Mother Russia (6 page)

The Volga slides to a stop in front of a gray stone structure on Dzershinsky Square not far from the Kremlin. Almost instantly the orderly has the general’s door open. Shuvkin steps onto the sidewalk, beckons his eccentric passenger to follow;
this is the end of the line and Pravdin finds himself bidding good day to the general before the main entrance to the KGB complex—a building he has studiously avoided even passing in front of before!

Retreating as nonchalantly as his pounding pulse will permit, Pravdin almost crashes into a sidewalk vendor demonstrating to silently watchful children tiny metal wind-up dolls doing military turns on the pavement. Pravdin’s fingers close around his piece of chalk; his eyes search out a rectangle of gray wall on the KGB building. Various juicy phrases come to mind and he is mightily tempted, but at the crucial moment he senses a certain wobbliness in his legs, a weakness in his writing wrist; in short, a loss of nerve. He bends his head into a wind that isn’t blowing and hurtles on.

Passing GUM department store across from Lenin’s Tomb, Pravdin senses currents of strength flowing back into his veins. He pauses to tighten a sneaker lace, quickly scrawls on a ledge:

To dine with the devil use a long spoon

(Anon: Pravdin, even in the camps, had the instincts of a gourmet). Checking to be sure no one has spotted him defacing public property, he hurries off toward the Metropole.

“Pravdin, R. I.,” Pravdin announced to the amazon with the guest list blocking the entrance, “at your beck and call.”

She coolly checks the
P’s
, looks up at Pravdin, checks the P’s a second time, shakes her head sternly. “No Pravdin,” she says with finality.

“Of course there’s no Pravdin,” Pravdin whispers. “Have you taken leave of your senses? Do you think they would permit my name to appear on a list that any Western operative could get his hands on. Reflect,” Pravdin orders, tapping a forefinger against his skull. “Are you a member of the Party?”

The amazon nods carefully.

“Then it comes as no secret to you that we are surrounded by enemies, that vigilance is everybody’s occupation.” Pravdin makes sure nobody is within earshot, leans across the table. “If anyone inquires whether there is a Pravdin, R. I., at the breakfast, you will know what to say.”

“You can count on me, comrade,” the amazon pledges.

Pravdin rewards her with a crooked smile, brushes past her into the Metropole dining room. Just inside the door he comes across Friedemann T.

“Bitch, isn’t she?” his old friend mutters, a coffee in one hand, a glass of slivovitz in the other. “What are we here? Literary?”

“What we are is theoretical physics,” Pravdin informs him, plucking a glass of slivovitz from the bar.

“Theoretical physics.” Friedemann T. takes this in, screws up his face as if he is flipping through some mental file cards, raises his voice. “Don’t you agree that formulating the correct question is more difficult than trying to answer it?”

Pravdin captures a plate of scrambled eggs, uncaps a salt cellar, pours salt into his palm, sprinkles some of it over the eggs and throws the rest over his shoulder. “Einstein once told Max Planck,” he casually remarks between mouthfuls of egg, “that it is the theory that decides what we observe.”

“I have always marveled at the simplicity of Marx’s response to Hume’s problem of induction,” ventures Friedemann T. He grabs two sugar buns from a passing tray and offers one to Pravdin. Across the room the Lithuanian physicist, a mousy man with green-gray skin, is uttering a few stock words of appreciation to his hosts. There is a smattering of applause when he finishes.

“I met him last time he had breakfast here,” Pravdin recalls, motioning with his sugar bun toward the Lithuanian. “He suffers from the cult of the personality without the
benefit of having a personality.” Something occurs to him. “Perhaps that’s why he only rates a breakfast.”

“Lithuanian theoretical physics,” Friedemann T. snickers, “is still trying to perfect the wheel.”

As they leave Friedemann T. asks Pravdin how he made out with his apartment hunting. Pravdin, dislodging bits of food wedged between his teeth with a toothpick, tells him about the last wooden house in central Moscow and the odd vegetarian called Mother Russia.

“But she’s quite famous,” exclaims Friedemann T. His head rolls in wonder. “She’s the crazy lady who is always writing letters to Brezhnev, whom she claims is the same little Leonid Ilyich she went to primary school with. Nobody believes her, of course, but the letters are sensational. Some of them were published in
samizdat
a year or so ago.”

Friedemann T. stops in his tracks and stares at Pravdin; the goateed painter has put two and two together. “Now I understand,” he mutters under his breath.

“Understand what?” Pravdin demands. “What understand?”

“It’s probably because you’re sharing an apartment with Mother Russia,” Friedemann T. concludes. He throws an arm over Pravdin’s shoulder and draws him off to a corner. “I must say, you had me worried. There have been whispers about you in the last day or so.”

“What whispers?” Pravdin cries in an agonized voice.

“Not to get excited,” Friedemann T. tries to calm Pravdin. “It’s nothing you can put your finger on. Just, well, whispers. One gets the impression that you are being talked about in the wrong places.”

“What talked about?” Pravdin’s voice is a contained shriek. “What wrong places?”

“Pull yourself together,” hisses Friedemann T. He looks around to see if anyone has taken notice of them. “It probably
has to do with your moving in with a crazy lady who writes to Brezhnev, that’s all. You must consider yourself lucky to have the apartment and forget about the rest.”

“My cup runneth over.” Pravdin moans, placing a hand to his cheek as if he is trying to dampen the throb of an aching tooth.

Pravdin is still edgy as he hurries to his midmorning appointment with the State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries. He jaywalks across an intersection without waiting for the light to turn, barely sets foot on the curb when a police whistle shrills almost behind his ear. Pravdin, out of his skin with fear, leaps a hundred and eighty degrees to find himself confronted by a grim-faced police officer with his arms folded across his impressive chest.

“Do you see the crosswalk markings over there?” demands the policeman.

“I have this appointment—”

“You have this appointment. Everyone always has this appointment. How old are you?”

“How old am I?” The question stuns Pravdin, if only because it is the last thing he expects to be asked. “You want to know how old I am? I’m forty-two is how old I am.”

“At forty-two,” the policeman lectures his captive jaywalker, “a citizen should know how to cross a street properly. Now turn around and go back and do it again the right way.”

“Back again?” Pravdin stammers. “But if it’s dangerous to jaywalk in this direction, it’s dangerous to jaywalk back in the other direction!”

The policeman’s eyes narrow. Without another word Pravdin jaywalks back through the traffic, returns on the crosswalk and continues on his way. Inside the ministry he
waits his turn at the information desk. Nearby a heavy girl inserts a kopeck in a public scale and steps on. Four or five boys with long hair and leather jackets gather around her and begin to call off the numbers as the needle climbs. “Sixty, seventy, seventy-seven.” The back of the girl’s neck turns red; fighting tears, she thrusts through the semicircle of boys and disappears out the main door.

“Next,” calls the woman behind the information counter.

“If you please, kind lady, the State Committee for Discoveries and Inventions is what I’m looking for,” Pravdin informs her.

The woman, a timeserver with an eye tic, studies her directory. “No such animal,” she drones. “Next.”

Pravdin holds off the man behind him with his briefcase. “What do you mean, no such animal? I know for a fact that such an animal is what there is. Do me the favor of looking again. State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries.”

“You said
Discoveries and Inventions,”
the timeserver complains. She appeals to the others on the line. “He said
Discoveries and Inventions
. Make up your mind.”

“Inventions and Discoveries, Discoveries and Inventions, what’s the difference?” Pravdin cries hysterically.

The woman addresses herself to the people behind Pravdin. “There’s a big difference, as any idiot could tell you. Discoveries and Inventions would be listed under D. Inventions and Discoveries would be listed under
I.”
She shakes her head in disgust, slowly looks down again at the directory. “Inventions and Discoveries, State Committee of, third floor, five-oh-eight. Next.”

Pravdin presents himself to a young male secretary posted just inside the door of five-oh-eight. “Pravdin, Robespierre Isayevich,” he says. A number of men, all with small
packages or contraptions on their laps, turn to look at the newcomer. Pravdin leans across the desk and lowers his voice. “It’s about my idea for a cotton-tipped toothpick,” he tells the male secretary.

“Meetings with the State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries are by appointment only,” the male secretary explains earnestly. “You must write for an appointment.”

“An appointment is what I already have,” insists Pravdin. He rummages in his briefcase and produces a letter with the committee’s letterhead. “Ten-thirty, see for yourself?”

The male secretary waves Pravdin to a vacant place on the bench between a man with an apple corer-peeler-and-slicer and another with an indestructible light bulb that he claims stores up sunlight during the day and plays it back at night. When Pravdin’s turn comes, two hours behind schedule, he is ushered into a conference room where seven men and a woman sit around a table covered with green felt. They are spooning yogurts.

“You have five minutes,” the woman informs him.

“My Q-Tip,” Pravdin launches into his pitch, removing a box from his briefcase, pushing out with his primitively long thumb the cardboard drawer, offering one to the first man on his right as if it is a cigarette, “will revolutionize Russia. Before you can build communism you must construct socialism. Before socialism, an advanced industrial society. And who ever heard of an advanced industrial society without Q-Tips!”

“What did they say?” Nadezhda scrawls, hands Pravdin the slip of paper. (His trouser pockets are filled with crumpled notes; they have been talking for a while.)

“They ate yogurts and passed a Q-Tip from one to the other as if it would bite them and told me to take the matter up with the All-Union Institute for Household Technology.”

They are huddled under a tree on Lenin Hills, which slopes up from the Moscow River and hovers over the city like the lid of an eye, waiting for the sun to burn through the shower. Water vapor rises from gravel paths. At a nearby tree a couple, their heads shielded under a copy of Pravda, is glued together in an embrace. An old peasant squats with his back to another tree sprinkling salt from a cellar onto seal-lions and biting off the tips. From excursion boats passing in the river below, the voices of guides on loudspeakers drift up through the trees.

“Look left, look right,” Pravdin mimics. “What the tourists don’t see is Moscow.”

Nadezhda, in a sleeveless summer blouse, shivers and Pravdin drapes his Eisenhower jacket over her shoulders. They stand close to each other without touching. Nadezhda writes on a slip of paper:

“Zoya says you were in the camps.”

Pravdin’s crooked smile, a muscular contortion devoid of mirth, spreads across his face. “Twelve years I was in the camps,” he confirms. Instinctively he glances at the couple under the newspaper, but they are absorbed with each other. “Nine of them in Siberia. I was arrested in the month of Ab in the year of our Lord five thousand seven hundred six.” Pravdin smirks. “That’s nineteen forty-five in Christian.”

“Are you religious?” Nadezhda asks.

“Religious?” Pravdin jeers. “Me, I have no spiritual equipment.”

“Why were you arrested?” writes Nadezhda.

“Why is what I never found out, little sister,” Pravdin replies. “I was selling watches I took from Germans, but everyone was selling watches they took from Germans. It got so it was hard to find a German who knew the time of day. Nobody ever bothered to tell me why I had been arrested.
A trial I never had. An officer with blue shoulder boards read through my dossier and announced ‘Eight years.’ Count your blessings, I told myself, he could have easily said eighty.”

“But you said twelve years,” Nadezhda writes.

“Twelve is what his eight turned out to be, little sister. When I found myself alive at the end of eight, I presented my cold body at the desk of the commandant, a man who later died of hiccups, or so I heard. He looked up my dossier and announced I had been given a bonus of four more.”

“How did you survive?” Nadezhda writes furiously.

“How I survived,” Pravdin explains, “was by getting my hands on something that everyone in the camp wanted. I served most of my time at a place called Krivoshchekovo. The winters were so bitter you couldn’t expose raw skin for more than a few seconds without getting frostbite. Fingers fell off if you lost a mitten. I told them I had been a nurse in the army and wangled a job in the medical section. There I got my hands on the list of female prisoners who had venereal disease. Every day dozens of people—prisoners, guards, brigade commanders, stoolies, cooks—would come to me and I would rent them the list for two minutes. They paid me in fistfuls of bread and spoonfuls of soup and cupfuls of tobacco and squares of cloth and stubs of pencils and scraps of metal and lengths of string. I was something of a celebrity in Krivoshchekovo for working out the official exchange rate. Four fistfuls of bread were equal to one bowl of soup were equal to eight grams of tobacco were equal to enough cloth to wind around an average foot were equal to—”

Nadezhda touches Pravdin’s cheek with her fingertips; tears moisten her eyes.

Pravdin stops talking.

The rain lets up and Nadezhda backs away from the tree to photograph Pravdin with her old Leica. On an impulse she kicks off her sandals and scampers up the hill, slipping on the wet grass. Pravdin, picking his way around patches of mud, follows. Half way up they find a bench and sit on plastic bags that Pravdin produces from his briefcase. Nadezhda dips into her net sack and comes up with two oranges. She breaks the skin of hers with her teeth and peels it with her fingers, which are long and delicate. Pravdin fishes a knife from his pocket and attacks his. When the oranges are finished Pravdin throws the peels in a trash basket and Nadezhda takes out some chocolate cake and a carton of milk. She bites off the corner of the carton and drinks in gulps with her head thrown back.