Monumental Propaganda (22 page)

53

I don't know about other people, but as I grow older, I find myself becoming less and less prepared to tolerate our Russian snows, blizzards and frosts, and even Pushkin's “frost and sunshine—glorious day” is, I fear, no longer for me. I become more and more fond of southern winters, with the gentle, muted sunshine, the warm showers, evenings that are not cold and faded blooms that are not frostbitten in the flowerbeds.

The sanatorium, named after some congress or other of the CPSU, was a place where the middle-level Soviet nomenklatura went to restore its health: deputy heads of Central Committee departments, deputy ministers, heads of industrial-sector central offices. According to the unwritten hierarchy (or perhaps it was written down somewhere), this class also included retired generals, certain leading industrial workers and certain members of the creative intelligentsia who were close to the top bosses— writers, artists and performers. This latter group was represented by People's Artist of the USSR Nikolai Kriuchkov, who walked with a rapid stride, smiled affably at everyone and ran down to the sea with a big towel in the mornings to bathe in the water that already had a wintry chill.

Aglaya had no interest in the sea, especially since she couldn't swim and didn't enjoy simply splashing about even in summer, although she did appreciate a steam bath, Russian-style, wet with a birch-twig besom. But she never actually went to the bathhouse. She was shy of being seen by people. Being such a well-known individual in Dolgov, she thought that they would scrutinize her in the bathhouse and then tell other people that they'd seen Revkina naked. And there had been a time when she was such an intimidating figure that not many people would have been able even to imagine her naked. There was no steam room here, but there was a sauna. Not quite the same thing, but better than nothing. What's more, she wasn't shy of the women here; they were from her own level, although they were pretty boring. They talked about nothing but their grandchildren, dieting, makeup and techniques of rejuvenation. By that time they were already excited about the silicone breasts and face-lifts that had become fashionable in the West.

After the three meals a day, the massage, mud bath, sauna and other corporeal pleasures and procedures, there was a lot of time left over, but Aglaya had left
The Foundations of Leninism
at home, she wasn't accustomed to sport and she simply didn't know how to occupy her time. She'd stopped reading the newspapers ages ago and was too lazy to watch television. What was there to watch anyway, apart from Brezhnev? Almost every evening he received some kind of award or gave one to someone else. They showed him so frequently and with such determination that the people christened the television program schedule “all about him and a bit about the weather.”

The walls of the lobby were painted all over with pictures of happy Soviet life and the friendship of the peoples. Standing to the left of the entrance to the main building was a palm tree in a large tub, and beneath its spreading fronds people in flannel pajamas, blue tracksuits and slippers were playing dominoes. In the sleepy calm of the sanatorium the clattering of the dominoes sounded like gunfire. In collectives of simple folk the game of dominoes is usually accompanied by loud conversations on the most various subjects, funny stories, jokes and jibes. But when the nomenklatura gathers together, it behaves with greater caution, aware that before you make fun of anyone, you have to decipher the subtle lines of subordination. And you couldn't tell just any old joke here. So they played in silence, concentrating, with expressions that suggested they were occupied with something exceptionally important. But even here, someone might forget himself and suddenly declare with loud relish, “Fishtail!” Or “Double at both ends!”; “Double at both ends and done!” But then he would immediately fall silent and glance at the other players, concerned that he might have got too carried away for such august company. And he would modestly pull his head down into his shoulders just to be on the safe side

For lack of anything else to do Aglaya tried playing a bit, assuming it to be a simple business, but she saw that even here you had to take note of who had which pieces, guess your partner's intentions, pick up his hints and follow the general style of the game, and in these matters the public assembled here were such aces that she could never compete with them. She began walking a lot. Varying her route, she walked sometimes along the lower esplanade, sometimes through the upper park between the boat station and the Hotel Pearl, and as she walked, she thought about the strange way life turns out, not at all the way you imagined at the beginning. When he was still a young communist, her husband, Andrei, had once said that as they advanced toward communism people would become ideologically stronger, think more about society and less about themselves. And what was actually happening? People were bogged down in their daily round; they thought of nothing but their stomachs and how to make their own lives more comfortable. Many of them had fallen into the clutches of acquisitiveness, and far from combating this way of thinking, the Party itself was even more avidly devoted to money-grubbing.

In the dining hall she sat in the very farthest corner, and at first she sat on her own. But one morning she came down to breakfast, and sitting there wolfing down his semolina was an elderly man in a dark blue sweater with the inscription ADIDAS on the chest.

“Hello,” she said.

“Good health to you!” The man raised his close-cropped head, and Aglaya glimpsed a swarthy face with high cheekbones and shaggy eyebrows. She caught her breath in astonishment.

“Is that you?”

The man, somewhat surprised at the question, looked himself over— shoulders and chest—and confessed: “It seems to be me all right.”

“Major General Burdalakov?”

“Lieutenant general,” Burdalakov corrected her, pleased to have been recognized. Although there was nothing surprising to Fyodor Fyodorovich Burdalakov about being recognized. Thanks to the television, cinema newsreels and newspaper photos, the general, a Hero of the Soviet Union and public figure, one of the founders of a major voluntary social movement, was known to practically everyone.

54

The movement For Yourself and the Other Guy had been born at the time when the people had grown a little weary of the all-inclusive building of communism and was hoping for some material incentive. But instead of giving the people money and a better life, new shining ideals were invented and tossed to it in the form of patriotic ideas. Ideologically armed with these, at the behest of the Party and the Komsomol, or under sentence by a court, the people felled the taiga forest, dug canals, plowed up virgin lands and laid the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railroad, all the time living in tents or barracks and eating unimaginable garbage. And so that the people would be more willing to expend its strength, calories and health, the Party rewarded it with various orders, medals, badges, certificates, pennants and challenge banners and set up these pseudopopular movements, pretending that they were the people's own idea. There were a lot of these movements. Their participants were invited to switch from the horse to the tractor, labor like shock workers, emulate leading workers, acquire a second profession, fulfill the five-year plan in four years, drive heavily loaded trains, pick cotton with both hands, tend twelve lathes each, save materials and produce additional output, overtake America, labor without laggards and work for the other guy. That is, for the guy who never came home from the Great Patriotic War.

Examined in the light of common sense, the appeal to work for the other guy was a little insulting. What did it mean to work for the other guy, and what was the point of working for him, if he didn't eat or drink and didn't require any other expenditure to support him? To be quite honest, this movement was a tactless rebuke to that same guy for lying where he had been dumped and forgotten and making no contribution to the building of communism. Nonetheless, the movement For Yourself and the Other Guy did exist, and one of its acknowledged initiators was Fyodor Fyodorovich Burdalakov, who had extensive personal experience in acquisition on behalf of “the other guy.”

55

For Burdalakov “the other guy” was a concrete individual, and he was called Sergei Zhukov, or simply Seryoga. In '43, Fedya and Seryoga used to go out on reconnaissance together ahead of the front line. They were bold operators who collected valuable information and brought back prisoners for interrogation, and in times which were not too generous with awards, they had each been decorated for their work. They always went out together and came back together. But one day Fedya Burdalakov had come back alone. After successfully completing their latest mission he and Seryoga had been making their way home through the enemy rear lines when they were caught in an ambush, and in the brief combat Seryoga was wounded in the stomach. For some time Fedya had struggled honestly to carry him, draining his own last ounce of strength, but it was pointless and too dangerous. Seryoga was bleeding heavily, groaning and crying out; he would inevitably have been heard by the enemy. There wasn't the slightest chance of getting him through the line of the front at that point, and if Fedya had got him through, it would only have prolonged his agony. Seryoga himself had begged and pleaded to be spared pointless torment. And before he died, he himself had taken off his still-quite-new cowhide boots and given them to his comrade.

We would not wish to slander Fedya. Having dispatched many enemies to the next world, he was far from ready to dispatch his friends as well, even in such a nightmarish situation with almost no alternative. But what could he do? Leave Seryoga there and go? Stay with him and fall into the hands of the Germans? Not deliver to his unit the important information on which so much depended? No one who has never been in such a situation can judge anyone who has. Possibly in Fedya's place some pretender to the title of humanist would have done nothing, and that would have been very bad for Seryoga, for the humanist and in general. Fedya Burdalakov didn't think about whether he was a humanist or something else. After downing half a flask of vodka, he performed the act of ultimate compassion or, to use the modern term, euthanasia. And after performing it he wept for a long time.

Fedya abandoned his own down-at-the-heel boots with torn soles in the forest and on returning to his company reported that Seryoga had died heroically fighting against unequal odds, but omitted the details. What good would the details have done anyone anyway? People were being killed in such multitudes that one death more or less was of no interest to anyone. As was the custom, Fedya received three days' rations for Seryoga, including three-hundred-gram combat portions of vodka. And then, in an interview with a correspondent from the army newspaper, he promised to hammer the enemy for two: for himself and for his friend Seryoga. As a matter of fact, that was when he first got the idea about “the other guy.”

As for Seryoga, even his posthumous story is a sad one. Burdalakov reported his death to the company commander, who was intending to pass on the information, but at that very time he was seized by enemy agents and carried off across the front for interrogation. The company commander went missing, dragging Seryoga after him into the lists of the missing. Which caused no end of difficulties for his wife, Valentina, the yard-keeper in Dolgov.

No two ways about it, Fyodor Burdalakov fought courageously. He didn't sit in staff HQs far from the front line, he didn't supervise rear-line supply structures. In the very fiercest engagements he hammered the enemy for himself and for Seryoga, demonstrating great valor, for which he was promoted and decorated. The closer the war came to its end, the more decorations were awarded. He finished the war as a Hero of the Soviet Union and a colonel, and he received two general's stars, the first for serving in the Central Political Administration of the Soviet Army and the second when he retired. But wherever he served and no matter what he did, Burdalakov never forgot about “the other guy,” about Seryoga, the accordion player, joker and brave soldier. He spoke about him wherever he could, he gave speeches in his name and even now in peacetime he received numerous signs of favor, badges of distinction and banknotes, all of them for himself and for Seryoga, while Seryoga's family lived in wretched obscurity and abject poverty. Which Burdalakov probably simply knew nothing about.

When he retired at a relatively early age, Fyodor Fyodorovich was still strong enough to lift heavy objects, dig potatoes, drill wells and bore holes or, as a last resort, polish his pants sitting in some office, but now he spoke endlessly, without any unnecessary breaks, at gatherings and meetings, or sat in presidiums with a solemn expression on his face—that is, he engaged in the kind of activity that used to be called patriotic. And naturally, he called himself a patriot.

As a public lecturer for the Ministry of Defense, General Burdalakov devoted a lot of attention to the military and patriotic education of youth. He traveled around to all the cities of the Soviet Union. In military units and labor collectives he spoke about Seryoga and about his own experiences at the front line, about the taking of various cities, the storming of high ground and the forced crossing of rivers. But since he had performed his own feats of heroism which—let us emphasize once again—were genuine and not false, a lot of time had passed, some things had faded a bit in his memory, the forms of things had grown a bit vague under the moss and begun to get confused with things he had read somewhere, imagined or invented. Gradually, his reminiscences came to resemble the fictions of journalists in peacetime, whose idea of war came from movies shot by directors who had learned about war from reports by journalists.

Fyodor Fyodorovich traveled a lot around the sites of his own and others' glorious front-line feats, and now he was rewarded not for his prowess in combat but, as they used to say, for domestic services, with decorations, privileges, trips to good sanatoriums, treatment in the generals' polyclinic, improved housing conditions and the exchange of his old dacha for a new one, until eventually he was transformed into a genuine parasite, one of those who did nothing for entire decades except recall the heroic feats of the past, exhort, moralize and give instructions to artists, writers and scientists on how to paint pictures and write books and which areas to develop in science. And naturally, all the writers, artists and scientists who did not pay attention to the general's instructions were regarded as antipatriotic freeloaders sponging off the working people.

The reader should not think that the author has no respect for those who gave their lives for their homeland or were prepared to do so. The author honors all who fought courageously against the enemy, as well as those who fought without courage (they were more scared than the courageous ones). The author would even feel unmitigated respect for Fyodor Burdalakov if only he had not taken it upon himself to instruct people in matters about which he'd never learned anything himself. But he would teach anybody at all about anything at all, and if certain groups or individuals among the artists, writers, geneticists and cyberneticists failed to accord his precepts due respect, General Burdalakov personally sat down at his typewriter and rattled off like a machine gun: “We, the soldiers, the veterans of the Great Patriotic War, demand in the name of the fallen the severest punishment . . .” And the Soviet government could not always refuse such distinguished people.

For some time General Burdalakov had carried around with him as a visual aid a red battle standard in a specially sewn case. Not an ordinary standard this, but one riddled by bullets and shrapnel and perforated here and there with a kitchen knife, bearing the image of a Guards badge and the words TAKE BERLIN! Fyodor Fyodorovich had supposedly captured the enemy capital carrying this standard in 1945, and moreover, if you listened to him and forgot certain other well-known facts of history, you could easily believe that he had taken the enemy capital in the same way as he had dealt with the bear (he used to tell a story about a bear as well)— all on his own. We don't really know about Berlin, but Fyodor Fyodorovich had certainly conquered many Soviet cities with this standard. On all kinds of anniversaries—Soviet Army Day, Soviet Navy Day, Victory Day, the start of the Great Patriotic War, the defeat of the Germans at Moscow—and on dates when individual battles were fought, regions liberated, rivers forded, fortresses stormed, bridgeheads captured and capital cities taken, Fyodor Fyodorovich was an indispensable performer at the festivities, at which he arrived bearing his standard. And let us remind the reader yet again: he never forgot Seryoga, he always spoke on his behalf and on behalf of the fallen in general, he swore on their honor and cursed in their name. This without the slightest inkling or realization that having survived into old age, having received all of his honors, appointments, decorations and special rations for the war, it was shameful to speak in the name of those who had died leaving no trace behind them when still young, as the poet put it “without loving to the end or finishing their final cigarette.”