Authors: Robert Littell
The rain has given way to moist sunshine. Below and to the right some middle-aged women strip to their underwear to take the sun. “I heard once about the wife of one of our diplomats in New York who took off her clothes in a park and sunned herself in her underwear, as our women here do,” Pravdin recounts. “Somehow her picture turned up in a newspaper and there was a great scandal. The Party members at the embassy got together to try her. She pleaded that her underwear were her best clothes—and got off!”
A black cat, its hair slick from the rain, wanders by, pauses to rub against Pravdin’s trouser leg. Pravdin takes it as an omen but Nadezhda smiles, reaches down to touch its fur, then writes to Pravdin: “How very intelligent of it to be all black.”
A blond boy wearing an embroidered Cossack shirt passes on the gravel path behind the bench. “Such a beautiful shirt,” Nadezhda writes. “My grandfather used to wear such shirts.”
“You like it?” Pravdin demands. “Ho, comrade, for how much do you sell your shirt?”
The boy shakes his head. “I don’t sell it,” he replies seriously, “but I’ll trade it.”
“Trade it is a good idea,” Pravdin exclaims, pulling several Swiss watches from his briefcase. “For one of these you’ll have to throw in some cash.”
“I’ll trade my shirt for her shirt,” the boy grins.
Pravdin looks from one to the other in confusion but Nadezhda understands instantly. Leaping from the bench she strips off her shirt and holds it out to the boy. He studies her small pointed breasts for a delicious moment, then pulls his peasant shirt over his head and exchanges with her.
Nadezhda pulls on the embroidered shirt, which is much too big for her, and starts to roll up the sleeves. Pravdin turns away, red faced. The boy walks off with her shirt folded under his arm singing, “Why do girls like handsome boys?”
Climbing the narrow steel steps that lead to the top of the hill, Nadezhda asks Pravdin if he likes her new shirt.
“It is reasonably ugly,” he answers, still in a bad humor.
“How can something be reasonable and ugly?” she asks.
“It is a play on words.”
“You must not play with words,” she writes. “They are serious things, words.”
At the top Nadezhda rinses her feet in some clear rain puddles and dries them with a scarf, hoists herself up on the low wall to sit in the sun. Lomonosov University towers behind them, Moscow is spread out like a buffet before them: the thin needle of the TV tower, the Kremlin with the river twined around it like a vine, several Stalin gothics. Just across the river a soccer game is in progress in a giant bowl of a stadium, and every now and then a roar from the crowd drifts over the river.
“Explain if you can,” Nadezhda writes, “why it is you live the way you live?”
“I live the way I do, little sister, in order to live.”
Nadezhda dismisses the answer with an annoyed shake of her head.
Pravdin tries again. “When I came out of the camps, an old man of thirty-one is what I was. I had no skill, no profession; all I had was a notation in my workbook that I had served time, and another notation on my internal passport that I was Jewish. Between the two who would give me a job? Nobody would give me a job is who. So I threw away my workbook and became self-employed. The only way I could live was inside the Jewish cliché—as a hustler on the make. As long as I do what everyone expects me to do, I am left to my own devices. I also have a theory, if you want to know it, that I fulfill a very important function in our socialist paradise. I supply people who have money with something to spend it on.”
“You make yourself sound important,” Nadezhda notes on her pad.
“Important is what I am,” Pravdin says sourly. “I take from the rich and give to me.” And he bends down and scrawls in chalk along the sidewalk under Nadezhda’s feet:
Behind every fortune is a crime
(H. de Balzac: Pravdin once spent two months in solitary with a Balzac nut).
Nadezhda winds the sandal straps around her ankles, ties them, starts walking toward the Metro station.
“Thank you,” she jots on a slip that she offers to Pravdin.
Still annoyed about the exchange of shirts, he crumples the note without reading it. “How could you do such a thing?” he demands, tugging at the rolled-up sleeve of her embroidered shirt.
She presses another note into his hand. It says:
“Who was hurt?”
I know what
we are here …
“I know what we are here,” boasts Friedemann T., helping himself to a generous portion of caviar from the sideboard.
“How could you not know,” remarks Pravdin, gesturing with his caviar and toast toward the chess players. A flamboyant Russian grand master named Zaitsev is strutting back and forth between two long tables full of very serious blue-blazered members of a British chess club. Zaitsev, who is playing twelve games simultaneously, grips a chesspiece in his fist and slams it down on the board with a roar.
“He never had a chance,” he tells the crowd of onlookers. “If God played the Benoni against God, white would win!”
Zaitsev reaches across the table to accept a glass of champagne, drinks off half of it in one smooth swallow, struts on to the next board. He tilts his great head and examines it for a moment, then pounces on a piece. “Check! Tell the truth—you didn’t anticipate that, did you? Never mind, you’re in good company: I crushed Petrosian in the sixty-nine interzonals with the same move.”
Zaitsev sails on to the next board, which is opposite Friedemann T. and Pravdin. He studies the position for a long moment with a baffled expression. Suddenly his eyes surge open as he spots the flaw in his opponent’s game. “But you haven’t done your homework,” he taunts. “Fischer tried pawn queen five in a queen’s gambit declined in fifty-nine and lost eighteen moves later!”
“That’s new,” Friedemann T. comments loudly. “He’s accepting an isolated pawn in return for a king’s side attack.”
“The poisoned pawn variation of the Najdorf defense is Zaitsev’s specialty,” Pravdin notes. He takes another bite of toast and caviar, sips champagne, adds:
“The offered pawn is what he always accepts.”
“I don’t really like caviar,” Friedemann T. admits on their way out of the chess club. “I don’t appreciate all those little explosions in my mouth.”
“I don’t mind the caviar,” Pravdin confesses, “but vodka I prefer to champagne any day. A headache is what champagne always gives me.”
Friedemann T. pauses to look in a department store window. “I don’t mean to alarm you,” he says quietly, “but one of us is being followed.”
“What followed?” Pravdin cries nervously. “Where followed?”
“The tall man in the blue raincoat at the kiosk. We’ll split up at the corner and see which one of us is the pigeon.”
They separate, walking off in different directions. When
they are half a block apart Friedemann T. turns and points at Pravdin as if to say, “It’s you.”
Pravdin, cursing under his breath, dashes down a side street, turns up an alley behind a theater, pauses to scrawl on the wall:
Full conformity is possible only in the cemetery
(I. Stalin: Pravdin has tried to grin and bear it), hears footsteps behind him and hurries on. Minutes later he pushes through the front door of GUM, the giant department store across Red Square from the Kremlin, plunges into the crowd and drifts with its flow. At a men’s clothing stall he ducks into a fitting room, watches through a slit in the curtain as the man in the blue raincoat, angrily looking right and left, rushes by. Pravdin hurtles back the way he came, dives into the Metro and emerges into the sunlight at the stop nearest the Hotel Ukraine, where he waits to see if Blue Raincoat is still behind him.
He isn’t.
Pravdin hurries off down Kutuzovsky Prospect to keep his rendezvous with the American journalist. He meets him in a coffee shop one flight up. Pravdin picks up a black coffee and a bun at the counter and joins the journalist, whose name is Hull, at a table. They don’t speak until they are alone.
“Coming here I was followed,” Pravdin blurts out.
“Maybe they picked up on you when you phoned the office,” Hull, a hulking, balding man with feverish eyes, tells Pravdin.
“Not possible,” Pravdin assures him. “I phoned from a pay booth and neither of us mentioned my name.”
The journalist shrugs. “If they were going to haul you in, they would have done it a long time ago. What about the interview with the kids who use drugs?”
“What about my fee?” Pravdin retorts.
Hull hands him an envelope, Pravdin stuffs it into his briefcase and gives the journalist a slip of paper with an address and a time written on it. “They will be watching to see if you are followed,” he reminds him. “If you are, they won’t be around when you get there. The conditions you understand? In your article, no names and fifty rubles a head for them.”
Hull nods. “Listen, Pravdin, there’s a choreographer with the Bolshoi who is supposed to have lost his job for applying for an exit visa to Israel. I don’t have a name but maybe you could nose around and set up something for me.”
“Maybe,” Pravdin says evasively.
“I also hear—” A lame lady limps by and Hull waits for her to pass. “I hear there’s a story in you.”
Pravdin spits a mouthful of coffee back into his cup. “What story where in me?” he wails. “Where do you hear such things?”
An army officer puts his coffee and bun on their table and goes off in search of a chair.
“I heard it from a Swedish correspondent, who says he got it from someone called the Druse. Does the name mean anything to you?”
“The Druse,” Pravdin protests sullenly, fighting down hysteria, “is no one I ever heard of.”
Pravdin, a maître d’ from a seedy hotel, ducks in and out of the milling crowd, a bottle of mineral water in one hand, in the other a vinegary Georgian red (“Ha!” sneers Zoya, “mis
en bouteille dans le sous-sol de GUM”)
filling with delicate flicks of his thin wrist and a terminal flourish the half-empty glasses of the guests.
“The trouble with Russia,” Zoya is lecturing some of her friends, “is that she kills her artists.”
“America kills them too,” Pravdin stage whispers, splashing wine into her outstretched glass, “by making them rich.”
“Zoya, dear, wherever did you find him?” cried Ludmila Serafimovna, one of Mother Russia’s cronies who lives in the prewar apartment building that backs onto the alley. “He’s absolutely adorable. In those funny shoes one can’t even hear him coming up on one.”
“I didn’t find him,” Zoya explains cheerfully. “He’s our new attic.”
“Quelle chance,” Ludmila Serafimovna exclaims. “Ah, there she is, the birthday girl herself,” and she cuts through the crowd like the prow of a ship, silk scarfs trailing from her fingertips, to embrace Nadezhda.
“Wine or water?” Pravdin offers Friedemann T., who has backed a very drunk General Shuvkin into a corner and blocks his escape with his caped body.
“The reason socialist realism doesn’t move people,” Friedemann T. is saying—“wine,” he flings at Pravdin and holds out his glass for a refill—“is that it shows them as they are. Take it from someone who has an instinct for such matters, the only thing that catches the attention of people is to show them, even for a fleeting moment, what they could become. This is the point of departure for my abstract socialist realism, you see.”
“Campaigns?” hiccups the general.
“I beg your pardon?” Friedemann T. inquires in confusion.
“Waak, waak, help, help.”
A flutter of wings! Vladimir Ilyich, somehow loose from his cage, sails around the room, winds up perched on Mother Russia’s broken Singer.
“Isn’t he beautiful,” squeals Ophelia Long Legs. “Look, comrade Eisenhower, a genuine bird!” She holds out her wine glass to Vladimir Ilyich; frightened by all the attention,
he backs off, wings beating the air, then leaps to the curtain rod above the window, out of arm’s reach.
“Help, waak, help, waak.”
“All the same,” Porfiry Yakolev, the weatherman with the handlebar mustache, is telling a group, “everybody should have a hero. Lenin perhaps. Or Marx. Or Engels. Something to give you a standard against which to measure your own performance.”
“My hero,” Zoya says sweetly, “is that darling little misfit Voltaire.”
“I don’t believe I know the name,” ventures Master Embalmer Yan Makusky.
“The Frenchman Voltaire,” Mother Russia explains. “He had to struggle with pain every single day of his life. But he produced more work than any other ape on this planet, with the possible exception of an agrarian reformer named Mao Tse-tung. You have heard of Mao Tse-tung, I take it? Unlike Mao, Voltaire led an active social life while he was doing all this. And I might add,” she says with a wink, “an active sexual life.”
“Ah.” The weatherman’s mouth falls open. His fingers twist the tip of his mustache into a point. “Sexual life, you say?”
“Nowadays our insane hyenas of psychiatry, those pimply führers in white coats, devote whole books trying to define that superior genital love-object, but my darling Voltaire did it in one neat sentence when he wrote his ugly little niece, ‘Both my heart and my prick love you!’ “
Porfiry Yakolev almost chokes on his mineral water and Mother Russia has to pound him on the back to help him over the crisis.
Threading the brim of a fedora nervously through his fingers, Master Embalmer Makusky notes, “You seem to
know a great deal about psychiatry. Do you have a background in the discipline?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Zoya allows. “I was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic by a malevolent ass when I was a textbook example of what schizophrenia and paranoia are not: warm, loving, outgoing, uninhibited, funny, sexy, bawdy, lively, happy and life-loving.”
“In a word,” the weatherman, recovered from his coughing fit, offers, “you were innocent.”
“Waak, help.”
Vladimir Ilyich lifts on his claws, beats at the air with his wings, settles back onto the curtain rod.
“In our epoch,” snaps Mother Russia, “innocence is no longer pertinent. But that’s another story.”