Monumental Propaganda (6 page)

13

This time around, Aglaya defied superior authority and refused to allow the sacked man back to work. That was when things began to get unpleasant. Porosyaninov called her in to see him, sat her down in a soft leather armchair and ordered in tea with hard crackers and lemon.

He began the conversation with a sigh: “Ah, Aglaya Stepanovna, you hot-blooded partisan! Just what position do you think you're storming now? So you don't like this Shubkin, but who does like him? I don't like him, and I confess I can't stand their entire nation. And what's going on at the top isn't to my liking either. Stalin stood at the head of the state for thirty years, we lauded him to the skies. A genius, a universal luminary, a generalissimo. And now they tell us he had Kirov killed, he devastated the peasantry, uprooted the intelligentsia, decapitated the army, exterminated the Party. And who are you and me, if we're not the Party?”

“Right!” said Aglaya, delighted. “That's exactly what I'm talking about.”

“Everybody's talking about it. Only between themselves, in a whisper. But out loud we must support the Party line. Whatever it might be, whichever way it might turn, we're communists and we vote in favor.”

“Without principles?” asked Aglaya.

“Without conditions,” said Porosyaninov.

Aglaya was incensed, she was about to object, and rather sharply, but just then the door of the office opened and first secretary of the district Party committee Nechaev came in without making a sound, as though he weren't even moving his feet. He shook hands with Porosyaninov, who leapt to his feet, and with Aglaya, laying a hand on her shoulder to prevent her getting up, and asked, “I won't be in your way, will I?” Then he sat on the couch and froze in the position of a passenger waiting for a train that he doesn't expect to arrive very soon. And with an expression suggesting that what was going on here had nothing to do with him.

“Well then, Comrade Revkina,” Porosyaninov continued. “It's not a matter of Shubkin, but of the Party line. Our Party's new policy is directed toward overcoming Stalin's personality cult. You know as well as I do that he committed many serious political errors. He ruled the country individually, devastated the peasantry, decapitated the army, led the persecutions of the intelligentsia, effectively annihilated the cream of our Party and encouraged his own glorification. And now the Party is courageously telling the people the entire truth, and what do you do? Are you,” Porosyaninov went on, looking Aglaya honestly in the eye, “opposed to the truth?”

“Who are you saying all this to?” Aglaya asked in amazement, recalling that a minute earlier Porosyaninov had been saying something entirely different.

“I'm saying it to you,” said Porosyaninov, casting a quick glance at Nechaev. “I'm telling you that we have the principle of democratic centralism, according to which if the Party has taken a decision, then the rank and file communists carry it out. That's all.”

At this point Nechaev stood up and left the room as quietly as he had entered. Aglaya followed him out with her eyes and then turned to look at Porosyaninov. Obviously highly agitated, he took a cracker from the dish and snapped it apart, took another one and snapped it, took a third and looked at Aglaya.

“Well then, Aglaya Stepanovna?”

“Well what?” she asked.

“Are you going to recant?”

“Me?” she asked, amazed.

“Take a sheet of paper and write: ‘I, Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, being slightly crazy, have failed to understand the new policy of the Party and failed to appreciate the wisdom of Party decisions, of which I do thoroughly repent and solemnly declare that I will never do it again.'”

“You can't be serious!”

“Comrade Revkina!” said Pyotr Klimovich, getting up. “Here in these offices, as you yourself know, we are always serious. I advise you seriously to think about it.”

“You chameleon!” said Aglaya, and left the room without even noticing his outstretched hand.

Shortly after that Aglaya received a severe reprimand for opposing Party decisions, and her status was reduced to that of an ordinary class teacher, like Shubkin. Which she took as a terrible insult.

14

Aglaya complained about her misadventures to her son, Marat, who was studying in Moscow at the Institute of International Relations. From her letter he learned that his mother was less distressed by her own personal misfortunes than by the general direction in which events were moving. “You know,” she wrote, “that neither I nor your father who perished so heroically ever spared ourselves, and I am not sparing myself now, but it makes me ashamed, so ashamed that I could cry to look at people who pour scorn on what they were glorifying yesterday. When Stalin was alive, I can't remember anyone ever saying there was anything about Stalin they didn't like. Everyone said the same thing: A genius, a great commander. Our father and teacher. The luminary of all the sciences. Did they really not believe what they were saying? Were they all really lying? I don't understand—when were these people being sincere, now or then? And how can they be so indifferent when they see that faith in the most sacred thing of all, in the truth of our cause, is being undermined among young people your age!”

Not once in her long letter did she ask her son how he was getting on, where he was living and in what conditions, whether he was well, what he ate or drank, or how he spent his free time. But she did express her opinion that no one has a right to judge and condemn a genius who stood at the head of the state for thirty years, carried through the collectivization of agriculture, crushed the opposition, transformed a backward country into an industrial power and won a victory of universal historical importance over the enemy.

In the same letter she expressed her dissatisfaction at the release from the camps of all the enemies of the people, who instead of saying thank you were now demanding all sorts of rights and privileges and shouting from every corner that they had suffered for nothing. Perhaps by some accident there had been isolated innocent victims among them, but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and you couldn't just let them all out indiscriminately. “And didn't we suffer?” Aglaya wrote. “Didn't we go short of food and sleep, wasn't it us the kulaks' sawn-off shotguns were pointed at? Those who spent a few years sitting in jail were fed in there for free, but your father gave his life without hesitation for the motherland and for Stalin. Then why aren't we complaining to anyone? See what great heroes they are! They suffered. Suffered so badly that now they want to weep for themselves. But I think that if anyone was wrongly punished, then now, when he has been corrupted in the camps and infected with anti-Soviet sentiment, there's no point in letting him out. He's an enemy now anyway, and he ought to be treated like an enemy.”

To her surprise her son responded coldly. He wrote to her that none of these problems concerned him and repeated almost word for word what Porosyaninov had said, remarking that you had to take a realistic view of life.

At the age of twenty-two Marat himself had already mastered the practice of taking a realistic view and was managing rather successfully in arranging his own affairs. Since according to Soviet notions he was of noble origin (Party workers were regarded as the advance detachment of the working class), he was studying in one of the most prestigious and exclusive institutes. He did not possess any brilliant talents, but he was quick-witted and observant. And he was very quick to note that while the general privileges he possessed as the son of Party members allowed him access to the academic subjects taught in the institute, there was among the students of the institute a narrow inner circle that was completely closed to him.

The children of the big bosses, generals, ministers and Central Committee members lived an entirely different life and could get away with a great deal more than their classmates. They skipped classes, held drinking sessions, cruised around in their parents' cars, arranged orgies with girls from their own circle (or not, as the case might be), sometimes even raped them, and in one instance they actually threw a girl off a balcony. It looked like there was bound to be a major scandal, but there was hardly even a murmur. The incident was very deftly hushed up by announcing that the girl student who was thrown had been depressed and threw herself off the balcony in question. And when it came to relatively minor pranks, these guys were absolutely home free. Marat knew he could never do what they were allowed to do and would never be forgiven for doing the things that they did. On the other hand, he could reach their level or even overtake them, but for that he had to prosper in other areas, pick up points where these boobies couldn't because they took no care for the future and relied on their dads and didn't realize that today your dad was everything, but tomorrow he would be nothing, and you would become nothing with him.

Marat drew the correct conclusions and behaved accordingly. He lived modestly, frequented the student research club and gave boring papers, took an active part in Komsomol life and prepared himself to join the Party. He absorbed the academic subjects with some difficulty, but he made a real effort, realizing that for his future career it was not achievement but effort that really mattered—the bosses had to see you were making an effort, listening with your mouth wide open and taking notes. And his notes could have been exhibited in a museum. Neat, tidy exercise books covered with pages from
Pravda;
upright, clear handwriting; important ideas underlined in red pencil to prove that after writing the study notes he had also read them. Marat had also learned that active involvement in social life was encouraged more than zeal in the acquisition of knowledge. He knew you had to be able to get along with people and be guided by sober calculation, not the heated impulses of passion, remembering that in real life it was not the written laws that mattered but the unwritten rules of behavior.

He had not formulated this thought for himself; it had come from the deputy minister of foreign trade, Salkov, the father of Zoya, the girl he was courting. And in his courtship of Zoya he was guided in the first instance by the rules. He was making a career, and he had observed that the age of the fanatics was finished. It was not just anti-Soviet types or malcontents who did not like them, but Party people as well. Party people no longer wanted to work in the old way, sitting up all night long waiting in case the Father of the Peoples might suddenly require some piece of information or something else; they were tired of living in constant fear and remembering that Party workers were still being shot. Now was a less dangerous but more complicated time to make a career; you had to be flexible and not be too hasty in adopting one position or another before it had taken clear shape.

Marat also realized that the time of excessively modest dressing— Russian collarless shirts, military tunics, semimilitary field jackets, coarse-fabric greatcoats and tall boots—was over too. He dressed as well and as neatly as he could, had his hair cut before it got long by an expensive hairdresser, and even used a little perfume. He avoided speaking to Zoya in the customary overfamiliar manner of the youths in her circle and actually demonstrated a certain old-fashioned gallantry. Which eventually won her heart.

15

What can we say of the others, if even Aglaya's own son did not understand? She took offense and began writing to him less often and less warmly.

Her relations with her fellow staff members in the children's home were strained or openly hostile. Nobody smiled as they used to do or went rushing to carry out her requests, and even the secretary, Rita, greeted her through clenched teeth. Meanwhile, Shubkin had been elevated even higher. He was appointed teacher of literature for the senior classes, and he now entered the children's home with a triumphant air that suited his position perfectly.

The new director of the children's home, Vasilii Ivanovich Chikurin, had no interest in anything except drink, and he allowed Shubkin very extensive leeway, of which Shubkin took full advantage. He not only taught literature in the senior classes; he set up a literary club called the Brigantine, ran the Meyerhold Drama Club and was still editor of the wall newspaper “Happy Childhood.”

Aglaya had never been a snitch and she didn't like snitches, but in accordance with her Party duty she pointed out to the new director on numerous occasions that Shubkin was exploiting his position to instill “ideas that aren't ours” in the heads of the pupils. During literature classes and literary club activities he made ironic remarks about the creative method of socialist realism, promoted writers of dubious reputation from nonrealist tendencies and praised writers condemned by the Party such as Zoshchenko, Akhmatova and Pasternak. He expressed a high opinion of Vladimir Dudintsev's flawed novel
Not by Bread Alone,
which had been rejected by the Soviet public, and he distributed this novel among the wards of the children's home; he also paid too much attention to western literature. Chikurin took no notice of these warnings; he merely shrugged, as if to say, Let him do as he wants. Especially since interest in literature among the pupils had clearly increased, they were studying better and their discipline had improved.

For the October festivities Shubkin and his pupils organized a large amateur concert which was attended by the bosses from the tannery and the Victory collective farm and also, naturally, the entire staff of the children's home.

Aglaya also came to the concert. She ended up in the middle seat in the third row, next to the chairman of the Victory collective farm, Stepan Kharitonovich Shaleiko, a thick-set, shaven-headed man about forty years old, whom she knew from the time when she was the Party secretary. She thought he was from the same district as Nechitailo; in any case, they spoke the same way, in a language that wasn't really either Russian or Ukrainian. At one time it used to be called the Little Russian dialect. In Ukraine this language is known as surzhik, and surzhik is a hybrid of wheat and rye. Shaleiko himself was like a hybrid of a man and some plant, perhaps some kind of baobab tree—bulky and gnarled, with coarse facial features and a drooping nose like an immature eggplant. He was dressed in the already almost outmoded fashion of the rural bosses of those times: a diagonal-weave Stalin field jacket with external pockets and box calf boots. He smelled of Chipre eau de cologne, shoe polish, sweat and agricultural activity.

Shaleiko greeted Aglaya pleasantly, almost even rising from his seat.

“I haven't seen you in a long time,” he said with a good-natured smile. “How are things?”

“So-so,” Aglaya shrugged.

“I heard about your spot of trouble,” he said in a low voice and sighed. “You're a woman of principle, inflexible. But it's the time of the flexible people now, the ones who know how to bend at the right moment. Especially since everything's changing now. Changing down here, changing up there.”

He pointed upward with his eyes. She followed his glance and saw two portraits of Soviet leaders above the stage. There had always been two portraits hanging there. But before, they had been portraits of Lenin and Stalin, and now . . . what incredible impudence . . . Lenin and Khrushchev! Or “that Baldie,” as she referred to Nikita Sergeevich. Aglaya was outraged to the very depths of her soul. She had managed to come to terms with Baldie's attacks on Stalin, but she hadn't expected him to take his insolence this far and set himself in Stalin's place. Beside Lenin. Who, by the way, was also bald and whom, without really admitting it to herself, she also did not like very much.

Sometimes Aglaya was overwhelmed by such paroxysms of fury that she quite literally began to shake. She clenched her fingers into tight fists, pressed her elbows against her sides and shuddered, feeling her heart pounding with incredible force. Once she had even tried to explain her condition to a neuropathologist. She had been afraid he would laugh at her, but he listened to her attentively and advised her to be wary of such occasions of extreme stress and shun them.

“Forgive me,” he said, “but I am a doctor and I must speak frankly. Your problem is that you're an angry person. And the first person the feeling of anger destroys is the one in whom it arises. You're the one who experiences this feeling inside yourself, it's your heart and nobody else's that pounds so furiously, and entirely without any point. And the person you're so angry with might not even notice. I advise you very strongly, try not to be so angry, be kinder to people, not for their sake, but for your own.”

She had taken the doctor's advice seriously and more or less tried to stick to it, but at the sight of Baldie's portrait she was unable to control herself, and once again she began shaking as though she was having a fit, although she realized that she was only harming herself. If only at least a part of her feelings had actually reached Baldie, he would probably have been incinerated, reduced to ashes on the spot, but there was no chance of that. She felt upset and wanted to leave. But at the very moment she started to get up, the lights in the hall went out, the stage was lit up by the beam of a spotlight and Shubkin appeared wearing crumpled trousers and a gray wool cardigan. He stood in the center of the stage looking out into the hall and squinting against the beam of the spotlight, then after a long pause he said quietly, “I have been around almost all the world . . .” And fell silent.

“He's lying,” Shaleiko whispered to Aglaya. “He went around the camps, not the world.”

“And life is good,” Shubkin continued thoughtfully, “and it is good to live.”

“It's a poem,” said Aglaya.

“He's lying all the same,” said Shaleiko.

Shubkin said nothing for a moment, then suddenly began speaking abruptly, sawing the air with his right hand.

“But in our combatant exuberant commotion, it is better still.”

Aglaya began to feel bored. Stalin had said that Mayakovsky had been and still was the best, the most talented, poet of our Soviet era. She didn't dare to argue with Stalin, but she didn't like Mayakovsky. She was much fonder of Demyan Bedny and Mikhail Isakovsky, whom she knew from his songs. She listened to Shubkin with only half an ear, gazing straight past him.

And Shubkin said: “The snake-street twists and turns, the houses in a row along the snake.”

At these words the boys and girls of the preschool group came running out from the wings, lined up in single file and began to run around the stage in a sinuous winding line, representing the snake-street.

“My street!” cried Shubkin. “My houses!”

The children surrounded Shubkin, and he flung out his arms, as though gathering them all in to protect them, and all of them together began shouting out triumphantly:

“The shops stand with their windows open wide,
Showing off the foodstuffs, tasty fruits and wine . . .”

 

Aglaya felt something touch her and looked down to see Shaleiko's knee rubbing against her own. At another time she might have enjoyed it. But now she wasn't in the mood. Onstage, Shubkin was behaving as though he was celebrating his victory over her. She looked into Shaleiko's face and said: “No.”

He asked her in a whisper: “Why?”

She answered him: “Because.”

He snorted in offense and began watching the stage, where the junior schoolchildren were performing a Red Navy sailors' dance. After that the intermediate-age schoolchildren performed the songs “Grenada” and “The Brigantine,” and the senior pupils performed extracts from some play about Lenin, which Shubkin had apparently written himself and in which he had given himself the leading role. When he came back out on stage wearing makeup and a beard, everybody simply gasped at how much he looked the part! He ran quickly around the stage, gesticulating wildly, screwed up his eyes cunningly, burred his
r
's French-style, slapped Stalin on the shoulder (he was played by Sveta Zhurkina in a false mustache) and called him “old chap,” pointed out his mistakes and shook a finger under his nose: “Wemember, old chap, legality is one of the supwemely important features of socialism.”

Aglaya watched the stage, clenched her fists and, forgetting the doctor's advice, she thought, I hate him!

Shubkin took over the second part of the concert completely, once again with poems by Mayakovsky and other poets. She heard “Verses About a Soviet Passport,” clenched her fists and thought, I hate him! He recited “Anna Snegina” and she thought, I hate him! He read extracts from “Vasilii Tyorkin,” and even then she thought, I hate him! But then he went on to some unprincipled modernist rubbish. Some Leonid Martynov or other:

What's this that's happened to me now?
I talk to you and yet somehow,
Although it's you my words are for,
They're echoed in the room next door.
And there's an echo I can hear
In woods and forests far and near,
In ruins right across the land
And people's houses close at hand.
I think it's no bad thing at all
If every sigh and every call
Travels so easily so far.
An echo that resounds and chimes.
Must be the kind of times these are.
Must be the echo of the times.

 

I hate him, thought Aglaya, pressing her fists hard against her knees.

However, most of the audience enjoyed the concert. There was a lot of applause and, of course, the loudest was for Shubkin.