Galakhov frowned. Commanding officers were his favorite military characters.
“Are you talking about my last novel?”
“Of course not, Nikolai! But do works of imagination really have to reproduce army regulations? or newspaper articles? or slogans? Mayakovsky, for one, took pride in using an excerpt from a newspaper as the epigraph to a poem. In other words, he prided himself on not rising above the level of a newspaper. If that’s how you think, what’s the point of literature? After all, a writer exists to teach other people. Isn’t that what was always expected of him?”
The brothers-in-law met infrequently and did not know each other well.
“What you say is true only under bourgeois regimes,” Galakhov replied cautiously.
Innokenty wasn’t going to argue with that.
“Of course, of course. Our laws are quite different. . . . I didn’t mean to. . . .” He made a circular movement with his hand. “Please believe me, Kolya. I really like you. . . . And that’s why I particularly want to ask you . . . while I’m in the mood . . . as one of the family. . . . Have you ever asked yourself . . . How do you see your place in Russian literature? I mean, you’ve written enough for a six-volume collected works. You’re thirty-seven . . . they’d already bumped Pushkin off at your age. You’re not in danger of that. Still, you can’t evade the question: Who are you? Is this tormented age any the richer for your ideas? Apart, of course, from the incontrovertible ideas you yourself owe to socialist realism.” Innokenty abandoned sarcasm and asked his next question as though it hurt.
“Tell me, Kolya, don’t you sometimes feel ashamed of our generation?”
Small furrows came and went on Galakhov’s brow, and he sucked his cheeks in.
“You’re touching me on a sensitive spot,” he answered, staring at the tablecloth. “What Russian writer hasn’t secretly tried on Pushkin’s frock coat? Or Tolstoy’s blouse?” He turned his pencil this way and that on the tablecloth and looked at Innokenty with eyes that had nothing to hide. He, too, felt an urge to speak out, to say things that couldn’t be said with other writers present. “When I was a kid, at the beginning of the Five-Year Plans, I thought I would die happy if I could just see my name in print over a poem. I imagined that would be the beginning of immortality. But then. . . .”
Dotnara advanced on them, avoiding empty chairs or pushing them out of her way.
“Ini! Kolya! You won’t shoo me off, will you? Are you talking about something too clever for me?”
She couldn’t have chosen a worse moment.
As she came toward them, the very sight of her, the thought that she was an inescapable part of his life, suddenly brought home to Innokenty the dreadful truth. He remembered what awaited him. The party and the humorous exchanges at table ceased to exist. His heart sank. His throat was hot and dry.
Meanwhile, Dotty stood waiting for an answer, toying with the edges of her raglan blouse. Her fair hair fell loosely over her narrow fur collar. She knew how to make the best of herself and had ignored nine years of changing hairstyles. She was flushed—or was it the cherry red blouse that made her look like that? And there was that doelike tremor of the upper lip that he knew and loved. It happened when someone paid her a compliment or obviously found her attractive. But why just now?
She had been trying for so long to emphasize how independent of him she was, how different her view of life was from his. Why this sudden change? A presentiment that they were to part? Why was she suddenly so meek and affectionate? Why that doelike twitch of the lip?
Innokenty could never forgive her and had not even asked himself whether he could forgive her for the long spell of incomprehension, estrangement, and unfaithfulness. He knew that she, too, could not change all at once. But this meekness of hers warmed his cramped heart. He took her hand and drew her onto a chair beside him, something that would have been impossible between them all through the autumn.
Dotty submitted gracefully, sat down beside her husband, and clung to him, not indecorously close but close enough for all to see how much she loved him and how happy she was to be with him. It occurred to Innokenty briefly, with Dotty’s future in mind, that it would be better for her not to make this show of an intimacy that did not really exist. But he gently stroked her arm in the cherry red sleeve.
The writer’s white ivory pencil lay idle.
Leaning on the table, Galakhov stared past husband and wife at the big window, which was lit by the streetlights at the Kaluga Gate. He could not talk frankly about himself with women around. Nor, perhaps, without them.
But . . . nowadays his poems, however long, appeared in print. Hundreds of theaters throughout the country put on his plays after their run in Moscow. Girls copied out his verses and learned them by heart. The central press had happily put its pages at his disposal during the war. He had tried his hand at the feuilleton, the long short story, criticism. And finally his novel had appeared. He had won one Stalin Prize, then another and yet another. And where had it gotten him? Strangely, he had won fame but not immortality.
He himself had not noticed when and how he had overburdened the bird of immortality and crippled its flight. Perhaps it had taken wing only in those few lines that schoolgirls memorized. As for the plays, the stories, the novel, they had died on him before he had reached the age of thirty-seven.
But why should anyone strive for immortality? Most of Galakhov’s fellow writers had no thought of immortality. What mattered to them was their position in their own lifetime. To hell with immortality, they said; surely it’s more important to influence the course of events here and now? And influence it they did. Their books served the people, they were published in print runs of hundreds of thousands, government subsidies assured their dissemination to libraries everywhere, and special book-promotion months were organized for them. Of course, much that was true could not be written about. But they consoled themselves with the thought that circumstances would change someday, and they would return to the same events, show them in a different and truer light, publish amended versions of their old books. Meanwhile, the thing to do was to write at least that quarter, that eighth, that sixteenth, or—yes, damn it!—that one thirty-second part of the truth which was permitted. Write about love and kisses and the beauties of nature if you like; any little thing was better than nothing.
But Galakhov was oppressed by a feeling that every decent page was harder to write than the last one. He forced himself to work to a timetable, struggled against his yawning fits, his mental sluggishness, his wandering thoughts, his habit of listening for the mailman and breaking off to look at the newspapers. He saw to it that his study was aired, that the room temperature was 18°C, that his desk was clean and polished; otherwise, he could not write.
Whenever he started on a new, large work, he was full of fire and swore to himself and his friends that this time he would make no concessions, that he would write a real book. He sat down enthusiastically to write the first pages. But he soon began to notice that he was not alone, that an image floated up and hovered ever more distinctly before him, the image of the one for whom he was writing and with whose eyes he willy-nilly reread each newly written paragraph. And this one was not the reader, his brother, friend, and contemporary, nor was he a generalized critic, but for some reason always the illustrious critic in chief, Yermilov.
Galakhov could not help imagining Yermilov reading this new work with his chin flattened against his chest, preparing to open fire on it with an enormous (it had happened before) full-page article in Literary Gazette. He would give it some such title as “Unwholesome Trends” or “Another Look at Certain Fashionable Tendencies on Our Tried and Tested Path.” He would not get straight to the point but would begin with some sacrosanct statement by Belinsky or Nekrasov with which only a villain could fail to agree. Then he would carefully twist these words, turn them around till they meant something quite different, and Belinsky or Herzen would be seen passionately attesting that Galakhov’s new book sho
wed him to be an antisocial, antihuman figure with shaky philosophical foundations.
Trying paragraph after paragraph to anticipate Yermilov’s objections and adjust himself to them, Galakhov soon weakened in his efforts to express himself fully. Of its own accord the book spinelessly curled up and collapsed. When he was already halfway through, Galakhov saw that a different book had been foisted on him, and he had another failure on his hands.
“Oh, yes, you were asking what Soviet diplomats are like.” Innokenty resumed where he had left off. But his voice was hollow, and he wore a wry smile. “You can easily imagine them for yourself. Firm ideological convictions. High principles. Total dedication to the cause. Profound personal devotion to Comrade Stalin. Unswerving adherence to instructions from Moscow. Some have a very good, others a poor knowledge of foreign languages. And then of course their great enthusiasm for the pleasures of the flesh. Because, as the saying goes, we only live once.”
Chapter 63
The Diehard
RADOVICH WAS A LONGTIME LOSER, an all-around loser. It had started back in the thirties—lectures canceled, books rejected, and to cap it all he was plagued by ill health. He had a splinter from one of Kolchak’s shells in his chest, he had suffered from a duodenal ulcer for fifteen years, and every morning for many years past he had carried out the excruciating procedure of irrigating his stomach through the esophagus, without which he could not eat and go on living.
But Radovich’s misfortunes were also his salvation. A conspicuous figure in Comintern circles, he had survived in the critical years only because he had never set foot outside a hospital. Illness had been his refuge again in the past year, when all the Serbs left in the Soviet Union had either been dragooned into the anti-Tito movement or thrown into jail.
Realizing how equivocal his position was, Radovich made a superhuman effort to restrain himself to say nothing, to avoid being drawn into fanatical disputes, to live the subdued life of an invalid.
Now, too, he was holding himself in check, helped by the “smoker’s table.” This was a small, oval table of dark wood, placed conveniently in the study to hold cigarette papers and a roller for filling them, a selection of pipes in a rack, and a mother-of-pearl ashtray. Near the table stood a tobacco cabinet of Karelian birchwood with numerous drawers containing a variety of cigarettes with cardboard mouthpieces, cigarettes without mouthpieces, cigars, pipe tobaccos, and even snuff.
Listening in silence to Slovuta’s account of preparations for biological warfare and the hideous crimes of Japanese officers against humanity, Radovich eagerly sniffed the contents of the drawers, trying to decide what to settle for. Smoking was suicide, strictly forbidden by all his doctors. But since he was also forbidden to drink or to eat (he had eaten practically nothing that evening), his sense of smell and his tastebuds were particularly sensitive to shades of difference between tobaccos. Life without smoking seemed flat. In his straitened circumstances he preferred to buy “homegrown” tobacco in peasant markets and roll his own cigarettes in newspaper. As an evacuee in Sterlitamak, he used to buy a leaf of homegrown from some old man with a private plot and dry it and cut it himself. Preparing his tobacco helped him to think in the empty hours of bachelorhood.
If Radovich had put his oar in, he would not in fact have said anything very terrible. His own views were not so far away from what the state required people to think. But Stalin’s Party, which was even less tolerant of fine shades of difference than of clashing colors, would have beheaded him in a trice for the smidgen of difference between them.
Luckily he managed to contain himself, and the conversation moved on from the Japanese to the relative merits of particular cigars, of which Slovuta knew so little that he almost choked on an incautious puff, to the fact that although the number of prosecutors grew from year to year, their work steadily increased.
“What do the crime statistics have to say?” Radovich asked. An apparently casual question—his parchmentlike features were expressionless.
The crime statistics had nothing to say. They were dumb, they were invisible, and nobody knew whether they still existed.
Which did not prevent Slovuta from saying, “The statistics tell us that the number of crimes is going down.”
He had not seen the actual figures, but he had read what the papers had to say about them.
He added just as sincerely, “But there’s still plenty of crime. It’s a legacy from the old regime. The people are very corrupt. Corrupted by bourgeois ideology.”
Three-quarters of those who went through the courts were born after 1917, but this did not enter Slovuta’s head. It was not something he had read.
Makarygin tossed his head. He didn’t need to be told this!
“When Vladimir Ilyich told us that the cultural Revolution would be much more difficult than the October Revolution, we couldn’t take it in. We realize now how farsighted he was.”
Makarygin had a backless head and prominent ears.
They puffed away companionably, filling the study with smoke.
Half of Makarygin’s small, highly polished desk was occupied by a big inkstand with a representation almost half a meter high of the Spassky Tower, complete with clock and star. The two massive inkwells (made to look like turrets on the Kremlin Wall) were dry. It was a long time since Makarygin had done any writing at home. He had plenty of time during office hours, and he wrote his letters with a fountain pen. Behind the glass doors of the Riga bookcases stood legal codes, collections of laws, sets of Soviet State and Law, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (the old erroneous edition, complete with “enemies of the people”), the new Great Soviet Encyclopedia (still with “enemies of the people”), and the Small Encyclopedia (also with mistakes and also containing “enemies of the people”).
It was a long time since Makarygin had opened any of these volumes because all of them, including the still officially operative but in fact hopelessly out-of-date Criminal Code of 1926, had been felicitously replaced by a bundle of supremely important and for the most part secret instructions, each of which he knew by its number—083 or 005/2742. These instructions, encapsulating all the wisdom of the judicial system, he kept in a single small file in his office. Here, in his study, books were kept not to be read but to inspire respect. The books Makarygin did read—in bed, on trains, at health resorts—were detective stories, which he kept hidden in a windowless cabinet.
A big portrait of Stalin in his generalissimo’s uniform hung over the desk, and there was a small bust of Lenin on a shelf.
Slovuta was a big-bellied man bursting out of his uniform, and the folds of his neck hung over his stiff collar. He looked around the study and gave it his approval.
“This is what I call living, Makarygin.”
“I don’t know. . . . I’m thinking of getting a transfer to oblast level.”
“Oblast level?” Slovuta turned it over quickly in his mind. His was not the face of a thinker—the heavy jaw and fat cheeks were its strong features—but he was quick to grasp essentials.
“Well, there might be some sense in it.”
They both knew what the point would be, and Radovich didn’t need to know. Oblast prosecutors got “packets” in addition to their basic salary. In the central military procuracy, you had to reach high rank before you could expect that.
“Your older son-in-law is a triple laureate?”
“He is,” the prosecutor answered proudly.
“And the younger one hasn’t made counselor first class yet?”
“Only second class at present.”
“He’s damned smart, though; he’ll make ambassador someday! Who do you think of marrying your youngest to?”
“She’s an obstinate wench, Slovuta. I’ve tried to marry her off, but she won’t have it.”
“An educated girl like her. What’s she looking for? An engineer?”
When Slovuta laughed, not only his belly but the whole upper part of his body heaved convulsively. “With eight hundred rubles a mont
h? Take my advice, and marry her to a Chekist*; that’s the best bet.”
As if Makarygin didn’t know it! In fact, he regarded his own life as a failure because he hadn’t managed to break into that charmed circle. The dimmest little operations officer in the most out-of-the-way hole had more power and got a bigger salary than an important law officer in the capital. The whole procuracy was regarded as a pointless farce, not worth its keep. Makarygin’s failure to become a Chekist was an inwardly bleeding wound.
“Right, then. Thank you for not forgetting me, Makarygin. Don’t press me to stay; I’m expected elsewhere. And you, Professor, look after yourself; don’t go getting ill again.”
“All the best, Comrade General.”
Radovich got up to say good-bye to the departing guest, but Slovuta didn’t hold out his hand. Radovich’s hurt look followed his fellow guest’s broad, round-shouldered figure as Makarygin escorted him to his car. Left alone with the books, he turned his attention to them. He drew his hand along a shelf and, after some hesitation, pulled out a book and was making for a chair when suddenly he noticed another small volume in a motley red-and-black binding on the table. He picked that up, too.
This other book burned his lifeless parchment-skinned hands. It was Tito:Traitor in Chief, by a certain Renaud de Jouvenel, just published in a first edition of one million copies.
Countless thousands of base, vicious, lying books had come Radovich’s way in the last dozen years, but it seemed a long time since he had held in his hands anything so obscene. He skimmed the new book’s pages with an old bookworm’s practiced eye, and it took him two minutes to work out who had thought such a book necessary and why, what sort of reptile its author was, and how much additional animus it would stir up against innocent Yugoslavia. His eye was caught by this sentence:
“There is no need to dwell in detail on László Rajk’s motives for confessing: He did confess—so obviously he was guilty.” Radovich, disgusted, put the book back where it had been. Of course there was no need to dwell in detail on his motives! No need to dwell in detail on the way interrogators and torturers beat Rajk, tormented him with hunger and sleeplessness, spread him out on the floor, perhaps, so that they could pinch his genitals with the toe of a boot. (Abramson, a prisoner of long standing with whom Radovich had felt a close affinity from the moment they met at Sterlitamak, had told him all about the NKVD’s little ways.) He had confessed—so obviously he was guilty! The summa summarum of Stalinist justice!
In the First Circle Page 62
