That day Nazar Kallistratovich went home earlier than usual. He had been living in Chkalova Street, close to the river and three blocks from the underground, since the time of his first marriage. At the time of his divorce, his first wife had – much to his good fortune – shacked up with some guy who lived in an even larger flat, three rooms at Ostankino, and so Nazar had kept their own flat. More than one person would have liked to live there: for example, an actor at the Taganka Theatre phoned and offered a four-room flat in exchange for his – a bargain. For an entire afternoon, Nazar Kallistratovich studied the public transport map for Moscow; to get to the Public Prosecutor’s office from there you had to take a trolleybus and then the underground, changing on the circle line – but why would you want to do that? He told the actor he wasn’t interested – sorry about that. And still someone would occasionally phone about this, and of course an extra room would come in handy, especially now that he had remarried and there was even a child. But he needed something close to the underground, and couldn’t possibly give up a house like that! So they continued to live in Chkalova, and besides, there was little to complain about: the neighbourhood was a pleasant one, and distinguished.
Deputy Minister Polad-zade lived on the floor below. Of course, more than once, his wife Asya had been obliged to go down the stairs and apologise, since the baby had learnt to walk and there was no longer any peace, but the Deputy Minister was politeness itself: Forget it! It was nothing, no disturbance at all! Even now, as the judge turns his key in the door, the flat reverberates with a horrendous metallic noise, like that of a tin drum, and on opening the door, there is a waft of greasy cooking in the air. Cabbage and mushroom soup, of course… And the drum, I suspect, is a pan that Misha is drumming with a spoon. On his father’s entrance, the baby, crouching on the floor, looks up at him and a happy smile spreads across his face. He opens his mouth, but can’t speak yet, and all that comes out of it is a dribble and a babble of satisfaction. This, Lappa thinks, is what makes life worth living; who would have thought I wouldn’t discover this until I was fifty? He kneels down next to his son and embraces him, and then gazes at his wife who, in her apron and slippers, is tasting her soup. Well, this too makes life worth living: the mother and wet-nurse, the companion of his bed… He stands up, kisses her on the mouth and then tries to put his hands under her skirt.
“Leave me alone,” Asya protested and pushed him away.
But she laughed. “Be a good boy until tonight,” she whispered in his ear. Nazar Kallistratovich looked around the kitchen as if seeking out something else to do. He went over to sniff the warm vapour of cooking that rose from the saucepan, but ultimately had to seek refuge in the windowless room that had long served as his storeroom and study. He switched on the light, clambered over the piles of books and papers that had accumulated next to his desk, and sat down. He looked around with an air of indecision.
What exactly was he intending to do? Ah, that was it! He extracted the Gorky Street leaflet from his briefcase, and sneered as he reread it. He was tempted to go through to the kitchen and get Asya to read it, but he restrained himself: it was a small miracle that Misha, intent upon his play, had not insisted on following him into his study, and if he were now to reappear, he wouldn’t be free of him until it was time for supper. And Lappa wanted to be left in peace for a little while. He folded the thin sheet of carbon copy and looked for a drawer in which to keep it. That simple act reminded him of the notification of execution he had signed a few hours earlier. His bag also contained his copy of that, and now that he had brought it here, he needed to file it away. A great quantity of grey cardboard files, each carefully marked with its own label, were heaped in apparent disorder upon the desk Asya never dared to dust. The judge unearthed a file that differed from the other in colour and format; it was yellow. He opened it… and take a look! There’s a whole pile of those little pink forms. He took the most recent notification from his briefcase and read it before adding it to the others. First there was the surname and forename of the condemned man – Protasov Valery Sergeyevich – and then the date of execution – 3 January 1988.
In that moment, the door opened and Asya entered holding the baby in her arms. On discovering that his father had hidden himself in there, Misha let out a cry of joy and stretched his arms towards him.
“You must excuse us! I was unable to keep him closed up in the kitchen. But you get on with your work; just carry on as though we weren’t here.”
Nazar quickly closed the yellow file and then, affecting indifference, he slipped it in amongst the grey ones. He extracted another one randomly and opened it. There would be hell to pay if Asya ever got wind of that collection; he had always been sure that something had died in Nina on the day she had opened that yellow file by mistake. It is in any case difficult to be the wife of a judge, and know that he is sending people to labour camps; a kind of unease will always follow him around, and it is only inurement that makes it undetectable. But then if the judge is not only sending people to labour camps, but also to their deaths, and he keeps a file in a drawer on all the people he has had shot… well in that case, who knows how it will end up. And it is just possible that Nina didn’t come across the file by chance, but that she actually sought it out, rummaging through his papers and spying on him… Of course, Asya is different; she is not always splitting hairs. And yet there are still things I wouldn’t want to discuss with her – which I wouldn’t even want her to know about. And Misha? He’ll grow up, open my desk, and criticise me… Lappa looked up at Asya to make sure that she hadn’t detected anything.
Then, reassured, he smiled and stretched out his arms towards the child who was wriggling free of his mother’s arms and reaching out for him “Well hello, Mikhail Nazarevich!”
“Can you look after him for five minutes?” Asya asked.
Lappa took the baby in his arms, and just in time he removed his glasses and placed them on the desk safe from the little hands that were already eagerly attempting to grasp them.
“Of course I’ll look after him,” he acquiesces, and on hearing his tone, Asya looks up and smiles at him. “I’ll look after him,” he repeats. “You go and do the cooking; I’m looking forward to your soup.” Asya kisses him on the mouth and rushes out of the room.
The judge and his wife, like most divorced people, were not keen on talking about their first marriages. He knew that Genya was an electronics engineer, and he had seen the photo of him in a black suit next to Asya, still a child, in front of the flame of the Unknown Warrior. As for her, she had never seen Nina, even in a photo. Three years earlier these two divorced people had met and fallen in love in a few days, in spite of the age difference. Neither of them had any children, and Asya wanted a child by him immediately, because, when it came down to it, she was not so young either: she was now thirty and in her heart she harboured the secret hope of one day producing a little sister for her boy. They were, however, unable to agree on this point: it’s okay becoming a father after having got through half a century of life, Nazar Kallistratovich would mutter contentedly, but at this age we are no longer capable of so much hard work; one child will have to suffice! But Asya was already missing the little baby Misha had once been.
Misha, at the time, was barely a year and a half old, and a child of that age appears tiny to everyone except its parents. Asya felt that her son had grown big far too quickly.
The nub of the question, if we are to be honest with ourselves, comes down to this: even though Misha depended on her for everything, he was no longer her exclusive property, as he had been at the beginning. If only they could go back to the time when he couldn’t walk and she would breastfeed him cuddled up on the bed while propped up on a mountain of pillows! Asya worked for a ministry and when she came home, she could forget the office and never give it another thought until the following morning – even with a sink full of dirty dishes, beds to be remade and a washtub overflowing with soiled nappies, so much housework that you didn’t
know which way to turn. Nazar Kallistratovich, on the other hand, continued to work when he came home; he continued to work while he travelled on the underground, while he stood in a queue, while he opened jars of puréed food and while he spoon-fed the baby. That evening, before he fell asleep, he again thought of the youth with the leaflets in Gorky Street, and wondered whether he would find him there the next day and whether, in that event, he shouldn’t call a policeman and have him identified – perhaps even open a file. And then, the youth’s moronic face with its insolent expression, cheeks devoured by acne and hair that was far too long, inadvertently superimposed itself on that of Valery Protasov, who a few days earlier had been sent before a firing squad, and it had been Nazar who had sent him there.
To be fair, the trial had been presided over by others; the judgement had been passed down by the female judge Grekova, and the death sentence had been requested by the deputy public prosecutor, Shaposhnikov, who was a nonentity. But he, Lappa, had carried out the investigation, arrested Protasov and sent him off to the court with a file that amounted to a death sentence. A double premeditated murder for vile reasons: shake off the weight of that whole affair! Nazar remembered how they found those two: the woman who was a union leader and her friend, both in the bathroom. It was summer and the weather was hot. Flies were humming all over the place. The policeman’s expression was one of contempt and he immediately said there could be no doubt that the perpetrator was a hit man: he had escaped without touching a damn thing and the house was full of money. Everyone knew that those two were dealing on the black market. Two days later they got to Valera, after having grilled very heavily all the misfits and dropouts that pass their days in the squares with their hands in their pockets – never working but never short of money. Then it turned out that Valery had not escaped the scene of the crime empty-handed: he had snatched a pair of American jeans, the first thing that came to hand. Lappa had removed his glasses and sighed: who would have thought it; he killed two people for a pair of jeans. There’s no way anyone can save this guy’s head… Not that he really cared! Nazar Kallistratovich had been brought up in a house full of books and in circles in which everyone was against the death penalty in principle, even though at the time you could only say this in a whisper, but nowadays any little upstart will go shouting it to the four winds. He was seventeen when Stalin died and at home they were discussing which faculty he should apply to. His mother proudly explained that the Soviet Union was the first country in the world to abolish the death penalty and that any return to abolition now depended on those of Lappa’s age. Later he had come across some youngsters who were quoting statistics that came from God knows where and proved that we shoot more people than any other country in the world, except perhaps China. “How can we live in such a country?” asked these young men with the short beards monks grow and these pale young women with crosses round their necks, whose cheeks however went red as their ardour intensified. Nazar was in the habit of agreeing with them. Only much later did he realise that in reality it mattered little whether one more or one less good-fornothing went to the scaffold: people die like flies every day for a wide variety of reasons, while these people at least die for a specific reason at the state’s expense. He often discussed this with his few friends outside the Chief Prosecutor’s Office and with his wife, and he was always surprised by the metaphysical nature of their opposition to the death sentence. “You don’t understand,” he had once said, and he remembered exactly when. It was a winter’s evening in his overheated kitchen; his friends were seated on plastic chairs, there were empty bottles of fizzy white wine on the table, and a woman was frying sausages on the cooker, only she was not yet Asya; she was still Nina. “You don’t understand. When we talk about the death sentence, you immediately think of the agony of an innocent person condemned to death, of Dostoyevsky and his comrades in front of a firing squad: the guards read them their pardon only after the squad had aimed their rifles at them, and in the meantime one had gone mad and another’s hair had turned white… But don’t you understand that the condemned man is almost never Dostoyevsky. Rather, he is almost always an appalling scoundrel, someone who has massacred or raped usually for nothing – for a few roubles or some foul gratification – or he is someone who has stolen, who has bought a car or given his lover a fur coat by supplying dodgy milk to nursery schools or concrete for bridges, and thinks he is smart and able to get away with it.
How can you be sad about such people?”
“That’s not the point!” someone retorted. “Almost always, you say, but what about the cases that are not like that?
When you sentence a poet to death or when you sentence an innocent to death?” Nazar removed his glasses: sausage grease hung in the air and had made it difficult to see through them. “What are you trying to get at? Why a poet or an innocent? First of all, they are not the same thing. When a poet has killed a woman to steal a few kopecks, he deserves to hang from the gallows, just like an electrician or unemployed person who has done the same thing: it is only us Russian intellectuals who are scandalised by such an idea. And he deserves it, I say, because in this country that is the law; those are the rules of the game and everyone knows them, so if you break the law, so much the worse for you; you were warned. If elsewhere there is life imprisonment instead of the death penalty, that is also okay, but here in Russia there is the death penalty and I can see nothing wrong with it.”
“And the innocent?”
Nazar stopped cleaning his glasses: the tablecloth was also greasy and was of no use. He got up, poured the dregs of a bottle into a glass, and drank the now warm fizzy wine. “The innocent… the innocent are a tragedy, but it is also a tragedy to send them to a labour camp for ten years, to torture their hands and feet with frostbite, to have their noses broken by one of their comrades or to contract syphilis. It is a tragedy that cannot be put right, but that has nothing to do with the death penalty.”
“Hold on!” a young woman interrupted him. “How do you explain this then? – that there is the death penalty today, as you say… Indeed there is now… But once there wasn’t!
Under the Tsars here in Russia, no one was executed! And if a poet split an old lady’s head open to steal a few kopecks, they sent him off to Siberia, not to the gallows, and his Sonia could follow him…”
“So?” Nazar replied. “Under the Tsars was one thing, and today is another. They lived in the nineteenth century, and we live in another one, and this century,” he concluded, lowering his voice, “did not turn out too well.” Nina put the steaming sausages on the table and for that evening the debate was over. But it came up again and again – amongst their friends or just between the two of them. It came up so often that it started to irritate Nazar; they didn’t want to understand him, and he too listened to them, but did not understand. Why on earth should we mark out a dividing line just short of death, as though all the rest, however arguable, was not by definition inhuman and therefore unacceptable a priori? Prisons, labour camps, self-criticism sessions in presence of the collectivity and tear gas against demonstrators are supposed to be on one side and death alone on the other, uniquely beyond human jurisdiction.
Human beings have always killed each other without the slightest discomfort: after all we are only monkeys, even if we are much more intelligent. Yeah, Nina had once retorted, monkeys created by God! Nazar had not replied; he had just shrugged his shoulders and gone away, but he knew very well that he had gone up a blind alley: if you marry someone who believes in God, you can keep saying for as long as you want that you don’t believe, but the matter will never be allowed to rest there.
Then along came Asya, small and round. For her marriage meant eating together, sleeping together and having a baby together, but not spending the entire night discussing things. Nazar could not believe his good fortune.
Of course, he would not want her to count the pink forms buried in the yellow file, and there are things that we would not want anyone else to know, but
which we are not necessarily ashamed of. This is why it was so strange that he could not get Valery Protasov out of his head that night.
He remembered that together they returned to the murdered woman’s flat, and how the murderer had coolly reconstructed his every movement that day, without however managing to explain what was going through his head in the moment he had fired his shots. The corpses had by then been removed, and all that remained were their shapes marked out in chalk on the bathroom tiles, and all the flies had died in the sealed apartment. Then time passed by and the seasons changed, and one fine day Valery entered death row, and the barber shaved off his moustaches with a single swipe of his razor, and then with a few more sweeps of his expert hand he cropped the hair on his head to zero. Why then did his face become confused in his dreams with that of the youth on Gorky Street? Valery, that’s a name that I have never liked. Mikhail is a good name, but you need foresight: I will never write it on one of his photographs. Yet the condemned man always kept a photo in his wallet of himself aged eight months, naked and laughing on his parents’ bed, with his name written in ink by his mother in the elegant hand of an intellectual. When Nazar first saw it, he felt that that baby resembled his own in such a striking manner that it sent a shiver down his spine. Now that baby had grown up, murdered two people and been shot…
Judge Lappa woke up with a start. Yes, he had dreamt something, but what? Moonlight seeped into the bedroom, and the alarm clock next to his pillow signalled that it was half past two. Next to him, his wife snored lightly. Nazar Kallistratovich smiled to himself and moved close enough to Asya’s body to feel her warmth through his pyjamas. Then he put his hand under her nightdress and sought out her belly; he pushed his fingers under her panties and stopped.
The Anonymous Novel Page 8