PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (25 page)

“I’ll come to the opening of the Marina Burchatkina House-Museum.”

Her smile cooled. She thought I was a coward. I was.

“I promise,” I said, turning to go to my office. “Your desk. Your writing implements. Your first editions. Your pajamas. I look forward to it.”

Because of her later celebrity, Marina Burchatkina looms large in this account, giving the impression that she figured large in my otherwise uneventful life. In fact, this was an extraordinarily busy and creative time for me. My third novel was nearing completion and Lydia was among those who had read sections of it and offered warm praise. Although I retained my snug and noisy office, my position in the union Secretariat improved. I won a trip to London as the more advantageous part of a cultural exchange. In Hyde Park one summer afternoon, on a bench near the Peter Pan statue, I lounged with the sun in my face and about ten shillings in my pocket and daydreamed about quietly defecting to Never-Never Land. I couldn’t, of course, but the thought effervesced through the remainder of my days and nights there.

Shortly after my return, in the early morning hours reserved for crises and bad news, the telephone rang. As I staggered into the hall and reached for the receiver, I was surprised by the number of alternatives of bad news that were possible. When I heard the high-pitched, quavering voice of Natalya Fyodorovna, Boris Sorokin’s wife, I assumed he was dead.

The story she told was complicated, lousy with red herrings and switchbacks. There had been an incident during the night. Sorokin had woken and claimed to be suffocating, and then to be suffering from a thirst of Saharan proportions, and as Natalya Fyodorovna rushed about to satisfy his various demands, he had fallen from his bed. But the ambulance had come right away, that
was the most important thing, she insisted, consoled. I gradually came to appreciate that Sorokin was not dead, but rather, creating more complications, critically ill.

In the taxi on the way to the Ochakovskoye Shosse and the landscaped complex in which Central Committee Clinic 2 was located, I hardly thought of Sorokin. I was thinking mostly of my own life, particularly of how this dash to the hospital was one I would never make on behalf of my father. He was already dead, killed during the war by a sniper in the Carpathian foothills. This sour reflection led to a well-trodden memory, the orphanage in Tomsk to which I had been evacuated with my sister in 1942. My mother had worked in a munitions plant, performing too important a job to be evacuated with us. The walls of the orphanage were lime green and always damp to the touch; the curve of my metal meal dish was broken by a dent that evoked the contours of some foreign coast; I was savagely beaten by boys slightly larger than me, until my face was a mass of tears and blood, and I in turn beat those slightly smaller; by the end of the war my sister was somewhere else, apparently unrecoverable even by the massive investigative machinery of the Soviet state. I remained immersed in the din of war and turmoil through my early life, even after I was reunited with my mother. It was not until I sent Sorokin some prose sketches of Moscow, thereby winning an invitation to be interviewed about my prospects for a literary career, that I began my adult, postwar existence.

So, I arrived to think of Sorokin after all. He was a tough old bastard, one of the founders of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, the revolutionary
precursor to the present-day Union of Soviet Writers. After publishing nearly a dozen books in the 1920s and’30s, he had established his literary reputation in the strife of the following decade. His four-volume collection of war reporting, which had taken him from Stalingrad to Berlin, was still celebrated as a model of literary journalism. Sorokin had sponsored my first publication and had brought me into the Secretariat. He was a gruff and distant man who never displayed pride in my accomplishments, yet his suggestions about the course of my work and my life had always been deeply considered.

The air of his hospital room was sweet with disinfectant. The bright early morning sun fell upon the heavy curtains, leaving the room submerged in an underwater darkness. Membership in the writers’ union gave you admittance to any of the union’s special polyclinics; rank won you a private room in Central Committee Clinic 2 and the best medical care in the Soviet Union outside, well, Clinic 1. Sorokin lay on his back, gently stirred by the tides and deep currents. I assumed he was sleeping. I turned to go, embarrassed to be catching him unawares.

“She called you?”

Illness had not lowered the deep register of his voice, but it seemed hollowed out, nearly weightless. I didn’t immediately find my own voice.

“Just an hour ago. I came down right away.”

“I told her to call you. She thinks I’m going to die—”

“No—”

“The doctors do too. But they’re a bunch of incompetents, hacks. You know, 2 was a good hospital once, before everything in this country fell apart.”

And that was all that was said for several minutes. Sorokin had always been a big man and in the last few years his body had become swollen and bloated, so that now it was barely contained by the hospital bed and its swathe of sheets. His bald head was like a great stone outcropping, a grim, lifeless rock that rose into view to daunt approaching travelers. He had not yet been shaved or bathed. The excess flesh around his chest and neck spilled from the top of his hospital gown, which, draped on his torso, carried the charge of intimate apparel. In all the years that I had known Sorokin, I had never seen him outside his suit, not even in the garden of his dacha, nor even at his granddaughter’s first birthday party. He appeared to have fallen asleep, but I remained at his side, trying to ignore the chill in my gut.

“I was in London,” I said at last, softly so as not to wake him.

“I know.”

“I liked it.”

“Of course you did,” he said, dismissively. “How’s Lydia?”

“Fine. She’s at the dacha. She’s translating André Malraux.”

A grunt rose from deep within Sorokin’s body, from as deep as his bowels. “A prick, a real social democratic prick. Who commissioned it?”

“Tvardovsky has his head up his ass,” he muttered, naming the journal’s editor. “She should get paid on acceptance. Don’t count on publication. Malraux, what a prick.”

The odor of his contempt lingered. After a while, I said in a hopeful voice, “My novel’s going well. I’m almost done with the first draft. When you’re ready, I’d like you to read it. It’ll be a success, I think.”

“Good,” he said.

“I’ve already talked to Yegor Nikitin. He’ll be my editor. He’s very enthusiastic. He’s even showed Mosfilm the outline.”

“Make sure they pay. Don’t let them dick you.”

I laughed nervously. I’d always been hopeless about money, and Sorokin knew it. Thank God I had the union to protect my interests.

“They won’t dick me,” I promised. “I expect a good contract. I’d like to build a proper dacha.”

Sorokin considered this. He knew better than I did how much I could hope to get for the book and the film rights and how much a dacha would cost.

“All right,” he said at last. “Get the money. When you’re ready, I’ll go with you to Litfond. I know a piece of property, a few blocks from our place. It’s right at the edge of the forest. It’s not planned for development, I’ve been holding it back. Just let me know when you’re ready.”

“Boris Stepanovich, thank you ...” I stammered.

For the next forty awkward minutes, I made pleasantries, told Aksyonov’s joke about the leaky boat, and elaborated upon some union gossip and intrigue. As I left, Sorokin’s promise continued to reverberate through me. I knew the piece of property to which he referred. A ski trail ran along its edge, there was a fast, clear stream nearby, as well as what Lydia had once identified as a stand of lindens. I paused outside the room for a few
moments, allowing my eyes to adjust to the light. The corridor was wide and airy, hosed and scrubbed down every several hours. Clinic 2 was in no way physically similar to the Rostov mansion, yet given the rotating population of the union’s corridor (Medved had died here; so had Yakov Baum), it was virtually another wing of the Secretariat. Sorokin had spent his whole adult life in the union, encased within its protective walls. It was foretold that I too would one day lie in this hospital, perhaps in the same bed that now held Sorokin’s carcass. I was thoroughly a union man.

Sorokin was eventually sent home for a long convalescence. Meanwhile, Marina’s novel approached like a distantly heard locomotive. And then it arrived and at a publication party in the writers’ union café, I was congratulated for “discovering” her. With an icy glass of whiskey in my right hand and a mentholated Rothmans in my left, I accepted the shower of compliments with the same equanimity as I might have accepted a soft summer rain. As for Anton, although he attended the party and received congratulations for being the first to publish the new author, he was no longer romantically involved with her. I knew that Marina had taken up with and dropped Vadim Andreyev, and had then performed the same indelicate operation upon Afanasy Malinin, who, leaning against the bar for support, his face drawn and his hair in his eyes, now looked much the worse for it.

The novel was well received: “a fresh voice,” “the cry
of brave and wise youth,” “a vigorous blow against hypocrisy.” For a television interview, she wore a prim gray dress that luridly accented her figure. The camera caressed her. Marina spoke directly into it, to a cameraman with a hard-on. A nation of readers was stirred.

Marina had inscribed the copy she presented me with a stanza from the nineteenth-century poet Fyodor Tyutchev:

It was an odd, literary inscription to an ordinary, unliterary,
anti-
literary novel, which I read with growing disbelief. I had read worse, of course, but probably nothing worse that had been so highly praised for no easily visible reason. Contrary to acclamation, her literary voice was stale, her cry foolish, and her stances hypocritical. I counted those who must have been involved in the construction of Marina’s celebrity: not only Anton, but the chief editor of Sovremennik, the editors of
Literaturnaya Gazeta
and other journals, critics, and television executives. Could they all have participated in this gross sham? How could she be sleeping with so many of them—and not be sleeping with me?

The volume of the praise forced me to reconsider the novel, and to concede that, whatever its (many, fatal)
faults, there was at least perhaps something engagé about the book, especially Marina’s satirical portrayal of a certain secondary character, a petty bureaucrat. It was Marina’s good fortune that her book was published just as the press began one of its periodic campaigns against “the bureaucracy,” a charade posited on the fiction that “the bureaucracy,” formless and faceless (save for a few carefully chosen scapegoats), was something independent from the Party. It was “the bureaucracy” that presented the greatest challenge to developing socialism; the Party needed to “redouble its efforts against the bureaucracy.” Although Marina’s novel was not in any way political, she developed a reputation as someone who
could be
political, a “reformist,” even a literary Young Turk.

Although my own novel was simply one of scores published that year and was intended for an entirely different audience, I sensed that it trailed in her wake. Given my status in the union, my first printing was much higher than Marina’s, but the novel wasn’t reviewed as prominently. Nor was I feted on television. As the weeks passed, several reviews appeared in the papers and literary journals, huffing their disappointment. The grievances conveyed by these reviews were consistent enough to be persuasive.

The gist of the complaints was that my novel, set aboard a Bering Sea icebreaker, was “ill informed” and “not genuine.” Indeed, a literal-minded review in
The Baltic Shipman,
by an active-duty mechanic, listed all its errors and solecisms, which evoked his compassion for
my ignorance about marine diesel engines. It was shamefully clear to this and other critics that I had never set foot aboard an icebreaker.

Yet I never hid the fact that I had no experience at sea and no interest in going to sea. To write
The Northern Lights,
I had looked in books and talked with sailors in order to obtain a few details, but in the end many of these were discarded or even contradicted for the sake of the story. I was more interested in imagining an all-male community in close quarters in a ferocious climate, in bitter conflict and urgent cooperation, than I was in documenting anything real. I believed that the novel needed not to be genuine, but only plausible, so that any errors would not distract the reader from the main thing, the story.

This method of operation had served me well in my first two novels, set respectively in a Kazakh kolkhoz and in a motorized cavalry unit during the closing months of the Great Patriotic War. When I was an unknown writer, critics were unaware that I lacked firsthand experience of my subjects. Now inflicted with the knowledge that I was a Moscow intellectual, they squawked that they were gravely disturbed.

The most savage of these attacks was launched by Sergei Makarov, whose standing had been recently enhanced by a collection of his travel essays. He took apart my novel like a kebab, and the other idiots followed suit. Although my novel was nonpolitical, Makarov leveled a political charge: to write about workers without having lived among them, or “as far as we can determine”
without caring about their “real historic triumphs” over hardship and backwardness, was a form of “literary colonialism.”

The single exception in this campaign was Marina’s long review in
Znamya.
Noting and, I suppose unavoidably, amplifying the criticism I had received, she absolved me of it. Marina conceded that my “pacing and characterization is weak,” that the plot “holds few surprises,” and that
The Northern Lights
was “a men’s novel,” but she admired “the vivid portrayal of human frailties and human passion aboard R. Krilov’s ghostly death-ship.” Her strain was apparent in every line. In the end, her condescension made her review the most galling of all that I had received. Everyone knew, of course, that I had been indirectly responsible for getting her work published.