Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

  "blue">7 The Soviet car-make which came closest in terms of lip-licking appeal: I’ve followed the male conversation at the beginning of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Monday Begins on Saturday in nominating the Gaz Chaika. For further Soviet automobiliana, see www.autosoviet.com, and below, part V chapter 1.

  4.

  White Dust, 1953

  Perhaps any great change demands a beginning in theimagination, a remembered moment about which you can say: for me at least, it began there. In the fervent early sixties, when the alliance for reform in economics was just dislodging the dogmatic monopoly that insisted all questions were already answered, and new criss-cross terrains for argument were opening up in department after department of thought where there had only been the catechism before, and there were constantly new people’s ears to bend, and stealthy new academic turf wars to fight – when all that was going on, Emil Shaidullin would tell himself that for him the beginning was the day he walked to the village. ‘Stalin was dead and the birds were singing,’ he would think. Yet right there, already, hindsight had contaminated the data. He would be far more glad later that Stalin was dead than he had been that summer, as a student freshly graduated from the economics faculty of Moscow University. Then, the death of the General Secretary scarcely felt like an event you could be glad, or sorry, about. Like a shift in the earth’s crust or a change in the climate, there it just was, huge, undeniable, but completely obscure in its significance as yet. If you were young in 1953, and lucky enough to come from a family that had not experienced the sharp end of his rule, you had no clear idea of what you had escaped, because an old Georgian had twitched his last on a government carpet; and you didn’t know, either, what there was to escape into. No other world for the inhabiting suggested itself as an alternative to the armour-plated reality you had always been told was the inevitable, the only possible, version of existence. At the very most, that summer, a sort of loosening in the fabric of things was discernible. The newspapers had become just a little bit more unpredictable. But the birds were singing.

  It had sounded simple enough, city boy that he was. He was working in Sobinka, a mill town a hundred kilometres or so out of Moscow on the Vladimir line. The book-keeping job he’d taken till his appointment to the Committee for Labour began didn’t use much of his brain. He spent a lot of time gazing out of the window at a spray of dusty willowherb nodding up-down, up-down, up-down in the hot green torpor of August. When he could he cadged phone calls to his fiancée back in the city. ‘I’m going to go and visit my parents after the exams,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come and collect me from the village this weekend? It’s time you met them. They’re getting curious about their future son-in-law. I’ll boast about you some more before you come …’ On Saturday morning he packed a satchel, and put on his best suit, a black broadcloth item with a rather English stripe, which he believed gave him a successful air, particularly when partnered with a dark shirt. For sure, it made him look like someone making their way in life. His fair hair curled as thick as ram’s wool at his temples, and he would have had the face of a young boxer if it wasn’t for his narrow chin. And his nose. He carefully spread open the shirt collar on his lapels. He put his grandfather’s gold ring on his finger. Then he took the scrap of paper he’d scribbled the village’s name on, and went to the railroad station.

  The clerk behind the grille had to look the name up in a directory. No, he said, there wasn’t a train that went there. He unfolded a tattered map of the region: ‘The place you want, it’s in here somewhere,’ he said, and his finger sketched out a surprisingly large blank space between two of the train lines raying out from Moscow. ‘You’d better get a ticket to Alexandrovsk and do the rest by bus.’ At Alexandrovsk he found the bus depot at the end of a street of little painted plaster houses sagging in the sun. ‘Where?’ said the girl in the kiosk. She called over the driver of a bus parked in the shade. When he heard the name of the village he laughed, showing gappy teeth. ‘You want to go there? Mister, you could wait a long time for a bus. On account of there being no road.’ ‘What do you mean, no road?’ said Emil. ‘I’m sorry,’ said the driver, grinning. ‘There just isn’t. It’s pretty marshy over there, and the only way in is a track along the top of the dyke. You can get a tractor in there, but not much else.’ ‘This is ridiculous,’ said Emil. ‘Moscow is only half an hour up the line. We’re practically in the suburbs.’ ‘Nevertheless,’ said the driver. He dropped Emil off at a corner out in the country where the metalled road turned a right angle and the track began. ‘You see?’ he said, pointing at a pair of wheel ruts that wavered away into green distance. ‘Just follow them. It’s nine, ten kilometres.’ The bus left, gears grinding.

  Emil hoisted his satchel and set off. The ruts must be deep sumps of mud when it rained. Now they were filled with dry white dust, which stirred up in little clouds as he stepped along, and settled, powdery, on the tall grasses. It was very quiet. He heard the grass swish against his legs as he walked, and not a human-made sound besides. Not a thread of speech in the air, not an engine in the distance, not a plane in the sky. For all the signs of it that there were here, Moscow might as well have been hundreds of kilometres away, thousands, instead of just over the horizon. Suddenly it was hard to believe it even existed. As his ears adjusted, new sounds declared themselves. Chirr, chirr went unseen insects in the grass. Every time he put a foot down, it muted the insects in a circle round about it, as if he had a disc of silence attached to each leg, but the moment he’d passed they started up again. In the air, dopplered strands of song flittered by. He had no idea what the darting birds were called, but he presumed that these would be the birds that poetry named, the larks, the thrushes. And it was hot. My, it was hot. The air baked. The sky was a dome of blue, so dark, so metallic-looking, you’d think you could have beaten it like a gong. The sun blazed straight overhead, apparently fixed in place. It shone down so whitely that the occasional clumps of trees along the path stood in puddles of shadow which seemed blue-green in contrast. Sweat trickled from Emil’s hairline to his collar. From somewhere, a couple of flies presented themselves, and kept him company in zizzing orbits.

  The only countryside he knew was the view from a train window. It was different being amidst it. The path ran along the top of a low causeway, only a metre or so high, and to left and right there spread out a wide floor for the big sky overhead. The ground rose a bit, off to the left, and a stand of trees darkened the horizon over there, but you couldn’t call it a hill, it was just a wrinkle on the face of earth. Grain was standing in the fields the causeway crossed, giving off a hot straw smell. In some places, the wheat stood all to attention, in burly masses. In others it fell about as if it had been trampled, or as if small local whirlwinds had blown upon it. Ahead, though, it was getting steadily thinner and sicklir-looking, the ripe yellow blended more and more with a green like the green of the grass along the causeway, only brighter. Too bright, in fact; getting toward the unhealthy brightness of the green slime on top of a stagnant pool. And after a pair of dykes crossed the route of the causeway at right angles, with a ragged drainage ditch between, the crops stopped altogether, and the bright, sick green took over, glistening on ground that was evidently as unstable as jelly. Puddles appeared, spread, joined into shallow sheets of water reflecting the sky. A rotten, composty vapour rose round him. The birdsong dwindled. He lost a fly and gained some mosquitoes.

  The sun hammered down. If anything it was hotter, now the air was damp. His hair stuck to his head like a helmet. Time for a rest. Fortunately he’d had the presence of mind to buy a drink at the kiosk. He pulled out the bottle and dropped to the grass. Instantly a mosquito bit him. Kvass was not his favourite drink, and the yeasty liquid was lukewarm, but he chugged it all gratefully, his adam’s apple pumping up and down. Then he leant back on his hands and breathed. Moisture trickled through his system. He was so glad of it, it took him a while to process what he was seeing, as he gazed down the length of his body. Then
he groaned out loud: a long, miserable, animal noise, like a dog in pain. Walking through the knee-high grass had coated his suit trousers almost to the knee with the dust, in a thick clinging layer. He scrubbed at the material, but his damp hands only turned the dust to muddy smears. He stood up: the dust had covered his backside too, and the back of his thighs. It was everywhere. It was everywhere, and he was in the middle of a marsh, in the middle of a fucking swamp, with a dusty path behind and a dusty path in front. With kilometres more of the fucking stuff to come.

  He twisted his head round. As far as the eye could see, the world was vacant of human life.

  ‘Shit!’ he shouted at the top of his voice. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! ’

  A hundred metres away, a waterbird suddenly took off, disturbed by the noise.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said to himself.

  He walked on. What else was there to do? At every step a little more of the Moscow Region lovingly transferred itself onto him, and the mixture of dust and sweat made him dirtier and dirtier. By the time he arrived he would look like a scarecrow. After a while, he felt better. He had outwalked his lost temper, walked it away in the endlessly repeating hiss of the grass against his legs. Ahead the air squiggled and wavered with heat. It really was peaceful out here, in a hot, annoying, bug-clouded, swamp-scented kind of way. The rhythm of walking gave everything a calm regularity. He slapped at the mosquitoes without malice. He could feel his thoughts settling into place, with a wide margin of quiet around them. So the impression he’d wanted to make was ruined: oh well. Under the big sky it didn’t seem like the end of the world. Here he was, plodding along in the heat, and all his education and all his good prospects didn’t make him any less a human speck, inching across the wide, flat floor of Russia. After another while, he started to laugh. Let this be a lesson to you, Mr Economist, he told himself. Any time you get imperious, any time you start to mistake the big enclosing terms you use for the actions and things they represent, just you remember this. Just you remember that the world is really sweat and dirt.

  But the descriptions of the world in economics were powerful. At least potentially they were. That was what had made him stick stubbornly to the subject, chance-found in the compulry course on Marxist basics, when on the face of things it was such an intellectual poor relation, such a neglected little annex of politics. Politics gave the orders, in the economy of the USSR, and economists were allowed to find reasons why the orders already given were admirable. But that was going to change, he suspected. He believed that the Soviet Union was soon going to need more from its economists, because there was more to life – there was more to running an economy – than giving orders. It might do for the brute-force first stage of building an industrial base, but what came next surely had to be subtler, surely had to be adjusted to the richer and more complicated relationships in the economy, here on the threshold of plenty. At college, of course, everything had had to revolve around Stalin’s little book Economic Problems of Socialism. They studied it as if it were holy writ, although you could search in vain in there for any ‘problems’ at all, in the sense of specific, unresolved issues looking for solutions. The World’s Greatest Marxist was not enthusiastic about the unknown. Indeed, he mocked the idea that planning an economy required any intellectual engagement with it; maybe any intellectual effort in itself, at all. Get the chain of command right, Stalin seemed to be saying, build it on the right ideological principles, and all that was left was a few technical details, a little bit of drudgery to be carried out by the comrades at Gosplan with the adding machines. But Emil, pursuing the elusive whatever-it-was that had excited him in the first place, had also been and read some Marx. No one could stop you. The dull-red volumes of the Collected Works were all over the place. And while Marx didn’t say much about economics after the revolution, he did insistently name the state he promised was coming, at history’s happy end. He called it ‘consciously arranged society’. Acting together, human beings were going to construct for the world a wealth-producing apparatus that far exceeded in efficiency the apparatus that formed ad hoc, by default, when everyone chaotically scrabbled for survival. If this were true, if this were truly the goal, Emil could not for the life of him see how the design of the economy could be an unimportant afterthought. He couldn’t see how the transformation Marx predicted could be anything but a task that required every scrap of a society’s deliberate intelligence, every reserve it had of analytical subtlety, every resource it possessed of creativity. This was the task of the ages they were talking about: history’s highest, hardest achievement. ‘Consciously arranged society’ demanded conscious arranging, and conscious arrangers to do it.

  He looked at economics, and he saw the source which would soon have to supply them. True, the tools economists should use for the task weren’t clear yet. He had the sense, at the moment, of groping for intellectual support, of casting about and dimly receiving a hint here, a hint there. Like a radio technician delicately picking signals out of background static, he’d learned to recognise voices worth listening to, voices that meant something distinct even when they used the same compulsory words as everyone else. Here and there, people were speaking with secret passion. Here and there, economists were starting to talk to biologists and mathematicians, and to the scholars building electronic calculating machines. If you knew where to look, several different lines of new thought were stirring, seemingly all pointed in contrary directions, but (he believed) really due to fuse, soon, into the knowledge they were going to need. For economics, after all, was a theory of everything. It wanted to explain the whole of human activity. The world was sweaty, the world was dusty, but it all made sense, because beneath the thousand thousand physical differences of things, economics saw one substance which mattered, perpetually being created and destroyed, being distributed, being poured from vessel to vessel, and in the process keeping the whole of human society in motion. It wasn’t money, this one common element shining through all its temporary disguises; money only expressed it. It wasn’t labour either, though labour created it. It was value. Value shone in material things once labour had made them useful, and then they could indeed be used or, since value gave the world a common denominator, exchanged for other useful things; which might look as dissimilar from one another as a trained elephant did from a cut diamond, and consequently as hard to compare, yet which, just then, contained equal value for their possessors, the proof being that they were willing to make the exchange.

  This was true the world over, in every kind of economy. But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on. That was Marx’s description, anyway. And what would be the alternative? The consciously arranged alternative? A dance of another nature, Emil presumed. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all. Emil gave a hop and shuffle in the dust.

  Was that something in the distance? A little dark blob had appeared on the causeway up ahead, an
d a new tendril of sound was curling its way from it to his ear: the sound of a motor. Emil waved his hand high over his head, and picked up the pace. Shk- shk-shk said the grasses briskly against his legs. The blob fattened in the pulsing air, got louder, was a tractor. A long-faced middle-aged man in overalls was driving it. His fiancée was sitting on the metal arch over the back wheel.

  ‘We were starting to wonder where you’d got to,’ she said, hopping down, ‘so Poppa borrowed – good grief, why on earth did you wear a suit?’

  ‘Well, somebody didn’t mention that they lived on the other side of a hippopotamus wallow. So this is your dad?’

  The driver grunted. He was squinting against the sun, and his weather-reddened brows were clenched together, so it was hard to tell if he was actively frowning at Emil or not, but he was certainly not smiling.

  ‘Hello,’ said Emil, and held up his hand to be shaken. He had to squeeze past the tractor’s front wheel to reach. Magda’s father took it for an instant and released it. ‘I’m afraid I’m all dusty,’ Emil said. ‘Should I climb up, or follow you back? Are you turning round?’

  ‘Where?’ said the driver. ‘Noom. Got to go back in reverse.’

  ‘Come round the side and step up on that,’ said Magda, pointing. ‘Come on – it’s not like getting dirt on a car seat.’

  The tractor only grated along, driven backwards, but it was twice as fast as he’d been walking, and after twenty minutes of engine noise too loud for easy speech, the ground lost its gelatinous shine, and the causeway merged with the slow rise of another modest hill. There were trees on its brow, and the corrugated iron shed of a Machine-Tractor Station, where his father-in-law-to-be parked their ride, slipping a couple of cigarettes to the technician on duty. The other side of the hill was in shade, now that the sun had crossed the zenith. Here the track descended again, to the curve of a creek which seemed to drain the marsh in this direction. It flowed slow and brown. There was a water-meadow beyond it, and a line of tall birches. Wooden houses were scattered higgledy-piggledy down to the water’s edge.