Monumental Propaganda (41 page)

103

Just at that moment there was a coded knock at the door and the subject of the conversation himself appeared in the doorway holding a bottle of vodka. As a well-trained operative, Roof said hello to Zherdyk without showing the slightest sign of embarrassment and only glanced at Vanka in an attempt to guess what had brought the victor in the elections here and whether Vanka had revealed certain schemes to him. Zherdyk in turn probed Roof with a searching glance, realizing that this was obviously not the first time he'd been here. But while neither of them revealed his suspicions to the other in any way, both of them began suspecting Vanka of playing a double game. At the same time, all three of them behaved in a friendly fashion, and after a little while they sat around the shaky little table standing at one side of the room. They drank and ate, and the more they drank, the more tender the feelings they expressed for each other became. An hour or so later they were recalling all sorts of incidents from their former life, proposing toasts to friendship, paying each other all sorts of compliments, and from the outside it would have been hard to tell that these men were enemies. But then in Russia the path from friendship to hate is always a short one. One minute we're drinking and embracing, you respect me and I respect you, and the next minute we're reaching for a knife or an ax or some kind of firearm.

Outside the window, the night was calm and frosty, the full moon was shining, the cats were screeching on the roof and the strains of songs rendered by a discordant male trio came drifting up out of the basement: “On the Wild Shores of the Irtysh,” “On the Wild Steppes of Baikal” . . .

“Guys! My friends!” Zherdyk exclaimed in an excess of convivial feelings. “How beautiful life is after all! And how good it is to feel that in this life you are a man, a being born—”

“Born for what?” asked Vanka.

“For something good. Korolenko said: ‘Man is born for happiness, as a bird is born for flight.'”

“Mind if I rephrase that a bit?” Roof asked good-naturedly. “I take a simpler view of things. Man is a permanently operational factory for transforming the products of nature into shit.”

104

Meanwhile, from the west, or perhaps from the east, or from some other direction—we won't be too precise in order not to subject the reader to the temptation of any double interpretation of text and subtext—anyway, approaching Dolgov from one of many possible directions was a cloud, which was by no means wintry in appearance, but charged with thunder and an ominous beauty. Probably few people had even seen it as yet, but Vanka could sense its approach from every side of his multilaterally truncated body. Let us immediately note here—although in the interests of the plot it should have been highlighted earlier—that any electrical storm reduced Vanka to a state of feral agitation, perhaps because almost all of his nerves had been severed so that they protruded at the surface and were more sensitive than any barometer at detecting even the most obscure of atmospheric disturbances. During meteorological cataclysms Vanka sometimes went insane, and the most terrible thoughts illuminated the inside of his externally mutilated head.

Looking up at the sky that evening, it was possible to observe that one side of it was a deep lilac-black while the opposite side, in contrast, was virginally clear. The black side slowly advanced on the clear side and the clear side advanced on the black side until finally they fell into each other's embraces directly above the center of the city of Dolgov. Afterward, they said that two atmospheric fronts had collided. One of the fronts was a very warm, damp cyclone, and the other was a dry, cold anticyclone. They collided, and suddenly the air was filled with howling and whistling. The lilac cloud was swirled into a vortex and transformed into a shaggy, dirty-black whirlwind, a spinning column with its lower end reaching down to the ground and its upper end extending out toward space. An incredible force spun this black slurry around, tearing dark tufts out of it and then drawing them back into the center again. And whirling and seething around this column were clouds of smoke, mist, steam, dirt and God knows what else, in the most loathsome shades of all the colors of the rainbow. The whirlwind didn't stand still in one spot and it didn't move in a straight line; it circled around the center of the city, as though it wanted to annihilate this particular spot totally. It bent down to the ground and broke trees, tore the roofs off houses, overturned automobiles, rolled empty barrels along the streets, dragged billboards around, smashed kiosks to smithereens and lifted up a horse and cart, carrying them away like a hot-air balloon, with the horse jerking its legs about helplessly. Everything was whistling, howling and roaring. The city was bombarded from the sky with rain, snow, hailstones the size of a man's fist and every other form of precipitation that can possibly be imagined, in volumes quite impossible to imagine. Zigzag lances of lightning flashed blindingly and thrust themselves into the earth with an appalling crash.

All the people woke up and looked out of their windows in terror, stopped up their ears and prayed to anybody or anything they could. Nobody had ever seen a storm like it in that season, or in any other, and they would rather not have seen it at all. And some even began to think it wasn't a storm at all, but a war—not just an ordinary one, but thermonuclear. Or plain ordinary doomsday. The last judgment, when the earth shall gape, all graves shall be opened and hordes of corpses will come clambering out with their teeth chattering. Everything was flashing and rumbling. Vanka started to get excited, and he was seized by the feeling that he himself was a part of this elemental chaos. Although to look at him no one would have thought it.

As we know, his room was located in the semibasement. The lower section of the window was set in a concrete recess about half a meter below the level of the pavement, and the upper section rose about a meter above that level. A stream of water came flying straight at the window as if it was blasted from a large-diameter pipe. The concrete recess immediately filled up, and the water began pressing against the glass and seeping dangerously into the room. A lightning bolt struck directly into the recess and the water immediately began to boil, but the window-panes didn't burst. Another bolt evidently struck the roof, and it felt as though a large bomb had fallen on the building. The three friends were still sitting around the table, casting glances in the direction of the window. Vanka recalled once again the battle in Kandahar, when their battalion had been caught practically defenseless in the gorge and the Mujahadeen had pounded it with every weapon they had. Roof also recalled his Aghanistan experience and the storming of President Amin's palace.

Zherdyk had nothing of the sort to recall and he crawled under the table.

“What's wrong?” Vanka shouted at him, lifting up the flap of the oilcloth.

“I'm afraid,” Zherdyk shouted from under the table.

“Everyone's afraid,” Roof said to him, “but why go crawling under the table? Come out of there.” He grabbed hold of Zherdyk by the scruff of the neck and began pulling him out, but he resisted, crying and shouting.

“Don't, guys! Don't. Leave me here! I'm afraid. You're not afraid, you're heroes, but I'm afraid.”

“Don't be. This is nothing to be afraid of,” said Vanka, apparently perfectly calm.

“Not for you it isn't!” yelled Zherdyk. “Because you're just a sawn-off stump. You've got nothing to live for, but I'm still full of life.”

It was hard to tell what the expression on Vanka's face meant.

“Out you come, Sanya!” he said to Zherdyk, almost tenderly. “Calm down. Haven't you ever seen a storm before? Come out and we'll have a chat.”

Strangely enough, these words worked on Zherdyk, and, pushing aside Roof's hand, he crawled out and shook himself off in embarrassment.

“That's right,” said Vanka. “That's better. Have another drink and calm down.”

Zherdyk took the glass that was proffered to him and sipped at it with his teeth rattling against the side, spilling vodka onto his chest.

“You know,” Vanka said to him, “when you're really afraid, you should think about something to distract you. When they were pounding us to bits in that gorge, I began remembering poems that I'd read somewhere and had memorized for some reason.” Vanka closed his eyes and began reciting in a singsong voice:

“Recently I was in a nearby Somewhere,
A ghetto district, cramped and overcrowded.
The climate's harsh—all winter and no summer . . .
And heat and light are never there when needed.
The day and night cannot be told apart
And people grope their slow way through the dark,
And though they cannot see each other's faces
All they feel for each other is pure hatred.
The only pastimes that these people know
Are squabbles, fights and rumor-mongering.
The only time their hearts feel a warm glow
Is when they know their next-door neighbor's suffering,
He's ricked his neck or else broken his leg,
Or had his wallet stolen in the subway,
Or had misfortune of some other kind.
That always really makes his neighbors' day.
So life is spent in ignorance and spite,
With soul and body starved for entertainment.
But if somebody does somebody in,
Of course, that makes the whole thing very different.”

 

As he recited, things outside the window got a bit calmer, and as Zherdyk recovered his senses, he asked who wrote the poem.

“I don't know,” said Vanka with a shrug. “Some dissident or other.”

“Sounds like it,” remarked Roof. “What does ‘in a nearby somewhere' mean? Does it mean in Russia?”

“Of course it does,” said Zherdyk, casting a nervous glance at the window. “Where else would you find people who hate their own country?”

“Everywhere,” Vanka muttered, remembering Jim. “There are people everywhere who—”

“But that poem,” said Zherdyk, “it isn't art, it's something else . . .”

“It's depressing,” suggested Roof.

“That's it, depressing,” Zherdyk agreed. “Art should be bright and happy. Its purpose is to exalt man, inspire him with faith in himself, in people, in friends.”

“That's right,” Vanka put in with unexpected enthusiasm. “How would you like to exalt us all a bit? Sing us ‘La donna è mobile.'”

“What, now?” Zherdyk asked in astonishment, and shuddered as the lightning flashed again outside the window.

“Sure, why not?” said Vanka. “Come on.”

There were two bright flashes of lightning, one hard on the heels of the other. Zherdyk was about to say something and he opened his mouth, but there was a flash and a thunderclap, as though an entire battery of jet-propelled rocket-launchers had turned all their firepower against this one house. Zherdyk clutched his head and climbed back under the table. The next bolt of lightning hit the concrete. This time the glass broke and boiling water came pouring into the room. Clouds of steam concealed everything from sight.

“I'm dying!” Zherdyk shouted from under the table.

“You'll die now all right!” Vanka confirmed. “With a song.” And he reached out toward the tape deck.

Roof immediately realized what that meant, but he couldn't see Vanka anymore.

“Stop,” he shouted, and made a dash at Vanka through the steam. He pounced like a jaguar. With his hands stretched out in front of him, he flew on an intercept course, rather like an air-launched torpedo. And when it came, it caught him in full flight.

Vanka pressed the key and Zherdyk's pure tenor poured out of the speaker: “La donna è mobile . . .”

And then there was a blinding flash, not from outside, but inside, and Roof didn't fall onto Vanka; instead, he went soaring upward and continued his flight on into infinity.

105

Shortly before the storm Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina was sitting at the table drinking tea with vanilla rusks and occasionally glancing out of the window. It was calm and clear outside. Absolutely no portents of any kind.

Aglaya was remembering her journey to Moscow, the meeting with General Burdalakov, the fight with the police, the row with the sculptor Ogorodov. What a nerve! Turning up to say goodbye with a disease like that. And now it was time for her to say her farewells to her lodger. Thirty years he'd lived here.

“You see,” she said, going over to him with her cup, “we got there after all. Tomorrow they'll put you back in your rightful place, and no one will ever move you from it again.”

She looked at him, but neither in his face nor his stance could she discern any sign of what he thought about the forthcoming event. Then a sudden thought struck her: What if he doesn't want to go? It's cold and damp out there, all those pigeons, and there could be all sorts of vicious plots. They'd already blown up a monument to Nicholas II in one town somewhere. They could blow up this one too. And she also thought: If I give him to them, then who will I be left with?

Alone in an empty apartment . . . Just as she used to do before, in her musings she lost sight of the fact that he wasn't really alive. And the thought flitted through her head: What if I don't give him back at all? These people repudiated him, she thought—forgetting that she was living in different times now, not in the age of the repudiators—so what right did they have to him?

After tea she began getting ready for the night. She made up the bed and switched on the television. The local channel was summarizing the results of the election. The communists had won an impressive victory. A woman journalist was interviewing the mayor of Dolgov, Alexander Zherdyk.

“I think our victory is only natural. People are sick of living in poverty and uncertainty. Now they can see for themselves that only the communists can provide them with a life of peace and dignity. And as far as I personally am concerned,” he added with a sorrowful expression, “I don't regard my new position as a source of any kind of privileges or advantages or anything of that kind. For me it means a hard daily grind of thankless work, but if we love our people and our homeland, then we have no right to shirk even the most difficult and tedious of jobs.”

After a break for advertisements there was a film from the series
Our
Old Movies.
It was a genuinely old film about the war, in black and white, with Vanin, Zharov and Astangov acting in it. A naïve sort of movie, of course, but ideologically correct. They knew how to make them in those days! A thriller with good actors and consistent ideology. Perhaps Zherdyk was right. Everything was going back to normal. Young people were watching these films and something must be reaching their hearts. Eventually, they would start to realize that the previous generation had lived by its ideals, not like these New Russians whose ideals were measured by the weight of the gold chains around their thick necks.

It was warm, even hot, in the room, but she was feeling a bit shivery, and she pulled the padded blanket up tight around her.

Outside the window the moon was shining, shining quietly and calmly and brightly enough to read a book by. Aglaya had warmed up now and she was feeling good. She watched TV, glancing occasionally at the moon, and now she could see it quite clearly: one brother stabbing the other. On the TV the village elder who had worked for the Germans and been captured by the partisans began shouting: “I'm Russian,” but the secretary of the district Party committee told him: “You're a traitor and for us you're three times as bad as any German, you snake.” Aglaya tried to follow the plot, but she was distracted by her thoughts. She didn't even notice when the film ended and another program began. One in which they were showing Valentina Zhukova and asking people to identify her. What did they need to identify her for, when everybody knew her anyway? Aglaya didn't understand it, she switched to a different channel and wound up with a quite different kind of program. They were showing a hall full of people who didn't look anything at all like partisans, and a young woman was walking around between them with a microphone, asking questions: “Tell me, you say you broke up with your husband because he didn't satisfy you sexually. What does that mean, ‘he didn't satisfy you'? Was he impotent? Couldn't he get an erection?”

“No,” replied the interviewee, “physically he was quite normal. But he simply refused to understand that there could be certain elements of fantasy, he wouldn't accept any deviations from what he regarded as the norm.”

“For instance?”

“Well, for instance he was against anal sex, and when I told him I wanted to sleep with his friend, he kicked up a terrible row and even went as far as to hit me. Eventually, I left him and married someone else.”

“And this someone else helps you realize your fantasies?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And he doesn't forbid you to sleep with his friend?”

“No, he doesn't forbid it, he actively encourages it. We often engage in group sex.”

“And do you like group sex?”

“Very much.”

“And what exactly is it that you like about group sex?”

“What I like best of all is double fellatio.”

“Double fellatio?” The presenter raised her eyebrows. “What's that?”

“Two pricks in your mouth.”

“Oh, I see! Yes, that must be really exciting. And have you ever tried triple fellatio?”

Spurred into action, Aglaya sprang up off the bed, ran to the television and began spitting on the screen and shouting: “Stupid fool! Two pricks in your mouth! People like that should be shot, shot!”

She was trembling in indignation and she'd covered the entire screen in spittle. She turned off the TV, and lay down, but it was a long time before she could calm down. What was going on? Had she and her generation really sacrificed their health and their lives for these parasites? She turned the TV back on and switched to a different channel. Thank God they were showing something old and familiar. A repeat from the
Blue
Lamp
New Year series with cosmonauts, leading industrial workers, famous writers and actors. The poet Robert Rozhdestvensky, still alive then, read his poem “about the other guy.” Ludmila Zykina pressed her hands to her bosom and sang her song “Out of the distance slow, See the great Volga flow.”

Aglaya had once sailed down the Volga on a passenger boat. It was a floating interregional Party conference. The people on the boat were regional and district Party secretaries and Party activists, with two members of the Politburo—Kaganovich and Voroshilov. The journey had not left much of a trace in her memory: endless hilly, forested riverbanks; songs from the movie
Volga-Volga;
lavish meals in the passengers' lounge; sailors bobbing up and down dancing the Little Apple and Voroshilov puking over the side—with two KGB men holding him by the elbows so he wouldn't fall overboard. One of them had spotted Aglaya on the deck and given her a very hostile look, and she had immediately made herself scarce. Remembering Voroshilov, she began thinking about Stalin, Stalin, Stal . . . and then she saw him. He was coming toward her down the steep opposite bank, a pair of long drawers tied around his head like a turban, with the tapes fluttering in the breeze. She wanted to tell Stalin: Careful, it's steep here, but she saw that the steep incline posed no threat at all to Stalin—as he leapt from one rock to another, he hovered in the air for a few seconds, seeming to soar like a bird, and then came down on the next rock. At first Aglaya was amazed at the way he did it, then she tried it herself and discovered that she could soar too. She didn't rise very high, perhaps only about five centimeters above the ground, but, holding herself at this level by a slight effort of will, she began moving toward Stalin, and when she came close, she said happily: “Comrade Stalin, yesterday in our shop they were selling groats.” Stalin smiled tenderly in response and said: “When I was little, I loved to ride on the locomotive Iosif Stalin.” Then he immediately climbed up onto the step of the locomotive, took hold of the handrail with his right hand, flung out his left arm and began singing in a beautiful voice: “La donna è mobile . . .”

Aglaya was a bit surprised at Comrade Stalin singing such a strange, non-Caucasian song, and her surprise woke her up.

There was no more moon outside the window. In fact, it was absolutely dark. And very quiet. Very calm. Too calm. Like before a sudden attack by the enemy. But she immediately asked herself what could possibly happen. She told herself nothing could happen. And she closed her eyes again.

. . . It was a bright summer day, the sun was at its zenith and Aglaya was standing in the tall grass of a clearing in a pine forest. The forest flowers were in bloom, there were butterflies and dragonflies in the air and Comrade Stalin was standing in a big tin basin, covered from head to toe in thick, soapy suds. She began rubbing him down with a bast scrubber and rinsing him off with water from a big enamel mug. And he was so small, like a five-year-old child, but with a mustache, and it wasn't clear if he was cast-iron or alive and in his uniform or without it. Aglaya kept on pouring the water out of the jug, but all the time there were more and more suds; they surrounded him like light, fluffy lace. Stalin kept disappearing in it and then reappearing. Aglaya wanted to ask someone what she should do about all these suds, and she saw Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Lenin was sitting with his jacket thrown over his shoulders on a tree stump by his forest shelter and rapidly writing his April theses in the middle of June, with a fuzzy ginger bumble bee circling over his head. She went up to him to ask what she should do about all the suds enveloping Comrade Stalin, but the leader didn't hear her; he carried on writing and wagging his beard, she touched his shoulder, he lifted his head and she saw it wasn't Lenin, it was Shubkin. Shubkin immediately covered his scribble with his hand, but she realized he was writing a report denouncing Stalin. “No, it's not a report,” Shubkin told her, “it's a satire. It's a fairy tale about three little pigs and its called
The Timber Camp.
” “All the same,” Aglaya said to him, “what do you want with a Timber Camp in Israel? There aren't any forests there.” She went back to Stalin. But he wasn't there anymore, neither was the big basin. General Burdalakov was standing there with his standard, which had unfurled even though there was absolutely no wind, and she could see the Guards badge on it and the inscription TAKE THE CHURCHKHELLA. And there were no holes. Aglaya went up to the general, said “Hello” and asked: “Have you already taken Berlin, or are you just getting ready for it?” “Church is the English word for a house of worship,” Burdalakov replied, “concerning which I have personally informed Leonid Ilich Brezhnev.” “And why not Comrade Stalin?” she asked strictly. “Comrade Stalin doesn't live here any longer, he's taken some leave and gone to Sochi.” Aglaya was delighted, recalling that she had to go to Sochi too, because she hadn't bought any kefir yet today. After saying “Thank you” she set off across the steppe, and beside the road she saw an abandoned cart with its two shafts resting on the ground. There was an armful of straw in the cart, with a naked child lying on it. It was Marat. He was two and he was dead; one of his eyes was closed and the other was missing altogether. She couldn't believe that he'd died completely and couldn't be brought back to life. She looked to see if there was anybody there, and again she saw Stalin. Now he was wearing a white coat with a stethoscope slung around his neck. “Comrade Stalin,” she said, “see how I suffer! My son has died and my husband perished heroically for the motherland.” “I'll help you,” said Stalin, and, setting his stethoscope against her chest, he began to sing: “La donna è mobile . . .” And the moment he began to sing, her husband, Andrei Revkin, touched the wires together and the dive-bombers came roaring out of the black clouds toward the ground. Bombs rained down and began exploding with a blinding brilliance and a terrible cracking noise, like canvas tearing.

Aglaya realized that this was all a dream; she only had to wake up and it would all go away. By a monstrous effort of will she forced her eyes open and saw that reality was even more terrible than her dream. There was flashing, rumbling, whistling and crackling outside the window. The oil depot was blazing, a tall pine tree burned as it fell, and a power-line pole did the same. The wires gave off showers of colored sparks as they touched, the television screen was lit up and the television was on fire. The glass from all the windows came hurtling into the apartment and spread itself across the floor in a glittering kaleidoscope, and Stalin—not the live one, the iron one—stood there amid the elemental chaos, rocking from side to side and singing “La donna è mobile.” He was trembling as he swayed; she could see he was desperate to move but he couldn't— some force was holding him back. He couldn't break free of the force, and he was hoping to overpower it with his song “La donna è mobile.” “La donna è mobile,” he sang yet again, and his efforts seemed to produce a response. There was a sudden rumbling and crashing, the light flashed in her eyes more brightly than before and the house began swaying. Stalin began to move, heading straight toward Aglaya, together with the metal sheet to which he was welded. He came waddling toward her, trampling the glass shards so that they crunched and jangled, sending showers of white crystal spray flying in every direction. And he kept advancing stubbornly, menacingly, implacably. Suddenly realizing that he was coming to her to take her as a woman, Aglaya was inflamed by an insane reciprocal passion. She raised herself up on her pillow, opened her skinny arms and legs wide and said quietly but passionately: “Come to me! Come quickly, come, come to me!” And he was coming to her, swaying and shuddering in an insatiable fever fed by some demonic force raging within him. He kept coming. Pieces of glass flew into his face, the light dazzled his eyes and they spouted streams of fire as though he were trying to see Aglaya with them. “Come to me, my darling! Come to me, my little boy!” she entreated him. At the edge of her bed he stopped, as if struck by doubts. He even swayed so far backward that he almost fell flat. The back of his iron head almost touched the floor, but some mysterious force halted him, lifted him, set him upright, tossed him up toward the ceiling and dropped him on his feet. He began trembling again, and with a cry of “La donna è mobil-e!” he collapsed onto Aglaya, and she received him with every inch of her spread-eagled body.