The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  He took the tag out of her hand and fetched her coat for her. It was a jacket with a hood, too light for the season.

  “I’ll walk you home,” he said, announcing rather than offering. She nodded.

  “Thank you.”

  He took her by the arm.

  “Shall we go straight to the metro, or walk a bit? You won’t get too cold? You’re very lightly dressed.”

  “I won’t get cold. My father’s from Vologda, I’ve got a hardy northern constitution.”

  “And I’m from Baku. I’ve been in Moscow for so many years, but I still can’t get used to the winter.”

  “Oh, what a play! Absolutely brilliant. I love the Taganka Theater anyway, more than the Sovremennik. I don’t even know what to compare it to, it was just … words fail me.”

  They walked a long time. From the Taganka they went to Kotelniki, crossed the streetcar tracks next to Ustinsky Bridge, and then went down Solyanka Street, talking all the while about Lyubimov, about Vysotsky, and about contemporary art, which was the only thing that breathed and moved in their stultifying existence.

  Karik echoed her sentiments, then turned the conversation to more mundane topics: What, how, with whom?

  “The same as before, only with a different husband.”

  “What about a job?”

  “Hmm, that’s more difficult. I have to chase around to find work, of course. I don’t go to an office—I write reports, teach a bit, do some translation.”

  “Oh, what languages do you know? French, wasn’t it?” Karik said.

  “My French is decent; I can do simultaneous interpreting, and written translation. My Spanish isn’t as good, but it’s passable. And my most recent love is Italian. It’s more like music than like language. I’m teaching myself. I mastered it in about a year. But you know how it is—I don’t have steady work; it’s either feast or famine.”

  “Do you know Spanish Spanish, or Cuban Spanish?” he said.

  “My Spanish is Spanish,” she said, and sighed. “But I don’t have a diploma, Karik. Perhaps you recall that I was expelled in my fifth year?”

  Karik laughed.

  “How could I forget, when I’m the one who caused it. I was the Komsomol organizer, and I was just in the process of getting admitted to the Party. You understand what I mean—I was about to defend my thesis, but I don’t have five languages under my belt, like you do. In fact, I’ve always had problems with languages. Armenian is my native language, and I know some Azerbaijani from playing with other kids in the neighborhood. I learned Russian at school. And also in the neighborhood. But we Caucasians can never get rid of our accents. I’ll be honest with you, I worked in England for a year, but nothing helped. They couldn’t make a spy out of me.”

  “Well, never mind. You still became a good KGB man, didn’t you?” Olga said, laughing.

  “Olga, didn’t your father work in the same capacity?” Karik said, smiling, not in the least put out by her comment.

  “No, my father is a military man, in the construction department. He’s retired now. My mother is active in the Party, though.”

  “Yes, I remember that someone in your family had a high position. My grandfather was a shepherd, and my father baked lavash at the market. There were eight of us children at home. Do you sense the difference?”

  Olga felt uncomfortable. She did sense the difference between his background and hers.

  “But I can help you out with work. I’m an administrative officer at the Writer’s Union, on the Foreign Committee. I can’t get you a staff position, but I can set you up with some freelance jobs. Our translator just resigned—you must know her, she was from your year: Irina Troitskaya. There is a Latin American writer arriving in two weeks. He’s already almost a classic. The job will involve travel to either Leningrad or Tashkent. You’ll have to accompany him, attend meetings with him, and so on. Would you be up to that? You won’t let me down?”

  Oh, so he does have a conscience after all! He’s trying to make up for past sins.

  They had already made their way to Dzerzhinsky Square. Olga was cold, and wanted to take the metro. He walked her to the entrance and they parted ways. They didn’t exchange phone numbers.

  Karik called her two days later, after Olga had already forgotten about their conversation. She still remembered everything about Hamlet, though; she couldn’t stop talking about it. In fact, all of Moscow was abuzz with it. It was the premiere of the season, a major event. Everyone was in a hurry to see it, because Lyubimov’s productions were always getting shut down, or even banned during rehearsals.

  Karik asked her to stop by his office on the same day. Olga was just three minutes away by foot if she went through the main entrance. Even less if she went by way of the courtyard.

  He was wearing a striped suit. Olga could tell immediately that it had been made by the Writer’s Union tailor. His tie was also striped. Later, when they went down to the cafeteria, and he sat down, crossing one leg over the other, she noticed that his socks were striped, too. But she held her tongue and refrained from making any cutting remarks about it to herself, reminding herself again: his grandfather was a shepherd, and his father baked bread at a market …

  “There will be two of them. One a writer, and the second a professor, both of them very well known. The writer is from Colombia, and the professor is Spanish. We’ll draw up a part-time contract; I’ll give you all the necessary instructions, and then we’re good to go! They should arrive on February first.”

  That day there was a big hullabaloo at the Foreign Committee. The day before, they had received a West German poet, a young leftist who enjoyed great renown. It was a farewell party for him, since he was flying back to West Germany that evening. The writer, whose face had a provocative SS pallor, had been flown to a writers’ conference in Baku. There he started an affair with the daughter of his translator, and now the entire Foreign Committee was at sixes and sevens.

  On the previous evening, this young whippersnapper of a girl, whom he had brought along with him to the official farewell ceremony, had stuck to him like a burr. At the end, he sat her on his bony, five-foot-tall knee. Her mother, herself a poet and a recipient of the Stalin Prize, had translated his “Mayakovskian” verse into Russian from someone else’s literal crib. Her face was an unhealthy beet-red color, and she was pretending not to notice anything.

  In view of these upsetting circumstances, no one paid any attention to Olga. Olga, by the way, knew the daughter of this translator very well, first from the exclusive Artek Pioneer Camp, where privileged children of prominent parents were sent, then from the Peredelkino dacha settlement for writers, and finally from the philological department.

  Karik came back, accompanied by an older woman with a dissatisfied expression on her face.

  “Olga, this is Vera Alekseevna, the goddess of our accounting department. She’ll give you money for expenses and will explain everything. Come to see me afterward.”

  The following ten days shook up Olga’s world and turned it inside out. The writer, a robust, bearded fellow, looked like a cross between Hemingway and Fidel Castro. He greeted her effusively, with a phrase Olga didn’t understand until later:

  “O Madonna! I thought we’d be in the care of some KGB agent, but they’ve sent us an angel instead! Too bad there’s only one of you for both of us!”

  Olga thrust a small, businesslike hand at him, and he kissed her on the forehead. The professor looked on disapprovingly, refusing to get into the act.

  Olga took them to the Metropol Hotel in an official car. In the lobby, she asked them whether they needed anything, and handed them two folders and two envelopes with small sums of money for expenses. She asked them to put their signatures on some documents.

  The writer whispered something into the professor’s ear. He turned green and whispered back something that Olga couldn’t make out. The only word she understood was mierda—shit.

  The writer guffawed, and gently nudged the professor in
the stomach with his elbow. Olga filled out the necessary paperwork at the reception desk, and they received their keys.

  “I’ll wait for you here, and then we’ll go have dinner.”

  Olga sat on a velvet couch by the wall and reflected on the situation. It was all quite exciting, but she shouldn’t have taken the job. It was ridiculous, sitting here and waiting like a servant, at their beck and call. There was something humiliating about it.

  The first to come down was the bearded one. He immediately dispelled all these thoughts.

  He smiled amicably, and bent down to her confidingly.

  “Did you notice what a long face the other guy pulled? I told him that these were payouts from the KGB! And we had to sign that we had taken the dough. He’s such a square, I love teasing him now and then.”

  Ten minutes later the professor came down. They went to a restaurant. The guests were agog at the decorative plasterwork and the abundance of mirrors, and the writer clucked his tongue, saying:

  “Real Communist luxury!”

  He turned out to be quite a glutton, ordering hors d’oeuvres, and soup, and two main dishes. He polished off one and a half bottles of wine, and demanded to know all about the local cuisine. The professor was more low-key, and looked tired. After dinner, the writer asked Olga to take them straight to Red Square.

  “I wouldn’t mind walking around a bit, either,” the professor said.

  “It’s nearby, just a few minutes’ walk from here,” Olga said.

  “No, in your case I’d advise against it. I was here in 1957, at the Youth Festival. There’s a national custom—you can only approach the mausoleum on your knees.”

  The professor was filled with alarm, and started waving his arms.

  “No, no, no, Pablo, I won’t go. I’ll stay in the hotel room.”

  Olga immediately picked up on the fact that this was a practical joke. The writer winked at her, as if urging her to get into the spirit of things. Which she did.

  “No, they changed that custom! You don’t have to approach on your knees anymore. That’s only for the true diehards…”

  The writer guffawed. The professor shook his head and started to laugh.

  “Oh, go to hell! I should have known, you’re always … me…” Olga didn’t catch the expression, but she understood the gist of it.

  The schedule was grueling. Every day there were two meetings with other writers, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, trips to the Bolshoi and the Tretyakov Gallery. And with each passing day, the writer seemed to grow more bored, as though he had expected something completely different from this trip.

  Then they went to Leningrad. In Leningrad, the writer cheered up. He had never been there before, and he was delighted with the city, which he justifiably compared with Amsterdam and (though it was a stretch) Venice.

  Olga was unable to offer any views on the matter, since all cities beyond the boundaries of the USSR existed primarily in the realm of her imagination, as a literary mirage, while this South American writer from some banana republic in the back of beyond was a citizen of the world. He had studied in Paris and New York, and had traveled throughout Europe. He ate and drank copiously wherever he went, read and wrote whatever he wanted, and lived life to the hilt, everywhere, without respite. Even the “snain,” the snow mixed with rain that fell unabated the whole time they were in Leningrad, pleased him. In the morning, in the corridor of the hotel, Olga noticed a powerfully built hooker, with the face of a grenadier, leaving his room.

  It’s none of my business, she thought on her way to the elevator.

  The last stop on their itinerary was Tashkent. The journey was exhausting, with a layover and a delay. The airports were freezing. Finally, they arrived at their destination. When they came out of the airport, it was dawn, and the air was warm. The sun was floating up over the horizon, right in front of their eyes.

  Olga had never been to Central Asia, and she had long wanted to see this part of the world. Ilya was very partial to it. They had planned to travel here together, but it had never worked out. The Baltic countries were as far as they had gone together.

  Unfortunately, they didn’t get a chance to see anything. They flew out of Tashkent on the evening of the following day, hastily and under a cloud.

  On the first morning, they were taken to a government building in the style of Stalinist barracks and ushered into a long hall with a table covered in Central Asian dishes. Along the entire length of the table, on both sides, sat middle-aged men in identical suits and ties—the Eastern men with skullcaps, the non-Eastern men without. It was a warm, almost hot February day, and the hall smelled of last year’s sweat. The reception was a red-carpet welcome; Party heads, municipal authorities.

  Evidently there had been some kind of misunderstanding. For some reason the local bigwigs thought they were receiving a government delegation from a friendly nation.

  Chile, Peru, Colombia—they were all the same to the Party functionaries. They had a job to do. And their job consisted in making speeches.

  From the very start of the first speech, Olga fell into despair: it was untranslatable. Olga leaned over to Pablo and told him this. He nodded and requested that she recite some Russian poetry—the sounds of the Russian language were very pleasant to his ear, and he easily committed the sounds to memory.

  “All right, I’ll recite Eugene Onegin, Pushkin’s novel in verse.”

  And Olga launched into a recitation from memory, echoing the cadences and intonations of the orator’s words. She inserted pauses and line breaks that coincided with the periods of speech and the expression of the orators.

  Pablo grew tired by the fourth chapter. The professor looked like he was about to fall into a dead faint.

  “All right, that’s it. This nonsense has to stop. José, I beg you, play along with me, just this once!” said the writer.

  When the next (but not meant to be the last) orator had finished making his speech and everyone was clapping, Pablo jumped from his place of honor, pulling his comrade, who was balking, and Olga, who needed no coaxing, in his wake. He stopped next to the tribune, festooned with red plush, and intoned in a deep, sonorous voice:

  “In my homeland, we have the custom of singing a song of gratitude to our friends. And so I will sing you our favorite song, which Christopher Columbus brought to America from Spain five hundred years ago.”

  And he began to sing. The song was “La Macorina,” a top-ten pop hit that had not yet reached Moscow, not to mention Tashkent. He galloped around, flailing his arms and pulling José toward him. This time, weary of the role that had been forced on him of older and wiser friend, an easy target for mockery, José gave himself over completely to the singer’s instructions.

  The refrain of the song, “Put your hand on me here, Macorina!,” was repeated about ten times, during which Pablo placed José’s hand on various parts of his body, gradually inching toward the locus of maximum masculine vulnerability.

  When he had finished his performance, Pablo raised his clenched fist in an archaic gesture completely unknown in this part of the world, and said to Olga, “And now, translate! Long live the teachings of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin! Proletarians of the world, unite!”

  And he began applauding himself, after which the skullcaps, completely baffled, joined in good-naturedly. Next to Olga stood the official who was responsible for leading receptions at the highest level. His face was as pale as it was possible for a face burned day after day by the Central Asian sun to be, and he whispered:

  “Olga Afanasievna! What is the meaning of this? What is he doing? It’s our heads that will roll for this! He’s ruining the entire event!”

  “Olga, tell him that we are leaving today. Have him change the tickets. Tell him to go to hell, that we have a meeting tomorrow at the highest levels!” The Colombian writer rolled his eyes in indignation, and, inflating his fleshy cheeks so that his thick mustache twitched, he blew out a stream of air. “Say whatever you want!”

&n
bsp; Olga translated.

  “What about Central Asia? You were so eager to see it.”

  “I’ve seen enough. Screw it!”

  “We haven’t booked a hotel room in Moscow for tonight!” Olga put forth a rational argument against their headlong departure, but Pablo would have none of it.

  “We’ll sleep in your kitchen!”

  “Are you crazy, what do you mean, sleep in my kitchen?”

  He looked around; fifteen or so functionaries stood around, uncomprehending but expectant.

  “Our guests would like to express their deepest apologies, but they must fly out today, since tomorrow the Central Committee of the Party will be receiving them.”

  “This is an outrage! Does he have any idea what he is doing?” the official in charge whispered to Olga.

  The final scene took place three days later, when Olga handed in the record of expenses to the accountant. The telephone rang.

  “Karik Avetisovich would like to see you,” the accountant told Olga.

  Karik was sitting behind his desk with an imperious air:

  “Would you care to explain to me what happened there?”

  Olga told him, being honest and forthright about it.

  “Um-hmm. Well, take out a piece of paper and write a report.”

  “Another report? I already submitted one.”

  “That was a financial report. This one’s for the KGB,” Karik said coldly.

  “What do you mean?” Olga said indignantly. “I won’t write any report! We agreed.”

  “What did we agree?”

  Olga put her head in her hands. What a fool she was! Now she would have to write a report, compromising her good name forever. This was how informers were born.

  From her purse she fished out the sizable packet of money she had just received from the accountant. A clear conscience was worth more to her.

  “Let’s just agree that I never worked here. Here’s my honorarium. Case closed.”

  “Let’s go out and get some fresh air, the weather’s nice,” Karik said, pointing at the ceiling with his thumb.

  Ah, so even you are afraid of listeners! Olga thought spitefully.