But Yugoslavia was too sore a point to touch on in conversation with Pyotr, then and there. So when his host returned, automatically casting a loving glance at the new decoration lying beside the tarnished older ones, Dushan was sitting quietly in his chair and reading a volume of the Encyclopedia.
“They don’t lavish honors on public prosecutors,” Makarygin said with a sigh. “They gave some away for the thirtieth anniversary, but only a few people got them.”
He very much wanted to talk about decorations and why he had been one of those honored on that occasion, but Radovich lowered his head and went on reading.
Makarygin took another cigar from the drawer and plopped down on the sofa.
“Thank you, Dushan, for not sounding off. I was afraid you might.”
“What could I have said to embarrass you?” Radovich asked in surprise.
“Lots of things!” Makarygin clipped his cigar. “You’re always sticking your neck out.” He lit his cigar. “Like when he was telling us about the Japanese . . . it was on the tip of your tongue.”
Radovich shot upright. “Because a filthy police provocation stinks ten thousand kilometers off!”
“Dushan! You must be out of your mind! Don’t dare talk like that in my presence! How can you talk like that about our Party?”
Radovich hedged.
“I’m not talking about the Party. I’m talking about Slovuta and his ilk. Why have we suddenly discovered in 1949 what the Japanese were up to in 1943? After all, we’ve had Japanese prisoners here for four years. And what’s this about the Americans dropping Colorado beetles on us from the air? Is that true as well?”
Makarygin’s bat ears reddened.
“Why shouldn’t it be? And if it doesn’t quite add up, it’s still politically necessary.”
The parchment-colored Radovich began turning pages irritably.
Makarygin smoked in silence. Should never have invited the man. Only let myself down in Slovuta’s eyes. Old friendships aren’t worth bothering about. Best to let them remain memories. The man can’t even behave with normal politeness, show some awareness of what gives his host pleasure and what worries him, as any guest should.
He smoked on. Unpleasant scenes with his youngest daughter came into his mind. Whenever they dined without guests, just the three of them, in recent months, what should have been a relaxed and cozy family meal had become a dogfight at the table. The other day she had been pounding a nail down in her shoe, singing some meaningless rigmarole as she did so, but to a tune her father knew only too well. Trying to keep cool, he remarked, “You might have chosen a different song to go with that job, Klara. ‘The Wide, Wide World’s Aflood with Tears’ is a song people died or went to Siberia singing.”
Out of sheer willfulness or for whatever reason, she bridled and said, “Did they, now, noble souls! Went to Siberia, did they? Well, they’re still going!”
The prosecutor was taken aback by the impertinence and impropriety of the analogy. How could anybody so completely lose all sense of historical perspective? Barely restraining himself from striking his daughter, he tore the shoe from her hands and hurled it to the floor.
“How can you make such comparisons! Between the party of the working class and that fascist scum!”
She was so hardened that she wouldn’t cry even if you punched her in the head. She stood there with one shoe on and one stockinged foot on the parquet floor.
“Spare me the rhetoric, Daddy! What do you have to do with the working class? You were a worker for two years once, but you’ve been a prosecutor for thirty now! Call yourself a worker—there isn’t so much as a hammer in the house! Being determines consciousness—you’re the one who taught us that!”
“Social being, you idiot! And social consciousness!”
“Take your choice, then. Some live in palaces and some in pigsties; some ride in cars and others have holes in their shoes. Which society are you talking about?”
Her father was left gasping. The age-old impossibility of briefly and clearly explaining to foolish young minds the wisdom of their elders. . . .
“You’re just stupid! You understand nothing, and you refuse to learn!”
“So teach me! Teach me! Whose money do you live on? Why do they pay you thousands when you produce nothing?”
The prosecutor had no answer to that; or, rather, the answer was obvious, but you couldn’t come straight out with it. He could only say heatedly, “Well, what do you do to earn eighteen hundred in your institute?”
His hard feelings toward his old friend were suddenly forgotten.
“Tell me, Dushan,” he said, “what am I going to do with this daughter of mine?”
Makarygin’s ears stuck out from his head like the wings of a sphinx. A look of bewilderment was strangely out of place on that face.
“How could it come to this, Dushan? When we had Konchak on the run, could we ever have imagined what sort of gratitude we would get from our children? If they have to take the platform and swear allegiance to the Party, the wretches rattle it off inaudibly as if they were ashamed.”
He told Radovich the story of the shoe.
“What ought I to have answered?” he asked.
Radovich took a grubby scrap of chamois leather out of his pocket and cleaned his glasses. There was a time when Makarygin had known all the answers, but his mind seemed to have gone to sleep.
“What should you have said? You should have told her about cumulative labor. Education, special qualifications, are a form of accumulated labor and are more highly paid.” He put his glasses on again and looked hard at the prosecutor.
“Still, the girl is basically right. We were warned often enough.”
The prosecutor was taken aback. “Warned? By whom?”
“We must know how to learn from our enemies.” Dushan raised a bony finger. ‘ “The Wide, Wide World Is Drowned in Tears.’ How many thousands do you get? While a cleaner gets 250 rubles?”
One of Makarygin’s cheeks twitched. Dushan had become spiteful. Envied others because he had nothing himself.
“You’ve gone crazy in your hermit’s cave! You’re out of touch with real life! You’ll come to a bad end! What am I supposed to do, go along tomorrow and ask to be paid 250 a month? How could I live on that? Anyway, they’d take me for a madman and kick me out! Nobody else is going to refuse the money!”
Dushan pointed at the bust of Lenin. “Remember how Ilyich refused to eat butter during the Civil War? Or white bread? Did people think he was mad?”
Dushan sounded almost tearful.
Makarygin warded off his attack with splayed fingers.
“Bah! You mean you believed it? Lenin didn’t go without butter, never fear. In fact, there was a pretty good staff dining room in the Kremlin even in those days.”
Radovich rose. His foot had gone to sleep, and he limped over to the shelf and picked up a framed photograph of a young woman in a leather jacket holding a Mauser.
“Didn’t Lena side with Shlyapnikov? Do you remember what the Workers’ Opposition said?”
“Put it down!” Makarygin had turned pale. “Don’t disturb her memory! You’re just a diehard! A diehard!”
“No, I’m no diehard! I just want Leninist purity.”
Radovich lowered his voice.
“Nobody writes about it here. In Yugoslavia there’s workers’ control in industry. . . .”
Makarygin gave an unfriendly laugh. “Of course, you’re a Serb, and it isn’t easy for a Serb to be objective. I understand and I forgive you. But. . . .”
But . . . they had reached the brink.
Radovich fell silent and shrank into himself, became a desiccated little man again.
“Finish what you were saying, you diehard, you!” Makarygin angrily demanded. “According to you, the semifascist regime in Yugoslavia is real socialism? And what we have here is a degenerate form? That’s all old stuff. We heard it long ago. Only, those who said it are in kingdom come now. You’ll be saying next t
hat we’re doomed to perish in the struggle with the capitalist world. Am I right?”
“No! No!” Radovich shot up again, his face radiant with prophetic certainty. “That will never happen! The capitalist world is consumed by much worse contradictions. Great Lenin foretold, and I firmly believe, that we shall soon witness armed conflict over markets between the United States and Britain!”
* * *
* Chekist: A Chekist belongs to the Cheka, a shorthand term for the original name of the Soviet secret police (1917-1922), the full name being the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage and Speculation.
Chapter 64
Entered Cities First
IN THE BIG ROOM they were dancing to a record player, one of the new, console type. The Makarygins had a cabinet full of records. There were the speeches of their Father and Friend, mumbling and droning with his Georgian accent. (No home could be called well supplied without them, though normal people, the Makarygins included, never listened to them.) There were songs about “Our Own, Our Beloved Leader” and songs in which airplanes “came first,” while girls took second place (though listening to them here would have been as improper as speaking seriously of biblical miracles in a pre-Revolutionary drawing room). The records in fashion now were imported but not to be found in the shops and never broadcast by Soviet radio. They even included songs sung by the émigré Leshchenko.
The furniture took up too much room for all the couples to dance at once, so they took turns. The young people present included girls who had been Klara’s classmates; a man from their class whose job now was jamming foreign broadcasts; the girl, a relative of the prosecutor, who was responsible for Shchagov’s presence; a nephew of the prosecutor’s wife, a lieutenant in the Internal Security Troops whom everybody called a “frontier guard” because of his green piping (his company was in fact attached to the Belorussian Station in Moscow to inspect passengers’ documents on trains and carry out arrests that proved necessary en route). One young man, a statesmanlike figure with smooth, already thinning hair, stood out from all the rest; he already had the Order of Lenin but wore just the ribbon, without the medal itself, carelessly (or carefully?) pinned slantwise.
This young man was twenty-four or so, but his comportment—the restrained movements of his hands, the gravely pursed lips—was intended to make him look at least thirty. He was one of the highly valued consultants employed by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and his main job was drafting speeches to be delivered by deputies at future sessions. The young man found this work extremely boring, but his prospects were of the brightest. Getting him to attend her party was in itself a triumph for Alevtina Nikanorovna, and marrying him to Klara was her wildest dream.
To the young man himself, the only interesting thing about the party was the presence of Galakhov and his wife. He had danced three times with Dinera. In her long black dress of imported silk she seemed to be sheathed in shiny black leather, with only her smooth, white forearms showing. Flattered by the responsiveness of such a famous woman, the young man grew bolder and tried to detain her after they had danced.
She, however, had spotted Saunkin-Golovanov, who did not dance and was at ease nowhere outside his editorial office, sitting in the corner of a sofa. She made straight for this square head mounted on a square body. The young consultant glided after her.
“E-rik!” she cried. “Why didn’t I see you at the premiere of 1919?”
Golovanov brightened.
“Went last night,” he said and moved up to make more room on the sofa, although he was at the very end already.
Dinera sat. The consultant sat down beside her.
If Dinera felt like an argument, it was hopeless trying to avoid it. Indeed, you’d be lucky if she let you get a word in edgewise. She was the subject of an epigram of sorts current in Moscow literary circles: “Oh how I enjoy my silent hours with you—I have to, for you never let me speak.” With no literary position and no Party office to inhibit her, Dinera boldly (but never overstepping the mark) attacked playwrights, scriptwriters, and producers, not sparing even her own husband. Her daring judgments, together with the daring way she dressed and her daring past, which everybody knew about, made her very attractive and agreeably enlivened the vapid judgments of timid literary officeholders. She attacked literary critics in general and the articles of Ernst Golovanov in particular. Golovanov showed forbearance and tirelessly alerted Dinera to her anarchistic errors and petit bourgeois backslidings. He was happy to keep up this humorous pretense of friendly enmity; his literary future depended on Galakhov.
“Do you remember,” said Dinera, striking a dreamy pose for which the hard back of the sofa proved too uncomfortable—“do you remember in another of Vishnevsky’s plays, An Optimistic Tragedy, that chorus of two sailors? One says, ‘Isn’t there too much blood in this tragedy,’ and the other says, ‘No more than in Shakespeare.’ Now that’s what I call clever! So you go to this new Vishnevsky play all agog. And what do you get? It’s realistic enough, of course, and the portrayal of the Leader is impressive, but, but . . . what else can you say?”
“What more do you want?” the consultant protested. “I don’t remember ever seeing such a moving representation of Iosif Vissarionovich. Many people in the audience shed tears.”
“I had tears in my eyes, too,” Dinera retorted. “That’s not what I’m talking about.” She turned to Golovanov again. “Hardly anybody in the play has a name. The dramatis personae are all faceless—three Party secretaries, seven senior officers, four commissars. It’s like the minutes of a meeting. And yet again, brief glimpses of the ‘little brothers,’ those sailors forever on the move from Belotserkovsky to Lavrenev, from Lavrenev to Vishnevsky, from Vishnevsky to Sobolev”—Dinera emphasized each name with a blink and a toss of the head—“you know from the start which are the goodies and which are the baddies, and how it will all end. . . .”
“Well, what’s wrong with that?” Golovanov asked in amazement. He livened up when he was talking shop. He looked like a hound following a good scent. “Why do you always want the unreal but superficially entertaining? Is life really like that? In real life did our fathers ever doubt how the Civil War would end? Did we ourselves ever doubt how the Fatherland War would end, even when the enemy was on the outskirts of Moscow?”
“And is a playwright ever in doubt how his play will be received? Explain to me, Erik, why first nights in Moscow are never a flop? Why don’t playwrights live in dread of a first-night flop? Honestly, I won’t be able to stop myself one of these days; I will put my fingers in my mouth and give such a whistle!”
She mimed it prettily, though it was obvious that no whistle would result.
“Certainly I’ll explain!” Golovanov said, unperturbed. “Plays in our country do not and cannot fail because playwright and public are in harmony both on the artistic and ideological level.”
This was too boring. The consultant straightened his yellow-and-blue tie once, straightened it again, and rose to leave them. One of Klara’s classmates, a thin, amiable girl, had been quite openly eyeing him all evening, and he decided to dance with her. A two-step. Then one of the Bashkir maids started carrying ice cream around. Two chairs had been pushed into the narrow space in front of the balcony door. The consultant steered his partner toward them, sat her down, and complimented her on her dancing.
She smiled encouragement and began chattering.
The budding statesman had come across willing females often enough but had not yet tired of them. This girl, now—all he need do was tell her where and when to turn up. He eyed her slender neck, her still-unripe breasts, and, taking advantage of the fact that curtains partly concealed them from the room, graciously captured the hand that lay on her knee.
She began talking excitedly. “Such luck meeting you here like this, Vitaly Yevgenievich! Don’t be angry with me for troubling you off duty. Only, I could never get past Reception at the Supreme Soviet” (Vitaly removed
his hand from hers). “Your Secretariat has had papers from the camp about my father for six months now, he’s had a stroke, and he’s still there, paralyzed, and I’m petitioning for a pardon.” (Vitaly leaned back helplessly in his chair and dug his spoon into the ball of ice cream. The girl had forgotten hers. Her hand clumsily brushed against the spoon, which somersaulted, left a spot on her dress, and fell by the balcony door. She let it lie.) “His right side is completely paralyzed! If he has another stroke, he’ll die, and he hasn’t got long to live anyway. Why keep him in prison any longer?”
The consultant looked sour.
“It’s . . . it isn’t very tactful of you to approach me here, you know. Our office number isn’t secret. Call me there, and I’ll make an appointment. What is your father in for, anyway? Article 58?”
“No, no, certainly not!” the girl exclaimed with relief. “You surely don’t think I’d dare ask you if he were a political offender? He was sentenced under the law of August seventh!”
“It comes to the same thing. Remission has also been abolished for people sentenced under the law of August seventh.”
“But that’s horrible! He’ll die in that camp! Why keep a terminally sick man in prison?”
The consultant looked her straight in the eye.
“If we take that line, what will be left of the whole legal code?” He grinned. “After all, he was duly tried and found guilty! Just think! What if he does die in the camp? People die in camps just like anywhere else. When the time comes, what does it matter where anybody dies?”
In the First Circle Page 63
