by Kim Newman
"I predict Yul will have a shock at the next script meeting."
"Why's that?" Cinzia asked.
Brynner carried himself like a king. There was authority in everything he did. Now he held out his hand, never looking away from Sanders, and someone placed a glass in it. He was famous as Prince Bolkonsky in The Rostovs, ITV's most successful beet opera.
"Because Natasha's going to go by August."
"Mother will be devastated. She always says Natasha's not really a bitch, just misunderstood."
"That's as may be, but the board just looked at Talia Gurdin's demand for a pay hike and have decided 'Tasha Rostova is going to be kidnapped by a flying samovar and returned to Earth as a disfigured hag. A
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chin-dimpled plastic surgeon played by Issur Demsky will reconstruct her in the likeness of a more affordable actress who happens to be mistress of the Head of Quality Drama."
"But that's ridiculous!"
"Cinzia Davidovna, it's no more ridiculous than anything else that happens in The Rostovs. Remember when everyone was assassinated by anarchists but it turned out to be Natasha's dream? Nothing in tele is real. The more unreal it is, the more the people like it."
Issac Judaiovch was difficult: always complaining, usually patronising, probably a lech. But it wasn't all charlatanry: he really could see the future. In cabbalist robes, he was presenter of ITV's top-rated gruel-time show, It's Your Fate. He began with a mystic weather forecast, ran through everyone's horoscopes and read tarot for guest celebrities to whom he was spectacularly rude ("I see you in the future," he had told Peter Ustinov, "entering your anecdotage"). He used means occult and mathematical to try to predict the kind of people who would win this week's lottery. He had never yet been right, but millions believed in his powers. His strongest suit was predicting the career reversals of politicians and the romantic down-turns of film stars. Much of it came from sitting in the Happy Guys Club and listening. If you needed gossip, Isaac Judaiovich had it.
"What will Brynner do?" she asked.
"Go back to the kinos. He's signed up for a cossack picture in which he leads a band of mercenaries in saving a poor village from a band of marauding Chechens."
At the far end of the room, by the tall windows, gathered a drunken mainly male group. Illya Kuriakin, the game show host, was at its centre. A scar-faced lad hauled a revolver out of his kaftan.
"Bozhe moi!" exclaimed Isaac, foreseeing trouble.
The gun-owner spun the chamber and handed it over. Kuriakin drunkenly waved the revolver around, an extremely effective way of getting elbow-room. He sat on a velvet-upholstered chair, and, gripping the weapon with both hands, held the barrel against his rainbow-pattern left boot about where his big toe would be. The room fell silent as Kuriakin squinted down, tongue sticking out as he tried to focus through vodka fog. The hammer clicked against an empty chamber. Everyone cheered. Kuriakin bowed, spun the chamber and handed the gun to another man.
Kuriakin was another tele personality, presenter of Russian Roulette. Ordinary people came on and spun a giant mock-up revolver. If they got
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an "empty chamber" they won a fortune. If they got the "bullet" they had to give all they owned, down to their children's toys, to charity.
Bloody silly, really.
"Cinzia, you look troubled," Isaac said.
"Nothing's wrong," she said.
Apart from the fact that she had no chance of getting back into medical school unless Mother won the lottery or her brother got a job. The odds of winning the lottery were eighteen million to one. A better bet than Vladimir getting a job.
"Nothing's wrong, child," Isaac pronounced, "but nothing's right either."
"Nichevo" she shrugged. Lousy job, few prospects. She was off men, too.
The seer took an empty ashtray and scooped melt-water from an ice-bucket. Sacramentally, he put the ashtray on the table.
"Take my hands," said the seer, "and we'll penetrate the veil of the future."
Yeah, sure, she thought, giving him her hands anyway.
"Now look into the water. What do you see?"
An ashtray full of water.
Isaac stared intently. His face reddened and veins in his temples throbbed as though he were suffering from constipation, yet his hands grasped hers gently.
"You will marry a prince," he said, matter-of-factly. "I know you don't believe me and I don't blame you. But sometimes, just sometimes, I see things so clearly I could almost be watching tele. Cinzia Davidovna, before this year's leaves have fallen, you will be married to a man who is wealthy, kind, dignified and courageous beyond words. And a Prince."
She laughed. He laughed. She leaned over and kissed him. "You are too kind, Isaac Judaiovich."
He shrugged. "You'll see."
Cologne stung her nostrils as someone oozed into a free space by their table. A hand settled on her shoulder.
"Prince Yussupov, what a pleasure," lied Isaac as the new newscaster sat next to them. The Prince didn't take his hand off her shoulder.
"You dirty old dog, Asimov," said Prince Felix Dimitrovich Yussupov, looking at her as if she were a plate of strawberries in honey. "Who's your charming young friend?"
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"Prince Yussupov, may I introduce Cinzia Davidovna Bronstein."
"Are you a good little Jewish girl, Cinzia Davidovna, or might we be fortunate enough to assume you consort with goyimV"
The Prince was in his late twenties, six-feet-something tall, built like an Olympic athlete. His blonde hair was permed, his flared jeans and jacket were of fashionably-distressed fabric de Nimes, and his cheesecloth shirt was open at the chest to reveal a cultivated thatch of hair and a gold icon with an inset diamond the size of a quail's egg.
"It depends," she said.
"On what?" said the Prince.
"Whether he's a mensch or a schmuck"
"You have beautiful cheekbones. I would very much like to get to know you better."
"Why? I'm a Jewish make-up girl. You're a newsreader with a title. If those magazines my mother is always reading are to be believed you own about a fifth of Russia, as well as stretches of the Ukraine, Siberia and the nmea.
"You forget Georgia, Tadjikistan and a golf course in Scotland. I own the highest mountain in the Crimea. It was given to my grandmother as a birthday present. Would you care for it? You are pretty. You could have pretty things."
"Like a mountain? I suppose you'd marry me, heirii Would you like having a Jewish mother-in-law? With all the things you own, why do you want to be a newsreader?"
He grinned as he lit a Sobranje with his flip-top Faberge. "Because I want to be loved, and I'd love you to love me."
She laughed. "I can't possibly love you!"
"Whyever not?"
"Because I would have to admire and respect you. You'd have to prove your physical and moral courage, you'd have to be kind to children and animals and the poor. Tell you what: if you donate ten million roubles to the Petrograd Free Hospital, I'll let you take me to dinner."
"You're the most expensive whore I've ever met! You fascinate me, Cinzia Davidovna."
His hand was in her hair again. She shook it free.
"Shall I tell you something even more fascinating? Isaac Judaiovich has just been scrying the future. He tells me I am to marry a prince. It could be you, Felix Dimitrovich Yussupov, but I wouldn't sleep with you unless you gave away all your property to the poor. We could live
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comfortably on your newsreader's salary. My mother would have to live with us, of course."
He stubbed out his cigarette, bored. "I suppose a quick fuck in the carriage park's out of the question then?"
She nodded.
He got up. "I'll see you again, Cinzia Davidovna. Cheerio, Asimov."
The newsreader strode off, jacket flouncing en pelisse.
"You should be mindful of him," said Isaac. "He's dangerous. Self-preservation should be your first law. Yussupoff is not above getting you jumped in a back alley and flown to some distant dacha."
"Then I'd have to hammer a tent-peg into his eye."
"You would too. You're quite a girl, Cinzia. You'd make a man very happy or very miserable. Nothing in between."
She raised her glass. "Here's to my prince. Just as long as it isn't Yussupov."
There was another flurry at the door. Middle-aged men marched in, handing coats to the ushers. At first sight, they did not belong in this gathering of glamorous and good-looking. Their boxy 1950s clothes suggested influence rather than fame. Cinzia recognised two television producers and a Member of the Duma. Among them was an unfamiliar face, a dignified, fastidious-looking type in an immaculate suit. He was obviously European, but the immense distance between his nose and top lip suggested something more exotic.
One of the producers spotted Isaac, waved, and ushered the strange-looking man towards their table.
Isaac stood and shook the producer's hand. "Bondarchuk! So you've come to Georgi's wake! Will you join us? May I introduce Cinzia Davidovna."
"Oh I know Cinzia. She's covers Georgi's vodka-blossoms," said Bondarchuk, taking her outstretched hand and kissing it. He was a little too old and formal to shake it. "Normally we have make-up girls, but Cinzia Davidovna is a make-up artist."
Bondarchuk pulled up a chair for his guest. "Permit me to introduce Sir Anthony Blunt. Personal assistant to the Dowager Duchess of York. He has come from London to help with the imperial wedding."
Sir Anthony nodded curtly. Because of her fluent English, Cinzia was assigned to work double shifts during the wedding story. She supposed she should be grateful.
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Sir Anthony was about to sit down when he noticed one of the pictures. A framed 1920s Rodchenko poster, advertising baby pacifiers. THERE HAVE NEVER BEEN SUCH GOOD DUMMIES! SUCK 'EM 'TIL YOU'RE OLD! The Englishman took a closer look while Bondarchuk whistled up champagne.
Blunt moved further along the wall to some Lissitzky posters for Red Wedge beer, and more Rodchenkos, with the pithy slogans by Mayakovsky. The Happy Guys Club was decorated almost exclusively with the products of "Advertisement Constructors, Mayakovsky-Rodchenko"
When Sir Anthony was out of earshot, Bondarchuk leaned his head towards Isaac and the table. "Isaac Judaiovich, humour this fish. He's a courtier straight out of the ancien regime. I've baby-sat him all day and I'd pay two years' salary to see him guillotined."
Sir Anthony sat down next to her. She smiled at him. He ignored her and eyed the champagne disdainfully.
Bondarchuk continued talking to them, smiling and nodding at his guest, "This prick Blunt doesn't want any of the engagement and wedding to be on tele in the first place. He's worried that it interferes with the monarchical dignity of the occasion. It's okay Isaac, he doesn't speak a word of Russian. Dignity of the monarchy! Who's madder, Nicky or his sainted Edward VIII?"
Cinzia spoke to Sir Anthony in English, "you are interested in advertising, Sir Anthony?"
"No, I am interested in art. Rodchenko intrigues me. Idealistic and brutal at the same time. One cannot help but feel that his talents would have been better employed by a totalitarian regime."
From the corner of her eye she saw Bondarchuk nudging Isaac in the ribs.
"Do you not think, Sir Anthony, that some advertising aspires to art?"
"Much great art was produced to glorify a wealthy patron. Advertising is the same, but the patron is a corporation. Charles I favoured Van Dyck because he made him look like a king."
"So now," she said, rubbing the lip of her glass with her finger, carefully avoiding Sir Anthony's eye, "our Tsar wants tele to take up the brush of Van Dyck."
Isaac, she knew, spoke English. So, she assumed, did Bondarchuk. Both looked into the air, pursing lips, nodding as though she had said something wise.
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Sir Anthony looked at her. "Your English is very good. Almost accentless. Are you British?"
"My mother is."
"The medium is neutral, whether paint or a cathode ray tube. What matters is the way in which the medium is employed. Van Dyck did not paint Charles stuffing his face with fowl, or scratching his fleas, or sitting on the commode. From what little I know, Russian television is solely interested in royalty on the commode."
"Bondarchuk, that's a great idea!" said Isaac. "I could interview people on the crapper...just a little cabalist humour."
Sir Anthony's disapproval was jarred by a feedback whine. "Weepy" Krasnevin, Director of Current Affairs Broadcasting, had picked up the microphone and was waiting for silence. Quiet came, but was instantly interrupted by a click and relief as someone else in Kuriakin's group didn't shoot his toes off.
"My friends," said Krasnevin, eyes dribbling crocodile tears, "this is a sad day for us all."
Except Prince Yussupov, she thought.
"Georgi Sanders is, one might say, a giant. He is the father of Russian current affairs broadcasting. His voice carried us through the dark days of the Great Patriotic War, the Alsace-Lorraine missile crisis, the assassination of Premier Smoktunovsky. You must all join me in wishing him the best for the future..."
Everyone clapped and cheered, banged fists on tables, stamped on the floor as Georgi bounded onto the low stage. Krasnevin, who had schemed for years to be rid of the newscaster, sobbed deeply and embraced the man he had just fired.
Cinzia saw the slightly smelly, bum-grasping salon snake she had sometimes thickly powdered, but recalled the suave, clear-sighted Sanders of wartime wireless and '50s television. The first Russian newsman to penetrate Capone's America. His sarcasm had been the single greatest factor in derailing the hysterical anti-Red pogroms of Ayn Rand. And he had tricked ITV into broadcasting footage taken amid the bloody shambles of the Duma's Indo-Chinese police action.
Georgi bowed to his audience, but did not smile.
Krasnevin took a carriage clock in the shape of Misha the Prime Time Bear from an impossibly beautiful girl and shoved it at Georgi. Between gales of tears, he garbled about "a small token of our affection".
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Georgi's lip curled. He swayed as though on the deck of a Baltic steamer in a bracing wind. He took the mike.
"I asked for a Faberge egg full of cocaine, but you got me a fucking clock."
"It's solid gold you ungrateful old bastard!" shouted Yussupoff.
Georgi bit into one of Misha's huge ears.
"So it is. Well, I'm touched. No, really I am."
There was an uncomfortable silence as Georgi carefully laid the Misha clock down on the floor, with more concern for his dignity than the clock's safety.
"Most careers end in tears and mine is one of them. I don't really want to go because I know retirement will bore me to suicide."
A huge monitor on a big wooden stand was wheeled towards the stage by minions.
"I hope you're looking forward to tele with pedigree. All the news the Tsar will own up to, read by pretty boys with lineages back to the Tartar bum chums of Peter the Great. As a farewell, I'd like to show you some film not broadcast on the orders of our magnificent emperor. A last taste of the sort of thing you won't be seeing on tele for a long time."
Everyone was listening now. Cinzia half-expected the Okhrana to burst in and arrest Georgi for sedition. Georgi signalled, and minions worked the machines.
"Can someone get the lights?"
The room went dark and chairs were turned towards the front, glasses were refilled, spectacles discreetly fished from inside pockets.
"Go on Illya," said someone, "a last time. Double or quits."
The screen came to light, first a fuzzy grey snowstorm, then bars.
There was a deafening discharge, screeches, a yelp of manly pain. Sir Anthony cringed as if he was the one the revolver had been sh
ot at.
Brynner said, "get an ice-bucket, put the toe in it and take him to the hospital. The new Chinese surgeon might be able to sew it back on."
Onscreen: a pockmarked landscape with no vegetation. It looked like a far-Eastern desert, except the sky was completely black. Two figures bounced into view, encumbered by bulbous pressure suits.
"Bozhe moil" said Bondarchuk.
Everyone knew what this was. In July 1969, the Imperial Space Program culminated with the lunar expedition. Count Rennenkampf and Count Ignatieff had died in the crash-landing of the Star of Russia and hailed as heroes of the motherland. But there were rumours that the
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landing had been successful and the cosmonauts perished later in some terrible manner that had been hushed up.
"This is Baikonur, talk to us, excellencies,'" crackled the soundtrack.
- bleep -
Cinzia heard wild tales that the cosmonauts had been eaten by some fabulous monster out of the Strugatsky paperbacks her brother read.
"No hospital," said Kuriakin. "This I have to see."
"Baikonur, this is Baikonur. Respectfully, talk to us, excellencies. Your wireless is not down. "
She recognised Valentin Bondarenko, Russia's first-ever cosmonaut and Director of the Space Program.
The Counts bounded around the lunar desert, light as children's balloons.
" This is Baikonur, excellencies. You are making us all look extremely foolish. "
No reply.
Another voice: " Velikovsky here. If you two titled pricks don t start acting like cosmonauts, Til... "
Finally, from one of the lunar explorers: "You 11 do what, Jew?" - bleep! -
Immanuel Velikovsky was President of the Bureau of Space Exploration. He had single-handedly built it from government department to semi-public corporation. When the Duma wanted to cut its funding to spare taxpayers' purses in an election year, Velikovsky enlisted private money by creating corporations to exploit spinoffs from space research, from technology through to television rights. Not one of these companies was in profit. Shareholders tended to be Strugatsky fans, people who believed they might be fabulously rich in thirty years' time, and the Imperial family. The Tsar had gained enormous influence over the space program.
