Red Plenty

by Francis Spufford

  ‘Here you are then,’ he said, pulling over at the base of the stone steps up to the main doors of the railroad station. ‘Need a hand?’

  ‘No thank you,’ said Chekuskin determinedly, though he winced as he negotiated the drop to the ground. He had stiffened up: a sore tightness ran from his knees to his neck. Citizens heading homeward poured past him. He took the steps one at a time. The snow was falling just as fast, but it seemed a tamer creature here. By the time he levered himself to the top, it was 6.15. Ryszard might still be there, or he might not. He almost hoped he wasn’t. The bar was off the ticket hall, an aquarium of smoke behind a glass door. No one paid him any attention as he limped at half-speed through the crowd, but the reflection he saw swimming up in the glass, shoulder-height to all the other men, seemed horribly memorable. The librarian had been out on a bender. He looked like a depraved old midget. His hair was wild, his face was blotchy, his neck was bruise-purple, his suit was wrenched and split at the shoulder, showing the lining. He would have turned away but there, indeed, was Ryszard, sitting at the bar with his back to the door, shoulders miserably rounded, pulling with one hand at the black spikes of hair on his scalp.

  Chekuskin limped in, parting blue eddies, and tapped the Pole on the arm.

  ‘There you are,’ said Ryszard. ‘I was just – good grief, man, what’s happened to you?’

  Chekuskin considered the task of ascending a bar stool and rejected it.

  ‘Could we move to a booth, do you think?’ he said. ‘I really need to sit on something with a back.’ He passed a banknote to the barman, also gazing at him agog, and led the way to an empty alcove with padded banquettes.

  ‘Oof,’ he said, settling himself. ‘That’s better. Mugged. I was mugged. About an hour ago. Couple of stilyagi. Really stomped me, the little bastards. Knocked the breath right out of me.’

  ‘Dear oh dear oh dear. How awful,’ said Ryszard sympathetically, but with a certain gloomy relish. He had brought his beer over; not his first, by the look of it. ‘Did they get much?’

  ‘Cigarette case. Bit of cash.’

  ‘Ouch. You should get yourself home, you know – put your feet up.’

  ‘I will, but I think I deserve a drink first, if you know what I mean. You’ll join me?’

  Ryszard waved his beer.

  ‘I meant a real drink. Ah, here we go.’

  Ryszard’s eyes widened. The station bar had no finesse. It slopped booze into travellers who needed help to endure the evening at home ahead of tm. Every tabletop was encrusted with olympiads of rings. But now through the yeasty murk a vision was gliding, a waiter ceremoniously holding out a sparkling-clean tray with a new bottle of Stolichnaya on it, in ice; and clean glasses, and tempting little saucers of gherkin, and ham, and red caviar, and pancake, and pickled mushroom.

  ‘I didn’t think they did zakuski here,’ said Ryszard.

  ‘They don’t,’ said Chekuskin. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers. All right, I’ll just stay for a couple, but then I better move. I’m expected.’

  ‘Of course. Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers. Mm, that’s the stuff.’

  It was making Chekuskin feel better too. This loosening of the grimy little knots tied in him by fear was the next best thing to bed. His policy was always to make clients feel he was matching them drink for drink, convivially, while truly consuming a fraction as much, but this time he tore into the bottle on his account, recklessly, only ensuring that he put a healthy spoonful of food into him for each slug. Ryszard was dabbing his empty little glass back across the table towards the bottle for more, with a flirtatious touch of one index finger on it, then the other, like a schoolboy dribbling a sugar-cube for a soccer ball, or Charlie Chaplin making his supper dance. He gave Chekuskin a smile that was already slightly muzzy. He had been good-looking not long ago; perhaps was still found so by his wife, judging by the rate at which they seemed to be reproducing; but the skin round his eyes was moist all the time now, like damp white suede, and he blinked a lot. Chekuskin poured him another one.

  ‘How’s the family?’ he asked, judging that the moment was passed when this would trigger thoughts of departure. It didn’t; it triggered storytelling, a morosely jokey account of life in wintertime in a two-bedroom flat with four children under seven and his mother-in-law, diapers constantly drying, the ammoniac tang of infant urine constantly in the air, green trails of snot constantly hanging from four noses.

  ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘I love ’em, but I leave in the morning, and it’s like a weight being lifted off, I swear I get taller just going down the stairs to the street door.’

  Chekuskin nodded sympathetically, but he didn’t say anything. Too risky, to stake out a position on someone else’s private life, when the tide of a drinker’s confidences might turn at any minute and flow back the other way, leaving you as the guy who criticised his nearest and dearest. A friend might do it. A friend, maybe, would speak up with an opinion here, or maybe take Ryszard by the ear and bundle him downstairs to his suburban train. But the lieutenant had been right about one thing. These careful connections weren’t friendships, quite, but imitations of them running in parallel to the real thing, always with an end in view, always lacking the commitment required to piss someone off and not care about it. The vodka couldn’t make Chekuskin as reckless as that. He poured himself another, and it burned.

  ‘About the Solkemfib order,’ he said, and hoped Stolichnaya would do most of the persuading. He seemed to have misplaced his own subtlety somewhat. ‘You promised to fill me in.’

  ‘I did?’ Ryszard’s hand was in his hair again, tugging. ‘God, must we? It’s been a long day.’

  Hasn’t it just, thought Chekuskin. But he coaxed together a firm smile – a firm, definite, adult smile, since Ryszard seemed to want to play at boyish sulks.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Give.’

  ‘I dunno,’ said Ryszard. ‘I dunno if there’s any point. You are a magician, I concede that freely’ – patting the empty space above the neck of the bottle – ‘but this is beyond your powers. It’s out of reach. And it’s confidential.’

  ‘Everything’s confidential,’ said Chekuskin sharply. ‘That never stopped you before. I’ll tell you what, we’ll do this the other way around. I’ll tell you what the problem is, and you confirm it or deny it, all right? Production problem.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Supply problem.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Political problem.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Personality problem?’

  ‘No – and you’re not going to guess it this way, I assure you. This is … a fuck-up from off the map. From out of nowhere. A new and unique style of fuck-up.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘You can’t fix it, Chekuskin. What’s the point in telling you about it, if you can’t fix it?’

  ‘Where’s the harm in telling me about it, if I can’t fix it?’

  ‘Oh, give me a break. All the harm in the fucking world. Do you know how public this is? Your precious clients break their machine – the only plant in the whole Union that has managed to do that, by the way – and suddenly, the whole world is watching. The fucking curtain has been lifted, don’t you get that? None of your ingenious little arrangements under cover of darkness will fly, even if you could find the money.’

  Chekuskin sat very still.

  ‘The money,’ he repeated.

  Ryszard wrapped his arms despairingly round his head. ‘Oh God,’ he said, from within the ball of wrists and hair, ‘I should have gone home. Give me another drink.’

  Chekuskin poured. The bottle was nearly empty.

  ‘The money,’ he said again, baffled. ‘This is a budget problem? Nobody cares about those.’

  ‘They do this time. They do this time. Because thanks to the special soddding circumstances, and the last-minute increase in the quota, Gosplan is trying to help us out with a budget increase. Which we have to justify by hitting the money ta
rgets this year as well as the physical ones. It’s not enough to just turn out eighteen machines; we’ve got to meet the sales target too. And so, although your clients want the upgrade, and believe me, we would like to give them the upgrade, because it is in fact easier to manufacture, we cannot give them the upgrade, because there is a little itty-bitty price difference between the upgrade and the original.’

  Price difference. Chekuskin could not think of an occasion in thirty years where this kind of thing had been an issue. He struggled to apply his mind through the analgesic fug.

  ‘All right, the upgrade costs more,’ he said. Where’s the problem? It’s not as if my guys are going to pay for it themselves. It all comes out of the sovnarkhoz capital account anyway.’

  ‘Ah, ah, ah. But it doesn’t cost more. That’s the delightful essence of the problem; that’s what you’re not going to be able to solve. It costs less. It costs 112,000 roubles less. Every one that leaves the factory would rip a great big gaping fucking hole in the sales target, which this year, courtesy of your guys, we’re going to have to care about. Gosplan is pressing its collective nose up against our workshop windows trying to see what’s going on.’

  ‘I still don’t get it,’ said Chekuskin. ‘Why should the upgrade cost less?’

  ‘We didn’t get it either,’ said Ryszard. ‘We asked for clarification. We said, why is our lovely new machine worth less than our old one? And do you know what they said, the sovnarkhoz? No? They pointed out that the new one weighs less. They said, and I’m quoting, “Pricing of equipment in the chemical industry is calculated chiefly by weight.”

  ‘And no,’ went on Ryszard, ‘I am not joking. I am in dismal earnest. So, you see, unless you can devise a way to compensate us invisibly, in plain sight, with the whole world watching, your clients will be receiving back the good old original PNSh-180-14S which they were so careless with in the first place.’

  *

  Ryszard went home. Chekuskin made to get up too, after a decent pause, but something dreadful had happened to his body while he sat. Under cover of the vodka, his aches had set like cement. He had stiffened in place, from his neck right down to the dangling soles of his shoes. His legs wouldn’t move properly at all. He had to get the barman and the waiter to lift him from the booth and chair him down the outer stairs to a taxi. They let him know by their resentful eyes what a bum he looked, and how very much this service was not included in his present deal with them. All the way down the steps in the snow, limp arms draped round their necks, he felt his debts mount.

  Nor was the widow glad to see him, when the taxi-driver dumped him at her threshold. It was understood between them that he would frequently need to return with a drink or two in him, but showing up incapable was a different story. She gave him a minimal arm to shuffle to the bathroom, past the guardian photos of her husband. No friendly blancmange-pink flesh to cuddle up to tonight. In the mirror, the halves of his shirt split centimetre by fumbling centimetre to reveal a dingy rainbow of bruise. He lay down in the dark and his head spun. Round and round the bed tilted, round and round reeled images of the day, a windmill whirl of them: Kolya’s illustrations, Mr Gersh and his pickled herrings, vomit on the snow, the paso doble, the lieutenant, the lieutenant, the lieutenant.

  Chekuskin dreamed. He was in a factory, sidling up the walkspace beside some immense machine. But when he put his hand on it to steady himself, instead of cold metal the surface he felt was leathery and warm. Little tremors ran through it, but not mechanical ones. The machine, he saw, was vilely alive. Beneath a membrane of purplish black, fluids were pulsing thickly from chamber to chamber. He stepped back, but his hand would not come free. It had stuck to the machine, and now, he realised, there was no real palm to his hand any more. He could no more pull away than he could pull his arm off. His arm, his whole body, were outgrowths of the machine, just a siphon in a man’s shape through which the same fluids sluggishly circulated. Then the walls were gone, but the machine remained. It stretched away into snowy darkness. Somehow, because he was part of it, he could feel its vastness. At its edges it was tirelessly eating whatever remained in the world that was not yet it, and it consumed its own wastes too. It was warm and poisonous, and it grew, and grew, and grew.

  *

  But in the morning he felt much better. The dream washed off him in a hot shower, the widow smiled at him forgivingly. Over coffee an inkling came to him of a solution to the Solkemfib problem, a first mental draft of a complex scheme of favours, arranged in a braided circle. By 8.30, he was waiting at the main entrance of Uralmash, his spare briefcase loaded with one or two carefully chosen items. Uralmash! A treasury of possibilities! The snow had stopped, and the world was as white as meringue, beneath a sky of eggshell blue. The gate swung open – ‘Morning, Yuri,’ he cried to the guard, ‘how’s your mother?’ – and through he danced on his neat little feet.

  Notes – IV.3 Favours, 1964

  1 Over the ridge where the floor heaved up they danced: I have no knowledge of any bulge in the dancefloor of the Sverdlovsk Palace of Culture. But the Novosibirsk Palace of Culture has one.

  2 A real Spaniard marooned here, in a crude cold steel town: and there were real Spaniards scattered around the Soviet Union, in just Senora Lopez’s position.

  3 It was his business to do so, he made his living snapping up these trifles: Chekuskin’s methods of operation in this chapter are elaborated from Joseph Berliner’s description of the work of the tolkach or ‘pusher’ in Factory and Manager in the USSR, with his capacity for instant friendship, and his memory for birthdays and children’s names, and his plausible entrée to every office in town. (The stereotypical traits of the successful salesman, in fact, here inverted for a situation in which buying rather than selling is the art that requires persuasion.) Berliner drew his information from post-war interviews with Displaced Persons, so the tolkach as he describes him is a creature of the 1930s: but the institutions of the Soviet economy that made the tolkach necessary remained essentially unchanged all the way from the Stalinist industrialisation to the fall of the state in 1991, and there were indignant newspaper reports and anti-tolkach cleanup campaigns every few years throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which suggests a basic continuity. Given Chekuskin’s continual use of individual favour-trading to oil the wheels of his industrial negotiations, another important source was Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours. I’ve made Chekuskin extremely blatnoi, rich in connections, but he isn’t quite a blatmeister, a maestro of individual deal-making about flats and schools and telephones and doctors and Black Sea holidays, because – to use Ledeneva’s elegant analysis of the psychology of blat – a blatmeister co-ordinated the mutual backscratching of many overlapping circles of friends, and could only thrive if perceived as a real friend, whereas Chekuskin is fundamentally a commercial figure, who leans across the boundary into the world of blat, just as he also does into the world of thods of olack market. Ledeneva is invaluable on the distinctions of feeling involved, the crucial one of which is the extent to which, in each of these three adjacent worlds of illicit behaviour, the actors let themselves see clearly what they were doing. Blat transactions were thoroughly mystified; they were conceptualised as part of the warmth of friendship, and could never be explicitly paid for by a return favour, though anyone who didn’t tend his or her end of a blat relationship would soon find the supply of friendly help drying up. The tolkach business knew it was a business; but it was one in which, as Chekuskin says below, Everything is Personal. The money was there, the price of a transaction had to be paid, but the object was to find non-money reasons for the transaction to take place. And at the other end of the scale, the black market was a market, of a rudimentary kind, where goods (for instance, stolen petrol) were sold to relative strangers in order to obtain cash. It was the limited utility of cash that limited the size of the black market.

  4 A flying saucer swoops down over the earth and grabs a Russian, a German and a Frenchman: authentic joke, in the
subgenre of comfortable self-insults to the Russian character, from Graham, ‘A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot ’. The aliens give all three abductees a pair of shining steel spheres and lock them in tiny compartments aboard the spaceship. They’ll release the one who can think of the most amazing thing to do with the spheres, they say. The German juggles with his spheres: not bad. But the Frenchman juggles with them while standing on his head and singing a beautiful love song. Surely he must be the winner – ‘but we’ll just check what the Russian can do,’ say the aliens. In a moment, they’re back. ‘Sorry, but the Russian wins.’ ‘In God’s name, how?’ says the Frenchman. ‘What else could he possibly have come up with?’ ‘Well,’ say the aliens in awe, ‘he broke one, and lost the other …’

  5 Over the intersection to the big portico of the Central Hotel: Sverdlovsk here has a generic Soviet geography, not the actual geographical detail of the actual city (now Ekaterinburg again).

  6 Feeling a certain wavering in his legs, as if they were anticipating a sudden need to flee: because Chekuskin’s activities are technically, of course, all illegal under Article 153 of the Soviet Criminal Code, prohibiting commercial middlemen.

  7 A gentleman named Gersh, who did pickled herrings in jars: or Hersch, as he would have been in other countries. Russian has no ‘h’, and renders the ‘h’ sound as ‘g’ rather than as (the other option) ‘kh’. The USSR was invaded in 1941 by a German dictator called Gitler. Mr Gersh’s pickled herring business, on the other hand, clearly operated during the New Economic Policy of the mid-1920s.

  8 A brown hundred on the outside: for contemporary banknotes, see http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category: Banknotes_of_the_ Soviet_Union,_1961.

  9 No one would have printed on a cup or a bowl what these citizens had imprinted on themselves: all of the tattoo designs here are authentic, and can be found in Danzig Baldaet al., Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (Gottingen: Steidl, 2004).