The Commissariat of Enlightenment (7 page)

GRIBSHIN
was leaving the train station’s waiting room at that moment, when he was startled by an airborne streak of long red hair. Nearly colliding with the girl, he caught a glimpse of her face. It was swollen and wet, the mascara and lipstick smeared by tears, and then she was past him. Men’s laughter snapped at her heels.

It was one of the prostitutes. Gribshin stopped at the door and watched her go. He guessed that she’d been struck or in some other way abused. He thought to run after her and offer a word of consolation, but he couldn’t guess which word would suffice. It was a mysterious impulse. He had seen prostitutes in tears before; usually, their upset had to do with the amount of money offered. Sometimes it involved a sudden, brutal appreciation of their degradation, as if they had not been degraded by the first of all the men who had come before. Gribshin had been present when prostitutes had been burned by cigarettes and whipped and otherwise insulted. He had stood by then, embarrassed. The girls were often
shockingly naive, or at least forgetful that men’s beastliness was part of their trade.

Some of the local girls had met their downfall only this week, on the opportunity occasioned by the presence of so many bored, cash-heavy men in the remote hamlet. Gribshin observed that their industry had been generated by the mortal illness of a reformed profligate who had railed against prostitution and been disgusted by the sex act, regardless of its purpose or the state of affairs between the man and the woman involved. In the imitation of animal behavior, the suppression of reason, and the loss of innocence, the Count saw depravity. The Count had been joined in his condemnation by the philosopher Fedorov. A bachelor and ascetic, Fedorov had promised that through science man would someday eliminate sexual appetites from his nature, just as he would abolish death. Once mankind was immortal there would be no need for procreation.

Visiting Europeans considered the Count’s ideas and Fedorov’s laughable, and Gribshin laughed too when he comically related to them these and the other millennial theories of contemporary Russian philosophers. Sometimes this happened en route to the Moscow saloon or brothel whose address he had acquired for the party. Yet Gribshin noted the chagrin of his acquaintances, usually Pathé men or junior diplomats in some mild dishevelment, later when they were seen leaving the rooms where the women had been engaged; in the embraces he had purchased himself he monitored the deeper registers of his own disquiet. Now the corseted figure of the red-haired prostitute diminished as she rushed away and Gribshin felt himself stirred unpleasantly by currents of desire and pity.

Professor Vorobev had become a familiar figure among Astapovo’s visitors. He attended the medical briefings with manifest skepticism, bunked in the press tent, and tenaciously demanded hearings before government officials and the Count’s junior apostles. That afternoon on the station platform, Vorobev managed to assemble a half dozen newspaper reporters around him, plus a few other strangers. Revisited by the chill induced by their first encounter, Gribshin paused to stand outside the little penumbra of professional interest. A gypsy band had begun a familiar tarantella in an empty lot nearby.

“We’ve had correspondence,” Vorobev was asserting. “Of course, I’m not privileged to divulge our personal communications. But he’s a man clearly receptive to science. And a great writer, a great Russian.”

“So he’s agreed to your proposal?”

Vorobev smiled, demonstrating his patience with the questioner.

“To talk of an agreement, in terms of this procedure, is a kind of empty legalism. We men of science aren’t lawyers; neither are the great men of literature.”

“Do you have
anything
from him in writing?”

Vorobev scolded the reporter. “Yes.
Everything
the Count has written shows him to be in so-called agreement. Read his novels, his stories, his letters, his pamphlets! He believes in beneficial scientific progress, he’s
opposed
to superstition and intellectual metaphysics. He’s in favor of universal education. This procedure
promotes
universal education in a way undreamed of merely five years ago!”

The reporters were foreign, but another of the Tsar’s subjects, a Caucasian, shared the platform with Gribshin. He was short and squarely constructed and his face was pocked and pitted. If, unin
timidated by the man’s rough countenance, you inspected his face closely, you would suspect that the tender skin above his lip had recently been shorn of its mustache. Although the man was not asking questions, he listened to Vorobev carefully.

Runcie from the
Standard
pressed Vorobev: “But, professor, just to make it clear—”

“In any case,” Vorobev said, annoyed, “I understand that the Count is no longer in any condition to accept or reject a proposal of this kind. The question must be put properly to Mr. Chertkov, as heir to his intellectual domain. Once he dies, the Count will no longer have use of his body. It will belong to posterity, and it is posterity to whom I must address my proposal.”

“Well, what does Chertkov say?”

“Unfortunately, Mr. Chertkov has been preoccupied with the Count’s family and personal affairs. I haven’t been able to present the proposal to him yet. To understand it, one needs a demonstration.”

At that moment another passerby, grinning as he put his arms around Runcie and another colleague, broke into the conversation.

“Wait until he sticks the stuffed rat in your face,” the man said. It was Khaitover, on his way back from his inauspicious interview in the stationmaster’s house. “The rat’s a charmer.”

The reporters snickered, immediately siding with their colleague. Neither Gribshin nor the other native responded. They waited for the professor’s reply.

“As I’ve already explained,” Vorobev said, “the rat isn’t stuffed. It’s embalmed.”

“Well, watch for it,” Khaitover told his colleagues. “It’s the highlight of the presentation.”

One of the reporters jeered, “C’mon, professor, show us the rat!”

“This is not a sideshow,” Vorobev said, huffing. “I’ll be pleased to demonstrate the results of this procedure only…”

But Khaitover had made his colleagues feel a bit ridiculous, the hour of the next press conference was fast approaching, and they began to wander off. Vorobev was left with no one but Gribshin and the Caucasian. He didn’t recognize Gribshin from the Tula rail carriage and was inclined to dismiss him because of his youth. But the two gazed at him with such interest that Vorobev was obliged to address them:

“In the future, our descendants will look upon us with disgust for our practice of consigning our most revered men to dirt and to mold, to the worms, like so much garbage.”

Gribshin nodded. The Caucasian smiled, as if someone had placed a fine meal before him. These were the first gestures of approval that Vorobev had won in Astapovo, but, coming from fellow nationals, he didn’t count them as significant. He didn’t bother displaying the rat.

The professor closed his trunk and hauled it down the platform on the way to the medical briefing. Meyer would need Gribshin, but the assistant remained in place, aware that he was being appraised by the Caucasian stranger. The man was in his thirties, muscular and self-assured. Gribshin withstood the unaccustomed scrutiny.

“A man of science,” the Caucasian observed, without the least suggestion of irony.

“I’m already acquainted with his work,” Gribshin said. “The embalmed remains are lifelike; he’s managed to preserve the
moistness of the tissues or at least give the illusion of moistness. The animal I saw was quite convincing.”

“It’s my understanding that you’re also involved in an enterprise dedicated to preserving the appearance of life.”

“What? Excuse me?”

The Caucasian’s eyes sparkled now. He enjoyed other men’s puzzlement and would organize his life around it. Then, raising his hand to stroke his mustache, he was surprised that it was gone. He recovered in a moment.

“Pathé,” he declared. “I’ve seen you working with them. Meyer’s real name is Mundviller. A Jewish-sounding nom de guerre is rather unfortunate, but he’s a brilliant man. What’s the cinema but the finest illusion of life? In that little
mashinka
—” he gestured toward the train station’s waiting room, where the next medical briefing was about to start. “—you capture light and make it solid, so that thousands of kilometers away, years hence, it’s released again as light and the dead move. They move, they dance, they go to war. Can we ever appreciate the miracle of it? I love the cinema, by the way, particularly topicals. It’s the art form of the future. Tell me, Nikolai Antonovich, do you ever think of the future?”

Gribshin was startled that the Caucasian knew his name and patronymic—and had deliberately told him he knew it. From whom did he overhear it? These days your name passed from hand to hand like a small coin. “I think of the future all the time,” Gribshin acknowledged.

“The twentieth century will need people like that,” the Caucasian said. “In earlier human epochs, men lived as their fathers did and life differed hardly from one generation to the next. It wasn’t necessary to see the future, except to predict the next day’s weather. But now dialectical forces have accelerated the pace
of change. The international working class needs men capable of understanding history and the direction in which it’s headed. It also needs men capable of envisioning how history may be shaped and mastered.”

The Caucasian was a revolutionist. This didn’t disturb Gribshin. In Moscow he consorted with many types—officers and students, diplomats and businessmen, most of whom barely noted his company. Revolutionists were everywhere, mostly talking, talking, talking, and boring their police auditors to death. The Tsar governed in the conviction that the Autocracy was eternal. Gribshin knew that the man before him was more than a talker, but he remained undisturbed; the Caucasian observed his coolness with satisfaction.

“The camera does not lie,” the Caucasian suggested. His eyes were no longer bright; he was speaking close to Gribshin, so that the young man could smell the garlic on his breath. Gribshin saw the last of the reporters enter the waiting room. The Caucasian went on: “The lens has no motives, no class background, no secret interests. It’s a piece of glass. It has no
mechanism
for lying. When we gaze at the cinema screen, regardless of how flickering and scratched the image, or the distractions of the cinema hall, or the competence of the cinematographer, we know that we peer through a transparent windowpane onto reality. Consider the potential: for education, for science, for documenting injustice, for ripping away the veil of lies thrown up by language.”

They understood each other. The Caucasian was privy to thoughts and ambitions that Gribshin had yet to articulate. “What you say is the truth,” Gribshin whispered, his lips parched.

Now the stranger smiled. “I consider this to have been a profitable conversation, Nikolai Antonovich.”

Gribshin didn’t return the smile.

“I must get to the medical briefing,” he said hurriedly. “But how can I, how can we—”

The Caucasian laid a hand on his arm. The hand gripped him firmly, so that he could feel the strength of steel within it. “I’ll know how to find you.”

THAT
night at the old post-house, after two more medical briefings and another argument with the authorities about filming the railroad station, Gribshin directed his thoughts toward the stranger from the Caucasus. He had made an impression on Gribshin as no one had since Georges Meyer arrived in Moscow in 1908. Meyer had come without speaking a word of Russian and with barely an understanding of the alien empire in which he now found himself, but he had been fired with enthusiasm for the progress that cinema would bring to mankind and, unlike other enthusiasts for new technology, he was endowed with great technical and artistic skill and passionate about sharing it. As Meyer’s pupil, Gribshin had been instructed that the cinema was the means by which man would extend enlightenment to every remote alpine hamlet, desert encampment, and village on the tundra.

But Gribshin had been pierced by the Caucasian’s ostensibly unoffending words. The Caucasian saw the future even farther than Meyer or Gribshin did. As for Dr. Vorobev’s rat…the revolutionist would use the rat.

“Sir, have you seen the Count?”

These were the first words that his host, Semyon, had volunteered on the subject of the Count and they were delivered with an almost painful tentativeness as his wife, Marina, poured tea for Gribshin. She seemed embarrassed. Unlike the other peasants in the area, Semyon had been reluctant to speak of the reason why so many strangers and foreigners had descended upon Astapovo and the neighboring villages. After Gribshin’s first casual inquiry about the Count’s standing among the common people of Russia met with monosyllabic responses, he had asked the couple no further questions.

“No one’s seen him,” Gribshin replied. He added, with a dim smile: “except for about ten of his children, about fifteen of his doctors, and about twenty of his closest friends and disciples, and the wife of the stationmaster, who bathes him every day.” He didn’t add that Meyer had made daily applications to Chertkov, promising that Pathé Frères would distribute free of charge to appropriate pacifist groups captioned films of the Count speaking his last words. Chertkov had been clearly intrigued by the offer to photograph the Count, but had not yet given the cinematographer permission. Meyer was now considering an approach to the Count’s youngest daughter, Sasha.

Semyon was sadly nodding his head, as if Gribshin had spoken some profound truth. His wife clenched her jaw. Neither of them looked toward the girl, Galya. Was it at the mention of the Count that she had raised her head? She was a stout girl with a spoiled complexion and unkempt hair the color of wheat. Pregnancy hadn’t invigorated her looks.

Semyon cleared his throat. “So what do they say of him? What are his intentions?”

“They say he’ll die soon, in a matter of hours or days. The pneumonia has infected both lungs. As for his intentions…he
won’t take Communion, if that’s what you mean. The bishop has sent a representative for this purpose, but he hasn’t been allowed to see him.”

Although Meyer had missed the arrival of the priest, who had been avoiding the cameras, he had managed a later shot of him in his black cassock as he paced the platform, an image of Russian Orientalism that would delight the audiences in Paris. The priest was desperate that the Count accept Communion so that he could be allowed a Christian burial. The State feared that obsequies outside the Church would provoke a violent public response.

“I mean to say, sir, his intentions about the division of his estate. Have they been made public?”

Despite their illiteracy and backwardness, the peasants were apparently well informed. Across the breadth of the Russian continent the Count’s domestic problems were gossiped about in courtyards and around wells, in stables and in rough taverns, by peasants who had never read a single word he had written.

Gribshin said, “The issue of his estate won’t be decided for many years. In any case, Chertkov is publishing millions of copies of the Count’s most recent spiritual works to be sold at cost, without royalties.”

“But sir, has any provision been made for me?”

The peasant was leaning forward, over the table, his hand before him as if reaching for Gribshin’s. His gaze was almost passionate. Marina nodded, clearly gratified that her husband had finally aired the subject.

“What?”

“For me Semyon Semyonovich, sir, your humble landlord. Do you know if my family will be included among the legatees?”

Gribshin winced, in part at Semyon’s use of the legal term. The question hung in the ether between them.

Semyon added, “It’s for the little one who’s on the way. We’re asking for very little.” He paused, trying to decide whether to continue. “A cow,” he declared. “We’re demanding a cow.”

It was not in Gribshin’s nature to laugh at absurdity. For such a young man, he had already encountered a great deal of absurdity, not only among the misconceived notions of the peasantry and the workers, but also among those opinions held by the intellectuals and the gentry. The Tsar would amnesty his political prisoners. The workers wouldn’t allow themselves to be led by intellectuals. The Constitutional Democrats would hold the balance of power in the next Duma. Austria wouldn’t annex Bosnia.

He said now, “I don’t think the Count is in a position to give you a cow. First, the Countess has legal control of Yasnaya Polyana and its chattel. And, you know, many men in Russia would find use for a cow—”

“It’s not for me,” Semyon asserted. “It’s for the little one who’s coming.”

“Even so—”

“His own flesh and blood! His child!”

Now Gribshin did laugh, just a little involuntary titter that he immediately regretted. It took a moment for him to recover himself.

“What do you mean? Speak straight, man.”

“The Count is the father of the child-to-be, my grandson if God wills it.”

“That’s impossible.”

Semyon laid a hand on his heart. “I swear, sir, it’s the truth. God is my witness.”

Gribshin sought a tone of reasonableness, but he couldn’t suppress the bubble of condescension that rose from his chest. “When was this supposed to have happened? The Count came to Asta
povo less than a week ago, an old, dying man. Your girl is already near confinement.”

“It happened,” Semyon said.

“Where? In Yasnaya Polyana? Are you saying the girl traveled to Yasnaya Polyana eight or nine months ago?”

Semyon fell silent and Gribshin once more felt the damnable strength of peasant thickheadedness. For this girl a journey to Yasnaya Polyana would have been as likely as a journey to Africa. It was an absurd claim, yet the peasants would not abandon it, refusing to concede anything to reason. They said what they believed and nothing could be done about it.

He addressed the child curtly: “Who’s the father?”

For the first time the girl’s eyes met his. Her eyes glistened as if they were about to spout tears. But she wouldn’t cry. A faint smile played on her lips, just at the edge of unworldliness. Gribshin marveled at this piece of theater—and particularly at the manner in which she had orchestrated the light reflecting within the pool at the surface of her eyes. As with the icon, it was a matter of lighting, but he could not fathom how it had been managed in this shadowy room.

He said, “You’ve never met the Count, have you? Not in body at least…So what you’re claiming, what you believe is…”

Now he laughed, full throatedly and unapologetically. He shuddered. Gribshin did not have a pleasant laugh. It was a rough, heaving sound and there was an unattractive nasality about it, suggesting some gross peculiarity in the anatomy of his respiratory system. The laugh rarely came easy.

In any case, few Russian landowners, even among the novelist-theist-pacifist-vegetarians of their class, left legacies to their bastard offspring.