Aunt Genya put a bowl of borscht in front of each of them, then served the main dish: meat patties with potatoes. Her son got three, Mikha got two, and she herself got one.
Marlen laughed, pointing at the meat patties.
“There’s your socialist equality! And everywhere you look, it’s always the same!”
Mikha racked his brains, trying to get to the bottom of things. He read and read; what he read generated many questions, and few answers. He tried to talk about socialism with Victor Yulievich, who just grimaced and said that he had no predilection for social science.
Ilya, who had one of the most inquiring and informed minds of all the people he knew, threw fuel on the fire. The most combustible, in his view, was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, the samizdat they had lost, without ever knowing what it was, in the briefcase of Pierre’s uncle Orlov, the French diplomat, in 1957. Nineteen Eighty-four made a deep impression on Mikha. He was far more receptive to the artistic word than to the dry erudition of socioeconomic scholasticism.
Ilya could boast of a small victory, at least: Mikha’s revolutionary ardor had cooled. Nevertheless, they began spending less time together. And Sanya was off in his own musical universe. He was up to his ears in arcane theories of scales, and his best friends could never have been interlocutors on this subject.
It was Mikha’s affinity for literature that had led him to the difficult and sad situation in which he found himself in the late autumn of 1966, unemployed and barred from graduate studies.
His would-be adviser, Yakov Petrovich Rink, was distressed about what had transpired and tried to help Mikha. Within the bounds of reason. Yakov Petrovich was unquestionably decent, but he was also pliant and adaptable. And so clever that he understood perfectly well how complicated and difficult it was to combine decency and pliancy when faced with the powers that be, with whom he had successfully negotiated his whole life. In Mikha Melamid’s case, however, he had not managed. It was a great disappointment, and it grieved him; but it hadn’t prevented them both from continuing work on their very important common cause.
Yakov Petrovich had made several attempts to help the young man find employment. Yakov Petrovich had countless connections in the pedagogical world, but even he wasn’t able to find a job that would allow Mikha to carry out his experimental research: implementing new methods of speech therapy.
Thus, every avenue of scholarly work was closed to Mikha.
The only thing Rink, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, was able to do was arrange for the unsuccessful graduate-school candidate to teach literature in a night school—and only on a part-time basis. The eight hours a week he taught offered them meager sustenance for only eight days—and there were at least thirty days in a month. Alyona was still going to college, and her studies completely exhausted her energies, which were not very ample to begin with.
Mikha became convinced that he would never be able to find work on his own.
At the local Board of Education, where he went to inquire about a permanent job as a teacher of Russian language and literature, he was told there were no vacancies in Moscow, and that he would have to go to the Ministry of Education—maybe they would have something on offer in the provinces. They told him to leave his résumé and contact information with them just in case; sometimes there were temporary vacancies.
Mikha didn’t go to the ministry. Alyona was a young wife and still a student; nothing could have induced him to leave her behind in Moscow to go it alone.
Victor Yulievich, who had left teaching, felt that Mikha didn’t stand a chance to find a job as a schoolteacher. Tutoring was his only hope. And he gave him a student right away. But none of that—work by the hour, private lessons—could really satisfy him. He missed the boarding-school children!
By this time Mikha had taken on the dullest and most strenuous job of all—he was loading and unloading cargo at night at the Moscow-Tovarnaya railroad station. The work wasn’t terribly difficult for him, but Alyona objected. Mikha’s eyesight had never been good, and it put too great a strain on his eyes, she said. And she was right.
Another regular source of income was blood donation. He became a donor, but there were limits placed on how often one could do this—only once a month.
Finally, Mikha decided to talk to Ilya about more unconventional ways of earning a living. They planned to meet at the Pokrovsky Gates in breezy Milyutin Park, which had once belonged to the Office of Surveying and Land Management, on a park bench with two broken slats. Each of them had a bottle of beer in his hand and a briefcase at his feet. Sanya wasn’t there. They had decided not to include him in their deliberations.
After they graduated from high school, Ilya was the first of them to realize that he didn’t wish to work for the state—whether on a nine-to-five, or an eight-to-eight, or a three-days-on, three-days-off schedule. He also had no desire to go to college, because everything that truly interested him he could learn without disciplinary regimentation and coercion. He was adept at various means of avoidance, evasion, and disappearance.
The best option was a fictitious hire as an assistant to a scientist or a writer. This kind of opportunity was not easy to come by, but it had guaranteed Ilya virtual independence from the state. A more reliable, but less attractive variant required real input of one’s own time and effort: working in a boiler room, as a concierge, or as a security guard. When it came to earning dough, Ilya knew plenty of ways.
Ilya expounded on this to Mikha, yet again demonstrating his long-acknowledged intellectual superiority.
“You see, Mikha, we’re really talking about two different things here: fulfilling, interesting work, and making money. But I still think that you have to know how to combine them. Let’s take samizdat. The phenomenon itself is remarkable and unprecedented. It’s vital energy that is spread from source to source, establishing threads, forming a sort of spiderweb that links many people. It creates passageways that conduct information in the form of books, magazines, poems, both very old and very new, the latest issues of the samizdat Chronicles. There are streams of Zionist literature printed in Odessa before the Revolution, or in Jerusalem last year; there is religious literature of both émigré and domestic manufacture. The process is in part spontaneous and natural, but not completely. This is a conscious undertaking for me, and, in a sense, a profession. This is the work that earns me a living. And, of course, the cause needs to be developed and expanded.”
Mikha sat rapt and openmouthed, quite literally. A small trace of saliva had even gathered in the corner of his mouth, as happens with a sleeping child. Ilya held forth in an unusually solemn, serious tone. Mikha was completely enraptured with the contents of the lecture, and at the same time filled with pride: that’s our Ilya!
“It’s a fine thing!” Mikha said quietly, somewhat overwhelmed with the greatness of his friend.
At that moment Ilya was himself enamored of his role in furthering world progress. The grandiose picture that he painted did not completely jibe with reality, but it wasn’t pure invention, either. The petty demons of the Russian Revolution—the very ones Dostoevsky described—haunted the darkening recesses of the forlorn, overgrown garden. The long shadow of the completely ingenuous Chekhov was moving in the direction of Immer’s garden store, where the writer had stopped in to buy seeds now and then, and in a neighboring wing, in about the same years, under the patronage of the not completely innocent Savva Morozov, died Levitan, the gentle Jew who sang the praises of Russian nature with his paintbrush …
On this very corner, a few steps away, twenty years before, a tram came to a screeching halt … Yes, Murygin.
But on the whole, progress was on the march; of that there could be no doubt!
Ilya had an intriguing proposal at the ready. Samizdat had become a widespread social phenomenon, and demand for it was growing steadily. By the mid-sixties, the provinces had come alive. Not all samizdat was produced by idealistic enthusiasts. A real market was taking shape, an
d the most diverse kinds of people were active in it, including those with purely commercial interests. In addition to publications, the cost of which was determined solely by the price of paper or film, new merchandise was appearing that was meant to be sold for profit. Something akin to a trading network was coming to life. One of the key figures in this market was Ilya. Mikha could help with the distribution.
Mikha would never make a stellar distributor, Ilya knew this already. He was too noticeable, too friendly and open, too imprudent. He was also trustworthy, loyal, and responsible, however. Ilya might have thought twice about making such a proposal to Mikha; but he needed to have some means of survival. And besides, he had a wife!
Mikha was appointed as a traveling salesman.
The first trips didn’t take him very far afield. Stuffing his backpack with samizdat, he set out on the commuter train or the bus for a nearby station: Obninsk, Dubna, or Chernogolovka. He would meet other young research associates, hand over the literature, take the money in exchange, and return home on the same day.
Getting acquainted with them was strictly forbidden. Mikha introduced himself as Andrei, and the counteragent didn’t introduce himself at all. He usually said something like: “Alexander Ivanovich sent me.”
From the money he received, Mikha would get five honestly earned rubles each time. The money stung his hand a little.
Working in the boarding school for the deaf-mute had been so much better. It had satisfied in some ideal way everything Mikha needed and wanted—a modest but sufficient income; absolute pleasure and satisfaction from the creative, useful work he did; a rare feeling of being in just the right place, at just the right time. That work, and the money he earned, had never stung his hand!
* * *
After two months, Mikha admitted to Ilya that he wanted more meaningful work than merely delivering goods in a backpack to different addresses. He was well versed in the ins and outs of samizdat, and he considered himself to be entitled to something more creative …
“Fine, all right. I knew this was bound to happen.” Ilya looked somewhat dissatisfied, though he usually swelled with pleasure when he could solve other people’s problems. “Edik is the one you need. Edik! You know, the tall fellow,” Ilya said.
Mikha remembered. He had delivered some books to him. And he wasn’t someone you could easily forget. He was nearly six feet six, and had a pink baby face with nothing growing on it but thick, bushy eyebrows.
Ilya took Mikha to meet Edik. Edik lived with his mother and his wife, Zhenya, in a separate two-room apartment. Looking around, Mikha again grew enamored of someone else’s home, which didn’t resemble anything he had seen before. Edik’s mother was a specialist in Buddhism. The walls were covered with Eastern paintings and images, which were, as Edik explained to him, Buddhist icons. Edik’s wife was an archaeologist, and she had left traces of her profession in their home: three unprepossessing earthenware pots. The women were not home at the moment.
Edik published the samizdat magazine Gamayun. It consisted of twenty pages of onionskin paper, crudely stitched together between two pieces of blue cardboard. It was a literary and social-commentary journal that thus far existed as one copy of the first issue. Mikha grabbed the magazine and examined it from cover to cover.
“Interesting! But why Gamayun?” he said.
“Alkonost and Phoenix were already taken; I don’t like Sirin. Gamayun was just the thing.”
“Yet another bird from Slavic mythology?”
Edik explained:
“Sure. But this little bird is a great intellectual. It knows all the secrets of the universe. It also has the gift of prophecy. We initially thought we would call it The Historical Project. But we decided that was too dry. It’s an educational journal. With modern poetry, naturally.”
Mikha was more than ready to take part in the publication of a journal that would open the eyes and ears of the unenlightened.
Ilya left Mikha at Edik’s, and the new friends shared a dinner of grayish macaroni. After the macaroni they agreed fairly quickly that the magazine should concentrate on literary and social commentary, rather than political. That is, politics would be kept to a minimum. Edik was interested in historical prognostication, and the analysis of social trends, tastes, and preferences—sociological subjects, in other words.
“As far as literature goes, I am most interested in poetry and science fiction. Science fiction is able to generalize the processes under way in the world and offer interesting prognoses. Nowadays, Western science fiction functions as futurology, the philosophy of the future. I simply don’t have time to take it on, though. If you would answer for it, it would be fantastic.”
Mikha thought about it: he had never been exposed to any science fiction. He promised to keep it in mind.
Right on the spot they decided on the contents of the poetry section for the next issue. There would be a large selection of works by one poet, and one or two poems each by five to eight other writers. Mikha suggested Brodsky as the featured poet, and began murmuring rapturously:
“General! Our maps are crap. I pass.
The north is not here at all, but at the North Pole.
And the equator is broader than the side stripes on your trousers.
Because the front, General, is in the south.
At such a distance a walkie-talkie turns any command
Into boogie-woogie.”
“Who are you going to surprise with Brodsky? Listen, there are new poets, nearly unknown:
‘Memory is an armless equestrian statue
You gallop wildly, but
You have no arms
Today you shout loudly in the empty corridor
You flicker at the corridor’s end
It was evening and tea swirled aromatically
Ancient trees of steam grew out of the cups
In silence, each admired his life
And a girl in yellow admired it most of all…’”
“Yes, it’s really good. Who wrote it?”
“Who? A nobody. Young fellow from Kharkov. Came to Moscow not long ago. No one knows him. But in five years they will. Like everyone knows Brodsky now. I’m willing to bet on it. He’s the one we need to publish.”
“I’m not so sure. I think we should take Khvostenko,” Mikha said.
“I love Khvost, but what is he without his guitar? This other fellow will make a stronger impression…”
“What’s his name?”
“What does it matter? I’m telling you—everyone will know him in five years. And you want Khvostenko?” Edik was getting angry, and the good-natured Mikha began feeling uncomfortable.
“This is absurd! We haven’t even started working together, and we’re already quarreling.”
Edik laughed. “That’s what always happens. I’m constantly falling out with my friends. It’s just my character.”
“What idiots we are!” Mikha said. “Gorbanevskaya! Natalia Gorbanevskaya! She’s the one we need! She’d be ideal.” And, his voice full of pathos, he began to recite:
“It will not perish in our wake—
The dry grass smolders.
It will not perish in our wake—
The millstones are still.
In our wake not a step, not a sigh,
no blood, no blood-soaked sweat,
No blood-sealed debt,
will perish in our wake.
The fire runs through the grass,
The fire presses to the trees,
And for those reclining in the foliage
A day of reckoning will come…”
“Done! There can be no objections to Gorbanevskaya! We just have to ask her,” Edik said.
“But it’s samizdat! Why ask permission? We’ll take these three poems, addressed to Brodsky.”
With his passion for the literary classics—the poetic correspondence between Pushkin and Vyazemsky, or the epistolary exchange of Herzen and Turgenev, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, or Gogol and his chosen friends�
�he wanted to elaborate on the subject immediately.
“It would be good to find poems of Brodsky’s addressed to Gorbanevskaya, or, for example, poems of Gorbanevskaya addressed to someone else!”
“To Pushkin, for instance! Go ahead, commission her to do it!” Edik said sarcastically.
But Mikha was supremely serious.
“No, that’s not what I mean. You know, it’s a good idea to look for poems addressed to friends. A poetic conversation between fellow poets. This one, for instance:
‘In the madhouse
Crush your palms,
Smash your forehead against the wall,
Like smashing your face in a snowbank…’”
“I remember that one. It’s to Galanskov,” Edik said.
“Here’s another one. Listen.
‘Brush the bliss of half-sleep from your cheek
And open your eyes until the eyelids cry in pain.
The filth and whitewash of the hospital—
A volunteer’s flag of your captivity.’”
“I know that one, too. It’s to Dimka Borisov. How do you know her poems so well?”
“I heard her read her poems twice at my father-in-law’s house. And I memorized them. She seems rather gloomy and unapproachable; but her poems are full of tenderness. I can’t say I liked her as a person. But she writes the kinds of poems I would like to have written myself.”
* * *
They decided that Mikha would go to Natalia and ask her for some new poems.
Then Edik remembered about some high-flying intellectual from the philosophy department at Moscow State University. He could write an article about contemporary American science fiction.
The third part of the magazine was a large section entitled “News.” And there was plenty of it. A large number of independently thinking people first whispered in corners among themselves, then spoke half out loud, and, finally, went out and joined demonstrations, protesting ever more boldly and conscientiously. They were detained, tried, sentenced to prison, and set free again, and life was full of daily events that people found out about from one another, or from Western radio stations: everyone picked up some bit of news or other.
The Big Green Tent Page 48