Monumental Propaganda (15 page)

35

The next day there was another stealthy knock at the door. Aglaya thought it was Kashlyaev again, but when she opened it, she saw a little old man who looked like Kalinin, with a goatee and thin mustache, wearing steel-rimmed glasses, a blue cloth coat trimmed with ancient rabbit fur that was moth-eaten even though it smelled strongly of naphthalene and button-up felt boots with galoshes. The little old man showed her the official identity card of an inspector of the Directorate for the Exploitation of Civil Structures, asked permission to come in and removed his galoshes.

He halted in front of the statue, peered at it over the top of his glasses, clucked his tongue and shook his head from side to side.

“Oi, madam, what a big, heavy thing it is! Pardon me, but I have to take some measurements.”

Removing his coat, he laid it on a chair and dragged another chair over to the statue.

“With your permission . . .” And without waiting for her permission, he clambered up on the chair, took a tailor's tape measure out of his pocket and set about measuring the statue.

“What are you doing that for?” asked Aglaya.

“That ought to be clear enough, my dear. It seems quite obvious to me that before expressing an opinion about an object, you need to measure it. When I was young, by the way, I worked as an assistant to a tailor's cutter, so I have been familiar with this procedure ever since. The cutter was a fine man, but very strict. The slightest mistake and he gave you the finest smack around the ear you can imagine. We were raised strictly, but it did us a lot of good.”

He jumped down onto the floor like a young man, took a notepad and an indelible pencil out of his pocket, and added and multiplied the dimensions he had taken. Then he groaned: “Oh no, that's quite impossible.”

“What's impossible?” asked Aglaya.

“The whole thing's impossible. As my immediate superior says, the dimensions exceed the limits. The floors here won't support such a heavy load. The hardware will have to go.”

“It's not hardware,” Aglaya protested angrily, “it's Comrade Stalin.”

“Oh no, my deary!” The little old man waggled his beard. “It's not Comrade Stalin, it's an alloy of iron and carbon, with a specific weight of— about eight grams per cubic centimeter. Let me give it to you straight— this thingy has to be removed.”

Aglaya rushed into her study and emerged with a red ten-ruble note, which she proffered to her guest without the slightest embarrassment.

“There, take it.”

“What's that?” the old man asked, squinting at the offering.

“Can't you see for yourself?” Aglaya asked sarcastically.

She had always been a convinced communist, with a firm belief in Soviet power and the Soviet people. Always believed in the people's devotion to the ideals of communism, its moral rectitude and incorruptibility. And at the same time, she had never had any doubt that each individual member of that people would sell outright his body, his soul, his country, his people and his communist ideals for five rubles, let alone for ten. If she had read in some novel or story that an imaginary official invented by the author had accepted a bribe from some imaginary suppliant, she would immediately have written an irate refutation to the editors. Libelous defamation of our social reality. Our Soviet officials do not take bribes and the author of such malicious fabrications should be punished with all possible severity. But in real life she could not even imagine that any Soviet functionary, great or small, would scorn the opportunity to take what was offered, or not to grant what was requested. And yet such people did exist. Not, of course, in every region and not in every district, but here and there they were to be found, as relics of the past. One such person was the inspector we are describing here, who said firmly: “Absolutely not, thank you.”

“Not enough, is it?” Aglaya asked, descending to sarcasm.

“It's enough,” said the little old man. “For my rank it's quite enough. Except, my dear, that I don't take bribes at all. I prefer to live on my salary. It makes things a bit tight, but at least my soul's at peace. I don't have dreams at night about the black raven and bolts clanking shut on prison doors.”

Embarrassed, Aglaya began mumbling something about it not being a bribe but a friendly gift, but even then the old man stood firm.

“No, I'm sorry, but I don't take friendly bribes either. But don't you worry. Other people will come to see you, perhaps even tomorrow, more important people than me. They'll take it. Of course, this ten rubles of yours won't be enough for them. But then, my precious, they'll allow you and your statue to go crashing down onto the heads of your neighbors. But that's none of my business. I'll go now and write my report.”

The old man was a true prophet.

One after another Aglaya was visited by a whole pack of agents from all sorts of monitoring and inspecting and absolutely irrelevant organizations, and unlike the little old man, all of them took five or ten rubles. Some even extorted twenty-five. The resulting situation was described by Aglaya's neighbor Georgii Zhukov as follows: “That lodger of hers doesn't drink and he doesn't smoke, but he still demands money.”

According to local standards, Aglaya was not poor. Her modest hard-earned savings, as she herself called them, had lain untouched in her post-office savings account for years. There had been a time when a Party special courier dressed in paramilitary uniform with a revolver in a tarpaulin holster would mysteriously appear every month and hand her an envelope that she signed for. It contained her second salary, the one that nomenklatura Party workers received for bearing on their shoulders such a great burden of responsibility. She had two salaries, but with her style of life one was enough. She put the entire second salary in the savings bank, and even to her, let alone to the envious glance of a stranger, the accumulated sum appeared a great, inexhaustible fortune. But this fortune proved insufficient to feed all the local inspectors. Her modest savings melted away before her eyes, and the inspectors became more and more insolent and insatiable.

36

The Admiral believed that in dethroning Stalin, Khrushchev had made a fatal error. He had transgressed the fundamental unwritten law of SCOSWO, according to which nothing should be subjected to doubt. If it was permitted to berate Stalin, that meant it was also possible to have doubts about Lenin. And if faith in Lenin's infallibility faltered, the temptation arose to start wondering just how correct SCOSWO was.

“Scoswu,” the Admiral stated, “is like an automobile tire. You can ride on it with confidence as long as it has no leaks. Prick one little hole in it and it has to be changed.”

“Or patched,” I said.

“Or patched,” the Admiral agreed. “But then you have a patched-up tire. And unlike a tire, ideal Scuswu must have the reputation of being unpuncturable in any circumstances.”

Beginning in the fall of 1961 many inhabitants of Dolgov—or more precisely, all of them—began to get the feeling that some irreparable dislocation had occurred in the life of the town and the district. When they removed the monument, it was like taking the axle out of a wheel. The center everything had revolved around was gone. As long as Stalin had stood in his place, he had served as an invariable reference point in both the literal topographical sense and another, metaphysical one. When a chance visitor to the town asked a local resident how to get to some place or other, he used to be told: Go straight on till you reach the monument, then turn right. Or left. Or carry straight on. But now there was no monument, only an empty pedestal with an inscription that someone had attempted to erase, but had not erased completely: I. V. STALIN. This granite cube affected people's imaginations in a strange way. When they looked at it, they felt very powerfully that there ought to be someone standing on it. And if no one was standing on it, then the whole of life lacked an essential core, in the absence of which many things became possible that had previously been impossible.

They say that was the precise time from which children became less obedient to their parents, discipline in industry deteriorated and the revenue from sales of alcoholic beverages to the public increased, along with the number of abortions and the frequency of violent crimes threatening the lives, honor and property of citizens. Of course, even before then for domestic reasons and on public holidays, the residents of Dolgov had stuck knives in each other, run each other through with pitchforks and beaten each other to death with fence poles, but all that had merely been the observance of old local customs. With the dethroning of the statue, however, the phenomenon began to emerge that was later christened “free-for-all.” The public prosecutor, Strogii, was caught molesting his own underage daughter. At about the same time, the first serial killer in the entire history of those parts made his appearance in the district, and he turned out to be a lecturer in Marxism-Leninism in the cultural-vocational school, an individual who had published regular articles in the
Dolgov
Pravda
on aspects of Soviet morality. On the Avenue of Glory vandals desecrated several graves, overturning the headstones and defacing them with villainous graffiti, paying special attention to the grave of Rosenblum—the stone on his resting place was shattered with a sledgehammer.

And as for the statue of Stalin, the rumors concerning it circulating in the town were each more absurd than the last. Aglaya's downstairs neighbors had definitely heard someone heavy walking around on the second floor at night. They could hear the footsteps and the beams creaking; they saw their chandelier swaying and plaster flaking off the ceiling. Then someone saw a figure wandering around the waste lot in the twilight. Late one night after a heavy drinking session, when Georgii Zhukov went outside for a smoke, he saw an old man in a military greatcoat sitting on the bench. Sitting there hunched over and smoking his pipe. Zhukov went up to him and asked: “Can you give me a light, Pops?”

Pops turned his face toward him, and Zhukov saw that the old man had a face made of iron, and he had big eyes with holes instead of pupils, but he was still looking straight at Zhukov.

“Excuse me,” said Zhukov, and quietly withdrew. After climbing the stairs to his apartment, he lay down in bed with his back to his wife and slept for exactly four days, which was officially certified in his sick note.

Nothing happened after that in Zhukov's life except that he gave up smoking. He drank even more than before, but he dropped smoking entirely and for good. And not at all out of any concern for his health— he just gave it up, and that was it. The morning after his lethargy he got up, grabbed a cigarette without having anything to eat first, went off to the toilet, made himself comfortable and lifted the match to the cigarette— but suddenly, at the memory of those iron eyes with holes in them, he didn't feel like having a smoke.

Zhukov didn't tell anyone about his nocturnal vision, but he listened attentively to other conversations about the mysterious old man of iron. And the conversations continued, more and more of them as time went by. People said that someone had met Him somewhere (people tried not to mention the name of the person who was met) in either his iron or ordinary form, and supposedly he had questioned them about the lives of the simple people in the district and whether the leadership was oppressing them and doing too well by itself. There were also reports that every full moon the statue mounted the pedestal and stood there with its hand raised, but immediately disappeared, dissolving into thin air as soon as a living human being approached. But then, all of this was no more than rumors, which should be regarded with great caution. The populace of the town of Dolgov and its environs had always had its fair share of wild and credulous people who believed in witch doctors, psychics, spies, the global Jewish conspiracy and Colorado beetles. I myself was acquainted there with fantasists who claimed that they had personally encountered devils, ghosts, house spirits, forest spirits, water spirits, witches and aliens, and had even journeyed to other galaxies in their flying saucers.

Naturally, an enlightened individual is not obliged to believe in all of this, but the fact that for many years after Stalin's death his spirit hovered over the Dolgov district and the entire territory of the Soviet Union, and over an even more extensive territory, is historically indisputable.

37

Aglaya paid no attention to rumors of the statue's unauthorized perambulations, knowing perfectly well that her iron lodger never went anywhere. But it sometimes seemed to her that even without going anywhere he nonetheless responded to events of All-Union or local significance, and even had premonitions of some of them. She noticed that as soon as some development that she found gratifying was imminent in the country, he began, if not exactly glowing, then at least brightening up just a little from the inside. Such a very little that it was unlikely any commission of experts would have been able to detect it with even the most sensitive of instruments. Or detect the imperceptible change that occurred in the expression of his face. In fact, Aglaya didn't even trust herself completely and wondered whether she was just imagining it. But somehow her imaginings were always opportune. What she imagined today happened tomorrow.

One day when she woke up later than usual to bright sunshine, she glanced at her iron lodger and saw that he was covered in a layer of dust. Feeling suddenly ashamed, she filled a basin with warm water and took a sponge and some toilet soap. She put the table beside the statue, set a stool on the table with the basin on it, risked life and limb by clambering up onto a second stool and set to work.

The sculptor Ogorodov had made a thorough job of everything: he'd drilled out the nostrils and scraped out the intricate indentations of the ears, and now all of this was clogged with dust. She wound some cotton wool onto a hairpin and cleaned out the holes with it. As she washed, she spoke words that her own son had never heard from her.

“Now,” she intoned, “we'll wash your nice hair, wash your lovely eyes and nose, and then your ears, then your shoulders and your chest and back and tummy . . .” Until she reached the place where the flaps of the greatcoat were parted to reveal the lower edge of the jacket and immediately below it the spot from which the legs began. Aglaya suddenly felt embarrassed. The spot, as a matter of fact, was smooth, the way it could only have been in a being that was either female or entirely sexless. And for some reason Aglaya felt strangely perplexed by this. She suddenly wondered—and felt angry with herself for doing it, but her doubts still remained—what had the living Comrade Stalin had at this spot? She was unable to think of him as having something at that spot, but to imagine that there hadn't been anything proved even harder. She abused herself, calling herself a fool and an old fool for having any such thoughts at all. She tried to drive the thoughts out of her head, but they came back and embarrassed her again. She knew that Stalin was a man, but she was unable to imagine him going to the toilet or fathering children. Quite impossibly stupid as they were, these notions kept on visiting her, and she began noticing that when she wiped down the statue she tried to avoid the spot that was causing her embarrassment. After a while she noticed that although he was clean everywhere else, that spot wasn't really clean at all. She began washing him equally well all over, but she was unable to rid herself of a distinct feeling of embarrassment.

Naturally, she didn't share her doubts with anyone. And she didn't give anyone any excuse for the rumors that soon began to spread through the town about her cohabiting with the statue as if it were a man. This surely had to be nonsense. How could a live human being cohabit with an iron statue? It should have been impossible even to imagine it, but as we have already noted, the people of Dolgov were quite remarkably gullible.

Aglaya's experience as a woman had been relatively modest and not very successful. Of course, she had had her husband, Andrei Revkin. And there had been (just a couple of times in her life) other brief attachments. But intimacy with a man had never had the effect on her that she had heard about from others. Her younger sister Natalya used to tell her that intimacy with a man excited her so much she went absolutely wild and experienced a quite incomparable sensation of heavenly bliss. She called this feeling an orgasm. When asked to describe it more precisely, Natalya rolled her eyes and giggled: “Do you think it can be described in words? It's, you know . . . It's, well it's just something else altogether.”

Natalya had been unable to come up with a more intelligible explanation, but Aglaya had understood it after a fashion. There had been times with some men, even that time with Shaleiko, when that “something else altogether” had almost happened to her. But it hadn't happened—either that time or before it or after it.

Apart, that is, from one occasion . . .

In the fall of '39 she had gone to Moscow to visit the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. She had been sent there as a leading worker of agricultural production, which was a way of showing appreciation for her Party activity. At the exhibition, it goes without saying, it was all meetings, speeches and banquets, and afterward there was a rally of shock workers of socialist labor in the Hall of Columns in Trade Union House. The guests included people famous throughout the entire country: five-year-plan heroes, collective farmers, steelmakers, miners, participants in all sorts of polar winter camps and record flights, and sports champions too. There was the miner Alexei Stakhanov, the woman tractor driver Pasha Angelina, the flyer Mikhail Vodopyanov and the actor Mikhail Zharov. Sitting beside Aglaya in the fourth row was the famous steam locomotive driver Pyotr Fyodorovich Krivonos. He drove very heavy trains and was as famous as though he, and not his locomotive, were the one who pulled them. Everyone took a long time finding their seats, then they waited for something, looking at the dimly lit stage, at the table covered with red cloth and the rows of carafes standing on it. Suddenly, the stage was lit up brightly and the members of the Politburo emerged from the wings on the right and walked toward the table in single file. Krivonos began whispering in Aglaya's ear the names of the leaders and the order in which they appeared. She knew them all herself, but she just couldn't believe that they were right there, alive, not just in their portraits: Voroshilov, Budyonny, Kalinin, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Shvernik. The delegates to the rally greeted the leaders with a tumultuous standing ovation, and the leaders applauded the delegates in return. The leaders began taking their seats, and Kalinin gestured with both hands to show that the audience could also be seated.

“I wonder why Comrade Stalin's not here,” Krivonos whispered to Aglaya.

“He must be very busy,” she suggested.

“Comrade Stalin's always very busy,” said Krivonos. “But he always finds time for the workers.”

Before he had finished speaking, a figure emerged from the wings on the left and walked unhurriedly toward the presidium—a short man with a mustache wearing a modest, semimilitary cloth field jacket.

“Glory to Comrade Stalin!” Krivonos roared like a steam locomotive, leaping to his feet.

The entire hall had stood on a single impulse and Aglaya had jumped to her feet with the rest of them, and then that “something else altogether” had suddenly and completely taken possession of her. It was as though lightning had pierced her body through and through; there was an incredible surge of heat in her chest that sank down to the bottom of her belly. Out of control, she clutched the back of the seat in front of her, shouted out, and felt herself burst apart. When she recovered her wits, she was afraid her neighbor might have noticed and guessed what had happened to her. But her neighbor hadn't guessed—he'd been howling and yelling in an incoherent frenzy himself—and afterward Aglaya thought it probably hadn't happened just to her, but to everyone else who had been thrashing about in hysterics.