The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  There was a handwritten sign on the door of his house, “Physiotherapy and Pranatherapy Surgery”, and outside there were hundreds of people expecting a miracle. The newspapers were not talking about him, so who knows how the whole country came to hear of him? They sleep in cars and tents, and trustingly await their turn. He sees everyone: disabled soldiers from the Afghan war and children with scoliosis; it’s true that he mainly works on the bones, and my case has nothing to do with my bones. He is nothing to look at – hardly inspires confidence: stocky, bald with two days’ growth of beard – with his overall worn over pants and vest, he looks like a butcher – and yet everyone believes in him unreservedly, and they talk of many total recoveries, healings. There must be some truth behind it. Of course the train from Moscow was full of people travelling to see him, and at his station our carriage emptied completely. In the village, they say that his father and grandfather practised this profession before him – he inherited the gift. Fruntsenskaya, more people get on and nobody gets off – they are literally sitting on my knees. Careful, bitch, my books! I wonder if I should go to the Institute: Obilin might be there, and I mustn’t give him any peace; I want it all to come out. He was ashamed. He couldn’t look me in the eye.

  Stupid bastard! He has thought up all kinds of excuses: suddenly there is no longer any need to go to Baku. They must have given him a real dressing-down, that much is clear. But who? I would really like to know: the rector? the KGB, if only? Poor little Viktor Nikolayevich! Or perhaps no one summoned him at all, but a colleague simply implied en passant that those WHOM IT MAY CONCERN were a little surprised, troubled… Why am I constantly revisiting these torments, these running sores? Today we must look to the future! Oleg is right: I should learn to deal with him in another way. You, he says, must pretend to go along with what he wants. Allow him even to change the title, if he wants; then he won’t be able to stop you from looking at things in the archive that you shouldn’t be. Bluebeard’s bride … But that’s not the way I’m made. I’ll never learn. I will torment him, and we’ll see who is the more stubborn.

  And if he’ll no longer give me the secondment, well I will just go to Baku under my own steam without even mentioning it to Obilin, who’ll bite his nails down to the quick. Nails…

  Just look at the varnish on that woman’s nails; you can’t tell what colour that is: it’s not purple and it’s not lilac. Nails that are claws! Oleg would like me to put some varnish on my nails, and a bit of lippie like that woman there. Who is she? Some clerical job in the Civil Service. No actually, more likely a factory manager’s secretary. Like Auntie Olya; only Auntie Olya didn’t doll herself up like that at her age… Mum sounded strange on the telephone this morning. Her voice sounded like something was wrong. Perhaps she’s got palpitations again; yesterday morning she already had bags under her eyes and was short of breath, as though she had had a panic attack in the night. Perhaps her kidneys are playing her up again. I can’t remember the last time she was drinking mineral water, and they say that the pharmacies have run out of Rilaten. It could be that Grandma is ill, and the last time, the doctor said that he can’t be sure he can get her any further hospital treatment. Well, she would be happy about that; she wants to die at home … Now that I think about it, Mum sounded like she had been crying with rage: perhaps the Housing Committee has told her that they won’t pay for the repairs; they’re quite capable of that. I must go and speak to them; Mum cannot stand up for herself; they can make her believe anything they want.

  When you think that during the year of the Olympics a delegation came to examine the building, and they said that the whole of Bauman Street needed to be refurbished! At the time I was only … it’s easy … fifteen years old. They came to our house and poked around in every corner. One guy went to look at the ceiling, another at the pipes. And the plaster was coming away from the walls, because of the leaks.

  Grandma was complaining about the damp; she didn’t understand – she thought they were the Housing Committee – that they would finally get round to replacing the pipes on the first floor. She explained everything to the strangers, and they simply shrugged their shoulders. There was also an architect-historian who spread out his plans – Mum cleared the kitchen table for him. It then came out that the apartment block was a stately home built for Prince Naryshkin, and our two rooms on the ground floor overlooking the lane had been part of the porter’s lodge.

  What station is this? Kropotkinskaya, nearly there. Yes, Prince Naryshkin… you should have seen how proud Dad was! He felt more important and wanted to show the lime tree in the courtyard to the delegation, and they were stunned that it still had so many leaves; Dad explained that the Petrov family on the first floor complained that the lime tree took away all their light, but it didn’t take any away from us, and in the summer it was such a pleasure to sit in its shade… But that was the last we saw of them; I had to put my hand in my own pocket and find the money for a painter and decorator who would come round on a Saturday to remove what was left of the stucco and then plaster the ceiling, so that plaster wasn’t constantly falling onto our dinner plates. Grandma was terrified of the cost of it all: fifty roubles felt like a colossal sum compared with her pension. I should have stayed at home last night; I can’t leave them on their own any more. Now Mum’s an old woman too. Who knows if in thirty years’ time, I will have a daughter who can look after me? Will I be alive in thirty years’ time? A daughter of my own… That would be good; I’ll get married when Grandma dies. No chance before then; I have to look after them, and Oleg would never be able to live with all three of us. He would learn to put up with my mother, and she’ll be useful – she can look after the children. I could sleep with him on Monday, if Auntie Olya comes to stay.

  God no, I’ve got to be at the Institute all day Monday – Valentina Leonidovna has asked me to stand in for her. By the evening I will be dead tired, and it will just be a repeat of last night. On the other hand, I might want him tomorrow or on Sunday, and I’ll be on my own. As for him – or at least according to him – he wants me night and day, and in every instant of his life. Once you’re in bed, you’ve just time to close your eyes, and here they are, his snake-hands. Oh, we would be so much better off if they hadn’t invented sex! I’d better stand up now, or I’ll never get off. Excuse me! Now it’s stopping. How are they all going to get on? Careful, let people get off, you animals! They say that in Tokyo, station staff with white gloves push the commuters into the wagons.

  Lord, it’s cold! There’s a freezing wind blowing from the direction of the river, and it’s carrying sleet. On the steps, everyone is rushing for the main entrance, and there’s a queue at the cloakroom. And here we have your typical old man with a hat, glasses, carefully manicured moustaches, leather gloves – in other words, a gentleman – and wouldn’t I just like to ask him, “Excuse me, gentleman, where exactly were you and what were you up to in 1937 and 1949?” Oleg would lose his rag; it could well be, he says when I start off with these questions, that he was an inmate in one of the camps. Well unlikely – really. Better to keep quiet. And yet I still feel that I can recognise them… Tanya, don’t get carried away with yourself – okay? Besides there isn’t only the old man; there’s also the girl wearing the scarf interwoven with gold thread, her eyes laden with mascara, gilt drop earrings with coloured stones – she might as well be coming to the library to find a husband. Maybe that’s exactly what she’s doing – consciously or unconsciously – and meanwhile she works on her thesis: money and years of life thrown to the wind. And the soldier, officer, or whatever kind of serviceman he is supposed to be – God, they look stupid with those hats. He’ll be coming to write an article on some battle or other; marry him, my dear, he’s not that bad looking with that black moustache; he’ll be an Armenian or a Georgian; marry him and he’ll make you have lots of children. Why am I in such a foul temper? Of course, I’m always this miserable on the first day of my period. And on the whole, November doesn’t exactly put a spring
in your step. Right, and under Stalin, saying something like that would have been enough to have you sent off there without so much as a by your leave. You have to admit that life must have been really hard! The bag, woman, just the bag; I need the notebooks. I know, yours is not such great job, either, but is it a reason for looking at us all with that expression?

  My God, what kind of people are we? Abroad, we must get abroad. Oleg always laughs when I say that: you’d better learn English first! But how are you supposed to speak that language? It practically dislocates your jaw, and even then, it’s still impossible to pronounce. He speaks English, French and German, and makes such an impression. He drives me crazy!

  “The newspaper Bakinsky Rabochy, please. The year 1951. Yes, I was the one who asked for it to be put aside.

  What are you staring at? Yes, I feel fine. My God, I must look pale. The pain has gone, the dog that gnaws – that gnaws at your guts – has gone, and perhaps this evening he won’t come back. I’d better go to the bathroom. Do I have a clean sanitary towel? Doesn’t matter, I’ll go later; if I don’t start work, another day will have been wasted. Where had I got to? Of course, the first of October. Maybe I should ask for next year now. Perhaps not. I have never done three months in a single day. I will put in the request for tomorrow just before leaving. Eh, we have something here. Where’s the pen? “The Republic’s Minister for the Petroleum Industry has firmly rejected the plan to build a new desalination plant for the Karadag wells. In its place, the Deputy Minister, V. Baklanov has proposed doubling the size of the existing plant, in spite of the clearly stated advice of the technicians and protests from the party organisations.” Hah, I wonder what Baklanov, seated at his desk on that first of October, thought when he read the first two lines at the bottom of the front page, no less. Let’s take a look at the green notebook: B, Babajan Bagirov – here we are – Baklanov Varlam Grigorevich, “Candidate Member of the Baku Regional Committee, XVII Conference, August 1948, Deputy Minister for the Petroleum Industry, September 1949, Candidate Member of the Central Committee of the Republic, IX Congress, December 1950, no further mention”. So there we are, Varlam Grigorevich, it all started with coffee and the morning paper. Take a note and move on. Nothing on page two. Just as well there’s only a few names; it’s easy to run along the columns – the eye can just keep scanning. Page three. “Medals awarded”. Nothing like a little medal! “On 30 September, M.A. Suslov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the USSR, Member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, conferred USSR state honours upon a group of comrades in the Kremlin. The Order of Stalin was awarded to” … let’s have a look … here we are! “The Second Secretary of the Baku Regional Committee, N.S. Yermolayev, received the Order of the October Revolution.” That’s it, I think… “M.A. Suslov congratulated these heroes and wished them many further successes in their work for the good of the fatherland. These newly decorated comrades expressed their profound gratitude towards Comrade Stalin, the Communist Party and the nation for such immense appreciation of their activities.” The green notebook again: Yermolayev, Yermolayev… here it is, “Yermolayev Nikolay Savelevich, First Secretary of District Committee in Moscow, appointed Second Secretary of the Baku Regional Committee in August 1949”. Clearly parachuted in! We’ve still got these kinds of guys today: the party parachutes them, as the expression goes, into places where they need people they can rely on, even though for them such places were never more than dots on a map where they speak some unheard-of language… where’s the record book? Don’t tell me I left the one for 1951 at home, and brought the one for 1950! Thank God for that. 1951, the week 1–7 October. The bloody pen’s leaking! As long as it doesn’t mark the paper; who cares about my fingers? Then: 1 October, article denouncing Baklanov V.G., decoration for Yermolayev N.S.

  Is any good going to come out of all this? Oleg says that I’m mad – that no one works this hard for a doctorate. He says I should only study the Central Committee and not the Regional Committee as well, and this is becoming a state thesis and I’m not yet a fellowship candidate. But then I’ll never apply for a fellowship. I won’t even be able to finish this thesis. Women’s logic, he would call it. Why don’t you go for something less ambitious? Look, you’re interested in the 1949 trial, am I right? Then why are you going on to 1953? Cut it off earlier, he says… but I simply can’t. I need to know what happened, and to understand history you need to follow it through. You can’t just stop at some random moment. You need to go even beyond 1953, and look at what happened in 1956 and 1964. And you’d need ten lives to do that. It’s not about Granddad, as Mum thinks. Of course, he’s in the green notebook too: ‘Parsamov, Aleksandr Ivanovich, Deputy Director of the petroleum company Azerneft, 1944–1949, Candidate Member of the Baku Regional Committee, July 1944, Permanent Member March 1948, arrested June 1949, shot August 1949, sources: family memories’… But it’s not for him. For me he was never anything more than a photograph, a bald engineer with glasses. Even Mum was just a little girl at the time. No, if this had all happened at the time of False Dimitry and I had revealing documents like these in my hands, I would experience the same overriding desire to find out how it all turned out. Some might say that this is just some scholarly fixation – a bookworm’s idea of fun – and turn up their noses at the smell of musty papers… But the truth is that the trials under the False Dimitry or under Peter I are still in the bloodstream of us Russians, and are just as important for anyone who wants to understand us; that’s why I say that if I could get my hands on those papers rather than these produced under Joseph I, they would take my breath away in exactly the same manner. And as for the smell, the papers and newspapers of 1949, they are already mouldy: we can only imagine the smell of blood.

  Anna Akhmatova, you must get on with your work. At this rate, you won’t even get through October, let alone the next three months. A month in a day, nine years would take a hundred and eight days, and working every day, that’s four months. Other people write an entire thesis in that time. What an idiot – I have already been doing three months in a day, and in a fortnight I will be done with the newspapers, then back to the archive. If only the trial records had been brought to Moscow – then I wouldn’t have to go back to Baku, I wouldn’t have to apply for permits for other archives, and I would be able to finish this year. But there’s no point in fooling yourself, my dear, they’ll have already burnt the trial records, put them through the shredder or thrown them in the sea. They won’t be gathering dust and awaiting your arrival. Those Baku permits, my dear, you should be asking for them now. Be sensible. Don’t even speak to Obilin, have your application seen by Sarabyanova, she only thinks about her own state thesis, now that it seems the commission will finally get round to meeting and assessing it, two years after she submitted it.

  Oh God, what is this? I’m getting damp down there. I’d better go and get a clean sanitary towel, instead of sitting here and dreaming. Let’s hope it doesn’t go on for ten days again. I’m sure it’s all the fault of that coil, and I’ll probably get some infection. Oleg was so proud of having found a doctor willing to insert it! Actually it is a pleasure to feel it slipping inside naked, without plastic or rubber, and without the fear of him not remembering to get out in time…

  But ten-day menstruations, that’s a different matter. And when will it ever stop? Mum’s stopped only last year: what a liberation!

  “I don’t know how I got out of there without spewing my guts up. Why do they leave the lavatories in that state? They say that public lavatories abroad are clean, shiny and a pleasure to use. Oleg laughs, yeah, abroad shit has the fragrance of rosewater! Just as well that my periods are not bad ones! – there are days when the STs are sodden within the hour; I can’t even go out of the house for fear of dripping all over the place. No surprise that I’m always tired – losing this amount of blood… Perhaps I should go for more tests, get a prescription for iron. It’s awful, gives me stomach pain, but at least when I took it, I was on my feet. What
I’m going through now isn’t a life. Where was I? The third of October, nothing. Fourth of October. Fifth of October… Was it hot or cold in Baku in October of 1951? In those days, the newspapers didn’t publish the weather: clearly they didn’t want to give information to the enemy… Of course it was hot – down there summer is only just finishing in October; only those who feel the cold would put on a coat in the early morning; the office stoves were not lit. Anyone coming from Moscow after several nights on the train, full of sleep, their shirts creased, the coats buttoned up, their hats down over their eyes, must have felt their hearts fill with joy, and never mind about the smell of diesel, no worse than the coal in Moscow, which from October belches out endless smoke from millions of chimneys. They would arrive with their briefcases loaded with papers, and head straight for the ministry buildings; there was probably a car to meet them, and the following day some people would be promoted, some would be dismissed and some would disappear entirely.

  They, on the other hand, would go for a pleasant walk on the beach before taking the train back – enjoy the luxury of eating a melon… The ninth of October, ‘The meeting has been carried out.’ What meeting? And what sloppy syntax, but who cares? ‘On 7 October, N.M. Mayzel, a member of the Central Committee of the CP of the Republic of Azerbaijan, met the Mexican consul, O. Flores de la Vega, and the Venezuelan one, E. Soto Alvares. The diplomats, on the orders of their countries’ governments, asked for the renewal of the trade agreement concerning the export of petroleum.’ No Mayzel, that really won’t do – meeting with foreign consuls, particularly someone like you, a future cosmopolitan without fatherland or honour; what will be your fate? – in the meantime let’s make an entry under the letter M, ‘Mayzel, Nicolay Moiseyevich, Acting Member of the Central Committee of the Republic, 1932, Full Member, 1939, Deputy Chairman of the Commission for Military Industry, 1942.’ What’s this? That’s why I thought I knew this Mayzel: ‘According to Yemelyanov’s memoirs, he was one of the principal witness-informers at the 1949 trials.’ I must check this, but I think that on these matters Yemelyanov is reliable. The memoirs were published by the academic Afanasyev in person, and their account of the informers has been confirmed by other sources. Some reported on their colleagues and ended up amongst the victims all the same – in some cases before the ones they reported on. Others got away with it, took the positions of those who had disappeared, moved into their apartments, grabbed their dachas and country residences… Hey, Mayzel!