Authors: Robert Littell
He is led through a maze of corridors and steel staircases to a room with an unmarked pale green door. With a flick of his head the guard motions Pravdin inside.
Inside he goes—to find himself staring at the lidded eyes, the shiny bald head, the tiny nostrils, the thin feminine lips of the Druse, Chuvash Al-hakim bi’amrillahi. Again Pravdin’s bloodless lips move, again words form, again no sound emerges; he is speechless with bewilderment. The Druse indicates with the forefinger of his right hand against his lips that Pravdin is to remain silent; he indicates with his eyes that the walls have ears; he indicates with two fingers of his left hand that Pravdin is to take the only other seat in the room.
“I am called Melor,” the Druse begins. He lights an American filter-tip cigarette from the butt of an old one. “I will
pose to you certain questions”—he taps with the long nail of his pinky a dossier open on the desk in front of him—“which have already been composed. You will think a moment and reply. We will now start.” The Druse studies the dossier, coughs discreetly into a silk handkerchief, switches on a tape recorder. “You were expelled from Lomonosov University for antisocialist onanism. You are now rumored to be involved in group sexual activities. Is that accurate?”
“Group sexual activities is what I would love to be involved in,” Pravdin cries passionately. “With me, two is already a crowd, one is unfortunately par. And where explain me is the law against masturbation?”
“Our interest is not so much in the sexual activities of the group, but in the existence of the group for whatever reason. A group is a place where conspiracies incubate.”
“
Participes curarum
is the only group I’ve ever belonged to,” claims Pravdin.
“What language is that, Jewish?”
“Jewish is right,” says Pravdin. “It’s an old Talmudic expression that means, ‘sharers of troubles.’ “
The Druse puts a tick next to an item in the dossier. “To move on, you are said to have attempted to bribe a woman at the Housing Ministry with two tickets to a performance at the Bolshoi of”—he glances at his notes—”
Eugene Onegin
.”
“
Tosca
is what it was. I left the tickets in my papers by mistake,” Pravdin explains lamely. “I asked for them back. Give them to me is what she wouldn’t do.”
Another tick. “You were seen walking on the grass in Sokolniki Park.”
“There was no sign that said keep off.”
“Keep off is understood.”
“Not by me. Detailed instructions are what I need.”
Another tick. “You obviously have a certain strength that originates in your lack of character; perhaps we should
call it ‘strength of character-less-ness.’ It occurs to me that that accounts for why it is difficult to categorize you. You don’t seem to fit anywhere.”
“I’m easy to categorize,” Pravdin says. “Afraid is what I am.
“Everyone’s afraid,” comments the Druse.
“You even?”
The Druse smiles weakly. “I’m afraid that one day I’ll come face to face with someone who won’t be afraid. To continue: You were observed meeting on several occasions with the American journalist Graham Hull. What was talked about?”
“The advances, touch wood, that have been made under scientific socialism,” Pravdin explains. “The inevitable victory of the working classes. Alienation. Vanguard of the proletariat. Withering away of the state. Surplus capital. And so forth and so on.”
“What are Q-Tips? Classic comics? Red Army exercises? Instant matzos? What is a vaginal deodorant spray?”
“Q-Tips are an idea whose time has come.” Pravdin launches into his pitch. Firing from the hip in short bursts, he explains each of the items on the Druse’s list. “Thesis: the male nostril, sniffing. Antithesis: the female organ, pungent. Synthesis: vaginal deodorant spray I” Leaning across the desk until his face is only centimeters from the Druse’s, he hisses: “Crazy is what I am!”
“That possibility is being considered,” the Druse replies evenly. He takes another sheet of paper from the dossier, studies it as he lights a new cigarette. “Explain, if you can, the significance of the following: Quis
custodiet ipsos custodes
; I’ve seen the future and it needs work; Nothing worth knowing can be teached; To dine with the devil use a long spoon; Behind every fortune is a crime; Full conformity is possible only in the cemetery; The shortage shall be divided among
the peasants; Publish and perish; So here it is at last, the Distinguished Thing; and last but by no means least, Chopping off heads is infectious—one today, another tomorrow and what will be left of the Party.” The Druse looks up, winks at Pravdin. “I believe we missed only one: you wrote something with a fingertip in the air. My operatives would have gotten it except for the fact that you weren’t working in Cyrillic.”
“French was the language of the moment,” Pravdin informs him. “My thumb, not my finger, is what I used. Jesus, sauve
Toi
is what I wrote.”
“
Jesus, sauve Toi
,” the Druse adds in longhand to his list. “Thank you. Would you now comment on the significance of these phrases.”
“Graffiti is what they are,” Pravdin explains. “Steam is what I’m letting off. It’s this way: I was wounded in the war. Shrapnel in the neck. Pinched nerve. The ability to shrug is what I lost. Result: tensions build up in me. Frustrations that others shrug away in me poison the blood, pinch the bladder, constrict the solar plexus; When I pass gas it’s always half an octave lower than anyone else out of nervousness. The only way I can live normally is to work off my frustrations. So I scribble on walls, windows, the sky even.”
“Graffiti is antisocialist,” the Druse informs him, “and out of place in a country that prides itself on progress. You do see that we are a land of progress, don’t you?”
“A land of progress is what we definitely are,” Pravdin readily agrees. “With my own eyes I’ve witnessed it. Take for example Uzbekistan, where shepherds pitch their yurtas around a six horsepower transformer with leads into each tent to watch color TV on large screens. It’s enough to take your breath away.”
“Just so,” the Druse agrees tonelessly.
Pravdin scribbles a note, passes it to the Druse. It says:
“When can I see you?” Out loud, he asks: “Why have I been brought here for interrogation?”
“You were picked up at random when your number came up in our computer.”
“My detention has nothing to do with … nothing?”
“Absolutely routine,” the Druse assures him.
“Manuscripts you’re not interested in?”
“What manuscripts are you talking about?” the Druse inquires.
“I’m writing a social history of the shrug,” Pravdin declares. “ The Shrug as Antithesis’ is its working title.”
The Druse shrugs to indicate his lack of interest.
“And I can go?” Pravdin whispers.
The Druse passes Pravdin a note that says: “Sandunovsky Bath House at ten.” Out loud, he says: “You can go, yes.”
Pravdin lifts his body off the seat as if it were bruised, backs toward the door, expecting at any moment the floor to give way beneath his sneakers, sending him spinning into some dark snakepit of a cell for twelve more years. To his astonishment the floor remains solidly beneath his feet. He reaches out and puts a hand on the knob and gingerly turns it, certain it will be locked. To his astonishment the door clicks open. He turns back to the Druse. “One question is what I have,” he says.
“Only ask.”
“Melor is not a name I’ve come across before. Russian it doesn’t sound. What is its origin, if it doesn’t offend you my asking?”
“Melor,” said the Druse, “is an acronym for Marx, En-gels, Lenin, Organizers of Revolution.”
The sidewalk vendor is down to
his last wind-up Quixote …
The sidewalk vendor is down to his last wind-up Quixote when Pravdin emerges into the thickening dusk, which is gathering over Moscow like the folds of a fire curtain. A sullen child with jutting ears silently pulls his reluctant mother toward the doll, which wheels on its horse and jerkily charges, lance level, a cardboard windmill.
“Want, want,” whines the child, tugging at his mother’s miniskirt until it comes off her hip. “Want.”
“How much?” the mother demands, annoyed at the vendor for putting temptation in her son’s way.
“Four rubles,” the vendor replies.
“Four rubles!” The woman is incredulous.
“Want, want,” cries the boy.
“Wanting is antisocialist,” Pravdin whispers in the woman’s ear. “Don Quixote also. Attention: those who are not with us are considered to be against us.” He shakes his head with exaggerated sadness. “Besides which, the windmill is who always wins.”
“For you, three rubles fifty,” the vendor coaxes.
“Want, want,” cries the child.
The woman looks at Pravdin as if he has bad breath, spins on one stiletto heel and wobbles off, yanking the boy after her so suddenly that he is lifted clear off the earth and trails after her like the tail of a kite.
The sidewalk vendor turns on Pravdin a look so mournful that he knows he is being hustled. He fishes from his change purse three rubles fifty, offers it to the vendor.
“Four rubles,” the vendor begs.
“Three fifty is what it was a minute ago,” complains Pravdin.
“For you, four,” the vendor stands firm.
Pravdin reluctantly counts out the change from his purse. The vendor accepts payment, verifies it. Pravdin, frustrated by his inability to shrug, stuffs the Don Quixote into his bulging briefcase, starts off in the direction of the Sandunovsky Bath House. Head angled into a gale that isn’t blowing, he crosses the cobblestones of Red Square, looks up to check his wristwatches against the great clock in the Kremlin tower, notices workmen draping from the Kremlin wall the first huge May Day banners, sees the minute hand of the great clock moving as if it is a second hand, sees the hour hand making the rounds as if it is a minute hand. Not at all dismayed, Pravdin turns his attention to a water truck making its way across the cobblestones directly toward a well-dressed men carrying a sack of avocados. Neither truck nor man veer. The truck escalates; its sprinkling system douses
the cobblestones for five meters on either side. Pravdin, fearful the truck will turn on him, dances away from an attack not made. The man with the avocados retreats too—too late, too late. His feet disappear in a swell of water. Pravdin, still reeling from his session with the Druse, has the impression that the well-dressed man, avocados held high to keep them dry, is walking on water, and he stares at the scene as if it is an epiphany.
“Epiphanies,” an inner voice warns him, “are antisocialist.”
“Those who are not with us,” Pravdin mutters out loud, “are considered to be off their rockers.”
“Talking to yourself,” Pravdin consoles himself, “has this advantage: conspiracy you can’t be accused of.”
“My kingdom,” Pravdin moans, “for a shrug.”
In frustration he scrawls in chalk across the inside of the Kremlin wall:
Better fewer, but better
(V. Lenin: Pravdin has a passion for quality control), dodges between some Scandinavian tourists staring up at the golden dome of an Orthodox church, zigs down several alleyways to make sure he isn’t being followed, continues at a more leisurely pace in the direction of the Sandunovsky Bath House.
Inside the entrance Pravdin counts out sixty kopecks, hands the change to an emaciated man sitting stiffly on a stool behind a high wooden counter. Pravdin senses that something is not quite right with the man, but it takes him several seconds of staring before he can put his finger on it: the ticket taker doesn’t appear to be breathing. Without any visible vital life signs except a tired mechanical muscular motion, he drops the kopecks into a compartmented drawer, tears off a ticket from a reel of tickets, rips it in half and deposits both halves in a cardboard box already brimming with torn
tickets. Pravdin helps himself to a rough white sheet from a pile stacked on a chair, strips quickly in the change room warm with the smell of sweat and birch bark, drapes the sheet across his shoulder like a toga, tips the attendant to keep an eye on his briefcase and change purse, skips the ritual weighing-in, enters the steam room. Instantly the hot moist air burns his nostrils, stings his eyes. Blinking quickly, gasping for air, Pravdin almost collides with a man sucking on a piece of salted fish. Another man with “For Stalin and the Motherland” tattooed on his biceps dashes a bucketful of water onto the fire bricks. Steam hisses off them into the saturated air. Wooden benches lined with naked, coughing men gradually come into view—a landfall seen through steam! Pravdin peers through the clouds of swirling steam looking for circumcised penises, spots none, keeps his toga draped casually over his private parts as he takes a vacant place on the end of a bench.
Next to him a pink-skinned man flails away at his back with a bouquet of leafy birch twigs, clears his throat several times, calls across the room in a commanding voice for someone to pour more water on the fire bricks, turns to Pravdin and out of the blue says: “Russia is a mysterious country, if you want my opinion.”
“Give me a for instance,” demands Pravdin.
“For instance,” the pink-skinned man obliges, “in all of Russia there is no place to get trousers cuffed, but millions upon millions of men are walking around with cuffs on their trousers.”
“Cuffs,” Pravdin mumbles, “are a covenant between God and his chosen people.”
“God is dead,” the pink-skinned man says gently.
“Touch wood,” Pravdin replies, rapping his knuckles on the bench.
The pink-skinned man leans toward Pravdin; his head emerges out of the steam, but not his body, causing Pravdin
to imagine that the two are no longer connected, assuming they ever were. ‘Tell me the truth,” he asks Pravdin, “you don’t really like steam, do you?”
“You read minds too,” he remarks sourly.
The pink-skinned man retreats into the steam; his voice, mocking in tone, emerges as if filtered by some barely remembered grievance. ‘The mister you want to see also doesn’t like steam. You can not like steam together in a private room, the door of which is behind you and to your right”