Monumental Propaganda (7 page)

16

After the concert the celebrations continued in the director's office, at two long desks set end to end. Aglaya found herself sitting between Shaleiko and Shubkin. She didn't speak to Shubkin at all and even pretended not to notice him. Turning her back, she began asking Shaleiko loudly about collective farm business: how had the spring harvest gone and had they sowed a lot of winter crops? As he informed her in a low voice of the main figures, Shaleiko touched her knee with his hand under the tablecloth. She shook his hand off and asked about the livestock—had the cattle sheds been coldproofed for the winter?

“But of course,” said Shaleiko, thrusting his hand back into place. “The roofs have been re-covered, the walls have been plastered, there are heaters everywhere.”

She forced him off again and carried on sitting there as if she were alone, pouring her own port.

Bogdan Filippovich Nechitailo proposed a toast to the October Revolution, to the Party that had successfully overcome the consequences of the cult of personality and to our own dear Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, who was leading the country along the path of renewal. He made special mention of Nikita Sergeevich's efforts in the area of reinstating Leninist norms of socialist legality.

Continuing the toast, Chikurin asked people to raise their glasses for one particular example of reinstated legality—in other words, for Mark Semyonovich Shubkin. Who, as Chikurin put it, had not taken offense at the Party. “People don't take offense at the Party,” Shaleiko put in.

“That's just what I'm saying,” Chikurin agreed happily. “People don't take offense at the Party. Soviet people have their pride, they might take offense at their neighbor, their fellow worker, their wife, brother, mother and father, but not the Party . . .” he paused for a long moment, thrust out his lower lip and held up his forefinger, wagging it from side to side. “Uh—uh! And Mark Semyonovich hasn't taken offense . . . You haven't taken offense, have you, Mark Semyonovich?”

“Not in the slightest,” responded Mark Semyonovich. “I haven't taken offense. And what's more, I've acquired some quite invaluable experience of life.”

“You should have acquired a bit more,” Aglaya joked unexpectedly.

“What?” asked Shubkin, turning toward her.

“Nothing,” she said, and turned away.

“Yes,” said Chikurin, continuing his speech. “Mark Semyonovich hasn't taken offense, he hasn't become embittered, he hasn't withdrawn into his own shell. He has launched himself energetically into work and social activity. He educates children and produces a newspaper, and he organized our amateur performance. Soon we're going to the district festival, where I have no doubt we'll take first prize.”

Naturally, Aglaya took the praise of Shubkin as a reproach to herself, but she didn't meddle in the conversation again. All the toasts proposed were alien to her, but she felt like drinking and she did, only without clinking glasses with anyone. And the more she drank, the more she became aware of a strange attraction to Shubkin. Even though Shaleiko was still occasionally pestering her from her left side and annoying her with his hands. After two glasses of port and half of a third, she began feeling boisterous and, leaning across to Shubkin, asked, “Are you glad you won?”

“No, it wasn't you I was fighting against,” Shubkin replied in a respectful tone, although he was three years older than she was. “I was defending principles. And I wish you no harm.”

“Oh, of course not!” she said in disbelief. “Sure you do! I think if it was in your power,” she said, surrendering to an agitation she was not even aware of, “you'd crack down pretty hard on me.”

“Only in one way,” said Shubkin. “I'd move you as far away as possible from children. But that's all.”

Meanwhile, the merriment continued. After supper they moved the tables aside and began dancing to an accordion. The musician was Aglaya's neighbor Zhorka Zhukov, a shock-haired, wild young guy who had been specially invited to perform for the gathering. He sat on a chair by the window with his glass of vodka set on the windowsill, and in the breaks between dances he took up the glass and sipped from it, then went on playing again with his eyes closed, as if he were asleep. Shaleiko persisted in his attentions, inviting Aglaya to dance. She danced one waltz with him but didn't really enjoy it.

Afterward, Shaleiko and Nechitailo sang a duet—“Boys, unharness the horses”—and Nechitailo's wife, Rada (which would translate from the Ukrainian as “Soviet”), performed an aria from the opera
A Zaporozhian
Beyond the Danube
—“I'm a maiden from Poltava and my name it is Natalka.”

When it was all over and the group of colleagues went tumbling out into the cold, rainy evening, Aglaya caught up with Shubkin outside the gates and tugged on his sleeve: “Listen you . . . if I had my way, if I'd come across you during the war . . . you mangy cur . . . my pistol . . . I'd have emptied the entire clip into you . . .”

Then she suddenly grabbed hold of him and pulled him hard against herself so that he thought she was trying to strangle him, not realizing that what she was feeling was a simultaneous upsurge of hatred and of passion. She wanted to kill him and at the same time she was consumed by the desire to be crushed beneath him, for him to trample her, smash her, flatten her out like dough on a board.

He was bigger than she was, the stronger sex, with muscles that had been pretty well developed in the logging camps. But coping with this frenzied woman proved anything but easy. He tried to break away but couldn't. She pulled his head down toward her and in her contradictory desire forced her mouth against him as though in a passionate kiss, but then pressed her teeth together and bit through his lower lip. The taste of blood made her want to keep on biting him, in anticipation of the onset of some exceptional state, but he cut short her passionate impulse with a rough shove and threw her off him so that she fell, bruising her knee and tearing her stocking, while he fled in horror, pressing his hand against his lip, spattering blood as he went and looking back over his shoulder.

Such behavior on her part may perhaps seem strange to some people. It seemed strange to this author. He even thought it might perhaps contain some key to the riddle of Aglaya's character and consulted a highly prestigious leading psychologist of the Freudian persuasion on the matter. The psychological luminary thought long and hard before delivering judgment: “Your heroine evidently belongs to the type of woman who suffers from constant sexual frustration. Some endure it relatively calmly. But she's from a different category. She can't accept anything at all calmly, and especially this. Under certain circumstances her desire is so passionately aroused that she cannot control it and becomes irrational. This desire arises suddenly, like a fit, and it is capable, even without any sexual act, of driving her to the point of orgasm, but at the very last moment the fit passes, the peak of desire and passion remains unattained and the result is a powerful and painful emotional devastation that renders her harsh, vicious and cruel.”

“All right,” I said, “let us assume all that is true, but what has it all got to do with Shubkin? What desire can he provoke, if she hates him so much she could shoot him?”

“Well that,” said the luminary, “is a fairly common psychological derangement. Insane hatred arouses the same kind of attraction as insane love. In a person like your Aglaya the most powerful manifestations of love and hate are quite indistinguishable from each other.”

17

I feel sorry for those future generations who will not even be able to imagine that there was a time when the broad extensive lands of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (broad extensive lands, not expensive foreign brands) were all under the sway of a general system of sociopolitical views that were progressive in every respect and compulsory for every one of the three hundred million representatives of the peoples, nations and tribes (some of them still pretty wild) who occupied those extensive lands, and which went by the name of the Sole Correct Scientific World Outlook.

This world outlook was uniquely correct, and it was promulgated by the only political party (there was no need for any others). But while all the members of the Party accepted the Sole Correct Scientific World Outlook, they were divided among themselves into two hostile tendencies. One tendency was Marxist-Leninist and the other was Stalinist. The Marxist-Leninists were good Marxists, kind people. They wanted to establish a good life on earth for good people and a bad life for bad people, but it had to be done in accordance with the World Outlook. And therefore they killed bad people, but whenever they could, they left the good people alive. The Stalinists, however, were essentially democrats—they killed everybody without distinction, and they regarded the World Outlook not as a dogma but as a guide to action. Consequently, the Marxist-Leninists were regarded as humanists and devotees of the Sole Correct Scientific World Outlook, while the Stalinists were devoted to Stalin and were prepared to follow him in any direction, wherever he might lead them.

And so the difference between Mark Semyonovich Shubkin and Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina was that he was a Marxist-Leninist and she was a Stalinist. But they both, each in their way, preached the Sole Correct Scientific World Outlook, which our Admiral referred to by the acronym SCOSWO, pronouncing it rather like a Japanese word—Scuswu.

By the way, about the Admiral. It's about time he was introduced in a little greater detail.

Alexei Mikhailovich Makarov did not bear this sobriquet because he had an admiral's surname. And it was not derived from his chosen profession, for by qualification he was a linguist and literary scholar. Nor was it the result of his actual labor activity, for he spent his working hours as a night watchman at a lumberyard. He was called Admiral because of his infatuation with the sea, which he had never seen, but about which he knew everything—from books. As a matter of fact, he knew everything about everything from books. Even more than Shubkin. When they asked him how he had acquired such extensive knowledge, he used to say it was simply good luck. In his childhood he had been confined to bed by poliomyelitis, so he had never played soccer or tag or chased the girls. And in those days he had never seen a television or computers, or computer games or the Internet. And it was yet another stroke of luck that he hadn't been born in America, where they would have invented some kind of electromechanical gadget to help him get about that would have distracted him from the acquisition of knowledge. Here in Russia he had been provided with absolutely ideal conditions, in which there was absolutely nothing else he could do but read an absolutely huge number of books and learn an absolutely huge amount about everything.

Like many other people condemned to immobility, in his childhood Alyosha Makarov had been fascinated by tales of sea voyages and adventures. He began, of course, with Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson and then delved deeper into the subject, studying the biography of every seafarer who was even slightly famous and the history of the discovery of various lands, and descriptions of sea battles, and he knew the different types of ships from ancient Greek galleys to modern atomic-powered vessels. In addition, he had an entire collection of navigational charts and nautical almanacs, but most important of all, he had a ship's wheel attached to the head of his bed, and it helped him plow his furrow through imaginary seas and oceans. By the age of eighteen Alyosha Makarov had made a partial recovery from his illness, had learned to walk with the support of two sticks, graduated from college (although largely by correspondence) and had even written a postgraduate dissertation on problems of linguistics. It was so brilliant that at first they wanted to award him a doctorate for it, but then they gave him five years in exile instead. That was how he had ended up in Dolgov from Moscow. At first he had lived here with his mother and then on his own. He couldn't work as a literary critic or perform any physical labor, and he wouldn't have been able to survive on his pension. Kind people fixed him up with a job at the lumberyard opposite his house, and he used to struggle across there on his sticks and spend every second night on watch.

And so our Admiral, being a man of immense learning and absolutely independent views, who always had his own original opinion on everything, regarded SCOSWO disrespectfully even in those times when very few people could even conceive of such a possibility. Under his influence I also began to ponder and to doubt things that had seemed incontrovertible to me only recently. I began to wonder why SCOSWO was regarded as exclusively true and scientific and why the cause of the people's future happiness required so many of the people to be killed, hounded, ruined, starved and frozen. And whether it might not have been better to invent some Uniquely Incorrect SCOSWO that would be a bit less hard on people. To this very day, however, the devotees of SCOSWO claim that the theory was good but the practice was bad. Lenin devised it correctly, but Stalin applied it wrongly. But who, where, in what country, has ever applied it correctly? Khrushchev? Brezhnev? Mao Tse-tung? Kim Il Sung? Ho Chi Minh? Pol Pot? Castro? Honecker? Who? Where? When? What is so good about this theory if it can never be confirmed in practice anywhere under any conditions?

Nowadays, of course, the number of people selflessly devoted to SCOSWO has fallen a bit. But in the times we are describing here the broad expanses of our homeland were home to quite large numbers of them, one of whom was Mark Semyonovich Shubkin, a faithful adherent of SCOSWO, a disciple first of Lenin-Stalin and then of Lenin alone. But he held on to Lenin for a long time, with firm, total commitment. Shubkin remained faithful to SCOSWO and to Lenin before and after his arrest, during his nocturnal interrogations, even during the years he spent engaged in public works. Despite the cold and hunger, never, not once, not for a single moment (until a certain time came) did he doubt. Major and minor devils frequently tempted him, trying to sow doubt in his mind, but he endured like Jesus Christ, in whom he did not believe.

The investigator Tikhonravov beat Mark Semyonovich very painfully with a towel twisted into a heavy rope while abusing him in the vilest possible terms, blinded him with the table lamp, prevented him from sleeping and wouldn't let him sit down, but when Mark Semyonovich, enduring all of this stoically, pointed to the portrait of Lenin hanging above the investigator's head and rebuked him with quotations from the leader, Tikhonravov replied simply, “I couldn't give a shit for your Lenin.” To which Shubkin was unable to find sufficiently convincing counterarguments. But he continued to display his previous fortitude. And he left the camp unbroken, undefeated, with his views unchanged. That is, in the words of the Admiral, he left it the same fool he was when he entered it. A sealed and certified fool, the Admiral called him, meaning a fool with certificates with big seals on them.

I must confess there were times when the Admiral's judgments seemed too harsh to me. And in Shubkin's case undeservedly harsh. After all, if a man had been through the camps and not changed his convictions in spite of everything, surely that was worthy of respect?

“Sheer stupidity, no matter what,” the Admiral used to reply mercilessly, “and not even stupidity—absolute idiocy.”

The Admiral regarded Shubkin with mild contempt, although at first he himself had attempted to shatter his faith in SCOSWO and its supreme idol. He used to tell Shubkin about the German money and the German railroad carriage (which also happened to have seals on it), about the priests and prostitutes executed on the personal orders of “the most humane man ever to walk the earth,” about his progressive paralysis as a result of syphilis, and many other things which at that time were known to only a few. None of these stories produced even the slightest effect on Shubkin. Especially since he knew many of them already. But he explained the actions of his idol by objective circumstances, harsh necessity and the fact that revolutions are not made wearing kid gloves. He advised the Admiral to undertake a close rereading of Lenin's full collected works. “And then,” he said, “it will become clear even to you that Lenin is a genius.” “If he's a genius,” the Admiral used to argue, “then why is this prison camp socialism of ours so badly constructed?” Shubkin would object, “Lenin didn't intend to build what exists now, but something better.” “But a genius,” the Admiral used to say, “builds what he wants to build, not something else.” “Lenin,” Shubkin would explain, “could not foresee the inertness of the peasant masses, which would not appreciate the advantages of socialism, and he could not foresee that the petit-bourgeois element would work its way up to the leadership of the country, that the leadership would turn aside from the road he had chosen, reject the New Economic Policy and advance too fast into collectivization.” “But a genius,” the Admiral would persist, “is only a genius if he does foresee things. It doesn't take a genius not to foresee things. We can all do that.” “Vladimir Ilich,” Shubkin would sigh, “was born a hundred years ahead of his time.” “Well there I agree with you,” the Admiral would say, nodding his head in confirmation, “but at your age you should know that premature children are often retarded.”

Shubkin withstood all the Admiral's onslaughts and for a long time, throughout the sixties and halfway through the seventies, he remained faithful to SCOSWO, and moreover, in doing so he behaved almost entirely in accordance with the behest of Christ, who had told his apostles: Go forth and preach. Shubkin preached to the old and the young, even to children of preschool age, hammering SCOSWO into childish heads in a form accessible to them.

For instance, in the form of folktales. Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina had been right when she suspected Shubkin of investing the apparently innocent tales that he told to children with far-from-innocent meaning. That was precisely it. When he told them about the wolf and the three little pigs, Shubkin did not make the gray wolf into the embodiment of American imperialism, as Aglaya wanted, or even a simple predator of the forest, but Stalin and the little pigs represented a trio whom he now regarded as faithful Leninists—Trotsky, Bukharin and Zinoviev.