Twilight of the Eastern Gods (15 page)

‘What do you think of Pasternak?’

Hundred Flower Bloom stared at him in bewilderment.

Maskiavicius asked him a couple more questions but Ping did not open his lips. Then Maskiavicius swore at him. Apparently Ping didn’t grasp the meaning because, as soon as Maskiavicius had turned his back, he pulled a concise dictionary from his pocket and started leafing through it, as he always did when he heard a word he did not know.

Somebody switched on a transistor. Yet more on Pasternak.

‘Looks like the campaign is being conducted throughout the length and breadth of the Soviet Union,’ I said to Antaeus.

‘It’s a joke. A farce.’

‘Why so?’

He looked around, then lowered his voice and whispered, ‘Do you remember the ballad by Goethe where someone calls on the spirits to help him fetch water from a well and then can’t get rid of them?’

We’d already had a conversation about that. For some time nothing had been heard from either Stalin’s supporters or his detractors. The state had been reassuring each side alternately so it could turn on either without warning.

At the moment it seemed to be the liberals’ turn to feel the whip.

‘Doctor Zhivago
was published in the West three years ago,’ Antaeus went on. ‘At the time none of those guys even mentioned it. But now he’s got the Nobel Prize they’re obliged to take a stand.’

‘By chance, I read a few pages of it,’ I said.

‘Really? How?’

‘Part of a typescript I found in an empty apartment. But I didn’t know what book it was.’

‘Don’t breathe a word of it to anybody. You could get into serious trouble over nothing.’

All around us the crowd of students was buzzing with talk.

‘So what are they going to do with Pasternak now?’ somebody asked.

‘Who knows? Maybe he’ll be deported.’

‘What?’

‘I said, maybe they’ll send him away, rusticate him. Remember, Ovid was exiled to Romania . . .’

‘Shut up, you idiot!’

‘Do you think they really are capable of doing such a thing?’ I asked Antaeus.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’

‘To Romania,’ somebody we couldn’t see repeated. ‘Like Ovid . . .’

‘Apparently they’re having talks right now. It’s a peculiar argument . . . but I don’t know the details.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t ask any questions!’

The whole trouble comes from Romania, I thought, collapsing with fatigue. It’s no coincidence that the previous evening I had thought of Trajan’s column. I could still feel the bruises on my skull from the hoofs of the Roman and Dacian horsemen. ‘What about Vukmanović-Tempo? Has he left Moscow?’ I asked.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Antaeus replied. ‘Maybe he’s still here.’

The bell rang for the last lecture and the courtyard emptied. Only a few shreds remained of a newspaper that somebody must have used as wrapping. On the separate pieces you could see groups of capital letters spelling out RNAK, VAG, then ZHIV, STERN and PAST.

The campaign against Boris Pasternak had started twenty-four hours ago and was being conducted with great intensity throughout the Soviet Union. On the radio from five a.m. until midnight, on television, in newspapers and magazines and even in children’s comics, the renegade writer was being spattered with venom. As was customary in cases of this kind, the bristling statements of Soviet literati were regurgitated by workers and collective farmers. Newspapers apologised for being able to publish only a minute proportion of the tens of thousands of letters and telegrams pouring in from the four corners of the Soviet lands. Among them were expressions of outrage from oil drillers, drama students, Orthodox priests, Bolshoi ballerinas, mountain climbers, atomic physicists, beekeepers, Caspian Sea salt-rakers, reformed mystics, the mute, and so forth. On the front page of
Literaturnaya gazeta
they’d printed statements by Shakenov and Ladonshchikov, among others. Most of the students on our course had also sent in statements and expected to see them in print in due course. One of them was Taburokov, who still believed that the Nobel Prize was awarded by the American government in cahoots with the Jewish lobby in New York. Another was Maskiavicius, even though he’d told me the previous day that Pasternak, despite his turpitude, was worth a hundred times more than any of the other runts of Soviet literature.

I had just come out of the last lecture when he told me there was a letter waiting for me in the porter’s lodge. I recognised Lida’s handwriting on the envelope. As I opened it I realised I had never before opened a letter with so much feeling. It had been mailed that same morning and it began without any preamble:

Since we met I’ve always liked you but I’ve never been completely in love with you. The day before yesterday I loved you, I couldn’t say why. Perhaps love came through compassion. In Old Russian, the words for ‘to love’ and ‘to sympathise’ used to be the same, then they split apart. That evening you looked so distraught that it broke my heart. In my memory that evening is a nightmare. It hardly matters that we have broken up. I would just like you to remember me kindly. As for me, I will remember that night with horror and with compassion (love). Lida Snegina

PS All day yesterday the radio went on and on about a writer who committed betrayal and I thought of you. L.

I folded it rapidly and stuffed it into my pocket. I was beside myself, not because of the letter but at the thought of what I had done after Lida and I had parted. Ha! I thought. Now you’re showing sympathy by delving into etymology and Church Slavonic. I was in a temper and it occurred to me that nobody could tell which of us was more to be pitied. Then, in a tangled skein, Stulpanc came to my mind, the way I’d handed Lida over to him as if we’d been at a slave market. In parallel, or like a substratum, I thought that it was all a diversion, an illusion of revenge and, looking at things in simple terms, mere nastiness on my part.

I was pacing up and down the courtyard like a madman, looking out for Stulpanc. I hadn’t seen him since that crazy conversation. At one point I’d been tempted to call a halt to it and tell him the whole thing had been a joke, but then I remembered I had given him Lida’s telephone number, which anchored it to reality. Two or three times I told myself that he had surely forgotten the episode, especially because he had been drunk at the time and had probably dropped the piece of paper with the phone number on it somewhere in the corridor. But each time I managed to reassure myself, doubts beset me again.

Suddenly I caught sight of him from behind, standing placidly at the Institute door, amid a group of students talking among themselves as they made for the trolleybus stop. I followed them at a distance of twenty yards or so. I just had to get into the same carriage as they did.

The trolleybus was half empty and I found a place near the rear window. Now and again I looked at Stulpanc’s open, honest face from the corner of my eye. I was torn. Should I go up to him or not? I was vaguely afraid that my appearance would remind him of the accursed words we had spoken, and that perhaps he had not forgotten them entirely.

The trolleybus gradually filled. Now that I could no longer see Stulpanc I stopped torturing myself. I would not have been able to get to him now even if I’d wanted to. At one point, I’m not sure how, I caught sight of his golden, perfectly brushed hair and, in a flash, I thought I’d done the right thing in handing Lida over to him, rather than to Abdullakhanov or the two Shotas. Then I told myself once more that the whole thing had been a bad joke he must have forgotten by now and that in a few days’ time I would call Lida and we would make up as we had in the past.

Through the rear window I gazed at the street that led to Butyrsky Khutor, which looked more miserable than ever. Stulpanc got off with four or five others at the stop near to Novoslobodskaya metro station, which surprised me. I watched them cross the road and walk towards the great reddish walls of Butyrky Prison, and it came back to me: they were going to see one of their friends, someone called Kolya Krasnikov. He’d been sentenced to eight years in prison because some time earlier, when Tito was visiting Moscow, he’d shouted at a meeting, ‘Long live the Tito-Ranković Clique!’ They’d asked me to go with them, and as I was curious to see the inside of a Soviet prison, I nearly said yes. But then I remembered I was a foreigner, and also the police summons, so I said no.

The trolleybus was now packed. Squeezed up against the rear window, I uttered two or three of those little sighs that the sight of a street in winter sometimes arouses. I was dead tired.

At the front door of the residence stood a tall man, boyishly skinny with colourless hair and a cigarette stuck between his lips, like the ones you don’t actually smoke. It was Zhenya Yevtushenko.

‘Have you seen Bella?’ he asked.

I shook my head, but it seemed obvious he didn’t give a damn where Bella was.

‘You seen that?’ he questioned, directing his eyes to his right-hand jacket pocket from which a copy of
Literaturnaya gazeta
was poking out, showing half of Pasternak’s name.

‘Yes, I’ve read it,’ I said.

‘Hee-hee,’ he said, with a triumphant grin. ‘The Nobel . . . at last!’

You could see straight away that he, too, was one of the disappointed ghosts. He was about to say something more but just then Ira Emelianova passed us, a sad smile hovering in the corners of her eyes and on her lips, as if she was about to burst into tears. She greeted us nervously and Yevtushenko then asked me, ‘You know who this Irochka is?’

I didn’t understand his question.

In a whisper, he added, ‘She’s the daughter of Pasternak’s mistress, a woman called Olga, who’s been divorced three or four times, and is said to be the root of all the misfortunes that have befallen poor Boris Leonidovich.’

He went on talking about their relationship, but I had stopped listening. I’d had only a few hours of troubled sleep over the last two nights, and I was exhausted. By the time I got to the door of my room I was in that strange state when you’re on the verge of sleep – I could feel dreams rising from my limbs, soft and porous, like sponges, and I felt I had only to stretch out my hand to touch or seize them or push them a little further away. I was sufficiently awake to realise that the spongy sensation beneath my belt belonged to the world of dream, and sufficiently asleep to feel it was completely natural, to the point that I was unable to escape from it. In my dreams I was lying in a large bath, and although the art history professor, whose job it was to turn on the hot tap, kept saying, ‘
Ubr jazëk
,’ the water still would not come. Then she declared, ‘We are in the very hammam where Aragon, Elsa Triolet and Lida took a bath, but the aesthetico-ideological nature of a hammam is conditioned in the first place by
tuuli unch bll
, that is to say by the typical situation . . . in other words by
tuuli zox
. . .’

When I woke, night had fallen almost completely. I stretched out my arm mechanically and switched on the radio. The anti-Pasternak campaign continued. I listened for a while with my hands behind my head. After a feature on a women’s meeting in Irkutsk, they read a statement from Anatoly Kuznetsov. It was the harshest of all those I had heard. My room was now almost totally dark. A few shards of light that had been trapped in the curtains wavered gently over my head. And it’s not even evening yet! I thought. Darkness suited evenings and night, but when it came before the end of the day it depressed me more than anything. I was alone, in the midst of an afternoon that might just as well have been called an after-midnight, with a radio blaring ceaselessly over a landmass of twenty-two million square kilometres. ‘One sixth of the earth drowning in such insults!’ I muttered to myself drowsily.

Then, all of a sudden, I shuddered. My mind now sharpened like a steel dagger, I took the full measure of the infernal machine running full speed ahead. What must it be like to be the target, to be the eye of that whirlwind? I imagined the legendary Slav head puffing out its cheeks in the middle of the steppe. Soviet propaganda was just like it. A few years earlier that head had raised a dust-storm against Stalin, and now, who knew why, it was blowing against its own supporters. What must it be like to be the target of all these attacks? I wondered again. I switched on my bedside lamp. How had it all been set in motion? I had no idea – I couldn’t imagine how it had been achieved. I knew of not a single work of Soviet literature that gave even a fragmentary description of how the machinery of state actually functioned: no insight into meetings of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, or the Politburo, or other more occult authorities. Antaeus and I had talked about it once at the Praga café. He hadn’t come across any either.

But – I thought in my puzzlement – maybe I’m wrong, maybe such works do exist and I just haven’t had an opportunity to read them yet. I recalled that last week Shogentsukov had given me a signed copy of one of his works that had been translated and published in Moscow. Where had I put it? I got up, in a daze, and found it only after I’d emptied all the drawers in my desk. The radio didn’t stop bawling. Shogentsukov, a former prime minister, must surely deal with the problems of the state somewhere or other. Yes, he must! I sat on the edge of my bed and, despite the migraine that was tormenting me, I started to read. The radio suspended its rant and broadcast some music, but even those sounds felt charged with hatred. After thirty minutes I cast the book aside. It was a novella-length idyll among shepherds, pastures and hills. Not only did it contain no mention of the institutions of the state, it did not admit of a single construction in brick or stone. Nothing but gurgling streams, fidelity and flowers, and a few hymns sung of an evening to the glory of the Communist Party of the USSR. Can this really be? I wondered.