The Commissariat of Enlightenment (15 page)

After the meal, when the men retired to the smoking room, he excused himself and stepped into the garden without his coat. The rain had washed away the clouds, leaving a sky as brilliant as the china on which they had just dined. He closed his eyes and turned toward the sun, letting its warmth soak his face. The confusion that shrouded his life briefly lifted. When he opened them he discovered that his father had joined him. He too lifted his face to the sun. After a while Anton said, “I believe there’s a path to the river. Perhaps it’s not wet.”

Not until they had crossed the lawn and entered the woods did the young man say, almost accusingly, “Who are these people?”

Anton didn’t reply; by the time they reached the narrow path he had entangled himself in rumination. His son walked a step behind. They climbed a small rise and the firs gave way to spindly birches. The ground was moist, but not muddy. Birds called urgently and the young man could smell the sweetness evaporating from the melting snow and ice. Buds were visible already; the ground was deep-black and loamy, spotted by green shoots. As it always does at the end of a Russian winter, nature was renewing it
self with sudden virulence. He felt himself moved, and then noticed that his father’s face was bathed in tears.

Anton couldn’t go further; nor could he raise his hands to cover his face. The young man understood that his father was responding to the particulars of the late winter day and perhaps to his own company. They hadn’t seen each other for some time. The years of war had probably been difficult; perhaps Anton still mourned his wife, who had finally succumbed to her ailments in 1915. Now Anton was overcome by emotion. His sobs were like the onrush of spring: inspirited, relentless, redemptive. They were becoming more audible. The young man wondered whether anyone else was nearby.

“Father, stop. Please stop. Stop now.”

But he also seemed to be losing his footing in a gale of sentimentality. His eyes had gone wet too. He shook his head, fighting off the surge of feeling. These days too much feeling was dangerous. He reminded himself that spring arrived every year, so there could be no great surprise in that. Spring wouldn’t equal a jot of historical progress: it would be followed soon enough by a winter identical to the one that had come before. Discussion in certain Russian intellectual circles had mooted that the cycle of death and rebirth was a sentimentalist phenomenon; history would rather build itself from what already existed and didn’t die. Synthesis.

A small animal rustled the brush. It was cooler here in the woods. The men had been foolish for not bringing their coats. He repeated the question he had asked before: “Who are these people?”

Anton wiped his face with his handkerchief. Embarrassed by his tears, he replied with some impatience: “Your mother’s relations, of course. Natasha Andreyevna is your great-aunt. Don’t you remember her? You’ve visited many times. Pyotr Vladimiro
vich is her husband. Ivan Petrovich was your mother’s favorite cousin. They used to summer on the Baltic together. Alyosha’s his son. They’ve always been fond of you.” Anton paused to reflect on family history, things his son would never know. “I wouldn’t expect a bequest, however.”

His mother’s relations. No, he couldn’t recall ever visiting these people or this house. His mother had been ill and had lived his childhood behind the closed door to her room, and everything with her and behind her had been closed to him as well. Her past had been like a long unlit corridor. He supposed that he had heard stories of her family, but he couldn’t remember them. These days, with the world being turned inside-out, stories of the past were evaporating and disappearing directly into the atmosphere.

ASTAPOV’S
car bounced to a halt among some basket-laden peasant women near the Revkom offices at the railhead. The railhead was now a small town in itself, with much more activity and commerce than Lomov could claim these days. Sheets of corrugated tin roofed a warren of temporary stalls and sheds around the station. Some of the roofs were missing: probably stolen, Astapov supposed. One of the stationhouse’s walls had been whitewashed, but like much of rural Russia it had yet to be daubed with anything red. Carpenters hammered at the skeleton of an outdoor stage between two tracks yawning away from each other east and south. The agit-train and its locomotive stood among this complex as prepotent symbols of Red power, even if they were built years ago in bourgeois factories, probably abroad. As Astapov climbed from the automobile, he saw that posters had been plastered onto the nearby hoardings:
WORKERS OF THE WORLD
,
UNITE
!

For a moment the exhortation troubled him as lewd. Perhaps he was still disconcerted by his encounter with the archpriest.

He found the Enlightenment offices in an uproar. For once there were too many workers waiting around for too few assignments; idleness had led them to debate politics, rather recklessly. He hurriedly had them dispatched, while arguing with one of the clerks about how to get the equipment he needed in Gryaz properly requisitioned. Afterward he stepped outside to light some
makhorka,
a noxious tobacco substitute, while his driver brought the required documents for the generator to the supplies office. Astapov was astonished by the dozens of peasant women at the railhead, several hundred meters from the market square. Some were selling produce—garden vegetables, mostly; produce they said they didn’t have, now sold brazenly at free market prices—but many had simply come to gossip, as if the Revolution had already brought them their promised leisure; as if men were not engaged in insurrection and repression a dozen versts down the road.

He stopped one of the Enlightenment girls, who was scuttling by in a pressed white blouse, a blue bow perched in her hair.

“What’s this about, comrade?”

“Women’s propaganda,” she said, smiling shyly. “We’re showing a new cinema program. I’m collecting the audience.”

Astapov nodded absentmindedly and wondered who had authorized the program. No propaganda film material had been delivered since they had seized Lomov. Competing duties now tugged at him. Shishko would have already begun moving on the monastery. Without Astapov present, the commander would let his men run wild. The film could wait. Meanwhile, though, Astapov’s driver hadn’t arrived with the equipment: the necessary electrical cable had been misplaced. The cinema coach was right before him, standing on a siding across a muddy patch.

Astapov climbed the stairs to the train. He edged his head into the coach—and then jerked it away, nearly smashing his head on
the door. Looking up from where she was working, examining some frames of a film that had not yet been wound onto the projector, Yelena Bogdanova was startled too. Alone in the coach, she had been completely lost in her study of the film. Now she made a sound, a pitiful little “oh.”

This was the proper moment to apologize for whatever it was for which he was meant to be sorry, but he couldn’t compose the words, much less place them on his lips. A couple are hunched over a work table; the man grips her shoulders; now the two of them are partially undressed; her blouse in her arms, she flees: these were the frames of
their
narrative. Yet despite his surprise and embarrassment, this peculiar mortification, Astapov was almost pleased to see her. He again murmured the word, “Comrade.”

It was an old third-class car, barely reconditioned for Enlightenment, except for the windows opaqued by crimson paint (he had insisted on this paint; on bright days it cast a sanguine glow onto the screen but didn’t interfere with the projection), and the other Bolshevik imperative daubed in the same shade on one wall above the windows:
ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS
! A bolt of linen fastened to the far door served as the cinema screen. Yelena had been alone, standing by the projector, a Hughes Bio-Pictoroscope, with an open film canister in one hand; with the other she held a strip of celluloid up to the bare lightbulb above her head. Now she brought it down to her chest.

“What film is this?” he asked brusquely, falling short of the required professionalism.

Yelena now appeared even more frail, even more pregnable to a moderate gust, than she been had when she had arrived half-starved in Samara. Her cheeks had gone hollow and her white blouse lay loose and undisturbed across her chest. At sixteen or seventeen years of age, she was much too young for this campaign
and for these conditions. She looked in his direction as she had this morning, with her gaze askew.

She finally replied, “Women’s propaganda, Comrade Astapov.”

So she remembered his name. This was a small relief. Yet she showed no sign of recalling that dismal episode—which should have brought him more comfort, since he fervently wished for every remnant of it to be expunged from her memory and his. Life’s struggle was not to control events, but the way in which they were remembered. Yet…He felt himself diminished by her amnesia.

“Which film? Where did it come from?”

“I made it myself.”

Astapov was taken aback. Cinematography equipment was scarce and access to it severely restricted. He thought he knew the disposition of nearly every motion picture camera in the Commissariat: only one had been assigned to his unit. But with the deepening of the agitational struggle, Enlightenment was growing faster than any other department of the Bolshevik government. In this province at least, the Whites were on the run; Enlightenment rushed to occupy the ideological vacuum behind them. Every day saw the arrival of new Enlightenment workers, many with unspecified jobs. He knew nothing of Yelena’s current assignment nor by what means she had managed to make a film. How had the film been developed? Had anyone approved the script? What was it about? He couldn’t settle these issues now. Shishko was waiting.

He said, “It has to be registered in Moscow, approved by the Commissariat, and then, before it’s played here, authorized by me. You can’t show the film until I’ve seen it.”

Yelena’s eyes fixed on him now. He noticed, for the first time, that her puffy, battered face was the material vessel for a furious anger.

“I have permission from the Women’s Section,” she declared, her voice like iron. Where did
that
come from? “And from Comrade Krupskaya herself.”

This was his second surprise in less than a minute. Ilich’s wife was now head of the Commissariat’s Political Education Department and Astapov’s faraway boss. What had Yelena done since Samara? How had she gotten to Moscow? To Krupskaya? What had she told the people in Moscow about him? And did Stalin know?

“Permission for this film?”

“For the subject matter. It’s a general authorization.” She withdrew a letter from her rucksack and handed it to Astapov. His knees nearly buckled under the weight of its provenance. Ilich’s wife! Several moments passed before he could turn his eyes around the words to make sense of them. Once he did, he realized that the document was by no means an official authorization, but only a letter vaguely encouraging the enlightenment of women through cinema propaganda. Nevertheless, wreathed in revolutionary blandishments, the letter addressed Yelena and was signed by Comrade Krupskaya. He handed it back to the girl, who added, “We’ve assembled dozens of peasant women. It wasn’t easy, particularly now with the harvest coming in. We have to seize the moment.”

“No. Absolutely not. I can’t allow the showing of a film I haven’t seen and I don’t have time to watch it now. Cancel the program or show something else. The harvest film. Show them that, get them ready for the food brigades.”

“I have Comrade Krupskaya’s permission!”

He swore. This was what the Civil War had brought: an ease about swearing at women. “She hasn’t seen the film. The film must be approved in Moscow.”

“It’s only for here, for Lomov. I need the peasants’ reactions before I submit it to the Commissariat.”

He abruptly seized the celluloid from her hands. She still held the canister. His pull brought her close enough for Astapov to feel the heat from her body. He hadn’t been with a woman since that night in Samara.

With his thumb on the sprocket holes, he held the film to the light and attempted to distinguish the subject of the horizontal series of tiny rectangular images, each only microscopically different from the next. It was an interior scene and a gray human figure was posed in the foreground. He couldn’t determine what it was doing. No intertitles were apparent.

He handed the celluloid back to Yelena. Now he had been placed in an even more difficult position, because he had seen the film. It would be slightly complicated to explain that he hadn’t been able to discern its subject or political conformity. These days anything could be used against you.

“All right. Thread the machine. How long is it?”

“Nine minutes.”

He opened the door of the coach. His driver stood by the Thorneycroft and smoked a good imported cigarette, staring ahead vacantly. Astapov’s equipment waited in the back of the car. Shishko’s troops would have entered the monastery by now.

The light in the coach was extinguished. For a moment the vehicle was in total darkness and Astapov apprehended Yelena’s close presence. It had been like this when they had worked together in Samara, her proximity urgently palpable. He took a step forward and a few strands of unkempt hair tickled his face. Something seemed to slither in his gut. Yelena breathed audibly.

The projector whirred and a light beam shot down the center
of the coach hard against the screen. Preceded neither by title nor credits, a gray ectoplasmic image appeared. In an invisible but physically sensible motion, Yelena reached forward to turn the lens. The picture swung into solidity—a girl, what?—and then fell from focus, and then abruptly gelled again. A girl reclined on a divan: With a start, Astapov realized that it was Yelena herself and, for God’s sake, it took him several moments to comprehend this, she was completely naked. In Samara she had never entirely given up her clothes, fighting him for her undergarments. Now flattened cinematically, she was hardly female. She stared at the camera with her diminutive paps visible and her legs up, and her pubic blackness lay on the projection screen like a defect, some stitching or a tear in the fabric. Her second finger was raised to the audience as if, perhaps, it had never seen a finger before.

“What is this?”

“Education for women.”

Dry-mouthed, Astapov watched as the filmic Yelena brought her finger down. She dug it into the screen defect with great deliberation and slowly exercised the area, making a sawing motion. With her left hand she pawed at her breasts. Her face remained expressionless, fixed on the camera lens. No sign of actual arousal was evident, but the oscillation of her right hand became more vigorous and her rump squirmed beneath it.

Close enough for him to feel her breath, Yelena said, “You’d be surprised at the number of peasant and proletarian women who can’t masturbate properly or are ashamed to.” There was extra heat coming from her now and her voice had become a shade huskier: the actual Yelena was aroused by the image of herself pretending to be aroused. Astapov himself had become warm. She added, “The first step toward emancipation is knowing how to
gratify yourself. My script explains this, with references to Marx and Comrade Ilich.”

“No,” Astapov declared. “This is indecent.”

“Indecency is a bourgeois concept.”

The scene shifted without transitional intertitles. Again Astapov required several moments to resolve the image. Yelena was still unclothed, on her hands and knees, with her delicately slender back arched and her buttocks raised. Ending before the corresponding male part came into view, the scene was followed by other blinking images: a breast, a tongue, possibly a vagina, possibly an anus, a rigid penis, more shots of breasts from various perspectives, an incongruously asexual elbow, and an extreme close-up of some wet conjoined organs in motion that he couldn’t identify at all. The naked body appalled him, its depiction was immoral and offensive, and valid references from Marx and Ilich were unthinkable, but he was aware of an additional assault on his consciousness: the nightmarish lack of sequentiality.

No story was offered here, not even the bourgeois-banal one of seduction and conquest. Yet the film was whole. Yelena had given up the story in order to compose a non-verbal experience, an erotic vaudeville, virtually subliminal and absolutely proscribed. The rebuttal of cause and effect positioned the film beyond the scientific workings of history. Anything could happen in such a film. Filmmaking without text unmoored the human imagination. It invited madness; also counterrevolution. With a once-familiar shudder he felt himself pitched forward, into a moment where unconnected images were ubiquitous and drenched in sex and noise. Here men were buffeted by so many visual representations, so much experience, that they were unable to make sense of their lives.

Now her face was viewed from the side. Something else was in the frame. He didn’t guess what it was until she placed the object in her mouth. It came out again, and then back in. When she removed the penis for the second time, she extended and rolled her tongue and ran the pointed tip of it along the underside of the shaft, instructively. She looked away, her eyes on the camera, which, with amateur incompetence, was jerking away to take in the larger picture. It included the figure of a stocky young man with black hair, leaning away, the palms of his hands on his buttocks.

In desperation, Astapov grabbed for the switch to the electric lights hanging from a cord near the doorway, but the photoplay persisted, out of his control, pale and insubstantial. “Comrade!” Yelena cried. The entire length of the penis was swallowed. He shivered and recognized the man as approximately resembling, in build and coloring at least, and in some other suggestive but indefinite way, one person: himself, Astapov. He moved swiftly to the projector and flicked the power lever.