Mother Russia (9781590209028)

by Robert Littell

  “Me too, I’m ready to concede me that,” Pravdin agrees dejectedly.

  “As Chuvash, I brought the girl Nadezhda, the woman known as Mother Russia and you together in the last wooden house in central Moscow, and then dropped the manuscripts in your collective laps because I represent people in high places who want to ruin Honored Artist of the Soviet Union Frolov. Or to be more precise, they want to ruin one very important person on the Politburo who has protected Frolov against charges of plagiarism all these years. As Melor, I became aware that you were about to come into possession of manuscripts that could ruin Honored Artist of the Soviet Union Frolov, thereby compromising the position of his protector on the Politburo, who happens to be my client as well as my superior. I therefore took immediate steps to monitor your conversations, keep track of your activities, record the messages you wrote on various walls, any one of which could have been a coded signal to the agent who was providing you with the manuscripts.”

  “But you are the agent who provided me with the manuscripts!”

  “Just so,” the Druse agrees.

  “Oy. How can you play two people at once is what I don’t understand,” Pravdin squeals, unable to control his voice. “Schizophrenic is what you have to be.”

  The Druse is not amused. “It is difficult to grasp, I can see that, how one person can represent two constituencies that have conflicting interests. At heart, I suppose, it is a matter of self-discipline. It is very much like playing chess with yourself, which is something I do every evening after I meditate. First I am white, and I move the king’s pawn forward two spaces in order to develop my king’s bishop. Then I am black. I know white has opened with his king’s pawn because he intends to develop his king’s bishop, so I forestall that by moving my queen’s pawn forward two spaces. Then I am white again, and I know that black has divined my intention to develop my king’s bishop, so I—”

  “Playing like that you could go insane,” Pravdin explains. “Listening to you I could go insane.”

  “It is every bit as difficult as it sounds,” the Druse concedes, “but I am convinced that with practice any normal person could do it. As Chuvash, for instance, I am absolutely sure that you are in full control of your faculties, which is to say, that you are perfectly sane. As Melor, on the other hand, I am beginning to have honest doubts on the matter.” Chuvash shrugs apologetically.

  “That makes me the modern existential hero,” Pravdin mutters, “the man in the middle. What do I do now is the question I’m asking? Which voice do I listen to, Chuvash’s or Melor’s?”

  “You listen to your own voice,” Chuvash suggests. “If you really are the modern existential hero, then you have absolute freedom of choice. Your problem is to find a rational criterion to serve as a basis for making this choice, a task you find difficult, if not impossible, because you are convinced in the utter absurdity of the world in which you function, and hence in the absurdity of making the effort to make a rational choice. Your problem is to rise above the absurdity and act, either as Chuvash tells you to or as Melor tells you to.”

  “What if Melor decides to put the screws on? What if?”

  “Chuvash will know about it beforehand, will warn you, will do his best to protect you.”

  “Who will win this tug-of-war is what I want to know, white or black?”

  “It doesn’t matter who wins,” Chuvash says. “The only thing that counts is to play.”

  Pravdin shakes his head in confusion, blows his nose into a corner of his toga, moves (flat-footed; the marble floor is still ice but his mind is elsewhere) toward the door. “It is only fair telling you,” he informs Melor, who stares after him with an appraising eye, “that the microphone in the table leg is what I found the day I moved into the attic.”

  Melor accepts this with a nod. “The microphone you found,” he tells Pravdin, “was the one you were supposed to find so you wouldn’t look for others.”

  Pravdin passes through the steam, skips the ritual weighing-out, dresses quickly with his back to the room to hide his covenant with a God in whom he doesn’t believe, retrieves his briefcase from the attendant, removes the change purse from the briefcase, checks to make sure the money is all there, finds in the coin compartment an entrance pass to the Writers’ Congress that starts the next day. “Chuvash,” he tries to figure it out, “had this put here, which means that Melor knows I have it, which means that Chuvash knows that Melor knows I have it. Oy”—his palm slaps against his high forehead in exasperation—“insanity may be an idea whose time has come. Touch wood.” And his knuckles rap without conviction against the wooden bench.

  Sequences flicker before Pravdin’s eyes like frames from an old Eisenstein. Eyeglasses shatter; the baby carriage hurtles down the steps. Pravdin has always been curious who was in that carriage. Now he knows! One moment he is outside the carriage watching it careen out of control with its tenor-stricken baby cargo. The next he is inside the carriage, curled up in a fetal position, sucking desperately on his deformed thumb, feeling the bouncing wheels jar his bruised spine, hearing the pitch of the panicky screams rise and fall as he streaks past the source of the sound. Oy, his tiny palm slaps against his tiny forehead, it’s me inside. Baby Robespierre pulls back on his erect joy stick as the carriage picks up speed; it soars into the sky, wheeling in a great arc over Moscow. Comfortably airborne, he grips the side of the carriage and peers over the edge, feels the wind fill his bonnet, sees far below huge crowds funneling into Red Square for the May Day parade. On a whim he begins to fart a stream of smoke and skywrites over Red Square:

  Waak, waak, Honored Artist of

  the Soviet Union Frolov is a plagiarist

  Instantly Melor’s voice crackles over the radio: “What language is that, Jewish?” he demands. “Jewish is right,” Baby Robespierre explains. “It’s an old Talmudic saying that means, it’s me who will watch the bosses.” He burps diabolically into the microphone, freezes in fear when dozens of balls of cotton begin bursting around the carriage. The seventy-first burst explodes just underneath and rocks the carriage; flames spurt from the sides and it starts to spiral toward the ground which, impatient for the crash, rushes up to meet it.

  “Aiiiiiiiii!” screams Pravdin, bolting upright in bed, sweaty and weak and wide awake. Nadezhda, looking around wildly, bolts upright too, absorbs what’s happening, presses her palm to his wet forehead, eases him back on the pillow, stroking all the while his forehead and, as he calms down and breathes more regularly, his penis, which slowly becomes erect.

  Their lovemaking is a triumph of sex over tenor. Gradually the shattered eyeglasses, the carriage hurtling down the steps, the bursts of cotton, the ground spiraling up to meet him, lose their narrative thread; Pravdin clings to the broken images as if they are buoys, but Nadezhda descends on his erection with silent lips, draws it slowly into her mouth, strokes it with a tongue as roughly caressing as a cat’s. Pravdin relinquishes the dream, lets it slip through his fingers, moans, tries to pull free when he feels himself coming off—too late, too late. Nadezhda locks him in her with her hand and accepts his flow, which seems to originate from some center so deep inside him he has never conceded its existence.

  “Aiiiiiiii,” Pravdin stifles a cry in the pillow as she sucks the last drops from him—a pleasure so close to pain he thinks he will go crazy if she stops or if she doesn’t

  When he finally musters enough force to speak, Pravdin’s voice is hoarse. “I tell you—” he says. He closes his eyes and sits motionless for a long moment. “I tell you,” he begins again, “that lovemaking makes the time stand still for me. You think a moment, reply, ‘Pleasure is a clock like any other.’ “

  “What a cynical thing for me to say,” Nadezhda writes. “I look old but I talk young.”

  They sleep again, Nadezhda tossing restlessly, Pravdin deep into a dreamless pit from which he has trouble emerging when it grows gray. At breakfast Mother Russia lays out yogurts, wheat germ cereal, a steaming bowl of Lapsang Suchon
g made from teabags Nadezhda picked up from a diplomat’s wife in exchange for some photographs of her children.

  “I got off another zinger to Singer,” Zoya informs them conversationally. “This one’s a time bomb. I told him people in an industrial society lose a sense of who they are and begin to see themselves as others see them, which is why we are all of us so different depending on whom we are with. I also told him I was an observer but only in the sense that his fellow American A. Toklas was an observer, which is to say she liked a view but she liked to sit with her back turned to it. I told him that that was the only way to look at things and stay sane.”

  “If you sit with your back turned,” complains Pravdin, “you can’t see where you’re going.”

  “Even with your back not turned,” Zoya argues, “you can’t see where you’re going. Anatole France, who was a charming sentimentalist before his tongue turned acid, once said something about how the future was hidden from the men who make it. To which I say, thanks God. If they could see where they were going they’d lose interest in the trip.”

  “The future,” writes Nadezhda, “is like seeing yourself in a mirror with your hair parted on the wrong side.”

  “Every time I look in a mirror,” Pravdin remarks, “nobody is whom I half expect to see looking back.” He smiles self-consciously. “Up to now there’s always been somebody: me with my medals on the wrong side of my Eisenhower jacket. Touch wood.” (His knuckles rap on the kitchen table.)

  “There aren’t many people left who touch wood,” observes Zoya.

  “There aren’t many people left who have wood to touch,” says Pravdin.

  “Not funny,” groans Zoya.

  “Not meant to be,” replies Pravdin.

  “People don’t touch wood,” explains Zoya, “because they’re no longer superstitious. The decline of superstition, if you want my opinion, is one of the tragedies of our epoch. If you are interested in the why, it’s because psychoanalysis has occupied the ground it left vacant. The social unit of the future, if there is a future, will be the Therapeutic State in which the principal requirement for the position of Big Brother will be an M.D. degree. Ha! Those medical Attilas, with their ugly little hearts contorted like fists, will run the world as if it were one long umbilical ward.”

  “Waak, waak, power to the powerful, power to the powerful,” comes from Mother Russia’s bedroom.

  “If I had to bet,” Nadezhda writes, “I’d bet the future will be futureless.”

  “Not funny,” Pravdin scribbles on her napkin.

  “Not meant to be,” she prints, in all capitals, under his scrawl.

  Zoya regards Pravdin with a mixture of shrewdness and affection. “Our new attic reminds me more and more of my late, silly, beautiful husband. An idealism just beyond articulation illuminated his actions the way cities over the horizon light up the night sky long before you actually see them.”

  “Idealism is an ideal,” protests Pravdin, “not a formula for everyday survival.”

  “You tried that out on me already,” Zoya chides him. “I didn’t believe you then, I don’t believe you now. You’re a closet idealist.”

  Pravdin wipes the wheat germ off his chin with his hand, adds milk to his tea, blows on it, bends his head down to the glass and noisily sips. “What you want to see, little mother, you see. When I was young, a problem child is what I was: Narcissus, Onan and Oedipus rolled into one. A problem man is what I grew into. In summer I used to haunt the banks of the Moscow River looking for lovers who swam naked, then swiped the clothes they left on the banks. The thefts were never reported because the militia frowned on naked swimming and advertise is what people didn’t do.”

  Nadezhda, preoccupied with dark thoughts, absently stuffs into her carryall an old Leica, two lenses, spare film, her wallet, a notebook with measurements of all her friends (if she comes across hard-to-get items of clothing, she will buy for everyone), starts for the door, changes her mind, comes marching back, writes with determination on her pad: “Enough is enough. For God’s sake give them the manuscripts and be done with it.”

  “You’re off your rocker,” says Pravdin, pushing the note away.

  “What did I say,” Zoya cries jubilantly. “A closet idealist! You light up the night sky from over the horizon.” She scrapes her chair closer to Pravdin’s, takes in her wrinkled fingers the lapel of his Eisenhower jacket, whispers urgently: “Unarmed truth can defeat even the seventy-first incarnation of God.”

  “Waak:, waak, power to the powerful, power to the powerful The bird lands on the bowl of fruit on top of the refrigerator, preens, pleased with its short flight. “Waak, waak.”

  “The Writers’ Congress is the perfect platform,” Zoya insists confidently. “Confront them with the facts, they’ll have to listen.” Her eyes become watery with excitement. Her fingers cling weakly to his lapel. She says harshly: “What are Chuvash and Melor against the likes of you. Confuse them is all you have to do. Become two personages yourself: one who wants to drop the whole thing and give back the manuscripts; the other a stubborn bastard who walks on water, moves mountains, works up a sweat from a noneconomic activity!”

  “Two personages is what I am already,” Pravdin announces morbidly. “I’m the hustler and the hustled.” He is frustrated by his inability to shrug; this would be the perfect moment. “Schizophrenia is an idea whose time has obviously come.”

  Nadezhda shakes her head angrily, writes, “Two can be arrested as cheaply as one,” drops the note in Pravdin’s plate, stalks from the kitchen.

  Pravdin pushes away the plate as if it contains a bill he doesn’t want to pay, grabs a pepper grinder and thrusts it in front of Mother Russia’s mouth. “In your opinion, Zoya Aleksandrovna, what is the most important problem facing the world today?”

  Mother Russia responds instantly. “Ha!” she cackles, “that’s deliciously simple: it’s population control. If you ask me, the government should drape the Kremlin with giant posters that say, ‘Have Cats, Not Brats.’ Between you, me and the wall, who are the three listening to my every word, Hemingway is the only cat lover in all of history I loathe. But that’s another story.”

  “Waak:, waak, help, help,” barks Pravdin. But his sinking heart isn’t in the game.

  Pravdin, cooling his heels on a wooden bench with initials carved all over it, stares at the small hand-lettered sign (“Department of Medicine, Moscow University”) until the letters blur and he loses a sense of where he is, who he is even.

  “Pravdin, Robespierre Isayevich,” an inner voice reminds him, “Homo Economicus with a jackpot mentality, hustler with the instincts of a victim, gate-crasher with a taste for black Beluga, graffitist who can turn watchstraps into sandals but not water into wine, shrugless in Gaza, a light sleeper and a heavy dreamer, no closet anything, vaguely aware of a covenant with God but suspicious that the Party of the First Part is not holding up His end of the Deal, and so forth and so on.”

  He suspends the inventory, glances at his two wrist-watches, sees he’s been waiting already two hours, carves with a small pocketknife in the wooden bench:

  Patience is a form of despair

  (Anon: Pravdin has spent the better part of his life despairing). Twenty minutes later the report Pravdin has come for is presented to him by a secretary. It says:

  Analysis of a cotton toothpick, prepared under the auspices of the Department of Medicine, Moscow University.

  1. The cotton toothpick consists of a sliver of wood, eight centimeters in length, with tufts of cotton weighing approximately .07 gram, glued to each end.

  2. With respect to the proposal to use the cotton toothpick to remove wax from the concha area of the ear, the following points should be taken into consideration:

  a. while it is considered possible to remove the wax with the implement under analysis,

  b. certain risks are involved, most notably the possibility of damage to the internal auditory meatus or a puncture of the inner ear caused by too profound inse
rtion of the cotton toothpick.

  3. Conclusion: While wax-free ears are considered desirable in an advanced industrial society, they are clearly not indispensable. Furthermore, the presence of the wax does not constitute in itself a sufficient health hazard to warrant running risks to remove it. In severe cases, when quantities of wax are allowed to build up, a slight infringement of auditory ability has resulted. This can be overcome by:

  a. turning up the volume of the sound source.

  b. removing the wax with traditional methods, i.e. keys, fingernails (only women’s nails are considered sufficiently long for this purpose), which have lower risk quotients than the cotton toothpick in question.

  Prepared, this date by

  A. N. Kulakova,

  candidate examiner,

  eyes, ears, nose, throat

  and sexual problems section.

  Reviewed and approved,

  this date, by N. R.

  Prornik, chief of section,

  eyes, ears, nose, throat

  and sexual problems.

  “What’s this sudden lust for traditional methods,” Pravdin explodes, tapping the sheet with the back of his hand. The secretary, a matronly woman in a white coat two sizes too large for her, backs away. “What do they do for fun in the eyes, ears, nose, throat and sexual problems section,” Pravdin yells after her, “swab throats with skeleton keys? Conduct gynecological examinations with the back of soup spoons?” A maniacal look comes into his eyes and he hefts his briefcase as if he is about to use it as a weapon. The woman cowers inside her white coat, turns her shoulder and peers at him over it.

  “No offense meant,” she says softly, “but you’re crazy.”

  “Ha!” cries Pravdin, dancing menacingly back and forth across her field of vision. “Under capitalism, man exploits man. Yes or maybe?” His rust hair flies off in all directions, giving to him the appearance of an agitated conductor. He scrapes what he can from an ear with a fingernail and thrusts it under her nose. “Nothing is what you remove from an ear with a fingernail,” he screams. “Nothing is no thing.”