The Russian Affair

by Michael Wallner

  “Writers?” she asked, unable to believe her ears. “You want writers to set foot in this apartment?”

  “But that’s what I’ve been talking about all this time.” He put his hands on his hips. “Will you cook for us, Anna? Will you do that? I’ll pay for everything.”

  “With what?”

  “With this, my dear child.” All at once, he was holding a piece of crumpled paper on which there were some handwritten figures.

  “They’ve paid you something?”

  “For the first time in nine years.” He nodded without emotion. “A princely advance. I don’t know anyone they’ve ever paid so well.”

  “Since when do you have this?” Anna held the check under the lamp.

  “Two days now. I wanted to wait for the best opportunity to surprise you with it. Do you think your beautiful friend will accept my invitation?”

  “Rosa?” Anna frowned. “If she knows that a bunch of banned writers will be gathering here, I think she’ll be only too happy to come.”

  “Really?” He grinned without understanding what Anna was alluding to. “So the only question remaining is what you’ll prepare for our guests.”

  “No.” She picked up her scarf again. “The only question is whether you’re going to fetch Petya home for dinner, or whether I’ll have to do it.”

  “Petya, yes, right, he must be frozen stiff!” The old man jammed his cap onto his head, put on his coat, and headed for the door. “Ah, Anna, I’m so glad, this is really a brilliant idea. We’ll put some life in this musty old place!” As he was about to go out, he turned around again and said,

  Come see us tomorrow, uplift and gladden us!

  Today’s rain refreshed us, and the forecast is glorious.

  And should we want stormy weather,

  We’ll make some together!

  And with that, he ran out of the apartment.

  EIGHTEEN

  Over the following days, Anna tried in vain to get in touch with Alexey. Only after a week had passed did he contact her and suggest a meeting. It was the first time she’d ever been obliged to turn him down; the date he proposed was the very evening on which Viktor Ipalyevich planned to throw his party.

  Anna’s father used the occasion as an excuse to resume his distilling operations. Turning a deaf ear to all her warnings, he took to leaving home early in the morning, scouring the city for the cheapest potatoes, and returning laden with twenty-pound bags. Then he’d peel and chop the tubers and place them in the boiling apparatus. The resulting mash would go through several distillations, at the end of which a stream of clear liquid flowed into Viktor Ipalyevich’s funnel. The smell of liquor wafted through the apartment and the stairwell and even drifted into the inner courtyard. Anna searched the faces of her fellow residents in the building, trying to discern whether they found her father’s illegal distillery a nuisance and were likely to denounce him to the authorities. But when even Secretary Metsentsev, who was picking up his laundry from Avdotya, ascended to the fourth floor to taste the Four-Star Tsazukhin, Anna abandoned her protest and let her father have his way.

  “Now, that’s what I call booze!” he called out as he emerged from the kitchen. “This batch gets five stars!”

  During the same period of time, in addition to distilling, Viktor Ipalyevich had submitted the repeatedly revised manuscript of his poems to the publisher and was awaiting the first proofs. He confidently hoped to have them in hand by the day of the party, so that he could offer his colleagues evidence in black and white of his return to the literary scene.

  Viktor Ipalyevich had expressed no particular wishes concerning the provision of food and drink for the occasion; he’d simply pressed a high-denomination ruble note into Anna’s hand. She spent three days devising and refining a menu, but in the end, she rejected the whole thing and opted for a mixed buffet. She set out with a long shopping list, and to her surprise, she needed only two days to acquire every item on it. After that, the distillery was thrust into a corner and all work surfaces cleared for the preparation of the tomato aspic, the herring zakuski, and Anna’s baked potato dumplings. When Viktor Ipalyevich saw the refined little morsels that resulted from his daughter’s labors, he cautiously asked her to consider that a crowd of Russian writers resembled a swarm of hungry grasshoppers and suggested that she prepare something more substantial for their guests. Accordingly, Anna steamed leeks and yellow beets in salted water for an entire day, pressed them through a sieve, thickened the purée with a roux, and, aided by Petya, seasoned the whole concoction. Meanwhile, she pressured Avdotya in vain to produce the new curtain; the seamstress hunkered down behind allusions to commissions for high-ranking customers and postponed the time of delivery. The party would have to take place with the sleeping alcove exposed to view.

  A few minutes before the arrival of the first guests, as Anna was putting on her green dress, she realized that she usually wore it only when she went to meet Alexey. The thought of spending an evening with him briefly awakened her longing, but joy soon returned, because Viktor Ipalyevich, at least for one night, was forswearing his reclusive habits, and the two of them, father and daughter, were really and truly giving a party.

  “I slept with my censor,” said the writer Akhmadulina, the first guest to enter the apartment. Her male companion uttered a brief, ironic laugh, to which her response was, “If I thought it would change anything, I’d really do it.” She threw her scarf over a chair. “But when they’re going to put you to work for the Censorship Department, I presume they cut off your dick first.” She embraced Viktor Ipalyevich.

  “I have no doubt you’re right,” the poet said, laughing. He’d buttoned his Russian shirt all the way up; instead of his customary suspenders, a belt was holding up his trousers; and he’d trimmed his beard and his eyebrows.

  The younger Strupatsky brother arrived. “You made it all the way to the All Unions Ministry?” he asked Akhmadulina incredulously. “They rejected me even from the Cultural Committee of the Russian Republic.” With his chestnut brown hair, amber eyes, and long eyelashes, Strupatsky was an extremely handsome man. Wherever he went, he nourished the hope that Moscow writers could be not only interesting but also good-looking.

  Anna greeted Vadim Kozhevnikov, whom her father had designated as a materialistic, corrupt hack ever since his war novels and spy stories had made him a ruble millionaire. “Well, well, my friend, where have you parked your new car?” Viktor Ipalyevich asked mockingly, standing at the window and pretending to search the street.

  “Good evening, my dear Viktor. How lovely to see you after such a long time,” said the easygoing Kozhevnikov, ignoring his host’s jab. The two men sported the same style of beard, but Kozhevnikov was portly, and his little goatee capped a double chin.

  “Have you delivered another irrelevant, blood-soaked volume to the Glavlit?” Viktor Ipalyevich asked, needling his colleague even as he embraced him.

  “These days, no one but you has the nerve to propose dissident poems,” the bestselling author said, accepting a glass of Five-Star Tsazukhin. Chattering away, the two men retreated to the sleeping nook.

  After eight o’clock, the apartment filled up quickly. The toothless Vagrich brought news of the person who’d been named editor in chief of Novy Mir. Amid general disappointment, the writers speculated that the new editor would toe the Party line even more assiduously than his predecessors. One of the younger authors said, “The days of Aleksandr Tvardovsky are gone forever.”

  “True,” Akhmadulina agreed. “The magazine’s been worthless ever since Tvardovsky got the ax. They don’t dare attack anybody now, except the Chinese and the junta in Chile.”

  While Anna was rearranging some dishes, she identified the sensation she had—she felt like a stranger—and realized that she’d felt that way whenever her father had invited his literary colleagues into the Tsazukhin home. This time, too, was like being in the midst of a race of people who communicated in their own coded language. As for her, she ha
rdly spoke during the party, except to respond to requests for her recipes or to describe her ongoing battle against Petya’s allergies; she limited herself to providing fresh supplies of food and drink. This limitation didn’t spoil the party for her, but it helped her see even more clearly that the man with whom she lived under one roof, day in and day out, belonged to a rare species. Tonight, among people of his own kind, he blossomed.

  Rosa Khleb appeared, accompanied by a couple who were both actors. Anna had conveyed her father’s invitation to Rosa halfheartedly and had secretly hoped that her friend wouldn’t have time to attend the party, but there she was. Her companions were part of the Taganka Theater Company and had starring roles in Yuri Lyubimov’s currently acclaimed production of The Tempest. Even though Viktor Ipalyevich evinced a lively interest in the arrival of these two artists, he was particularly electrified by the coming of the Khleb. “We meet again, sooner than expected!” he cried over the others’ heads, pushed his way through the crowd, and kissed Rosa’s hand. She’d chosen to wear her sailor outfit, which gave her (as many of her clothes did) the air of an adolescent angel. Anna was amazed at how young Rosa could look when she set her mind to it.

  Word went round the gathering that a reporter for the Moscow Times had come to pay her respects to the poet, and soon the writers were crowding around Rosa. She’d read Strupatsky’s latest collection of short stories and asked him some critical questions. The author gave evasive answers that were supposed to be funny, but Rosa laid him low with a few sentences: “Your ambivalent attitude toward the present is reflected in your book, Comrade. When I read it, I wasn’t completely sure, because you’re such a skilled craftsman. Unfortunately, meeting you in person has confirmed the impression of emptiness I got from your texts.”

  Anna admired Rosa for giving Strupatsky her frank opinion and inwardly agreed with her. In the course of the evening, Anna had heard nothing but self-adulation and general wound licking from her father’s colleagues. They complained about the oppressive censorship, which made it impossible for them to write “the Truth.” The experimental philosopher Vagrich even let himself go so far as to say that his work should be judged not by what it contained but by what it did not contain.

  Returning from a brief stint in the kitchen, Anna found that a new energy had suddenly seized the company, with the result that the table and the sideboard had been shoved against the wall near the window and a half circle formed around the sofa. The guests in the front row were lounging on the floor; behind them sat those who’d managed to get a hold of chairs. Petya was perched atop the living-room cabinet, where someone had placed him. The actress assumed a feline attitude near the sofa, and her partner stood with his face to the wall and bowed his back. He was shaking, portraying a man racked by heavy sobs.

  “Now does my power gather to a head,” he recited through his tears. His partner replied, “You did say so when first you raised the tempest, sir. How fares the King and his followers?” Anna gathered from someone’s whispered remark that what she was hearing was Shakespeare. Without a struggle, the acting couple had let themselves be persuaded to present a sample of their art, and the scene, in their performance, was filled with pain and hopelessness. They dashed around the sofa, hauling and mauling each other, until the actor, in indescribable affliction, uttered the words “And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book,” and pitched forward onto the actress’s lap.

  During the vehement applause, and while the audience was breaking up and beginning to discuss Shakespeare, “their contemporary,” Anna noticed that her father was standing in a corner, looking gray and bitter. She couldn’t figure out why until she spotted the folded manuscript pages in his hand. The poet had suffered a crushing insult. No one had asked him to read from his recent work; instead, the actors had put on their own show, and in his very home. Anna would have liked to bring the guests’ discourtesy to their attention, but she didn’t intervene.

  The level of sound in the apartment rose. The radio was playing loudly, and Anna was glad that both the upstairs and downstairs neighbors were among the guests and thus prevented from complaining about their disturbed rest. The supply of Five-Star Tsazukhin was exhausted, and Anna brought out the store-bought vodka.

  “Has Alexey contacted you yet?” Rosa asked behind Anna’s back.

  Anna looked around cautiously to make sure that nobody was listening to them.

  “These stars of the poetical firmament orbit only around themselves,” Rosa said with a smile. “They don’t even notice us.”

  “So far, I haven’t been able to meet him.”

  “You should. Star-Eyes won’t like it if your brief evening with Lyushin has damaged your relationship with Alexey.”

  Anna nodded. “I’ll make it up to him.”

  “Lyushin was granted the funding he wanted,” Rosa went on. “When he left for Dubna, he was quite satisfied.”

  Anna was trying to fathom the meaning of this remark when she heard a familiar, drunken voice coming from someone in the crowd milling around the sideboard. “It’s been years since the last time I read a Soviet author! I find you all so tame and domesticated I prefer to immerse myself in the works of the nineteenth century!”

  It was Viktor Ipalyevich, getting even with his colleagues for not having asked to hear a sample of his poetry. “As I look around,” he cried, “I remember how much more revealing the compositions of our classical authors are than anything any of you dare to write.” He took a step toward the bookshelf. “All the Yevtushenkos, Voznesenskys, and Kozhevnikovs amount to but one thing: a dreary farewell to Russian literature!” With no less effect than the actors had produced, Viktor Ipalyevich flung out an arm and swept the topmost row of volumes from the shelf. They flew through the room, struck several persons, and landed with cracked spines at the writers’ feet. Anna expected expressions of dismay or protests, but she was wrong. As though at the end of a successful performance, the playwrights and poets, the essayists and novelists burst into unanimous applause, praised Viktor for his revolutionary gesture, and received him cordially into their midst again. More surprising than his fellows’ thick skins was Viktor Ipalyevich’s own reaction: His face beaming, he snatched the cap off his head—his sweaty hair stood up in all directions—and bowed around the room. “And now, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, compelling his listeners to fall silent. “I shall demonstrate to you what contemporary Soviet verse is!”

  He took out the crumpled pages and, without waiting for his guests to settle down, began at once: “On Good Fortune.” Approving whispers indicated that the subject was a welcome one.

  Why pull the wool over your eyes?

  I didn’t leave my union card at home;

  I threw it in the trash bin on the Petrovka.

  A calm set in, a sign that the guests weren’t at some ordinary party, but in the home of Viktor Ipalyevich Tsazukhin, the poet, who was still capable of snapping in all directions while others had long since grown toothless. He read without emotion and yet vibrantly; his verses enfolded his audience. He ended his poem on good luck with these lines:

  All things pass. Even our Star will go out.

  But human grief is as deep as eternity.

  No one ventured to say anything until Rosa asked, in a refreshingly matter-of-fact tone, “And you got that past the Glavlit? I admire your courage, Viktor Ipalyevich.”

  He couldn’t have received a finer compliment. The poet went down on one knee in front of Rosa and kissed the hem of her skirt. With some effort, and surrounded by laughter, he rose to his feet again. Kozhevnikov, profoundly moved, embraced him. “You are our most precious diamond,” the million-selling author said before blowing his nose.

  When two a.m. came and went and apparently no one had yet given any thought to leaving, Anna asked her neighbor if she could take Petya downstairs to her apartment and put him to bed. He protested, even though his eyelids were rapidly getting heavier, and he fell asleep on his mother’s shoulder while the
y were still on the stairs. She laid him on the neighbor’s sofa, covered him with a blanket, savored a few peaceful moments at his side, and went back upstairs.

  Things gradually started to break up, including the apartment furniture. A chair was reduced to its component parts; five guests lay unmoving in the sleeping alcove. In the kitchen, the pall of cigarette smoke was so heavy that people had to sit on the floor in order to breathe. Anna pondered what method she could use to initiate the process of departure and settled on tidying up. This plan faltered because of the impenetrable juxtaposition of legs, bottles, and food scraps. An hour later, a place was freed up on the sofa; she sat down and closed her eyes. Words and sounds reached her from farther and farther away. She prepared herself to remain in that position until daybreak.

  When she heard the steps on the stairs, she started awake immediately. Surely no partygoers could be arriving at this late hour; the fun would never end. She must prevent them from entering! With leaden limbs, she rose to her feet and saw her father lounging against the windowsill; one of his hands was caressing the back of Akhmadulina’s neck. Anna climbed over a group of guests who were spinning bottles and reached the apartment door. Someone really was coming up the stairs. She put on her most resolute face and slipped outside. The newcomer hadn’t turned on the lights and seemed familiar with the steps. He climbed up slowly, like someone carrying a heavy burden.

  At the next turning, his shock of hair appeared, as well as his brown overcoat. When he saw the woman standing one floor above him, he dropped his pack and charged up the last flight of stairs.

  “Anna, you’re still up!” Leonid said joyfully.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, she threw her arms around his neck.

  NINETEEN

  Leonid’s memory of his first night with Galina—it had been, in fact, a morning—remained fixed in his mind. He’d waited five hours for her in the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk hospital. During that time, several emergency cases had been admitted, and the friendly nurse had informed him repeatedly that Doctor Korff wouldn’t be free for a while yet; wouldn’t he prefer to come back another day? But Leonid had traveled to the capital city precisely in order to see the woman in question, Galina the severe, Galina with the scornful eyes. After midnight, when the ambulance sirens had finally fallen silent and the bustle in the hospital corridors gave way to an unreal calm, Leonid had stretched out on the row of three screwed-down chairs and fallen asleep.