The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  Of course, much older husbands can be an uncooperative bunch, there’s no two ways about it. They don’t think that one day, if God grants them the fortune to get there, they will be little old arthritic men, and their wives will be active women at the height of their careers. And even the children – these children procreated after half a century of life out of pure egotism, let’s be blunt about it – will find when they reach the age at which the great world should open out before them, that they will have to take responsibility for the old man and worry about his medicines, his catheters… It is true that the old man could look after himself, because the state will pay his pension and, when necessary, there is always the rest home: here in Russia, whether you like it or not, they won’t let you die of hunger! But were these the thoughts going through Nazar’s head as he sat at the table and Asya, having told the story and found that the child still wasn’t sleepy, went back to clearing the table? Come on, you know the type: he was sitting there like a perfect idiot contemplating his little boy playing with a fork and attempting unsuccessfully to bend its handle with his baby fingers. When he dropped it on the floor after having pricked his fingertip, Misha got down on all fours under the table to retrieve it and proceeded to investigate all possible methods for inserting it in his ear.

  Only then did the father shake himself free of his ecstatic torpor to remove the weapon and ensure that the child did not harm himself. And the child looked at him in bewilderment and let out a scream.

  “Noooo! Bine!” he protested, by which he meant that that marvellous and shiny instrument was his and his alone, and no one had the right to deprive him of it.

  “It is not yours,” the father explained gravely. “This is yours,” he added as he scooped up a tin lorry from the floor; it was nine months old and a present from Grandfather Frost.

  “By lowwy,” confirmed Misha. And then, immediately taken by the new idea, “Pennep lowwy!” The father obediently showed him how the tiny door opened and shut. Then he looked hard into his son’s wideopen eyes and solemnly decreed, “And now I’m going to eat it!” He opened his mouth as far as it could go.

  Misha started to scream as he watched the toy moving closer and closer to that enormous cavern and about to disappear inside it like a rissole, “Nooo, Dad, nooo!”

  Satisfied, Nazar closed his mouth, “So I’ll not eat it?”

  “No,” confirmed the child, looking relieved.

  “Let’s get it going? Hold on while I clear the road,” and he clumsily piled a stack of dirty plates on one side of the table.

  “Pushu, Dada, pushu!” the child encouraged him.

  “We’re off!”

  The lorry hurtled across the table and inevitably plunged off the end, just as the learned men of Salamanca had predicted would happen to Christopher Columbus after passing through the Columns of Hercules.

  “Be too!” declared Misha, as he came back up from the floor with his toy in his hand. He put it on the table and tried to give it a push, but could not get it to go. He tried again and then again. He turned to his father questioningly, “No go, Dada, no go!”

  “It’s not going? Just wait. Like that!” and Nazar guided his little hand and gave it a push: the lorry sped across the table and plummeted towards the floor.

  “Again!” Misha exclaimed.

  “Again? No, my cutie, that’s enough now. Time for bed.”

  “No! Nother tory!”

  “Mummy,” called the indulgent father. “Would you tell him another story?”

  Asya abandoned her plates in the sink once more and came towards them, drying her hands on a dishtowel.

  “Tory! Onuponatimegirl…”

  “No,” Asya interrupted. “Let’s have another story – one that daddy would also be interested in. Because he doesn’t know that a certain little boy had a temperature this morning and didn’t go to nursery school!”

  Nazar frowned as he looked at her.

  “But don’t worry. It was nothing serious,” Asya reassured him. “Just listen to the story! Once upon a time there was a baby boy…”

  “Temture?” Misha asked with a worried expression and touching his throat. “Yes, the baby was running a temperature, so his mummy wanted to give him some cough mixture, but there wasn’t any. They had to go to the chemist’s to buy some.”

  Misha laughed. He understood that this was an extraordinary story – more so than any other story that had ever been told, because he was himself the protagonist! But Asya had to stop on seeing Nazar’s worried look.

  “No, no,” she reassured him, “it really wasn’t anything.

  This morning he had a slight temperature, and I said to myself that I was going to keep him at home. There’s not a lot on in the office at the moment, so I rang and took a day off. I wanted to give him something but there was nothing in the house, so I went down to the chemist’s.”

  “But what about him?” Nazar interrogated her.

  “I took him with me! I put on a lot of clothes and kept him nice and warm, don’t you worry. And the cold weather hasn’t come yet… I could hardly leave him on his own in the house! And then I had to do some shopping. Do you remember, Misha? Mummy got very angry.”

  The child hid his face behind his hands, but looked mischievously through his fingers and laughed.

  “Yes, he made me very cross. We went to the grocer’s shop, and it was enough to drive you crazy. They keep promising to improve the supplies, but it seems to me that shops are increasingly short of stock. Today there was no cheese and no yogurt: the entire dairy counter was empty.

  There was some milk, but I didn’t buy any because the containers had been badly sealed. One woman told me it had gone sour. Can you believe it? No ham, no salami, just a few sausages, and they ran out before I could get to the top of the queue. The same story at the butcher’s counter: no lamb, and as for pork, just offal; there was no veal last week, but now that they’ve got some in, it is already defrosted and you wouldn’t even want to touch it. There was poultry, but that too was awful. We used to get the Hungarian stuff, which was always a delight: neatly packaged and appetising, but you can only get our own products and it’s so depressing. It is not packaged, and is piled up in compressed, frozen blocks. And not even plucked. I bought smoked fish, as there was nothing fresh, and the meatballs – well, you saw what they were like, and basically, they’re made of bread.”

  “You said that Misha made you angry.” “Yes, yes! Just as we were leaving, we met the wife of Polad-zade, the Deputy Minister. You know that I’m always a bit embarrassed in her company: their bedroom is right underneath our own, and you know what a noise we can make. But she is always so kind; she smiled at Misha and waved at him. I wondered whether the little boy would deign to say hello. He never greets those he doesn’t know, and he never says thank you – clearly beneath his dignity. Misha, I say, say hello, please! He looks at me with a thoughtful expression and naturally makes no attempt even to look in her direction, and says, ‘Can’t’. I explain everything and that our neighbour is offended. ‘Can’t,’ he says again, the little horror!”

  “Well, just listen to that,” Nazar grumbles with mock severity as he bends down towards the laughing child. “I have heard some worrying reports concerning young Mikhail Nazarevich.”

  “Nother tory!” Misha demanded; clearly the little prince was enjoying these accounts of his heroic exploits, no less than the princes of yesteryear who commissioned poets…

  “No,” ruled Nazar. “It is late, and Mishanya must go to beddy-byes, and Mummy and Daddy will soon be doing the same.”

  And in truth – as soon as Asya had got Misha asleep – Nazar took her by the arm and led her to bed, even though she protested that she was not sleepy. Doesn’t matter, he whispered in her ear. Actually it’s better that way. Then they didn’t say another word, not to avoid waking the baby who was now in a deep sleep and wouldn’t stir until the morning, but because their mouths were engaged in other activities and even when they were free
, they did not emit words but suffocated moans… And anyone who could be bothered to listen to them would not have been able to distinguish the semblance of a word, except an occasional “yes” repeated breathlessly. But then Asya let herself say with a more prolonged sigh than the others and in a tone of stupefied beatitude: Yours is sweeter than an orange… And without letting go of his wife who was wriggling free like a snake beneath him and flailing her opened legs wildly, Nazar thought with sudden lucidity: Here we are, animals once more! How strange that is! Man is the marvel of creation: we think, write, construct, muddle along, watch television and then – we’re nothing more than body and sweat, and in place of language, we just grunt like beasts! How wonderful that is!

  Yes, of course, but just at that moment the phone rings.

  It’s a curse, but there’s no escape. You have to disentangle yourself, draw breath so that your voice does not sound too distorted on the phone, and all this before the third or fourth ring, because otherwise there really would be the risk of waking Misha. As for not answering, that is out of the question; if they ring at this late hour, then it must be a matter of some moment!

  “Hello.”

  “Stepankov speaking. Were you asleep?”

  What a question… Nazar tenderly glanced at his wife’s naked body shiny with sweat. His eyes met her questioning ones. “No, I wasn’t asleep…”

  “Just as well,” the Deputy Chief Prosecutor cut him short. “Get in your car. You do have one, don’t you? Well, just come over here and see what they’ve brought us. I’ve got an idea that you’ll be rather interested. But best not to talk on the phone. Come to the Prosecutor’s Office immediately.”

  XXVII

  The conversation

  Moscow, October 1988

  Nazar was rubbing his hands together as he contemplated the cardboard box they had put on his desk. It could have once contained anything, say bottles of mineral water, but now it contained something much more precious! It was like being a child again and opening New Year’s presents during the years just before the war. He was only three or four at the time, but he remembered those heavy packages very well: the gold-coloured paper, the toys made of painted wood and tin, all things that the war swallowed up and never returned. But this was a present that came all on its own.

  He had brought a dozen of these boxes from the canteen, where they had eventually stored all the material transferred from the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. The wooden crates from the sovkhoz were not in fact very practical. There had been little room for them in his office: they had cluttered the floor and his colleagues had been complaining. There already wasn’t much room with four people working in the same office. Now it was a different matter: the cardboard boxes could be stored in the cabinets. Half of them had been put there in front of his desk, after throwing away whole piles of papers that had accumulated over the years and would no longer be needed. And the other half had been stored for the moment in the broom cupboard at the end of the corridor, but the janitor who had the keys was someone who could be trusted.

  A week had passed since that memorable night in which Stepankov summoned him to the Prosecutor’s Office to show him the purple notebook and inform him that in all probability the rest of those notorious papers confiscated in Baku were hidden in the basements of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, and since then, Nazar had almost gone without sleep. At his age, it was no longer so easy to stretch it out like that, no matter how many coffees he drank. But there was little choice. Now you’ve got your teeth on the bone, gnaw at it as hard as you can, before the other dogs take it off you again. And there was a lot to be done, starting with the difficult decision on where to start. The girl who had found the material, for instance – Voznesenskaya Tatyana Borisovna: he had interrogated her for a whole day, before sending her home and not thinking about her again.

  To look at, the chubby young woman appeared insignificant and no different from millions of others, but she certainly wasn’t stupid – that much was clear. And it also seemed clear that she wasn’t lying: she really had come across those crates by sheer chance. As luck would have it, the first thing she took a look at happened to be the purple notebook: any reasonably bright person would immediately understand that there was something suspicious about that… In strictly logical terms, the next step should have been to interrogate the director of the archive, Tabeyev: Would you like to tell us exactly how all this stuff ended up in your basement? But for the moment, Nazar preferred to let the matter run: why in fact would he want to cause a commotion? It would be much better for no one to know anything about it; as long as they thought their treasure was buried there, they would feel quite relaxed. Instead of the director, he had interrogated the attendant Lyudmila Kudryashcheva who, accord to Voznesenskaya’s statement was with her at the time of the discovery. As a precaution, he went to see her at home rather than at work. She lived in a bedsit – no, what am I saying, a box room in a community flat in Izmaylovo, outside the ring road. Every day it took an hour and a half to get to work. Nazar immediately reached an understanding with this little woman who dyed her own hair red at home, and was an alcoholic – and perhaps a little loopy, and the pair of them organised an operation that wasn’t exactly legal. Well, actually it was probably completely illegal: that same evening long after the archive closed, a police van drew up at the pavement in the lane outside the service door, and Kudryashcheva opened it from the inside and then accompanied the judge and the policemen through the basements to those crates. They simply picked them up and took them away. For the moment, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism was outside the investigation, not that Nazar had given up on the idea of finding out sooner or later exactly how those crates had ended up there. The important thing for the moment was to examine their contents.

  And the contents did not disappoint Nazar’s first, hurried and random glance through those shelves of ledgers in Pankratov’s flat one afternoon in Barrikadnaya Street. It would take two months, he had said to himself, to sift through it all properly, and now he was not expecting to do it any quicker. However, by putting his hands on the right papers and ledgers in the first week, he had already been able to formulate quite a clear picture of what had been going on. And what wasn’t coming out of the ledgers! You were left rubbing your eyes. Of course, we all know some things: shop managers are robbing us – who could imagine anything different? and shop assistants are also robbing us, albeit just on the weight – that too is something we’ve known about for some time. But it is one thing to know about it as a generalised reality, and maybe complain about the woman at the corner shop who by dint of nibbling away on a piece of cheese and a pat of butter manages to put away quite a snack every day, and so she ends up eating for free; and who cares? But it is something entirely different to discover a whole pile of school exercise books, the ones with large squares that children use in primary school, each book representing an entire year and the oldest ones beginning to turn yellow after ten or maybe even fifteen years, and in them they have recorded everything wholesale and retail: not just a pat of butter, I can tell you. There was everything stolen by the grocers of Baku or at least those who gave a cut to the Accountant. Filippov, the manager of the grocery shop in Square of the Twenty-Six Commissars, pocketed 171,300 roubles in ten years of business, and gave Dyakonov a cut of 84,642, no less. The Accountant then paid out a large part of that in bribes: for instance 8,640 roubles to the chief of police, who until 1984 was a certain Mustafayev, and then our friend, Amir Salayev. This Filippov wasn’t even a big fish; there were those who pocketed more and paid out less: clearly people on the ball, who had the right friends. Ambarzumov, the manager of the fruit and vegetables warehouse, had embezzled 405,000 roubles in fourteen years, starting from 1973, and he only paid out 51,000: all the rest clung to his sticky fingers. Dyakonov’s role also became increasingly clear; he offered a service, a useful one at that. There’s a dirty job to be done, lubricating all those cogs; well, I and my boys can deal with it –
of course, working with all that lubricant means that we’re going to get our hands pretty greasy too… Your head starts to swim when you see how that river of roubles just keeps flowing. To the chief of police, as we have said, but also down to his immediate subordinates and further down to his squad commanders, and presumably they too had to put something aside for their men, who couldn’t be left with a parched throat. But when you do the figures, you realise that only a part of that miracle water went to the police; actually it was more like a rivulet. The people who drank most deeply of those waters were the managers of the commercial sector from the assessors at the Chamber of Commerce who issued the certificates and upwards to Ali Karayev, the general manager at the Ministry of Food Products: he would never be happy with less than ten per cent…

  So far, let’s be honest, there is nothing at all surprising, if for no other reason than that in our country we are now used to believing in anything: the human will is capable of everything, and not only have they been repeating this for seventy years, but they demonstrate it every day. But in some of those ledgers, Nazar discovered things that left him speechless with astonishment, and he thought he had seen it all. For instance, there were two legal experts: one directed a legal consultancy office at the Baku courthouse and the other was actually an academic holding the chair in criminal law at the KGB College of Higher Education. They are in league with Neporozhny Mikhail Gennadyevich, the director of the fish market. Who knows how they got to know each other, but the fact is that as soon as the first law on cooperatives was passed, these three got together and in no time they have built a fish cannery. Ah, the miracle of cooperation! Everything they touch turns to gold, and in less than a year, they have put aside something like one and a half million roubles, as shown in the Accountant’s books.