The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  Anxiously he awaited her reaction, but as she continued to snore, he started to caress her. After a while he realised that his wife was awake and waiting for him. He moved his mouth to her ear and murmured:

  “Let’s make love, my little hairy one?”

  Okay, that is what he called her in bed, and she addressed him in a certain manner – it would be embarrassing to repeat it… But this is not so strange when you think about it? Even in the smart apartment blocks built in the Khrushchev era on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, the tenants in their intimate moments call each other by such pet names as “chick”, “my buck rabbit” and worse, much worse, but no one would suspect this on seeing them leave home in the morning, unsmiling and full of self-importance. Besides, Asya really was hairy: sparse black hairs grew on her arms and legs, and lazy as she was, she refused to wax or shave herself even in the summer. Just think that Nina even shaved her armpits. The judge chased away the memory of those livid cavities raw from being scraped by a razor and smelling only of deodorant. His wife pulled up her nightdress to her waist and drew him towards her.

  “Wait!”

  They whispered to avoid waking Misha.

  “Keep it quiet …”

  In the darkness, hands fumbled around blindly and legs were entwined under blankets that could not be removed.

  And what if the baby suddenly woke up and sat up in bed?

  “Is that good?”

  You ask me that, my little violet, my sweet freckled dumpling! But kiss me, bite my tongue or I’ll shout out and wake the baby … Yes! Yes! And you? Again? Enough for you too; it’s late, we must get back to sleep… Nazar leant on his elbow and looked at the alarm clock: a quarter to three.

  Asya was curled up on her side of the bed, and was again snoring, but louder than before. Perhaps she hadn’t even waken up. What a joy! Now, the judge thought, it would be good to have a cigarette, perhaps a nip of something; there isn’t any vodka, is there? We’ll make do with water… Nazar got up for a drink, but before leaving the room, he stopped to look at his son in his cot. As usual, he had lost his covers. For an instant, the photograph of Valery Protasov came to mind, and he felt he could remember his dream, but the impression only lasted a second and then faded.

  Lappa tucked in the blankets around the child, stroked his rebellious locks of curly hair and said to himself, “Mi kha El, who is like God?”

  VI

  Nazar Kallistratovich Lappa

  Moscow, the eighties

  We were talking about Judge Lappa. You wouldn’t find many like him at the Chief Prosecutor’s Office. And just think, he actually enjoyed his job! Let’s get a few things straight: here in Russia lawyers and judges who enjoy their work are usually best avoided. In court they can immediately smell out an enemy of socialism – not only in the accused but also amongst the witnesses (at least, this used to be true at the time in which this novel is set; now, however, everything has changed and no one makes the slightest mention of socialism in the courts of justice, and yet the judges, would you believe it, are exactly the same ones as before). In the West on the other hand, where they could never give a damn about socialism, it is the law that they put up on an altar: it is sacred and whoever criticises it will have hell to pay! Remember, I am talking about judges who like their work. Nazar Kallistratovich, although a graduate in law, differed from most lawyers and judges in that he did not for one minute believe in the sacred nature of the law – or indeed of socialism for that matter. But he still liked his work. What do I hear you muttering? Why wouldn’t he, with all those backhanders they get in those jobs? Well, I’ll have you know that Judge Lappa never took so much as a kopeck in his entire life. No, he was just one of those judges that guy was referring to: he liked to judge, just as a carpenter likes to make furniture or an actor likes to act… What a load of shit he had to put with when he finally dared to admit it! Nina tormented him in every possible manner: what a philistine, he likes to judge! And who are you to judge others?

  “I am a judge,” Nazar Kallistratovich had replied, and had gone to get his graduation certificate. “Look, I have a degree in jurisprudence. Check it out. They taught me to judge, and the state pays me to do it.” Occasionally this silenced them, but there was always someone who felt obliged to point out: Say, for example, that you judge this guy; have you ever thought that if you had ended up in the same situation as that unfortunate, perhaps you would have done exactly the same things, and so you have no right to judge him! “Not perhaps,” Lappa would reply, “but unquestionably; and this other guy might have been the judge and would have sentenced me – and would have done the right thing.”

  When faced with such frankness, most people just gave in, but not a certain Sergey, who refused to let go. How can you, he would say, judge and condemn other human beings – this is something I really don’t understand! And of course, it was not just a matter of sentences in general, but mainly of those cursed death sentences. Everyone knows that such things are just murder under another name! the seraphic Sergey would say while he rolled himself a suspiciouslooking cigarette. The young women around him nodded in agreement, and one or two of them went off into a corner with Nina: How could you have married him; explain the mystery! Sergey in the meantime tormented him in the kitchen: Yes, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it is murder! But once the thing turned out badly for him.

  “For example,” Nazar Kallistratovich had started, “you’ll remember the case of that gunman who went into a nursery school in Minsk, and held prisoner twenty children and their teacher? He wanted a million dollars and a visa for the West and I don’t know what else. He had a pistol and belt full of hand grenades. He released the children one by one, but when only six were left, he sent the teacher out, and she didn’t want to go – the kids were all crying – but he threw her out and said that he wouldn’t free the other six unless they immediately gave him what he wanted. The special forces burst in ten minutes later and he had a pistol in his hand pointed at one of the children, so they shot him – they killed on the spot. Didn’t they perhaps do the right thing?”

  “No,” said Sergey firmly, “they did not do the right thing.”

  Nazar studied him at length.

  “Well then, you’re a complete cretin,” he said eventually.

  “If you don’t understand this, you’re a cretin, and I’ll no longer speak to you. I’m not interested. Out of my house!”

  And he really did throw Sergey out of his house. In the ensuing commotion, chairs were tipped over and Nina screamed, while Nazar took Sergey by the collar and dragged him to the door, and it looked as though he would throw him down the stairs. Who would have thought that the peaceful Nazar Kallistratovich with his hundred kilos and metal spectacles would have been capable of this? Well, Sergey was never seen again. He finished university and went to work as a chemical engineer in some industrial complex on the Baikal, but the whole affair kept coming up again and again. It seemed that no one had anything else to talk about. You judge, you pass sentence, you throw people in jail and you get them shot. What about humanity? But why do you take it out on me? Lappa complained. Only one man has lived in this world, who was capable of loving all people in the same way, and of forgiving them, whatever they might have done. I don’t make such a claim, and have no desire to do so. Besides there were people who had gone through his office whom even Jesus Christ would not have wanted to love! One Sunday evening, for example, in came the hooligans who had been arrested at the stadium following the match between Spartak and Dinamo Kiev; the first, of course had been arrested there, while the others, who thought they had got away with it, were being picked up in their houses one at a time by the police, and they would continue to arrive throughout the night. The chief duty officer, Drapkin, was there with him and had an enormous register in which he ticked off the names of these lads as they appeared before him. At the beginning there were only a couple of them and Lappa was in a foul temper, because the hospitals were sending in reports
of broken heads and concussion, the traffic had to be diverted in the whole area around the stadium and he felt that the police should have acted earlier. What is more, it wasn’t supposed to be his shift and he was standing in for a colleague only because of exceptional circumstances and as a personal favour. And when it came down to it, it irritated him that he had to deal with such a banal and vulgar incident. Drapkin was offended: we started patrolling the stadium this morning, he said as he lit a cigarette, and I can tell you that if we hadn’t been there, we would now be counting the dead.

  What a joke! People get angry because we don’t pick up these thugs before they start fighting: there’s no law that allows this. We get them all on CCTV, and we report them as soon as they are identified. They will all end up like these two – and he nodded towards Potravin and Ssylko who were seated and handcuffed in the lobby, and wearing frayed jeans jackets covered with badges and scarves around their necks with the colours of Spartak, burgundy red. The knives and metal bars confiscated from these two at the time of arrest glistened on a table. The judge and the policeman looked each other in the eye as though to say, All this is pointless. Here we have Ssylko: he doesn’t go to school, he lives on his own, he doesn’t study and he doesn’t work – God knows how he keeps body and soul together! His social workers have washed their hands of him long ago. He is retarded, but not physically. He is respected in the gang, and at the age of sixteen, he is already a pachan, in the parlance of these delinquents – in other words, a minor boss. And here we have Potravin, with his rebellious tuft of hair hanging down his forehead and an arrogant expression.

  A child of alcoholics who lives with his grandmother. They’ve arrested him several times for acts of hooliganism and once for obscenity: he was with a girl in the park in the full light of day. Somehow he had found the money to pay her. We know the two of them very well, and with them all the others; there’ll be fifty or sixty of them in that gang in the Moskvoretsky District, and they call themselves the “United States of Shabolovka” and have their own symbol. Today they were the ones beating up the fans from Kiev, and next Sunday the hooligans will come from another district, and we’ll put them in prison too. Is there any point to this? Of course not. Work it out yourselves. It achieves absolutely nothing, but you still have to do it: this is urban industrial society as we live it in the twentieth century. Take whatever helping you want.

  It’s true that this story occurred later, when in Chkalova Street the heated discussions through the night had been over for some time, and if someone was up and in the kitchen at midnight, it was to heat up the baby’s bottle and not to fry sausages. Now Nazar only told the stories of what was happening at the Chief Prosecutor’s Office to Asya at night in bed when both of them were unable to sleep and had to talk softly to avoid waking the baby. Hey, what’s new at work? Asya would ask, snuggling up to him, and Nazar would tell her stories, like the one about Citizen Skorokhod.

  This good fellow worked for an organisation overseeing the export of tinned salmon, caviar, crab, sturgeon and other delicacies of the Soviet table, and enjoyed a modest degree of affluence, which can be achieved by any worker as long as he has the good sense to seek out employment in the right sector. A three-room flat in Izmaylovo, a dacha on the Yauza, little more than a wooden shack without heating, but decorated in lively colours. A vegetable garden for cabbages and onions. An eight-year-old Lada, but his office had already put him on the list for a new one. A sixteen-year-old son enrolled at the Suvorov Military Academy, although mother and father were not too happy about that: they would have preferred him to follow in his father’s footsteps…

  So Citizen Skorokhod turned up one day at the police station, overwhelmed by a sense of indignation, because for the second time in a week unknown vandals had slashed the tyres on his car. Did the police know how much you have to pay for new tyres these days? Well, not entirely new tyres, of course, but second-hand ones, because no one would dream of actual new ones. No, the police did not know and what is more, they didn’t really want to, but Citizen Skorokhod raged so powerfully about how his rights had been violated and about the ineptitude of a police force incapable of defending honest citizens from delinquents, that in the end a policeman was assigned the task of going to take a look. The citizen went home in the police car and sat next to the driver. For the entire journey all he could say was that sooner or later people would have to take the law into their own hands, given that the state did not care a damn about them. When the car turned into his road, Skorokhod became very pale and suddenly went silent. The policeman parked next to his doorway and just behind what should have been Skorokhod’s car; he let out a whistle as he had seen policemen do in American movies. The Lada had been reduced to a pulp. The job had been carried out in workmanlike fashion: windows shattered with a sledgehammer, bonnet and doors staved in and the number plate removed; and we all know that while a car can actually move without a number plate, it is as though it has ceased to exist, and you might as well have never owned it. As white as a sheet, Skorokhod took the lift to the sixth floor and the policeman came along. The citizen had taken a day off work in order to make his report at the police station, and his wife who was at work would not be back until the evening. The apartment door had been forced open, and all the furniture completely wrecked with an axe. The television had been smashed, broken plates and glasses were strewn across the floor, the sofas had been ripped, curtains, bedspreads and sheets had been shredded with shears and the drawers of the desk emptied into the bathtub which was full of water. There was an envelope nailed to the inside of the door and on it was written, “For the police”. The policeman opened it, and inside someone had scribbled the address of the dacha in pencil. The policeman took Citizen Skorokhod by the arm and led him downstairs to telephone, because the telephone wire had been ripped out, and ten minutes later both of them were in another police car with another three policemen and on their way to the dacha. Skorokhod was sweating and did not say a word. They reached the dacha and everything appeared in good order. The owner of the house rummaged around in his pocket for his keys and then opened the door. There was a large wooden bowl on the table and it was full of gold coins, Alexander II ten-rouble pieces and sovereigns. And then there was the suitcase which was full of banknotes in carefully arranged bundles: the roubles on one side and the dollars on the other. In a corner there was a sealed envelope also with that same address, “For the police”. Inside there were documents that proved Citizen Skorokhod’s involvement in the illicit trade in tinned fish between Riga and Hamburg, a sketch of the house with instructions on where to find where all the riches had been hidden, and a letter explaining how Citizen Skorokhod and his friends caused anyone who did not cover for their activities to lose their jobs and their health, and how the police had always failed to listen to their complaints. And so a group of honest workers had decided to take the law into their own hands and then they signed themselves, “The band of Robin Hood”.

  “But who were they?” asked Asya.

  “No idea!” Nazar replied. “Actually we never really looked for them. They are tearing their hair out at the Izmaylovo police station: the crime statistics for the district went up last year, and now they absolutely must come down. We told them to do what they could…”

  Besides, Nazar thought to himself, did they really need to find and imprison these avengers? Who can tell? It is certainly not a simple matter if you examine it from an ethical point of view. When it comes down to it, you are usurping not only the power to put people in prison or send them to the gallows, in accordance with the law, but also the power not to apply that damned law, when it suits you. But then why not? Isn’t that all the judge’s craft amounts to?

  Yes, but what about consistency? Oh, who cares a fuck about consistency? One of the things I’ve discovered in life, Nazar reflected, is that consistency is not necessarily a virtue. Take, for example, the case of the brothel in Kuntsevo! One day they rang the Chief Prosecutor’s Office to inf
orm him that they had a young woman who was drunk and with whom it might be worth having a little chat.

  Clearly there was some trainee there who had nothing to do with any of the other police officers in the district: instead of locking her up for the night so that the effects of the alcohol could pass before she was sent off home, he had somehow got wind of something rather interesting behind her rambling and apparently mindless story. Lappa went to the Kuntsevo police station and found the girl drunk, of course, but above all terrified: they had stopped her for speeding, but the car wasn’t hers and she had insisted that everything was in order – and Novosadov had sent her to take a customer home. Lappa waited for her to become a little less inebriated and then asked her who this Novosadov was. She then became even more terrified and didn’t want to say a thing, but she soon understood that it wasn’t in her interests to pursue this line. She spilled the beans – every last one – and swore that she was nothing to do with it and that it was the first time. The next day, the police broke into the flat on the second floor of a dilapidated building in Myasnichesky Lane: there they found two men from Central Asia who were having a good time with Muscovite women, and then in the kitchen there were the landlady and her friend. Every one of them ended up in Lappa’s office. It turned out that the woman, Ogurtseva, did not work, but she came to the judge’s office in a fur coat, and at home there were rings, wedding rings, gold chains. Her friend, Novosadov, was officially a guard at a building site, and that morning he had gone to report the theft of the car, as though there was nothing strange – convinced as he was that no one would ask him how he had managed to buy it.

  The girls were the terrified ones, even though Lappa explained that there was no law against what they had been doing. Apart from the two arrested in the flat, four others had been uncovered – all working women: a painter and decorator, a cleaning lady and even a doctor of philosophy, who was the wife of a corresponding member of the Academy. And so we finally get to the question of consistency! If that affair had been dealt with by another prosecutor – for example Grekova Yevgeniya Vasilyevna – you can imagine what would have happened: the women would have been taken to the court in a police van, and would have been photographed from the front and the side. Then they would have had their fingerprints taken using that indelible ink you can’t wash off for a week. And the husbands, fathers and whoever else would have been left outside in the corridor, biting their nails. And then off home, and you know what a belting those women would get. But it wouldn’t end there: they would have convened the employers and party officials. Come on, comrades, what kind of supervision is this? Look at what’s been going on under your noses! In fact, this is exactly how things stand: the law is imperfect and full of holes, and everyone can escape through those holes, but SOCIALIST LEGALITY is something quite different, and you don’t escape so easily from that. Those two will end up in a labour camp, but you too, my beauties – how you will weep! But as fortune would have it, Judge Lappa has no use for consistency of this kind. Instead of sending off the police to pick them up, he had telephoned them at work and summoned them privately: why ruin their family life? They had come running immediately, ready to burst into tears. They were only doing it for the money, they explained; it was a means like any other for getting the wherewithal to buy nice clothes, and Ogurtseva was such a useful woman – she was the one who found the customers.