The Big Green Tent (48 page)

Nikolay Mikhailovich examined them for a long time, groaned, sniffed, then said drily:

“Boris, I had no idea what a real draughtsman you were. Of course you can't remain here any longer. I don't know what you have in mind, how you intend to live your life further, but I'm taking these drawings with me to Moscow. I'll keep them safe until you return…” He smiled. “If I can stay safe myself.”

“Do you really think they're any good? I wasn't thinking about that—whether they were good or not. Don't keep them at home, though. Give them to Ilya. Maybe he'll find a place for them,” Boris Ivanovich said.

He was very, very happy. Nikolay Mikhailovich was highly respected among artists, known for his severity of judgment and his scant praise.

They left the next day, Nikolay Mikhailovich and his son in the direction of Moscow, Boris Ivanovich in the direction of Vologda.

Boris Ivanovich evaded arrest for four whole years. He had already grown used to the thought that they would catch him in the end, anyway, and he lived recklessly, frivolously, first in the Vologda region, then for three months or so in the city of Tver with the vivacious and full-throated Anastasia. Then, growing bolder, he moved back closer to Moscow and lived in a relative's dacha outside of town. Then it occurred to him: maybe no one was looking for him after all.

His friend Ilya helped him enormously—he kept his entire collection, except for the works he had managed to deliver safely to the West. Everything was going beautifully there. At the end of 1976, an exhibit was organized in Cologne with the title “Russian Nature Laid Bare.” The old women, naked and terrible, frolicked. They were enjoying themselves.

And that's when it happened. They caught him, four years after his timely flight.

They only gave him two years, and they came up with an astonishing charge: pornography. They didn't nail him for the anti-Soviet salami, or for the sausage mausoleum, or even for the shocking portrait of the Leader made of ground sausage and holding a cut-off piece of ear on the tines of a fork. No, they nailed him for pornography! Considering that no one had ever been imprisoned in the USSR for pornography, it was some sort of record.

After spending two years in a camp near Arkhangelsk, he was released, and soon after that he emigrated to Europe with his new wife, Raika, a small Jewess, as agile, neat, and compact as a little boat, and somewhat reminiscent of the long-lost Anastasia. Until recently they lived there still.

The lovely Natasha also fared well. While Boris Ivanovich was on the run, she found herself a completely ordinary engineer, with whom she had a daughter of the same Kustodiev-type Boris Ivanovich had once liked. Maria Nikolayevna looked after her granddaughter and prepared their meager meals. She liked her current son-in-law—he was a decent person—but he didn't measure up to Boris Ivanovich!

All the old women in Danilovy Gorki died long ago.

Everything is just as it should be.

 

THE DELUGE

The girl, it seemed, had called from a pay phone near the entrance to the building, because she was at the door in the space of two minutes.

Ilya had been at their house a few times before her parents were sent to prison, but he either hadn't noticed her, or she hadn't been home at all. Or maybe she had already gone to bed.

Olga was certain that she was seeing the girl for the first time. She had the kind of face one doesn't forget—small and thin, with eyes that were pale and somehow flattened out, and too big for the rest of it, and a tiny nose with a collapsed bridge. A strange physiognomy! Ilya had once mentioned her, saying she had a vicious character, and that no one could handle her. Olga had heard a great deal about her father, Valentin Kulakov, however. He was a Marxist who proclaimed himself to be Marx's true successor, accusing all others who had entrenched themselves within the walls of the Institute of the Workers' Movement and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism to be falsifiers, if not downright traitors.

Olga didn't remember the details about where he had been expelled from, and why, before ending up in prison. He'd branded his enemies by any means available to him; he'd even written letters to the Central Committee of the Party, but they refused to listen to him. Then Kulakov single-handedly multiplied his battle cries for truth on a government copy machine, and began writing daring and irresponsible letters to the International Communist Party, the Italian branch, or the Austrian—or maybe both at once.

It must be said that the authorities tolerated his escapades for a long time, but when they finally expelled him from the Party and his institute, he became unhinged. He started an underground Marxist magazine and even tried smuggling it abroad, which was completely unacceptable to the authorities. That was when they threw him in prison. At the same time, they imprisoned his wife, Zina, who, though she was all thumbs, somehow copied and bound the publication herself, and was not a whit less dedicated than her husband on an ideological level.

He was, as they say, a foremost specialist on Marx and Engels, and at the institute there weren't many scholars who could measure up to him. Inspired by Marx-Engels, he learned German. His goal was to read the
Paris Manuscripts of 1844
in the original before he died. There was something in them about which Marx didn't speak in his later years. When Hitler came to power, the German socialists had managed to smuggle these manuscripts into Moscow.

“What was the point? They're languishing there under lock and key, and they won't let anyone read them,” Valentin complained to Ilya.

Those were the days when Valentin and Ilya communicated most often, usually in the smoking lounges of various libraries. It was also when Ilya visited their home for the first time, and photographed both Valentin and Zina. Olga remembered the photograph—it was in one of the folders of Ilya's archive. They made a funny couple. He had thick hair, parted in the middle and falling in two waves from the top of his head down to his ears. His wife had short, sparse wisps of hair, like a child after a long illness, and a doll-like face.

And now their scruffy daughter, wearing a child's jacket with sleeves too short for her and a threadbare collar, was standing at their door. A medium-size dog with thick, light gray fur, a curlicue tail, and a pleasant expression on its face (unlike his mistress) was sitting next to her obediently. It was a northern breed, a laika. Both the collar and the leash were made of good-quality leather.

“I'm Marina. Did Ilya tell you I was coming?” She kept standing in the doorway without trying to enter.

“Yes, please come in.”

Marina made a little sound like a cough, and the dog went through the door ahead of her. The girl was carrying a rucksack.

Ilya came out into the hall and greeted her.

“Sit!” the girl said in a commanding tone. The dog sat and watched its mistress with an expression that seemed to say, Will there be anything else, ma'am?

Marina unhooked the leash and gave it to Ilya.

“Now she'll only go out with you. Not with anyone else. If you say the word, you know,
spazieren
 … she'll come.”

When it heard the German word, it pricked up its ears.

“I see.” Olga smiled. “That's a smart dog.”

“Hera? Smart? She's a genius. She's a laika. And laikas are the smartest dogs of all.”

Olga offered her tea, and then remembered—a child bereft of her family needed to eat! She asked if she wanted something to eat.

“Yes, but I should warn you, I don't eat meat.”

What cheek
, Olga thought; but Marina smiled, showing her tiny pearl-like teeth, and turned the insolence into a joke.

“Hera and I made a bargain: she'll eat the meat, and I'll eat everything else.”

And she launched into a story about what remarkable dogs laikas were, and how they had always had laikas at home, since before the war, because her grandfather had studied the northern peoples, and had brought home their first laika, a puppy, forty years ago, and ever since then …

Olga vaguely remembered something about her grandfather, a philologist who was compiling a dictionary of the language of a disappearing northern tribe … and then disappeared himself, into the camps.

Marina ate a bowl of kasha. She smeared a thick layer of butter on her bread. Her hands were scratched up, as though she had a litter of kittens in her care rather than a dog. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick. She ate the whole bowl of kasha, four pieces of bread and butter, all the cheese there was, and almost half a pound of smoked sausage, apparently forgetting that she didn't eat meat.

Poor thing
, Olga thought, and sprang to her feet.

“Oh, do you like apricot jam?”

It turned out she liked it very much indeed.

The two of them ate more than half a jar of the jam. Then Ilya glanced into the kitchen, where they were eating, and, apparently feeling left out, said:

“What, without me?” Then he ate the rest of it.

Kostya came home from school, and was overjoyed to see the dog; but Marina warned him that it was a real dog, not a toy, and that he couldn't play with it. It would rip him to shreds.

Kostya was very surprised. What was the use of having a dog, then?

Olga grew alarmed—yes, the dog might actually bite her son.

“Not bite him; rip him to shreds,” Marina said softly.

The dog was sitting stolidly in the same spot where he had been commanded to sit before they ate.

“Olga, will you give her something for a bed, a place she can lie down?” Marina said with easy familiarity.

After they had finished their tea, Marina said that she had to go out for a little bit. She ordered the dog, “Lie down!” and the dog lay on the old children's blanket Olga had given her.

While the girl was gone, Ilya told Olga about this Valentin Kulakov.

“Strange as it might seem, we have only one thing in common: Stalin. Though he doesn't hate him for the blood, for the Terror, but for trampling his own ideals. Kulakov had a rather complicated multilayered schema of consecutive betrayals: Stalin betrayed Lenin, but Lenin had already distorted Marx, though Marx had some sort of misunderstanding with Hegel, whom Marx didn't altogether understand correctly, at least as Kulakov saw it … and for life to unfold and develop as it should, in accordance with the laws of dialectical materialism, everything had to be brought down to a common denominator and adjustments had to be made everywhere, and Stalin had to be exposed as a criminal, an enemy of the idea of socialism. There is a whole group of them who are prepared to walk through fire over some quotation or other from
State and Revolution.
”

“Oh, you don't have to explain. It sounds just like my mother.”

“No, not at all! She's a completely different breed. She'll believe whatever they order her to believe. But this one uses his own brains; he's seeking the truth, comparing texts and checking them against one another,” said Ilya.

“But my mother also believes in something,” Olga said, trying to defend her mother's honor.

Ilya snorted dismissively.

“Sure, she believes. In directives issued from above. Everyone knows how she smeared Pasternak!”

Relations between the son-in-law and his mother-in-law were absolutely cut and dried: they felt a profound mutual aversion. Ilya couldn't forgive Antonina for having kicked Pasternak out of the Writers' Union. They had asked her to preside as secretary of that meeting, and she had agreed, whether out of foolishness or vanity—or perhaps fear. What a disgrace!

The mother-in-law couldn't stand her son-in-law, either. She considered him to be unsteady and ill-mannered. His laugh was loud and unpleasant, and even the smell in the WC after his visits there was particularly repulsive to her. “He smells like an animal. Some sort of Jewish smell.” And each time she had to go into the WC after him, she would light a wad of newspaper to dispel the odor. “What a stinking stallion my daughter had to go and pick for herself…”

Olga, devoted body and soul to her husband, was disconcerted by the emanations of hatred that filled every space her mother and Ilya happened to occupy at the same time, and she tried as hard as she could to neutralize their interactions.

“All right, Ilya, I know all about my mother, it's all hot air. But what about the girl? How can we help her? Maybe the foundation will do something.”

The Foundation for the Support of Political Prisoners, run by the most famous prisoner, the most controversial writer, and the most implacable émigré of all, was already transferring his royalties from the West to Russia, and they were being distributed in the labor camps as food packages. They also went to other destinations as aid to the families of people behind bars, to facilitate their release, and to pay medical bills. And although all the people running the foundation were honest and upright, they were, in the Russian manner, disorganized and lackadaisical. Everything was carried out haphazardly, with blunders and mishaps—letters were mixed up, and money and packages had a habit of falling into the wrong hands. And the authorities weren't asleep at the wheel—Stop, thief!—so the game took on enormous dimensions, involving post offices, messengers, secret codes, and muddles throughout the country.

“Who should they help, if not this girl?” Olga said.

“No, Olga, you don't understand how it works. They do have money, and it's earmarked for the needs of political prisoners and for those who are being released. But, you know how it is, you first need to get the go-ahead from the Classic.”

“So you need to get permission for every transfer or handout?”

“Not exactly. As far as I know there is regular distribution of, say, food, and the list of recipients is made up here. It's not monitored over there, but when there is some irregularity, they start asking questions.”