I usually enjoyed these so-called creative trips to the provinces. For one thing, the per diem for expenses negotiated by the union was usually far in excess of the expenses incurred. Less tangibly, visits from the capital were celebrated as important events in the provincial villages and kolkhozes, which often provided the guests with tours, lavish banquets, and introductions to admiring readers. Writers never tire of readers who admire them. I should have made the journey the night before with the other writers who had been invited, including Schenëv and Basmanian, but I had been delayed by union business. Now I would be lucky to arrive by the start of the evening’s program.
I seemed to have left my luck in Moscow. A half hour across the featureless farmland, the driver abruptly pulled to the side of the road and shoved open his door, just catching the bottle as it fell. It was an agile gesture, probably well practiced. He followed it by heaving the contents of his guts onto the gravel. I looked away, but after he slammed shut the door, I became aware that he was wiping his mouth with his sleeve. The stink deepened.
He shifted into gear. As he gunned the engine, the truck jerked forward and fell back. Its engine stalled. I looked down at the wheels. They were mired in the soft, oily mud alongside the road. The driver didn’t seem surprised. He put the gearshift back into neutral, stepped from the machine, and began shoving it from the rear. His grunts were arrhythmic and short winded. The truck rocked but remained in place.
I could have put my own shoulder to the back of the UAZ while he worked the gears. But he didn’t ask for help and I would have refused him if he had. He groaned and the truck rocked again.
As the landscape bounced in the distance, I marveled at my spitefulness, which was only delaying my arrival at the kolkhoz. It burned in me like a flame. This man was the Russian peasant as he had been known for centuries, a creature of ignorance and superstition, servility and obstinacy, drunkenness and brutality. Fifty years of communism had hardly touched him any more than the previous efforts to reform and Europeanize our country. What could I say that might eventually move him to some awareness of his primitiveness and of his opportunity to escape it? What could I write? There was no guarantee that he even knew how to read.
After a quarter of an hour he succeeded in extricating us. The UAZ’s front wheels rolled onto the pavement. His face was florid as he returned to the truck, but he made no comment. I looked across the borderless fields and imagined that I saw all the Asian continent before me; it held Muscovy with a gun to its head. We approached the kolkhoz just as night fell. The driver’s stink had surely permeated my clothes, but I wouldn’t have time to change them.
The UAZ entered a large unlit compound in which were located a number of nondescript but well-maintained agricultural buildings, including several stables. Farm equipment stood idle, as if on display. The compound’s most prominent feature was the House of Culture, a white neo-neoclassical structure built from a design used in thousands of kolkhozes, villages, and provincial towns throughout the country. A series of concrete pillars carried the pediment. On it was inscribed a quotation illegible in the dark. I stepped from the machine and walked up to the silent building.
Neither door behind the columns would open. I turned and saw that the UAZ, whose engine had roared like a jet’s all the way from the station, had left soundlessly and that now the compound was completely deserted, without even a chicken scratching in the gravel. The evening was calm and the first stars were visible over the purpling fields. I keenly felt my solitude and, even as the nightmarish thought that I had somehow come on the wrong night or even to the wrong kolkhoz slowly descended upon me, I enjoyed the quiet of the evening. I closed my eyes for a moment.
“Rem Petrovich!”
One of the doors had swung open without apparent human agency. I felt a blast of yeasty warmth and found myself at the back of a brightly lit auditorium. Hundreds of heads were turned in my direction. From nearly every face radiated a smile of welcome. As if in a trance, I stepped through the portal, past the shadowed, matronly sorceress who had invoked my name and patronymic.
Is there any question why I went on these trips? It was a full house—of readers, those dear, dear, hopeful, faithful readers, their eyes bright, their fingertips hungry for the touch of the page. Kerchiefed and capped heads testified to the universality of the respect with which literature was held in our country. Jackets and taffeta dresses in turn testified to its high honor. I glided down the aisle past rows of fresh-faced young men and cherry-lipped farm girls. Readers, readers all.
At the front of the room, beneath a red banner, a long dais was covered by a white tablecloth on which stood green bottles of mineral water and a vase of pink lilacs. Basmanian and Schenëv were there, along with a writer I didn’t recognize. Another unfamiliar writer, a longlegged girl in her early twenties, stood in front of the table, reading at a battered iron lectern that appeared to date from the early, battered years of collectivization.
Lost in her own text, she was the last in the hall to become aware of my arrival. She was declaiming her words with great feeling and concentration, as if testing their sound against the walls of the auditorium. When she finally sensed the audience’s distraction, she glanced up from the lectern and, with a suddenness that surprised us both, her pair of dark, ovaline eyes found mine. I momentarily faltered in my advance to the dais.
Then she glanced to her side at Anton, who had displayed his full set of teeth at the moment he had seen me. He said something, the soundless shadow of my name, and then she too showed her teeth—but it was the instant before she turned to him that continues to vibrate outside time. By some trick of the light or of that sadistic joker, chance, we had caught each other unguarded. Now the girl offered me a smile that was both warm and embarrassed.
I approached the front of the hall. “Forgive me for interrupting you,” I whispered. An empty chair waited for me at the end of the dais. I kept my head down, as if not to draw any further attention to myself.
The girl resumed reading. Still waking from the dreamy confusion of my arrival, I gradually settled myself at the table. A tiled mosaic portrait of Lenin on the left wall gazed upon a team of farm workers at harvest on the right. The banner above our heads was stirred by an unaccountable breeze. The girl, big boned like the kolkhoz girls and in a plain brown dress, was reading some prose, either a story or a memoir. I wasn’t yet ready to listen for its meaning, but the sound of her voice was as deep and clear as a cistern, and in it I thought I heard a familiar cadence.
She finished. It was now my turn. I removed a folder of typed pages from my suitcase as the fat, nervous kolkhoz chairman garbled the title of my first novel by way of introduction. I replaced him at the lectern and made a few humorous apologies about my late arrival (while working in the book’s correct title). The audience laughed as easily as breaking a pane of glass, and in the shards of laughter falling around me I recognized the girl’s, glittering and sharp. And then I decided not to read from my recently published second novel, as I had planned: I would read from my third, still in progress. In the flush of creation, I believed it was the best thing I had ever written. Indeed, I believed it was the best thing anyone had ever written. Lately I had been carrying a few completed chapters in my briefcase, not so much to show other people, but as a talisman, a reminder of my talent. I now removed the manuscript from the folder.
Once I began my descent down the first page, I forgot the girl and the rest of the audience. I was the work’s only reader, attentive and discerning, its perfect reader, and I thrilled to its broadcast over the hall’s modest amplification system. The damn thing was brilliant; there were twists of plot and turns of language in it that surprised me as if I were reading it for the first time. When it was over, I looked up and nearly expected to be crushed by admirers.