“Sure,” I said, backing away.
“Yes.”
“I’ll come to the opening of the Marina Burchatkina House-Museum.”
Her smile cooled. She thought I was a coward. I was.
“I promise,” I said, turning to go to my office. “Your desk. Your writing implements. Your first editions. Your pajamas. I look forward to it.”
Seven
Because of her later celebrity, Marina Burchatkina looms large in this account, giving the impression that she figured large in my otherwise uneventful life. In fact, this was an extraordinarily busy and creative time for me. My third novel was nearing completion and Lydia was among those who had read sections of it and offered warm praise. Although I retained my snug and noisy office, my position in the union Secretariat improved. I won a trip to London as the more advantageous part of a cultural exchange. In Hyde Park one summer afternoon, on a bench near the Peter Pan statue, I lounged with the sun in my face and about ten shillings in my pocket and daydreamed about quietly defecting to Never-Never Land. I couldn’t, of course, but the thought effervesced through the remainder of my days and nights there.
Shortly after my return, in the early morning hours reserved for crises and bad news, the telephone rang. As I staggered into the hall and reached for the receiver, I was surprised by the number of alternatives of bad news that were possible. When I heard the high-pitched, quavering voice of Natalya Fyodorovna, Boris Sorokin’s wife, I assumed he was dead.
The story she told was complicated, lousy with red herrings and switchbacks. There had been an incident during the night. Sorokin had woken and claimed to be suffocating, and then to be suffering from a thirst of Saharan proportions, and as Natalya Fyodorovna rushed about to satisfy his various demands, he had fallen from his bed. But the ambulance had come right away, that was the most important thing, she insisted, consoled. I gradually came to appreciate that Sorokin was not dead, but rather, creating more complications, critically ill.
In the taxi on the way to the Ochakovskoye Shosse and the landscaped complex in which Central Committee Clinic 2 was located, I hardly thought of Sorokin. I was thinking mostly of my own life, particularly of how this dash to the hospital was one I would never make on behalf of my father. He was already dead, killed during the war by a sniper in the Carpathian foothills. This sour reflection led to a well-trodden memory, the orphanage in Tomsk to which I had been evacuated with my sister in 1942. My mother had worked in a munitions plant, performing too important a job to be evacuated with us. The walls of the orphanage were lime green and always damp to the touch; the curve of my metal meal dish was broken by a dent that evoked the contours of some foreign coast; I was savagely beaten by boys slightly larger than me, until my face was a mass of tears and blood, and I in turn beat those slightly smaller; by the end of the war my sister was somewhere else, apparently unrecoverable even by the massive investigative machinery of the Soviet state. I remained immersed in the din of war and turmoil through my early life, even after I was reunited with my mother. It was not until I sent Sorokin some prose sketches of Moscow, thereby winning an invitation to be interviewed about my prospects for a literary career, that I began my adult, postwar existence.
So, I arrived to think of Sorokin after all. He was a tough old bastard, one of the founders of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, the revolutionary precursor to the present-day Union of Soviet Writers. After publishing nearly a dozen books in the 1920s and’30s, he had established his literary reputation in the strife of the following decade. His four-volume collection of war reporting, which had taken him from Stalingrad to Berlin, was still celebrated as a model of literary journalism. Sorokin had sponsored my first publication and had brought me into the Secretariat. He was a gruff and distant man who never displayed pride in my accomplishments, yet his suggestions about the course of my work and my life had always been deeply considered.
The air of his hospital room was sweet with disinfectant. The bright early morning sun fell upon the heavy curtains, leaving the room submerged in an underwater darkness. Membership in the writers’ union gave you admittance to any of the union’s special polyclinics; rank won you a private room in Central Committee Clinic 2 and the best medical care in the Soviet Union outside, well, Clinic 1. Sorokin lay on his back, gently stirred by the tides and deep currents. I assumed he was sleeping. I turned to go, embarrassed to be catching him unawares.
“She called you?”
Illness had not lowered the deep register of his voice, but it seemed hollowed out, nearly weightless. I didn’t immediately find my own voice.
“Just an hour ago. I came down right away.”
“I told her to call you. She thinks I’m going to die—”
“No—”
“The doctors do too. But they’re a bunch of incompetents, hacks. You know, 2 was a good hospital once, before everything in this country fell apart.”
And that was all that was said for several minutes. Sorokin had always been a big man and in the last few years his body had become swollen and bloated, so that now it was barely contained by the hospital bed and its swathe of sheets. His bald head was like a great stone outcropping, a grim, lifeless rock that rose into view to daunt approaching travelers. He had not yet been shaved or bathed. The excess flesh around his chest and neck spilled from the top of his hospital gown, which, draped on his torso, carried the charge of intimate apparel. In all the years that I had known Sorokin, I had never seen him outside his suit, not even in the garden of his dacha, nor even at his granddaughter’s first birthday party. He appeared to have fallen asleep, but I remained at his side, trying to ignore the chill in my gut.
“I was in London,” I said at last, softly so as not to wake him.
“I know.”
“I liked it.”
“Of course you did,” he said, dismissively. “How’s Lydia?”
“Fine. She’s at the dacha. She’s translating André Malraux.”
A grunt rose from deep within Sorokin’s body, from as deep as his bowels. “A prick, a real social democratic prick. Who commissioned it?”
“Novy Mir.”
“Tvardovsky has his head up his ass,” he muttered, naming the journal’s editor. “She should get paid on acceptance. Don’t count on publication. Malraux, what a prick.”
The odor of his contempt lingered. After a while, I said in a hopeful voice, “My novel’s going well. I’m almost done with the first draft. When you’re ready, I’d like you to read it. It’ll be a success, I think.”
“Good,” he said.
“I’ve already talked to Yegor Nikitin. He’ll be my editor. He’s very enthusiastic. He’s even showed Mosfilm the outline.”
“Make sure they pay. Don’t let them dick you.”
I laughed nervously. I’d always been hopeless about money, and Sorokin knew it. Thank God I had the union to protect my interests.
“They won’t dick me,” I promised. “I expect a good contract. I’d like to build a proper dacha.”
Sorokin considered this. He knew better than I did how much I could hope to get for the book and the film rights and how much a dacha would cost.
“All right,” he said at last. “Get the money. When you’re ready, I’ll go with you to Litfond. I know a piece of property, a few blocks from our place. It’s right at the edge of the forest. It’s not planned for development, I’ve been holding it back. Just let me know when you’re ready.”