I nodded.
“Would I have read anything you’ve written?”
“No,” I said.
Lydia never saw the book, having drifted to a less populous section of the garden, and as we walked the few dusk-softened blocks back to our dacha, she was unmoved by my descriptions of Marina’s book and the selfdoubts it had engendered.
“She’s not a talented writer.”
“Well, someone must think so,” I said. “The publisher. The readers. Norman Mailer, for God’s sake.”
We had just reached a turn in the road. Lydia halted there and tilted her head. She was listening to a bird. I prepared to wait it out. I was usually indifferent to bird song, rarely distinguishing the cry of Bird A from that of Bird B. Yet by some trick of the evening, by the thickened light or the taste of the air or the cognac, I found myself not only attending the bird, but in pursuit of its climb up the musical scale. The song was not pretty. Yet in its ungainliness and rawness there was something ancient that resonated from the age when birds sang without men to hear them. The song was distinctly its own; this was Bird Z.
Then it stopped. We resumed our walk.
“Rem, look at the pornography and detective fantasies that sell millions in the West. The market is the worst judge of talent. So what if a few thousand Americans buy Burchatkina’s book? Compare that with the hundreds of thousands of Russians who will read one of our talented, serious authors in a low-cost edition—and then save that book as a treasure in their family bookcase.”
We walked on a bit, silently reflecting upon the great spill of sex and violence, dishonesty and tawdriness, that spewed from the West’s printing presses. I had no illusions that the same material would fail to sell well here, making millionaires of unscrupulous writers. Only the vigilance of the writers’ union and Glavlit, the government censorship agency, prevented our literature from being eroded and degraded by commercial exploitation.
Lydia asked, “And how do you know that the market really finds her talented? Talent may not be the only selling point. She’s a contemporary Russian writer. She’s a young woman. Merely being published in the West gives her a political aura. Americans are buying her out of curiosity.”
It wasn’t the novel they were selling, it was the author. This was something I had previously not considered, but knew was true. In the West, literature might not be entangled in political considerations, but it could certainly be knotted in nonliterary commercial ones. I knew that if anything was heavily enough advertised it would sell (our newspapers were always writing about the useless trinkets that, thanks to advertising, Americans thought they could not live without). Even the endorsements on the back cover were not necessarily sincere; they had certainly been solicited, as some kind of favor to someone in the publishing house. This went on all the time. Nevertheless, the fact was this: her novel was being published in America and mine wasn’t.
“Her picture’s on the book jacket,” I murmured. “I suppose it doesn’t hurt that she’s very attractive.”
“Is she?”
I searched Lydia’s face for an ironic smirk or grimace, but her question was asked in earnest. I was taken aback. She knew Marina, had attended parties at which Marina had been marked as the most attractive and glamorous guest. I could recall twice when Marina’s presence caused a palpable strain in a party’s superstructure, at fracture points of longing and envy—or so I thought at the time. Hanging in midair by its typographical hook, Lydia’s question now made me wonder if the young author’s beauty was not so obvious. There had been no strain at these parties; I had imagined it. Was there some cosmetic defect to which I had been blinded? Usually it was the other way around: a girl’s attractiveness would obscure her personal faults, sometimes catastrophically. Now it was disquieting to have it suggested that Marina’s beauty was not self-evident, that there was something more than superficial to my desire. Lydia stared, waiting for my answer, and it seemed that she noticed my confusion, but that might have been a misperception as well.
Eleven
The fall passed in a blur of wet streets and mud. Construction debris flowed over onto Gertsena from the new Prospekt Kalinina, which had obliterated the seedy old Arbat neighborhood and put in its place high-rises gleaming with the optimism of the new age. The jackhammers could be heard in my office. As I had expected, publication in the West heightened Marina’s celebrity at home, and there was talk of electing her to the presidium of the union’s youth section. I had again established winter quarters in our flat, while Lydia burrowed into her dacha solitude. Our ambiguous conversation of the summer, as I recalled it, proved to be a scratch on the pane of our marriage. My memory would skid past the intervening weeks and snag on that walk back to our dacha. I would wonder about my assessment of Marina’s work and her beauty. I lay awake in my bed, listening to the sounds of the city I didn’t know, a city of certitude. The city in which I dwelled was cast in shadows.
Late one December afternoon I lifted the receiver of my office telephone and heard a familiar growclass="underline" “Rem, come here at once.”
Sorokin had been in and out of the hospital all year, his pallor deepening to a permanent jaundice, his mass of flesh rising like a loaf of bread and gradually immobilizing him in his office chair. His demeanor was somber and worried and he sometimes seemed distracted. A few weeks earlier I had come to his office with a package, and, to our mutual embarrassment, he hadn’t immediately recognized me. Afterwards he muttered something about my hair getting too fucking long, I looked like a goddam, fucking khipi.
Now he said, “We have a problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Viktor Panteleyev.” He pronounced each syllable of the man’s name slowly, enunciating it carefully, “Is he a friend of yours?”
Sorokin studied me. Afraid of what I might say if I hesitated, I rushed to answer: “Yes.”
Sorokin made a sound halfway between a grunt and a belch and then said, “He must have lost his mind.”
“Oh my God. What did he do?”
“Nothing yet. Some agitators are planning some kind of protest at Pushkin Square this evening at six. He intends to join them.”
“What kind of protest?”
“What do you think? So-called human rights, I suppose.” He sneered and added in contempt, “Decembrists.” The Decembrists had been a group of army officers whose pro-democracy rebellion in December 1825 was savagely put down by Tsar Nicholas I and bravely exalted by Pushkin.
“Panteleyev’s involved?”
“Apparently. He’s a fool. His participation poses a threat to the entire writers’ union. It puts our loyalty in question. Certain members of the Central Committee already have raised their voices against ideological drift. Too much publication abroad, too many European friends, not enough editorial oversight by Glavlit. I can’t say I disagree. Who has the guts to call himself a Marxist-Leninist writer these days?”
“But Panteleyev’s acting on his own!”
“No one acts on his own. He’s a member of the union. The union gives him the right to publish, to call himself a Soviet writer. It gives him housing and social benefits, annual holidays and health care. He has responsibilities in turn, and one of them is not to bring his fellow writers into disrepute.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t mean it that way,” I said lamely. “Look, I’ll call him. I’ll ask him not to attend.” This didn’t sound strong enough. “I’ll stop him.”
Sorokin examined me for a moment and then closed his heavy, warted eyelids.
“Boris Stepanovich, do you need something? Some juice?”