Monumental Propaganda (29 page)

The rite continued for a long time, concluding with the priest hanging a cross around the newly baptized believer's neck and dressing him in dry clothes. Then Antonina wiped the floor, rang out the wet drawers and put them on the radiator and carried the water out. After that we sat down at the table to celebrate the event. We drank some vodka, accompanied with fried potatoes and rissoles. Then we drank some more.

As we ate, the priest asked me if I would like to be baptized after all.

“All right,” I replied evasively, “perhaps, someday.”

“Look here, dear fellow,” said my newly baptized host, “leave it too late and it'll be the worse for you. The devils will roast you in a frying pan. Won't they father?”

“They will,” the priest confirmed.

“I don't think so,” I said. “Of course, I'm up to my eyes in sin, but the devils ought to like that. They'll roast the ones they hate. The righteous.”

68

Aglaya could remember almost nothing of that time. Shubkin's baptism took place without her being aware of it, but her memory did retain something of his departure. He knocked on her door, holding a bottle of some foreign beverage. She was amazed.

“You've come to see me?”

“That's right,” said Shubkin, “I want to say goodbye. I'm going away.”

She thought for a moment, then stepped aside and said in the familiar fashion she had once used to address him: “Come on in!”

She led him through to the kitchen and sat him down opposite her. He stood the bottle on the table and said: “It's calvados, apple vodka.”

The only food she had to go with it were potatoes baked in their skins.

“Where to?” she asked. “America?”

“Israel.”

“Yes?” she asked in surprise. “But how are you going to live there? They've got Arabs there. You must be afraid.”

“That's one thing I didn't expect to hear from you—talk about being afraid,” said Shubkin. “You're a partisan and a heroine.”

“Ah!” said Aglaya with a wave of her hand. “I used to be a heroine. Out of stupidity. But I was fighting for the homeland. For the homeland and for Stalin . . .”

“Well, I'm doing the same,” Shubkin joked. “For my historical homeland and Menachem Begin.”

“A-ah!” said Aglaya. “If that's it, then of course. And I can see there are brave people among your nation too.”

“Yes, there are a few,” Shubkin agreed.

“Yes, yes,” she said, nodding. “But everyone's always saying, ‘The Jews, the Jews.' Why do they think like that? Maybe you need to think up a different name?”

“Okay then,” said Shubkin, getting up. “I'll be going.”

“Okay.” As she saw Shubkin to the door, she suddenly said in amazement: “It seems odd even to me, but I've got used to you. I used to listen to that BBC of yours with you.”

“Just a moment,” he said.

He went out and came back with a Speedola radio and a book. He held the radio out to her.

“There. Take it.”

“Oh no!” She was startled. “It's such an expensive thing.”

“Never mind. And by the way, the radio's been adapted. It has other frequencies as well as the basic shortwaves. Sixteen and nineteen meters. You can listen to the BBC, Radio Liberty, Voice of America and Deutsche Welle. And this is my novel,
The Timber Camp.
”

She started reading it that very evening, but she didn't get beyond the Bolshevik who wheezed something about Lenin.

That evening there was a farewell party in Shubkin's room. The members of the Brigantine Literary Club and the Meyerhold Drama Club came, and with them Father Radish. They had a drink, held a prayer service and sang, “The Brigantine hoists its sails.”

In the morning, when Shubkin and Antonina were piling themselves and their luggage into the taxi they had called, Aglaya came running down to them in her slippers. She gave Shubkin's hand a firm shake and surprised even herself by hugging Antonina and kissing her on the cheek.

When she saw that, Shurochka the Idiot thought she was imagining things.

69

Everyone who listened to the “voices of the enemy” that year knew that Shubkin's departure was the result of an ultimatum issued to him by our “organs.” The Western radio stations interpreted this event as yet another success for the KGB in the struggle against dissent. They broadcast the details: who saw Shubkin off to Moscow's Sheremetievo-2 Airport and who met him at the airport in Vienna. But there wasn't a single word in the Soviet mass media. This was the new tactic—to keep mum about the dissidents, not kick up any fuss about them, not give them any free publicity. Naturally, our district press didn't print a word about Shubkin either. Then suddenly, about two or even three months later, when many people really had begun to forget Mark Semyonovich, the
Dolgov Pravda
unexpectedly came out with a swinging article entitled “Any Old Rags,” in which Shubkin's entire biography was deliberately misrepresented. Supposedly born into a prosperous Jewish family (in actual fact Shubkin's father was a poor tailor), he was imbued with the ideas of Zionism from childhood. He joined the Party in order to undermine it from within. He committed a number of crimes against Soviet power but had eventually been magnanimously forgiven. He was offered the chance to reconsider his views and mend his ways, but, compelled by a morbid vanity, Shubkin had begun to court cheap fame beyond the bounds of the country that had raised him: He had written and published the libelous and worthless work
The Timber Camp
and attempted to sell it for as much money as possible. He had supplied the special services of the West with libelous material about the Soviet Union, for which his masters had paid him less in money than in secondhand clothes, things the Americans throw out with the garbage. Then came the finale, the event that the entire logic of his preceding life had been building up to. His shifting ideals led him to the betrayal of his homeland. And he himself had been tossed out onto the garbage dump like worn-out goods that were no longer of use. In the final analysis there was nothing unusual about the appearance of such an article. From time to time slanders against dissidents were printed in many of our newspapers and the
Dolgov Pravda
was no exception. No, it was not the appearance of the article that was surprising, but the name of the author—Vlad Raspadov. The same Raspadov whom Mark Semyonovich Shubkin had considered his best pupil. And who, by the way, had maintained relations with his teacher right up until his departure and helped to see him off. The entire Brigantine literary circle had said goodbye to Shubkin at the railroad station, and Raspadov had been there with the others.

Of course, the article evoked a strong response from the members of the Brigantine and the general public. Many people stopped saying hello to the author, and Sveta Zhurkina, whom Vlad had been courting, threw his book of poetry—
Touch
—back in his face. But there were others who didn't rush to break off relations with him, on the assumption that the article was the result of pressure applied to him by the organs. They said he had been summoned to Where He Needed to Go and threatened with a jail sentence for distributing anti-Soviet literature, specifically the novel
The Timber Camp.
Then an even spicier rumor started doing the rounds: that Raspadov was actually gay and he had not only been Shubkin's pupil, but his lover as well. Shubkin himself, according to this account, was bisexual. Then one of the reasons for what Raspadov had done could have been that he was jealous of Shubkin's relationship with Antonina. If all this was true, then Raspadov could be absolved of blame, at least in part. You can imagine what a difficult situation he found himself in, what unpleasant consequences he was threatened with if he refused to speak out against Shubkin. And Shubkin himself was no longer under any kind of threat. He had already settled into life in a country where the authorities didn't read the
Dolgov Pravda,
and it almost certainly didn't even reach him.

Of course, we lived in difficult times back then. When civic passions boiled over, nobody forgave anybody, apart from themselves, for even the slightest weakness. But nonetheless, when I met Raspadov in the street, I didn't dash over to the other side and I didn't refuse to shake the hand held out to me. I didn't even ask him about anything, but he began talking aggressively, running Shubkin down, saying he'd acted with calculated cunning from the very beginning. He'd written his
Timber Camp,
created a sensation abroad and cleared off to his historical homeland, essentially betraying those of us who were left behind. In other words, Raspadov had redirected his conflict with Shubkin into a different channel. I realized that when he read me his poem “You and We,” of which I can only remember the end:

You could not care where you set up your home,
Whose hand you feed from, you could not be bothered.
You have a handy reserve aerodrome—
Our reserve is the graveyard of our fathers.

 

He recited his opus, then asked what I thought of it.

“Well now,” I said to him, “it's professional verse. It has regular meter and it rhymes in the right places.”

He said: “You know I'm not asking you about that, but about the content.”

“Well, the content is absolutely vile,” I said. “You can feel any way you like about Shubkin, I'm no great admirer of him myself, but it's not all the same to him what food he eats, and his father's graveyard is in the same place as yours.”

“What?” Raspadov shouted. “My parents, grandparents and great-grandparents are buried in Russia.”

“And where are his grandparents and great-grandparents buried?” I asked.

“His?” Raspadov thought about it. “Then why do they [he didn't say who “they” were] leave?”

“They get a bellyful of poems like that and they go. And by the way, on the subject of food,” I said to Vlad, “I don't know who eats what delicacies from whose hands, but I don't think we need to wonder any longer whose hand throws you your chaff to chew.”

He never could forgive me for that phrase.

70

Man embarks upon old age unprepared. For as long as childhood, adolescence, youth and maturity last, man dwells on this earth with his own generation, with those who are a little older and a little younger than he is, as if they are all traveling together in one company. At school, at work, in the street, in a meeting, in a shop, in the bathhouse and the movie theater, by and large he always meets the same people—some he knows well, some he knows to say hello to and some he has simply seen somewhere at some time or other. And some are older than he is, some are younger, and yet others are just like him. A man can be imagined as walking along in the middle of a long column: there are still plenty of people ahead of him and people keep joining in behind. The man walks on and on, and suddenly he realizes that he has reached the front and there is no one left ahead of him. There are no more people who are twenty years older, ten years older, five years older, and even most of his contemporaries have died. And no matter which way he turns, everywhere he is the oldest. He looks back over his shoulder and there are many people who are younger, but they have grown up after the man glancing back had already stopped working; he has never associated with them and he doesn't know them. And so it turns out that an old man, although he still has other people around him, is alone. Surrounded by the buzz of other people's lives. Other people's ways, passions, interests. And he doesn't even completely understand the way they speak. And the old man begins to feel as if he has been transported to a foreign country even though he has stayed put in the same place all his life.

Aglaya had lived in Dolgov all her life. The town had not changed especially fast, but gradually and inevitably it had become strange and unfamiliar to her. The people she could remember had disappeared. Shaleiko died of a stroke. Nechaev was killed in an automobile crash. Muravyova died in an insane asylum. Botviniev choked to death on a bone. The former public prosecutor, Strogii, was killed by convicts in a prison camp. Nechitailo died of lung cancer.

One old acquaintance she did happen to meet in the street one rainy day in fall, but didn't recognize immediately, was Porosyaninov. He had long hair and a fluffy gray beard, and he was dressed unusually for those parts—his body robed in a black cassock, white gym shoes on his feet, a ginger fur cap with earflaps on his head, and above his head an orange umbrella. He was clutching the umbrella in his right hand and holding up the hem of his cassock as he picked his way through the puddles.

“Have you joined the priesthood then?” she asked, amazed at such an unexpected metamorphosis.

“I serve as a deacon in the church,” Pyotr Klimovich informed her.

“Been there long?”

“It'll be three years soon. Why, don't you go to church?”

“Not me,” she said. “I'm an atheist. A nonbeliever.”

“You are a believer,” Porosyaninov objected. “You believe that God doesn't exist.”

“And you believe that he does?” she asked mockingly.

“I believe,” he said, failing to notice the mockery, “that it's not possible to live without faith in something. You're probably baptized, aren't you?”

“I should think so,” she said. “Before the revolution my father was a churchwarden.”

“Then come to church. Repent of your sins before God, and He'll take you back again.”

“Leave me alone! I have my own God,” she said, and walked away.

“What you've got is not God, it's the devil!” he shouted after her.

Aglaya would run through various names in her head, and no matter who she thought of, they were either no longer among the living or she'd completely lost track of them.

The grannies—Old Nadya and Greta the Greek—had died, but two other women neighbors had turned into old grannies and taken their place on the bench in front of the house, and there was no obvious difference between them and the previous ones. But there was no din generated by new generations echoing around the house, because the building was gradually emptying.

In the course of its existence it had grown extremely dilapidated and been declared unfit for human habitation, so no one new was moved in anymore. Those who had left had left. The others were ignored; they could live out the rest of their lives here. But there were no more housewarmings celebrated here. Eventually, of all the former residents the only ones left were Aglaya, the two old grannies already mentioned, Shurochka the Idiot with all her eternal cats and Valentina Zhukova and her grandson Vanka. By this time Valentina was already Granny Valya to many people and her grandson abbreviated this name, calling her Gravalya.