Monumental Propaganda (21 page)

She took a long time to get to sleep, and so did her guests. Hearing noises outside, Marat leapt out of bed three times to check that no one was stealing the car. Then he lay down again. He lay there, looking at the statue, and it looked at him. He closed his eyes, and then he thought the statue had begun to move and was coming toward him. He had no time for mysticism, he knew it couldn't happen, but he couldn't resist opening his eyes. The statue was standing in its original position, but Marat had the feeling (which he didn't believe) that it had only just got back there. He closed his eyes again, and there were times when he almost fell asleep completely, but as soon as that happened, the statue immediately came across and leaned over to gaze at him. In his dream he assessed his own state critically, asking himself: Am I asleep or not? And he answered himself: No, I'm not asleep, because I can see and feel everything that's going on around me, I'm lying here and Zoya is lying beside me, here's my nose, here I am twitching it, no I'm not asleep. An automobile went roaring past the window, the glare of its headlights burst into the room and skidded along the wall and Stalin dashed quickly back into his corner, but as soon as the light disappeared, the statue crept silently over to the sofa bed. Marat tried to ask Stalin what he wanted, but when he opened his mouth, he couldn't say anything and his fear woke him. When he woke, he noticed that Zoya wasn't sleeping either.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

“I'm afraid of him,” Zoya whispered.

“Nonsense!” he growled irritably, trying to reassure himself as much as her. “It's nothing but an inanimate object, cast iron, a piece of monumental propaganda, that's all.”

He thought he would distract her, and himself, in the way people usually distract themselves, especially since they were in a new place, and a new place always excited him precisely because it was new. And the process of distraction had already proceeded very far when Zoya objected in a whisper: “No! No!” And she pushed him out of her.

“What's wrong?” he asked, disgruntled.

“I can't with him here,” she said.

In the morning, while her visitors were still sleeping, Aglaya went to see her acquaintance at the motor base. He didn't have any spare wiper blades, but purely out of respect for Aglaya he gave her some taken from an official automobile.

They ate a silent and hasty breakfast. Marat hadn't slept enough and he was grouchy. He kept glancing into the room in amazement. During the night he'd thought Stalin had looked menacing and mysterious, but there was no menace now, just a little old man in cast iron, looking like a portrait of a doorkeeper by the Georgian painter Pirosmani, standing there with one hand raised absurdly. Perhaps that was what he'd been like—a little pockmarked nonentity—and people themselves had endowed him with superhuman qualities; their cowardly imagination had transformed him into an all-powerful ghoul so they had trembled in fear at the sight of him.

Marat and Zoya wanted to leave as soon as possible, and Aglaya wanted them to go. They were already in the corridor and ready to say their goodbyes when Aglaya said, “Just a moment,” and went dashing into her study, then came back and handed her son an envelope with the address “L. I. Brezhnev, The Kremlin, Moscow.”

“I want you to do something for me,” she said, lowering her voice. “Take this to the Central Committee. There's an entrance on Old Square, number four or number six. They take in letters there.”

“Oh, Mom!” Marat said, frowning. “When am I ever going to be there? It'll get there quicker by post.”

“What's wrong with you? Don't you understand?” she asked in a whisper, and glanced toward the door.

He glanced in the same direction and looked at her.

“What don't I understand?”

“I'm being followed,” she went on nervously. “Every step I take. They've gone soft on the enemies of the people, but they've put a communist and a partisan like me under close surveillance. They intercept my letters. But it's my duty. And the people at the top must know what the rank-and-file communists are thinking.”

“Are you writing about that dummy?” asked Marat, jerking his head in the direction of the sitting room.

If only Marat had known the effect his words would have. Aglaya's heart began pounding furiously.

“What?” she asked in astonishment. “You said ‘dummy'? Did you call Comrade Stalin a dummy?”

“Mom!” Marat exclaimed in fright.

“Aglaya Stepanovna,” Zoya intervened. “He didn't mean Stalin. He meant the statue. It is a bit odd, after all—”

“Shut up!” Aglaya bellowed, the way she used to bellow when she was interrogating a
Polizei
or an embezzling collective farm chairman.

“Mom, what's wrong with you?” said Marat, trying to calm her down. He even held out his arms to give her a hug. “I'm not talking about Stalin himself, I mean that idiotic sculpture. It's not a man, it's an idol—”

“Ah, it's an idol!” Aglaya flared up. “How dare you! Take your hands off me! . . . How dare you say that about the man who means more to me than—”

“Mom!” Marat appealed to her one more time.

“I'm not your mom!” she yelled. “And you're no son of mine! Clear out the pair of you and don't let me ever see you again!”

“Mom,” mumbled Marat. “I just don't get it, why are you so—”

“Get out!” said Aglaya, and pushed him in the chest.

Zoya stepped out onto the landing. Marat turned to follow her.

“Get out!” Aglaya repeated, and pushed him in the back. Then she slammed the door shut, turned the key in the lock and went into the sitting room, prepared to cry her eyes out. But glancing by chance at the statue, she froze. Stalin was gazing at her so expressively that she had no difficulty in reading complete approval of her courageous act in his eyes.

51

We simply cannot ignore one important event that occurred in Dolgov in the late summer of 1969. Georgii Zhukov and his wife, Elizaveta, having decided to celebrate their son Vanya's fifth birthday, bought a canister of Polish spirits from a conductor on a passing train and invited guests in. The spirit turned out to be methyl alcohol, both of the Zhukovs died, one of their guests followed their example and another three went blind.

The yard-keeper Valentina howled for a week over her beloved son and wanted to do away with herself, but then she realized she had no right, she had to carry on living for the sake of her little grandson Vanya.

Apart from that it was a good year.

An article entitled “Loyalty” appeared in the
Dolgov Pravda.
It had been written very much earlier. At the beginning of '65 a correspondent had come to see Aglaya and asked her a heap of questions. And he'd written the article soon afterward, but it hadn't seen the light of day at the time. From time to time in the newspaper office, they would take the material out of the editorial portfolio and prepare it for printing, but at the last moment they would decide the time hadn't come yet. Now, apparently, the time had come. It turned out to be a big article, covering two bottom half-pages. It gave Aglaya Revkina's heroic biography in full— in all honesty, embellished just a touch here and there. It spoke of the firmness of her convictions. Of the trials and tribulations through which she had maintained her devotion to her ideals, the Party, the Revolution and the state. It gave a highly detailed account of the most important achievement of her life: preserving the precious monument, a masterpiece of monumental propaganda. The hope was expressed that the day was not far off when this masterpiece would take its place on the pedestal that was waiting for it.

It can hardly be regarded as a coincidence that the day after the article appeared a courier came dashing over to Aglaya's place (on foot) with a brief note: “Dear Aglaya Stepanovna! Could you please call into the district committee urgently. Porosyaninov.”

She would really have liked, through the courier, to send the sender of the message to hell or farther, but curiosity got the better of her.

As she prepared to go to the district committee offices, she wondered whether she ought to put on her military tunic with the medals, but decided that nowadays that would be going a bit too far. She dressed herself up in a dark blue suit and a blouse, displaying on the jacket the ribbons from her decorations and a university badge presented to her for taking some Party courses.

Her old office looked less modest than it had in her time. There was a new desk and cupboard of Karelian birch, a heavy bronze chandelier with cupids, a soft leather divan, two leather armchairs, a low table with the journals
Ogonyok
and
Woman Worker
and, above Porosyaninov's head, two portraits: Lenin and Brezhnev.

“Hello, Aglaya Stepanovna!” Porosyaninov greeted her joyfully. He came out from behind his desk, went toward her and even spread his arms wide, intending to embrace her, but he'd forgotten who he was dealing with. She mumbled a barely audible “Hello” and dodged his embrace. He caught on immediately and didn't insist, just directed her to one of the armchairs and took the other himself.

He said nothing for a while, as though he hadn't thought of the right way to approach the conversation, laughed and said, looking straight into her eyes: “Well now. Let's start by agreeing to let bygones be bygones. You suffered for sticking to your principles, that's clear enough, and it's been taken into account. The feeling is that it's time to put a few things straight, and so I can inform you that the decision to exclude you from the ranks of the Party has been annulled. Your period of membership remains continuous; for the time being you can register at your home address, and we'll sort things out later. Are there any questions on that point?”

“Yes,” said Aglaya. “I demand an apology.”

“What?” Porosyaninov was astonished.

“Well, you have to apologize to me.”

“I see.” Porosyaninov sighed, looked at her and said with feeling: “Aglaya Stepanovna! My dear Party colleague! You know very well that our Party acknowledges and corrects its mistakes, but it doesn't apologize.”

“All right,” Aglaya agreed. “Then the second question. When will you rehabilitate Stalin?”

Porosyaninov was embarrassed. He thought for a moment. “In the first place,” he said, “since you, unlike Stalin, have been completely rehabilitated, you have the right to say ‘we' instead of ‘you.' So what is your question?”

“When will we rehabilitate Stalin?” she asked, switching the pronoun.

“I have a question to you in reply. What in hell's name do you want him for?” Porosyaninov asked, fixing Aglaya with an unblinking stare.

“What?” Aglaya was taken aback.

It was the same situation that had arisen with Marat. But Marat was her son, and this man . . .

“All right, let's move on,” said Porosyaninov, switching into an official tone of voice. “In our party, Aglaya Stepanovna, we hold the opinion, which Stalin himself shared, that history is not made by individual heroes, but by the people under the leadership of the Communist Party. Headed at the present stage by the leading Leninist, Comrade Brezhnev. Now we've passed that station,” he said, giving her no time to gather her wits, “and we'll switch trains. We, the Party leadership of the district, have applied for you to be transferred to a republican-level personal merit pension. And in addition, here is a travel warrant for a trip to Sochi, any ticket, train or air, will be paid for. Take some time to build up your health, steam for a while in the sauna, try the various treatments—massage, mud baths, the Charcot shower. It's very good, I've tried it myself. When you feel strong enough, come back and drop in to see us. If you want, we'll find you some worthwhile social work to do. If you don't, take it easy, read a few books, study the classics of Marxism-Leninism.”

52

Divanich volunteered to see her off and lugged her suitcase to the station on foot.

Outside the station there were two police cars with blinking lights, a gray Volga and a military truck with soldiers under a tarpaulin.

There was a lot of noise on platform 1. A crowd of people Aglaya didn't know were celebrating a wedding. The bride in a white dress and white veil, the groom in a black suit with a white rose in the buttonhole. The friends, girlfriends, parents and relatives of the bride and the groom. Lots of people, all different sorts. A bayan player with gold teeth was stretching open his bellows, a young man and woman were dancing, the woman shrieking out rhyming ditties of distinctly ribald content. At first glance it was a wedding like any other. Only there was something unusual about it. There were some people acting too tensely and keeping a sharp lookout on all sides. Aglaya recalled that later. But at the time, although she sensed something, she was too preoccupied with her own problems. She was afraid she might have been lured away with the travel warrant so that they could remove the statue while she was gone.

“Oh no,” Divanich reassured her. “That's not the way it looks. Quite the opposite, full rehabilitation is what's expected now.”

“Okay,” she said, “but if anything happens, you run straight down to the post office and send me a telegram. Not an open message, write: ‘Granddad not well.' You understand?”

“And what if Granddad's fine?” Divanich joked.

“If everything's all right, don't write anything.”

Carriage no. 4, the one Aglaya had a ticket for, stopped right in front of her. First the conductress jumped out of the carriage with her curls peeping out from under her red peaked cap, then behind her Shubkin and Antonina appeared at the top of the steps. “He's been to Moscow again!” Aglaya thought furiously. He was surprised to see her and wondered what she was doing there, but he smiled and said: “Good afternoon!” She didn't reply, but she said hello to Antonina. He jumped down onto the platform with a big, bulging briefcase and then helped his traveling companion down the steps. Aglaya had already taken hold of the handrail when Divanich tugged on her arm: “What's wrong?” she was about to ask, but following the signs Divanich was making, she looked in the direction Shubkin had taken and witnessed an extraordinary scene. Shubkin was already nearing the station entrance when everyone involved in the wedding revels, including the bride, crowded around him and Antonina. Just then the gray Volga came hurtling onto the platform out of nowhere, and Aglaya heard first Antonina's cry: “Mark Semyonovich!” and then Mark Semyonovich's own voice: “What's going on, Comrades? What is this? I protest!” Then there was the sound of doors being slammed, and a second later the Volga, its tires squealing, hurtled out of the crowd and raced along the platform with Antonina running along after it, her arms held wide open. Before it reached the warehouse, the car swung around the corner of the station and disappeared from sight. And Antonina stopped and stood there motionless with her hands held out stupidly in front of her, as though she was expecting somebody to put something in them. The crowd on the platform evaporated immediately and only then did Aglaya realize there hadn't been any wedding, it was a special operation.

“Yes!” said Divanich with a mysterious smile. “Neatly done! Now it'll be a long time, so to speak, till he sees freedom again.”