The Big Green Tent (10 page)

Ilya lay in his dark burrow for what seemed a long time, then began groping the walls. He discovered a large pipe leading slightly downward. He started to crawl along it. He crawled and crawled, and then the pipe made a slight turn and started leading upward. He had wrapped his camera in his woolen cap and stuffed it under his belt. After some time, he paused and slept a little while, and when the bitter cold forced him awake, he couldn't remember right away how he had come to be in this dank hole. He lifted up his head and saw a large, rectangular grate about six feet above him. It wasn't that there was light on the other side—just that the darkness there was not as thick. He was terribly thirsty. The stench was foul, but not from sewage; it smelled of rusty iron and rats. He didn't see any rats, though—they must have been running in a dense mass toward the Hall of Columns, too.

He had to get out of there. Thin, ladder-like iron brackets jutted out from the vaulted walls leading up to the grate above his head, and he began to climb. He made it to the top with ease, but the grate turned out to be welded shut. He couldn't possibly force it open to get through. He descended again, curled into a little ball, and fell asleep. When he woke up, the light from above seemed stronger. He moved farther along the pipe—it grew wider.

He came to another grate, about fifty yards from the first. He felt around for the brackets and began to clamber up them. The grate wasn't welded shut this time; it was secured fairly loosely, but there was a lock on the outside. Ilya kept going. The grates appeared at regular intervals, fifty yards or so apart. He passed eight of them, investigated each one, and found that almost all of them were welded shut, except for two, with locks on the outside. Soon he lost count. He dropped off to sleep several more times from exhaustion, woke up, then kept going.

Three or four grates in a row were directly under the feet of the surging crowds. He couldn't see them, since there was no light, but he heard the dreadful roar, and understood that he shouldn't even try to exit there. Once he came upon a broken grate—half a dead body dangled through the gaping hole.

He had no idea what direction he was headed in, but he understood clearly that the pipes were his only way out, and that he had to keep moving along them, though he didn't know where they would lead.

He lost track of time. Suddenly, he saw a grate, beyond which shone a bright yellow light. He climbed the brackets, touched the grate, and it opened. He crawled out and discovered that he was standing under the streetlamp in the courtyard of the building where Sanya Steklov lived. He had just enough strength left to make it to Sanya's door and ring the bell.

Anna Alexandrovna opened it.

Ilya collapsed. His hands were clasping his stomach, where Fedya was still safely tucked away under his belt.

It was eleven in the evening on March 7. Anna Alexandrovna did what she could for Ilya: she undressed him, carried him to the bath with the help of a neighbor, and waited for him to open his eyes. Then she washed him off with a big shaggy sponge, carefully avoiding his wounds. His whole body was black and blue; his stomach was one big bruise. She was surprised that this skinny boy, with a completely boyish face, was already so well equipped for manhood. He got out of the bath by himself, made it to the divan, and collapsed again. They put a woman's nightgown on him, covered him with a blanket, gave him sweet strong tea. Then, stuffing a big pillow behind his back, they propped him up to feed him some soup. He fell asleep.

The Steklovs sat at the table in silence.

“Nuta, I think a lot of people must have died today,” Sanya said to his grandmother, his voice a whisper.

“Most likely.”

Then Sanya sat down next to the sleeping Ilya, hoping he would wake up and tell him everything that had happened. His feelings for his friend were strong and complex: he was proud of him, and a bit envious that he himself wasn't like Ilya, but he didn't really want to be, either. He also understood that Ilya was a man—and it was not only the dark fuzz on his upper lip that attested to this, but the dark path of hair under his belly leading down to his large male member, which was not made just for peeing. He had never seen a naked man before today: he had never been taken to the public baths.

He had never seen a naked woman, either. Why would two proper, well-educated ladies, his mother and grandmother, take a notion to start undressing in front of him? But Sanya could guess what women were about—the breasts under the dress, the dark nest below the stomach. This naked man, his friend and classmate Ilya, surprised him much more—with a pang, Sanya sensed that he was not, and never would be, like his friend. Portraits of naked women—Sanya had seen many of them in museums and in art books—for some reason did not awaken such confusion and excitement in him as the nakedness of a man. He felt he might faint from the crudeness and power of it.

He had almost finished reading
War and Peace
, and the female shades didn't move him in the least—Natasha, with her silly enthusiasms, Princess Liza with her short upper lip, Princess Marya, whose unattractiveness was stressed throughout; but the men … They were magnificent—their strength, generosity, their wit and intelligence, their nobility and sense of honor. Now, looking into Ilya's face, he tried to figure out which of these magnificent men his friend resembled. No, certainly not the dry, aristocratic Bolkonsky; nor the fat, intelligent Bezukhov. And not the wonderful Petya Rostov, beloved by all. Not Nikolay, either, of course … Most likely it was Dolokhov.

*   *   *

Maria Fedorovna, Ilya's mother, had been sitting on a chair by the door to the apartment for two days running. They didn't have a telephone yet, and Anna Alexandrovna couldn't inform her that her son was alive. It was terrifying, and too dangerous, to venture out onto the streets. And, in any case, crossing the streetcar tracks at the intersection of Chistoprudny Boulevard and Maroseyka was impossible because of the military and police cordons blocking the path.

A pall of fear hung over the city—an ancient terror, familiar from Greek tragedy and myth, enveloped it, drowning it in its black waters, the kind of terror that visits one only in dreams, in childhood nightmares, a terror that rises up from the bottom of the soul. It was as though some underground deposit had ruptured, and was now threatening all human life.

Borya Rakhmanov's parents were also sitting, paralyzed with fear. It was impossible to reach the police, the hospital, or the morgue. All the lines were busy.

They would find Borya only four days later, among the bodies lying in the snow next to the overflowing Lefortovo Morgue. They would identify him by the laundry mark on the shirt—Galina Borisovna Rakhmanova never washed white shirts herself, preferring to take them to the cleaners. There was one other number on the hand of her dead son, written in violet ink: 1421.

These people, the victims of the stampede, were buried quietly, in secret. No one counted them a second time, and only the number on Borya's hand witnessed to the fact that there had been no fewer than fourteen hundred of them.

No wreath from Borya's school was laid on his grave. There were no flowers to be had in those days, anyway—all of them had been lavished on the Great Leader. During those terrible days, one other person died, a private death at home—the composer Sergei Prokofiev. This went completely unnoticed.

Of all Ilya's photographs, only two came out. As he had suspected, the light was insufficient. But apart from the official images of the coffin in the Hall of Columns, which appeared in all the papers, no other photographs of that event existed.

 

THE LORLs

On Wednesdays, Victor Yulievich would make the rounds of Moscow with the LORLs (as they called themselves) in tow. Like some latter-day Pied Piper blowing on his flute, he would lead them out of their poor, sick time into a world where thought labored and lived, a world of freedom, and music, and the other arts. This is where it had all happened, right here, behind these very windows!

Their peregrinations through literary Moscow had a wonderfully chaotic character. On what was once called Gendrikov Lane, they looked into the courtyard of a building where Mayakovsky was rumored (mistakenly) to have shot himself. From there they walked down Dzerzhinsky Street, formerly Lubyanka, to the Sretensky Gates. This renaming of Moscow streets disturbed Victor Yulievich, and he always called them by their original names when he was with his students.

They walked down the boulevards to Pushkin Square, where their teacher showed them the house of Famusov, and they stopped at all the addresses associated with Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin: the houses of Vyazemsky and Nashchokin, and the house where Yogel's dancing classes were held. This was where Pushkin had first seen the young Natalia, who would later become his wife.

“Tverskoy is the oldest of the boulevards. At one time it was just called the Boulevard. There was only one. They call it the Boulevard Ring, but there is no ring, and never was. It's a semicircle. It runs down to the river. All the boulevards are built on the place where the stone walls of Bely Gorod, the White City, once stood.”

From Pushkin Square they would pick out some unfamiliar route to explore. They walked through Bogoslovsky Lane to Trekhprudny, to the house where the poet Marina Tsvetaeva had lived. Or they would take Tverskoy and Nikitsky Boulevards to the Arbat, and cross Malaya Molchanovka near the little house where Lermontov had lived. Passing through Sobachya Square they found themselves in front of Scriabin's last apartment. This was where he played, and people still alive today attended his private recitals at home. The students asked questions, and the names stuck in their memories. They ambled through the city without any preconceived plan, and it was impossible to imagine anything better than these aimless pilgrimages of discovery.

Victor Yulievich spent long hours in the library preparing for these outings, digging through old books and scouting for rare tidbits of information. In the History Library, he discovered rich deposits of handwritten memoirs, photographs, and letters. Some of the materials, judging by the library's records, had never before been examined. He came across a great deal of valuable and intriguing information. He was surprised to learn that many, if not all, of the notable people of the nineteenth century, while living very disparate lives, were related by blood. Certain far-flung clans were intimately intertwined by birth, like a tree with myriad branches. Letters from before the Revolution constantly witnessed to this remarkable web of kinship, and all these connections, as well as family disputes and quarrels and
mésalliances
, were transformed in Tolstoy's novels into something larger, greater, than just a family chronicle.
It's like the Russian Bible
, thought Victor Yulievich.

Like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, Victor Yulievich was tied by every strand of hair to the ground of Russian culture, and these ties extended to the boys, who were acquiring the taste, growing accustomed to this dusty, papery, ephemeral nourishment.

With the group of boys he would walk down Gorky Street, past Eliseevsky's, the finest grocery store in the capital, telling his LORLs about Zinaida Alexandrovna Volkonskaya, who had owned this palatial house before its reconstruction.

“She held a literary salon, famous all over Moscow, and all of Moscow's high society would gather here. Writers, artists, musicians, and professors would all attend, among them Pushkin. Not long ago I came upon an interesting document in the library—a report from Colonel Bibikov dated 1826, in which it was spelled out in black and white: ‘I keep a close eye on the writer Pushkin, insofar as possible. The homes he visits most frequently are the homes of Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya, Prince Vyazemsky, former minister Dmitriev, and Prosecutor Zhikharev. Conversations there revolve primarily around literature.' You understand what this means, don't you?”

Ilya was the first to respond. “What's there to understand? They were spying on him.”

“Precisely. Because all through the ages there have been people who want to ‘revolve primarily around literature.' Like all of us here!” The teacher laughed. “And then there are the Colonel Bibikovs, who are charged with keeping a close eye on them. Yes, such are the times.”

He hadn't said anything in particular, but hovered just on the brink of it. He had understood long ago that the past was no better than the present. That was as plain as day. One had to try to escape, to wrestle free from every era, so as not to be devoured by it.

“Literature is the only thing that allows us to survive, the only thing that helps us to reconcile ourselves to the time we live in,” Victor Yulievich told his charges.

Everyone agreed eagerly. Only Sanya had his doubts—what about music?

From listening closely to Mozart and Chopin, he had grasped that there was another dimension quite distinct from literature, a dimension into which his grandmother, then Liza and his music teacher, Evgenia Danilovna, had initiated him. This was the place he had escaped to every day after school, when his hand was still whole and intact. But even now, with his mangled fingers, he had not parted ways with music—he listened to it constantly, picked out melodies on occasion. How could he play, without the use of two fingers? He wasn't going to fool himself.

For Mikha, these literary journeys were also a form of escape—from his dreary aunt Genya, with her trivial concerns—and a flight into a rarified atmosphere inhabited by noble men and beautiful women.

Ilya didn't miss a single one of these walks through the city, either. He had set his own task—to document all the events and compile reports accompanied by photographs. Some of these reports were stored at Victor Yulievich's home, and the others in Ilya's closet.

*   *   *

More than a decade would pass before the degenerate heir of Colonel Bibikov, Colonel Chibikov (the immortal Gogol grins each time such echoes in nomenclature spring up), would get his hands on the childhood archive, and fifty more years would pass until an Institute for Central and East European Studies, in a small German town with a fairytale name, would register this archive under a seven-digit number with a forward slash, and the archive would pass into the hands of another one of the LORLs, also a student of Victor Yulievich's, but a year younger, for safekeeping.