Odd Jobs (96 page)

The texture of the present-day, ostensibly autobiographical passages
is airy, startling, disjointed, and deft—somewhat like that of Raymond Queneau, if Queneau had been a less happy man. Konwicki enjoys that easy access to the surreal noticeable in Polish writers as disparate as Lem and Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz, as Jerzy Kosinski and I. B. Singer. But our attention scatters amid these tipsy incidents and arguments; it is in two extended historical fantasies that Konwicki shows his imaginative strength and brings the reader into the continuing Polish agony. The first, over fifty pages long, describes the attempt of a twenty-three-year-old soldier, Zygmunt Mineyko, to lead, under the name Colonel Macidj Borowy, a section of the uprising of 1863, one of a number of unsuccessful nationalist rebellions in the long century (1795–1918) when Poland didn’t exist on the map, having been partitioned among its three large neighbors; the second historical episode, in a later time of troubles, shows another young man, with the name of Traugutt, saying goodbye to his wife in a hotel room before going off to accept “the leadership of the People’s Government” in Warsaw—an assignment certain to cost him his life. No doubt both these doomed heroes are enshrined in the collective Polish memory; for any reader the sense of circumambient oppression, of terror and futile daring and bravery amid the details of the daily are evoked with a masterly command of such sensory realities as the noises of drunken Russian officers in the adjoining hotel room and the singing sound of sand spinning from the wheels of a carriage. Of course, Communist writers have often sought breathing space in historical fiction, where dangerous contemporary issues can be avoided or disguised, and are at home there; nevertheless, the immediacy of these “old-fashioned” pieces of Konwicki’s narrative oddly overpowers the whimsical, skittish rest. A sexy strain of imagery does link the Polish past and present: the desirable women all savor of grass and herbs. Colonel Borowy admires a young wife whose eyes “shimmered with the colors of moss and heather” and whose scent is mingled of “sleep, lovage herb, and impetuous love.” Traugutt’s wife “gave up her warm cloak, which smelled of heather,” and, when she was further undressed, “her damp sweat … smelled like herbs.” Our aging author joins these warriors whose “sweetheart [was] Poland, golden-haired Poland,” when, rather ignominiously couched with his shop assistant, he finds “she smelled like the wild herbs of the earth.” An earth that, in the Polish complex, floats underfoot, not quite possessed, parcelled out, dominated by others historically and now.

Estrangement—from earth, sky, and the ruling powers in between—is
not absent from Western contemporary literature, either, and there is no assurance that under a capitalist system Erofeev would drink less, Ludvik would find it easier to locate what he calls “final beauty,” or Konwicki would be spared the discomforts of turning fifty. Yet all three books have been outlawed in their respective homelands, and therefore must contain words judged dangerous by the authorities. The absurd cowering by Communist governments in the face of honest and questioning art is one of the wonders of the world, a fertile source of embarrassment to its enforcers and an apparent declaration of bad faith; for from such fear of the truth we can only deduce a power that believes itself to be based upon lies.

A
NOTHER
L
IFE
and
T
HE
H
OUSE ON THE
E
MBANKMENT
, by Yuri Trifonov, translated from the Russian by Michael Glenny. 350 pp. Simon and Schuster, 1983.

W
ILD
B
ERRIES
, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis. 296 pp. Morrow, 1984.

R
USSIAN
W
OMEN:
Two Stories
, by I. Grekova, translated from the Russian by Michel Petrov. 304 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

T
HE
I
SLAND OF
C
RIMEA
, by Vassily Aksyonov, translated from the Russian by Michael Henry Heim. 369 pp. Random House, 1983.

The Russians seem to be receding. It is not just that our President cracks jokes about outlawing them and calls them an evil empire; their own chiefs of state, from the sickly late Brezhnev to the sallow and infirm Andropov to today’s far from entirely healthy Chernenko, have become wan, and the Russian global presence is signified by a muffled, stubborn war in Afghanistan and by non-appearance—at the Olympics, at the conference table. One remembers with a perhaps soft-headed fondness the old days of Khrushchev in America, banging his shoe at the
U.N. and waggling his hips at Disneyland. And one turns to some contemporary Russian fiction with genuine curiosity as to life in our recessive fellow superpower’s territory, on that portion of our planet’s surface just about equal, in acreage, to what we can see of the moon.

Yuri Trifonov had emerged, in the last decade of his rather short life (1925–81), as the most sensitive and honest of officially published Soviet fiction writers. The son of an Old Bolshevik who fell from favor under Stalin and disappeared, Trifonov, when young, wrote a novel that won a Stalin Prize. In middle age he turned apolitical and became a first-rate writer; his chosen form was the novella, and his subject the private lives of white-collar Russians—professors, translators, theatrical people. Three of his novellas were translated and published here in 1978, under the title
The Long Goodbye
. Now two more,
Another Life
and
The House on the Embankment
, are available, in one volume. All take place in Trifonov’s recognizable world, a dense world of edgily multi-generational families crowded into Moscow apartments, of dachas and seaside vacations as escape hatches into the romantic, of mysterious and ominous professional rises and falls, of admirable women and unhappy men, of nagging dissatisfaction and nostalgia, a world described in leisurely loops of flashback, with something of Chekhov’s tenderness and masterly power of indirect revelation.

Another Life
transpires in the reminiscing mind of Olga Vasilievna, whose husband, Sergei, has recently died. She and her teen-age daughter, Irinka, still live with Sergei’s mother, Alexandra Prokofievna, who possesses a law degree and whose husband, a mathematics professor, died in the 1941 defense of Moscow. She is a staunch Communist and forgiving neither of her granddaughter’s typically adolescent behavior nor of her daughter-in-law’s supposed guilt: “This woman firmly believed that the death of her son, in November of the previous year from a heart attack at the age of forty-two, was the fault of his wife.” Olga’s memories, as if searching out the justice of this charge, move back through her seventeen years of marriage, beginning with a sunny Black Sea vacation and ending under a Moscow cloud as Sergei, a historian, somehow offends the academic higher-ups with his researches into the Czar’s secret police. Throughout their relationship, Olga has been distressed by the other women whom her moody and elusive husband has attracted, and by his fickle professional enthusiasms. A successful biologist, reasonable and shrewd enough to see in Sergei and his family an “emotional ineptitude and a compulsion to do only what pleased them,”
she nevertheless is “psychologically dependent” upon him and fiercely defensive of what is consistently italicized as “
their life
”—“their life” as opposed to the “separate life” he keeps living during his mysterious escapes from domesticity and “another life” of which he often dreams. In the surprising ending, it is Olga who finds “another life,” with a nameless man who sounds even frailer in health than Sergei and who, from his coy anonymity (in a narrative where even the most fleeting characters are named), might be a version of the author. Trifonov dedicated the book to his wife, Alla, and seems to have reaped the benefit of detailed female confidences. As a portrait of Olga in her stages of young beauty and mature weariness, in her moods of happiness and anger, in her conflicting roles as mother, lover, daughter, and worker,
Another Life
has been executed with an air of natural understanding and admiration. “Look at this woman!—she exists!” the book seems to exclaim, and only the warmth of the exclamation suggests that the creator and the creation are not of the same sex.

The House on the Embankment
also describes balked academic careers, rotting but embowering dachas, heavy-drinking men with adverse cardiovascular symptoms, and deliberate efforts of reminiscence. For Trifonov, too, the novella seems to have been an exercise in reminiscence; it reworks many of the characters that appeared in his first novel,
Students
(1950). One of these seems to be a stand-in for the author: “Yura the Bear” narrates intermittent chapters of this tale of ambition and aging, and Trifonov spent much of his childhood in privileged housing like “the house on the embankment.” The apartments within are spacious and the top stories have a view, across the Moscow River, of the Kremlin walls; its shadow cuts off sunlight from the shabby little house where lives Vadim Alexandrovich Glebov, with his father, grandmother, and Aunt Paula in one room, while six other families crowd into the other rooms. The Glebov boy’s jealousy of those who live above him in the apartment house forms “a source of burning resentment from his childhood onward.” The schoolboy episodes of this novella reminded me of the coarse nicknames and dangerous pranks of Günter Grass’s
Cat and Mouse
and Shusako Endo’s
When I Whistle;
they reflect a more Spartan youth culture than that sketched in, say,
Penrod
. The author’s treatment of Glebov—who from his shabby beginnings rises to betray (slightly) his literature professor and to become a literary functionary with a spoiled and silly daughter and international travel privileges—reminded me of Chekhov’s “The Darling,” or, rather, of Tolstoy’s well-known
commentary upon it, to the effect that Chekhov, setting out to satirize his character, “intended to curse, but the god of poetry forbade him, and commanded him to bless.”

Trifonov, whose own father fell to the unanswerable workings of tyranny, and who as an author had to maneuver his realism into print through the ever-present maze of official scruples, must have had little use for characters like Glebov. He portrays him as timid, indecisive, and materialistic; yet the timidity and indecision are so empathetically limned, and the materialism (Glebov is a great noticer of clothing and furniture, with all the social resonance of such possessions) such a basically humble attribute, that the reader, like Glebov’s betrayed fiancée, Sonya, loves him in spite of himself. An apparatchik could hardly be more tenderly dismantled. The boy in his poverty begins by trading on the one meagre advantage he has: his mother sells tickets in a movie theatre and can let him in free, with what friends he chooses to bring. He ends, successful and afflicted by arteriostenosis, by failing to buy an antique table he had his heart set on; further, he is snubbed by a workman at the furniture market, whom he has suddenly recognized as a once powerful and flamboyant old school friend. A bit later, this same friend’s mother, a former aristocrat also fallen in the social scale, has snubbed him on a train to Paris. We never see Glebov oppressing others, but only Glebov oppressed—oppressed not least by the need to make decisions. A splendid turn in the plot occurs when, on the eve of a fateful meeting at his university, where he must testify on one side or the other, his grandmother Nila, whom he loves (“Who else was there to love, if not old Nila?”), dies as if to spare him, on his day of mourning, this crossroads:

Glebov’s melancholy rise in the world is traced among so many such vivid vignettes and small scenes as to summarize the general flow of Russian life from 1940 to 1974. He is described, by the first-person voice whose disquisitions rather jarringly interlard Glebov’s story, as “a
nothing person
”; but into this nothing, this cautious acquisitor of things, so much observed life rushes that a less passive and more principled hero would have seemed less human. “He dreamed of all the things that later came to him—but which brought him no joy because achieving them used up so much of his strength and so much of that irreplaceable something that is called life”: a moral for many a capitalist tale as well.

At a student party in
A House on the Embankment
, one guest is “a poet who had been deafening people at student parties with his crashingly metallic verses—in those days, for some reason, they were regarded as highly musical.… Nowadays, thirty years later, the poet is still grinding out his brassy verse, but no one any longer thinks it musical—just tinny.” It is a compliment, of sorts, to Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s fame and durability that a Westerner, without presuming to judge what verse sounds brassy in Russian, thinks first of him in relation to this unkind allusion. Born in 1933 and still going strong, Yevtushenko has managed to steer a daredevil course amid the perils of being a poet, a crowd-pleaser, a sometime protester, a travelling emblem of Russian culture, and lately a movie director and actor—all this within the Soviet system, which since Lenin has insisted on its right to supervise the arts. Khrushchev, whose sanctioning of the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
in late 1962 unleashed hope for freer expression, personally took it upon himself, a few months later, to bring Yevtushenko to heel. More recently, Yuri Andropov publicly complained that “Trifonov and others devote too much concern for the minutiae of daily life without sufficient regard for the good of the Party, for whom they are not doing their bit.” The Party has continued to allow Yevtushenko access to print and audiences because, my guess is, for all his rakish and rebellious tendencies he is a sincere patriot and genuinely at home in the poster-bright, semi-abstract realm of global aspiration wherein the slogans of
the Revolution make some sense. Gone are the days, in Russia and the West alike, when he and Andrei Voznesensky were glamour boys, bringing to stadiums and auditoriums on both sides of the Iron Curtain word of the new possibilities stirring under Khrushchev. But neither poet has been silenced in the airless decades since, and Yevtushenko, who had earlier composed some short stories and a banned memoir (
A Precocious Autobiography
, 1963), published in 1981 a first novel that sold two and a half million copies. This book,
Wild Berries
, is now published here, in a typeface that looks muddy and a sexy pastel dust jacket that depicts two haystacks.