The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  Don’t rush off like that, dear man, there are many more exciting new wonders that await you! Indeed the advert goes on to explain: The Association can also provide universal technology for welding metals and alloys. The regional branches can also supply pigskins, calf leather, granulated chicken droppings, cotton fabrics… Hold on a moment!

  Granulated chicken droppings! Over there in the West, of course, they could never dream up such things: the mind simply isn’t up to it… Cotton fabrics, artificial cotton fabrics, steel scrap in 16 kg blocks containing 1.4 % carbon and 1% flint. Because of course steel scrap has to be sold in amounts of 16 kg; You don’t like it? Not a problem! We’ll find someone else… On the other hand, you can have chicken droppings in any quantity you want, and you can choose your own shape. The only thing that’s missing is a system for transforming base metals into gold! Out of curiosity, I look for the address of this unlikely band of tricksters who would never be taken seriously in the West, and here we are, mail to be sent to them care of the Academy of Science of the USSR! This is no lie: Sretenka Street, No. 10… I can see the academicians all sitting round a table and rubbing their hands together. They have just been for a haircut so as to look the part: soon the customers’ letters will start arriving and with them will come riches! Who knows how long they will stay there before accepting the dispiriting reality: the letters will never come…

  In comparison, Yury Yemelyanovich Markov, chairman of the “Aurora” cooperative in Pskov, is a reliable businessman with his feet set firmly on the ground: he merely wants a partner in the production of chickens’ eggs with the yolks and whites separated out. More than a hundred million eggs are supposed to undergo this process every year. If only Bulgakov were still alive! It seems that here in Russia it is always a matter of eggs when we’re poised between tragedy and farce: if the yolk is heavier, we’ll be plunged into the abyss, and if it is lighter, we’ll continue to teeter on the edge of the precipice for a little bit longer… That, I’m afraid, is just how it is! On the one side this riff-raff, and on the other Artem Tarasov and his computers; who knows which in the end will prove to be heavier…

  The concert hall is now emptying, and they are switching off the lights on the stage. The competitors have all gone off to party or to cry on their mother’s shoulder. Even the provincial journalist has disappeared somewhere, and that leaves Oleg, Grant and the Swedish journalist at the table.

  By having gulped down one vodka after another, the Swede has finally managed to get drunk, Oleg observes with a degree of satisfaction. Perhaps she’ll pull out a wad of dollars and take us all to a currency bar, because there’s not a fucking thing to drink in this sordid hotel for people who can only pay in plain roubles. Say madam, what about turning up at the, at the… Oleg slurs the parts of this sentence in English, how the fuck do they say currency bar?

  Shakespeare could never have got his head around a concept as complicated as that! To hell with it, let’s go about this in another way: What about one more drink? O-o-okay, his Swedish colleague agrees, and she grabs onto his arm.

  He could lift her bodily, she is so sylphlike after sixty years of yogurt and carrots – but also one or two vodkas in the evening and an entire bottle on Saturday evenings, I would swear it. But listen, you’ve got to pay, here they only accept bucks. Yeah, she agrees with a shrug of her shoulders; she wasn’t born yesterday and she knows the Soviet Union.

  Okay, guys, where is this currency bar? It turns out that the bar is on the sixteenth floor, so they stagger off to the lift and then they are guided along a dirty corridor by the rock music which is being played at full volume in the bar. And there they know how to party: there are already several broken glasses on the floor, and as in a conjuring trick, Dyakonov and his heavies are sitting at the best table with three or four young tarts. He treats the barman as though he were his employee, and German marks are falling out of his pockets. One of the girls occasionally stoops down to pick them up and stuff them quickly in her handbag. When Grant throws open the door, the Accountant turns to look at them and, removing his cigarette from his mouth, he shouts, Slava, pour them some drinks! The Swedish woman doesn’t want this; no, no, she wants to flash her own dollars about, but the barman has already started to pour the cognac, and Oleg has a word in her ear: Be cool; better to go along with it. But why? she persists. Listen, we’ve no choice, and that’s that. And why not? Aren’t we just returning some of his ill-gotten gains to the people in the form of alcohol?…

  Dyakonov laughs and drinks, shakes his head of shining, gel-smeared hair in rhythm to the music, and upends the cognac bottle over the glasses, but it turns out to be empty.

  Hey, Slon, guffaws his boss, come on, show us what you’re capable of – with these empty bottles! The largest of his gorillas, a brick shithouse with a scar that crosses his entire cheek, slowly wipes his mouth with a napkin, grabs a bottle by its neck, lifts it and smashes it on his forehead. I’m not joking! At the very most, all he did was close his eyes at the moment of impact, and then he throws the shorn-off bottleneck on the floor as though nothing unusual had occurred.

  Then he looks around and sniggers, while the others are falling about laughing. You’re the best, Slon, Dyakonov chortles and rummages about in his blazer pockets. For some reason they are empty, and what now? No problem! There’s a briefcase on the floor next to the chair legs, and the Accountant puts it on his knees, triggers the combination lock and – another wonder upon wonders! – it too is overflowing with marks; no, actually, this time it is dollars. Dyakonov grabs a handful without counting them and majestically proffers them to the elephant sitting opposite, who thanks his boss and quietly pockets them.

  The girl they saw earlier comes out of the lavatories; her colouring is livid under the artificial light. She’ll have gone to piss out everything she’s poured down her throat or to vomit up the caviar. The Accountant gets up and goes off to meet her. She allows herself to be guided to the dance floor, where they start to throw themselves around quite frenetically and the rock music becomes harder. It appears that we’re the most sober people in the room, remarks Oleg:

  Dyakonov’s bodyguards are full of alcohol, and let’s hope they don’t get that idea of warming up the party by shooting the ceiling, as you can see the bulges where they carry their pistols and Slon seems to have a sub-machine gun… The prostitutes are even drunker: one gets up and another follows, and they too start to writhe about to the beat of the rock music, their hair sweeping the air; a third one is still seated, but what next? – she’s chucking down the last of her drink, undoing the buttons of her shirt with mutinous fingers. Then she unfastens her bodice and dances with naked breasts to the applause and acclamation of her gangster friends. Oleg grimaces suddenly; Grant notices and elbows him: What’s up, why the face? Nothing really, says Oleg, just remembering something; what’s that sentence you always hear on television – the live coverage of the party congress? You know, the first thing all the deputies say when they get the microphone: All this is the work of Mikhail Sergeyevich, he’s the one we really have to thank…

  Grant sniggers and shakes his head. Then he says as he raises his glass with uncertain fingers: Yes, let’s drink to him, he is the one we have to thank for all this…

  XXXIII

  A funeral in Baku

  Moscow, June 1989

  Shoes. The first thing you see is a mountain of shoes. Used, worn-out shoes covered in dust; shoes made of plastic, cloth and God knows what else – and not just shoes, but sandals, clogs and everything else that can be turned out by our footwear industry, in its eternal struggle to keep up with the five-year plan; almost always men’s shoes, but here and there the odd child’s shoe. And then there’s this guy with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, whose job it is to stand guard on that great mound. What’s that? Of course he’s not a concentration-camp guard. That’s ridiculous, and the shoes do not belong to deportees to Auschwitz. The Nazis have nothing to do with this, and it has to be admitted that
I was the one who unconsciously misled you: I did speak about a mountain, but in reality the shoes are neatly lined up in a large quantity on a kind of carpet or worn runner, if you prefer. And let’s make it immediately clear that this is not a shoe shop either. This footwear is used, and some of the shoes are in such a condition that even a junk shop would be ashamed to offer them to a customer. No, this is a very different matter: we are at the entrance to the Mosque of Taza-Pir in Baku, the one which the late Pashayev once served at, may God’s blessings and peace be upon him. And it appears that a solemn funeral service is being held: the faithful have gathered barefoot in the mosque, where they are sweating copiously in that closed and overcrowded place, although it is not that hot outside and the weather in Baku has suddenly broken. A fresh wind is blowing from the mountains and the khadim, who is guarding the shoes with his cigarette lost in the midst of his bushy grey beard, keeps his hands in his pockets and wears a sheepskin shapka on the side of his head.

  And back in Moscow, Tanya does not yet know anything about all this. No, she has just got back home from the Institute, and as she is turning the key in the lock, she is already aware that her Auntie Olya is visiting, because of the voices coming from the kitchen. Oh, Tanya, is that you? smiles her aunt, and then she looks at her watch and looks up wide-eyed: Just look at the time, and we’ve been sitting here all afternoon chatting like magpies, just like magpies! There’s a pile of dirty dishes in the sink; the ladies have lunched and then forgotten all about it… How come Auntie has had her lunch here? Why didn’t she go to work? You know how it is, Olya laughs on seeing Tanya’s surprise; to tell the truth, I did intend to go this morning, and just as I was leaving, the phone rang. They were calling me from my old job; it was Nekrasova – you remember? Of course you remember her; her name is Ninel and her patronymic Filippovna, would you believe it? You couldn’t possibly not remember her; you all came to see me once at the office, and you must have been five… Well, would you believe it, Nekrasova rings me from the ministry this morning to tell me that they’re selling fresh fish over there, so along I went of course. And then I came here, because I could hardly go to the office with a bagful of fish. It’s delicious fish, too! It’s bass, and I could hardly eat it all on my own, now could I?

  We cooked it for lunch, but don’t worry, we left some for you…

  While her aunt was chattering away, Tanya rolled up her sleeves, put on an apron and started to wash the dishes.

  The television in the corner was on but with the volume turned low. They were doing one of the sensationalist news reports that are all the fashion these days, with titles like “A Glance at What’s New” and “Six Hundred Seconds”. Initially Tanya paid little attention; since childhood she had been used to getting on with her own things while the television murmured away in the kitchen without anyone listening, showing some interest or even switching it off. This was a habit of theirs… But then her mother got up to increase the volume, and so Tanya turned around to see what was going on. Extravagant images were passing across the screen: a mountain of sacks stacked next to a warehouse in a courtyard and even in the road nearby. Workers with red scarves on their heads were coming and going unhurriedly, and a man with a medal on his lapel – clearly some kind of headman – was opening one of those sacks in front of the camera; he thrust his hands in, drew them out and poured from them a kind of shiny white sand. The man, it appeared, was the manager of a cake factory somewhere in the Urals – in Chelyabinsk or around those parts, and a few weeks earlier the Minister for Agricultural Resources had rung him to say that he would shortly be receiving his entire sugar allocation for the following year, 1990, in order to speed up delivery procedures and the fulfilment of the five-year plan. I was very pleased to hear this, said the manager, as the factory had been practically idle for a month precisely because of a lack of sugar, and I was unable to source it anywhere else. But then I did a few sums and started to panic: the annual allocation specified in the plan is for one thousand five hundred tonnes, and our warehouses can only store a tenth of that. I rang Moscow and even rushed over there in person: Cancel that order, I say. If only it were that easy! I never even discovered who actually signed the order, and in the meantime, the sugar keeps arriving! Every day, they are offloading two or three railway wagons. My lorries are only just managing to bring the stuff here. As for storing it properly – well, you can see for yourselves: the warehouse is full, the yard as well, and now we are obliged to offload the sugar in the road. People are complaining that it is blocking the traffic… But no one thinks about the inconvenience to us. Tons of sugar is piled up in every room in the factory. There is no room for the other raw materials, and even the workers can’t move about! But that is not all: according to my calculations, the quantity on the order has already been delivered and we now have at least two thousand tonnes of sugar, while more is arriving every day.

  No one at the ministry seems to know how to stop it. It’s as though it loads itself on the wagons, and we have to take the deliveries…

  You have to remember that, at Tanya’s home, they had been living without sugar for months! It disappeared from the shops in Moscow before Christmas, and they had now used up the considerable stockpile that Mum had put aside in the store cupboard. So that’s where all the sugar ended up: in Chelyabinsk! While the factory manager railed against his ministry, and the journalist, one of those young louts with a leather jacket and a Leningrad accent who seem to be everywhere these days, held the microphone under the manager’s snout and nodded his agreement with a grave expression, Tanya’s mother exclaimed, “My dear ones, enjoy my jam while you still have it, because I’m not sure that we’re going to have any next year!”

  Tanya looked at her grandmother who, on hearing this prophecy, was looking profoundly concerned, and then stared at her mother with disapproval. Such jests were not good for the health of her grandmother, Anna Mikhaylovna; the old woman had become very apprehensive and any silly little thing could alarm her. Of course, thought Tanya, she’s eighty-four – born in 1905; incredible to think of all the things she must have seen… Now after more than two months in hospital, she is strained, weakened, and not only in her body, but also in her head, whether you like it or not: she has survived the heart attack, and it doesn’t appear to have left any visible signs, but the organism has suffered a heavy blow. Because this too had happened, and just at the time when Tanya was finishing the last chapter of her thesis: one night Granny felt ill, the ambulance came and she was taken as an emergency case to the Botkin Hospital… A few weeks later, she wanted to come home; she had had enough of those alien sheets, the hospital regime and the eternal smell of stale urine and mustard poultices.

  Another five old women were mouldering in the same ward.

  As for the daily enema, that was a torture. Tanya had attempted to convince the nurse that it wasn’t necessary – in fact it was doing more harm than good; she was her grandmother after all! And she understood her very well!

  But some things cannot be tampered with, and procedure is procedure. She even spoke to the consultant during the three minutes of the morning visit, and he just shrugged; Do not interfere with the nurses, when they are trying to get on with their work, he muttered. On that occasion, Tanya lost her patience: Do you not understand, she screamed, that these enemas of yours are inflicting pointless suffering? Isn’t your profession meant to be about eliminating suffering?

  Then for some reason, she came out with a Gorky quotation:

  “Suffering is my enemy.” The consultant turned purple with rage, and started to shout too: Don’t come here and start lecturing me with a few lines from Gorky; I was reading Gorky before you were born! All around the other patients were shaking their heads with disapproval: What bad manners, arguing with the doctors, and they’re doing everything they can. They work so hard, and what can she know about what should or should not be done? Well, that’s what the young people are like these days; they think they know everything, and have no respe
ct for anything… In other words, it was like bashing your head against a wall! As for returning home, the consultants held a meeting after a month, and their decision was unanimous: No, the old lady is too weak; she needs to have rest to recover, and where better to get rest than in a hospital? Much better here than in an overcrowded and insalubrious flat! Of course here in Russia, there is never a great hurry to send patients home – God forbid that a hospital should have too many empty beds when the auditors do the end-of-year inspection. The government is quite capable of closing a whole lot of wards, an absolute calamity! So Granny Anna Michaylovna was stuck in the Botkin for another month, where she became increasingly irritable and started arguing with the other patients. By the end it was complete hell. For example, the other old women were all religious, and they prayed and crossed themselves the whole day long. Now this was of itself an insufferable bore, but you could have put up with it if this religion of theirs had taught them a little Christian charity! We could do with a bit of that now, it occurred to Tanya; and when you think about it, they used to teach us at school that Christian charity was the mask that covered capitalist hypocrisy… But those patients belonged to that category of believer that the theologian Vetelev defined as ritualist and superstitious in his treatise on the art of preaching published in Zagorsk in, would you believe it, 1949! By this he meant people who are spiritually immature, intellectually obstinate and instinctively fanatical.