinema. When Astapov had arrived this morning and introduced himself as a representative from the Commissariat, Light’s acknowledgement had been cold and dismissive.

Astapov inhaled alcoholic fumes as he passed among the extras, who were arguing among themselves, apparently about money. The general disorder was unfortunate. It demonstrated the masses’ failure of resolve, even now, more than three years after the Revolution. As if to demonstrate his thesis, yesterday’s beggar
from the Arbat arrived, raucously demanding “honest” work. He was sent down to the other extras who would be acting as protesters. Chipolovsky showed up too, less theatrically. The correct hat had been obtained—in the end, from Stalin himself—but on Astapov’s instructions Chipolovsky would leave it in his pocket until the actual filming. Astapov chose a place for himself on a rise at the edge of the open-air set.

An hour passed before the cameras were secured on the hill overlooking the Tsar’s once-lavish gardens and beyond it muddy Bolotnaya Square on the other side of the Moscow River. Astapov saw at once that this perspective, too distant from the action, would pose a problem for Comrade Light. Just before the filming was to commence, the director realized it as well and ordered a camera wheeled down to the field. He carried a megaphone but didn’t use it, instead shouting at the crew. He angrily waved back the extras who had begun to wander off around the lot.

Light planted his feet in the center of the field. Once the extras were in place at either end, he glared at them one more time and retreated to the side, a few meters from Astapov, who he continued to ignore.

“Let’s go!” he cried at last.

As they had been instructed, the two sides approached each other, moving in measured steps. Their voices could not be recorded, so the men jeered wordlessly and good-naturedly into the stiff breeze against them. Banners were held aloft, made illegible by their fluttering. Astapov heard Light counting as he calculated how much film was being used. The ominous procession of the angry workers and peasants was suddenly disrupted. Both Astapov and Light saw the cause of it at the same time. Some of them had collided with their comrades, who had pushed them back laughing and swearing.

“Idiots! Stop the filming!” Light ran out onto the pitch and screamed up to the cameras on the hill:
“Stop!”

The director looked as if he were about to strike some of the extras, those who were still grinning and pushing each other.

“What are you
doing
? This is a fucking revolution! You’re angry. For centuries the Romanovs have beaten you down! You’ve been slaves! You’ve been betrayed at home and in war! You can’t even buy your daily fucking bread!” Astapov winced at the director’s tactlessness; the Bolsheviks had just been forced to raise the price of rationed bread to five hundred rubles a loaf. Light continued: “You’re going to seize the Moscow Kremlin, ancestral home of the tsars! You’re going to overcome the police! The police are in the pay of your masters and they want to shoot you down like dogs! Act angry,
be
angry!”

Many of the actors playing policemen, who had come into earshot, were now laughing at these reprimands. One called out, “Tell them, Ilich!”

Light wheeled. “You!” he said, pointing a finger. “You’re fired! Go home, go to a tavern, just go! You too.”

One of the targeted policemen stood his ground. He was no longer laughing. “I want my thousand rubles,” he said. “A thousand rubles a day. That’s what we were promised for our troubles.”

“A thousand rubles!” Light raged. “You’re lucky you don’t get beaten for your troubles!”

The man stood his ground, making demands and threats for another minute. The police extras had been drinking too, and his face had flushed and his eyes had narrowed to the size, shape, and hardness of a child’s marbles. As an actual police sergeant, he was hardly ever intimidated by civilians. He had represented his prerogatives today by wearing his uniform, a blue greatcoat with pol
ished brass buttons. But the cameras had established another, unforeseen level of authority. Dumb and all-seeing, evoking the specter of a vast audience placed beyond their lenses, the cameras mocked his rank. When he finally left the Alexander Gardens the cop was still swearing and sensed, in a dim, animal way, that the natural order of things had been overthrown.

Comrade Light ordered the men to march at each other once more and instructed them to look angry, or else they too would be sent off without pay. “‘All power to the Soviets,’” he told the workers and peasants. “Shout it when you approach the Kremlin wall. That’s all I want to hear from you.” He told them he would give the signal to charge the uniformed extras, who would then turn tail, dropping their hats and rifles.

Again Light was dissatisfied with the filming. This time he didn’t blame the extras, but saw that he needed another vantage point even closer to the two mobs’ point of impact. He ordered the extras back to their original places. The air had become frigid and a light drizzle now penetrated their unlined coats and caps. Most of their outer garments dated from before the Great War.

“A thousand lousy rubles,” muttered one of the men. “The fuckers. They’ll have us marching up and back till nightfall. You’ll see.”

There were some murmured noises of assent around the man, especially from a gang of rough-looking youths, their faces un-shaven for days, their jackets torn as if they had been fought in or slept in. One of the youths replied, “And who knows if we’ll even get the money. You can’t trust the Bolsheviks.”

More murmuring. Someone added, “By the time you get your thousand, it’ll be worth a hundred.”

That’s when they saw Astapov, standing within earshot with his arms crossed. They fell silent and stared at him, insolence carved
into their faces. Astapov contemplated each of them one at a time and then turned and walked away, back toward the director and his assistants. Something unintelligibly derisive was voiced, followed at once by barkinglike laughter.

The prophecy of the first man seemed to be fulfilled: the director was determined to keep them going all day if need be. Astapov had stopped following Chipolovsky, who was so unobtrusive that he kept getting lost among the other extras. Most of them continued to behave satisfactorily, if sullenly, but Astapov watched the most obstreperous men in the crowd. They had begun singing “The Internationale,” ironically. At one point, after the fourth or fifth attempt at filming the scene, Astapov considered suggesting to Light that the bottles of the supernumeraries be confiscated. Light, however, was disinclined to take suggestions from the Commissariat. In any event, given the level of general inebriation that had already been achieved, the effort would have been impracticable.

Something thumped on the dirt nearby. It was evidently a stone, but no one among the film crew had heard it or seen it. At that moment Light was in close consultation with his chief cameraman, gesturing in the direction of the Kremlin gate. He wanted to shift the camera again. The police and mob extras saw his intention and responded with a furious buzzing on both sides of the divide, their solidarity forged by impatience.

Light’s crew laboriously brought the camera to its new position and the director returned to the center of the field. Before he could speak an empty bottle was fired from behind the front-line angry workers and peasants. A veteran of several dangerous Civil War topicals, Light ignored the missile, hoarsely repeated his orders, and gave the sign to begin filming. This time the two marching sides were even more unruly. “All power to the Soviets!” was
replaced by obscene chants that played on Ilich’s name. A fistfight broke out between an un-uniformed extra and an actor-policeman, who ended up striking the other man with his nightstick.

Astapov gazed beyond them at the walls of the Kremlin. At the gate at the end of the drawbridge the guards were vigilant and well-armed but few in number. From a hundred meters away, he could read the alarm on their faces. He skirted the filmmaking pitch and approached them briskly, his hands out of his pockets. They raised their weapons. A guard met him halfway across the bridge and demanded his documents. Upon opening the stamped book, the soldier nodded, obviously relieved at Astapov’s high position. “What’s happening in the gardens, comrade? What are they doing? Rocks have been thrown. We’ve heard counterrevolutionary statements.”

“Alert the Cheka,” Astapov commanded and ran him back to the guardhouse. He gave the men there the name and telephone number of a trusted colleague in the Lubyanka. He added, “We need troops.”

“We should call the Kremlin guard,” said the soldier.

“Do that.” Astapov turned and surveyed the rising tumult at the other end of the bridge. “Do you have loaded weapons stored here? Rifles? We need them supplied at once.”

The soldier was puzzled. “Supply who?”

Astapov nodded toward the Alexander Gardens. “Them. The police. They have guns, but they aren’t loaded.”

“But they’re not real police, are they?”

“I’ll deputize them, on behalf of the Commissariat of Enlightenment. Come on, hurry! The mob will be at the gates in a minute.”

The guns were rushed down in carts. Again the two teams of extras had been separated with difficulty. One of the police had
been brought off the field, his head smashed and bleeding heavily. Meanwhile the crowd of angry workers and peasants had expanded far beyond its original number. Raggedly dressed youths, gypsies, and other ruffians were pouring out of the Arbat. The men were joined by women, some of them carrying babies. Small children darted in and out of the crowd, chasing each other, engaged in their own make-believe. Sticks and makeshift pikes had materialized. The extras milled around extemporaneous speakers, all of them gesturing wildly and making seditious statements. One of them wore Ilich’s brown goatee.

Astapov went on a sprint back to the side of the field where the cameras were arrayed. He shouted at the director: “Light, we have to disperse them!”

The director glowered. “Disperse them? No, this is great. I’ve been working all day to get their blood up. Now I have something to film.”

“That’s the Kremlin.”

“Fuck, I thought it was a whorehouse.”

“They’re angry, they’ve got sticks,” Astapov said. “We can’t allow violent incidents at the Kremlin walls. They can get through the gates. Look, I’ve had the police-extras armed, they’ll fire if you don’t hold back the mob. Those are loaded guns.”

“Even better.”

“This is not a set!”

“Today it is!” Light was glaring now, trembling, spittle on his lips. “I have permission from the Politburo! From your fucking pantywaist Commissariat. Clear out! You’ll have your own head broken.”

But it was Light who stepped away, nearly on a run, back into the middle of the field.

“One more time, and let’s do it right!” he bellowed. “You
people are useless. The Russian people are useless, they’re lazy and stupid and superstitious and cowardly! Old women! I would’ve been better off with a bunch of Yids. Now listen, march on my command. Remember, you’re seizing the Kremlin! This is a Revolution!”

Astapov started after him, intending to address and warn the angry workers and peasants himself. But he managed only a single step before his motion was arrested by an overpowering anticipation, a familiar thrill, and an agitation within his gut. History was being made now, actually manufactured in the maw of the cameraworks. This was how it had to be done. Events would be revisited, history and its retelling shadowing themselves down long, mirrored corridors deep into the century. Everything was transformable, revisable, amplifiable, and, if need be, deniable. Now he saw the beggar from the Arbat and at that moment recognized him from another time and place, as the Astapovo man whose whittlings made more sense than the figures he shaped.