Stalin's Teardrops

by Ian Watson

  Stalin's Teardrops

  Ian Watson

  Another story collection from the prolific Watson (Salvage Rites, Evil Water, Slow Birds), this one comprising 12 tall tales published between 1985 and 1990. The longest piece here is brilliantly conceived: a company of Ushabti, tiny clay figurines placed in the sarcophagus of a pharaoh as his attendants, explore their sarcophagus-universe, then attempt to revive their dead master; what makes no stylistic or literary sense, and irredeemably flaws the story, is Watson's introduction of some investigating Egyptologists in the form of a play and, worse, chanting blank verse. Also noteworthy: the impressively imagined title yarn, which probes the strange consequences arising from deliberately distorted maps but all too soon meanders off into unfathomable byways; and a persuasive yarn that features the surrealist architect Gaudi. Elsewhere, three clumsily obvious metaphors (time travel and race hatred; rich vs. poor; a human chicken becomes chancellor of Oxford University) irritate rather than uplift; a jailer physically and psychically absorbs his prisoners; an English village hides odd goings-on; Sherlock Holmes ponders Cinderella, to astonishing effect; and an ayatollah's eyeball elicits only routine irony. Amazingly inventive – but too often inattentive or downright eccentric in the execution.

  Ian Watson

  Stalin's Teardrops

  Part I: The Lie of the Land

  "This is the era of clarity now, Valentin," Mirov reproved me. "I don't necessarily like it, but I am no traitor. I have problems, you have problems. We must adapt."

  I chuckled and then said, "In this office we have always adapted, haven't we?"

  By "office" I referred to the whole cluster of studios which composed the department of cartography. Ten in all, these were interconnected by archways rather than doors so that my staff and I could pass freely from one to the next across a continuous sweep of parquet flooring. In recent years I had resisted the general tendency to subdivide spacious rooms which, prior to the Revolution, had been the province of a giant insurance company. For our drawing tables and extra-wide filing cabinets we needed elbow-room. We needed as much daylight as possible from our windows overlooking the courtyard deep below. Hence our location here on the eighth floor; hence the absence of steel bars at our windows, and ours alone. Grids of shadow must not fall across our work.

  On hot summer days when breezes blew in and out we needed to be specially vigilant. (And of course we used much sealing wax every evening when we locked up.) In winter, the standard lighting-those big white globes topped by shades-was perfectly adequate. Still, their illumination could not rival pure daylight. We often left the finalization of important maps until the summer months.

  Mirov's comments about clarity seemed spurious in the circumstances; though with a sinking heart I knew all too well what he meant.

  "We have lost touch with our own country," he said forlornly, echoing a decision which had been handed down from on high.

  "Of course we have," I agreed. "That was the whole idea, wasn't it?"

  "This must change." He permitted himself a wry joke. "The lie of the land must be corrected."

  Mirov was a stout sixty-five-year-old with short grizzled hair resembling the hachuring on a map of a steep round hillock. His nose and cheeks were broken-veined from over-indulgence in the now-forbidden spirit. I think he resented never having been attached to one of the more glamorous branches of our secret police. Maybe he had always been bored by his job, unlike me.

  Some people might view the task of censorship as a cushy sinecure. Not so! It demanded a logical meticulousness which in essence was more creative than pedantic. Yet it was, well, dusty. Mirov lacked the inner forcefulness which might have seen him assigned to foreign espionage or even to the border guards. I could tell that he did not intend to resist the changes which were now in the air, like some mischievous whirlwind intent on tossing us all aloft. He hadn't come here to conspire with me, to any great extent.

  As head of censorship Mirov was inspector of the department of cartography. Yet under my guidance of the past twenty years cartography basically ran itself. Mirov routinely gave his imprimatur to our products: the regional and city maps, the charts, the Great Atlas. Two years his junior, I was trusted. The occasional spy whom he planted on me as a trainee invariably must deliver a glowing report. (Which of my staff of seventy persons, busily drafting away or practising, was the current "eye of Mirov"? I didn't give a hoot.) As to the quality of our work, who was more qualified than myself to check it?

  "What you're suggesting isn't easy," I grumbled. "Such an enterprise could take years, even decades. I was hoping to retire by the age of seventy. Are you implying that I stay on and on forever?" I knew well where I would retire to…

  He rubbed his nose. Did those broken capillaries itch so much?

  "Actually, Valentin, there's a time limit. Within two years-consisting of twenty-four months, not of twenty-nine months or thirty-two; and this is regarded as generous-we must publish a true Great Atlas. Otherwise the new economic plan… well, they're thinking of new railway lines, new dams, new towns, opening up wasteland for oil and mineral exploitation."

  "Two years?" I had to laugh. "It's impossible, quite impossible."

  "It's an order. Any procrastination will be punished. You'll be dismissed. Your pension rights will diminish: no cabin in the countryside, no more access to hard-currency shops. A younger officer will replace you-one of the new breed. Don't imagine, Valentin, that you will have a companion in misfortune! Don't assume that I too shall be dismissed at the summit of my career. My other bureaus are rushing to publish and promote all sorts of forbidden rubbish. So-called experimental poetry, fiction, art criticism. Plays will be staged to shock us, new music will jar the ears, new art will offend the eye. Happenings will happen. Manuscripts are filed away under lock and key, after all-every last item. We only need to unlock those cupboards, to let the contents spill out and lead society astray into mental anarchy."

  I sympathised. "Ah, what we have come to!"

  He inclined his cross-hatched hill-top head.

  "You, Valentin, you. What you have come to." He sighed deeply. "Still, I know what you mean… Colonel."

  He mentioned my rank to remind me. We might wear sober dark suits, he and I, but we were both ranking officers.

  "With respect, General, these-ah-orders are practically impossible to carry out."

  "Which is why a new deputy-chief cartographer has been assigned to you."

  "So here is the younger officer you mentioned-already!"

  He gripped my elbow in the manner of an accomplice, though he wasn't really such.

  "It shows willing," he whispered, "and it's one way out. Let the blame fall on her if possible. Let her seem a saboteur." Aloud, he continued, "Come along with me to the restaurant, to meet Grusha. You can bring her back here yourself."

  I should meet my nemesis on neutral territory, as it were. Thus Mirov avoided direct, visible responsibility for introducing her.

  Up here on the eighth floor we in cartography had the advantage of being close to one of the two giant restaurants which fed the thousands of men and women employed in the various branches of secret police work. The other restaurant was down in the basement. Many staff routinely turned up at eight o'clock of a morning-a full hour earlier than the working day commenced-to take advantage of hearty breakfasts unavailable outside: fresh milk, bacon and eggs, sausages, fresh fruit.

  As I walked in silence with Mirov for a few hundred metres along the lime-green corridor beneath the omnipresent light-globes, I reflected that proximity to the restaurant was less advantageous today.

  At this middle hour of the morning the food hall was almost deserted but for cooks and skivvies. Mirov drank the excellent coffee and cream with almo
st indecent haste so as to leave me alone with the woman. Grusha was nudging forty but hadn't lost her figure. She was willowy, with short curly fair hair, a large equine nose, and piercing sapphire eyes. A nose for sniffing out delays, eyes for seeing through excuses. An impatient thoroughbred! An intellectual. The privileged daughter of someone inclined to foreign and new ways. Daddy was one of the new breed who had caused so much upset. Daddy had used influence to place her here. This was her great opportunity; and his.

  "So you were originally a graduate of the Geographical Academy," I mused.

  She smiled lavishly. "Do I take it that I shall find your ways a little different, Colonel?"

  "Valentin, please."

  "We must mend those ways. I believe there is much to rectify."

  "Are you married, Grusha?"

  "To our land, to the future, to my specialty."

  "Which was, precisely?"

  "The placing of names on maps. I assume you know Imhof's paper, Die Anordnung der Namen in der Karte!"

  "You read German?"

  She nodded. "French and English too."

  "My word!"

  "I used my language skills on six years' duty in the DDR." Doing what? Ah, not for me to enquire.

  Her shoulders were narrow. How much weight could they bear? Every so often she would hitch those shoulders carelessly with the air of an energetic filly frustrated, till now, at not being given free rein to dash forth-along a prescribed, exactly measured track. There lay the rub. Let her try to race into the ambiguous areas I had introduced!

  I covered a yawn with my palm. "Yes, I know the Kraut's work. He gave me some good ideas. Oh, there are so many means for making a map hard to read. Nay, not merely misleading but incomprehensible!

  Names play a vital role. Switch them all around, till only the contour lines are the same as before. Interlace them, so that new place names seem to emerge spontaneously. Set them all askew, so that the user needs to turn the map around constantly till his head is in a spin. Space the names out widely so that the map seems dotted with unrelated letters like some code or acrostic. Include too many names, so that the map chokes with surplus data."

  Grusha stared at me, wide-eyed.

  "And that," I said, "is only the icing on the cake."

  Back in cartography I gave her a tour of the whole cake. In line with the policy of clarity I intended to be transparently clear.

  "Meet Andrey!" I announced in the first studio. "Andrey is our expert with flexible curves and quills."

  Red-headed, pock-marked Andrey glanced up from his glass drawing table, floodlit from below. Lead weights covered in baize held sheets of tracing paper in position. A trainee, Goldman, sat nearby carving quills for Audrey's later inspection. At Goldman's feet a basket was stuffed with an assortment of wing feathers from geese, turkeys, ducks, and crows.

  "Goose quills are supplest and wear longest," I informed Grusha, though she probably knew. " Turkeys ' are stiffer. Duck and crow is for very fine work. The choice of a wrong quill easily exaggerates a pathway into a major road or shrinks a river into a stream. Observe how fluidly Andrey alters the contours of this lake on each new tracing."

  Andrey smiled in a preoccupied way. "This new brand of tracing paper cockles nicely when you block in lakes of ink."

  "Of course, being rag-based," I added, "it expands on damp days by, oh, a good two percent. A trivial distortion, but it all helps."

  The second studio was the scale room, where Zorov and assistants worked with camera lucida and other tricks at warping the scales of maps.

  "En route to a final map we enlarge and reduce quite a lot," I explained. "Reduction causes blurring. Enlargement exaggerates inaccuracies. This prism we're using today both distorts and enlarges. Now here," I went on, leading her to Frenzel's table, "we're reducing and enlarging successively by the similar-triangles method."

  "I do recognize the technique," answered Grusha, a shade frostily.

  "Ah, but we do something else with it. Here is a road. We shrink a ten-kilometre stretch to the size of one kilometre. We stretch the next one kilometre to the length of ten. Then we link strand after strand back together. So the final length is identical, but all the bends are in different places. See how Antipin over here is inking rivers red and railway tracks blue, contrary to expectation."

  Antipin's trainee was filling little bottles of ink from a large bottle; the stuff dries up quickly.

  Onward to the blue studio, the photographic room where Papyrin was shading sections of a map in light blue.

  "Naturally, Grusha, light blue doesn't photograph, so on the final printed map these parts will be blank. The map, in this case, is correct yet cannot be reproduced-"

  Onward to the dot and stipple studio… Remarkable what spurious patterns the human eye can read into a well-placed array of dots.

  All of this, even so, was only really the icing…

  Grusha flicked her shoulders again. "It's quite appalling, Colonel Valentin. Well, I suppose we must simply go back to the original maps and use those for the Atlas."

  "What original maps?" I enquired. "Who knows any longer which are the originals? Who has known for years?"

  "Surely they are on file!"

  "All of our maps are in a constant state of revolutionary transformation, don't you see?"

  "You're mocking."

  "It wouldn't be very pure to keep those so-called originals from a time of exploitation and inequality, would it?" I allowed myself a fleeting smile. "Nowadays all of our maps are originals. A mere two percent change in each successive edition amounts to a substantial shift over the course of a few decades. Certain constants remain, to be sure. A lake is still a lake, but of what size and shape? A road still stretches from the top of a map to its bottom; yet by what route, and through what terrain? Security is important, Grusha. I suppose by the law of averages we might have returned to our original starting point in a few cases, though frankly I doubt it."

  "Let us base our work on the first published Atlas, then! The least altered one."

  "Ah, but Atlases are withdrawn and pulped. As to archive copies, have you never noticed that the published products are not dated? Intentionally so!"

  "I must sit down and think."

  "Please do, please do! I'm anxious that we co-operate. Only tell me how."

  My studios hummed with cartographic activity.

  Finding one's way to our gray stone edifice in Dzerzhinsky Square only posed a serious problem to anyone who paid exact heed to the city map; and which old city hand would be so naive? We all knew on the gut level how to interpret such maps, how to transpose districts around, and permutate street names, how to unkink what was kinked and enlarge what was dwarfed. We had developed a genius for interpretation possessed by no other nation, an instinct which must apply anywhere throughout the land. Thus long-distance truck drivers reached their destinations eventually. The army manoeuvred without getting seriously lost. New factories found reasonable sites, obtained their raw materials, and dispatched boots or shovels or whatever with tolerable efficiency.

  No foreigner could match our capacity; and we joked that diplomats in our capital were restricted to line of sight or else were like Theseus in the labyrinth, relying on a long thread whereby to retrace their footsteps. No invader would ever broach our heartland. As to spies, they were here, yes; but where was here in relation to anywhere else?

  Heading home of an evening from Dzerzhinsky Square was another matter however. For me, it was! I could take either of two entirely separate routes. One led to the flat where tubby old Olga, my wife of these last thirty years, awaited me. The other way led to my sleek mistress, Koshka.

  Troubled by the events of the day, I took that second route. I hadn't gone far before I realized that my new assistant was following me. She slipped along the street from doorway to doorway.

  Should I hide and accost her, demanding to know what the devil she thought she was doing? Ah no, not yet. Plainly she had her reasons-and other peopl
e's reasons too. I dismissed the speculation that she was another "eye of Mirov." Mirov had practically dissociated himself from Grusha. She had been set upon me by the new breed, the reformers, so-called. Evidently I spelled a special danger to them. How could they create a new country while I held the key to the old one in my keeping?

  I had not intended a confrontation quite so soon; but she was provoking it. So let her find out! I hurried up this prospekt, down that boulevard, through the alley, over the square. Workers hurried by wearing stiff caps. Fat old ladies bustled with bundles. I ducked down a narrow street, through a lane, to another street. Did Grusha realize that her gait was springier? Perhaps not. She had not lost her youthful figure.

  At last, rounding a certain corner, I sprinted ahead and darted behind a shuttered kiosk. Waiting, I heard her break into a canter because she feared she had lost me. By now no one else was about. Leaping out, I caught her wrist. She shrieked, afraid of rape or a mugging by a hooligan.

  "Who are you?" she gasped. "What do you want?"

  "Look at me, Grusha. I'm Valentin. Don't you recognize me?"

  "You must be… his son!"

  "Oh no."

  The distortions wrought by age, the wrinkles, liver spots, crow's feet and pot belly: all these had dropped away from me, just as they always did whenever I took my special route. I had cast off decades. How else could I enjoy and satisfy a mistress such as Koshka?

  Grusha had also shed years, becoming a gawky, callow girl-who now clutched my arm now in awkward terror, for I had released her wrist.

  "What has happened, Colonel?"

  "I can't still be a Colonel, can I? Maybe a simple Captain or Lieutenant."

  "You're young!"

  "You're very young indeed, a mere fledgling."

  "Was it all done by make-up-I mean, your appearance, back at the Centre? In that case how can the career records…?"

  "Ah, so you saw mine?" Despite the failing light I could have sworn that she blushed. "Make-up, you say? Yes, made up! My country is made up, invented by us map makers. We are the makers of false maps, dear girl; and our national consciousness is honed by this as a pencil is brought to a needle-point against a sand-paper block, as the blade of a mapping pen is sharpened on an oil stone. Dead ground occurs."