Monumental Propaganda (18 page)

43

Meanwhile, Rebecca Moiseevna was developing another of her attacks of angina pectoris. Her daughter had measured her out a triple dose of Valocordin drops and was now sitting on the bed beside her, uncertain what to do. They had no telephone, of course, and it was a long way to go to fetch an ambulance, and pointless in any case. The last time they'd asked her: “How old is your mother? Eighty-two? We don't go out to people that old.”

Ida Samoilovna held her mother's hand. The attack seemed to have passed, the Valocordin seemed to have taken effect and the old woman began falling asleep. But no sooner had she begun than there was the sound of singing from the other side of the wall, only now accompanied by an accordion and much louder than before. They struck up “In the wide spaces of our glorious homeland” and without a break launched into “From land to land, where mountain peaks do rise, where mountain eagles soar on outspread wings, of our beloved Stalin dear and wise, in beauteous songs the grateful people sing.”

Ida Samoilovna picked up an old shoe and banged on the wall with the heel.

At that moment Mark Semyonovich Shubkin was sitting at his typewriter, writing one of his missives to the Central Committee of the CPSU. First of all, he congratulated Comrades Brezhnev and Kosygin on the occasion of their election to the high posts of first secretary of the Central Committee and chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and wrote that he entirely supported the Party's courageous and timely decision intended to avert a new personality cult, this time not of Stalin but of Khrushchev. He condemned Khrushchev's dictatorial decisions in foreign and domestic policy, but at the same time expressed the hope that the Party would not permit a return to Stalinism, would not seek to excuse Stalin's heinous misdeeds and would completely abolish the censorship.

His typewriter clattered loudly, but this time its clatter was inaudible because the music and singing were even louder.

Some time after two in the morning Ida Samoilovna, with her coat thrown over her dressing gown, ran to the police station. There she happened to find Precinct Captain Anatolii Sergeevich Saraev, who until recently had also lived at 1-a Komsomol Cul-de-Sac until he was moved to a new building to improve his living conditions. Saraev's presence at the station at such a late hour was explained by the fact that he and the senior lieutenant on duty, Zhikharev, were celebrating the latter's birthday, in honor of which they were sitting behind the glass partition, pouring confiscated moonshine from an aluminum teapot into mugs of the same metal and drinking it, while snacking on bread, liver sausage and onions sliced in thick rings. They were conversing on a range of substantial themes, such as: is there life on other planets, what the difference is between a zebra and a horse and whether a new police uniform would be introduced some time soon.

The night had been relatively calm. The holding cells contained only three arrestees: a collective farmer who had killed his wife with a rake in a drunken fit and two sharp dressers from the group of students who had come to help with the harvest. The boy had been arrested because he'd grown his hair too long and the girl because she'd come to a dance wearing jeans, but even worse than that—with an image of the American flag on her backside. When the man was installed in his cell, he clambered onto the bunk and immediately lapsed into a deep sleep. The female student cried a bit and went to sleep too, but the male student banged on the door and kicked up a racket, shouting about his rights and demanding to be released immediately.

“In the morning we'll shave both your heads and let you go,” Zhikharev promised.

“You've no right!” the student shouted from behind the door. “Where does the law say anything about the length of people's hair? In the Constitution? In the Criminal Code? In the Program of the CPSU?”

“Stop yelling, or we'll work you over good,” Saraev said good-naturedly.

“What!” the student shouted. “You've no right! Just you try it! I'll take you to court!”

“Hang on,” Zhikharev said to Saraev, and went into the cell, and immediately there was the sound of shouting and screaming.

“What are you doing? Bandit! Fascist! Gestapo pig! I'm going to comp——”

At that point the shouting ceased and Zhikharev came back to the table, licking blood from his fist.

“Scratched it on his glasses,” he explained to Saraev. Then he complained: “Some people, eh! Can't get on quietly with their own lives, just have to get on other people's nerves.”

He poured himself and his friend yet another shot. They drank, snacked, talked about their wives and mothers-in-law, about the advantages of Izhevsk motorbikes over Kovrov motorbikes, and naturally they didn't fail to comment on the main political event of the day.

“They've given Khrushchev the shove,” said Zhikharev.

“Yeah,” agreed Saraev, after which they were both silent for a long time, trying to think of something to say.

“Yeah, given him the shove,” Zhikharev finally repeated.

“Yeah,” agreed Saraev.

And they sat through another long silence.

“And now,” surmised Zhikharev, “Stalin will sort them all out his own way.”

“How can he sort them all out, when he's dead?” Saraev asked doubtfully.

“That's the whole point, he isn't dead,” said Zhikharev.

“In what sense?” asked Saraev.

“In the sense that he's not dead, but alive,” said Zhikharev, and related to his colleague a story he'd heard from his brother-in-law, who worked in the Kremlin as a waiter, that in '53 Stalin hadn't died, he'd just pretended to die. And he'd gone into hiding, shaved off his mustache, dressed himself in rags, and like Tsar Alexander I before him, he was wandering around Russia begging for alms and looking to see how the people lived and whether they were carrying on building communism.

“Bullshit!” was Saraev's opinion of the story, and just as he said it, his former neighbor Ida Samoilovna appeared in front of him with her complaint about Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina and her noisy guests.

“Tolya,” Ida Samoilovna said to Saraev. “I'm begging you, please. You know my mother. You know how ill she is. And these people are yelling at the top of their voices in the middle of the night.”

Saraev wiped his mouth with his sleeve, looked at the clock and promised he would come and get to the bottom of things.

“Will you come soon?” asked Ida Samoilovna.

“Soon, soon,” the policeman answered impatiently, and as soon as she was gone, he expressed to Zhikharev his opinion that Zhikharev's information was nothing but a load of hot air, to which fact Saraev could testify in person. In March of '53, when he was a cadet at the police school, he'd been sent to Moscow and had personally taken part in the cordon on Pushkin Street by Hunter's Row station on the Lazar Kaganovich Metro, and at night the policemen had been allowed to approach the coffin.

“And I saw him there dead, just like yourself.”

“What d'you mean, just like me?” objected Zhikharev, ready to take offense. “I'm not dead.”

“Not in the sense that you're dead, but I was standing right beside him. Only a meter or half a meter away from him. I'm standing here, and he's lying here.” Saraev even tipped his chair back to represent the recumbent corpse, but being not entirely sober, he lost his balance and would have fallen if Zhikharev hadn't caught him in time. “So,” continued Saraev, setting the back of his chair upright, “I could see his face as well as I can see yours. And he was quite dead. He wasn't breathing, he didn't blink, he was made up and the color was like a live person all right, but he was dead as a doornail.”

“I'm not saying the corpse wasn't dead. Only the corpse wasn't Stalin, but People's Artist Gelovani. They buried him instead.”

“Alive?” Saraev asked in horror.

“Why alive?” Zhikharev asked with a shrug. “Don't be stupid—alive! Are they brutes or something, to put a live man in a coffin? They put him down first and then buried him.”

“Well, if they put him down, that's all right. Got money for it, I suppose?”

“Heaps,” Zhikharev said confidently. “He's a People's Artist of the whole USSR. D'you know how much they get paid?”

“How much?” asked Saraev.

“Lots,” said Zhikharev with a sigh.

Saraev inclined the teapot and topped up his own moonshine and his comrade's. They clinked mugs without speaking, drank, grunted and took a bite to eat.

“All right then,” said Saraev, after thinking hard for a moment, “they put this guy in the coffin. But where did Stalin get to?”

“Hey, I told you already! He went away. Didn't say anything to anybody. The only one he left a note for was Molotov.”

Captain Saraev didn't believe a single word Zhikharev said, especially since all the drink was finished and the hour was rather late. But on the way home he suddenly remembered that not long ago he'd arrested an indigent old beggar at the railway station and was going to bring him in to the cells, but the old man had bought him off with twenty-five rubles. Which hadn't surprised Saraev in the least—he'd known for a long time that the bulk of beggars were rich. Now, recalling the beggar, he also recalled that there'd been something unusual about his face, that he reminded him of someone, and now he thought that the beggar had reminded him of . . . But then that was all nonsense, Saraev told himself, nonsense and nothing more, and at that very moment he heard loud singing coming from an open window.

44

As always, there was no light in the entrance, but there was a glimmer somewhere upstairs. It was the lighted candle that Ida Bauman was holding where she was standing on the landing in her dressing gown and slippers.

“Oh, at last! Thank you for coming,” she said, touched. “It's really quite impossible. Mother's had an attack, and just listen to the way they're carrying on. All right, it's allowed until eleven. And we put up with it until twelve. But it's just too much!”

Realizing that references to doctors, laws and the late hour might prove to be an insufficient argument, Ida Samoilovna thrust into the policeman's hand a three-ruble note which he took by touch to be a fiver and immediately stuck in his pocket. And then he knocked resolutely on the door of Aglaya's apartment. At first tactfully, with the knuckle of his middle finger. Then with his fist. Then with the handle of his revolver. No one answered, and he went in on his own.

The spree was in full swing. Wafting away the cigarette smoke with his hands, the policeman finally made out the lady of the house, sitting sideways to him in a dark blue jacket, and her guests Divanich and Georgii Zhukov. Behind them in the thick cigarette smoke, his hand pressed against the ceiling, stood the cast-iron generalissimo.

Divanich, his face red and sweaty from effort, was in his green uniform shirt and suspenders. His colonel's jacket was hanging on the back of his chair. Zhukov, leaning slightly backward on his stool with his eyes narrowed, was expanding his accordion bellows. Aglaya was conducting. She did this with true inspiration, feeling that perhaps she had never been as happy as she was today.

If on the holiday we should encounter . . .

And at that very moment Saraev appeared. The singers completed the next line about “a few old friends” and fell silent, turning to face him. But Saraev was looking at them and at the iron man standing behind them. Under that iron gaze Saraev somehow wilted, and instead of addressing Aglaya firmly, as he had been planning, he said very timidly: “I beg your pardon . . .”

But Divanich waved a finger at him to tell him he must be quiet and returned to the couplet they'd left unfinished.

“. . . a few old friends . . .”

“...all we hold dear comes back to mind,” Aglaya picked up the refrain, “and our song sounds the sweeter.”

“I beg your pardon, Aglaya Stepanovna,” the captain repeated, “but you'll have to cut short your fun . . .”

The accordion gave one last pitiful squeal; Zhukov squeezed the bellows shut and reached into his pocket for a handkerchief. Divanich said nothing and looked at the captain attentively, and Aglaya took out a new cigarette, softened it between her fingers, tapped the cardboard mouthpiece on the table and lit up, sensing that her mood was about to be spoiled.

“I beg your pardon,” Saraev said for the third time, “but after twelve o'clock it's not allowed.”

“Not allowed?” Aglaya asked.

“Not allowed,” Saraev repeated.

“And what if people have something to celebrate? If people, so to speak, have had a baby?” asked Divanich. “Isn't it allowed then?”

“Who's had a baby?” the policeman asked.

“I have,” Zhukov owned up. “Four and a half kilos. That big,” he said, holding his hands up. “Howls like a steam engine.”

“Like a steam engine.” Divanich echoed. “And he howls after eleven o'clock? Arrest him and give him fifteen days. Isn't that right, Captain?”

“But he'd howl even more in there,” said Aglaya. Even she was in the mood for jokes today.

“Well anyway, I've warned you,” said the policeman with all the severity that he could muster. “So just you be careful. If you break the law, then . . . I personally . . . I could do without this . . . but I'll have to . . . I beg your pardon . . . take appropriate measures . . .”

Divanich was suddenly enraged. “Appropriate measures? Against whom? Her?” he said, prodding Aglaya with his finger. “Our heroine? Our legendary heroine? Or him? He's a soldier, he fought against counter-revolution in Hungary. Or me, a colonel, a veteran of two wars? An honored, so to speak, that is . . . Or him?”

Divanich stretched out his arm toward Stalin and then, frightened at his own audacity, he switched into a whisper. “I tell you what, my dear friend, why don't you just drop it? Sit down with us and we'll celebrate. Since such important events have taken place. On the one hand a man has been born, and on the other, as they say, you know . . . Do you get my meaning, Captain?”

“Certainly, Comrade Colonel,” Saraev agreed.

“Right then, sit down. If our hostess has no objections . . .”

The hostess had none, and for a start she suggested the policeman should drink to the health of Stalin. And although the captain doubted whether you could drink to the health of someone who was dead, he figured that if it was their treat, then that was all right. And anyway, dead people could be regarded as healthy because they never got sick.