Monumental Propaganda (10 page)

“Right now if you like,” Shaleiko said, perking up.

Aglaya hesitated. She didn't really fancy Shaleiko that much, but it was a long time since anyone had courted her, although she was only forty-two and all her vital cycles still functioned as regularly as the rising and the setting of the moon. At night she still dreamed of the delights of carnal love—not often, but sometimes so tangibly she felt the next moment her longings would be satisfied, but the moment never arrived and she woke feeling disappointed and irritable.

“Not right now,” said Aglaya, not wishing to be too easy a conquest for Shaleiko. “If you don't go away or change your mind, then drop by this evening.”

23

While Aglaya was having lunch, her neighbor Shubkin was making himself comfortable in his new apartment. For an extra charge Opryzhkin had put up some bookshelves for him, and they now displayed the works of Lenin, Gorky, Mayakovsky, Korolenko, Kuprin and the coming fashionable writer Saint-Exupéry. The shelves with Shubkin's library occupied all four walls with the exception, naturally, of the door and window apertures, and in front of the books Shubkin had hung portraits of his idols, which included Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Gorky, Mayakovsky and the hero he had especially revered in his youth, Giuseppe Garibaldi. When he was finished with the library, Mark Semyonovich installed his so-called writing desk at the window with his homemade table lamp, then put his Record radio on it and threw the wire antenna out of the window. He could scarcely wait to listen to one of the foreign radio stations and check how good the reception was here, but for some reason in this area he couldn't pick up the Voice of America at all, Radio Liberty was jammed very powerfully and the BBC only worked in the evenings.

24

Aglaya spent the whole day busy around the apartment: doing the laundry, washing the floors and windows, changing the sheets. All the while realizing that Shaleiko might sober up, change his mind and not come. But shortly after seven o'clock in the evening, there was a knock at the door. When she opened it, she saw Stepan Kharitonovich beaming brightly with a bottle of cognac in one hand and a paper bag in the other.

“Did anyone see you?” Aglaya asked

“I don't know,” said Shaleiko with a shrug. “I think there were a couple of old women sitting on the bench, but what's that to you? You're not married.”

“I wasn't thinking about me,” said Aglaya, “but about you. Aren't I supposed to be in disgrace right now?”

“Oh, forget it. In disgrace!” her guest replied casually, standing the bottle on the table and tipping two lemons and some Mishka in the North candies out of the paper bag. “What do I care if you're in disgrace? Do you think I'm going to avoid you now? I'm Shaleiko. A Cossack! I went into the attack without any helmet.” He slapped his bald patch to show how he fought without a helmet. “I wasn't afraid of the bullets, I didn't cringe at the shrapnel, so now what? I wouldn't want my wife to catch me, but as for the Party committees, what can I say, I couldn't give a hoot for the damn lot of them. Now show me how you live,” Shaleiko asked her.

He went around the entire apartment, knocked on the walls, tugged at the window frames, flushed the toilet and pronounced judgment: “Good apartment. Bad that it hasn't got any real foundation at all. But all the conveniences are good. The bath, and this thing, just pull the chain and it goes glug-glug. We still do everything the old-fashioned way out in the village. Water from the well, conveniences out in the yard, wash yourself in the bathhouse. But where d'you get the gas from?”

“From the collector,” said Aglaya.

“And what's that?”

“It's in the basement. Twelve cylinders of gas. Propane and butane.”

“Gases for the masses,” Shaleiko said with a laugh, and then gave his approval. “Gas is good. I lived in Kiev with relatives, and they have gas too. You can put on a pan that size and it boils in five minutes. I think maybe we'll live to see electricity in every house, and gas and sewers. They ask me, ‘Are you crazy or something?' But I say I'm not crazy, I have a dream. Lenin dreamed about it and so do I. No, I'm not comparing myself. Lenin is, you know, oho, and I'm something different altogether. Lenin had a dream maybe a kilometer long, and mine's only fifty centimeters, but everyone has a right to dream. But it's bad your house has almost no foundation. What if there's an earthquake?”

“How could we have an earthquake?” Aglaya objected. “That's for places in Central Asia. Or in Italy. Or in Turkey. We've never had anything of that sort.”

“That's true enough,” said Shaleiko, “we haven't. But we will now.” And he swept Aglaya up in his arms and dragged her into the bedroom. “Oh, what an earthquake there's going to be now!”

She didn't resist. She just asked: “But what about the cognac?”

“It'll keep,” Shaleiko assured her.

I can clearly picture my pampered modern-day reader frozen in anticipation of the details of what actually happened in Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina's bedroom, what positions our characters assumed, which of their body parts were conjoined and how, what words they whispered to each other while they were doing it, and how exactly they climaxed. But the author is not going to relate any of this. And not even primarily out of his own innate modesty (which goes without saying), but because there is nothing particular to talk about. Our characters came from a workers' and peasants' background and upbringing, they never had any sex education, they hadn't seen our modern television programs “about that,” they hadn't read any Indian, Chinese or other books about the refinements of erotic pleasure. For the most part they read the newspaper
Pravda, The Agitator's
Notebook
and
The Short Course in the History of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).
Aglaya had never even heard the word “sex,” and although Shaleiko had heard it, he thought it meant “six” in German. So it all went off without any particularly spicy bits, although it should be noted that the persistent Stepan Kharitonovich did succeed in rousing some kind of feeling in Aglaya because, although he lacked education, he was physically strong and he tried hard, he snorted and chomped on her hair and told her: “You're my pussycat.”

And just when she was approaching the station her train had never reached in all her life, and he was riding the same track and they were both ready to go tumbling down the mountainside, plunging headlong into Nirvana, somewhere very close by (but not inside them, somewhere outside) music began to play and a low woman's voice announced simply:

“This is the BBC broadcasting from London. Western correspondents in Moscow inform us that according to rumors circulating there the policy of de-Stalinization is encountering significant resistance from the more orthodox members of the CPSU. In this connection the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU is considering the possibility of purging the ranks of the party of those who secretly or openly oppose the new general line as defined at the Twentieth Congress . . . As one party representative put it, the party will expose and punish not only those who openly oppose the new line, but also those who do not ostracize them with adequate vigor.”

That means me! Shaleiko thought with a sudden unpleasant feeling in his chest.

“What's that?” he asked without abandoning his efforts, but feeling himself beginning to sober up.

“Take no notice,” Aglaya whispered, panting and trying not to lose her grip on her mounting excitement. “It's my new neighbor. Shubkin. You know him.”

“Shubkin,” Shaleiko repeated with disappointment. “But if we can hear him, that means he can . . .”

“I don't know. I don't care,” Aglaya said rapidly, annoyed, but she told a lie because in fact it excited her a lot that perhaps Shubkin could hear, and if Shaleiko had only had the wits or the tact to stay silent for a second or two . . .

“But I do care,” Shaleiko whispered in her ear, carrying on moving. “You heard, they say there's going to be a purge. For those who oppose and those who don't ostracize them. But I don't oppose and I wholeheartedly and absolutely”—he began moving even more energetically— “condemn your position!”

“Ah, so you condemn it, do you?” she cried in outrage, trying at the same time to stay hot and to reach that final point. But by this time he was going through the reverse process, and although out of politeness he was still slithering up and down on top of her, his energy was declining. She sensed this, her mood turned sour, she lost patience and pushed him off herself rather roughly. Muttering unintelligible apologies, he slid down on to the floor and began to get dressed.

She didn't reproach him, but she glared at him spitefully. She threw on her silk Chinese dressing gown with the peacocks and waited impatiently for him to fasten up all his buttons. He had already put on his hat and set off toward the door when she snatched his briefcase out of his hands and started stuffing the cognac and lemons into it.

“Don't do that, Stepanovna!” he said, trying to reason with her, but she handed him the briefcase and said: “Get lost, sissy!”

Shaleiko thought this label was very insulting, and it was all the more insulting because he had actually been called “a sissy” in his childhood. He went out onto the landing with a heavy sigh, hoping that he could make an inconspicuous exit from the house. Of course, he remembered, there were some old women sitting out in front of the house. They were always ready to stick their noses into everything, but they were so blind, deaf and stupid they probably wouldn't realize who he was and where he'd been.

But before he met the old women again, right there on the landing he ran into Shubkin. After listening to the latest broadcast from the BBC, Mark Semyonovich had decided to take out the garbage pail and on the way to think over current events. He also had various ideas concerning a possible purge in the CPSU, and as he walked along, he was already composing yet another letter to Khrushchev with a demand not to limit the action to the expulsion of high-placed factionalists, but to purge the Party of the most extreme Stalinists ensconced in Party structures at the regional and district levels.

Shubkin emerged onto the landing with the pail and came face-to-face with Shaleiko. Seeing Shubkin there, Shaleiko decided he must have heard the bed squeaking and the words “You're my pussycat” and wanted to see who had spoken them, not realizing that a creative individual (such as Mark Semyonovich Shubkin undoubtedly was), being entirely absorbed in his own thoughts (and he was always absorbed in them), became so cut off from everything going on around him that he didn't hear any conversations or other extraneous sounds, and if he did hear occasional oohs and aahs and spoken words, then it was only as unintelligible noise, like the distant pounding of the surf on the shore. But Shaleiko, who did not understand the subtle spiritual constitution of the creative individual, was convinced that this snake had been listening and perhaps even eavesdropping, and so there was no point in trying to hide anything from him.

“Aha,” he said, donning an expression of sincere joy at seeing Shubkin. “Hi there!”

“Hello,” said Shubkin absentmindedly or, as it seemed to Shaleiko, evasively.

“I was just, you know . . . Well, I had a couple of drinks. And the clutch went. I spent the night in the Collective Farm Workers' House . . .”

“Ah, good,” said Shubkin abstractedly, without meaning anything by it, but it seemed to Shaleiko that the word “good” concealed Shubkin's suspicions concerning what he had heard.

“Look, I'm trying to explain to you,” said Shaleiko, taking offense at something or other. “Well, I was a bit tipsy. I confess it happens to me sometimes. And I met her. I lead a dog's life, always traveling on business. Either Party conferences or leading workers' seminars, or a course, or an exhibition. My wife's got women's problems. She says to me herself: ‘You can do what you like, Styopa, just don't leave me.' And I'm not a weak man, after all. At the front I went into the attack without any helmet, with bullets whistling between my head and my ear, but I didn't cringe for them. I'm Shaleiko, I am! I'm a Cossack. But when I see a good-looking woman, especially if . . . And so . . .” He sighed and assumed a dignified air. “But on the ideological level I accept no compromises. Shaleiko's hard as flint when it comes to that.” He held up a clenched fist, no doubt intending it to illustrate the hardness of the aforementioned mineral. But he decided to try a different approach. “Listen, fancy a glass of cognac? Look, it's good stuff, Moldavian, four stars. No? Suit yourself. So what are they saying about us now on the BBC? Some kind of twisted slander, eh?”

He pronounced the final phrase as though in passing and without any emphasis, but as if he was hinting that if you should happen to inform on us, then we've got something we can pass on to the right place as well.

“Not really,” Shubkin replied absentmindedly, “nothing special.” He wanted to get rid of Shaleiko as quickly as possible and be alone with his own thoughts. So he pretended he'd forgotten something and went back into his room, without taking the garbage out after all.

Shaleiko stood there on the landing for a little while, shrugged and set off reluctantly down the stairs.

25

It was already getting dark, but since it was a Sunday and a warm evening, the courtyard was full of people. There were children playing soccer, hide-and-seek, forfeits and mumbly peg. The policeman Tolya Saraev was pumping up the tire on his Kovrovets motorbike. Shurochka the Idiot was boiling up some kind of slop for the cats on a Primus stove. The full complement of old grannies was seated on the bench. Zhora Zhukov was playing the “Weary Sun” tango on his accordion. His mother, Valentina, was dancing with Renat Tukhvatullin, and Tukhvatullin's wife Raya was taking the washing down from the line, casting jealous glances at the dancing couple.

In short, when Shaleiko emerged after seeing Aglaya, there was such a large throng of people with a keen eye for others' lives already gathered outside that even an ant could not have crawled past unnoticed. And Shaleiko was by no means an ant, but a large man who was conspicuous from every angle. And, moreover, he was wearing a straw hat. So he hoped in vain that the people in the yard, being exclusively absorbed in their own affairs, would not pay any attention to him. Of course, they did. They paid attention when he went in. And when he came out, they paid even more. And when, in an attempt to avoid being recognized, he lowered his head and pulled his hat down over his eyes, they paid attention to the fact that he lowered his head and covered his eyes with his hat. Shaleiko moved off in the direction of Rosenblum Street. The grannies watched him go, and Greta the Greek asked, employing the conditional interrogatory intonation pattern: “Would he have just come out from the shnoot's then?”

To which she received the reply: “From the shnoot's, sure as sure, where else?”

Being an individual of a relatively sober cast of mind, Shaleiko did not suppose that the people he met as he left Aglaya's place were following instructions from anybody; experience of the world had taught him that since their minds were not overburdened with matters of practical necessity, old grannies who whiled away the time on benches were keen observers with retentive memories, and if anyone were to ask them whether they had been sitting on a bench on such and such an evening and whether they might have noticed a man of a particular appearance walking by in a straw hat, then naturally they would say, “Why certainly, of course we noticed him,” and immediately recall in detail how he was dressed, what he looked like, when he arrived and at what time he left.