“Look! This’ll be the drawing room. Leave your luggage, I’ll give you a guided tour.”
They resume their stroll through this very white interior, lit by clusters of halogen spotlights, which Shutov hesitates to call an “apartment.” As he put his bag down he had experienced a childish fear: would he be able to find it again in this labyrinth? Yana walks on, smiling, explaining. The kitchen, the dining room, another dining room, “in case we ever have a full house,” a bathroom but with an ordinary tub, a bedroom, another bedroom… She says “we” and Shutov does not dare to ask if she is married… He remembers that she works in the hotel business. So could this perhaps be a suite for renting? He lacks the Russian words to translate such a new reality.
He had noticed this deficiency a short while earlier. The taxi dropped him at the edge of a district closed to traffic. He was walking along, light, curious, relaxed—a demeanor appropriate, he thought, for his status as a foreigner whose clothes and movements would not pass unremarked. Very quickly he realized that no one was paying him any attention. The people were dressed as they would be in a city in the West, perhaps a little less casually. And if he did stand out in the midst of this summery throng it was thanks to his own clothes looking tired. Disconcerted, Shutov had told himself he was not far off being taken for a tramp…
“And here, you see, this part of the ceiling will open up. We’ll be able to see the sky. We need to take advantage of every ray of sunlight. We’re not in Florida…” Shutov subjects Yana to the intense scrutiny an explorer would reserve for a new species awaiting classification. She is reminiscent of Léa… No, this is a false similarity. Quite simply she corresponds to a certain type of European woman: svelte, sleekly blond, face carefully smoothed of wrinkles.
“So will your family live here?” He would have liked to talk to Yana about their past but he must first ask conventional questions like this.
“As a matter of fact, the move was planned for tomorrow. But with these celebrations we had to put everything off… As a result, if you’d like to sleep here… Finding a good hotel won’t be easy. We’ve got four in our chain but with the number of VIPs arriving, you’d feel as if you were in a fortress under siege, there are ten bodyguards at every entrance. So welcome to my humble abode! Two of the rooms are already more or less furnished… And this is another corridor, you see. When we joined all the apartments together we fixed up a two-room suite for my son. Vlad, may we come in?”
The young man who welcomes them looks strangely familiar: a gangling youth in T-shirt and jeans, a fair-haired twenty-year-old such as one might come across in London or Amsterdam or an American sitcom.
“Whiskey? Martini? Beer?” Vlad offers with a smile, indicating a tray with an array of bottles. “So this is it,” thinks Shutov. “We’ve reached the stage of irony.” At first Russia copied these Western fashions, now they delight in pastiching them. Near the window is a coatrack surmounted by a plaster cast of Andy Warhol’s shaggy head. Across from that a scarlet banner, with letters in gold: “Forward to the Victory of Communist Toil!” A poster of Madonna, with Second World War medals attached to her chest. A television set with a screen at least three feet wide: a car comes to a halt on a mountaintop, facing a magical sunrise. “To be on time, when every second counts!” says the warm, virile voice of the commercial…
Vlad sits down at his computer. Yana smooths a tuft of his hair. Annoyed, he moves away: “Hey, stop that, Ma…” A momentary look crosses the mother’s face, which Shutov recognizes with a sudden intake of breath.
“I’ve checked,” says Vlad. “They don’t market you too well in Europe.” Shutov bends over and is stunned to recognize his photograph.
“I’m not too well… known. Besides… I didn’t know my books were listed on the Internet. In fact, I don’t have a computer. I write everything by hand, then I type it out…”
Vlad and Yana laugh uncertainly: their guest has a somewhat ponderous sense of humor.
There is a muffled cough in the room next door, which relieves the situation. Through the half-open door Shutov catches sight of patterned wallpaper, the foot of a bed covered in a dark green blanket, like those provided on night trains in the old days…
“Yes, this is pure Ionesco!” Yana exclaims, anticipating his question. “No, I must tell you. We managed to clear four communal apartments and that was on two floors. Eleven rooms to be joined up, twenty-six people to be relocated! A real estate management maneuver crazier than a game of chess. We’ve rehoused them all. For some of them we had to make a triple swap. Piles of paper, lots of red tape, palm greasing. I’ll spare you the details. In the end both floors were ours. There was just this room. With a housewarming gift in it! Yes, this old man (he’s paraplegic, poor thing), who was due to be admitted to an old people’s home ten days ago. And then, what happens? We have this wretched tercentenary, the city’s all closed off. And lo and behold, we have to live with a grandfather who doesn’t even belong to us! Well, actually, the day after tomorrow he’s going to be moved. But, as I say, it’s like the play by Ionesco, you remember, that apartment where there’s a corpse and no one knows how to get rid of it…”
The comparison is rather dubious and to retrieve the situation, Yana knocks on the door. “Georgy Lvovich, may we come in to say hello?” To Shutov she murmurs: “I think he’s a bit deaf. And what’s more, he’s lost… the power of speech.”
It is a slip of the tongue this “power of speech”; she should have said “he has aphasia” or “he’s mute.” But they are already entering the room.
An old man lies on a bed constructed from nickel-plated tubes, of a type Shutov believed had long since disappeared. On his night table is a cup in which a tea bag is macerating, and the glint of thick bifocal glasses. His eyes return Shutov’s look, with perfect lucidity. “It’s all been arranged, Georgy Lvovich. You’ll be in good hands very soon.” Yana speaks in loud and artificially cheerful tones. “The doctors are going to take you right out into the country. You’ll be able to hear the birds singing…” The old man’s face remains unchanged, maintaining its air of grave detachment, with no hint of bitter tension, showing no inclination to make contact through facial expression in default of language. Does he understand everything? Almost certainly, even though his only response is to close his eyes. “Fine. Have a good rest, Georgy Lvovich. Vlad’s here all the time if you need anything…” With a little tilt of her head, Yana indicates to Shutov that the visit is at an end. As he backs out he notices a book lying on the bed: the old man’s hand is touching the volume as if it were a living being.
Yana closes the door and raises her eyebrows with a sigh. “For someone of his generation it would have been better to depart this world before the latest upheavals. Do you know what monthly pension he gets? One thousand two hundred. Rubles. Forty dollars. That’s enough to strike you dumb. After fighting in the war all the way to Berlin. But, you know, these days, nobody could give a damn! And it’s a crying shame we can’t hear his voice anymore. He was a professional singer. His neighbors told me that in the war, well, during the siege of Leningrad, he went out with a whole choir to sing to the troops…”
She starts walking again, stops in front of an open window. A bright fresh May evening, strangely autumnal in feel. “You see, when we were young we didn’t have time to talk to people like him. But now he’s the one who can’t speak…”
Shutov is preparing to tell her why he came, to remind her of their youth… “Guess what this is!” Yana insists, resuming her tour guide’s voice. A huge marble hand placed on an occasional table in the entrance hall to the apartment. “It’s Slava’s hand!” Perceiving Shutov’s puzzled expression, she pulls a surprised face, as if failing to recognize “Slava’s hand” were a flagrant breach of taste. “Yes, Rostropovich’s hand. He’s a friend. It was my idea. Everyone has visiting cards these days and I thought our guests could leave their cards in this hand… People generally put out one of those earthenware things but a hand is m
uch more original…” Shutov reflects that in the days of his youth he never saw anyone in Russia taking out a visiting card. Yes, their youth…
“You know, I didn’t come here for the celebration…,” he says with slightly gruff insistence. “I thought that…” Yana’s cell phone rings. “Yes, I’m on my way. I was in a traffic jam. Well, have you seen the chaos? I’ll be there in a quarter of an hour…”
She shows Shutov the two bedrooms he may choose between and races away. That “owner’s tour” of hers was also, in fact, a way of taking evasive action. Yana kept on talking, laughing, addressing other people, as if she were afraid of what he might have to say about their past. But how, in any case, could he have brought up those distant days that still form a bond between them? “I love you, Nadenka…” Shutov smiles. Yes, he could have quoted Chekhov.
He leaves the apartment five minutes after Yana. The gravitational pull of the city sucks him in, thrusts him toward a life in which he will be himself once again, speaking the language of his childhood, immersed in a human mass to which he belongs by origin. He feels like an old actor who has been performing in an overlong play (“my life in the West,” he thinks), now casting aside his tattered finery and losing himself in the crowd.
Not far from the Admiralty policemen bar his way. He makes a detour and encounters another street closed. Heads toward the Palace Embankment and finds himself thrust back into Millionnaya Street. He tries to argue, then, naively, demands an explanation, and finally walks away, no longer trying to reach the site of the celebrations. The festival is at its height, so close, just a few blocks away, yet inaccessible, as on a tortuous path in a nightmare. “You should have read the papers,” grunts one of the policemen. “They showed all the closed-off districts…”
He keeps moving, guided by increasingly vague indications. The luminous hiss of a firework, a gust of wind, autumnally sharp, coming from the Neva… Or else the two couples, walking along squabbling, who seem to know the route to the festivities. He is about to approach them but they get into a car, drive off…
He is so weary that when he comes to the Summer Garden he mistakes the high grille for yet another barrier. He grips the iron bars, his face straining toward the fragrant darkness of the pathways. The foliage is delicate, as always in this fleeting foretaste of summer. He has to force himself to concentrate so that the words dreamed of for so long can be spoken with fitting gravity: “Beneath these very trees, thirty years ago…”
He hears a groan, moves away from the grille, hesitates over what attitude to adopt. The young woman he sees appears to be drunk. Or rather… She has just trodden on a shard from a bottle and cut herself. The festive streets are strewn with fragments of glass. “You need rubber boots here…,” she moans. Shutov tells her to sit down on the ledge beside the railings, takes hold of the gashed foot, cleans the wound with the towel they gave him on the plane. The girl must be seventeen or eighteen. The age Yana was, he thinks. And he was right: she is drunk, she staggers, he needs to escort her as far as the metro. He goes down with her. The train comes so quickly they do not have time to exchange a single word. Beyond the closing doors he glimpses her sitting down, already absorbed into a life where he does not exist. And yet his hand still retains the ephemeral impression of that delicate injured foot.
He goes back to Yana’s new apartment after midnight. Vlad lets him in, his ear glued to his cell phone. The conversation is in English: the young man is talking to a client in Boston. Without breaking off he leads Shutov to the kitchen, shows him where the coffeemaker is, opens the refrigerator with a gesture of invitation, smiles, goes away.
Shutov eats, amazed by the variety of the food, the quality of the coffee. This is the kind of apartment, the type of food, which in the Soviet era the Russians used to picture when they spoke of the West… And here it is, they have re-created a quintessence of the West that he himself never really experienced in the West at all. A paradox that helps him feel less behind the times.
He goes to look for the bedroom Yana assigned to him, gets lost, smiles. “Why not go to sleep on the doormat, here upon the threshold of this new world?” In the great bathroom the taps gleam like weighty museum pieces. “Scythian gold… ,” he murmurs, continuing on his way.
How should he regard this new life? With delight? With regret for its frenzied materialism? After all, in ten years’ time the young may well feel no feverish excitement when confronted by this intrusive stuff. Young Vlad, here, lounging on a leather sofa in front of the television. He sips a beer while on the screen, in almost the same pose, a young man embraces a blond girl whose shoulder is gradually bared in time with their sighs. A commercial break cuts short their clinch: a head of hair enriched by a particular shampoo flits by; a cat pounces upon the gleaming contents of a can; a tall, dark, handsome man inhales his cup of coffee; a car embeds itself in a sunrise… Shutov remembers the slogan and mentally repeats it: “To be on time, when every second counts!”
The old man’s door is ajar. A bedside lamp, a blanket, the outline of a motionless body. And suddenly the rustle of a page. Should he go in? Speak to him, even without any hope of a reply? Or simply say good night? Shutov hesitates, then resumes his journey: if he starts from Vlad’s office he can remember the way better.
In his bedroom he discovers what had escaped his notice earlier during the guided tour: volumes on a large wooden bookshelf painted silver. Russian and foreign classics in deluxe editions. Leather spines with generously wide bands, gold, paper that gives sensual pleasure to the fingers. Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy… He seizes a volume of Chekhov. The story he is looking for is there. Two lovers, their descent on a toboggan. “I love you, Nadenka…”
In the morning Shutov follows Yana, who talks incessantly on her cell phone, while performing a thousand useful acts: retrieving a stumbling child, pointing out the splashes of paint on the marble to the workmen in the bathroom, plugging in a kettle for breakfast, adjusting a skirt that Vlad’s young girlfriend is trying on… Catching Shutov’s eye she smiles, shakes her head by way of saying, “I’ll be with you in a second,” and the whirlwind resumes, the workmen want her opinion on the color of a sealant, Vlad asks for money, a woman laden with a bundle of clothes proclaims that tomorrow the old man’s room will be vacated. None of this prevents her from giving instructions over the telephone: “If he needs a sitting room get number twenty-six ready… He ought to be perfectly happy with a standard room… So what? We’ve got fifteen ministers in our hotels. If they all started demanding suites… Well, let Putin put them up in his Konstantin Palace! All right, give this one a different room but not the others… Let me know what happens!”
Before the next call she finds time to give Shutov the name of the restaurant where they can meet for lunch and “finally have a heart-to-heart talk.” The phrase is hackneyed but it touches him; he embarks on a sentence that is far too long, too nostalgic, ill suited to the frenzied rhythm of the morning. Along the lines of: “Do you remember that pathway through the trees in the Summer Garden?…” Yana blows him a kiss and runs toward the elevator, shouting into her cell: “It’s no good here. I’ll call you from the car.”
The energy of this new life is pleasantly contagious, a euphoriant that Shutov encounters again in the street in even stronger doses. He feels rejuvenated, almost mischievous, leaps up to catch the balloon a child has let go of, favors its mother with a wink. Buys himself an ice cream, gives directions to two young female tourists who are lost. And having reached the Nevsky Prospekt, attests to the miracle: he feels completely at one with the carnival crowd making its way toward the Winter Palace, and it is a physical belonging, a bodily adherence.
It is also a… face transplant! A violent image, but it expresses vividly what he feels. His new physiognomy has a skin that is regenerated by the glances alighting on him, amid a flood of smiles, shouts, embraces. Yes, a man with a skin graft must go through the same mixture of dread and delight on walking out into the street: Will they notice? Turn
away as I pass by? Give me pitying looks? No, it seems they perceive nothing. They all smile at this man who is not me. So I have the right to live among them once again.
At first Shutov walks along with the wariness of just such a skin-grafted man. But quite quickly the madness of what is happening all around him rids him of any fear. The music from several bands creates such a din that people communicate by facial expression and gesture. Besides, the only message to be shared is one of permanent amazement. A giant inflatable cow with eight legs floats above the crowd, its enormous udder sprinkles the onlookers, who yell, dodging the jets, opening their umbrellas. A little farther on the human tide is cut in half by a procession of Peter the Great look-alikes! Military frock coats, three-cornered hats, mustaches like an angry cat’s whiskers, canes. Most of them are of a stature at least faintly evocative of the czar’s six foot six, but there are also some little ones and even a woman dressed as the czar. At one crossroads this regiment gets mixed up with a squad of near-naked “Brazilian dancers,” adorned with feathers. The czars’ uniforms brush against long bronzed thighs, graze the hemispheres of plump buttocks. And quickly these give way to courtiers in periwigs, the avenue is awash with crinolines, sunlight dancing off the high powdered coiffures. The whipped cream of their attire is succeeded by a new inflatable monster. A dinosaur? No, a ship. Shutov reads the name on its stern: Aurora. “That was the cruiser in the October Revolution,” a mother explains to her son of about twelve… If that historic gunshot, which children in the old days would have come across in primary school, now has to be explained, this really is a new era… The forgetfulness is refreshing: yes, spare them your wars and revolutions!
The Life of an Unknown Man Page 5