The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  For them, the theologian observed, offending or humiliating one’s neighbour is just a venial sin, while drinking a glass of milk on Wednesday is a mortal one, that must be punished severely. So the five old ladies talked and talked, and never let off insulting Jews. Every two or three words in their conversation would bring them back to this fixation, and Granny was infuriated: What are you people on about, she eventually said, you spend your whole time insulting the Jews, and then you’re off praying to Christ and worshipping him. But your Jesus was also a Jew! Well I never! You’d have thought she had just uttered a most outrageous blasphemy: they could have assaulted her, but contented themselves with the accusation of Zionism…

  Remembering all this, Tanya sighed and shook her head, and then immersed her arms once more in the dishwater.

  While the television moved on to its next scandal, she got lost in her own thoughts and was unaware of what was happening in the kitchen. So what was absorbing her mind?

  What was she brooding about? Well, the answer is very simple. Have we not just said that she has just got back from the Institute, where she had been called to speak about her thesis? Now she was mulling over that encounter with Obilin – vile worm that he is. Yes, she brooded and brooded, and she always came to the same conclusion: the weevils have got into that flour, and that bran is full of impurities; there is no way you could digest either of them… And yet the first impression was that there was little to complain about! Over the last two years, there were moments in which she would have written her signature in her own blood to get such an outcome. The thesis was stuck with the commission, but there is nothing strange about that. Here in Russia, a thesis is not judged in a month or even a year, particularly if the subject is, for one reason or another, considered somewhat delicate… The important thing is that some information is leaking out of the commission, and today the news was good: the ministry had finally replaced the academician Abrikosov, who had resigned the previous year, and his replacement was none other than the liberal professor, Pitovranov, and the rumour was that he was very close to Afanasyev. And anyone who is close to Afanasyev could only approve of a thesis like hers! (Yuri Afanasyev, the incredibly powerful director of the Institute of Archives, was the only topic of conversation at the Institute and a thousand other similar organisations; apparently he decided what was going to be published and what wasn’t, and which textbooks most needed rewriting, and if there was any doubt, he would just get onto the phone to Gorbachev. Now, we don’t hear any mention of him, and who knows where he and so many others have ended up…) Yes, Obilin seemed to be absolutely delighted, and perhaps that was the reason why he was getting so much on Tanya’s nerves. I have always argued, the old man droned on, that the time has come to open those closed doors and to fill the empty pages; for the moment, we have only just started, and the best is yet to come. The best? Tanya wondered to herself, but she didn’t have to ask him out loud, as Obilin was in loquacious mode; his tongue had suddenly loosened and he had put his fears aside. Perhaps it was the results of the Pan-Soviet elections of 26 March, and the unexpected triumph of the democrats… Yes, he said, your thesis has opened the way.

  When I think back to when you started on it, well what a powerful idea, how original! Of course, you did lose a lot of time, but that is not your fault; we have to learn how to do studies of this kind. Oh, so it wasn’t my fault, thought Tanya, well, thank you very much! Vile worm that you are…

  What a pity that you didn’t manage to finish it a bit earlier, Obilin jabbered, because if you had, we could have published it. The Institute of Archives has financed such publications, but they have to be submitted by December.

  Afanasyev phoned me personally; Yes, I said, one of my assistants is working on a thesis like that, and it will turn out to be a good piece of work, but it isn’t finished; it simply couldn’t be published in its present state! What a pity, he told me, we’ll have to discuss it later… But now we will be producing many more theses of this kind. They’ll find that our Institute is to be second to none. I have already seen to it. There’s Dekanozov, for example, his thesis on the successes of the Party in Stavropol during the seventies was going nowhere; I changed the title and he’ll study the trials, but not the ones in the forties as you have done, but the important ones, the ones carried out by Yezhov in ’37… And then there’s Arbuzov, he hasn’t yet made up his mind about the subject of his dissertation; we were quite right not to rush him!

  Yes, this is what Tanya was thinking about as she washed the plates, and without realising it, she had twisted her mouth into a grimace of disgust. Then suddenly a harsh and raucous voice erupts from the television:

  “… mayimiza inana bilmirak, EY AZILANLARIN…”

  The three women seated at the table all turn towards the appliance that has just started to talk in an incomprehensible language expressed in urgent tones. Even Tanya at the sink leans towards the screen, now curious.

  “… GALBLARIN SEVIMLISI, EY KHOMEINI!”

  And a thousand voices respond in unison with a savage enthusiasm:

  “EY KHOMEINI!”

  The camera shot frames a wreath of flowers: interlaced red roses – the colour of blood and martyrdom. At the centre of the crowd, there is a photo of an austere old man with a turban and a white beard, but his eyebrows are, for some reason, black and bushy… Of course, Tanya remembers, Ayatollah Khomeini died the other day, and the Muslims are carrying out the funeral rites. Here they are lined up barefoot on carpets in the mosque, almost in military-style ranks, without a tear but ready to shout themselves hoarse should the ceremony require it. The officiating cleric is standing in front of the crowd, a black cloak on his shoulders, and on his head a Karakul hat. He is reading in his language in an inspired voice and every time he mentions the deceased, he half closes his eyes and waits for the faithful to unleash their howl:

  “EY KHOMEINI!” Where are they – in Teheran? Yes, that’s where it must be, or somewhere in Persia surely. But why then is the television journalist one of ours, a Soviet of course and a little younger than the other one but still with a Leningrad accent? And why is he going up to the mullah in the mosque courtyard and the mullah answering him in Russian? (While the mullah is speaking, a crowd of small children enter the courtyard and a man from the mosque is handing out cakes to them. The children are pressing around him and holding out their little hands towards the cardboard box, which he is holding above their heads. He is trying to avoid them stamping on his feet, but the crush is so fierce that his legs have entirely disappeared from view. None of the men who are praying inside appear to be irritated by the racket; clearly handing out cakes is part of the ritual). The mullah speaks into the microphone, and what does he say? In our country too, the grief of the faithful… What does he mean, IN OUR COUNTRY? And he’s talking in Russian…

  “But that’s in Baku!”

  It was the grandmother who spoke, and she was even halfway out of her chair with surprise. They’re now filming the granite buildings in Lenin Square, and you can clearly see the Harbour Station in the background. In the middle of the square, the same journalist is interviewing an official from the city’s soviet. Our people are in mourning, the woman says, and the Republic’s authorities are with their people. A great international leader has died, and these demonstrations of mourning have been authorised…

  “I cannot believe it,” Granny mutters and shakes her head. “When I think that we used to live there! Do you remember it, my dears?”

  Tanya’s mother and aunt are speechless. But that’s how it is: you are born in a city and you live there, and even after you have moved away, you continue to think of it as your city, but it isn’t. It can no longer be. And God knows how all this is going to end up? Today they are mourning Khomeini, tomorrow who knows… What about me? thinks Tanya.

  Because I went through a lot; I went down there without permission, I uncovered those mouldy papers, I have even written a chapter on the NKVD investigators, but why call the
m that? Obilin can call them that, if he wants; my chapter is on torturers and executioners, with their full names, but what now? Those people kneeling down barefoot on prayer mats and invoking Khomeini don’t care a damn about all that. Why should they care about firing squads in the basements of their prisons forty years ago? Of course they don’t care… So all this anguish and hard work has been for nothing? Oh no, Tanya rebels, don’t ever think like that; is the truth less important, just because the people in the streets prefer to listen to lies or, we can admit it, another truth? No, we must not fall into that trap. Yeast too is just a little dust, but without it you can’t bake bread. Of course, they won’t publish our works in millions of copies, but we will still leave our mark, perhaps more than the people who wrote all those volumes in red covers that are now on their way to the shredder… And then Tanya encounters her grandfather’s eyes staring out from the small framed photograph hanging in a corner of the kitchen. Please, Granddad – don’t give me a telling-off – I haven’t told them here at home that I found you. You could not imagine it:

  Granny was forty-four when they arrested you, and now she is a little old woman. Why stir up all that pain! I’ve thought about it, and perhaps I’ve got it wrong, but I thought it was better this way. Besides I wasn’t looking for you. Your name is in my thesis, but in the midst of hundreds of others; pity must be shared out equally amongst you all; the distress is the same, so is the wound. But those two who made you confess everything they wanted – I speak a lot of them: there is a paragraph on each of them. And they didn’t want it; they did everything to impede me, and they didn’t succeed!

  So you rest in peace… But, thought Tanya, it is such a load to carry all on your own. If only I could speak about all this to someone, discuss it – but who with? Could you discuss it with the Dekanozovs and the Arbuzovs? You must be kidding… Luckily there’s Oleg, Tanya thinks and immediately softens. She returns to her plates: Let’s hope that living like this isn’t too high a price for him; let’s hope that he can wait, because I don’t think I could go on without him…

  XXXIV

  Matroskaya Tishina

  Moscow, June 1990

  Here in Moscow we have as many prisons as you could possibly want. It’s true that some of them are no longer used as prisons; for example, they say that no one has been locked up in the Lubyanka for quite some time. This is not some sudden outbreak of good-heartedness – of course! It is just that the bureaucrats are many and office space is limited, so by continually converting one room after another into offices, they can swallow up a whole prison… But don’t you worry; when it comes to well-functioning penal institutions absolutely chock-a-block with reluctant lodgers, we’ve still got plenty of them left. On Novoslobodskaya Street, for example, you have Butyrka, the famous transit prison, and it’s no distance at all from one of the least frequented railway stations in the capital: from there they can send you straight off to the labour camps, with no delays and no unnecessary inconvenience. On Energeticheskaya Street, what you have is the Military Prison of Lefortovo. During the reign of Catherine II, it was a barracks, but then they discovered a much better use for all those dormitories. Our prisons have been around for a long time; they were built by autocrats and then served the people, because here in Russia when we carry out a revolution, we don’t go running off to tear down our prisons.

  No, no, when it comes to places of confinement we are not squanderers; they’ll come in handy sooner or later, we think to ourselves… Take the French for example: they’re a breezy bunch of happy-go-luckies who fiddle all day and never think of tomorrow. They start off by taking the Bastille, and then set about razing it to the ground, as though this were a matter of little consequence. They turn it into a square, and now it appears that an opera house has been built there.

  Does that sound like a sensible act? No, we Russians hold our prisons dear, and now that THE TIMES HAVE CHANGED once more, our intellectuals would object to anyone wanting to knock them down: the whole of our culture has passed through those walls; they are the most literary places in the whole of Moscow. So perhaps those same democratic intellectuals who today are chattering away so merrily will still have a chance to make a better acquaintance with the hard benches of the Butyrka and Lefortovo Prisons, who knows…

  But let’s be clear about one thing, not all the capital’s prisons are ancient; God forbid! No, here in Russia – our very good fortune – we have some quite remarkable prisons that do not smell of the Ancien Régime; prisons that are wholly ours and truly proletarian. During some periods in our recent history – for one reason or another – the number of detainees awaiting justice in Moscow has been higher than at the time of the Tsar. It’s true that the cells were more crowded: where the jailers of Catherine and Nicholas could stuff in five or six prisoners, those of the Kremlin highlander could pack in fifty or sixty! In spite of these conjuring tricks, there were never enough prisons, and it was an absolute priority to build more, so the building programme never ended. For instance, they hurriedly knocked one together at Sokolniki in 1949 – in a road at the back of beyond that no one had ever heard of, but gave it such a poetic name: Matroskaya Tishina, the Silence of the Sailors. Who knows how they came up with a name like that? Some people argue that at the time of Peter the Great the navy had its headquarters there – before the construction of Saint Petersburg of course. But why those sailors had to keep quiet is not at all clear, even though, if you think about it, this was probably prudent behaviour even then. In any event, they constructed a prison in the year of grace 1949, and it was nothing special – just like a normal prison with barbed wire and walkways along the perimeter for the sentries.

  And in the spring of 1990 they transferred from Butyrka Prison to Matroskaya Tishina the former deputy minister, Polad Alyevich Polad-zade. The intervening year and a half of incarceration had changed Nazar’s neighbour a great deal: if you’d frequented him during the good times, you would actually have had difficulty in recognising him! Pale with a long beard and bags under his eyes, he dozed all day on an unmade camp bed. He never changed his pyjamas – no matter what time of year – and he had lost so much weight that his legs would shake in his trousers. His cellmates had long since ceased to treat him with any respect: So who is he? A deputy minister – well, fancy him such a great man!

  The slops pail makes him dirty and smelly just like everyone else. He has stopped reading the newspaper, which he used to have brought to him every day. He no longer bothers to protest about this and that. Strange, because in the early days he did nothing but complain, and now he has walls oozing damp and mouldy rations! Yes, the comrade deputy minister had calmed down completely. Anyone who saw him now with his few whitish hairs coming away in clumps and his broken glasses tied together with string, would not have recognised the sultan of yesterday who once, while inspecting a factory in the Urals, had had the company’s swimming pool cleared of the workers who were using it – more than a hundred people – just so he could go for a swim without having to mix with that scum! (Indeed, this too had come out during the investigation: as soon as the news of Polad-zade’s arrest had been published in the newspapers, the letters had started to come thick and fast. They were mainly anonymous, but some were signed, and they did not just come from Moscow, but also from the most unexpected places. As far as he could, Nazar checked them out, and although some were simply defamatory, there were far too many that were authentic and verifiable. The swimming-pool story was one of these: people had protested, and several workers who were relaxing after their shift refused to leave, but the management, suffering from an attack of servility, would not listen to reason and drove them all away to make room for the deputy minister). No, you wouldn’t have recognised that shabby old man, whose name the other prisoners could not pronounce so they simply called him ’lyevich, not even bothering to capitalise the first letter…

  That day Nazar had come to Matroskaya Tishina with a little gift: a new cellmate whose name he knew well: none o
ther than the former chief of the Baku police, Amir Salayev.

  It had taken some time for the authorities to get their hands on him. Stepankov had been quite right when, on asking Nazar if he wanted to go to Baku in person to arrest them all, he had warned that a pistol would not suffice… In Moscow, you might have had all the proof you needed to show that these good people are up to their necks in some dirty business, starting with the Party’s first secretary who, it should be said, was only involved in taking bribes – but what bribes! But it was yet to be proven that he had had an active role reaching down to the chief prosecutor and the chief of police, who on the other hand could not have been lining their pockets very nicely without giving anything back. No, that was beyond doubt. The criminals were asking them to give a warning phone call, when circumstance required, and perhaps lose the occasional irksome file from the documentation for committal hearings. And of course, prosecutor and police chief both would promptly deliver the goods… Yes, you can have the evidence you want – clearly stated in black and white – but putting them inside is a very different question! You have to remove them and replace them with others willing to sign the arrest warrants and then implement them at the risk of their careers and even their skins. To remove them, you need the Party committee to take the decision, and you can bet that they won’t be rushing it through… It is, in fact a vicious circle; Stepankov was right, there was nothing for it but to be patient and wait, and throw into prison all those who happened to be in Moscow at the wrong moment, rather than their beloved Baku, the heroin-city. As in the case of Deputy Minister Polad-zade…

  So time would show that Stepankov was right, and not only on that occasion; not for nothing did he eventually become the Chief Prosecutor of the USSR or, as we now call it, Russia. And they did not have long to wait – a mere nothing in relation to the usual time frame for our legal system. Little more than a year of patience was required before the situation in Azerbaijan fell apart all on its own.