The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  Here, Mark turned round and continued his review. But how can I describe what he saw? Oh, my readers, the Russian language is a sublime instrument, an organ with an endless range of pipes in a temple whose vaulted ceilings are so high it is almost impossible to make them out, a magical microscope with lenses of diamond and emerald, a rich dish in which the Tartar and the Kalmuck, the Greek and the Variagian have added pine-nuts, currants, ginger, cinnamon and dried fish to taste. But it can happen that the musician feels his blood run cold and his fingers fumble, that the eyes blur over with tears and can no longer see anything through the enchanted stones, that the open jaws are paralysed in mid air and only manage to guess at the taste of that dish forever hidden behind its perfumed vapours. But then again, it might not be like that at all, and it actually all comes down to this: you have to be good. It would be far too easy if just anyone was able to scribble down their characters’ thoughts in such moments as these. Oh well then, let’s get on with it: he saw Masha. What do you mean, who’s Masha?

  But of course you know, Masha from the secondary school in Odessa, the one he was desperately in love with, the one he hasn’t seen for God knows how many years; I feel sure I’ve written about her somewhere in this book… The pen writes and it does not know what it’s doing, the ink does not corrode the paper, the notebook does not catch fire, the bells do not start to ring in the monasteries, the traffic does not come to a halt, the guards at the Mausoleum do not drop their rifles in surprise and Mark does not fall down dead or faint, nor does he lose his voice or control of his movements; in fact he smiles and says:

  “Hi!”

  Masha too had recognised him, and had been dismayed to see him dressed in that manner. Mark, a general? Well, we know that everything is possible here in Russia… She didn’t take fright. Certainly not. Masha wouldn’t have been frightened of the wolf in the night; she would have looked at it with her cold eyes, and the humiliated wolf would have run off whimpering to hide himself in the darkest corner of the forest. She certainly couldn’t have been afraid of Mark, even with the general’s epaulettes. As for him, he was terrified, judging by the way his heart was beating. And you should know that what he saw, in appearance at least, did not deserve to provoke such a reaction. In fact this is what he saw: a woman of forty years, who looked every one of them. There were the signs of tiredness around her eyes, the skin over her cheekbones was taut and almost transparent, and bitterness had carved two wrinkles on the sides of her mouth. Her mass of black hair was streaked with grey. Her glasses had thin lenses and a gold frame undoubtedly of foreign manufacture, but one of the arms was broken and held together with a piece of wire. Mark had never seen Masha with glasses, but behind those lenses, her eyes were just the same: timid and proud, sardonic and glacial, and they made him lower his own eyes: just as had happened when they were teenagers…

  “Hi!” she replied, and her voice, Mark noted, was also unchanged: almost inaudible, confident, courteous and capable of piercing his skin like a red-hot iron.

  “How are you doing?” he asked. Yes, my lords and masters, I beg you to bear with me! I know myself that this is an entirely banal conversation, of which no syllable is worthy of being handed down to posterity, but you must know that for Mark every word of that conversation has been impressed on his memory, and is by itself worth the whole of Hamlet’s soliloquy.

  “Can’t complain,” replied Masha. “And you?”

  “Me? Can’t complain…”

  There was a pause. The queue was moving ahead, and the people behind Masha looking askance and lifting themselves up on their toes: Why aren’t these two moving?

  He may be a general, but we don’t want to lose our soap! So they had to take a few steps, and once more they were stationary.

  “So they made you a general,” Masha muttered and pointed to his epaulettes. And Mark – the complete idiot! – was too ashamed to tell her the truth. The reason is quite clear: when he was close to her, his brain turned into mush.

  God knows what’s inside: neurons, electrons, whizzing around in their orbits and their precision is to the nearest tenth of a millimetre, but as soon as there’s news that Masha has been sighted, goodbye to all that: the whole thing turns into soap bubbles. One day, when they were students in Odessa, she went home with him from the school; they got to his lane, Mark slowed down to prepare for the goodbye, and she pointed to a doorway: Do you live here? He actually lived in the next courtyard, but he daren’t suggest that she had got it wrong. He stopped there, and pretended to be looking for his keys in his pocket. He even continued to tinker about in the entrance hall until she had gone round the corner, and just as well that no one came out of the building while he was hiding there like a thief. If one day Masha had come to see him, he would have had trouble trying to explain the truth: who knows what he would have invented, perhaps that they had moved house. But there was never any need; Masha never came to knock on his door. Now the same thing was happening with this general business. Telling the truth was not in his power, so he continued to lie and got in deeper and deeper. After all, he wasn’t an actor for nothing!

  “As you can see,” he confirmed, smiling pathetically. “Not so bad, you know. What about you, an engineer, if I’m not mistaken?”

  “Electronic engineer. Now I’m a researcher at the Institute of Electronic Engineering. I have just finished my state thesis.”

  “Congratulations. And where is this Institute?” Masha told him the address. It was close enough to the Ministry of the Interior, behind a square where Mark had been seated for several days on a bench in order to get to know the kind of faces real generals have and how they wear their uniforms.

  “Well who would have thought it, we’re practically neighbours,” he muttered. Now the performance was sailing before the wind, and if she had suggested walking back to his place of work, he’d have been quite capable of going to the ministry and perhaps even entering the building, always supposing he could get past the sentries.

  “And where do you live?”

  It turned out that she lived in Khimki, and had to take the train to Moscow every day. “We never found a flat in Moscow. Previously we were hoping to have one allocated, but now I am alone…”

  “What do you mean? You’re on your own? What about your husband?”

  Masha looked at him with a guilty smile, “He died five years ago. A car accident…”

  Of course, the last time he’d seen Masha, she had just got married – and seventeen or eighteen years had gone by.

  It was spring in Odessa, and in the lanes and courtyards, that musty smell was giving way to that of the sea. The old school friends drank in the restaurant – and danced, but she only danced with her husband. The late Albert Lvovich was a wiry Judean with a Vandyke beard and a superior expression, precisely the kind of Jew who spoils our image. I don’t know if you get the drift: he rolled his r’s and spouted off one speech after another… To his credit however, he completely lost his head for Masha, and he couldn’t contain his desire to touch her, breathe in her warmth and keep her close. Mark soon realised that Masha loved him madly, and wanted to be touched, felt up and kissed by him, and she didn’t care if others were looking. That’s right, the Snow Queen, as they had called her at school, the princess who never raised her voice or made a move that wasn’t carefully measured: no one had ever dared to put out their hand and touch her, just to check that she was in fact alive… It is true that that worm, Butyrenko, had suggested hiding in the girls’ toilets “to see Masha having a shit”, and instead of thumping him, everyone had laughed – what pigs they were!

  As for Mark, he would not have been surprised if they had discovered that the only things that came out of Masha’s body were violets and tangerine peel. So that was it, Albert Lvovich was three or four years older than them and he whisked her away. But on seeing her so much in love, Mark had briefly managed to suppress his jealousy – to be happy for her… And now she was working in Moscow and on her own for five ye
ars; clearly she had no children. Mark did not know what to say, so he changed the argument. He asked her about her work, and since then he has not been able to hear mention of Maxwell’s equations without an ineffable sweetness seeping through his inner self like honey. What’s that you’re saying? When attempting to enter into the process of Mark’s character, the author becomes a vulgar sentimentalist. Away and leave me in peace, you fuckers! I repeat, and see if I care: when he hears mention of Maxwell’s equations, an ineffable sweetness starts to seep through his inner self like honey.

  “You know, Mark, I’m glad I found you,” said Masha. “I need to speak to someone.”

  “What’s happening?” he asks, surprised by that intimacy.

  “I’m about to leave,” she replies in a whisper. “I’m off to Israel. I’m expecting the passport any day. I have sold everything, even my furniture. I’ve only kept a mattress for sleeping on the floor.”

  Great… Of course: I’ve just found you again, and it just had to be that you’re off again, this time forever. Or perhaps not forever, but just another eighteen years. By that time, the line might have been changed, and we’ll have become bosom buddies with Israel and be going over there for our holidays on Haifa beach. And that’s where I’ll run into you again. And we’ll only be sixty, a mere nothing… No, Mark was trying to work it out but panicking at the same time, it’s not possible, I cannot lose her again. And why does she want to go? She never spoke about it before! (Of course, things had been different eighteen years before, but he was not very lucid in that moment; try to understand him).

  “I’m tired,” Masha muttered. “It’s five years that I’ve been tired. While Albert was still alive, I didn’t realise, but now…

  You perhaps don’t know what’s happening to us these days,” she added, nodding at his uniform, “things that once did not happen. The neighbours’ children grow up; once they were dear little children, but now they go around with their hands in their pockets, their jackets buttoned up, and they give you such looks! I, of course, pretended not to notice, and followed my own road. I didn’t even want to admit it to myself. And when I passed a demonstration organised by these… criminals with their yellow and brown badges, I just hurried on and didn’t even read their placards. Exactly how I managed not to hear what they were shouting I really don’t know. Then one day I came back home and found a note written in chalk on my door:

  JUDEANS TO THE GAS CHAMBERS… I was looking for the house key in my bag and I couldn’t find it; my hands were trembling and I started to cry. I couldn’t stand up, and crouched down outside my own door and cried. I heard an apartment door on the floor below slightly open, and then nothing, as though the neighbours were listening in: let’s see if the little Jew likes our joke! And then, you know, I just got angry… I stopped crying, I stood up, I blew my nose, I left the building without even going into my flat, and I went to sleep with a woman friend of mine. The following morning, I didn’t go to the Institute; I went to the passport office.”

  “And so,” Mark murmured incredulously, “you’re going to Israel. On your own.”

  “On my own,” the woman confirmed and shrugged her shoulders.

  “And you’re not afraid?” She smiled sadly and it even seemed that a tear was glistening behind those glasses, but that, of course, might just be what he imagined. Masha never cried, and still less would she do so in front of a general.

  “Of course I’m afraid,” she hissed in the smallest possible voice. “If only I were not alone!”

  No, thought Mark, this cannot be happening. I cannot let her go. Down there in Israel, she’ll die of heartbreak. But no chance of her listening to me. Throughout her life, Masha has always done whatever she put her mind to: she wanted to be an electronic engineer and everyone telling her that it wasn’t a job suited to a woman, and well, you’ve seen the result… And then it clicked, the solution was very simple: why hadn’t he thought of it immediately?

  “Masha! I can come too. What do you say?”

  She stared at him in stunned silence. He saw that her mouth was buckling, and he thought she was going to laugh, but instead she lowered her head. Right, thought Mark, now she’s going use the same words as THAT OTHER TIME: that evening long ago when he finally managed to tell her that he loved her. “We must talk about this sometime,” she had pronounced. There was no limit to the ingredients she had managed to squeeze into those six words: surprise, good manners, perhaps even a little tenderness, but above all of course, the inevitable rejection. He was of absolutely no use to her – there is no other way to put it… Of course!

  That evening they had put on Hamlet at the House of Culture, and Mark had spoken to her during the first interval, for as we know we are perfect imbeciles at that age.

  Of course, the play was going on forever and ever, the audience was half asleep, and they weren’t even sitting close to each other. Hamlet was raving away on the stage, and Mark thought he was the one promising to “drink up eisel” and “eat a crocodile”…

  “But what are you talking about, Mark. We haven’t seen each other for twenty years.”

  “Eighteen. And if only you knew how many times I think of you! I know you like I know myself. For years I have thought about you every day.”

  Masha looked at him with a serious expression; clearly she was again making every effort to find those words, so that all the terms would be in the right place and the equation would work. “Thinking too much is dangerous,” she eventually announced. “You imagine people who are different from who they really are.”

  For a moment Mark went silent; he felt beaten. But then with a sense of triumph, he remembered the clothes he was wearing, and knew what he had to say.

  “Sometimes you look someone in the face, and see that person as different from who he really is. Do you think I won’t come to Israel with you?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Masha.

  “Then just watch me!” He solemnly removed his general’s hat, threw it on the snow just in front of her, and proceeded to stamp all over it. When you think about it, he should perhaps have done without that bit, trampling it into the snow. Someone could have reported him for public insult to Soviet power. The people behind him in the queue looked on with a mixture of horror and amazement. He tore off the epaulettes and chucked them away; then he unbuttoned his coat and let it slip to the ground. Underneath he had his pyjama top. He encountered the stare of an elderly woman, petrified by astonishment – in front of her eyes something was happening that she would have always believed impossible: a Soviet general was taking off his uniform in the street, and standing in his pyjamas. The queue was beginning to murmur. Some people in front of them had turned around; the lad with the earring looked at Mark and winked with approval. Only then did Mark look at Masha.

  Her mouth was open, and she may have been frightened of him: he’s mad; they’ll call the ambulance… He took her by the arm.

  “Now we’re off.”

  “Are you mad!” she hissed.

  “Not at all, and that’s why I’m telling you that we should get out of here. Here, let’s get to my place.”

  Masha followed, but turned to look back. People were forming a circle around the general’s hat and coat, but no one lifted a finger to stop them.

  “What about the soap?” Masha still managed to ask.

  “They’ve got as much as you could want in Israel,” Mark replied.

  And that’s exactly how it went. Of course, he explained everything before they got to his home, even about the “economic assault troops” and the “twenty-nine billion kilowatt hours”, and she taught him about the red tape you have to go through to get your hands on a bloody passport – the written and unwritten rules – and who to contact to sell the mahogany desk without losing too much on the deal: after all it was a Tsar Alexander, and in very good condition!