“Believe me, Anton, I’m grateful. Don’t worry, I’ll do a good review.”
“Do a responsible review.”
I returned the telephone to its hook and went to the table. Inside the carton, encased in gleaming, wine red leather, lay the books Malaya Zemlya, Rebirth, and the about-to-be-issued, still-classified conclusion to the trilogy, Virgin Lands. Their author was L. I. Brezhnev. I pulled the first volume from the box. As I lifted its warm, supple cover to my face, I could almost smell the cow chewing her cud. The cow groaned with pleasure as I opened the book. In contrast to the extravagance of the binding, the paper within the book was nearly tissue thin and the type laid upon it was small, about eight-point, and ungenerously leaded. I wondered what portion of these books, the subject of my first writing for publication in ten years, I would actually read.
My stomach turning, I realized that to find the right words of praise, to modulate my lauds into plausibly critical language, to prove my tough-mindedness by offering a few trivial caveats that I would immediately renounce, to concede generously that my own novel on a similar theme could not be rightfully compared with Comrade Brezhnev’s achievement, to announce, as I undoubtedly would, that Comrade Brezhnev had raised the art of historical fiction to new and commanding heights—in short, to write an article in which every glimmer of doubt or irony had been eradicated—I would need to read every page of the trilogy, perhaps even twice. The desperate shreds of my ambition would demand it.
Despite the significance it carried for my future, I did not immediately fall upon the general secretary’s work. Returning to the hallway where the lieutenant had paused in his inspection of my bookcase, I assumed the same detached and suspicious stance that he had. Relics of a life so distant as to seem nearly prehistoric, the journals ran across the top shelf from left to right. The species had evolved from a single cardboard-bound book that I had been given for my seventeenth birthday. Its cheap binding had broken and now the pages were kept within the covers by force of habit and nostalgia. It was succeeded by three or five very faux-leather notebooks, the detritus of my university years, and then a series of teal, pretentiously unpretentious softbound composition books, which had served me early in my professional career. Then came a long line of black-and-red hardbound diaries that I had purchased twelve years before, in 1966, in a neighborhood stationery store in London. Their confident march into posterity was abruptly broken, and the teal composition books, now simply unpretentious, my pretensions shattered, resumed their course.
Placing my tips of my fingers against the glass at the spot where the English journals were arrayed—the glass was warm, the books smoldered—I marveled anew at the naive confidence of my fourth decade and the century’s seventh. And then, as if driven by an itch, the fingers were pushed to the left, to the first set of teal composition books, where I knew, somewhere, lay the notes of my critical conversation with Viktor Panteleyev.
I did not need to fish out the key to the bookcase from my desk: I knew what was in the journals. The bindings were sufficiently mnemonic.
Two
It had been a miserable, brooding weekend under concrete skies, out in Peredelkino. Lydia, my first wife, showed little interest in my quandary. “Do whatever you like,” she said. Lydia considered the petition a distraction, a waste of time, yet another seduction to which I was hurrying to succumb. As if she possessed only a single photograph of me, hunched over my desk, she believed I should work every minute of the working day. Time was running out, she always said, not portentously, but as a matter of scientific, cosmological fact. As for herself, she foresaw the diminishing future as a place where she would occupy our newly acquired dacha year-round, tend to the garden, make small repairs, jar preserves, do some translation work, and, above all, read. Her only life ambition was to read every good book that had ever been published.
The text of the petition lay on the kitchen table all that long weekend, pushed aside by the salads and the roast, imprinted by rings of bottles, smeared by cigarette ashes and jam. The cat sniffed at it and slinked away. Viktor had always been a lazy writer. “Beseeching the most respected First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers,” “stressing the undersigned’s conformity to Marxist-Leninist principles in service to the state,” “begging for the careful reconsideration of the case of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vishnevsky,” and “reviewing for the First Secretary’s benefit the salient facts as we understand them,” the petition was like one of Viktor’s novels, sentimental and over-participled. I could, on the basis of literary squeamishness, refuse to attach my name to it. The weekend passed into overtime, a tense, loose-boweled Monday.
Yet on Tuesday, back in Moscow, I telephoned.
“Let’s meet.”
“All right,” Viktor replied slowly and thoughtfully, to indicate that he understood the implications of my invitation.
“At the union,” I said, and then, with a pretense of casualness, I added, “Would you like to come up to my office?”
Given my low rank and the office’s consequent humility, I rarely met people there. The sweep of the door nearly obliterated the room’s walking space. The aged, lumpy divan’s only charm was its reputation for having once been slept on by Isaac Babel. But the office was adequately lit and well stocked with books and liquor. I found the room a pleasant enough place to write and to attend to union business, especially that requiring discretion. It moreover offered a bright portal onto Gertsena, the always churning street named after Aleksandr Herzen. My pursuit of this office had been uncontested. Most of my colleagues preferred the view of the courtyard, with its statue of Leo Tolstoy.
Viktor arrived on Tuesday afternoon, his face set in a rictus of grim deliberation. He too had traversed a difficult weekend. His suit was wrinkled and his tie undone. His stare was glassy. I recalled that his wife had left him and, I swear, I had a premonition. I motioned him toward the divan, but he ignored the invitation to make pleasantries. Stooping awkwardly, he opened his briefcase, removed the original copy of the petition and slid it across the desk.
I saw at once that I had been snookered. No more than a half-dozen signatures filled the left-hand side of the petition below Viktor’s. Viktor had said the week before that Misha Vishnevsky had many friends in high places, and not only in the union. Misha, Viktor said, was genuinely liked and politically well connected. In any case, even among those who didn’t know him, there was widespread revulsion at the tactics of the security organs and a commitment not to allow the gains of the past few years to be reversed. Yet most of the names on the list were unfamiliar and those that weren’t belonged to individuals of exceedingly modest reputation. Not one of my colleagues in the Secretariat was represented.
“It’s early in the week,” Viktor muttered, by way of explanation.
“Monday’s early in the week. Tuesday’s already the beginning of the middle of the week.”
“No one’s been in their office.”
“But you’ve received commitments?”
He nodded his head in assent.
“From who?”
“I’d rather not say, not until they’ve actually signed. You know how it is.”
I did. I made a falsely hearty mental shrug and signed the petition with an extravagant flourish, plunging my name’s descenders to the floor of the next space.
When Viktor sighed I realized that he had been holding his breath. “So, Rem,” he said. “That’s done.” He gingerly returned the document to his briefcase.