Happiness is Possible (22 page)

‘I'll tellyallrite – I'm on the tractor.'

He utters the words so simply, so matter-of-factly . . .

Tears spring to my eyes too, but the vodka's not to blame. Our dear, wise, Russian peasant! What would we do without you?

When Tamara and I moved into our flat, the first thing I did, of course, was replace the standard, municipal-issue lock on the door with one exactly like it, bought in a shop. Immediately after that I took a piece of paper with my new address (in case I forgot it), went to the post office and subscribed to a newspaper. Both of these actions were, as I understand them, intended to assert my identity as a citizen, something I felt an acute need to do at the time. After all, the flat had been bought by Toma's dad, and I, as a student of merely average academic achievement, represented a social unit of a rather low order. The keys to my own flat and a newspaper that would now be delivered to me personally implicitly raised my status, even if only in my own eyes and also, perhaps, in the eyes of the local postwoman. I wanted to acquire greater respectability, and I can't see anything greatly wrong with that. In addition, when I was still little I had acquired the ineradicable habit of reading while I eat. But there was another reason for subscribing to the newspaper: I needed a regular source of information. After all, I was intending to become a dutiful philistine and, as a general rule, the philistine likes to snuggle down in a safe little refuge from which he can peep out unnoticed, observing what's going on in the world.

However, not many peepholes were available to us philistines of the totalitarian era. The hot and cold water taps functioned more or less adequately, but the information tap oozed only turbid sludge. The TV and most of the newspapers were not only brazen pedlars of political untruth, they also simply suppressed all the facts that interested us. I am not talking here, of course, about crimes, air crashes and the personal lives of celebrities: the philistine of the totalitarian era was interested in far loftier matters than that. Only two daily organs of the press could even come close to satisfying the philistine demand, one Moscow paper and one All-Union paper. I won't mention their names now because, with the arrival of freedom and democracy, they were both dumbed down and have deteriorated into tabloids.

My choice, therefore, was not wide. Of the two newspapers I, as a philistine with a relatively broad outlook, chose the All-Union one.

However, a few years later the winds of change began howling across the country. We greeted them enthusiastically, my newspaper and I. Everybody then was literally intoxicated with the advent of new freedoms. But, as everyone knows, intoxication loosens the tongue – and my newspaper's tongue was loosened to a positively indecent degree. My philistine nature sought objective yet reassuring information, but I had to read interviews with insane politologists, accounts of crimes and daily reports of various ‘glamorous' binges. For a while I continued to subscribe to this newspaper out of sheer inertia, although I could feel it slipping down the ladder of evolution and dragging me with it. The paper got more expensive with every month that passed and grew fatter on my money, spawning all sorts of senseless inserts and supplements. My home began to resemble a collection point for waste paper.

Eventually my tolerance snapped and I decided to find myself a different, more respectable newspaper. However, despite the modern-day abundance of periodical publications or, perhaps, precisely because of this excessive abundance, my search dragged on and on. The philistine of the totalitarian era, leafing through today's newspapers would probably decide that he was being taken for an idiot. Today's newspapers are not actually intended for any normal kind of philistine. They are mostly read by what is euphemistically referred to as ‘the people', but should really be called ‘the herd'.

Even so, my obstinacy was eventually rewarded – I found exactly the newspaper that I was looking for. I won't say what it's called, to avoid providing it with free advertising, but it's a very good newspaper. Not left, not right, not pro-government or anti-government; not sensational, with no advertisements and no show-business faces. A sound, reliable philistine newspaper. Nonetheless, in the light of my previous experience, I decided not to register any official relationship with the newspaper in the form of a subscription. Instead of this I got my wife Tamara into the habit of buying it for me at the kiosk beside the metro station on her way home from work.

Some might perhaps say the only possible reason to read any kind of newspaper these days is for the ritual of it. Forty TV channels and the Internet provide us with information 24/7, so there isn't even any need to go downstairs to the post box to get it. I won't argue with that. I'm a philistine, which means that my existence is dependent on rituals. Without rituals, life starts to seem empty and pointless to me. As an example, let me tell you that when Tamara left me and there was no one to buy my newspaper at the kiosk by the metro, I fell into something like a state of depression. I drank my morning coffee, staring blankly at the fridge, ate lunch without any appetite and in the evenings I quaffed vodka, simply to get to sleep. I had developed such an entrenched aversion to the television and the inane consumerist optimism it touted that I never even went near it. I didn't switch the computer on either, so that it wouldn't remind me about work.

Without a newspaper I was going completely to seed, losing count of the days and losing track of international political developments. Naturally, things couldn't go on like that forever. I was already gathering myself to take the plunge and subscribe to that newspaper of mine. Or I could have walked to the kiosk at the metro every day to get it, which would, of course, have been stupid and irrational. The root of the problem was that every action taken to improve my conditions of life would have signified acceptance on my part that I had made the transition to the unmarried state. Such an admission would have signified the final collapse of all my philistine illusions, and I absolutely did not wish to part with them. It still seemed to me, especially in the evenings, that the door would open at any moment and Tamara would walk in, bringing me my newspaper.

Nonetheless, some decision had to be taken, and a decision had almost matured within me, but I can't remember what that decision was now, because I never took it at the time: external circumstances intervened. My thoughts concerning the newspaper and other matters were interrupted by an unexpected telephone call from a certain literary club: I was invited to a meeting with readers. I say the call was unexpected, but that was only because I was so engrossed in all these difficulties with newspapers and other non-literary problems. Generally speaking, all Moscow writers expect calls like that as a matter of course and respond to them enthusiastically, since they believe that meetings with readers increase their popularity. The writers preferred by clubs are poets, because poets have more charisma, and the clubs preferred by writers are the ones that offer decent hospitality. In this respect the club to which I had been invited was highly regarded and I was delighted to accept the invitation.

Forgetting all my philistine woes for the time being, I immersed myself in preparations for the literary evening. The first thing I had to do was find my best pair of trousers and remove the stains deposited on them at my last buffet reception. This proved far from easy, because previously my trousers had always been found and cleaned by Tamara. In addition, it was rather a long time since my previous buffet reception, so the stains were well dried in. After that it got easier; I knew how to wash my hair and shave for myself – I actually performed both these functions more often than I had meetings with readers. My appearance did not require any other cosmetic procedures; in this respect we male writers have an advantage over our colleagues of the female sex, who have to work hard and earn lots of money to pay the masseuses, facialists, etc.

The function had been arranged for seven in the evening, but since I don't use surface transport, I arrived ahead of time, as always, for this meeting with myself. In order not to cause the organisers any stress by making my appearance too early, I didn't go into the club immediately but stayed outside on the porch for a smoke. The public gradually began rolling up. Men and women of various ages – all, however of a readerly appearance – walked in through the door without taking the slightest notice of me. Only one gentleman, probably a regular at the club, came over, politely shouldered me aside and started reading a notice that I had apparently been obscuring.

‘Who have we got today?' he muttered. ‘Aha.'

The notice announced that today they had me. The gentleman paused doubtfully for a moment, but then proceeded into the club anyway.

Eventually, having smoked two cigarettes, I decided it was already acceptable for me to enter. To the organisers' great credit, they recognised me the moment I walked in and immediately led me off to a special little room to discuss the format of the evening in prospect.

‘Do you smoke?' they asked, pouring me coffee. ‘If you do, go ahead.'

In order not to offend the obliging organisers, I lit up a cigarette – my third in the last twenty minutes.

We exchanged ideas over coffee, first on a professional wavelength and then on a social one. Whatever I said, the organisers listened to it with interested expressions on their faces, although from time to time one or other of them would offer his excuses and absent himself from the room to see what was going on the hall. The burden of their reports was that the hall continued to fill up, a circumstance by which the organisers were clearly surprised.

‘Generally speaking, not so many people show up for the prose writers,' they told me. ‘But then, of course, you know that yourself.'

We started hypothesising, wondering what could be the reason for this unprecedented turn-out, and came to the conclusion that I had the French writer Houellebecq to thank for it. He had cancelled an appearance in Moscow that evening for reasons unknown, thereby unwittingly diverting the readers' attention to me.

Then my hour struck. I walked out into the hall, accompanied by the organisers. There were fifteen, perhaps even twenty people out there. It wasn't possible to tell which of them were Houellebecq's admirers and which were mine. After the applause died down, the youth chairing the meeting introduced me and listed off my services to Russian literature, checking with his notepad as he did so. When he finished he handed me the microphone and I also said a few words about myself. Then, in accordance with the agreed format for the evening, I opened a small volume containing my latest work and started reading out loud to the readers. After that everything went as usual. At first the audience responded adequately to the text, that is, they laughed at the funny parts and sat quietly through the parts that weren't funny. But gradually the audience's attention started to flag; some were already whispering together, hiding their mouths behind their hands, others were searching for something in their handbags. Eventually, unable to take any more, one of the readers got up, hunching over as if he was in a cinema, and loped out of the hall on squeaking shoes. Taking this as a sign, I slammed the book shut and suggested that the remaining readers ask me questions. The audience brightened up a bit.

The first question, naturally, was what I thought about Houellebecq. That, though, was the only non-traditional question throughout the entire evening, apart from the very last one, which I'll tell you about later. In this respect, by the way, our reading public is not brilliantly original: whatever a novelist might write, the questions put to him will be the same. I don't think there's any point in listing them here – after all, since you are reading the present lines, you are a reader and you ask these questions yourself. That's the way these meetings with writers go, provided that some complete outsider doesn't blunder in from off the street. But my function happened to be graced with just such an individual.

This person had absolutely nothing to do with me or Houellebecq. While I was reeling off stereotype answers to stereotype questions, he kept his head well down. But when our pleasant discussion had almost reached its conclusion, when my ear had already caught the distant clinking of glasses; that was when he raised his hand.

‘Tell me, please,' the man from off the street asked, ‘what do you think about the global financial crisis that has broken out?'

After a momentary pause the audience broke into a general chorus of laughter.

‘This is not an economic forum,' the youthful chairman remarked with a withering glance at the man from off the street. The man blushed and pulled his head down into his shoulders.

‘I only asked . . .' he muttered.

At that moment I felt the urge to pity him – a purely philistine response. But, of course, I didn't give any sign of it.

‘Well, sir,' I said with a condescending grin, ‘you see, this crisis that you ask about, for me it's as it if didn't exist. The fact is . . . er . . . I don't read the newspapers.'

The audience giggled and craned its necks to see this fellow-citizen of theirs who had made such a fool of himself. The man from off the street had sat right through that boring evening to ask his one and only question, which might have been agonisingly important to him. What if all his hard-earned savings had gone up in flames in some bank or other, and he had come here to ask a writer how he could carry on with his life now? What had he heard in reply? An arrogant ‘I don't read the newspapers'! Why hadn't I told him I didn't read the newspapers because my wife had left me and a crisis had broken out in my life as well, and the emotional capital I had accumulated over the years had gone up in flames too? If I hadn't spent all those days wallowing in my own tragedy, but read a newspaper and thought about the financial crisis, perhaps now I would have found something comforting to say to the man from off the street. And he might have found words of comfort and support for me.

The miracle didn't happen. The literary evening concluded as it was supposed to do. I signed about ten of my own books and when all the grateful readers eventually left, the organisers called me into that special room, where they regaled me at the expense of the establishment. We started with very hot, but rather weak mulled wine and concluded, of course, with vodka, accompanied by herring salad. Yet another minor event ticked off on the calendar of Moscow's cultural life.