Mother Russia (12 page)

Nadezhda playfully fills in the squares, returns the paper with X’s next to “Yes,” “Now,” “Above,” “Unconventional.”

Pravdin laughs wickedly, lunges for Nadezhda, who makes no effort to escape.

Pravdin, descending noisily from the attic as if he has been there all night, yawns casually, but Nadezhda gives the game away when she turns up for breakfast with a streak of blue dye between her burning eyes—concocted from the juice of an herb called usma that she once bought from an old Uzbek at the open market.

“So that’s how it is,” Mother Russia exclaims when she sees the streak, and she ceremonially embraces Nadezhda and then Pravdin, kissing them each on the left shoulder and the forehead in the Uzbek manner of greating young lovers.

Count your blessings
, Pravdin tells himself as he starts down the wooden staircase. You’re
reasonably healthy, you can still get it up three times in one night and you live in the last wooden house in central Moscow. Touch wood
. (His bony knuckles rap on the polished banister.)

At the screen door Porfiry Yakolev, the weatherman, and Master Embalmer Makusky smirk when they catch sight of Pravdin and hurry down the alley whispering excitedly. General Shuvkin emerges into the sunlight, sees Pravdin, winks, pats him on the back with his good arm. “Over and above the call of duty,” he snaps, starts off after Yakolev and Makusky.

“So you made it with Nadezhda,” comments Ophelia Long Legs, sitting on the front steps embroidering the bell-bottoms of a pair of jeans. “It’s the floorboards,” she explains when she sees Pravdin’s puzzled expression. “Cheer up,” she adds, “at your age three times in one night is nothing to be ashamed of.”

* * *

Pravdin, scurrying along behind the Church of All Mourners across the river from the Kremlin, stops to tighten a sneaker lace, glances apprehensively at the clear heavens, sky-writes with the tip of his deformed thumb:

Jesus sauve Toi

(Anon: Pravdin has always been free with his ecumenical counsel), races off for his appointment with the prosecutor.

At the Ministry, Pravdin snatches his cardboard number and takes his place on the bench between a starchy Muscovite with bifocals peering at the long gray columns of Pravda and a blond Georgian boy carrying a stringless guitar. “What are you here for?” the Georgian asks conversationally.

“I’m here to complain about Honored Artist of the Soviet Union Frolov,” Pravdin explains. ‘It’s this way: During the Civil War he swiped the manuscripts for
The Deep Don
from a White Russian officer named Krukov and published it under his own name.”

The Georgian shrinks away from Pravdin to avoid contamination. “You’re off your rocker, you know,” he says seriously.

Pravdin’s palm slaps his high forehead. “Off my rocker is what I am!”

When his number is called Pravdin hurtles headlong into the prosecutor’s office. “Robespierre Isayevich Pravdin at your—your—at your …” Pravdin’s bloodless lips continue to move, words form but no sound emerges; he is speechless with astonishment. He stares wide eyed at the man behind the desk, then at the photograph of Lenin haranguing workers at the Finland Station. “Where’s ‘Civic courage is rare’ and so forth and so on? Where is the public prosecutor?”

“You are looking at the public prosecutor,” the prosecutor says coldly.

“The prosecutor I spoke with in this office yesterday is who I’m not looking at,” insists Pravdin. “Even your fingernails are different.”

“You’re off your rocker,” the prosecutor, a sallow-skinned functionary, tells Pravdin. “I’ve been in this office every workday for fourteen years except for authorized vacations and the time I fractured my tibia skiing in Zakopane.”

Pravdin tries to flash his crooked smile, manages only a grimace. Backpedaling toward the half open door, he does a little jig and mumbles in a singsong voice:

“Unarmed truth is not an idea whose time has come.”

CHAPTER 6

Pravdin, buried in
Pravda’s
back pages …

Pravdin, buried in Pravda’s back pages, glances up, sees that the train is just pulling out of the Kiyevskaya station, goes back to his newspaper hunting for the innocuous items that contain the real news. He reads about the charges brought against two brothers in Minsk with obviously Jewish names; it seems they had set up a nailpolish remover factory in their basement, pasted “Made in Amerika” labels on the product and sold it for exorbitant prices on the black market. (They were tripped up when an alert client’s suspicions were aroused by the
k
in “Amerika.”) He reads about a candidate member of the Politburo with an obviously Armenian name who has been farmed out to run a tractor factory in Kirgizia; the official
explanation is “mental fatigue,” but Pravdin has heard on the grapevine that the man in question had been discovered
in
flagrante delicto with the wife of one of the upwardly mobile directors of the Komsomol. Pravdin’s eye catches a tiny item sandwiched between the soccer scores and an account of an extraordinary rainfall in Mongolia: the Kremlin chimes that regularly sound the hour have not been heard for two days; the official explanation is “metal fatigue,” but Pravdin has heard on the grapevine that Brezhnev suffers from migraines and has been complaining about the noise.

The train pulls into a station, Pravdin catches sight of a sign that says “Studencheskaya” and dashes from the car just as the doors start to close. At the far end of the car a heavy-set man in a blue raincoat and a flat short-brimmed fedora struggles with the door to keep it from closing, overpowers it, squeezes through onto the platform. Pravdin sprints up the stairs to the street level, darts behind a kiosk selling lottery tickets, waits. The man in the blue raincoat comes panting up the stairs, stops short, looks around.

Pravdin walks directly up to him. “Professional is what you’re not,” he whispers nervously to the man in the blue raincoat. “I know you’re following me.”

“If you know I’m following you,” the man informs him, “you’re meant to know I’m following you.”

“That I hadn’t thought of,” Pravdin admits. He turns, wanders uncertainly for a few blocks, then briskly cuts across Kutuzovsky Prospect and ducks into the cemetery, with the man in the blue raincoat not far behind. In the cemetery Pravdin joins a funeral procession for a few steps, then races down a pathway, stops to catch his breath crouching behind a headstone, on the back of which he scrawls in chalk:

So here it is at last, the Distinguished Thing

(H. James: Pravdin is queer for dying words). After a while
he makes a run for a side gate and loses himself among the pedestrians in the street.

At Poklonnaya, he spots a postal box, takes from his briefcase a batch of zingers Mother Russia has given him to mail, notes their addressees (Mr. Singer of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, Comrade Chairman Leonid Brezhnev of the Politburo, Premier Pompidou of the Elysée Palace and one to the “Person in charge of cholesterol” at the World Health Organization in Geneva), slips them through the slit. Two blocks further along he enters an apartment house, lingers on the third floor landing long enough to make sure he isn’t being followed, then climbs to the sixth floor, crosses over to another wing, descends to the fourth floor and presses with his deformed thumb on a bell. Friedemann T. opens the door a crack, sees Pravdin’s face peering at him, tries to slam it shut again. Pravdin’s sneaker, strategically wedged, prevents him.

“For God’s sake,” Pravdin wails, “my toes!”

“You can alleviate the pain,” Friedemann T. explains calmly, “by the simple expedient of removing your preposterous shoe from my communal doorstep.”

“I’m here to offer you a hundred rubles for half an hour of your precious time,” Pravdin cries.

The pressure on Pravdin’s sneaker eases. “A hundred rubles, you say?” Friedemann T. pokes his head into the corridor, looks both ways, motions Pravdin into the apartment with his hand. He locks the door behind him, leads the way into his bedroom, locks that door too, turns on the radio. “Were you followed here?” he demands.

“Touch wood, that’s all finished with,” says Pravdin. “A simple case of misunderstanding on the part of one of my important clients.”

“What do I have to do for the hundred?” Friedemann T. wants to know.

“It’s this way,” Pravdin explains. “I have a client who happens to be an American journalist. He’s willing to pay two hundred rubles for an interview with a Bolshoi choreographer who was fired because he applied for an exit visa to Israel. I figure you could pull it off easily, and we’ll split the two hundred down the middle. What do you say?”

Friedemann T. raises a forefinger to his pursed lips, rocks thoughtfully on the soles of his feet. “Dear boy,” he muses, “I only applied for my exit visa when the police confiscated my choreographic notations for a new ballet based on Solzhenitsyn’s
The First
Circle.”

“I’ve always felt,” Pravdin speaks up on cue, “that the performing arts were obliged to pick up where the creative arts left off.”

“I have it on good authority,” Friedemann T. goes on, “that the decision to suppress my ballet was taken on the Politburo level. I can tell you”—the painter lowers his voice—“that a candidate member of the Politburo with an obviously Armenian name was packed off to Kirgizia for favoring the production. But I refuse to be intimidated.”

“I’ve always maintained,” Pravdin is well into the game now, “that the bosses have two choices: they can convince us or they can kill us. Ha! That’s a good line. I’ll bet you wish you’d said that.”

“When your journalist friend shows up,” Friedemann T. comments, “I will.”

“For you, good news,” Pravdin tells Hull, the American journalist. They are sharing a shelf at a stand-up coffee bar on the top floor of GUM. “The Bolshoi choreographer you asked about is whom I found. Two hundred rubles is what it will cost you—half for me, half for him.”

“Two hundred is kind of steep,” Hull complains.

“Work is what he’s out of,” Pravdin explains. “He needs the money to leave the country.”

“And you?” Hull asks. ‘What do you need the hundred for?”

“To stay in the country is what I need it for.” He passes Hull a folded slip of paper with Friedemann T.’s name and address on it. Hull pockets the paper, hands Pravdin a wad of ten-ruble notes. There is an excited rush of shoppers in the passageway outside the coffee bar. A woman with dyed red hair pokes her head in, calls to a friend, “Tania, come quickly, they’ve got a shipment of West German electric hair curlers,” disappears. All the women in the bar, and some of the men, abandon their coffee in mid-sip and dash after the woman with the dyed red hair.

“You don’t need electric hair curlers?” asks Hull, his voice thick with sarcasm.

“I saw the salesgirl on my way in,” replies Pravdin. “She put two sets aside for me.”

Hull shakes his head in admiration. “You’re one in a million, Pravdin.”

“The sense of that is what I don’t get,” says Pravdin. “What means this ‘One in a million?”

“It means you stand out in a crowd.”

“That,” Pravdin agrees, “has always been my problem.”

Pravdin starts to leave but Hull puts a hand on his arm. “You’ve seen the item in the Chronicle
of Current Events
?” he asks casually.

Pravdin looks at him suspiciously. “Clandestine anti-Soviet publications are what I don’t subscribe to,” he says. “What item?”

“They claim that someone in Moscow has come up with original manuscripts proving that Frolov is not the real author of The Deep Don.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” Pravdin demands hysterically.

Hull studies Pravdin, his eyes more feverish than ever. “Listen, I’d be willing to put a good deal of money on the line for an introduction to the someone in question and a peek at the manuscripts. Hey, Pravdin, where’s the fire?”

But Pravdin, abandoning the idea of collecting his hair curlers, is removing his panic-stricken heart from GUM.

On Gorky Street, Pravdin looks at his watch with the water vapor under the crystal, sees that it is almost eleven, Moscow time, stops at a public phone to call the Danish diplomat who has agreed to trade his entire pop record collection for an icon.

“Knud Thestrop is whom I want to speak to,” Pravdin says when the phone is picked up at the other end.

“Knud Thestrop has left the country,” a man’s voice says.

“What left the country?” cries Pravdin. “I recognize your voice. How is it you can say you left the country when you’re standing there talking to me? What about our deal?”

“I’m sorry,” the man’s voice says nervously. “You’ll have to understand. Thestrop is no longer in the country.” The phone clicks dead.

Pravdin inserts another two-kopeck coin, dials the private number of the post office official responsible for confiscating (and supposedly burning) foreign-language books that are sent by mail to the country. Every two weeks or so Pravdin stops by, picks up a package of books for resale on the black market, splits the proceeds with the official.

The phone rings four times, then a recorded female voice comes on. She says:

“I’m sorry, but the number you reached doesn’t exist. Please consult the phone book in the central post office. I’m
sorry, but the number you reached doesn’t exist. Please consult—”

Pravdin, furious, frightened, drops the receiver back on the hook, hurries over to Aragvi for a luncheon in honor of a French doctor who is a world-renowned specialist on the inner ear.

“Pravdin, R. I.,” Pravdin announces to the pretty young woman with the guest list. ‘Doctor of micro-philately.”

The woman takes in the unkempt reddish hair going off in all directions at once, the Eisenhower jacket with the four medals dangling on the chest, the basketball sneakers, runs a manicured nail down the P’s looking for Pravdin.

“I’m sorry,” she says finally, “but I don’t appear to have you on my list.”

“Remarkable lady,” Pravdin begins, flashing his crooked smile as he edges past the table, “how could you have me on your list when I only just now arrived from the International Symposium on the Inner Ear in Vienna?” Pravdin is past her now, backing toward the dining room. He gives a half bow and turns—to find his path blocked by an unsmiling gorilla with enormous shoulders.