Authors: Robert Littell
“Honored Artist of the Soviet Union Frolov is a plagiarist.”
The intensest of the intense young women taps Pravdin on the arm. His eyes open; the houselights have come on, the music has stopped. “I’ve never seen anyone watch a ballet with his eyes closed,” she comments scornfully to her comrades.
“Attention,” Pravdin cautions her in a stern voice, “those who are not with us are not with us.” He climbs awkwardly over knees, makes his way down to the well-lit room where refreshments are sold. Frolov, a sturdy man in his seventies, is standing near the bar, his back toward Pravdin, sipping fruit juice. Pravdin, his pulse pounding in his temples, his eyes feverish, pushes through the crowd, causing one woman to spill wine on the dress of another.
“Honored Artist of the Soviet Union Frolov?” Pravdin addresses the man’s back.
He turns, takes in Pravdin’s basketball sneakers, his trousers frayed at the cuffs, his Eisenhower jacket with the four medals overlapping above the breast pocket, his red hair going off in all directions. “So it is you,” he says.
“Honored Artist of the Soviet Union Frolov is a—”
Thwak
.
Pravdin, his cheek stinging from the blow, reels back drunkenly. Tears (of frustration, of anger, of pain, of fear even; who can say?) well in his eyes. He looks around quickly; only half a dozen people nearest them have noticed anything
out of the ordinary. Pravdin sinks into a comic crouch, cackles wildly, cries with all his force:
“Honored Artist of the Soviet Union Frolov is a son of a bitch.”
His voice is lost in the din of conversation.
“The twentieth century,” Pravdin yells, tears streaming down his cheeks, “is a time without an idea. Read the handwriting on the wall, Frolov is the louse who’ll defeat Lenin. Better more but worse. Ha! I look sane but I talk crazy. To dine with the Druse use a long spoon.”
Pravdin sees through his tears a blonde with a large wine stain on her dress bearing down on him. “You think you can bull your way through crowds and spill wine,” she shrieks. Heads turn. Conversation stops. Liquids solidify in midair, in permanent pour between bottle and cup. “Look at this,” the blonde cries tragically, holding high her stained skirt for everyone to see. Over her shoulder Pravdin catches sight of Frolov disappearing toward the exit.
“Gracious lady,” he blurts, starting after him, but she bars his way, pushes him back.
“Who will pay for this,” she demands, “is what I want to know?”
“Put salt on it,” someone suggests.
“Ice water,” a woman offers, “is the thing for wine.”
“The juice of a lemon,” advises a waiter, “is highly recommended.”
“It’s ones like you …” the blonde, distraught to the point of hysteria, begins to harangue Pravdin, jabbing her index finger into his solar plexus.
Pravdin retreats. “Talking stains is like talking about life after death,” he murmurs. “I have thank you enough trouble with life before death.”
The bell for the second act sounds. The crowd breaks up (reluctantly; Muscovites don’t particularly like
Don Quixote
).
Folding himself into what is left of his dignity as if it is a tattered Army greatcoat, sweating from noneconomic activities, shivering from drafts from a window that isn’t open, Pravdin hurries off toward the last wooden house in central Moscow.
They are waiting for him in the kitchen: Mother Russia and Nadezhda standing stiffly with their backs to the sink; Friedemann T., the beardless assistant rabbi and three other men sitting awkwardly around the table sipping out of politeness an infusion the aroma of which they can’t support. There is, between them, an uncomfortable silence broken only by the delicate scraping of China cups on saucers and an occasional cough.
Pravdin takes in the scene from the door. “With me, one is unfortunately par, two is already a crowd, three has the makings of a conspiracy, but this”—he motions with his briefcase toward the reception committee—“a convention of the Supreme Soviet is what this looks like. To what do I owe the honor? Friedemann has come to talk about his new ballet based on Solzhenitsyn’s
First Circle
, that much I can figure out. But the rest of you are expecting what from me? Swiss watches with wrist alarms? Carburetors for Fiats? Instant matzos even? Tickets maybe to Red Square for the May Day parade?”
One of the visitors, an intense young man with long curly sideburns and a heavy beard, angrily pushes away his cup, leaps to his feet. “I told you we shouldn’t come,” he blurts out.
“Calm yourself, Aaron,” Friedemann T. tells him.
“Sit down,” the assistant rabbi orders, pulling Aaron back into his seat. “There’s still time to leave when he says no.
“No.” Pravdin supplies the item so they can leave. “It
doesn’t matter the question, no is my answer. So now is when you can all pick yourselves up and go home.”
“Why so much belligerence?” the assistant rabbi demands. “Blood we’re not asking for. Besides, how can you give an answer when you don’t know the question? It’s not biblical.”
“Biblical times are what we don’t live in,” Pravdin explodes. “The chosen people is what we no longer are. Some big shot Old Testament prophet come to lead us in your frayed tallith and mended yarmulke to the promised land is what you’re not!”
“For God’s sake, Robespierre,” Mother Russia cries, tapping the counter with her fly swatter in annoyance, “get hold of yourself. Listen to them. The one with the sideburns and beard has honest fingernails.”
Pravdin turns on her. “If I’m worked up,” he retorts, “I’m worked up over a noneconomic activity.”
Nadezhda moves to his side, slips her hand into his, draws the back of his hand to her mouth and kisses it. Pravdin reddens at this very public gesture of affection, breathes deeply, calms down. “So what is it?” he inquires. “It must be life or death if you’re drinking Zoya’s infusions.”
The five men put their heads together in the middle of the table and hold a quick conference. “You’re at least a friend of his,” Pravdin hears the assistant rabbi whisper. Silence. Finally Friedemann T. scrapes back his chair, faces Pravdin, adjusts his overcoat that hangs like a cape from his shoulders, clears his throat.
“What we are here is Jewish,” Pravdin coaxes.
“Dear fellow, this is not a laughing matter,” Friedemann T. chastises Pravdin. “It appears that the rabbi here, and Aaron, and myself, have been approached separately by representatives of the government and informed that twenty-five exit visas would be delivered to the Jewish Committee
if a certain Robespierre Pravdin could be prevailed upon to return whatever it is they want him to return.” Friedemann T. holds up a palm. “Once again I beg you not to say what it is they want. We don’t know, and it goes without saying we don’t want to know. Isn’t that right, gentlemen?”
The others nod in agreement.
“In any case,” Friedemann T. continues, “all of us here have a vested interest in this matter inasmuch as all of us have applied for exit visas. So we formed this delegation—”
Pravdin can’t believe his ears. “All of you want exit visas?”
Friedemann T. squirms uncomfortably. “All of us, yes.”
“Israel is where you want to go, Friedemann?”
“Israel and points west, yes,” Friedemann T. acknowledges. He takes a step toward Pravdin. “You’ve got to do this for me, Robespierre. I’m sick of always being on the outside and trying to get in. I’m fifty-seven years old.
Fifty-seven!
I’m sick of gate-crashing. I want a standing invitation for my old age.”
“Dear Robespierre,” Zoya says, “give them what they want. Nobody can say you didn’t walk on water.”
“Three of the exit visas will go to you,” the beardless assistant rabbi adds. “You can take anyone with you. Nowhere is it specified they have to be Jewish.”
“You don’t have the right to say no,” Aaron says emotionally. “We have families, futures—”
“What makes you think there is a future?” Pravdin taunts him, taunts them all. “What makes you think we’re not the point of time? Listen”—Pravdin sinks into a comic crouch, indicates with his eyes the walls have ears, continues in a stage whisper—“a while ago they offered one exit visa to get back what I have and they want. Today twenty-five. Tomorrow fifty maybe, a hundred even. All we have to do is
hold out a month or two and we can get all the Jews out of Russia. All the goyim too; nowhere is it specified they have to be Jewish. Ha! Will the last goy to leave the country please close the lights! Picture it: a giant moving truck pulls up to the last wooden house in central Moscow and those funny men in blue raincoats start carrying in cartons of exit visas. Two hundred and thirty million of them. A mound—mound nothing,
mountain!
—of visas! We’ll flood Israel with immigrants, they won’t have room to turn around they’ll be so many of them. A line of immigrants stretching from Odessa to Haifa walking on water to the Promised Land! And I’ll be the one who did it. Robespierre Isayevich Pravdin, the man who got everyone out of Russia. Hero of Socialist Labor! The Order of the Red Star!! The Order of the Red Banner!!! The Order of Lenin even!!!! I’ll maybe take Brezhnev with me. Also the big bosses of the Writers’ Union. And all the bastards who turned down the Q-Tip. Listen, rabbi, you want to do something for the Jews? Stay in Russia and mind the store when we all leave.”
“You have no heart,” the beardless assistant rabbi laments.
“A heart is what I have,” Pravdin corrects him. ‘Wounded is what I thought it was, but it turns out, touch wood, to be only circumcised.”
Pravdin sleeps
on his side …
Pravdin sleeps on his side, his back to Nadezhda, his arms hugging his torso as if he is in a straitjacket instead of pajamas. Snatches of song drift through his head. At times he remembers the words, not the music; at times the music, not the words. He struggles to join the two together as if they were halves of a broken saucer, but the glue (squeezed from a tube of depilatory cream) doesn’t hold. Frustrated, he tosses onto his back, is suddenly pricked into consciousness by an omen: an old man in the alley outside the house is sharpening knives on a pedal-driven wheel and calling out, in a singsong voice that has both the words and music, “Knives, scissors, blades of all manufacture, honed until they bleed.”
Pravdin shuffles to the window, looks out over the eucalyptus branch on the sill to watch the peddler at his work. Feet pumping, he bends over his wheel and presses with three fingers of his left hand the blade against the grindstone. Soft silent sparks angle off in all directions: a miniature fireworks from the collision of molecular worlds maybe. Civilizations too small to be imagined, destroyed in the blink of the peddler’s goggled eye! Straining, Pravdin can almost make out a distant “Aiiiiiiii.” He shivers uncontrollably from tiny catastrophes, inaudible whimpers. Nadezhda comes up behind him, throws a shawl over his bony shoulders, draws him back toward the bed.
They make love in the dancing shafts of sunlight that slip through the leaves outside Nadezhda’s window. “Knives, scissors, blades of all manufacture,” the peddler’s chant reaches them from the cul-de-sac. Pravdin struggles to get his mind off worlds disintegrating without so much as a decibel count. “Honed until they bleed.” Nadezhda becomes aware of his softness, senses his lack of concentration, takes corrective action. Soon the bed springs and floorboards are drowning out the inaudible whimpers in Pravdin’s skull. Their bodies press together like halves of a broken saucer and off he comes—not an instant too soon.
Later, Nadezhda passes him a page from her notebook on which she has written: “You tossed during the night. Did you dream?”
“I dreamed I was trying to reconstruct a dream I wasn’t sure I ever had,” Pravdin replies sleepily. “Bits and pieces were all I got.”
“Give me a bit, give me a piece,” Nadezhda writes.
“There was something painfully bright, a searchlight maybe, stabbing toward me from far away,” he remembers. “It hurt my eyes so I squinted into the dream, which had the physical form of a tunnel, to cut the glare. As soon as I
did that I could make out the scene: I was vacationing in a gigantic hotel on the Black Sea reserved for KGB interrogators. God knows how I got there, but there is where I got. They assumed I was one of them and started to ask me about my score, my techniques, my favorite cases. Criminal is what we are here, I told myself, so I gave them ten minutes of police bla-bla-bla. Something I said made them suspicious—probably the item about how I tortured suspects by scenting their cells with vaginal deodorant spray. Next thing, they had me strapped to an animal I was afraid to identify and something painfully bright like a searchlight was stabbing toward me from very far away. It hurt my eyes so I squinted into the dream, which had the physical form of a tunnel, to cut the glare. And so forth and so on.”
“Your dreams are like cylinders on a player piano,” Nadezhda writes. “The same thing keeps coming around again.”
“Also my life,” Pravdin mutters.
Nadezhda passes him a note she has obviously written the night before. “Zoya wants you to return the original manuscripts and so do I. Don’t argue, Robespierre. Neither of us realized how stubborn you were when we got you into this. I remember your story about making sandals from watch-straps, but I didn’t believe it. I do now. You will give it up, won’t you? We can make a life together, the three of us—me, you, Zoya. We don’t need to set things straight. Life is too short.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Pravdin tells her, but she can see from his expression that she has made some headway.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Pravdin repeats to Mother Russia over a breakfast of rice-cake cereal and steaming glasses of tea sweetened with spoonfuls of jam.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Zoya scolds, wagging a wrinkled finger under his nose. “Your life is one big maybe yes, maybe no. You’ve done everything you could. What, for God’s sake,
did you hope to accomplish by slugging Frolov in front of everyone at the Bolshoi?”
“I thought they would have to arrest me and the truth would come out at the trial,” Pravdin explains lamely.