‘Too bad,’ said the captain. The driver looked at him, expecting a taste of the impersonal relish with which, on the whole, bystanders watch the great go down, and their retinue with them: payback time for lording it before. But he didn’t seem to be enjoying himself, particularly. ‘There’ll be a replacement along any minute. It’s on the day sheet.’
There were new faces in the guard box by the gate, and a couple of men he didn’t know over by the front door of the main house. But the strangest thing was how quiet things were, this morning. The air was scarcely moving, just the lightest little autumn breeze. The birches along the path by the high yellow wall trembled where they stood. The sad red leaves of the cherry trees trembled where they drooped. The noise of Moscow beyond the wall seemed further away than usual. By now, on every other day that the boss had lived here, there would have been a vortex of bustle emanating from the house. Mr K. would already have been on the steps, looking at his watch, talking nineteen to the dozen to a stenographer while Mrs K. straightened his tie, drawing into the knot of people around him tributary streams from the households of the other high-ups in the leadership compound, who had come through the connecting door in the tall yellow wall to snatch a moment of his time before the ride to the Kremlin. And the Zil would have been waiting for him at the bottom of the steps, purring, its brightwork immaculate, its leather soft, ready to go. The boss liked to be on his way at 8.30 sharp; and he always was, even in midwinter, even on the really cold days when the driver rose at six in the iron-hard dark to warm the Zil’s engine block with a blow-lamp. But today the doors of the house stayed closed. The many telephones inside it were silent. One of the new security men over there was even smoking, perhaps not knowing how much the boss detested the smell. Or perhaps not caring.
‘Yes, here we are,’ said the captain. The barrier was rising. A long shape in black and silver nosed through the gate. A Chaika: this was not so bad. The Chaika was a fine car. It was a copy of the Packard Patrician. It did not quite have the broad, overwhelming presence of the Zil, with the radiator grille wrapping all the way across the front fender to the headlights. It was not quite the barge of state the Zil was. But it still had muscle, it still had eminence. If the Zil was transport for the highest powers, the Chaika was the next step down, the magic-carpet ride for the rest of the Presidium, and for regional chiefs. The stylised wings of the seagull it was named for spread, shining, across the grille. The big black hood, between humped tunnels for the lights, stretched back and back. Really, things could be worse. The Chaika only lacked 10 kph of the Zil’s top speed; still speed enough to feel the metal fly.
One of his colleagues from the motor pool was at the wheel – got out with eyes averted, and stepped away, once the paperwork was signed, as fast as if he stood on poisoned ground. The driver ignored him, took jealous possession, eased the Chaika ugh the garage doors. Then he took inventory. He squinted at the polish job, checked out the tyres. He found flecks of chipping paint beside the chrome rails that ran along the sides, swooping and rising again, gull-like, on the rear doors. There was autumn mud spatter on the side panels and the tail. Salt had corroded the underside a little, nothing too bad. He popped the hood. Sparks all right, the V8 a little worn-looking; again, nothing too bad, but the Chaika had not been cherished, that was clear. It had come straight from the general service pool. Well, he thought, a wash and a polish and an oil change, at a minimum. Then we’ll see. He put on his overalls.
He was on his back on the dolly-board, under the Chaika, when he felt a polite tap on his ankle. He slid out. It was the guard captain again, expression still neutral; but the motor-pool colleague was back too, and he was openly smirking.
‘Sorry,’ said the captain. ‘Change of plan.’
He finished the oil change – had to, or the Chaika wasn’t driveable – and then watched it driven away, rising and dipping over the bump by the guard box, showing a last gleam of its black flank as it turned onto the Vorobyovskoe Chausseé.
‘Somebody changed their mind?’ he said.
‘I’d say,’ said the captain.
In place of the Chaika, he had now been brought a Volga. It also was black: but what a difference. It was a car, on the whole, for people who drove themselves around: obkom third secretaries, raikom chairmen, factory accountants. Thousands of them were in use as taxis. It was even for sale to the public, if you had the life expectancy required to survive the waiting list. The driver stared at it. It was not a bad car. It was a copy of the Ford Crestline. But compared to the Zil it was a tin can. And who was to say that he would even be the one driving it?
‘Comrade Captain,’ said the driver, formally, ‘may I ask if a decision has been made about the personal staff?’
‘I haven’t heard anything.’
The driver considered. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. The captain nodded. The driver took off his overalls and went into the house by the servants’ entrance. Perhaps by the time he came back, the Volga would have metamorphosed into a Moskvitch. Or a bicycle.
In the kitchen he found the cook unnaturally at rest, sitting on a stool beside the table and gazing at the remains of the family’s breakfast, by the look of it hardly touched. In here she had prepared the banquet for the boss’s seventieth birthday. She had made canapés for the President of Finland and the Chinese Foreign Minister. She had had access to the best scraps in the country; what Mr K. ate, her husband ate two nights later.
‘Heard anything?’ asked the driver.
‘No,’ she said. She might not be in the same boat as him. She had been cooking for Mr K. since ’54, he had been driving for him since ’48, but it might well be that she stayed with the house while he followed the man, or vice versa.
‘Any chance of a drink?’ he said experimentally.
‘In the cupboard,’ she said. ‘You can pour me one too.’
They drained a glass each.
‘They say he didn’t fight,’ she said. ‘Just gave it up.’
The driver grunted. No one knew how this was supposed to go, this so-called retirement. There had hardly ever been one before. The big bosses died on the job, or got arrested. They didn’t – they hadn’t – taken a pension and stepped into obscurity, before. Everyone understood how the old style of fall dragged a household along with it, wife and relatives and aides and staff, circling the plughole their vozhd had gone down; but what kind of suction had this new fate? Where would they be going, because the boss had decided not to fight?
The drink had muzzed the edge of anxiety, at least. He went back outside. The Volga was still there. Someone was making a point with it, he guessed. There’d been a fuss a little while back when the boss had had an economy drive and tried to cut down the number of limos the apparat used; it was going to be Volgas, Volgas, Volgas all the way for all the middle-sized cadres around the country. Let’s see how you like it, someone was saying.
He had better clean the damn thing. He was just getting the bucket when the front door of the house opened, and everyone in the yard turned and looked. The boss came out, with his son holding an arm under his elbow and seeming to be guiding him. Mr K. looked grey in the face, and stunned – the muscles slack around his mouth and his eyes. He moved uncertainly. To the driver, he had always been the embodiment of power, thick forefinger stabbing the air to make his points, or the shoulder of the person he was talking to; voice the loudest in any room. Suddenly a fat old man was standing in his place. Fat and tentative. He had his pants hoisted up over his belly like a peasant grandad come to town. The driver threw the dry chamois in his hand into the empty bucket; it hit the bottom with an angry clang.
The guard captain trotted over. He was much taller than Mr K., but he bent his head respectfully.
‘Good morning, Nikita Sergeyevich,’ he said. ‘Melnikov, your new kommendant. You don’t remember me, but I worked in the government box at the Sports Palace. I used to see you there. What are your orders?’ He waved his hand at the Volga. ‘Perhaps you’d like to take a
drive to your dacha?’
‘Hello,’ said the boss, leadenly. He shook Melnikov’s hand. ‘You’ve got a tedious job cut out for you. I’m a loafer now. I don’t know what to do with myself. You’ll waste away from boredom with me. But you may be right. Why sit around here? Let’s go.’
And they all piled into the Volga, Khrushchev and his son the aeroplane engineer in the back, Melnikov in front next to the driver. The Volga was a fair-sized sedan, but it was no limousine, and the car felt very full with the four men packed into it. Everyone was squeezed together more than Mr K. was used to. The driver saw him, in the mirror, moving his shoulders around and glancing from side to side in a surprised way, like an animal in an unfamiliar enclosure. The driver fumbled with the keys. The truth was, he had grown used to the beautiful automatic gearbox on the Zil. It was a while since he had driven a stick shift. He tried his best, but there was a grind and a scrape as he pulled out through the arch onto the Vorobyovskoe Chaussée. The hood was much shorter than he was used to, too, and sloped down more. Virtually straight in front of him, just over the leaping stag ornament of the Gaz company, he could see every crack in the asphalt going by. And feel them: the Volga wasn’t sprung, like a Zil or a Chaika, to cancel out the road surface. Around the corner, up to the junction with the predictable surrealism of Mosfilmskaya Street where, today, a party of extras dressed in SS uniforms were chatting to ringletted ladies in ball gowns. And he stalled at the lights! The starter motor chugged fruitlessly, he pumped at the choke, and the engine only started as the lights turned back to red. When they went green, the Volga, released, bounded forwards in a series of humiliating hiccoughs.
‘What a balls-up!’ he muttered, meaning more than the junction.
‘Steady on,’ said Melnikov, looking at him sharply.
‘Leave him be,’ said the boss, from the back seat.
Then over the river bridges, and northward out of town. He was suddenly unsure whether to use the special lane, but Melnikov made no face, gave no signal, so he swung across between the white lines of privilege, and put his foot down. The Volga accelerated with a plaintive whine.
At the dacha, Melnikov politely tried to walk behind the Khrushchevs as they took Mr K.’s favourite walk, but the boss summoned him forward. The driver leant against the car and watched them go, over to the brook, then across to the cornfields of the state farm next door. Mr K.’s hands rose; he began to gesture; without a doubt, he was lecturing to Melnikov about the proper cultivation of maize. He was himself. But abruptly his hands dropped to his sides and he shrank again. After a moment he turned away, and came picking his way back toward the car, in the pale autumn sun. The other two followed more slowly, Melnikov’s head attentively inclined.
Mr K. arrived and leant against the car next to the driver.
‘No one needs me now,’ he said to the air straight in front of him. ‘What am I going to do without work? How am I going to live?’
It was unbearable seeing him so reduced. The driver pulled out his cigarettes.
‘Would you care for a smoke, Nikita Sergeyevich?’ he asked.
‘I’ve lost my job, not my senses,’ the boss snapped. ‘Put that crap away.’
That was better.
Notes – V.1 Trading Down, 1964
1 The Zil had disappeared in the night: though the chauffeur himself is fictional, the sequence of appearing and disappearing cars on the day after Khrushchev’s fall from power is entirely factual. For a description of that day on which this chapter draws heavily, see Sergei Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev, pp. 165–9. See also Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 620–1.
2 It was a copy of the Cadillac Eldorado: the American originals for the Zil, Chaika and Volga are all authentic. The Soviet car industry had been founded in the 1930s with the import of a complete Buick/Ford production line, including American engineers to act as consultants, and Soviet automobile design was still very imitative of American models, though not always on a neat one-to-one basis. Some Soviet cars copied several different American cars at once. Later, with the establishment of the giant plant to build Fiats at Tolyatti on the Volga, the American influence was diluted, and by the 1980s the Soviet Union had a distinctive automotive style of is own, though without anything approaching the idiosyncrasy of the Czech Tatra marque or the cardboard-chassised Trabant in the GDR. But then, both East Germany and Czechoslovakia had had indigenous motor industries of their own before the Second World War. Middle-class consumers who cannot afford German or Japanese imports continue to buy Volgas in present-day Russia. For a roll-call of models, with photographs, see www.autosoviet.com.
3 It had come straight from the general-service pool: I have no knowledge of the Kremlin’s carpool arrangements, and this is guesswork.
4 But compared to the Zil it was a tin can: the chauffeur is being snotty in the extreme about the Gaz M-21 Volga, which most Soviet citizens coveted, and which is now recalled by Russians in their fifties and sixties with the kind of nostalgia that the chromed monsters of Detroit rouse up in Americans of the same age. There are numerous M-21 fan sites on the internet.
5 Metamorphosed into a Moskvitch. Or a bicycle: the Moskvich 400, produced from 1946 to 1964 by MZMA, the Moscow Factory for Small Displacement Automobiles, closely resembled the 1938 model of the Opel Kadett. This was because it was manufactured with the tooling for the 1938 Kadett, which the Red Army had captured intact during the advance into Germany. But after 1964 it was redesigned with ‘sleek modern lines’, and the Moskvich 412 even won a small export following among budget-conscious Western motorists. Thanks to stern rules limiting the value of the prizes that could be offered on television in Britain, the star prize in the early 1970s on the British TV gameshow Sale of the Century was frequently a 412 in bright orange. See Andrew Roberts, ‘Moscow Mule’, The Independent Motoring Section p. 7, 11 October 2005.
6 She had made canapés for the President of Finland: this, the seventieth birthday party and the reception for the Chinese Foreign Minister were all real occasions, but the cook herself is imaginary.
7 ‘Good morning, Nikita Sergeyevich,’ he said: the real words of the real Sergei Melnikov, from Sergei Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev. Melnikov appears to have tried to treat the fallen leader with as much dignity as possible, and was fired a few years into Khrushchev’s retirement for showing excessive sympathy. Khrushchev’s reply is word-for-word accurate as well.
8 ‘No one needs me now,’ he said to the air straight in front of him: a real utterance of Khrushchev’s on that first stunned day, but addressed to ‘no one in particular’, not a chauffeur.
2.
Ladies, Cover Your Ears! 1965
Emil splashed his head with cold water from the basin and chased the stinging rivulets down the bare dome of his scalp. He had sunburn. His skull was a baked egg, hideously pink, with limp wings of curl on each side. Usually, he flattered himself, his early baldness looked distinguished; a form of cerebral display, even, showing off the smooth casing of the mind that had made him, while still so young, the head of a lab, the head of an institute, a corresponding member of the Academy. Women didn’t seem to mind the change. And students, if anything, deferred to him more. But now he seemed suddenly ridiculous to himself. He mopped himself with a towel. Insects whose names he still had no idea of were belting out the music of July in the meadow around the government dacha, and from the main room came the equally tireless buzz of the minister’s aides, amplifying whatever it was they took to be the minister’s mood just at this moment. He blotted his eyebrows. He should go back in.
He had felt sure straight away, last year, that Khrushchev’s fall was something to welcome. This time around, it was quite possible to imagine other states that the world might be in; and from everything he heard through his Moscow contacts, it had become urgent that the world be put into a state where Mr K. was no longer in charge, because the craziness was getting out of hand, and something needed to be done to protect the reform agenda from its own err
atic patron. A task with the delicacy of reforming the planning system required a safe pair of hands. Rumour had it that towards the end Mr K. had slipped into real puce-faced spittle-streaked raving – threatening to abolish the Red Army, the Academy of Sciences, heaven knows what. So when he went the overwhelming sensation was relief. The new Presidium, led by Brezhnev and Kosygin, immediately confirmed that the main lines of policy would not change. Only what the Pravda editorial called the ‘harebrained schemes’ would disappear. The new men exuded a deliberate, welcome calm. You are ruled, they indicated, by professionals now, steady and businesslike people who will not trip the country up on a banana skin and pitch it down an open manhole cover. The clowning was over. No more of that crass voice on the radio, talking on and on, making grammatical errors at the rate of approximately one per sentence. No more speeches in which Mr K. told generals how to fight wars, novelists how to write books and plumbers how to fix pipes. Or, worse, in which he told geneticists how to do genetics. It was goodbye to the snorter, the ranter, the joker, the table-pounder. Goodbye to the man who you always felt might break wind while addressing the United Nations, and would probably guffaw if he did. Even the movies got better, in the months after Khrushchev fell. A backlog of good stuff had built up, it turned out, which had fallen foul one way or another of Mr K.’s recent cultural brainstorms, and now out they came, release after release. At the picturehouse in Akademgorodok, Emil sat in the crowded dark with students and scientists and watched the smoke-billowed bundle of blue rays over his head paint the screen again with recognisable life. It felt as if hopeful times were back.
Red Plenty Page 33
