Monumental Propaganda (23 page)

56

Apart from all of this, Fyodor Fyodorovich turned out to be a sociable individual dedicated to healthy living. He easily struck up a friendship with Aglaya, began calling her Glasha, gave her a foreign book called
Running for Your Heart
to read and persuaded her to go jogging along the seafront in the mornings. She didn't have the right clothes for this, but the general rang the secretary of the municipal Party committee, who rang the chairman of the municipal Soviet executive committee, who rang the director of the municipal trading trust, who rang the director of the sports shop, and two days later Aglaya turned out for her first run in a blue jersey tracksuit with the word “Dynamo” on the chest and sneakers, which were only just coming into fashion at the time. Burdalakov himself was in running shorts, an Adidas sweatshirt and Adidas sneakers.

Fyodor Fyodorovich, with his large, well-proportioned figure, graying slightly, but his face still suntanned and not yet old, was already waiting for Aglaya, warming up patiently by running on the spot.

On the first day she walked to begin with and he ran beside her at the same speed, but raising his knees high, pumping his arms like crankshafts and panting like a steam locomotive.

She liked the look of the general. He had a broad back like wrestlers have—slightly round-shouldered with mobile shoulder blades—and strong legs with well-muscled, suntanned calves that were sparsely covered with hair and gleamed as though they'd been waxed. Every day they made their way down the steep asphalt track that wound and twisted its way to the seafront like a paper streamer, on their way meeting the actor Kriuchkov with a towel around his neck, who was running up the hill, also puffing and panting.

On her first day Aglaya ran no more than fifty meters, but a week later she could easily manage the distance from the hotel to the boat station and back again, and she could easily have carried on running, but Fyodor Fyodorovich, who had become extremely cautious with age, advised her not to push herself too hard.

“Now,” he would say as he ran alongside her, “if you would only give up smoking or at least cut down. If you could see your lungs from the inside, they'd look like a flue pipe. Coated in soot. If you could look inside yourself, you'd be horrified. I used to smoke too, like a trooper, and then I started having problems with my legs and the doctor warned me: ‘You carry on smoking and you won't have any legs.' I told him ‘Thank you,' walked out of the polyclinic, threw my cigarettes in a litter bin, and I haven't smoked a single one since.”

They ran shoulder to shoulder, as though they were in harness. Sometimes the young Georgian Nukzar, a local good-for-nothing, would fall in with them and run alongside in football boots, always mumbling the same thing: “Hey, Dad, sell me the shoes! I'll give you a hundred rubles!”

“Clear off, young friend,” Fyodor Fyodorovich said, waving him away, “don't pester me, can't you see I'm with a lady?”

“Sell me them, Pops,” Nukzar persisted, and raised his price: 120 rubles, 130, 150.

This dialogue-on-the-run took place every day, but the young man's persistence was clearly pointless and therefore incomprehensible. Fyodor Fyodorovich explained to her the boredom of local life in winter.

“In summer he sells kebabs, but in winter there's nothing to do. It's boring running on his own, that's why he pesters us.”

Usually, the general and Aglaya ran side by side, but sometimes he would warn her, “Excuse me, I'll just sprint a bit,” and put on an abrupt spurt, running up to three hundred meters ahead of her and then coming back to meet her at a leisurely pace.

After the run she would slowly climb the hill, hot and sweaty, occasionally looking back over her shoulder at Burdalakov swimming in the cold sea.

She couldn't bring herself to bathe in the sea, but she did enjoy taking a contrasting shower—first hot water, then cold, then hot-cold, hot-cold several times.

They went down to breakfast together, sat down at the table on which there were already glasses of sour cream covered with napkins as well as plates of curd cheese and sour cream sprinkled with sugar, and immediately the waitress Ninulya would wheel over a trolley of other food, which she promoted in an affectionately cajoling singsong style: “Good morning,” she would sing. “What are we going to have to eat? Lovely semolina, tasty porridge, scrumptious omelette, cheesy pancakes, rissoles, a little bit of potato?”

Fyodor Fyodorovich took the first meal of the day seriously, and for breakfast he ate the soft cheese with sour cream and a portion of semolina and a three-egg omelette and a piece of cheese. Aglaya had no appetite in the morning, she would just eat a cheese pancake and take a sip of tea, then reach for a cigarette.

“After your poison again,” the general would comment.

“At least I'm not smoking on an empty stomach.”

“You're just prevaricating,” said the general, screwing his eyes up craftily. “Fooling yourself and trying to fool me. I used to be just the same. Sometimes, I would wake up with my hands reaching out for a cigarette. And I'd be shaking all over, I wanted a drag so badly. In order not to smoke on an empty stomach, I'd take a bite of bread, or carrot, or a rissole. I'd swallow anything and then light up immediately, feeling pleased with myself. But in actual fact, Glasha, smokers should eat a particularly solid breakfast. Especially bearing in mind the wise old Chinese proverb: Eat your breakfast alone . . .”

“I know,” Aglaya interrupted: “Share your lunch with your friend and give your supper to your enemy.”

“Precisely,” said Burdalakov, nodding keenly. “I have a friend named Vaska Serov, also a general, but as fond of jokes as a child and quite incrediblely simple. Gray-headed already and into his seventies, but he's always full of fun and games. ‘Fedya,' he says, ‘I live strictly according to the Chinese rules: I eat my breakfast alone, I'm prepared to share my lunch with you, and I give supper to my Ninka.' And he laughs at himself.”

Of course, Burdalakov wasn't always lecturing Aglaya or trying to educate her. Often he simply related some story from his old days at the front, but once again these stories were in the genre of socialist realism and resembled short stories from the journals
Ogonyok
and
Soviet Soldier.

More lively were his descriptions of various outstanding people of our times, and in his life he'd met a few good outstanding individuals. Members of the Central Committee of the CPSU, ministers and generals, and he remembered all of them, and called every one of them by his forename and patronymic: Leonid Ilich (Brezhnev), Nikolai Viktorovich (Podgorny), Mikhail Andreevich (Suslov), Anastas Ivanovich (Mikoyan) . . . he loved to describe top-flight receptions, especially in the Kremlin, and tell her who was there, what the tables and the chandeliers were like, what was served on what kind of china and what was poured into the glasses.

After breakfast they went their separate ways for treatments. Burdalakov went for a massage and sunbath in the quartz solarium and took a Charcot shower (he tried not to miss anything that they gave him for free), and Aglaya's timetable included electrophoresis and mud baths—just recently her knees and hands had been bothering her.

But there was enough time left over for walks. They went strolling together along the walks around the sanatorium before lunch and following the afternoon nap. The paths were laid out in circles on a level surface and some anonymous wits had nicknamed them the Lesser Infarction Track and the Greater Infarction Track. It was a curious fact that Fyodor Fyodorovich looked different at different times of the day: the later it was, the older he looked. After lunch he walked along in a civilian raincoat and a knitted wool cap with his hands clasped behind his back, leaning slightly forward the way people with sick kidneys walk. Aglaya walked beside him, feeling as if her arms were somehow awkward and out of place, and whatever position she held them in—behind her back, crossed on her chest or simply lowered at her sides—it felt unnatural.

57

Their walks often led them to the spot where the steep descent to the sea began and there was a bench with a curved back made of wooden slats on a cast-iron frame that was usually empty. But there were times when it wasn't empty. Some couple would be sitting there, having sought solitude for purposes of tactile togetherness. The general and Aglaya would walk up, sit down and converse in low voices. And the young people usually felt embarrassed and annoyed, unglued themselves from each other and sat there with strained expressions, casting occasional glances at the new-comers, and once convinced that they had settled in for a long stay, they would get up and walk off without speaking in search of another secluded spot.

Burdalakov liked this situation; he enjoyed intimidating courting couples and he didn't do it only with people. In his young days he used to go around the village with a stick and prize dogs apart.

“You know,” he said to Aglaya, “I see a beautiful young woman come to the resort. Her husband sees her off and meets her. Doesn't he realize that she's bound to take a lover here?”

“But not all of them,” Aglaya objected.

“Every one,” Fyodor Fyodorovich insisted. “Unless she's really very ugly. But if she's not bad-looking and, as they say, there's something to look at and something to grab hold of, then I assure you. I've spent a lot of time in resorts, but I've never seen any women who, given the opportunity, would never, no way, not with anyone. And by the way, the Germans have a custom that one day in the year husbands and wives can be unfaithful to each other, even spend the night apart, but then they don't mention it for the whole year—as though nothing had happened. That's more or less the way it is with our resorts. She's had her holiday, and what happened happened, and that's it until next summer.”

“Not for everyone,” said Aglaya. “Just recently I saw the movie
Lady
with a Ginger Dog . . .”

“With a ginger dog or a lapdog?” asked Burdalakov.

“Wait a moment.” She thought about it and sighed. What a fool she was! “
Lady with a Lapdog
—there was a little dog in it. So they began at the resort and they couldn't stop. Although she had a husband, and a dog . . .”

“She did it with the dog too?” the general asked in horror.

“Oh, I don't remember. You know I watch these films with my eyes half-closed, I'm thinking about something else.”

“I just don't understand,” said the general, “what our inspectors can be thinking of. Sometimes they show such terrible, pardon the expression, garbage. The things people write in books! And it all gets passed. And they say we have censorship. What censorship, when we have ten thousand writers. Just imagine. Ten thousand! There were only half that number of soldiers in my division. I once raised the matter with Leonid Ilich. ‘Leonid Ilich,' I said, ‘why do we need so many writers? Pick five or ten, talented men, Party members, politically aware. Give them the subjects and let them work away.'”

“Do you mean to say you're personally acquainted with Brezhnev?” Aglaya asked.

“With Leonid Ilich?” Burdalakov returned. “Why, of course! It was in these parts that we got to know each other. If you take the ferry to the right here, first you come to Tuapse, then Novorossiisk, but before Novorossiisk there's a cape called Myskhako. We landed there in 'forty-three under the command of Major Tsezar Kunikov. He was a brave man, even if he was Jewish by nationality.”

“And Brezhnev was there?”

“Well, let's say he was there some of the time. When the main forces arrived. He was head of the political department of the army. By the way, he presented me with the medal For Valor. And curiously enough, he remembers it to this day. When we meet somewhere at a veterans' rally, I ask him: ‘Leonid Ilich, do you remember you presented me with a medal?' And he laughs and says: ‘Why, Fedya, don't be silly—how could I not remember you?' Between you and me, he's a good guy. Well, he likes a drink, and he's not indifferent to the ladies, but if ever you ask him to do something, he always listens carefully, then he snaps his fingers and says to his executive assistant: ‘Write that down and check to make sure it's done.'”

When Fyodor Fyodorovich met Aglaya, he was a recent widower; his wife had died six months earlier from lung cancer. “Yes,” Fyodor Fyodorovich remarked to Aglaya, “she used to smoke just like you.”

After losing his wife he lived in the country. He had a good general's flat in Moscow on Begovaya Street, but his elder daughter was there, forty years old and an old maid with a difficult character. His younger daughter, Asenka, beautiful and domineering, the kind that men like, had married a diplomat and now she had two children in India. His youngest son, Sergei, who had been named in honor of the general's front-line friend, had followed in his father's footsteps; he was a military man, a pilot and his squadron's deputy commander for political affairs.

“Do you have a dacha in the country?” Aglaya inquired.

“Of course. A big one. Half a hectare of land and eight rooms on two stories. Just imagine. Sometimes it upsets me so much I could cry.”

“Why, what's the problem?” Aglaya asked anxiously.

“Other people have eight people to one room, and I have eight rooms for one person. And sometimes I sit in one room on my own and the other seven are empty. And if I go into another room, then the first one will be empty.”

Despite his healthy lifestyle, Fyodor Fyodorovich often complained of headaches and insomnia.

“Last night,” he would say, “there was a bird calling, then the wind was making a noise, then something else, I don't known what, but I simply couldn't sleep. There must have been some kind of atmospheric phenomenon taking place up there in the sky. When I was young, atmospheric phenomena never used to bother me. You couldn't wake me with a cannon, quite literally, but now somewhere up in the stratosphere two clouds have collided or the moon's in the wrong place, and here I am a man, the crown of creation, and I can't get to sleep. If I switch on the light and pick up a book, then I feel sleepy. If I put down the book and turn off the light, then the feeling's gone. You know, I went through the entire war without a single scratch, but it was still a tremendous strain on the nerves, and I'm feeling it now. It's like a time bomb.”

After supper in the general hall they watched the news program
Time,
the ice hockey and the figure skating, or went to the movie hall if they were showing something old and familiar in black and white about the five-year plans, the war, bringing in the harvest, a Party membership card and spies.