The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  “But no, that’s not what really interests me. What concerns me is something else. These materials must be preserved at all cost. What has already been taken from you will remain safe. It will be preserved for all eternity. Or most of eternity, at any rate. But what will become of the work you do tomorrow, or the day after, or a year from now? Of course, if they don’t throw you in prison tomorrow. I must admit that I like you, Ilya Isayevich. I wouldn’t want you to have to experience prison, or the camps. But this is your own choice. In the space of a very short time it will be decided. It is, strictly speaking, already decided.”

  * * *

  Ilya sat motionless. He didn’t frown, but the back of his head was pounding again. He felt his heart stop beating, then scramble into motion with renewed force. I must have a heart defect. The thought flashed through his head. They can pin anything on me, even espionage. And that gets you more than three years. What’s the most incriminating thing there? Perhaps the portrait of Sakharov? I didn’t keep it at home. When he sent out his Memorandum to the Soviet Leadership I gave the photograph to Klaus. It never made it into the German newspapers. But maybe it was printed somewhere after all?

  “But, I’ll be honest with you, I have a few special means at my disposal. I’m going to make you a proposition that I want you to think about. It’s possible that it will take you by surprise. I don’t rule out that you may be offended by it at first. But think about it before you give me your answer.”

  Pause. For thinking?

  “You have a wrongheaded view of our organization. It’s no longer what it was during the thirties and forties. There are new ideas, new forces, new people. Profound changes are taking place in the country, which not everyone can sense yet. And the changes might be much more profound and radical than you imagine. Things aren’t as simple as you imagine them to be. I don’t want this portrait to be the last one you do. I’m talking about the portrait of Sakharov. I want you to continue your work. I’m prepared to back you up, to vouch for you. My conditions are that everything you do, you should do in two copies. One for yourself, and another for me. And, I stress, for me. Consider this to be my personal archive of your work. This is in the interests of history, if you will. Not to mention your own interests.”

  I’m caught. It’s not about the typewriter anymore. It looks like they’re not even interested in the manuscript of the Gulag. It’s me they’re after, lock, stock, and barrel.

  His head was no longer pounding. He needed to have a clear head to find some way out of this. Ilya’s face remained calm while he pondered these matters; but his palms were sweating.

  “You are playing a dangerous game, and I respect you for it, though I’ve told you my views on the radical movements of our society. After the 1917 Revolution, all of them are doomed to fail, and, what’s more, are devoid of meaning. This is simple dialectics. You’ll understand it in time, I hope not too late. Frankly speaking, I’m not terribly worried about how you will go about your work in the future. As I explained, routine operations are not my domain. If you accept my proposal, you can do a great deal of interesting work. Moreover, I understand that a person who is able to create such a magnificent archive at the age of fifteen—I’m talking about the LORLs—is capable of working on a much more serious level.”

  He looked at the clock.

  “I hope you understand that our conversation must remain strictly confidential. This is in your interests, as well as mine.”

  “It’s hard to consider our conversation to be confidential, Anatoly Alexandrovich.” Ilya swallowed, and gestured toward the slightly open door.

  “Don’t let that worry you. No one has seen you. And no one will see you. Stand up, please, and turn toward the window. Yes, that’s right.” Anatoly Alexandrovich, in a loud, commanding tone, said: “Vera Alekseevna, you may leave.”

  He heard the click-click of high heels, then the door to the corridor opened with a creak, and the lock snapped shut.

  “It’s not all as simple as it appears to you, Ilya Isayevich,” Chibikov said sadly.

  Ilya said nothing.

  “You must decide today. Today I can still do something for you,” the “colonel” said in a dark, velvety voice. “Tomorrow it will be too late.”

  So if I say no right now, they won’t let me out of here. And they have all my things, anyway. If I agree, I can continue to live as before—but I will be working not for myself, but for them. No, I can’t imagine this kind of life …

  “Moreover—and here I just want to convey the full picture—if I don’t intervene right now and the matter resumes its…”

  Pause.

  “… former course, you and your wife will be held liable. We can say that you brought the books into the house single-handedly; but the typewriter is hers. And Solzhenitsyn’s manuscript was in her possession. You’re putting not just yourself in jeopardy, but her, too. Just between ourselves, you were the one who dragged her into this risky business. And that’s a serious argument. While I still have the wherewithal to intervene in the matter.”

  They’ve got me. There’s no way out. It’s a Fool’s Mate. My dear girl, I will never betray you.

  “This is a gentlemen’s agreement. I’ll give you my phone number. At home. We won’t keep up regular contact. You will call me when something interesting arises. You will print as many copies as you consider necessary for your work, and you will hand over the negatives to me.”

  “The negatives! That’s asking too much,” Ilya said sharply.

  But the “colonel” already knew he had won. He laughed.

  “You’re twisting my arm!” he said.

  “No, if we’re talking about a gentlemen’s agreement, I have to defend my interests,” Ilya insisted.

  Chibikov looked at him with new respect.

  “All right. You keep the negatives. The last thing I need is your signature.”

  “But it’s a gentlemen’s agreement!” Ilya protested.

  “I have to defend my interests, too,” Anatoly Alexandrovich said, smiling.

  Between them they had smoked both packs of cigarettes. The boys were still pulling on their nets behind the shimmering pall of smoke.

  When Ilya left, it was already dark. And the autumn rain, an insistent drizzle, was still falling.

  THE ANGEL WITH THE OUTSIZE HEAD

  “It’s improbable, completely unlikely,” thought Tamara early the next morning, before she had even opened her eyes, reflecting on the evening before. For so many years she had kept her rotten secret about her great and forbidden love to herself, like a jar of preserves, and now it had burst open. She had told all to the person whom she had her whole life considered superfluous, alien, a chance appendage to her existence. For so many years she hadn’t breathed a word about it: not to her mother, so as not to disappoint her; not to Olga, so as not to break the ban; not to Vera Samuilovna Vinberg, her best friend and teacher, so that the secret wouldn’t erupt into someone else’s life and shake the happy equilibrium of another family … And suddenly, out of nowhere, she had gone and told everything to Galya, the wife of a KGB agent. Now it seemed that everything that had come before was no longer relevant.

  No, that wasn’t quite true—she had confessed the whole story once before, before she was baptized, to her priest. He had listened patiently, without betraying any emotion, and had then said, smiling:

  “That’s all in the past now. A new life begins with baptism; you will become an innocent babe again. This is one of the advantages of being baptized when you are older. It is a conscious choice. You are being offered a new purity, and you must look after it.”

  Her new purity faded rather quickly. Her former life didn’t just disappear, and it cast a long shadow over the future. Until he died two years later, even the old Robik, whom Marlen had left behind, continued to sleep on the rug he had occupied every Shabbat eve for many years waiting for his master. The dog kept silent, and Tamara did, too.

  But the evening before, the dam had brok
en and she had told Galya everything. Why? No, no—it was what it was. It had to happen the way it did, and she would have lived her life the same way again. She was sorry for her mother. Raisa Ilinichna had cried. No, not about the Korovin, nor about the Borisov-Musatov—but about the small, almost perfunctory study by Vrubel. It was a large head and a wing, contradicting all known laws of anatomy. Though who had ever been able to observe the anatomy of angels? All the paintings had belonged to her grandmother. They were originally from the Gnesins, and had been given to her over the years. Elena Fabianovna had been her best friend since childhood. Grandmother had devoted her life to this family, and there were still many traces and tokens of the girls’ friendship in the house: teacups, postcards, feathers, books inscribed with loving sentiments in neat, small letters, with flourishes of signatures. But those three paintings were gone. Without a trace. No, no, she had no regrets about them. Far worse were the fevered years of eclipse, the burning passions, of which nothing remained but a feeling of bereavement. No, no, no—she wasn’t talking about that.

  Everything had already been terrible. Marlen was fired from his job. He had been denied a visa to leave the country over and over again. They had dragged him to the Lubyanka, threatened to imprison him. And at the very end, he confessed that his wife was pregnant and was just about to give birth. He always spoke so disdainfully about his wife and so warmly about his daughters that Tamara had formed a picture in her mind of a family life in which a new baby was somehow conceived out of thin air. He was so much her husband and hers alone. And, suddenly, here was another wife, a pregnant one …

  He lost weight, and his skin took on a yellowish cast. Tamara even took him to the lab for tests. But his blood was in order, his liver just where it should be. And still they denied him the exit visas. The former obstacles had resolved themselves and vanished. His poor handicapped sister died, followed by his mother, who didn’t want to hear a word about Israel. She hated that enemy country that caused so many so much grief. It was impossible to budge her from her position on the matter. And she would never have given her permission for her son to emigrate.

  On the penultimate Shabbat of December, Marlen visited Tamara. His dog could hardly drag himself along for the visit. Robik, the only witness of their love, had grown old and decrepit. They were not embarrassed in front of him.

  They had no reason to feel embarrassed in front of Raisa Ilinichna, either—in all these years she had never once laid eyes on Marlen. Before he arrived, she would sequester herself in her tiny room. They even resurrected her grandmother’s chamber pot and put it under her bed.

  The worse the circumstances, the hotter their embraces. Now, years later, Tamara began to feel a belated perplexity: Why had she been so completely taken over, to the exclusion of everything else, by this simple, mechanistic ritual, this here, there, and back again? How was it she had soared to such ineffable heights, when it was all just a matter of two steroid rings, one attached to the other, and one more on the upper right side, with a half-ring to the side, and a commotion of radicals forming around them? Who understood better than she the biological formula that dominates our bodies and souls so absolutely …

  But now she felt awkward and even ashamed. And she was ashamed for him, too: Poor Marlen, why had he behaved so badly? He, too, had been ruled by hormones.

  On that penultimate Shabbat in December, when their hearts were still pounding and his moist, hairy chest was still pressed tightly to hers, he had said matter-of-factly:

  “On Wednesday they called me in for questioning again. They’ve thought up a new approach for nailing me: now I’m not just a Zionist, but a human rights activist. Their evidence is that I signed a petition on the right to emigrate. They went nuts after the demonstration, of course. The bald one who’s always there says: You won’t get off with just fifteen days administrative detention this time. Take a piece of paper and explain in writing how you ended up with the petition. Who brought it to you? Maybe it was Academic Sakharov? And there were about fifty names on it. I said I didn’t intend to incriminate myself. Well, in short, they said they would give me three days to tell them who gave me the petition. If I don’t tell them, they’ll arrest me. So it might be a long time before we see each other again, Tam.”

  The weight of the broad-boned male body, being filled by it, becoming one with it … Today I will get pregnant and then give birth … come what may … no more abortions … today … and if they throw him in prison, I’ll do it myself … I’ll raise the boy alone …

  “Then, you know, I learned of a new circumstance.”

  Propping himself up on his elbow, he wiped himself off with the edge of the sheet, then sat up, swinging his woolly legs down to the floor.

  Tamara hardly heard him. She was listening hard to something else at that moment: how two microscopic but living entities, hers and his, were drifting toward each other slowly, but surely; it just had to be. Let that plump Lida of his bear him another girl, but she would give birth to a boy, and, all by herself, raise him … it was now or never. And she wasn’t going to ask.

  She lay on her back and stroked her belly. What an idiot I was. What an idiot. I wasted so much time. He would already be starting school by now if I had made up my mind right off, Tamara thought, imagining the life she wasn’t destined to live.

  “It’s a very interesting circumstance. Long ago I had heard that these bastards let Jews out for a price. I found it hard to believe. It’s just like it was in Germany in 1939: they used to let rich Jews buy their way out of the concentration camps. Later, even that became impossible. That’s the way it works here now. Can you believe it?”

  “What are you saying? Here?” Tamara said, astonished, forgetting momentarily about her imaginary embryo.

  “Of course, here! Where else?” Marlen said, frowning. “Believe it or not, someone from my aunt’s village told her. A tailor, you know, just as you’d expect. An excellent one, as a matter of fact. He outfits a very high-ranking official—I can’t tell you his name.” He knocked softly on the wall, then bent over to whisper in Tamara’s ear.

  “You’re crazy! I don’t believe it.”

  “Believe it! I’m not making it up. This tailor has been sewing for him since before the war. He sews for his whole family. The official even moved him to Moscow, and set him up in his own apartment. Well, not his very own—he has several apartments at his disposal, for people he needs around him. And he’s a decent fellow, in his own way.”

  “The tailor?” Tamara said.

  “Who cares about the tailor? No, the official! This man, Mister X, isn’t a bad sort. He’s not bloodthirsty; he just likes money. Well, actually, not money for its own sake, either. He collects art. Serious paintings, by famous artists. Serov, Perov, you know, those Wanderers, or whatever you call them. He had a whole trainload of them brought here after the war—German paintings. Now he’s collecting Russian painters.”

  “An art collector?” Tamara couldn’t quite grasp the notion of a bigwig official who was so devoted to art.

  “Well, yes, a collector, if you like.” Marlen grimaced slightly. “This tailor is a distant relative of ours. He says he has access to his boss. His boss doesn’t want to get mixed up with just anyone, as you might imagine. So this relative of ours knows how to go about it. He’s pulled it off before. They let out a family of four for a Savrasov. A rather small picture it was, too.” Here Marlen demonstrated with his hands, just as the tailor had done.

  Tamara understood instantly what he was asking her.

  “Marlen, we don’t have any Wanderers. The most valuable thing we have is a Korovin, and another by Borisov-Musatov.”

  “He didn’t say anything about those. He said that the guy had his heart set on a Vrubel.”

  “Vrubel wasn’t a Wanderer,” Tamara said. “We do have a Vrubel, but it’s not a painting; it’s just a study.”

  “What difference does it make? The main thing is to act quickly. If they throw me in prison, no paint
ing is going to help. That falls under another department.”

  Tamara turned on the light. The angel with the broken wing hung above the headboard of her bed. The head was outsize, the forehead too convex. The face was lacking in detail, all smears of paint, the strokes hurried and nervous. The wing, though, was bluish and softly feathered, shimmering and iridescent. It was a fine wing.

  “Take it,” Tamara said breezily. “Take all of them.”

  “But, you do understand—it might not work.” He seemed to doubt himself whether it was worth the risk, but Tamara sensed that his eyes had grown brighter, and he was already thinking ahead—where to take the paintings, how to hand them over, and so on.

  “Perhaps. But they may throw you in prison.”

  Without covering their nakedness—it no longer existed—they grabbed the pictures off the walls. They wrapped all three of them up in sheets, then got dressed.

  “Please excuse me, Tam, but I’ve got to run. I’ll catch a cab and take the pictures to my aunt. The tailor promised to come tomorrow at ten in the morning. He said we should have everything ready for him by then. I’ll leave Robik with you till tomorrow.”

  After that, events unfolded at lightning speed.

  Three days later, instead of being arrested, Marlen was called to the district office of the KGB, where he was given a document revoking his citizenship and permitting him to leave the country, accompanied by his entire family, within three days. The next Shabbat he didn’t come to see Tamara; he dropped in on Friday morning. He brought Robik with him on his leash. He told her they were flying to Vienna the next day.

  “I’m in your debt till the end of my life,” Marlen said. “You’re the best thing I’ve ever had. If you ever think about returning”—he always said “returning,” rather than “emigrating”—“get in touch through Ilya. I’ll send an invitation for you right away. I’m leaving Robik with you to remember me by.”