I got home at around one in the morning. Lena said drily, “Congratulations.”
I told her about my day. Her response was, “Fantastic things always happen to you…”
Early the next morning my brother called. I was in a lousy mood. I didn’t feel like going to the office. I didn’t have any money. My future was murky.
And besides, there was something heraldic about my face. The left side was dark. The bruise shimmered with all the colours of the rainbow. The thought of going out into the street was horrible.
But my brother said, “I have something important I need you for. We have to perform a financial transaction. I’m buying a colour TV on credit, then selling it for cash to this guy. I’m losing about fifty roubles on the deal, but I’m getting over three hundred to pay back in instalments over a year’s time. Got it?”
“Not quite.”
“It’s all very simple. I get the three hundred like a loan. I pay off my minor creditors. Get out of my financial dead end. Get my second wind. And the debt for the television I pay off slowly and steadily over the year. See? Speaking philosophically, one big debt is better than a hundred small ones. Borrowing for a year is more respectable than begging with a promise to pay it back the day after tomorrow. And besides, it’s more noble to be in debt to the state than to borrow from friends.”
“You’ve convinced me,” I said. “But what do I have to do with it?”
“You have to come with me.”
“That’s all I need!”
“I need you. You have a more practical mind. You’ll make sure I don’t blow the money.”
“But my face is all bashed in.”
“Big deal! Who cares about that? I’ll bring you a pair of sunglasses.”
“It’s February.”
“Doesn’t matter. You could have flown in from Abyssinia. And anyway, people don’t know why your face is bashed in. What if you were defending a lady’s honour?”
“That’s what happened, more or less.”
“All the more reason…”
I got ready to go out. I told my wife that I was going to the clinic. Lena said, “Here’s a rouble, buy a bottle of sunflower oil.”
I met my brother on Konyushennaya Square. He was wearing a worn sealskin hat. He took a pair of sunglasses from his pocket. I said, “The glasses won’t help. Give me the hat instead.”
“But the hat’s supposed to help?”
“At least my ears won’t freeze.”
“That’s true. We’ll take turns wearing it.”
We went to the trolleybus stop. My brother said, “Let’s take a taxi. If we arrive by trolley, it’ll be unnatural. Our pockets are bursting with money now, so to speak. Do you have a rouble?”
“I do. But I have to buy a bottle of sunflower oil.”
“I’m telling you, we’ll have money. If you want, I’ll buy you a bucket of sunflower oil.”
“A bucket’s too much. But if you would return the rouble.”
“Consider that lousy rouble already in your pocket…”
My brother flagged down a car. We went to Gostiny Dvor,* into the audio department. Borya disappeared behind the counter, looking for some guy named Mishan. As he left, he handed me the hat.
“It’s your turn. Put it on.”
I waited around twenty minutes for him, examining radios and television sets. I held the hat in my hand. I had the feeling that everyone was interested in my left eye. If a pretty woman appeared, I turned my right side to her.
My brother, agitated and joyous, appeared for a second. He said, “Everything’s going fine. I’ve signed the credit papers. The buyer just showed up. They’ll give him the TV in a minute. Wait here…”
I waited. I moved from the audio department to the children’s section. I recognized the salesman as my former classmate Lyova Girshovich. Lyova began examining my eye.
“What’d they hit you with?”
I thought, “Everybody’s interested in what they hit me with.” I wished just one person would want to know why.
“A shoe,” I said.
“Were you sleeping on the pavement or something?”
“And why not?”
Lyova told me a wild tale. They’d discovered major embezzlement at a toy factory. Wind-up bears, tanks and walking excavators were disappearing in enormous quantities. The police worked on the case for a year, without any success.
Quite recently the crime was solved. Two workmen at the factory had dug a short tunnel, leading from the plant to Kotovsky Street. The workers took the toys, wound them up, and set them down. And then the bears, tanks and excavators went off on their own. In an endless flow, they left the factory.
At that moment I saw my brother through the glass partition. I went over to him.
Borya had changed visibly. There was something aristocratic in his manner now, a satiety and an indolent lordliness. In a wan, capricious voice he said, “Where did you disappear to?”
I thought, “So that’s how money changes us. Even if it’s someone else’s.”
We went out on the street. My brother slapped his pocket.
“Let’s go out and eat!”
“You said you had to pay off your debts.”
“Yes, I said I had to pay off my debts. But I didn’t say we had to starve. We have three hundred twenty roubles and sixty-four copecks. If we don’t eat, it will be unnatural. Drinking isn’t obligatory. We won’t drink.” Then he added, “Have you warmed up? Give me my hat.”
Along the way, my brother began daydreaming.
“We’ll order something crunchy. Have you noticed how I like crunchy things?”
“Yes,” I said. “Like Stolichnaya vodka.”
Borya chided me. “Don’t be a cynic. Vodka is sacred.” Sorrowfully he added, “You have to treat things like that seriously…”
We crossed the street and found ourselves in a shashlik place. I had wanted to go to a milk bar, but my brother said, “A shashlik joint is the only place where a smashed face goes unnoticed.”
There weren’t many customers. Winter coats hung darkly on the coat rack. Pretty girls in lacy aprons ran around the room. The jukebox was blaring.
Rows of bottles glimmered by the bar at the entrance. Beyond that, on a platform, were the tables.
My brother immediately took an interest in the spirits.
I tried to stop him. “Remember what you said.”
“What did I say? I said we wouldn’t drink. In the sense of getting drunk. We don’t have to drink by the glassful. We’re cultured people. We’ll have a shot glass each just for the mood. If we don’t drink at all, it’ll be unnatural.”
And my brother ordered half a litre of Armenian cognac.
I said, “Give me my rouble. I’ll buy a bottle of sunflower oil.”
He grew angry.
“You’re so petty! I don’t have a rouble, it’s all tens. When I break a ten I’ll buy you a cistern of sunflower oil.”
As we took off our coats, my brother handed me the hat.
“It’s your turn, take it.”
We sat down at a corner table. I turned my right side to the room.
Everything that followed went by in a flash. From the shashlik place we went to the Astoria Hotel. From there, to see friends from the ice ballet. From their place, to the bar at the Journalists’ Union Club.
And everywhere my brother said, “If we stop now, it’ll be unnatural. We used to drink when we didn’t have money. It’d be stupid not to drink now, when we have it.”
Whenever we walked into a restaurant, Borya handed me his hat. When we went back out on the street, I would return the hat to him with thanks.
Then we went into the theatrical store on Ryleyev Street. He bought a rather ugly Pinocchio mask. I had spent an hour in that mask at the Yunost bar. By that time my eye had turned purple.
By evening my brother had developed an obsession. He wanted to fight. Rather, he wanted to find the bullies who had beaten me up the night before. Borya
thought he could recognize them in a crowd.
“You haven’t even seen them,” I said.
“What do you think intuition is for then?”
He began pestering strangers. Luckily, everyone was afraid of him – until he picked on a Hercules near a clothing store. That one wasn’t frightened. He said, “I’ve never seen an alcoholic Jew before!”
My brother grew incredibly animated, as if he had been waiting all his life for someone to insult his national dignity. Especially since he wasn’t a Jew at all. It was I who was Jewish, to some degree. That’s how it was. A complicated family history. Too long to go into…
Incidentally, Borya’s wife, whose maiden name was Feinzimmer, liked to say, “Borya has drunk so much of my blood, he’s half Jewish now!”
I had never noticed any Caucasian patriotism in Borya before. But now he was even talking with a Georgian accent.
“I – a Jew? You mean, you think I’m a Jew?! You’re insulting me, my friend!”
They headed for an alleyway. I said, “Stop it. Leave the man alone. Let’s get out of here.”
But my brother was already turning the corner, shouting, “Don’t leave. If the police show up, give a whistle.”
I don’t know what happened in that alley. I only saw passers-by recoil.
My brother returned in a few moments. His lower lip was split. He held a brand-new sealskin hat in his hand. We quickly strode towards Vladimirskaya Square.
Borya caught his breath and said, “I punched him in the face. And he punched me in the face. His hat fell off. And my hat fell off. I looked and saw his hat was newer. I bent over and picked it up. And naturally, he picked up mine. I cursed him out. And he cursed me. And we went our separate ways. And I’m giving this hat to you. Take it.”
I said, “I’d rather you bought me a bottle of sunflower oil.”
“Naturally,” my brother said. “But first let’s have a drink. It’s necessary, as disinfection.”
And he stuck out his lower lip as proof.
I got home late that night. Lena didn’t even ask where I had been. She did ask, “Where’s the sunflower oil?”
I mumbled something unintelligible.
Her answer was, “Your friends are always drinking at your expense!”
“But at least,” I said, “I have a new sealskin hat.”
What else could I say?
From the bathroom, I heard her repeating, “My God, how will all this end? How will it all end?”
The Driving Gloves
I FIRST MET YURA SCHLIPPENBACH in Tauride Palace in Leningrad, at a conference of newspaper editors. I represented Turbobuilder, and Schlippenbach was there from a film-industry magazine called Close-Up.
Second Secretary of the Regional Party Committee Bolotnikov had the floor. At the end of his speech, he said, “We have model newspapers like Banner of Progress. We have average ones, like Admiralty, and bad ones, like Turbobuilder. And then we have Close-Up, which is in a class of its own – it is spectacular in its mediocrity and tedium…”
I hunched down a bit in my seat. Schlippenbach, on the contrary, proudly straightened up – apparently he felt like a persecuted dissident. Then he called out, “Lenin said that any criticism has to be substantiated!”
“Your paper, Yura, is beneath all criticism,” the secretary replied.
In the intermission, Schlippenbach stopped me and asked, “Excuse me, how tall are you?”
I wasn’t surprised; I was used to it. I knew I should expect the usual stupid exchange: “How tall are you?” “Six four.” “Too bad you don’t play basketball.” “I do play.” “That’s what I thought.”
“How tall are you?” Schlippenbach asked.
“Six four. Why?”
“You see, I’m doing an underground film. I want you to play the lead.”
“I can’t act.”
“That’s not important. You have the right look.”
We agreed to meet the next day.
I had known Schlippenbach from seeing him around the central newspaper offices. We had never met personally. He was a thin, edgy man with long, dirty hair.
He claimed that his Swedish ancestors are mentioned in historical documents. In addition, he carried a single volume of Pushkin verses in his carryall. ‘Poltava’ was bookmarked with a candy wrapper.
“Read,” Schlippenbach would say nervously. And without waiting for a reaction, he’d bark out:“And soon the foe begins to yield.
The cannons roar: platoons are shaken,
Mingled, dismembered, crushed in mud:
The fiery Schlippenbach is taken,
And Rosen leaves the field of blood.”*
People were wary of him at the news headquarters. He was very bold. Perhaps the ardour inherited from the Swedish general was coming through. Schlippenbach refused to give up or give in. Once, when the old journalist Maryushin died, someone took up a collection for the funeral and approached Schlippenbach. He exclaimed, “I wouldn’t give a rouble for Maryushin alive. I certainly wouldn’t give a copeck for him dead. Let the KGB bury its informers.”
Meanwhile, Schlippenbach was constantly borrowing money from his co-workers, and he was reluctant about returning it. The list of creditors took pages in his notebook. When he was reminded of a debt, he would threaten, “You keep nagging me and I’ll cross you off my list!”
That evening after the meeting he called me twice, for no real reason. His offhand tone bespoke our closer relationship: you can call a friend for no reason. “I’m bored,” he complained. “And there’s nothing to drink. I’m lying here on the couch all alone, with my wife…” At the end of the conversation, he reminded me, “We’ll discuss everything tomorrow.”
We spent the morning in the newspaper offices. I was going over proofs, and Schlippenbach was laying out his issue. He kept shouting things like, “Where’s the scissors? … Who took my ruler?… How do you write South African Republic – with or without a hyphen?”
Then we went to lunch.
Back in the Sixties, the canteen of the Press Centre was a closed club with access to hard-to-find foods: it sold veal hot dogs, canned goods, caviar, marmalade, tongue and smoked sturgeon. Theoretically, the canteen served only people who worked at the Press Centre, including writers from the industry papers; in practice, you would find people off the street in there – freelancers, for instance. That is, it gradually became less and less exclusive. And that meant fewer and fewer hard-to-get things. By this time, all that was left of its former glory was the Zhiguli beer.
The canteen took up the northern part of the sixth floor. The windows opened onto the Fontanka River. The three rooms could hold over a hundred people. Schlippenbach dragged me into an alcove, to a table for two. Apparently we were going to have a highly confidential conversation.
We got beer and sandwiches. Schlippenbach lowered his voice a bit and began.
“I turned to you because I value cultured people. I’m a cultured person. There aren’t many of us. To tell the truth, I’m surprised there are as many as there are – aristocrats are a dying breed, like prehistoric animals. But let’s talk business. I’ve decided to do an underground film on my own. I’m tired of giving the best years of my life to run-of-the-mill journalism – I want to do real creative work. Anyhow, I start shooting tomorrow. It will be a ten-minute film, a satire. Here’s the plot: a mysterious stranger appears in Leningrad. We see right off that he’s Tsar Peter the Great, the man who founded this city two hundred and sixty years ago. Now the great sovereign finds himself smack in the middle of vulgar Soviet reality. A policeman threatens to run him in. Two winos ask him to chip in for a bottle. Whores take him for a rich foreigner. KGB agents think he’s a spy, and so on. In short, it’s a drunken whorehouse of a city. The Tsar cries, ‘What have I done?… Why did I ever build this whorish city?’”
Schlippenbach laughed so hard that the paper napkins flew up in the air. Then he added, “The film will be politically touchy, to put it mildly. It will hav
e to be shown in private apartments. I’m hoping Western journalists will see it – that will guarantee worldwide resonance. The consequences may be most unexpected. So, you think it over, weigh the facts. Do you accept?”
“You said to think it over…”
“How long can you think? Just agree!”
“Where will you get equipment?”
“No need to worry about that. Don’t forget, I work at Lenfilm studios. Everyone there is a friend, from the top directors down to the lighting crew. The equipment is mine to use. I’ve been running a camera since I was a child. So think about it and decide. You suit me. This is a role I can trust only to a like-minded individual. We’ll go to the studios tomorrow, get the necessary props, talk to make-up. And we’ll start.”
I said, “I have to think about it…”
“I’ll call you.”
We paid and went back to the office.
I really didn’t have any acting talent, even though my parents were theatre people – my father was a director and my mother an actress. Although my parents didn’t leave any deep mark on theatre, which may be a good thing.
As for me, I had been on the stage twice. The first time, back in school, we put on a stage version of the story Chuk and Gek.* As the tallest, I got to play the polar-explorer father. I had to come out of the tundra on skis and then give the final monologue. The tundra was played backstage by a straight “F” student Prokopovich. He cawed, howled, and roared like a bear. I appeared onstage shuffling my feet and waving my arms – my impression of a man on skis. That was my own idea, my contribution to stage conventions.
Unfortunately, the spectators did not appreciate my formalist invention. Hearing Prokopovich’s howls and seeing my mysterious movements, they decided I was supposed to be a hooligan. There were plenty of hooligans in the post-war schools.
The girls were outraged and the boys applauded. The school principal ran onstage and dragged me off. The literature teacher had to give the final monologue.
The second time I acted was four years ago. I was working on the regional Party newspaper and was assigned to play Grandfather Frost. I was promised three days off and fifteen roubles. The editorial staff was giving a New Year’s show for an affiliated state school. Once again I was the tallest. They glued on a beard, gave me a white hat and jacket and a basket of gifts, and let me out on the stage.
The Suitcase Page 9