Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

  The goblin was as good as his word. He worked with silent zeal and made no complaints, whatever shifts he was assigned. But he was not popular. He spoke in clipped, telegraphic style, spending as few words as possible on each utterance. He had a way of meeting the eye of the person he was talking to the whole time the conversation lasted, unremittingly, as if he scorned to do otherwise. He lived alone in a hostel room. ‘Shacked up with a slide rule,’ said Kosoy. He never joked, he never smiled. He was never seen to take a drink. For recreation, he wrote long letters and posted them. The most animated you might see him was on the nights just before the quarters ended, when No. 1 and No. 2 were storming. Then, when every cause that stopped the lines or cramped their speed had been pushed, somehow, to one side, and the digesters were shaking as they churned the cellulose crumbs with carbon disulphide, and the air was thick with the smell of putrefied cabbage, and the lines were quivering end-to-end with work being done – then, Ponomarev quivered too, and patted the surfaces of the machines with his fingertips.

  ‘Won’t he have our balls in a vice, afterward?’ said Mitrenko.

  ‘Who’s going to believe him?’ said Kosoy.

  ‘Who’d take his word over ours?’ said Arkhipov.

  In fact when they told him what he had to do, if he wanted to keep his residence permit, he said nothing at all. He only gazed from face to face. Then he took his good time to act. In fact, he played it bloody close to the limit. They’d backdated so much production on No. 2 to pad out the earlier quarters’ figures – some of Q2 assigned to Q1, more of Q3 asssigned to Q2, all of Q4’s production so far assigned to Q3 – that there was very little margin left; No. 2 had to go down soon. Arkhipov was more relieved than he could remember being since the war when the emergency klaxons woke him in the middle of the night and he could go off in overcoat and fur hat to tour the carnage Ponomarev had contrived, gravely shaking his head. Give the little fucker his due, he had done a beautiful job, ‘prepared in depth’ as they used to say of battle plans. And he conducted himself through the investigation that followed as if he had ice water in his veins, and it was the furthest thought from his mind that he was basically staked out in front of the Solkemfib administration building, waiting to be grabbed, quick and easy, if the word came down from above that a culprit was required. But Moscow, it turned out, did not require a culprit. Moscow scowled, and dispensed happy endings all round. An attachment order arrived, entitling the Solovets Chemical Fibre Trust to take emergency delivery of one Uralmash PNSh-180-14S (upgrade model). Ponomarev could slink back to his hostel room, and Arkhipov, Mitrenko and Kosoy could climb aboard the express, knowing that one year of reduced bonus lay ahead of them, rather than unlimited ignominy.

  ‘Now look what I’ve got here,’ said Arkhipov, reaching into his suit pockets like a meaty-fingered magician. ‘Gentlemen, take a look at these. C’mon, Mitrenko, leave the kid alone.’

  Mitrenko had the door into the corridor open. He was baiting a young soldier trying to get by.

  ‘Please move your leg, mister,’ said the boy.

  ‘Suck my cock,’ remarked Mitrenko, pleasantly.

  ‘Get out of the way!’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘Get out of the way!’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘Get out of the way, you old fart!’

  ‘Ooh!’ said Mitrenko, and blew in the boy’s face. In a minute, the boy would lose it and take a swipe; then the militiamen in the next compartment would rise up, take the side of authority against youth, and, delightfully, sling him off the train at the last stop before Moscow, where he could expect to spend the night shivering on the platform, this being the last inbound service.

  ‘Come on,’ said Arkhipov. ‘Never mind that.’ He was holding up three fat cigars. ‘Remember the Cuban delegation?’

  Mitrenko slammed the compartment door in the kid’s face and reached for his stogie. They smelled of dry brown summer far away, with a tickle of spices. He and Kosoy and Arkhipov bit the ends off and took turns to draw at the flame of Kosoy’s steel lighter, tongues curled. Suck-suck-suck. And blow. ‘Here’s to us,’ said Arkhipov. In the rattling heat of the compartment the rich smoke rose in spirals, blue as the wild snow outside where the sorcerer’s apprentice rampaged.

  Back at Solovets, the snow had barely begun. Only the first dotting of powdered diamond hung in the cones of the arc-lights where Ponomarev was walking, in dark, in light, in dark, in light, up the cinder road past the lumber stacks and the moulding shop, up the hill overlooking the poisoned lake, to the director’s house where Mrs Arkhipov was waiting for him, with her pink nose and her nervous hands. He was carrying sheet music for a piano duet. He, too, had decided to defect from the usual rules of the game.

  Notes – IV.2 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1963

  1 They were off to the fleshpots together for the annual jamboree: the festive jaunt to Moscow to deliver the plan, and a lot of the rest of the behaviour of Solkemfib’s management, comes from Joseph Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1957). See also, by the same author, ‘Informal Organization of the Soviet Firm’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 1952, pp. 342–65; The Innovation Decision in Soviet Industry (Boston: MIT Press, 1976); and Soviet Industry from Stalin to Gorbachev: Essays on Management and Innovation (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). An archetypal Soviet manager is among the semi-fictional ‘portraits’ in Raymond A. Bauer, Nine Soviet Portraits (Boston: MIT Press, 1965).

  2 The hotel Icebound Sea faced across the town square: from the hotel to the fisheries-trust teashop, all details faithfulheight="0eeflect the Strugatskys’ version of the town of Solovets.

  3 They’d hit the gross target for the year 1962 dead on, 100% delivered of the 14,100 tonnes of viscose planned: a target figure for Solkemfib concocted by calculating the average planned output for a real Soviet viscose plant in 1962 from Shabad, Basic Industrial Resources of the USSR.

  4 All seeing the possibilities, all liking what they saw: I am probably anticipating the shamelessness of managerial behaviour in the later 1970s and 1980s by making Arkhipov, Mitrenko and Kosoy be willing to countenance an actual act of sabotage. It probably took longer than this for the fearful restraint of the Stalin time to come apart. But this was the direction in which things were going, so again, a real process has been foreshortened here. For an illuminating discussion of late-Soviet managerial gamesmanship, see Yevgeny Kuznetsov, ‘Learning in Networks: Enterprise Behaviour in the Former Soviet Union and Contemporary Russia’, in Joan M. Nelson, Charles Tilley and Lee Walker, eds, Transforming Post-Communist Political Economies (Washington DC: National Academy Press, 1997).

  5 Let alone to tolerate the signature stink of the viscose process: caused by the breakdown of dense quantities of carbon disulphide in the plants’ air, into even fouller-smelling carbonyl sulphide. Rotting cabbage was the usual comparison.

  6 He had been imprisoned, but was now released: for the situation of ex-political prisoners, see Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago vol. 3 part VI, ‘Exile’, pp. 335–468. Having the decree of exile lifted did not automatically restore one’s original residence rights. For a treatment in fiction of a prisoner’s unsettling reappearance among the comfortable and prosperous, see Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing, translated by Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

  3.

  Favours, 1964

  Toreador pants were hard to come by on the eastern slope of the Urals, and so Chekuskin was wearing his suit trousers, with a plum-coloured shirt: but when Señora Lopez began to pound out the paso doble on the Palace of Culture’s piano, he cocked his hip and he was off with the rest of the class, small feet stomping. Over the ridge where the floor heaved up they danced, over the other side and down to the level again. Darrarrum, darrarrum, darrarrum said the piano. Somewhere far below one of the mines wormholing the earth under Sverdlovsk had given way, and the buildings on the surface just here had all been stretched and creased in unp
redictable ways. Theclass were used to it; they rose up over the bulge like a wave of the sea.

  Darrarrum darrarrum darrarrum. Chekuskin spun neatly, head tilted back, and gilded mirrors flew across his field of vision, with ochre plasterwork, and the teacher’s ravaged face at the piano. It must be strange for her, he thought, to be so far from home, a real Spaniard marooned here, in a crude cold steel town beyond the bounds of Europe. He had pieced together a little of her story: husband a refugee from the Fascists in Spain, husband meeting the usual fate of mouthy foreign communists not too long after; then deportation east, a quarter of a century of music teaching, the Palace of Culture piano. He pieced together all stories, if he could. It was his business to do so, he made his living snapping up these trifles. Not to pass judgement; to try to see what, in each case, might be the quickest way to sympathy with that person, and what they might have and what they might need in this life. Even the most unpromising individual might turn out to possess, unknown to themselves, the key to some stranger’s dilemma. In Chekuskin’s experience it was never wasted time to make a new friend. Señora Lopez, for example, knew him as a gentlemanly, assiduous regular, a little comical by reason of his height but a true aficionado of the Latin style. She would not refuse if he brought her – tentatively, with a proper diffidence – a request for Spanish lessons from a lady he knew whose husband was soon to be posted to the Caribbean. As it happened, he knew, at the moment, of no such person. But he might do tomorrow, or next week, or next year, and there in his stock-in-trade now sat the Spanish language, waiting to be exchanged for something else entirely, and for that matter too the tango, the rumba and the cha-cha-cha. Chekuskin’s small feet flew.

  Afterward, he towelled his head dry and changed back into his everyday shirt, putting the purple one in his almost empty briefcase. A touch of pomade on his grey hair; tie, jacket, coat, scarf, gloves, fur hat, and out onto the January street. It was bitterly cold, with last night’s snow drifted deep against the buildings and the weight of more bellying down the leaden sky. But the city was at work. Smoke shovelled itself out from chimney stacks, a burly cacophony shouldered aside the snow-hush. The air tasted brackish as it warmed on his tongue. Traffic steadily churned onward towards the cream-and-rust vanishing points where the horizons ate the straight street, and pedestrians tramped head down along the flattened strips in the centre of the sidewalks. No one was looking at Chekuskin, but even if they had been, there was nothing worth remembering about him. His face was an obliging oval. He must have had eyes, and a nose, and mouth, but the moment you turned away from him, the details began to slip your mind. ‘He looked like –’ you might say to someone, and then pause, stumped. What did he look like? Along with the bright shirt had disappeared his only distinctiveness. He was short, that was true, very short; but apart from that, he looked as much as possible like everyone else. His suit was neither particularly old nor particularly new, neither a particularly good fit nor a particularly bad one, although the tailor who made it for him would have been glad to cut it any way he chose. He looked like a librarian as he joined the crowd waiting at the streetcar stop; or a teacher, or a clerk. One of the world’s nondescripts. Across the way, two men with ladders had stripped HAPPY NEW YEAR off a billboard and were pasting up its successor in sections. Gradually, a moustached fellow of improbable brawn appeared, in overalls, holding out his big bare arms for a hug. A MAN TO A MAN, said the poster, IS A FRIEND, COMRADE AND BROTHER. Hatted and mufflered, blue in the cheeks, breathing out clouds of steam, the crowd gazed back impassively; Chekuskin too.

  He got off the streetcar at the central post office. Under the clangorous dome, there were lines for the counters and lines for the row of phone booths. Mildly, courteously, he ignored them all, and as if he had a perfect right, interrupted the transaction in progress at the third window along by leaning forward with one of the few items in the briefcase presented in his outstretched hand: a little bunch of violets. ‘Mr Chekuskin!’ said the woman serving, and beamed at him. ‘Wait!’ she said te customer, turning off the smile as if it had never been. She slid off her stool, and rummaged on the shelves behind her. ‘Here we are. Your letters, and one – two – three telegrams today. I’ll bring them around.’ Chekuskin bowed, and moved to the door at the end of the counter to meet her. She led the way across the main floor to the telephones and unlocked the varnished door of the last booth with a key from a bunch as big as a prison warder’s. Ceremoniously, she removed the OUT OF ORDER sign that had been threaded through the door handles; she patted the seat inside with a rapid little to-and-fro motion as if dusting it for him. ‘There,’ she said, handing him his mail. ‘Are you better?’ ‘Oh, I can’t complain,’ he said. ‘A few sniffles, but it’s the season, isn’t it? And yourself?’ ‘The same,’ she said, ‘awful aching. I suppose you didn’t –’ ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I did? I spoke to the friend I mentioned, and he said you should certainly consult a specialist. I took the liberty of writing down the name and address of the lady he suggested. She’s very good, apparently; very understanding.’ And he passed over a slip of folded paper, which went straight into a skirt pocket. ‘I really can’t imagine’, she said, ‘how you manage to find flowers in January.’ ‘My secret,’ he said.

  In the booth he organised himself. Stack of ten-kopeck pieces on the shelf, case on his knees to serve as a desk. The door opened again a crack, and a glass of tea, steaming, appeared at his elbow, in a tin holder ornamented with flowers and cosmonauts. Bless her. And so to work. He slit envelopes. Numbers he wrote down in pencil in his notebook, but words, and especially names, he preferred to remember. He had an excellent memory, developed over the years until it resembled the interior equivalent of a whole card index, and it was in here, on the phantoms of file cards that no one could read but him, that he stored his true stock-in-trade, his ever-expanding contacts list, without which the pencilled figures, he trusted, would mean very little indeed. His clients paid him to solve problems, not to create them. Today, six of the fifteen firms he represented had sent messages, though a couple of them were only expressions of anxiety, reiterated statements that they were depending on him for the timely despatch of this item or that. He couldn’t blame them. They were only acting in accordance with his own great principle that, when you need something from someone, you should never quit their consciousness, you should always make sure to be there on the edge of their attention, pleasantly maintaining the need to deal with you and your request, soon; and he was the person whom his firms could bother. Rapidly, he built a running order for the day’s calls.

  ‘Hello, Chekuskin here. Yep, colder than a witch’s tit, isn’t it? Listen, about that sand …’

  ‘Hello, is that Masha? Did the tickets arrive? They did? I’m so glad. Yes, one of his best performances I think; real magnetism. Oh now, sweetheart, as if I would ever want anything in return. Oh you cynic. God preserve us from cynics. Shame on you. Weell, there is just one thing …’

  ‘Hello, may I please speak to Deputy Director Sorov? My name is E.M.Chekuskin, representing the surgical equipment division of Odessa Saws and Cutlery, we have an order in with you for Grade 12 low-carbon steel billets, and we have a suggestion to make about the delivery schedule which we think will considerably ease things for you in the first quarter. Yes, I’ll hold …’

  ‘Chekuskin. Where are the vehicles, Andrei? Where are the bloody vehicles? We’re trying to be good guys about this, we’ve wrked with you a long time and you know we’re reasonable people, but you need to understand the shit you’re getting into here, you really do …’

  ‘You don’t know me, sir, but Secretary Belaev recommended me to get in touch. He’s very well, sir; he sends his greetings and his congratulations, sir. Now, the reason I’m calling …’