Monumental Propaganda (17 page)

41

While I accept, at least retrospectively, that the Admiral's opinion was honest and unbiased, I can't say the same thing about Shubkin. At first he distributed his former camp comrade's work on every side, praising him to the heavens, and then he began to feel envious of him. He became jealous of his success and began saying he'd seen more interesting things and he could write about them just as well. Only he didn't have the time. And he even discovered several faults in the novella, saying that it gave a one-sided picture of camp life. The author had depicted the camp as though there were nobody in it but so-called ordinary people. He hadn't noticed the genuine intellectuals, the people with high aspirations, the warriors of principle who, despite everything, had remained faithful to their convictions and ideals.

By that time our circle had already arrived at the definite conclusion that Shubkin was a good man, socially active and gifted; he could write a decent story or essay, a poem or a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU, but he was hardly capable of a great literary work. Then suddenly one day I ran into Shubkin in the barber's, where he was having the borders of his bald patch trimmed behind his ears. He asked me: “What are you doing this evening?” “Why?” “Nothing special, but if you're not doing anything, drop in around sevenish.” I asked him why, but he said mysteriously: “You'll find out when you get there.” Of course, I went. And there was a crowd of people there. His pupils Vlad Raspadov, Sveta Zhurkina, Alesha Konovalov and someone else, I can't remember who. There weren't enough chairs—after all, there were only two of them. Some of us sat on the bed, some on the floor or the windowsill. Shubkin installed himself in a collapsed armchair under a standard lamp with a straw shade. Antonina served the guests tea. Some in glasses, some in teacups, some in half-liter jars. I got a mayonnaise jar. Shubkin himself was not drinking tea, but kefir. Gulping it straight from the broad mouth of the milk bottle. He gulped a bit and set the bottle down beside his left foot. Lying on the low table was a heap of jam pies, which we rapidly polished off.

And so our host sat in his armchair, holding a light-brown cardboard file with badly soiled silk ribbons bearing an inscription in large letters— LECTURE NOTES—and a greasy ring from the frying pan.

It was unlike him, but he was obviously feeling nervous and irritable, and everything annoyed him. He untied the tapes with trembling fingers, took out the first sheet of paper, adjusted his glasses on his nose and began reading: “‘Have you ever seen a spar pine fall, sawn off at the root? . . .'”

I thought this must be an imitation of Gogol and the next phrase would be “No, you haven't seen a spar pine fall, sawn off at the root . . .”

At this point Shurochka the Idiot's black cat walked in through the door, crossed the room and jumped up on my knees. I stroked her to calm her down, but she began purring. Shubkin stopped reading and fixed me with a gaze of silent reproach, as though I were the one purring. Embarrassed, I threw the cat out into the corridor.

“‘Have you ever seen . . .'” Shubkin began again, but then the cat began scratching at the door.

Raspadov went out into the corridor and kicked the cat away.

“‘Have you ever seen . . .'” Shubkin read again, but then a wasp flew into the room and began buzzing and banging against the window. All of us together tried to drive it out through the small upper window, but it didn't understand what we wanted to do and carried on stubbornly and stupidly pounding against the window until Antonina swatted it with a towel. We closed the small window to be on the safe side and everyone froze and sat there quietly without moving a muscle, so that neither of the chairs or the bed would creak, but as soon as Shubkin opened his mouth, we clearly heard a voice speaking on the other side of the wall.

“Lenin's world outlook and the foundations of Leninism are not identical in volume. Lenin is a Marxist and the basis of his world outlook is, of course, Marxism. But from that it does not at all follow that an exposition of Leninism must be begun with an exposition of the foundations of Marxism . . .”

“Oh my God!” said Antonina, throwing up her arms, and the others burst into laughter. At which Raspadov remarked: “It seems to me we're dealing with related themes here.”

But Sveta Zhurkina didn't understand, and nodding toward the wall, she asked what the next-door neighbor was reading and to whom.

“It's Stalin's work
The Foundations of Leninism,
” said Shubkin, who had recognized it.

“But who's she reading it to?”

“Stalin,” said Raspadov.

And everyone burst into laughter again.

“Lenin's world outlook . . .” Aglaya repeated beyond the wall.

“Okay,” Shubkin said quietly. “I'll continue, and you just ignore her.”

“‘Have you ever seen a spar pine fall, sawn off at the root? . . .'”

What came next wasn't Gogol, but something rather different: “‘A pine falls straight without bending, like a guardsman struck down by an enemy bullet.'” An image that was, of course, both affected and inaccurate. What kind of guardsman? From whose guards? In what situation is he struck down, and why does he fall without bending? I've never seen guardsmen struck down, but it seems to me that when they are struck down by bullets, they probably fall in all sorts of ways, just like other people.

But I didn't cavil, not even to myself, especially since the narrative gradually took a grip on me. Shubkin performed his task with artistry. Using intonation to emphasize certain phrases or words. Reading the dialogues in different voices, rising from a deep bass to a falsetto, somehow managing even to imitate the crunching of snow underfoot, the roar of a Friendship chain saw and the crash of a falling tree.

The first chapter, as the author later explained, set the tone for the entire work. It was about a brigade of convicts in a timber camp. The best brigade in that particular prison camp zone. It was led by Alexei Konstantin Navarov, a Bolshevik, a hero of the Revolution and the Civil War who had escaped shooting by chance. Even though he was actually a very experienced lumberjack, Navarov made a mistake and was crushed by a pine that he felled. I must say that Shubkin gave a really vivid description of the handsome pine tree, the way it was sawn off at the root and still carried on standing there without wavering. They sawed right through its trunk and still it stood. And then Navarov undercut it with an ax. It began revolving around its own axis and its crown spun around against the background of the clear sky as though moving to some accelerating dance rhythm, and then the entire tree began heeling over as it spun and finally came tumbling down with a deafening crash, breaking branches off the pines standing beside it and crushing the bushes beneath it. The convicts working nearby didn't hear the faint moan at first, but when they came running up, they saw the Bolshevik Navarov lying under the pine, crushed. He was lying there pressed down into the snow, with the pine across his chest. It was so huge it was impossible to shift it or to pull the crushed man out from under it, and cutting the tree into sections would have taken too long. The hero of the story, apparently Shubkin himself (the narrative was in the first person), ran over to the crushed man while he was still alive. “‘He was lying,'” Shubkin read, lowering his voice, “‘with his head thrown back. Blood was bubbling out of the corner of his mouth. There was blood pouring from his nose and his left ear. I moved close to him, thinking that he was unconscious, and I was about to leave, when suddenly I noticed that one of his eyes had opened and was watching me, and his lips were moving, whispering something that was obviously very important to him. Overcoming my fear, I put my ear to his lips and heard words so astounding that I will never forget them as long as I live.

“‘Read Lenin,' Navarov wheezed. ‘Always read Lenin. Read him in good times, read him in bad times, when you fall ill, when you are going to die, read Lenin and you will understand everything, surmount all difficulties. Read Le——'”

I won't describe in detail how deeply all of us who heard the first reading of
The Timber Camp
were affected by this scene and with what great interest we followed the subsequent history of a man who passed through the hell of Stalin's camps without losing faith in his “shining ideals.” This faith helped him to survive quite inhuman suffering, and when he was freed, his devotion to these ideals was as unshaken as when he lost his freedom.

By that time, of course, I was already a badly damaged individual. Talk of shining ideals irritated me, but in this case . . . Although the novel was about a Leninist communist, what was described were Stalin's camps, the solitary interrogation cells, transit prisons, punishment cells, investigators, armed escorts, secret service agents, guard dogs . . . In short, the time for such works had not yet come, and it wasn't clear that it would come very soon. But while the novel's time had not yet come, the time of Article 70 of the Criminal Code (anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda—from three to seven years in the camps) was not yet gone. So this was more than what is usually called an artistic achievement; it was a demonstration of civic courage. And after all, the author had already had a bellyful of all this. Naturally, this situation affected the way the entire work was received, and I was conquered by it. And although, of course, I had certain doubts, I took Shubkin's
Timber Camp
to the Admiral in his lumberyard.

“Well then?” I asked when I dashed around to his place the next morning. “What do you say about that? Not at all bad, eh?”

The Admiral put on his spectacles and gave me a lingering look over the top of the lenses (if he was looking over the top, why did he put them on?).

“Are you trying to tell me it's not too bad?” I asked in embarrassment.

“No,” the Admiral answered. “What I can say about your Shubkin is that as a writer he's weak and as a thinker he's stupid, but in every other respect I kneel before him in admiration.”

42

“This is the BBC. Western correspondents in Moscow inform us that Nikita Khrushchev has been removed from the post of first secretary and excluded from the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Un——”

And then came the crackling and howling of the jamming stations that had not been switched on for a long time.

Aglaya jerked her head off the pillow and began wondering whether she had dreamed the words or they had really been spoken. Western correspondents inform us . . . When she'd gathered her wits, she went dashing over to the television.

Although it was still early morning, on Channel One they were already showing the children's cartoon film
The Little Girl and the Bear,
but Channel Two wasn't working yet. Aglaya had an old single-channel radio-speaker shaped like a plate, so she switched it on and listened to the broadcasts for a whole hour without a break:
Rise and Shine for Exercise!;
For the Laborers of the Village; Pioneer Dawn; At Home with the Composer Tulikov.
Finally, the news came on, but there was nothing in it except the flight of the three cosmonauts, the battle for the harvest, the blowing-in of a blast furnace somewhere and the launching of a new diesel-electric ship. With her long experience as a consumer of the Soviet media, Aglaya also derived certain information from what she didn't hear. The presenters said not a single word about Khrushchev, but this total failure to make any mention of an individual whom it was absolutely compulsory to mention was a sign that the BBC had not been indulging in idle speculation.

After first making herself decent she went out of her flat and knocked on Shubkin's door. He came out looking yellow and unshaven, wearing flannel pajamas.

“You?” he said in surprise when he saw Aglaya. “To see me?”

“To see you,” said Aglaya.

“Come in,” he said, stepping aside, putting his hand over his chin and shuddering. “Only please don't bite—I'm infectious, I've got the flu.”

“Don't worry,” Aglaya said meekly, “I just wanted to ask you something. That whats-its-name of yours”—she wanted to ask and at the same time express her contempt for the subject of her inquiry—“that BBC of yours . . . does it tell the truth?”

“It tells lies!” the sick man cried joyfully, suddenly animated. “They always tell lies, but all the lies they tell actually come true.”

Without answering her neighbor, Aglaya went back to her flat and was immediately overcome by an elation so tumultuous that she surrendered to it and went dashing to her iron idol, embraced him, kissed him (bruising her nose aganst him), laughed, cried and called out incoherently: “They've thrown him out, they've thrown Baldie out. A knee up the backside. Thrown him out like a dog.” She jumped up and down, taunting her invisible enemy, curled her lips and stuck out her tongue, chanting: Our beloved . . . dear . . . most dear . . . precious . . . maize man, NEC man, manure man . . .”

That evening Divanich turned up at her place uninvited and unannounced in his colonel's dress uniform, cleaned up a bit, darned a bit (and with all the buttons in place), in a glitter of metal teeth, orders and medals. He didn't come empty-handed—he had a red carnation and two bottles of Moldavian cognac at four rubles twenty kopecks each.

“Permit me, Aglastepna,” Divanich said in an unexpectedly ceremonious fashion, “on the occasion of this portentous event, to kiss you fraternally and, pretty much, as a frontline comrade.”

And he followed this preface by kissing Aglaya on the left cheek and the right cheek and then fastening his mouth on her lips like a vampire, even attempting to insinuate his tongue as a hint, but she pushed him away rather roughly.

“What are you doing?” she asked angrily.

“What's wrong with it?” Kashlyaev asked simplemindedly.

“There's no point,” she said. “I'm a pensioner—in the bazaar they call me a granny already.”

“And I'm a grandfather,” said Divanich. “My daughter's gone and produced a granddaughter for me.”

“All the more reason,” said Aglaya. “You a granddad, and letting your hands wander.”

“Within moderation,” said Divanich. “I'm a military man. If they tell me I can, I advance, if they say I have to, I get up and charge into the attack, and if they say I mustn't, I retreat, but I never surrender.”

Even so, she felt flattered. No one had attempted to court her since Shaleiko.

To mark this festive day, which Aglaya wanted to celebrate “together with Him,” she covered the table in “His” room with a tablecloth. They drank the first glass for Him. He glowed with intangible good nature.

“It feels like May 9, 1945,” said Aglaya.

“To be quite honest, I'd stopped believing it would ever happen.”

“You were wrong then,” said Aglaya. “Stalin taught us that you should never lose faith. Remember his parable about those . . . you know . . . those men in the boat. There was a storm, they got frightened and gave up, a wave swamped them and . . . goodbye, Mama. But the others don't give up, they just keep on and on rowing”—she began swaying to and fro on her chair, in a rough imitation of a rowing action—“they row straight into the waves and the wind, they don't give way to doubt and . . . Listen,” she said, interrupting herself, “what do you think they'll do with Baldie now?”

“Put him in jail is what I think,” said Divanich, biting the head off a sprat.

“I think they'll shoot him,” Aglaya said dreamily.

“Na-ah,” the house manager objected, “those times are gone. It's all reinstatement of Leninist norms and socialist legality nowadays.”

“Oh come on, Colonel, come on! What socialist legality? When they shoot Baldie, that'll be socialist legality. What they had was nothing but lousy corruption, not legality. The state they reduced the country to! Take him over there”—she nodded toward the wall behind which Shubkin lived—“he writes whatever he likes. He writes about the camps. Nowadays everybody writes about the camps. As if there weren't any other subjects. They let everybody do whatever they want. People listen to the foreign radio, they tell anti-Soviet jokes, Party people have their children christened in church and they're not afraid of anyone. No, I'd have Baldie executed on Red Square in front of all the people . . . And I wouldn't shoot him, I'd hang him.”

“But all the people wouldn't fit in Red Square,” Divanich observed. “Although more than enough would turn up to trample quite a few to death. But they wouldn't all fit in the square.”

“Then we'd show the people who couldn't fit in the whole thing on television, with all the details. Have you seen what it's like?”

“Nah,” said Kashlyaev, “God has, so to speak, spared me that. I've seen plenty of things, but not that.”

He topped up his own cognac and hers and set two round slices of salami sausage on a piece of bread.

“You've missed something. When we retook Dolgov from the Germans, we hanged the mayor, the head of police and a prostitute for sleeping with Germans. Would you believe it, the prostitute held up to the very last and spat in the face of the partisan who was hanging her. The mayor was shaking with fear, but he didn't beg and plead. But it makes me sick to remember the
Polizei,
he crawled on his knees, ‘Forgive me,' he said, ‘have mercy.' But I said to him: ‘You vermin, what mercy did you show to our lads?' And then when the trio of them were hanged, some people with weak nerves fainted, but I watched.”

“Was it interesting?” Divanich asked cautiously.

“Very! You know, when they hang a man, first he starts trembling all over, trembling like he's having convulsions, and then his eyes start bulging, he sticks his tongue right out and . . .”

“Oi, oi, oi, don't, don't!” cried the house manager, stopping up his ears.

“Why not?” Aglaya asked in surprise. “You're a military man. A frontline veteran.”

“I was on the frontline,” Kashlyaev confirmed proudly. “Pretty much the whole war, so to speak, from Brest all the way there and back again. I apologize sincerely, Aglastepna. I may be a frontline veteran, but I've never . . . never . . . I've never hanged anyone, that's what.” And as he spoke, his expression was sad and guilty, as though he was aware of the full extent of his evident inferiority.

“Because you served in regular units, but I was in the partisans. And in the partisans you're commander and mother and father and court-martial all in one. We caught them ourselves, sentenced them ourselves and executed them ourselves.” She sipped from her glass and nibbled on a slice of sausage. “Do you think it was easy? Do you think I'm not a human being?”

“Don't say that, Aglastepna!” said Divanich, frightened. “How can you, about yourself! Even though you are, pretty much, a human being of the female, so to speak, variety, I think we should all learn a lesson from your great Party qualities and courage.”

“Learn it, then,” said Aglaya. “I'm a woman, a mother. I have a son who's in the diplomatic line . . . But when I face the enemy, I've no mercy for him, I'll put the noose around his neck . . .”

“Aglastepna, my dear,” said the colonel, waving his arms in the air, “no more! Don't, I'll be sick.”

“Damn you then,” said Aglaya with a wave of her hand. The drink had already gone to her head and she was in a good humor. “If you don't want to listen, then let's sing something.”

“That's a different matter,” said the house manager. He drew himself up and straightened his jacket, touched his Adam's apple, coughed and began in a low voice: “His orders were to go west . . .”—but he was interrupted.

“Why that old stuff?” Aglaya asked. “Let's sing this.” And with a broad, smooth sweep of her right hand from left to right and upward, she began in her hoarse, smoky voice:

In our wondrous homeland's wide expanses,
Striving in war and laboring in peace,
We have composed a bright and joyous anthem
Of our dear friend and our most mighty chief.

 

She gestured with her left hand for Kashlyaev to join in and he coughed again and picked up the refrain:

“Sta-lin, our glo-ry in the batt-le . . .”

“Stalin, the free flight of our youth,” she sang, drowning him out.

“We sing as we fight as we conquer”—their two voices fused into one—“our people following in Stalin's steps.”

It must be hard for the modern reader to imagine that in those times people sang such songs not only on the stage or lined up in ranks, but for themselves, personally, and actually derived pleasure from doing it.

At midnight there was a knock on the door. Aglaya opened it. Ida Samoilovna Bauman was standing on the doorstep in a washed-out flannel dressing gown with newspaper curlers in her still-damp hair.

“I'm sorry to bother you,” she said, “but could you be a bit quieter? My mother's not well and she can't get to sleep.”

“She will if she wants to,” said Aglaya. “At the front we slept through artillery fire and bombing raids.”

And she slammed the door shut.

“Who was that?” asked Divanich.

“Nobody,” said Aglaya. “Let's try this one.” And she began swaying from side to side:

From land to land, where mountain peaks do rise . . .

There was another knock at the door. Thinking her neighbor had come back again, Aglaya opened the door feeling annoyed, but it was Georgii Zhukov she saw standing there with his accordion around his neck and two bottles of vodka in his hands.

“What do you want?” she asked in surprise.

“What are you celebrating?” he asked.

“What difference does it make to you?”

“It makes no difference to me, but I've got something to celebrate too. I've had a son, and I've got no one to drink with. Four and a half kilograms. That big!” He spread the hands holding the bottles to demonstrate the approximate size of his progeny, and later, the more he drank, the wider he spread his hands, like a fisherman showing the size of the catfish he caught.

“Come in,” said Aglaya.