The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  The story doesn’t end there, however—not for the rest of Irina Troitskaya’s family, in any case. The scandal caused by the Nobel Committee would have been impossible for the young diplomat to manage single-handedly; but the foreign ministry liked to apportion blame not to the highest diplomats, but to those who occupied a lower rung. They claimed that Lena’s husband hadn’t tried hard enough. And then there was Irina’s defection! The diplomat, Lena’s husband, was put through the wringer for the Nobel Prize—a matter in which he had played no part whatsoever—as well as for Irina’s defection and for his own lack of initiative. The young couple with brilliant credentials was recalled home from Sweden.

  The unlucky diplomat returned home to Moscow with his family to live in the general’s apartment. The children, twin boys, liked Moscow. Lena had soup waiting for her husband every day when he returned from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he was the fifth deputy of the seventh assistant in a department that had been slated for dissolution for twenty years already. His salary was so poor that Lena finally went to teach English at a secondary school. Grandmother Nina, like an ordinary housekeeper, took the children for walks in Chapaev Park, until she came down with pneumonia and died. Everything was worse than one could have imagined possible, until Lena visited a fortune-teller. The fortune-teller was a real character, with a penchant for all things Indian. She instructed Lena to “purify her karma,” but first she told her to clean up her house, in which a great deal of “filth” had accumulated. She recommended that they remodel.

  Her husband was extremely dissatisfied. As it was they could hardly make ends meet, and now—remodeling!

  To save on expenses, they completed the first stage themselves. To begin with, they removed all the books from Igor Vladimirovich’s heavy bookcase before moving it away from the wall. They took the books with leather bindings to an antiquarian bookseller, who gave them a huge sum of money in exchange. He wouldn’t accept all the books, however. It turned out that many of the general’s books had library or museum stamps in them, and the booksellers wouldn’t touch those.

  Lena’s husband found a large number of anti-Soviet books in the bottom section of the bookcase, including a collection of the works, complete thus far, of that very Nobel laureate who had caused him so much grief.

  “Yes, Father collected books,” Lena explained. “He had access to all the books that were seized during searches. Some books were brought from abroad by his friends. He was a great collector: of coins, paper currency, stamps.”

  Lena’s husband did not occupy as high a position as his late father-in-law had, and couldn’t allow such a collection to remain in the house. Late at night they took the dangerous books down to the garbage heap.

  The next evening they were tearing off wallpaper when they discovered a safe in the depths of the thick supporting wall. There was no key. They were unable to open it with any household appliances, though it easily slipped out of its niche in the wall. The back of the smallish box turned out to be plywood. They ripped it off and discovered that the safe contained several stacks of old dollars, which still happened to be in circulation, and twenty-five pre-Revolutionary gold coins.

  Her husband clutched at his head in consternation—but didn’t take the safe down to the garbage heap.

  This is where the story of Irina Troitskaya and her family ends.

  * * *

  What will now be related has nothing at all to do with them. Igor Chetverikov’s shift at the boiler room ended at eight in the morning. He usually went trash-picking after six in the morning, making his rounds of the nearby garbage heaps. The Sokol district didn’t yield much of value. There weren’t many old buildings left. The houses in the neighborhood had been resettled just before and just after the war, so the local residents either threw away the Karelian birch and the French bronze before they moved in or had never had them in the first place.

  Here, in what was formerly the settlement of Vsesvyatsky, if something did end up in the trash it was usually vestiges and remnants of the petite bourgeoisie. Not long ago he had found a trunk full of mid-nineteenth-century women’s clothes. Some of the contents had already been dragged off by some little girls, but Igor managed to salvage a brown frock with a crinoline, a fur wrap, and a girl’s school uniform.

  This time, what he saw made him gasp. Next to the wooden bin where the residents deposited their household garbage stood some neat piles of tamizdat, books in Russian published abroad. Without examining them too closely, he took them to the boiler room and ran to the metro to make a call from a pay phone. Ilya, his former classmate, was still asleep, and answered gruffly:

  “Are you nuts? Do you even know what time it is?”

  “Come to the boiler room immediately. In a car.”

  Ilya knew the boiler room well, since he had been responsible for getting Igor a job there after he had been expelled from the Kurchatov Institute under a cloud.

  Half an hour later, Ilya arrived. They loaded the books into the car and drove them to the apartment of another general, who had at one time been enamored not of coins and books, but of old furniture. And he had preferred to live at his dacha, not in his apartment in the city.

  Kostya had already left for school. Olga made coffee for the men and sat on the floor to go through the books. She had already read everything there. Among the small volumes she found a Khodasevich with a coffee stain on the cover—a sort of tree, and a road.

  “Igor, is your boiler room at Sokol, in the Generals’ Building?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Oh, no reason. It’s just that I read all these books in college. The owner has probably died. He was a general.”

  THE FUGITIVE

  The storm took place at half past two in the morning. It was like an opera or a symphony—with an overture, leitmotifs, and a duet of water and wind. Lightning bolts flew up in columns, accompanied by incessant rumbling and flashes. Then there was an intermission and a second act. Maria Nikolayevna’s heart pains, which had plagued her all day, stopped immediately, as did Captain Popov’s headache, from which he had been suffering for the past twenty-four hours. He even managed to get some sleep before going to work. The only thing he didn’t manage to do was put a stamp on the document. But he could do that later.

  At nine o’clock sharp he rang the doorbell. No one opened for a long time; then he heard a commotion behind the door.

  “Who’s there? Who is it?” a tentative female voice called out.

  Finally, the door opened a crack; but the chain was still secured. Sivtsev and Emelyanenko shuffled impatiently from foot to foot. They wanted to get this over and done with. Greenhorns. Popov showed his badge in the narrow space between the door and the door frame. Again, there was a commotion, and the door opened.

  The witness, his man at the local housing authority, trotted up.

  “Does Boris Ivanovich Muratov live here?”

  Right then, Muratov appeared. A hefty fellow, about forty years old, with a beard. Wearing a blue robe that looked like it could be made of velvet.

  We don’t have robes like that, Popov thought suspiciously. It’s foreign. Where do they get the stuff?

  “Passport, please,” Popov said with absolute civility.

  Muratov went into the next room, from which his wife was just emerging. She was a real beauty, of course, also wearing a blue robe! Amazing—two of them, exactly alike!

  When Muratov returned, Popov held out the search warrant for his perusal.

  “Take a look at this, please,” he said, standing some distance away, still clutching it in his hands.

  “May I?” Muratov said, reaching out for it.

  But Popov refused to part with it.

  “What is there to read? It’s a search warrant, you can see that yourself. I’ll hold it, and you can read it if you think it’s necessary.”

  “I can see it’s a search warrant. But it isn’t stamped.”

  “Oh, hell!” Popov grew irate. “That’s unimport
ant. A warrant is a warrant; it’ll get its stamp, don’t worry about that.”

  “First stamp it, then you can enter,” Boris Ivanovich said haughtily.

  “If I were you, I’d try being more polite. Having words won’t help either of us. Now let me get on with my work, please.”

  He moved deeper into the apartment, followed by Sivtsev. Emelyanenko stood in the tiny entrance hall, keeping an eye on the door and the living room.

  “One moment, please,” Boris Ivanovich said, going into the smaller room.

  Popov knew the layout of three-room apartments like this like the back of his hand. First a tiny entrance hall, then a larger pantry space with built-in wall cupboards where they kept everything. He had seen plenty of them.

  He blocked the door so Muratov couldn’t enter the larger room. Muratov turned red, moved the captain aside, and went in to rummage through the top drawer of his desk. Popov lost his composure. In this petty struggle, Muratov was right. The warrant, strictly speaking, was invalid.

  The captain couldn’t admit defeat, however, and barked out:

  “Don’t touch the drawers! We’ll need to look through them.”

  But Muratov, apparently, had found what he was looking for. He unfolded a thick piece of paper, yellowed at the edges, bearing an official red letterhead and a profile of the “greatest of the great” leaders.

  “My Certificate of Honor.”

  The artist thrust the paper at the captain, but at such a distance that he couldn’t read anything it said.

  Again, Popov’s head started to throb.

  “What is the meaning of this?”

  The wife, blue-eyed, in her blue robe, her face pallid, looked beseechingly at her husband. Maria Nikolayevna, his mother-in-law, poured out tea for them as though nothing at all were happening.

  Boris Ivanovich held the paper at a more reasonable distance: the captain could see it, but he couldn’t snatch it from him.

  “I’ll hold it, and you can read it. I’ll hold it.”

  The captain read it through. The captain heeded it. He turned around to go, his detachment following at his heels. They didn’t say a word.

  Muratov flung the saving document into a corner.

  With a graceful flourish, Maria Nikolayevna placed a teacup and a sandwich in front of Boris Ivanovich.

  Boris Ivanovich loved his mother-in-law; in her he saw Natasha, but with a more decisive character. In his wife, Natasha, he saw features of his mother-in-law—the first signs of a gentle fullness, small lines around the mouth, and a burgeoning soft pouch under the chin. Good, healthy stock. The generous plumpness of Kustodiev’s women, but all the more alluring for it.

  Natasha picked up the letter, which had been casually cast aside.

  “What is this, Boris?”

  Boris made a gesture indicating that walls have ears.

  “Well, my dear Natasha, I got that Certificate of Honor after my Sculpture and Modeling Plant entrusted me with the task of manufacturing an object with the code name ‘SL,’ in two copies, as a matter of fact. This remarkable object represented, my girl, the sarcophagus of the leader and teacher of all times and peoples, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. And just look at the signatures! The highest authorities express their gratitude to me.”

  After this booming announcement, he made an obscene gesture, visible though inaudible, at those very walls.

  Maria Nikolayevna smiled. Natasha put her white hands on her still whiter neck.

  “What’s going to happen now?” she said quietly.

  Boris picked up one of the pages of thin gray paper that were heaped about the room in multitudes, and wrote with a pencil:

  “He disappeared to an unknown location.”

  And on that same piece of paper he drew his usual cartoon of himself—a large head hunched into his shoulders, a short, straggly beard, and a forehead framed by two bald patches on either side.

  “Another cup of tea, please, Maria Nikolayevna!” he said, jangling his cup for effect.

  Natasha sat rigid in her chair. Maria Nikolayevna went to put the kettle on again.

  Boris embraced his wife.

  “I knew this would happen. It’s all so awful,” she said.

  Then she took a pencil and wrote in the margins of the page:

  “They’re going to arrest you.”

  “I’m leaving home in half an hour,” he wrote back. And he drew himself somersaulting down the stairs.

  The page was filled. He tore it up and burned it. He waited until the flame burned the entire page, nearly to his fingertips, then dropped the vestiges into the ashtray.

  He took a new page and drew himself running down the street. At the top of the page he wrote “Train Station,” and showed it to Natasha and Maria Nikolayevna, who had just come back. His mother-in-law grasped the situation faster than his wife, and nodded.

  “Right now,” Boris said.

  “Alone?” Natasha said.

  Muratov nodded.

  Then he started rummaging around in those very walk-in cupboards that Captain Popov had been so eager to inspect, and pulled out a folder, in which he kept exactly what the captain had been looking for.

  He took out a sheaf of pages, full of drawings, and went out to the kitchen.

  Maria Nikolayevna watched him in silent sympathy.

  Muratov pulled a baking sheet out of the oven, put several pieces of the paper on it, and lit a match. Maria Nikolayevna snatched the matches from him.

  “How many times have I told you not to interfere in my household duties, Boris Ivanovich.”

  He was sitting on his haunches in the middle of the floor, looking up at her. Maria Nikolayevna pushed him out of the way, then squeezed past into the corridor, where she pried up the edge of the worn-out linoleum by the wooden threshold. Boris Ivanovich merely shrugged in amazement.

  Deftly and in perfect concert, as though they had been doing this their whole lives, they stuffed all the drawings under the linoleum, then tucked the worn-out edge under the threshold again. Everything was just as it had been before, as though nothing at all had happened. Boris Ivanovich kissed Maria Nikolayevna’s cheek gratefully. It would have been a pity to have to burn them.

  Then he found some canvas trousers, short in the leg and loose in the waist, in the lower drawer of the dresser. From the cupboard he took out an old straw hat. Both had belonged at one time to his late father-in-law. He did all this without saying a single word.

  “He’s gone crazy. He’s gone crazy,” Natasha said. His mother-in-law, pointing to the telephone—she was as sure as Boris that their apartment was bugged—said in a loud voice: “Boris, shall I make meat patties for your lunch?”

  “Meat patties sound good.”

  Twenty-five minutes later he left the house. He had shaved off his beard, but left a mustache. He’d cut his hair shorter. He walked through the courtyard, so full of rainwater that he could have floated across in a boat. Broken branches protruded from the giant puddle, like trees after a flood. Boris was lugging a big shopping bag in which he had a change of underwear, a sweater, and his favorite little pillow, as well as all the money he had been able to scrape together.

  Sivtsev and Emelyanenko, who had stayed behind to keep watch, were lounging on a little bench in the courtyard, smoking. They were deliberating whether to go and get some beer.

  Captain Popov arrived at ten fifteen with the required stamp on the warrant. Natasha Muratov, wife and officially registered tenant of the apartment, opened the door right away this time, and said that her husband had gone to work. Popov threw a furious glance at his blockhead underlings.

  “He doesn’t have a job!” Popov said. “What kind of work are you talking about?”

  “He’s an artist. He doesn’t have a job, but he has plenty of work. You saw yourself: he worked on Lenin’s sarcophagus,” the mother-in-law piped up.

  “He was fired after that,” Popov said, offering a belated piece of evidence.

  “That’s right, he went out
to look for a job,” Maria Nikolayevna retorted.

  “Wasn’t he planning to come home for lunch?” the captain asked.

  “Of course.” They’d taken the bait about the meat patties, the damned eavesdroppers. They worked fast! “And he ordered meat patties. We’re expecting him home for lunch.”

  The captain got down to work. He spared no effort in tackling the mountains of assorted papers. The samizdat were the run-of-the-mill variety that everyone had. The samizdat weren’t what Popov was hoping to find, however.

  What he was looking for was lying on his own desk in his office in the form of photocopied pages from Stern magazine. These were cartoons: gigantic letters spelling “Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” and under them a crowd of people and dogs trying to reach the sacred words. The words themselves were made of sausages: boiled salami, with circles of white fat where they had been sliced. They were strung together with rope, from which dangled a price tag reading “2 rub. 20 kop.”

  Another cartoon depicted a mausoleum made of the same kind of salami, with the word Lenin written in sausage links.

  The third cartoon showed the Volga boatmen from the famous painting by Repin, harnessed together, and pulling, not a barge, but a rocket ship.

  The agents had been searching for the malicious cartoonist for a long time, and had discovered him quite by chance. All that remained now was to find the original drawings, sketches, or something similar.

  Captain Popov departed late in the evening. He took three bags of samizdat with him. The drawings that Popov had hoped to find were not discovered.