There had been a time, even before I set out as a writer, when I had believed that it was. As a schoolboy, I had daydreamed of Alpine monasteries and tropical islands provided with nothing but great books. This fantasy was the strongest and most maddening when I was in the army, serving out my conscription in the Turkmen desert and surrounded by men of such low intelligence and negligible curiosity that they were barely more than machines for eating and shitting. After using a month’s salary to ransom a secondhand edition of In Search of Lost Time from the depredations of an Ashkhabad bookshop, I conspired to obtain two weeks of duty in a remote, vacant guardhouse. The job required nothing but my presence. I had already inspected the building: The unpainted room I would inhabit was clean, warm, and well lit. There was a bed and a desk.
By the second day, by the time Marcel had witnessed the duchess in the chapel of Gilbert the Bad, I was defeated, unable to turn another page. The guardhouse’s low concrete ceiling hardly allowed me room to breathe, and I was tortured by a single fly orbiting a bare lightbulb on the other side of the room. Nor could I bear another lap around the muddy meadow outside the guardhouse. I was beset with doubts about my character and identity. To my piercing horror, I now believed that I didn’t care to read after all. My literary enthusiasm was no more than an affectation, common to “sensitive” adolescents. The brutes in my company were my real friends, my real brothers. The remainder of the two weeks before I was returned to them seemed as vast as the desert itself. I discovered in myself an enormous capacity for sleep and masturbation.
I eventually returned to Proust, of course, not in a quiet season, but rather in a year of loss and upheaval, when I changed flats and jobs in quick succession and when the connections between one day and the next seemed as tenuous as the skin on the surface of a bowl of pudding. Although my daily ration of reading was limited to a few labyrinthine paragraphs at bedtime, consumed in rough living quarters amid unfriendly strangers, the events in Combray and Faubourg St. Germain never lost their narrative continuity. My conquest of the novel set a pattern for my reading throughout my adult life, all of which seemed to have been caught on the fly.
Although I regretted my chaotic reading and writing habits, I could never be satisfied with the life of the monkish intellectual. I needed the glitter of society and the refreshment of action. Yet at parties, surrounded by noise and dispute, I would be seized by the desire to return home at once, either to my typewriter or to that evening’s book. One desire fed another. Consequently my favorite place to read was on the train, where the book trembled in my lap like a living thing and each page consumed another kilometer or two of track.
In similar regard, the union was the perfect place for me. I loved the unliterary busyness of it: the applications and other forms to be processed, the reports to be filed, and the many meetings to attend in chandeliered banquet rooms, all in the service of literature.
I read much and worked hard the first winter Lydia stayed at the dacha. It was also one of the most unsettling and gayest seasons of my life. Every night in Moscow there were sprawling, sloppy parties, often with marijuana, fisticuffs, foreign girls in miniskirts and vinyl boots, deadly serious political and literary arguments (I don’t remember any of them), and, over and over without end, Rubber Soul. Many of the foreign girls I brought back to my flat couldn’t read a word of Russian, but believed afterwards that they had become experts in contemporary Soviet literature.
And then spring arrived early, promising even more political freedom and travel. Friends went off to Paris and New York and came back agog. The gatherings moved out to Peredelkino, where they bloomed into lovely garden parties with even more foreigners. Lydia consented to attend these parties, chatting amiably with the visitors in their own languages and, in the garden, inspecting with an appreciative, critical eye every flower and plant. She appeared to have come out of the winter without ill effect to her humor or warmth.
My memory of all the parties I attended in Peredelkino have merged into a single gathering, which continued for days and was crammed with scandale. For the purposes of this recollection, I have located the über-party in Sasha Nasedkin’s garden and peopled it with everyone I knew at the time, whether they were in Moscow then or not. The compact circle of chairs around the picnic table dreamily accommodates two hundred guests. Vasily Aksyonov tells a joke about Kosygin, Johnson, and de Gaulle in a leaky boat. Gavril Feldshteyn snaps down the hors d’oeuvres as if he hasn’t eaten in a week, which is very likely nearly true. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a dapper bitnik in a black turtleneck, strenuously flirts with two flushed starlets. Apart from the group, over by the lindens, Vadim Surkov speaks with Lydia. Hello? I screw up my eyes. Surkov spent the winter in Peredelkino, just a few doors from Lydia, but I decide that the conversation is too easygoing for them to be sleeping with each other.
Meanwhile, morose and inattentive, Viktor downs one glass of vodka after another. His conjuration at the party is a bit of a stretch, since he hardly ever went out. He had nearly dropped from sight, though occasionally one heard reports of him emerging from a rain-soaked alley or from the most obscure and remote research rooms of the Lenin Library, always alone. When we occasionally crossed paths, his conversation became guarded and his look furtive. I would sense that I had interrupted a conversation that he was having with himself. At the section of the table where I have placed him, cozy between two women poets of advancing years, he has created a small disturbance, a tear in the social fabric, but the precise nature of his mutters remains beneath human hearing, which is lucky for him.
Six
A train was canceled, I missed my connection, and so I spent the better part of a day in an intermediate station, happily reading Beckett in a glassed-in waiting room perfumed by fresh flowers. By the time I reached Mtsensk, it was late in the afternoon. I was supposed to be met there by a representative of the collective farm that had invited me to read at a “literary evening,” but no one was on the platform. I buttoned my jacket against the chill—in fact, it was a superb late-summer afternoon, the surrounding wheat fields incandescent—and stepped onto the gravel beside the station house. Parked there was a mud gray military vehicle covered in gray mud. A middle-aged man behind the wheel, his jaw slack and bristled white, stared directly ahead and took no notice of me.
“I’m Krilov.”
The man responded with an almost imperceptible shrug. I went to the other side of the vehicle, a small UAZ truck with a torn canvas top. The door squealed as I opened it. A fecal, alcoholic odor spilled out. I could see the vodka bottle, not quite empty, wedged between the driver’s seat and his door.
“Are you in any condition to drive?” I said.
He didn’t reply. In any case, I myself couldn’t drive. I climbed into the truck, taking care not to bump my head. He switched on the ignition and lurched us onto the road.
“How far?” I asked.
At last he spoke, in a sullen rasp. “Fifty-three.”
We drove along a pitted road so straight that its end shimmered and dissolved in the distant haze. I rolled open the window, hung my face out into the passing air, and closed my eyes. The warmth of the setting sun was like a caress.