There was one state of mind Kondrashov had never experienced—indifference. He made no secret of his immoderate likes and dislikes. He was famous for his uncompromising judgments. He was a devotee of Rembrandt and a debunker of Raphael. An admirer of Valentin Serov and fiercely hostile to the Itinerant School. He was incapable of qualified approval; for him there was no midpoint between boundless enthusiasm and boundless indignation. He could not stand Chekhov. He was repelled by Tchaikovsky (“He suffocates me! He robs me of hope and the will to live!”) but felt such an affinity with Bach’s chorales and Beethoven’s concertos that he might have composed them himself.
“Must pictures be true to nature?” was the subject for discussion this time.
“Well, suppose you want to depict a window opening onto a garden on a summer morning,” Kondrashov said. His voice was youthful, with an occasional shrill note when he was excited. If you closed your eyes, you might think you were listening to an adolescent arguing.
“If you faithfully copy nature, if you depict it all just as you see it, will it really be all? What about the singing of the birds? The freshness of the morning? The purity of the scene? While you are painting, you are aware of these things; they enter into your experience of the summer morning. But how are you to preserve them in the picture? How can you avoid denying them to the viewer? Obviously you have to find some substitute for them, using the only resources you have, color and composition.”
“So you can’t just copy?”
“Of course not! And anyway”—Kondrashov was beginning to get carried away—“you begin every landscape, and every portrait, by admiring nature and thinking, how marvelous! how fine! if only I could show it just like that, just as it is! But you get deeper into your work, and suddenly you realize. . . . Just a minute! Hang on! So much for nature! This is simply absurd, just nonsense, completely incongruous! Look here, for instance! And here! It ought to be like this! And like that! That’s how you paint!” Kondrashov looked triumphantly and challengingly at his companions.
“Yes, but ‘ought to be’ takes you down a very dangerous road, old man!” Rubin protested. “You’ll find yourself making angels and devils out of flesh-and-blood people, which, in fact, is just what you do. Say what you like, if you paint a portrait of Andrei Andreich Potapov, it ought to be Potapov.”
“But what does portraying him as he really is mean?” Kondrashov protested. “There must of course be an external resemblance—same facial proportions, same shape eyes, same color hair. But isn’t it rather rash to suppose that we can see reality just as it is? Especially spiritual reality? Who can see that or know it? And if I look at a sitter and discern in him qualities finer than those he has so far revealed, why shouldn’t I make so bold as to depict them? Help the man find himself and rise to higher things?”
Nerzhin clapped his hands. “Why, you’re a one hundred percent socialist realist. The deputy minister doesn’t know what a treasure he has in you!”
“Why should I undervalue his soul?” Kondrashov’s glasses, immovably fixed to his nose, flashed angrily in the half darkness. “Let me tell you, the most important thing about portrait painting, and indeed about all relationships, is that whatever one person sees and identifies in another is evoked and activated in that other person! Understand?”
“In short,” Rubin said dismissively, “objectivity means nothing to you, in this as in other things.”
“Yes, indeed! I’m unobjective and proud of it!” Kondrashov thundered.
Rubin was taken aback. “Eh? eh? What’s that you say?”
“You heard! I’m proud of being unobjective!” Kondrashov’s words were like the blows he might have struck if the upper bunk had not cramped his swing.
“What about you, Lev Grigorievich? What about you? You are unobjective, too, but consider yourself objective, and that’s much worse! That’s where I’m superior; I’m unobjective, and I know it! I take credit for it! That’s the essential me!”
“Not objective? Me?” Rubin seemed astonished. “If I’m not objective, who on earth is?”
“Nobody!” the artist cried exultantly. “Nobody at all! Nobody ever was, and nobody ever will be! In fact, every cognitive act has an emotional coloring, has it not? The truth that is destined to be the end result of long inquiries is surely dimly present in our minds before our inquiries even begin! We pick up a book feeling a vague antipathy for the author, we foresee before we have read the first page that we will pretty certainly not like it, and of course we don’t! You’ve embarked on a comparison of a hundred of the world’s languages, you’ve only just finished lining up your dictionaries, there’s forty years of work ahead of you, but you’re already sure that you’ll succeed in proving that all words derive from a word for ‘hand’! Do you call that objectivity?”
Nerzhin, highly gratified, roared with laughter at Rubin. Rubin laughed, too—how could anyone be angry with this holy innocent!
Kondrashov had not mentioned politics, but Nerzhin was quick to do so.
“Go one step further, Ippolit Mikhalych! Just one, I beg you! What about Marx? I feel sure that before he had begun his economic analyses or compiled any statistical tables, he knew in advance that under capitalism the working class faces absolute impoverishment, that it is the best part of mankind, and hence that the future belongs to it. Hand on heart, Lev, isn’t that the truth?”
Rubin sighed. “My dear friend . . . if we could never foresee what we were going to find. . . .”
“You see, Ippolit Mikhalych! And that is what they base this ‘progress’ of theirs on! How I hate that meaningless word ‘progress’!”
“Well, in art there is no ‘progress’! There can be none!”
Nerzhin was delighted. “No, indeed! Indeed there isn’t! That’s what’s so good about it! The seventeenth century had Rembrandt, and Rembrandt’s still here—just try and go one better today! Whereas seventeenth-century technology seems primitive to us now. Or think of the great inventions of the eighteen seventies. To us they look like children’s toys. Yet those were the years in which Anna Karenina was written. If you know of anything finer, I would like to hear about it!”
Rubin seized his opening.
“Hold on, there, maestro. You do at least leave us with some progress in engineering? You don’t call that meaningless.”
“Anyway, Gleb Vikentich,” Abramson put in, “your argument can be turned inside out. It can be taken to mean that scientists and engineers have done great things over the centuries and made progress, while the art snobs have obviously just been playing the fool. Parasites. . . .”
“In it for the money!” Sologdin exclaimed. He seemed pleased about it.
He and Abramson, poles apart, were allies for the space of a single thought.
Pryanchikov applauded.
“Bravo! Bravo! Well done, boys! That’s just what I was trying to tell you yesterday in the Acoustics Lab!” (He had been talking about the superior merits of jazz, but it seemed to him now that Abramson was expressing his own thoughts for him.)
“I think I can make peace between you!” Potapov laughed knowingly. “There has been in the course of this century one historically well-attested occasion on which a certain electrical engineer and a certain mathematician, painfully aware of a lacuna in the belles-lettres of their fatherland, jointly composed a short piece of fine writing. Alas, it was never written down; they had no pencil.”
“Andreich!” cried Nerzhin. “Couldn’t you reconstruct it?”
“With a bit of a struggle and your help. It was my one and only opus. So I ought to be able to remember it.”
“Gentlemen, this is going to be fun!”
Sologdin brightened and settled himself more comfortably. Jeux d’esprit of this sort were the thing he really enjoyed in prison.
“But you surely realize that, as Lev Grigorievich teaches us, no work of art can be understood unless we know the history of its creation and the social requirement it meets.”
“You’
re improving, Andreich.”
“So, dear guests, eat up the cake that was made for you. The story of its creation is as follows: In the summer of the year one thousand nine hundred and forty-six, in a hideously overcrowded cell in the nursing home called Bu-Tyur—the administration had stamped that inscription, meaning Butyrskaya Tyurma, Butyrki Prison, on the crockery— Gleb and I were lying side by side under the bed planks to begin with, then on the bed planks, gasping for air, groaning from hunger, and we had nothing to occupy ourselves with except light conversation and observation of behavior. . . . I’m not sure which of us said it first. What if. . . ?”
“You did, Andreich. You said, ‘What if. . . ?’ In any case, the key image from which the piece takes its title certainly belongs to you. . . .”
“Well, Gleb and I asked ourselves . . . what if . . . what if suddenly into our cell. . . .”
“Don’t tease! What did you call it?”
“All right, all right, let’s try and remember that ancient tale between us, shall we?” Potapov’s voice, cracked and muffled, was like that of an inveterate devourer of dusty folios. “Its title was ‘The Buddha’s Smile.’ ”
* * *
†††††† Geebees: A version of gebisty, a slang term for the MGB, the Ministry of State Security.
Chapter 59
The Buddha’s Smile
“THE EVENTS RECORDED in our remarkable narrative relate to that famous summer of blazing heat in 194– when prisoners outnumbering the proverbial cartload of monkeys languished, clad only in loincloths, in stifling air behind the fishy-eyed opacity of the world-renowned Butyrki Prison’s muzzled windows.
“What can one say of that useful and smoothly functioning establishment? It traced its ancestry to the barracks of Catherine the Great. In the cruel age of that empress, bricks were not grudged for those fortresslike walls and vaulted arches.
The stately castle was constructed
As castles should constructed be.
“After the death of Voltaire’s enlightened pen pal, those hollow halls where once the clumsy tramp of carabineers’ jackboots reechoed were derelict for many long years. But as progress, universally longed for, advanced upon our fatherland, the royal descendants of the aforesaid imperial lady thought fit to accommodate there both heretics, who sought to rock the Orthodox throne, and obscurantists, who stood in the way of progress.
“The mason’s trowel and the plasterer’s spatula helped divide those enfilades into hundreds of commodious yet cozy cells, while the unsurpassed skill of our fatherland’s blacksmiths forged unbendable bars for the windows and tubular bed frames to be lowered for the night and raised by day. The finest craftsmen among our talented serf population made their precious contribution to the immortal fame of Butyrki Castle; weavers wove sackcloth covers for the bed frames, plumbers laid an ingenious sewage system, tinsmiths riveted together capacious four- and six-gallon night buckets with handles and even lids, carpenters cut feeding flaps in the doors, glaziers installed spy holes, locksmiths fitted locks, and in the ultramodern times of People’s Commissar Yezhov a special breed of craftsmen in reinforced glass poured opaque, molten glass over wire netting and erected those ‘muzzles,’ unique of their kind, which shut off from the heinous prisoners the last visible corner of the prison yard, the prison chapel, and a patch of blue sky.
“For the convenience of guards with, as a rule, only rudimentary education, the curators of the Butyrki rest home had exactly twenty-five bed frames fixed to the walls of each cell, making possible simple arithmetical calculations: Four cells equals a hundred head of prisoners; one corridor, two hundred.
“And so for decades on end, this therapeutic establishment flourished, without ever incurring the censure of society and without complaint from prisoners. (Witness the infrequency of censure and complaints in Stock Exchange Gazette and, subsequently, their total absence from Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies’ News—Izvestia, for short.
“But time was not on the side of the major general in charge of Butyrki Prison. Even in the early days of the Second World War, it proved necessary to exceed the statutory norm of twenty-five to a cell and to install additional inmates, who were left without bunks. When the surplus assumed menacing proportions, bed frames were left permanently lowered, the sacking covers were replaced by boards, and the triumphant major general and his colleagues started wedging fifty men into each cell. Then, after the historic victory over Hitlerism, as many as seventy-five. This, again, posed no problem for the guards: They knew that there were now six hundred head to a corridor and were paid a bonus.
“In this congestion it no longer made sense to give out books, chess sets, and dominoes; there weren’t enough to go around anyway. As time went by, the enemies of the people received a smaller and smaller bread ration, fish was replaced by the flesh of amphibians and hymenoptera, and cabbage and nettles by cattle fodder. The dreaded Pugachev Tower, where the empress had kept that hero of the people on a chain, was now made to serve a pacific purpose as a silo.
“People poured in; new prisoners arrived all the time; oral traditions faded and were garbled; people forgot, if they had ever known, that their predecessors had reclined on canvas sacking and read banned books (it was only from prison libraries that the authorities forgot to remove them). When ichthyosaurus broth and silage soup were borne into the cell in steaming pails, the prisoners drew their feet up onto the bedboards, drew their knees up tightly to their chests in the confined space, and braced themselves on all four paws, and in this canine posture, baring their teeth like so many yard dogs, kept a sharp eye on how much swill was ladled into each bowl. The pails made their round, ‘from the night bucket to the window’ and ‘from the window to the radiator,’ after which the inhabitants of the bedboards and of the kennels underneath them, fell to, threatening each other’s bowls with tails and paws, and the only sound to disturb the philosophical silence of the cell was that of seventy-five mouths slurping life-giving porridge.
“And everyone was content. Neither in the trade union newspaper Trud nor in the Bulletin of the Moscow Patriarchate was a single complaint to be found.
“Cell 72 was a cell among other cells with nothing to distinguish it from the rest. It was already doomed, but the prisoners peacefully dozing under its bedboards or cursing on top of them knew nothing of the horrors in store. On the eve of the fatal day, they were as usual making leisurely preparations for bed on the cement floor near the night bucket or lying in their drawers on the bedboards, fanning themselves (the air was hot and stagnant, because the cell was not ventilated from one winter to the next), killing flies, and telling each other how nice it had been in Norway or in Iceland or in Greenland during the war. The time sense that all zeks perfect by long practice told them that there were only five minutes left before the screw on duty bellowed through the feeding flap, ‘Come on, get to bed, it’s after time!’
“But suddenly the prisoners’ hearts missed a beat as they heard keys turning in the locks! The door flew open, and there stood a dapper captain with white gloves, looking ex-treme-ly agitated. A retinue of lieutenants and sergeants buzzed behind him. In funereal silence the zeks were led out into the corridor ‘with belongings.’ (A whisper went around that they were on their way to be shot.) In the corridor five times ten men were counted off and bundled into neighboring cells just in time to grab a bit of sleeping space. These fortunate ones had escaped the fearful fate of the other twenty-five. The last thing those left outside their well-loved Cell No. 72 saw was some sort of infernal machine with a sprayer attached to it driving in through their door. Then they were made to do a right turn and marched, to the rattling of guards’ keys against belt buckles and the snapping of fingers (recognized signals in Butyrki meaning ‘prisoner under escort approaching’), through several internal steel doors and down several flights of stairs to a hall, which was not the execution cellar, not an underground torture chamber, but the changing room, well known to the zek tribe, of the celebrated Bu
tyrki baths. The dressing room had a suspiciously innocent, everyday look—the walls, benches, and floor covered with chocolate brown, red, and green tiles, the carts noisily trundling on rails from the heat sterilization room with diabolical hooks to hang prisoners’ lousy clothes on. Playfully slapping and punching (for the prisoner’s Third Commandment is ‘grab what’s offered’), the zeks scrambled for the red-hot hooks and hung on them their long-suffering clothes, already discolored, singed, and in places burned through by fumigation at ten-day intervals, while two old crones, hell’s sweltering handmaidens, long since indifferent to the sight of naked prisoners, rolled the clattering carts into Tartarus, slamming the iron doors behind them.
“The twenty-five prisoners were left in the changing room, locked in on all sides. They had nothing in their hands except handkerchiefs or strips torn from shirts, which served the same purpose.
“Those of them whose skinny frames retained a thin layer of leathery flesh on that modest part of the body by means of which nature has blessed us with the gift of sitting—those happy souls seated themselves on warm stone benches, inlaid with emerald and reddish brown tiles. (The Butyrki bathhouse is far superior in the luxury of its fittings to the Sandunovski baths, and the story goes that curious foreigners sometimes gave themselves up to the Cheka just to enjoy a bath there.)
“Other prisoners, so emaciated that they could only sit on something soft, paced the antechamber from end to end, making no attempt to cover their shame and seeking to penetrate the veil of mystery in heated arguments.
Their starved imaginations
Hungered for fatal sustenance. . . .
“They were, however, kept in the antechamber for hours on end, so that speculation flagged, their bodies were covered with heat spots, and their stomachs, accustomed as they were to sleep from 10:00 p.m. on, pleaded piteously to be filled. The dominant party was now that of the pessimists, who held that poison gas was already seeping in through the gratings in the walls and floor and that they would all shortly die.
In the First Circle Page 56
