Twilight of the Eastern Gods (17 page)

‘But what if he doesn’t turn down the prize even after the third degree? What happens then? Will there be a fourth degree?’

Maskiavicius interrupted the speaker. ‘You won’t catch me out as easily as that, mate! I wouldn’t be so careless as to tell you anything about the fourth degree. Sss.’ He whistled. ‘Fourth degree! Hey-hey! Degree number four . . . Hm! Brrr!’ With a diabolical glint in his eye, he turned tail and disappeared into the crowd.

The meeting was held in the auditorium on the first floor of the Institute. Almost all the seats were taken when I went in. It was already twilight outside and the feeble light that trickled through the tall bay windows seemed to form an alloy with the bronze chandeliers that hadn’t yet been switched on, though I didn’t know why. The room was packed and virtually silent. The scraping of a chair and words whispered into neighbours’ ears could not dent the empire of silence. On the contrary: the occasional sounds of creaking seats and muffled gossip made the atmosphere only more leaden.

I was standing at the entrance, unsure what to do, when I noticed people waving at me. It was the two Shotas, Maskiavicius and Kurganov, who were almost sitting in each other’s laps. I forged a path between the rows of seats, and my fellow students huddled even closer together to make just enough room for me. In the row in front of us were the Karakums and somewhere to the side I thought I could see one of the ‘Belarusian Virgins’.

‘How are you?’ someone asked me quietly.

I shrugged. The mood was such that you didn’t have the slightest wish to answer anything about yourself. In that drab room you felt as though you could speak only about generalities, and only through the use of impersonal verbs, if possible in a chorus, as in some ancient drama.

I looked around at the participants. Apart from the students and teachers of the Institute, there were many known faces. The front rows were almost completely filled with literary mediocrities. They were just as I had always seen them, always present and totally invulnerable, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the front rank, stepping up to glorify Stalin before anyone else, and to drop him in favour of Khrushchev; they were quite capable of deserting Khrushchev for some other First Secretary.

Right at the back, in a corner, in the middle of a group that remained obscure, I thought I could make out Paustovsky. Was it a group of the silent opposition or of Jewish writers? I couldn’t see them clearly enough. It was getting ever darker in the room. At long last someone thought of switching on the lights. The candelabra immediately banished the weak daylight and filled the hall with a light that reminded me of Ladonshchikov – a brightness tainted with anxiety. The first thing the light revealed was the long table of the Presidium, decked out in red velvet. The porcelain vases at each end and the bouquet in the middle made it look like an elongated catafalque. I recalled the wallpaper on the walls of the empty apartment where I had read a few pages of
Doctor Zhivago
. It was no coincidence that its pattern had made me think of the lid of a sarcophagus.

‘What does the third degree consist of?’ I asked in a whisper. ‘Is that what we’re about to see?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. It depends on Chukovsky, who’s gaga already.’

‘I meant to ask, what exactly has he done?’

‘Nothing, apparently. Around two he went to Pasternak’s
dacha
at Peredelkino, but it seems he forgot why he was there. So he drank a cup of tea, and then had a nap on the sofa.’

I was just about to guffaw, but at that moment a kind of shiver ran through the room. The meeting’s Presidium had come on to the stage to take their seats at the long table with its crimson drapery. The first were already sitting down while others, who were still in the audience, were lining up and creeping forward in waves, like a snake. Their whispered names circulated among us. They’d been summoned from here and there; most were old, some had been publishing trilogies for forty years; if my memory serves me right, five had published novels with titles that contained the word ‘earth’, and two had gone blind. My mind went back to Korney Chukovksy’s fateful siesta, but I couldn’t manage to laugh about it.

‘Comrades, we are gathered here today . . .’

The opening speaker was Seriogin, director of the Gorky Institute. His eyes, as always, had a sinister and malicious glint. To his right sat Druzin, representing the governing body of the Writers’ Union. His hair was snow white, but his massive head and thrusting jaw seemed so fierce and warlike that it was hard to believe the white hair was real.

‘We are gathered here to censure, to . . .’

Seriogin’s voice contained the same proportion of malice and gall as his eyes, the stripes on his suit and even his hands, one of which had been replaced by a black rubber prosthesis. The first time I saw him I supposed he’d lost his hand in the war, but Maskiavicius told me that Seriogin’s hand had slowly withered of its own accord in the course of the third Five-year Plan . . .

Seriogin’s speech was a short one. Then Druzin rose. His contribution was no more drawn out; what he said didn’t match his white hair. As always, everything about him jutted like his chin.

‘Now for the fireworks!’ Maskiavicius said, once Druzin had sat down.

Indeed, at that point dozens of hands were raised to request the floor. From the outset it was clear that, as was customary in such circumstances, the Presidium’s selection of speakers sought to maintain some kind of balance between generations, nationalities and regions, as well as between undeclared literary groupings.

Ladonshchikov was among the first allowed to speak. In a special voice that was both gloomy and booming (a Party voice, in Maskiavicius’s phrase), in a voice that his lungs could only ever produce on occasions of this kind, Ladonshchikov made the proposal to his silent listeners that Pasternak be expelled from the Soviet Union.

‘Was that the third degree?’ I whispered in Maskiavicius’s ear.

He nodded.

‘If he fails to make a decision by eight p.m. . . .’

All those who spoke after Ladonshchikov supported the proposal, without exception.

It was one of the Shotas’ turn when I realised I hadn’t seen Stulpanc. All around the hall dozens of hands were still being raised.

‘Have you seen Stulpanc?’ I asked Maskiavicius.

‘No,’ he answered. ‘That’s a point. What’s he up to?’

One of the ‘Belarusian Virgins’ has just walked on to the stage.

I hadn’t seen Antaeus either.

‘Now it’s the Karakums’ turn,’ said Maskiavicius. ‘That should be a laugh!’

It was as clear as daylight: Stulpanc was with Lida Snegina while this was going on . . .

Now it was Taburokov’s turn.

I told myself that I had never had occasion to wile away a campaign of denunciation in the company of a young woman . . .

Taburokov must have said something peculiar because the audience was trying to stifle a groan.

Being alone with a girl, I thought, in the course of a campaign or something of that sort, such as an epidemic – now that would most likely stick in your memory for a good long while . . .

After a couple of first-year women had said their piece, Yuri Goncharov and Abdullakhanov took their turn. Then Anatoly Kuznetsov was called to the podium.

I thought I glimpsed Ira Emelianova’s blonde hair behind Paustovsky. He had Yuri Pankratov and Vania Kharabarov to each side. One was tall and thin and moved his arms stiffly, like a robot; the other was short and looked repulsive.

‘I’m looking at them as well,’ Maskiavicius said, in my ear. ‘You know they’re both spies for Pasternak? They’re here to pick up everything that’s said about him and then they’ll report back to him.’

‘Ah!’ I said, lost for words.

‘Is Yevtushenko going to speak?’ someone asked, from the row behind me.

Where Yevtushenko was concerned, I’d heard people utter every imaginable insult and every imaginable compliment about him.

At this point a member of the panel shouted, ‘Maskiavicius, you have the floor!’

He glanced at me, then stood up and made his way to the podium.

‘As long as we are together, what does it matter if the world is going to ruin . . .’ I recited the two lines from De Rada automatically in my head. In his novel the lovers meet during an earthquake.

On the stage, speakers came and went. Then a muffled mumble swept through the hall. Pasternak was racing across the tundra: Kyuzengesh was about to hold forth!

Stulpanc and Lida were perhaps listening to it all on the radio, in the corner of some café. They were gazing into each other’s eyes and maybe they were talking about me.

Amplified to a terrifying degree by the loudspeakers, Kyuzengesh’s murmuring now filled the whole hall.

Yes, they must have occasion to talk about me. Did she not like dead writers? Once again we had mounted the same horse: I was the dead and she was the living rider, like the legendary Kostandin and Doruntine. Except that instead of there being two, there were now three of us: the living couple, and the deceased me.

The campaign went on. Nothing was known for certain about the outcome of the Gorky Institute meeting as far as Pasternak’s expulsion from the Soviet Union was concerned. Some people said he had already sent an urgent telegram to Stockholm to decline the prize, others that he was still wavering. In the best-informed circles, they were saying he’d written a moving letter to Khrushchev and that his fate now hung on the First Secretary’s response. But they were also claiming that Khrushchev had been furious with writers for some time, and only a very harsh reply could be expected.

Meanwhile gusts of icy wind bore down on Moscow. Sometimes you could hear them howling as they blew in from some indeterminate point. At Butyrsky Khutor it seemed as if they were coming from Ostankino, but in that corner of town people reckoned they’d been let loose in the centre, near the main squares.

All through the long moan of winter Stulpanc went on seeing Lida. They sometimes talked about me, he said. It sounded macabre. Breaking all the laws of death, he informed me about how mine had occurred. It was against nature for anybody to hear about that, because nobody can ever know such things. But there did exist in this world one being for whom I counted as dead, and so, objectively speaking, some part of me must have passed to the hereafter. And that being, Lida Snegina, was the only person in whom the details of my death were located. Lida was my pyramid and my mausoleum; she was where my sarcophagus lay. Through her, the whole relationship between my being and my nothingness had been turned upside down. And when Stulpanc came back from spending time with her, I felt as if he was returning from the other world, coming down from a higher plane, from an alternative time with newspapers bearing future dates and archives containing information about me that looked like nothing at all, since no one had yet looked at me in the light of my own death.

Sometimes it seemed to me that my death was also being broadcast through Stulpanc’s eyes. On a couple of occasions when he’d looked as if he wanted to talk to me, I’d cut him off: ‘Say no more!’

At one of the anti-Pasternak meetings I’d made the acquaintance of Alla Grachova, a theatre-loving girl with a sense of humour. Every time the radio announcers returned to the subject of Pasternak after a musical broadcast, she would take my hand and say, ‘Let’s go somewhere else!’

But the campaign was all around us and nobody could get free of it. It had winkled its way inside us. When Alla talked about some of her relatives, she told me what they were saying about Pasternak. One of her uncles was the angriest of them all.

‘But you told me he’d made his career since the rise of Khrushchev!’

‘Yes, he’s a Khrushchevite through and through, and a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Stalinist too.’

‘But how can that be possible?’

She looked at me sweetly, as if she didn’t understand what wasn’t possible. I decided to explain it to her in simple terms.

‘Your uncle paints Pasternak as black as coal, right?’ She nodded. ‘And he also heaps insults on Stalin, right?’

‘Yes,’ said Alla, eyes wide.

‘And Pasternak most certainly slings mud at Stalin. In other words, your uncle has the same attitude to Stalin as Pasternak does. Right? Well, then, arithmetically, between your uncle and Pasternak there should not be any incompatibility. Quite the opposite, actually.’

‘Damn!’ she said. ‘I can never get the hang of that kind of thing and I’ve no wish to. We’d said we’d drop the subject. You can’t imagine the goings-on at our place . . .’

All the same, newspapers, radio and TV carried on campaigning.
Doctor . . . Doctor . . .
The wailing of the transcontinental wind made it seem as if the entire, and now almost entirely snow-covered, Soviet Union was calling out for a man in a white coat.
Doctor . . . Doctor . . .
Sometimes, at dusk or in the half-light of dawn, you could almost hear the deep-throated moaning of an invalid waiting for the arrival from who knew where of a doctor who had so far failed to turn up.

The campaign stopped as suddenly as it had started. One fine morning the radio began broadcasting reports on the achievements of the collective farms in the Urals, about summer retreats, about arts festivals in one or another Soviet republic, about the abundance of the fisheries, about contented young people in the steppe near the Volga – but it uttered not another word about Pasternak.