We had many friends living in the village. That summer we attended parties extending well into the following morning, parties of great mirth and good feeling, and I felt more a member of the literary fraternity than I had ever felt before or have since. Even Lydia enjoyed these revels, displaying a degree of ease that I had not witnessed since the earliest days of our marriage. As late summer gave way to mushroom season, the fungal equinox, she put off her return to the city.
On the Saturday morning after I met with Viktor, I woke late and found Lydia reading outside on the porch swing, her bare legs folded beneath her. Transfixed by type, she didn’t look up. I kissed the back of her neck, recalling that we had made love on the swing the night before. She mumbled something. I made some Nescafé and watched her read. When she turned the page at the end of the chapter, I said, “By the way, I signed that petition after all.”
She looked up, her eyes unfocused.
I made an elaborate flourish in the air. “J’ai signé cette pétition-là. You know, Misha Vishnevsky. They’ve put him in a psychiatric hospital.”
“You signed it!” She appeared surprised.
“I told you I might. It was under discussion, remember? You didn’t give me advice either way.”
“I said that it wasn’t going to do any good.”
“That’s not advice. Some actions are morally correct even if they have no practical consequences.”
“You mean, if you’d like to make a grand gesture.”
She had put down her book and had raised and turned herself in the swing, unconsciously choosing the position in which I had penetrated her. I smiled at the recollection.
“All right, so let’s say it’s a grand gesture. That what’s happening now, grand gestures in defense of liberalization. You’re right, individually it’s not going to have any effect, Vishnevsky will never be freed. But look, we’re trying to overcome this monumental legacy of Stalinism. We can’t oppose the hard-liners head-on, there’s too many of them, but we can reach and persuade high-ranking people in the union and the Party. There are some honest and decent men.”
“It’s only politics, Rem. You sound like a politician.”
“If there’s a protest this time, the hard-liners will think twice the next.”
“That’s something Panteleyev told you,” she guessed, correctly. “Why should they think twice, if there are no practical consequences from the first protest or from any of the others?”
I frowned. I hadn’t expected this opposition and hadn’t prepared any arguments.
“Let me put it another way,” I said. “There’s a man. As we argue now in the cool autumn air, surrounded by greenery, he’s imprisoned in a so-called psychiatric institution, out of contact with his family, lost to the world. In our own country! Viktor has evidence that he’s being tortured and pumped full of drugs—not to cure him of any supposed psychosis, but to induce psychosis. This is being done on behalf of our government and on behalf of a Party claiming to advance the interests of the people. Doesn’t that anger you?”
“Do you know this man? Why do you care?”
“It’s a writer’s duty to imagine other people and sympathize with their situation,” I insisted, shaking my head. I looked at a pile of books alongside the swing, just as I had painted it on the wall of the café, and then through the open door at the library that had mysteriously arisen in the front room, like an Inca city in the jungle. Where had all these books come from? I had hardly noticed an attenuation in the thick growth of literature that covered the walls of our flat. “In fact, I would think it’s a human duty. I don’t understand.” I waved at the new library. “What’s the point of all these books if they have no impact on your life?”
“But they do.”
“They don’t!” I raised my voice. “They’re all about the world and the society you disdain. The characters of the best of them are deeply involved in human life, they’re men and women challenged by imperative moral questions, by history, and by the defects of their own personalities. Reading them, you should be moved to reexamine your own character, to question your involvement in society, to act.”
She snorted. “Spoken like a Bolshevik. That’s not why I read. I’m sick to death of literature as medicine, literature as therapy, literature as politics, literature as the beacon of mankind. I couldn’t care less what writers say about the so-called world. Why should they know more about it than I do? Does anyone really believe that a writer, by virtue of his profession, is honest or compassionate or even intelligent? Look at the lives of most writers, the best writers, they’re scoundrels and hypocrites. Start with Saint Leo. Why should his view on moral issues be instructive? And the proof of this is in the readers. Are they usually kinder than nonreaders? More moral? Are they more successful at life?”
“I’m not talking about moral instruction, Lydia. A good writer, no matter how much a fool he is otherwise, will place his characters in situations in which their actions have moral consequence. Can’t you then, as a reader, imagine yourself in such a situation and learn from it?”
“What a writer says about a particular situation is irrelevant. I care only about how he says it. Style is everything, style is content. I don’t read Gogol because I have an interest in the depressed state of the landed gentry in provincial Russia of the nineteenth century, or Victor Hugo from an interest in Gothic architecture or Nabokov from an interest in pedophiles. It’s their language I admire.” She paused to collect her thoughts, speaking after a week virtually empty of conversation. “I don’t mean that I simply admire their pretty metaphors. It’s the words they choose, when they can choose perfectly good other words, the tone, their strategy for telling the story… The means by which they create the illusion of event arise from the convolutions of their individual genius. That’s style. That’s real art.”
The reference to Nabokov stung. I had gone to some great lengths a few months earlier, incurring social debts that would take years to pay back, in order to obtain a British copy of Lolita for her.
Lydia asked, “Have you read Vishnevsky’s work? I have.”
“You have?”
“Burden of Blood. Across the Tundra. They’re mediocre books, more like tracts than novels, lots of cheap effects and jargon. Also, they’re wordy, mean-spirited, chauvinistic, perhaps even anti-Semitic.”
I shrugged. “So, he’s a bad writer. Bad writers deserve human sympathy too,” I said, but I wished Lydia had told me about his work the week before. “And they’re citizens just as much as good writers, and they deserve to be treated under the law. Viktor says the authorities have violated their own procedures and decrees.”
“Viktor Panteleyev, the noted legal scholar.”
I sat down heavily on the swing, spilling some of my coffee. Lydia stretched her bare legs on my lap and I ran my fingers over them.
“Anyway,” I said. “This is a small thing. You’re right, it’s a gesture. There’s dozens of petitions flying about and they’re all being ignored.”
Four
I never took note of the arrival of Marina Burchatkina’s second package, though if my memory has correctly ordered the sequence of events, the manuscript must have arrived sometime early the following year. As I inspected the return address, several moments passed before I disentangled Marina’s name from those of other provincial writers who had contacted me recently, as well as Kaluga from Kalchuga, Kalino, and Kalashnikovo. These had been months of tumescent expectation. Like worms after a spring rain, would-be writers were squirming up out of the soil, clutching accounts of Stalinist repression, famine, and war. Some of these works reached print; all of them, I presume, reached the KGB. Most were poorly done, but their quantity testified to an enormous and somewhat premature national effort to reclaim the country’s memory. As for our petition on behalf of Misha Vishnevsky, there had been no action taken or any response at all. It was as if we had set it afire and sent the smoke to the gods. I had no further discussions about the petition, not even with Viktor. Viktor was becoming a strange man. I had seen him last at a party, in a dim corner by himself, brooding into a glass of Johnnie Walker.