The Road (26 page)

3.

The spaceship took off.

As if through a hole in the ice, an animal plunged into space. The windows and screens were arranged in such a way that, wherever it turned its head, the animal saw only space, losing all sense of what was earthly and familiar. The universe was penetrating the brain of a dog, of a young bitch.

Aleksey Georgievich was convinced that his connection with Pestrushka remained unbroken; he could feel this connection even when the capsule was a hundred thousand kilometers from earth. And this had nothing to do with the automatic radio signals telling him about Pestrushka’s racing pulse and the sudden jumps in her blood pressure.

The following morning, laboratory assistant Apresyan said to him, “She was howling. She was howling for a long time.” He added quietly: “It’s scary—a solitary dog, alone in the universe, howling.”

The instruments all worked with total, unbelievable accuracy. The grain of sand that had gone out into space found its way back to the earth, to the grain of sand that had given birth to it. The braking systems worked flawlessly; the capsule landed on the chosen point of the earth’s surface.

Apresyan smiled and said to Aleksey Georgievich, “The impact of certain cosmic particles will have restructured Pestrushka’s genes and she’ll have puppies with outstanding creative ability for everything in the realm of higher algebra and symphonic music. The grandsons of our Pestrushka will compose sonatas as good as Beethoven’s. They’ll construct cybernetic machines that will be new Fausts.”

Aleksey Georgievich did not reply to this joker.

Aleksey Georgievich himself traveled to where the capsule had landed. He had to be the first to see Pestrushka; this time no deputy or assistant could go in his place.

Their meeting was everything Aleksey Georgievich had hoped it would be.

She rushed at him, shyly wagging the tip of her lowered tail.

For a long time he was unable to see the eyes that had taken in the universe. The dog kept licking his hands as a sign of obedience, a sign of her eternal renunciation of the life of a free wanderer, a sign of her acceptance of everything that was and will be.

Eventually, however, he saw her eyes—the misty, impenetrable eyes of a poor, beggarly creature with an agitated mind and an obedient, loving heart.

Nikolay
Viktorovich had removed his gown and was about to set off back home when Anna Aristarkhovna, who was famous for growing the best strawberries in town, said to him breathlessly, “Nikolay Viktorovich, a colonel’s just driven up outside.”

“Well,” said Nikolay Viktorovich, “I suppose that’s what colonels do.” And he began pulling his gown back on.

Anna Aristarkhovna’s admiring gaze was, he knew, a tribute to his air of sleepy calm. Really, however, the colonel’s arrival alarmed him every bit as much as it alarmed Anna Aristarkhovna. And he and his wife were planning to go to the theater in the evening; this might make him late.

Nikolay Viktorovich was someone who felt compelled to appear better in the eyes of women than he was in reality. Women had always liked him, and his innate gallantry—as well as a certain protectiveness he could not help feeling with regard to his halo— prevented him from revealing the many ways in which he differed from his persona.

Even though his hair had gone gray, he was still a handsome figure—slim, tall, graceful, always tastefully dressed. His fine, distinguished face wore the expression portrait painters aspire to bestow on the good and the great, on those whose vocation is to adorn this world.

Women fell in love with him and never imagined that he was not in the least as he appeared; that really Nikolay Viktorovich was a very ordinary man, someone who did not care about world problems, someone who knew nothing about literature or music, someone who adored comfort, elegant clothes, and massive saffron-yellow rings set with large precious stones. No, it never entered their heads that he had no special love for his work as a doctor and that what he really enjoyed was dining in good restaurants, traveling first class when he went on holiday to Moscow, being seen with his dear Yelena Petrovna—who was as tall, graceful, and handsome as he himself—in the most expensive seats of a theater and intercepting admiring glances, glances that said, “What a handsome couple!”

He was too worldly, too much in love with elegance and high society, to work in a university clinic; instead, he had become head physician of the splendid government sanatorium in Kislovodsk. He never, of course, carried out any research, but it was really very pleasant indeed to stroll through the sanatorium with his entourage, to walk through marble-columned halls and exchange casually respectful greetings with acquaintances who happened to be masters of the Soviet state...

His hero was Athos from
The Three Musketeers. “
That book is my bible,” he would say to his friends.

As a young man, he had played poker for high stakes and been considered a connoisseur of racehorses. On visits to Moscow, he would sometimes telephone important figures who at one time or another had been his patients, men whose names had a place in the history of the Party and whose photographs appeared in
Pravda
; their warm responses never failed to gratify him.

And it was the love he felt for his comfortable Morocco-leather armchair, his love for all his comfortable and luxurious furniture and his fear of bleak goods wagons with their tin teapots and small smoking stoves—it was this love of comfort and terror of bleakness that prompted his decision not to allow himself to be evacuated when the first mechanized and mountain light-infantry units of the German Wehrmacht began to approach Kislovodsk.

Yelena Petrovna, who liked the Germans no more than her husband did, went along with this decision. She too loved antique tables with precious inlays, and mahogany settees, and porcelain, and crystal, and fine carpets.

Yelena Petrovna also loved clothes from abroad—and especially those that provoked the envy of certain other women she knew, the wives of politicians and public figures. And as she put on dresses the like of which none of these important ladies had ever seen, her face would take on the modest, weary expression of a woman indifferent to vanity and frippery.

When Nikolay Viktorovich first saw a German motorized reconnaissance patrol pass by on the street, he felt dismayed and frightened. The faces of the German soldiers, the horned silhouettes of their submachine guns, the swastikas on their helmets, seemed unbearable, loathsome.

For perhaps the first time in his life he spent a sleepless night. What, in the end, did a Turkoman carpet or a writing desk from the reign of Paul I really matter? He had evidently acted frivolously, staying behind in a town that was about to be occupied.

All that night he kept thinking about his friend from childhood, Volodya Gladetsky, who had volunteered to fight in the Red Army during the Civil War.

Gaunt, his cheeks pale and sunken, wearing an old belted coat, Gladetsky had gone limping down the street toward the station, leaving behind him everything he loved: his home, his wife, and his sons. Years went by without the two men seeing each other, but from time to time Nikolay Viktorovich had word of Gladetsky and of the course that his life had taken.

That first night of the occupation it was as if he saw two paths: his own and Gladetsky’s. How different they were!

Back in the days of the tsar, Gladetsky had been expelled during his last year of high school; he had been exiled to Siberia, then confined to the town where he was born. When war began in 1914, he had been conscripted; after being wounded toward the end of 1915, he had returned home. And always his Bolshevik soul had proved stronger than anything else he held dear, and everything harshest and bloodiest in the life of his country and people had somehow become his own life and fate.

Nikolay Viktorovich, on the other hand, had never been a member of the Bolshevik underground or been pursued by the tsarist police; he had not led a battalion against
Kolchak’s forces during the Civil War; he had not, like Gladetsky, been the commissar in charge of food rationing for an entire province during the famine of 1921; nor, during Party meetings, had he forced himself to denounce friends from his student days who had joined the
Left and Right Oppositions; nor had he spent days and nights without sleep on the vast construction sites of the Urals; nor had he hurried through the dark to report to a man in a Kremlin office flooded with white electrical light...

Help from various acquaintances had led to Nikolay Viktorovich being exempted from service in the First Cavalry Army. He studied in the faculty of medicine; he lost his head over the beautiful Yelena, who subsequently became his wife; he journeyed to different villages, trading his family’s coats and furs, along with his father’s hunting boots, for supplies of flour, fatback, and honey—and with these supplies he had managed to keep his mother and his old aunt alive. During the storm and romance of the Revolution he had lived far from romantically—although he had, admittedly, sometimes come back from the countryside not only with fatback and honey but also with supplies of home-distilled vodka, and then, during evenings lit only by small oil lamps, there had been parties; they had danced, played charades, and exchanged kisses in frosty kitchens and dark corridors while from outside, from the other side of windows hung with blankets, came the sounds of shots and the tramping of heavy boots.

The country had lived out its fate, but Nikolay Viktorovich’s own fate had been free of storms, calamities, hard labor, or war. And there had been times of great Socialist victories, on battlefields or construction sites, when he had been overwhelmed by despair—because a woman had rejected him...Or when what had been a harsh and terrible year for the Russian people had for him been a year of light and love...

And now here he was, standing by the dark window of his room, listening to the noise of war—to the grinding of the treads of tanks and the guttural shouting of commands. The small points of light he could see were flashlights—flashlights held by German noncommissioned officers.

A year before the war Nikolay Viktorovich had seen a man being admitted to the sanatorium—a gray-haired man with a lined face and olive-colored bags beneath his eyes—and had realized that this was his old school friend, Volodya Gladetsky.

It had been a strange meeting. The two men had been simultaneously overjoyed and wary; they had felt drawn to each other and repelled; they had wanted to talk openly and been afraid to talk openly; their former trust had suddenly been reborn, as if their days of whispering in the boys’ toilet about schoolboy pranks had come around again—and yet, between the two men, between Nikolay Viktorovich and the seriously ill Party official, there lay an abyss.

Each season of the year, as a rule, someone famous came to the sanatorium for treatment. Moscow informed the doctors well in advance; a luxurious room was prepared for the visitor; and for years afterward the staff would say things like “That was when we had
Budyonny staying with us...” At the time that Gladetsky arrived, they had had a well-known Old Bolshevik staying with them, a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences who had been a friend of Lenin. As a young man sentenced to years in a tsarist jail, this Savva Feofilovich had composed a well-known revolutionary song.

Savva Feofilovich and Gladetsky had seen quite a lot of each other. They had gone for walks and spent evenings together, and sometimes, if the old man was feeling poorly, they had had supper together in Savva Feofilovich’s room.

Once Nikolay Viktorovich had chanced upon the two men as they were walking in the park. They had all sat down for a while on a bench under some laurels. Nikolay Viktorovich had felt a feeling that was familiar yet strange, sweet yet painful, an emotion compounded of a sense of power—the power of the senior doctor who, without formalities, can enter any sick grandee’s heart—and a sense of astonishment that he, Nikolay Viktorovich, should be sitting beside this thickset old man who had a large head with thin gray hair and whose broad white hand had often shaken the hand of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Gladetsky said, “Nikolay Viktorovich and I were at school together. And I can remember one story, Savva Feofilovich, in which you yourself play a role.”

The old man expressed surprise, and Gladetsky then recounted an incident that Nikolay Viktorovich had forgotten. One day long before, when they were both still at school, Gladetsky had invited Nikolay Viktorovich to a meeting of a revolutionary circle; they were going to learn revolutionary songs. Asked afterward why he had not turned up, Nikolay Viktorovich said he had also been invited to the name-day party of a girl he knew, a student at the same school. And that, it seemed, had marked the end of his career as a conspirator.

One of the songs the students sang that evening was the famous song that Savva Feofilovich had composed in jail.

The old man laughed good-naturedly and said, “Two years before the war, you say? That was when I was a prisoner in the
Warsaw citadel.”

During the course of a routine medical examination Nikolay Viktorovich once said to Gladetsky, “I can’t believe it. Savva Feofilovich’s heart is in better shape than the hearts of men half his age. It sounds so young and strong!”

And with suddenly renewed trust, with a surge of feeling, Gladetsky replied, “But he’s a superman, he has the strength of a superman! And believe me—I’m not saying this because he survived the
Oryol prison, or the Warsaw citadel, or years in the underground with hardly anything to eat, or exile in Yakutsk, or life as an émigré with only the clothes on his back. No, I’m saying this because he had the strength to denounce Bukharin in the name of the Revolution. Yes, he had the strength to demand that a man he knew to be innocent should be sentenced to death; he had the strength to expel talented young scientists from a research institute merely because their names were on certain blacklists. Do you think it’s easy for a friend of Lenin to do such things? Do you think it’s easy to destroy the lives of children, women, and old men, to feel pity for them in the depths of your soul as you carry out acts of terrible cruelty in the name of the Revolution? I know only too well what it’s like—believe me! Yes, there’s no truer test of strength or weakness of soul.”

All this came back to Nikolay Viktorovich the night the Germans arrived. Ashamed of his own pathetic lack of resolve, he said to his ever-young and astonishingly beautiful Yelena Petrovna, “Lena, what have we gone and done? Now we’re going to have to live with the Germans.”

In a serious voice she replied, “It’s nothing to feel good about, I know. But it doesn’t matter, Kolya. Whoever we end up having to live with—whether it’s Germans, Italians, or Romanians—there’s one thing that will save us. We’ve always wanted to stay the people we are, but that doesn’t mean we wish anyone else ill. We’ll survive all right.”

“But it’s awful. The Germans are here. And if we’re still here too, it’s only, really, because of all our clutter.”

What Nikolay Viktorovich did not tell his wife was how Gladetsky had laughed as he told an old comrade of Lenin’s about a name-day party Nikolay Viktorovich had chosen to go to when he could have gone to a meeting of a student revolutionary circle. It had been the name-day party of a high-school girl called Yelena Petrovna Ksenofontova.

Yelena Petrovna replied sharply, “Why call it clutter? This clutter is years of our life. Our porcelain, our tulip-shaped crystal glasses, our pink ocean shells, our carpet—you said yourself that it smells of spring, that it’s woven from the colors of April. It’s who we are. It’s the way we’ve lived our lives, and it’s the way we’ll go on living our lives. What else can we do except go on loving what we’ve loved all along?” She struck the table several times with her long, narrow, and very white hand and repeated obstinately, in time with the blows of her hand, “Yes, yes, yes, yes. It’s who we are and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s who we are.”

“You’re very wise,” he said. They seldom spoke seriously about their life, and her words had comforted him.

And they went on living, and life was livable. Nikolay Viktorovich was called to the commandant’s office and asked to work as a doctor in a hospital for wounded Red Army soldiers. He was given a good ration card, Yelena Petrovna was given a somewhat less good ration card, and they were able to obtain bread, sugar, and dried peas. At home they had stores of honey, condensed milk, and clarified butter; supplementing the German rations from her own supplies, Yelena Petrovna was able to prepare meals that were ample and even quite tasty. In the mornings they went on drinking the coffee they had grown used to over the years. It would be a long time before they ran out of coffee, and the milkmaid went on bringing good milk, and it was not even any more expensive than it had been before; the only difference was that the money they handed the milkmaid was no longer Russian money.