Authors: Robert Littell
“An infusion won’t help,” complains Pravdin.
“This one will; it’s three parts rum, one part boiling water, also sugar,” Zoya reassures him.
“Nastrovia.”
“L’Chaim”
Pravdin blows into his cup to cool it, sips noisily. “Zoya Aleksandrovna,” he confesses, “there is something in all this business I can’t put my thumb on.”
“Try.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said, try,” Zoya repeats, a mischievous glint in her eyes. “Commence with the Druse.”
Pravdin’s voice slips several sprockets. “How do you know about the Druse?” he demands.
“I told you when you arrived that we would the both of us together try and figure out why you had come,” Zoya
explains patiently. “The Druse, Chuvash Al-hakim bi’amril-lahi, with his long pinky nail that indicates a taste for the absurd, is the key.”
Pravdin’s eyes bulge. Questions stick at the back of his throat like bones. Zoya enjoys his discomfort. “Four years ago I was evicted from my room in Proletarsky when one of my letters to Comrade Brezhnev wound up in the
New York Times
. The thing that was unusual about this was I never sent the letter to the
New York Times
. But that’s another story. I was desperate, you can imagine. I tried everything I could think of to find a place to live. Nothing seemed to work. Every time I came across something I liked, the papers would mysteriously turn up indicating the apartment had already been assigned to someone else. It was almost as if a ghost were following me around and ruining my possibilities. I took to looking over my shoulder, I was that upset. One day a man on line behind me at the Housing Ministry whispered something about a Druse. I went to see him naturally; I was willing to try anything. He had nails that grew into the flesh at the sides, an indication of luxurious tastes. And of course there was his pinky nail. We drank a wonderful infusion made from rose hips and hell and talked about reincarnation and visits from other civilizations. Finally he asked me, almost as an afterthought, why I had come. I told him I needed an apartment. He wrote a name and phone number on a scrap of paper. When I called the number a man told me I could have this”—Zoya indicates the door to her room. “So here I am, in the last wooden house in central Moscow.”
Pravdin stares at the shimmering images in his grog. “Was Nadezhda here?” he asks.
“The general was here, along with Ophelia Long Legs and the crew downstairs,” Zoya says, “but the only person upstairs was a strange young creature with a blue flower tattooed on her cheek. She slept in the attic when she was here, which
wasn’t very often; she would disappear for weeks at a time. She never received mail or phone calls, and only spoke to ask if there was anything she could pick up for me. The first time she asked I laughingly said American coffee. She turned up several days later with two tins. The next time I tried something harder, as a test you understand. I asked her for typewriter ribbons. She returned with four, of West German manufacture. At various times she brought me carbon paper, copies of an American magazine called News-something-or-other, some Swiss homeopathic sleeping pills, an English knife sharpener and some French headache suppositories. Ha! Suppositories for a headache! Only the French would think of
that!”
“What about Nadezhda?” insists Pravdin.
“Nadezhda moved in about three months after me,” Zoya continues. “Her story was much the same as mine. Her building was being razed to make way for a new hospital. Which hasn’t been built yet. But that’s another story. She searched for an apartment for weeks, but everything she heard about seemed to disappear before she got there. Someone whispered something about a Druse, she went to him and wound up here. It took several weeks of talking about various things until we stumbled on what we had in common: my husband defending her grandfather. Nadezhda said it was a coincidence that had brought us together, but I always thought it was fate.”
“You were both wrong,” comments Pravdin. “It was the Druse.”
Zoya nods. “It was Chuvash Al-hakim bi’amrillahi,” she agrees. “I must say you were less obvious; I couldn’t understand what you had to do with us until the manuscripts arrived. Then I saw the lovely logic of it. The Druse has organized the perfect team: the granddaughter of the real author, the wife of the only member of the 1929 commission
to support that authorship and a hustler who is neither mute nor crazy, who can figure out how to right this wrong. Armed with the manuscripts—”
“The manuscripts,” Pravdin cries, “are a mystery.” He is intoxicated with panic. “Where did he get them? And why does he want to ruin Frolov?”
“What does it matter?” declares Zoya. “His motive may be personal. Or political. Maybe someone in the superstructure is out to sink Frolov and is using the Druse. Who cares about the why? What matters is that we have the proof—the original manuscripts of
The Deep Don
in Krukov’s handwriting.”
Pravdin, calmer, only shakes his head. “There is still something in all this business I can’t put my thumb on.”
Mother Russia
is certified …
Mother Russia is certified, Pravdin berates himself under his breath, but I’m the one who is off his rocker.
The man at the next urinal, a trim captain in the regular Army, hears Pravdin rambling on. “Were you addressing me, comrade citizen?”
Instinctively Pravdin casts a quick glance at his neighbor’s penis, notes that he’s not circumcised. “Not at all, honored captain,” he replies hurriedly, hunching forward into the urinal to hide his own covenant with a God in whom he doesn’t believe. “I was mulling over some lines from one of Lenin’s articles. You know the one; it’s called, ‘What is to be done?’ “
Staring suspiciously, the militia captain zips up, wipes his palms on his trousers as he leaves. Clutching his briefcase tightly under his arm, Pravdin shakes out a few last drops, retracts, bends his knees, pulls up his zipper and straightens at the same time, scrawls with his felt-tip pen above the urinal:
The shortage shall be divided among the peasants
(Anon: Pravdin considers himself something of an armchair agronomist).
That’s it
, Pravdin thinks, no more procrastinating, and he dashes into the corridor in search of the room marked “Public Prosecutor.”
He has changed his mind a dozen times a day for the last week. Even after he photocopied portions of the manuscripts at the Lenin Library (a “favor” that cost him a German edition in braille of
The Story of O
and a two-year-old Sony four-band portable) and hid the original, he wasn’t sure he would go through with it. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” was the best Mother Russia could get out of him when she pushed him into a moral corner.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” she scolded, wagging her fly swatter under his nose. “Your life is one big maybe yes, maybe no. For God’s sake, take a stand. Run a risk. Walk on water. Move mountains. Change the world. Work up a sweat from a noneconomic activity! A little idealism is good for the digestion, heartburn, headaches, neuritis, neuralgia and sexual potency.”
“Idealism is an ideal,” Pravdin protested gloomily, “not a formula for everyday survival.”
“Ha! Survival!” cried Zoya, seizing upon the word as if it were an admission of guilt that slipped accidentally from the lips of the accused. “All you think about is survival.”
“Survival, little mother, is a habit I don’t want to kick.”
“Will you or won’t you?” she demanded, exasperated to the point where she had trouble breathing.
“Maybe yes, maybe no.”
Nadezhda took another tack. “If you think it is too dangerous,” she wrote once, “perhaps you shouldn’t.”
“Nobody will criticize you if you back out now,” she wrote on another occasion.
“Go ahead with it only if you feel it is the right thing to do,” she wrote the following day, slipped the folded note into his shirt pocket, stood on tiptoes and kissed him squarely on his bloodless lips.
“You win,” Pravdin told Zoya over camomile tea the next morning. He rolled his bloodshot eyes in mock horror. “Let’s see who will surrender to unarmed truth.”
The waiting room outside the public prosecutor’s office is as hushed as a library reading room. “Take a number,” the clerk at the door whispers to Pravdin.
“I’ve got it,” he says, thinking she is about to try and read his mind.
“From the box,” she hisses when she sees what he’s up to.
“Oh,” Pravdin says out loud. A half dozen heads swivel toward the sound of his voice; he expects to be shushed. He takes a cardboard number, moves to a place on the wooden bench next to a stony-faced war veteran whose one remaining eye is fixed on the shadowy crotch of a young girl across the room. Pravdin follows his gaze, sees she is wearing the shortest miniskirt he has ever seen.
After a while the one-eyed war veteran pokes Pravdin with his elbow. “If miniskirts go up another centimeter,” he snorts, “there’s going to be a revolution.”
“We’ve already used up our quota of revolutions, friend,” Pravdin replies sourly.
The one-eyed war veteran leans toward Pravdin, talks to him while continuing to stare at the girl. “What are you here for?” he asks conversationally.
“I’m here to complain about doctors,” Pravdin tells him.
“It’s this way: I share my one-room flat with my mother, who is a hundred and twenty-two years old. Touch wood.” (His knuckles rap on the bench.) “The problem is that we’re a little cramped for space and she looks as if she’s going to live forever.”
“But what’s that got to do with doctors?”
“What’s that got to do with doctors,” Pravdin explains, his voice rising in desperation, “is that they’ve ruined pneumonia!”
The one-eyed war veteran turns toward Pravdin for the first time and regards him through his narrowed eye. “You’re crazy, you know,” he says seriously.
Pravdin’s palm slaps his high forehead. “Crazy is what I am!”
A middle-aged woman with a small boy in tow emerges from the inner sanctum. “Number one forty-one,” the clerk calls. The one-eyed war veteran glances at his number, grunts, heaves himself off the bench and starts toward the door of the prosecutor’s office. Pravdin averts his eyes from the mini-skirted siren, loses himself in thought. He remembers sitting for fourteen hours on exactly the same kind of wooden bench, clutching his throbbing thumb broken under the heel of a KGB interrogator, waiting to see the officer with the blue shoulder boards. The interview, when it finally came, lasted two minutes. The officer, a young man with a permanent pout, leafed through the dossier marked “Pravdin, R. I.,” ranted about some conspiracy or other, ordered Pravdin to name names, asked Pravdin in the name of Stalin to name names, begged Pravdin for his own good to name names, shrugged, uncapped his fountain pen, wrote something, signed it with a flourish, looked up and said, “Eight years.” In his mind’s eye Pravdin sees himself standing before the officer, only vaguely comprehending what has happened to him, mumbling his thanks (his thanks! Even now Pravdin cringes
with humiliation when he remembers he thanked the bastard), executing a military about-face and marching briskly off as if his cadenced step would testify to his loyalty to Mother Russia and Papa Stalin.
“Number one forty-two.”
Frightened by the pounding of his heart, Pravdin looks up at the clerk.
“Number one forty-two,” the clerk repeats. Across the room the girl in the miniskirt uncrosses and recrosses her legs, stares inquisitively at Pravdin. “Are you or aren’t you?” the expression on her face seems to ask.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Pravdin mutters.
“I beg your pardon?” the clerk says.
Pravdin rises on weak legs, still not sure he’ll go through with it. Droplets of sweat break out like pimples on his forehead. He tries to tally up the pros and cons but can only think of the cons. And Mother Russia telling him to walk on water. And Nadezhda’s cool kiss on his bloodless lips. And in he goes.
The first things he notices are the public prosecutor’s fingernails (thick, cut squarely, a sure sign of rural roots) and a small hand-lettered plaque on the wall under the obligatory photograph of Lenin that reads, “Civic courage is rarer than military valor.”
“You really believe that?” Pravdin asks, indicating with his nose the plaque under Comrade Lenin haranguing workers at the Finland Station.
The prosecutor, an intense young man with thick wavy hair and a broad open face, nods solemnly. “With all respect to your medals,” he says, “I do. Military valor requires you to do what, in doing, wins approval. Civic courage requires you to go against the grain; to do things that people disapprove of. Civic courage requires moral judgments.”
The prosecutor speaks with quiet conviction and Pravdin
realizes he has landed before a rare bird—and from the look of him, one fresh from the sticks. His suit is the tip-off: a shiny navy worsted, it is much too thick for this time of year and indicates that the prosecutor hasn’t been in Moscow long enough to pick up one of the lightweight models available in the special stores set aside for bosses.
“Let me begin by offering you my personal congratulations,” Pravdin ventures.
The young prosecutor is startled. “Why?”
“The promotion is why,” Pravdin explains. “Not to mention the transfer. Before Moscow where were you posted?”
“I was in Alma Ata,” the prosecutor acknowledges. His face has reddened. “But how do you know these things?”
“I have friends in high places.” Pravdin winks. “I could use influence, but I don’t take advantage of my name. I wait my turn like any ordinary citizen. When my number is called I present my body, scarred in defense of the Motherland, exactly as if I were a nobody.”
“It is only fair to tell you,” the prosecutor informs Pravdin gravely, “that I am not impressed with physical scars.”
“Mental scars then,” Pravdin clutches at a straw. He lowers his voice, gestures to the walls to indicate they have ears. “When I was thirteen I was picked up for writing antifascist slogans on the Kremlin walls. I chose the wrong moment; Papa Stalin had just signed on the dotted line alongside von Ribbentrop. I was accused of premature antifascism and packed off to a Komsomol camp, where the big problem was premature ejaculation. Mental scars, friend, are what I have more than my share of.”