2.
The Price of Meat, 1962
Volodya stood by the parapet at the edge of the flat roof of the city procuracy, and fought against the urge to crouch. He had been frightened since yesterday morning, and now he was terrified. The crowd was coming into view around the bend of Moscow Street. They should have been stopped by the line of tanks on the bridge at the edge of town, but somehow they had not been; they should have been stopped by the fire engines posted in the side streets along Herzen Hill, but somehow they had not been; and now the front rank of the strikers was almost here, red flags flying, portraits of Lenin held high, looking extraordinarily like the virtuous mob in every film about the Revolution, except that among the stores for the May Day Parade they’d raided, they were waving homemade placards of their own, as indecorous as farts in church, which said MEAT, BUTTER & A PAY RISE or, worst of all, CUT KHRUSHCHEV UP FOR SAUSAGES. And as they neared the square, the noise grew, an insistent buzz of anger Volodya had never in his life heard before. It was good-humoured anger, so far, a kind of carnival fury, because it was the sound of people who thought they they were winning. All along the street the shops were still open, windows glinting and flashing in the sun, unbroken, even the windows of the empty-shelved food shops, and the workers had brouheyeir families, dressed up in holiday clothes. Students from the Polytechnical Institute were along too, seizing the chance to protest the grey pea soup and gristle served in their canteen. Excited children were running up and down on the sidewalks. It looked like a parade to them, Volodya supposed, and the weather was right for a parade, only the dust and the haze clouding the hard southern blue of the sky. The tarpaper roof of the procuracy exuded a sluggish summer perfume. But no one was in charge, down there. Ten thousand voices were talking at once, ten thousand voices merging into human static, from which you could pick out only the anger they were voicing in common. And they were all, in effect, angry with him.
‘Silly sods,’ said the white-haired man Volodya had just unlocked the rooftop door for, along with five or six soldiers. ‘Where do they think they are.’ Almost affectionate. The soldiers did what he told them to, but he was a civilian, dressed in a flat workman’s cap, a waistcoat and watch-chain. He had a monk’s face, red and jovial and sad-eyed.
‘All right, son,’ he said to Volodya. ‘That’s us settled. Off you go. Chop-chop.’
Volodya took the stairs in threes, gulping his breaths, glad to be out of sight of the crowd but still hearing its wrathful mutter through the stairwell walls. Out of the backdoor, across the courtyard, over the cross-street behind the police cordon, to the rear of the gorkom – only to see the visitors from Moscow pouring out of the building themselves, trotting in hasty retreat to the line of black cars parked there in the dust. Basov, the regional first secretary, spotted him and jerked his head at the last car. Volodya piled in and found himself squeezed among the silent senior members of the regional apparat; men who, till yesterday, he’d have schemed to be noticed by, but who now gazed hungrily at him, too junior to have caught their contagion, and therefore still able, if he played his cards right, to come out of this with a career intact. They were unshaven and sweat-stained after their night held captive at the plant. The special forces squad had rescued them at dawn, but they had not been allowed to go home and freshen up; Basov and his cronies were required to tag along behind the Muscovites, humiliated and silent, as an object-lesson in blame. Volodya, on the other hand, was allowed to run errands. Basov had a sick look of disaster in his eye, and the others looked just as defeated, except perhaps Kurochkin the plant manager, who Volodya believed was quite possibly too stupid to take in the scale of the reverse that had just hit his life.
Basov cleared his throat.
‘I trust’, he said, ‘that you’re offering every assistance to our friends.’
‘Every assistance I can, Comrade Basov.’
‘If there’s any local knowledge they require, any resource they wish to draw on – well, I’m sure you won’t hang back. In a certain sense, you now represent the Party’s authority, locally. I hope you understand that.’
Meaning, thought Volodya, that I have a responsibility to throw you any lifeline I can think of. Thanks for nothing. In any case, all they require of me is running up and down flights of stairs. But he nodded gravely.
‘Do you know,’ said Kurochkin, too eagerly, ‘can you tell us, whether the comrades have given, uh, any indication yet of their thinking?’
‘Oh, leave it alone, can’t you,’ snapped one of the others, and wretched silence fell in the car. The conv barrelled through traffic signals as if they were invisible. Volodya turned his face away from the plague victims and stared out of the window, still breathing fast, trying to shake off the touch of nightmare he’d felt on the roof.
This shitty town. He shouldn’t even be here. He didn’t really understand why he was. They had been sitting pretty two years ago for a life in Moscow, he and Galina; contacts made, dues paid, friendships lined up to let him start his Party career with a metropolitan bounce, and them their marriage. He still missed her. She had seemed so matter-of-fact. But suddenly she had grown reticent, embarrassed, evasive, and all about what, she wouldn’t say. She wouldn’t say and he couldn’t tell. Something had happened, though; something, it became clear, bad enough to cast a shadow over her reliability, and by extension over his judgement for pairing up with her. Nothing to do then but to break things off. And still, it turned out, the doors he had so painstakingly opened remained shut. If he wanted to be a Party full-timer, there was no question now of easy acceleration up a ministry, or even of putting in his footsoldier-time at some convenient raikom or gorkom in the Moscow region. It was back out to the provinces again, for him; back down to the bloody South, ‘because you’ll know the territory’, only a couple of hundred kilometres from where he’d started, with all the ground to make up again that had so mysteriously been lost.
Down south to dusty trees, and a boarding-house life conducted from a suitcase under the bed, and perpetual mild hunger. Even with his spets for the Party store, a lot of the time he was subsisting on cans of anonymous fish, spooned up stone cold after work. He was doing up his belt two holes tighter than he had last autumn. He didn’t know whether the town really did run particularly badly. It felt as if it did. The supply system had it moronically misclassified, on the basis of the Polytechnical Institute, as a college town, in need of the calorific intake required to lift pencils and wipe blackboards; but there were forty thousand people living and working in the industrial zone out by the tracks now, and between the students and the loco workers, a locust would have been hard put to it to find a spare crumb. White bread was a distant memory, milk was dispensed only at the head of enormous queues. Sausages were as rare as comets. Pea soup and porridge powered the place, usually served on half-washed plates. He’d spent his days, this last year, trying to get people motivated for the cost-cutting competition with Rostselmash in Rostov. The productivity charts in his briefcase were waxy along the crease-lines from folding and unfolding. But you never saw one spark of enthusiasm from the workers for the pledges the labour union and the management and the Komsomol branches had signed them up to; just coarse faces looking back, lumpy with impulses not voiced. Other activists could at least kindle a guffaw with the right joke, but he didn’t have the touch. He didn’t see how it was done, no matter how often he watched it, that particular sleight-of-hand, that conjuring trick which extorted liking from a crowd even while you were picking their pockets. Perhaps the secret was just expecting to be liked, in your suit, with your chart, when the foreman called a break and you hopped up onto the chair or the box. It was a world of managers he had meant to join: he had never, particularly, stopped to think about his relationship to these others he was supposed to be able to control, to cajole. In theory, they were the body, and he was supposed to be the agitating consciousness; but it didn’t feel like that. Most evenings, he walked. He’d start thinking about something in the par
k, burping back the taste of fish, and find his feet had carried him wishfully to the train station again. Hot slate-coloured sky; the caboose lights of departing trains wavering to nothing in the distance like pennies falling to a stream-bed. A bit of music would have helped. But if anyone played live here, it was only ever oompah-oompah.
The cars bounced hard on their springs as the convoy shot under the raised barrier at the entrance to the barracks. Security men spilled out of the lead vehicle and made a double line of protection in the courtyard, up which they beckoned the two grandees in the next limo, followed by scurrying aides and officers and, last, the carload of the disgraced. Volodya moved ahead of them as quickly as he could during the race back along the corridors to the conference room where the day had begun: he had a place to stand, now, over against the wall behind the end of the table with the telephones on it, and he wanted to be back in it.
But Kurochkin, to his horror, had followed him, and now lurched past, sweating with desperate amiability, to bother the men from the Presidium. They had only just sat down, Mikoyan as dapper as ever, Kozlov radiating heat of his own from his pink jowls and his brilliantined wave of white hair.
‘Comrades!’ said Kurochkin, ‘if I might be permitted to suggest –’
‘Who’s this?’ said Kozlov. ‘Which one of the idiots is this?’ An aide whispered in his ear. ‘Ah, the Director himself. The Marie fucking Antoinette of Novocherkassk. You’re uglier than your picture, Marie.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Kurochkin, stretching his cheeks into a grin painful to see, as if a joke might be coming that he, too, could laugh at.
‘No? Aren’t you the one who told ’em to eat cake, yesterday? Aren’t you the one who thinks, angry crowd, how can I make things worse, how can I fuck up a well-fucked situation so it’s even more fucked: oh, I know, why don’t I add insult to injury. Why don’t I say some fucking stupid thing that will really rub in the salt. That’s you, Marie, isn’t it? Isn’t that you?’
Yes, that was him. Volodya still had trouble believing what had come out of Kurochkin’s mouth when he remembered it. It had been a little after eight o’clock yesterday morning, and a couple of hundred workers from the first shift had left the steel foundry and gathered in the square in front of the admin building to complain about the price rises just announced. Nobody could call this good; the crowd had already ignored two orders to get back to the job, and workers from other divisions were beginning to stream into the square too as word got around. But neither was it completely out of hand yet. Volodya and the trusties of the plant’s Party branch and the Militia auxiliaries were already out in the crowd trying to dampen things down one small knot of listeners at a time, trying to smooth shouting back into discussion and thence into obedience again; and the mood was only excited and aggrieved, not drunk yet on the pleasures of defiance. Maybe it would have been enough if the crowd had felt it had been heard, that it had been taken seriously. After all, by going to the admin building the workers had, in a sense, been taking their complaint to authority. When Kurochkin came out, the crowd tried to hush, so that he and they could be heard. Everyone twitched around, Volodya remembered, to try and face the pilastered frontage of the offices, where he was standing. There was no PA system, so what was said was amplified by being relayed in shouts back over people’s shoulders. It travelled outwards in ring-shaped waves, picking up commentary as it travelled. And then picking up fury. Volodya was close enough in to glimpse Kurochkin’s nervous bulk, and to hear his actual voice bleating away. Accusations were raining onhim, about the wages, and the norms, and the apartment shortage, and the broken stoves in the canteens, and the missing safety equipment, and Kurochkin was denying everything: not making promises, not expressing sympathy, just flat-out refusing to proceed on the basis that anything, anywhere, was less than perfect. Then a woman worker in a headscarf, really upset, said, ‘How are we supposed to manage, if meat costs two roubles a kilo? That’s more than it costs at the market. What are we supposed to give the kids?’ And Kurochkin replied, ‘Let them eat pirozhki,’ and laughed, and added something about liver still being nice and cheap. ‘He said, “Let them eat pies”,’ the bucket-chain of shouts repeated. ‘Feed your kids on pies.’ ‘Give them liver pies to eat.’ A tiny pause, for digestion. Someone roared: ‘The bastards are mocking us.’ Then the shouting was continuous. The shouting, the surging to and fro, the eruption out of the plant grounds, the blocked railroad, the daylong carnival of forbidden statements down on the waste ground by the tracks, the sucking in of the students and the townspeople, the whole unrolling catastrophe.
‘So I’ll tell you what you’re permitted to do,’ crooned Kozlov, ‘since it was your big mouth that got us into this. You’re permitted, comrade, to sit down over there, and to shut the fuck up. Is that simple enough for you? Is that something you can understand, you dopey fuck?’
Kurochkin backed away, white; Kozlov sank into his chair, blowing out air in a long disgusted stream. Volodya understood that he was frightened too, and needed to pass it on. He was not what Volodya had expected to find, at the top of the organisational tree. He’d thought the caste of professionals he’d joined would grow more and more subtle the further up you went. The brutishness was all supposed to be down below, as he understood things. Mikoyan resembled his idea of Party seniority much better. During the tirade, he’d winced but made no move to interrupt. Now he sat with his fist in front of his mouth, stroking his narrow moustache up and down with a knuckle.
‘I still think we should have talked to them,’ Mikoyan said. ‘We’re all Soviet people here. This isn’t enemy action.’
‘You don’t know that,’ said Kozlov. ‘We’re in Cossack country. This could be irredentism, this could be a provocation, it could be any number of things. If “we’re all Soviet people here”’ – he made Mikoyan’s formula sound prim and weak – ‘tell me why this one town has gone apeshit. Everywhere else, a bit of angry graffiti, a few nasty jokes, the odd arrest. Here, they’re seizing the town hall. Tell me you see a difference.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Mikoyan. ‘The reason this is the only place that’s had an explosion is, this is the only place that had the price rise right on top of a pay cut. Have you looked at the figures? Our trembling friend over there decided to bring in the new work-norms all at once, instead of phasing them in once he’d got productivity raised. There are people in that crowd who’ve lost 30% of their pay packets. Come on, there’s room for manoeuvre here. The price rise stays, but we offer some hope on the norms. We should talk to them.’
‘What, with a gun to our heads?’ said Kozlov. You wouldn’t even think about talking if there weren’t, pointed out an unruly voice deep inside Volodya. ‘I don’t think so.’
They glared at each other.
‘Nikita Sergeyevich will be expecting our ort,’ Kozlov said, and reached for the phone between them. Mikoyan’s hand had come out too, but it was a tentative movement, checked almost immediately. Kozlov jiggled the handset, barked at an operator and then abruptly became deferential and solemn, like a doctor giving bad news. The disorder, he said, was severe and increasing. From the receiver, Volodya could hear the thready murmur of a voice familiar from newsreels and the television. It was surreal: as if Khrushchev had entered the room, but reduced to the size of a paperclip.
Kozlov was describing the march of the strikers into town, without actually exaggerating the scene but with the terror Volodya had felt somehow daubed directly onto the crowd – ‘troublemakers and hooligans, Nikita Sergeyevich’ – when a runner in uniform burst into the room and carried a piece of paper to the generals from the North Caucasus Military District. They bent their heads over it, and then one of the generals stepped forward, tapped Kozlov’s arm and held the message before him.
‘Excuse me, Nikita Sergeyevich,’ said Kozlov. ‘I’m just being told that shots have been fired at the central police station. Apparently, a part of the mob are storming it, and are trying to seize automatic weapo
ns from the militia.’
Pause. Thready murmur.
‘My recommendation is for decisive action,’ said Kozlov.
Pause. Murmur.
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ said Kozlov. ‘The time for talking’s gone.’
Pause. Murmur.
Kozlov said to Mikoyan: ‘Nikita Sergeyevich wants to know if you concur.’
‘Surely –’ began Mikoyan.
Kozlov muffled the receiver against his shoulder.
‘You know this is over the line,’ he said to Mikoyan. ‘This is so far over the fucking line I can’t believe you think there’s even anything to discuss.’
Mikoyan dropped his gaze to his lap, looked up again; nodded.
‘He concurs,’ said Kozlov into the phone. ‘We’ll get on it immediately. Don’t worry, it’ll all be sorted by sundown. Yes. Yes. As soon as we know anything.’
Volodya felt an instant and deep relief. The end was in sight; it was all going to be sorted out. The troops would break up the crowd. Things would be normal again. He could feel the knot in his guts unclenching.
Kozlov put the phone down. He beckoned. Aides gathered round him and Mikoyan in a muttering huddle, and quickly generated a mass of orders, scribbled on little bits of folded paper. One of the scribblers pointed at Volodya.
‘You,’ he said. ‘You’re the local guy, aren’t you? Take this back where you just came from.’
Volodya’s heart sank. ‘In the car?’ he said stupidly.
‘Take a dromedary, for all I care,’ said the aide. ‘Just be quick. We’re on a timetable now.’
Volodya lurched off the wall and forced his feet to carry him out of the smoky safety of the conference room, back up the barracks corridor towards the roaring world. The last thing he heard was Kozlov’s voice. ‘And get me some real grub,’ he was saying. ‘This place is such a fucking hole …’
Red Plenty Page 23
