Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

  ‘You’re well yourself?’ he said, smiling across the back seat.

  ‘Oh, the usual ups and downs. My wife is trying to carry off the most complicated dacha-swap you could possibly imagine, and we keep having to have these cantankerous old bastards to dinner, from the committee; and my son finishes at MSU this next summer, and the grad school he wants is like gold dust – you know. Busy, busy, busy. Or, no,’ went on Morin grinning, ‘I suppose you don’t know. It’s bachelor freedom all the way with you, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m married!’ protested Galich.

  ‘Well, technically. From what I hear, not in any way that, uh, slows you down,’ said Morin. ‘You probably can’t even imagine these … domestic chains and shackles.’

  ‘Oh, I do try to imagine them. For material, you see. I’m a very sympathetic person.’

  ‘Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Actually, talking of busy – I’d better say, I shouldn’t stay out of the office for too long. It’s quite a newsday.’

  ‘The Congress, of course?’

  ‘The Congress of course. And everything that goes with it. Not that I’m expecting too many surprises’ – another finely calibrated twinkle – ‘but there’s a lot to cover today. Just look at it all.’

  Galich looked. They were swinging around the Inner Ring, crossing Gorky Street, Nikitskaya Street, the Arbat, all the radial avenues that led inwards towards the Kremlin. Each of them was a corridor of flags. But where, in the past, the mood aimed for at Congress time had been spartan determination, now the effect was lighter. Happiness, said the city’s decor; hope, it added; youth, it remarked. And for once the real Muscovites seemed to harmonise with the message, rather than letting it down with their lumpish private faces. This year, the Party Congress was promising a future, not of sacrifice, but of a myriad everyday satisfactions rolled together into one ball of achievable desire, and crowds who undoubtedly dreamed of flats and cars, televisions and fresh fruit salad, flowed along the sidewalks, stepping easy; welled up at metro signs from the underground kingdom of granite and chrome, rock crystal and gilt. Girls dressed for colder weather carried their coats, checked their reflections in shop windows. Stilyagi sauntered by, quiffed and narrow-lapelled, too cool to flirt. Taxis idled at red lights, gunned forward in unison on the green. And outside the hotels, middle-aged women with clipboards marshalled hordes of Africans in dashikis, slouching Cubans, Indonesians in little round red hats, Egyptians in dress uniform, angular Indians elegant in saris and Nehru jackets, Iranians and Arabs and Mongols and Koreans and Japanese. Moscow, capital of half the world; Moscow, with its best bib and tucker on. The skyline was spires and monoliths, Deco ziggurats and barbers’-pole chimneys belching smoke, all twinkling, all glittering, all shining in the sun. It should have made his heart lift. Lord knows, he preferred this version of his city to the ragged place in which he had first been one of the lucky ones. It almost looked like the hospitable home for a million separate stories which every great city was. It almost looked like Paris. But he had seen Paris. Moreover he worked in film: he saw this city, and he couldn’t help but notice the way is surfaces habitually turned face-outward to be seen, instead of inwards for the comfort of the inhabitants. He recognised the thinness of the scrim, the cutting of corners where the audience would have its attention elsewhere and be content to register a general blur of grandeur. Those doors would be out of focus anyway: who needed to make sure they actually fitted their frames? The skyscrapers blocked out bold volumes of air, the walls of the city were receding planes, leading the eye back to a sky painted on glass. Moscow was a set, and like all sets looked more convincing from the middle distance than close up.He had started to brood lately on what was behind it; on what you would find if you peeled back a corner of the painted hardboard.

  *

  Some kind of international problem had broken out on the kerb outside the Writers’ Union. Grigoriy, the doorman, was barring the way to two obvious foreigners. ‘No – no – closed,’ he kept saying, loud and simple and desperate, but they were gesturing angrily towards the dining room clearly visible through the ground-floor windows, where waiters were coming and going with steaming trays.

  ‘Mr Galich,’ said Grigoriy with relief, ‘can you talk to these two? They don’t understand a word I say.’

  ‘Sh-sh-sh-sh. That’s fine, that’s no problem. Let’s all just calm down. Er – Deutsch? Italiano? Français? Ah, Français. Messieurs, je vous prie de nous excuser, mais ici, c’est pas un restaurant, c’est le club privé des écrivains sovietiques. I’m telling them this isn’t a restaurant.’

  ‘Ah merde,’ said the shorter of the Frenchmen, who had black bristles for hair and the jowls of a disappointed dog. ‘Est-ce que ce ville ne contient pas vraiment un seul café ouvert, un seul petit bistro? ’ Does this town really not possess one single open cafe, just one little bistro?

  How to explain; how to explain that the doors of Moscow’s eating-places indeed opened only to those entitled to pass through them, and that there were remarkably few places where you could hope to be fed simply by turning up with money. These two should be eating their lunch with the delegation they came with. They must have wandered enterprisingly off, to fend for themselves. Somewhere, a woman with a clipboard was tearing her hair out. Ah –

  ‘Par hasard, vous êtes peut-etre des journalistes?’

  ‘Oui,’ said the Frenchman cautiously. ‘Agence France-Presse.’

  ‘They’re journalists. Grigoriy, I’m going to let them in. My responsibility: I’ll sort it out upstairs. En ce cas,’ he said smiling, ‘vous vous trouvez chez vous. Un maison des écrivains, c’est aussi naturellement un maison des journalistes. Nous vous souhaitons la bienvenue, commes nos invités.’ And having told them that a house of writers was a house of journalists too, and welcomed them as guests, he ushered them up the steps, followed by Morin, amused but hanging unobtrusively behind.

  ‘Is this really all right, Mr Galich?’ said Grigoriy.

  ‘Yes. Don’t worry.’

  In fact it took twenty minutes in the secretariat upstairs to clear what he had done, and to see to it that Intourist would send a car after lunch to collect the lost sheep. When he made it backn to the dining room – having been waylaid to sign a petition protesting some new slander broadcast by Radio Free Europe – the French pair were settled at an obscure table, eyeing the linen and the silverware and the painted panelling. He supposed they would get served eventually. Morin was waiting at a rather better table, and had been equipped with a glass of wine. He was taking in the celebrity floorshow – Ehrenburg holding court; Sholokhov, in town for the Congress, already rosy round the chops and a little loud – but also covertly glancing at his watch.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Sasha said, slipping into his seat. ‘– Yes, another glass of that for me, please. Are you still doing the veal? Good. Veal for us both.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Morin. ‘You’re a man of impulse, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Galich said. ‘It just seemed to me that two plates of lunch were a price worth paying for a favourable view of the Soviet Union.’

  ‘There you are, you see,’ said Morin, pointing a big finger at him, hairy-knuckled. ‘That’s the kind of fearless thinking we need these days. Responsible, sincere –’ More mottoes of the Thaw.

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  ‘All right, all right. But I mean it. Listen, since time is tight: I do have a business proposition for you.’

  ‘I thought you might. Go on.’

  ‘Well. We’re running a series. “Life in 1980”. The idea being to put some, ah, meat on the bones of the future, to bring it to life for readers, from various different points of view. You know, political, economic, cultural, and so on.’

  The veal arrived: escalopes in a cream sauce with peppercorns, on a bed of rice. Morin cut his up, speared a morsel and chewed blissfully. ‘What did I say? Ex-quisite.’ Galich waited. ‘The problem’, said Morin, waving his fork, ‘is that they’re all coming in a bit
dry. Take a look at this – in confidence, of course,’ and he reached under the table to his briefcase and rummaged out a few pages of typescript.

  ‘The Universal Abundance of Products’, read Galich. He took out a pair of reading glasses he preferred not to put on in public, and leafed forward through the papers. ‘Food’, he read, ‘should be tasty, varied and healthy, and have nothing in common with the primitive gluttony of curs or the perverted gourmandism of plutocrats … Each member of society’, he read, ‘will obtain a sufficient amount of comfortable, practical and handsome clothing, undergarments, footwear, etc., but this in no way presupposes superfluousness or extravagance.’ He began to laugh quietly, and went on laughing as the author explained how, in 1980, everyone’s need for ‘cultural goods’ would be fully satisfied, but it would be sufficient to be able to borrow a musical instrument ‘from the public store room’.

  ‘That’s it?’ he said. ‘That’s it? The dream of the ages, and it comes down to mashed potatoes, woolly socks and shared use of a trombone?’

  Morin smiled uneasily. ‘As I said, it’s a little dry; not very inspiring. That would be where you come in. We were thinking: a piece about the world of the future from the point of view of the human heart. How it will change us, how will it change the way we live and love, to be citizens of a time without scarcity? That sort of thing. The private life of the future – not a bad title, inidentally.’

  ‘Come on, you don’t need me. You want, what, a science-fiction writer.’

  ‘No, no, we do exactly need you. We said to ourselves, we don’t need anybody else who’s an expert about the future; what we have to have is an expert in feeling. This’ – he tapped the typescript – ‘is all well and good, but it needs to be brought alive. It needs the little touches that say: real life is here. You can do that. You can make people believe in it.’

  Oh Morin, fuck your mother.

  ‘Do you believe it?’ said Galich, and didn’t realise for a moment that he had actually voiced it, this latest of the unaskable questions that lately ran in his head, through and beside and around the conversations he had aloud; reckless shadow repartee, plain and drastic instead of smoothly dabbed with nuance. There were ways to find out what people thought, and they were polite dances of implications, not this blunt public assault. It hadn’t been a wish to know Morin’s opinion that had caused the words to slip out of Galich’s mouth now. But he had said them. There seemed little to do but to follow with a smile, as non-committal as possible, as sphinx-like, leaving Morin to wonder about his motives for the provocation.

  Morin coloured. ‘What a question!’ he said. ‘My subjective reactions are … I mean, we can have this conversation’ – the poor boob really does want to be friends, thought Galich – ‘but I don’t think this is the time or the place, to, to … Yes, of course I do,’ he went on angrily. ‘Of course I believe it. This is a moment of justified optimism, based firmly on the foundations of science. The ascent towards communist abundance’, he snapped, ‘is a profound historical process in which, as a journalist, I am naturally proud to participate.’ Good enough for you? said his eyes. He ran a hand back through the damp cow-lick on his forehead. ‘Honestly! What has come over you?’

  I don’t know, Sasha thought. Embarrassing someone like that is the last thing I would do. It’s dangerous, and worse still, it’s naive. But I have to say, it doesn’t feel bad.

  The silence lengthened.

  ‘Well,’ said Morin, after a while. ‘Will you do the piece?’

  ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ he said.

  *

  Morin long gone, and another taxi, heading across the river in the stretching shadows of afternoon to his appointment at Mosfilm. The water swayed like dark-blue ink under the long bridges, crinkled here and there by the first licks of a breeze. Barges dragged triangles of churned white behind them. From the chocolate factory on the island opposite the Patriarchate drifted clouds of insinuating sweetness, working their way through the seams of the cab and into the piebald upholstery. The driver had the radio on, relaying the opening speeches of the Congress and bursts of stormy applause, but Galich was gazing at his city again, and hearing the soundtrack it would have, if it were filmed on a day like today. Basso brass for the barges and the smokestacks, muted trumpets for the towers, tweedling clarinets for the pedestrians, skittering timpani for the traffic, all saying urgency, expectancy, hectic charm. Gorky Park unreeled to the right; offices and workshops, velodromes and slaughterhouses went by; at the bend of the river ahead, the gud curved up to a tree-lined ridge with the immense golden spike of the university rising behind it. What has come over me? thought Sasha. He remembered a joke. What is a question mark? An exclamation mark in middle age. Maybe that was all this was, just his arrival at a time of life when the muscles of certainty begin to go slack, and doubt naturally replaces vigour. Just the first delivery of the universal scepticism of old men. But then why did he find himself so much angrier than before?

  It had been exciting, four or five years ago, to feel the space expand that a writer was allowed to work in. What could be said ballooned, not because it had become permissible to disagree about anything fundamental, but because suddenly it seemed that a huge area of human nature existed which could be explored without needing to jostle the orthodoxies. Possibility made Soviet literature dizzy for a while. You could write confused sons rather than authoritative fathers, disappointment rather than just contrasting shades of rapture, lyrical intimacy instead of monotonous epic. For a while, he scarcely cared about the limits of this new freedom, they were drawn so much further out than they had been, they pressed so much more lightly. But soon he found he had reached them all the same. The mere logic of devising characters more freely got him there. Why must the confusion of the sons always be dissolved away, at the end of the piece, into a goodwill felt by no person in particular, yet, somehow, all in general? Why, in a piece of work for grown-ups, must disappointment always be assuaged? Why must lyric defend nothing larger than the integrity of friendships round the kitchen table? If anything, the frustration was worse now than it had been before. He had not known what he was missing until he was arbitrarily allowed a fraction of it; that was part of it. And another part was that the reason for limits had departed. It had been acknowledged now, once for all, that life was not just the forward surge of a crowd, everyone singing and shouting, everyone moving with that tumbling impetuousness that in Soviet film made even showing up at the factory gate look like a spontaneous march on the Winter Palace. It had been admitted that other moods, other tones of voice, existed and were necessary. And with that, the rapture was gone.

  The rapture had been real. He made himself remember that. He had had one of the happy childhoods Stalin had promised would someday be universal, and had ardently desired to defend it, to stop class enemies and kulaks and fascists from threatening the components of the good place he lived in, as he knew them: the hard earth path from the dacha to the lake, under the resiny pines, and the yellow oilcloth lampshade in his parents’ book-filled apartment, and shovel-handed Masha the nanny, in whose name he loved all the peasant Mashas and Ivans populating the great cloudy landscape beyond the familiar streets. There was fear, too, as he got older; but never only fear. He and his friends admired their teachers, gazed up at the thrumming squadrons on Aviation Day, dreamed the approved dreams. He had been happy to serve. He had been happy to be squeezing up the aisles of the troop-trains, guitar held over his head, and to find that the stuff he’d practised really worked, compartments-full of tough and surly boys cracking into smiles at his teasing chastushki, singing along with ‘The Little Blue Shawl’, ‘Lady Death’ and his own ‘Goodbye Mama, Don’t Be Sad’. Tears in their eyes, some of them. Doubt had seemed a detail then; and he had moved through the dangerous world immune, encased in luck like a bullet-proof bubble. On one single occasion had he ever come close to danger, in ’49, during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, wandering on a vague impulse of solidarity into a
meeting of the Writers’ Union’s Yiddish section. Suspicious faces turned towards him as he walked into the roo; everyone there, of course, as good a Stalinist as him, but bearded, foreign, exuding a perfume of alien pickles. ‘D’you speak Yiddish?’ asked someone. ‘No? Then fuck off, you louche little momzer. Visit your roots some other way. What, you think this is some kind of a Jew buffet? All the zhids you can eat? Out, out.’ Two weeks later, the section was disbanded, and most of the people in the room were on their way to execution. Only then, reading the paper, did he understand that he’d been protected by the kindness of strangers.

  Drip by drip, these last years, he had understood more of what had been happening in his own time, just around the corner, just behind the scenes, just out of his sight, as if he had been a child in a fairytale wood who sees only green leaves and songbirds ahead, because all the monsters are standing behind him. Quiet conversations with a returned choreographer, almost toothless, who’d survived his ten-year stretch on dancer’s strength. Confidences from an uncle’s friend, a secret policeman blurred by the bottle, who knew that young Sasha was svoi, one of us, and could be trusted; so talked, in a kind of laughing shame, a nightmare fit of giggles, about the famous year of 1937, when the vanloads came in so fast for the bullet that the drain in the floor of the basement corridor sometimes blocked, and some poor sod had to fish in it, and pull out mush and bonechips and hanks of human hair. Putting two and two together from the silences in old soldiers’ talk. A little light reading done in Paris. The uncertain bursts of revelation in the newspapers at home, sanitised by code phrases about ‘breaches of socialist legality’. Khrushchev’s own secret speech of 1956, passed along to him in the little red booklet stamped NOT FOR THE PRESS. A drip of knowledge from here and a drip from there, till he saw that his lucky world was founded on horror. Like Peter the Great’s city beside the Neva, his city was built upon a layer of crushed human beings, hundreds of thousands of them, or perhaps even millions. And you were not supposed to mind too much. It was enough to be assured that such things no longer happened, that mistakes had been made but were now corrected. It served no purpose to look back. It did no good to toss in bed in your elegant apartment and remember the ways in which you’d helped to give horror its showbiz smile, its interludes of song and dance.