The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  But you needed more than that. Lumin was no fool. He stayed behind the door and asked questions through a crack: Do you have a warrant from the Prosecutor’s Office?

  No, they reply, we do not have one with us. Then why do you come and disturb people, damn your mother! No, this Lumin is a hard nut to crack.

  You’ll be thinking that they could have gone off and got themselves this warrant, but it’s not that easy! At the Prosecutor’s Office, they’re not very happy about signing this kind of warrant; in fact they treat them like the plague. They can cause all sorts of troublesome lawsuits, and they never achieve anything. They are considered a complete waste of time and resources; there is nothing to be gained but high blood pressure. If you manage to drag tenants to court for non-payment and even to have them found guilty after years in which their files have been cluttering your desk, these people then appeal and probably win. That’s the way it’s always been; you’ll understand yourselves that in terms of productivity there is little here for a prosecutor to feel cheerful about, and then there’s the risk of another scolding from the bosses: why have you spent years on this action, if at the end you cannot win it? No question, the guys in the Prosecutor’s Office were fleeing the guys on the Housing Committee as though they had the plague… So that day, the whole Naryshkin Building was in a state of agitation: a policeman has come to ring the doorbell for the Lumins’ flat!

  And at all the doors and landings, the tenants were eager to hear the slightest sound coming from the flat in question.

  The policeman had the dispirited air of those who, whatever happens, are never paid an adequate salary. He goes up one floor at a time, of course, just like everyone else. He’s on the first floor; he’s on the second; he’s on the third – where he pauses to get his breath back and wipe away the sweat – and then he’s off up the final flight of steps. He’s on the fourth-floor landing and ringing the bell… In the apartment there is only silence. The policeman, as usual accepting of whatever eventuality, rings again. As fate had decreed, nothing happens. The fellow takes out his pencil from his pocket, and scribbles something on a piece of paper, which he then pushes under the door. Then he turns around and with his heavy tread he goes back down the stairs. One after another, the doors close as he passes, while inside the flats, his passing triggers unflattering comments on the nature of the police force: so yet again, that Lumin has got off scotfree.

  All right, an unedifying incident, there’s not a great deal to say. Initially Tanya had listened to them, at least until she guessed the outcome. Then she realised that she could no longer follow her mother through all the details and digressions; there was something else that occupied her thoughts and left no room for anything else. And finally it came out: she interrupted her mother at entirely the wrong moment, just when Lidya Aleksandrovna was yet again describing the policeman with his boots splattered with mud and his paunch hanging over his belt – a fine example indeed! – and asked her quite abruptly, “Mum, what was the name of your friend in Baku? Tamara Petrovna?”

  “Tamara Pavlovna,” corrected her mother, who could not conceal her surprise. “Rybakova is her surname. We were at school together, when we were still living down there… What made you think of her?”

  “I’ll tell you shortly,” Tanya promised. “Now I’d like to know: you went to see her once, am I right?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” her mother was losing her patience.

  “But it’s years since I last went; it’s a strain going all the way, and besides it’s expensive!”

  “Listen, do you think she would put me up, if I were to spend a few weeks in Baku, this summer?”

  “Well yes, I suppose so. But hold on a minute,” Lidya Aleksandrovna was suddenly beginning to understand, “won’t they give you a secondment, if you’re going there for your thesis? Why would you have to find a place to stay?”

  “I’m not sure they’ll give me a secondment,” Tanya said in a neutral tone, as though it were a detail of little importance. “If they give me one, then all well and good, but if for some reason they refuse me it, well I’ll still go. I’ll go in the holidays, so I won’t have to ask anything of anybody.”

  Her mother shook her head; she wasn’t easily fooled.

  “What possible reason could they have for not giving you it?” she stared at her daughter questioningly, but her voice was cracked. She knew the answer already.

  “Well, you know!” Tanya tried to avoid her. “It could happen, I suppose. But don’t you worry, nothing is going to happen.”

  As Tanya very well knew, Mum had never stopped worrying since she had understood the kind of work her daughter had got tangled up with. Mum believed that one day they would come and take her away while she was working in the archive, and she – her mother – would never know what had happened to her… And now, how could Tanya tell her that even the old man at the Institute – this Obilin – was trying to make things difficult for her, and that she had had to use a ploy to get a signature on the application for access to the KGB archive, which in accordance with the law had to be submitted six months earlier, and it wasn’t even the director’s signature but that of his deputy, Sarabyanova? When the time comes, she’ll be very luck to get the secondment order to go to Baku.

  “I can remember her too, Tamara Pavlovna!” the grandmother broke into the conversation. “Her people lived in Malaya Krepostnaya Street; do you remember, Lidochka?

  A wooden house, just opposite the city walls, with a mulberry tree in the courtyard. We used to go and visit them, and you and Olya were just teenagers, and we had tea in the courtyard and ate blackberries… That street was so narrow, wasn’t it? There were houses with wooden overhangs at the first floor, which took away all the light.

  The people had washing lines that stretched from one house to another… Who knows if they still live there?”

  “Mum,” Lidya Aleksandrovna shook her head, “no one lives there any more. They pulled all those houses down many, many years ago. No, she lives on the outskirts – what’s the name of that new district? – Akhmedly, I seem to remember. When they cleared everyone out of the old district, they found her accommodation there. Comfortable and modern… down there in the old city, you must know, it was already falling to bits – even before the war!”

  “What a shame!” the old woman muttered. And the mulberry tree? – she thought to herself, but did not have the courage to say it out loud. Of course, they’ll have cut that down too; people are so uncaring, what a pity! In the meantime, Tanya had regained her self-control. She spoke with determination before her mother had a chance to open her mouth.

  “Well, Mum, I’ve told you that I don’t know whether or not they’ll give me a secondment, but I must go there whatever happens – and I want to go there. Are you going to write to Tamara Pavlovna? I’ll ask for the holidays in July or August, whichever is more convenient for her… always supposing that I’ll be in need of her help,” she added hurriedly.

  “What can I do? I’ll write!” her mother gave in. “But you be careful. Don’t get yourself mixed up in trouble down there. Don’t do anything without permission.”

  “Don’t you worry,” Tanya drawled. “I want to finish this thesis and you know that I am not an easy person to stop.”

  Lidya Aleksandrovna shook her head and was divided between anxiety and pride: who would have thought it; she came out of me, this daughter, and it seems only yesterday that she was feeding at my breast; now just look at how she goes about this vast world all on her own…

  XII

  Fish soup

  Baku, winter 1988

  Someone else had been thinking about Tanya for some time.

  This other person was not, however, moved by tender or maternal feelings on experiencing such thoughts. Most certainly not, so if poor Lidya Aleksandrovna had known anything about it, she would have begun to despair. Well, if you want to see who this person is, you only have to lean forward a bit and take a peep now that he is sitting at h
is desk – a great hairy body inside a general’s uniform… What was that? But no, not the actor; this is a real general, and the flashes on his collar are the blue ones of the KGB, not those brown ones of the Ministry of the Interior. Besides that of course, this uniform with gold buttons does resemble the one that Mark Kaufman wears on stage and occasionally at home, as we have seen, but always remembering that there the actor wore old, shapeless slippers – a fine general.

  Whereas this other one wears a pair of black shoes, in truth of mediocre manufacture but solid and hard-wearing with toecaps, as though their owner has every intention of kicking the cobbles on the street or perhaps the ribs of some unfortunate. But actually there is no reason to be surprised: those shoes are standard issue, and everything our man is wearing is in accordance with the regulations, including his olive-coloured socks, the khaki vest and, yes, even his cotton pants. There lurks his cramped dick with its purplish glans revealed in all its glory by a circumcision from more than sixty years ago, given that this morning the general, before rising, took his wife in the marital bed while she was still half asleep; for it is written, “Women are your fields: go, then, into your fields whenever you like” (Koran, II, 223).

  General Zia Yusuf-zade, the commander of the KGB in Baku, is drumming his fingers yellowed by nicotine on the green surface of his desk, just next to a packet of Marlboro.

  When you go into the office, General, what is the first thing you do? The doctor had asked. A damn fool question! Well, I hang up my hat and coat, then I sit down, open the first file and start to work. Wrong! The first thing you do, I swear it, is light up a cigarette. Try not to light it, that first cigarette of yours. Easier said… To hell with doctors! The general wriggles in his chair and then grabs the packet, takes out a cigarette with two fingers and lights it up. Now he can start to think! The smoke rises to the brain, and the drowsy beast slowly starts to wake. It is still sluggish and curled up in its hiding place, but it starts to look around. If tobacco can achieve this miracle, then think what could be done by those other herbs our fathers used to smoke? The general sighs and scratches his nose; there’s nothing for it, he must get on with his work. He opens the brown file that’s in front of him, and reads the first lines of the report. Yet another two teachers of Russian have reported stones being thrown through their windows. Recently these cases have been becoming increasingly frequent, but they don’t usually get as far as his desk. Usually someone else sees to it that they are registered and sent to the archive… Why then has this report got this far? His suspicions aroused, the general remembered something he himself had said at an internal seminar, something that was precisely on the question of windows and stones. What was it? Yusuf-zade forced himself to remember and the scene came back to his memory: lights turned low, an oval table, paper and pens, and mineral water, as always in such situations. “Do you perhaps believe that our people know nothing about these groups? But what can they do, except perhaps throw the odd stone at the windows of some professor of Russian?”

  That’s what he had said, and everyone laughed. Now the general half closed his eyes and tried to remember who was at the conference. A lot of people could have been there.

  Anisimov, his deputy, with his straw-coloured hair and watery eyes; up till now he had appeared relatively innocuous, and that is precisely why the general fears him like fire itself: those who inspire trust are the ones you have to be most careful of. If they’re organising some kind of challenge to him, then they’ll be biting off more than they can chew. For starters, he would ring Bakinsky Rabochy and give an interview: there must still be the draft for last year’s one somewhere in the drawer. The general rummages around in the untidy drawer with both hands and still holding his cigarette between his teeth, until he finally comes across two sheets of typescript held together by a safety pin. He quickly runs his eyes over it: clandestine sectarians; reactionary clergy; the urgent need to intensify our vigilance. Well, that would certainly do the trick. And perhaps a telephone call to those who know how to spread the word, so that the lads are kept calm. Or perhaps not?

  Suppose this were the false move they were expecting of him. Anisimov – was he or wasn’t he at the conference?

  The general is already agitated. Every morning starts with one headache or another; working in this office is becoming insufferable! He gets up heavily, opens a cupboard in the wall and takes out a bottle of whisky; out of habit he contemplates the green and gold label with satisfaction – a rare brand, Scottish. He pours a glass and gulps it down.

  The whisky tastes of smoke and marshland, and evokes places he has never seen and possibly could never imagine.

  In the absence of anything more suitable coming to mind, he thinks of the uninhabited wastelands not far from Baku, where abandoned oil wells rust and petrol swamps ignite spontaneously and burn all night on their own: the fireworshippers once went there to pray to their god Zoroaster, in the conviction that the divine spirit had taken up its residence there in that oily ground. For the general, whisky evokes all these things, and on cold winter mornings when a light sea mist mixes with the smoke from the refineries, there is an even greater pleasure in drinking it. The physical pleasure momentarily drives away all other thoughts, before causing him another concern, not unpleasant though. He phones home.

  “It’s me. Listen, have they brought the fish? Yes? Ten kilos? Is there any mullet? Good, then it’s fish soup this evening. Yes, don’t worry, as always.”

  He puts the receiver down, and then dials another number.

  “Gennadych? The fish has come! Thanks!”

  At the other end of the line, someone must have cracked a joke, because the general laughs: a hearty laugh that reveals yellow teeth, the sharp canines of an inveterate carnivore.

  “Are you still there? No! You know very well that whenever I can be of any help… Of course. See you soon.”

  Good! Gennadych is a good lad, and keeps his word.

  Good humour comes with the thought of his wife and the maid cleaning mullet and mackerel, the kitchen filling up with scales and the smell of the sea, red, brown and silvery fish still alive and wriggling under the knife, and the fish soup that the coming afternoon will slowly cook and fuse with the onions, green peppers and bay leaves. He lowers his eyes to his desk, and the complaint from the Russian language teachers whose windows were smashed by unknown hooligans is still there in front of him. Esteemed Ivan Ivanych and most esteemed Marya Ivanovna, you cannot expect me to get involved with every laddish prank committed during the night in a city like Baku! However we will take note, don’t you worry, and when the times come, we’ll remember who you are. The general has only just rubber-stamped the file to show it has been processed, when there’s a knock at the door, and a man comes into the office: he is about forty years old, has a stomach that is spilling over the top of his belt and wears civilian clothes – a blue suit with a yellow shirt and a red tie. His few flaxen hairs are glued to his round skull: he is Major Anisimov. He salutes with two fingers and very informally asks if he can sit down, while his hand is already on the back of the chair.

  The general smiles, gestures with his hand and looks him up and down through his half-closed eyelids. He suddenly comes to a decision – an instinctive one, as is his habit, which so far has served him well. He stretches his hairy hand across the desk and holds out the file he has just stamped towards the man. Anisimov was about to say something, but now he can’t; he is obliged to read it, word by word, because it would not be good manners just to run his eyes across it. That’s how you get things done! But when it comes to understanding whether he has already read the report or if he was responsible for it ending up on the general’s desk, he is none the wiser; Anisimov was not born yesterday.

  The latter drops the report on the table and twists his mouth. “Such trivial matters! Let’s send it to the police.”

  “But it was the police who sent it to us. I don’t know if they’re looking for our permission to lock them up.”
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br />   It would have been better not to have said that: because why would the police want his permission for a trifle like this, almost as though they suspected that he, the general, might have some objection? Anisimov continued to smile and did not say anything.

  “Can I smoke?”

  “Go ahead, smoke!” the general said grumpily, and as soon as the other guy puts the Marlboro packet back on the desk, he too takes one and lights it. “Listen, general, here we like to tell it how it is, in the good Bolshevik tradition,” the man with the thinning strawcoloured hair sneers. “I have had two or three disturbing reports in the last few days, but I put off speaking to you until I was sure I wasn’t wasting your time. There are unpleasant things going on under our noses, and I’m not talking about these master glaziers. The Republic’s borders appear to be an open house, and sooner or later someone is going to hold us responsible.”