I wasn’t crushed. The audience remained in its seats and applauded, even enthusiastically, but not as enthusiastically, I thought, as it should have. A twinge of disappointment ran along the left side of my face.
It was only a brief sensation, for the program was ended and, after the kolkhoz chairman, clapping emphatically, shouted his thanks to us, the most appreciative fragments of the audience surged to the front of the hall. Several of the kolkhozniks clutched copies of my novels to be signed. Others crowded around my colleagues, including the girl, who seemed unprepared for the attention. I watched her while I attended to my readers. She had long, straight black hair and as she stooped to take in the words of her interlocutors, it fell across the side of her face. She scooped the hair away from her eyes, an annoyed but fetching gesture to be repeated several times within the minute.
As I signed the last book, the girl approached me, led by Anton. She was tall and moved with a slight deficit of grace that accentuated her physicality.
“I told you he’d make it,” Anton said triumphantly.
The girl embraced my hands. Hers were warm and fleshy.
Anton said something by way of introduction. I didn’t listen, I was weighing her hands and still considering what had been confessed and exchanged between us. She let my hands go. They remained in the air, buoyed by the remnant heat.
“Rem Petrovich,” she murmured, her speaking voice softer and rounder than the one she had used to read her work. “Thank you for everything. None of this would have happened without you.”
Anton said, “In September we’re publishing two stories and eight poems. They’re going to make an impact, Rem. Everyone at the journal is looking forward to it.”
“Kaluga,” I muttered to myself, the light flicking on at last.
Marina Burchatkina continued to gaze at me with a solar warmth. But then she squeezed Anton’s arm. This caused a corresponding compression around my chest. To think what I had done, the promises I had made, the lies I had told, the imbroglios in which I had involved myself, the embarrassments I had suffered, and the pain I had visited upon others, only recently, to sleep with girls half as attractive! I had to look away.
There was a banquet later that evening, the second in as many days, accompanied by toasts in praise of ourselves and our literary forebears, and presentations of the local wine and kolkhoz-made cheeses. It was all very nice—the apparently oafish kolkhoz chairman turned out to be a raconteur and a lover of good literature—but all the while I kept my eye on the girl. She seemed preoccupied. So did Basmanian sitting at her left. I suspected that they were playing footsie beneath the linen tablecloth. Later, in my spartan room in the administration building, an acrid, pale yellow cloud lowered upon me.
Later that year, I saw Marina and Anton together several times in the union café, once at a concert, and at any number of parties. At one of the parties, Anton momentarily disentangled himself from his protégée and approached me.
“Rem, she’s enchanting. I owe you one.”
“Shit,” I said. “You owe me a dozen.”
That autumn Marina’s work was published in Anton’s journal and I studied it, trying to discern those qualities that I had overlooked in my first reading. I sought to approach her stories and poetry with neither the negative prejudice of having already read and dismissed them nor the positive one produced by their appearance in print. I was keenly aware that publication adds luster to a work; a manuscript comes to you stark naked.
But true literature always showed. When I was young, I wondered if my stories seemed jejune and awkward only because I was reading them in my own notebook, in my own clumsy, heavy-footed hand. As an experiment, I had copied “The Captain’s Daughter” into my own notebook, hoping to see it diminished. But before I had completed even the first paragraph, I felt Pushkin’s power flowing in a rush through my arm and the clench of my fingertips. The words blazed onto the faintly ruled paper. After the first page, although the results of the experiment were conclusive, I could not resist copying the story to the very end, merely for the pleasure of witnessing the words of a genius emerge from under the nub of my pen.
Conversely, ten-point Pragmatica on heavy stock did not transform Marina’s work into something of significant literary value. As poor as it was, the work was not a particularly freakish inclusion in a literary journal. Every year the journals printed a fair amount of garbage, either for political or personal considerations, or simply through errors of judgment. Although theory held that editors were bound by the decisions of their editorial boards, in practice they could publish whatever they wished, and Goskomizdat guaranteed that a certain number of copies would be printed. (Goskomizdat also set quotas for pulping.) One could usually guess the reasons behind a poor writer’s success. Anton escorted Marina around town all that autumn and winter, basking in the heat of her beauty. I heard that they were sent together on a “literary youth” junket to Tashkent, her first airplane flight, and never emerged from his hotel room, not even for the gala Uzbek national folk program.
I passed the journal to Lydia and asked her to read Marina’s stories and poems.
“Garbage,” she announced afterwards.
“Thank you,” I said, and kissed her hard on the lips, more emphatically than I had intended to.
She raised her eyebrows.
“Are there any other stories that you would like me to tell you are garbage?”
Later that year, I heard that Marina had submitted a novel to the Sovremennik publishing house, which agreed to bring it out in the spring. Was this Anton’s doing? I hadn’t believed that his influence extended that far. Was she sleeping with someone at Sovremennik? Who? Or was the novel genuinely good? As Lydia contentedly endured her second winter in Peredelkino, I waited for Marina’s first novel with deepening anticipation.
I saw her quite often, at parties and literary affairs, and each time she embraced me warmly. We met in a corridor of the Rostov mansion one evening. Her body pressed against mine a second longer than necessary and I was fully immersed in the nimbus of her perfume.
“Kaluga,” I murmured as she slowly disengaged herself.
“Have you been there?”
“I haven’t had the pleasure.”
“I’ve moved to Moscow, you know.”
There was a rising note of triumph in her voice. It was not easy to get a Moscow residence permit.
“Your own flat?”
“I share it with two girls. But I have my own room. I’m not writing in the pantry anymore.”
“Mmmmm,” I said, pretending to recall her letter only with difficulty. Then I gave up the pretense and ventured, “And not in your pajamas?”
Her face lit at my concession.
“Sometimes I do,” she said.
“They’ll be famous pajamas someday.”
“And you?”
“I wear a shirt and tie when I write. I like to look my best when I meet the Muse. Of course, I’m sure the Muse is pleased with your pajamas.”
“They’re nothing special. You’ll have to judge for yourself.”
When she smiled, her mouth opened, almost carnivorously, it seemed to me. I wondered if she wrote with such heat, by herself, at her desk, in her pajamas. I could hardly bear to look into her face. In the glistening of the saliva on her teeth, I found a world-consuming avidity.