Authors: Robert Littell
“Am I to assume that you are a member of the Party?” the Prosecutor inquires.
“I’m better,” Pravdin assures him earnestly. “I believe in communism. For me the second holy of holies is the British
Museum Reading Room, the birthplace of pure Marxism, the only twentieth century ism to convey a sense of morality without religion.” The prosecutor purses his lips; Pravdin, trying to decipher the signals, wonders if he has stepped on toes. “Not that I have anything against religion,” he quickly adds, imagining the prosecutor’s old babushkaed mother trudging through ankle-deep mud toward some dilapidated church.
The prosecutor, intrigued, leans forward, elbows on the desk, fingers laced under his chin; it is the gesture of someone twice his age and it makes him look, to Pravdin’s eye, somehow biblical. “You believe in original sin then?” he asks politely.
Floundering, not sure what high ground to claim as his own, Pravdin tries to sidestep. “I believe in original naivete,” he quips.
“But original naiveté
is
the original sin,” the prosecutor warns.
“Not at all,” Pravdin hears himself say. “Naivete is no sin. It is a blessing in disguise, a state of grace, a chain-mail Eisenhower jacket.”
The prosecutor frowns. “What is it you have come to tell me? Against whom do you wish to lodge a complaint?”
Pravdin takes a deep breath, holds it until his eyes bulge. “It’s this way,” he begins, expelling a lungful of air. And he tells the prosecutor about the handwritten manuscripts that prove that Krukov, not Frolov, is the real author of The Deep Don.
The prosecutor listens intently to the story, asks Pravdin to repeat it a second time while he takes notes. When Pravdin has gone through it all again the prosecutor asks to see the manuscripts. Pravdin laughs nervously. “The manuscripts are what I don’t have,” he explains. “They have been
stashed in a safe place. A kind of insurance policy is what it is, if you get my drift. But I have the next best thing.” And he dips into his leather briefcase and pulls out a sheaf of photocopies of manuscript pages. “Listen.” Pravdin says excitedly—he pushes two sheets across the desk under the prosecutor’s nose—“you remember the part in
The Deep Don
where the Cossacks find worms in their meat, draw their sabres, arrest the worms, march them up to the company commander and announce they’ve brought in some prisoners. Look, here the story is recounted in a letter written by Krukov to his father-in-law in 1919. And here is the same story, again in Krukov’s hand, in a manuscript page of his novel. And then it turns up several years later in Frolov’s book!”
The prosecutor reads, rereads the photocopies of the letter and the manuscript page, studying each line through a magnifying glass. “It goes without saying the handwriting will have to be authenticated,” he says carefully.
“Without saying is how it goes,” Pravdin agrees eagerly.
“If it turns out that this documentation is authentic,” the prosecutor continues—Pravdin catches the treble-shift of excitement in his voice—“we will have a very important case on our hands.”
“Handled discreetly,” Pravdin exclaims gleefully, “it could revolutionize Russia.”
The prosecutor rises, Pravdin follows suit. “Speak to no one about this,” he instructs Pravdin formally.
“No one is whom I’ll speak to,” he vows.
“Be back here tomorrow at nine.”
“Back here is where I’ll be.”
The prosecutor reaches across the desk and offers Pravdin his hand. “Russia is a country of rusty-hinged shutters waiting to be oiled and opened,” he says gravely. “Together we will open one and let in some air.”
“Only pay attention,” Pravdin cautions the public prosecutor, “not to catch cold from the draft.”
Suppressing the urge to whistle, Pravdin heads across town for a rendezvous with the All-Union Institute for Household Technology. On Gorky Street he glances at his two wristwatches (Moscow time, Greenwich Mean Time), looks up to compare them to the giant digital clock on the side of the post office, which keeps flashing 9:32:32 like a needle stuck in a groove.
“You wouldn’t happen to have the correct hour?” inquires a well-dressed woman in her seventies. She is holding the hand of a fifty-year-old man who heels at her side like a dog. His coat is neatly buttoned to the neck, his collar turned down.
“Ice cream, mama,” the fifty-year-old man whines, tugging at his mother’s hand.
“Dear Madam, it is twenty minutes past seven in Greenwich, England, and twelve minutes past eleven here in Moscow,” Pravdin informs her.
“But how is that possible?” the woman demands.
“What I see is what I know,” Pravdin snaps, hurtles, head angled like a bull’s, on down Gorky. At the AU-Union Institute for Household Technology, a heavy-set woman sips mint-flavored milk and listens, her features sagging in apathy, to the Q-Tip spiel.
“The Q-Tip is an idea whose time has come,” Pravdin argues passionately. “Before you can build communism you must construct socialism. Before socialism, an advanced industrial society. And whoever heard of an advanced industrial society without Q-Tips!”
The woman fingers the Q-Tip as if it has sexual possibilities, shakes her head regretfully, says nothing can be done
without careful examination of the medical implications by the Department of Medicine at Moscow University.
So that the morning isn’t a total loss Pravdin delivers a diamond-tipped Shure cartridge and two Beatle records to a disc jockey at the radio station, a set of National Geographies to the wife of a member of the Supreme Soviet, a year’s supply of West German birth control pills to a famous folk singer, then takes the Metro back to the Kremlin and walks over to the Hotel Moskva where he presents himself at a luncheon honoring the author of a new book that explores the possibilities of time travel.
“Pravdin, R. I.,” he announces to the near-sighted spinster editor fanning herself with the guest list, “at your beck and call.” Leaning closer he tells her:
“Absolutely no autographs—except for you, elegant lady.” He uncaps his felt-tipped pen and scrawls across her guest list, “To my dear friend—” He looks up questioningly.
“Natalia,” the spinster replies. “Natalia Mikhaylova.”
“—Natalia Mikhaylova, the mere glimpse of whose lascivious eyes and luscious body have permanently wrecked my hormonal balance.” With a flourish he signs, “Robespierre Isayevich Pravdin.”
Flashing his crooked smile, Pravdin bows from the waist and brushes past the stunned woman into the luncheon hall.
Friedemann T. stands with his back to a mural depicting prosperous peasants during a bountiful harvest, a glass of slivovitz in one hand, a wedge of cold quiche in the other, nodding noncommittally to a bald man with bad breath. The bald man retreats as Pravdin approaches.
“What are we here?” Friedemann T. whispers desperately.
“What we are here is time travel,” Pravdin informs him.
Friedemann T.’s features relax. “Time travel.” He ponders this for a moment. “That’s a new one.” He rocks on the
balls of his feet, shrugs his cape back onto his shoulders, raises his voice. “Frankly, I’m skeptical. If time travel is possible, why haven’t we been visited by people from the future?”
Pravdin deftly snags a sandwich from a passing tray. “Maybe there is no future,” he ventures. “Maybe we are the point of time.”
“Statistically unlikely,” Friedemann T. dismisses the suggestion.
“Someone has to be the point of time,” Pravdin insists.
“Even that’s not clear,” says Friedemann T. “The trouble with you is you’re a prisoner of logic. Why should every event have a cause, and why should every cause precede its effect? How do we know that the atom doesn’t consist of the radiations that it gives off? Where is it ordained that a window can’t break before the ball is thrown at it?”
Pravdin thinks about this for a moment. “What tortures me,” he says—he waves across the room to nobody in particular—“is: if I travel back in time I may disrupt events so that they create a future that doesn’t contain me, so I don’t exist to travel back in time.”
Friedemann T. laughs at a thought.
“What’s funny?” Pravdin demands.
“Maybe,” Friedemann T. says—he gestures toward the crowd milling around the author and laughs again—“maybe we’ve already traveled back in time.”
Later, as they start toward the exit, Friedemann T. steers Pravdin into the men’s room. “You should have told me, you know,” he chastises him. “I’m supposed to be a friend.”
“Told you what?” Pravdin wants to know, his voice slipping over the edge into nervousness.
“If I knew about what, I wouldn’t be asking you to tell me,” says Friedemann T. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he adds in a low voice.
“What for God’s sake am I doing?” demands Pravdin.
“That was precisely what the militia major wanted to know.” Friedemann T. turns to go, adds with icy politeness:
“Do me the service of waiting a minute or two so we won’t be seen leaving together.”
“What leaving together?” Pravdin cries hysterically. “About what are you talking?”
But Friedemann T. has already slipped out of the men’s room.
In the street Pravdin glances over his shoulder every few seconds, doesn’t notice anybody following him, stops to scrawl on the rear wall of the Union of Journalists:
Publish and perish
(Anon: Pravdin has recently skimmed some Abram Tertz stories in
samizdat)
, hurries on to the synagogue for his appointment with the beardless assistant rabbi.
“The answer is
nyet,”
the rabbi cries when he catches sight of Pravdin.
“How can you give an answer when you don’t know the question?” argues Pravdin. The rabbi scurries down the aisle past the neon Star of David into the bare vestibule that serves as an office. Pravdin is hard on his heels.
“It doesn’t matter the question, the answer is no,” the rabbi repeats, unwinding the frayed tefillen from his forearm.
“That’s not biblical,” protests Pravdin.
The rabbi turns on him angrily. “We don’t live in biblical times,” he wails. “We are no longer the chosen people. You are not some big shot Old Testament prophet come to lead us in your Eisenhower jacket and basketball sneakers to the promised land. If the Red Sea parts tomorrow it will be to let some capitalist Cain under contract to some Arab Abel drill for oil.”
“For God’s sake calm yourself, rabbi,” Pravdin urges.
“It’s not as if I yelled the secret name of God outside the holy of holies.”
The assistant rabbi settles into a chair, closes his eyes, sucks in air through hairy nostrils. “Be my guest, pose the question,” he says hoarsely.
Pravdin leans across the table until he is breathing into the rabbi’s face. “Instant matzos,” he begins, “is an idea whose time has come. Thesis: powdered matzos direct from Tel Aviv. Antithesis: holy water from the River Jordan. Synthesis:”—Pravdin sways back, pauses for theatrical effect—“all the matzos your heart desires for the High Holy Days.”
“I’ve heard the question, you’re my witness,” the assistant rabbi says with controlled calm, “and the answer is still no.” He springs from his chair, takes Pravdin firmly under the elbow, steers him toward the door. “What are you up to these days that they come here asking about you?” he whispers. Pravdin starts to reply but the assistant rabbi holds up a palm. “Better you don’t tell me. What you don’t tell me I don’t know. If I don’t know it can’t be a conspiracy. Listen, Robespierre Isayevich, you want to do something for the Jews, go become a Christian.”
Pravdin, wounded, clings to the doorknob like a child on his first day at school. “It’s too late to convert,” he whines. “I’m circumcised.”
The assistant rabbi, surprisingly strong, pries his fingers off the knob one by one. “Circumcise your heart,” he advises, and he shoves him out the door.
Mother Russia pulls her fox furs tightly around her neck, leans over the stove to taste a spoonful of soybean soup, swallows, grimaces, adds a pinch of salt.
Pravdin, moody, mumbles unintelligibly.
“What did you say?” Zoya takes the seat across the table from Pravdin.
“Nothing is what I said,” he answers sullenly.
She pats his arm reassuringly. “What nothing?” she coaxes. “Out with it, give?”
From behind the closed door of Mother Russia’s room comes the muted cry of Kerensky:
“Waak, waak, power to the powerful.”
“Make an effort,” urges Zoya.
“I walk on water,” Pravdin finally blurts out, “and soybean soup is all you think about.”
“Oh Robespierre, you don’t understand. I’m superstitious is all. I’m afraid it will go away if we talk about it.” Zoya covers her mouth with her hand, talks through her fingers. “His nails sound respectable. Do you really think your prosecutor is a serious personage?”
“He is young and wet behind the ears,” Pravdin says quietly, “but he’s honest, if that’s possible anymore.”
“I came across an honest bureaucrat once,” recalls Zoya. “It was in thirty-seven or thirty-eight. I was trying to post a package to my husband. The official advised me not to bother because the camp guards took everything for themselves.”
“Zoya Aleksandrovna, sometimes I think nostalgia is your strongest emotion,” Pravdin says.
Mother Russia’s eyes lose their focus. “Yes, it’s true what you say. For me the past is more”—she searches for the right word—“intense than the present.”
“The murder of your husband—”
“Oh, I don’t mean only the arrests and the camps and the war. I mean the past. I remember when I was a little girl and my father took the family to the countryside to pick mushrooms. It was a great occasion because it was my first ride in an automobile. My father had had one for several months but he had considered it too dangerous for the women in the family. One day, only God knows why, he relented. We drove with planks strapped to the side of the car.
It was just after the last snows had melted and the roads were full of potholes. At each hole my father stopped and we children would lay down the planks and he would drive across as if he were traversing some deep, dangerous gorge. Then we would pick up the planks and strap them back onto the side of the car. It seems to me, now that I think of it, that the mushrooms we picked had more taste than the ones I find nowadays. But that’s another story.” Zoya absently pets the head of one of her foxes. “You were naughty not to invite me to lunch,” she scolds Pravdin. “I’m very interested in extraterrestrial phenomena and time travel and that kind of thing.”