Stalin's Teardrops

Part III: The Cult of the Egg

Church bells were ringing out across the city in celebration, clong-dong-clangle. The great edifice on Dzerzhinsky Square was almost deserted with the exception of bored guards patrolling corridors. In the mahogany-panelled office of the head of the directorate of censorship, General Mirov rubbed his rubicund boozer's nose as if an itch was aflame.

"How soon can we hope to have an accurate Great Atlas?" he demanded sourly. "That's what I'm being asked."

Not right at the moment, however. The six black telephones on his vast oak desk all stood silently.

Valentin blinked. "As you know, Comrade General, Grusha's disappearance hasn't exactly speeded the task. All the damned questioning, the interruptions. Myself and my staff being bothered at our work as though we are murderers."

The ceiling was high and ornately plastered, the windows taller than a man. A gilt-framed portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky, architect of terror, watched rapaciously.

"If," said Mirov, "a newly appointed deputy-chief cartographer-of reformist ambitions, and heartily resented because of those, mark my words!-if she vanishes so inexplicably, are you surprised that there's a certain odour of rats in your offices? Are you astonished that her well-connected parents press for the most thorough investigation?"

Valentin nodded towards the nobly handsome young man who stood expressionlessly in front of one of the embroidered sofas.

"I'll swear that Peterkin here has undergone a personality fluctuation because of all the turmoil." dangle, dong, clong. Like some mechanical figure heeding the peal of a carillon, Peterkin took three paces forward across the oriental carpet.

"Ah," said Mirov, "so are we attempting to clear up the matter of Grusha's possible murder hygienically in private? Between the three of us? How maternal of you, Colonel! You shelter the members of your staff just like a mother hen." The General's gaze drifted to the intruding object on his desk, and he frowned irritably "Things have changed. Can't you understand? I cannot suppress the investigation."

"No, no, no," broke in Valentin. "Peterkin used to be a bit of a dreamer. Now he's a demon for work. That's all I meant. Well, a demon for the old sort of work, not for cartographic revisionism…" As if realizing that under present circumstances this might hardly be construed as an endorsement, Valentin shrugged.

"Is that thing supposed to be a sample of his most recent work?" The General's finger stabbed accusingly towards the decorated egg which rested on his blotting paper, geometrically embellished in black and ochre and yellow. "Reminds me of some tourist souvenir on sale in a foetid East African street. Some barbaric painted gourd."

"Sir," said Peterkin, "it is executed in Carpathian pysanka style."

"You don't say?" The General brought his fist down upon the painted egg, crushing the shell, splitting the boiled white flesh within. "Thus I execute it. In any case, Easter is months away."

"You're unhappy about all these new reforms, aren't you, Comrade General?" Valentin asked cautiously, "I mean, deeply unhappy. You hope to retire honourably, yet what sort of world will you retire into?"

"One where I can hope to gather mushrooms in the woods to my heart's content, if you really wish to know."

"Ah, but will you be allowed such tranquility? Won't all manner of dark cupboards be opened?"

"I'm busy opening those cupboards," snapped Mirov. "As quickly as can be. Absurdist plays, concrete poems, abstract art, economic critiques… We scurry to grease their publication, do we not? Grow faster, trees, grow faster! We need your pulp. Bah! I'm somewhat impeded by the sloth of your department of cartography. I demand true maps, as soon as can be." With a cupped hand he swept the mess of broken boiled egg into a trash basket.

"Those dark cupboards also contain corpses," hinted Valentin.

"For which, you imply, I may one day be brought to book?"

"Well, you certainly oughtn't ever to write your memoirs."

"You're being impertinent, Valentin. Insubordinate in front of a subordinate." The General laughed barkingly. "Though I suppose you're right. The world is now shifting more swiftly than I imagined possible."

"We aren't safe here, in this world that's a-coming."

The bells continued to ring out cacophonously and triumphantly as if attempting to crack a somewhat leaden sky, to let through rifts of clear blue.

Peterkin spoke dreamily. "The egg celebrates the mysteries of birth and death and reawakening. Simon of Gyrene, the egg merchant, helped Jesus to carry his cross. Upon Simon's return he found to his astonishment that all the eggs in his basket had been coloured with many hues."

"I'll bet he was astonished!" said Mirov sarcastically. "There goes any hope of selling my nice white eggs! Must I really listen to the warblings of this tinpot Dostoevsky? Has the cartography department taken leave of its senses, Colonel? Oh, I see what you mean about Comrade Peterkin's personality. But why do you bother me with such nonsense? I was hoping to catch up on some paperwork this morning and forget about the damned-"

"Ding-dong of rebirth in our land?"

"Carl Faberge made his first imperial Easter egg for the Tsar and Tsaritsa just over a century ago," said Peterkin.

"Please excuse his circuitous approach to the meat of the matter, General," begged Valentin. "Almost as if he is circumnavigating an egg? I promise he will arrive there sooner or later."

"An egg is like a globe," Peterkin continued. "The department of cartography has never designed globes of the world."

"The world isn't shaped like an egg!" objected Mirov, his cracked veins flushing brighter.

"With respect, it is, Comrade General," murmured Valentin. "It's somewhat oblate… Continue, Peterkin!"

"Faberge cast his eggs from precious metals. He inlaid them with enameling, he encrusted them with jewels. He even kept a special hammer by him to destroy any whose craftsmanship fell short of his own flawless standards."

"What is this drivel about the Tsar and Tsaritsa?" exploded Mirov. "Are you preaching counter-revolution? A return to those days of jewelled eggs for the aristocracy and poverty for the masses? Or is this a metaphor? Are you advocating a putsch against the reformers?"

"Traditions continue," Peterkin said vaguely.

"Yes," agreed Valentin. "We are the descendants of the secret police of the imperial empire, are we not? Of its censors; of its patriots."

"Bah!"

Peterkin cleared his throat. He seemed impervious to the General's displeasure.

"The craft of decorating eggs in the imperial style continues… in the dead ground of this very city."

"Dead ground?"

"That's a discovery some of us have made," explained Valentin. He gestured vaguely through a window, to somewhere beyond the onion domes. "The wholesale falsification of maps produces, well, actual false places-which a person in the right frame of mind can genuinely reach. Peterkin here has found such places, haven't you, hmm? As have I."

Peterkin nodded jerkily like a marionette on strings.

"You're both drunk," said Mirov. "Go away."

"I can prove this, General. Comrade Grusha strayed into one of those places. She was following me, acting as an amateur sleuth. Ah, the new generation are all such amateurs compared to us! Now she haunts that place because she lacks the cast of mind that I possess-and you too, General."

"What might that be?"

"An instinct for falsification; for the masking of reality."

"I'm charmed at your compliment."

"You'd be even more charmed if you came with me to visit my darling young mistress Koshka who lives in such a place."

One ageing man regarded the other quizzically. "You, Valentin? A young mistress? Excuse me if I'm skeptical."

"You might say that such a visit is a rejuvenating experience."

Mirov nodded, misunderstanding. "A youthful mistress might well be as invigorating as monkey glands. Along with being heart attack territory."

"To enter the dead ground is rejuvenating; you'll see, you'll see. That's one frontier worth safeguarding-the border between the real and the ideal. Perhaps you've heard of the legend of the secret valley of Shangri-la? The place that features on no map? To enter it properly, a man must be transformed."

"That's where the egg crafters come into this," prompted Peterkin.

"Internal exile, General! Let me propose a whole new meaning for that phrase. Let me invite you to share this refuge."

"You insist that Comrade Grusha's still alive?"

"Oh yes. She walks by my Koshka's apartment at nights."

"So where does she go to by day?"

"I suspect that it's always night for her. Otherwise she might spy some escape route, come back here, stir up more trouble…"

"Are you telling me, Colonel Valentin, that some zone of aberrant geometry exists in our city? Some other dimension to existence? I don't mean the one advertised by those wretched bells."

"Exactly. Just so."

Mirov stared at the portrait of Dzerzhinsky, who would have answered such an eccentric proposition with a bullet, and sucked in his breath.

"I shall indulge you, Colonel-for old time's sake, I'm tempted to say-if only to study a unique form of psychosis which seems to be affecting our department of cartography."

"It's best to go in the evening, as the shadows draw in."

"It would be."

"On foot."

"Of course."

"With no bodyguard."

"Be warned, I shall be armed."

"Why not, General? Why ever not?"

But Peterkin smirked.

So that same evening the three men went by way of certain half-frequented routes, via this side street and that alley and that square until the hollow raving of the bells was muffled, till distant traffic only purred like several sleepy kittens, and a lone owl hooted from an old-fashioned cemetery amidst century-old apartment blocks.

As if playing the role of some discreet pimp, Peterkin indicated a door. "Gentlemen, we will now visit a lady."

Mirov guffawed. "This mistress of yours, Colonel: is she by any chance a mistress to many?"

"My Koshka lives farther away," said Valentin, "not here. Absolutely not here. Yet don't you already feel a new spring in your gait? Don't you sense the weight of years lifting from your shoulders?"

"I admit I do feel somewhat sprightly," agreed the General. "Hot-blooded. Ripe for adventure. Ah, it's years since… Valentin, you look like a younger man." He rubbed his hands. "Ah, the spice of anticipation! How it converts tired old mutton into lamb."

Peterkin admitted them into a large foyer lit by a single low-powered-light bulb and decorated by several large vases of dried, dusty roses in bud. A faint memory of musky aroma lingered, due perhaps to a sprinkle of essential oils. A creaky elevator lifted them slowly to the third floor, its cables twanging dolorously once or twice like the strings of a double bass. Valentin found himself whistling a lively theme from an opera by Prokofiev-so softly he sounded as though he was actually labouring up marble stairs, puffing.

The dark petite young woman who admitted these three visitors to her apartment was not alone. Mirov slapped the reassuring bulge of his gun, as if to stun a fly, before relaxing. The other two occupants were also women, who wore similar cheap dresses patterned with roses, orchids, their lips and cheeks rouged.

"May I present Masha?" Having performed this introduction, Peterkin slackened; he stood limply like a neglected doll.

"This is my older sister Tanya," Masha explained. Masha's elder image smiled. If the younger sister was enticingly lovely, Tanya was the matured vintage, an intoxicating queen.

"And my aunt Anastasia." A plumper, far from frumpish version, in her middle forties, a twinkle in her eye, her neck strung with large phony pearls.

Absurdly, the aunt curtsied, plucking up the hem of her dress quite high enough to display a dimpled thigh for a moment.

"We are chief Eggers," said Anastasia. "Tanya and I represent the Guild of Imperial Eggs."

The large room, replete with rugs from Tashkent and Bokhara hanging on the walls, with curtains woven with thread of gold, housed a substantial carved bed spread with brocade, almost large enough for two couples entwined together, though hardly for three. All approaches to it were, however, blocked by at least a score of tall narrow round-topped tables, each of which served as a dais to display a decorated egg, or two, or three. Some ostrich, some goose, others pullet and even smaller, perhaps even the eggs of canaries.

On gilt or silver stands, shaped as swans, as chariots, as goblets, these eggs were intricately cut and hinged, in trefoil style, gothic style, scallop style. Some lids were lattices. Filigree windows held only spider's webs of connective shell. Petals of shell hung down on the thinnest of silver chains. Pearl-studded drawers jutted. Doors opened upon grottos where tiny porcelain cherubs perched pertly. Seed pearls, lace, gold braid, jewels trimmed the doorways. Interior linings were of velvet…

To blunder towards that bed in the heat of passion would be to wreak devastation more shattering than Carl Faberge could ever have inflicted on a faulty golden egg with a hammer! What a fragile cordon defended that bedspread and the hint of blue silk sheets; yet to trespass would be to assassinate art-if those eggs were properly speaking the products of art, rather than of an obsessional delirium which had transfigured commonplace ovoids of calcium, former homes of bird embryos and yolk and albumen.

Aunt Anastasia waved at a bureau loaded with egging equipment: pots of seed pearls, jewels, ribbons, diamond dust, cords of silk gimp, corsage pins, clasps, toothpicks, emery boards, a sharp little knife, a tiny saw, manicure scissors, glue, nail varnish, and sharp pencils. The General rubbed his eyes. For a moment did he think he had seen jars of beetles, strings of poisonous toadstools, handcuffs made of cord, the accoutrements of a witch in some fable?

"Aren't we just birds of a feather?" she asked the Colonel. "You use the quills of birds for mapping-pens, so I hear. We use the eggs of the birds."

"I've rarely seen anything quite so ridiculous," Mirov broke in. "Your eggs are gimcrack mockeries of Tsarist treasures. Petit bourgeois counterfeits!"

"Exactly," agreed queenly Tanya. "Did not some financier once say that bad money drives out good? Let's suppose that falsity is superior to reality. Did you not try to make it so? Did you not succeed formerly? Ah, but in the dialectical process the false gives rise in turn to a hidden truth. The map of lies leads to a secret domain. The egg that apes treasure shows the way towards the true treasury."

Tanya picked up a pearl-studded goose egg. Its one oval door was closed. The egg was like some alien space-pod equipped with a hatch. Inserting a fingernail, she prised this open and held the egg out for Mirov's inspection.

On the whole inner surface of that goose egg-the inside of the door included-was a map of the whole world, of all the continents in considerable detail. The difference between the shape of the egg and that of the planetary globe caused some distortion, though by no means grotesquely so. Mirov squinted within, impressed despite himself.

"How on earth did you work within such a cramped volume? By using a dentist's mirror, and miniature nibs held in tweezers? Or… did you draw upon the outside and somehow the pattern sank through?"

"Somehow?" Tanya chuckled. "We dreamed the map into the egg, General, just as you dreamed us into existence by means of your lies- though unintentionally!"

She selected another closed egg and opened its door.

"Here's the map of our country… Ours, mark you, not yours. If you take this egg as your guide, our country can be yours, too. You can enter and leave as you desire."

"Be careful you don't break your egg." Aunt Anastasia wagged a warning finger.

"The same way you broke the pysanka egg," squeaked Peterkin, emerging briefly from his immobility and muteness. "Most of those eggs are technical exercises-not the one you hold." (For Mirov had accepted the egg.) "That was dreamed deep within the other country." Having spoken like a ventriloquist's dummy, Peterkin became inert again.

However, he left along with his two superiors-presently, by which time it was fully night.

"Maps, dreamed on the insides of eggs! Deep in some zone of absurd topography!" Mirov snorted. "Your escape hatch is preposterous," he told Valentin, pausing under a street lamp.

"Actually, with respect, we aren't deep in the zone at all. Oh no, not here. But that egg can guide-"

"Do you believe in it, you dupe?"

"Why didn't I receive one for my own? I suppose because I already know the way to Koshka's place…"

Mirov snapped his fingers. "I know how the trick's done. They use transfers. They draw the map on several pieces of paper, wet those so they're sticky, then insert with tweezers on to the inside of the shell. When that dries, they use tiny bent brushes to apply varnish."

Mirov removed the map-egg from his overcoat pocket, knelt, and placed the egg on the pavement under the brightness of the street lamp. Was he surprised by the limber flexibility of his joints?

"I can prove it." Producing his pistol, Mirov transferred his grip to the barrel, poising the handle above the pearl-studded shell. "I'll peel those transfers loose from the broken bits. Ha, dreams indeed!"

"Don't," said Peterkin in a lame voice only likely to encourage Mirov.

"Don't be a fool," said Valentin.

"A fool, is it, Comrade Colonel?"

"If you're told not to open a door and you insist on opening it-"

"Disaster ensues-supposing that you're a child in a fable."

Valentin knelt too, to beg the General to desist. To an onlooker the two men might have appeared to be fellow worshippers adoring a fetish object on the paving slab, cultists of the egg indeed.

When Mirov brought the butt of the gun down, cracking the egg wide open and sending tiny pearls rolling like spilled barley, a shock seemed to ripple along the street and upward to the very stars, which trembled above the city.

Although Mirov probed and pried, in no way could he discover or peel loose any stiffly varnished paper transfers.

When the two sprightly oldsters looked around again, Peterkin had slipped away without a word. The two men scrambled up. Night, and strange streets, had swallowed their escort utterly. Despite Valentin's protests-which even led the men to tussle briefly-Mirov ground the shards of egg to dust under his heel, as if thereby he might obliterate any connexion with himself.

Eventually, lost, they walked into a birch wood where mushrooms swelled through the humus in the moonlight. An owl hooted. Weasels chased mice. Was this woodland merely a park within the city? It hardly seemed so; yet by then the answer scarcely mattered, since they were having great difficulty remembering who they were, let alone where they were. Already they'd been obliged a number of times to roll up their floppy trouser legs and cinch their belts tighter. Their sleeves dangled loosely, their shoes were clumsy boats, while their overcoats dragged as long cloaks upon the ground.

"Kashka? Kishka? Was that her name? What was her name?" Valentin asked his friend.

"I think her name was Grusha… no, Masha."

"Wasn't."

"Was."

Briefly they quarrelled, till they forgot who they were talking about.

Through the trees, they spied the lights of a village which strongly suggested home. Descending a birch-clad slope awkwardly in their oversized garments-two lads dressed as men for a lark-they arrived at a yellow window and peered through.

Beautiful Tanya and Aunt Anastasia were singing to two huge eggs resting on a rug. Eggs the size of the fattest plucked turkeys, decorated with strange ochre zig-zags.

Even as Valentin and Mirov watched, the ends of the eggs opened on brass hinges. From each a bare arm emerged, followed by a head and a bare shoulder. The two women each grasped a groping hand and hauled. From out of each egg slowly squeezed the naked body of a man well past his prime, one with a beet-red face, though his trunk was white as snow.

"How did they fit inside those?" Mirov asked Valentin.

"Dunno. Came out, didn't they? Maybe there's more space than shows on the outside…"

The two newly-hatched men-who were no spring chickens-were now huddling together on a rug by the stove, modestly covering their loins with their hands. Their faces looked teasingly familiar, as if the men might be a pair of… long-lost uncles, come home at last from Siberia.

By now the two boys felt cold and hungry, so they knocked on the cottage door. Aunt Anastasia opened it.

"Ah, here come the clothes now!" Anastasia pulled them both inside into the warmth and surveyed them critically. "Oh, what a mess you've made of those suits. Creases, and mud. Never mind. They'll sponge, and iron. Off with them now, you two, off with them. They're needed. Tanya, fetch a couple of blankets for the boys. We mustn't make them blush, with a chill or with shame."

"Do we have to sleep inside those eggs?" asked Mirov, almost stammering.

"Of course not, silly goose! You'll sleep over the stove in a blanket. Those two other fellows will be gone by the morning; then you'll have a better idea who you both are."

"Koshka!" exclaimed Valentin. "I remember. That was her name."

"Now, now," his aunt said, "you needn't be thinking about girls for a year or two yet. Anyway, there's Natasha in the village, and Maria. I've kept my eye on them for you two. How about some thick bacon broth with a sprinkle of something special in it to help you have nice dreams?"

"Please!" piped Valentin.

When he and his brother woke in the morning a lovely aroma greeted them-of butter melting on two bowls of cooked buckwheat groats. The boys only wondered for the briefest while where they had been the evening before.

Tanya and Anastasia had already breakfasted, and were busy sawing ducks' eggs.