Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

One

Just as in our dreams, a fist thumped at the door, and I opened it and there stood a greatcoated lieutenant of the Committee for State Security. He was at least a head taller than me; that head was blond and square-jawed, without a blemish. Frigid, almost transparent blue eyes floated in their sockets.

“Documents.”

I handed over my passport as he allowed himself into the flat. He compared my photograph to my face and then examined the stamp that gave me the right to live in the capital, a right that had degenerated into the occupancy of this tottering apartment building on the outskirts. After checking my face again, he opened a leather purselike bag at his side and removed a sheaf of papers.

I became aware that the apartment smelled of fried eggs. In advance of his arrival I had tried to put the place in order, but the sagging bookcases and the pile of unmarked student composition books gave evidence of its chronic dishevelment. These days I taught literature at the Pedagological Institute.

“Sign here,” the lieutenant said, pointing a manicured finger at the top sheet of his papers. “Here. Here. Here.”

Another officer of lesser rank stepped into the flat. He carried a brown cardboard carton that later proved to be quite heavy, though he himself didn’t show any strain. The lieutenant waved at the table in the little room on the other side of the entrance foyer. The officer deposited the carton there and left, not once looking at me.

The lieutenant inspected my signature and then found another half-dozen places for me to sign on the other pages. As I leaned over the credenza in order to write my name, the lieutenant walked deeper into the cramped, overstuffed flat. He stopped at a photograph of me and Varvara, taken in the Crimea, and then at some unanswered personal mail on a chair. He was most interested in the locked, glassed-in bookcase and its shelf of notebooks. He studied their bindings for a minute.

“My personal journals,” I confessed.

He examined them a moment longer and then reclaimed his papers. After patiently confirming that my signature was at each required place, he returned the papers to his pouch and, with a barely perceptible nod of acknowledgement, departed as well.

I remained several minutes in the foyer, breathing deeply, trying to shake off the image of the lieutenant’s lacquer-clear fingernails. When my composure had returned, I telephoned Anton Basmanian at his office.

“They’ve arrived,” I said, looking at the carton on the table.

“All right, shall we say”—he paused while, I presumed, he looked at his calendar—“December 3? A first draft, reviewing the trilogy as a whole. Twenty pages doublespaced at a minimum.”

“That’s fine. That’s great. I’m looking forward to reading the books.”

“Rem,” he said sternly, detecting sarcasm where there was none. “Many on the board were opposed to giving you this assignment. I’ve gone out on a limb, you know. But it’s time to get you back into print, to forget the past. This could be the beginning.”

“Believe me, Anton, I’m grateful. Don’t worry, I’ll do a good review.”

“Do a responsible review.”

I returned the telephone to its hook and went to the table. Inside the carton, encased in gleaming, wine red leather, lay the books Malaya Zemlya, Rebirth, and the about-to-be-issued, still-classified conclusion to the trilogy, Virgin Lands. Their author was L. I. Brezhnev. I pulled the first volume from the box. As I lifted its warm, supple cover to my face, I could almost smell the cow chewing her cud. The cow groaned with pleasure as I opened the book. In contrast to the extravagance of the binding, the paper within the book was nearly tissue thin and the type laid upon it was small, about eight-point, and ungenerously leaded. I wondered what portion of these books, the subject of my first writing for publication in ten years, I would actually read.

My stomach turning, I realized that to find the right words of praise, to modulate my lauds into plausibly critical language, to prove my tough-mindedness by offering a few trivial caveats that I would immediately renounce, to concede generously that my own novel on a similar theme could not be rightfully compared with Comrade Brezhnev’s achievement, to announce, as I undoubtedly would, that Comrade Brezhnev had raised the art of historical fiction to new and commanding heights—in short, to write an article in which every glimmer of doubt or irony had been eradicated—I would need to read every page of the trilogy, perhaps even twice. The desperate shreds of my ambition would demand it.

Despite the significance it carried for my future, I did not immediately fall upon the general secretary’s work. Returning to the hallway where the lieutenant had paused in his inspection of my bookcase, I assumed the same detached and suspicious stance that he had. Relics of a life so distant as to seem nearly prehistoric, the journals ran across the top shelf from left to right. The species had evolved from a single cardboard-bound book that I had been given for my seventeenth birthday. Its cheap binding had broken and now the pages were kept within the covers by force of habit and nostalgia. It was succeeded by three or five very faux-leather notebooks, the detritus of my university years, and then a series of teal, pretentiously unpretentious softbound composition books, which had served me early in my professional career. Then came a long line of black-and-red hardbound diaries that I had purchased twelve years before, in 1966, in a neighborhood stationery store in London. Their confident march into posterity was abruptly broken, and the teal composition books, now simply unpretentious, my pretensions shattered, resumed their course.

Placing my tips of my fingers against the glass at the spot where the English journals were arrayed—the glass was warm, the books smoldered—I marveled anew at the naive confidence of my fourth decade and the century’s seventh. And then, as if driven by an itch, the fingers were pushed to the left, to the first set of teal composition books, where I knew, somewhere, lay the notes of my critical conversation with Viktor Panteleyev.

I did not need to fish out the key to the bookcase from my desk: I knew what was in the journals. The bindings were sufficiently mnemonic.

Two

It had been a miserable, brooding weekend under concrete skies, out in Peredelkino. Lydia, my first wife, showed little interest in my quandary. “Do whatever you like,” she said. Lydia considered the petition a distraction, a waste of time, yet another seduction to which I was hurrying to succumb. As if she possessed only a single photograph of me, hunched over my desk, she believed I should work every minute of the working day. Time was running out, she always said, not portentously, but as a matter of scientific, cosmological fact. As for herself, she foresaw the diminishing future as a place where she would occupy our newly acquired dacha year-round, tend to the garden, make small repairs, jar preserves, do some translation work, and, above all, read. Her only life ambition was to read every good book that had ever been published.

The text of the petition lay on the kitchen table all that long weekend, pushed aside by the salads and the roast, imprinted by rings of bottles, smeared by cigarette ashes and jam. The cat sniffed at it and slinked away. Viktor had always been a lazy writer. “Beseeching the most respected First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers,” “stressing the undersigned’s conformity to Marxist-Leninist principles in service to the state,” “begging for the careful reconsideration of the case of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vishnevsky,” and “reviewing for the First Secretary’s benefit the salient facts as we understand them,” the petition was like one of Viktor’s novels, sentimental and over-participled. I could, on the basis of literary squeamishness, refuse to attach my name to it. The weekend passed into overtime, a tense, loose-boweled Monday.

Yet on Tuesday, back in Moscow, I telephoned.

“Let’s meet.”

“All right,” Viktor replied slowly and thoughtfully, to indicate that he understood the implications of my invitation.

“At the union,” I said, and then, with a pretense of casualness, I added, “Would you like to come up to my office?”

Given my low rank and the office’s consequent humility, I rarely met people there. The sweep of the door nearly obliterated the room’s walking space. The aged, lumpy divan’s only charm was its reputation for having once been slept on by Isaac Babel. But the office was adequately lit and well stocked with books and liquor. I found the room a pleasant enough place to write and to attend to union business, especially that requiring discretion. It moreover offered a bright portal onto Gertsena, the always churning street named after Aleksandr Herzen. My pursuit of this office had been uncontested. Most of my colleagues preferred the view of the courtyard, with its statue of Leo Tolstoy.

Viktor arrived on Tuesday afternoon, his face set in a rictus of grim deliberation. He too had traversed a difficult weekend. His suit was wrinkled and his tie undone. His stare was glassy. I recalled that his wife had left him and, I swear, I had a premonition. I motioned him toward the divan, but he ignored the invitation to make pleasantries. Stooping awkwardly, he opened his briefcase, removed the original copy of the petition and slid it across the desk.

I saw at once that I had been snookered. No more than a half-dozen signatures filled the left-hand side of the petition below Viktor’s. Viktor had said the week before that Misha Vishnevsky had many friends in high places, and not only in the union. Misha, Viktor said, was genuinely liked and politically well connected. In any case, even among those who didn’t know him, there was widespread revulsion at the tactics of the security organs and a commitment not to allow the gains of the past few years to be reversed. Yet most of the names on the list were unfamiliar and those that weren’t belonged to individuals of exceedingly modest reputation. Not one of my colleagues in the Secretariat was represented.

“It’s early in the week,” Viktor muttered, by way of explanation.

“Monday’s early in the week. Tuesday’s already the beginning of the middle of the week.”

“No one’s been in their office.”

“But you’ve received commitments?”

He nodded his head in assent.

“From who?”

“I’d rather not say, not until they’ve actually signed. You know how it is.”

I did. I made a falsely hearty mental shrug and signed the petition with an extravagant flourish, plunging my name’s descenders to the floor of the next space.

When Viktor sighed I realized that he had been holding his breath. “So, Rem,” he said. “That’s done.” He gingerly returned the document to his briefcase.

“We should talk sometime, Viktor.”

He nodded his head again, meaning: not here. Too many ghosts stalked the corridors of this building, a neoclassical mansion that had been built in the nineteenth century for a count named Sollogub. The yellow house, trimmed in white and flanked by two symmetrical wings, was said to have later served Tolstoy as a model for his depiction of the Rostov mansion in War and Peace. Many of us, unconsciously indulging the conceit that fiction trumped fact, would insist that it was indeed the Rostov mansion.

“Thank you.”

Viktor clasped my hand, and I was surprised by its strength and warmth. Then he left. The whole thing had taken less than a minute.

Now I realized that the weight pressing on my soul the entire weekend was not the fear of signing the petition, but the fear that I would not. With the door closed, I seemed about to levitate from my desk. Or, conversely, I was in the tumble of some glorious fall, the wind sweeping my precociously graying, sloppily long hair behind me. All at once I recalled the sensations—so vivid they were nearly physical—that I had experienced when my first poem had been accepted for publication. Then too there had been relief: I would be a writer after all. Then too there had been a wonderment at my trespass: in that case, across the holy fields of Russian literature. And then there had been the prolonged, deliciously drowsy wait for the journal’s actual publication and arrival. (None of the pleasures of publication approach the pleasure of anticipating publication.)

Still buoyed by relief, I turned to the mail that had accumulated on my desk in the previous few days. There was some union business—applications for membership and information about a forthcoming musical program dedicated to a visiting Malaysian playwright—as well as a personal letter from a family friend and a large gray envelope that contained, I knew at a glance, a manuscript from some provincial literary aspirant. I received envelopes of this kind not infrequently and considered the thoughtful reading of their contents an obligation incurred by my profession as well as by my office. My own literary career had begun with a similar packet addressed to Boris Sorokin. I cut open the large envelope and shook out onto the desk a spill of onion skin.

The cover letter contained a few comments about my most recent novel that were perceptive in their artfully offhanded approval. I brought the paper to my face, but the only perfume was the ink’s. Sometimes ambitious female writers sent their photographs; Marina Burchatkina hadn’t, so I assumed that she was plain. I wasn’t disappointed. Already the caress of her praise had produced the accustomed tingling along the insides of my thighs, a quickening of my appetite. If she were plain, I could at least be assured that my response to her work would be based on its merit.

Her letter stated that she was a schoolteacher in Kaluga and had contributed a number of items to a vaguely familiar provincial youth magazine. She asked if perhaps, “respected comrade,” I would advise her, on the basis of these stories and poems, whether she should continue her literary pursuits.

I returned the manuscript to the envelope, which I slid into a drawer for later reading, but curiosity prevented me from releasing my grip on it. I pulled out the manuscript. Never did I open an envelope from a novice writer without the trembling hope that it contained something wonderful, something that would change my life or the course of Russian literature. I had yet to be rewarded for this expectation, which I sustained for its evidence of my idealism and open-mindedness. Even today, I pick through the most obscure and irregularly published journals looking for a miracle.

A minute swept away that morning’s millennial hopes. Marina had sent me three short stories and a sheaf of poetry, forgettable even now after all that’s happened. I remember only my response: a headshake and a dull, leaden feeling. Her work was not as poor as other samotyok that had “self-flowed” onto my desk. She had a competent command of the language, but it was put to use for nothing original and certainly nothing urgent. Mired deep within the then loosely watched borders of conventional socialist realism, the stories were predictable and unpersuasive. Some of the poems simply failed to scan.

Fortunately for Marina, enough of my good mood remained to compose a few words of mild encouragement. I rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter. I told her that I appreciated her comments about my novel and was touched by her decision to turn to me for advice. I commended her careful use of language and her obviously heartfelt sentiments. All true. And then I advised her as I would have advised the most inarticulate and illiterate of aspirants and what I advised myself when my own work faltered: keep writing.

Three

Of course, it was not only ghosts that stalked the halls of Vorovskovo, 52. There were corporeal informers and professional eavesdroppers or, to put it more benignly, people whom we would simply prefer not have auditing our conversations. Viktor’s nod had reminded me, as I needed to be reminded from time to time, that the union was an instrument of the state. It was closely monitored by several organs of the state, including the Committee for State Security—that is, the KGB—and the Party. Indeed, several high-ranking members of the Secretariat passing through the narrow hallways also held rank in the KGB, and others owed their official positions to inclusion on the Party’s or the KGB’s nomenklatura lists. This infiltration was ubiquitous throughout Soviet society. As if placed in a room with two bright lamps, each organization or government agency cast a pair of shadows; one belonged to the Party and the other to the security forces.

On the Rostov mansion’s polished parquet floors, there were many places where the penumbras of these shadows overlapped. Various union secretaries, section secretaries, deputies, and other officials openly served more than one master. Many of them did it with a grace that lent them authority and propriety. Boris Sorokin was a fixture at Party congresses, where he lectured the delegates on the importance of providing the resources to maintain high literary output. Kind, garrulous Viktor Ilyin, the Moscow branch’s organizational secretary, was a former lieutenant general in the KGB, with whom he kept close ties. It was presumed that even Darya Sergeyevna, the stout old lady who had been watching our coats since Gorky’s time, castigating us for being underdressed and prescribing home remedies when, as a consequence of our defiance, we became ill, kept a tally of our comings and goings, and especially who with.

The shadows overlapped across our desks. The rank and file never forgot that a full literary career outside the union was impossible: nonunion writers without registered employment risked prosecution as “social parasites.” All of us knew our responsibilities as Soviet writers. We had private and public selves. Writing was the work of the public self.

The year-long repairs of the café downstairs ended with it unpainted. The café reopened anyway and after the first weekend a number of comic and obscene graffiti marked the walls. They were brought to the attention of Konstantin Fedin, the union’s first secretary, who furiously swore he would catch and punish the perpetrators. Before that could happen, some anonymous hero painted over the evidence with a copse of graceful palm trees. Afterwards it was allowed that other writers could add to the landscape “in a tasteful way,” and soon the walls were covered with more palm trees, Gaugin-esque girls in straw skirts, dragons, flying fish, and gentle, hilarious caricatures of our most easily caricatured colleagues. More than one observer commented that we made better artists than writers, a remark that seemed less amusing when Valery Schenëv mordantly responded, “Yes, that is fair, since the members of the artists’ union are better writers.” Indeed, the artists’ union, much more political than the writers’ union, was currently consuming itself with petitions and tracts.

I laid a brush to the middle of the wall closest to the kitchen and when I pulled it away there remained the image of a naked, round-faced woman, angelic in her demeanor, her torso almost entirely obscured by tomatoes, green pepper plants, vines, and a tottering stack of books. At the woman’s shoulder, incompetently foreshortened so that it appeared to be resting on it, was balanced a small, uneven wooden house, our dacha. I suffered a number of comments about being either so sentimental or so guilty that I would paint my own wife.

I don’t make any claims for the painting’s artistic merit, but I liked it anyway, for its lushness, for its appetizing, perfectly round tomatoes, and for my wife. The painting was indeed sentimental: the one or two square meters that it occupied was a map of idealization. I’m told it remains on the café wall to this day.

My wife Lydia was from the country, a small town in central Russia, and never seemed to forgive the circumstances (admission to the philology department of Moscow State University) that had brought her to Moscow. She hated the motor traffic, she hated the noise, and most of all she hated the food, the dearth of fresh vegetables and fruit even in summer and their tinned replacements all year round, the factory chickens, the pale, tasteless cellulose-stuffed bread and the fatty, rancid meat. She called it food for slaves. She had hardly less disdain for the union food packages, containing otherwise impossible-to-get delicacies, that I brought home from Yeliseyev’s Gastronom. Shortly after we married she established a garden on our fifth-floor balcony. The balcony was almost always in shade and hardly anything grew there save her resentment. I could watch her from a window in my study as she crouched at the root of a sickly vine, tapping the soil, muttering incantations. Then she would shake her head, give the root a parting touch, and go back to her book.

Lydia’s passion for reading, her wanton surrender to an author, was the sexiest thing about her. Embracing a book, she was completely vulnerable to the author’s advances. She would accept any indignity, swallow any lie, and remain constant in the face of the author’s infidelities and depravities. Regardless of the wattage of the light above her head, she gave the text the firm grip of her attention. She was always missing her metro station, even when she read standing, wedged between the other passengers. Sometimes the text was my own. In the hours when I knew she was reading my work, I lived a kind of distracted half-life, as I imagined the play of my words against her retinae.

One evening earlier that summer, like a gladiator approaching the tribune with booty, I had swaggered into our flat and announced that we had been given the right to rent a small union dacha in Peredelkino, the writers’ settlement just outside Moscow. I had expected to be tattooed with kisses, but Lydia was too surprised to even congratulate me. As she stood in the kitchen, tears welling in her eyes, I realized that I hadn’t fully gauged the weight of despair that she had accumulated living here in the city.

Even though the hour was late and the juices of a roast were bubbling in the oven, she demanded that we inspect the property right away. By elektrichka from the Kiev Station the village was a half hour’s journey. In that time she hardly spoke, as if fearing to break the spell. The house was located about two kilometers from the train stop, a distance we covered nearly on a run. We arrived during the prolonged twilight, the shadows long and diffuse, the birds childishly atwitter about their late bedtimes.

The dacha was small, but it was a dacha nonetheless, a wooden, two-room house sitting on a small plot of land and encroached by vines and juniper bushes. The overgrowth made it impossible to see our neighbors, even though they were less than twenty meters away on either side of us. An outdoor dinner party unwound somewhere and a woman’s laugh was close enough to promise that I might someday know it intimately. Our dacha possessed neither indoor plumbing nor telephone, but it had a stove and was comfortably laid out and clean. From the porch I watched Lydia till some soil with her foot, testing it.

“No chickens,” I declared.

She turned and gazed at me as if I were mad, the mad tsar issuing an ukase to his tenth-of-an-hectare kingdom.

“I’m sorry, but it just won’t do,” I said. “This is a writers’ settlement.”

She scowled. “You’ve never had a real egg, that’s your problem.”

We moved in the following day and at once set to work clearing the refuse, broken bottles, and abandoned building materials that were scattered in the underbrush. After marking out a rectangle at the side of the house, Lydia laid down a thick layer of fresh topsoil that had been procured at great expense from a truck driver who worked in a nearby kolkhoz. It was already too late in the year to plant anything but lettuce, dill, parsley, and sorrel.

I hardly accomplished any literary work the remainder of that month. Moving into the dacha, as modest as it was, occupied the sum of our energies and imaginations. The first morning I woke in the straw-filled dacha bed, I lay for hours looking up through the square of sky unevenly partitioned by the trunk of a birch tree and believed that I loved the birch as much as I loved life itself. This was not the manifestation of anything as simple as a love of nature. The allocation of this dacha was an enormous professional success, as much as the publication of my first book.

On a pleasant summer weekend, when things were good, Lydia and I would stroll hand in hand down the lanes, blowing cigarette smoke over the hedges of the residences of our greatest writers. On wide Serafimovicha, Korney Chukovsky lived in a yellow-and-brown house with a veranda on which he read his verse and Whitman’s to the neighborhood children. A few blocks away, Zinaida Nikolayevna, Pasternak’s widow, was living out her last days in their round, wooden dacha. From the street, one could see into Pasternak’s upstairs study and, through the line of unshuttered windows, the woods behind the house. Zinaida Nikolayevna’s immediate neighbors were, on one side, Mayakovsky’s former lover Lily Brik and, on the other, Pasternak’s friend and persecutor, Konstantin Fedin.

Each dacha was like a book, in that it represented an author. But there were many more variations among Soviet dachas than there were among Soviet books. Some were located on large grounds and were cottages of more than one story, others were rusticated gingerbread shacks, some were constructed on an individual plan, and many more were built according to a standard design—and each variation spoke of the inhabitants’ literary success, productivity, social standing, and political reliability.

Most dachas were owned outright, not rented, by writers who claimed achievements greater than my two novels. I would be reminded of this every month when I paid Litfond, the union’s social welfare agency, for the vouchers that I would then give to another clerk in the same office—a pointless, time-consuming task that satisfied somebody somewhere that the capitalist practice of “renting” had been subverted. The vouchers were not inexpensive, but Lydia took on some lucrative translation work and I augmented my schedule of well-paid “creative trips” that brought literary programs to provincial audiences.

Lydia had immediately declared her intention to spend every remaining week of the summer in Peredelkino, and that was fine with me. Accompanied by dozens of other husbands, I took the train out every Friday evening, bringing my manuscript and two or three books or “thick” journals for Lydia. The husbands would return on Monday morning, looking forward to hot showers in our newly roomy flats and the capital’s parties and romantic intrigues.

We had many friends living in the village. That summer we attended parties extending well into the following morning, parties of great mirth and good feeling, and I felt more a member of the literary fraternity than I had ever felt before or have since. Even Lydia enjoyed these revels, displaying a degree of ease that I had not witnessed since the earliest days of our marriage. As late summer gave way to mushroom season, the fungal equinox, she put off her return to the city.

On the Saturday morning after I met with Viktor, I woke late and found Lydia reading outside on the porch swing, her bare legs folded beneath her. Transfixed by type, she didn’t look up. I kissed the back of her neck, recalling that we had made love on the swing the night before. She mumbled something. I made some Nescafé and watched her read. When she turned the page at the end of the chapter, I said, “By the way, I signed that petition after all.”

She looked up, her eyes unfocused.

I made an elaborate flourish in the air. “J’ai signé cette pétition-là. You know, Misha Vishnevsky. They’ve put him in a psychiatric hospital.”

“You signed it!” She appeared surprised.

“I told you I might. It was under discussion, remember? You didn’t give me advice either way.”

“I said that it wasn’t going to do any good.”

“That’s not advice. Some actions are morally correct even if they have no practical consequences.”

“You mean, if you’d like to make a grand gesture.”

She had put down her book and had raised and turned herself in the swing, unconsciously choosing the position in which I had penetrated her. I smiled at the recollection.

“All right, so let’s say it’s a grand gesture. That what’s happening now, grand gestures in defense of liberalization. You’re right, individually it’s not going to have any effect, Vishnevsky will never be freed. But look, we’re trying to overcome this monumental legacy of Stalinism. We can’t oppose the hard-liners head-on, there’s too many of them, but we can reach and persuade high-ranking people in the union and the Party. There are some honest and decent men.”

“It’s only politics, Rem. You sound like a politician.”

“If there’s a protest this time, the hard-liners will think twice the next.”

“That’s something Panteleyev told you,” she guessed, correctly. “Why should they think twice, if there are no practical consequences from the first protest or from any of the others?”

I frowned. I hadn’t expected this opposition and hadn’t prepared any arguments.

“Let me put it another way,” I said. “There’s a man. As we argue now in the cool autumn air, surrounded by greenery, he’s imprisoned in a so-called psychiatric institution, out of contact with his family, lost to the world. In our own country! Viktor has evidence that he’s being tortured and pumped full of drugs—not to cure him of any supposed psychosis, but to induce psychosis. This is being done on behalf of our government and on behalf of a Party claiming to advance the interests of the people. Doesn’t that anger you?”

“Do you know this man? Why do you care?”

“It’s a writer’s duty to imagine other people and sympathize with their situation,” I insisted, shaking my head. I looked at a pile of books alongside the swing, just as I had painted it on the wall of the café, and then through the open door at the library that had mysteriously arisen in the front room, like an Inca city in the jungle. Where had all these books come from? I had hardly noticed an attenuation in the thick growth of literature that covered the walls of our flat. “In fact, I would think it’s a human duty. I don’t understand.” I waved at the new library. “What’s the point of all these books if they have no impact on your life?”

“But they do.”

“They don’t!” I raised my voice. “They’re all about the world and the society you disdain. The characters of the best of them are deeply involved in human life, they’re men and women challenged by imperative moral questions, by history, and by the defects of their own personalities. Reading them, you should be moved to reexamine your own character, to question your involvement in society, to act.”

She snorted. “Spoken like a Bolshevik. That’s not why I read. I’m sick to death of literature as medicine, literature as therapy, literature as politics, literature as the beacon of mankind. I couldn’t care less what writers say about the so-called world. Why should they know more about it than I do? Does anyone really believe that a writer, by virtue of his profession, is honest or compassionate or even intelligent? Look at the lives of most writers, the best writers, they’re scoundrels and hypocrites. Start with Saint Leo. Why should his view on moral issues be instructive? And the proof of this is in the readers. Are they usually kinder than nonreaders? More moral? Are they more successful at life?”

“I’m not talking about moral instruction, Lydia. A good writer, no matter how much a fool he is otherwise, will place his characters in situations in which their actions have moral consequence. Can’t you then, as a reader, imagine yourself in such a situation and learn from it?”

“What a writer says about a particular situation is irrelevant. I care only about how he says it. Style is everything, style is content. I don’t read Gogol because I have an interest in the depressed state of the landed gentry in provincial Russia of the nineteenth century, or Victor Hugo from an interest in Gothic architecture or Nabokov from an interest in pedophiles. It’s their language I admire.” She paused to collect her thoughts, speaking after a week virtually empty of conversation. “I don’t mean that I simply admire their pretty metaphors. It’s the words they choose, when they can choose perfectly good other words, the tone, their strategy for telling the story… The means by which they create the illusion of event arise from the convolutions of their individual genius. That’s style. That’s real art.”

The reference to Nabokov stung. I had gone to some great lengths a few months earlier, incurring social debts that would take years to pay back, in order to obtain a British copy of Lolita for her.

Lydia asked, “Have you read Vishnevsky’s work? I have.”

“You have?”

“Burden of Blood. Across the Tundra. They’re mediocre books, more like tracts than novels, lots of cheap effects and jargon. Also, they’re wordy, mean-spirited, chauvinistic, perhaps even anti-Semitic.”

I shrugged. “So, he’s a bad writer. Bad writers deserve human sympathy too,” I said, but I wished Lydia had told me about his work the week before. “And they’re citizens just as much as good writers, and they deserve to be treated under the law. Viktor says the authorities have violated their own procedures and decrees.”

“Viktor Panteleyev, the noted legal scholar.”

I sat down heavily on the swing, spilling some of my coffee. Lydia stretched her bare legs on my lap and I ran my fingers over them.

“Anyway,” I said. “This is a small thing. You’re right, it’s a gesture. There’s dozens of petitions flying about and they’re all being ignored.”

Four

I never took note of the arrival of Marina Burchatkina’s second package, though if my memory has correctly ordered the sequence of events, the manuscript must have arrived sometime early the following year. As I inspected the return address, several moments passed before I disentangled Marina’s name from those of other provincial writers who had contacted me recently, as well as Kaluga from Kalchuga, Kalino, and Kalashnikovo. These had been months of tumescent expectation. Like worms after a spring rain, would-be writers were squirming up out of the soil, clutching accounts of Stalinist repression, famine, and war. Some of these works reached print; all of them, I presume, reached the KGB. Most were poorly done, but their quantity testified to an enormous and somewhat premature national effort to reclaim the country’s memory. As for our petition on behalf of Misha Vishnevsky, there had been no action taken or any response at all. It was as if we had set it afire and sent the smoke to the gods. I had no further discussions about the petition, not even with Viktor. Viktor was becoming a strange man. I had seen him last at a party, in a dim corner by himself, brooding into a glass of Johnnie Walker.

It appeared that Marina had occupied the intervening period in a frenzy of literary activity. What was now deposited on my desk were no mere poems, but entire poem cycles. Plus there was an epic poem (about the siege of Leningrad) and a ballad (about what, I wasn’t sure). The contents of this envelope were in no way an improvement over the first, but the cover letter was more peculiar and more original than anything contained in her rhymes. Marina thanked me. She wrote that in the weeks before she received my letter she had become desperate about her future as a writer. My gratifying remarks had given her new inspiration: every night, when she began to write, she taped the letter to the inside of the door to her communal apartment’s pantry. She took it down when she was done. She wrote every night, in her nightclothes, at a folding table in the space made when the door was swung open.

I hadn’t saved a carbon of my amazing, inspiring letter to Marina. I wondered if I had confused the bland letter I recalled sending with one to another correspondent, but as I examined this possibility I became convinced that I had not. The evidence was her letter itself, specifically her gush. I suspected that my enthusiasm was a crafty fiction, which she had invented to implicate me in her career. Perhaps she thought I wouldn’t remember what I had written. And there was a small flirtation here as well: the invitation to imagine her writing at her table.

“Hey, old man, got a minute?”

Anton Basmanian had poked his head through my door, affecting a familiarity we didn’t share. An old schoolmate, he was now the editor of a small literary magazine that made a feeble attempt at liberal fashion.

“For you, two minutes.” I lay my watch on the table.

“Nice piece of work in Literaturnaya Gazeta,” he said, referring to an article of mine the week before. He beamed. “Very nice.”

I didn’t reply at once. Basmanian had violated an unspoken rule of the professional writer: don’t compliment another’s work, at least not casually. It was all right, of course, to praise work in a written article, or in a symposium, or even in a serious critical conversation with the author. But we took our labors too seriously to have them evaluated like a haircut or a new tie. We all knew that praise could be too easily given and too easily overvalued; it became then just another soft currency.

“Thank you, Anton. How have you been?”

“No, I thank you. Very subtle piece of criticism, but it’ll be understood in the right places.”

It took me a few moments to figure out what he was talking about. The article had been a general appraisal of current Georgian cinema, based on a week’s gloriously bacchanalian stay in Tbilisi. Then I recalled that my review had in passing praised the film My Father’s Orchard, which was loosely based on some stories by Elgudzhi Piranishvili. Piranishvili had written a bruising attack on the critic Mustai Suleimenov in Novy Mir just a few months earlier. This had come, allowing for publication delays, immediately after Suleimenov had blistered Fazil Iskander, who was frequently published in Anton’s journal. Sides were being taken. I had somehow blundered into a literary intrigue that, given the number of Caucasians involved, would probably send my greatgrandchildren into hiding sometime in the next century. I looked for a way to ease out of the conversation.

“Here’s some poems,” I said, pushing the manuscript across the desk. “Tell me what you think of them.”

“Marina Burchatkina. Who is she?”

“Some lady in Kaluga. She writes prose too, stories.”

The quality of his smile changed, showing his nearly radioactive white teeth. The smile was both predatory and congratulatory. At the same time, the image of the poet in her nightclothes penetrated my imagination. The flirtation hit home.

“I’ve never met her,” I said at once. “She just sent this to me. If you don’t care for it, fine. You can dispose of it.”

Five

From that winter (or was it another?) I remember great gusts of wind spraying loose snow up Moscow’s icy streets, blowing off hats and freezing the trolley tracks and tram lines. Through the twilight weeks and months of sub-zero temperature, Lydia remained at the dacha, reading under a sixty-watt bulb by the stove, eating macaroni and the vegetables and fruit she had conserved, plus whatever I managed to bring in from the city. Because of the weather and various commitments, some of which were frankly unburdensome, I couldn’t make the journey to Peredelkino every weekend, but she didn’t seem to mind my absence or in any way suffer her solitude. She made the acquaintance of her neighbors, mostly the straw-whiskered parents of our literary lions, so she wasn’t entirely alone. She raised her head from her books from time to time, I surmised, and gazed through the frosted window pane at the babushkas as they trudged in felt boots through the snow, pulling their groceries and firewood on sleds. When I arrived at the dacha, Lydia and I would mostly talk about what we had been reading. She had no interest in gossip from the city, not even when it involved authors whose work she knew intimately. She hardly showed more interest in my occasional and grossly minimized confessions of marital misconduct, except to the extent that it distracted me from my work.

In the afternoons she led me on walks along the village’s icy, rutted streets, and then into the woods on skis, though we rarely got very far before she stopped to investigate some tree stump or burrow. She marveled at the signs of life submerged within the brittle, unmoving landscape: moss on the underside of a rock, a rodent’s tracks, a deer’s scat, a momentary rustling in the underbrush. The burrows were her favorite sites of investigation. She learned to recognize which animal sheltered within each hole and, more interestingly for her, how recently it had emerged to forage. There were two sides to the woods and it was the unseen one, in wary repose, that carried on life from one year to the next. A creek was interrupted by a sloppy, half meter’s fall, at the bottom of which was a pool cloudy with tiny iridescent fish. Lydia gazed into the super-cooled water while I stamped my skis for warmth and made grunting sounds in favor of moving on.

It occurred to me that Lydia might have taken a lover here in Peredelkino, an eventuality that I did not welcome but had in any event prepared myself for. Turnabout was fair play and all that, especially after Tbilisi. On my return trips to Moscow, I tallied the likely candidates among the village’s permanent residents, the ones into whose arms she might that very moment be flinging herself after a weekend’s forced separation, and concluded with a very short list. In winter the village was populated by few men of an appropriate age or suitable social background.

I resolved to keep an eye on these three or four hypothetical swains, but the more I dwelled upon them, the less likely the liaisons seemed. There were much younger girls available, and Lydia had never been a flirt, and these guys worked too hard anyway, which is why they lived year round in the village. But rather than take comfort in the deduced proof of her constancy, I became increasingly worried for her. My wife’s emotional life was contracting. How could she not be lonely? Was literature and nature sustenance enough?

There had been a time, even before I set out as a writer, when I had believed that it was. As a schoolboy, I had daydreamed of Alpine monasteries and tropical islands provided with nothing but great books. This fantasy was the strongest and most maddening when I was in the army, serving out my conscription in the Turkmen desert and surrounded by men of such low intelligence and negligible curiosity that they were barely more than machines for eating and shitting. After using a month’s salary to ransom a secondhand edition of In Search of Lost Time from the depredations of an Ashkhabad bookshop, I conspired to obtain two weeks of duty in a remote, vacant guardhouse. The job required nothing but my presence. I had already inspected the building: The unpainted room I would inhabit was clean, warm, and well lit. There was a bed and a desk.

By the second day, by the time Marcel had witnessed the duchess in the chapel of Gilbert the Bad, I was defeated, unable to turn another page. The guardhouse’s low concrete ceiling hardly allowed me room to breathe, and I was tortured by a single fly orbiting a bare lightbulb on the other side of the room. Nor could I bear another lap around the muddy meadow outside the guardhouse. I was beset with doubts about my character and identity. To my piercing horror, I now believed that I didn’t care to read after all. My literary enthusiasm was no more than an affectation, common to “sensitive” adolescents. The brutes in my company were my real friends, my real brothers. The remainder of the two weeks before I was returned to them seemed as vast as the desert itself. I discovered in myself an enormous capacity for sleep and masturbation.

I eventually returned to Proust, of course, not in a quiet season, but rather in a year of loss and upheaval, when I changed flats and jobs in quick succession and when the connections between one day and the next seemed as tenuous as the skin on the surface of a bowl of pudding. Although my daily ration of reading was limited to a few labyrinthine paragraphs at bedtime, consumed in rough living quarters amid unfriendly strangers, the events in Combray and Faubourg St. Germain never lost their narrative continuity. My conquest of the novel set a pattern for my reading throughout my adult life, all of which seemed to have been caught on the fly.

Although I regretted my chaotic reading and writing habits, I could never be satisfied with the life of the monkish intellectual. I needed the glitter of society and the refreshment of action. Yet at parties, surrounded by noise and dispute, I would be seized by the desire to return home at once, either to my typewriter or to that evening’s book. One desire fed another. Consequently my favorite place to read was on the train, where the book trembled in my lap like a living thing and each page consumed another kilometer or two of track.

In similar regard, the union was the perfect place for me. I loved the unliterary busyness of it: the applications and other forms to be processed, the reports to be filed, and the many meetings to attend in chandeliered banquet rooms, all in the service of literature.

I read much and worked hard the first winter Lydia stayed at the dacha. It was also one of the most unsettling and gayest seasons of my life. Every night in Moscow there were sprawling, sloppy parties, often with marijuana, fisticuffs, foreign girls in miniskirts and vinyl boots, deadly serious political and literary arguments (I don’t remember any of them), and, over and over without end, Rubber Soul. Many of the foreign girls I brought back to my flat couldn’t read a word of Russian, but believed afterwards that they had become experts in contemporary Soviet literature.

And then spring arrived early, promising even more political freedom and travel. Friends went off to Paris and New York and came back agog. The gatherings moved out to Peredelkino, where they bloomed into lovely garden parties with even more foreigners. Lydia consented to attend these parties, chatting amiably with the visitors in their own languages and, in the garden, inspecting with an appreciative, critical eye every flower and plant. She appeared to have come out of the winter without ill effect to her humor or warmth.

My memory of all the parties I attended in Peredelkino have merged into a single gathering, which continued for days and was crammed with scandale. For the purposes of this recollection, I have located the über-party in Sasha Nasedkin’s garden and peopled it with everyone I knew at the time, whether they were in Moscow then or not. The compact circle of chairs around the picnic table dreamily accommodates two hundred guests. Vasily Aksyonov tells a joke about Kosygin, Johnson, and de Gaulle in a leaky boat. Gavril Feldshteyn snaps down the hors d’oeuvres as if he hasn’t eaten in a week, which is very likely nearly true. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a dapper bitnik in a black turtleneck, strenuously flirts with two flushed starlets. Apart from the group, over by the lindens, Vadim Surkov speaks with Lydia. Hello? I screw up my eyes. Surkov spent the winter in Peredelkino, just a few doors from Lydia, but I decide that the conversation is too easygoing for them to be sleeping with each other.

Meanwhile, morose and inattentive, Viktor downs one glass of vodka after another. His conjuration at the party is a bit of a stretch, since he hardly ever went out. He had nearly dropped from sight, though occasionally one heard reports of him emerging from a rain-soaked alley or from the most obscure and remote research rooms of the Lenin Library, always alone. When we occasionally crossed paths, his conversation became guarded and his look furtive. I would sense that I had interrupted a conversation that he was having with himself. At the section of the table where I have placed him, cozy between two women poets of advancing years, he has created a small disturbance, a tear in the social fabric, but the precise nature of his mutters remains beneath human hearing, which is lucky for him.

Six

A train was canceled, I missed my connection, and so I spent the better part of a day in an intermediate station, happily reading Beckett in a glassed-in waiting room perfumed by fresh flowers. By the time I reached Mtsensk, it was late in the afternoon. I was supposed to be met there by a representative of the collective farm that had invited me to read at a “literary evening,” but no one was on the platform. I buttoned my jacket against the chill—in fact, it was a superb late-summer afternoon, the surrounding wheat fields incandescent—and stepped onto the gravel beside the station house. Parked there was a mud gray military vehicle covered in gray mud. A middle-aged man behind the wheel, his jaw slack and bristled white, stared directly ahead and took no notice of me.

“I’m Krilov.”

The man responded with an almost imperceptible shrug. I went to the other side of the vehicle, a small UAZ truck with a torn canvas top. The door squealed as I opened it. A fecal, alcoholic odor spilled out. I could see the vodka bottle, not quite empty, wedged between the driver’s seat and his door.

“Are you in any condition to drive?” I said.

He didn’t reply. In any case, I myself couldn’t drive. I climbed into the truck, taking care not to bump my head. He switched on the ignition and lurched us onto the road.

“How far?” I asked.

At last he spoke, in a sullen rasp. “Fifty-three.”

We drove along a pitted road so straight that its end shimmered and dissolved in the distant haze. I rolled open the window, hung my face out into the passing air, and closed my eyes. The warmth of the setting sun was like a caress.

I usually enjoyed these so-called creative trips to the provinces. For one thing, the per diem for expenses negotiated by the union was usually far in excess of the expenses incurred. Less tangibly, visits from the capital were celebrated as important events in the provincial villages and kolkhozes, which often provided the guests with tours, lavish banquets, and introductions to admiring readers. Writers never tire of readers who admire them. I should have made the journey the night before with the other writers who had been invited, including Schenëv and Basmanian, but I had been delayed by union business. Now I would be lucky to arrive by the start of the evening’s program.

I seemed to have left my luck in Moscow. A half hour across the featureless farmland, the driver abruptly pulled to the side of the road and shoved open his door, just catching the bottle as it fell. It was an agile gesture, probably well practiced. He followed it by heaving the contents of his guts onto the gravel. I looked away, but after he slammed shut the door, I became aware that he was wiping his mouth with his sleeve. The stink deepened.

He shifted into gear. As he gunned the engine, the truck jerked forward and fell back. Its engine stalled. I looked down at the wheels. They were mired in the soft, oily mud alongside the road. The driver didn’t seem surprised. He put the gearshift back into neutral, stepped from the machine, and began shoving it from the rear. His grunts were arrhythmic and short winded. The truck rocked but remained in place.

I could have put my own shoulder to the back of the UAZ while he worked the gears. But he didn’t ask for help and I would have refused him if he had. He groaned and the truck rocked again.

As the landscape bounced in the distance, I marveled at my spitefulness, which was only delaying my arrival at the kolkhoz. It burned in me like a flame. This man was the Russian peasant as he had been known for centuries, a creature of ignorance and superstition, servility and obstinacy, drunkenness and brutality. Fifty years of communism had hardly touched him any more than the previous efforts to reform and Europeanize our country. What could I say that might eventually move him to some awareness of his primitiveness and of his opportunity to escape it? What could I write? There was no guarantee that he even knew how to read.

After a quarter of an hour he succeeded in extricating us. The UAZ’s front wheels rolled onto the pavement. His face was florid as he returned to the truck, but he made no comment. I looked across the borderless fields and imagined that I saw all the Asian continent before me; it held Muscovy with a gun to its head. We approached the kolkhoz just as night fell. The driver’s stink had surely permeated my clothes, but I wouldn’t have time to change them.

The UAZ entered a large unlit compound in which were located a number of nondescript but well-maintained agricultural buildings, including several stables. Farm equipment stood idle, as if on display. The compound’s most prominent feature was the House of Culture, a white neo-neoclassical structure built from a design used in thousands of kolkhozes, villages, and provincial towns throughout the country. A series of concrete pillars carried the pediment. On it was inscribed a quotation illegible in the dark. I stepped from the machine and walked up to the silent building.

Neither door behind the columns would open. I turned and saw that the UAZ, whose engine had roared like a jet’s all the way from the station, had left soundlessly and that now the compound was completely deserted, without even a chicken scratching in the gravel. The evening was calm and the first stars were visible over the purpling fields. I keenly felt my solitude and, even as the nightmarish thought that I had somehow come on the wrong night or even to the wrong kolkhoz slowly descended upon me, I enjoyed the quiet of the evening. I closed my eyes for a moment.

“Rem Petrovich!”

One of the doors had swung open without apparent human agency. I felt a blast of yeasty warmth and found myself at the back of a brightly lit auditorium. Hundreds of heads were turned in my direction. From nearly every face radiated a smile of welcome. As if in a trance, I stepped through the portal, past the shadowed, matronly sorceress who had invoked my name and patronymic.

Is there any question why I went on these trips? It was a full house—of readers, those dear, dear, hopeful, faithful readers, their eyes bright, their fingertips hungry for the touch of the page. Kerchiefed and capped heads testified to the universality of the respect with which literature was held in our country. Jackets and taffeta dresses in turn testified to its high honor. I glided down the aisle past rows of fresh-faced young men and cherry-lipped farm girls. Readers, readers all.

At the front of the room, beneath a red banner, a long dais was covered by a white tablecloth on which stood green bottles of mineral water and a vase of pink lilacs. Basmanian and Schenëv were there, along with a writer I didn’t recognize. Another unfamiliar writer, a longlegged girl in her early twenties, stood in front of the table, reading at a battered iron lectern that appeared to date from the early, battered years of collectivization.

Lost in her own text, she was the last in the hall to become aware of my arrival. She was declaiming her words with great feeling and concentration, as if testing their sound against the walls of the auditorium. When she finally sensed the audience’s distraction, she glanced up from the lectern and, with a suddenness that surprised us both, her pair of dark, ovaline eyes found mine. I momentarily faltered in my advance to the dais.

Then she glanced to her side at Anton, who had displayed his full set of teeth at the moment he had seen me. He said something, the soundless shadow of my name, and then she too showed her teeth—but it was the instant before she turned to him that continues to vibrate outside time. By some trick of the light or of that sadistic joker, chance, we had caught each other unguarded. Now the girl offered me a smile that was both warm and embarrassed.

I approached the front of the hall. “Forgive me for interrupting you,” I whispered. An empty chair waited for me at the end of the dais. I kept my head down, as if not to draw any further attention to myself.

The girl resumed reading. Still waking from the dreamy confusion of my arrival, I gradually settled myself at the table. A tiled mosaic portrait of Lenin on the left wall gazed upon a team of farm workers at harvest on the right. The banner above our heads was stirred by an unaccountable breeze. The girl, big boned like the kolkhoz girls and in a plain brown dress, was reading some prose, either a story or a memoir. I wasn’t yet ready to listen for its meaning, but the sound of her voice was as deep and clear as a cistern, and in it I thought I heard a familiar cadence.

She finished. It was now my turn. I removed a folder of typed pages from my suitcase as the fat, nervous kolkhoz chairman garbled the title of my first novel by way of introduction. I replaced him at the lectern and made a few humorous apologies about my late arrival (while working in the book’s correct title). The audience laughed as easily as breaking a pane of glass, and in the shards of laughter falling around me I recognized the girl’s, glittering and sharp. And then I decided not to read from my recently published second novel, as I had planned: I would read from my third, still in progress. In the flush of creation, I believed it was the best thing I had ever written. Indeed, I believed it was the best thing anyone had ever written. Lately I had been carrying a few completed chapters in my briefcase, not so much to show other people, but as a talisman, a reminder of my talent. I now removed the manuscript from the folder.

Once I began my descent down the first page, I forgot the girl and the rest of the audience. I was the work’s only reader, attentive and discerning, its perfect reader, and I thrilled to its broadcast over the hall’s modest amplification system. The damn thing was brilliant; there were twists of plot and turns of language in it that surprised me as if I were reading it for the first time. When it was over, I looked up and nearly expected to be crushed by admirers.

I wasn’t crushed. The audience remained in its seats and applauded, even enthusiastically, but not as enthusiastically, I thought, as it should have. A twinge of disappointment ran along the left side of my face.

It was only a brief sensation, for the program was ended and, after the kolkhoz chairman, clapping emphatically, shouted his thanks to us, the most appreciative fragments of the audience surged to the front of the hall. Several of the kolkhozniks clutched copies of my novels to be signed. Others crowded around my colleagues, including the girl, who seemed unprepared for the attention. I watched her while I attended to my readers. She had long, straight black hair and as she stooped to take in the words of her interlocutors, it fell across the side of her face. She scooped the hair away from her eyes, an annoyed but fetching gesture to be repeated several times within the minute.

As I signed the last book, the girl approached me, led by Anton. She was tall and moved with a slight deficit of grace that accentuated her physicality.

“I told you he’d make it,” Anton said triumphantly.

The girl embraced my hands. Hers were warm and fleshy.

Anton said something by way of introduction. I didn’t listen, I was weighing her hands and still considering what had been confessed and exchanged between us. She let my hands go. They remained in the air, buoyed by the remnant heat.

“Rem Petrovich,” she murmured, her speaking voice softer and rounder than the one she had used to read her work. “Thank you for everything. None of this would have happened without you.”

Anton said, “In September we’re publishing two stories and eight poems. They’re going to make an impact, Rem. Everyone at the journal is looking forward to it.”

“Kaluga,” I muttered to myself, the light flicking on at last.

Marina Burchatkina continued to gaze at me with a solar warmth. But then she squeezed Anton’s arm. This caused a corresponding compression around my chest. To think what I had done, the promises I had made, the lies I had told, the imbroglios in which I had involved myself, the embarrassments I had suffered, and the pain I had visited upon others, only recently, to sleep with girls half as attractive! I had to look away.

There was a banquet later that evening, the second in as many days, accompanied by toasts in praise of ourselves and our literary forebears, and presentations of the local wine and kolkhoz-made cheeses. It was all very nice—the apparently oafish kolkhoz chairman turned out to be a raconteur and a lover of good literature—but all the while I kept my eye on the girl. She seemed preoccupied. So did Basmanian sitting at her left. I suspected that they were playing footsie beneath the linen tablecloth. Later, in my spartan room in the administration building, an acrid, pale yellow cloud lowered upon me.

Later that year, I saw Marina and Anton together several times in the union café, once at a concert, and at any number of parties. At one of the parties, Anton momentarily disentangled himself from his protégée and approached me.

“Rem, she’s enchanting. I owe you one.”

“Shit,” I said. “You owe me a dozen.”

That autumn Marina’s work was published in Anton’s journal and I studied it, trying to discern those qualities that I had overlooked in my first reading. I sought to approach her stories and poetry with neither the negative prejudice of having already read and dismissed them nor the positive one produced by their appearance in print. I was keenly aware that publication adds luster to a work; a manuscript comes to you stark naked.

But true literature always showed. When I was young, I wondered if my stories seemed jejune and awkward only because I was reading them in my own notebook, in my own clumsy, heavy-footed hand. As an experiment, I had copied “The Captain’s Daughter” into my own notebook, hoping to see it diminished. But before I had completed even the first paragraph, I felt Pushkin’s power flowing in a rush through my arm and the clench of my fingertips. The words blazed onto the faintly ruled paper. After the first page, although the results of the experiment were conclusive, I could not resist copying the story to the very end, merely for the pleasure of witnessing the words of a genius emerge from under the nub of my pen.

Conversely, ten-point Pragmatica on heavy stock did not transform Marina’s work into something of significant literary value. As poor as it was, the work was not a particularly freakish inclusion in a literary journal. Every year the journals printed a fair amount of garbage, either for political or personal considerations, or simply through errors of judgment. Although theory held that editors were bound by the decisions of their editorial boards, in practice they could publish whatever they wished, and Goskomizdat guaranteed that a certain number of copies would be printed. (Goskomizdat also set quotas for pulping.) One could usually guess the reasons behind a poor writer’s success. Anton escorted Marina around town all that autumn and winter, basking in the heat of her beauty. I heard that they were sent together on a “literary youth” junket to Tashkent, her first airplane flight, and never emerged from his hotel room, not even for the gala Uzbek national folk program.

I passed the journal to Lydia and asked her to read Marina’s stories and poems.

“Garbage,” she announced afterwards.

“Thank you,” I said, and kissed her hard on the lips, more emphatically than I had intended to.

She raised her eyebrows.

“Are there any other stories that you would like me to tell you are garbage?”

Later that year, I heard that Marina had submitted a novel to the Sovremennik publishing house, which agreed to bring it out in the spring. Was this Anton’s doing? I hadn’t believed that his influence extended that far. Was she sleeping with someone at Sovremennik? Who? Or was the novel genuinely good? As Lydia contentedly endured her second winter in Peredelkino, I waited for Marina’s first novel with deepening anticipation.

I saw her quite often, at parties and literary affairs, and each time she embraced me warmly. We met in a corridor of the Rostov mansion one evening. Her body pressed against mine a second longer than necessary and I was fully immersed in the nimbus of her perfume.

“Kaluga,” I murmured as she slowly disengaged herself.

“Have you been there?”

“I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“I’ve moved to Moscow, you know.”

There was a rising note of triumph in her voice. It was not easy to get a Moscow residence permit.

“Your own flat?”

“I share it with two girls. But I have my own room. I’m not writing in the pantry anymore.”

“Mmmmm,” I said, pretending to recall her letter only with difficulty. Then I gave up the pretense and ventured, “And not in your pajamas?”

Her face lit at my concession.

“Sometimes I do,” she said.

“They’ll be famous pajamas someday.”

“And you?”

“I wear a shirt and tie when I write. I like to look my best when I meet the Muse. Of course, I’m sure the Muse is pleased with your pajamas.”

“They’re nothing special. You’ll have to judge for yourself.”

When she smiled, her mouth opened, almost carnivorously, it seemed to me. I wondered if she wrote with such heat, by herself, at her desk, in her pajamas. I could hardly bear to look into her face. In the glistening of the saliva on her teeth, I found a world-consuming avidity.

“Sure,” I said, backing away.

“Yes.”

“I’ll come to the opening of the Marina Burchatkina House-Museum.”

Her smile cooled. She thought I was a coward. I was.

“I promise,” I said, turning to go to my office. “Your desk. Your writing implements. Your first editions. Your pajamas. I look forward to it.”

Seven

Because of her later celebrity, Marina Burchatkina looms large in this account, giving the impression that she figured large in my otherwise uneventful life. In fact, this was an extraordinarily busy and creative time for me. My third novel was nearing completion and Lydia was among those who had read sections of it and offered warm praise. Although I retained my snug and noisy office, my position in the union Secretariat improved. I won a trip to London as the more advantageous part of a cultural exchange. In Hyde Park one summer afternoon, on a bench near the Peter Pan statue, I lounged with the sun in my face and about ten shillings in my pocket and daydreamed about quietly defecting to Never-Never Land. I couldn’t, of course, but the thought effervesced through the remainder of my days and nights there.

Shortly after my return, in the early morning hours reserved for crises and bad news, the telephone rang. As I staggered into the hall and reached for the receiver, I was surprised by the number of alternatives of bad news that were possible. When I heard the high-pitched, quavering voice of Natalya Fyodorovna, Boris Sorokin’s wife, I assumed he was dead.

The story she told was complicated, lousy with red herrings and switchbacks. There had been an incident during the night. Sorokin had woken and claimed to be suffocating, and then to be suffering from a thirst of Saharan proportions, and as Natalya Fyodorovna rushed about to satisfy his various demands, he had fallen from his bed. But the ambulance had come right away, that was the most important thing, she insisted, consoled. I gradually came to appreciate that Sorokin was not dead, but rather, creating more complications, critically ill.

In the taxi on the way to the Ochakovskoye Shosse and the landscaped complex in which Central Committee Clinic 2 was located, I hardly thought of Sorokin. I was thinking mostly of my own life, particularly of how this dash to the hospital was one I would never make on behalf of my father. He was already dead, killed during the war by a sniper in the Carpathian foothills. This sour reflection led to a well-trodden memory, the orphanage in Tomsk to which I had been evacuated with my sister in 1942. My mother had worked in a munitions plant, performing too important a job to be evacuated with us. The walls of the orphanage were lime green and always damp to the touch; the curve of my metal meal dish was broken by a dent that evoked the contours of some foreign coast; I was savagely beaten by boys slightly larger than me, until my face was a mass of tears and blood, and I in turn beat those slightly smaller; by the end of the war my sister was somewhere else, apparently unrecoverable even by the massive investigative machinery of the Soviet state. I remained immersed in the din of war and turmoil through my early life, even after I was reunited with my mother. It was not until I sent Sorokin some prose sketches of Moscow, thereby winning an invitation to be interviewed about my prospects for a literary career, that I began my adult, postwar existence.

So, I arrived to think of Sorokin after all. He was a tough old bastard, one of the founders of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, the revolutionary precursor to the present-day Union of Soviet Writers. After publishing nearly a dozen books in the 1920s and’30s, he had established his literary reputation in the strife of the following decade. His four-volume collection of war reporting, which had taken him from Stalingrad to Berlin, was still celebrated as a model of literary journalism. Sorokin had sponsored my first publication and had brought me into the Secretariat. He was a gruff and distant man who never displayed pride in my accomplishments, yet his suggestions about the course of my work and my life had always been deeply considered.

The air of his hospital room was sweet with disinfectant. The bright early morning sun fell upon the heavy curtains, leaving the room submerged in an underwater darkness. Membership in the writers’ union gave you admittance to any of the union’s special polyclinics; rank won you a private room in Central Committee Clinic 2 and the best medical care in the Soviet Union outside, well, Clinic 1. Sorokin lay on his back, gently stirred by the tides and deep currents. I assumed he was sleeping. I turned to go, embarrassed to be catching him unawares.

“She called you?”

Illness had not lowered the deep register of his voice, but it seemed hollowed out, nearly weightless. I didn’t immediately find my own voice.

“Just an hour ago. I came down right away.”

“I told her to call you. She thinks I’m going to die—”

“No—”

“The doctors do too. But they’re a bunch of incompetents, hacks. You know, 2 was a good hospital once, before everything in this country fell apart.”

And that was all that was said for several minutes. Sorokin had always been a big man and in the last few years his body had become swollen and bloated, so that now it was barely contained by the hospital bed and its swathe of sheets. His bald head was like a great stone outcropping, a grim, lifeless rock that rose into view to daunt approaching travelers. He had not yet been shaved or bathed. The excess flesh around his chest and neck spilled from the top of his hospital gown, which, draped on his torso, carried the charge of intimate apparel. In all the years that I had known Sorokin, I had never seen him outside his suit, not even in the garden of his dacha, nor even at his granddaughter’s first birthday party. He appeared to have fallen asleep, but I remained at his side, trying to ignore the chill in my gut.

“I was in London,” I said at last, softly so as not to wake him.

“I know.”

“I liked it.”

“Of course you did,” he said, dismissively. “How’s Lydia?”

“Fine. She’s at the dacha. She’s translating André Malraux.”

A grunt rose from deep within Sorokin’s body, from as deep as his bowels. “A prick, a real social democratic prick. Who commissioned it?”

“Novy Mir.”

“Tvardovsky has his head up his ass,” he muttered, naming the journal’s editor. “She should get paid on acceptance. Don’t count on publication. Malraux, what a prick.”

The odor of his contempt lingered. After a while, I said in a hopeful voice, “My novel’s going well. I’m almost done with the first draft. When you’re ready, I’d like you to read it. It’ll be a success, I think.”

“Good,” he said.

“I’ve already talked to Yegor Nikitin. He’ll be my editor. He’s very enthusiastic. He’s even showed Mosfilm the outline.”

“Make sure they pay. Don’t let them dick you.”

I laughed nervously. I’d always been hopeless about money, and Sorokin knew it. Thank God I had the union to protect my interests.

“They won’t dick me,” I promised. “I expect a good contract. I’d like to build a proper dacha.”

Sorokin considered this. He knew better than I did how much I could hope to get for the book and the film rights and how much a dacha would cost.

“All right,” he said at last. “Get the money. When you’re ready, I’ll go with you to Litfond. I know a piece of property, a few blocks from our place. It’s right at the edge of the forest. It’s not planned for development, I’ve been holding it back. Just let me know when you’re ready.”

“Boris Stepanovich, thank you…” I stammered.

For the next forty awkward minutes, I made pleasantries, told Aksyonov’s joke about the leaky boat, and elaborated upon some union gossip and intrigue. As I left, Sorokin’s promise continued to reverberate through me. I knew the piece of property to which he referred. A ski trail ran along its edge, there was a fast, clear stream nearby, as well as what Lydia had once identified as a stand of lindens. I paused outside the room for a few moments, allowing my eyes to adjust to the light. The corridor was wide and airy, hosed and scrubbed down every several hours. Clinic 2 was in no way physically similar to the Rostov mansion, yet given the rotating population of the union’s corridor (Medved had died here; so had Yakov Baum), it was virtually another wing of the Secretariat. Sorokin had spent his whole adult life in the union, encased within its protective walls. It was foretold that I too would one day lie in this hospital, perhaps in the same bed that now held Sorokin’s carcass. I was thoroughly a union man.

Eight

Sorokin was eventually sent home for a long convalescence. Meanwhile, Marina’s novel approached like a distantly heard locomotive. And then it arrived and at a publication party in the writers’ union café, I was congratulated for “discovering” her. With an icy glass of whiskey in my right hand and a mentholated Rothmans in my left, I accepted the shower of compliments with the same equanimity as I might have accepted a soft summer rain. As for Anton, although he attended the party and received congratulations for being the first to publish the new author, he was no longer romantically involved with her. I knew that Marina had taken up with and dropped Vadim Andreyev, and had then performed the same indelicate operation upon Afanasy Malinin, who, leaning against the bar for support, his face drawn and his hair in his eyes, now looked much the worse for it.

The novel was well received: “a fresh voice,” “the cry of brave and wise youth,” “a vigorous blow against hypocrisy.” For a television interview, she wore a prim gray dress that luridly accented her figure. The camera caressed her. Marina spoke directly into it, to a cameraman with a hard-on. A nation of readers was stirred.

Marina had inscribed the copy she presented me with a stanza from the nineteenth-century poet Fyodor Tyutchev:

It was an odd, literary inscription to an ordinary, unliterary, anti-literary novel, which I read with growing disbelief. I had read worse, of course, but probably nothing worse that had been so highly praised for no easily visible reason. Contrary to acclamation, her literary voice was stale, her cry foolish, and her stances hypocritical. I counted those who must have been involved in the construction of Marina’s celebrity: not only Anton, but the chief editor of Sovremennik, the editors of Literaturnaya Gazeta and other journals, critics, and television executives. Could they all have participated in this gross sham? How could she be sleeping with so many of them—and not be sleeping with me?

The volume of the praise forced me to reconsider the novel, and to concede that, whatever its (many, fatal) faults, there was at least perhaps something engagé about the book, especially Marina’s satirical portrayal of a certain secondary character, a petty bureaucrat. It was Marina’s good fortune that her book was published just as the press began one of its periodic campaigns against “the bureaucracy,” a charade posited on the fiction that “the bureaucracy,” formless and faceless (save for a few carefully chosen scapegoats), was something independent from the Party. It was “the bureaucracy” that presented the greatest challenge to developing socialism; the Party needed to “redouble its efforts against the bureaucracy.” Although Marina’s novel was not in any way political, she developed a reputation as someone who could be political, a “reformist,” even a literary Young Turk.

Although my own novel was simply one of scores published that year and was intended for an entirely different audience, I sensed that it trailed in her wake. Given my status in the union, my first printing was much higher than Marina’s, but the novel wasn’t reviewed as prominently. Nor was I feted on television. As the weeks passed, several reviews appeared in the papers and literary journals, huffing their disappointment. The grievances conveyed by these reviews were consistent enough to be persuasive.

The gist of the complaints was that my novel, set aboard a Bering Sea icebreaker, was “ill informed” and “not genuine.” Indeed, a literal-minded review in The Baltic Shipman, by an active-duty mechanic, listed all its errors and solecisms, which evoked his compassion for my ignorance about marine diesel engines. It was shamefully clear to this and other critics that I had never set foot aboard an icebreaker.

Yet I never hid the fact that I had no experience at sea and no interest in going to sea. To write The Northern Lights, I had looked in books and talked with sailors in order to obtain a few details, but in the end many of these were discarded or even contradicted for the sake of the story. I was more interested in imagining an all-male community in close quarters in a ferocious climate, in bitter conflict and urgent cooperation, than I was in documenting anything real. I believed that the novel needed not to be genuine, but only plausible, so that any errors would not distract the reader from the main thing, the story.

This method of operation had served me well in my first two novels, set respectively in a Kazakh kolkhoz and in a motorized cavalry unit during the closing months of the Great Patriotic War. When I was an unknown writer, critics were unaware that I lacked firsthand experience of my subjects. Now inflicted with the knowledge that I was a Moscow intellectual, they squawked that they were gravely disturbed.

The most savage of these attacks was launched by Sergei Makarov, whose standing had been recently enhanced by a collection of his travel essays. He took apart my novel like a kebab, and the other idiots followed suit. Although my novel was nonpolitical, Makarov leveled a political charge: to write about workers without having lived among them, or “as far as we can determine” without caring about their “real historic triumphs” over hardship and backwardness, was a form of “literary colonialism.”

The single exception in this campaign was Marina’s long review in Znamya. Noting and, I suppose unavoidably, amplifying the criticism I had received, she absolved me of it. Marina conceded that my “pacing and characterization is weak,” that the plot “holds few surprises,” and that The Northern Lights was “a men’s novel,” but she admired “the vivid portrayal of human frailties and human passion aboard R. Krilov’s ghostly death-ship.” Her strain was apparent in every line. In the end, her condescension made her review the most galling of all that I had received. Everyone knew, of course, that I had been indirectly responsible for getting her work published.

In conversations with friends and in private dialogue with myself, I hotly defended the book, my ire leading me to make some extravagant claims for it, but when I descended to my desk, the arena of my ambitions, selfdoubt coursed through me like a fever. Upon setting out to write the novel, I had been unsure whether I would succeed in believably describing the work of the sailors aboard the icebreakers. Certainly I was not sure of every line, nor of every effect I had hoped to achieve. How could I be? Fiction is a gamble. The thought that I had failed intensified. The sales were very poor. No film was made. The plot at the edge of the woods remained as undeveloped as my critics said my novel’s was.

I now wondered whether I had ever wanted to write this novel in the first place, whether The Northern Lights, as well as the novels I had previously written and the ones I planned to write, merely conformed to conventional expectation about the work of a contemporary writer (why write novels? why not sonnets or haiku?). Although I confessed pride in my published books, I recognized that they existed alongside another body of work. In actuality, fragments and seeds of this work were located within the journals in my locked bookcase; in potentiality, the work existed in a kind of mirror universe glimpsed on the horizon at twilight or in a glass of ice water at the precise moment the ice has melted or in the polished surface of a quickly passing foreign car. This putative, parallel work was by no means anti-Soviet—I believed I didn’t have a single anti-Soviet bone in my body; my father had bequeathed me a name drawn from the words Revolution, Engels, and Marx—but I also recognized that this writing would never be published here. In the existent passages and stanzas imperfectly set down within my notebooks, there was something too wild and too personal, too much without concession, and perhaps it was simply not very good.

At the euphoric First Union Congress in 1934, Leonid Sobolev announced, “The Party and Government have given the writer every freedom, and taken away from him only one thing—the freedom to write badly.” Isaac Babel responded in apparent affirmation, noting that the freedom to write badly was “a very important freedom, and to take it away is no small thing. It is a privilege that we were taking full advantage of.” The officials on the dais and in the front rows of the auditorium enthusiastically thumped themselves over this declaration. The rank and file were chilled; they knew Babel was being ironic. Unwilling to give up the freedom to write as he wished, even badly, Babel went on to practice “the genre of silence.” Five years later he was arrested at his dacha, brought to the Lubyanka, and executed.

It was some consolation that at least Lydia was pleased with The Northern Lights and contemptuous of my critics. If anything, she was annoyed that I saw any merit in their arguments at all.

“Yuri Vorontsov, Sergei Makarov—they’re hacks. They think fiction is a dramatization of journalism. They don’t respect that the story stands outside reality. To criticize a novel for getting details of a setting wrong is like criticizing a dream for not being true-to-life.”

I was sitting on the porch, watching Lydia weed (I myself was forbidden to interfere). She did this with great care in order to remove the root structure without disturbing her cherished tomatoes. I had spent most of that summer at the dacha, traveling to the city for a few days each week only to check my mail and perform some routine union business. I was hardly writing, nor reading much. I had avoided the many parties in the neighboring dachas. I was sure my critics would be there and was unsure how to greet them. With a self-deprecating joke? An insulting one? A punch in the face?

I asked Lydia, “And do readers understand these distinctions, when the critics don’t? How about all those earnest letters I was sent by the peasants in Kazakhstan? They said they loved my novel and then petitioned me with complaints about inefficient kolkhoz directors and unreachable quotas, as if I were working out of an office in the Ministry of Agriculture. Readers want journalistic literature.”

“There are hack readers, just as there are hack writers. How many good readers do you need? Are you standing for election? This lack of confidence unbecomes you, Rem.”

I grimaced my disagreement, though I knew she was right.

“My lack of my confidence is my strength,” I said. “It makes me more open to criticism. It allows me to learn from my mistakes.”

Lydia straightened and dropped the last of the weeds in a box. She wiped her hands on her smock. “Last year, at Sasha Nasedkin’s, I heard Pavel Dubrovski say that he should have won the Lenin Prize for his last novel and that Sholokhov himself had complained on his behalf. You’re a much better writer than Dubrovski, but you have a tenth of his confidence.”

“That’s my point, exactly. If I had his level of confidence, I’d be complacent, and therefore a much worse writer than I am now.”

In truth, my inconspicuousness that summer was due in small part to my disinclination to see either Vorontsov or Makarov; the large part was my avoidance of Marina. I didn’t want to have to thank her for my defense nor to be obliged to say anything kind about her novel. Yet, on my nights in Moscow when, sticky and logy from the heat, I gazed from my apartment balcony out onto the roaring, frantic city of six million, the capital of an empire, I knew that she was there. When I sat down at my desk to write, she was probably working at that moment too, at her desk somewhere else in the city. She was present like the humidity.

Nine

It must have been the intensity of this awareness that forced Marina’s precipitation from the urban haze one afternoon, gently onto the steps of an escalator plunging into the depths of the earth beneath the Kremlin. The complex was at the intersection of two public metro lines, plus a third, famously secret line called Metro-2, built by Stalin for his own speedy exit from the capital in the event of war.

I myself was rising from the Prospekt Marx station, past enormous lamp stanchions topped with white glass globes. A red filament incandesced within each globe, a worm crucified on a bolt of electric current. I had just crossed the landing between escalators and had begun the second stage of my ascent when, beyond the lamps at the descending escalator, I recognized Marina. She was gazing down the length of the tunnel, as blind as a burrowdwelling animal.

I abruptly turned to face the gray wall sliding by. I was amazed by this impulse, but she had passed before I could overcome it. By the time I reached the top of the escalator, I gravely regretted my cowardice. A barricade guarded by a severe-looking matron forced me to walk to the end of the corridor before I could double back. As soon as I was caught in the flow to the lower level, I realized that I would never overtake Marina before her train arrived.

Pressed at my back by the other travelers, stumbling against the heels of those ahead of me, I sought to identify the cause of my swelling urgency. To be sure, Marina was an attractive girl, but at that very moment equally attractive girls darted at the edge of my vision and bumped against me and besides, I was only three weeks into an intensely physical liaison with a lithe, myopic clerk at the Dom Knigi bookstore. I had been on my way to her a minute earlier.

Marina was a mystery. I hardly knew her, save for what she wrote and the record of our infrequent, occasionally charged conversations over the years. Sometimes I couldn’t even picture her face. But she represented a potentiality, and that counted; in those years the potential carried more weight than the actual. I could not bear to define that potentiality.

Now I changed my mind about pursuing her and took a prohibited but unblocked turn on the next landing, through a corridor that I believed would lead to another escalator rising to my original destination, the Ploshchad Revolutsii platform. I must have misread a sign, because it was soon apparent that I was not on my way to Ploshchad Revolutsii at all. The dim passageway wound through the complex without end, sprouting new corridors and escalators and gradually entangling my sense of direction. I lost any idea of which point my underground position might correspond to in the city above. An escalator hundreds of meters long raised me to a distant corridor that, after a sharp turn to the right, ended in an even longer escalator returning down. The subterranean heat made me feverish.

I was seized by the idea that I had somehow wandered into Metro-2. It was said that in the 1950s, after Stalin began living and working full-time at his Near Dacha in Volynskoye, construction of the line had been abandoned. Rumors of this sort tended to be disinformation. The military abandoned nothing. Millions of rubles had been poured into this tunnel, equipping it with the most advanced military technology. There were other stations on the line, vast caverns and intricate warrens. The line had likely remained a military installation, a shadow city inhabited by apparatchik-phantoms. The commuters walking shoulder-to-shoulder with me carried torn string shopping bags and their clothes were ordinary univermag suits and jackets, but I detected a distinctive confidence in their stride and a wariness in their glare. Whether army or KGB, they knew the secret underground workings of our society, which manifested themselves only obliquely in the events that played out in public view in our newspapers and television reports, on our boulevards and avenues. Or perhaps Metro-2 was the real city, and the above-ground Moscow was the one in shadow.

The last corridor discharged onto an unfamiliar platform, which, like every other metro station in the capital, was lavishly decorated around a particular theme.

This station seemed to imply some kind of southern motif. The station’s supporting columns were tiled with scenes of swarthy peasant-workers at garden banquets and vineyards set beneath distant mountains. Grapes and other subtropical fruit were depicted on the pediments above the platform. They were alternated with garlanded, hammer-and-sickled seals of one of the organs of power, I couldn’t recognize which. Someone behind me took me firmly by the arm and I recalled that it was the emblem of the old NKVD. Through the foggish heat that had descended upon me, I heard my name called.

“I was just thinking of you a few minutes ago. I must be a witch,” Marina said. “A picture of your face popped into my head and look, here you are.”

“Amazing coincidences happen,” I replied slowly, recovering from a series of sentiments that passed through me in the space of a few seconds: first, there had been fright, and then an unspeakable elation, and then embarrassment at the fright and elation. “Even in a planned economy.”

We were standing close enough to each other to embrace, or to dance. Buffeted by the rush of commuters, their bags and parcels brushing against us, we began to sway, as if we were indeed dancing—a lazy, slow, subtropical rumba.

We appraised each other again and I was revisited by the impulse to which I had first given in: to turn away. I repressed it and at last said, “How’s everything?”

Marina groaned. “Complicated. I’m not with Iosif Spirin anymore.”

I bobbed my head sympathetically, but with a slightly quizzical expression fixed upon my face, as if I hadn’t known that she had been with Spirin at all. It occurred to me to resent that she thought I was keeping track of her love life, though in fact I was.

She pursed her lips and frowned. “Where are we?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I thought I was going to Ploshchad Revolutsii. I think my stairs are at the other end of the platform.”

“I’ve never been here before.”

“They’re always opening new stations,” I said and forced a laugh.

At that moment, a train roared into the station, displacing stale tunnel air and discharging a swirl of passengers. Unsure of what else to say, and unable to speak over the noise anyway, I waited until the train left. Meanwhile, Marina studied my face as if she intended to write about it. I wondered if she had been pursuing me. Had she too been caught in the labyrinth of tunnels, corridors, and escalator chutes? Before the first train could leave, another arrived from the opposite direction. And then another every sixty seconds, according to the digital clocks at each end of the platform. We had stumbled into the tumult of rush hour.

I asked her if she would come with me for a cup of coffee, but the invitation was completely submerged in the noise. I couldn’t hear my words nor even feel their consonants upon my lips. The long hall was scoured by sound, a great onrushing, rarefying force as elemental as gravity or light.

“Marina,” I said. “I want to take you home.”

This was an experiment. She smiled and pointed to her ears and made a gesture of helplessness.

“You can’t hear me,” I said, searching her face for any kind of acknowledgment.

She smiled at my persistence in trying to speak.

“Good. Marina, you’re driving me crazy. I can’t stop thinking about you. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s your success. I resent it. I resent you.”

She shook her head to show her incomprehension.

“But I want to make love to you,” I said. “I want to fuck you silly. I want to ride your ass from one end of my flat to the other. I want to smear sperm all over your tits, your face, all over your body. I want to put my cock in your mouth.”

I was shouting now and I still couldn’t hear my voice. Of course, Marina should have been able to lip-read at least some of what I was saying, but even that, I felt in the white heat of the moment, had no consequence. The safest place to practice the genre of silence was in a tunnel of noise.

Marina laughed, to show that she at least comprehended the dispensations allowed us a hundred meters beneath the Kremlin. She would never be sure of what I said and later I could solemnly deny everything, since I couldn’t hear it myself. She could deny it too, even what she was sure of. Now she began shouting too. The trains arrived and left. The clocks were reset to zero. Commuters grimaced at the spectacle we were making. We said whatever came into our heads, whatever we wished. My eyes focused on her finely shaped mouth and, thrillingly, I thought I saw it shape itself around words that encompassed lewd acts. This spurred me on, to match my own lewdness with hers—“let’s fuck right here on the platform,” I cried—spinning out obscene fantasies with increasing abandon, things I never even knew I could imagine. Then three words emerged from her lips, clearly readable. The words were: “democracy and freedom.”

With that, the waves of machinery cast forth by the agate print of the metro schedule met at a point of destructive interference. The station emptied of trains. The noise subsided, despite the hundreds of travelers making their way to the platform exits. Marina and I heard each other laugh, nervously now. I was shocked by the words I had spoken, but even more so by what I believed were hers. We fell silent. Now that she could hear me, I wasn’t sure what I wished to say. I looked down the hall, the clock had passed the sixty second mark, but there was no sign of a train approaching on either track.

“Marina,” I said.

My voice was perfectly audible. Her smile was warm. Our eyes met as they had the night of our reading.

“Marina,” I repeated. Then I said, “Thank you for that review in Znamya.”

She made a small, disappointed laugh and the air deflated from her.

“There’s no need to thank me. I write whatever I like.”

“Of course,” I said, stung by her rebuke. This did not stop me from adding: “And your novel. I liked that too.”

Another train finally arrived and we embraced in farewell. In my arms she assumed a substantiality that I had not expected, as if before I had only confronted the idea of Marina, and this was Marina herself. I began to tighten my embrace, but, no longer smiling, she abruptly brushed my cheeks with her lips, pulled away, and went to the opposite end of the platform. I watched her go. As I returned to the staircase that had brought me here, a second train arrived. It was just then, before the train obscured it, that I looked up to read the name of the station emblazoned on the wall on the other side of the tracks: Beryevskaya, after Lavrenty Beria, the Georgianborn secret police chief executed in the weeks following Stalin’s death. At least, that’s what I thought I read.

I eventually found Ploshchad Revolutsii and hurried home, no longer in the mood to see my book clerk. Something had passed, I believed. I continued to run into Marina, of course, at parties and literary events, but less frequently, and the encounters carried less weight and possibility. Her novel won a few prizes and subsided from the public’s short-term memory. It was said that she was working on a second novel, but she showed it to no one. Despite taking occasional detours, and once even diagramming my recollection of the maze of tunnels, I never again succeeded in finding the metro station in which we had met.

Ten

Cowed by the criticism The Northern Lights had received, I put off work on my next novel. The skies grayed late in August, shortly after we picked the tomatoes. The crop was beautiful that year. Lydia and I ate them like apples, the juice running down our shirt fronts.

It wasn’t until November that Novel 4 began to emerge from the mists, but shortly afterwards I received a note that, in its powerful effect, prevented me from doing any writing the rest of the day and unsettled me for several weeks to come. The union’s Foreign Commission, the letter duly informed me, was negotiating with an American publishing house for the rights to Marina’s first novel. I put the note down and stared at my desk for a while, infused with the childish hope that nothing would come of the negotiations.

My own discretion notwithstanding, the contents of the confidential memo became common gossip by the end of the day. I am sure that most of my colleagues initially reacted as I did, if for less complicated reasons. Publication abroad, especially in the West, was always a source of envy. Although the union and the government claimed three quarters of the royalties, and the remainder was transmuted into rubles and vouchers good at hard-currency stores, the balance was still a hefty amount of change. The foundation of many a dacha was composed of foreign royalty checks.

Moreover, translation, even if no further than into the obscure, tortured languages of the fraternal socialist countries, was a matter of great prestige. It made you an international writer, elevated you to panels discussing issues of great import, and won you a greater print run for your next book. Marina would be invited on the best domestic “creative trips”—such as the ones to the Baltics—and even garner foreign invitations. I expected that her novel would eventually be transformed into a film, a mysterious process that enhanced the author (even while it attenuated his work) and brought him even more piles of gold (or its voucher equivalents).

Once the negotiations were completed, several large numbers were bruited about in the café, but I declined from using my union position to discover the size of Marina’s royalties. Shortly after the book was published in America, I attended a small party at Bulat Okudzhava’s, with Marina in attendance. Although the party around Okudzhava’s kitchen table was ostensibly in celebration of his birthday, Marina sat erect in her chair, flushed and bright eyed, as if the birthday honors belonged to her. She received our cheers and congratulations with regal grace.

None of us, however, saw the translation itself until the following year, when it was brought to Moscow by a middle-aged Canadian tourist unaware that our customs officials looked unkindly on the import of any books about Russia or by Russians, alive or dead, living abroad or at home, anti-Soviet or not, and would have preferred that visitors to our country not waste any of their valuable time here reading at all. The book was taken from her, she was questioned by a matronly guard in a rank customs booth, and then it was returned to her without explanation (the explanation would have been that it was not on the list of proscribed titles). The tourist had returned to her tour group dazed and thrilled by her brush with dictatorship. No Russian succeeded in parting her from the book after this adventure, so once the book’s arrival became known by a friend of a friend of her Intourist guide, it earned the woman an invitation to a party at Sasha Nasedkin’s dacha. The book was passed around and casually examined by writers and editors who risked hernias trying to feign their indifference.

“The word made flesh,” announced Anton Basmanian, his grin as sour as good Russian rye bread. He passed the book to me. The Canadian was at his side, warily observing the transaction.

In my hands, the object seemed to transmit a kind of fragile radiance. I caressed the silky dust jacket, printed as boldly as a call to revolution. Our books were rarely published with dust jackets. On the back cover were voiced shouts of praise from Norman Mailer, Alberto Moravia, and Graham Greene. Inside the back cover the author herself was pictured, her eyes and hair luminous, her torso sleek in a tight red pullover. Her posture and scowl were defiant. But despite the shock that was delivered by the book’s wrapper, nothing prepared me for the appearance of the words on the printed page. The type was large, the print so sharply defined that I imagined that it would have been legible even to a non-English speaker. My first thought was that this wasn’t a novel, it was a product, something like a tube of toothpaste.

Our own books were such paltry affairs, pretty much identical in their physical form, their paper coarse and their type small, dense, and erratum-infested. Their bindings were easily broken. Although I never considered our books “bad” for that—the quality of a book did not reside in its physical presence, did it?—I could not help but be impressed by Marina’s. With a glass of Armenian cognac in my left hand and the open book in my right, I began reading the translation, my eyes gliding over the voluptuous Latinate letters like (I imagined) a Cadillac on a California highway, the heft and texture of the book massaging and soothing my critical faculties. I ascertained at once that the translation had been performed competently by some émigré who was no worse a writer than Marina. Part of me acquiesced in the seduction performed by the book’s material body; the other part, the critic-writer part, coolly informed me, trying not to raise its voice, that my original evaluation was correct, that the novel was shallow in thought and inept in its execution.

Yet I dimly heard the tourist murmur that Marina’s book was selling well after having been favorably and even enthusiastically reviewed by the leading American literary publications. Marina had received tens of thousands of dollars for the novel in advance of its publication and would receive even more once the receipts were counted.

This news worked through me like a poison: the market liked her work. Each copy sold for nearly seven dollars. This was in a country where readers were offered a vast choice of attractively packaged books, plus a variety of other leisure distractions that we could barely comprehend, yet a sizable number of Americans chose to read Marina’s novel and paid for it in hard currency. For all the approval, comforts, and forest-clearing print runs bestowed upon her more-celebrated elders in the union, it was Marina Burchatkina who was a real-world success. If I could have been so wrong in my critical assessment of her talent, how could I be so sure of my own? Stupefied, I handed the book back to the tourist.

“And are you a writer too?” she asked brightly, in English.

I nodded.

“Would I have read anything you’ve written?”

“No,” I said.

Lydia never saw the book, having drifted to a less populous section of the garden, and as we walked the few dusk-softened blocks back to our dacha, she was unmoved by my descriptions of Marina’s book and the selfdoubts it had engendered.

“She’s not a talented writer.”

“Well, someone must think so,” I said. “The publisher. The readers. Norman Mailer, for God’s sake.”

We had just reached a turn in the road. Lydia halted there and tilted her head. She was listening to a bird. I prepared to wait it out. I was usually indifferent to bird song, rarely distinguishing the cry of Bird A from that of Bird B. Yet by some trick of the evening, by the thickened light or the taste of the air or the cognac, I found myself not only attending the bird, but in pursuit of its climb up the musical scale. The song was not pretty. Yet in its ungainliness and rawness there was something ancient that resonated from the age when birds sang without men to hear them. The song was distinctly its own; this was Bird Z.

Then it stopped. We resumed our walk.

“Rem, look at the pornography and detective fantasies that sell millions in the West. The market is the worst judge of talent. So what if a few thousand Americans buy Burchatkina’s book? Compare that with the hundreds of thousands of Russians who will read one of our talented, serious authors in a low-cost edition—and then save that book as a treasure in their family bookcase.”

We walked on a bit, silently reflecting upon the great spill of sex and violence, dishonesty and tawdriness, that spewed from the West’s printing presses. I had no illusions that the same material would fail to sell well here, making millionaires of unscrupulous writers. Only the vigilance of the writers’ union and Glavlit, the government censorship agency, prevented our literature from being eroded and degraded by commercial exploitation.

Lydia asked, “And how do you know that the market really finds her talented? Talent may not be the only selling point. She’s a contemporary Russian writer. She’s a young woman. Merely being published in the West gives her a political aura. Americans are buying her out of curiosity.”

It wasn’t the novel they were selling, it was the author. This was something I had previously not considered, but knew was true. In the West, literature might not be entangled in political considerations, but it could certainly be knotted in nonliterary commercial ones. I knew that if anything was heavily enough advertised it would sell (our newspapers were always writing about the useless trinkets that, thanks to advertising, Americans thought they could not live without). Even the endorsements on the back cover were not necessarily sincere; they had certainly been solicited, as some kind of favor to someone in the publishing house. This went on all the time. Nevertheless, the fact was this: her novel was being published in America and mine wasn’t.

“Her picture’s on the book jacket,” I murmured. “I suppose it doesn’t hurt that she’s very attractive.”

“Is she?”

I searched Lydia’s face for an ironic smirk or grimace, but her question was asked in earnest. I was taken aback. She knew Marina, had attended parties at which Marina had been marked as the most attractive and glamorous guest. I could recall twice when Marina’s presence caused a palpable strain in a party’s superstructure, at fracture points of longing and envy—or so I thought at the time. Hanging in midair by its typographical hook, Lydia’s question now made me wonder if the young author’s beauty was not so obvious. There had been no strain at these parties; I had imagined it. Was there some cosmetic defect to which I had been blinded? Usually it was the other way around: a girl’s attractiveness would obscure her personal faults, sometimes catastrophically. Now it was disquieting to have it suggested that Marina’s beauty was not self-evident, that there was something more than superficial to my desire. Lydia stared, waiting for my answer, and it seemed that she noticed my confusion, but that might have been a misperception as well.

Eleven

The fall passed in a blur of wet streets and mud. Construction debris flowed over onto Gertsena from the new Prospekt Kalinina, which had obliterated the seedy old Arbat neighborhood and put in its place high-rises gleaming with the optimism of the new age. The jackhammers could be heard in my office. As I had expected, publication in the West heightened Marina’s celebrity at home, and there was talk of electing her to the presidium of the union’s youth section. I had again established winter quarters in our flat, while Lydia burrowed into her dacha solitude. Our ambiguous conversation of the summer, as I recalled it, proved to be a scratch on the pane of our marriage. My memory would skid past the intervening weeks and snag on that walk back to our dacha. I would wonder about my assessment of Marina’s work and her beauty. I lay awake in my bed, listening to the sounds of the city I didn’t know, a city of certitude. The city in which I dwelled was cast in shadows.

Late one December afternoon I lifted the receiver of my office telephone and heard a familiar growl: “Rem, come here at once.”

Sorokin had been in and out of the hospital all year, his pallor deepening to a permanent jaundice, his mass of flesh rising like a loaf of bread and gradually immobilizing him in his office chair. His demeanor was somber and worried and he sometimes seemed distracted. A few weeks earlier I had come to his office with a package, and, to our mutual embarrassment, he hadn’t immediately recognized me. Afterwards he muttered something about my hair getting too fucking long, I looked like a goddam, fucking khipi.

Now he said, “We have a problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Viktor Panteleyev.” He pronounced each syllable of the man’s name slowly, enunciating it carefully, “Is he a friend of yours?”

Sorokin studied me. Afraid of what I might say if I hesitated, I rushed to answer: “Yes.”

Sorokin made a sound halfway between a grunt and a belch and then said, “He must have lost his mind.”

“Oh my God. What did he do?”

“Nothing yet. Some agitators are planning some kind of protest at Pushkin Square this evening at six. He intends to join them.”

“What kind of protest?”

“What do you think? So-called human rights, I suppose.” He sneered and added in contempt, “Decembrists.” The Decembrists had been a group of army officers whose pro-democracy rebellion in December 1825 was savagely put down by Tsar Nicholas I and bravely exalted by Pushkin.

“Panteleyev’s involved?”

“Apparently. He’s a fool. His participation poses a threat to the entire writers’ union. It puts our loyalty in question. Certain members of the Central Committee already have raised their voices against ideological drift. Too much publication abroad, too many European friends, not enough editorial oversight by Glavlit. I can’t say I disagree. Who has the guts to call himself a Marxist-Leninist writer these days?”

“But Panteleyev’s acting on his own!”

“No one acts on his own. He’s a member of the union. The union gives him the right to publish, to call himself a Soviet writer. It gives him housing and social benefits, annual holidays and health care. He has responsibilities in turn, and one of them is not to bring his fellow writers into disrepute.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mean it that way,” I said lamely. “Look, I’ll call him. I’ll ask him not to attend.” This didn’t sound strong enough. “I’ll stop him.”

Sorokin examined me for a moment and then closed his heavy, warted eyelids.

“Boris Stepanovich, do you need something? Some juice?”

He didn’t open his eyes. “Just take care of it,” he said.

No one answered the telephone at Viktor’s. I let it ring ten times and then called again. Then I went down to the café, hoping to find him quaffing a drink before going out to wreck his life. He wasn’t there of course, it had been years since I had seen him in the café. A few heads turned in my direction. I offered a smile and they quickly looked away. Nearly all the tables had been taken, but the room was unusually quiet. They couldn’t speak of what they most wished to speak. Had I been the last to learn of the demonstration?

It was well past five o’clock, already dark. I went for my coat and took a taxi through the wet, pedestrianchoked streets, not directly to Pushkin Square, but down the boulevard a bit, in the hope that I would be able to intercept Viktor on his way. I stood and looked back to the statue, reverse-shadowed by a layer of fresh snow. Pushkin’s curl-topped head was bowed in contemplation. One hand rested in his gown, the other held a derby at his side. In the dark, I couldn’t read the inscription on the statue’s base, but every schoolchild knew it:Throughout great Rus’ my echoes will extend, And all will name me, all tongues in her use….

No protesters gathered. Only passersby walked through the wet, lightly falling snow. A bus huffed by in a cloud of lingering, neon blue exhaust. Two babushkas swayed across the pavement, lugging what appeared to be either a large package of fruit preserves or pickles. There was no such thing as an anti-government demonstration in the Soviet Union, just as they didn’t sell blini in the Congo.

I continued to stand there, wondering how Viktor had become embroiled in Sorokin’s fantasies. The snow collected on me while it collected on Pushkin, but my overcoat, bought in London, kept me dry. The other pedestrians were also well dressed in warm cloth coats and good boots. To what else could Russians reasonably aspire? With a minute or so left before six, a tall woman in a long black coat emerged from the static that fell across the evening’s empty screen. She was beautiful. It was Marina.

She carried a shopping bag from which emerged a long piece of kolbasa. She didn’t see me at first. When she did, from a distance of about ten meters, recognition spilled across her face like ink tipped from a bottle. She halted, but she didn’t smile. She blinked in confusion, a gesture probably reflected on my own face. Then she resumed her approach, moving briskly.

“You’re on your way home,” I called out, not sure that she would stop again.

She brusquely kissed me twice on the cheeks but continued her motion forward.

“I need to be somewhere.”

“Home?”

“Where are you going?” she asked. Our questions carried equal measures of hopefulness. Tentatively, she said, “The same place?”

“Home? Your home?” I replied, trying to banter. “Is that an invitation?”

“I have an appointment,” she said guardedly.

“At 6 P.M.? That’s an unusual time for an appointment.”

“A friend.”

“What friend?” I asked. “Somebody I know? Let’s go for a drink.” We were already crossing the street. I blurted, “Are you going to Pushkin Square?”

She smiled cautiously.

“Listen,” I said. “Don’t go. It’s dangerous.”

Her face clouded over. I tried to block her but she walked around me. I hurried after her and took her arm.

“Listen, Marina, I know what they’ve planned. If I know, don’t you think the KGB knows? Everyone knows! You’ve been set up!”

“Good. We want the KGB to know. It’s against the KGB! What would the point be if they didn’t know?”

“Marina, where do you think you live? One word from Glavlit and you’ll never be published again! They’ll remove your book from the libraries. They’ll remove you from the union—then where would you be? Kaluga? Is that what you want? Don’t you want to be a writer?”

“Leave me alone!”

Her long strides had taken us to the edge of Pushkin Square—“Who do you think you’re going to help!” I cried—and suddenly dozens of people converged upon us. It wasn’t a mere chance eddying of the pedestrian flow. For the most part, they looked like intellectuals, poorly dressed and ineptly coifed, and more than enough were Jews. Marina roughly threw off my arm and rushed to the other side of the statue, disappearing behind a line of four or five women. They were standing in some kind of formation, pale and almost mortally self-conscious.

And then several things happened in what must have been the space of a minute, though the space seemed even more compressed than that, airless and radiant.

A second hand on some unknown watch lurched into the cleavage of a twelve and the line of women marched to the base of the statue. From a worn plastic shopping bag one of them removed a long roll of white cloth on which something, some slogan, had been painted. This woman was middle-aged, squat, with heavy eyeglasses and a long, nearly simian jaw. Tight-lipped, like a high diver at the edge of the board, she passed one end of the cloth to the last woman on the line. It took a moment for them to shake out the banner; even then, even though I was only a few paces away, I could not read the words. As if in another language, or printed in invisible ink, they refused legibility.

Springing from the soil, it seemed, there were then many men with bulky, grotesquely oversized flashcameras. “They’re here!” someone shouted, and others moaned with surprise and fright. The men wore pale brown raincoats. Each time they squeezed off a picture, darting and spinning around us, they grimaced. As the evening landscape turned stark and two-dimensional, the flashes made a soft popping sound that echoed like something from a childhood memory.

It was then that I glimpsed Viktor, standing distant from the melee, a sign of his own hanging from his neck. He seemed disoriented and uncomprehending, an actual passerby. I could read his sign: “RESPECT THE CONSTITUTION!”

In these electric moments, I thought of grabbing Viktor and pulling him away, but the thought barely lasted its articulation. I stuffed my face into my coat and turned to run. Then suddenly dozens of more men, most of them in leather jackets, arrived among us, further outnumbering the protesters. They headed for the women carrying the banners, making detours to push and throw punches at other civilians. Someone I never saw thumped me on the back, a terrific, expert blow that knocked the wind from me and brought me to my knees. When I looked up, two black Volgas had arrived, and the women were being roughly shoved into them, held firmly by their necks.

The woman who had unfurled the banner was the last to go. Her shopping bag had burst, scattering onto the pavement some groceries and several pages of typescript. Both the groceries and the typescript were being frantically collected by a man in a leather jacket. The woman was also taken by the neck, but the plainclothesman holding her missed the opening into the back of the car and, quite deliberately I was sure, smashed her face into the doorframe. From where I knelt, I could hear the contest of bone against steel. Steel won. Her eyeglasses flew off her broken face and into the street. They lay there as the car drove off.

More photographs were being taken and more arrests were being made. I didn’t search for either Marina or Viktor. Now I succeeded in getting away, my face covered by the back of my arm. Fifty meters up Gorky Street I overtook pedestrians oblivious to what had just happened, oblivious to my terror. I bumped against them, a few hurled curses at me, and I continued running through the darkness. Down the stairs of an underground passageway across Gorky, I slipped on some ice and took a tumble. As I fell onto the steps, one of my hands was pulled the wrong way, delivering a sharp jolt to my wrist. When I resumed my flight, cold air whipped around my naked left knee.

I was thoroughly winded by the time I reached the union. I didn’t remove my coat—“Rem Petrovich!” shouted old Darya at the coatcheck—and went straight to my office. I collapsed at my desk and then, with the door closed and the lights off, I wept, spasmodically trying to catch my breath. The tears sluiced down my face and flowed into the mucous pouring from my nose. I tasted the salts of humiliation for the first time since I had left Tomsk.

I don’t know how long I wept. Eventually I removed my handkerchief from my jacket and wiped my face. I was still wearing my coat. I sat in the dark for a while, trying to sort out what had happened, what terrible calamity I had narrowly escaped, or perhaps hadn’t escaped at all. The photographers had been all over the place; would the KGB accept Sorokin’s explanation of my attendance? But now my thoughts departed from the practical and the actual. The moment I had taken flight I comprehended the full measure of the difference between my size and the size of the power that commanded the man who thumped me on my back. It rendered me insignificant, and all the literary pretensions I possessed—as creator, as an individual whose life was bound to his art, as heir to Pushkin, as, ha ha, the unacknowledged legislator of the world—were rendered negligible. How easily I had fallen to my knees… And then at some indeterminate time, hours later perhaps, the door to my office opened soundlessly and a shadow passed through it.

The door closed and the office was dark again. A featureless gray form hovered before me, radiating heat. For a long time I remained at my desk, waiting for the form to define itself. Finally I stood, became a form myself, and the two forms swelled toward each other. She too wore her coat. My hands slid beneath it, along the back of a damp, moist blouse. Her body quavered beneath my touch, but not from my touch. It was fear, at least at first. Her hands ran along my sides and pressed me to her. A stray photon drifted into the room and phosphoresced in a tear swelling at the surface of one of her eyes. I made out the smear of her mascara. That was the last thing I observed, because suddenly I was bereft of language, even language with which to think. Not a single word was exchanged between us.

Twelve

A severe flu descended upon me the following week, and I seemed to be ill the remainder of the winter, which I spent mostly under the blankets, tending to myself. Feverish, congested, and exhausted, I lay in bed brooding about the protest and the events that immediately followed it, but in these days I could barely phrase two consecutive thoughts. I drank weak tea with honey and dried berries; then tea from lime blossoms. I drank warm milk with honey, then with butter, then with Borzhomi water. I placed mustard plaster on my chest. I hung garlic cloves around my neck and stuffed two of them up my nose. That winter I hardly went in to the office. I was waiting for the next shoe to drop, but the demonstration, although well known throughout the city by some kind of jungle telegraph—not a word about it was set into type—didn’t lead to further arrests. No action was taken against Marina, nor against Viktor. No inquiries were made about my own presence on Pushkin Square that evening.

I saw Marina on a few occasions, but not in a private setting, and neither of us took the opportunity to speak with each other. The glow of celebrity had faded from her face and her eyes had become dull. In these encounters, no matter the liveliness of the company, her expression remained pensive. She didn’t offer me any significant look except, once in the café, a kind, mournful smile. These days she seemed to be carrying something deep within her, like the intimate knowledge of her own mortality. In retrospect, I had perceived this the night of the protest. At no time had our embraces and caresses felt like something that was beginning. It had felt, right to the final shudder, like something ending. What was ending, I didn’t comprehend until later.

The confused nature of the evening’s events, and particularly their lack of record or apparent consequence, invited me to believe that they had never happened. At night I lay awake, my fever breaking once again, and tried to recall what I had seen and felt. Repeatedly I found myself in that elongated moment when the women at the base of Pushkin’s statue unfurled their banners. I stood there, squinting, trying to hold the moment long enough to read what was on the banners. Letters and words swirled along the cloth—fragments of political declarations, fragments of declarations of love, lines from poetry and novels, some of them my own—but they never remained there long enough to be understood. Always, in the end, the banner would come up empty, a stretch of white cloth, anti-Soviet merely by its existence, but offering nothing to be read.

I never said anything about the demonstration to Sorokin and he never brought it up with me. I was grateful for that. Meanwhile, Marina kept herself out of view and out of gossip. Many times I dialed the first five digits of her telephone number, merely for the pleasure of doing so, but with no intention of dialing the sixth.

Springtime came and my head began to clear. I tossed aside the notes for my novel and began anew. Then came an unusually sweltering summer, an odd summer, really, unnervingly quiet and suffused with expectation, which I mistook for anticipation of the summer Olympics to be held in early September. The press and television were consumed by oracular pronouncements on the prospects of our swimmers, our runners, our acrobats, and especially our weightlifters. Several of my better-placed friends and colleagues had wrangled assignments to cover the games or to join the government delegation to Mexico City. As I gingerly returned to social life, I found that my friends did not want to speak of literature, but rather of Janis Lusis, our promising javelin thrower.

I managed to get caught up in the pre-games fervor, at least to some extent, despite the absence of a radio at the dacha and our avoidance of the news from one day to the next. This was part of my convalescence, to seal myself in the dacha with Lydia, her gardening implements, and our books. As August wound down and the afternoons became chilly, I looked with some regret toward my return to the city. Lydia began harvesting and canning her tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, and cherries, while I watched her from over the novel I pretended to read. She wore a light, full-length dress as she leaned over the rows, not bending her knees. A breeze skittered around her ankles and for a moment plastered the dress against the backs of her legs and thighs. I rose from the hammock to walk off my hard-on and strolled over to the hedge.

The street was quiet. A lone babushka, Vadim Surkov’s mother-in-law, pulled a wagon up the street, laying in her firewood early. She was an elderly woman, bloated beneath her housedress, a squall of wrinkles around her toothless mouth. We had never spoken, though Surkov’s dacha was located two doors down. Now as she spotted me, her eyes danced beneath her cataracts.

She laughed, a kind of mad cackle, and shouted, “The fascists are in for a hot time now. The whole lot of them.”

I smiled. “What fascists?”

“You know, sonny, the counterrevolutionaries. The wreckers. The Right Oppositionists.”

The phrase made me smile again. I assumed she had become distracted from the exertion of pulling the cart, or simply from being old, and had imagined herself to be living in another time. It was a remarkable phenomenon, entirely forgivable, and I thought of all that her generation had seen and suffered. I should have offered to help her with the cart. Instead, to draw her out, to keep the dream going for my own instruction, I asked her, “These Right Oppositionists, who might they be?”

“Dubcek,” she spat. “And his ilk! They’ve locked ’em up, all of ’em! The bastards will hang from the lampposts.”

Muttering and sniggering, she made her way down the street. I turned to Lydia, who was working so intently that she had not heard the remark. Her face was entirely composed, self-contained, satisfied with the dirt under her fingertips. Without a word I hurried from the garden, down the block in the opposite direction, to Sasha Nasedkin’s dacha.

This had been the scene of a particularly raucous party just the week before. We had attended it, but left early: by chance, Lydia and I had looked up at the same time and communicated to each other the urgent desire to read for a half hour before turning in. This murmured agreement—this congruency of desires—surprised us. We giggled at it. The party had continued in our absence and, like every great party in those last days, had ended at least one marriage and did not wind down until the morning sun had lifted itself above the treetops.

Now the house had the air of centuries-long abandonment. No one was in the untended garden, where some chairs had been tipped over and an empty vodka bottle lay in a vine-choked, crumbling fountain. The windows to the house were closed, but the doorway gaped like a vacant tooth.

“Sasha? Hello? Anyone home? It’s me, Rem!”

The inside of the dacha smelled of trash and spoiled food. Papers were scattered everywhere, on the kitchen table and on the windowsills. I found something odd at the foot of the warm stove: half a typed manuscript, the bottom half, charred around the upper edges. In the next room there was an insistent radio buzzing noise, which I recognized at once as the sound of the BBC being jammed.

“Sasha?”

Between a bottle of Gordon’s gin and one of Schweppe’s tonic, a juice glass was filled to the top. Sasha stared at it, ignoring me. He was disheveled, in some ratty dressing grown, unshaven and red eyed. The BBC rattled in the radio like a trapped bee.

“It’s Dubcek?” I asked. “I just heard.”

Sasha gave a little half laugh.

“Rem Krilov, always well connected and well informed… Not to worry, ha ha. Our good Czechoslovakian friends… fraternal brothers, friendly friends… socialist allies. They’ve invited us to a party. They asked us to bring our tanks… I’m such a great literary critic, how come I couldn’t read the writing on the wall?”

“When did this happen?”

“Can’t you tell by how drunk I am? Two days ago.”

I pointed into the next room. “And the manuscript?”

“Nothing really, Rem. Just some housecleaning. Just cleaning house, getting ready for the next decade, ha ha. But I don’t have the balls for cleaning house. I pulled it out of the fire. What can they do to me? I haven’t invited them, ha ha.”

Before I left I squatted by the stove and picked up the remains of the manuscript. It was a memoir. Balanced on my haunches, able to read no more than ten or eleven lines of each page, I nonetheless recognized that it was a work of enormous accomplishment, honest and unrestrained, like nothing that had ever been published in our literature. Its phrases even now resonate in my head (later I tried to copy the words into my notebook, but could never get them exactly right). I read the manuscript to the very end, taking perhaps more than an hour, never changing my position. Occasionally I heard Sasha stir behind me. He stretched a leg, he picked up his glass, he sighed, he drummed his fingers on the table. The BBC continued to hiss and moan. When I finished the manuscript, I opened the stove door and gently deposited the pages into the dimming fire.

I returned my stiff back and numb left leg to our dacha. Lydia was in the kitchen, preparing a ragout from a recipe in an Italian cookbook. The cookbook was one of several brought to Moscow by a visiting Italian publisher in the correct expectation that he would be showered with lapel pins and would want to give something in return. Lydia had made his acquaintance at a party and, though no lapel pins had been exchanged, the book became one of Lydia’s earthly treasures. When I told her the news, she raised her hand to her face and made a little soundless moue of pain. She looked back at the recipe. Stained and swollen, evidence of cosmopolitan tastes and foreign contacts, the book was now enveloped in the aura of samizdat.

Anyone who had spent an entire life in the Soviet Union—indeed, a week would have served, and been far more convenient—knew at once that the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia would be accompanied by a crackdown at home. I realized now that we had been expecting this always, even counting on it. The expectation had fevered our social gatherings, our love affairs, and, especially, our work. Night would follow day; it always did.

Most of the trips to Mexico City were canceled. The apartments of dissidents were searched, as were those of nonconformist journalists, lawyers, and trade unionists. A demonstration in Red Square lead to seven arrests, including the arrest of a woman wielding an empty baby carriage. On the carriage was hung the banner: “To Your Freedom and Ours!”—Aleksandr Herzen’s cry in defense of Polish rebels a century before. First Secretary Alexander Dubcek and his colleagues were abducted to Moscow and forced to recant the heresy of reform communism.

Even in the best of times, our news reports were delivered by radio and television in a harsh drone nearly devoid of information. Across the airwaves, the standard words and phrases churned and boiled like the Baltic in winter. After heralding the delivery of “urgent aid to the fraternal Czechoslovak people,” “in defense of peace,” a harsher tone was taken, with many references to “traitors” and “agents of world capital,” but the roar itself remained constant, an almost soothing accompaniment to one’s breakfast or dinner. This is how it had always been. And then one September morning, in this ocean of radio noise, the words “Marina Burchatkina” surfaced like an enemy submarine.

I was home, making coffee in my bachelor kitchen and glumly looking ahead to my day’s work, which had faltered since my return from Peredelkino. Taking the broadcast of Marina’s name as an aural hallucination, I decided that my obsession with her had finally overcome my senses. I could still feel her touch echoing off my skin.

This acknowledgement meant that my life would be different now. I would have to pursue her, win her, and marry her; otherwise I would know no mental ease. I loved her. The hallucination then deepened, deforming reality itself. I heard the following:

“…outrage at her selfish and criminal anti-Soviet actions. We cannot understand how someone raised under Soviet rule, whose education and professional status were provided by the toil of common laborers, can so unscrupulously libel our way of life. Burchatkina’s letter serves only the interests of Western reactionary circles opposed to the efforts of the Soviet Union to foster peaceful coexistence. She who blackens her country and people and tries to turn back history deserves only contempt and indignation.”

Thirteen

I forced myself to finish breakfast, not fully understanding what I had just heard (but understanding enough). I dressed and hurried to the metro. The train arrived as I reached the platform and I was carried by the masses into the central car, whose atmosphere was thick with the odors of garlic and sour milk. Pressed against my body, the other passengers showed me their faces of ash and their blind, watery eyes. They were not only my compatriots, they were my readers. Emerging from the Krasnopresnenskaya metro station, I deeply inhaled but failed to taste fresh air. Inside the Rostov mansion reigned a deep, muffled silence. A few colleagues crossed my path, but they didn’t look my way. Something had slightly altered the building’s dimensions, narrowing the foyer corridor and deepening the tread on the little steps down to the café. Desperate, I went to the publications office and found Anton Basmanian at a desk, studying a sheet of galleys.

He had gained some unbecoming weight in the last few years, especially in his jowls and belly. With his head down, the thinning of his hair was apparent. It was probably just as well that his wife had come up from Yerevan. Meanwhile, he had kept control of his journal by fluttering it to the right side of the innocuous.

“Anton,” I said.

He kept his eyes fixed on a line of type.

“Rem.”

“Tell me. What did I hear on Radio Beacon?”

“A Bach cantata, perhaps. ‘Sleepers Awake.’” Now he put down his pencil and looked up. He strained out a smile. His teeth were as gleamingly white as ever. “She wrote a so-called open letter to the Politburo. She appears to be a bit put out by Czechoslovakia.”

“It was published?”

“In Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, the New York Times, Die Zeit.”

The title of each foreign publication struck me like a body blow. I collapsed into a folding chair. I had known that she had done something terrible, but nothing as terrible as this.

My mouth was parched when I spoke next. “Well, she’s finished.”

Anton chuckled, monstrously. “No, she’s just beginning. I haven’t told you the best part.”

“What?”

“The letter was written in Paris. She has a visiting lectureship at the Sorbonne. On what subject, I don’t know. In Kaluga she taught arts and crafts to twelve year olds.”

My brain had slowed nearly to a stop; I could barely make out Anton’s words. I felt as if I were still in the metro, surrounded by strangers. I closed my eyes and felt a filament of steam from a cup of espresso tickle my nostril hairs.

“She’s not coming back.” I tried to make it sound like a declarative sentence, but there was a childish, hopeful interrogative rising at the end.

He laughed at the possibility. She had already been stripped of her Soviet citizenship, of course.

Anton said, “I suppose you haven’t talked to Sorokin, or been by your office, have you?”

“I’ve just come in.”

“There’s a union petition against her. You’ll have to sign. And I suppose there’ll be a pro forma expulsion. That’ll be on the agenda, a real spectacle I’m sure.”

I slumped my shoulders.

“And let me give you some advice, Rem, my friend.”

I looked at him dejectedly.

He said, “It won’t hurt for you to be the one to submit the resolution. People have memories, you know. They know about the role you played in her career.”

“I hardly had anything to do with her. Anyway, she’s in Paris now. People should forget her.”

“You don’t understand, the entire union is under a microscope. Not just the leadership: the rank and file too. They’re talking about a new censorship regime, closing literary journals, ending foreign travel.”

“Because of a single letter in Le Monde?”

“It’s the whole international situation. They’re going back through everything that’s been written in the past ten years, looking for divergences from Party views. Suslov’s involved! The pressure’s incredible. The union has to respond in a positive way.”

“Fine, I’ve got no objection to that.”

“Look, Rem, all they’re asking for is a little self-criticism. It’s nothing.”

“For what? For reading her work?”

“For recommending her for publication. You know, write about how your proletarian vigilance had been relaxed, about how you were misled.”

“But you published her!”

“I’m also writing a letter of self-criticism. I’m pouring a bucket of shit on my head.”

“And you had an affair with her! You spent a week with her in Tashkent!”

“That’s personal. It had nothing to do with politics,” Anton said. The recollection brightened his smile.

Later that day, the text of Radio Beacon’s attack on Marina Burchatkina was posted in the glassed-in bulletin board in the lobby outside the café. It was signed and ostensibly written by six Heroes of Socialist Labor, members of the mechanics’ union at the Zil Autoworks.

In September 1944, as the Red Army pressed on toward central Europe, an ineptly planned uprising by Slovak partisans was countered by the 357th German Infantry Division and the 108th Panzar Division. Rushing to the Slovaks’ aid, the Red Army descended from its positions in the Carpathian mountains and met the Germans in and around Krosno. Two days of close fighting ensued. As it advanced into the Dukla Pass, the 38th Red Army’s first Guards Calvary received orders to open a narrow corridor, less than 2000 meters wide, between the villages of Lysa Gura and Gloitse. Leaving behind its heavy weaponry and much of its ammunition, the Soviets passed through a zone raked by machine-gun and mortar fire. My father, a young lieutenant who had won decorations at Lvov, took a sniper’s bullet in the throat. It was not necessarily a mortal wound, members of his company said later, but without quick medical attention he bled to death on the pass’s wooded slopes.

As our government propagandists reminded us, the Soviet people had paid a high price for the liberation of Czechoslovakia. Even among my liberal friends, there were now murmurs that Dubcek had left us no alternative.

Meanwhile, news of Marina Burchatkina had, by way of returning travelers and those who had access to Western media, filtered through to the Rostov mansion. She had appeared on French TV. From there she went to America. It was said that her publisher offered her a lucrative contract for her next work, a book of political essays. She became romantically linked to a famous Hollywood director.

Every piece of news was treated with ironic contempt by my colleagues, but I kept my silence, trying to identify the precise nature of my loss. I now spent hardly any time at the union, not even in the café. I worked every day at home, when I did any work at all. In the evenings I stayed home too; suddenly, there were no parties, no salons, no encounters with foreign guests. Out at the dacha, I mentioned Marina’s spectacular defection to Lydia, but she shrugged it off. For her, the invasion of Czechoslovakia had more serious consequences: the flow of foreign books into Russia, whether authorized or not, was slowed to a desperate trickle.

I had never told her about Pushkin Square. Now I didn’t tell her that I had been asked to sign another petition, nor that it had been suggested that I sponsor a resolution. The only piece of writing that I produced that autumn was a lengthy and flamboyantly damning letter of self-criticism, which I tore into little pieces and flushed down the toilet.

A few weeks after my encounter with Anton, I was called into Sorokin’s office. He shoved a piece of paper across the desk.

“Read this.”

Marina Burchatkina’s open letter to the Politburo, published all over the world, had been printed on a numbered document that was labeled the property of the Committee for State Security. I had not heard of anyone who had actually seen the letter, among neither travelers to the West nor the privileged recipients of foreign newspapers. I took a seat and read it, aware that Sorokin was closely reading my face, on which I had pasted a stern, worried expression. I immediately recognized that the letter was no great advance in the literature of political philosophy; it was an absurd amalgam of special pleading and whiffy analysis, to which were tacked irrelevant quotations from Gandhi, Tolstoy, the Czech statesman Jan Masaryk, and Lenin himself, and then John Lennon. When I reached the end (“Comrade Brezhnev, please give peace a chance!”), I said, “It’s vile.”

“I’m relieved to know that you think so. Because some suspicion has been voiced that you might sympathize with these anti-Soviet sentiments.”

“I can’t believe—”

“So why isn’t your name on the union petition?”

“I wasn’t happy with the wording. You know, as a writer, how you hate to put your name on anything that you haven’t written yourself.”

In fact, Sorokin probably didn’t hate it at all, he probably took it as a matter of course. He responded to my well-rehearsed evasion by pressing heavily with his elbows against his desk. His face flushed and his arms trembled as he rose from his seat. By the time he reached his feet, he was breathing heavily. He moved with an unfamiliar, listing limp across the room to a gray gunmetal safe implanted in the wall between two bookcases. He blocked my view of it as he turned the wheel. He removed something from inside the safe, brought it back to his desk, and laid it carefully before me.

It was Marina’s portrait, encased in a thin crimson border: the cover of Time magazine. I recognized that I was not meant to touch it. The picture had been done in oils, and my first thought was that it was not a good likeness, that this was not as I had known her. While the artist had succeeded in making her attractive, he appeared to have added years and hard experience to her beauty. As she gazed up from the cover, her face was drawn and slightly battered. The resolute set of her jaw raised a faint crease along the base of her left temple, her moral fiber made visible.

The gross tangibility of this image gave me pause. I had to concede something to the vision of the artist, even if he were merely a workaday magazine illustrator. Action was character. The actual Marina Burchatkina was not the person that, entangled by desire, I thought I had known. I gazed into the printed eyes, unable to turn away. Sorokin spoke over my shoulder, his voice thick.

“That’s their new heroine, their Joan of Arc. She pours lies and filth on the name of the Soviet people. They won’t rest until the Soviet Union is destroyed.”

I studied the picture, trying to commit it to memory. I thought it was the last thing I would ever know about her.

“No, Brezhnev’s destroying it himself,” I murmured, not bearing to look at Sorokin. “This invasion puts back the political development of our country twenty years. It’s a disaster for my generation.”

This was the first time I had ever articulated this thought. It was not even something I had known I believed. The force of my belief made me dizzy.

Sorokin belched. It came out in a growl.

“Rem, you’re so fucking smart. Tell me then, how did I learn in advance about Pushkin Square?”

I turned to face him. He was leaning on the desk, towering over me.

“I don’t know. From one of the security organs, I suppose.”

“Damn straight I did. But who in the security organs?”

“How would I know? I don’t care. I have no idea how the KGB operates. They must have placed an informer among the demonstrators. I know they have contacts in the union.” I waved vaguely with my hand, not wanting to directly accuse him.

Sorokin continued to stare, his eyes brimming with disgust.

“What?” I said.

He didn’t reply.

“Bullshit,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”

Now Sorokin’s expression turned smug. He enjoyed this, it recalled the literary wars of his youth, against Zamyatin, against Babel, against Akhmatova. The color that had come into his face made him look healthier than he had in years.

“It’s impossible,” I protested. “She was probably one of the ringleaders.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“What’s right?”

“She was a ringleader, she was an agent provocateur. She smoked out the so-called dissidents. Too bad you didn’t stop Panteleyev. We wanted to keep the union out of it.”

“How can that be! She just defected! She wrote an anti-Soviet letter to Le Monde!”

“That’s what’s so despicable. Here is someone, a supposedly loyal citizen of the state who, after years of delicate cooperation, suddenly has a so-called ‘crisis of conscience.’ She changes sides, acts the pure innocent, the defender of liberty against the very system that helped bring her to prominence in the first place. She planned this, she knew she was going to defect when she applied for the trip to Paris. She wasn’t coming back. The KGB searched her flat. It was cleaned out, not a single manuscript or notebook or address.”

My voice was no more that a whispered croak: “When did she apply?”

He was distracted by his anger and didn’t answer at once, not understanding the import of my question. I repeated it.

“Last winter. Right after Pushkin Square.” Glaring, he said, “Write your own statement.” He added sarcastically, “I want that you should be satisfied with the wording.”

He returned the magazine to his safe.

Fourteen

The resolution had been circulated among the executive members of the Secretariat several days before the meeting, but had been left unsigned. Anton told me that he offered to sponsor it, but the offer was refused: First Secretary Fedin demanded a higher-ranking official. Anton said that Sorokin demanded me—“Idiot, she’s in California! What do you care? They can’t touch her!”—but I wasn’t approached again. Indeed, hardly anyone spoke to me that week. Now Anton avoided me as well. I gave off the odor of bodily corruption. At the very last moment an unknown children’s poet was flown in from Irkutsk, presumably on the principle that if rank would not serve, then “the people” would. In the poet’s address, she expressed the indignation of all the Far East writers of children’s literature at Marina Burchatkina’s “betrayal of high principles,” which aimed to “mislead and pervert incorruptible Soviet youth.”

As the evening wore on, the speeches became more hysterical. Marina was called “a prostitute” and “a traitor”; the threat she “and her masters” posed to the Union of Soviets was as great as that of the armies of the Third Reich. I hardly paid attention to the crash and pounding of the rhetorical surf. Instead I took into account the ten hours’ time difference and, assisted by several glasses of whiskey administered shortly before the start of the evening’s program, I saw Marina waking late at her director’s Pacific beach house. She luxuriated for several minutes in the big bed and soft white linen, marveling at the paleness of the light playing against the room’s trim, understated furnishings and fixtures. (At the microphone, someone cried, “Marina Burchatkina, did you receive your thirty pieces of silver?”) Placed in a sunny mood by her surroundings, she rose from the bed, wearing the director’s pajamas, slipped her feet into an ex-wife’s slippers, and summoned one of the servants to serve her coffee on the terrace. She brought her expensive fountain pen (a gift from the director) and a tablet of writing paper (I assumed she had purchased that on her own) out to the glass café table and, after sipping the coffee and smiling at some seagull swooping over the water in search of its own breakfast, she began her day’s work.

There was an end to the speeches and then the hall was quiet. Sorokin spoke from his place on the dais: “Any more comments?” His gaze passed across the surface of the audience like a spotlight. It avoided me, but I felt its heat just the same. This was my last chance to make amends. Hiding in the third or fourth row, I kept my gaze straight ahead, at a portrait of Gorky on the wall behind the dais, and tried to demonstrate my obliviousness.

After a while a vote was taken. It was unanimous. From exhaustion, even I raised my hand in favor, though the official observers of the vote would have recorded that my arm was not fully extended and by how much. I knew that my friends at the meeting, Anton and the others, who had chosen not to sit with me, would be relieved: a difficult chapter was closed. I sought relief as well, but was instead visited by a strange foreboding.

There was more business at hand, of course, including a report on our accounts, a report about our increased membership, and even a resolution lauding the Czechoslovak writers’ union, which had been brutally reconstituted after the invasion, for its “brave defense of national sovereignty.”

Then the floor was opened to “questions from the floor,” and someone I didn’t know approached the microphone, a hefty dark man in a gray pullover. He identified himself as a poet-miner from Kemerovo. I idly wondered how many words rhymed with “shovel” and “bituminous.” As I began making a list of rhymes, as I had done with the aid of my father’s dictionary when I was first seized by the idea of becoming a poet myself, I became conscious of the furtive looks again glancing off me from around the hall. The attention was disturbing, but not as much as the furtiveness. The miner predictably encountered difficulty reading his own speech, mispronouncing and replacing many words, but it seemed to be in general praise of the Soviet medical profession.

A hospital had been built in Kemerovo, providing free medical care to all workers. The miner-poet went on for some time about the hospital and about the general advances in medical care throughout the Soviet Union, rambling a bit and thus giving evidence that he might have written at least part of the speech himself. My attention abated again, but part of me continued to follow in parallel his spiraling oration down some very nasty hole.

It reached the bottom of its descent when he warned against “gross libel of the Soviet psychiatric profession.” He reminded us that, while psychiatric care in the West was a luxury of the rich and pampered, Soviet psychiatry served “working-class men and women with working-class problems.” During the Great Patriotic War, honorable men of the psychiatric profession had served on the front lines against the Nazis, risking and often sacrificing their lives to treat the psychological effects of war on the heroic defenders of liberty. Was this the reason “shell shock,” as it was called in the West, was virtually unheard of in the Red Army? Today Soviet psychiatric medicine was poised to advance to the furthest reaches of human consciousness, promising relief from anxiety, stress, and neurosis, if only it were not impeded by the forces of reaction.

When Viktor Panteleyev’s name was read out by the miner, I knew that all was lost. My name and a few others, belonging to men who were far more surprised than I was, shortly followed. The air in the room turned cold; there were gasps of surprise. Sorokin asked if anyone wished to speak on the question. No one did, not even those who had been named. Viktor, of course, had not bothered to attend the meeting. The news of his expulsion from the union would come to him in a registered letter, which he might well neglect to open. When eventually arrested for “social parasitism,” he would go without protest. This time the vote was opposed by a few liberal stalwarts with secure reputations, but it passed easily. Men rose from their seats. As if the vote had somehow reversed evolution, not one stood fully erect. They staggered from the hall.

This was expected of me as well, but I found myself paralyzed and my vision dimmed. Sorokin stood at the podium in a shaft of avenging light, the dome of his massive head radiant. He glowered at me, focusing all the attention in the hall. He had silenced the audience, even their incidental coughs and rustling of papers. At last I climbed from my seat, tripped over some legs, crawled out into the aisle, and left.

I struggled up the carpeted, chandeliered stairway to the third floor. As I entered the corridor in the afterhours murk, I could see four large cardboard boxes neatly stacked outside my office. I approached them warily, my legs shaking. My home address was neatly printed on the top box. I opened the door to the office and flicked on the light. The room was perfectly empty, much larger than I had remembered it. The office needed a new paint job, but it would have taken the most rigorous forensics to determine that I had ever inhabited it.

I returned downstairs, claimed my coat (Darya Sergeyevna gave it up reluctantly, scowling), and left the building.

The snow was falling thickly by the time I disembarked at Peredelkino, the only passenger stepping from the dark and frigid train. When I reached the end of the platform I turned and saw that the snow had already covered my tracks. The streets of the village were unlit except by the radiance of the snow itself, which swallowed the sound of my footfalls.

Once the train had pulled from the station, the village offered the illusion of being completely detached from the world. It was self-sufficient: fed, heated, and powered by the imaginations of its inhabitants. I crossed over the frozen brook unwinding along the station and headed up the hill. The air was scented with sweet chimney smoke. Someone was burning cedar, an extravagance. The lovingly maintained fiction was that this village was a republic. Its only currency was language, and its military was composed of readers, partisans who would defend it at any risk to themselves. Its laws were just and mostly grammatical, but no less severe for that. The village was a confident one and defiant in its knowledge that it had chanced upon the most perfect political economy.

As I crossed our gate, I suffered a premonition that I was about to be surprised for the second time that evening. I stopped at the window, expecting to see Lydia in Vadim Surkov’s embrace.

But Lydia was alone, sitting in her upholstered chair, fixed in the amber cone of the reading light. A fat book rested on her lap. It was mine, The Northern Lights. She was entirely motionless, as if holding her breath. I could not make out the movement of her eyes. After a while she turned the page. She would not have seen me even if she had looked up, because I was standing in the dark behind the glass, in the dark nowhere place from where authors always watch their readers. To disturb her would have been as if to ripple the surface of a clear mountain lake in which the moon and the cosmos were perfectly reflected. I knew that shortly there would be many explanations to be made, however imperfectly, and then confessions and recriminations, protestations of grief and loss, and then at last hard, practical calculation. Before that, I wanted to absorb—place into words I would always be able to summon—an image of her like that, the passionate reader. I watched for a long time, letting the cold seep through my coat and skin. The snowflakes, like a precipitation of type, collected in my hair and upon my eyelashes.