“He never had a chance,” he tells the crowd of onlookers. “If God played the Benoni against God, white would win!”
Zaitsev reaches across the table to accept a glass of champagne, drinks off half of it in one smooth swallow, struts on to the next board. He tilts his great head and examines it for a moment, then pounces on a piece. “Check! Tell the truth—you didn’t anticipate that, did you? Never mind, you’re in good company: I crushed Petrosian in the sixty-nine interzonals with the same move.”
Zaitsev sails on to the next board, which is opposite Friedemann T. and Pravdin. He studies the position for a long moment with a baffled expression. Suddenly his eyes surge open as he spots the flaw in his opponent’s game. “But you haven’t done your homework,” he taunts. “Fischer tried pawn queen five in a queen’s gambit declined in fifty-nine and lost eighteen moves later!”
“That’s new,” Friedemann T. comments loudly. “He’s accepting an isolated pawn in return for a king’s side attack.”
“The poisoned pawn variation of the Najdorf defense is Zaitsev’s specialty,” Pravdin notes. He takes another bite of toast and caviar, sips champagne, adds:
“The offered pawn is what he always accepts.”
“I don’t really like caviar,” Friedemann T. admits on their way out of the chess club. “I don’t appreciate all those little explosions in my mouth.”
“I don’t mind the caviar,” Pravdin confesses, “but vodka I prefer to champagne any day. A headache is what champagne always gives me.”
Friedemann T. pauses to look in a department store window. “I don’t mean to alarm you,” he says quietly, “but one of us is being followed.”
“What followed?” Pravdin cries nervously. “Where followed?”
“The tall man in the blue raincoat at the kiosk. We’ll split up at the corner and see which one of us is the pigeon.”
They separate, walking off in different directions. When they are half a block apart Friedemann T. turns and points at Pravdin as if to say, “It’s you.”
Pravdin, cursing under his breath, dashes down a side street, turns up an alley behind a theater, pauses to scrawl on the wall:
Full conformity is possible only in the cemetery
(I. Stalin: Pravdin has tried to grin and bear it), hears footsteps behind him and hurries on. Minutes later he pushes through the front door of GUM, the giant department store across Red Square from the Kremlin, plunges into the crowd and drifts with its flow. At a men’s clothing stall he ducks into a fitting room, watches through a slit in the curtain as the man in the blue raincoat, angrily looking right and left, rushes by. Pravdin hurtles back the way he came, dives into the Metro and emerges into the sunlight at the stop nearest the Hotel Ukraine, where he waits to see if Blue Raincoat is still behind him.
He isn’t.
Pravdin hurries off down Kutuzovsky Prospect to keep his rendezvous with the American journalist. He meets him in a coffee shop one flight up. Pravdin picks up a black coffee and a bun at the counter and joins the journalist, whose name is Hull, at a table. They don’t speak until they are alone.
“Coming here I was followed,” Pravdin blurts out.
“Maybe they picked up on you when you phoned the office,” Hull, a hulking, balding man with feverish eyes, tells Pravdin.
“Not possible,” Pravdin assures him. “I phoned from a pay booth and neither of us mentioned my name.”
The journalist shrugs. “If they were going to haul you in, they would have done it a long time ago. What about the interview with the kids who use drugs?”
“What about my fee?” Pravdin retorts.
Hull hands him an envelope, Pravdin stuffs it into his briefcase and gives the journalist a slip of paper with an address and a time written on it. “They will be watching to see if you are followed,” he reminds him. “If you are, they won’t be around when you get there. The conditions you understand? In your article, no names and fifty rubles a head for them.”
Hull nods. “Listen, Pravdin, there’s a choreographer with the Bolshoi who is supposed to have lost his job for applying for an exit visa to Israel. I don’t have a name but maybe you could nose around and set up something for me.”
“Maybe,” Pravdin says evasively.
“I also hear—” A lame lady limps by and Hull waits for her to pass. “I hear there’s a story in you.”
Pravdin spits a mouthful of coffee back into his cup. “What story where in me?” he wails. “Where do you hear such things?”
An army officer puts his coffee and bun on their table and goes off in search of a chair.
“I heard it from a Swedish correspondent, who says he got it from someone called the Druse. Does the name mean anything to you?”
“The Druse,” Pravdin protests sullenly, fighting down hysteria, “is no one I ever heard of.”
Pravdin, a maître d’ from a seedy hotel, ducks in and out of the milling crowd, a bottle of mineral water in one hand, in the other a vinegary Georgian red (“Ha!” sneers Zoya, “mis en bouteille dans le sous-sol de GUM”) filling with delicate flicks of his thin wrist and a terminal flourish the half-empty glasses of the guests.
“The trouble with Russia,” Zoya is lecturing some of her friends, “is that she kills her artists.”
“America kills them too,” Pravdin stage whispers, splashing wine into her outstretched glass, “by making them rich.”
“Zoya, dear, wherever did you find him?” cried Ludmila Serafimovna, one of Mother Russia’s cronies who lives in the prewar apartment building that backs onto the alley. “He’s absolutely adorable. In those funny shoes one can’t even hear him coming up on one.”
“I didn’t find him,” Zoya explains cheerfully. “He’s our new attic.”
“Quelle chance,” Ludmila Serafimovna exclaims. “Ah, there she is, the birthday girl herself,” and she cuts through the crowd like the prow of a ship, silk scarfs trailing from her fingertips, to embrace Nadezhda.
“Wine or water?” Pravdin offers Friedemann T., who has backed a very drunk General Shuvkin into a corner and blocks his escape with his caped body.
“The reason socialist realism doesn’t move people,” Friedemann T. is saying—“wine,” he flings at Pravdin and holds out his glass for a refill—“is that it shows them as they are. Take it from someone who has an instinct for such matters, the only thing that catches the attention of people is to show them, even for a fleeting moment, what they could become. This is the point of departure for my abstract socialist realism, you see.”
“Campaigns?” hiccups the general.
“I beg your pardon?” Friedemann T. inquires in confusion.
“Waak, waak, help, help.” A flutter of wings! Vladimir Ilyich, somehow loose from his cage, sails around the room, winds up perched on Mother Russia’s broken Singer.
“Isn’t he beautiful,” squeals Ophelia Long Legs. “Look, comrade Eisenhower, a genuine bird!” She holds out her wine glass to Vladimir Ilyich; frightened by all the attention, he backs off, wings beating the air, then leaps to the curtain rod above the window, out of arm’s reach.
“Help, waak, help, waak.”
“All the same,” Porfiry Yakolev, the weatherman with the handlebar mustache, is telling a group, “everybody should have a hero. Lenin perhaps. Or Marx. Or Engels. Something to give you a standard against which to measure your own performance.”
“My hero,” Zoya says sweetly, “is that darling little misfit Voltaire.”
“I don’t believe I know the name,” ventures Master Embalmer Yan Makusky.
“The Frenchman Voltaire,” Mother Russia explains. “He had to struggle with pain every single day of his life. But he produced more work than any other ape on this planet, with the possible exception of an agrarian reformer named Mao Tse-tung. You have heard of Mao Tse-tung, I take it? Unlike Mao, Voltaire led an active social life while he was doing all this. And I might add,” she says with a wink, “an active sexual life.”
“Ah.” The w
eatherman’s mouth falls open. His fingers twist the tip of his mustache into a point. “Sexual life, you say?”
“Nowadays our insane hyenas of psychiatry, those pimply führers in white coats, devote whole books trying to define that superior genital love-object, but my darling Voltaire did it in one neat sentence when he wrote his ugly little niece, ‘Both my heart and my prick love you!’ “
Porfiry Yakolev almost chokes on his mineral water and Mother Russia has to pound him on the back to help him over the crisis.
Threading the brim of a fedora nervously through his fingers, Master Embalmer Makusky notes, “You seem to know a great deal about psychiatry. Do you have a background in the discipline?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Zoya allows. “I was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic by a malevolent ass when I was a textbook example of what schizophrenia and paranoia are not: warm, loving, outgoing, uninhibited, funny, sexy, bawdy, lively, happy and life-loving.”
“In a word,” the weatherman, recovered from his coughing fit, offers, “you were innocent.”
“Waak, help.” Vladimir Ilyich lifts on his claws, beats at the air with his wings, settles back onto the curtain rod.
“In our epoch,” snaps Mother Russia, “innocence is no longer pertinent. But that’s another story.”
Mother Russia hooks her arm through Ludmila Sera-fimovna’s and pulls her into a corner. “I sent off another zinger to Singer today,” she confides in her friend. “My fingers are swollen from typing the copies-to. I don’t know how long he’ll be able to hold out against me.”
“I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.” Ludmila Serafimovna laughs. The two women giggle conspiratorially, and Zoya’s friend demands: “What did you hit him with this time?”
“I told him,” Zoya boasts triumphantly, “that Singer ruined sewing.”
“Oh dear,” Ludmila Serafimovna cries excitedly, “that should give him something to think about.”
Ophelia Long Legs switches off the naked overhead bulb just as Pravdin emerges from the kitchen carrying a birthday cake with lighted candles. The guests cluster around Nadezhda, whose eyes sparkle in the candlelight. Ludmila Serafimovna counts the candles. “Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six—but my dear, you don’t look a day over nineteen!”
“She looks young,” Pravdin mutters, “but she talks old.”
Nadezhda takes a deep breath and blows out all the candles but one. Pravdin moistens his primitively long, broken, badly set thumb and his forefinger and extinguishes the last flame between them.
“Leave everything,” Mother Russia instructs Pravdin. ‘We’ll clean up tomorrow. I enjoyed your friend Friedemann T. What does he do for a living?”
“Anything,” replies Pravdin.
“Not funny,” groans Zoya.
“Not meant to be,” says Pravdin.
“Dear Robespierre, you look like a man of the world.” Zoya drops into a seat across the kitchen table from Pravdin. “I need some advice on how one goes about getting an import license.”
“What don’t we manufacture in this socialist paradise that you need an import license for?” Pravdin wants to know.
“I need a piece for my Singer sewing machine, and the only—”
Nadezhda hands Zoya a note. “Come help with the birthday presents.”
“Think about it,” Zoya orders Pravdin. The two of them follow Nadezhda into her room and watch as she attacks the boxes piled on her bed.
“How nice of the general,” exclaims Mother Russia as Nadezhda peels away paper from a Czechoslovak hair dryer. Ophelia Long Legs has given her a pair of handmade leather sandals; Porfiry Yakolev, the weatherman, an alarm clock that wakes you up with the first notes of the “Internationale”; Yan Makusky, the embalmer, a recording of Uzbeki folk songs. Mother Russia’s gift is wrapped in tissue paper. It is a small icon, faded with age, depicting the Virgin Mary and a very chubby infant Jesus. Nadezhda stares at it for a long moment, turns to Zoya and embraces her.
Pravdin fetches his present from the attic, self-consciously presents it to Nadezhda. “It is the best I could do, little sister, on such short notice he apologizes.
Zoya gasps as Nadezhda removes the paper. “It is something people don’t part with for money,” she says in wonder.
Nadezhda runs her fingertips over Pravdin’s gift as if she is blind and her impressions come from her sense of touch. It is an extremely rare volume of Mandelstam’s collected poems published in 1928 and called simply, Poems. Three-quarters of the way through the book a small dried flower has been placed as a marker. Nadezhda opens to it immediately, reads the poem, hands the book to Zoya, who reads it aloud in a hoarse voice.
… your spine has been smashed forever,
My beautiful, pitiful age,
And with an inane, bewildered grimace
You now look back, both cruel and weak
At the tracks of your own paws.
Mother Russia looks up. “Tell us how it is you found this book?” she asks in awe.
“You forget, little mother, that I am a hustler,” replies Pravdin.
“You are to hustling,” Zoya dismisses his answer impatiently, “as a sailor who is uncomfortable with the wind is to sailing.”
They are reading some of the other poems, passing the book from one to the other, when Ophelia Long Legs comes bounding up the stairs carrying a small wooden trunk. “The attic before Comrade Eisenhower left this for Nadezhda,” she explains breathlessly. “You remember, the one with the funny blue flower tattooed on her cheek. I asked her to come up but she dropped the trunk into my arms and raced off down the alley. I suppose,” Ophelia says as she hands the trunk to Nadezhda, “she’s shy is what it is. Say, what a neat record—can I borrow it?” Nadezhda nods and Ophelia hurries off downstairs with the Uzbeki folk songs.
“Here’s a mystery,” Mother Russia announces, obviously relishing the possibility.
Nadezhda bangs on the lock with the flat of her palm but it doesn’t give. Pravdin opens the small blade of his pocket-knife and, kneeling with his eye almost against the wood, inserts it in the lock.
“There are parts of you we haven’t been to yet,” teases Zoya.
“Opening closed doors is my specialty,” Pravdin says, delicately twisting the blade. Suddenly the lock snaps open. He lifts back the lid.
“Papers only,” he says, disappointed.
“Manuscripts,” Mother Russia corrects. She and Nadezhda exchange looks.
Nadezhda takes out the manuscripts, which are bound with faded red ribbons, and spreads them on the bed. The paper, thin and brown and brittle, is cracking with age. The writing has all been done in longhand. Nadezhda gently picks up a page, reads it, bursts into silent sobs.
Her voice reduced to a moan, Zoya quickly crosses herself and says: “Such things are not possible.”
“What’s going on?” cried Pravdin.
By now Mother Russia is reading and weeping too. The sight of the two women with tears streaming down their cheeks demoralizes Pravdin. He charges out of the room, slamming the door behind him, splashes water into the teapot and bangs it down on the stove. An instant later he pushes open the door of Nadezhda’s room again. “No matches,” he barks.
Nadezhda, drying her eyes on her sleeve, comes out and finds them for him. She gestures him aside and prepares three cups of camomile infusion, which she carries back into her room on a tray. Mother Russia, her eyes dry but red, is avidly skimming manuscript pages.
Pravdin pushes a lump of sugar into his mouth and noisily strains his infusion through it. The act of drinking something warm seems to calm everyone down considerably.
“And so?” Pravdin demands almost belligerently.
“I’ll explain everything,” Zoya promises, turning page after page of manuscript. She shakes her head as if the motion will clear it. “It is a miracle,” she begins, “there is no other way to describe what has happened.”
“You can describe what has happened,” Pravdin remarks impatient
ly, “by describing what has happened.”
Zoya nods, collects her thoughts. “Where to start? The story begins with a Cossack novelist named Krukov, who served with the Whites during the Civil War. In 1922 I think it was, he was wounded and spent the next fourteen months convalescing on the estate of an uncle. During those fourteen months he was known to have written the rough draft of a long novel on the Civil War called The Deep Don. In 1923 the Red Guards finally brought the Cossacks to heel, arresting and summarily executing the White officers they got their greasy little paws on. Krukov made no attempt to escape; there is a story that he put on his uniform and sword and went out to meet the Reds when they arrived. At any rate, he was interrogated by a young Komsomol activist known only as Filipovich. When members of Krukov’s family attempted to find out what had happened to him, they learned that he had been put up against a wall and shot and that his manuscripts, which he kept in a small wooden trunk, had vanished.”
Pravdin stares at the trunk on the floor.
“Four years later,” Zoya continues, “a talentless short story hack named Ivan Filopovich Frolov—”
“Frolov is the Filopovich of your story!” Pravdin interrupts.
“Frolov published his epic, which he also called The Deep Don.” Pravdin starts to interrupt again but she motions him to wait. “Be patient; there is, God help us all, more. The book, a sizzling masterpiece full of passionate characters and breathtaking imagery, won for Frolov instant fame and fortune. But there were whispers of plagiarism, and two or three articles found their way into the newspapers abroad. To clear the air the Bolsheviks organized a commission in 1929 to investigate the situation and report on who was the real author of The Deep Don. The committee consisted of four writers and four editors, all members of the Party, to be sure.”
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