Good People (21 page)

‘Kharms was there, Vvedensky, Zabolotsky and some others that I don't remember.'

‘I am surprised you have left out Malevich.' Sasha turned towards her. ‘A man dies, and is forgotten?'

‘He was there, too,' said Emma in a muffled voice.

‘Would you say that Malevich was loyal to the party line?'

‘In my opinion he wanted to be. He suggested visual realism as a correction of socialist realism.'

‘Emma Feodorovna, Malevich was a mystic. You have been deeply influenced by his art.'

‘To tell the truth, it disgusts me to hear someone like you even pronounce his name, and, as for influence, there were many others.'

‘Did you admire him and Kharms?'

‘I have a habit of admiring great artists.'

‘Was Chagall at the meeting?'

‘Obviously he wasn't!' Emma shouted, coming to life. Her cheeks
were flushed, and she seemed eager for battle. ‘None of us could stand him. He is pure garbage, a nothing who envied Malevich everything he was doing in Vitebsk: it wasn't Malevich's fault if all of Chagall's students went over to him.'

‘So, you admire great artists. Did you also admire Nadyezhda Petrovna?'

‘But you know the answer. Nadya was never a great poet. Her poetry has nothing special about it. Sometimes it's one thing and sometimes it's something else. She stole a little from everyone. You can say this about her: she was the best mixer of other people's genius.'

‘Did you read the poems she wrote condemning the party leaders?'

‘I don't remember,' she answered irately. ‘She was always reading her scribblings aloud. In the end no one listened to her except for your father and Brodsky, who were in love with her and didn't understand a thing about poetry. She had charisma, no doubt about that.'

‘So you were charmed too.'

‘Absolutely not,' Emma declared. ‘It was a kind of feverish, annoying charm. She was always overflowing with discoveries, plans, opinions, and they all changed every day. Weak men loved her, but Varlamov, for example, couldn't stand her. They were opposite types, like Turgenev and Tolstoy.'

‘And you, Emma Feodorovna.'

‘She was mainly a burden for me,' Emma sighed. ‘She used to sleep in my room and torture me all night with stories about other people's misfortunes.'

‘Why did she write the poem about Stalin? Brodsky and a few others admitted that it was in keeping with the atmosphere in the group,' Sasha said, remembering Stepan Kristoforovich's instructions: do what Lenin did, learn how to trade—in people.

‘But you know why. She wanted attention. From your father, from Levayev, from Brodsky and from all the other men who admired her. At some point she realised that she would only be a great poet if her scribbles got swallowed up by a horrible event in her own life, if her poems became inseparable from her tragedy.'

‘Did she say that to you?'

‘I said it to her.'

‘So in fact you're arguing that Nadyezhda Petrovna is not an enemy of the people?'

‘The bureaucrats might see her as an enemy. But her only ambitions were for herself. All she cared about was for people to admire her and say she was a genius. She dreamed that one day she would have masses of admirers, that she would receive grants and especially that she would have an apartment, like Varlamov. She was always complaining about how we are crammed together like cucumbers, four to a room, eight to an apartment, grandmothers knitting, aunts making borscht, adolescents masturbating, babies howling, while that cherry-tree poet idles in a hammock in his beautiful garden.'

‘Are you willing to begin your confession with the story of the meeting in 1928? It's now clear that the people you met there had discarded every idea of responsible art—Malevich, Kharms, Vvedensky, and we know that Narbut was there, too. You were a confused young woman. They made a big impact on you.'

Emma looked at her furiously. ‘Listen, you insect, I've already told you I'm not guilty of anything.'

‘Look, Emma, for now they're treating you kindly, but your file contains enough to put you on trial. They can make you confess any number of ways, and in the end you'll confess. Everybody writes a confession in the end.'

It was evident that a powerful desire to curse had billowed up inside Emma, but after a short struggle she decided to keep silent. Sasha stifled a laugh. How easy it was to toy with a person's weaknesses, to tease him with the one thing he couldn't bear to lose; strip him of it and he would no longer be the person he was. Styopa was so impressed with this ability of hers that he would invite her to his office every week, and ask her about her recent interrogations. ‘Marchkov is a tough guy. How did you persuade him to correct his confession?'

‘I made him cry,' she would answer happily. ‘We cried together until we came to the conclusion that the party had failed, everything
was lost, there was not a shadow of hope left. Our final task was to prevent a bitter civil war, and for that the government needed the public confessions of its opponents.'

He praised her, blushing like a proud father, and the artery in his neck swelled; she liked looking at his artery and imagining she was talking to it. What she had done was so simple, in a world full of marvels and mysteries, that his excitement was hardly justified. Styopa understood and blurted out, ‘Your talent is precisely that everything looks elementary to you!'

In the case of Emma it was even simpler. Nibble away at the image she had fabricated for herself—a brave, rebellious poet who would tell the truth at any price—and she would do what you wanted. People like that cling to the image they've invented for themselves. They have nothing else. Have one little exchange that spoils the image—just now, for example, when she wanted to curse and didn't and was ashamed—and maybe one or two more like that and she would be prepared to make a deal.

Sasha sometimes wondered whether the stories she told Styopa helped him to coax her talent out. Perhaps she was teaching her future hangman the spell that would lead to her own ruin.

Maxim Podolsky and other simpletons, men and women, found it hard to understand her dazzling rise in the second department: people said, at least according to Maxim, that she had more influence on the boss than Reznikov, and that was because Styopa had formed a passion for this pretty young girl from the detested ‘intelligentsia', which he publicly mocked while being secretly pleased to have one of them working for him. Even if there was some truth in that, he might not have wanted her to do more than her duties as a stenographer. But in fact he promoted her because he respected her talent. Styopa insisted that she at least supervise every confession for which he was responsible, and if Reznikov appeared in his office, waving a confession he had extracted from a stubborn target, he immediately asked him whether Comrade Weissberg had read it.

‘So now I'm taking instruction from a girl who has only ever known
enemies of the people?' demanded Reznikov.

She stood in her office holding a dossier with the protocol of the interrogation of Morozovsky. She was familiar with the chilly touch of dossiers after they had been stored for a night in the unheated office. Apparently she mustn't expect a more significant sign of appreciation than ‘Good work, Comrade Weissberg' at the end of the day. That was the logic of the organisation: no nostalgia for past achievements—all that counted was the last thing you did.

She rushed through the door and hurried to the interrogation room. She had to sweep away all suspicion that she wasn't doing her job properly. Was there really something broken inside her? Perhaps Stepan Kristoforovich was right. ‘We all struggle, Weissberg,' he said. ‘We all have a degenerate side that tortures us. We haven't been redeemed yet. Do you remember Mayakovsky:

Sasha remembered Emma and Nadya standing in the living room reciting that poem. Brodsky was laughing. ‘It would be interesting,' he chuckled, ‘to identify the circus clown who's been passing himself off as Mayakovsky.'

Nadyezhda crowed, ‘Do you remember the excellent comment of Poe's Inspector G.? “Not altogether a fool, but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool.”'

Her throat was dry. All her memories were polluted. What had Maxim said on her last night in her childhood home? ‘Your history belongs to the dark side of the party. In Islam they would call you
mahound
. You have to be reborn. Otherwise you won't finish this year alive.'

Osip Levayev had been the most miserable of all the members of the Leningrad Group. He had sat in the interrogation room, his eyes
red, with pale yellow blotches on his cheeks and two creases intersecting on his forehead. The man has a cross on his forehead, she laughed to herself. Can a person like that be innocent?

Meanwhile he was griping that he had an eye infection. He hadn't been allowed to see his wife for more than a month, and he wasn't getting her packages. For ten hours they made him sit, forbidding him to get up, or stand next to the wall. He expected that sitting would be easier than standing, but a standing person could ease his pains and shift his weight. ‘Comrade Weissberg, I've already prepared the general outlines of my confession,' he complained, ‘and now they also want me to confess that at the university I established a network to incite public opinion against the party.'

‘And didn't you?' she asked. She understood that he was testing her: the accused liked to call the interrogator ‘Comrade' to flatter him, and were often answered with curses and blows. Osip Levayev had undergone this ritual, and now he was looking for a small proof to reinforce his faith that she was the person to whom he could entrust his fate.

‘Perhaps.' He stared at her as though trying to extract the right answer.

‘You have to make up your mind. We don't want false testimony.' He coughed, seeking direction. She found it hard to look at the man who had squeezed those soft looks out of her mother, the man she had kissed on the beach, whose tongue tasted so sweet; now he was nothing more than a limp tangle of limbs.

‘I don't believe I did,' he said. ‘Damn it, my whole miserable back is paralysed.' He was like an old man, attaching adjectives to his body to emphasise its weakness. ‘So tell them I didn't, although if they're asking they may have firm evidence.'

Then he added quickly, ‘Maybe it happened and I don't remember. Since my arrest my memory has been swerving off into strange realms. I can only see my future as rotting leaves rustling on the horizon, if you understand me.'

‘Naturally, I understand,' she answered. ‘A person's future is
unknown. But regarding the past there is certainty. Brodsky wrote in his confession that on a trip to Tbilisi in 1936, standing next to Griboyedov's tomb, you told him that the persecution of the lecturers at the University of Leningrad was an embarrassing act.'

‘Brodsky said that? I don't remember saying anything like that,' muttered Osip Levayev. He stood up and felt for his trousers, from which the buttons had been removed.

‘Brodsky has an excellent memory. Maybe the time has come to exercise yours.'

‘Yes, you're right,' said Levayev. ‘My meaning was that if I don't remember things exactly, how can I recall exact details?'

‘Really, Osip Borisovich,' she said, exasperated, and stood up too. It was clear to her that remaining in the room any longer would reduce her pity for him. ‘After all, it's simple. There aren't many poets with your imagination. If you insist that you don't remember, hatch the plot again, think about what you would do, and who you would turn to, and that's probably what happened.'

‘A brilliant idea!' Levayev shouted. He sat down and rubbed his eyes with filthy fingers. ‘But my body is paralysed. I can't even move my miserable fingers. Could I have a nap? It will be better if I'm fresh when I write the confession.'

‘According to the procedures, we can't cooperate about other things until we have a first draft,' said Sasha and walked to the door.

‘Will you read my confession after I finish it?' Levayev called to her. ‘Because of my condition some mistakes may creep into it.'

‘But of course,' she encouraged him. ‘We'll work on it together until it's perfect.'

She moved quickly down the crowded corridor. The Monday morning crew. A few stood chatting, others were reading the bulletin board. Natalia Prikova, a secretary in Maxim's department, was picking dog hairs out of her grey scarf. Everyone stared at Sasha. What was the rush?

Reznikov passed with his nose in the air and straightened the
sheepskin lapel of his coat, which looked like a duck's bill. ‘Good morning, Goncharova,' he whispered. When others could hear he always addressed her as Comrade Weissberg, but she rather liked Goncharova. If it was meant to be an insult, it also acknowledged her influence: better to be a wily seductress like Pushkin's wife than one of those weepy women who crowded around the post office for days to beg for information about their arrested relatives.

She paced down the passageway that connected the office building with the courtroom on its upper floors and with the adjacent building, which served as a detention centre. Whenever she passed between them, excitement gripped her: here she was, stepping through the famous passageway of the
bolshoi dom
as if she owned the place. She went downstairs to the interrogation room. It was cold and damp. She sat across from the barred window and stroked the tablecloth embroidered with butterflies. She lit a cigarette and leafed through Morozovsky's file. He had already confessed to ideological nearsightedness and to cooperation with the Leningrad Group, but he refused to confess to planning sabotage. He did declare that he had participated in meetings where people voiced severe criticism of the government, and that he had been prepared to help publish the poems of Nadyezhda Petrovna and of other poets who mocked the achievements of the party. A list of works, such as ‘If I Were a NEPman' (Nadyezhda Petrovna, 1926) and ‘Realistic Writers Always Look at the World, Never in the Mirror' (a short article by Emma Feodorovna Rykova, 1934), was included in the file. The works themselves were kept in a safe.