Authors: Robert Littell
“She said no Pravdin,” the gorilla says.
“Listen, friend,” Pravdin begins. Peeking around the man he catches a glimpse of Friedemann T. absently popping hors d’oeuvres into his mouth. “What you don’t know can hurt you, and what you don’t know is who I am.”
The gorilla advances; Pravdin retreats toward the street door. “There is no Pravdin,” the gorilla repeats.
“Pravdin is what there is,” Pravdin retorts. “You have the honor of having him before your very original body. A serious mistake is what you’re making. I have friends in high places. I—”
The front door of Aragvi is unceremoniously slammed in his face.
Pravdin, scurrying toward the offices of the All-Union Household Hygiene Bureau, convinces himself that everything that has happened in the last few days is a coincidence. He reaches this comforting conclusion by a process of elimination: if it isn’t a coincidence, it’s a catastrophe; a catastrophe is unthinkable; ergo, it’s a coincidence,
“Three minutes,” the man with thick eyeglasses and a toupee announces, punching his stopwatch and looking up, lips pursed, at Pravdin.
“Three minutes is all I need,” Pravdin launches into his pitch, “to convince you that vaginal deodorant spray is an idea whose time has come.”
The bureaucrat’s jaw droops. “Did I hear you say vaginal?”
“Vaginal, as in vagina, is what I said, right. Before you can build communism you must construct socialism. Before socialism, an advanced industrial society. And whoever heard of an advanced industrial society without vaginal deodorant spray!” Pravdin practically climbs across the desk in excitement; the bureaucrat shrinks back in horror. “Thesis: the male nostrils, sniffing,” Pravdin continues. “Antithesis: the female organ, pungent. Synthesis:”—Pravdin shouts it out in a voice raw with lust—“vaginal deodorant spray!”
“Out,” orders the bureaucrat, his toupee slipping across his forehead in agitation. He stabs wildly at intercom buttons on the desk, yells, “Get him out of here, get him out.” The door is flung open; two burly secretaries advance on Pravdin, who is packing away the vaginal deodorant spray in his briefcase. “It comes in three flavors,” Pravdin shouts from the door. “Raspberry, lemon, lime.”
“Pervert,” screams the bureaucrat, straightening his toupee with both hands as if it is a helmet. “What kind of a man are you to come in here with this capitalist filth.”
“Homo Economicus
is what kind of man I am,” Pravdin yells back, and he makes an obscene gesture with his primitively long, broken, badly set thumb.
Pravdin, thinking about the unthinkable, drops off a Q-Tip at the Department of Medicine at Moscow University, fills in a form requesting that an analysis of its medical potential be prepared for the All-Union Institute for Household Technology.
“I can tell you right off,” a lady doctor in a white coat informs Pravdin, “that the shaft is made of wood.” She rolls the Q-Tip between her fingers. “The fluffy white stuff at each end is probably cotton. This is an odd bird. What are you supposed to do with it?”
“In the ear is where it goes,” Pravdin tells her. “Cleans out wax more efficiently than keys.”
The lady doctor frowns. “We have to be careful what goes into the ear, don’t we?”
“You’re the first person in Russia to suggest that,” says Pravdin.
The lady doctor looks up sharply. “I’m not sure I appreciate the implications of that.”
Pravdin bristles. “The implication that there is an implication is what I don’t appreciate.” He slips two Bolshoi tickets into the lady doctor’s pocket. “Bewitching lady doctor, I have friends in high places. I could use influence, but I don’t take advantage of my name. I wait my turn like any ordinary citizen. An analysis of something that could revolutionize Russia is all I ask.”
The lady doctor pockets the Bolshoi tickets. “Russia,” she says suspiciously, “has already had its revolution.”
With his deformed thumb Pravdin presses the doorbell of the fourth floor apartment off Kutuzovsky Prospect. Instead of
the usual buzzer, he hears the distant sound of musical chimes. An eye piece clicks open and Pravdin has the sensation of being sized up; beneath his nonchalance, his skin crawls. Finally, grudgingly, the door is opened a crack—a safety chain prevents it from being opened any wider—and a maid in a starched black uniform with a grim set to her lips stares silently out at him.
“Pravdin, Robespierre Isayevich,” Pravdin announces, clicking the heels of his sneakers together, inclining his head, “at your beck and call. Dear lady, I am known to the maestro. I had the honor of obtaining for him two precious tickets to the hockey championship with the Canadians last year.”
“Only wait,” the maid instructs him, eases shut the door in his face. A few minutes later the door is opened again and Pravdin is ushered through the foyer, the walls and ceiling of which are covered in thick black fabric, into an airy book-lined study. The maestro, wearing blue jeans and a yellow silk robe, his bare feet propped up on his desk, his toes wiggling, sits before a pair of French windows overlooking the Moscow River dictating into a Japanese tape recorder that is voice activated.
“The tape recorder I got you too,” Pravdin reminds the maestro. “Also the door chimes.”
“Of course I remember you,” the Poet says affably. “What can you do for me now?” He laughs at his own joke.
“What I can do for you,” Pravdin launches into his pitch, “is add respect to what you already have, which is fame and fortune.”
“I am already respected,” the Poet says.
“By the wrong people,” Pravdin asserts. “Around the bush is where we shouldn’t beat. The people who count are the ones who don’t read you anymore. The last time you recited your poems, the hall was half full—”
“Three-quarters—”
“Quibble you’re not in a position to. The next time you recite, you stick with me, it will be standing room only. Ladies will faint from the lack of oxygen. The ones outside who can’t get in will riot.” Pravdin leans across the desk, his nose close to the Poet’s. “Facts is what we have to confront. Something is missing from your life. Around the age of forty every man comes face to face with the fact that he has not achieved what he thought he would achieve during the period of his optimism; that he is not the man he thought he was. I personally have been spared this because I consider it a major accomplishment, far surpassing my wildest expectations, to be alive at forty. Touch wood. But you, comrade Poet, are another ladleful of yogurt soup. You have the trappings of success: chimes on your door, voice-activated tape recorders and so forth and so on. But respect you don’t have. Respect with a capital R is what I’m offering.” Pravdin lowers his voice. “A touch of dissidence is what your image needs. Nothing dangerous, naturally, but something to convince the people that all this”—his hand takes in the luxurious apartment behind him—“is what you’re prepared to risk when it comes to poetry or principles.”
“It goes without saying you have just the issue?”
“If not, here is where I wouldn’t be,” Pravdin says, sinking back into the chair. “It’s this way: I know someone who has written evidence that Honored Artist of the Soviet Union Frolov swiped the manuscript for
The Deep Don
from a White Russian officer named Krukov. Once the original material is made public. Frolov will be
kaput
. It’s only a question of who gets the credit for going public.”
The Poet stretches his lanky frame. “You don’t think the affair is too hot, do you? I have a lecture tour of the United States of America scheduled for next month. New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles. You don’t think that would be jeopardized, for instance?”
“The evidence is in black and white,” Pravdin assures him. “Frolov has enemies in high places, which is how the manuscript surfaced. On my own I wouldn’t be doing this; I’m after all not completely crazy. Exposing Frolov is an idea whose time has come.”
“Yes, I see all that,” the Poet says thoughtfully. “It only remains, then, to work out what I can do for you in return for bringing me this plum.”
Pravdin waves away the idea of payment. “I’m a modest man, maestro, content to store up credit in high places. When you can do me a favor you will know it without my asking.”
The Poet rises from the swivel chair suddenly, motions for his visitor to stay where he is, disappears from the study. Pravdin hears a hurried, hushed conversation with the housekeeper, a phone being lifted from its cradle, a door closing, then stillness. He waits five minutes, ten, a quarter of an hour, fidgets with the medals on his Eisenhower jacket, paces. Half an hour goes by and no Poet. Pravdin pokes his head out of the study, spies the housekeeper, her thick arms folded across her breasts, mounting guard on the front door.
“Where, ravishing lady, has our Poet gone to?”
“What Poet?” demands the housekeeper.
“What Poet is a funny question,” Pravdin says. He whistles between his teeth, shakes his head. “
The Poet
,” he says when the housekeeper makes no reply. “The Poet who sleeps, eats, masturbates, defecates within the wallpapered walls of this faded palace.”
“I told you when you forced your way in,” the housekeeper says sternly, “he has been on the Black Sea these past two weeks. A mud cure. Maybe now you will believe me.”
The man in the blue raincoat and the flat short-brimmed fedora, along with two others in identical raincoats (but bareheaded; Pravdin claims to discern a hierarchy based on
whether plainclothes police wear hats) are waiting outside the Poet’s apartment building. As Pravdin appears they spring into life. Their movements are precise, choreographed even: one opens the rear door of a black Moskvitch parked at the curb; the other two arrange themselves on either side of Pravdin as if they are parentheses. “You are obliged to come with us,” the man with the fedora instructs him.
Pravdin’s bloodless lips move, words form but no sound emerges; he is speechless with fear. His tongue goes bone dry, his bowels churn; he passes gas. A neck muscle, then an eyelid, twitches. Infirmities spread through his body like a rash; no sooner has he suppressed one twitch than another pops out. The only proper attitude, it occurs to Pravdin, is panic. Accordingly, his brain loses contact with his knees; his briefcase slips out of his hand; his thin body starts to sag at the joints. The men on either side, experienced in such matters, retrieve the briefcase, catch Pravdin under the armpits and funnel him toward the car.
Pravdin twists his head so that he can see over his shoulder, spots the Poet watching from a fourth-floor window. “Oy, where come with you?” he cries, suddenly finding his voice. “Why come with you?” He tries to catch the eye of a woman pushing a baby carriage, but she walks past as if the little group doesn’t exist. “When come with you?” Pravdin croaks, ducking his head and climbing into the back seat. The two blue raincoats pile in after him. “Who are the you I’m supposed to come with?” he whimpers as the door slams shut and the car lurches forward.
The Moskvitch drifts through light traffic back toward the center of Moscow. The man on Pravdin’s left takes out a package of American chewing gum, offers a stick to Pravdin. When he doesn’t respond, he removes the wrapper and slides it into his mouth. His jaw working, he stares out the window lost in thought. Pravdin presses his nose to the side window,
lost in fear. The limousine stops for a red light. Without thinking Pravdin starts to open the door. The man chewing gum gently restrains him.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Back to nature, if it’ll have me,” Pravdin replies. Trembling, he coils into a fetal ball in the corner of the back seat.
The car pulls up before the great doors of the KGB complex on Dzerzhinsky Square. Pravdin sees the sidewalk vendor is still there, though the tiny metal wind-up dolls doing military turns have been replaced by wind-up, horse-mounted Don Quixotes with large sombreros and long lances.
The doors swing open, a sentry peers through the driver’s window. “Pravdin, Robespierre Isayevich,” Pravdin mutters, hoping against hope he’ll be told, “There is no Pravdin” and turned away. But the sentry pays no attention to him, instead motions in a stiff-armed military gesture for the car to proceed.
Pravdin is hustled into a windowless, immaculately white, brilliantly lit room with a single stainless steel chair and a stainless steel table.
“Strip,” orders a husky attendant. “Clothing on the table, folded.”
Under the watchful eyes of the attendant Pravdin unties the laces on his sneakers, pulls them off, then the socks, strips to the skin and folds his Eisenhower jacket and trousers and shirt and underwear on the table. In the neon-bright light his pale skin takes on a sickly yellowish tint. Veins throb in his thin arms. An eye twitches. His head aches. Pravdin brings a hand in a clawing motion to his forehead, presses his damp palm to his clammy skin.
“Bend over, spread your cheeks,” orders the attendant. He systematically searches the various openings in Pravdin’s body, checks between the toes and behind the ears, runs a fine tooth comb through the wild red hair on his head and the tangled spirally hair on his pubis. Satisfied that Pravdin is
hiding nothing, he turns to his clothing and goes over every garment centimeter by centimeter. When he finishes he returns everything except the shoelaces and the belt, indicates with a wave of his hand that Pravdin is to dress, leads him into another room that looks like a doctor’s waiting room. There are several old chairs with worn fabric, a pile of Polish magazines on a low table, a window with a wire mesh grille on the outside overlooking Dzerzhinsky Square and the Detsky Mir, a toy emporium across the way. The glass on the window is thick, the window is screwed shut, and the sounds of the traffic are very faint, almost as if they originate in Pravdin’s memory.
Pravdin fogs up the glass with his breath, writes on the fog with his deformed thumb:
Chopping off heads is infectious—one today, another
tomorrow and what will be left of the Party?
(I. Stalin: Pravdin figures this came from the horse’s mouth), hears someone at the door, erases the graffiti with his sleeve just as he is summoned for interrogation.