Authors: Robert Littell
The Druse sips his tea while it is still scalding hot. Pravdin leaves his bowl on the table and blows on it until he can bear to lift it. When the bowls are empty the old woman is summoned to take them away.
“So.” Pravdin dries his lips on the sleeve of his Eisenhower jacket, clears his throat.
“Brother, it has come to me again,” Chuvash says.
Pravdin, concealing his skepticism behind a crooked smile, leans forward.
Chuvash places both hands on the iron table, palms down, speaks with his eyes closed, his back straight. “It is the reign of the last Emir of Bukhara, Said Mirmuhammed Alimkhan,” he recounts intently. “He lives in the Ark twenty meters above the level of the city. This Friday, as every Friday, carpets are laid between the Ark and the mosque. The people prostrate themselves, see only the Emir’s finely worked golden slippers as he makes his way to the mosque. Later he returns to the Ark through the twin towers, mounts the tunnel between the prison cells, pauses to say something to a dignitary just before my door. I see him through a crack in the wood. He is a slight man, absolutely beardless. When he speaks to the dignitary I become aware that he has a stutter. ‘That the executions b-b-b-b-begin/ he commands. The dignitary falls to his knees to kiss the hem of his robe. The Emir continues on to the balcony to watch the executions. This Friday there are five. They are performed with a knife. I am to be the fourth.”
“How can you be sure it’s you?” Pravdin, agitated, demands.
“In the vision I am brought to the courtyard below the balcony. They are dragging away the corpse of the man before me; he had been convicted of incest. I fall on my knees and lift my palms to the Emir for mercy. And I see on my palm the triangle of lines indicating I am a seer.” Chuvash turns up his right palm and traces the triangle with his finger. “You see, it is always the same.”
“What about the mercy?” Pravdin wants to know.
“The Emir smiles down at me and nods in a kindly, almost fatherly, way just as the executioner’s knife slices through my jugular.”
“Aiiiiiiii,” Pravdin grimaces, clutching his own throat; he has a vivid imagination and a low threshold of pain.
Chuvash smiles. “It is fascinating, is it not? If there were only a way to study this phenomenon scientifically, to confirm it—”
“How many of these incarnations have you had?” asks Pravdin.
“It is difficult for me to say. Often different visions seem to relate to the same incarnation. I count at least six, but I’m not certain. And you?” Chuvash gestures with his pinky nail, which he has allowed to grow extremely long. “I understand you don’t consider them evidence of previous incarnations as I do, but have you had any more of your dreams?”
Pravdin flashes his crooked smile. “I dreamed about a monastery cell, whitewashed. The bunk bed has no pillow, the crucifix above it has been pried off but it has left its imprint from having been there for centuries. A bearded Jew of indeterminate age leans against the imprint of the crucifix.”
“Ah,” sighs Chuvash, impressed.
“It is only a dream,” cautions Pravdin.
“Of course,” Chuvash nods. “Continue.”
“Shots ring out, a ragged volley first, then a single shot from a smooth-bored naval pistol. The Jew starts, opens his eyes, sees for the first time the imprint of the crucifix. His bloodless lips move, words form but no sound emerges; he is speechless with humiliation. A horrified expression crawls across his face like a crab. At that instant a key turns in the lock, the door swings open with a squeal.”
“Who is it?”
“Who it is I will never know,” Pravdin confesses. “Someone flushed the communal toilet, the pipes banged and I woke up.”
Zosima slips into the room, whispers to the Druse. He
produces a huge gold pocket watch, sees it has stopped, taps it with his pinky nail to make it start, says a few words in Uighur. Zosima backs out of the room.
The Druse appears pressed for time. “What brings you to me, brother?” he asks politely.
Pravdin laughs nervously. “What brings me to you is a favor.”
“Only ask it,” Chuvash instructs him.
Pravdin hesitates long enough to suggest he doesn’t relish asking favors, then tells him about the tearing down of the next to last wooden house in central Moscow.
Chuvash pulls a scrap of paper from a pocket, uncaps a pen, jots a name and phone number on the paper, offers it to Pravdin. “If they are forcing you out of the next to last wooden house in central Moscow, there is only one place for you: the last wooden house in central Moscow. Call this number, ask for a man by this name, speak to no one else, say only that you are a friend of Chuvash Al-hakim bi’amrillahi.”
Stunned at the ease of it all Pravdin accepts the paper, folds it away between the bills in his change purse. “When I can do “something for you only ask,” he promises the Druse.
“When you can do something for me,” Chuvash replies evenly, “you will know it without my asking.”
The last wooden house
in central Moscow …
The last wooden house in central Moscow, two floors of frayed eaves and awnings, looms at the dead end of an L-shaped alley off Trubnaya Square. Pravdin, nostalgic for the ordered sweetness of shtetl life he has never experienced, blinks back a rush of emotion as he sets down his rope-bound cardboard suitcases. Dear God in heaven, a building with soft edges and no right angles! Surrounded by a fence! White birch trees! Shrubbery! A garden! Weeds even! Next door, the faded paint peeling from its onion-shaped domes: a sixteenth-century Orthodox church that has been converted into a wine shop. Across the alley, towering over both the church and the wooden house: a line of prewar
apartment houses, their backs to the alley, their windows silvery with reflected sunlight. Pravdin, fighting faintness, rests a hand on a birch to steady himself. Birds chirp. The sound of Mozart hangs in the air like moisture. The alley seems to swallow Pravdin as he approaches the house, swings back the wooden gate. Hinges squeal. Count your
blessings
, Pravdin almost weeps.
You’re reasonably healthy, relatively wealthy and you’re moving into the last wooden house in central Moscow. Touch wood
. (His knuckles rap against the wooden fence.)
“Hello to anyone?” Pravdin hollers into the house, holding open the front door. “Someone home?”
“Hello yourself,” a female voice calls from one of the ground-floor rooms. A moment later a young girl pads into the hall on bare feet. She has long matted blonde hair that falls to her waist, wears an American sweat shirt with “Make Amends” embroidered across the breast and jeans that flare at the ankle. She appears to be about fifteen. “I’m Ophelia Long Legs,” she supplies, cocking her head, studying Pravdin with childlike curiosity. “You must be the new attic. Wow! What a fantastic jacket. Where’d you ever find it?”
“It’s an old Eisenhower jacket,” Pravdin starts to explain.
“What’s Eisenhower? Say, do you eat meat?”
“What kind of a question is that, ‘Do you eat meat?’ “
“I don’t mean to be nosey.” Ophelia Long Legs glances up the stairs, lowers her voice. “The reason why I ask is because the ladies you share the kitchen with are vegetarians and they can’t support the smell of meat.” Ophelia giggles. “We don’t eat meat either but that’s because we can’t afford it.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Pravdin, always on the alert for new clients, wants to know.
“ We’ is whoever happens to be in the room. We’re volosatiye—hairy ones—you see. Friends come, friends go. Some stay a day, some stay a month.”
“What about residence permits? What about the police?”
“Oh, the militia gives us a wide berth,” Ophelia boasts. She whispers again. “Some of us have fathers who are vlasti—you know, bosses. What’s your name anyhow?”
“Pravdin, Robespierre Isayevich,” Pravdin draws himself up, soundlessly clicking the heels of his sneakers together, “at your beck and call.”
“Hey, that’s cute,” Ophelia giggles, looking at the sneakers. “What kind of a nutty name is Robespierre? It doesn’t sound Russian.”
“It’s French. A famous French revolutionary is whom I was named after,” Pravdin explains.
“I thought France was capitalist,” the girl says innocently. “Say, you wouldn’t happen to have any French rock records, would you?”
“I know where I can put my hands on some,” Pravdin ventures cautiously, “but they’re for sale, not for lend.”
“Oh, we’ve got money when it comes to records, don’t you worry your head about that.”
Pravdin drags his suitcases into the hall as the girl holds open the door. “What’s the lowdown on the building?” he demands.
“There are a couple of drips on this floor,” Ophelia replies. “The man who lives there is an embalmer.” Her face screws up in disgust. “They say he’s the one who bathes
Diadya
Lenin every other week. A genuine general has that room. A limousine with the tiniest flag on the fender you ever saw comes to get him every morning. That must mean he’s important, mustn’t it? And the weatherman lives there with his girl friend who’s not here now because she’s having marital problems with her husband. The weatherman is neat; he’s the one on television every night with the weather report, the one with the cute mustache. Upstairs there’s Mother Russia and Nadezhda. And you. Mother Russia is a super lady.”
Ophelia leans toward Pravdin’s ear. “She’s a bit off her head actually, but it’s nothing serious. She believes in flying saucers and visitors from outer space and things like that. You’ll get along with her just fine if you know what she likes and what she doesn’t like. She’s kind of old and fussy and fixed in her ways, if you know what I mean.”
Pravdin, a collector of idiosyncrasies as well as things, settles down on a suitcase. “What does she like and not like, then?”
Ophelia thinks a moment. “She doesn’t like germs, telephones, the Singer Sewing Machine Company, knocks on the door, starch in shirts or sheets, General Shuvkin,”—Ophelia indicates the General’s door—“meat, sneezing because it lets the soul escape, insane asylums, lightning and electric samovars. As for what she likes: there’s fresh snow, getting letters and writing them, all things the color of absinthe, exotic tea, parrots, wood, Akhmatova, softness, craziness and me. She likes me,” Ophelia laughs happily. “And what is it you don’t like, Comrade Eisenhower?”
Pravdin remembers some words from a poem. “What I don’t like is mist, bell sounds and brokenness,” he replies.
“Hey, you’ll get along fine,” Ophelia concludes brightly. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to Mother Russia. I’m dying to see how she’ll react to someone with a name like Robespierre.”
Ophelia grabs one of Pravdin’s suitcases and drags it up the wooden stairs ahead of him. “Zoya Aleksandrovna,” she calls. “Come look—your new attic is here.” Laughing merrily, she tosses back at Pravdin: “Wait until she hears about your mist, bell sounds and brokenness.”
Zoya Aleksandrovna Volkova emerges from her room and leans over the banister under a skylight. She is dressed in pleated trousers, sturdy walking shoes with low heels and
laces, a man’s shirt, wears two ragged silver fox pieces around her neck to guard against chills, carries a fly swatter tucked under her arm. Her hair, twisted into a bun, is gray.
“Charmed,” she says in a suspicious voice, leaning over the railing to offer Pravdin her hand, palm down. He reaches up and takes it, is uncertain whether to kiss it or shake it; he is struck by her skin, which is soft with age and doesn’t seem to be attached to the bones.
“Greetings to you, little mother,” he offers politely.
Mother Russia draws Pravdin’s hand to her bifocals, raises her head to study his nails through the lower lens. “Good, good, you don’t at all appear to be communistical. Here, child, regard the paleness of his nails; it indicates melancholy for certain, persecution maybe. The broadness”—Mother Russia’s thumb polishes each of his nails as she proceeds along his hand—“is a positive sign, yes, it means he’s not, thanks God, ambitious. (Only fools are ambitious is what I think. But that’s another story.) Ah, the white mark is
mauvais, mauvais
, means misfortune, poor dear.” She looks up suddenly into his face. “What is your given name?”
“Robespierre, little mother.”
“Robes-pierre.” She tries it, then shifts the accent. “Robes-pierre. Yes, I like it better, don’t you, that way. Robespierre. Well, God grant you don’t end up the way he did.” She releases his hand, sniffs the air. “You don’t I hope to God have any communicable diseases, do you?”
“He looks as white as a sheet,” Ophelia comments.
“No, no, perfectly healthy is what I am,” Pravdin protests. “Pale is how I always look. Hustlers, like Hasidim, avoid the sun. Take my word for it, little mother, from me there’s nothing you can catch.”
“Tant mieux,”
she tosses over her shoulder, heading for
the kitchen and indicating with a flick of her fly swatter that he is to follow.
“You’re in the attic, up those stairs. The toilet’s here. Each of us expected to buy paper whenever we find it, Scandinavian brands preferred. They’re more, excuse the expression, absorbent. As for the kitchen, I suppose Ophelia told you about no meat. No meat includes no chicken. No meat. No chicken. Fish, eggs, grains, herb teas of all sorts. Here”—Mother Russia thrusts into Pravdin’s hands a eucalyptus branch—“put this on your windowsill, it will discourage the mosquitoes. When you’re unpacked call me; whatever you do, don’t knock at my door; never knock at my door. I invite you for an infusion. We will have a conversation, you and I; perhaps we will the both of us together figure out why you have come to us.”
“I have come to you only to live, little mother,” Pravdin says, puzzled.
But Mother Russia only smiles as if she knows better.
Pravdin unpacks his belongings, folds away his khaki shirts on the top shelf of the closet, lays out his toilet articles on the shelf over the small washbasin in his room, disinfects the basin with alcohol that he pours on and ignites. He finds a broom in a kitchen closet and sweeps the attic. From under a dresser he collects a pile of sawdust.
Termites!
he thinks, horrified. He pulls out the drawers one by one and examines the interior. Nothing. He gets down on his knees and examines the under side. On the inside of one of the legs he finds a layer of wood plaster. He tests it with his fingertip. The plaster is dry, but behind it there is a small hollow. Pravdin leans back on his haunches, wipes away with his sleeve the sweat that has accumulated on his forehead. Suddenly he shudders. Why, he asks himself, struggling for calm, for logic, for perspective,
why would they put a microphone in my room? What is it they expect to
hear? He is tempted to
talk into it, to tell them he knows it’s there, to take a knife and pry it out and fling it from the window (open, with the eucalyptus branch on the sill). But an old camp instinct tells him: