I eventually found Ploshchad Revolutsii and hurried home, no longer in the mood to see my book clerk. Something had passed, I believed. I continued to run into Marina, of course, at parties and literary events, but less frequently, and the encounters carried less weight and possibility. Her novel won a few prizes and subsided from the public’s short-term memory. It was said that she was working on a second novel, but she showed it to no one. Despite taking occasional detours, and once even diagramming my recollection of the maze of tunnels, I never again succeeded in finding the metro station in which we had met.
Ten
Cowed by the criticism The Northern Lights had received, I put off work on my next novel. The skies grayed late in August, shortly after we picked the tomatoes. The crop was beautiful that year. Lydia and I ate them like apples, the juice running down our shirt fronts.
It wasn’t until November that Novel 4 began to emerge from the mists, but shortly afterwards I received a note that, in its powerful effect, prevented me from doing any writing the rest of the day and unsettled me for several weeks to come. The union’s Foreign Commission, the letter duly informed me, was negotiating with an American publishing house for the rights to Marina’s first novel. I put the note down and stared at my desk for a while, infused with the childish hope that nothing would come of the negotiations.
My own discretion notwithstanding, the contents of the confidential memo became common gossip by the end of the day. I am sure that most of my colleagues initially reacted as I did, if for less complicated reasons. Publication abroad, especially in the West, was always a source of envy. Although the union and the government claimed three quarters of the royalties, and the remainder was transmuted into rubles and vouchers good at hard-currency stores, the balance was still a hefty amount of change. The foundation of many a dacha was composed of foreign royalty checks.
Moreover, translation, even if no further than into the obscure, tortured languages of the fraternal socialist countries, was a matter of great prestige. It made you an international writer, elevated you to panels discussing issues of great import, and won you a greater print run for your next book. Marina would be invited on the best domestic “creative trips”—such as the ones to the Baltics—and even garner foreign invitations. I expected that her novel would eventually be transformed into a film, a mysterious process that enhanced the author (even while it attenuated his work) and brought him even more piles of gold (or its voucher equivalents).
Once the negotiations were completed, several large numbers were bruited about in the café, but I declined from using my union position to discover the size of Marina’s royalties. Shortly after the book was published in America, I attended a small party at Bulat Okudzhava’s, with Marina in attendance. Although the party around Okudzhava’s kitchen table was ostensibly in celebration of his birthday, Marina sat erect in her chair, flushed and bright eyed, as if the birthday honors belonged to her. She received our cheers and congratulations with regal grace.
None of us, however, saw the translation itself until the following year, when it was brought to Moscow by a middle-aged Canadian tourist unaware that our customs officials looked unkindly on the import of any books about Russia or by Russians, alive or dead, living abroad or at home, anti-Soviet or not, and would have preferred that visitors to our country not waste any of their valuable time here reading at all. The book was taken from her, she was questioned by a matronly guard in a rank customs booth, and then it was returned to her without explanation (the explanation would have been that it was not on the list of proscribed titles). The tourist had returned to her tour group dazed and thrilled by her brush with dictatorship. No Russian succeeded in parting her from the book after this adventure, so once the book’s arrival became known by a friend of a friend of her Intourist guide, it earned the woman an invitation to a party at Sasha Nasedkin’s dacha. The book was passed around and casually examined by writers and editors who risked hernias trying to feign their indifference.
“The word made flesh,” announced Anton Basmanian, his grin as sour as good Russian rye bread. He passed the book to me. The Canadian was at his side, warily observing the transaction.
In my hands, the object seemed to transmit a kind of fragile radiance. I caressed the silky dust jacket, printed as boldly as a call to revolution. Our books were rarely published with dust jackets. On the back cover were voiced shouts of praise from Norman Mailer, Alberto Moravia, and Graham Greene. Inside the back cover the author herself was pictured, her eyes and hair luminous, her torso sleek in a tight red pullover. Her posture and scowl were defiant. But despite the shock that was delivered by the book’s wrapper, nothing prepared me for the appearance of the words on the printed page. The type was large, the print so sharply defined that I imagined that it would have been legible even to a non-English speaker. My first thought was that this wasn’t a novel, it was a product, something like a tube of toothpaste.
Our own books were such paltry affairs, pretty much identical in their physical form, their paper coarse and their type small, dense, and erratum-infested. Their bindings were easily broken. Although I never considered our books “bad” for that—the quality of a book did not reside in its physical presence, did it?—I could not help but be impressed by Marina’s. With a glass of Armenian cognac in my left hand and the open book in my right, I began reading the translation, my eyes gliding over the voluptuous Latinate letters like (I imagined) a Cadillac on a California highway, the heft and texture of the book massaging and soothing my critical faculties. I ascertained at once that the translation had been performed competently by some émigré who was no worse a writer than Marina. Part of me acquiesced in the seduction performed by the book’s material body; the other part, the critic-writer part, coolly informed me, trying not to raise its voice, that my original evaluation was correct, that the novel was shallow in thought and inept in its execution.
Yet I dimly heard the tourist murmur that Marina’s book was selling well after having been favorably and even enthusiastically reviewed by the leading American literary publications. Marina had received tens of thousands of dollars for the novel in advance of its publication and would receive even more once the receipts were counted.
This news worked through me like a poison: the market liked her work. Each copy sold for nearly seven dollars. This was in a country where readers were offered a vast choice of attractively packaged books, plus a variety of other leisure distractions that we could barely comprehend, yet a sizable number of Americans chose to read Marina’s novel and paid for it in hard currency. For all the approval, comforts, and forest-clearing print runs bestowed upon her more-celebrated elders in the union, it was Marina Burchatkina who was a real-world success. If I could have been so wrong in my critical assessment of her talent, how could I be so sure of my own? Stupefied, I handed the book back to the tourist.
“And are you a writer too?” she asked brightly, in English.