Monumental Propaganda (20 page)

49

Korotyshkin, of course, was hoping that Shubkin would realize the fatal nature of his errors and take fright. And he was right. Shubkin believed in socialist legality, but with very substantial reservations. He decided not to write any more letters to the Central Committee, not to circulate his literary opuses, not to travel to Moscow and not to associate with dissidents and foreigners. And he began behaving in such an exemplary fashion that our organs should have been delighted and displayed his portrait on their walls as the most dutiful and deserving citizen-imitator. But since they needed Shubkin precisely in his capacity as a dissident, they tried to think up a way of inciting him to show his hand again, and think one up they did.

The
Dolgov Pravda
published an article entitled “The Deeper You Go in the Forest, the More Firewood You Find.” In summarizing Shubkin's biography, it either noted openly or hinted that he was a Jew, that he had broken Soviet laws, had been convicted of anti-Soviet activity and released early on humanitarian grounds. Not a single word about his having been rehabilitated, although it was noted that Mark Semyonovich had failed to learn the lessons of his past, had backslid into anti-Soviet activity and was presently the Western security services' most highly prized lickspittle and purveyor of slander against his homeland, which had raised him, fed him, clothed him, put shoes on his feet, provided him with an education and given him the hope of happiness.

Shubkin took this article as a signal that he was going to be jailed again and he decided to follow the advice of a certain experienced Moscow dissident, who explained to him that his salvation lay in maximum publicity. “If you keep quiet, they're bound to put you away. But you start kicking up a rumpus, and you'll attract serious attention from the West, then instead of your being afraid of them, they'll be afraid of you.”

Shubkin believed him. He started to take action. And far more audaciously than before. Previously, he had written letters to the Central Committee of the CPSU. Then he'd sent copies of his letters to
Pravda
and Izvestiya. Then to the international communist newspapers: L'Humanité, the Morning Star, L'Unità. But now every letter went direct to the Times (London), the
New York Times, Le Figaro, Die Welt
and
Aftonbladet.
And it was instantly clear to Shubkin how these newspapers differed from the communist ones. His letters were printed immediately, and in the most conspicuous positions on the page. People began talking about Shubkin. His texts began to be broadcast regularly. The Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, Radio Liberty and the BBC broadcast them with numerous repeats, while showering Shubkin with flattering compliments. The longer it went on, the more imposing the compliments became. A leading dissident. A major writer. An outstanding advocate of human rights.

The Dolgov organs were thrown into consternation. They themselves had pushed Shubkin into acting so decisively, and now they didn't know what to do. He had become too famous, and now they weren't sure from which angle to approach him. Just recently, he could quite easily have been jailed without any particular fuss. But now . . . Korotyshkin himself could be sacked and jailed at any moment, even shot if it was really necessary, and nobody would notice. But Shubkin? Lay a finger on him and all these voices would set up a deafening howl all around the planet. The case would come to the notice of all sorts of human rights organizations, they would appeal to their presidents, the presidents would tell Brezhnev about Shubkin, Brezhnev would get angry and summon Andropov, Andropov would summon the head of the fifth section, the head of the fifth section would summon the head of the Dolgov office, and how it would all end for Korotyshkin no one could tell.

Not knowing what to do, Korotyshkin decided not to do anything and pretend that Shubkin simply didn't exist. Which, of course, played into Shubkin's hands. Seeing that no one did anything to him, he cast caution to the winds and in addition to newspapers he appealed to presidents and prime ministers and to international public opinion in general, in other words effectively to the whole human race. He wrote about everything. About the official authorities' retreat from communism. About bureaucracy and bribe-taking. About universal drunkenness. About people being persecuted for their religious beliefs. About the authorities' failure to preserve cultural values.

One way or another he sent all these materials to Moscow, from where everything found its way to the West, and in the evenings when Shubkin searched for his name on the airwaves, he almost always found it.

“Come here!” he would shout to Antonina. “Listen to what they're saying!”

He was delighted, but Antonina was distraught.

“Oh, they'll put you away, Mark Semyonovich, oh, they will, they will,” and she would shake her head in misery.

“Don't be afraid, Tonechka, they won't put me away,” Mark Semyonovich would comfort her. “How can they put me away now, when the whole world knows who I am?”

Of course, he was sacked from his job, and excluded from the Party.

But this was the very time when he himself began to deviate from Marxism and Leninism. A crisis began to develop even in his view of the world around him. But being the kind of man who simply can't live without a SCOSWO, he began seeking one in the very world outlook which he himself had only recently called opium for the people.

50

There was a knock at Aglaya's door; she opened it without asking who was there and started in surprise. Standing on the doorstep holding a large watermelon was a sporty-looking young man wearing jeans and a leather jacket.

“Marat!” Aglaya gasped, suddenly overcome by a joy she hadn't expected to feel. She was surprised and delighted both by Marat's appearance and her own maternal feelings, by the fact that she actually had any.

“Hello, Mom!” said Marat, clutching the melon to his belly and smiling, while a young blond woman in jeans and an unbuttoned denim jacket stood smiling behind his back.

“Hello, son,” said Aglaya, skirting around the melon and kissing Marat somewhere close to his ear. She held out her hand to the blonde: “Aglaya Stepanovna. And you are . . .”

“Mom, this is Zoya, my wife,” Marat said reproachfully. “I wrote you lots of times.”

“Yes, of course you did,” Aglaya agreed. “But what does marriage mean nowadays? Not a thing. It used to be different . . . When your father and I got married . . .” She faltered, recollecting that her union with Andrei Revkin could hardly be represented as ideal. “Never mind,” she said, interrupting herself. “But you're a bolt out of the blue. You could at least have sent a telegram.” She led them through to the room. “Come in. How could you come without a telegram? The place is a mess and the refrigerator's empty.”

She entered the room first, shrugging her shoulders as she carried on talking, turned around and saw they had barely stepped over the threshold. The two of them were just standing there, he wearing an expression of amazement and she one of horror.

“Ah yes,” said Aglaya. “Didn't I write you about it? I'm keeping it. Have been for almost eight years.” A sudden thought struck her. “Have we really not seen each other for eight years? Or even longer? Will you put that watermelon down!” she shouted at her son, and he lowered the fruit onto a chair and rocked it to and fro to make sure it wouldn't roll off.

Then they sat in the kitchen at the round table covered with the Kremlin towers oilcloth and waited for the water to boil in the big battered aluminum kettle. The kitchen was grubby and untidy, with cobwebs in the corners. Aglaya set a half-kilogram jar of sugar and half a packet of Greetings biscuits on the table, gave Marat the glass in a glass-holder, gave Zoya the porcelain cup with no handle and the inscription WPRA— 20 YEARS and for herself she took the enamel mug, after first wiping it with a towel.

Marat observed that his mother had aged since they had last seen each other. There were bags under her eyes, and bags under the bags, and her entire face had somehow turned knobbly, with deep, open pores. As she poured the tea, he noticed that her hands were trembling and her fingers were dark and crooked, like twigs. But why, he thought, after all, she's not that old. Fifty-four. Zoya's mother was two years older, but she looked a lot younger. Perhaps because she went to a beautician and dyed her hair. He's got older, thought Aglaya, looking at her son. How old is he now? About thirty-five and already bald, with a paunch and a double chin and going gray at the temples.

“What's the WPRA?” Zoya asked, examining her cup. Aglaya looked at her in surprise, unable to believe it was possible not to know that, and Marat explained: “The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army.”

“When did you arrive?” Aglaya asked.

“We've only just got here,” said Marat.

“Only just got here.” She looked at her watch. “What train were you on?”

“We didn't come by train,” Marat said with a smile. “We came by car. I collected coupons in Cuba—and there you are . . .” He led her over to the window. “You see the light blue Volga?”

“Is it yours?”

“My very own. Yes, by the way, I forgot to take off the windshield-wiper blades. How are things around here? Do they steal them?”

“Where don't they steal them?” asked Aglaya.

“I just thought that maybe here . . . This used to be a quiet kind of place.”

“There used to be order,” she said. “It was quiet everywhere then. Now some people gasp and say: ‘Oh, under Stalin they gave you ten years for a single ear of wheat.' And they did right. Nowadays they thieve it by the wagonload, not the ear. By the trainload. Never mind, what am I talking about that for? Tell me how you are, how both of you are.”

She was entirely unprepared to receive guests, with nothing in the house for supper except some potatoes, half a bottle of kefir and the same amount of vodka. But it turned out that in a cooler bag in their car her guests had two roast chickens, boiled eggs and salami sausage, and Marat went to the delicatessen and bought a pack of butter, a bottle of sunflower oil, three cans of Bulgarian stuffed cabbage leaves, two bottles of Algerian dry wine and a Capital torte.

When Marat was on his way to the delicatessen, the wiper blades were still there and he thought he'd remove them on the way back, but when he returned, they were already gone. This event cast a pall of gloom over their supper. However, Aglaya had an acquaintance who was the boss of the motor depot, and she hoped to get hold of some wipers in the morning.

During supper Marat sat facing the half-open door of the room, glancing from time to time in the direction of the darkness out of which the statue was observing him curiously. This iron gaze played on Marat's nerves. He turned away, shifted his chair, sat sideways to the door, but the mysterious force emanating from the statue lured him, making him twist his neck to meet the incomprehensible question projected in that gaze.

Aglaya knew that Marat had a son, but not being certain whether there was anyone else, she asked cautiously: “How's the younger generation?”

Marat was delighted she'd remembered about her grandson and told her that Andrei was staying with Zoya's parents. The boy was in first grade at school, but he was a poor student because he got into too many fights.

“He's a lot like you,” said Marat.

“Because he gets into too many fights?”

“I mean he looks a lot like you.”

“That means he's a lot like me on the inside too. I was a real little scrapper when I was a kid,” she recalled with satisfaction. “All the boys were afraid of me. And you,” she said, turning to Zoya, “what do you do? Are you a housewife?”

“Certainly not,” Zoya objected. “While the baby was small, I stayed at home with him, but now I work at Intourist.”

At Intourist she worked as a guide in the department of individual services for especially important foreign political figures, artists and writers. She happily related how she had traveled all over the country with Howard Fast, James Oldridge, Rockwell Kent and some other people whose names meant nothing to Aglaya. But from the enthusiasm with which the names were pronounced, she could guess that these were famous people and the services provided to them were fuller and more comprehensive than those required by the formal responsibilities of the job.

Usually the foreigners were taken on the customary routes: “Moscow— Leningrad—Kiev—Zagorsk,” but the moment you turned aside from the well-trodden path, unforeseen and amusing incidents occurred. For some reason the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, whom Zoya accompanied on one trip, had wanted to visit the city of Tselinograd. At first they attempted to dissuade him, but while they were dissuading him, the order was given for the double-quick completion of building work on the city's central hotel, a building that had been under construction for several years. The local construction brigades were reinforced with crack workers from the Moscow construction trust, Mosstroi, who did their damnedest, and by the time the foreign guest arrived, they had managed to complete the second floor, the staircase leading to it (the unfinished sections were covered with a red carpet runner) and the hall, where all the pompous uniformed attendants standing around with simpleminded expressions on their faces held the rank of at least major. The walls were decorated with a motley selection of lamps and animal horns, and that day the bar sold all sorts of drinks never seen before by the locals, while the newspaper kiosk offered all sorts of newspapers and magazines, local and foreign, including, of course, Indian ones. In order to create the impression that publications and beverages could be freely purchased, KGB agents approached the counters and bought both kinds of items, but everything was taken away from them at the exit to prevent them from trying Coca-Cola and becoming infected with the spirit of consumerism, or being subjected to ideological pressure by the newspapers, which, not knowing foreign languages, they would have been unable to read in any case.

The deluxe room for the exalted guest was equipped by the secretary of the regional Party committee with his own furniture, very luxurious and with no bedbugs. Everything was going well, or even better than well, but there was still no plumbing in the hotel and the sewerage system had not been linked up yet. And since the guest was an important individual who couldn't just relieve himself out in the street, they rigged up two barrels on the third floor and brought in water through the back entrance, pouring cold water into one barrel and hot water into the other. As for the sewage system, they dealt with that very simply: the discharge pipe broke off short in the deluxe room on the first floor with a bucket standing under it, and Aunty Sima, the cleaning lady, kept guard by the bucket. In the morning Granddad Java (as Zoya called the honored Indian guest) did his business, then pulled the handle, sending the load crashing down into the bucket, which Aunty Sima then grabbed, setting another in its place. Zoya gesticulated energetically and constantly repeated the expressions “great” and “a gas.” “When the water runs, Aunty Sima runs,” she said (she thought that was funny). And she deliberately mangled some words to make them sound folksy. When Marat asked if he should pour her more wine, she said: “Nacherly.”

Aglaya drank her wine with a frown—she liked vodka better, but she concealed her weakness from her son. She hardly touched the food at all, smoked her coarse Belomor cigarette and leaned forward over the table in fits of hollow coughing. Marat offered her his foreign Marlboro cigarettes, she tried one, began coughing even more and said: “Rubbish, like straw, our Belomors are far better.” She listened to Zoya's stories politely but with great impatience, and she interrupted an attempt to tell her about the trip Marat and Zoya had made to Kizhi with a question.

“What interests me is . . . your father has an important job—I suppose he rubs shoulders with the big shots?”

“Sometimes,” Zoya agreed, not without a certain pride.

“So are they going to do anything up there about restoring justice?”

“What for?” Zoya asked with a frown. “It seems to me justice has been restored already. All the politicals were released ages ago, they get higher pensions, and there's enough talk about them already.”

“Perhaps even too much,” said Marat, with an involuntary sideways glance at the statue.

“That's what I mean,” said Aglaya, “that there's too much. But I didn't really mean them, but him.” She pointed to the statue. “He did so much for the country, and then they dumped him like so much garbage!”

She hadn't drunk a lot, but a little was enough for her. She flushed bright red and tears sprang to her eyes.

“Yes,” Zoya agreed, “I think the same. Papa said the top leadership had plans to rehabilitate him, but international public opinion and the Western communist parties—”

“Damn the Western communist parties,” Aglaya said coarsely, and lit her next cigarette from the last. “Don't we have a mind of our own?”

“In principle you're right,” Zoya agreed again, “but in the present world situation . . . Of course, the time's ripe, but . . . I think the same, and papa thinks the same, and lots of people do, so perhaps there'll be a resolution for the ninetieth anniversary.”

“There won't,” said Marat. “There won't be any resolution.”

Zoya looked at him in surprise and Aglaya asked: “Why not?”

“Because, dear Mama,” Marat said with a laugh, “after the Stalin personality cult there was the Khrushchev personality cult, and after that there'll be the personality cult of our present living general secretary, and it will go on like that, and no one needs a dead rival. One dead Lenin is quite enough.”

Aglaya looked closely at her son. Marat caught her glance and read the condemnation in it.

“I'm sorry, perhaps you think I'm too cynical. But every cynic is a disenchanted romantic. First he believes in ideals, then he sees that they don't correspond to the realities of life and he starts to trust nothing but his own eyes.”

“That's not cynicism, that's called realism,” objected Zoya.

“Clever girl,” Marat agreed. “You could put it like that.”

“But I still don't understand,” said Aglaya. “It seems to me the present leadership regards Stalin with respect, then why—”

“Because, Mama dear,” Marat interrupted her, “there's a lot more pleasure in licking a live ass than an iron one.”

That night she opened out the sofa in the sitting room for the young couple. It was a long time since it had seen active service as a bed. She went off to her own bedroom. She lay there smoking and thinking that Marat was obviously right. The present leadership had their merits, but they also had quite obvious failings. They weren't rehabilitating Stalin; they were fudging the job with the dissidents. They were afraid of the Western communist parties and international public opinion . . . And the result was a load of nonsense. The bigger the dissident and the more damage he did, the more they pampered him. They didn't put him in jail but polemicized against him in the newspapers, and that was just what he wanted. Who would fight seriously against these dissidents anyway, if politics at the top was nothing but toadying and time-serving? Brezhnev was lauded and decorated at the slightest excuse, or even without one. Only recently, he'd been honored with the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. For what? Length of service? And they talked about Stalin. Yes, Stalin . . .