Madness Treads Lightly

CHAPTER 21

Michael was a little fatter and had let his beard grow. He was as bald as an egg, and his girth and short stature made him look a bit like a tennis ball. He looked cheerful and rested, despite the long flight.

“I’m starving! The vegetarian meal on the plane was disgusting,” he jabbered in his Brooklyn English. “But Lena, you look marvelous. And this, I understand, is Mr. Krotov. Am I right?” He shook Gosha’s hand mercilessly.

“No, Michael, Mr. Krotov is in London right now. This is Gosha. We work together.”

“Goshua? Wonderful! Do you speak English?”

“Yes, a little,” Gosha told him modestly, although he had a degree from the English department of the prestigious Foreign Languages Institute.

“Very pleased to meet you.” Michael kept on jabbering. “How are you doing? Now where did you say your husband was? London? Steven said you married a police colonel. Congratulations! And he went to London to help out Scotland Yard? Ha ha ha! You know, Sally got herself a third dog. Another Airedale. There’s no end to it. My wife’s decided to turn our house into a haven for dogs. By the way, Sally sends a big hello. She sent along some medicines for you.”

“Medicines?” Lena said, surprised. “What for?”

“Her friend Judy read in some newspaper that there’d been several aspirin poisonings in Russia. Sally sent high-quality American aspirin for you. Just in case. And something else. You’ll see when we get to your apartment. Sally and I spent a very long time picking out a present for your daughter. In the end we decided on Legos. We bought a small set geared to two-year-olds. Our psychologists say that building sets have a very good influence on a child’s intellect. It sure is cold here in Moscow! In New York it’s full-blown spring. True, they’re promising colder temps next week, but Sally doesn’t believe the forecasters. Me neither. Everything here’s changed so much! You’re becoming much more European. I never ever expected it would happen this quickly.”

“Lena, does he ever shut up? Do you think you’ll last ten days? And with that accent—won’t your eardrums get sore?” Gosha whispered in Russian, leaning toward Lena.

“Gosha, stop it. It’s not nice.”

“Wow!” Michael howled at the top of his lungs. “We’re riding in a Volga! A real Russian Volga! It used to be rich Communists riding around in these cars. Now it’s rich New Russians? Goshua, are you a New Russian?”

“He’s mocking me now!” Gosha whispered, rolling his eyes. “No, Michael,” he said in English, smiling graciously and unlocking the car. “New Russians prefer Mercedes and BMWs.”

“Oh, right! Not long ago I saw on television…”

Michael didn’t shut his mouth the entire drive. Lena nodded distractedly in reply, sometimes saying, “Yes, certainly” or “Really? Impossible!” She was thinking about Volkov. Why had her name caused such a stormy reaction in someone she’d only barely known fourteen years ago? According to what Gosha said about him, Veniamin Volkov should have been someone with nerves of steel. But the reaction was hysterical.

It makes no sense. A millionaire, a megaproducer who’s up to his elbows in shit and blood, was frightened by the mere mention of my name. He did have a fierce, burning passion for me fourteen years ago. But that’s ridiculous to think of now. No, not ridiculous. Dangerous, very dangerous. Old passions have nothing to do with this. Still, there must be some connection to our past.

Everything was shipshape at home. Vera Fyodorovna had even remembered to make up the couch for Michael in the living room.

“It’s too late to eat,” Michael declared. “I know you Russians like to sit drinking tea in the kitchen at night. But with your permission, I’m going to take a shower and go to bed. Tomorrow morning I want to get to the Tretyakov Gallery.”

“Of course, Michael.”

Gosha had a quick cup of tea and headed home. Lena was glad to sit in silence. Everyone in the apartment was asleep. It was two thirty, but Lena knew she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep.

This terrible day refused to end. She turned on the kettle, trying not to make too much noise, took a small stepladder out of the hall closet, climbed onto it, and took the cardboard vacuum cleaner box she kept her old manuscripts and letters in off the top shelf.

In Soviet times, half the country’s population wrote. Mountains of manuscripts were sent to magazine offices. Mostly it was poetry, but there was fiction, too. Those outpourings of the people’s creativity had to be read, reviewed, and returned to the author with a detailed, substantive reply.

Every literature department had a regiment of freelance literary consultants performing this dreary but well-compensated labor. For the most part, the consultants were unemployed writers and poets, but sometimes the magazine’s own employees did it on the side for extra money. Every twenty-four typewritten pages was worth three rubles. If you grabbed a stack of manuscripts from the office, took them home, and worked at the typewriter for a few hours, you could earn an extra fifty or even a hundred—if you had the energy to read through 240 pages of mediocre prose.

Everybody wrote. Young Pioneers and war vets, tractor drivers and milkmaids, miners and pilots, sailors and housewives. But most of the poetry came from people who’d been sent to prison or to the camps. These were the most patriotic and most ideologically keen opuses.

Burglars and rapists wrote poems about Lenin, the Party, and the victory of Communism. As a rule, they weren’t shy about bringing up the articles for which they’d been “unjustly and illegally” convicted.

After university, when she was working as a special correspondent for a popular youth magazine, Lena often patched her financial holes by taking home manuscripts that had come to the literature department. But it wasn’t just about the money for her. She liked it when she unexpectedly glimpsed a faint flash of talent in all the verbal garbage.

Sometimes, the submissions were accompanied by long letters in which the person told their life story. This usually turned out to be much more interesting than the works themselves. As a rule, authors were profoundly lonely people, and their few crooked quatrains were just an excuse to express themselves, get a human response, and write more.

In her years of work, about three hundred of these letter-confessions had been sent to the editorial office and addressed to her personally. She’d kept a number of them; she couldn’t bring herself to throw them out.

Now, in the dead of night, she searched through the old papers for a few letters once sent to her from Tobolsk and Tyumen. She came across one of them almost right away.

The letter was stapled to a manuscript, “Justice,” a strange story set out on ten typewritten pages about an officer who doesn’t believe a murder suspect’s guilt. This officer, Vyacheslav, has a feeling that someone else is the murderer.

At the base of the plot were general arguments, not facts or clues. In rereading the story, it seemed to Lena that the dead first lieutenant had left out the specifics on purpose. He may have been lightly fictionalizing a real case, and out of a police officer’s natural caution, preserved a certain amount of secrecy even in a work of literature. But he couldn’t remain silent. This case bothered him so much he decided to write a story.

The story had a happy ending. Justice triumphed. The innocent man was released, his elderly mother sobbed on the noble officer’s chest, and the real killer, crafty and cold-blooded, was escorted to prison.

“Zakharov, Zakharov. Could you have been that conscientious and honest officer? And is that why they killed you?” Lena didn’t notice she was talking out loud.

Setting aside the manuscript and letter, she started reading through some more of the letters. There was one more letter she remembered—from a prison with a long code. But Lena knew that prison wasn’t far from Tyumen.

“Vasya,” Lena sighed after reading the letter. “Vasya Slepak.” Again she’d spoken out loud without noticing.

He hadn’t told her the details in his letter because prisoner letters went through the censor. And a letter that discussed a criminal case might not get through for censorship reasons.

Many years ago, Lena had kept her promise. She got Vasily Slepak, the prisoner outcast, published.

It hadn’t been easy. Lena pestered her editor in chief and department head for a week and listened to all their heavy sighs, exclamations, and reprimands—and what they had to say about her and her pushiness. But in the end they did publish Vasya Slepak’s poem in the “Anthology.”

All that was a very long time ago, another lifetime practically. That youth magazine was long defunct, and her department head had retired and was looking after his grandchildren. The editor in chief had jumped into politics, ridden the wave of ’91 high, and then quietly and smoothly sank into private entrepreneurship. Soviet poet Studenets turned himself into the founding father of one of the many Nazi-Communist organizations.

The only one Lena knew nothing about was Vasya Slepak.