Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

  They volunteered for things. At first the things were tiny, clapping when a monument was unveiled or handing out towels when students from fraternal Poland came to the university. A period of probation was normal. They expected as much: the Komsomol wouldneed time to sort out solid types from fly-by-nights. But reassuringly quickly, it seemed to be understood by those who made such matters their business that the two of them were indeed electing themselves (which was the only way it happened) into the ranks of the energetic and reliable, and then the activities they were called on for got more important; more interesting, even. Volodya was asked to join the university’s Komsomol delegation to the conference on youth and sport which the Moscow City Soviet was holding, and she, she found herself one August morning sitting in a bus drawn up on a side road by Sokolniki Park.

  It was a hot, overcast day with a sky of grey haze creased with brightness here and there. Pollen was blowing about.

  ‘Everyone dressed smartly, I see. Good,’ said a district official called Khristolyubov, whom it was hard not to stare at because he had lost one of his ears in the war, and moreover wore glasses, which he’d had to tie on behind his head with a cord. Still, presumably the war injury helped make up for the difficulty of running a Party career with a name that meant ‘Christ-lover’. She wondered why he hadn’t changed it. ‘We’ve divided you into twos –’ and he started to read a list from his clipboard. ‘Galina with Fyodor,’ he said eventually. She looked around, and saw that a few rows back a boy in a leather jacket was raising his eyebrows and a finger. Her heart sank slightly – he had the type of face which looks as if it is permanently kinked towards amusement even when it is at rest – but she nodded and gave him a comradely smile. ‘Now remember,’ Khristolyubov went on, ‘don’t miss any of the opportunities to put our point of view. Don’t be rude to the guides, but use all of the openings that we’ve discussed, and don’t forget to write in the visitors’ book on the way out. The Americans are asking for comments? Give them comments.’

  They got out, and scattered into the press of people waiting at the main gate of the exhibit, Fyodor-in-the-leather-jacket falling into step beside her.

  ‘Off we go to America,’ he said. She didn’t know how to reply.

  ‘Where are you at college?’ she asked politely.

  ‘No college,’ he said. ‘Factory. Electrical circuits.’

  With their allotted tickets they didn’t have to stand in line, and the next time the gate opened, in they went, up the avenue of poplars towards the golden dome where the tour began. American girls in polkadotted knee-length dresses led the way. They all had little round hats on, and white gloves, and identical black high-heeled shoes: it was a uniform. She smoothed at the white cotton dress she had chosen. It was simple, but she had added a green leather belt bought at the flea market and a green purse, nearly matching, which her mother had found in a department store. Simple was all right, if you had black hair and grey eyes. You needed plain colours and not too much fuss. Fyodor caught the gesture and glanced down. She frowned. The American girls’ faces were ordinarily mixed between pretty and less pretty, except that all of them seemed to be flushed with the same pink good health, and, studying them more carefully, some of them turned out to be much older than she had first imagined. Some might be as old as thirty, yet these ones were as thin as the twenty-year-olds. Thinness seemed to be a kind of uniform too. They spoke good Russian, but you would have been able to tell they weren’t Russian girls even without the clothes or the narrow waists, because they smiled all the time, so much it must make their faces ache, she thought.

  As they got closer, she could see that the big curve of the dome was actually made of thousands of straight struts, arranged in a complicated pattern of triangles. It didn’t look like a building at all; it seemed hard but flimsy, like the hollow shell of a marine animal that you might find on a beach, sucked thin by tides. Everybody looked up as they stepped in through the door of the dome, and murmured with surprise. Inside, the dome was all one huge room, with no ceiling, just the same crisply flimsy skin, which you could see from here was organised into six-pointed stars or flowers, repeating over and over. Now the result seemed halfway between an organism and a mechanism. It puzzled her a bit that the Americans would pick such a thing as the centrepiece of their exhibition. It was certainly impressive, in its way, but you could tell that it sat lightly on the earth, and would soon be gone. It looked strangely casual.

  ‘Mm-hmm,’ said Fyodor.

  ‘… designed by a famous American architect, Buckminster Fuller,’ one of the girls was saying. Right across the big floor of the dome, the same speech was being made to close-packed circles of listeners as more and more people poured in. White-gloved hands pointed to exhibits around the base of the walls, and to the cluster of seven giant white screens overhead, which filled most of the span of the golden wall in front of them. She tried to see the computer they had been told about with the answers to four thousand supposedly comprehensive questions about the United States. The suggested tactic there was a loud, increasingly indignant search for a question about unemployment. There, that was probably it, the panel of black glass glowing with columns of white text – but the lights in the dome had started to dim, and the crowd of Muscovites in their summer clothes were falling silent, and gazing upward at the screens.

  On all seven screens, the night sky bloomed. It took a minute to realise that the constellations varied from screen to screen: instead of showing the same image seven times, as she had expected, the screens were showing seven different images. Quiet orchestral music started to flow from loudspeakers, music with the easy swoosh of a film score, yet what followed were not moving pictures but still frames that only moved by changing, all in time together sometimes but also in unpredictable independent rhythms as pairs, as threes, as fours. The stars faded out. Other lights faded in: aerial shots of big cities by night, twinkling. Then came seven dawns, and a burst on all seven screens of landscapes, empty early-morning landscapes with no people in them. Mountains, deserts, wooded hills, plains covered in crops. The photographs had a glassy, exact distinctness. Everything in them had sharp edges, and the colours were soaked with richness, so that lakes reflected the sky as a deep turquoise and all the browns of the land verged on red, a particular almost edible red pitched somewhere between the shades of chocolate and of blood. The pace slowed again. One farmhouse appeared, prosperous in the new morning light; then many; then screen after screen of houses, and streets from the air, flick flick flick, photographed from just far enough up so you could see the patterns of the streets repeating over and over, in grids and curves and spirals like snails’ shells. Doorsteps, and painted front doors in a rainbow of colours as shiny as lacquer. Doorsteps with bottles of milk, doorsteps with newspapers left on them. The doors flew open! Out came men in hats, men in overalls, men kissing their wives, men wiping their mouths and handing their wives coffee-cups, and children, children holding boxes like miniature suitcases. The little boys had short haircuts, like soldiers, or convicts. The children went off to school in square yellow buosperous i the men went to work, in a pelt of images of trains and cars. Some of these, suddenly, did move; all of a sudden, seven shining cars stretched out long and low were speeding on highways reduced by speed to blurs of that same rich red-brown. Still you couldn’t watch them the way you’d watch a film in the cinema. You had to look around the seven screens, not at any one of them, and more was always going on than you could quite grasp, more was always going in at the corners of your eyes. More roads, more bridges, more tunnels. More highway intersections seen from the sky, gigantic, twisted like concrete knots and dotted with mad numbers of vehicles. One would have been a marvel: this many were a bombardment. More more more.

  The American day proceeded. The men worked, in offices and factories. The children studied. The women, apart from the ones who were teaching the children in the schools, stayed at home, polishing and vacuuming huge rooms as uncluttered as stage sets. The
camera lovingly kissed every surface. It was as enthusiastic over the grey metal of a filing cabinet as it was over faces. Everything shone, as if it had been new-minted that moment. She kept expecting that the screens would soon show technical or artistic achievements the Americans were specially proud of, and there were some industrial pieces of footage which made the audience in the dome stir, and squint to get a better view, but they were very short. She had never really had to think about the Americans before. They were the villains in the story. She would have supposed that they would seize this chance to tell a rival story, a counter-story, in which they were the heroes. Instead they seemed to have come with no story; no story beyond this untiring, universal brightness, this glow spreading from every object. Now evening had come, and families sat down to eat in front of plastic curtains printed with merry cartoon animals. Children joked and fathers sawed at roasted beef, luminously red-brown, red-brown, red-brown. She felt …taunted. She reached in her mind for the familiar comfort of her future, but the picture of the trim, comfortable life she had planned with Volodya, always so near and easy to lay hands on till now, didn’t seem to be where she had left it. It had been displaced somehow by the picture show. She hunted quickly through her memory, expecting to find it shoved to one side by the press of this American stuff, yet still intact, still as tightly filled out as ever with reassurance. She hunted and hunted, but there it wasn’t. She couldn’t find it, couldn’t frame it in her head as a solid thing. It had gone, as if the scouring wind of images had blown upon it, and it had abraded away. But she needed it. As she went on searching, a sensation she didn’t recognise began to take hold of her. A kind of bubble was rising in her chest, rising and growing and wanting to break out. If it did she would shake or shout out, she could tell.

  On the seven screens, the day ended seven ways, in tranquil black and white. Lovers embraced, a little girl kissed her sleeping father, a baby settled to stillness in a crib, a couple reached to switch off matching lamps screwed to the headboard of their bed. The screens all went dark. Then the one in the centre faded up again with one last, long image, of blue flowers in a jug. The crowd in the dome murmured the name of the flowers as people identified them. ‘Forget-me-nots …’

  ‘Hey. Hey. Hey.’

  Fyodor was shaking her shoulder, and she was still staring up at the screens with her mouth open. There was work to do: already the crowd was being gathered up for the rest of the tour by new guides fanning out through the dome, men this time. She swallowed hard, and pushed the bubble of panic back down towards the place it came from. She would not permit it. She was a sensible person.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ said their new guide, making a gesture with both arms which expertly claimed for his own a group of fifteen people or so. ‘Welcome once again to the American National Exhibition, would you like to follow me. My name is Roger Taylor, and I’m a student of the Russian language at Howard University in Virginia, just outside Washington, DC. Please, if I make any mistakes speaking your beautiful language, you should just sing out straight away and tell me. I’m sure I have an accent. Now, the theme of our exhibition here is the American Way of Life …’

  She was trying urgently to catch Fyodor’s eye, but he had already turned and was trailing out of the dome with the rest of the group, leaving her to digest by herself the fact that Roger Taylor, unexpectedly, was a Negro. The hand he was holding above his head like a sail or a shark’s fin was – not black, she thought, more a kind of golden caramel. The debating points they had been given had not been devised with him in mind. Though the Komsomol, she thought angrily, had been sending activists into the exhibition for nearly two months now; they must have known that some of the guides were Negroes; they might have said. She hurried to catch up.

  The group were walking across the turf towards the main pavilion, a long curved arc of a building so thoroughly constructed of glass that you could see right into it, to where many flights of metal steps went up and down between blocks of colour apparently floating in mid-air.

  ‘… a fully-featured beauty salon,’ Roger Taylor was saying, ‘where you ladies are welcome to try out one of the facial treatments invented by Madame Helena Rubinstein, and to hear about the cosmetics which are in fashion in the USA right now. And we have a complete colour-TV studio, and a demonstration of packaged and convenience foods, and also –’

  ‘Is this,’ she interrupted, and was amazed at how harsh and loud her voice sounded. ‘Is this the national exhibition of a powerful and important country, or is it the branch of a department store?’

  Roger Taylor looked at her unsurprised, as if to say: ah-ha, so you’re my designated opponent this time round, are you? And where’s your friend? The rest of the group registered her presence too. She could feel it, a faint intensifying of reserve in the presence of authority, or in the presence of somebody connected to authority, however long the string. She had done it herself, this slight withdrawal with no actual movement, but never been on the receiving end.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I certainly hope you won’t be disappointed, once you’ve had a chance to see some of the exhibits. But as I was saying before, the theme is the life people are leading in America today, so the exhibits are chosen to give you information about how ordinary Americans spend their time; how we work, how we dress, what we do for entertainment. The things you’ll see today are chosen because they’re typical, not because they’re exceptional. Take this display for example –’

  By now they had entered the pavilion and climbed up one of the flights of steps. The blocks of colour turned out to be panels of fine, translucent plastic fitted into a framework of thin rods to make cubic display cabinets. In them were gleaming aluminium saucepans and little stacks of plastic utensils. There were blue plastic bowls big enough to hold three or four broken eggs, there were little ivory plates ridged up and down and left to right as if the plastic surface had swallortp a piece of chequered fabric, there were beakers standing in groups. The beakers had handles just big enough for a child’s fingers, and smooth rims. In the flush of colour from the panels, they shone with their own colours as if they were lit from within. Spotlights were aimed up through them from below, and made the little plastic beakers into goblets of cheap emerald, cheap ruby, cheap sapphire. Everything about them said ease. She had seen Fabergé eggs in an art gallery, and they implied a world when you looked at them, a tiny world of tsars and tsarinas, a jewelled world in which jewels were at home. These implied a world too: a world which had been rid of friction, because its surfaces were easy to wipe, its draining-boards didn’t crack and buckle, its paintwork didn’t bubble with mineral salts. Roger Taylor’s tour group stood on the metal landing and gazed into the cubbyholes of light floating before them. The beakers were out of reach, and this was good, because she wanted to put out a fingertip and stroke them.

  ‘All of these pieces of cookware that you see here are well within the budget of the average American family,’ he continued. ‘This was a guiding principle of the exhibition. You don’t have to be rich to buy any of these.’

  ‘Nothing for millionaires, then?’ asked an elderly worker. ‘No diamond-studded toilet seats or gold plates?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Roger Taylor.

  The old man gave a comical sigh of disappointment.

  ‘What is this one for?’ asked a woman in her forties.

  ‘It’s a salad spinner,’ he said. ‘You put your lettuce leaves in here after you’ve washed them, and wind the little handle, and the water flies off. But you should really ask my mother. I’m not a good cook.’

  The group laughed. They liked him.

  ‘Through here we have our supermarket,’ he said, leading them to a balcony from which they could see a hall full of Russians pressing up against a counter manned by more of the guides. ‘As you can see, it’s quite crowded, so let’s wait a moment before we go down.’

  ‘Are the goods really for sale?’ said a man in a check shirt with a face from the Far East, Ch
ukchi or Mongolian or something like that.

  ‘Unfortunately not,’ said Roger Taylor. ‘I’m afraid all we can do is show them to you. But I can promise you a free cup of Pepsi once we’re done in here. (It’s a kind of soft drink, ma’am.) In the meantime, why don’t we have a look at this chart. As you can see, the average wage for an industrial worker in the USA is round about a hundred dollars a week – which comes to, say, a thousand roubles at the tourist exchange rate. What can you buy for that? Well, you could get yourself two men’s suits. Or seventy-six of those saucepans we just saw. Or 417 packs of cigarettes. Or –’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Fyodor. ‘Excuse me for interrupting, but how much of this hundred dollars does this “average worker” get to keep? Isn’t it the case that he must pay nearly thirty dollars of it in taxes? I mention this because in the Soviet Union, as a matter of fact, we hardly pay taxes at all. And then what about rent? What about transportation? What about healthcare, which of course is not free in the United States? How much would you say is really left over for buying suits or saucepans?’

  He said all his smiling, and he spoke quickly, rattling off his sentences. The group, which had murmured sympathetically at the mention of the American taxes, all turned their heads to see what Roger Taylor would say, with the spectatorial interest of a crowd at a soccer match who’ve just seen the ball kicked deep into the other side’s half of the pitch.

  The guide gave an acknowledging nod to Fyodor. He was smiling too. ‘I suspect you can tell me,’ he said. ‘I suspect you’re thinking of the figures published in this April’s issue of the Congressional Record, am I right?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I am. According to this newspaper – which is an official newspaper of the US government, I think – the “average” American worker can only afford to spend about $7.50 of his wages on clothing. You can’t buy a suit for that, can you?’