“The same needs everyone has are what I have,” Pravdin gives ground grudgingly.
Nadezhda scribbles furiously, taunts him with a slip of paper on which she has written:
“Power, prestige, money, money, money.”
Pravdin stubbornly defends himself. “What you don’t know, it’s easy to make fun of.”
“What makes Pravdin run?” writes Nadezhda.
“It seems to me,” Pravdin answers, his face twisting into a crooked smile, his voice thick with self-mockery, “that my whole life I’ve wanted to do an exploit. Like those knights in shining armor with long lances riding animals they could identify.”
“That’s for the ego,” Nadezhda writes. “What’s for the body?”
Pravdin reads the note, crumples it, flings it across the table at Nadezhda. “Sex is what’s for the body!” he cries.
Nadezhda regards him for a long moment, comes to a decision, leads him by the hand into her room, locks the door behind her, pulls back the cover from the bed, kicks off her sandals, turns on the radio, begins to remove her clothes.
“Sex is an idea whose time has come,” Pravdin explodes jubilantly, flinging away his Eisenhower jacket. “Thesis: the male organ, erect. Antithesis: the female organ, moist. Synthesis:”—he shouts it out in a voice raw with lust—“sexual intercourse!”
They make love, guided by instinct more than ardor, in the light of the small bulb that illuminates the radio dial. The springs of the bed and the floorboards squeak beneath them. Their bodies become slick with sweat; there is a sucking sound when their chests press together. Pravdin kisses her with lips that have lost their erogenousness from disuse, feels her wet palms on his bony flanks pulling him inside her and off he comes—too soon, too soon!
“Too soon, sorry,” he mutters as he collapses on her, dizzy with effort and gasping for air. Nadezhda twines her arms and legs around him and holds him close.
After a while she shifts uncomfortably under his weight. He rolls off her and they lie side by side staring at the ceiling until they are dry. Then Nadezhda props herself up on an elbow, makes him hard, climbs on top and they make love again, this time slowly, meticulously, as if tuning an instrument. The squeaking of the bed springs and the floorboards is more rhythmic. The second coming, a triumph of technique, is at hand. Pravdin utters a long low moan of pleasure and sinks bade onto the mattress; the squeaking continues for a few seconds, Nadezhda arches her back and then silently folds herself into the angles of his body.
Somewhere in the building a toilet flushes; water rushes through pipes in the walls. Nadezhda leaps lightly from the bed, rummages in a dresser, returns with a towel, wipes Pravdin and then the sheet. She settles cross-legged on the bed, her back against the wall, writes something and passes him the note. He leans closer to the radio to read it in the light from the dial. She has written: “Love making makes time stand still for me.”
Pravdin borrows her pad, scribbles, “Pleasure is a clock like any other,” tears off the page, passes it to her.
While she is reading that he hands her another page that says, “Imaginary conversations are what I have with you all day long.”
“What do I say?” she writes.
“I tell you,” Pravdin writes, “there are between us simple things that have the possibility of becoming complex. You think a moment, reply, ‘Yes, there are things between us, but they are complex and have the possibility of becoming simple.’ “
“I look young but I talk old,” Nadezhda writes. “What else?”
“I tell you,” Pravdin writes, “there are between us simdevelop. You think a moment, reply, “Emotion is what we must develop. Philosophy attacks like erosion, emotion like a chisel.’ “
“I tell you,” Pravdin writes, “emotion is what I’m not comfortable with. You think a moment, reply, Tour problem is you try to pry apart an emotion with words when you should be riding it the way a surfer skims along on a wave.’ “
“I tell you,” Pravdin writes, “people are hooked on words. You think a moment, reply, ‘People exist, like minnows between rocks, swimming in the spaces between the words.’ “
Pravdin reaches out with his primitively long, broken, badly set thumb and presses Nadezhda’s nipple as if it is a doorbell. With the other hand he passes her a page on which he has written:
Yes
Now
No
Later
Maybe
Tomorrow
Above
Conventional
Below
Unconventional
Nadezhda playfully fills in the squares, returns the paper with X’s next to “Yes,” “Now,” “Above,” “Unconventional.”
Pravdin laughs wickedly, lunges for Nadezhda, who makes no effort to escape.
Pravdin, descending noisily from the attic as if he has been there all night, yawns casually, but Nadezhda gives the game away when she turns up for breakfast with a streak of blue dye between her burning eyes—concocted from the juice of an herb called usma that she once bought from an old Uzbek at the open market.
“So that’s how it is,” Mother Russia exclaims when she sees the streak, and she ceremonially embraces Nadezhda and then Pravdin, kissing them each on the left shoulder and the forehead in the Uzbek manner of greating young lovers.
Count your blessings, Pravdin tells himself as he starts down the wooden staircase. You’re reasonably healthy, you can still get it up three times in one night and you live in the last wooden house in central Moscow. Touch wood. (His bony knuckles rap on the polished banister.)
At the screen door Porfiry Yakolev, the weatherman, and Master Embalmer Makusky smirk when they catch sight of Pravdin and hurry down the alley whispering excitedly. General Shuvkin emerges into the sunlight, sees Pravdin, winks, pats him on the back with his good arm. “Over and above the call of duty,” he snaps, starts off after Yakolev and Makusky.
“So you made it with Nadezhda,” comments Ophelia Long Legs, sitting on the front steps embroidering the bell-bottoms of a pair of jeans. “It’s the floorboards,” she explains when she sees Pravdin’s puzzled expression. “Cheer up,” she adds, “at your age three times in one night is nothing to be ashamed of.”
* * *
Pravdin, scurrying along behind the Church of All Mourners across the river from the Kremlin, stops to tighten a sneaker lace, glances apprehensively at the clear heavens, sky-writes with the tip of his deformed thumb:
Jesus sauve Toi
(Anon: Pravdin has always been free with his ecumenical counsel), races off for his appointment with the prosecutor.
At the Ministry, Pravdin snatches his cardboard number and takes his place on the bench between a starchy Muscovite with bifocals peering at the long gray columns of Pravda and a blond Georgian boy carrying a stringless guitar. “What are you here for?” the Georgian asks conversationally.
“I’m here to complain about Honored Artist of the Soviet Union Frolov,” Pravdin explains. ‘It’s this way: During the Civil War he swiped the manuscripts for The Deep Don from a White Russian officer named Krukov and published it under his own name.”
The Georgian shrinks away from Pravdin to avoid contamination. “You’re off your rocker, you know,” he says seriously.
Pravdin’s palm slaps his high forehead. “Off my rocker is what I am!”
When his number is called Pravdin hurtles headlong into the prosecutor’s office. “Robespierre Isayevich Pravdin at your—your—at your …” Pravdin’s bloodless lips continue to move, words form but no sound emerges; he is speechless with astonishment. He stares wide eyed at the man behind the desk, then at the photograph of Lenin haranguing workers at the Finland Station. “Where’s ‘Civic courage is rare’ and so forth and so on? Where is the public prosecutor?”
“You are looking at the public prosecutor,” the prosecutor says coldly.
“The prosecutor I spoke with in this office yesterday is who I’m not looking at,” insists Pravdin. “Even your fin
gernails are different.”
“You’re off your rocker,” the prosecutor, a sallow-skinned functionary, tells Pravdin. “I’ve been in this office every workday for fourteen years except for authorized vacations and the time I fractured my tibia skiing in Zakopane.”
Pravdin tries to flash his crooked smile, manages only a grimace. Backpedaling toward the half open door, he does a little jig and mumbles in a singsong voice:
“Unarmed truth is not an idea whose time has come.”
CHAPTER 6
Pravdin, buried in Pravda’s
back pages …
Pravdin, buried in Pravda’s back pages, glances up, sees that the train is just pulling out of the Kiyevskaya station, goes back to his newspaper hunting for the innocuous items that contain the real news. He reads about the charges brought against two brothers in Minsk with obviously Jewish names; it seems they had set up a nailpolish remover factory in their basement, pasted “Made in Amerika” labels on the product and sold it for exorbitant prices on the black market. (They were tripped up when an alert client’s suspicions were aroused by the k in “Amerika.”) He reads about a candidate member of the Politburo with an obviously Armenian name who has been farmed out to run a tractor factory in Kirgizia; the official explanation is “mental fatigue,” but Pravdin has heard on the grapevine that the man in question had been discovered in flagrante delicto with the wife of one of the upwardly mobile directors of the Komsomol. Pravdin’s eye catches a tiny item sandwiched between the soccer scores and an account of an extraordinary rainfall in Mongolia: the Kremlin chimes that regularly sound the hour have not been heard for two days; the official explanation is “metal fatigue,” but Pravdin has heard on the grapevine that Brezhnev suffers from migraines and has been complaining about the noise.
The train pulls into a station, Pravdin catches sight of a sign that says “Studencheskaya” and dashes from the car just as the doors start to close. At the far end of the car a heavy-set man in a blue raincoat and a flat short-brimmed fedora struggles with the door to keep it from closing, overpowers it, squeezes through onto the platform. Pravdin sprints up the stairs to the street level, darts behind a kiosk selling lottery tickets, waits. The man in the blue raincoat comes panting up the stairs, stops short, looks around.
Pravdin walks directly up to him. “Professional is what you’re not,” he whispers nervously to the man in the blue raincoat. “I know you’re following me.”
“If you know I’m following you,” the man informs him, “you’re meant to know I’m following you.”
“That I hadn’t thought of,” Pravdin admits. He turns, wanders uncertainly for a few blocks, then briskly cuts across Kutuzovsky Prospect and ducks into the cemetery, with the man in the blue raincoat not far behind. In the cemetery Pravdin joins a funeral procession for a few steps, then races down a pathway, stops to catch his breath crouching behind a headstone, on the back of which he scrawls in chalk:
So here it is at last, the Distinguished Thing
(H. James: Pravdin is queer for dying words). After a while he makes a run for a side gate and loses himself among the pedestrians in the street.
At Poklonnaya, he spots a postal box, takes from his briefcase a batch of zingers Mother Russia has given him to mail, notes their addressees (Mr. Singer of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, Comrade Chairman Leonid Brezhnev of the Politburo, Premier Pompidou of the Elysée Palace and one to the “Person in charge of cholesterol” at the World Health Organization in Geneva), slips them through the slit. Two blocks further along he enters an apartment house, lingers on the third floor landing long enough to make sure he isn’t being followed, then climbs to the sixth floor, crosses over to another wing, descends to the fourth floor and presses with his deformed thumb on a bell. Friedemann T. opens the door a crack, sees Pravdin’s face peering at him, tries to slam it shut again. Pravdin’s sneaker, strategically wedged, prevents him.
“For God’s sake,” Pravdin wails, “my toes!”
“You can alleviate the pain,” Friedemann T. explains calmly, “by the simple expedient of removing your preposterous shoe from my communal doorstep.”
“I’m here to offer you a hundred rubles for half an hour of your precious time,” Pravdin cries.
The pressure on Pravdin’s sneaker eases. “A hundred rubles, you say?” Friedemann T. pokes his head into the corridor, looks both ways, motions Pravdin into the apartment with his hand. He locks the door behind him, leads the way into his bedroom, locks that door too, turns on the radio. “Were you followed here?” he demands.
“Touch wood, that’s all finished with,” says Pravdin. “A simple case of misunderstanding on the part of one of my important clients.”
“What do I have to do for the hundred?” Friedemann T. wants to know.
“It’s this way,” Pravdin explains. “I have a client who happens to be an American journalist. He’s willing to pay two hundred rubles for an interview with a Bolshoi choreographer who was fired because he applied for an exit visa to Israel. I figure you could pull it off easily, and we’ll split the two hundred down the middle. What do you say?”
Friedemann T. raises a forefinger to his pursed lips, rocks thoughtfully on the soles of his feet. “Dear boy,” he muses, “I only applied for my exit visa when the police confiscated my choreographic notations for a new ballet based on Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle.”
“I’ve always felt,” Pravdin speaks up on cue, “that the performing arts were obliged to pick up where the creative arts left off.”
“I have it on good authority,” Friedemann T. goes on, “that the decision to suppress my ballet was taken on the Politburo level. I can tell you”—the painter lowers his voice—“that a candidate member of the Politburo with an obviously Armenian name was packed off to Kirgizia for favoring the production. But I refuse to be intimidated.”
“I’ve always maintained,” Pravdin is well into the game now, “that the bosses have two choices: they can convince us or they can kill us. Ha! That’s a good line. I’ll bet you wish you’d said that.”
“When your journalist friend shows up,” Friedemann T. comments, “I will.”
“For you, good news,” Pravdin tells Hull, the American journalist. They are sharing a shelf at a stand-up coffee bar on the top floor of GUM. “The Bolshoi choreographer you asked about is whom I found. Two hundred rubles is what it will cost you—half for me, half for him.”
“Two hundred is kind of steep,” Hull complains.
“Work is what he’s out of,” Pravdin explains. “He needs the money to leave the country.”
“And you?” Hull asks. ‘What do you need the hundred for?”
“To stay in the country is what I need it for.” He passes Hull a folded slip of paper with Friedemann T.’s name and address on it. Hull pockets the paper, hands Pravdin a wad of ten-ruble notes. There is an excited rush of shoppers in the passageway outside the coffee bar. A woman with dyed red hair pokes her head in, calls to a friend, “Tania, come quickly, they’ve got a shipment of West German electric hair curlers,” disappears. All the women in the bar, and some of the men, abandon their coffee in mid-sip and dash after the woman with the dyed red hair.
“You don’t need electric hair curlers?” asks Hull, his voice thick with sarcasm.
“I saw the salesgirl on my way in,” replies Pravdin. “She put two sets aside for me.”
Hull shakes his head in admiration. “You’re one in a million, Pravdin.”
“The sense of that is what I don’t get,” says Pravdin. “What means this ‘One in a million?”
“It means you stand out in a crowd.”
“That,” Pravdin agrees, “has always been my problem.”
Pravdin starts to leave but Hull puts a hand on his arm. “You’ve seen the item in the Chronicle of Current Events?” he asks casually.
Pravdin looks at him suspiciously. “Clandestine anti-Soviet publications are what I don’t subscribe to,” he says. “What item?”
“They claim that someone in Moscow has come up with original manuscripts proving that Frolov is not the real author of The Deep Don.”
“What’s that got to do with me?” Pravdin demands hysterically.
Hull studies Pravdin, his eyes more feverish than ever. “Listen, I’d be willing to put a good deal of money on the line for an introduction to the someone in question and a peek at the manuscripts. Hey, Pravdin, where’s the fire?”
But Pravdin, abandoning the idea of collecting his hair curlers, is removing his panic-stricken heart from GUM.
On Gorky Street, Pravdin looks at his watch with the water vapor under the crystal, sees that it is almost eleven, Moscow time, stops at a public phone to call the Danish diplomat who has agreed to trade his entire pop record collection for an icon.
“Knud Thestrop is whom I want to speak to,” Pravdin says when the phone is picked up at the other end.
“Knud Thestrop has left the country,” a man’s voice says.
“What left the country?” cries Pravdin. “I recognize your voice. How is it you can say you left the country when you’re standing there talking to me? What about our deal?”
“I’m sorry,” the man’s voice says nervously. “You’ll have to understand. Thestrop is no longer in the country.” The phone clicks dead.
Pravdin inserts another two-kopeck coin, dials the private number of the post office official responsible for confiscating (and supposedly burning) foreign-language books that are sent by mail to the country. Every two weeks or so Pravdin stops by, picks up a package of books for resale on the black market, splits the proceeds with the official.
The phone rings four times, then a recorded female voice comes on. She says:
“I’m sorry, but the number you reached doesn’t exist. Please consult the phone book in the central post office. I’m sorry, but the number you reached doesn’t exist. Please consult—”
Mother Russia (9781590209028) Page 9