Authors: Robert Littell
Pravdin retreats. “Talking politics is like talking about life after death,” he murmurs. “I have thank you enough trouble with life before death.”
The crowd breaks up (reluctantly; Muscovites don’t particularly want to get where they are going). Folding himself into his dignity as if it is an old Army greatcoat, Pravdin hurries off toward the Slaviansky. On the path that runs parallel to the Moscow River he pauses alongside the Kremlin wall to light a cigarette, then quickly scribbles with a piece of chalk:
I’ve seen the future and it needs work
(L. Steffens: Pravdin never forgets a face or a phrase). His spirits buoyed, he cuts through the Kremlin with a group of German tourists, tries (unsuccessfully) to sell Bolshoi tickets to the stragglers, stops under the clock in the Kremlin tower (which is two minutes slow) to buy a lottery ticket but doesn’t find a number that suits him. Ten minutes later he is at the entrance to the Slaviansky Bazaar, a restaurant remarkable (in addition to its Polish vodka and Georgian sausages) for its prerevolutionary decor.
“Pravdin, Robespierre Isayevich,” he announces to the lady wrestler with the guest list, “at your beck and call.”
She takes in his basketball sneakers, his trousers frayed at the cuffs from walking on them, his Eisenhower jacket with the four medals overlapping above the breast pocket, his day-old growth of rust-colored beard, she runs her polished
thumbnail down the P’s. “There is no Pravdin,” she says cautiously.
“But there is, ravishing lady; you have the honor of having him before your very original body.” Pravdin gives her a fleeting glimpse of a small laminated card (the menu from a Leningrad ice-cream parlor), mumbles something about representing the Second Chief Directorate of GLUBFLOT.
“Oh dear,” the woman says nervously. Pravdin smiles crookedly (according her a glimpse of stainless steel bicuspids), bows, brushes past her into the Slaviansky.
The first person he runs into is another freeloader, his old camp friend Friedemann T., a goateed painter who claims to have created abstract socialist realism. He is wearing a dark tapered suit (French), pointed shoes (Greek), a white-on-white shirt (Russian) with studs (his grandfather’s) and a light prewar overcoat (origin obscure) draped over delicately hunched shoulders.
“What are we here?” the painter whispers urgently, a glass of vodka in one hand, a Georgian sausage in the other. “Computers?”
“What we are is literary,” Pravdin whispers back, plucking a glass of vodka from a passing tray.
“Literary.” Friedemann T. takes this in. He lifts on his toes, sways as if he is putting himself into gear, raises the pitch of his voice. “What’s wonderful in a book, if you want my view, is what the author doesn’t say.” He bites into the sausage and washes it down with a mouthful of vodka.
“In my new novel,” Pravdin offers—neither bothers looking at the other—“I’m experimenting with action that has no relation at all to character.”
“Not possible,” Friedemann T. dismisses the idea out of hand. “Action
is
character.”
“The trouble with that,” complains Pravdin, “is there’s no way for a character to step out of character. Whatever he does, he is. My God, that’s worse than solitary confinement!” Through ventriloquist’s lips he adds:
“Where are they hiding the sausages?”
The painter motions with his head and they casually move off in that direction. “Mind you, his work is splendid,” the painter loudly confides. He nods at a famous editor, who looks back blankly. “If it has a fault it is that he doesn’t empty himself. When I work I always go to great pains to empty myself.” Friedemann T. snorts. “Quietly, it goes without saying, so as not to make waste or noise.”
“In thirty-four I think it was,” Pravdin reaches back into his memory, “Isaac Emanuilovich told the First Congress of Soviet Writers, I have invented a new genre—the genre of silence.’ “
Friedemann T. belches; his overcoat falls to the floor. Pravdin restores it to his shoulders. “The genre of silence!” the painter remarks. “I’ll bet you wish you’d said that.”
“I will,” Pravdin promises.
On their way out Friedemann T. consults his pocket calendar, reminds Pravdin about a midafternoon vernissage at the Artists’ Union and a dinner symposium of geologists at the Rossiya. “The geologists are serving chicken Kiev,” he reminds him, “and a decent Bulgarian wine.”
“It is not possible,” Pravdin tells him regretfully. “Apartment hunting is what I am obliged to do.” He explains about the notice tacked to the tree.
“They’re not going to tear down that beautiful building of yours?” Friedemann T. whistles. “Aesthetically speaking, that could qualify as a crime. There aren’t five like it left in central Moscow.”
“After this one goes there won’t be but one; mine is the next to last,” Pravdin says wistfully. “A vacant apartment by
any chance you don’t know of? My requirements are modest: sunlight, space, calm, privacy and discreet neighbors.”
Friedemann T. shakes his head gloomily. “If I knew of such a place I would move in myself. Why don’t you approach the Druse?”
“No, no, for small things I don’t like to bother him,” Pravdin insists.
“Since when is an apartment a small thing?”
“For the Druse,” Pravdin assures him, “it is.”
Pravdin, twenty minutes early, is hoping to be the first on line; he is forty-first. He comforts himself by thinking of those ahead as potential clients.
“How do I know these tickets are genuine?” demands a middle-aged woman wrapped in an enormous brown shawl.
“How does she know these tickets are genuine?” Pravdin repeats innocently. “Yes or no? Under socialism, forgery is a state crime but hustling is a state necessity?”
The woman laughs self-consciously. “I’ll take two,” she says and carefully counts out eight rubles from her wallet. Pravdin folds the money away in his change purse.
Behind Pravdin two young men are playing chess on a pocket board. White advances his queen’s bishop to knight five. “If I say Schonberg,” he complains, “you say Webern; if I say chromatic equality
is
a built-in tenet of serialism, you opt for diatonic species.”
“I couldn’t help overhearing,” Pravdin intrudes. “What a coincidence you speak of Schonberg. I happen to have on my very person some Deutsche Grammophon discs that arrived only last night from West Germany.”
When Pravdin’s turn comes he finds himself face to face with the most expressionless human he has ever set eyes on in his life.
“Next,” the woman says, glancing up from her incredibly organized desk at a wall electric clock that has no hour hand. Like Pravdin she is extremely thin; unlike Pravdin she is thin without being frail. “Next,” she repeats tonelessly, impatiently, tapping a front tooth with a fingernail.
Pravdin hands her the form he has filled out, along with his Moscow residence permit (it cost a small fortune), his internal passport, a letter (forged) certifying he is a member in good standing of the Writers’ Union and therefore is entitled to twice the standard nine square meters of living space that is the inalienable right of every Soviet citizen, and a military certificate (the genuine article) indicating he suffers from an old war wound and therefore is entitled to live within a radius of a hundred meters of public transportation. Methodical in her movements the woman piles up the documents, begins with the internal passport, glances at the word Jew penned in alongside entry three (ethnic origin), pockets the two Bolshoi tickets Pravdin has discreetly placed in the military certificate.
The interview, Pravdin senses, is off to a reasonable start. Touch wood.
“What is the nature of your war wound?” the thin woman asks in a voice that conveys total lack of interest in the answer.
“Shrapnel in the neck,” Pravdin explains. “Pinched nerves. I lost the ability to shrug.”
“That doesn’t sound incapacitating,” comments the thin woman.
“Incapacitating is what it is,” Pravdin argues passionately. “In a workers’ paradise the inability to shrug is the ultimate wound.” Pravdin leans across the desk. “Lovely lady,” he pleads, “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.”
The thin woman shuffles through some file cards. “I can offer you a flat in Dzerzhinsky—”
“Sooner Siberia!” blurts Pravdin.
“Dzerzhinsky is twenty-five minutes by metro from the Kremlin,” the woman continues tonelessly. “The flat is in a building with an elevator, it is eighty-five meters from a metro station, it has fourteen square meters surface, heat, hot water and kitchen privileges—”
“I’m entitled to eighteen square meters,” Pravdin whines.
The woman shrugs, writes the address on a card, stamps the card with a seal and signs her name across the seal, hands it to Pravdin, looking up at him for the first time.
“Could I trouble you,” Pravdin says with mock formality, “for the return of my Bolshoi tickets.”
“What tickets,” the thin woman asks innocently, “are you talking about?”
Pravdin paces off the distance from the metro to the front door of the gray building, six stories, one of many in a suburban project set at angles that suggest they are giving each other the cold shoulder. People stare. Pravdin concentrates, loses count, starts again, is annoyed to find the total eighty-three.
The occupants of the flat, a worn, tired man with thinning hair and his pregnant wife, are wrapping dishes in newspaper and packing them in cartons when Pravdin knocks. (A note indicates the bell is out of order.)
“You’re the new tenant then,” the man assumes. He manages a smile. “Come on, 111 give you the royal tour.”
“First the lowdown on the building,” Pravdin demands. His eyes, darting nervously, take in the room: boxes tied and ready to go, matching overstuffed easy chairs, a grand-father
clock with a sweep second hand that jerks when it passes the five, a huge television set, trunks, suitcases.
The pregnant woman straightens, her palms on the small of her back. “I have to admit it, the building has a certain charm,” she observes dryly. “Today for instance there was no cold water in the taps. You wouldn’t be interested in a kitchen table, would you? The top is genuine formica.”
Pravdin, dispirited, shakes his head, shuffles around the room, peeks into the kitchen, the toilet (both shared with another family), sniffs, screws up his face in disgust, tries to flush the toilet, has to climb on the handle to depress it. Using the tip of his sneaker he pushes up the yellowing plastic toilet seat; it is angled badly and bangs down again.
“How do you pee?” Pravdin asks absently.
“Quickly,” the man replies.
“Funny is what you’re not,” snaps Pravdin. He turns on the tap marked “cold”; rusty hot water gushes out. He looks up at the shower nozzle, which is caked with a whitish residue, and then down at the hole in the cement floor that serves as a drain.
“I suppose the facilities are like this in our space rockets,” the pregnant woman clucks her tongue sympathetically. Her husband shoots her a look and she goes back to her packing.
“The same is what it is,” Pravdin agrees, “with the possible exception that the drain holes are stainless steel.”
“Listen, it’s not all that bad,” the tired man urges. “The couple you share the kitchen with, the woman works at the hard currency store for tourists and gets the inside track on certain shipments before they’re put on sale.”
“She’s good on fur hats, leather gloves, waterproof boots,” the wife calls out.
But Pravdin is already removing his sinking heart from the flat.
There are no signs forbidding people to walk on the grass; none are needed. But Pravdin, hunched forward, absorbed in his thoughts as he cuts diagonally across Sokolniki Park, is in no mood to obey signs that aren’t there. Pigeons scatter. Emaciated squirrels claw their way up trees. An old man in civilian clothes with a chest full of medals angrily shakes his cane but Pravdin, out of earshot, hurtles on. At Khokhlovka, a district of factories and warehouses, he reaches for his chalk, scrawls in English across a billboard trumpeting how many schools have been built in the last five years:
Nothing worth knowing can be teached
(Anon: Pravdin studied English in the camps but his teacher disappeared in midcourse); Glancing fearfully at dark clouds conspiring over the rooftops, he hurries on to the warehouse that serves the Druse as a base of operations.
The small door at the rear opens before he has a chance to ring. Pravdin, shivering from a rain that has yet to fall, ducks to enter, is greeted by Zosima, a Berber with a small blue flower tattooed on her left cheek. Long plaits of silky black hair fall across her shoulders to her waist, indicating that she is not married. Her lids are painted blue; her gaze is direct, unblinking. Pravdin has seen her before; she is one of the Druse’s “nieces” and chauffeurs him around in a curtained Packard that is said to have belonged to the Cuban ambassador. (“I never drive myself,” the Druse once confided to Pravdin, “my hands are too small.”)
“Chuvash expects you,” murmurs Zosima.
“How expects me?” Pravdin is edgy. “I never called I was coming.”
Zosima only steps back, bolts the door behind him,
leads the way through labyrinthian warehouse aisles stacked with busts and statues of men whose biographies have been conveniently lost: Bukharin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev. (“I am the day watchman at a pantheon of nonpersons,” the Druse told Pravdin the first time he visited the warehouse.)
The Druse, whose full name is Chuvash Al-hakim bi’amrillahi, greets Pravdin at the door of the room that serves the warehouse guardian as an office. Dressed in a black European suit, an embroidered skullcap set squarely on his shiny bald scalp, deeply tanned, he places his right hand on his heart, inclines his head to Pravdin. “Salaam aleikum, brother,” he says quietly.
“Shalom Aleichem back to you.” Pravdin bows awkwardly, precedes the Druse into his office which is covered, floors and walls, in oriental carpets, giving to the room the thick muffled atmosphere of an Uzbek yourta. Chuvash and Pravdin sit cross-legged on either side of a low iron table. An old beetlelike woman, her face masked by a heavy black horsehair veil, hovers. Chuvash mutters something to her in Kirghiz (one of the six Turkic dialects he speaks fluently). She moves away, neither man speaks, she returns with shallow bowls of green tea brewed in a charcoal-heated samovar and served with a delicate herb called hell. The aroma clears Pravdin’s nasal passages. The Druse offers Pravdin a plate of biscuits. He takes one, bites into it, cups his other hand underneath to catch the crumbs.