The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  “In his depiction of these change times [Gorbachev’s Russia], Barbero’s political intelligence is apparent. So, however, is his skill as a novelist, … Finally, and best of all, there is the talk. Russians are great talkers and the novel floats on a sea of wonderfully varied, expressive and tremendous speech. … If you have any feeling for Russia or for the art of the novel, then read this one.” – The Scotsman

  “Barbero writes in a bright and breezy, satirical style,…, which leads the reader to believe that some Russian master has been leaning over his shoulder, guiding his hand. … It is a deeply rewarding pleasure to be lost in this novel.” – The Herald

  “Barbero uses the diabolic skills of an erudite and professional narrator to seek out massacres of the distant and recent past. The Anonymous Novel concerns the past-that-never-passes (whether Tsarist or Stalinist) and the future that in 1988 was impending and has now arrived.” – Il Giornale

  “Barbero is an absorbing and eloquent narrator who is very capable at continuously juggling an abundance of stories and a great number of characters, whose frenetic movements judiciously evolve with a complicit suspense even when they are entirely marginal and encountered only once during the animated events involving those who have the onerous task of being the main protagonists.” – La Stampa

  “As in a vast Russian river, thousands of rivulets and currents intersect with each other in Barbero’s novel, which provides us with an amazing snapshot of the reality of yesterday and today with all the endless nuances, and holds our attention with the events of a police investigation.” – L’Indice

  The Anonymous Novel

  Sensing the future torments

  by Alessandro Barbero

  Translated by Allan Cameron

  Contents

  Title page

  Prologue

  I. A suitcaseful of tomatoes

  II. Love in the morning

  III. Old newspapers

  IV. Mahogany

  V. The tenants of Chkalova Street

  VI. Nazar Kallistratovich Lappa

  VII. The Astafyev affair

  VIII. The Thaw

  IX. At Cinema Minsk

  X. Chimut-Dorzhev

  XI. Yellow flowers

  XII. Fish soup

  XIII. Strangers on a train

  XIV. Amongst the believers

  XV. The Sura of the Spider

  XVI. Koshchey Bessmertny

  XVII. Nazar’s trip to the country

  XVIII. The Accountant’s bolt-hole

  XIX. A conspiracy of women

  XX. The exhumation

  XXI. The red wolves

  XXII. Cooking the lamb

  XXIII. Tricks of the heat

  XXIV. The toffs’ talking shop

  XXV. The purple notebook

  XXVI. Animals in the city

  XXVII. The conversation

  XXVIII. In the steam room

  XXIX. Tennis

  XXX. A dead man beckons

  XXXI. Foul weather has the wolves wandering in

  XXXII. The new world

  XXXIII. A funeral in Baku

  XXXIV. Matroskaya Tishina

  XXXV. The glory of empire

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  Copyright

  The Anonymous Novel

  Prologue

  When you land in Moscow at night and the plane slowly banks around the city while awaiting permission to land, your gaze through the side window can hardly avoid the university’s skyscraper standing on the Sparrow Hills. The lights from the innumerable windows are weak, it is true, but they shine in the dark, and on the highest spire the red star glows, as it has for so long. The skyscraper is still there – for the moment. It may well be that one day they will demolish it with dynamite, and in its place, who knows, maybe they’ll dig a hole and make a swimming pool: I don’t think anyone is seriously talking about this yet, but it would be a pity. A fanciful foreigner once compared it to a medieval castle covered with alembics and observatories, while in its dungeons computers palpitate and alchemists wear white overalls. Crows make their nests in its battlements and bats drowse in its towers, their heads hanging downwards. And perhaps there really are witches and fairies who endure tiresome lives in one of its forgotten storerooms or amongst the dusty showcases of its museum of natural history. Many people dislike it. They find it architectural nightmare and, indeed, a reactionary monument: “the quintessential…” how did he phrase it? I have the cutting here; give us a moment, he put it so well! Yes, here it is: “the quintessential schizophrenia in town planning that plagued us in other times”.

  Sorokin, however, says that this building was not built for men or by them, but rather by the state for the state: what a pity then that people actually study there! It would be better if it existed solely for itself and that no one lived there except Hegel’s ghost. The Thing in Itself… Of course, Sorokin can write and you have to take your hat off to him for that. And yet, take a look at a photograph of the skyscrapers that the Americans were building at the same time, and tell me that they don’t resemble each other! You could switch the central spire of our one with, say, the one on the Chrysler Building, and most people would never notice the difference. Damn it, now I’ve got this nagging doubt: perhaps that style, which we have always taken for Stalin’s unmistakable hallmark, was simply a product of contemporary tastes that were the same around the world. Here in Moscow, just as in New York, Sweden and, God knows, Australia… There is always something to do there. If you don’t need a book from the library, you can go in search of some acquaintance, sit down in the café with a fruit juice, join the queue for the barber’s or go for a swim in the pool. Why not snoop around the dormitory corridors and put your ear to the doors so that you can hear what is going on behind them, especially ones through which a couple have just gone hand in hand? I too have lived there – for three or four years; I shared a room with Alekseyev; you know the guy?

  He’s a painter. One of his paintings was hung on the further wall just behind our foldaway beds. It was a metre high and two wide. At that time it was the only place in the whole of the Soviet Union where they would have allowed him to hang it. It depicted a man seated on a toilet bowl, intent upon reading a copy of Pravda. All you could see of the man were the hairy legs with his breeks down by his ankles and the brim of his hat protruding at the top… The paper was of its actual size and produced by collage: you could have read it, if you wanted to – it was all there! There was a photo of an eighteen-year-old Uzbek weaver on her first day of work at the carpet factory, and another of a Ukrainian foreman who had committed himself to fulfilling a contract for 16.3 quintals of corn per hectare. There was even the interview with the commander of Mig-23 squadron stationed in the GDR. I can still recall how it started, and the title was “On the Front Line”: “As I walked with Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Mamaliga at the edge of the runway, another fighter was taken out of its hangar. Military service in the Soviet Armies in Germany is difficult. There can be no easy tasks in Germany, but still less here. A simple statement of geographical significance: our community’s frontier, the last outpost, is barely ten kilometres away.” I well remember Alexseyev producing that painting right there in our room at the dormitory. We were both first-year students, and he would sit at the easel next to a pile of old newspapers, as he looked for choice articles. This caused a difference of opinion amongst our little group of friends: was the artist right to reconstitute the page of a newspaper with cuttings from different issues, or wouldn’t it have been better to take any whole page at random and stick it up there exactly as it was? The result, most of us argued, would have been the same. You cannot improve on nature’s work… But this is just a jumble of words. It makes no sense, so
meone will object. For instance, what has Alekseyev to do with it? Well, quite a bit, actually. He was the one who came up with the idea of going to Zyuzino a couple of years ago.

  This was still the period in which the Muscovite Underground had to be understood literally: everyone was going mad for that Mother Earth stuff – the vital humidity of the world underground. Misha Roshal staged an open-air performance in which he had himself buried, and the title was of course Underground. Monastyrsky thought he was a shaman, and wrote poems to his woman in which he invited her to join him in his tomb and gnaw at his bones. And Nikita, that’s Alekseyev’s name, painted a colonel in uniform with chicken’s claws, and entitled it “Humid Mother-Earth”.

  He then organised the exhibition for the underground world at the Avant-Garde Club. We went in procession to Zyuzino, one miserable afternoon under a leaden sky that promised the first snow: naturally it was All Souls’ Day. Nikita had managed to bring together quite a few people who had a car, even journalists: there’s never been such a happening, he said, even in America… Someone brought along the shovels, which had probably been stolen from a cemetery. Once we got to Zyuzino, we dug a large grave and we buried dozens of books and manuscripts. Misha Sukhotin had brought all his drafts, carefully arranged in a cardboard box file with a “For Correction” label. At the last moment he decided that he too wanted to be buried with them: this way, he said, I will finally have time to correct them. He was drunk, and it took all Alekseyev’s authority to dissuade him…

  Exactly six months later, after the First of May, we returned to disinter our works. After a public reading of manuscripts which were filthy with earth and soaking after the thaw, all the material was carried off to be filed away in a cabinet at the club. Everyone who had brought something was able to rediscover their buried work, and then this manuscript turned up which no one knew anything about. It was a large package of extra strong paper typed with single spacing in two copies. The whole thing was well protected in its cardboard packing, but it lacked both the author’s name and the title. What were we to do with it? Alekseyev stuck it inside his anorak and took it away. Then one morning he rang without so much as a by-your-leave and ordered me to join him at his studio. As we all know, conditions had changed considerably since dormitory days: for some perhaps, things had got worse, but for him they were unquestionably better, what with all those dollars the Americans were pushing his way! He’d bought a studio on the Arbat, this Nikita of ours. And when you consider that I am still having to manage with sharing a room which comes with use of a kitchen. Forget it. I went to see him and found him sitting in a rocking chair, a fag in his mouth and an ashtray full of butts. You could have cut the smoke-filled air with a knife. “It’s not at all bad, you know,” he mutters as soon as he sees me.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The manuscript, the one without a title. Go on, read a bit!”

  I start to protest. I say that I don’t have time, and it’s true. I have to see somebody on the other side of the city.

  Nowadays, you know, it is not like it once was, when those who couldn’t be bothered simply didn’t go to work. Now we’ve got capitalism, we’re obliged to knock our pan out just to put lunch and dinner together.

  “Tolik,” he replies sharply, “am I wrong in thinking that you work for a publisher? Do you not understand that this is work too? Stay here and read.” What can I do? I obey. I stay there reading until the evening, drinking coffee prepared by one of Nikita’s girls and eating Napoleon cake.

  When I finish, Nikita looks at me and grumbles without removing the cigarette from his mouth: “Well, are you not going to thank me? Now run off and take it to your boss.

  Down there, they’ll think you’re God Almighty; they’ll be desperate to get a novel like this published.” It is not easy to find a reply. Nikita has become too accustomed to having a following wind; some things he simply cannot understand.

  Yes, I work for a publisher, but our publishers are not what they used to be. They only publish pornography, and if things go well, a few detective stories. But here you have someone who even talks about politics. Imagine that, and then there is the way that he does it! Well, I’ve done my bit: I gave my boss the manuscript, and for a year I haven’t heard a word about it. Then the other day I open the broom cupboard to get a roll of toilet paper, and there’s the package – unopened. They didn’t even take a look. This is what it’s like now. Once you could at least get a manuscript abroad, and there they would pay its weight in gold; now the West couldn’t care a damn about us – they don’t even know that we’re alive. What can I do? I go back to Zyuzino by bus and cross the park sodden with melted snow. I dig a hole with a garden spade, and I bury the manuscript once again; only this time I add a note because I want whoever finds it to know how it all went and what manner of times we are living through. Above all, I want to make it clear that I didn’t write this fucking novel. In fact I don’t want to have anything more to do with it and you won’t be hearing another word about me. And the way things are going, it’ll take all my energies just to avoid the hassles.

  Moscow, spring 199…

  I

  A suitcaseful of tomatoes

  Moscow, November 1987

  Our story commences on a dark Moscow evening, when the snow and the frost could freeze your blood. And the place?

  Well, you can get to it by taking any of the underground railways to the city centre, but you wouldn’t find much when you got there. Any sensible person would stay at home, snuggled up close to the stove. In any event, you would have to change for the circle line and get out at Krasnaya Presnya.

  Then you go left as far as Malaya Gruzinskaya, turn right and then left at the first lane. At this stage you find yourself in front of a long, eight-storey, dirty-white building, which is rather imposing from the outside, but in reality is falling apart: it has been a long time since the walls and the stairs last exuded the smell of fresh paint. Enter at number 90, and if the lift is working, go up to Flat 48 on the sixth floor. If I remember correctly, it is now the home of Ivan Dedyukhin, who works the petrol pumps on Kotelnichesky Street on the riverside, and his wife, who, when she is not at work in the factory, wanders around the flat in a dressinggown with nothing on underneath and the windows open – something of a scandal. But at the time when our story took place, this petrol-pump assistant was not living there. No, it was home to an insignificant little man with glasses, who on the evening of 7 November 1987 was sitting in the kitchen and watching the parade in Red Square on television for the second time, and dining despondently on a few slices of salami. Tanks paraded across the television screen; they pointed their steel machine-guns to the sky, and red stars appeared on the armour-plated sides; on each one a soldier protruded in a rigid, straight-backed salute as they passed under the rostrum, and military bands blasted out the Soviet Union’s anthem or, at the critical moment, the Internationale.

  Who could have imagined then that there would only be another three parades to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution? And if anyone had foreseen it, he would have been taken universally for a fool and a fantasist.

  The kitchen was so small that the television was half a metre from its solitary spectator, who did not however find it a problem as he suffered from acute myopia. A small dirty frying pan, a plate, a glass, a knife and a fork were piled into the sink and awaited the householder’s routine evening washing-up. On the other wall, a fridge that was nearly always empty served as a bookshelf. Indeed books had even colonised the other two rooms in the flat, where they had long ago outgrown the shelves designed to hold them and now covered the carpet and the sofa. The cursed things protruded from under the bed, and could even be found in the bath, which, it has to be said, was very rarely used. The owner of both the books and the apartment, Viktor Nikolayevich Obilin, the director of the Institute of History of the CPSU at the State University of Moscow, chewed on his last slice of salami and reflected sadly on the i
nconvenience of holidays in a well organised calendar. The arrival of this particular festivity meant that the institute and the library were closed, and Professor Obilin was obliged to spend the entire day at home. The woman who came every day to wash his clothes and prepare his food had not, of course, turned up, and as his culinary abilities only stretched as far as fried eggs, he had eaten two of these for lunch, and was now working hard on the mastication of left-over salami.

  The realisation that the following day was also a holiday only came to him in the late evening, or in truth, the middle of the night. Since he had reached fifty, this was when he suffered insomnia – yet another vexation. Too tired to get up to work, Viktor Nikolayevich tossed and turned under the blankets, and it was while he suffered this torment that the imminent approach of this deplorable reality suddenly made itself felt. Clearly the day after the October anniversary would be a holiday this year as it was in any other one, so that people could get over their hangovers from the night before. In any case no one would have turned up to work, so it only made sense for the state to demonstrate its generosity.

  Therefore Zoya Filippovna would not come and the corner shop would not open. There was nothing to eat in the house, and this terrifying thought drove Obilin from his bed to check out the situation. He put on his dressing-gown and shuffled into the kitchen, where he opened the fridge and was relieved to discover an open bottle of milk and a carton of yogurt that he had previously overlooked. Moreover there were two lemons on the lowest shelf. This was better than nothing. In extremis, he could satisfy his hunger: better a tub of yogurt than lunch with his sister in Medvedkovo.