The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  “My dear ones!” Asya exclaimed. “Three hours, three hours queuing to buy sugar, and they wouldn’t give me more than five kilos even with my ration card!”

  “But weren’t they meant to give you ten kilos?” Nazar objected.

  “They were supposed to! But now they’ve changed the allocations, and our ministry is only getting five kilos a head, and we have to be thankful that we get them in one go; Nyura came to see us and where she works now, she says, they can only get it a kilo at a time!”

  While she was talking, Asya had dropped the bags full of sugar and fruit on the table; the effort of carrying them had left her breathless.

  “As for the apples, it’s enough to make you weep; at the market they cost twelve roubles a kilo, and who can afford that? I got the rejects at the shop. Fortunately Verochka keeps them back for me, but now they are talking about rationing those too, but perhaps that’s all for the best. At the moment you can only buy them in Moscow, and they come in from the country like locusts and buy up the lot of them… Well done, put the potatoes on to boil, at least that’s been done… We’ll make some compote this evening; are you going to give me a hand, Misha?

  “The sugar is for making compote?” the child asked.

  “Yes, dear,” Asya answered, “otherwise what would Misha be eating this winter? This evening we’ll get down to it; we’ll cook the fruit…”

  “But I’ve got a better idea,” Misha solemnly declared.

  “Don’t let’s make compote; let’s eat the sugar with a teaspoon!”

  Asya started to laugh. “No, my little one, listen to your mummy: we’ll make compote while they’re still giving us sugar… Oh, and have you heard?” she turned heatedly to Nazar. “There’s a stall at the market that always has cherries; they had them last year and I made a preserve, do you remember? Well, today they had them and nice ones too. I’m about to buy a few kilos, and the peasant woman says, No, my girl – that’s how she put it – here you can only buy in dollars; do you have any dollars? Just like that, as though this were totally normal. I became red with embarrassment; if this goes on much longer, I thought to myself, we won’t even be able to buy bread without dollars…”

  “And so what happened?” Nazar was frowning.

  “What could I do? I couldn’t buy them…”

  “But you did get some meat, didn’t you?”

  “You’re kidding! You can’t find that anywhere, and the cooperatives are to blame! Even before, there was very little, but now it all ends up in the cooperative restaurants, where you can guzzle as much as you want…”

  Asya went silent, ran a hand through her hair, sighed and started to empty her bags.

  “Are you worried?” Nazar looked at her over the top of his glasses.

  “A little,” she muttered disconsolately.

  Her husband stood up and embraced her; then he helped her take out the packets of sugar.

  “You’ve managed to feed us up till now; I’m sure we won’t die of hunger,” he joked. “Everyone stay where you are!” Misha’s high-pitched voice interrupted them. He was in the doorway to the kitchen, hot and excited as he laughed; he was seated on a rocking horse, and was brandishing a plastic sword – a fouryear-old lionheart…

  “Who are you supposed to be, a brigand?” asked Nazar.

  “No, I’m a warrior!” proclaimed Misha, lifting his sword even higher and threatening some imaginary dragon. A ray of sunlight penetrated the room through a gap in the curtains and, forgetting all else, the child rushed towards it swirling his sword and shouting, “Forward into battle! Fight the fire bird!”

  Asya came up to Nazar, and together they studied their child leaping around the room. The father called to him several times, but Misha was oblivious.

  “He’s in another world,” said Nazar.

  “A very distant one,” Asya agreed in a voice that was almost tremulous. “But now he’ll come back. Misha!” she shouted loudly. The child turned and saw her stretching out towards him, and he threw down the sword and ran to the comfort of her arms.

  “Hi, Misha! Have you come back home?” she asked.

  The child nodded as though he had understood, and hugged her. Then he slipped free of her embrace and looked at his parents, who were unable to take their eyes off him; you could tell he was about to make a declaration.

  “What’s up, Mishanya?” asked his dad.

  “When I’m grown up, you’ll have to make another baby!…

  Because I will have another job.”

  Nazar looked at his wife and laughed, “Yes, you’ll have another profession, no longer that of being a child.”

  Asya, in turn, looked her husband in the eyes, smiled and shook her head, while an inexplicable melancholy swept through her being…

  XXXV

  The glory of empire

  Moscow, February 1991

  Mark Kaufman returned home with an aching arm. He had just been to the Passport Office, where he had been filling in forms all day: his muscles hurt and his name no longer made any sense. Markman Kauf Isakovich or Man Isak Kaufevich, it was now all the same: do what you want with me, just get me on that plane! He had very little left in his suitcase to sell – his manuscript and his underpants. He would have like to have taken away his general’s uniform, but this was no longer possible. And then, who knows what aggravations would await you if they opened your suitcase, and they will do, the bastards: they find it, they finger it again and again, they scratch their heads and, as you have been expecting, they call you to one side – away from the queue: Come over here a minute, general, we’ve got a couple of things we’d like to say to you! No, no, it is better this way.

  The Tupolev taxis along the runway, and it’s bollock-freezing inside, because the heating system hasn’t yet kicked in, but who cares? Tomorrow we’ll be eating grapefruit on the beach at Tel Aviv, always supposing they have a beach down there…

  No, Mark has not gone mad; it’s just that he is tired of living amongst such madness. Once he’d come to this realisation, he made his decision: I’m off and that’s that. If I also get tired of that madness down there, then I go off and find the cowboys, or who knows where; there are madmen everywhere, of course, but ones like these here in Russia, never! How come, you’ll be saying, it took you so long to understand the bleeding obvious? All too easy, I can assure you: just listen. It all started one morning just like any other; the radio announced the temperature during the night: Moscow, -20°, falling to -25°; in the Moscow Region, falling to -30°. During the day, overcast with sunny spells, some light snow showers, temperatures rising to -15°. At home, thank God, it is warm, and you can wander around in your pyjamas and turn on the television: channel one – gymnastics, channel two – teach-yourself German! What garbage they do feed us! You put the milk pan on the cooker and in the meantime you start to march about the kitchen: falsch, falscher, falschest! Stolz, stolzer, stolzest! Carry on like this and the milk’ll turn sour… You go to the window, and there’s no sign of the sunny spells, but the snow showers are definitely there. Whether you could call them light is another matter. Generally speaking, believing the weather forecast is a sign of a weak mind: they are a superstition of our own age, and in a hundred years’ time they’ll be laughing at us. They thought they could predict the weather, just imagine! Just like those who think we can colonise Mars or that communism would be built by the year 1980… Yes, I know, forget it. Mark yawns and tries to think up a way of getting through the day; he does actually have a script to learn – well, they couldn’t go on playing The Sarcophagus forever, but this was one of those days in which you know from the moment you open your eyes that anything and everything would be better than working. And these are such wonderful days; the more often they happen, the better it is: you do a bit of housework, you tidy up here and there… For instance, there is a pile of old newspapers under the bed; Mark, you see, does not read the newspaper every day, but when there happens to be one about, he is in the habit of reading it in bed b
efore he falls asleep – quite often it’s yesterday’s paper. Its effect is however utterly unerring: as soon as his eyes start to close, flop! The newspaper’s under the bed, you switch off the light and sweet dreams. Then it comes in handy, if you need to wrap something up, such as shirts for the laundry: you put your arm under the bed, pull out whichever sheet of paper comes to hand… It’s just that in this way the paper builds up, and the oldest stuff is never touched, and some kind of insect proliferates amongst these old papers; they’re called silverfish, I think, and in the dark wander all over the floor, but if you turn on the light they turn tail and rush for home in their papers. In other words, you occasionally have to throw the whole lot away. Exactly the kind of job to get done on mornings like this one, thought Mark, getting up off the floor with arms loaded with old paper: take the whole pile to the kitchen table, squash the occasional invertebrate, switch on a light and examine your catch. The oldest newspaper, would you believe it, came out five years ago: Pravda, Tuesday 7 January 1986. This veteran has survived five years in the darkness under the bed and avoiding the various round-ups. It hasn’t even been creased; it just has a slightly mouldy smell. On the cover, the vanguard milkmaids, Afanderova and Tarakanova, are smiling at the photographer and showing their gold teeth. On the back page, we have the sport: the women’s handball team from Baku has beaten the team from Bratislava to reach the quarter-finals of the Cup Winners’ Cup: 31 – 21. Well done!

  And on page two, the showcase story: “Four reactors, each with a power of 1 GW, of the”…

  Four reactors…

  Well, four reactors, what can that be about?

  He quickly checks the date. But yes, 7 January 1986.

  Oh, my country, my country… Go then to the dogs and die, my native country!

  And immediately afterwards: but why mine? Yours! You wanted it like this, not me! And now you can keep it! Yes, you keep it! I’M OFF!

  Calm down though, let’s not lose our heads. If we do, no one will understand. They’ll say: It’s just theatre, what else could you expect of an actor? But it’s not theatre: it is the absolute truth, printed in Pravda. Let’s transcribe the text, but anyone can check it in the library; it is newspaper number 24.629, the seventh of 1986, in other words, the issue of Tuesday 7 January, and the article is on page two, right in the middle: highlighted by a frame too. “The four reactors, each with a power of 1 GW”… what this GW means the devil alone knows… “each with a power of 1 GW, are now operating at full power in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. Only highly competent and experienced specialists are working there. This collective success story has been ensured by the commitment of every worker. The Power Station staff decided to work in the spirit of socialist rivalry and lifted the restrictions imposed by the rules: they want to increase the annual electricity production to twenty-nine billion kilowatt hours. From the start of the year, the staff have been working flat out.” Well, judge for yourselves…

  There are also two photographs, not that you can make out very much, but the captions say it all: “The engine room of the second reactor” and “The worker’s living quarters at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station”, a picture of children running on skis between the apartment blocks of five storeys. If I am not mistaken, it was the second reactor that blew up, Mark said to himself, but this must have been autosuggestion, because he later checked the script of The Sarcophagus and it was in fact the fourth reactor that exploded: that’s what they say when they phone Anna Petrovna in the first act. But still, you understand, that’s enough to send a shiver down your back. If I invented something like that when I was writing, God help me, the critics would crucify me: Just look at what he’s come up with; has he no shame? It’s completely unbelievable: come on, throw him out, and let’s teach him what it means to be a writer! Take that, and that, and that! But here it is written in black and white: in praise of these economic assault troops, the technicians at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. Now some years have gone by and everyone has been racking their brains: it shouldn’t have happened; how could it have happened? The power station, according to the Americans, was out of date: everything is falling apart over there in Russia… Not at all, up jump the English: the staff were not well trained! Excuse us, the Swedes object, it was none of all this: we have discovered that they were testing out safety measures, and the untamed animal ran out of control. And here in Russia the chorus is: It was fate, and you can never fight against an unfavourable destiny! But the explanation was actually printed in Pravda, and, please note, printed three months before the event! That’s the kind of press we have here in Russia: it’s true that they don’t print the news, but the explanations they most certainly do, and in advance! Now go and tell the Americans and all those others that there’s no need to puzzle over this any more: how the hell did that blow up? Here’s why: the workers decided, We’ll not be outdone by anyone else! We’ll raise the restrictions and we’ll increase our workloads to heroic levels, but twenty-nine billion kilowatt hours are going to be pumped whatever happens: we’ll put the lights on in entire cities… And well, they lit them up.

  Naturally, Mark Kaufman got himself drunk that morning. When else would you get drunk, if not then… And he poured the milk down the sink, particularly as it had boiled over and started to stink out the kitchen with the smell of burning. When he woke up, it was already beginning to get dark; he looked for his watch, but it was still in the bedroom on the bedside table, but he must have been on the floor there for five or six hours snoring in his pyjamas. That’s why they put linoleum on our floors: if you drop a cigarette butt on the floor or pour any liquid, it will leave a mark that will never go away – in other words, there isn’t a filthier material in the world – but if you fall down drunk, your landing is soft and it’s so warm! Hollywood millionaires don’t understand this, but our Soviet planners do. Just try sleeping a whole day on a marble floor with half a litre of alcohol in your stomach: the chances are you’ll croak. Even then, our Mark was not feeling at all good; if only he had eaten something while he drank, but there was nothing in the house, nothing! The light was on, and that bloody Pravda was still lying open on the table. He turned over to avoid looking at it, and ran out of the kitchen on all fours. But it was not enough to escape the kitchen, he thought confusedly: I have to get out of this house immediately, or I’ll be sick! He was drunk, please remember.

  That is why, on throwing open the wardrobe doors in search of something to wear, he started to laugh on seeing the general’s uniform hanging there on the only serviceable hanger left. Well, why not? Better than any threadbare coat… The hat was in the upper compartment and he had to stand on a chair to get it. And he kept hooting with laughter as he got dressed; he was an oddball, we’ll have to admit it.

  He completely forgot about shirt and tie, and instead of pants, he kept his pyjama bottoms on, but when the last button was buttoned up, he was a general from head to toe.

  He took one last look at the open door of the kitchen; the milk pan was still in the sink, and some burnt substance was sticking to its sides. Oh Lord, what the hell is happening in my stomach? Out of here, out of here, fresh air!

  At the door however, he felt fear taking him by the arm:

  Where are you off to, imbecile? He forgave her familiarity, because they knew each other very well. She had been a close acquaintance of his household even before he was born: she was that ancient Soviet fear of doing something wrong, because everything that is not explicitly permitted here, is prohibited. And why call it Soviet? No, it is that ancient Russian fear, which made people lower their heads when they passed a helmeted policeman, with the addition of a large dose of ancient Jewish fear: you’re always rotting in the mouldy ghetto where the sunlight never strikes, and always keeping an ear out for the cries of a pogrom… But is there any reason, thought Mark, why I shouldn’t go out into the street in a general’s uniform? And inside him, a little voice said, No, no you can’t! Jews always have too much imagination; that
is their great misfortune. He was already envisaging the stupid face of the policeman who would ask him for his documents, the incredulous and mocking smile on discovering that not only was he no general, he was also a Judean: so then it would be off to the police station, a night in the cell and a beating; in a corner of his consciousness, dear departed Gogol was vainly shouting that no one, but no one, in Russia asks a general for his documents… But be that as it may! He took a deep breath, closed the door behind him and went down the stairs of course, because what would have happened if he’d got stuck in the lift? Just think about it, the alarm goes off, the neighbours come running and inside the lift they find Kaufman dressed as a general! In fact, he tiptoed down to avoid making a noise; his shadow with a hat like a bedpan was leaping grotesquely across the walls like that of a burglar.

  Down in the street, the odd snowflake was descending limply. For a moment, he was suddenly taken with the idea of going back up to his rooms and the warmth: Hey, he thought, that’s just spineless; now you’re here, you have to follow this through… So off he went along the deserted lane, terrified at the idea of having to meet someone sooner or later. On the boulevard, the traffic jostled, the headlights flickered, the people rushed for home – to be in time for a plate of soup and the football match. When he turned on the pavement, he suddenly found himself in the midst of the pedestrians: Now they’ll kill me! But to his relief, the crowd was in far too much of a hurry to take any notice of him. Of course! But what if I meet some soldiers? They’ll salute you, you stupid, and you don’t have to acknowledge their salute: keep calm and they won’t report you. And what if I meet another general? Well, he would also have to be from the Ministry of the Interior before he would suspect anything, and at that stage, you might as well be frightened of being run over by a lorry as you cross the road; you can’t go around being frightened of everything… And then, just when he was starting to feel more at his ease, and it had become clear that no one would show the slightest interest in him, there on a boulevard corner he saw an illuminated shop window and a queue waiting to get in. Like Cinderella at midnight, he forgot he was a general: under the grave exterior of a general’s uniform there still beats the heart of the eternal Soviet consumer. He went up to the man at the end of the queue and asked what was on sale. Soap, the guy replied with eyes sparkling with excitement. Soap! said another voice behind him. No, it wasn’t Gogol’s… or maybe it was, who knows! At the theatre’s company shop, they kept saying that soap was about to arrive, but it never did. But this shop window was overflowing with soap in blue and white boxes whose Latin characters revealed their Lithuanian provenance, and the queue was not that long; it only reached to the end of the block. The latest arrivals could still see that pyramid in the shop window, and the first lucky shoppers were leaving with their bags bursting and corners sticking out all over the place, because the soap packets were of a strange and awkward shape, a kind of rectangle, and you didn’t know how to pack them. We’ll be there in an hour, the man at the end of the queue said, and that made up Mark’s mind. He could have just walked off, and then his life would have turned out very differently. A few seconds later, he was in the queue, and others were joining it behind him. The queue was now round the corner, and how long it was stretching from there had become an unknown. Well, he thought, it isn’t actually that cold, it’s barely snowing and what’s the hurry to get back home? There, the five-year-old newspaper is spread out on the kitchen table, and awaits the sound of the key turning in the lock. At least here, the shops are open, their windows lit up, cars and buses go by, and people rush hither and thither… Further up the queue someone had turned round, and Mark could see that they were suspiciously glancing at the general’s hat and the coat with epaulettes. Then their eyes relaxed, they shrugged and turned back to look fixedly to the front. But they weren’t questioning his status as a general. No, they hadn’t sensed that deceit at all; it was simply that they feared he would any minute now start to skip the queue and thus compromise their own rights. Here is the people of Moscow queuing: a fat woman, another fat woman, a youngish but already wasted woman, a fat old woman wearing a scarf, a bearded man, another fat woman, a lad with a pigtail and an earring in his left earlobe, another fat old woman, a man with a woollen hat, a general.