Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (4 page)

           
Cjrigor awoke. He almost never
needed the alarm these days, though he still routinely set it every night
before taking the
midnight
pill. But he woke these mornings five or seven or nine minutes ahead of the
alarm, and lay unmoving in the black darkness while his mind roved. For some
reason, he did his best thinking in these brief moments in the dark, just
before the
four
A.M.
pill; by the time the alarm sounded, more
often than not, he had at least one new joke to write on the notepad beside his
bed.

           
A
new five-year plan has been announced. Its goal is to tell the truth about all
the other five-year plans.

           
Yes!
¹
No? It was so hard
to tell, really. Comedy now seemed not so much about humor as about defining
the limits in a world where the limits shifted daily; a situation which was
already comic, or at least absurd. The purpose of a joke these days was not to
make people laugh at the comedy of it but at the daring of it, at how close the
joke teller has come to the very edge of the permitted, in a time when nobody
knows
what’s permitted. Everything?
Hardly.

           
The alarm buzzed, a discreet low
noise, penetrating within this room but not strong enough to disturb any other
resident of the complex. Grigor sat up, switched on his bedside light, put the
notepad on his knee to jot down the five-year-plan joke for later study in the
cold light of day, then got out of bed and padded into the bathroom for water
with which to take the pill. He had a much more lavish life here in
Moscow
than he’d ever had in
Kiev
. His own private room, well-furnished. His
own bathroom, fully equipped, even to a hardly rusted shower. Such luxury!

           
Our
orbiting cosmonaut is on strike. He refuses to land until he
^’
s
allotted an apartment as large as his capsule.

           
Grigor took his pill, used the
toilet, then padded back to the bedroom and wrote the cosmonaut line on the
notepad. Maybe so, maybe so. It was safer to talk about strikes today than even
two or three years ago. Topicality, that was the secret. Dart in when the
subject’s safe, use it, be out and gone when the next crackdown comes.

           
God
save Godless
Russia
.
When would that one get its moment? It was
one of the first jokes Grigor had ever thought of, and it had scared him so
much—still did—that he’d never even written it down. Would he, ever? Would it
be said on the television by Boris Boris, ever?

           
Oh, well. The future holds wonders,
no doubt, some few of which will still be seen by Grigor Alexandreyovich
Basmyonov, fireman/jokesmith. Consoled by that thought, Grigor got back into
bed, knowing that only a moment or two of introspection would pass before he
was asleep once more. Amazing how easily he slept. Amazing, he thought, that he
slept at all. Using up these precious hours.

           
The transition from Grigor
Basmyonov, fireman, bachelor, twenty-eight years of age, lifelong resident of
Kiev
, to Grigor Basmyonov, gag writer for the
television star Boris Boris and inhabitant of the Bone Disease Research Clinic
resident center at the Moscow University Teaching Hospital overlooking
Gorky
Park
, began on
April 26, 1986
:
Chernobyl
.

           
Most of the firemen who were first
to reach the
Chernobyl
nuclear plant that night, the local ones, were already dead. Some
became quite sick, but survived, and a very few seemed not to be harmed at all
by the experience, except for the temporary loss of their hair. Among the later
fire companies to arrive, those who had at least received
some
warning of the dangers, deaths were fewer but illness more
widespread. Why some people died while others lived, why some were terribly ill
but others were not, was a primary concern of the doctors at the Bone Disease
Research Clinic. Grigor, a survivor thus far but among the doomed, a young and
healthy bachelor willing to be experimented on, was the perfect specimen for
their purposes.

           
It was while signing the release
papers at the hospital in
Kiev
that Grigor made his first joke: “Well, at least now I’ll be able to
read in bed without turning on the light.”

           
The doctor and nurse in attendance
on him, to help him fill out the forms, were both shocked. The doctor, as young
as Grigor with some Asiatic flatness in his face—Uzbek, perhaps— frowned down
at the papers and muttered, “Hardly something to make jokes about.”

           
“For you, no,” Grigor told him. “But
for me, yes. I am permitted.” And he suddenly smiled, an honest joyful sunny
smile. “I am the
only
one permitted,”
he told them, and felt some great tight-clenched muscle deep inside himself
relax, a muscle he’d never known was there until it released its clamp on his
guts. The only one permitted.

           
At first his jokes were concerned
exclusively with himself— “The best thing about all this is, I can no longer
find my bald spot”—but once he’d settled into the routine at the clinic and
started taking an interest in the television news (so much more news than there
used to be), his subject matter broadened and the people around him began to
respond more comfortably to his jokes.

           
It was a doctor at the clinic, one
who had an old classmate with a girlfriend at Moskva Film, who encouraged
Grigor to write down the jokes and comments that came to him with such
increasing frequency. The girlfriend at Moskva Film turned out to be the wrong
person, but she knew someone who knew someone, and by a frail web of
relationships two pages of badly typed Grigor Basmyonov jokes eventually found
their way to Boris Boris, who said, “I’ll buy this one, this one, this one, and
that one. The rest I spit on. Who does this person think he is?” And so their
relationship began.

           
The first time Grigor and Boris
Boris met, when Grigor was made a staff writer rather than a mere contributor,
they became friends at once, because it turned out Boris Boris was permitted as
well; the only other person permitted. Grigor walked into the sunny office in
his neatly pressed suit and gleaming round bald head, and Boris Boris looked at
him and said, “If I had a crystal ball like that head, I could see into the
future.”

           
“I
can
see into the future,” Grigor told him. “I’m not there.” Boris
Boris laughed and clapped his hands together and said they should have a drink,
which they did.

           
Grigor himself was not a television
personality, nor would he ever become one. His name was on the program’s credits,
that was all. In the first place, the government would never permit such public
acknowledgment that this gallows humor rose from its own most egregious attack
on the Russian people. And in the second place Boris Boris would never permit
it: “Nobody tugs at heartstrings around here but
me.
I keep that to fall back on in case these miserable jokes of
yours fail to do the job.” But the jokes did their job, most of them, and
roubles accumulated in a bank account with Grigor’s name on it, pointless roubles
he would never have the time or the inclination to spend nor a person to will
them to; as though he were a hungry cat locked in a cabbage field.

           
The work, however, was its own
pleasure, and all in all Grigor’s only objection to his life was its anticipated
brevity. He made up jokes, he edited the jokes of others, he drank sometimes
with Boris Boris, and he enjoyed watching Boris Boris use the material on
television. “You make it all sound much funnier than I do,” he told Boris Boris
once, early in their friendship, and Boris Boris replied, “That’s
my
genius, to make something out of
something.
Tour
genius is to make
something out of nothing, or I’ll kick you downstairs.”

           
That was the work. For the rest of
it, life was uncomplicated and fairly content. He took his medicine every four
hours, not with any anticipation of a cure, but because it would assist the
doctors in their researches. He was their field of study, just as the array of
news programs and the minute shifts and adjustments in the social order was his
field of study. One of his fields of study.

           
The other was
Chernobyl
. He knew what had been done to him, but now
he wanted to know how it had been possible. As the months and years went by,
more and more was generally known about what had happened there, and more and
more was publicly acknowledged. Grigor studied the magazine articles and books,
watched the television programs, and learned so much about the plant he could
almost have run it himself. Except that he wouldn’t have run it; he’d have shut
it down.

           
There were flaws in the design, that
was finally admitted. Beyond that, there were flaws in the maintenance of the
plant, flaws in the administration, flaws in the ordinary everyday procedures
of running the place. Ultimately,
Chernobyl
had been operated as though nothing could
ever possibly go wrong, no matter how sloppy or ignorant its servants became.
Nothing
could
go wrong because
nothing ever
had
gone wrong. And that
was another fine joke: a nuclear plant, the most modern sort of enterprise on
the planet, run by superstition and magic.

           
Was there a way to
make
a joke out of that, Merlin at the
helm of the nuclear plant? No. It was old hat, for one thing, stale news, no
longer of interest to anybody except a few leftovers like Grigor and their
attentive doctors. Boris Boris would reject such a joke out of hand, and he’d
be right.

           
Grigor was just easing back into
sleep, comforted by this thought (that the world goes on, the world goes on),
when the knocking sounded at the door. Surprised—the patients’ sleep was
never
disturbed—Grigor sat up and
switched on the bedside light, and the time was six minutes past four. They’ve
discovered a miracle cure! Couldn’t wait another second to tell me! Smiling at
his own manic optimism—like a thirteen-year- old’s cock, it rose at the most
inconvenient moments—Grigor got out of bed and padded across the room to see
what this
really
was.

           
Opening the door, Grigor saw a
fellow patient, a man in the striped pajamas and green robe of the clinic, with
heavy brown wool socks on his feet and a square pale envelope in his hand.
“Grigor,” he said, voice hushed because of the hour, “I won’t come in. I just
wanted to give you this.” And he extended the envelope.

           
Automatically taking it, trying to
remember
which
of his fellow patients
this was, Grigor said,
^cc
What are you doing up so late, uhhhh?”
Trailing off because he was unable to remember the man’s name. The corridor
night-lights offered very little illumination, and his own body blocked the
faint gleam from his bedside lamp; the man was familiar, of course, but Grigor
couldn’t quite make out which particular fellow guinea pig this was. “Very
late,” he repeated, hoping for a clue from the man’s voice.

           
“We must be on the same medicine,”
the man answered, in a perfectly ordinary and non-specific voice. “I heard your
alarm just after mine, and thought you’d be the perfect person for this
invitation. I can’t go, you see.”

           
“Invitation?” Grigor half turned, to
put the envelope in the light, and saw it was nearly square, made of heavy
cream-toned paper, and blank. An exterior envelope with stamps and name and
address must have been discarded. Inside this envelope was a card of nearly the
same size, which made it hard for Grigor to slide it out. When he did, he saw
it was indeed an invitation, printed in flowery script, addressed to no one in
particular— “You are invited.. —and done in two languages: next to the familiar
Cyrillic script, the same sentiments appeared in Roman script, in English.

           
The invitation was to a soiree
(“cocktail party” in the English) tomorrow evening—well, no, this evening—at
the Hotel Savoy, one of the two or three first-class hotels in this classless
city. (They accepted foreign hard currency only, no roubles.) The group
extending the invitation was the International Society for Cultural
Preservation.