PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (26 page)

In conversations with friends and in private dialogue with myself, I hotly defended the book, my ire leading me to make some extravagant claims for it, but when I descended to my desk, the arena of my ambitions, selfdoubt coursed through me like a fever. Upon setting out to write the novel, I had been unsure whether I would succeed in believably describing the work of the sailors aboard the icebreakers. Certainly I was not sure of every line, nor of every effect I had hoped to achieve. How could I be? Fiction is a gamble. The thought that I had failed intensified. The sales were very poor. No film was made. The plot at the edge of the woods remained as undeveloped as my critics said my novel’s was.

I now wondered whether I had ever wanted to write this novel in the first place, whether
The Northern Lights,
as well as the novels I had previously written and the ones I planned to write, merely conformed to conventional expectation about the work of a contemporary writer (why write novels? why not sonnets or haiku?). Although I confessed pride in my published books, I recognized that they existed alongside another body of work. In actuality, fragments and seeds of this work were located within the journals in my locked bookcase; in potentiality, the work existed in a kind of mirror universe glimpsed on the horizon at twilight or in a glass of ice water at the precise moment the ice has melted or in the polished surface of a quickly passing foreign car. This putative, parallel work was by no means anti-Soviet—I believed I didn’t have a single anti-Soviet bone in my body; my father had bequeathed me a name drawn from the words
Revolution, Engels,
and
Marx—
but I also recognized that this writing would never be published here. In the existent passages and stanzas imperfectly set down within my notebooks, there was something too wild and too personal, too much without concession, and perhaps it was simply not very good.

At the euphoric First Union Congress in 1934, Leonid Sobolev announced, “The Party and Government have given the writer every freedom, and taken away from him only one thing—the freedom to write badly.” Isaac Babel responded in apparent affirmation, noting that the freedom to write badly was “a very important freedom, and to take it away is no small thing. It is a privilege that we were taking full advantage of.” The officials on the dais and in the front rows of the auditorium enthusiastically
thumped themselves over this declaration. The rank and file were chilled; they knew Babel was being ironic. Unwilling to give up the freedom to write as he wished, even badly, Babel went on to practice “the genre of silence.” Five years later he was arrested at his dacha, brought to the Lubyanka, and executed.

 

It was some consolation that at least Lydia was pleased with
The Northern Lights
and contemptuous of my critics. If anything, she was annoyed that I saw any merit in their arguments at all.

“Yuri Vorontsov, Sergei Makarov—they’re hacks. They think fiction is a dramatization of journalism. They don’t respect that the story stands outside reality. To criticize a novel for getting details of a setting wrong is like criticizing a dream for not being true-to-life.”

I was sitting on the porch, watching Lydia weed (I myself was forbidden to interfere). She did this with great care in order to remove the root structure without disturbing her cherished tomatoes. I had spent most of that summer at the dacha, traveling to the city for a few days each week only to check my mail and perform some routine union business. I was hardly writing, nor reading much. I had avoided the many parties in the neighboring dachas. I was sure my critics would be there and was unsure how to greet them. With a self-deprecating joke? An insulting one? A punch in the face?

I asked Lydia, “And do readers understand these distinctions, when the critics don’t? How about all those earnest letters I was sent by the peasants in Kazakhstan?
They said they loved my novel and then petitioned me with complaints about inefficient kolkhoz directors and unreachable quotas, as if I were working out of an office in the Ministry of Agriculture. Readers
want
journalistic literature.”

“There are hack readers, just as there are hack writers. How many good readers do you need? Are you standing for election? This lack of confidence unbecomes you, Rem.”

I grimaced my disagreement, though I knew she was right.

“My lack of my confidence is my strength,” I said. “It makes me more open to criticism. It allows me to learn from my mistakes.”

Lydia straightened and dropped the last of the weeds in a box. She wiped her hands on her smock. “Last year, at Sasha Nasedkin’s, I heard Pavel Dubrovski say that he should have won the Lenin Prize for his last novel and that Sholokhov himself had complained on his behalf. You’re a much better writer than Dubrovski, but you have a tenth of his confidence.”

“That’s my point, exactly. If I had his level of confidence, I’d be complacent, and therefore a much worse writer than I am now.”

In truth, my inconspicuousness that summer was due in small part to my disinclination to see either Vorontsov or Makarov; the large part was my avoidance of Marina. I didn’t want to have to thank her for my defense nor to be obliged to say anything kind about her novel. Yet, on my nights in Moscow when, sticky and logy from the heat, I gazed from my apartment balcony out onto the roaring,
frantic city of six million, the capital of an empire, I knew that she was there. When I sat down at my desk to write, she was probably working at that moment too, at her desk somewhere else in the city. She was present like the humidity.

It must have been the intensity of this awareness that forced Marina’s precipitation from the urban haze one afternoon, gently onto the steps of an escalator plunging into the depths of the earth beneath the Kremlin. The complex was at the intersection of two public metro lines, plus a third, famously secret line called Metro-2, built by Stalin for his own speedy exit from the capital in the event of war.

I myself was rising from the Prospekt Marx station, past enormous lamp stanchions topped with white glass globes. A red filament incandesced within each globe, a worm crucified on a bolt of electric current. I had just crossed the landing between escalators and had begun the second stage of my ascent when, beyond the lamps at the descending escalator, I recognized Marina. She was gazing down the length of the tunnel, as blind as a burrowdwelling animal.

I abruptly turned to face the gray wall sliding by. I was amazed by this impulse, but she had passed before I could overcome it. By the time I reached the top of the escalator, I gravely regretted my cowardice. A barricade guarded by a severe-looking matron forced me to walk to the end of the corridor before I could double back. As soon as I was
caught in the flow to the lower level, I realized that I would never overtake Marina before her train arrived.

Pressed at my back by the other travelers, stumbling against the heels of those ahead of me, I sought to identify the cause of my swelling urgency. To be sure, Marina was an attractive girl, but at that very moment equally attractive girls darted at the edge of my vision and bumped against me and besides, I was only three weeks into an intensely physical liaison with a lithe, myopic clerk at the Dom Knigi bookstore. I had been on my way to her a minute earlier.

Marina was a mystery. I hardly knew her, save for what she wrote and the record of our infrequent, occasionally charged conversations over the years. Sometimes I couldn’t even picture her face. But she represented a potentiality, and that counted; in those years the potential carried more weight than the actual. I could not bear to define that potentiality.

Now I changed my mind about pursuing her and took a prohibited but unblocked turn on the next landing, through a corridor that I believed would lead to another escalator rising to my original destination, the Ploshchad Revolutsii platform. I must have misread a sign, because it was soon apparent that I was not on my way to Ploshchad Revolutsii at all. The dim passageway wound through the complex without end, sprouting new corridors and escalators and gradually entangling my sense of direction. I lost any idea of which point my underground position might correspond to in the city above. An escalator hundreds of meters long raised me to a distant corridor that, after a sharp turn to the right,
ended in an even longer escalator returning down. The subterranean heat made me feverish.

I was seized by the idea that I had somehow wandered into Metro-2. It was said that in the 1950s, after Stalin began living and working full-time at his Near Dacha in Volynskoye, construction of the line had been abandoned. Rumors of this sort tended to be disinformation. The military abandoned nothing. Millions of rubles had been poured into this tunnel, equipping it with the most advanced military technology. There were other stations on the line, vast caverns and intricate warrens. The line had likely remained a military installation, a shadow city inhabited by apparatchik-phantoms. The commuters walking shoulder-to-shoulder with me carried torn string shopping bags and their clothes were ordinary
univermag
suits and jackets, but I detected a distinctive confidence in their stride and a wariness in their glare. Whether army or KGB, they knew the secret underground workings of our society, which manifested themselves only obliquely in the events that played out in public view in our newspapers and television reports, on our boulevards and avenues. Or perhaps Metro-2 was the real city, and the above-ground Moscow was the one in shadow.

The last corridor discharged onto an unfamiliar platform, which, like every other metro station in the capital, was lavishly decorated around a particular theme.

This station seemed to imply some kind of southern motif. The station’s supporting columns were tiled with scenes of swarthy peasant-workers at garden banquets and vineyards set beneath distant mountains. Grapes and other subtropical fruit were depicted on the pediments
above the platform. They were alternated with garlanded, hammer-and-sickled seals of one of the organs of power, I couldn’t recognize which. Someone behind me took me firmly by the arm and I recalled that it was the emblem of the old NKVD. Through the foggish heat that had descended upon me, I heard my name called.

“I was just thinking of you a few minutes ago. I must be a witch,” Marina said. “A picture of your face popped into my head and look, here you are.”

“Amazing coincidences happen,” I replied slowly, recovering from a series of sentiments that passed through me in the space of a few seconds: first, there had been fright, and then an unspeakable elation, and then embarrassment at the fright and elation. “Even in a planned economy.”

We were standing close enough to each other to embrace, or to dance. Buffeted by the rush of commuters, their bags and parcels brushing against us, we began to sway, as if we were indeed dancing—a lazy, slow, subtropical rumba.

We appraised each other again and I was revisited by the impulse to which I had first given in: to turn away. I repressed it and at last said, “How’s everything?”

Marina groaned. “Complicated. I’m not with Iosif Spirin anymore.”

I bobbed my head sympathetically, but with a slightly quizzical expression fixed upon my face, as if I hadn’t known that she had been with Spirin at all. It occurred to me to resent that she thought I was keeping track of her love life, though in fact I was.

She pursed her lips and frowned. “Where are we?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I thought I was going to Ploshchad Revolutsii. I think my stairs are at the other end of the platform.”

“I’ve never been here before.”

“They’re always opening new stations,” I said and forced a laugh.

At that moment, a train roared into the station, displacing stale tunnel air and discharging a swirl of passengers. Unsure of what else to say, and unable to speak over the noise anyway, I waited until the train left. Meanwhile, Marina studied my face as if she intended to write about it. I wondered if she had been pursuing
me.
Had she too been caught in the labyrinth of tunnels, corridors, and escalator chutes? Before the first train could leave, another arrived from the opposite direction. And then another every sixty seconds, according to the digital clocks at each end of the platform. We had stumbled into the tumult of rush hour.

I asked her if she would come with me for a cup of coffee, but the invitation was completely submerged in the noise. I couldn’t hear my words nor even feel their consonants upon my lips. The long hall was scoured by sound, a great onrushing, rarefying force as elemental as gravity or light.

“Marina,” I said. “I want to take you home.”

This was an experiment. She smiled and pointed to her ears and made a gesture of helplessness.

“You can’t hear me,” I said, searching her face for any kind of acknowledgment.

She smiled at my persistence in trying to speak.

“Good. Marina, you’re driving me crazy. I can’t stop thinking about you. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s your success. I resent it. I resent you.”

She shook her head to show her incomprehension.

“But I want to make love to you,” I said. “I want to fuck you silly. I want to ride your ass from one end of my flat to the other. I want to smear sperm all over your tits, your face, all over your body. I want to put my cock in your mouth.”

I was shouting now and I still couldn’t hear my voice. Of course, Marina should have been able to lip-read at least some of what I was saying, but even that, I felt in the white heat of the moment, had no consequence. The safest place to practice the genre of silence was in a tunnel of noise.

Marina laughed, to show that she at least comprehended the dispensations allowed us a hundred meters beneath the Kremlin. She would never be sure of what I said and later I could solemnly deny everything, since I couldn’t hear it myself. She could deny it too, even what she was sure of. Now she began shouting too. The trains arrived and left. The clocks were reset to zero. Commuters grimaced at the spectacle we were making. We said whatever came into our heads, whatever we wished. My eyes focused on her finely shaped mouth and, thrillingly, I thought I saw it shape itself around words that encompassed lewd acts. This spurred me on, to match my own lewdness with hers—“let’s fuck right here on the platform,” I cried—spinning out obscene fantasies with
increasing abandon, things I never even knew I could imagine. Then three words emerged from her lips, clearly readable. The words were: “democracy and freedom.”