Monumental Propaganda (30 page)

71

Everybody called Vanka Zhukov Vanka Zhukov. It was his real name and at the same time a nickname. Had it not been for Chekhov's famous story “The Letter,” Vanka would simply have been called Vanka. Or simply Ivan. Or simply Zhukov. Or simply Zhuk. But since Chekhov had a story about a Vanka Zhukov, and a very well-known story at that, and since Vanka Zhukov lived in a society in which people still read books and remembered them, and actually studied Chekhov in school, that was what Vanka Zhukov was called by many people—Vanka Zhukov. And nothing else.

Gravalya doted on Vanka. She had never paid her own son half as much attention. Because when she had a little son, she was still young and stupid. And she wanted to have a bit of fun herself. Go to the movies. Or an amateur concert. Or have a gossip with a neighbor. Or pass the time with a man. Perhaps that was why Georgii had grown up such a good-for-nothing. But she watched over Vanka with bated breath and was constantly amazed.

“I can't imagine,” Gravalya used to say to Aglaya, “who it is he takes after. I was a good-for-nothing, my son was a wastrel, my son's wife was an alcoholic, but look at him . . . Thirteen years old and he still doesn't drink or smoke, and he's a star pupil in school.”

Even at that stage Vanka was most interested in the exact sciences— mathematics, physics and chemistry—and he attended meetings of the model-airplane hobby group and the Young Chemist Club. With his own hands he made models of airplanes, ships and locomotives; he built a radio receiver and a tape deck. He engrossed himself in articles about the possibility of melting the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps and reversing the direction of major rivers by means of controlled explosions.

Of course, in his history and sociology classes in school, they tried to beat something into his head about socialism, communism, the CPSU and the struggle for peace, and they forced him to study Brezhnev's biography, but that all made no impression on him at all.

Vanka didn't hang around with hooligans, but they had begun to pay attention to him. He was small and weak, exactly the kind that made a safe and easy target. One day the hooligans met him in the waste lot when he was coming home from school. There were ten or twelve of them; their leader was a lanky kid by the name of Igor, and his surname was Krysha, meaning “Roof.” It was no nickname, but strangely enough it suited him very well. With his short-cropped hair, sloping crown and low forehead he did have a certain resemblance to a single-pitch roof. Roof was distinguished from his peers and gang comrades by the fact that he wore a good suit and a tie and from a distance he looked like a cultured young man. Roof and his gang were fairly well known in town, where they were regarded as genuine bandits, and so Vanka was not afraid of them, believing he was too insignificant a person to be of any great interest to bandits. But he was not entirely right. He was not of any great interest to the bandits, but they never passed up anything that was even slightly interesting.

So on this day they met him in the waste lot and began pushing him about, but Roof immediately stopped them and asked Vanka a question.

“Where are you headed, sonny?” he asked, being no more than six years Vanka's senior himself.

“I'm going home,” said Vanka, not suspecting a thing.

“Where from?”

“From school.”

“Aha,” said Roof thoughtfully. “Now you're going home from school, and tomorrow you'll go to school from home. Right?”

“Right,” Vanka agreed.

“Have you ever been in America?” asked Roof.

Vanka confessed that he hadn't.

“Well now, over in America,” Roof explained to him, “you have to pay to use all the roads. We ought to introduce the same system here. Have you got any money?”

Vanka said he hadn't. Roof announced that now there would be a customs inspection. They hemmed Vanka in, turned out his pockets and found a three-ruble note, as well as about a ruble in change.

“That's not good,” said the Roof, counting the money again. “That's already fraud and attempted importation of currency without payment of customs duty. So this is subject to confiscation.” And he put the money in his pocket. “And now,” he said, “we'll check what you have in there.” He pointed at the briefcase. “Open it please.”

Vanka did as he was told. There was nothing in the briefcase that interested Roof, apart from a Parker ballpoint pen in a mother-of-pearl case. Gravalya had bought the pen at a flea market and given it to Vanka for his thirteenth birthday. Roof tried the pen on his own wrist to see how it wrote and declared that it was confiscated as foreign goods illegally imported into the country. After that Roof and his hoodlums began meeting Vanka regularly and relieving him of the ruble Gravalya had given him for exercise books, or the scarf she had knitted him for New Year, or the cap— genuine lambskin—that had belonged to his father. Vanka tried changing his route, but the bandits commanded by Roof trailed him, intercepted him and once beat him very badly. Gravalya noticed Vanka had a black eye and asked him what it meant. Vanka said he'd been running down the corridor at school when he tripped and bumped into something metal. Gravalya inquired where his pen, scarf, cap and a few other things had gone to. Vanka gave her some unintelligible answer, but of course he didn't tell her the truth. And she didn't actually press him too hard. She was the yard-keeper and she knew what went on in the neighborhood. And she knew Roof. One day Gravalya spotted Roof down by the delicatessen, and he was wearing Vanka's cap and scarf. Roof was standing there, surrounded by his little runts and lanky brutes—his thugs, as people called both groups. Everyone was afraid of them and gave them a wide berth.

Gravalya strode briskly toward the crowd of them. When two blocked her way, she tossed them roughly aside. She grabbed hold of Roof's scarf.

“Where did you get that?”

“You flipped your lid or something, Granny?” Roof asked in surprise, and the gang began closing in around the old woman.

“Take your hands off, Granny,” said Roof. “I respect old people, but even so—”

He didn't finish. Gravalya let go of the scarf, grabbed hold of both of Roof's ears, pulled down hard and put her knee in the way of his face.

“Boys!” the Roof roared, streaming blood.

The boys immediately moved in and, of course, the first was Roof's closest friend Tolik, nicknamed the Ax. He'd already reached out his hand and spread his fingers to grab the old woman's face when he received a blow to the solar plexus that doubled him over and dropped him to the ground, gasping for air like a fish. The gang leader's second-best friend Valya Dolin, nicknamed Validol, advanced on the old woman from the other side. She turned to face him in time and he retreated, setting a good example to the others. Having increased the distance between themselves and the granny, the others stood in a semicircle, not knowing what to do. But the granny grabbed the back of Roof's neck with her left hand, squeezed it in her powerful, crooked fingers, clenched her right hand into a fist and raised it to his nose. Reciting as she did so a tirade consisting of lexical items not all of which were even in Roof's vocabulary. If the old woman's speech were translated into literary language and the gist isolated, one could say that it contained a warning to the effect that the person of Ivan Zhukov was inviolable, and anyone who chose to disregard this would face irrevocable and severe retribution. Following which Vanka went to school in his own cap, in his own scarf, with his own pen and without paying any customs fees, annexations, contributions or reparations. If Roof happened to encounter Vanka, he was the first to acknowledge him with a wave of the hand and the respectful greeting: “Hi there, Vanka lad!”

And when Vanka became friends with his classmate Sanka Zherdyk, the guarantee of personal inviolability was extended to him too. Although before the friendship, anybody who happened to feel like it used to beat Sanka Zherdyk hard and often.

72

We introduce Sanka Zherdyk into the narrative at this point since he has also been allotted a role of some significance in our story. Sanka Zherdyk and Vanka Zhukov became friends quickly and easily, because children in general make friends easily, particularly if they study in the same class and especially if they sit at the same desk. But by nature they were very different people from the very beginning. In contrast with Vanka, Zherdyk was suited by character for the humanities. It was as if there were two people living inside him. The first sought fulfillment in art. He sang in a choir and wanted to be an opera singer. He knew a lot of arias, but there was one he could sing better than any other: the Duke's song from the opera
Rigoletto,
that well-known and popular piece “La donna è mobile.” Maybe he suffered from some kind of mania, but in any case, beginning from his schooldays he would sing this song all the time, everywhere. At amateur concerts, at parties and for no reason, just for himself. He also dreamed of being a poet, and when he was still in school, he composed quite tolerable verse with a bias toward the romantic. In his poems he dreamed of love, believed in the affinity of souls, appealed to people not to close their hearts, not to lock their doors at night, not to build walls, not to hoard money in money boxes and not to hoard it at all, not to concern themselves with material things, not to resign themselves to evil, not to cherish their own lives, but hand out free flowers and love to all and sundry. But in life Zherdyk would have no truck with romanticism of any kind and harbored the worst possible suspicions of everybody.

Maybe the origins of this contradictory character lay in his biography. At one time, like everybody else, he had a father and mother. And of course, like most normal children, he had thought the world of his parents. Then they had separated. But his father didn't simply leave his mother, the way it often happens; he fled to the north, switched addresses and dodged out of paying alimony—that is, he refused to support his son. His mother and he both struggled along on her miserable salary as a book-keeper in some office. Sanka had loved his father and believed in him more than in anybody else, and the realization that his father had betrayed him was the initial cause of his disenchantment with adults. The second blow he suffered was struck by his mother. No, she didn't betray him. But left without a husband, she started bringing lovers home. They lived in a single room in a communal apartment, and at the age of nine Sanka already knew what grown-ups get into bed for and what they do to each other in there. The conclusion he drew was that grown-ups were villains, bigots, hypocrites and lechers. The only thing they were interested in was “that,” and nothing but “that.” In the daytime they worked, spent time with each other, talked about something intelligent, but in reality all they were thinking about was “that,” waiting impatiently for the hour when evening would come and the children would fall asleep. At first Sanka was so badly shaken by this discovery that he even contemplated suicide, but he settled for regarding grown-ups with contempt and derision. In school, when the teacher called him to the front of the class or the headmistress summoned him to the teachers' room and they put him through the mill, he laughed as he gazed at his tormentors and thought: I know how you're put together, what it is you're really looking for and what you do at night.

In their serious talks about life Sanka tried to convince Vanka that man is a base creature, venal, egotistical and hypocritical, motivated only by his own personal interests, or at most by his family's interests. And all the words spoken about goodness, love for one's neighbor and one's country, for truth and justice—that was just for public consumption.

Vanka and Sanka graduated from school together, Vanka with a gold medal and Zherdyk with a certificate full of basic passing grades. Vanka went on, without taking any entrance exams, to study at the Moscow Chemical and Technological Institute, but Zherdyk's start in life proved less auspicious. He tried to get into the Moscow Conservatory. At the entrance examination he sang the aria “La donna è mobile.” The examiners liked the aria. They asked him to sing something else. But his something else didn't turn out quite so well, and they didn't give him a place. He didn't get through the competitive examination for the Literary Institute either. He entered the school of journalism. But although Vanka and Sanka were students in different colleges and lived at opposite ends of Moscow, that didn't put an end to their friendship.

73

In Moscow, Vanka found lodgings not far from his institute. He rented a room of six and a half square meters from Varvara Ilinichna, a thin old woman who reeked of tobacco smoke. She smoked savage cigarettes called Whiff, three packs a day, several times a day she drank strong tea with caramels, and from morning till night she typed something on her old Erika typewriter.

She turned out to be typing samizdat literature, which Vanka had heard about vaguely at some time or other, but he didn't know what it was. Now he found out that samizdat was texts, usually rather pale, typed out on tracing paper and distributed from hand to hand.

From time to time, modestly dressed, cultured-looking people would gather at the old woman's apartment and discuss human rights, articles of the Criminal Code, prisons, banishment, transit prisons, food supplies and BBC broadcasts. And also their acquaintances, who were either serving sentences in the camps or had been released, or had been released and emigrated. After some time Vanka realized that Varvara Ilinichna's guests and she herself were those very dissidents he'd read things about in the newspapers, always bad things, but had never been able to imagine that he would ever see them with his own eyes.

He used to think that dissidents were secret conspirators who always wore dark glasses and carried guns, actually hid underground in cellars or catacombs and used some device like a hectograph to print flyers with appeals to overthrow Soviet power. But now he'd seen for himself that they didn't hide from anyone, went about their business openly and gave the authorities every opportunity to catch them and put them in prison without any excessive difficulty or risk.

Sometimes in the evening the dissidents would organize a party, and someone would bring a bottle of vodka, someone else a piece of salami or a fancy cake, and the fare would be as unsophisticated as they were themselves. They argued about the fate of Russia, discussed various open letters, recited poems (usually bad, bombastic ones) on civic themes. Sometimes foreign correspondents showed up; they brought wine, whiskey or gin and tonic (that was when Vanka first got to know the taste of these foreign drinks) and took interviews for their agencies and newspapers. The dissidents answered the questions they were asked directly without trying to be cunning, talked about the situation in the country—acts of repression against dissidents, the suppression of national self-awareness, the oppression of the workers, the collective farms in which the peasants were kept by force and made to work without pay, the tyranny of the authorities and the police—in other words, about everything that was bad in the country and not about anything good, because in their opinion there wasn't anything good. And while they did this they ate, smoked and told jokes. The ones who were a bit younger made up to each other and hugged and kissed in the corridor; in fact, they seemed to live a normal life. But from time to time, one of them would be arrested again, put on trial, sent to a camp or a crazy farm, and the ones who remained at liberty would protest outside the court buildings, go to visit the exiles, collect money, clothes and food to support the families of the ones who were in prison.

From the very beginning of their acquaintance Varvara Ilinichna made no real attempt to hide what she was doing from Vanka, and almost immediately she began to give him her own retyped copies of works by Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, Djilas and Avtorkhanov, as well as the regular numbers of the
Chronicle of Current Events.

After he read all these things, Vanka began thinking for the first time about politics, about what Soviet power was, how many nations it had ruined and the goal it had done it for. Being of a technical turn of mind, Vanka decided to assist the development of samizdat in a concrete way. With a bit of thought and a bit of physical effort, he invented and manufactured the item that was later referred to in the case materials as the instrument of crime—a photocopying machine. A machine that was every bit as good as the similar machines of the famous firm Xerox. Perhaps even better. A light construction of stainless steel with winking lights of various colors, it rustled quietly as it printed off samizdat on ordinary paper in any quantity desired. It reduced or increased the size of text and if necessary sharpened its definition. And the samizdat writers no longer came to Varvara Ilinichna with their own texts and those of others; they came to Vanka Zhukov.

Whenever he met Zherdyk, Vanka used to tell his friend about the dissidents and his meetings with them. He supplied him with samizdat. Sanka read the samizdat eagerly and listened to Vanka's stories with interest, but he didn't share his enthusiasm for the dissidents, believing that most of them were merely promoting their own interests, making a name and a career for themselves. But even so, whenever he came to see Vanka, he used to ask if he had “anything else anti-Soviet.”

And of course Vanka did. Because his machine was working away full speed ahead and producing samizdat a hundred or more copies at a time instead of five.

I hardly need to say there was no way Vanka's activity could have gone unnoticed. He was eventually arrested for what was called the manufacture and distribution of anti-Soviet literature in especially dangerous quantities. In Soviet times, of course, any quantity, even a quantity of only one copy, was dangerous. And Vanka had virtually an entire printing house.

Vanka was arrested. He spent two months in Moscow's Lefortovo jail, where the investigators promised him seven years of strict regime exile under Article 70 of the Criminal Code. But the organs received a letter from a group of professors and students. The authors requested mitigation of the imminent sentence in view of the fact that Ivan Zhukov came from a simple working family, had been raised without any father or mother, was a gold medal–winner in school, possessed substantial knowledge in the field of the exact sciences as well as exceptional abilities as an inventor, and could still be of great service to our society. A famous electronics specialist and academician also wrote a plea in his own name, pointing out that Zhukov's copying machine was highly advanced and its performance parameters exceeded those of Western industrial models. In view of all these circumstances, Vanka was first reclassified from Article 70 to the less harsh Article 190 and then, going even further, it was decided to limit his punishment to exclusion from the Komsomol, expulsion from the institute and deprivation of his Moscow residence permit.