The Big Green Tent (72 page)

Vitka was the one who suffered most. He hardly remembered his father, and now, just as he was starting to get used to him, he disappeared again.

The decorations were returned to the general's home again through a chain of acquaintances and half-strangers. “Naked,” deprived of their little handcrafted coffins, they were wrapped up in cellophane and placed in an iron skillet for safekeeping. Then they were committed to the ground, buried at the dacha of Zoya's niece near Kratovo Station, on the Kazan railroad line, behind two pine trees holding up a child's swing. Awaiting better days.

And better days did, in fact, come. In the end, the general was reunited with his decorations. The general lived in a country where you have to live for a long time. He lived until he was ninety, and thus managed to die a hero. He was buried in 1991, and all his medals and decorations, once wrapped up in worn-out underwear with a nap, even the American medal, were displayed on a pillow in front of his coffin. And the pillow was red, just as it was supposed to be.

 

THE IMAGO

Everything was just as it had been before—the courtyard, the neighbors, the broken floorboard in the corridor, the saleswomen in the bakery and the fish store, the building manager. Yet it seemed to Mikha as though thirty years had passed, and not just three. One false move and everything might split open with a resounding crash—the house, the courtyard, his little daughter, his wife, and the whole city, and April, so warm and welcoming this year. Cautiously, gingerly, he made his way around the room, the apartment, and his surroundings, doing what he had to do.

He first went to see Anna Alexandrovna. Then to the police, to have his passport registered. They said he had to find a job within thirty days.

Then he went to the History Library, almost certain they wouldn't admit him. But they just told him he needed to reregister his library card.

Several weeks later, after Anna Alexandrovna's death, he went to see Ilya and Olga. He rarely visited this strangely eclectic apartment—an admixture of Communist asceticism and Russian Empire style—on Vorovsky Street. Olga had never really warmed up to Alyona, but she adored Mikha.

Olga kissed him, and pulled out of the refrigerator some parchment paper bundles of pâté, Wallachian salads in little tartlike pie crusts, cold cuts, herring, and who knows what other marvels, all from the Prague confectionery and delicatessen. She laid it all out on translucent plates, and, blowing a kiss good-bye, ran off to finish a translation that had to be completed by the morning. Ilya took out a bottle of Armenian cognac. Mikha could hardly drink a thing, and he ate sparingly as well, expecting the pains in his stomach to start up again at any moment.

They sat down and looked at each other closely. Ilya was afraid to say anything out of place or unnecessary. He wasn't terribly sentimental, but he was overcome with a feeling for Mikha that he had rarely even felt toward his disabled son. His eyes and nose stung.

“Did you see it last night?” Mikha asked.

Ilya nodded.

“Of course. All of Moscow watched it. Everyone was expecting something like this.”

“Expecting it? And I could never have imagined that he would do anything of the sort…”

“Ingenious, in its own way,” Ilya said.

The trial of Chernopyatov and his two closest friends had ended the night before. There had been an unprecedented television broadcast—a press conference with Chernopyatov. Sergei Borisovich had repented of all his sins against the Soviet authorities for an hour and a half. And he did this with real talent—if one can be said to have a talent for baseness and treachery. The most surprising thing was that he introduced himself as the head of the “Democratic Movement,” its leader, and its main ideologue; and as self-proclaimed leader of the movement he called upon his followers to reexamine their actions. Everyone who was even remotely involved understood very clearly that there was no unified movement to speak of, that there were various groups of people with their own concerns and “interests,” which sometimes coincided and sometimes did not, who were united only in their rejection of the current authorities and their hunger for change. And the change they wanted varied from group to group, person to person …

Many people discussed the previous day's broadcast. The similarity with Dostoevsky's
The Possessed
was not hard to see. People with a pragmatic bent feared an unleashing of wholesale repression against any nonconformist thinker. People who took a more philosophical view asked more abstract questions: Had the great Dostoevsky discovered a particular elemental force in the Russian character, this possession by revolutionary fervor, or had he unwittingly created it, along with his literary protagonists Stavrogin and Pyotr Verkhovensky?

He and Mikha talked about this all evening, without coming to any hard and fast conclusions. There was too much of the story that still remained obscure.

It was impossible to fathom what had happened to Chernopyatov himself. He had been the most steadfast of them all, wise and experienced. He had survived the children's penal colony, Stalin's labor camps, and exile … And he had a clear-cut enemy: the Soviet authorities, Stalinism. What could have happened to him to make him turn around so abruptly, so radically?

“Ilya, a month and a half before my release they brought me face-to-face with him. I didn't know that he had been arrested and was naming names. A frank confession, they call it. Dozens of names. He betrayed nearly the whole
Chronicle
: editors, writers, compilers. This was the last thing I expected. Sergei Borisovich told me that I was making a mistake, that I needed courage to admit my mistakes, that I had to seek a new path. They tried to pressure me into going down that path with him. I refused. They told me they would send me up for a second term if I didn't cooperate. I was certain they would never let me out after that. But they did. They made me sign a paper saying I wouldn't engage in anti-Soviet activity, and let me go. What happened to him I really don't understand. Maybe there is something we don't know. They have so many methods at their disposal, besides beatings.”

“I was told they have some sort of ‘truth serum' that they sprinkle in your food,” Ilya ventured.

“I could believe that. You know yourself that they're professionals, and we're absolutely defenseless against them. And we're just as defenseless against the common criminals. I thought about Mandelstam a lot when I was inside. What it was like for him … to die there.

“But don't imagine that they feel any lack of moral justification! In fact, they feel they are morally superior. For them, breaking a person with ideals is a special pleasure. It's like we all have the same face to them. Like we're all Chinese; or like we're all weaklings who wear glasses. Before I was transported from prison to the camp, one of the jail bosses smashed my glasses. He got such a charge out of it, it was such a thrill to him to hear them crunch underfoot. I really can't see a thing without them, as you know. I only received a new pair three months later—Anna Alexandrovna sent them to me. Chernopyatov, by the way, also wears glasses.”

“Yes, I photographed Chernopyatov a few years ago. It was a good portrait.”

No, Ilya didn't feel any guilt about that whatsoever.
What a bunch of motherfuckers
was what he was thinking.

“Well, I'm just thinking about the ways in which he was vulnerable, that's all,” Mikha said, explaining something that Ilya already knew perfectly well. “Maybe they made him drink something, or broke him in some other way … I just don't want you to say anything bad about him. One has to feel sorry for him, on top of everything else. He wasn't thinking of Alyona. How will this affect her? And all the people who've surrounded him all these years.

“I think the price he has already paid is so high that he is worse off than everyone else. How will he ever live this down?

“You helped me so much, Ilya, before my arrest. I'll always remember what you said to me: ‘Every word you say will work against you. Keep silent. The best thing is to say nothing.' And that's what I did. But you know yourself, Sergei Borisovich is a big talker—an orator, even. He said too much, and then there was no going back. Or maybe his strength and willpower gave out. I'm not going to be the one to judge him.”

*   *   *

Mikha's words were feverish and disconnected, but Ilya understood everything. In silence, Ilya poured them each another glass, and then drank, saying: “Me neither.”

“I don't know what I'm going to do for work now. It turns out that working with the deaf children was the best thing I've done in my life.”

“We'll think of something,” Ilya said, with less confidence than usual. “Have you ever thought about emigrating?” This was the first time Ilya had ever brought this up directly with Mikha.

“Emigration—only to save my skin. The most terrifying thing for me is the prison camps, Ilya. I won't survive them a second time. But emigration … I'm from here, everything I know and love is here. Friends, Russian, my work.”

“Work? What kind of work?”

Mikha seemed to wilt.

“But how—without work?”

Ilya didn't know either. For him it wasn't a matter of a single job, but of various kinds of work. A multitude of tasks.

“You know, let's take one step at a time. First we'll find a job for you. Then we'll try to take stock of the situation, and think about where to go from there. I've already asked around. My friends are keeping an eye out for some kind of job for you. Start with your personal life, putting your own house in order.”

“That sounds like one has to make a choice—between one's personal life and society.”

“Your head's full of romantic rubbish. Why a choice? What kind of choice? That's just childish thinking. There's no choice—you wake up in the morning, brush your teeth, drink your tea, read a book, write your poems, earn your money, gab with friends—what kind of choice does that involve? At a certain moment, you start to feel—there's something dangerous here. So you don't touch it. You stay away from it. There's always a boundary line. But we'll figure that out when we come to it. You're not going to go around asking for trouble! Sometimes you can't help it. But you learn to move to the left, move to the right, so they don't grab your ass. Of course, there are those who love to bask in glory, to be in the limelight. Sergei Borisovich is ambitious that way. He wanted fame, influence. He wanted to play a role. But there are others—Vladimir Bukovsky and Tanya Velikanova, for example. Sakharov. Valera, Andrei, Alik, Arina … many of them! They never choose between personal life and social life. They just live how they live, from morning till night. They don't play at life…” Ilya said, sounding certain and knowledgeable. It was difficult to counter him. But there was something in his reasoning that didn't add up. Mikha jumped on it.

“You've got to be kidding! You've just named all the ones who actually did make a choice. Not all of them have served time in prison yet, but their time will come, you'll see. And I won't survive another term in prison. I know that about myself. I won't make it.”

But, as it turned out, Mikha didn't have to make a choice after all. Everything happened of its own accord.

*   *   *

There were bad days and good nights—so bright and brilliant was the unprecedented love that finally took hold between Alyona and her husband that it illuminated the gloomy days. Only now, Mikha sensed, was Alyona finally able to respond to his loving ardor. They were in corporeal dialogue with each other, something that had never happened before now. Something had shifted in the depths of her body—or was it her heart? Or perhaps the birth of their child had opened something like a sluice gate? And some natural gravity drawing a woman toward a man had fallen into place. Their sleeping daughter warmed them with her presence, and she gave great meaning to their unfolding happiness.

Their intimate life flourished and filled the gaps of their impoverished existence. But what happened in the world outside the small circle of their love for each other gave no cause for comfort or hope. There was no job, no money, no meaningful activity of the kind that had occupied him before he was imprisoned. Their home, which had always been full of friends, both Muscovites and Central Asians, was now empty. Either they were afraid for themselves, or they were staying away because they feared for Mikha and Alyona.

Even Sanya almost stopped dropping by. He was feeling both relieved and slighted: Alyona had seemed to have dropped him like a thing she no longer needed. Now he was perplexed. Had he imagined all the emotional pressure that Alyona put him under during the three years that Mikha was gone? He was hurt that Maya so easily and quickly withdrew her affection from him. She no longer clung to his neck or tickled his ears. Were all women in it together?

Sanya even began to think vaguely about some colossal struggle of women against men, similar to the class struggle. Only Nuta never took part in that struggle: she loved boys. Most of all she loved her own grandson, of course; but she had also loved Mikha and Ilya. He wondered how it had been with her husbands and lovers—but it was unlikely she had waged war on them.

Perhaps the problem was one of age? In youth, there is conflict; then a truce is declared; and, finally, in old age men and women become invulnerable to each other.

I should discuss it with Nuta
, he thought by force of habit. But this thought came up against the feeling of injury toward Alyona and Maya, who (both of them!) had loved him so importunately, so onerously, for three years; and then, after Mikha's return, within a matter of a few weeks all that love had dried up and disappeared, as though it had never been …

*   *   *

Sanya would never know what Nuta thought of all of this. And Mikha would never know that Anna Alexandrovna couldn't stand Alyona—or any others of that subtly drawn type: weak, demanding, despotic, feeble women, with a gift for inspiring tenderness, passion, and love, but who were nearly incapable of responding to it with gratitude and sympathy.