The Big Green Tent

THE COFFEE STAIN

Irina Troitskaya, just over six feet tall, nicknamed Mile, with man-sized extremities, never told anyone that her father was a general. And definitely not which department he served in. She dressed like everyone else, even though her walk-in closet in the Generals’ Building next to the Sokol metro stop contained everything a young girl could ever dream of.

She had everything a young girl could dream of, and more besides. But no one wanted to befriend her during her college years. When she approached, people would fall silent. And not only in the cafeteria; in the smoking lounge, too. They didn’t mind bumming cigarettes off her; but they still wouldn’t talk to her. Actually, not everyone avoided her—mainly the ones she would have wanted to be friends with: Olga, Rikhard, Lyalya, Alla, and Voskoboinikov. What hurt her most was that Olga’s father was also a general, Rikhard’s father was a government minister in Latvia, and Lyalya’s was an ambassador to China. Why were they so haughty and contemptuous of her? She couldn’t simply go around telling everyone right and left that although her father was a general in the KGB, he was a real heavyweight—he had been in foreign intelligence his whole life.

Her older sister, Lena, had graduated from the Moscow State University of International Relations. She hadn’t experienced anything like the kind of contempt Irina endured there. On the contrary: children of bigwigs were highly respected. The girls all got married before graduation, to suitable young men of their own caste. This was encouraged. None of the girls embarked on independent careers, but for any diplomat, a well-prepared wife was an advantage.

The most eligible boys in Lena’s year practically stood in line to ask for her hand; and students that were ahead of her in college as well. Her father joked: they’re like Orthodox priests—they won’t get ordained if they aren’t married. And marriage was indeed good for their careers; they got excellent appointments.

Her father was very smart, jovial, and handsome. Her mother deferred to him in everything—except her height. Igor Vladimirovich always said he had married his wife, Nina, to improve his stock and produce strapping boys, but she brought him only girls. What use was their height to them? They might at least have played basketball.

Both his daughters were half a head taller than their father, and their shoes were two sizes larger. They adored their father, small of stature but always fascinating. He knew something about whatever subject one broached: history, geography, literature. Their home library was like that of a university professor. He wasn’t a professor himself, but his grandfather had taught Roman law at the University of Kazan in those antediluvian times before there was any trace of Marxism-Leninism, and the founder of the backside of that future science sat on the benches among his fellow students, showing little interest in the subject.

Igor Vladimirovich insisted that his daughter study, arguing that life was far more interesting among educated people than among the uneducated.

He went up to the bookcase and pointed at the titles:

“If you can’t read them, at least study the covers: Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch. Irina will study a smattering of these at the university; but you, Lena, should read a book occasionally—it won’t hurt you.”

Lena and Irina glanced absently at the valuable books. They had known which books stood where since childhood.

The bookcases were antique, of Swedish make. The lower shelves were enclosed, and the upper shelves were covered with glass panes. On the bottom shelves her father kept special books—they were in Russian, but had been printed abroad. He brought them home from work.

Lena had no interest in them whatsoever, but Irina sometimes read them. There were many interesting books that one couldn’t find in the library: Gumilev, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Mandelstam.

It was these very books that changed Irina’s status in her department. This poetry that had been out of print for ages was the bait that lured the whole group to her side. Then she began taking other books from her father’s shelves, one by one. She didn’t inform her father, naturally. He himself, by the way, loved this rare poetry, and knew much of it by heart.

Irina Troitskaya’s prestige grew. She was clever and didn’t reveal all her treasure to them at once, but apportioned it in measured doses. She brought dangerous publications and valuable rarities with her to the smoking lounge—all brand new, and published abroad. Most of them had been published by the YMCA Press. This was the first time that Olga had ever come across the name of Berdyaev; but back then she preferred poetry. By mistake she spilled coffee on the cover of a volume of Khodasevich—now it looked like a murky tree and a road, so indistinct you could tell your fortune in it. Olga was very upset about the incident, but Irina just shrugged it off and told her not to worry.

Then the first Nabokov arrived in Russia. It was Invitation to a Beheading. The group of friends read it and were completely beguiled by it. It was a tattered copy, published in Berlin in 1936. Inside the front cover was an inscription that read: “To my dear Edwin, on his birthday. Anna.” It had been confiscated during the arrest of a German Jew who had emigrated to Russia from Germany in the thirties. The above-mentioned Edwin had studied Russian with this book; in the margins there were German annotations in pencil.

A friend of General Troitsky’s had given it to him as a gift, also on his birthday, but many years later. These books met with various fates. Some of them were destroyed; others passed from hand to hand. The Gift was one of the latter. Its readers discovered a new writer who was not to be found in any library, nor mentioned by name in any textbook.

Olga was bursting with desire to show the book to her favorite professor. She asked him gingerly about Nabokov. He raised his eyebrows. “Which book?”

“The Gift.”

The professor had himself only recently become aware of it—one of his students, a Canadian of Russian descent, had brought him his first Nabokov.

“Yes, yes.” The professor nodded circumspectly. “A remarkable writer. There has been nothing like it in Russian for many years.”

He didn’t ask: What else do you have?

Invitation to a Beheading was making the rounds of the young philologists. It put a dent in the Iron Curtain. Hands trembled, hearts skipped a beat. How to accommodate it? It required a complete revision of the entire hierarchy. A new heavenly body had appeared in the galaxy; the web of connections was disrupted, the celestial mechanism shifted before their very eyes. Half the literary canon underwent spontaneous combustion and turned to ash.

It was the purest diamond. And all courtesy of Irina Troitskaya.

By pure coincidence, that very copy of The Gift, which had passed from hand to reliable hand and had ended up in his, was confiscated from the professor during a search. Notes he had made during his reading were also found with the book. He had already begun writing an article on the book called “Return to the Homeland.” He didn’t manage to finish it. But even these hasty, incomplete notes were seized, to the professor’s chagrin.

A scandal ensued, and the professor and his co-author were imprisoned—not for Nabokov, of course, but for their own books, published in the West under pseudonyms. A petition was initiated, heads flew, students were dragged in for questioning. Olga was expelled from the university for signing a letter in defense of the teacher. No one touched Irina Troitskaya. She didn’t sign any letters, no one from Olga’s circle of friends pointed at her as the source of anti-Soviet agitation.

Irina told her father, belatedly, about her enlightenment mission. Her father did not fear much in life, but he was shaken by this information. Afterward, when everyone involved had been imprisoned, banished, or expelled, he replaced the lost copy with another. This was, however, an American edition. The general revered Nabokov as deeply as the professor did.

The general also duly read the books written by the imprisoned writers. He told his daughter: they’re not bad, but they didn’t warrant such a fuss. Irina agonized over these events, although she remained unscathed by them. She didn’t see Olga anymore, and she regretted her disappearance. Now everyone was friends with Irina, although she no longer brought books with her to the university—her father forbade it.

Irina graduated, and she got an excellent appointment with the Foreign Committee of the Writers’ Union. An old comrade of her father’s was in charge of the union and fixed her up with the job.

In 1970, Igor Vladimirovich died suddenly of a heart attack. Not long before his death, he caught wind of a rumor that Solzhenitsyn had been nominated for the Nobel Prize. He was agitated by this news.

“What kind of outfit is this Nobel Committee, anyway? They didn’t give it to Tolstoy, but they’re giving it to Solzhenitsyn?”

After her father’s death, Irina fell into a depression: everything made her feel sick, even her wonderful job. Her sister, Lena, lived in Stockholm, where her husband was a cultural attaché in the Soviet Embassy.

It was clear that the decision of the Nobel Committee was going to cause problems for him.

Something remarkable happened to Irina that year. An elegant middle-aged woman spotted her in a crowd and invited her to come in for an audition as a fashion model. The woman turned out to be the country’s most famous fashion designer. The invitation lifted Irina’s spirits. She went in for the audition, and they took her immediately. There were no tall fashion models at the time; she would be the first.

Thanks to her family’s privileged position, Irina Troitskaya was allowed to travel abroad during the first year. She went first to Belgrade, then to Paris, and, finally, to Milan. In Milan she remained, having received an unexpected proposal from a journalist who wrote a fashion column for a provincial newspaper. He was neither handsome nor a millionaire, but they were supremely happy together in southern Italy, near Naples, where he was from. Her Italian husband soon quit both the Communist Party, of which he was a member, and his journalism job, and opened a small restaurant. Later he became mayor of the tiny town they lived in. Irina did not become a Slavist, nor did she become a translator; she never again visited Russia.

The story doesn’t end there, however—not for the rest of Irina Troitskaya’s family, in any case. The scandal caused by the Nobel Committee would have been impossible for the young diplomat to manage single-handedly; but the foreign ministry liked to apportion blame not to the highest diplomats, but to those who occupied a lower rung. They claimed that Lena’s husband hadn’t tried hard enough. And then there was Irina’s defection! The diplomat, Lena’s husband, was put through the wringer for the Nobel Prize—a matter in which he had played no part whatsoever—as well as for Irina’s defection and for his own lack of initiative. The young couple with brilliant credentials was recalled home from Sweden.

The unlucky diplomat returned home to Moscow with his family to live in the general’s apartment. The children, twin boys, liked Moscow. Lena had soup waiting for her husband every day when he returned from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he was the fifth deputy of the seventh assistant in a department that had been slated for dissolution for twenty years already. His salary was so poor that Lena finally went to teach English at a secondary school. Grandmother Nina, like an ordinary housekeeper, took the children for walks in Chapaev Park, until she came down with pneumonia and died. Everything was worse than one could have imagined possible, until Lena visited a fortune-teller. The fortune-teller was a real character, with a penchant for all things Indian. She instructed Lena to “purify her karma,” but first she told her to clean up her house, in which a great deal of “filth” had accumulated. She recommended that they remodel.

Her husband was extremely dissatisfied. As it was they could hardly make ends meet, and now—remodeling!

To save on expenses, they completed the first stage themselves. To begin with, they removed all the books from Igor Vladimirovich’s heavy bookcase before moving it away from the wall. They took the books with leather bindings to an antiquarian bookseller, who gave them a huge sum of money in exchange. He wouldn’t accept all the books, however. It turned out that many of the general’s books had library or museum stamps in them, and the booksellers wouldn’t touch those.

Lena’s husband found a large number of anti-Soviet books in the bottom section of the bookcase, including a collection of the works, complete thus far, of that very Nobel laureate who had caused him so much grief.

“Yes, Father collected books,” Lena explained. “He had access to all the books that were seized during searches. Some books were brought from abroad by his friends. He was a great collector: of coins, paper currency, stamps.”

Lena’s husband did not occupy as high a position as his late father-in-law had, and couldn’t allow such a collection to remain in the house. Late at night they took the dangerous books down to the garbage heap.

The next evening they were tearing off wallpaper when they discovered a safe in the depths of the thick supporting wall. There was no key. They were unable to open it with any household appliances, though it easily slipped out of its niche in the wall. The back of the smallish box turned out to be plywood. They ripped it off and discovered that the safe contained several stacks of old dollars, which still happened to be in circulation, and twenty-five pre-Revolutionary gold coins.

Her husband clutched at his head in consternation—but didn’t take the safe down to the garbage heap.

This is where the story of Irina Troitskaya and her family ends.

* * *

What will now be related has nothing at all to do with them. Igor Chetverikov’s shift at the boiler room ended at eight in the morning. He usually went trash-picking after six in the morning, making his rounds of the nearby garbage heaps. The Sokol district didn’t yield much of value. There weren’t many old buildings left. The houses in the neighborhood had been resettled just before and just after the war, so the local residents either threw away the Karelian birch and the French bronze before they moved in or had never had them in the first place.

Here, in what was formerly the settlement of Vsesvyatsky, if something did end up in the trash it was usually vestiges and remnants of the petite bourgeoisie. Not long ago he had found a trunk full of mid-nineteenth-century women’s clothes. Some of the contents had already been dragged off by some little girls, but Igor managed to salvage a brown frock with a crinoline, a fur wrap, and a girl’s school uniform.

This time, what he saw made him gasp. Next to the wooden bin where the residents deposited their household garbage stood some neat piles of tamizdat, books in Russian published abroad. Without examining them too closely, he took them to the boiler room and ran to the metro to make a call from a pay phone. Ilya, his former classmate, was still asleep, and answered gruffly:

“Are you nuts? Do you even know what time it is?”

“Come to the boiler room immediately. In a car.”

Ilya knew the boiler room well, since he had been responsible for getting Igor a job there after he had been expelled from the Kurchatov Institute under a cloud.

Half an hour later, Ilya arrived. They loaded the books into the car and drove them to the apartment of another general, who had at one time been enamored not of coins and books, but of old furniture. And he had preferred to live at his dacha, not in his apartment in the city.

Kostya had already left for school. Olga made coffee for the men and sat on the floor to go through the books. She had already read everything there. Among the small volumes she found a Khodasevich with a coffee stain on the cover—a sort of tree, and a road.

“Igor, is your boiler room at Sokol, in the Generals’ Building?”

“Yes, why?”

“Oh, no reason. It’s just that I read all these books in college. The owner has probably died. He was a general.”