The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Vasily Innokentievich knew only one person who had received this honor. General Nichiporuk had lain in his hospital in 1945. In the evenings the hospital head had visited the general. Several times they had drunk and conversed together. The general had gone straight from the hospital to get his decoration, and they drank to the honor together the same evening. There was no doubt in his mind that these decorations belonged to General Nichiporuk—the proof of this were the others, much more common, for Königsberg and the Arctic Circle. This geography corresponded exactly to the war biography of Peter Petrovich.

  Were these stolen? Vasily Innokentievich wondered, and immediately remembered that someone had told him General Nichiporuk had lost his mind, or was in prison for anti-Soviet activities. Vasily Innokentievich didn’t remember the details.

  “What’s your grandfather’s name?” he asked the boy sternly, gripping his bony little shoulders.

  “I don’t have any grandfather! Let me go!” the boy shouted.

  “Where did you get these medals?” The old man shook him by the collar.

  “I found them in the wardrobe, at my grandmother’s! My grandmother gave them to me!” He was an energetic little fellow. He twisted and turned, trying to slip out of the old man’s grasp.

  When he finally wriggled free, he bit Vasily Innokentievich’s hand.

  “You little stinker!” the old man said angrily. “Let’s go see your grandma!”

  “She’s not there! There’s no one home!” he said, turning to go.

  “Well, take me to your mother, then. Come on, let’s go!” the old man insisted, clutching the little boy by the back of the neck with his steely grip.

  “No! I won’t go! I won’t take you there!” little Vitka screamed.

  Then he fell silent, and, in a grown-up, serious voice, offered him a deal. “You might as well take them; the big boys will take them away from me, anyway. Only I don’t want to go home.” He could just imagine how his grandma would shout at him, what a whipping his mother would give him. It was better just to surrender now.

  “Take off your shirt,” the old man commanded.

  He had intended to take the decorations and medals off the faded blue shirt and return it to its rightful owner. But as soon as Vasily Innokentievich held the shirt with the decorations and medals in his hands, the boy slipped away, like a bar of soap, and disappeared under the gate.

  It was stolen—there’s no doubt about it. Stolen, Vasily thought. He folded up the child’s shirt without unpinning the medals, and stuffed the whole thing in the pocket of his suit jacket, not without difficulty. His jacket was sagging, weighted down on one side.

  Strange, strange incident—funny, in a curious way.

  Vasily Innokentievich hadn’t seen General Nichiporuk since the war. After that, it was rumored that Nichiporuk was teaching at the Military Academy. He was no longer in touch with the general, but finding him would be easy enough—through Nefudov or Golubeva.

  Pondering all of this, he walked to the church. Nadezhda was standing by the door. She looked like a forty-year-old Nuta, though completely ordinary. Nuta, of course, had been magnificent, incomparable, peerless. There was no one like her.

  Two old women he didn’t know, and two young men—Sanya and his friend, the red-haired, bearded Mikha—were chatting with Nadezhda.

  Anna Alexandrovna’s friend Elena ran up and stood next to him—her face was scarlet, and she was out of breath. She was a witness, a trusted companion, nearly a participant in their lives.

  High blood pressure, Vasily Innokentievich noted to himself. He kissed Elena, but didn’t mention her blood pressure. What would be the point?

  A church attendant came out.

  “Father is calling you inside to the service.”

  Vasily Innokentievich stood between Nadezhda and Elena, the old women he didn’t know stood at the sides, and behind them, Sanya and his friend.

  From a side door a small, desiccated priest came out, swinging a smoking censer.

  Vasily Innokentievich was in a church again for the second time in two months: first for Anna Alexandrovna’s funeral service, and now for the forty-days memorial service. Before this he hadn’t set foot in a church for about forty years. He had to admit, it stirred something in his soul that had stayed with him since childhood. How strange … Perhaps he was feeling his age. The elderly women sang magnificently, and he suddenly recollected all the words. Some men’s voices from behind joined in. He turned around to look. Sanya, Nuta’s grandson, a sweet boy, was singing: “O Thou, Who with wisdom profound order all things with love, and Who give to all what is needful, O only Creator, give rest, O Lord, to the souls of Thy servants, for on Thee have they set their hope, our Maker and Builder, and our God.”

  How can he know this music? Vasily Innokentievich wondered.

  In truth, forty days before, Sanya had not known it at all. But now he did.

  Sanya’s red-haired friend was weeping like a child. Both of them were holding burning candles.

  Vasily Innokentievich felt an indeterminate sense of guilt, longing, and sadness. Nuta, his second cousin, his first love and the love of his life, a romance that had lasted, with interruptions, since childhood—a parallel life, flickering, fading in and out, and most precious. How pitiless fate was … Her whole life she had tried to fend him off, but he pursued her insistently, stubbornly, making his presence known almost by force. She responded reluctantly, it seemed … and said with a smile, mysterious and melancholy, that had an air of the early twentieth century about it:

  “Vasily, you always appear in my life when it is falling to pieces; you are my rescuer. But, forgive me, you are also the sign and the embodiment of my failure and misfortune…”

  This is what Vasily Innokentievich recalled in the midst of the wondrous chorus of voices. He didn’t give a single thought to the military decorations belonging to someone else that were weighing down his pocket. He had completely forgotten about them.

  * * *

  Peter Petrovich was arrested in Minsk on the day after his departure. On the same day they came to his house and searched it. There was nothing in the house, but they ransacked it, nevertheless, turning everything upside down. They took away some small tokens—autographed books from experts in his field from before the war, lecture notes.

  Zoya was glad that the military decorations had been removed from the house. In fact, the medals were not really even valid. It had been one thing after another: the general had been reduced to the ranks, stripped of his military honors, he was an ex-con, and had been pronounced insane. She knew, of course, that there was nothing wrong with Peter—it was the country that was insane.

  * * *

  As for Tonya Mutyukin, it was a long time before she realized that she was only keeping watch over empty boxes in her house, and that the decorations had disappeared. This was revealed when her older brother, Tolya, came back from doing time with a pile of money, bought everyone presents, and gave the rest of the money to his mother. His mother bought a new wardrobe with it. She began throwing out junk from the old one, and that was when Tonya realized that the military decorations were missing. She was beside herself. First she suspected Tolya, since she knew that those medals were worth a lot of money.

  But Tolya had had nothing to do with it.

  Anyway, why even bring him into it—two months later he was picked up again, because the money for the presents was stolen after all.

  Vitka was the one who suffered most. He hardly remembered his father, and now, just as he was starting to get used to him, he disappeared again.

  The decorations were returned to the general’s home again through a chain of acquaintances and half-strangers. “Naked,” deprived of their little handcrafted coffins, they were wrapped up in cellophane and placed in an iron skillet for safekeeping. Then they were committed to the ground, buried at the dacha of Zoya’s niece near Kratovo Station, on the Kazan railroad line, behind two pine trees holding up a child’s swing. Awa
iting better days.

  And better days did, in fact, come. In the end, the general was reunited with his decorations. The general lived in a country where you have to live for a long time. He lived until he was ninety, and thus managed to die a hero. He was buried in 1991, and all his medals and decorations, once wrapped up in worn-out underwear with a nap, even the American medal, were displayed on a pillow in front of his coffin. And the pillow was red, just as it was supposed to be.

  THE IMAGO

  Everything was just as it had been before—the courtyard, the neighbors, the broken floorboard in the corridor, the saleswomen in the bakery and the fish store, the building manager. Yet it seemed to Mikha as though thirty years had passed, and not just three. One false move and everything might split open with a resounding crash—the house, the courtyard, his little daughter, his wife, and the whole city, and April, so warm and welcoming this year. Cautiously, gingerly, he made his way around the room, the apartment, and his surroundings, doing what he had to do.

  He first went to see Anna Alexandrovna. Then to the police, to have his passport registered. They said he had to find a job within thirty days.

  Then he went to the History Library, almost certain they wouldn’t admit him. But they just told him he needed to reregister his library card.

  Several weeks later, after Anna Alexandrovna’s death, he went to see Ilya and Olga. He rarely visited this strangely eclectic apartment—an admixture of Communist asceticism and Russian Empire style—on Vorovsky Street. Olga had never really warmed up to Alyona, but she adored Mikha.

  Olga kissed him, and pulled out of the refrigerator some parchment paper bundles of pâté, Wallachian salads in little tartlike pie crusts, cold cuts, herring, and who knows what other marvels, all from the Prague confectionery and delicatessen. She laid it all out on translucent plates, and, blowing a kiss good-bye, ran off to finish a translation that had to be completed by the morning. Ilya took out a bottle of Armenian cognac. Mikha could hardly drink a thing, and he ate sparingly as well, expecting the pains in his stomach to start up again at any moment.

  They sat down and looked at each other closely. Ilya was afraid to say anything out of place or unnecessary. He wasn’t terribly sentimental, but he was overcome with a feeling for Mikha that he had rarely even felt toward his disabled son. His eyes and nose stung.

  “Did you see it last night?” Mikha asked.

  Ilya nodded.

  “Of course. All of Moscow watched it. Everyone was expecting something like this.”

  “Expecting it? And I could never have imagined that he would do anything of the sort…”

  “Ingenious, in its own way,” Ilya said.

  The trial of Chernopyatov and his two closest friends had ended the night before. There had been an unprecedented television broadcast—a press conference with Chernopyatov. Sergei Borisovich had repented of all his sins against the Soviet authorities for an hour and a half. And he did this with real talent—if one can be said to have a talent for baseness and treachery. The most surprising thing was that he introduced himself as the head of the “Democratic Movement,” its leader, and its main ideologue; and as self-proclaimed leader of the movement he called upon his followers to reexamine their actions. Everyone who was even remotely involved understood very clearly that there was no unified movement to speak of, that there were various groups of people with their own concerns and “interests,” which sometimes coincided and sometimes did not, who were united only in their rejection of the current authorities and their hunger for change. And the change they wanted varied from group to group, person to person …

  Many people discussed the previous day’s broadcast. The similarity with Dostoevsky’s The Possessed was not hard to see. People with a pragmatic bent feared an unleashing of wholesale repression against any nonconformist thinker. People who took a more philosophical view asked more abstract questions: Had the great Dostoevsky discovered a particular elemental force in the Russian character, this possession by revolutionary fervor, or had he unwittingly created it, along with his literary protagonists Stavrogin and Pyotr Verkhovensky?

  He and Mikha talked about this all evening, without coming to any hard and fast conclusions. There was too much of the story that still remained obscure.

  It was impossible to fathom what had happened to Chernopyatov himself. He had been the most steadfast of them all, wise and experienced. He had survived the children’s penal colony, Stalin’s labor camps, and exile … And he had a clear-cut enemy: the Soviet authorities, Stalinism. What could have happened to him to make him turn around so abruptly, so radically?

  “Ilya, a month and a half before my release they brought me face-to-face with him. I didn’t know that he had been arrested and was naming names. A frank confession, they call it. Dozens of names. He betrayed nearly the whole Chronicle: editors, writers, compilers. This was the last thing I expected. Sergei Borisovich told me that I was making a mistake, that I needed courage to admit my mistakes, that I had to seek a new path. They tried to pressure me into going down that path with him. I refused. They told me they would send me up for a second term if I didn’t cooperate. I was certain they would never let me out after that. But they did. They made me sign a paper saying I wouldn’t engage in anti-Soviet activity, and let me go. What happened to him I really don’t understand. Maybe there is something we don’t know. They have so many methods at their disposal, besides beatings.”

  “I was told they have some sort of ‘truth serum’ that they sprinkle in your food,” Ilya ventured.

  “I could believe that. You know yourself that they’re professionals, and we’re absolutely defenseless against them. And we’re just as defenseless against the common criminals. I thought about Mandelstam a lot when I was inside. What it was like for him … to die there.

  “But don’t imagine that they feel any lack of moral justification! In fact, they feel they are morally superior. For them, breaking a person with ideals is a special pleasure. It’s like we all have the same face to them. Like we’re all Chinese; or like we’re all weaklings who wear glasses. Before I was transported from prison to the camp, one of the jail bosses smashed my glasses. He got such a charge out of it, it was such a thrill to him to hear them crunch underfoot. I really can’t see a thing without them, as you know. I only received a new pair three months later—Anna Alexandrovna sent them to me. Chernopyatov, by the way, also wears glasses.”

  “Yes, I photographed Chernopyatov a few years ago. It was a good portrait.”

  No, Ilya didn’t feel any guilt about that whatsoever. What a bunch of motherfuckers was what he was thinking.

  “Well, I’m just thinking about the ways in which he was vulnerable, that’s all,” Mikha said, explaining something that Ilya already knew perfectly well. “Maybe they made him drink something, or broke him in some other way … I just don’t want you to say anything bad about him. One has to feel sorry for him, on top of everything else. He wasn’t thinking of Alyona. How will this affect her? And all the people who’ve surrounded him all these years.

  “I think the price he has already paid is so high that he is worse off than everyone else. How will he ever live this down?

  “You helped me so much, Ilya, before my arrest. I’ll always remember what you said to me: ‘Every word you say will work against you. Keep silent. The best thing is to say nothing.’ And that’s what I did. But you know yourself, Sergei Borisovich is a big talker—an orator, even. He said too much, and then there was no going back. Or maybe his strength and willpower gave out. I’m not going to be the one to judge him.”

  * * *

  Mikha’s words were feverish and disconnected, but Ilya understood everything. In silence, Ilya poured them each another glass, and then drank, saying: “Me neither.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do for work now. It turns out that working with the deaf children was the best thing I’ve done in my life.”

  “We’ll think of something,” Ilya said, with l
ess confidence than usual. “Have you ever thought about emigrating?” This was the first time Ilya had ever brought this up directly with Mikha.

  “Emigration—only to save my skin. The most terrifying thing for me is the prison camps, Ilya. I won’t survive them a second time. But emigration … I’m from here, everything I know and love is here. Friends, Russian, my work.”

  “Work? What kind of work?”

  Mikha seemed to wilt.

  “But how—without work?”

  Ilya didn’t know either. For him it wasn’t a matter of a single job, but of various kinds of work. A multitude of tasks.

  “You know, let’s take one step at a time. First we’ll find a job for you. Then we’ll try to take stock of the situation, and think about where to go from there. I’ve already asked around. My friends are keeping an eye out for some kind of job for you. Start with your personal life, putting your own house in order.”

  “That sounds like one has to make a choice—between one’s personal life and society.”

  “Your head’s full of romantic rubbish. Why a choice? What kind of choice? That’s just childish thinking. There’s no choice—you wake up in the morning, brush your teeth, drink your tea, read a book, write your poems, earn your money, gab with friends—what kind of choice does that involve? At a certain moment, you start to feel—there’s something dangerous here. So you don’t touch it. You stay away from it. There’s always a boundary line. But we’ll figure that out when we come to it. You’re not going to go around asking for trouble! Sometimes you can’t help it. But you learn to move to the left, move to the right, so they don’t grab your ass. Of course, there are those who love to bask in glory, to be in the limelight. Sergei Borisovich is ambitious that way. He wanted fame, influence. He wanted to play a role. But there are others—Vladimir Bukovsky and Tanya Velikanova, for example. Sakharov. Valera, Andrei, Alik, Arina … many of them! They never choose between personal life and social life. They just live how they live, from morning till night. They don’t play at life…” Ilya said, sounding certain and knowledgeable. It was difficult to counter him. But there was something in his reasoning that didn’t add up. Mikha jumped on it.