Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

  ‘Professor,’ she asked, ‘won’t your wife mind us all dropping on her in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Oh, she isn’t here,’ said Leonid Vitalevich. ‘She doesn’t get along very well with Siberia, you see.’

  The car rounded a corner, then another corner. Trees blocked out the stars. ‘Not far now,’ said someone at the bottom of the heap. Streetlamps returned, and the driver pulled over. The knot on the back seat unknotted itself; she spilled out with the rest into meadow-grass, feathery and thigh-high. It smelt of summer. There were ferns in it, and clover, and flowers with delicate little bells, of what colour ouldn’t tell, because in this dimness they showed only as a silvery glimmer. Grasshoppers sang all around. The trees arched overhead, hanging down their tresses of small leaves into the street lighting; and beyond a white wooden fence, a row of houses stood, bigger and solider than any dacha. Somehow they were familiar though, and so was the layout of the wide, quiet road, with its twin sidewalks set back in the long grass. As Leonid Vitalevich led them through the gate in the fence, and up the garden path, she got it: familiarity resolved into a memory, not of anything she had ever seen herself, but of that brilliantly insidious filmshow at the exhibition in Sokoloniki Park, three years ago. This was what American suburbs looked like, more or less. Here, in the middle of a Siberian wood, as a reward to its geniuses, the Academy of Sciences had apparently recreated a piece of the good life as defined far, far away, on the world’s other shore; recreated it, she could see when she got closer to the house, in the same standard concrete panels as her apartment block, trimmed with wood. But the local materials scarcely took away from the inspiring comedy of the idea.

  Light and a hubbub of voices came from the screen door on the porch. Leonid Vitalevich’s open house had clearly been running without him for several hours already; in effect, a parallel party, attended by an older contingent that preferred talking to dancing, and liked to do its drinking sitting down. Little groups were scattered through the house. Shaidullin was leaning on the mantelpiece, talking to a couple of grandees. As the professor bustled to find a bottle and glasses for his gaggle of newcomers, she walked from room to room. Through room, after room, after room. It was the biggest private dwelling she had ever seen, easily five or six times the floor area of her new flat. And he lived here alone. At the same time it was almost as empty as her new flat, except for the books. A few chairs in the kitchen, a brand-new dining table set, a desk. The walls were huge and bare. Many of the conversations were taking place at floor level, for want of seating. Leonid Vitalevich seemed to be camping out in his mansion. He must roll around in its spaces like a pea in an empty coffee can.

  There was a philosophical argument going on in the kitchen, between a man in his forties, leaning down low from his seat with his elbows on his knees, long fingers palping the back of his neck, and a floor-dweller of the same age propped against the white-tiled wall, his face gleeful. They were both glitter-eyed and slightly ruddy from the booze; still under control but definitely lit up, suffused. Probably she looked the same way herself.

  ‘Look, I’m not saying your plenty is impossible,’ jabbed the man on the floor. ‘Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. How would I know. Pure maths, me, every time. None of your murky compromises. No, what I’m saying is that plenty is an intrinsically vulgar idea. It is, in itself, a stupid response to human needs. “Oh look, there’s someone unhappy. Let’s overwhelm him!” Real human needs are always specific. No one ever feels a generic hunger or a generic loneliness, and no one ever requires a generic solution to those things. Your plenty is like a bucket of plaster of Paris you want to pour over people’s heads. It’s a way of not paying human attention to them.’

  ‘Bullshit, Mo,’ said the man in the chair. ‘Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Plenty is the condition that will let us distinguish,for the first time, between avoidable and unavoidable suffering. We solve the avoidable stuff – which seems pretty bloody generic to me, given that a bowl of soup cures everybody’s hunger and a painkiller cures everybody’s headache – and then we know that what’s left is real tragedy, boo-hoo, writea play about it. Who the hell ever said that plenty was supposed to abolish unhappiness? But what it will do is free our hands to concentrate on unhappiness. If we’re so minded. If we’re as as pure as you. And I don’t see how that can be anything but a humane goal. A humanist goal, if you like. Plenty will let a truly human life begin.’

  ‘Oh, bullshit yourself! “Let human life begin”? What d’you think we’re living now, for God’s sake?’ He cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘Hey, is there a biologist in the house?’

  She couldn’t help herself, and raised a finger silently, where she stood in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘Excellent!’ said Mo. ‘You know about animal behaviour?’

  ‘Not so much,’ she said. ‘I’m a microscope biologist.’

  ‘Ah well, pretend you do. Dear old Sobchak here will never be able to tell the difference. Right! What does squirrel behaviour consist of?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno,’ she said. ‘Gathering nuts … scampering around in trees … making baby squirrels …’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mo. ‘And this has been uniformly true of squirrels at all times and on all continents, am I right? So, if somebody said to you – Sobchak, for example – that the true behaviour of squirrels was to ride around on little bicycles while singing selections from Verdi, even though no squirrel to date had ever, ever done those things, this would be –?’

  ‘Untrue.’

  ‘Oh, worse than that. It would be rubbish, it would be nonsense; just like Sobchak’s claim that true human behaviour consists of living in a way that no one has yet experienced.’

  ‘You could always try pouring your drink over his head,’ she suggested to Sobchak.

  ‘Don’t think I’m not tempted,’ said Sobchak, mournfully.

  She went away.

  Leonid Vitalevich caught up with her to give her a glass just as Shaidullin caught up with him.

  ‘It’s going to happen,’ said Shaidullin. ‘The news just came in on the teletypes, apparently: an announcement to be printed on the front page of every paper tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Have you got a copy?’ asked Leonid Vitalevich.

  ‘No. We’ll have to wait for the printed version. But the outline is – small cuts on rayon and sugar, 25% rise on butter, 30% rise on meat.’

  ‘And how much of the retail increase gets passed on?’

  ‘10% for butter, virtually all of it for meat.’

  The two of them smiled at each other.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. Nor need you understand, said Shaidullin’s expression. But her host was obviously the kind of man who responded by reflex to statements of ignorance.

  ‘The price of meat is going up,’ he said kindly.

  ‘And … you’re pleased by this? You want people to pay more?’

  ‘Well,yes: in this case.’

  ‘That seems rather callous.’

  Valentin had appeared at Shaidullin’s elbow, as if summoned out of the air by the exchange of secret knowledge.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Shaidullin sharply. ‘Why don’t we have Valentin here explain it to you?’ He waved them off with his well-kept fingers.

  The boy looked irritated. Impressing her obviously dropped precipitously down his list of priorities, if there was a chance to be on the inside track of something important. But he accepted the assignment, of course. He led her through the house to the porch steps, where someone was strumming a guitar in the starlight. She looked back as they went: Shaidullin and Kantorovich were touching their glasses together, like men solemnly saluting a success.

  ‘Where’s Kostya?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him. Don’t you think’, he said when they had sat down, ‘that you were a bit rude back there? Those are people whose good opinion is valuable. You can’t go round just saying whatever comes into your head, you know.’ She opened her mout
h and shut it again.

  ‘I just didn’t see what there was to be glad about.’

  ‘That’s because you’re not thinking cybernetically. You’re not thinking in terms of the whole system.’

  ‘No, I’m thinking in terms of seventy million families who will wake up tomorrow morning and find they can’t afford beef any more.’

  ‘Yes, but it isn’t a straight loss of something they really possessed, is it? How many of those families do you think were actually able to find any beef to buy today, or in the last week, even, at the old price? It’s been in deficit for years, compared to the demand for it, and there’s a relationship between the degree of the shortage and the level of the price. The national economy is one of the most complex cybernetic systems ever created, you know, with an enormous variety of different feedback mechanisms at work in it, from low-level autonomic loops all the way up through the planning system to the meta-mechanisms of political oversight. You’re smiling.’

  ‘I’ve just never come across a Party secretary who’d be glad to be described as a meta-mechanism.’

  ‘Well, meet your first.’

  ‘What – you?’ Oh, Valentin.

  ‘On a very small scale. I’m second secretary of the Komsomol group in our institute. It makes sense; we’re under the Academy so we’re exempt from supervision by the county committee, and the more the Komsomol and the institute committees are run by scientists, the more, in effect, we supervise ourselves. Very meta-mechanical. Anyway, beef, if you still want me to tell you?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Well,’ said Valentin, ‘the thing is that, till now, the procurement price the state pays to collective farms for meat hasn’t been enough to cover the farms’ costs for producing it. They’ve been losing money with every cow. It costs eighty-eight roubles to produce a hundred kilos of usable meat, and for this the state paid them R59.10. That’s why the drive to increase meat production hasn’t got anywhere. The farms didn’t have any incentive to go along. But if the retailg is tha beef goes up by 30%, and the slice taken out by meatpackers and wholesalers stays the same, then the state can pay the kolkhozniks ninety roubles for the hundred kilos. And suddenly, as of tomorrow, they’ll be in profit, and their incomes will go up. Which is good news, because farm workers are the poorest people in the Soviet Union.’

  ‘Ye-es, but then the good news for them is bad news for everyone else.’

  ‘Well, there will be some benefit for the consumer. There’ll be much more beef in shops. I know, I know, people won’t be able to afford it – but in a way, like I was saying, there’s no real new bad news there, is there? There isn’t much logical difference between not being able to find something you can afford, and being able to find something you cannot afford. Is there?’

  Spoken like somebody who doesn’t do the shopping, she thought.

  ‘At least, this way, the production level for beef will be up, which is the essential first step towards getting beef that’s both cheap and available. If we had optimal pricing, then once the higher level of meat production was established, the unit cost would drop, and the selling price would go down again with it, automatically.’

  ‘But we don’t have optimal pricing.’

  ‘No. This is just another old-style administrative change.’

  ‘So those two in there aren’t celebrating a victory for the stuff you told me about.’

  ‘Actually, they sort of are. You see, if the idea is to get prices which can function as useful signals in the economy, then this counts as a step in the right direction. What’s more’ – he lowered his voice impressively – ‘it’s a sign that we can win the political argument for active pricing.’

  ‘Your geniuses in there were pushing for the price increase?’

  ‘Economists all over the Soviet Union advised it, but we certainly added our weight to the recommendation.’

  All of a sudden she could hear the middle-aged man that Valentin was going to become, sooner than he imagined. A good teacher, but a slightly pompous one, inclined to wrap himself in borrowed dignity. Oh, Valentin.

  ‘All right,’ she said, and held up the brimming shot of hooch Leonid Vitalevich had given her. ‘To brown-eyed boys and expensive beef.’ She drank it down.

  Valentin smiled uncertainly.

  ‘You’re laughing at me,’ he said. But then Shaidullin called him, from inside the house, and he jumped to his feet. ‘You do know’, he said, hovering, ‘that you won’t be paying the new beef price? You’re on the Academy’s special list, now. Cheap meat, cheap butter, cheap eggs, and cans of salmon on public holidays.’

  No one else on the steps seemed inclined to draw her into their conversation when Valentin had gone. She laid her cheek against the cool wood of Leonid Vitalevich’s porch, and gazed into the glimmering dark, and listened to the grasshoppers. Perhaps, she thought, it followed from feeling all the gargantuan furnishings of this world lose their grip on the ground, at least in thought, and bob in place obedient as soap bubbles, that you would then take the emotions of your fellow creatures just as lightly. But who was she to talk. If she was immune to this ticular dream, it was through no particular virtue of hers. She had her own professional vision which removed her, in some ways, even further from everyday human sympathies, when she was looking through her science’s eyes. She too was a believer in a world that could be reduced, along one dimension of its existence, to information: only in her case, it was the information of the genes, not the information of the computing circuit, which stood as the pattern of patterns. And once you had seen it, once you had parted the curtains of the visible world and seen that human beings were only temporary expressions of ancient information, dimly seen in tiny glimpses by the light of science’s deductive flashlight, but glimpsed enough to tell that it was vast, and intricate, and slowly changing by indifferent rules of its own as it went on its way into a far future – then all the laws and plans of the self-important present looked like momentary tics and jitters in comparison. A dark message, posted from the past to the future; a dark armada, floating through time. Dark masses, moving in the dark. Dark water. Dark ocean swell.

  ‘Don’t wake her up,’ said Hairband Girl. ‘Can’t you see how tired she is?’

  *

  A trumpet blew in her ear.

  ‘Hello,’ said Kostya. He lifted whorled metal to his mouth and did it again. ‘I’m sorry I was so long. It took forever to find someone who’d lend me it.’

  Another blast.

  She looked round wildly. Embers of the party were still alight, but two or three hours of the short summer night had passed. The moon was up, scorching the mock-suburb with explicit silver; her cheek was corrugated.

  ‘Oh now really,’ said Leonid Vitalevich, arriving on the porch flustered, more like a hen than a crow. ‘Now really, Kostya. That’s just too loud. Take it outside. Take it away, take it into the forest.’

  ‘Sorry, Professor,’ said Kostya, quite amicable. ‘Well, what do you say to a little concert under the trees?’

  ‘Excellent plan, you madman,’ said Valentin, coming to see the commotion. He and Hairband Girl had their arms round each other’s waists. ‘In fact, why don’t we collect everybody up, listen to you do your thing, and then go down to the sea for sun-up?’

  ‘The sea,’ she said stupidly. A children’s-atlas outline of Asia drew itself in her mind’s eye, with their present position marked by a flag, halfway across the blob and almost halfway down: about as far from an ocean shore as it was possible for a human being to be.

  ‘You really haven’t had time to look round yet, have you?’ said Kostya. The momentary look of annoyance on his face had already disappeared.

  ‘Nobody say anything,’ Valentin commanded. ‘Let’s keep it as a surprise.’

  The guitarist, the girl leaning on his shoulder, sleepy leavetakers emerging from the house: nine or ten people straggled up the sidewalk in the moonlight. She walked with Kostya, yawning. They crossed a wide avenue lined with un
finished apartment houses, the glassless windows black gaps in silver. Nothing moved in either direction as far as the eye could see, as if the bright gaze of the moon had pinned the earth into stillness. Kostya was humming something over to himself, under his breath. She wondered, irritably, howmuch simulated music appreciation was going to be required of her to keep the male ego happy. Go home, she instructed her legs, but they kept on walking with the group through the silent town, past the shops, past the cinema, past the hotel. The weightless feeling was gone. She was just tired. And she was finding the moonlight curiously oppressive. It shone hard enough to cast shadows, to throw a pale bleak certainty over foolishness. Why is moonlight different from sunlight, mama? Sometimes it isn’t different enough. ‘What am I doing here?’ she thought.

  But then they stepped back under the trees, and the moon receded as the sun had done, into a faraway source only sifting speckles of light down into dimness. Under the pines and the birches the night turned indefinite again. Black shapes of the walkers slipped between black masts, black birdcage spars. Somebody laughed. Small rustles propagated in the resinous air, origin unknown, destination unknown. Here and there a thinning in the canopy made a patch of dappled paleness on the leafmould floor of the forest, and in one of these they came to a halt around Kostya, whose trumpet, when he lifted it, became an abstract knot of shine and shadow.

  ‘Comrades,’ crooned Valentin, ‘I give you –’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Kostya, ‘before I forget what I’m trying to do. “Blue in Green”,’ he announced, ‘by Mr Miles Davis.’ He nodded to her. ‘This is what I like.’

  Then he lifted the horn and began to blow high, exact phrases. There was nothing to anchor them into the rest of a song, and you could tell, anyway, that they were carefully refusing expectation, declining sweetly to close or to resolve, to fall in with the hints of structure they themselves were constantly giving. Yet they were familiar all the while. They were still hoisting the sorrows of the world, only the sorrows had been unpicked from the old sense woven of them and let go to dart though the dark in single threads. All this, to her surprise, she heard in the thirty seconds after he started to play. The first phrases laid an elusive pattern, in pieces, in the air; the second set of them complicated it by adding another layer athwart or at an angle to it; and after that, it exceeded her power to keep track of it.