Twilight of the Eastern Gods

CHAPTER FOUR

‘Doctor, Doctor, help me! I’m feeling very bad… Ah! Dr Zhivago, Dr Zhivago… The bastard!’

What’s happening? I wondered, in my sleep, as I snuggled deeper under my blankets. Who’s calling for a doctor and how did he get into my room? My mind was still befuddled from the previous night and I wasn’t up to understanding anything much. Someone was feeling ill, doubtless because of last night’s drunken binge. Maybe it was Stulpanc, or one of the Karakums, asking for a doctor to help. To hell with them! I thought. I’m not a doctor and they’ve no reason to yell at me through the keyhole like that. I stuffed a loose corner of blanket into my ear and tried to get back to sleep, but it didn’t work. Someone went on calling for help, moaning and uttering indirect threats. You really should go to hell, I thought. You drank like a fish all night, and now you want help? I stuffed my head between the pillows and tried to go to sleep but I could feel the voice calling me, obstinately and evenly. What makes him think I’m a doctor? I wondered in my half-awake state. ‘Doctor, Doctor!’ Enough! After a night like that, I could really do without this! I threw off my bedclothes and listened hard. It was a strange voice, which took a couple of seconds to shake itself free of the aural fog that had shrouded it in my half-conscious mind. It emerged different — unadorned, firm, inhuman: ‘… the bourgeoisie’s nefarious aims, this infamous anti-Soviet work. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is the expression of…’

Only then did I realise I had forgotten to switch off my radio when I’d gone to bed. I tried to raise myself to hear it better but my head was still too leaden. The announcer was going on angrily about some novel about a doctor. Dr Zhivago, Dr Zhivago… Where had I seen or heard that name before? Oh, yes! In the empty apartment, of course: still-life with sardine tin and typescript. The announcer was probably fulminating against that very script. At first I felt like laughing: a typescript and an empty vodka bottle! Were they really worth air time on Radio Moscow so early in the morning?

‘… a provocative and odious action of the international bourgeoisie. The award of the Nobel Prize to this reactionary novel…’

I whistled. This was serious. A novel called Doctor Zhivago had bagged the Nobel. It had to be a bad novel. A very bad one! Appalling, even!

I held my neck stiff, as if it had been screwed to the pillow, to listen to the rest of the broadcast. It was a gloomy morning. A greyish light strained to get through the double-glazed windows and barely allowed me to make out what was in the room. It was grey and drab, save for the dimly lit rectangle of the radio, whence emanated words that were just as sombre and sticky: ‘… the peoples of the Soviet Union… indignant… libellous… scurrilous… This counter-revolutionary novel… our magnificent Soviet reality… dragged through the mud…’

Could those typed pages beside the bottle and empty tin really contain all those abominations? I’d held them in my hand without suspecting a thing. But who had written them? I thought I’d heard the name Boris Pasternak. I put out an ear. Yes, that was it. Now his name was being repeated every three to four seconds. How odd. I’d seen Pasternak less than two months previously on a walk in the woods around Peredelkino. We’d left the village and Maskiavicius had pointed out Pasternak’s dacha to me. It was a large two-storey cottage with big bay windows on the ground floor. ‘Look, there he is!’ Maskiavicius had said, a few moments later, pointing to the grounds of the villa. I’d gone up to the fence. At ‘heart-pouring’ times I’d often heard his name mentioned — with admiration from some, but hatred from others — and I was curious to see him, a few feet away from me, digging the garden outside his dacha. He was wearing a very plain cap and boots and, with his strong jaw, he looked like the vice-president of a collective farm.

‘Assuming the role of an agent of the international bourgeoisie, Boris Pasternak…’

A Nobel Prize didn’t seem compatible in my eyes with the rolled-up sleeves of the shirt he’d obviously bought from the store at the nearest kolkhoz…

I got up, dressed, and went into the corridor. In the half-light I could see people dotted around, but they were almost unrecognisable with their swollen eyes, and they seemed to find it hard to recognise anyone else. It was half past eight and most of the residents were still asleep. I was tempted to go back to the empty suite to have another look at that accursed typescript, but I thought better of it straight away. Why should I get into an extra tangle with the KGB now that I was sure Auntie Katya had been ordered to demand the papers of anyone visiting me? The communal bathrooms where we washed every morning were deserted. The cleaners had dealt with the vomit, and not a trace of it remained: everything was clean and cold. I took a look at myself in the mirror. I had big bags under my eyes, my right eye was swollen, as if I’d broken a blood vessel, and my complexion was earthen. If Lida had seen me she would have believed I really was dead! Immediately I felt a needle stuck into my heart: Lida in the lift… Trajan’s column… her telephone number handed over to Stulpanc… What a fool! I said to myself. I must be the king of cretins to do that!

As I was crossing Pushkin Square on my way to the Institute, I noticed that people queuing for tickets at the Central Cinema were deeply absorbed in their newspapers. That must mean the press has started its campaign, I thought.

The wind was cold, with something blind and unforgiving about it. I crossed Gorky Street at the junction, went into the pharmacy on the other side and bought some aspirin, then hurried on — I didn’t want to be late for my lecture.

The professor had just come into the lecture hall. I pushed the door open very quietly, and when I entered, I noticed the room was almost empty. It was very dark and I wondered why nobody had put the lights on. Was there a power cut? I could make out two shapes near the windows and a third in a corner; maybe it was Shogentsukov.

The lecturer looked at his watch, brought his wrist closer to his eyes to make out the time, then looked around as if to ask, ‘What’s going on?’ Half out of his briefcase, I saw a morning paper with Pasternak’s name on the front page.

I soon recognised one of the shapes near the window: it was Antaeus. The other one, in the corner, was indeed Shogentsukov. He never missed the first lecture of the day: it was a habit, as he said, that he’d adopted when he was prime minister and held meetings with his cabinet at seven in the morning. Now he was hunkered down in the corner as if he had turned to stone.

The door swung open and the ‘Belarusian Virgins’ made their entrance, with Yuri Goncharov behind them. They were all holding a copy of Literaturnaya gazeta, the organ of the Writers’ Union. Then, on the threshold of the lecture hall, the plump, solemn and drab figure of Ladonshchikov appeared.

‘Morning, comrades,’ he said, in a peculiar voice that seemed to combine a sigh and a threat, concern for the common cause and mournful meditation, executive emotion and the gnashing of teeth.

As they came in each one flicked the light switch and, after looking either at the ceiling fixture or at the lectern, mumbled something about there being no power. Ladonshchikov did likewise, then slumped into his seat and opened his newspaper. ‘Vot podlets! What a scoundrel!’ he barked, after a while. His face and the unfolded newspaper then engaged in a curious mirror-dance: his eyebrows moved in lock-step with the headlines, his lips responded and his teeth ground in harmony with the printed words.

The lecturer had begun. It was already half past nine but the hall was still in deep twilight. Daylight from the windows cast illumination only as far down as the print of a Repin picture hanging on the wall opposite me. I’d never even read the caption on the painting, which showed a few wooden faces belonging to high officials or to the editorial board of a journal that would never appear, or perhaps they were a military high command that had never gone to war and never would. Any time you were feeling depressed, that picture made your mood even darker.

‘What happened to you?’ Antaeus asked me, in the break. ‘What’s that graze on your forehead?’

I put my hand to my head and discovered that it was a bit sore. ‘I don’t know!’

I really didn’t. Maybe I’d scratched it on the lift cage — or had somebody done it with their nails?

‘Did the drinking go on late last night?’

‘Don’t bring that up.’

Antaeus lived on his own in an apartment on Neglinnaya Street and had not yet caught up with what had gone on at the hall of residence.

‘You’ve heard about the Pasternak affair?’

I nodded. There was a sarcastic gleam in his intelligent eyes.

The rest of the group slowly trickled in. Pale and dishevelled, some looking grey as steel, others with puffy cheeks and narrowed eyes, a few more simply haggard, they burst into the hallway and took off their heavy winter coats. They were all holding a newspaper in one hand. In the state they were in, it was surprising their eyes were still capable of deciphering a headline, let alone an article. It struck me that any normally constituted individual would have shivered with dread on seeing them all loom up like that. They looked as though they had torn their eyes out during a night of tormented sleep, thrown them at random on top of their discarded clothes, and on waking this morning, had fumbled around to find them, stuck them back in any old how, then dashed, squinting, to the Institute.

The next lecture was on art history.

As we trooped back into the hall, the lecturer came up to me and smiled brightly.

‘Your topic was just wonderful,’ she said.

‘What topic?’ I replied, almost scared. ‘I haven’t prepared anything.’

She went on smiling. ‘A living army commanded by the ghosts of a dead general and a dead priest. A fantastic invention!’

‘No, that’s not it,’ I murmured, though I had no wish to elucidate. ‘It’s more like the other way round. A dead army commanded by a living general and a living priest.’

‘Really?’ she said, tipping her head to one side, while I racked my brains, trying to remember when I had told her about it. I had no recall. ‘But that’s even better,’ she went on. ‘I think it’s even more beautiful. Are you aware of the Pasternak business?’

‘Yes.’

She began her lecture, but nobody was paying attention. Minds were elsewhere.

At the next break most students went outside. The courtyard was packed and there was much more excitement than usual. Everybody, from first-year students to seniors, postgraduates and professors, was holding an open or read and refolded copy of Literaturnaya gazeta. Some were reading Pravda or Izvestia, both of which carried front-page attacks on Pasternak. One of the Shotas had an economics magazine that also denounced Pasternak on its front page.

Nobody talked about anything else. Some spoke harshly, others more timidly. The Nobel Prize? ‘Out, damned spot! Out, I say!’ A Scandinavian plague. ‘Even though Sholokhov takes a trip to Sweden every year to make sure the Academicians haven’t forgotten about him?’ someone behind me blurted out.

‘Keep your voice down!’ a friend warned. ‘You talk too much!’

‘What is the Nobel Prize, then?’ Taburokov asked one of the ‘Belarusian Virgins’. ‘I must have heard something about it…’

‘A poisoned gift of the international bourgeoisie,’ she explained.

‘And what does that old running-dog Ilya Ehrenburg say about the business?’ Maskiavicius mumbled behind me. He seemed to be looking for someone to talk to. I kept clear of him as discreetly as I could but, after he’d exchanged a few words with people I barely knew, he decided to launch into Ping, the Chinese student.

‘What do you think of Pasternak?’

Hundred Flower Bloom stared at him in bewilderment.

Maskiavicius asked him a couple more questions but Ping did not open his lips. Then Maskiavicius swore at him. Apparently Ping didn’t grasp the meaning because, as soon as Maskiavicius had turned his back, he pulled a concise dictionary from his pocket and started leafing through it, as he always did when he heard a word he did not know.

Somebody switched on a transistor. Yet more on Pasternak.

‘Looks like the campaign is being conducted throughout the length and breadth of the Soviet Union,’ I said to Antaeus.

‘It’s a joke. A farce.’

‘Why so?’

He looked around, then lowered his voice and whispered, ‘Do you remember the ballad by Goethe where someone calls on the spirits to help him fetch water from a well and then can’t get rid of them?’

We’d already had a conversation about that. For some time nothing had been heard from either Stalin’s supporters or his detractors. The state had been reassuring each side alternately so it could turn on either without warning.

At the moment it seemed to be the liberals’ turn to feel the whip.

‘Doctor Zhivago was published in the West three years ago,’ Antaeus went on. ‘At the time none of those guys even mentioned it. But now he’s got the Nobel Prize they’re obliged to take a stand.’

‘By chance, I read a few pages of it,’ I said.

‘Really? How?’

‘Part of a typescript I found in an empty apartment. But I didn’t know what book it was.’

‘Don’t breathe a word of it to anybody. You could get into serious trouble over nothing.’

All around us the crowd of students was buzzing with talk.

‘So what are they going to do with Pasternak now?’ somebody asked.

‘Who knows? Maybe he’ll be deported.’

‘What?’

‘I said, maybe they’ll send him away, rusticate him. Remember, Ovid was exiled to Romania…’

‘Shut up, you idiot!’

‘Do you think they really are capable of doing such a thing?’ I asked Antaeus.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’

‘To Romania,’ somebody we couldn’t see repeated. ‘Like Ovid…’

‘Apparently they’re having talks right now. It’s a peculiar argument… but I don’t know the details.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t ask any questions!’

The whole trouble comes from Romania, I thought, collapsing with fatigue. It’s no coincidence that the previous evening I had thought of Trajan’s column. I could still feel the bruises on my skull from the hoofs of the Roman and Dacian horsemen. ‘What about Vukmanović-Tempo? Has he left Moscow?’ I asked.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Antaeus replied. ‘Maybe he’s still here.’

The bell rang for the last lecture and the courtyard emptied. Only a few shreds remained of a newspaper that somebody must have used as wrapping. On the separate pieces you could see groups of capital letters spelling out RNAK, VAG, then ZHIV, STERN and PAST.

The campaign against Boris Pasternak had started twenty-four hours ago and was being conducted with great intensity throughout the Soviet Union. On the radio from five a.m. until midnight, on television, in newspapers and magazines and even in children’s comics, the renegade writer was being spattered with venom. As was customary in cases of this kind, the bristling statements of Soviet literati were regurgitated by workers and collective farmers. Newspapers apologised for being able to publish only a minute proportion of the tens of thousands of letters and telegrams pouring in from the four corners of the Soviet lands. Among them were expressions of outrage from oil drillers, drama students, Orthodox priests, Bolshoi ballerinas, mountain climbers, atomic physicists, beekeepers, Caspian Sea salt-rakers, reformed mystics, the mute, and so forth. On the front page of Literaturnaya gazeta they’d printed statements by Shakenov and Ladonshchikov, among others. Most of the students on our course had also sent in statements and expected to see them in print in due course. One of them was Taburokov, who still believed that the Nobel Prize was awarded by the American government in cahoots with the Jewish lobby in New York. Another was Maskiavicius, even though he’d told me the previous day that Pasternak, despite his turpitude, was worth a hundred times more than any of the other runts of Soviet literature.

I had just come out of the last lecture when he told me there was a letter waiting for me in the porter’s lodge. I recognised Lida’s handwriting on the envelope. As I opened it I realised I had never before opened a letter with so much feeling. It had been mailed that same morning and it began without any preamble:

Since we met I’ve always liked you but I’ve never been completely in love with you. The day before yesterday I loved you, I couldn’t say why. Perhaps love came through compassion. In Old Russian, the words for ‘to love’ and ‘to sympathise’ used to be the same, then they split apart. That evening you looked so distraught that it broke my heart. In my memory that evening is a nightmare. It hardly matters that we have broken up. I would just like you to remember me kindly. As for me, I will remember that night with horror and with compassion (love). Lida Snegina

PS All day yesterday the radio went on and on about a writer who committed betrayal and I thought of you. L.

I folded it rapidly and stuffed it into my pocket. I was beside myself, not because of the letter but at the thought of what I had done after Lida and I had parted. Ha! I thought. Now you’re showing sympathy by delving into etymology and Church Slavonic. I was in a temper and it occurred to me that nobody could tell which of us was more to be pitied. Then, in a tangled skein, Stulpanc came to my mind, the way I’d handed Lida over to him as if we’d been at a slave market. In parallel, or like a substratum, I thought that it was all a diversion, an illusion of revenge and, looking at things in simple terms, mere nastiness on my part.

I was pacing up and down the courtyard like a madman, looking out for Stulpanc. I hadn’t seen him since that crazy conversation. At one point I’d been tempted to call a halt to it and tell him the whole thing had been a joke, but then I remembered I had given him Lida’s telephone number, which anchored it to reality. Two or three times I told myself that he had surely forgotten the episode, especially because he had been drunk at the time and had probably dropped the piece of paper with the phone number on it somewhere in the corridor. But each time I managed to reassure myself, doubts beset me again.

Suddenly I caught sight of him from behind, standing placidly at the Institute door, amid a group of students talking among themselves as they made for the trolleybus stop. I followed them at a distance of twenty yards or so. I just had to get into the same carriage as they did.

The trolleybus was half empty and I found a place near the rear window. Now and again I looked at Stulpanc’s open, honest face from the corner of my eye. I was torn. Should I go up to him or not? I was vaguely afraid that my appearance would remind him of the accursed words we had spoken, and that perhaps he had not forgotten them entirely.

The trolleybus gradually filled. Now that I could no longer see Stulpanc I stopped torturing myself. I would not have been able to get to him now even if I’d wanted to. At one point, I’m not sure how, I caught sight of his golden, perfectly brushed hair and, in a flash, I thought I’d done the right thing in handing Lida over to him, rather than to Abdullakhanov or the two Shotas. Then I told myself once more that the whole thing had been a bad joke he must have forgotten by now and that in a few days’ time I would call Lida and we would make up as we had in the past.

Through the rear window I gazed at the street that led to Butyrsky Khutor, which looked more miserable than ever. Stulpanc got off with four or five others at the stop near to Novoslobodskaya metro station, which surprised me. I watched them cross the road and walk towards the great reddish walls of Butyrky Prison, and it came back to me: they were going to see one of their friends, someone called Kolya Krasnikov. He’d been sentenced to eight years in prison because some time earlier, when Tito was visiting Moscow, he’d shouted at a meeting, ‘Long live the Tito-Ranković Clique!’ They’d asked me to go with them, and as I was curious to see the inside of a Soviet prison, I nearly said yes. But then I remembered I was a foreigner, and also the police summons, so I said no.

The trolleybus was now packed. Squeezed up against the rear window, I uttered two or three of those little sighs that the sight of a street in winter sometimes arouses. I was dead tired.

At the front door of the residence stood a tall man, boyishly skinny with colourless hair and a cigarette stuck between his lips, like the ones you don’t actually smoke. It was Zhenya Yevtushenko.

‘Have you seen Bella?’ he asked.

I shook my head, but it seemed obvious he didn’t give a damn where Bella was.

‘You seen that?’ he questioned, directing his eyes to his right-hand jacket pocket from which a copy of Literaturnaya gazeta was poking out, showing half of Pasternak’s name.

‘Yes, I’ve read it,’ I said.

‘Hee-hee,’ he said, with a triumphant grin. ‘The Nobel… at last!’

You could see straight away that he, too, was one of the disappointed ghosts. He was about to say something more but just then Ira Emelianova passed us, a sad smile hovering in the corners of her eyes and on her lips, as if she was about to burst into tears. She greeted us nervously and Yevtushenko then asked me, ‘You know who this Irochka is?’

I didn’t understand his question.

In a whisper, he added, ‘She’s the daughter of Pasternak’s mistress, a woman called Olga, who’s been divorced three or four times, and is said to be the root of all the misfortunes that have befallen poor Boris Leonidovich.’

He went on talking about their relationship, but I had stopped listening. I’d had only a few hours of troubled sleep over the last two nights, and I was exhausted. By the time I got to the door of my room I was in that strange state when you’re on the verge of sleep — I could feel dreams rising from my limbs, soft and porous, like sponges, and I felt I had only to stretch out my hand to touch or seize them or push them a little further away. I was sufficiently awake to realise that the spongy sensation beneath my belt belonged to the world of dream, and sufficiently asleep to feel it was completely natural, to the point that I was unable to escape from it. In my dreams I was lying in a large bath, and although the art history professor, whose job it was to turn on the hot tap, kept saying, ‘Ubr jazëk,’ the water still would not come. Then she declared, ‘We are in the very hammam where Aragon, Elsa Triolet and Lida took a bath, but the aesthetico-ideological nature of a hammam is conditioned in the first place by tuuli unch bll, that is to say by the typical situation… in other words by tuuli zox…’

When I woke, night had fallen almost completely. I stretched out my arm mechanically and switched on the radio. The anti-Pasternak campaign continued. I listened for a while with my hands behind my head. After a feature on a women’s meeting in Irkutsk, they read a statement from Anatoly Kuznetsov. It was the harshest of all those I had heard. My room was now almost totally dark. A few shards of light that had been trapped in the curtains wavered gently over my head. And it’s not even evening yet! I thought. Darkness suited evenings and night, but when it came before the end of the day it depressed me more than anything. I was alone, in the midst of an afternoon that might just as well have been called an after-midnight, with a radio blaring ceaselessly over a landmass of twenty-two million square kilometres. ‘One sixth of the earth drowning in such insults!’ I muttered to myself drowsily.

Then, all of a sudden, I shuddered. My mind now sharpened like a steel dagger, I took the full measure of the infernal machine running full speed ahead. What must it be like to be the target, to be the eye of that whirlwind? I imagined the legendary Slav head puffing out its cheeks in the middle of the steppe. Soviet propaganda was just like it. A few years earlier that head had raised a dust-storm against Stalin, and now, who knew why, it was blowing against its own supporters. What must it be like to be the target of all these attacks? I wondered again. I switched on my bedside lamp. How had it all been set in motion? I had no idea — I couldn’t imagine how it had been achieved. I knew of not a single work of Soviet literature that gave even a fragmentary description of how the machinery of state actually functioned: no insight into meetings of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, or the Politburo, or other more occult authorities. Antaeus and I had talked about it once at the Praga café. He hadn’t come across any either.

But — I thought in my puzzlement — maybe I’m wrong, maybe such works do exist and I just haven’t had an opportunity to read them yet. I recalled that last week Shogentsukov had given me a signed copy of one of his works that had been translated and published in Moscow. Where had I put it? I got up, in a daze, and found it only after I’d emptied all the drawers in my desk. The radio didn’t stop bawling. Shogentsukov, a former prime minister, must surely deal with the problems of the state somewhere or other. Yes, he must! I sat on the edge of my bed and, despite the migraine that was tormenting me, I started to read. The radio suspended its rant and broadcast some music, but even those sounds felt charged with hatred. After thirty minutes I cast the book aside. It was a novella-length idyll among shepherds, pastures and hills. Not only did it contain no mention of the institutions of the state, it did not admit of a single construction in brick or stone. Nothing but gurgling streams, fidelity and flowers, and a few hymns sung of an evening to the glory of the Communist Party of the USSR. Can this really be? I wondered.

On the radio the anti-Pasternak diatribe had resumed. The announcer read out a letter from the people of a region of Qipstap, on the steppe, then a statement by the Tashkent clergy. A sixth of the globe was awash once more under a tidal wave of invective. In recent times so many important events had taken place — there had been so many tragic reversals: whole central committees had been thrown out, factions had fought implacably to gain or retain power, there’d been plots and backstage deals. But none of that, or almost none, showed up on the pages of novels or in the speeches of characters on stage. All you got was the rustling of birch trees — ah! my beloved silver birch! — and in all that literature it was always Sunday, as it had been on the day we were skiing at Peredelkino.

I got up, dressed and went into the corridor. I was at a loose end and just sauntered up and down. The dim bulbs gave off a wan light and now and again you could hear the lift humming. I knocked at Stulpanc’s door a couple of times but there was no answer. Where have they all gone? I wondered. I went back to my room and stood in front of the radio with my arms at my sides, almost standing to attention, as if I’d just heard a sentence handed down by a court. The campaign was still going on. Some statement was being made in elaborately convoluted prose, maybe by the North Sea whaling fleet. Not much later I was in the corridor again, and as I wandered up and down, I found myself in front of Stulpanc’s door more than once. Where has he gone? an inner voice asked. It was buried deep inside me, but I could feel it rising to the surface. As my hand reached out mechanically to knock on Stulpanc’s door for the fourth time I realised that I had been waiting in the corridor for his return. In my muddled mind I tried to imagine where he had gone to hide, but it took me a while to convince myself that it was a useless game, and that it mattered not a jot to me whether Stulpanc was at the bar of the Kavkaz, the editorial offices of Tabak, having lunch with Khrushchev or supping with the Devil himself. The only thing that mattered was that he was not with one particular person — Lida. I couldn’t believe he’d have phoned her so soon and it was even less believable that he’d got a date already. That’s impossible, I said to myself. Stulpanc is a plodder in that department. And then, if she’d written me such a sorrowful letter, it wasn’t so she could fall into someone else’s arms!

But one minute later I was convinced the opposite was the case. It wasn’t possible that Stulpanc had refrained from trying to get in touch with such a pretty woman. He’d seemed entranced by her. No, no, there was no reason for him to have put off calling her. As for Lida, her letter, the feelings she’d put into it, the Old Russian and all that, wouldn’t have prevented her running off with Stulpanc — quite the opposite, if all she’d written to me was true and if therefore her affection for me, the etymology, the Old Russian and all that such things entailed, had reached the state she had claimed, then of course, once she’d heard about the disaster (because that idiot Stulpanc must surely have told her I was dead), she must have dropped everything to hurry round to see him to find out more. Yes! Yes! I almost cried aloud in despair. He called her and she’s gone out with him on a date! Especially because, on this ice-cold day, all she had to listen to was this unending campaign, which must have made her think about writers and similarly sinister matters. I shouldn’t have let Stulpanc out of my sight on a day like this.

I was at my wit’s end. I’d spent half an hour shuttling back and forth between my room and the corridor, so I decided to go out to cool off.

A chilly breeze was whirling snowflakes into spirals under the lamp posts. I got onto a trolleybus that took me to Pushkin Square. Gorky Street looked quite beautiful in the snow. I walked to the Artists’ Café where I’d decided to have dinner. To hell with the pair of them! I thought, in a sudden burst of indifference. The snow, the wind and the street in its winter attire had clarified my feelings. It all seemed simpler now. They were in their own country, they could get married and have children, whereas I was only in transit. In transit seemed a good way to refer to myself in the soggy, soporific season of winter that I had lived through up to this point. In transit, I repeated to myself, and the Russian word vremmeny — ‘provisional’ — merged in my mind with the name of Vukmanović-Tempo. Yes, to hell with them! I ordered a glass of wine, and a little later I came out of the restaurant and went back to the bus stop in a thoroughly good mood.

*

The first thing that struck me when I reached the residence was the light streaming from under Stulpanc’s door. I felt a pang in my heart. I no longer had the support of snow-covered open spaces and I almost fainted. I hurried on and pushed into his room without knocking. He was smoking a cigarette. I tried not to speak too quickly.

‘So where did you get to, then?’

Guilt and surprise were combined in the smile that spread across his broad Nordic face. I’d never burst into his room before with a plaintive ‘So where did you get to?’

‘Well?’ I added.

‘What?’

‘Where were you?’

He stared at me with pale eyes that seemed not to have enough room in his face. At last he replied, ‘Well, I was out, with her.’

‘With Lida?’

He nodded, without ceasing to stare at me.

Gently, in heavy silence, something broke inside me. So there you are, I said to myself. I felt a great emptiness. Ideas and words had simply flown. All that was left were a few scraps of language, sounds like um and I see and really. I remembered that whenever I had had an upset of this kind, words had left me just as plant life deserts areas where the climate is too harsh; all I had left were clipped syllables of that sort, as if only they could tolerate the sudden worsening of the climate inside me.

‘But you yourself said…’ Stulpanc began. He surely meant to say, ‘You palmed her off on me,’ but apparently he found it too direct, or too vulgar, to say outright.

My mind was a blank and I studied a picture on the wall. It depicted a sight I knew: Sigurd’s castle in Latvia. I’d visited it the previous summer.

‘But didn’t you set me up?’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

‘I can see you’ve had a change of heart. But if you like…’

‘What?’ My voice had gone faint despite all my efforts to make it sound normal.

‘If you like… though now, of course, the case is closed. Yes! To hell with it!’

I’d lost the thread. Who or what was supposed to go to hell? Could nothing be salvaged? ‘Did you tell her I was dead?’

He swallowed, then admitted it. ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

‘I’d hoped you would be kinder!’ Now I knew the truth, words had returned to me. ‘Yes, kinder!’ I repeated, doing my best to laugh as I said it. ‘It’s just like you to pass a death sentence on me!’

‘But you asked me to say that! And you went so far as to tell me I should say you had died in a plane crash. Don’t you remember?’

‘That really takes the biscuit! I was drunk, for heaven’s sake! Didn’t you notice?’

‘Do you think I was sober?’

I thought, It’s all over now. Now she believes I am dead, it’s all done for. ‘If only you hadn’t killed me off entirely,’ I said, with a flicker of optimism. Just before, when I’d asked him if he’d told Lida of my death, he’d replied, ‘In a manner of speaking…’ ‘You could have told her I was only injured…’

Now Stulpanc lost his temper. ‘You need your head examining!’ he shouted. ‘You got me into this. I’ve never played that sort of trick. You’ve turned me into a kind of Chichikov from Dead Souls. I’d never have called the girl if she hadn’t attracted me so… so… What’s the Russian adverb to express an absolute superlative?’

‘Insanely.’

‘That’s right! Attracted me so insanely!’

We stood there without speaking for a few seconds. I examined the Latvian castle on the wall, trying to summon up some memory of the previous summer I’d spent in Stulpanc’s country, but it was now light years away.

‘All right, all right,’ I said wearily. ‘How did she take it?’

He saw that I had calmed down and smiled faintly, without looking at me. ‘She was very upset…’ He was staring at the floor, but I kept my eyes on him. ‘Yes, she was very, very upset,’ he repeated. ‘Insanely so.’ I thought, To be pitied by someone, to arouse sympathy in Old Russian… ‘She even wept. Yes, she cried a couple of times. I saw tears in her eyes…’

I sighed deeply, trying not to make a sound to prevent Stulpanc noticing I had sighed. I felt strangely relieved. Maybe things were better like this. If they’d been different, perhaps she would never have had a chance to cry over me. Suddenly a vague, lukewarm feeling spread through my chest. My ribs began to soften and bend as if they were in a surrealist painting. One day you will cry over me… Two days earlier such a thought would have made me laugh out loud. Ah! She’s crying! Little Lida is upset! Tut-tut! I was making superhuman efforts to hold down a great guffaw accompanied by those clucking noises I found so repellent in other people, but I failed. But far from succeeding in clucking, like the ne’er-do-wells of Gorky Street, I couldn’t even manage to laugh naturally, like an ordinary person. The whole thing seemed more and more primitive to me. I must have been waiting years for someone to shed tears on my behalf. I’d longed for tears with a more terrible thirst than a parched Bedouin in the deserts of Arabia. Over the last two years I’d had relationships with young women who were very free: I’d taken them to the theatre, to cafés, on night trains; we’d danced and kissed and slept together without ever saying, ‘I love you’, because it seemed old-fashioned, and recently we’d gone so far as to replace the word lyublyu (‘I love’) with the word seksyu, and were very proud of our invention. So we’d said a lot of stupid things and done just as many, following our whims from bars to dance halls, and from there, blindly and joyfully, onto a snowy downhill slope. This long pilgrimage through the desert, in gradual stages, without my noticing, but to an unbearable degree, had given me that thirst for a few tears. At last they had been shed. It had taken the intercession of death to bring those tiny blue drops into being.

‘What a peculiar fellow you are,’ Stulpanc said.

So that was it! She liked dead men more than the living. And his words of consolation had not been wasted.

‘You really are funny,’ Stulpanc went on. ‘At first, when you came in, you looked like a thundercloud, but now you’re almost smiling. Did you know that sudden changes of mood are supposed to be one of the first symptoms of madness?’

I went on staring him in the eye. ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It’s quite possible I’m going off my rocker, seeing what I did.’

The following morning was as gloomy as the ones that preceded it. I’d barely washed when I switched on the radio, automatically. The campaign hadn’t stopped. The diatribes were the same as before but they were now being spoken in a graver tone. You could sense straight away that a new phase of the campaign was being launched that day. There was no doubt that it had been worked out in advance in great detail. The gigantic state propaganda machine never slumbered.

There was an unusual bustle at the Gorky Institute. The consequences of Sunday’s drinking — puffy cheeks, blotches, bags under the eyes — had been finally wiped from faces that henceforth expressed only sinister harshness.

After the second period, posters appeared on the walls of all corridors announcing an ultra-important meeting that afternoon. It was rumoured that the most eminent writers of the Soviet Union would attend, and there was even talk that the presidents of the Writers’ Unions of the People’s Republics had been called to Moscow and would probably be there.

Meanwhile the Institute’s inmates carried on sending statements to the papers and to radio and television stations. Taburokov alone had sent pieces to fourteen different reviews and newspapers; in one he’d even described Pasternak as an enemy of the Arab nation. On the second day of the campaign one hundred and eleven dailies and seventy-four periodicals had published editorials, articles, statements and reports condemning Pasternak. More such pieces were expected in other daily, weekly and fortnightly publications and then in monthly and bi-monthly journals, science magazines, quarterlies, bilingual reviews and so on.

‘He ought to make a statement this evening turning down the Nobel,’ Maskiavicius said. ‘If it’s not wrapped up by eight tonight, the campaign will get even nastier.’

‘How could it be nastier than it is?’ someone asked.

‘Apparently,’ Maskiavicius answered, ‘the patriarch of Soviet letters, Korney Chukovsky, is going to call on him at two this afternoon to try to persuade him.’

‘And if he fails?’

‘Then we’ll have a big meeting.’

‘To what purpose?’

‘I suspect we’ll move to menace, third degree.’

‘Where did you learn all that?’

‘I know what I know,’ said Maskiavicius. ‘That’s all.’

‘But what if he doesn’t turn down the prize even after the third degree? What happens then? Will there be a fourth degree?’

Maskiavicius interrupted the speaker. ‘You won’t catch me out as easily as that, mate! I wouldn’t be so careless as to tell you anything about the fourth degree. Sss.’ He whistled. ‘Fourth degree! Hey-hey! Degree number four… Hm! Brrr!’ With a diabolical glint in his eye, he turned tail and disappeared into the crowd.

The meeting was held in the auditorium on the first floor of the Institute. Almost all the seats were taken when I went in. It was already twilight outside and the feeble light that trickled through the tall bay windows seemed to form an alloy with the bronze chandeliers that hadn’t yet been switched on, though I didn’t know why. The room was packed and virtually silent. The scraping of a chair and words whispered into neighbours’ ears could not dent the empire of silence. On the contrary: the occasional sounds of creaking seats and muffled gossip made the atmosphere only more leaden.

I was standing at the entrance, unsure what to do, when I noticed people waving at me. It was the two Shotas, Maskiavicius and Kurganov, who were almost sitting in each other’s laps. I forged a path between the rows of seats, and my fellow students huddled even closer together to make just enough room for me. In the row in front of us were the Karakums and somewhere to the side I thought I could see one of the ‘Belarusian Virgins’.

‘How are you?’ someone asked me quietly.

I shrugged. The mood was such that you didn’t have the slightest wish to answer anything about yourself. In that drab room you felt as though you could speak only about generalities, and only through the use of impersonal verbs, if possible in a chorus, as in some ancient drama.

I looked around at the participants. Apart from the students and teachers of the Institute, there were many known faces. The front rows were almost completely filled with literary mediocrities. They were just as I had always seen them, always present and totally invulnerable, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the front rank, stepping up to glorify Stalin before anyone else, and to drop him in favour of Khrushchev; they were quite capable of deserting Khrushchev for some other First Secretary.

Right at the back, in a corner, in the middle of a group that remained obscure, I thought I could make out Paustovsky. Was it a group of the silent opposition or of Jewish writers? I couldn’t see them clearly enough. It was getting ever darker in the room. At long last someone thought of switching on the lights. The candelabra immediately banished the weak daylight and filled the hall with a light that reminded me of Ladonshchikov — a brightness tainted with anxiety. The first thing the light revealed was the long table of the Presidium, decked out in red velvet. The porcelain vases at each end and the bouquet in the middle made it look like an elongated catafalque. I recalled the wallpaper on the walls of the empty apartment where I had read a few pages of Doctor Zhivago. It was no coincidence that its pattern had made me think of the lid of a sarcophagus.

‘What does the third degree consist of?’ I asked in a whisper. ‘Is that what we’re about to see?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. It depends on Chukovsky, who’s gaga already.’

‘I meant to ask, what exactly has he done?’

‘Nothing, apparently. Around two he went to Pasternak’s dacha at Peredelkino, but it seems he forgot why he was there. So he drank a cup of tea, and then had a nap on the sofa.’

I was just about to guffaw, but at that moment a kind of shiver ran through the room. The meeting’s Presidium had come on to the stage to take their seats at the long table with its crimson drapery. The first were already sitting down while others, who were still in the audience, were lining up and creeping forward in waves, like a snake. Their whispered names circulated among us. They’d been summoned from here and there; most were old, some had been publishing trilogies for forty years; if my memory serves me right, five had published novels with titles that contained the word ‘earth’, and two had gone blind. My mind went back to Korney Chukovksy’s fateful siesta, but I couldn’t manage to laugh about it.

‘Comrades, we are gathered here today…’

The opening speaker was Seriogin, director of the Gorky Institute. His eyes, as always, had a sinister and malicious glint. To his right sat Druzin, representing the governing body of the Writers’ Union. His hair was snow white, but his massive head and thrusting jaw seemed so fierce and warlike that it was hard to believe the white hair was real.

‘We are gathered here to censure, to…’

Seriogin’s voice contained the same proportion of malice and gall as his eyes, the stripes on his suit and even his hands, one of which had been replaced by a black rubber prosthesis. The first time I saw him I supposed he’d lost his hand in the war, but Maskiavicius told me that Seriogin’s hand had slowly withered of its own accord in the course of the third Five-year Plan…

Seriogin’s speech was a short one. Then Druzin rose. His contribution was no more drawn out; what he said didn’t match his white hair. As always, everything about him jutted like his chin.

‘Now for the fireworks!’ Maskiavicius said, once Druzin had sat down.

Indeed, at that point dozens of hands were raised to request the floor. From the outset it was clear that, as was customary in such circumstances, the Presidium’s selection of speakers sought to maintain some kind of balance between generations, nationalities and regions, as well as between undeclared literary groupings.

Ladonshchikov was among the first allowed to speak. In a special voice that was both gloomy and booming (a Party voice, in Maskiavicius’s phrase), in a voice that his lungs could only ever produce on occasions of this kind, Ladonshchikov made the proposal to his silent listeners that Pasternak be expelled from the Soviet Union.

‘Was that the third degree?’ I whispered in Maskiavicius’s ear.

He nodded.

‘If he fails to make a decision by eight p.m… ’

All those who spoke after Ladonshchikov supported the proposal, without exception.

It was one of the Shotas’ turn when I realised I hadn’t seen Stulpanc. All around the hall dozens of hands were still being raised.

‘Have you seen Stulpanc?’ I asked Maskiavicius.

‘No,’ he answered. ‘That’s a point. What’s he up to?’

One of the ‘Belarusian Virgins’ has just walked on to the stage.

I hadn’t seen Antaeus either.

‘Now it’s the Karakums’ turn,’ said Maskiavicius. ‘That should be a laugh!’

It was as clear as daylight: Stulpanc was with Lida Snegina while this was going on…

Now it was Taburokov’s turn.

I told myself that I had never had occasion to wile away a campaign of denunciation in the company of a young woman…

Taburokov must have said something peculiar because the audience was trying to stifle a groan.

Being alone with a girl, I thought, in the course of a campaign or something of that sort, such as an epidemic — now that would most likely stick in your memory for a good long while…

After a couple of first-year women had said their piece, Yuri Goncharov and Abdullakhanov took their turn. Then Anatoly Kuznetsov was called to the podium.

I thought I glimpsed Ira Emelianova’s blonde hair behind Paustovsky. He had Yuri Pankratov and Vania Kharabarov to each side. One was tall and thin and moved his arms stiffly, like a robot; the other was short and looked repulsive.

‘I’m looking at them as well,’ Maskiavicius said, in my ear. ‘You know they’re both spies for Pasternak? They’re here to pick up everything that’s said about him and then they’ll report back to him.’

‘Ah!’ I said, lost for words.

‘Is Yevtushenko going to speak?’ someone asked, from the row behind me.

Where Yevtushenko was concerned, I’d heard people utter every imaginable insult and every imaginable compliment about him.

At this point a member of the panel shouted, ‘Maskiavicius, you have the floor!’

He glanced at me, then stood up and made his way to the podium.

‘As long as we are together, what does it matter if the world is going to ruin…’ I recited the two lines from De Rada automatically in my head. In his novel the lovers meet during an earthquake.

On the stage, speakers came and went. Then a muffled mumble swept through the hall. Pasternak was racing across the tundra: Kyuzengesh was about to hold forth!

Stulpanc and Lida were perhaps listening to it all on the radio, in the corner of some café. They were gazing into each other’s eyes and maybe they were talking about me.

Amplified to a terrifying degree by the loudspeakers, Kyuzengesh’s murmuring now filled the whole hall.

Yes, they must have occasion to talk about me. Did she not like dead writers? Once again we had mounted the same horse: I was the dead and she was the living rider, like the legendary Kostandin and Doruntine. Except that instead of there being two, there were now three of us: the living couple, and the deceased me.

The campaign went on. Nothing was known for certain about the outcome of the Gorky Institute meeting as far as Pasternak’s expulsion from the Soviet Union was concerned. Some people said he had already sent an urgent telegram to Stockholm to decline the prize, others that he was still wavering. In the best-informed circles, they were saying he’d written a moving letter to Khrushchev and that his fate now hung on the First Secretary’s response. But they were also claiming that Khrushchev had been furious with writers for some time, and only a very harsh reply could be expected.

Meanwhile gusts of icy wind bore down on Moscow. Sometimes you could hear them howling as they blew in from some indeterminate point. At Butyrsky Khutor it seemed as if they were coming from Ostankino, but in that corner of town people reckoned they’d been let loose in the centre, near the main squares.

All through the long moan of winter Stulpanc went on seeing Lida. They sometimes talked about me, he said. It sounded macabre. Breaking all the laws of death, he informed me about how mine had occurred. It was against nature for anybody to hear about that, because nobody can ever know such things. But there did exist in this world one being for whom I counted as dead, and so, objectively speaking, some part of me must have passed to the hereafter. And that being, Lida Snegina, was the only person in whom the details of my death were located. Lida was my pyramid and my mausoleum; she was where my sarcophagus lay. Through her, the whole relationship between my being and my nothingness had been turned upside down. And when Stulpanc came back from spending time with her, I felt as if he was returning from the other world, coming down from a higher plane, from an alternative time with newspapers bearing future dates and archives containing information about me that looked like nothing at all, since no one had yet looked at me in the light of my own death.

Sometimes it seemed to me that my death was also being broadcast through Stulpanc’s eyes. On a couple of occasions when he’d looked as if he wanted to talk to me, I’d cut him off: ‘Say no more!’

At one of the anti-Pasternak meetings I’d made the acquaintance of Alla Grachova, a theatre-loving girl with a sense of humour. Every time the radio announcers returned to the subject of Pasternak after a musical broadcast, she would take my hand and say, ‘Let’s go somewhere else!’

But the campaign was all around us and nobody could get free of it. It had winkled its way inside us. When Alla talked about some of her relatives, she told me what they were saying about Pasternak. One of her uncles was the angriest of them all.

‘But you told me he’d made his career since the rise of Khrushchev!’

‘Yes, he’s a Khrushchevite through and through, and a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Stalinist too.’

‘But how can that be possible?’

She looked at me sweetly, as if she didn’t understand what wasn’t possible. I decided to explain it to her in simple terms.

‘Your uncle paints Pasternak as black as coal, right?’ She nodded. ‘And he also heaps insults on Stalin, right?’

‘Yes,’ said Alla, eyes wide.

‘And Pasternak most certainly slings mud at Stalin. In other words, your uncle has the same attitude to Stalin as Pasternak does. Right? Well, then, arithmetically, between your uncle and Pasternak there should not be any incompatibility. Quite the opposite, actually.’

‘Damn!’ she said. ‘I can never get the hang of that kind of thing and I’ve no wish to. We’d said we’d drop the subject. You can’t imagine the goings-on at our place…’

All the same, newspapers, radio and TV carried on campaigning. Doctor… Doctor… The wailing of the transcontinental wind made it seem as if the entire, and now almost entirely snow-covered, Soviet Union was calling out for a man in a white coat. Doctor… Doctor… Sometimes, at dusk or in the half-light of dawn, you could almost hear the deep-throated moaning of an invalid waiting for the arrival from who knew where of a doctor who had so far failed to turn up.

The campaign stopped as suddenly as it had started. One fine morning the radio began broadcasting reports on the achievements of the collective farms in the Urals, about summer retreats, about arts festivals in one or another Soviet republic, about the abundance of the fisheries, about contented young people in the steppe near the Volga — but it uttered not another word about Pasternak.

It was the same in the papers and on TV, in the streets, on the bus and in the corridors of the Institute. Twelve hours earlier the name of Pasternak had come out of people’s mouths with an angry, violent snarl; now it didn’t seem anyone could even get it out properly any more.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked Antaeus. ‘Could this be the fourth degree that Maskiavicius mentioned?’

‘Hard to tell. Apparently, it wasn’t needed.’

‘What do you mean? Why did there have to be exactly that much, neither more nor less? Can you tell me that? Speak, O Greek!’

In the corridor, in the cloakroom, on the staircase, out in the courtyard — not a word. I was tempted to go and question Maskiavicius in person: could this be the fourth degree? But I thought better of it. Everybody was converging on the auditorium where, as if to rub out the memory of the sinister anti-Pasternak event, there’d just been an enthusiastic reception for a friend of the Soviet Union, the Malagasy poetess Andriamampandri Ratsifandrihamanana, to be followed shortly by an equally warm-spirited reception for the eminent leader of the Algerian Communist Party, Larbi Bouhali.

Today was different in every way from the cloudy Pasternakian yesterday. The walls were plastered with posters bearing exclamatory slogans praising Soviet-Algerian friendship. The drapery that covered the long table of the Presidium had acquired a purplish hue. Red canvas banners bore slogans where USSR and Algeria were accompanied by words like ‘heroic’, ‘blood’, ‘freedom’, ‘bombs’ and ‘flag’. Over the loudspeaker came revolutionary marching songs.

At last he made his entrance to a long ovation, waving at the audience, smiling and cheerful: a positive hero emerging without transition from the fire of epic combat. The clapping didn’t stop all the time he was walking slowly towards the podium. Just as Larbi Bouhali got to the steps that led up to the lectern, Seriogin and a colleague took hold of him by the arms, and that was when the whole audience, through the mist of strong emotion, realised that he had a gammy leg, or perhaps an artificial one. That was all it took for the ovation to rise to a new level (level four), in a paroxysm that had to end in screaming. Eyes were watering, and breathing felt like swallowing your neighbour’s exhalation. Seriogin gestured to the audience in a way that suggested, ‘That’s enough… such strong feelings… at your age…’ In the row behind mine, Shakenov had already launched into one of his heroic ballads and the ‘Belarusian Virgins’ had taken out their handkerchiefs, while Antaeus hissed something hateful into my left ear. He sounded as if he was speaking from far away. ‘It’s all a lie, believe me. I know the story well. He hasn’t set foot in Algeria for years. As for his leg, he broke it when he was skiing somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow. You got that? He broke his leg skiing. That scoundrel has a dacha next door to a Greek guy, who told me about it. Sure, he’s an imposter, you understand? A fraud!’

When the meeting was over Antaeus and I left together. I hadn’t seen Stulpanc anywhere.

‘Some militant that was!’ Antaeus muttered, from time to time. We were both in the darkest of moods. In Algeria there was bloody carnage, and that bastard was waiting for the war to end so he could return and seize power. ‘And then he’ll sell his country to the Soviet Union for a dacha and a pair of slippers! Oh! I’m going to burst!’

I’d never seen Antaeus so indignant. As he spoke his face twisted as if his war wounds were hurting him again. Maybe they were.

‘Are the plans for the meeting going ahead?’ I asked, to change the subject.

‘What meeting?’

It was some time before he grasped which meeting I was talking about.

‘Oh, I see,’ he said eventually. ‘Yes, sure, the subcommittees are hard at work…’

The subcommittees are hard at work… I repeated to myself. O Ancient Athenian, tell me, why does that send a shiver down my spine?

We parted at the Novoslobodskaya metro station. I decided to walk all the way back to Butyrsky Khutor. It was a grey day; the buildings went on and on in interminable and depressingly monotonous rows, and the hundreds of windows, perhaps because of their skimpy panes, had a malicious look about them. I crossed Sushchevsky Val, but it was still a long way to the residence. The hundreds of television antennae on the roofs of the houses looked like so many walking-sticks raised in anger by a crowd of old folk. Four days previously, Pasternak’s name had been pouring down on them, like black snow. I went on past Saviolovsky Voksal, cursing myself for not having caught a bus. An old house had been knocked down and bulldozers were shovelling away the rubble.

What a stressful week! I thought, staring at a half-demolished concrete pillar with wire reinforcements sticking out at the top, like uncombed hair. I walked on a bit and then — who knows why? — turned round to contemplate that lump of concrete: a pillar that had lost its head.

The week ended with the death of the famous story-teller Akulina. Although she was illiterate she had long been granted membership of the Soviet Writers’ Union, and the entire complement of the Gorky Institute attended her funeral at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

A sharp wind swayed the leafless branches of the trees. It seemed to hiss the traditional opening of a Russian folktale: once upon a time, in some kingdom, in some state… в нeком цapствe, в нeком госyдapствe…

For half an hour we processed behind the pink-silk-draped coffin of the old lady who had told so many stories about the creatures of Slav myths, Scythian divinities and maybe also about that solitary head puffing out its cheeks to blow the wind across the steppe…

Once upon a time… жил-ъыл… No work of any period could have a more universal opening than that formula in the imperfect tense: once upon a time, there used to be… Nobody, no human generation, could ever do without it…

Once upon a time there used to be a foreigner who met a young Russian woman called Lida Snegina…

The long procession of mourners finally came to a standstill. Stulpanc had still not shown his face. Was he so much in love? Around marble tombs, bronze crosses and bare branches, the wind went on whistling the opening lines of fairy-tales. Once upon a time… жил-ъыл… The phrase seemed to come straight from the ancient lungs of the terrestrial globe… Once upon a time there used to be a giant state whose name was Soviet Union…