Monumental Propaganda (32 page)

78

Every person who is not dead possesses the peculiar quality that the very fact of his existence is irksome to someone else who is still alive. Even some bum out on the street, collecting bottles from garbage dumps, irks another collector like himself. But a dead man is irksome to no one. Unless, that is, he happens to be lying in a mausoleum.

Of course, Aglaya too had always irked someone. In the past she had irked people so badly that they made attempts to dispose of her by radical means. In 1930 one dekulakized peasant had attempted to hack her to death with a mattock, which left its mark on her temple and her shoulder. When she was with the partisans, the Germans had offered more money for her head than for a cow. And when she was secretary of the district Party committee, someone had once lobbed a cobblestone through her window. But now, after being away from work for so long, how could she possibly irk anybody? But she did.

One day the
Dolgov Herald
happened to carry a small article by a local hydrologist about the fact that the town was apparently built over an underground spring—no, not oil, merely mineral water. But very good water. Saturated with all sorts of salts and other healthy substances. Good for drinking and for taking baths that facilitated the rejuvenation of the organism. This article caught the attention of a certain Valentin Yurievich Dolin, a New Russian businessman, but not one of those who wear thick gold chains around their necks and ride around in Mercedes 600s. No, he wore a relatively thin chain, rode around in a Mercedes 300 (although admittedly, he had already ordered himself a 600) and all in all was an educated man, who in Soviet times had graduated from the school of philosophy at Moscow State University and had almost got as far as defending a doctoral dissertation on the topic “Problems of Reinforcing Discipline in Production Work and Mutual Support in the Labor Collective in the Period of Advanced Socialism in the Light of Instructions by General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Comrade Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko.” While he was preparing to defend his dissertation, Comrade Chernenko's instructions had suddenly ceased to be of any philosophical value; a new and different life had begun and our doctoral candidate had abandoned scholarship and moved into the activity that was referred to as business consultancy. That is, for big money he provided a “roof” to foreigners who wanted to make a killing in the new Russian bazaar and provided them with consultation on how, in the incomprehensible local conditions, they could avoid taxes, pay bribes, launder their money and take it out of the country. In a short while he scraped together quite a respectable fortune—he had two casinos, three restaurants, one movie theater, a real estate company called Housewarmer and a tourist agency called the World in Your Hand.

I have always admired businessmen and criminals. How cleverly they react to all sorts of discoveries or events and turn them to their own advantage! Even an eclipse of the sun. When we simple folk hear that one's coming up soon, we just act dumb and talk about it without seeking any material advantage for ourselves, saying how interesting astronomical phenomena are and how we really ought to watch them. A businessman, though, realizes that people will want to watch the eclipse but they won't want to go blind in the process. That means they'll need special glasses, and plenty of them. The businessman gets to work on the glasses, but meanwhile the criminal is already figuring it will be dark during the eclipse, and while the people are gazing up into the sky, they're sure to lower their guard and forget to keep an eye on their pockets. Or else, let's say, they'll go dashing out into the street to observe the eclipse without closing the door to their apartment.

Being in every respect a man of business, Valya Dolin, known in criminal circles by the nickname of Validol, having read the notice in the
Dolgov Herald,
immediately discerned that a fluid so beneficial to the people's health shouldn't simply be going to waste lying under the ground. He immediately imagined the sequence of actions that had to be taken: build a glass factory, make masses of bottles, drill a well, pump out the water, bottle it and sell it for a fair price. And if there was a lot of water, he could build a hydropathic clinic. And if there was an awful lot of it, there was a chance of transforming Dolgov into a balneological resort that would make him rich and famous.

Validol engaged in some of that activity known as market research. He found out which way the water flowed, how deep it was under the ground, where was the best place to drill and locate the first hydropathic clinic. And it turned out there was not and could not be any place better than house no. 1-a on Komsomol Cul-de-Sac.

After carrying out a second piece of market research, Validol calculated how much money he needed to acquire this house and resettle the remaining residents somewhere else. In the process it transpired that one of the residents, Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, would not agree to the move at any price, due to the impossibility of taking with her the monument that stood in her apartment. On account of the ceilings in the new apartments being too low for the monument. This circumstance greatly complicated his problem, but Validol was a resourceful man, he didn't believe in problems that couldn't be solved, and Aglaya Stepanovna was suddenly in very serious danger.

79

As the Admiral once remarked, Russia is a country where they talk a lot about repentance, but it's a rare event for anyone actually to say “I'm sorry.” His words always come to mind when I remember Mark Semyonovich Shubkin's return to Dolgov. Or rather, his attempted return. Following the auspicious changes that took place in our country, many émigrés, especially people from the world of the arts, began coming back to their homeland. Shubkin decided to return too. And not to Moscow, like the others, but to Dolgov. Because, as he used to say (and quite correctly), Moscow is not Russia. And his praiseworthy intention was precisely to go back to Russia. The reader can imagine what an event this was. Maybe in Moscow it would have been nothing out of the ordinary, but for a district-level town it was really big. While Shubkin was still packing his suitcase in Jerusalem, the whole town of Dolgov was already buzzing. An entire delegation was put together to meet the returning émigré, and it was headed, of course, by Vlad Raspadov. Although in his time he had written some unpleasant things about Shubkin, time had gone by, the old memories had dimmed and Shubkin himself had very probably never read that article. In any case, who could have met Shubkin if not Raspadov? After all, by that time he was the most important and authoritative literary figure in the district in question. On the eve of the event he was apparently spoken to in person by the mayor of Dolgov, Korotyshkin. The same Korotyshkin who once used to work in the KGB. But with the passing years many people had revised their former views, and Korotyshkin had become a thoroughgoing democrat, a resolute anticommunist and a God-fearing parishioner of the local church. He might even have turned out himself to meet the famous writer, the author of that celebrated novel
The Timber Camp,
but there were new elections coming up, the communists were making a bid for power and it was essential for them to be rebuffed. Basically, Korotyshkin didn't have the time. And as he told Raspadov, to arrange an official reception for Shubkin would be going too far. If, he said, we were to arrange personal receptions for everyone who went away, we'd be spending all our time welcoming these departees home. That, at least, was what he told Raspadov, apparently apprehensive that departees would descend on this godforsaken backwater in hordes, whereas in fact there had only ever been two departees from Dolgov: Shubkin himself and Antonina. But even though a full-scale official reception was not expected, a certain number of people did turn up at the station. I happened to be in Dolgov at the time, and I also went along to welcome home the illustrious foreigner. There were many people gathered on the platform: local intellectuals, the teaching staff of the children's home and some of its former wards. The
Dolgov Herald
sent its own correspondent, and a reporter and cameraman from the regional television company tagged along. It was a clear, sunny day. The starlings were warbling in the trees, there was a smell of hot diesel fuel and boiled potatoes with dill. The local grannies had come to meet the train with their customary goods: potatoes, pies, dried fish and pickled cucumbers.

The train was a bit late. So everyone started getting nervous. And I remembered that time when Shubkin had been arrested right there on the platform. “He must be savoring the contrast,” I thought. Finally, someone shouted out: “It's coming!” Everyone tensed and froze. The train approached. Not as picturesquely as it used to. What an occasion it used to be! The locomotive Iosif Stalin tearing into the station, enveloped in clouds of steam! Huffing and puffing so loud! Gleaming so bright! But now? A pathetic-looking, grubby little electric locomotive whistled in a thin falsetto and pulled sixteen carriages into the station as easily as if they were toys on a string. And everyone saw Shubkin standing above the steps of carriage no. 4. Only they didn't recognize him immediately. With his big gray beard he no longer resembled Lenin; he looked more like Karl Marx or one of the biblical prophets. He was holding on to the handrail with one hand and waving to the waiting crowd with the other. And peeping out from behind him with a big smile was Antonina, her head tightly bound with a silk scarf. This scarf seemed somehow out of place, and it was only later that I discovered its significance. It turned out that in Israel Antonina had converted to Judaism, and she adhered strictly to the tenets of her new faith, completely shaving her head and covering it with a scarf. But Mark Semyonovich had remained in the Orthodox Church. So their family had become sort of ecumenical. And there they were, waving their hands as they rode in, and the people there to meet them were waving too and shouting something, and several women were even pressing handkerchiefs to their eyes.

Shubkin stepped down onto the platform and Antonina followed him with two suitcases. People immediately surrounded them, embraced them, kissed them, presented them with flowers. The critic Raspadov also stepped up to the returnee with a bouquet of three scarlet carnations. But he didn't present the flowers immediately; he transferred them from his right hand to his left and raised his right hand as a sign for everyone to be quiet. And he then delivered a speech that could be called historical.

Shunted off to one side by the eager crowd, I was standing a long way from the orator and the wind carried his words off into the air, but I was able to make out a bit here and there and I marveled at our critic's ability to direct his flow of thought first in one direction and then in its opposite. First Vlad extended hearty greetings to the returnee, calling him an outstanding writer whom we (who? he himself perhaps?) had missed all these years. “We,” he said, “are pleased to greet all of our compatriots whose return has become possible because of our perestroika and, let us say it, avoiding false modesty, thanks to us, its rank-and-file engineers. Our labors have created the appropriate conditions for their return, and it is good that Mark Semyonovich is now with us. It must be admitted that at the time not everyone regarded his departure with understanding—some of us even condemned him in harsh terms . . .” At this point, I thought, there ought logically to follow an apology. Or an expression of regret. Or something of the sort. But Raspadov came out with something different. Some of us, he went on, had condemned him in harsh terms, even, perhaps, unjustly, but we should not go to the opposite extreme of praising Mark Semyonovich excessively and making him into a hero. The man left—it had been to his advantage to do so. Over there they live well; they eat kosher. Here we were eating Chernobyl potatoes and tomatoes full of nitrates. But after all, someone had to stay here to protect our culture, our monuments, our graves . . .

I repeat, I was standing a long way off, and I couldn't see everything. And then a train going in the opposite direction pulled in at platform 2. So my view was obstructed and I could hear almost nothing. But people who were a bit closer told me that when he got to the subject of our graves— apparently, indeed, as a result of some powerful excitation associated with graves—Vlad Raspadov suddenly lost control of himself. The picture painted by his own words seemed to be that while he'd been here sitting on the gravestones, Shubkin had been living it up and wolfing down kosher meatballs in the Garden of Gethsemane. And though his arms were already spread wide to embrace Shubkin, instead he spat in his face. Shubkin, who had been listening with a bewildered smile, froze, still smiling. But a sigh of surprise ran through the crowd “Aagh-aagh-aagh!” For his part, after this gaffe, Raspadov himself was aghast at what he'd done and stood there for a long time in a defenseless pose, as though expecting his opponent to take adequate satisfaction. But when it didn't happen, he said: “And in general, welcome back to your homeland!”

And he tried to hand Shubkin his carnations. But Shubkin turned out to be touchy! He grabbed the suitcases and with a cry of “Antonina, follow me!” he leapt onto the train going back the opposite way, and that was the last we saw of him. He went back. As someone wrote about him later in the newspaper, he was fonder of his matzos than he was of his homeland.

Of course, in the eyes of many, Mark Semyonovich Shubkin was and remains a comical figure: all those ideals and beliefs of his, the way he arrived at them and the way he abandoned them and, most importantly, all the grimacing and gesturing involved looked funny, but at the same time there was something touching about him—his actions were driven by noble impulses and elements of the recklessness that is so highly esteemed in our society. You could pass as many ironic comments as you liked on all of this, but it wasn't right to spit in his face.

Nonetheless, Raspadov's gob of spittle was soon forgotten, and people recalled Shubkin with incomprehension, resentment and bitter irony. He just came, stuck his nose up in the air and went away again. There was no orchestra to greet him, you see. And the only explanation they could find for the way Shubkin acted was that he'd got too used to the good life and the good food in the Promised Land. And to this day certain people in Dolgov regret the sincere feelings they invested in the attempt to welcome Shubkin back with open arms.