Monumental Propaganda (14 page)

33

In October 1961 at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, the old Bolshevik Lora Lazurkina accused Stalin of numerous violations of socialist legality and proposed the removal of the violator from Lenin's Mausoleum. It was clear to everyone that the proposal was made with the approval and on the instructions of more highly placed comrades. Therefore, the more lowly placed comrades (those whose seats were quite literally lower) supported the proposal and approved it (while censuring it in their hearts) with tumultuous applause, and later other comrades separated Com. I. V. Stalin from Comrade Vladimir Ilich Lenin and buried him in a cowardly manner under cover of inclement weather and in secret from the people, by the Kremlin wall. Naturally, mass disturbances had been anticipated. Additional KGB and MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) forces had been moved up to Moscow to deal with them. Police patrols were intensified, and a state of high alert was declared in the Kantemir and Taman army divisions. But all these efforts proved entirely unnecessary. The people, who only recently had one and all adored Comrade Stalin, responded to the action that had been taken with absolute, indifferent silence. As the people themselves say, they couldn't give a hoot. But what could you expect from the people if even the Party leaders, from the very highest ranks to the very lowest, who only recently had been lauding Stalin to the skies, swearing eternal love and devotion to him and promising to give their lives for him just as soon as the slightest need or opportunity arose, had immediately begun hastily taking down their darling's portraits and removing the volumes of his collected works from the bookshelves and dumping them out with the trash, freeing up the space for the already swelling collected works of “our dear and beloved” Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev?

On October 31, the day the congress finished, Aglaya received a letter from the distant Isle of Freedom, as Cuba was then known. Having graduated from the Institute of International Relations, Marat had been posted there as an assistant press attaché in the Soviet embassy. In his first letter he described his new life without any superfluous detail, mentioning the unbearable heat, the local customs, the cigars, drinks, dances and music. The letter concluded with the announcement that Zoya had given birth to a son in a Havana hospital, and the young parents had named the child Andrei in honor of Marat's deceased father. “Our boy,” wrote Marat, “was a big baby, four and a half kilograms, but he's restless. He doesn't sleep at night and he cries. The doctor advises us not to leave him in a nursery. We have had to hire a housekeeper, whose wages are only partly covered by the embassy.” But despite his modest salary and large outgoings, Marat was hoping to save up for a Volga automobile and a house in the country, and therefore he would have to deny himself absolutely all indulgences.

The envelope also contained a photograph of the naked tot with his thumb in his mouth. Having glanced at the photograph, Aglaya put it away in the drawer of her writing desk and wrote in reply that she cursed Lora Lazurkina and her audience. By which, of course, she meant Khrushchev and all the delegates to the Communist Party Congress, but anticipating the likelihood of correspondence being opened and read, she limited herself to the single word “audience.” The audience that had failed to demonstrate its devotion to principle and had unanimously approved decisions imposed from above, including, as she hinted, “the destruction of things that were not built by them.” Attempting to conceal her central ideas in the subtext, Aglaya gave vent to her indignation toward the modern-day vandals and destroyers of sacred values, to whom nothing was precious: neither homeland, nor people, nor history, nor the individuals who had made that history. At the same time, she stated her conviction that the gravediggers had miscalculated. You could bury the body of a great man anywhere you liked, but his memory could not be buried. Armed with historical optimism, Aglaya promised her son that he would live to see the total and unconditional restoration of justice, to see the day when, as the great leader had once foreseen, “there'll be dancing on our street.”

After sealing the envelope, Aglaya decided to send the letter by registered mail, and so she set out for the post office.

As usual in Dolgov, this time of year was dreary and rainy. The rain had been falling cheerlessly for a week and a half or two weeks and the entire natural landscape had turned faded, gray and turbid and spread out through the streets in a liquid goo. The mud squelched underfoot with excruciating relish, sucking in Aglaya's rubber boots. In order not to be left barefoot, she had to pull up the tops of her boots with her hands at every step as she tugged her foot free.

And so Aglaya was making her way along the walls and fences, wresting every step by force from the sodden ground, when suddenly she saw a Chelyabinsk Factory tractor wallowing radiator-deep in the mud and grunting with the strain as it cruised toward her, hauling along on a cable a large, elongated object that Aglaya took for a log. But on looking more closely, she made out the toe of a boot at one end of the log and a nose, mustache and the peak of a cap protruding in a highly absurd fashion at the other end.

It was absolutely impossible to run through mud like that but, impelled by the strength of her feeling, Aglaya managed to overtake the tractor, then leap out into the middle of the street and, ignoring the slop that had flowed into the top of her left boot, she spread her arms picturesquely and cried: “Stop! Stop!”

The tractor carried on grunting and advancing on Aglaya. Unfortunately, at that moment there was no sculptor or painter beside her who could have recorded this unforgettable scene: the tractor pressing on stupidly regardless and the frail woman with her outspread arms in the hood that had slipped down to the back of her head to reveal her hair (already streaked with gray), her eyes filled with the determination to die rather than give ground. No, there was no sculptor or painter at the scene, but just a little distance away there was the poet Serafim Butylko with a string shopping bag full of empty bottles. By this time he had long ago abandoned his plans for achieving fame and glory but had still not lost all hope of a bit of successful speculation. To be precise: that he would manage to return all six Zhigulevskoe beer bottles and the woman checking them would not notice that the mouth of one was slightly chipped. Then he would add the money recovered in this way to the two rubles he already had, and he would have just enough for a bottle of Kubanskaya vodka, a pack of Pamir cigarettes and box of matches to go with it. A modest plan, but it had been calculated down to the last kopeck and it was realizable. In his baggy coat with the darned elbows, the poet was clinging to the fencing slats as he made his way toward the reception point for empty jars and bottles, when he caught sight of Aglaya standing there in the middle of the road with her arms outstretched. However, he failed to discern any heroic gesture in her impulsive action, deciding that the woman must have made up her mind to hire a vehicle for carrying firewood, which was something he needed to think about too. Or perhaps he did discern a heroic gesture, but being in a state of creative crisis, he failed to convert his observation into verse. In any case, no mention at all of this event was subsequently discovered either in his verse or among the entries in his diaries. Especially since he never kept any diaries.

The tractor advanced on Aglaya; she stood her ground, gritting her teeth and clenching her fists. The tractor stopped. Its driver, Slava Sirotkin, stuck his head out of the cabin and, sheltering his tousled head of hair against the rain with an oilskin mitten, he inquired of Aglaya whether she might by any chance have escaped from the madhouse. Aglaya sidled up to him, and nodding at the object being towed by the tractor, she asked: “Where are you towing that?”

“What?” asked Sirotkin.

“Do you know who it is you're towing?” she shouted above the noise of the engine.

“Who?” Sirotkin eased back into the cabin and took out the coarse cigarette he'd been holding in reserve behind his ear.

“Do you realize that's Stalin?”

“Who else could it be? Obviously it's him.”

“So where are you towing him then?”

“They told me to drag him down to the station,” said Sirotkin, lighting up. “They must be sending him on from there for melting down. The country needs metal awful bad for the space program.”

“Metal?” Aglaya cried indignantly. “You call this metal? It's a monument to Comrade Stalin. We all erected it together, all the people. We put it up when folks had no bread to eat and nothing to feed their children with. We denied ourselves everything to put it up here. And you're dragging it through the mud like some lump of pig-iron. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

“What have I got to be ashamed of, Ma? There's no shame if you keep it hid, as they say, but I'm just . . . you know . . . just the tractor driver. They tell me to tow it, and I tow it. If they don't tell me, I'll go for a smoke, that's what I'll do, see,” and he showed her how he would smoke, “and no questions asked.”

“And what if they hook Lenin on—will you drag him along too?”

Sirotkin gave her a reproachful look.

“Listen, Ma, let's not get into politics. That's all right for the folks up there with the big heads. But I'm a tractor driver. Sixty-six rubles a month, and I can earn a bit on the side if someone needs a kitchen garden plowed or something. But who gets hooked on and towed, that's for the foreman, Dubinin, to decide. Let's say he says, ‘Sirotkin, you've got to take that there.' What am I supposed to say? If he says take it there, should I take it somewhere else? Am I crazy or something? So you just shift yourself, Ma, and let's get moving again.”

Sirotkin went back to his levers, but Aglaya stood in front of the tractor again. Sirotkin let go of his levers, leaned back and relaxed.

“Listen, son,” Aglaya said to him sweetly, “what if . . .”

Serafim Butylko saw Aglaya get into the cabin beside the tractor driver, who shuffled his levers and the tractor moved forward, made a wide circle and hauled its iron billet off in the direction it had come from.

To the uninvolved observer the tractor's subsequent route would have seemed strange. After following a long and winding path, dragging the work of art along behind it, the tractor ended up on the northern outskirts of the town by the gates of the Collective Farm Building Trust's transport depot. There Sirotkin left Aglaya in the tractor with the engine running and ran off to find his friend, the motorized crane driver Sashka Lykov. Sashka wasn't there, but they said he was at the station helping to rehang the portraits for the imminent anniversary of the October Revolution. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin had been hanging on the pediment of the façade, but now only Marx and Lenin were left. Engels had been removed for the sake of symmetry.

They found Sashka in the buffet, where, having rehung the portraits, he was drinking beer and chatting about this and that with the counter girl Antonina. They tore him away from the counter girl and took him along with them, this time to the house where Aglaya lived. The tractor went first, with the statue dragging behind it, and the motorized crane came behind that. They hauled the statue up to the window and dumped it. Of course, the residents came running up to see what would happen next. It seemed the idea was to introduce the monument into Aglaya's apartment. The dimensions fitted. The statue was two and a half meters high, and Aglaya's ceilings were three meters and ten centimeters. Sashka, being the most quick-witted, examined the work site and said: “We'll go in through the window.”

“How?” asked Aglaya.

“We'll lever it in. Archimedes, Ma, said, ‘Give me a lever, I'll turn anything you like upside down.' So that's the way we'll go. We'll lash some rope on it, hoist it up, give it a heave and shove it in. If we work clever, Ma, I can get you an elephant in there.”

How they carried out this unusual commission is hard even to imagine now, but on that afternoon the iron generalissimo, with the help of a motorized crane, four hands and four bottles of vodka, was raised, dragged in through the window and installed in Aglaya Revkina's drawing room, in the corner between the two windows—one of which overlooked the yard and the other faced east, toward the motor depot on Rosenblum Street. Of course, the generalissimo himself was not able to stand on his own two feet, some kind of pedestal was required. Sashka Lykov brought around a piece of five-millimeter iron sheeting and a welding kit and welded the statue to it. Moreover, he did it entirely free of charge.

In the old days, when someone who had no living space was moved in with someone who had an excess of it, it was known as consolidation.

PART TWO

WE SING AS WE FIGHT AS WE CONQUER

34

On the sixth of November, as evening was drawing in, there was a stealthy knock on Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina's door. She came out into the corridor, holding a towel in her wet hands, but before she had time to ask who it was, the door began creaking open in a sinister fashion worthy of a horror movie, revealing a shoulder tautly clad in threadbare military fabric, which gradually evolved into the familiar crumpled profile of the house manager, Dmitrii Ivanovich Kashlyaev, nicknamed Divanich, a red-cheeked and red-nosed former colonel of the meteorological service who had been discharged from the army for drunkenness. Well, not simply for drunkenness—for drunkenness, the entire officer corps of the Soviet army could have been dismissed—but specifically because Colonel Kashlyaev, while the head of the meteorological service of the Ministry of Defense in northern latitudes, had permitted his subordinates (even, apparently, collaborating with them) to drink the alcohol out of various sensitive instruments and replace it with water. Things had gone so far that the main thermometer at the main meteorological station in the military district used to freeze at precisely zero degrees Celsius. But even so, the service continued to operate, compiling weather reports and forecasts that were used by the ships of the Soviet navy and units of the strategic air arm. Divanich, it is true, was a very experienced meteorologist. He could easily determine the current temperature and wind direction simply by holding up a finger moistened with saliva, and he compiled the short-term forecast on the basis of general weather signs and the aching in his knee that had been injured at the front during the war. Certainly, he made mistakes—he was bound to—but no more than the All-Union Hydrometeorological Center. But then, perhaps the Hydrometeorological Center made its mistakes for the same reason. Divanich had been discharged from the army, and now he worked as a house manager, receiving a colonel's pension in addition to his modest pay.

The door creaked as Divanich forced his way in past it with stubborn determination, holding it back with his hand in order to leave himself only a crack to squeeze through, thereby zealously emphasizing the insignificance of his own person, as though it were not deserving of full and free access. At the same time, however, he demonstrated a distinct effrontery, his expression indicating that he might have opened only a modest crack for himself, but he was going to creep in through it come whatever. Eventually, he materialized completely, dressed in an officer's uniform with dark, unfaded patches where the shoulder straps and collar tabs had been ripped off and with two buttons, one of which was a military button, but the other was from a trade-college uniform.

“Good health to you, so to speak, Aglastepna” (the form of address into which he unvaryingly conflated her first name and patronymic), “and best wishes, so to speak, for the coming holiday.” The colonel tugged off his cap with the red band and cracked peak and shook his head, sending flakes of dull white dandruff swarming into the air, where they hovered above Divanich's head in a wan halo before settling back onto his shoulders.

Aglaya looked at the new arrival inquiringly, saying nothing. He looked back at her, clearly having forgotten what he'd come for.

“Here I am then, so to speak,” said the colonel, and shook his head again.

“Well, since you're here, come through, only take your shoes off, I'm not swabbing the floors after you.”

“Whatever you say,” Kashlyaev readily agreed. “The mud outside's pretty much knee-deep, and trailing it into the house . . .”

Without bothering to finish the phrase, he kicked off his shoes, with their lingering vestiges of light brown coloration, and set off, slipping and sliding on the painted floor in his gray woolen socks with holes in the big toes. The colonel skidded into the drawing room after his hostess and stopped, dumbfounded, as though he had suddenly been confronted by an elephant or the Empire State Building.

Standing there before him full-length in his cast-iron full-dress uniform was the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, his left hand clutching his gloves and his right hand thrust up almost against the ceiling. Newly cleaned and washed by Aglaya, he stared Divanich straight in the eye, his entire left side glinting dully in the light of the five-branched chandelier.

Divanich had known the statue was standing here, it was the reason he'd come, but the visual impact of the monument reduced him to total stupefaction.

“Fu-aa-oo!” moaned Divanich, after which there wasn't enough air left in his chest for any more intelligible interjection.

He carried on standing there with his mouth open until his hostess brought him back to reality with a question concerning the purpose of his visit.

“Well, you see . . .” Divanich began, embarrassed, then fell silent, leaving his thought unspoken, his gaze riveted once again to the statue.

“What do you want?” Aglaya repeated her question.

“Well, you see . . .” Divanich twitched one shoulder in an attempt to progress further with his deliberations. “Well you see,” he said, pointing to the statue, “it's like this, the residents have written collectively that it's a pretty heavy, so to speak, load. The floors here are pretty much made of wood, and the Tukhvatullins have got cracks in their ceiling.”

“And what of it?” asked Aglaya.

Kashlyaev indicated with a simultaneous parting of the hands, shrugging of the shoulders and pursing of the lips that he possessed no satisfactory answer to the question he had been asked. But he made an effort to express his opinion more intelligibly: “Look, he says, a crack. And I say, so it's a crack, what of it, what harm's it doing you? Not in your head, is it, that crack? And he says, it's not right, I'm sitting here eating my soup and I feel, he says, something hard, I think, he says, my tooth's fallen out, but I look and I see it's not a tooth, it's a bit of plaster. It's not really meant, so to speak, for indoor conditions. Out on the square's a different matter, he can stand there and even if he keels over, it's not like it's any of our business. He's in the right spot there, and people can go up and leave flowers or come around with the tour guide, but this here is pretty much a residential, so to speak, building and the beams are wood and it's got rot. Anything goes wrong, let's say, and it's the jailhouse, so to speak, for me and pretty much a death sentence for the Tukhvatullins, and the other residents, they're worried about it too.”

Aglaya listened to all of this with her arms crossed on her skinny chest. She sighed: “So what are you trying to tell me? That I should throw him out? Throw Stalin out—where to? The dump? Out with the garbage? Eh?”

Kashlyaev gave a deep, sad sigh.

“What can I say, if only he was just alive, for him I could, pretty much, so to speak . . . how can I put it . . . off the fifth floor.” Kashlyaev left his thought unfinished and gave the statue a respectful glance, as though hoping for its understanding. But when he met the statue's eyes, he felt uneasy. And the statue was regarding him with such hostility that he began feeling positively apprehensive. He even staggered backward a few steps toward the exit and didn't immediately hear the question his hostess asked him. “What?” he asked her.

“I asked if you want a drink.”

“A drink?” Kashlyaev froze and licked his lips. The colonel badly wanted to say: No, never, not for anything—and proudly withdraw. Or before he withdrew, click his worn-down heels together and express some exalted sentiment concerning the honor of a Soviet soldier which—or so it sometimes seemed to him—he had never completely drowned in drink. But he had never done anything of the kind, and never said anything of the kind. Although there had been plenty of occasions to say it. For whenever it was needed, or just in case it might be, the residents would slip him a five-ruble or three-ruble note (although some, seeing his shabby appearance, restricted their offering to a single crumpled ruble), and he took everything they handed him. This time too the offer of a drink provoked only a second's hesitation in him before, turning his gaze away from the statue, he said “Uh-huh” and was duly invited into the kitchen and seated at the round table covered with oilcloth with pictures of the Kremlin towers on it.

Aglaya always had vodka in the house. Since the partisan days she had regularly drunk a glass or two with supper, but never went beyond that, having heard that inveterate alcoholism inevitably resulted in petrification of the liver.

She took a bottle of Moskovskaya vodka with a picture of lots of medals drawn on its label out of the Saratov refrigerator, took out two cold meat rissoles, cold potatoes, some sauerkraut and a tin of Atlantic skippers. Aglaya used her teeth to tear off the bottle's thin metal cap with the lug that you could pull with your fingers.

“Oh!” said Divanich admiringly. “That's the way to do it! But I can't. My teeth are all loose thanks to not getting enough calcium and vitamins.”

“Right then, here's to him,” Aglaya proposed, raising her glass.

“Without clinking glasses, then,” said the house manager.

“We'll clink!” she protested. “For us he's eternally alive.”

“Eternally alive!” Kashlyaev agreed and stood up, quite reasonably assuming that you should stand to drink for the eternally living. His hostess stood up with him.

Long after midnight, when Divanich was already standing with his coat on in the hall, he went back to the statue, stood in front of it respectfully and said quietly: “He was a great man. A commander!”

“There aren't any more like him,” Aglaya responded.

“And never will be.” Beginning to cry, the colonel hastily brushed away a tear and went out.