Mark agreed and yawned, but then quickly closed his mouth: the old man had reappeared in the courtyard and was hurrying towards them, and it appeared that he didn’t have the bottle with him. Hell knows what had happened.
Puffing and panting, he came up to them and you could see that he was in quite a state of agitation: the words came tumbling out fast and confused.
“Listen lads! You’ll never believe what I have just seen as soon as I left here – right on the corner of the boulevard? I saw this great crowd of people and I went to take a look myself; in the midst of them they were waving a flag, and what flag do you think it was? The Russian one! I mean not our red one, but the Tsar’s one, the prerelusho… You know, pre-Revolutionary one! I go up close – I have to rub my eyes: there are two young men under the flag dressed in uniform – dressed as white officers. Would you believe it?”
“Why are you getting so excited; they’ll be making a film,”
Stas muttered in a listless voice.
“There wasn’t any film, I tell you,” the old man protested.
“There wasn’t even a television camera. There was, however, this guy with a grey beard waving around an icon as though he was the parish priest, and haranguing the passers-by on his megaphone.”
“And what was he saying?” enquired Mark who was becoming curious.
“God knows! It was a bit of a dog’s dinner, but he certainly had it in for the Jews and some other people, I think: enough to make your head spin! But the weirdest thing was that there was a police van with two policemen standing there and taking notes, and they still let them carry on as though it was no big deal!”
“Just a pile of horseshit,” Stas shook his head in disgust.
“Let’s deal with the important business: why haven’t you brought a bottle?”
The bewildered old man went silent, but Mark, who was fighting to overcome his vodka-induced sleepiness, stood up and beckoned with his finger. He couldn’t make up his mind about what it was all about, but he got it into his head that he wanted to take a closer look at this fellow with a grey beard, this bearer of icons.
“Okay, take me along; I want to have a look,” he muttered.
Kaufman went off with the old man, pursued by Stas’s ineffectual counter-orders: Where are you off to, partners?
That’s no way to behave! It appeared that he was thinking about dragging himself off the bench and following them, but then their drinking buddy’s legs must have betrayed him, because he decided to stay just where he was…
The fact is that they didn’t have to go very far: as soon as they were outside the courtyard, you could already hear a raucous, thundering voice shouting from a megaphone: exactly what he was shouting was not at all clear. It was muffled by the roar of the traffic, but then maybe there wasn’t much to understand… They went round the corner into the boulevard and, just as the old man had reported, the red, white and blue flag was hanging limply from a lamp post, and people were crowding round it. The old man suddenly stopped and scratched his head: Well there weren’t that many people just now, they’re getting more by the minute, to hell with the bastards! Mark elbowed his way into the crowd, cutting a path almost as far as the flag.
There were indeed two young men dressed as Tsarist officers, but no one was interested in them: everyone was looking up open-mouthed at a big, burly guy with a beard streaked with grey who was leaning against a gilt icon of Saint Sergey of Radonezh and shouting with all his fibre into a megaphone. He was wearing a military-style tee-shirt of camouflage green. There was a bag full of leaflets at his feet.
He had a yellow and brown armband and a badge with the same colours, Mark noticed that he was mainly surrounded by middle-aged women who were avidly digesting his every word. A little way away, he saw five or six guys – big and burly too – and at first he took them for druzhinniki, voluntary policemen. They stood in a corner with their arms folded and looked just the type: the one who had tattooed forearms and a scar on his cheek must have been a foundry worker and the other, with a moustache and the early makings of a nice little paunch, a gymnastics instructor…
Then Mark looked a little harder and noticed that they didn’t have red armbands. Not volunteers at all! In fact they were wearing the same yellow and brown ones. In other words, they were all part of the same machination…
“Dimitry Donskoy,” shouted the man with the icon, “saved Russia from the Tartars, and we will save Russia from the Jews! All true Russians are with us, and we’ll show the Jews who are the masters of this country.”
Later when he thought about it, Mark tried to persuade himself that all he had felt for the delinquent and his yellowbrown accomplices was revulsion. But this was not true: not revulsion alone; when he realised what was going on, he was paralysed with fear. What if the bastards find out I’m a Jew?
His brain, dulled by the heat and the vodka, could not focus on anything else. Then, he forced himself to calm down: we’re in the Soviet Union, I’m in Moscow, I’m a Soviet citizen and the police are over there keeping an eye on things…
Yeah, and what policemen would they be? A few metres away was a parked police van, but the man at the wheel was dozing off, his companion on the back seat was yawning away, and a third policeman, a captain, had gone out into the street and was listening to the orator with his arms folded, his legs apart, his boots firmly on the road. As he listened, his expression remained wholly impenetrable, and every now and then he wrote something in his notebook…
“Jews and Freemasons are the ruin of this country,” the speaker continued to bellow. “They are the ruin of Moscow, citizens! Listen, we have studied the plan for the new districts that are going up on the outskirts, horrendous buildings in which man cannot live, poured concrete that buries our Russian forest, and we have discovered that seen from above, these ugly apartment blocks intersect with each other and form the shape of the Star of David. Incredible though it might seem, but all the architects who worked on those districts are Jews! Perhaps you’ll ask me why they would do that. There isn’t actually any reason, but Jews are irrational and they want to Judaise the whole world.”
Mark was hypnotised; it was like a journey back in time.
In Munich in the twenties, it all started with ugly brutes and madmen just like these – and with tankards of ale… No, how can one put up with all this? You practically want to go round the corner and throw yourself under the next trolleybus. While he listened incredulously to the furious litany of accusations from the man with the megaphone, who was occasionally interrupted by applause from his gorillas and, dear me, part of the crowd, he suddenly had this idea for a great project which in that particular moment he did not consider monstrous – in fact he found it highly felicitous: Yes, I’ll just stay and see what happens, and then I will describe it all in my novel. How else could I endure this obscenity? It was all so simple – he had no choice but to take notes just like the police captain… And he now saw the whole scene in a different light; his brain, a little less clouded than before, started to work: this is all useful material; what a stroke of luck the old man brought me here! It wasn’t at all easy to imagine what the Nazis were like, and now I can just copy them from life!
The man with the beard behind the glistening icon continued to scream with unending and unchanging energy.
“Do not believe that they have just started! No, the Jewish campaign to pervert the nature of our capital city and deprive it of its Christian soul started a long time ago! Just think about it: who tore the heart out of Moscow? The Jew Kaganovich! Citizens, you now go for a swim in the Moscow Swimming Pool, but how many of you know that previously that was the site of the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer?
There is a film that documents its demolition, and it is enough to make your hair stand on end: they tear away the gold from the domes, destroy the statues with pickaxes, and carefully dismantle the iconostasis piece by piece to be crated up and sent off to America, where it was bought by a millionaire. Then the
y press a button and the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer was finished forever. But who, if not the Jew Kaganovich, could have persuaded Stalin to have it dynamited, and who pocketed all those American dollars?
But then the Jews are guilty of all the crimes and shameful deeds that happen here in Russia. Who led the red armies and was willing to sacrifice the entire Russian people to the Moloch called Revolution? The Jew Bronshtein! Who exterminated the emperor-martyr and all his family? The Jew Sverdlov! And these are the names we all know, but there were many others. Who organised the destruction of Orthodox churches? The Jew Gubelman! Who directed the collectivisation?
The Jew Epshteyn! And just think, they themselves were ashamed of their names and had them changed: one called himself Jaroslavsky and the other Jakovlev! But that is not all; today there is a lot of talk about the trials in ’37 and ’38, and they have published the names of the inquisitors and torturers. And who were the most ferocious of them all? The Jew Shvartsman! The Jew Rodos!”
Mark was inspired, That’s it! That’s who Shagal should be in the novel! An officer in the NKVD! That’s why he stayed behind in Odessa, and the passport declaring him to be a businessman is just a cover! He is an agent involved in counter-espionage, a saboteur who has stayed behind the lines to organise attacks on the Germans… And then they arrest him because someone has reported him for BEING A JEW, and they send him off to Auschwitz without ever having a suspicion of who he really was… What a fantastic idea! Quick, a pen! I must write this down before I forget it.
He frantically fumbled around in his pockets in search of something to write with, but there was nothing. So, without thinking about it, he touched his neighbour on the shoulder, “Excuse me. You wouldn’t happen to have a biro on you?”
The man, who had blond hair glued down with sweat, studied him suspiciously, “Biro? What do you want to write?
And who are you… from the KGB?”
“But what do you mean?” Mark was horrified. And he realised that the idea of taking notes was not such a good one, after all. No, you couldn’t run such a risk… in the midst of that crowd, he could get a thrashing. Instinctively he searched for salvation in the form of a policeman, and saw the captain who lit a cigarette and was peacefully smoking as he walked up and down the pavement stopping every now and then to examine the toecaps of his boots. After a bit he had decided to put away his notebook and pencil; clearly he had written enough. Well, maybe I could ask him for his pencil, this was Mark’s next absurd idea.
“Fellow Russians,” the streaked beard was not letting up, “the Jews are the ruination of our country! If it weren’t for them, Russia would be rich! Just try asking the Jews where last year’s harvest ended up! Ask them how come at the time of the Tsar, Russia was selling wheat all round the world, but now we have to import it from Canada! You have to understand that they are the ones who are speculating, the bastards, and they build their dachas with our money.
And who knows what goes on inside them? They are the ones who want to subjugate us to America, where the Jews have been in charge for a hundred years. They even had a Jewish president called Abraham, only he changed his surname just as our Jews do! When we are in power, they will no longer be allowed to hide themselves like rats in a sewer. We’ll flush them out! Actually,” he added with an immediate change of tone, “if by any chance there are any Jewish comrades here amongst us, would they be so kind as to step forward, make themselves comfortable behind here, and we’ll get on with the business straight away.”
The three or four women closest to the man with the megaphone screamed their approval: That’s the way to do it.
You told those bloody Jews exactly like it is! Hysterical women, thought Mark. But at that very moment another one came forward: she was a small woman with grey hair that was thinning, perhaps a little greasy, and she wore glasses with thick lenses and carried a shopping bag on her arm.
“Well, here I am, I’m a Jew,” she said loudly right in front of the orator’s face. The man nearly lost his balance and had to grab hold of the Saint Sergey icon. The other women stepped back and an empty space opened up around the woman.
“Yes, I’m a Jew,” she continued in a shrill voice. “And you can certainly get down to business with me straightaway! If only you knew how tired I am of this same old story! The Jews are hoarding the grain, the Jews are all working the black market. The Jews are more cunning than other people and stealing from them. The Jews never do military service.
Even back in the war, I remember those who used to say:
Ivan is fighting in the trenches and Abram is trading in the warehouses! I heard this in my childhood, and now I’m going to be old, but still I cannot escape these tirades: the Jews, the Jews!”
That’s it again, came another of Mark’s lightning bolts.
She’s going in the novel too! Standing there and challenging the SS, before her execution! And not some raven-haired young woman with shining eyes – that’s for cheap novels – but just like that, grey and greasy with those lenses.
Kseniya Erdreich the pharmacist? Yes, but with some changes… And then you know what I’ll do? I’LL PUT IN, thought Mark, someone who just looks on and doesn’t have the guts to step forward…
Hey, what’s going on? They’re beating her up! Suddenly you couldn’t see anything, not the man with the megaphone, not Saint Sergey, not the elderly Jewish woman, just people running. Where the woman had been standing there was now a scrum of burly men with yellow-brown badges shouting with rage and kicking and kicking something on the ground… Most of the people had now left, and one of the thugs bent down, grabbed the woman by her arms as she screamed and kicked her legs, and dragged her half a metre and then let her go. He then looked around and saw that his companions were disappearing – even the guy with the megaphone had taken his icon and was distancing himself at considerable speed. So the bruiser turned again and kicked the woman one last time in the ribs, making her whimper in agony. He then put his hands in his pockets and wandered off. Mark, paralysed by the horror of it all, looked at the police captain and he was still standing with his arms folded and his feet apart, firmly rooted to the ground. A cigarette was hanging from his mouth, and he looked as though nothing untoward had happened… The woman was motionless in the middle of the street; her nose was bleeding and her glasses had been shattered. She had lost her shoes and her shopping bag had rolled far away. A couple of heads leaned over greedily: I wonder what the Jew has bought?
But they were disappointed; it turned out she had only bought some cabbages and some apples. A man in tennis shoes kneeled down next to her body and then shouted something Mark was struggling to understand: … ance!
Call an ambulance!
There were only three or four people left, apart from the policemen. They looked each other in the eye and encountered the same indecision. There was a telephone box just there and in the end a youth went in and dialled the emergency services. You could see him talking into the receiver, and then he ran out, red in the face.
“It’s not coming,” he exclaimed. “What do you mean it’s not coming?” retorted the man in tennis shoes who was leaning over the woman. “She’s in a bad way!”
“It’s not coming!” the boy shouted, almost crying. “I told them everything, and they say they don’t want to get involved… to ring the police.”
The police captain came over, his boots clattering on the paving.
“What’s going on?” he muttered in a dull, expressionless tone. “What is this unauthorised gathering? Move on!”
“Can’t you see this woman isn’t well? They’ve just beaten her!” the man in tennis shoes said indignantly. The woman was now groaning and feebly moving her arms in an attempt to get up on all fours.
The captain spat the stub from his mouth and shook his head. “But nothing happened at all,” he asserted.
He was about to add something else when up comes an army officer in a short-sleeved kaki shirt with stripes on his epaulettes
; who knows, perhaps he had been observing the scene from a distance without anyone being aware of him.
“Okay, lads, give me a hand!” he said. “I’ll take her to the hospital in my car. Christ, a nasty business!” he whistled as he took a look at the woman’s bleeding face.
“Which car, where?” asked the man in tennis shoes suspiciously.
“Over there, that’s mine,” the officer pointed to a blue Zhiguli parked on the other side of the road.
The police captain came up again, dark with suppresed anger, and exclaimed, “You too, comrade major, please move on, there is nothing here that concerns you!”
The major stared at him for a second and then spat on the ground. “Go to hell, bastard,” he drawled through gritted teeth. Then he decided to ignore the policeman, and he bent down and picked up the woman under her armpits while the man in tennis shoes grabbed her bare feet, and together they carried her to the Zhiguli.
Mark, who up to that moment had been standing there speechless, saw the police captain biting his lip as he went over to the van. Well, he sorted you out, Mark thought. Just look what you can do if you have a uniform: it appears to give you courage, which is something either you have or you haven’t…
XXIV
The toffs’ talking shop
Moscow, September 1988
In normal conditions, it was not at all unpleasant to work in the researchers’ common room at the Institute of the History of the CPSU. Tanya quite enjoyed the long days when she was on shift at the Institute; indeed she sometimes took on extra ones. All right, the plaster is coming away from the wall, and there’s the occasional damp patch. Last time they were repainting the interiors, they forgot to do that room; besides, you don’t get into it from the main corridor but from a kind of hidden stairway and you have to go down five or six steps. Well, to be absolutely honest, it is a kind of basement with bad lighting. The upside is that it is a peaceful place and you don’t risk meeting too many people there: those who just want a chat and a fag go into the courtyard and those who have to finish an urgent job go into the library… However, today is not a good day for work. Our Valka, senior researcher Valentina Leonidovna Stark, is on the phone and she shouts her private business to the four winds:
The Anonymous Novel Page 37
