The Commissariat of Enlightenment (8 page)

THE
Count’s condition was unchanged the following day and no new course of treatment was prescribed by the attending Moscow doctors who now superseded Makovitsky. Early in the afternoon the Countess fainted on the platform outside the door to the stationmaster’s house. She was carried by two of her sons to a bench and revived with smelling salts. Coming to her senses, she cried the Count’s name. Meyer wasn’t alerted in time to film any of this, a lapse for which Gribshin held himself responsible. Although he wasn’t reproached, Gribshin felt the pressure of dwindling cinematic opportunities. He assigned a man to keep continuous watch on the Countess. The foreign reporters found themselves increasingly uneasy as the Astapovo dateline threatened to slip off the front pages of their newspapers. Many of them were paid by the number of their published words, an amount now in precipitous decline.

The Countess resumed her vigil on the station platform, drawing attention to herself with easily readable facial expressions and emotional gestures, as if the platform were a theater stage. Like
Professor Vorobev and countless other supplicants for publicity, she accosted the reporters indiscriminately; her offer was to reveal the truth behind the Count’s abduction.

Yes, he had been
abducted,
by Chertkov and Makovitsky. She told the reporters that thugs were denying her access to the man with whom she had lived for nearly fifty years and for whom she had borne thirteen children. She reminded them that she had been the one who had made fair copies of his manuscripts and negotiated the publication of his greatest works—and now these
thugs,
she repeated, this gang of religious charlatans, refused to allow her a few last minutes with him! At this point, precisely at the moment when the first exclamation point could be imagined (more would follow shortly), a flush became visible beneath her powdered cheeks and a line of perspiration showed itself above her lips. From a few meters down the platform, as a misty dusk fell upon Astapovo, Gribshin watched as she gave her “exclusive” to Khaitover.

Gribshin was aware that he was being watched too. Of course, the cinematography crew was always attended by onlookers, but none ever remarked the young Russian assistant—until today. The Caucasian stranger remained beyond the audience, well away from it, apparently en route somewhere else, as if hurriedly to an appointment, yet…Gribshin was sensitive to how he must have looked executing common tasks, the dependent tone of Meyer’s comments and commands, and of the sense that he was handling light itself, hot and fluid. Gribshin’s cinematographic skills were being tested, according to terms offered the night before.

In the evening Gribshin entered the press tent, where Meyer was consuming his dinner and a bottle of wine. Meyer had just come
from his own disappointing meeting with Chertkov. The chief disciple now seemed disinclined to allow the cinematography camera into the stationmaster’s house. Meyer had emerged from the meeting bearing a ruminative expression that he would maintain through the first two courses of his meal. His little garden table was draped with a checkered tablecloth, which had been brought to Astapovo with the rest of his equipment.

“Allow me to speak with the Countess,” Gribshin proposed. “We can provide her with a service that the newspapers can’t.”

“What service is that?”

Gribshin hesitated, unsure of how to describe his intentions. “Let me show you. We can always scrap the film later.”

Meyer looked at him for a moment with surprise—after all, Meyer had been the one to make first contact with the Countess—and then sunshine broke across his globelike face. He was always pleased at his assistant’s displays of initiative, and was very much of an adventurer himself. The Caucasian stranger had been quite right about his alias; the cinematographer had been born in Alsace as Joseph-Louis Mundviller, but, like every man of revolution on the continent, he hadn’t found success until he discovered his one true name. “All right, my boy. Let’s see what you can do.”

Gribshin went back to the platform, whose population had thinned at the supper hour. He expected to find the Countess there; she would not eat, she had declared. After searching her out in the waiting room and ticket office, he walked over to her private railway carriage. A servant standing in braided livery outside the car scowled at his approach. Gribshin smiled and explained that he needed to speak with the Countess. The man scowled again and told him that the Countess wished to be alone in this moment of family tragedy.

“I have a personal message from my colleague, M. Meyer of Pathé Frères. Please tell the Countess that it’s an urgent matter.” Gribshin bowed and handed the lackey a coin. “Pathé Frères is grateful for your assistance.”

The man turned his back and climbed into the coach in the manner, perfected by generations of servitude, of someone who had been on his way into the coach all along. As a faint drizzle softened the electric glare of the lights around the station and penetrated his coat, Gribshin waited at the foot of the stairs, confident that the coin had fallen into its slot. He waited twenty minutes. The door finally slid open and the Countess herself appeared at the door of the carriage.

Although she stood at the top of the steps above him, elevation was not the source of her dominating bearing. She was broad and bullnecked, the inheritor of noble blood, the Countess who had matched the Count strength against strength for half a century. In the absence of a smile vanished any history of a smile. Gribshin had underestimated her. She testified to a resoluteness that contradicted everything he had been told. The fact that she had tried to kill herself more than once had left no mark of mental imbalance upon her doughy, gray face. In her gaze he found total comprehension of her situation, even of the ludicrous image that she presented to the public.

“Yes? What is it?”

Appealing to her aristocratic vanity, he replied in French: “M. Meyer sends his warm regards.”

The young man had hoped to be invited to board the railway carriage. He was looking for an intimate setting, one that would cast him in the most trustworthy and compassionate light to make an audacious proposal. But the coldness of her expression warned
that if he were to ask to be admitted now, she might refuse and escape within the coach. As the drizzle intensified and the sounds of the railway station became muffled, Gribshin felt the swelling imminence of a historic moment. He spoke with a strong, clear voice; so, too, was his conscience.

“Madam, M. Meyer offers you his great respect and affection and wishes to inform you that we have just received a cable from M. Pathé. M. Pathé predicts that the film taken upon your arrival will be a big success in Europe and America. It’s very sympathetic. We beg for permission to film you again. We believe that there is a story in Astapovo that can be told only through the cinematograph.”

She stared with her eyes so hard and cold that Gribshin wondered if, no, he had been wrong again: she was crazy after all.

“With all due respect, Madam, you are mistaken in believing that you and your family are the sole victims of the current situation. Something is being perpetrated here that calls into question the Count’s genius and the nature of his family life. The entire world is defrauded by this state of affairs. For the public to understand the truth—the real truth beyond the circumstances of the moment—it will need to have seen that you’ve said farewell to the Count and received his blessing. The Count would wish this himself, if he only had the power to effect it.”

“Chertkov won’t permit it.”

Gribshin forced a chuckle. “Mr. Chertkov’s writ runs just so far. He may or may not be the lord of the stationmaster’s house. It is indisputable that M. Pathé is the lord of the cinema. On behalf of M. Pathé, I ask that you prepare yourself to be filmed. Please meet us on the platform near the stationmaster’s door within, say, a half hour. I promise that at that time the truth shall be filmed.”

“How can I trust you?”

Gribshin was surprised by the question, which was tossed to him like a rope thrown by a drowning swimmer. He fingered the cord for a few moments. And then he replied:

“Madam, you can’t trust me. You can trust only in the truth.”

LATER
that week cinema audiences across Europe would witness the following: the Countess approaches the stationmaster’s house and climbs the three steps to the front door, where she is met by a plain young woman, her youngest daughter Sasha. After the Countess is clearly seen to have asked for permission to enter, she steps forward past Sasha into the house. At that moment the film image momentarily darkens and jumps, producing the disruption in continuity that has come to signify the passage of time in the emerging language of the cinema. After the break the two women are still in the frame, but now the Countess is moving past Sasha in the opposite direction, on her way out of the house. She offers Sasha a relaxed, gratified expression, almost a smile, her first in Astapovo. Sasha is still frowning. The Countess carefully descends the steps, which have no railing, and crosses the borders of the illuminated screen bearing a dignified grief.

At the time of the filming, the re-fired stage lights had drawn an audience to the front steps of the stationmaster’s house, but Gribshin had brought his men out in force and the gendarmes agreed to assist him in clearing the area circumscribed by the eye of the cinematograph. Advancing from her railway carriage, the Countess parted the crowd. Gribshin bowed again and explained what it was that she would have to do. She understood at once. Meyer stood by, providing Gribshin with his authority. Although he had first been intrigued by Gribshin’s scheme, he was now entertaining second thoughts about it; his third thoughts comprised a resolution to get the scene on film and to worry about the second thoughts afterward. The door to the stationmaster’s house remained shut. As Gribshin presented his directions to the Countess, he was distracted by some fracas in the crowd.

“You don’t fucking own this fucking train station,” someone was asserting, quite drunk. Laughter spilled around him.

One of the gendarmes in Meyer’s pay summarily removed the dissident and Gribshin again reviewed her part with the Countess. “We have one chance to make this right,” he said. Meyer counted to three and began turning the crank.

Raising her skirt off the wet platform, the Countess walked up to the stationmaster’s house and ascended the steps. She lightly rapped on the door. After a few moments it gave way to Sasha, who must have been watching, without comprehension, from one of the windows. She was a woman in her twenties, but in the uncompromising glare of the Jupiter lamps she had acquired a middle-aged ponderousness like her mother’s.

“Mother, please don’t—”

“Aleksandra,” the Countess said, using her daughter’s given name, “please be a good girl and allow your mother to see your father. It’s a matter of common decency.”

Sasha replied blandly, “Dr. Makovitsky says no.”

But the Countess had already pushed across the threshold into the darkened house. From where Gribshin stood he was able to see figures within the house rushing at her, gesturing forcefully. None of this could be distinguished by the camera; nor, of course, could their cries of protestation be recorded.

“Now,” Gribshin said. Meyer held fast the crank. Gribshin didn’t want this editing to be done in Paris, where his intentions could be missed or challenged.

The Countess spun on her heels, remarkably dexterous for a woman of her years and mass. In the gloom of the house, the figures never reached her. Their arms flailed like undersea plants.

“Now,” Gribshin cried again, just as she stepped back across the threshold.

The cinematograph thudded back to life. Gribshin had come to know the three cameras Meyer had brought to Astapovo so well that he recognized the characteristic sound of each one’s mechanism. The gears of the camera Meyer used now whirred at a pitch slightly higher and more distinctly feminine than that produced by the others. You could hear a soft gravely undertone to it. Gribshin loved this: the parallel time unwound by the film’s unspooling. When an event was being filmed, Gribshin saw it happen as if it were already filmed, without color or depth and at a speed a few percents more hurried than normal life processes, but enhanced by narrative. The distortion gave the image content.

Sasha didn’t understand what had just happened, but merely attributed to her mother’s native eccentricity the way in which she had stormed into the house and then as abruptly stormed out. Years later Sasha would at last see the news-reel; in Paris a follower
of the Count, in the careless assumption that she would be pleased, would arrange a private midday screening in a cinema near Montparnasse. By that time so much would have happened to her, to her family, and to her country that her only observable response would be a slow, rueful shake of her head.

Gribshin also would have occasion to revisit this scene in later years, also in a private showing, in a Kremlin ballroom designated for his use. His expression would turn contemplative: this was the moment that had firmly set his life’s trajectory. As the Countess passed out of the film frame and new images from Astapovo filled the screen, he would gaze above his head at the trail of cigar smoke rising through the projector’s beam of light. In this light, the smoke would appear as substantial as concrete.

In this room, you wouldn’t hear the machinery of government at work: telephones sang, orders were rasped, girl secretaries tattooed the marble floors of the corridors, typewriters rattled, pens scraped against documents, papers ruffled, vaults slammed, men laughed with dead seriousness, soldiers goosestepped in the courtyard, the engines of military vehicles chuffed, and here was only the
click-click-click
of the film projector, which in Gribshin’s ears (but the ears would no longer belong to a man known as Gribshin) was the true sound of power.
Click-click-click:
light was molded to human purpose. In the screening room, you wouldn’t hear the gunshots in the basement.

“You’re a hoodlum, that’s all, another circus carny.” The drunk, Khaitover, had returned just as the circle around the cinematography camera was breaking up.

Gribshin smiled thinly. “Sir?”

“This is a fraud. It’s clear now. You intend to put out that the Count said farewell to his wife; perhaps even that he gave her his
blessing or control of his copyright. Something like that. It’s a sham.”

“So write an article,” Gribshin said, not smiling at all now. He seemed to be entirely serious. Without a word to either Gribshin or Meyer, the Countess had returned to her coach. “Expose Pathé Frères. Make a scandal.”

“I will,” Khaitover promised. And then he soberly considered the confidence displayed on the Russian’s face. “But the cinema audience will watch it happen. They’ll see the satisfied expression on her ugly mug. They’ll make an investment in your illusion.”

At that moment Meyer doused the stage lights. As the two men were plunged into darkness they were joined by the Caucasian stranger. Gribshin at first believed that the Caucasian was coming to his rescue, in the event the reporter struck him. Then he realized that he was simply listening in on their argument. A smile played across the stranger’s features. Khaitover didn’t notice him.

Gribshin said, “You’ll set history right.”

Khaitover squinted, as if trying to see history itself. There was no jeer running beneath Gribshin’s declaration; one might even detect in it the earnest hope that Khaitover would succeed.

“I understand what you’re doing,” Khaitover said. “I don’t understand why. What does Pathé have to gain by this deception? Future access to the Countess? Exclusive rights to cinema shows of the Count’s works? Has she bribed you?”

All of these were reasonable hypotheses. The last was not true, of course. Nor had the boons predicted by Khaitover been contemplated beforehand, but, Gribshin reflected, they were indeed possible outcomes of his cinematographic sleight-of-hand. Khaitover’s accusations convinced him that he had performed an
advantageous service on Pathé’s behalf. Gribshin was and always would be intensely loyal to whomever employed him.

He was moved now by an impulse to speak without guile before the Caucasian. He gazed directly at Khaitover and explained:

“Cinema’s a relatively new invention, still subject to experiment and development. We’re discovering how it might be used in the future.”