Mother Russia (18 page)

“Toothpaste is what it’s not,” announces Pravdin. The functionary with the toilet paper on his chin assumes a judgmental posture in his chair, absently treats himself to spoonfuls of honey as he listens. “It’s this way,” Pravdin begins. “Depilatory cream is an idea whose time has come. Before you can build communism you must construct socialism. Before socialism, an advanced industrial society. And who”—the monologue is not particularly animated; Pravdin waves the tube about in the air out of force of habit—“ever heard of an advanced industrial society without depilatory cream!”

Pravdin hefts himself with an effort onto the desk. “Thesis: unwanted body hair. Antithesis: soft stubble-free skin. Synthesis—”

Pravdin’s bloodless lips move, words form but no sound emerges; he is speechless with apathy. Exhausted, he sinks back into the chair. “Oy”—his palm slaps in anguish against his high forehead—“what is it I’m selling? And why?”

“Go on,” encourages the functionary with the toilet paper on his chin. “This has possibilities.”

“Synthesis,” Pravdin mumbles, desperately trying to pick up the thread. His eyes, suddenly moist, close; a lid twitches.
“Synthesis: Ha! A wind-up Quixote emerging from the last wooden house in central Moscow to charge the holy of holies. Off my rocker is what I wish I was!
Dei mentsh iz vos er iz, ober nit vos er iz geven
.“

“What language is that,” the functionary asks in a kindly way, “Latin?”

“What it is is Jewish. It’s an old Talmudic saying I just invented that means, ‘A man is touch wood what he is, not what he was.’ “ Retreating toward the door, Pravdin produces from a pocket a huge handkerchief, mops his brow. “Hot is what it is in here,” he complains, weak and wide awake—and sweating from a noneconomic activity.

Pravdin slips into the self-service elevator at the Hotel Rossiya with a group of women from the American Mid West. “Did you see the shoes,” whispers one carrying a wooden babushka doll. “Their feet must be pointed to get in them.”

“How about the trousers,” ventures another, giggling. “If the legs were wider they’d be a skirt. Look at the trousers on this one!”

“Misses,” Pravdin says with exaggerated politeness, “about the trousers, did you maybe notice how cuffs is what they all have. Cuffs”—he dances in place as if he has to urinate urgently—“are a covenant between the seventy-first incarnation of God, who is alive and well in the Sandunovsky Bath House, and
his
chosen people. Aiiiiiii,” Pravdin cries, pressing his hand to his crotch in evident discomfort, “in is where I can’t hold it any longer. Do you know, Misses, that in this worker’s paradise we are not allowed to pee without a permit? I’m one of the privileged few who touch wood has one.” He starts to unzip just as the elevator doors jerk open. The women gasp in relief, flee into the corridor. Pravdin, immediately calmer, continues on the fourteenth floor, makes his way to the barber shop, settles into a chair for a shave by
a lady barber who has the habit of cradling her client’s head on her abundant bosom. When the hot towels are covering all of Pravdin’s face except his mouth, he turns slightly toward the man in the next chair, whose face is equally hidden, and asks in English:

“How did the Bolshoi interview go?”

“Pretty well,” Hull replies in an undertone. “He came up with some great lines.”

“Give me a for instance?”

“He said something about how the bosses have two choices,” Hull says quietly, “they can convince us or kill us. Listen, something very strange took place at the Writers’ Union Congress yesterday.”

“Strange how?” Pravdin demands, his voice suddenly tense. “How strange?”

The lady barber removes the towels, strops the blade on a strip of leather, lathers Pravdin’s beard.

“Think of me as hemophiliac,” he instructs her through clenched lips as she clamps his head to her bosom.

“Talk less, listen more,” she orders. With the back of her thumb she removes most of the lather, flicks it into a bowl, starts to shave him. For a while the only sound is Pravdin’s labored breathing and stainless steel scraping against rough skin. When she finishes the lady barber wraps Pravdin’s head again in hot towels.

“Strange how?” Pravdin repeats to the man next to him.

“Strange because nobody showed up except the union officers, who went ahead and made speeches to an empty house. According to what I heard, they were expecting somebody to turn up and make a plea. I’d be willing to pay through the nose to know who turned up, and what he said. How about it, Pravdin? Get a line on this for me and I’ll really make it worth your while.” When Hull realizes he is getting no response he peels the towels from his face, turns
toward the next seat, discovers it is empty; Pravdin has already removed his feverish head from the barber shop.

Pravdin, clutching his stomach because of ulcers he’s sure will one day come, makes his way down the fire staircase one flight to the twelfth floor (there is no thirteenth, there may be no Pravdin), hunts for the linen storage room where a woman he knows hides odds and ends left behind by tourists (combs, safety razors, hairpins, ballpoint pens, magazines, books, an occasional shirt or pair of suspenders, and so forth and so on) until he picks them up for resale. “Excuse me,” Pravdin stops a chambermaid wheeling a cart full of dirty towels and used soap, “but room twelve-seventeen seems to have disappeared.”

“There is no twelve-seventeen,” snarls the chambermaid.

“And the linens, if it’s not a state secret, are stored where,” Pravdin leers at her, “in heaven?”

“There are no linens,” the chambermaid hisses. “There is no heaven.” She backs off a few paces, fills her lungs with air, starts pushing her wagon toward Pravdin as if she intends to run him down. “God is dead,” she gasps. “Religion is the opiate of the people.”

“Violence is what’s the opiate of the people,” Pravdin corrects her, sidestepping at the last instant, playing her past with his briefcase and a mumbled “Olé.”

The chambermaid hurtles down the corridor, puts on her brakes, maneuvers her wagon around, starts back toward Pravdin. “Oy,” he moans, “off her rocker is what she is.” He scrambles into a stairwell, takes the steps two at a time, stops for breath at the eighth floor landing, scrawls with chalk on the wall:

They are capable of loving only the dead

(A. Pushkin: Pravdin speaks from long personal experience). He is drawn to a small rain-spotted window on the landing by
the distant feedback of a loudspeaker system. Pravdin peers out, finds himself looking down on Red Square, which is filled with floats and ranks of sweat-suited gymnasts rehearsing for the May Day parade.

“Wave now, that’s the way,” a voice drifts up from the loudspeakers, “Remember to smile when you pass the reviewing stand. What is it? Not now, not now. You girls over there, don’t just hold the flowers up, wave them. A little enthusiasm, if you please. That’s better. Good, good. Where is the monitor? One, two, three, four and one, two, three, four
and
—No, no, the hoops go
up
on two and
over the head
on four. Those with fans, open on one, close on three. We’ll begin from the beginning. Once again now. One, two, three, four and one, two, three, four
and
…”

Pravdin sinks back on his haunches, fingers his four overlapping medals, watches the marchers being put through their paces as if they were circus horses, watches one girl with long braids being instructed to spontaneously race up to the latest of the Great Mountaineers and thrust a bouquet of roses into his hands.

Slowly Pravdin drifts off into a daydream. In his mind’s eye he sees himself waving to the huge crowd from the reviewing stand atop the holy of holies, which has been scented with vaginal deodorant spray for the occasion. The buildings on every side are draped in giant red cloths to keep the dust off during the spring cleaning. The cobblestones in Red Square have been scrubbed and waxed and covered with pages of
Pravda
. Animals Pravdin is afraid to identify prance by in lockstep pulling a float on which a half dozen actors are frozen into a statuelike tableau; it portrays the last Emir of Bukhara, Said Mirmuhammed Alimkhan, gazing serenely down from the Ark twenty meters above the city to watch the Friday executions. Below, the Druse, on his knees, is lifting his palms to the Emir for mercy as the executioner’s
knife slices into his jugular. “Aiiiiiiii,” Pravdin cries as the float rumbles past on the copies of
Pravda
. He steps up to a microphone and cries out, “
Waak, waak
, Honored Artist of the Soviet Union Frolov is a plagiarist.” Instantly his voice echoes from the speakers around the square, “Honored Artist … Honored Artist … Honored Artist …” A young girl detaches herself from the crowd, dashes up the steps to the reviewing stand, thrusts a bouquet with a note attached into Pravdin’s hands. “What language is that, Jewish?” is what the note says. “Who wrote this?” Pravdin screams into the microphone, furiously waving the note over his head. (“Who wrote … who wrote … who wrote …” echoes from the loudspeakers.) When nobody steps forward, Pravdin flashes his crooked smile. “That’s where I was,” he says. “That’s not touch wood where I am.” (‘There may be a Pravdin … there may be a Pravdin … there may be a Pravdin,” echoes from the loudspeakers.)

Across from the Bolshoi, in the pale early evening shadow of a small fountain, an off-duty taxi driver with wild eyes is waltzing on gangling legs, head flung back, arms out, with a nonexistent partner. Suddenly he leaps to a stop before the gold-toothed woman who sells kvass, bows low inviting her to dance.

“How can you dance without no music?” she taunts him.

“But there is music,” cried the off-duty taxi driver. “Can’t you hear it?” He cocks his head, listens. “Crazed Misses Marmeladeev and her troupe of children dancing to her frying pan drum on the Voznessensky Bridge. Dostoyevsky heard it. I hear it.”

The
kvass
lady shoves him away angrily. “Get off,” she scolds, “and leave me be.” The off-duty taxi driver laughs, waltzes silently off. A dozen or so hippies sitting on the edge of the fountain clap rhythmically.

“Comrade Eisenhower, hey ho, Comrade Eisenhower,” calls Ophelia Long Legs as Pravdin lopes by heading for the Bolshoi. She catches up with him at the theater steps, tugs at his elbow. “Comrade Eisenhower,” she tells him in an undertone, “the militia were nosing around this afternoon.”

Pravdin stops short, draws Ophelia Long Legs into the lee of a column. “What did they ask?” he demands breathlessly.

“They didn’t ask,” she explains, “they looked. They posted a man at the front door so nobody could leave, then started at the attic and worked down. It’s a wooden house and noises carry so we could hear them moving furniture and opening drawers. When they did Mother Russia’s room, she sat in the kitchen drinking tea and composing letters out loud.” Ophelia does a surprisingly good imitation. “ ‘To my adorable former classmate with the big ears and narrow nails, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, with copies to the
New York Times
, the London
Times, Le Monde
, the Voice of America, the Secretary General of the United Nations, the World Health Organization. Leonid Ilyich: your pimply ruffians in boring blue trenchcoats …’ Oh, you should have heard her. The only time she lost her temper was when they told her one of her parrots had escaped out the window. He flew the coop when they opened the cage to search it.”

“Which one?” Pravdin asks, on the alert for omens.

“The one that’s always saying, ‘
Waak, waak, help, help
.’ ”

“Vladimir Ilyich is who it was.”

“Shhhhhhhh.” Ophelia Long Legs looks around quickly. “Someone will hear you.”

Pravdin laughs wickedly. “Picture it,” he cries even more loudly, “Vladimir Ilyich splattering the holy of holies with white fungus and
waaking
away at the masses below.
Help, help, waak, waak
. Ha! What did the boys in blue do when they couldn’t find anything?”

“How do you know they couldn’t find anything?”

“Because the last wooden house in central Moscow is not where what they’re looking for is!”

“So that’s why they were so annoyed,” Ophelia remembers. “When they left, the last one out angrily wrote something on a patch of dirt next to a tree. It probably was a code or something. It said, ‘The louse will lose.’ What does that mean, the louse will lose?”

“It’s an old Talmudic saying,” Pravdin explains, “that means, It’s the bosses who’ll watch the bosses.’ “

“Who’s Talmud?” Ophelia asks.

Pravdin only shakes his head, dips into his briefcase, comes up with a Beatles record that he offers to Ophelia.

“How much?” she asks suspiciously.

“A present is what it is,” Pravdin says. Before she can not protest, he melts into the crowd hurrying up the steps to the Bolshoi for a performance of the ballet Don
Quixote
. At the third balcony he squeezes past four intense young women and takes his seat as the house lights dim. The giant curtain opens, the music swirls through Pravdin’s head. His lids close. In his mind’s eye he sees Frolov, a sturdy man in his seventies, sitting just where the unsigned note he found under his door said he would be: in the first row of the orchestra, his eyes glazed with lack of interest. The first act ends and he makes his way, along with several men and women tucked around his heels like bird dogs, toward the bar for a cognac his doctor has forbidden him to drink. Holding court in the bright light of the room where refreshments are sold, Frolov is suddenly confronted by a pale, fragilely thin man with wild red hair.

“Honored Artist of the Soviet Union Frolov?” the thin man demands.

Thinking he is being asked for an autograph, Frolov reaches for his fountain pen. The thin man with the wild red
hair going off in all directions rears back and slaps the aging Nobel laureate across the face.
Thwak
. Everyone in the room is instantly and utterly silent. To Pravdin it looks like a statue vivante entitled “After the Slap.” Even liquids seem to solidify in midair, in permanent pour between bottle and cup. Tears (of frustration, of anger, of pain, of fear even; who can say?) well in Frolov’s eyes. Pravdin’s voice rivets everyone: