The Commissariat of Enlightenment (22 page)

THE
face. The hyperborean smile, the Asiatic eyes, the thick eyebrows, the hairless head, the tight, ascetic skin, the sandy-tinted goatee, the condescending tilt of the head. Those eyes and the adamantine will behind them. The lighting was clumsy, handled by blockheads, but the reflection off Ilich’s pate could be interpreted as a kind of beacon, a beam emanating from his skull. A nice effect, really, especially with the rest of the frame in shadow.

You had to use the backgrounds. There was a developing science to exploiting the landscape: the landscape established Ilich in Russia, in the capital itself. And, looming in the foreground, he always dominated it. Ilich in the Kremlin courtyard, speaking to Zinoviev,
instructing
him, his back slightly arched away. Ilich lecturing and exhorting on Tverskaya, in front of a monument to Yuri Dolgoruku, Moscow’s founder. Beyond the statue fluttered a flag that was presumably crimson (already the Soviet cinemagoer translated it as crimson, even if the camera couldn’t). Ilich standing on the river embankment. Again inside: Ilich at a
table, an island in a circle of light, writing, truly oblivious to the camera.

Ilich with a cat, in a flat of extravagant frugality. Krupskaya sat beside him, grim and thoroughly unpretty, her arms crossed. Ilich smiled without any notion of humor. The cat lay in his lap and, like the continent itself, inflexibly within his grip. Ilich didn’t speak, transferring the energy he usually expended for that task (that joy! that glory!) to the cat, which he stroked with enormous vigor. He looked at the camera and smiled placidly, but his caresses did not vary in either motion or force. One more minute of filming, and the cat would have been killed.

Astapov smoked, lighting one cigarette directly after the other. Sometimes he studied the threads of smoke dissolving as they rose to the ceiling of the coach. He had seen these films often enough to know the details of every frame, including the flickering defects on their master prints. Ilich never bored him, though: every shot demonstrated how a great leader must be filmed. Ilich never entered or left a frame; the scene began and ended with his presence. Ilich always kept his hands or body in motion. When Ilich looked into the camera, he saw the audience.

Outside, the air thumped against the sides of the speeding train.

Now the most recent footage: filmed in the autumn and held back by the Commissariat. The lighting was dim. Krupskaya had whined about the heat of the lamps and no one had been available to contradict her. The film was unusable, Ilich barely distinguishable in the gloom, save for his eyes, which were bright with illness, madness perhaps. They were fixed on the cameraman and their stare was like a view through a keyhole into another landscape. At this point he had probably lost his power to reason. Now only the
will remained. He wore a cap that had become a size too big for him. Krupskaya was too thrifty to buy him a new one.

“He’s not dead yet, is he?”

Astapov hadn’t heard Vorobev’s steps as he entered from the other coach. There was no telling how long the professor had been watching these films or what thoughts they had inspired in him. It was already near two in the morning.

“No, Ilich lives,” said Astapov, thinking of possible intertitles. “Ilich will live always. Ilich will always live.”

“He had another stroke,” Vorobev guessed.

“Several. The most recent of them occurred yesterday, and since then he’s been conscious only intermittently. His vital signs are weak. The physicians offer little hope.”

Vorobev snorted. “The physicians are without hope because they’re without imagination. For them life and death stand in opposition, as if an organism exclusively occupies either one state or the other. Like the ancients, they consider death a man’s complete negation: the so-called soul must depart in an instant, as if to catch a train.” He paused. “I trust you’re in telegraph contact with Moscow. Please have them transmit the information regarding Ilich’s pulse and body temperature.”

At that moment the film shuddered to its end, the take-up reel spun away without restraint, and a splash of white light on the screen illuminated the two men. They glanced at each other, as if for the first time, and then a smile curled Vorobev’s face: “Astapovo,” he murmured. The comrade from Moscow flipped a switch and replaced the film. When the film resumed, there was Ilich again, again writing within a halo of electric light. By some unintended trick of the lamps and the developing process, the murk around this sphere was not entirely black, but it possessed a
kind of visible texture, something old and organic. This could be used, Astapov knew. The frame was often more important than the picture.

“You were there, weren’t you?” said Vorobev, looking beyond him so as not to spoil the memory. “Simply remarkable, historic, how those few days of contemplation allowed me to entirely reformulate my procedure, and the proof was accomplished at once. You recognize, of course, that you were witness to a scientific breakthrough.”

“It was another time,” Astapov said vaguely.

Vorobev nodded, taking Astapov’s manner as a rebuke for a reference to the past; the Bolsheviks were touchy about the oddest things, and especially about the past. He said, “I’m sure the subject’s sickroom is overheated. It’ll be necessary to lower the room’s temperature to, say, fifteen Celsius. In the subject’s present condition, a drop of eight or ten degrees will cause hardly any sensible discomfort. Also demand that his attendants extinguish all the candles in the room. In the Age of Electricity, they consume oxygen for no purpose whatsoever. We need to
increase
the oxygen content in the room. Make a request that pressurized oxygen containers be brought to the sick room to await our arrival. And the subject should be fed nothing but strained broth.”

“This will prolong Ilich’s life?”

Vorobev’s head wagged. “Ilich’s so-called life no longer serves either himself or, for that matter, the world proletariat. These measures are taken on the behalf of the Ilich who will survive the cessation of his biological functions.”

Astapov said, “We’ll send a coded message from the next station. It will all be done.”

He rose to notify the train crew, but, standing, the two men watched the film to its end one more time. Astapov observed that
the inscrutability of the later film images were perhaps their most useful element. After all, not everything on the iconostasis had been easily read. A little strain, artfully introduced, further closed the difference between the moving images on a cinema screen and the icon screen’s stationary ones.

IT
was an illusion. It began with a series of still images. Passed quickly through the electric, they created the dream of movement, meaning, and rampant, striving, confused, crushed, embittered, hopeful, mortal life. Because your eyes couldn’t entirely absorb the information cast upon the screen, you were left with malleable and half-formed impressions of seemingly irrelevant details. A lamp with its shade painstakingly even. A half-drawn curtain. In the unfocused distance, one of the double-headed eagles on the Kremlin towers. Colorless, soundless, uneven in their motions, the phantoms posed as real as long as the machine continued to operate at a speed that protected you from a clear perception of the individual frames. You flowed with the coursing narrative. You were aware of this trickery and you acquiesced to it. Your submission opened the way to further illusion.

In the cinema halls, where he monitored the conditions in which Enlightenment’s materials were presented, Comrade Astapov spied on the audiences. Sometimes he watched from behind the screen, through gaps in the fabric. He saw the reflections of the films in the spectators’ eyes. Their attention was nearly total;
even the furtive grapplings in each other’s laps were accomplished distractedly. From their responses, he could follow the films’ narratives. The audience’s faces were flat, their mouths dry and slightly parted, sometimes with a string of spittle between their lips, the thread trembling within their respirations. The spectators forgot to breathe from time to time. He saw their unconscious erections and raised papillae. The cinemagoer was both alone and in the crowd, momentarily unaware of the other spectators, even when they hissed and cheered. This augmented the manipulation: the crowd exerted surreptitious control on the individual.

Do-gooders within the Commissariat pressed for a more vigorous literacy campaign, as well as for greater financial subventions to book publishers—covert threats to the Revolution. Astapov believed that the old Bolsheviks’ romantic affections for the reader were misplaced. They failed to realize that at home at his table, the book supine beneath him, the reader was free to disagree with the words on the page, perhaps even mentally dispute them, and indulge his skepticism irresponsibly. The reader could even close the book (Marx’s, Ilich’s) without reading it, in contempt or in apathy, and no one would be the wiser. But in the cinema, surrounded by his neighbors, the exits watched by the militia, his mind inundated by light, the same person would be forced to remain in his seat until the show was completed.

It was now feasible to record speech and other sounds on film, in accompaniment to the cine-play. The implications were hardly discussed within the Commissariat, where most debate dwelled on immediate political concerns and the virtue of any technical innovation was taken for granted. Astapov privately doubted the sound film. Silence was the more powerful medium, engaging the imagination with what was not said, adding a spectral, larger-than-life presence to the figures portrayed on the screen. Speech was too
specific. It individualized the actors, making them more human, when what was needed was to idealize them, to emphasize their mythic qualities: worker, peasant, soldier, plutocrat; father, mother, child. The spectacle of the riot in the Alexander Gardens, despite its nearly disastrous consequences, had given Astapov a belief in the utility of crowd scenes. He now preferred that individual Soviet men and women not be filmed, save for Party leaders representing the masses they led. But he kept these views to himself, confiding them only to Stalin, and he worked surreptitiously within the Commissariat to impede sound’s arrival, at least until the Revolution was consolidated, by questioning the expense of the equipment and the class loyalties of certain sound enthusiasts.

His favorite cinema, the Mirror, whose lobby had once been compared in advertisements to the palace at Versailles, was located on Tverskaya. Most of its mirrors were now smashed or bent. Passing through the lobby, Comrade Astapov caught unrecognizable bits and pieces of himself in the remaining silver, as if he had survived revolution and civil war only as tumbling quanta of light. The ceiling had been shot up, probably less in revolt than in revolutionary exuberance. The screen had gone yellow with age. Astapov secretly grieved. He suspected that the original screen, which he recalled as creamy and silklike, had been stolen or sold or somehow betrayed and had been replaced by something inferior.

Another film, as dawn approached: a Pathé news-reel from nearly a year past, the single Pathé News that had been approved by the Commissariat for public exhibition. Dozens of copies (from an original purchased abroad) had been produced and distributed
throughout Soviet Russia. The news-reel was exclusively concerned with the recent opening of the tomb in which the Egyptian pharaoh Tut-ankh-amen had been interred thirty-three centuries ago. No news event of the last year, perhaps none in this century, had stirred the public imagination like the daring discovery by the two British archaeologists, Howard Carter and his patron Lord Carnavon—followed by Lord Carnavon’s mysterious fatal illness attributed to a pharonic “curse.” Reporters had flooded Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, from where they had wired daily dispatches. The correspondents camped out in burnooses and togas, suffering third-degree burns in the heat. Access to the tomb had been strictly managed as the explorers negotiated exclusive contracts with certain newspapers for the rights to their story. As each treasure was extracted from the tomb, it was raced away in an ambulance. This year Tut-ankh-amen continued to inspire women’s fashions and cosmetics, furniture design, books, cine-plays, and popular songs.

The affair had captured the Russian imagination no less than it had the world’s. In the Bolshevik Empire’s cities and most distant outposts, tens of thousands of cinemagoers who might have resisted an exhibition of domestic agitprop paid two million catastrophically devalued rubles apiece to view the Pathé news-reel. Astapov’s colleagues questioned the expense of copying and distributing moving pictures produced by a foreign bourgeois company—and why was it
this
film that needed to be so extensively distributed?—but through obstinacy and subterfuge Astapov prevailed. He was softening the ground. Egyptian civilization, particularly its funerary art, had been one of the wellsprings of Russian art, with artistic presumptions and conceits still immediately recognizable in this far-removed place and time. The supremacy of
the image over the word had passed across the centuries, transmitted into the Eastern Church by the pharaohs’ Hellenic and Roman successors.

Even in the Western countries, where the written word had reigned for centuries, the bourgeois eye was increasingly overwhelmed by visual representations unhinged from language. Comrade Astapov saw how columns of informative advertising text in German newspapers and French magazines had been supplanted by merely suggestive (and far more effectual) photographs and illustrations, and that the articles themselves were increasingly dominated by visual aids. Line drawings and halftones were plastered across the hoardings in Britain. According to secret reports from the Commissariat’s foreign agents, the movies had reached every burb and hamlet of America. This transformation of the civilized world had taken place within a single historic instant. Despite its rejection of Byzantium, the West was creating an image-ruled empire of its own, a shimmering, electrified web of pictures, unarticulated meaning, and passionate associations forged between unrelated ideas. This was how to do it: either starve the masses of meaning or expose them to so much that the sum of it would be unintelligible. Wireless cinema loomed. A man’s psyche would be continually massaged, pummeled, and manipulated so that he would be unable to complete a thought without making reference to some image manufactured for his persuasion. Exhausted, his mind would hunger for thoughtlessness. Political power and commercial gain would follow.

Some clever Englishman, some former journalist, had already claimed the right to link Tut-ankh-amen to products that had nothing to do with ancient Egypt, receiving his profits from their manufacturers. King Tut Tobacco, Tut bath soap, Pyramid Motor Oil, etc. A copyright-protected silhouette suggesting the dead
pharaoh was one of the most recognizable images of the age. Hightower Promotions Ltd. had become a highly valued issue on the London Stock Exchange without producing a single tangible item.

This morning Astapov ran the film several times, no longer seeing the tomb nor the ancient relics that had been discovered within it. He half-dozed off, letting the flickering shadows of the tomb supersede his dreams.