PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (22 page)

“I’m sorry, but it just won’t do,” I said. “This is a writers’ settlement.”

She scowled. “You’ve never had a real egg, that’s your problem.”

We moved in the following day and at once set to work clearing the refuse, broken bottles, and abandoned building materials that were scattered in the underbrush. After marking out a rectangle at the side of the house, Lydia laid down a thick layer of fresh topsoil that had been procured at great expense from a truck driver who worked in a nearby kolkhoz. It was already too late in the year to plant anything but lettuce, dill, parsley, and sorrel.

I hardly accomplished any literary work the remainder of that month. Moving into the dacha, as modest as it was, occupied the sum of our energies and imaginations. The first morning I woke in the straw-filled dacha bed, I lay for hours looking up through the square of sky unevenly partitioned by the trunk of a birch tree and believed that I loved the birch as much as I loved life itself. This was not the manifestation of anything as simple as a love of nature. The allocation of this dacha was an enormous professional success, as much as the publication of my first book.

On a pleasant summer weekend, when things were good, Lydia and I would stroll hand in hand down the lanes, blowing cigarette smoke over the hedges of the residences of our greatest writers. On wide Serafimovicha, Korney Chukovsky lived in a yellow-and-brown house with a veranda on which he read his verse and Whitman’s to the neighborhood children. A few blocks away, Zinaida Nikolayevna, Pasternak’s widow, was living out her last days in their round, wooden dacha. From the street, one could see into Pasternak’s upstairs study and, through the line of unshuttered windows, the woods behind the house. Zinaida Nikolayevna’s immediate neighbors were, on one side, Mayakovsky’s former lover Lily Brik and, on the other, Pasternak’s friend and persecutor, Konstantin Fedin.

Each dacha was like a book, in that it represented an author. But there were many more variations among Soviet dachas than there were among Soviet books. Some were located on large grounds and were cottages of more than one story, others were rusticated gingerbread shacks, some were constructed on an individual plan, and many more were built according to a standard design—and each variation spoke of the inhabitants’ literary success, productivity, social standing, and political reliability.

Most dachas were owned outright, not rented, by writers who claimed achievements greater than my two novels. I would be reminded of this every month when I paid Litfond, the union’s social welfare agency, for the vouchers that I would then give to another clerk in the same office—a pointless, time-consuming task that satisfied somebody somewhere that the capitalist practice of
“renting” had been subverted. The vouchers were not inexpensive, but Lydia took on some lucrative translation work and I augmented my schedule of well-paid “creative trips” that brought literary programs to provincial audiences.

Lydia had immediately declared her intention to spend every remaining week of the summer in Peredelkino, and that was fine with me. Accompanied by dozens of other husbands, I took the train out every Friday evening, bringing my manuscript and two or three books or “thick” journals for Lydia. The husbands would return on Monday morning, looking forward to hot showers in our newly roomy flats and the capital’s parties and romantic intrigues.

We had many friends living in the village. That summer we attended parties extending well into the following morning, parties of great mirth and good feeling, and I felt more a member of the literary fraternity than I had ever felt before or have since. Even Lydia enjoyed these revels, displaying a degree of ease that I had not witnessed since the earliest days of our marriage. As late summer gave way to mushroom season, the fungal equinox, she put off her return to the city.

On the Saturday morning after I met with Viktor, I woke late and found Lydia reading outside on the porch swing, her bare legs folded beneath her. Transfixed by type, she didn’t look up. I kissed the back of her neck, recalling that we had made love on the swing the night before. She mumbled something. I made some Nescafé and watched her read. When she turned the page at the end
of the chapter, I said, “By the way, I signed that petition after all.”

She looked up, her eyes unfocused.

I made an elaborate flourish in the air.
“J’ai signé cette pétition-là.
You know, Misha Vishnevsky. They’ve put him in a psychiatric hospital.”

“You signed it!” She appeared surprised.

“I told you I might. It was under discussion, remember? You didn’t give me advice either way.”

“I said that it wasn’t going to do any good.”

“That’s not advice. Some actions are morally correct even if they have no practical consequences.”

“You mean, if you’d like to make a grand gesture.”

She had put down her book and had raised and turned herself in the swing, unconsciously choosing the position in which I had penetrated her. I smiled at the recollection.

“All right, so let’s say it’s a grand gesture. That what’s happening now, grand gestures in defense of liberalization. You’re right, individually it’s not going to have any effect, Vishnevsky will never be freed. But look, we’re trying to overcome this monumental legacy of Stalinism. We can’t oppose the hard-liners head-on, there’s too many of them, but we can reach and persuade high-ranking people in the union and the Party. There are some honest and decent men.”

“It’s only politics, Rem. You sound like a politician.”

“If there’s a protest this time, the hard-liners will think twice the next.”

“That’s something Panteleyev told you,” she guessed,
correctly. “Why should they think twice, if there are no practical consequences from the first protest or from any of the others?”

I frowned. I hadn’t expected this opposition and hadn’t prepared any arguments.

“Let me put it another way,” I said. “There’s a man. As we argue now in the cool autumn air, surrounded by greenery, he’s imprisoned in a so-called psychiatric institution, out of contact with his family, lost to the world. In our own country! Viktor has evidence that he’s being tortured and pumped full of drugs—not to cure him of any supposed psychosis, but to induce psychosis. This is being done on behalf of our government and on behalf of a Party claiming to advance the interests of the people. Doesn’t that anger you?”

“Do you know this man? Why do you care?”

“It’s a writer’s duty to imagine other people and sympathize with their situation,” I insisted, shaking my head. I looked at a pile of books alongside the swing, just as I had painted it on the wall of the café, and then through the open door at the library that had mysteriously arisen in the front room, like an Inca city in the jungle. Where had all these books come from? I had hardly noticed an attenuation in the thick growth of literature that covered the walls of our flat. “In fact, I would think it’s a human duty. I don’t understand.” I waved at the new library. “What’s the point of all these books if they have no impact on your life?”

“But they do.”

“They
don’t!”
I raised my voice. “They’re all about the world and the society you disdain. The characters of the
best of them are deeply involved in human life, they’re men and women challenged by imperative moral questions, by history, and by the defects of their own personalities. Reading them, you should be moved to reexamine your own character, to question your involvement in society, to act.”

She snorted. “Spoken like a Bolshevik. That’s not why I read. I’m sick to death of literature as medicine, literature as therapy, literature as politics, literature as the beacon of mankind. I couldn’t care less what writers say about the so-called world. Why should they know more about it than I do? Does anyone really believe that a writer, by virtue of his profession, is honest or compassionate or even intelligent? Look at the lives of most writers, the best writers, they’re scoundrels and hypocrites. Start with Saint Leo. Why should his view on moral issues be instructive? And the proof of this is in the readers. Are they usually kinder than nonreaders? More moral? Are they more successful at life?”

“I’m not talking about moral instruction, Lydia. A good writer, no matter how much a fool he is otherwise, will place his characters in situations in which their actions have moral consequence. Can’t you then, as a reader, imagine yourself in such a situation and learn from it?”

“What a writer says about a particular situation is irrelevant. I care only about how he says it. Style is everything, style
is
content. I don’t read Gogol because I have an interest in the depressed state of the landed gentry in provincial Russia of the nineteenth century, or Victor Hugo from an interest in Gothic architecture or Nabokov from an interest in pedophiles. It’s their language I
admire.” She paused to collect her thoughts, speaking after a week virtually empty of conversation. “I don’t mean that I simply admire their pretty metaphors. It’s the words they choose, when they can choose perfectly good other words, the tone, their strategy for telling the story ... The means by which they create the illusion of event arise from the convolutions of their individual genius. That’s style. That’s real art.”

The reference to Nabokov stung. I had gone to some great lengths a few months earlier, incurring social debts that would take years to pay back, in order to obtain a British copy of
Lolita
for her.

Lydia asked, “Have you read Vishnevsky’s work? I have.”

“You have?”

“Burden of Blood. Across the Tundra.
They’re mediocre books, more like tracts than novels, lots of cheap effects and jargon. Also, they’re wordy, mean-spirited, chauvinistic, perhaps even anti-Semitic.”

I shrugged. “So, he’s a bad writer. Bad writers deserve human sympathy too,” I said, but I wished Lydia had told me about his work the week before. “And they’re citizens just as much as good writers, and they deserve to be treated under the law. Viktor says the authorities have violated their own procedures and decrees.”

“Viktor Panteleyev, the noted legal scholar.”

I sat down heavily on the swing, spilling some of my coffee. Lydia stretched her bare legs on my lap and I ran my fingers over them.

“Anyway,” I said. “This is a small thing. You’re right,
it’s a gesture. There’s dozens of petitions flying about and they’re all being ignored.”

I never took note of the arrival of Marina Burchatkina’s second package, though if my memory has correctly ordered the sequence of events, the manuscript must have arrived sometime early the following year. As I inspected the return address, several moments passed before I disentangled Marina’s name from those of other provincial writers who had contacted me recently, as well as Kaluga from Kalchuga, Kalino, and Kalashnikovo. These had been months of tumescent expectation. Like worms after a spring rain, would-be writers were squirming up out of the soil, clutching accounts of Stalinist repression, famine, and war. Some of these works reached print; all of them, I presume, reached the KGB. Most were poorly done, but their quantity testified to an enormous and somewhat premature national effort to reclaim the country’s memory. As for our petition on behalf of Misha Vishnevsky, there had been no action taken or any response at all. It was as if we had set it afire and sent the smoke to the gods. I had no further discussions about the petition, not even with Viktor. Viktor was becoming a strange man. I had seen him last at a party, in a dim corner by himself, brooding into a glass of Johnnie Walker.

It appeared that Marina had occupied the intervening period in a frenzy of literary activity. What was now
deposited on my desk were no mere poems, but entire poem cycles. Plus there was an epic poem (about the siege of Leningrad) and a ballad (about what, I wasn’t sure). The contents of this envelope were in no way an improvement over the first, but the cover letter was more peculiar and more original than anything contained in her rhymes. Marina thanked me. She wrote that in the weeks before she received my letter she had become desperate about her future as a writer. My gratifying remarks had given her new inspiration: every night, when she began to write, she taped the letter to the inside of the door to her communal apartment’s pantry. She took it down when she was done. She wrote every night, in her nightclothes, at a folding table in the space made when the door was swung open.

I hadn’t saved a carbon of my amazing, inspiring letter to Marina. I wondered if I had confused the bland letter I recalled sending with one to another correspondent, but as I examined this possibility I became convinced that I had not. The evidence was her letter itself, specifically her gush. I suspected that my enthusiasm was a crafty fiction, which she had invented to implicate me in her career. Perhaps she thought I wouldn’t remember what I had written. And there was a small flirtation here as well: the invitation to imagine her writing at her table.

“Hey, old man, got a minute?”

Anton Basmanian had poked his head through my door, affecting a familiarity we didn’t share. An old schoolmate, he was now the editor of a small literary magazine that made a feeble attempt at liberal fashion.

“For you, two minutes.” I lay my watch on the table.

“Nice piece of work in
Literaturnaya Gazeta,”
he said, referring to an article of mine the week before. He beamed. “Very nice.”

I didn’t reply at once. Basmanian had violated an unspoken rule of the professional writer: don’t compliment another’s work, at least not casually. It was all right, of course, to praise work in a written article, or in a symposium, or even in a serious critical conversation with the author. But we took our labors too seriously to have them evaluated like a haircut or a new tie. We all knew that praise could be too easily given and too easily overvalued; it became then just another soft currency.

“Thank you, Anton. How have you been?”