The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  Then a vague recollection suddenly came to him. Full of hope, he closed the fridge and went to the cupboard at the other end of the flat. It was dark and he couldn’t see a thing.

  For weeks he had been meaning to change the lightbulb in the hall, but then Zoya Philippovna had assured him that there were no lightbulbs in the shops. He took a chair from the kitchen and clambered onto it so that he could fumble around on the highest shelf in the cupboard. Amongst a thousand other worthless things, his hands finally encountered a large, round, glass object, and then another. They were there! He took them down so that he could see them: a jar of cucumbers and a jar of dried tomatoes that had been waiting in the dark for who knows how long and were now ready to offer up their treasure in order to quiet his hunger.

  Obilin lived a frugal life: lunch and supper were guaranteed for the following day. He returned to bed a comforted man.

  In the life of Viktor Nikolayevich, 8 November in no way differed from the previous day. He woke early, he put on his misshapen slippers and the old jacket he wore about the house, he drank a cup of tea, into which, while chomping on a pickled gherkin, he dunked a piece of dried bread that good fortune had hidden in the kitchen’s recesses, and then he went to his study and worked until three in the afternoon.

  He held a book open in front of a pile of blank sheets of paper, on which he scribbled his notes. He turned the pages of the book one at a time, and occasionally sighed.

  Rewriting this textbook was no joke, and it was not just any textbook: History of the Soviet Union for secondary schools, initial print run one million copies… Take this for example, on page 263 it says (and you can check this out for yourselves): “The kulaks were given plots of land some distance from the collective farms. Many kulaks were moved to remote parts of the country. However, experience showed that you had to act decisively when dealing with the kulaks.

  Those guilty of terrorist acts were punished with the full force of Soviet law.” Well, at one time there was nothing wrong with writing such things, but now even a child can see that this is no longer the case: even a short while ago, perhaps you still could, but no more! Okay… but how were you now expected to write? Perhaps something along these lines: “the imposition of administrative methods in the countryside did not produce the hoped-for results.” Or perhaps you could go as far as “gave rise to malpractices and illegality”. “Indeed, it would appear that it gave rise …” Now you understand that this was not the kind of work you could do in any old fashion – just as it comes into your head! Viktor Nikolayevich therefore worked to a very severe routine, which is more or less what he had done throughout his life. His alarm clock ticked away the hours at his desk and was set to inform him of the arrival of lunchtime. At three o’clock, he stood up and went into the kitchen, where he switched on the television and ate cucumbers, tomatoes and yogurt. He drank the milk and watched the military parade in Red Square for a third time. After lunch he went to sleep for an hour; young people might ridicule such behaviour, but at a certain stage in life, it becomes a necessity. On reawakening, he went to the bathroom to freshen up and clean his glasses, and then he returned to his desk and worked until eight. In the afternoon his brain found it more difficult to work than in the morning, and increasingly Viktor Nikolayevich had to suppress a yawn.

  The volume of screwed up pieces of paper thrown in the wastepaper bin grew more rapidly, so by the evening it was full, but the professor was a stubborn man and continued to work until the appointed time for ending his day’s labour.

  Only when the clock rang out its eight chimes did he move to the kitchen, where he switched on the television and finished the milk and cucumbers. In truth, he was still slightly hungry after he had emptied both jars. He briefly wondered whether it was worth returning to his desk. As he flicked through newspaper cuttings he had put aside for a chapter in his textbook, he came across a statement by the economist Tikhonov, which had caused him some mental confusion. The economist claimed, difficult as it is to imagine, that the kulaks never existed; those who went under this name were not capitalists at all, but simply those who had worked a bit harder in the period following the Revolution. Whatever next? These tricksters were constantly shifting their ground and suddenly black was white and white was black. He had to sleep on this one, as it would take more than an evening to sort out such a vexed question. Besides, wasn’t it supposed to be a holiday? He finished drying the remaining dishes, and then sat at the table and switched the television back on.

  The next morning Obilin got up in excellent mood: thanks be to God, the holidays were over, and the institute, the library, the canteen – that is everything a man needed to pursue a civilised existence – had returned to normal operations. He drank his tea and took nothing to eat, while vaguely considering the possibility of stopping at the institute’s store to buy a few doughnuts. He left home and marched through the snow in complete darkness until he reached the underground station. He would have liked to have bought his usual newspaper at the news-stand in Malaya Gruzinskaya, but on this occasion he had to forego this particular element in his daily routine: there was a queue of about seventy or eighty people, and of course all of them would be wanting to buy that same damned magazine.

  While he was waiting for the train within the crush of passengers, he saw it again: many were holding Moscow News, and he tried to catch the headlines. Naturally he had never bought the magazine; indeed he was stunned that they didn’t ban it, but it was good to keep oneself informed. He was just able to make out the cartoon at the bottom of the first page: a radio journalist presses his microphone against the glass of an aquarium and asks a fish, “Could you give us your opinion on transparency!” Of course, who talks about anything else these days? But no one seems to know what it means. Everyone likes to fill their mouths with the stupid word: We want transparency! As he considered these changes, the train arrived with a blast of its horn, and the crowd carried him in, where good fortune allowed him to sit down on a seat just vacated by a departing passenger.

  Obilin could count on the fingers of one hand the times that he had managed to find a seat throughout the year, and for a short while, he allowed himself to relax and savour the pleasant sensation of being rocked by the gentle movement of the underground train as it sped noisily through Moscow’s subterranean world. But then he started to feel the heat. The morning crush filled the carriage, and he wouldn’t have relinquished the prized seat he had secured even if threatened with a knife. To take off one’s coat would have been unthinkable; as for reading a book, that was entirely out of the question. People were already frowning at him because of his black leather briefcase which he kept at his feet, where it took up vital space. The situation was aggravated by the fact that it was clearly of foreign manufacture.

  There was nothing to be done: he had to sit there and sweat.

  Viktor Nikolayevich was thin, below average height and generally inconspicuous. That day, he was wearing a brown suit under his coat; it was worn at the elbows and the seams, and unkindly drew attention to its owner’s narrow shoulders. The cuffs of his shirt were frayed: when it came to washing and ironing his clothes, Zoya Filippovna would go as far as replacing his buttons, but she did not consider it her duty to tell him when an item was too worn to be put on in decent society. The only showy object he possessed was his briefcase, and when he finally got out of the underground station, Obilin discovered to his horror that there was a hole in it the size of a five-rouble coin, which had not been there when he left home. More terrible trials awaited him that day, but as yet he was unaware of this, so he already felt that he had suffered intolerably. Once he was in the open, he walked in a purposeful manner, holding his briefcase so that passers-by would be unable to notice the tear, and he reflected on the possible causes of such a disastrous turn of events. Could a briefcase ruined by the slightest scratch be made of real leather, as the gypsy in the Budapest subway had assured him? While he pondered this question, a car passed dangerously close
and someone threw a cigarette butt at his feet. Obilin watched the car with loathing as it disappeared into the traffic, and then resumed his stride. After he had taken a few steps, he once more had the sensation that all was not as it should be. But this time, the problem did not concern his briefcase, but his person, or to be more precise, the bottom of his trousers, from which a narrow wisp of smoke was rising, as he was to ascertain with a bitter pang of resentment after a more careful examination of the crime scene. The still burning cigarette end had been caught in the turn-up of his trousers and, within a few seconds, had created a small hole into which Viktor Nikolayevich could insert his little finger, after he had extracted the butt with an expression of disgust.

  Horrified by the way fate had decided to persecute him, he scurried as fast as he could across Manezh Square towards the safe haven of his institute.

  Although part of the University of Moscow, the Institute of History of the CPSU was located in a large aristocratic building in Herzen Street, a few blocks from the Kremlin.

  Who knows what’s there now? Probably Dresdner Bank.

  Obilin was out of breath when he got to the stairs. He ran up the stairs as far as the neoclassical colonnade, under whose shadow he opened a heavy, dark-walnut door. Here he almost bumped into two small mustachioed men, who appeared from nowhere in that instant. Their clothes were threadbare and their shoes muddy. The shabbier of the two was dragging along a suitcase tied together with string.

  Judging by their appearance, they must have passed the previous night in a train or an airport waiting-room, and had not had time to tidy themselves up. While they apologised for the incident, Viktor Nikolayevich felt he recognised one of the moustaches as belonging to the director of some institute in Baku, whom he had met years before at a very select seminar; he recalled kebabs and swimming in the sea – the last time he had done so in his life. It must have been the case, because the man rewarded him with a wide smile full of golden teeth, kissed him and embraced him. He declared that he had come from his distant home to Moscow for the sole purpose of finding Obilin. The second moustache was of the same race and muttered an incomprehensible name while hurriedly shaking his hand.

  Obilin took his guests into the cream-coloured corridor, which had recently been painted. Next to the last issue of the institute’s wall newspaper, which had yellowed with age over the year it had hung there, someone had put up a poster to celebrate the Great Patriotic War, carefully framed and protected by a pane of glass: mother and child clung to each other as they confronted the threat of a Nazi bayonet dripping blood, and cried: “Soldiers of the Red Army, save us!” The two mustachioed perused the manifesto quizzically and then burst into ill-mannered laughter. While they waited for the lift to come clattering down, Obilin stubbornly looked at his feet. Baku! A voice within him said that he should not expect anything good to come from down there, but he could not put his finger on why. Having at last reached the third floor, they came out of the lift and walked down the deserted corridor. It appeared that there was no one in the institute. Not a very good impression for the guests, Viktor Nikolayevich thought; people should get in a little earlier! He pushed the glass door and entered the waiting room for his office followed by the two men from Baku, who showed a great interest in their surroundings. Fortunately, the elderly scientific assistant Valentina Leonidovna Stark had turned up. When she saw her boss, she put down her knitting, opened her bag and handed over two packets wrapped in greasy paper, which suggested that they contained caviar.

  “These were left by Dekanozov,” she said.

  Obilin’s mouth watered, and the memory of the cucumbers he had eaten the night before made his stomach feel empty. If he had been alone, he would have immediately opened one of the packets, but now these two tiresome visitors had turned up, such an indulgence was unthinkable.

  He remembered with regret that there were also those doughnuts from the institute’s store, and he hesitated: they were special doughnuts with caraway seeds that smelt particularly good. But there was no dignified way out of this predicament: first he had to receive the unexpected guests.

  After having closed the office door behind him, he propped his briefcase against the wall, hiding the recent tear as he did so, he hung up his coat and hat on the hatstand, slipped the packets into the bottom drawer of the desk, and asked the visitors to sit down as he in turn sank into his office armchair. The second of the two men with moustaches put down his suitcase tied with string close to the door, and sat down without a word. The first imitated him, then cleared his throat, smiled and started to talk. Or rather he launched into interminable preliminaries, during which he assured his host that he had not come to waste his time and dwelt on many superfluous details of their previous meetings.

  Obilin remembered the kebabs, the disgusting sheep fat that ran down his fingers, the swimming costume he was obliged to borrow which smelt musty, the water of the Caspian Sea that was as warm as soup and on which small oil slicks floated, and the tar that clung to his feet while he paddled around the shoreline. For some bizarre reason all these memories did not appear unhappy ones; indeed, they were almost worthy of nostalgia. But there was something else which meant that nothing good could come out of Baku, and yet he could not remember what it was. His guest talked and talked, while his companion nodded his agreement with every word, but his expression was completely blank – so much so that Obilin wondered whether he understood Russian. Then his ears pricked up like a dog’s, because the speaker had suddenly come to the point.

  “Viktor Nikolayevich, as I have already told you, we have not come to waste your time. As the poet said, ‘There is indeed no worse death than waiting!’ I have only one question to ask you, and you will understand that it is not a matter of secondary importance, if we have gone so far as to disturb you; besides, we know that we can always count on your understanding. Well, you have assigned to one of your institute’s researchers a thesis entitled, correct me if I’m wrong, ‘Party Cadres in the Baku Region between 1945 and 1953’. Or perhaps I haven’t remembered it correctly?”

  That’s it, thought Viktor Nikolayevich. I told Tanya Voznesenskaya! He raised his eyebrows to create an expression of surprise and he took his time, “What can I say? You have caught me on the hop, and I have no memory of it at all, but I can always find out.”

  He opened a drawer, took out a metal box file that contained a pile of rectangular, rigid, white cards, and quickly flicked through them. He then took one out, replaced the box file in the drawer and leant back into the comfort of his chair. The two guests followed him with their eyes, clearly unimpressed by these manoeuvres.

  “This would appear to be the case,” Obilin finally admitted. “There is such a thesis. It was requested by Tatyana Borisovna… Voznesenskaya,” he muttered, briefly checking the card as though it were the first time he had come across that name.

  “You’ll excuse me, Viktor Nikolayevich,” exclaimed the first of the two with unexpected forcefulness, “is it not possible that this young woman find a more appropriate subject for her doctorate? You will of course have reflected on the complications that research of this kind could throw up. Let’s face it; that was a very difficult period! There surely can’t be any need for us southerners to explain such things to someone like you. And then, my esteemed Viktor Nikolayevich, if only it were some thesis cobbled together while sitting comfortably in the Lenin Library! You lot in the capital are very lucky; here, you have everything. You just have to look up the catalogues, and they bring you the books to your table. You want to study? Then go ahead; God forbid that we should interfere! But no, this girl comes to us and demands her right to stick her nose into our archives.

  And with the current legislation, as you well know, this is no joking matter: when someone turns up, you have to let them in. Just try saying no! So it is up to you, here in Moscow, to weed out what is unacceptable. But in this case no one could argue that this business is very clear. Is it really appropriate that people go around
muckraking in times like these? Is this the way in which our people should behave? I think not. But do you know what transpired, when we got round to carrying out a cursory investigation into whom we were dealing with? Don’t make me say it, my esteemed professor; you know better than I do! Viktor Nikolayevich, please understand me; we are certainly not accusing you, but someone has been a little careless.”

  Professor Obilin was not stupid. His works were as dull as ditchwater, it is true, and his line of argument was often obscured by tortuous syllogisms, but he usually re-emerged unscathed. His endnotes were put together meticulously and, although they tended to be excessive, they were proof against all criticism. The manner in which he expressed himself was not crystal clear, but he observed all the rules of grammar and syntax, something that could not be said of all his colleagues. For example, the academician Abrikosov wrote in an article… Well, I won’t go into that now. Obilin was profoundly surprised and increasingly unnerved by the frenetic way in which his historian colleagues greeted that third year of Gorbachev’s perestroika. But equally it would have been too easy to pretend that nothing was happening.

  Viktor Nikolayevich knew very well that in such cases it is not wise to rush ahead, but equally one should not lag too far behind, because it is quite possible that, once things have settled, someone starts to rummage around and then traps you in a difficult corner: look at what you wrote in 1987! But if you rush ahead, you might find yourself in the wrong with no way out: they’ll make mincemeat of you and feed you to the wolves. So when the best of his students asked permission to study that argument during those years, Viktor Nikolayevich reflected at length on the question.