Authors: Robert Littell
“Waak, waak, rev-lutions are verbose,”
comes from the partly open door of Mother Russia’s room.
“—the great mountaineer himself, and I even received an answer once, from what I supposed was a secretary, saying that Iosif Vissarionovich was occupied with the war and would get back to me when it was over. Well, he got back to me all right. They came to collect me in the middle of the night and carted me off to an asylum near Leningrad. I was there for three and a half years, and in a certain sense it was worth it. I can see that surprises you, doesn’t it? You see, when they tossed me back into the lake they certified me insane, which more or less gives me license to do as I please, write what I please to whom I please. They can’t touch me as long as I don’t hurt anybody because I’m legally insane!”
Everyone is moved by the story: Mother Russia by the telling of it, Nadezhda and Pravdin by the listening to it. After a while Pravdin says, “I can guess those were hard years for you in the asylum.”
“Oh, they were, I’ll admit it, difficult,” Mother Russia agrees. “The worst thing was the slamming of doors. I have a feeling that is threatening to become a theory: that the way you close doors shows in a profound sense what you think of the people inside. I imagine in the Kremlin they pad about on thick carpets and ease the doors closed so that you can’t even hear the latch click into place. In my asylum the insane people who claimed to be doctors would fling the doors shut
as if it were an afterthought. Slam! Like that.” Mother Russia slaps the table and winces at the noise and the memory it evokes.
Pravdin begins to clear away the dishes. Nadezhda scrubs up and sets them to drain. Mother Russia turns in; she is planning to take an electric train into the countryside the next day to pick mushrooms and wants to get an early start.
“I’m pleased with our new attic,” she whispers to Pravdin as she goes, and stretches on her toes to kiss him on each cheek.
Nadezhda invites Pravdin into her room for a nightcap. He settles awkwardly on the edge of the bed, which is covered with a quilt and embroidered pillows and serves as a couch. Nadezhda places an old Glenn Miller record on the phonograph, wipes it with a soft cloth, sets the needle in the first groove. She pours out two small cognacs, offers one to Pravdin. They click glasses and drink.
The room is lighted by a Japanese paper lantern in one corner. On a low table near the bed is a large basket full of dried flowers from Lenin Hills. Pravdin picks up one with a long stem and pale violet flowers, and Nadezhda writes on her pad:
“Parnassia palustris.”
The walls are covered with ornate gilt frames, several with old blown-up photographs of Civil War battle fields strewn with corpses, one with a map of the Paris Metro, some with nothing in them at all but wall. One series of photographs in particular catches Pravdin’s eye: four stills that have captured, through streaks of light and a suggestion of blurring, the motion of the earth.
“Extraordinary is what they are,” Pravdin comments. “Who made them?”
“I made them,” writes Nadezhda. “I work as a photographer at the central fashion house. These I do for me.”
Pravdin is mesmerized by the photographs. “The people
in these photos look as if they’re being pulled in different directions by forces they can’t control,” he says. He shakes his head in admiration.
Nadezhda writes excitedly, “We are being pulled in different directions—we are in giddy motion. The earth’s spin on its axis = 16 miles a minute. Around the sun = 1,200 miles a minute. Solar system moves through local star system = 780 miles a minute. Local star system moves through Milky Way = 12,000 miles a minute. Milky Way moves with respect to distant galaxies = 6,000 miles a minute. All in different directions!!!”
“We are being pulled apart, little sister. They are all in your photographs, every one of these motions. On display is where these should be.”
“Not possible,” Nadezhda quickly writes. “They say they don’t present life as it really is. They say such photographs might be misinterpreted.”
“They say, they say, they say,” sneers Pravdin.
Nadezhda writes: “You sound as if you want to change the system.”
“You’ve got it all wrong, little sister.” Pravdin laughs. “All I want to do with the system is beat it.”
“What do you do for work?” Nadezhda asks.
“For work I do what everyone does,” Pravdin answers, “which is as little as possible. Actually, I’m what is known as a professional hustler.”
“Hustler?”
“It’s like this, little sister: When I was a boy I lived in a village not far from Moscow. Nowadays it’s a watering hole for certain artists who know which side their bread is buttered on. In those days the local militia used to pay ten rubles to anyone bringing in a viper, which gave me the bright idea to breed them. I dug a snake pit behind the cottage and raised vipers, and once or twice a week I would
make my way to the militia headquarters and hand in a dead snake and collect the bounty. I brought in so many that the regional paper wrote me up and the Komsomol pinned a medal on me. I lost that medal, but I still have the cottage; a teenage hustler breeds vipers in the same pit. Nothing is what changes.”
Nadezhda writes: “I don’t believe a word.”
“True is what it is, little sister, all of it and more. Listen,” he says, leaning forward, “what I do is buy and sell: blue jeans, records, automobile parts, residence permits, exit visas, electrical appliances, books, and so forth and so on. But I have big plans too.” And he tells her about his idea for developing the Q-Tip and the classic comic.
“I have heard about such people as you,” Nadezhda writes, “but I have never met one before. How do you stay out of the way of the police?”
“By giving them, from time to time, things that they need too,” Pravdin explains. “Screening for a dacha, a carburetor for a 1956 Mercedes, tickets to a hockey match; I am famous in certain circles because I managed to acquire twelve tickets to the final with Canada last winter. At the time they had approximately the same value on the open market as exit visas to Israel.”
“And so the police leave you alone.”
“Up to now,” Pravdin agrees. He remembers the microphone in his room. “Can I use that?” he asks. She hands him her pad. He writes:
“Before me who lived in the attic?”
“A Berber girl,” Nadezhda writes her answer under the question, “with a blue flower tattooed on her cheek.” Nadezhda looks at Pravdin quizzically, then scribbles: “Why do you write your question?”
“So that anyone listening will hear only the scratching of a pencil,” he writes back.
Pravdin, squinting
into the morning …
Pravdin, squinting into the morning so that the comers of his eyes look like tiny fans, leans over the sill with the eucalyptus branch to see what the commotion is about.
“Sorry if we woke you, Comrade Eisenhower,” calls Ophelia Long Legs, looking up from scattering bread crumbs to a flock of pigeons.
Pravdin closes the window, dresses, gulps down an obligatory cup of black coffee, ransacks the attic for his appointment calendar, finds it under several copies of Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle in German, confirms the breakfast for the Lithuanian physicist at the Metropole. He pulls on his Eisenhower jacket, double knots the laces on his basketball sneakers, fills his
briefcase with Q-Tips and assorted odds and ends until it is bulging, starts downstairs.
Count your blessings
, Pravdin mumbles under his breath. You’re reasonably healthy, relatively wealthy and you live
in the last wooden house in central
Moscow. Touch wood. (His knuckles rap on the banister.)
Ophelia sits on the bottom step of the porch, her long legs stretched out before her, absently chewing gum and contemplating the milling pigeons. “Which came first,” she asks suddenly, “the Second World War or the Korean war?”
“The Second World War,” Pravdin informs her. “Why are you asking such a question?”
“Oh, just like that.” Ophelia shrugs. “I suppose you could say I’m naturally curious.”
The screen door bangs behind them. Ophelia’s first floor neighbor, Porfiry Yakolev, the weatherman with the handlebar mustache, steps briskly into the sunlight, takes several deep breaths.
“Pravdin, Robespierre Isayevich,” Pravdin announces, “at your beck and call.”
“Yakolev, Porfiry Osifovich,” the weatherman returns the greeting. He shifts his umbrella and raincoat and briefcase to his left hand, shakes with Pravdin.
“Why all the rain gear?” Ophelia teases. “You predicted sunshine on television last night.”
The weatherman casts a professional eye at the crystal sky, sniffs the air as if it is vintage wine, frowns. “Low front moving in from the east,” he murmurs, “overcast by midafternoon with the possibility of scattered showers toward evening.” He nods formally to Pravdin and hurries off down the alley.
Master Embalmer of the Soviet Union Yan Ernestovich Makusky emerges a few minutes later. He is a small, nervous old maid of a man who chews passionately on his cuticles in any kind of social situation. Pravdin creates one by introducing
himself. Blinking anxiously, the master embalmer attacks the cuticles on one hand, shakes with the other. Pravdin’s nostrils flare delicately; the odor of formaldehyde has reached his nose—or is it his imagination? He suddenly remembers what Ophelia whispered to him when he arrived: he is holding the hand that touches the clenched fist, combs the beard,
adjusts the facial expression even
of the Great Leader, the Living Light, Vladimir Ilyich himself. (“Waak, help,” echoes in Pravdin’s head.) “Is it true, comrade embalmer,” he demands urgently, drawing closer to Makusky, “that you are in personal charge of the body of our beloved Lenin?”
Makusky tugs until Pravdin is obliged to let go of his hand, brings a hangnail to his lips, acknowledges the fact with a downward jerk of his head.
“Tell me, if it’s not a state secret, comrade embalmer,” Pravdin urges, his lips almost against Makusky’s ear. “Is it really Vladimir Ilyich there in the flesh, or a wax dummy?”
Makusky turns to stare at Pravdin with a hurt look in his eyes. Pravdin (sure now that the formaldehyde is not a figment of his imagination) backs off. “Consider the question withdrawn,” he fumbles, smiling nervously.
“Lenin lives,” the master embalmer spits through clenched lips, hefts his briefcase, darts off down the alley, scattering the pigeons in his path.
“What’s itching him?” Ophelia wonders, throwing a handful of crumbs to the pigeons filtering back in twos and threes toward the porch in Makusky’s wake.
General Shuvkin, crew cut and ramrod straight in a pressed three-piece civilian suit with the left sleeve doubled back and neatly pinned to the shoulder, struts onto the porch, gives a last-minute shine to his shoes by rubbing them on the back of his trousers. His eyes wander over Pravdin, take in his sneakers, the Eisenhower jacket (vaguely familiar)
and come to a staring stop at the Order of Lenin dangling on his chest.
“Shuvkin,” the general snaps, offering his only hand.
“Pravdin,” Pravdin fires back. They shake once.
“Campaigns?” the general demands.
Pravdin permits his eyes to water at the thought of comrades dead and buried in far off fields. “Stalingrad under Chuikov, Belorussia under Cherniakhovsky, Berlin under Zhukov, comrade general.”
The general nods knowingly; his lips purse; his mind’s eye summons up row upon row of grave markers meandering like furrows in the caked Ukrainian earth. “My car’s at the foot of the alley,” Shuvkin orders. “I offer you a lift.”
Waving to Ophelia, Pravdin falls into place on the general’s left side, does a little jig to get into lock step with him. Shuvkin asks where he is going. Pravdin tells him about the breakfast for the Lithuanian physicist at the Metropole.
“So you are a physicist then,” Shuvkin notes; he guessed that the eccentricity represents genius, not power.
“In a manner of speaking,” Pravdin replies vaguely. His voice conveys that there are things one doesn’t talk about, even with generals.
Shuvkin picks up the hint. “I understand completely,” he says.
The general’s orderly holds open the rear door of the shiny black Volga with shirred curtains on the windows and a discreet plastic flag with two stars on the right front fender. Pravdin, his corporal instinct surfacing, ducks and enters first, settles into a seat on the street side, fidgets (generals are not his cup of tea), brushes off the shoulders of his Eisenhower jacket specks that aren’t there. The Volga pulls away from the curb. Through the front window Pravdin can see uniformed policemen flagging down cross traffic as soon as they catch sight of the general’s two-star flag on the fender. To
make conversation, Pravdin tells Shuvkin about an old idea of his (Hero of Socialist Labor! Order of the Red Star!! And so forth and so on) to publish an illustrated book of Red Army exercises. Reducing is an idea whose time has come, Pravdin begins. Warming to the subject, he goes on to spell out the advantages: Russian women will become slimmer and more attractive than their capitalist sisters; as women slim down they will require less room, thus alleviating the housing shortage; their stomachs will shrink, thus alleviating pressure on the agriculture sector of the economy and permitting the funneling of agriculture funds into military hardware. As the state withers away, Pravdin argues passionately, so too will the excess fat; Russia will become a trim muscular nation of builders of communism.
“Interesting,” comments Shuvkin. “What was the reaction to your proposal?”
“An All-Union Sports functionary sipped carrot juice and listened politely,” Pravdin recalls, “but decided he couldn’t make a move without the approval of the Ministry of Defense. The Ministry of Defense people drank kvass from paper cups and concluded that anything that had to do with the Red Army, including its exercise programs, was classified information requiring Central Committee clearance. The Central Committee’s second Directorate drank imported Scotch on the rocks in crystal glasses and said they couldn’t proceed without the green light from GLAVLIT. The GLAVLIT people served lukewarm ersatz coffee and agreed the project had potential, but insisted that nothing could be done until it had been taken up with the All-Union Sports Directorate.”