Good People (19 page)

Suddenly she was filled with happiness. If he had come to announce that her parents were dead, he wouldn't have mentioned any plays, and he wouldn't fool around with parables.

She gained strength. I don't remember, she wanted to say. You and I, we're always sweeping up memories and putting them in piles.

He sat on the bed. He was holding a cup in his right hand. He dipped his fingers in the water and moistened her lips. Then he supported her back, and with a delicate movement he helped her drink: a sip, a pause, a sip, a pause.

‘Ismene was right,' he said. ‘It's foolish to exceed your ability. You aren't powerful enough to oppose the will of the people.'

The city wafted from his body: crisp bread and cooking oil and tar, the saltiness of the wind, the sweat of a street bustling with people, a wet leather coat. Hunger went wild inside her, and she imagined bread with goose fat and her grandmother's meatballs.

‘And you, Sasha, have only two choices: Die or become another person.'

LENINGRAD

AUTUMN 1939

The sound of someone breathing: Sasha heard him grunt, exhaling his dreams. She once tried to stay awake the whole night just to throw open a window onto his dreams. In their June nights, when they were sixteen, a dazzling light poured into the city, whitening the stone bridges, stirred in the currents of the river. Midnight, and the strange feeling of a city not sleeping but fainting. They lay in parks or under bridges or even on roofs, exchanging the same secrets, pretending they had never heard them before, guessing at what window a face might appear only to recoil at a cruel blow of light. Sometimes after a few kisses, before they had done anything, he would fall asleep. He was one of those people who went to sleep as soon as they lay down, no matter where. He hid in the mystery of sleep, and she negotiated with his body: pinched his arm, whispered to him, tried to guess his dreams. His imagination flew off to distant realms while his body clung to hers, yearning for her warmth. Are you your body? The question stayed with her.

Now he was sighing. His right hand tunnelled under her back to
link up with his left, which lay across her stomach. She never understood how he managed to do it—she resisted and pressed her back against the mattress, and he had to struggle against her. It amused her to see a person show such determination even in sleep.

His manoeuvre ended with victory. His arms tightened around her, his stomach was pressed to her hips, his lips on her neck. Now he'd encircled her. Even in winter he slept half-naked, and his nakedness demanded that her body defend him against the cold. Sometimes she was put off and drew away, and would then run her fingers with pleasure over his goosebumps. Sometimes it got so cold that she imagined there were no walls, only the dark trees that swayed in the wild nights and shook off clumps of snow.

How simple relations were with a sleeping body. You could erase all trace of your actions as if nothing had happened. In childhood she used to dream she was wandering in a world that had gone to sleep and she could do whatever she liked. She turned beggars into kings, and cut noblemen down to size, but she always knew she had to put things back the way they were before everyone woke up. She told Nadya about that dream, and Nadya snapped at her, ‘Girl, don't you dare even in your dreams to make a mess?'

The illumination of the room in the dawn light gave her the strange sensation that it was orchestrated against her in particular. She tried to convince herself that she was in charge now, and had arranged the furniture in their new apartment to her satisfaction, but with every glance her eyes sought traces of the house that was lost. At least twice a week she woke in the middle of the night with anguish crouched on her windpipe. She would wander through the apartment, groping for the familiar hallway, the living room, the sofa next to the window until she stopped before the absent mirror. She would realise that it wasn't Kolya lying in her bed, and in the living room, between two bookcases, there was no black piano with paint peeling from its legs. Resist it as she might, she came to the realisation that the only thing left to her now was loss. What kind of person would she be without it?

The minutes passed. Their room brightened. The picture hanging opposite the bed—a reproduction of Surikov's ‘Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy'—was the first thing to emerge. Sasha and Maxim had both liked that painting ever since they were in school. Once a week the members of Maxim's class used to act out the execution, piling up old wooden beams to look like the platform in the picture. Podolsky sometimes played the judge and sometimes the hangman. The judge would announce the verdict to a chorus of cheers, and the children would crowd around in tight circles. Girls weren't allowed to squeeze to the front—except for her, of course. Two boys would snatch the trembling little boy whose turn had come, and the hangman would tighten the noose around his neck until the victim coughed.

The reproduction was their first joint purchase. They laughed when they hung it up, and they laughed when, for just one day, they stole a cartoon version of it that Podolsky had found during a search of some provocateur's lair, and stuck it on their bathroom door: Stalin and his entourage taking pleasure in piling up frozen corpses. They enjoyed tired old jokes from the days when Yezhov ran the NKVD:

A breathless elephant turns up at the border checkpoint. ‘I have to escape from here,' he begs the guards.

‘Why?' they ask in surprise.

‘Come on! Didn't you hear the NKVD is purging Russia of sheep?'

‘But you're an elephant.'

‘Go tell that to Yezhov.'

How did the dawn rise in her window? First in secret, as though lazily climbing the walls, until in one swoop it swallowed the night. Then Maxim awoke. He yawned. His white tongue looped out like a dog's, he stretched his arms, and his chest expanded. She rushed to the silver-plated samovar in the kitchen to boil water, and sat at the wooden table, which was painted a happy orange. At her side was another chair. She heard the water bubbling in the samovar, ‘A Wedding Present to the Young Couple', that they received from Stepan Kristoforovich and the comrades from the second department. Soon
the whistle would blow, and the four little legs would tremble. Sometimes they scuttled a full six inches before the water boiled. She got up, brewed tea, filled two cups and sat down again. In the bedroom bare feet shuffled, then she could hear running water, and the sound of the razor blade against skin, which always gave her the chills, and in a few minutes the tapping of shoes. She sipped the tea and gazed down the corridor. Now her husband appeared, washed, dressed and perfumed. He sat down next to her, and gave her a fond smile that seemed significant. Sometimes she imagined that his ginger sideburns were shaped like smiling lips.

‘Good morning, dear,' he called.

He liked the morning. He always woke up ready to take the world by storm. But then the passing hours wore him out: the new day never met his expectations, and in the evening he crawled home weary and brooding. And she? She hated the morning. It was clear to her that she wouldn't make it through the new day safely. She needed at least an hour to wake up in silent preparation for what was to come. After that her anxiety faded, and she felt stronger, and when evening came she felt like putting on her prettiest dress and strolling arm in arm with Maxim, attracting admiring gazes: a tall, handsome young couple, people always said.

Her husband stuck a cube of sugar in his mouth and sucked on it. Sometimes the first noise that tickled her ears in the morning was the sound of that sucking. In the first week in their new apartment, she used to turn on the radio while he was sucking the sugar. One morning the announcer quoted a speech by Stalin from 1935: ‘Life is getting better, comrades, life is getting merrier.' Strange how sad those words made her feel. Afterwards she decided to get used to the sucking.

He looked at her and slurped his tea. It dripped from his stylish moustache—a project now two months old. That was a sign for her to head for the bathroom, to wash in cold water, put on a faded skirt and a yellowish buttoned blouse, and tie her hair in a single braid. She wore no make-up except for a pale strip of red lipstick. ‘Comrade Weissberg, you must not look too pretty at work,' Stepan Kristoforovich
Merkalov, the head of the department, had instructed her.

Now it was a quarter past nine. Four short blasts of a car's horn were heard from the street. ‘A lot of honking this morning, Stepan Kristoforovich,' Maxim growled. He was the only one in the office who insisted on calling him by his name and patronym. Everyone else called him by his nickname, Styopa. Each morning that honking made Maxim frown, the first sign that today wouldn't be any different from any other day.

‘Almost ready,' she said and hurried to the bedroom, stuck her pocketbook and a few files under her arm, and stepped out the door. She rushed down the stairs, waving goodbye to a boy who was sitting there, looking all dressed up and sour. He was holding a package wrapped with colourful ribbons. ‘A present for your teacher?' she asked. He didn't answer. A good spanking wouldn't harm that child.

The black car was waiting for her at the end of the tunnel that connected the building to the street. Every morning, when it parked there, other tenants were forced to squeeze between it and the wall to get outside. Of course no one complained. She always wondered whether Styopa even saw those people.

‘Good morning to the chief editor of the NKVD publishing house in Leningrad,' her boss called out gaily. This was his constant line. Now it was her turn, as in an orchestra. ‘The best life stories that will never see the light of day,' she recited.

Styopa smiled. Even after four months he was still entertained by his fake description of her position.

From the window of their fourth-floor apartment Maxim watched the car. The department head's new custom of picking Sasha up every morning didn't please him. It was better to keep a distance from your superiors. Otherwise you got friendly with them, and friends always quarrelled, and that could lead to unnecessary trouble. But Sasha and Maxim both understood that that wasn't the issue. Maxim Podolsky, the man who restored Sasha from the dead, as he claimed, was forced to accept a new patron, a department head no less, who used to pat Maxim's shoulder with infinite condescension. ‘Young Comrade
Podolsky,' he would say, ‘they're very pleased with your work up there.'

‘Comrade Weissberg, you look tired,' said Styopa. ‘Had a hard night?' He winked.

‘I'm fine, Comrade Merkalov,' said Sasha.

‘Very well.' Styopa stretched in his seat. ‘Now listen to a funny story: Reznikov calls me yesterday and says, “Punin? This is the NKVD. Please report to our office tomorrow morning at 11 a.m., room 229, the pass will be ready at the gate.” And I say to him, with the pathetic stammer of the poor soul who suddenly understands that we're on his tail, “Sir, Comrade NKVD, I'm a decent and loyal citizen. I've never done anything. Decent and also loyal…Besides, tomorrow my daughter Natalia is getting married.” And our darling Reznikov gets furious and shouts, “We'll see how loyal you are. As far as I'm concerned, your mother could get buried twice tomorrow,” and he slams down the receiver.

‘Then I call Reznikov, and I say to him, “This is the head of the department. First, you have to learn how to speak more politely to citizens.” He realises that he called me by mistake, and he starts panting like a dog chasing a train. “Second,” I ask him, “does Punin have any daughters?” He's quiet for a moment. “Yes…two,” he mumbles. “And what are their names?” “Eva and Yelena.” “So there's no Natalia? Not only did you mismanage the matter of the daughters, Comrade Reznikov, but according to the protocols you're supposed to identify yourself by name. We don't want citizens to see us as something inhuman. And to bury Punin's mother twice, even though he hasn't admitted anything yet?”'

He laughed and pounded the seat with his fist. The driver let out a snort of laughter. Sasha looked at Styopa with gratitude, feeling her body warm up at Reznikov's humiliation.

Every morning the department head regaled them with amusing stories inspired by mishaps—letters, minutes, orders and misdirected telephone calls, innocuous errors made by his subordinates. But when a mistake involved senior people, Styopa crawled through the rooms of the department clutching a pile of crumpled papers, cursing under his breath.

Stepan Kristoforovich was a hefty fellow who was light on his feet. But his bloodshot face always made him look sickly. He was a polite, pleasant man to share a joke with or trade gossip, but some people misread him. If, for example, he started to pat his shirt down, or to take an interest in the furniture, this was a sign he had lost interest in you, and you'd better clear out. He held a grudge against people who didn't take the hint, and the grudge might last for months, until he got even with them. In general nothing faded in Stepan Kristoforovich's world, which was why he never saw fit to respond to his subordinates' requests or to sort out their disputes. His greatest talent, so he claimed, was putting time to work, to harness the advantages that could be drawn from its passage, to understand how the curve of its usefulness rose, and then fell—and to act only after its advantages had been entirely exhausted. ‘And that, young Comrade Weissberg,' he always said, ‘is something that, unfortunately, cannot be learned. It's the holy trinity: intuition; principles that you never abandon; and friends who would inform on you only at the last.' In the office people said he was loyal to his subordinates, and also one of the most accomplished liars in the history of the
bolshoi dom
; he could talk your mother into swearing she was a virgin.