by David Szalay
‘Okay.’
‘Leave the keys with Stepan. The porter,’ she says.
‘Okay.’
‘Thank you.’
He waits for the tram on Mayakovsky Street. It is a sharp blue-skied September morning. This sort of autumn weather, these sort of mornings and their sad, still, quiet afternoons always make him think of the autumn of forty-eight, as if every autumn since then were only a memory of that one. The tram takes him to 1905 Square from where he walks the short distance to Ivan’s flat. He is passing through the lobby when a voice shouts, ‘Excuse me!’ It is the porter, Stepan presumably, in his ill-fitting uniform. ‘Who are you?’ he says.
Aleksandr explains.
‘Oh yes?’ Stepan is openly sceptical. ‘I don’t know you.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘Well, they’re not in,’ he says.
‘I know. I’ve got the key.’
‘Have you?’
‘My brother’s in hospital. I’m here to feed the cat.’
For a moment Stepan squints at him suspiciously. Then – perhaps noticing that, despite his somewhat threadbare coat and very old astrakhan hat, his shoes are polished, his fingernails scrubbed – he seems to decide that what he has said is a plausible enough explanation for his presence. Certainly it would be a strange thing for an impostor to say. ‘Eighth floor,’ he murmurs, and Aleksandr summons the lift. It hums down, and stops with a loud tick.
The upstairs hall is silent. He lets himself into Ivan’s flat. Lovkach – white, fluffy – is immediately there, miaowing loudly and showing his milky needle-teeth. He flicks his tail and trots up and down the parquet, shoving himself against the legs of the furniture. The hall is long and large, with the living room on the left. Part of the dividing wall is made of smoked glass and some shadowy daylight seeps through. Aleksandr shuts the front door and, with the usual slightly intrusive feeling of entering someone else’s home when they are not there, followed by Lovkach, makes his way into the kitchen.
It is spotless and full of strange electric machines. The fridge is like a white sarcophagus. He takes out a plastic sack of milk and looks for a knife or scissors to open it with. There is a wooden block with several slots in it, in which knives of various sizes are inserted. He takes one of the smaller ones and saws at the plastic until it suddenly splits. Quite a lot of milk spills onto the floor, and Lovkach starts to lick it up. Swearing quietly, Aleksandr fits the sack of milk into its special plastic holder and looks for something to pour some into. Then, while Lovkach laps noisily, he finds and opens a tin of sardines. He puts it on the floor next to what is left of the milk, and washes the oil from his hands.
While Lovkach eats, he wanders through the flat. On a table in the hall – over which hangs a deluxe portrait of Lenin under a picture light – there is some unopened mail, and invitations to official functions propped on the wall, and two tickets to the Sverdlovsk opera. Mozart’s Don Giovanni. For tonight, he notices – Friday, 29 September 1972. (Ivan is no opera buff – it is the sort of thing that Agata would want to do.) There are framed photographs of Ivan’s four children at various ages.
The living room is very large. Nevertheless, it is somewhat shadowy. The curtains are heavy green velvet. The furniture is sombre. From the far end, the fat television stares. There are shelves filled mostly with the works of Marx and Lenin in fine leather editions. There is an expensive Czech sound system, and some Western LPs, probably purchased in Yugoslavia. A malachite ashtray. Some journalism awards in frames on the wall. A black-and-white photo of Ivan meeting Kosygin, part of a line-up of nervous provincial journalists, smiling and shaking his hand.
He slides open the terrace door and steps outside – the sharpness of the air is a shock after the well-heated flat. From the eighth floor, looking south-east, the lowlying city spreads out under white plumes of steam. The sky has a frosty shimmer. He looks for landmarks. Lenin Prospekt is an obvious one. And the lake, shining like polished metal – on the other side the park has turned yellow. The traffic noise is thin.
22
THE FOURTH DEPARTMENT hospital, once the suburban villa of a Yekaterinburg industrialist, is surrounded by a high wall. The wall is old now, buckling in places, flaking, eaten by damp, discoloured. Over the brown barbed wire that spirals along its summit are the bare branches of mature trees. A young soldier – a teenager with a shadow moustache – stands at the gate, holding a machine gun in his mittened hands as if he is not sure what it is. He looks worried when Aleksandr walks up to him. Few people arrive here on foot – there are ambulances, long Zil limousines, minibuses full of staff. Solitary people who have walked from the tram stop on Volgograd Street, however, are seldom seen. When Aleksandr says who he is, the soldier withdraws into his tar-paper hut and, eyeing his elderly visitor suspiciously through its scuffed plastic window, picks up the phone. It is a dull October afternoon.
The exterior of the hospital is shabby, the paintwork falling off in stiff pieces. Not so the interior. Polished parquet floors, a faintly medicinal smell, the quiet of a university library. In the foyer, Aleksandr unwinds his scarf and takes off his astrakhan hat. It is old now, its elegantly shiny surface losing its profound lustre, starting to separate into stiff individual hairs; its satin lining fraying to show the simple felt underneath. It was a present from Irina. Her last to him, for his birthday in February forty-eight.
Ivan is sitting up in bed, propped on a pile of pillows, surrounded by newspaper pages and sweet wrappers. He is holding a newspaper, and peering at it through heavy-framed spectacles. The radio is on – a serious female voice, the news – and Aleksandr Ivanovich sits easily in a velvet armchair, still in his soft overcoat, trying successfully to impress his father by translating the German text on the packaging of some pharmaceuticals. They both turn to the door when Aleksandr enters.
‘Sasha!’ Ivan says, whipping off the large spectacles and slipping them into the breast pocket of his pyjamas. Aleksandr Ivanovich puts down the West German medicine and smiles, though without warmth. He leaves soon afterwards. ‘See you tomorrow, Dad,’ he says, leaning over to kiss Ivan.
‘Yes, see you tomorrow, Shurik.’
When he has left, however, Ivan says, ‘I won’t see him tomorrow, of course.’
‘Oh? Why not?’ And then, when Ivan says nothing, ‘It’s tomorrow, is it?’
‘Tonight.’
‘Well, you’ll see him the day after then. How long is he here for?’
‘In Sverdlovsk? I don’t know.’
‘And Galina?’
‘Yes, she was here this morning.’ Ivan sighs. ‘She brought me that. Very kind of her.’
There is a trug of fruit, including a small fresh pineapple, on a side table.
‘I’m not allowed to smoke,’ Ivan says, unwrapping a sweet, while Aleksandr studies the spiky-topped fruit. Though he has tasted it in tins, in its natural state it is something new to him. ‘You’re not allowed to smoke?’ he says. ‘That’s not surprising.’
‘I eat these to try and take my mind off it, but it doesn’t work.’
Aleksandr puts down the pineapple. ‘How are you feeling?’ he says.
‘Okay. Fine, actually.’
‘You look well.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes.’
In fact Ivan looks puffy and his face has a suffocated purplish hue; even speaking seems to leave him slightly short-winded. ‘I feel fine,’ he says. ‘And I tell them that. I tell them.’
There is a small possibility that he will not survive the operation. The doctors are quite open about it. They say that without it another heart attack is almost inevitable. For the last few weeks, he has been totally sedentary, has slept with an oxygen mask strapped to his face; it has left a stipple of irritation around his mouth. He picks up one of the newspapers that surround him, and then immediately puts it down. ‘How are you?’ he says.
Aleksandr shrugs.
On the radio, the serious woman says that, following the signin
g of the US–Soviet trade pact on 18 October, Armand Hammer, the president of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, is in Moscow. Sounding very slightly proud, she says that Mr Hammer has presented the Soviet Union with a Goya painting ‘worth one million dollars’. Negotiations on a trade package will start imminently, and will be finalised, it is hoped, in time for Brezhnev’s visit to the United States in the spring of 1973 …
‘Do you mind if I turn it off?’
‘No.’ In his nest of newspapers, Ivan shakes his head, his thoughts elsewhere. ‘No.’ Aleksandr turns off the radio, and in the sudden silence sits down on the velvet armchair. They talk for a while.
When he leaves it is late afternoon. The old stairs squeak under his feet in the oak-panelled stairwell. Outside wet snow is starting to fall. It forms a thin slush on the dark tarmac of the drive, settles frailly on the sombre cedars that surround the hospital. A light is on in the soldier’s hut. It is a long walk to the tram stop. And then, in this suburb, he might have to wait forty minutes for a tram.
23
HE MARRIED AGAIN in 1960, twelve years after he and Irina were divorced – Serafima, a KGB colleague, a small, softly spoken woman, whose first husband was a war hero who died at Stalingrad. 1960 was the time of his troubles with the Lozovsky case – the tribunal – and she was strongly opposed to his treatment. Politically, they were on the same side. It was the functional marriage of two people in their late forties, without too many illusions left, and the divorce, in 1964, was perfectly friendly. For a few years, he still saw her quite often. He never saw Irina in the same way. She moved to Moscow, where one of her younger sisters was married to someone important. Sometime in the late sixties she must have moved back to Sverdlovsk – one day he saw her in the park near 1905 Square, feeding the pigeons. He had not seen her for twenty years, not even at Nikita Stepanovich’s funeral.
He was sitting on a bench under the trees – it was his lunch hour – when he noticed the middle-aged woman feeding the pigeons. Though it was summer, she was wearing a grey raincoat, and her hair was grey, and every few moments she put her hand into the plastic bag she was holding and threw more crumbs to the pigeons. Filthy and flapping, they entirely surrounded her. It was only when she turned to leave that he saw her face, and then only for a second. He watched her walk away. She still walked the way she used to. When she was almost out of sight, he stood up and started to follow her. She was some way ahead, and in the sunlight of Lenin Prospekt she quickened her pace. Still in the shade of the park he tried to do the same. He would not have been able to whisper her name, much less shout it out. There was a tram standing at the stop. That was why she had started to jog. The doors shut, she hit them and they opened again. The tram moved off. He stood on the pavement of Lenin Prospekt, frighteningly light-headed. The sun was in his face. He did not feel well.
Someone even said, ‘You alright?’
Was he alright?
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, thank you.’
‘What?’
He shook his head.
‘You should sit down.’
He nodded, and let them lead him to a bench in the shade.
Several people were looking down at him. One of them was holding his hat, which he must have dropped. ‘My hat,’ he said. It was handed to him. He put it on. ‘Thank you.’ He smiled. He was embarrassed to find himself in this situation. His shirt was wet. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, still smiling. ‘Thank you.’ They looked sceptical, but when he stood up – standing made his head spin – they stood aside to let him leave.
She died of lung cancer in 1971. He did not find out until the spring of the following year.
Note
The Soviet Union was divided into Republics (e.g. Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan) which were further divided into regions. The Russian word for these regions is oblast. As with the USSR as a whole, each oblast had parallel state and party bureaucracies – the obkom was the highest party body in the oblast, the oblispolkom its state equivalent – and as in the USSR as a whole, the party always had the final word. As Stephen Kotkin puts it, ‘Both parts of the party-state were functional, but their functions were different: whereas the state’s role was defined in terms of competent technical and economic administration, the party’s was defined in terms of ideological and political guidance. Such a bifurcated political system, with the party analogous to a church, resembled a kind of theocracy.’1 Thus, while day-to-day administration was handled by state institutions, the first secretary of the obkom was the most powerful individual in the oblast. Much of this power was exercised through the nomenklatura, a list of senior positions – in all walks of life, including the oblispolkom – which were filled only with obkom nominees.
Technically part of the state bureaucracy, the state security police was in fact more or less independent, part of a separate and parallel structure, with the Ministry of State Security in Moscow at its summit. It was formed in 1917 and was known as the Cheka, the ‘All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Sabotage’. Throughout the Soviet period, state security officers were popularly known as ‘Chekists’. The institution itself was known by an ever-shifting series of acronyms. Put simply, the Cheka became the GPU (State Political Directorate) in 1922, the OGPU (Unified State Political Directorate) in 1923, the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) in 1934, the MGB (Ministry of State Security) in 1946 and the KGB (State Security Committee) in 1954.
1 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation (University of California Press, 1995)
Acknowledgements
I AM PARTICULARLY indebted to the work of three historians. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism; Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation; and Jochen Hellbeck’s Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin, especially the chapters on Stepan Podlubnyi and Zinaida Denisevskaya. Other books that were useful to me were: Russia: the People and the Power by Robert G. Kaiser; The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 by J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov; Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov; Stalinism as a Way of Life by Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov; Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism by Donald Filtzer; The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System by James R. Harris; Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 by Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk; Khrushchev Remembers by Nikita Khrushchev; Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore; and finally, though it was in fact the starting point of the whole thing, The Man with a Shattered World by A. R. Luria.
I would also like to thank my agent, Anna Webber, and Dan Franklin and Alex Bowler at Jonathan Cape, for all their input and support.
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