“I’m relieved to know that you think so. Because some suspicion has been voiced that you might sympathize with these anti-Soviet sentiments.”
“I can’t believe—”
“So why isn’t your name on the union petition?”
“I wasn’t happy with the wording. You know, as a writer, how you hate to put your name on anything that you haven’t written yourself.”
In fact, Sorokin probably didn’t hate it at all, he probably took it as a matter of course. He responded to my well-rehearsed evasion by pressing heavily with his elbows against his desk. His face flushed and his arms trembled as he rose from his seat. By the time he reached his feet, he was breathing heavily. He moved with an unfamiliar, listing limp across the room to a gray gunmetal safe implanted in the wall between two bookcases. He blocked my view of it as he turned the wheel. He removed something from inside the safe, brought it back to his desk, and laid it carefully before me.
It was Marina’s portrait, encased in a thin crimson border: the cover of Time magazine. I recognized that I was not meant to touch it. The picture had been done in oils, and my first thought was that it was not a good likeness, that this was not as I had known her. While the artist had succeeded in making her attractive, he appeared to have added years and hard experience to her beauty. As she gazed up from the cover, her face was drawn and slightly battered. The resolute set of her jaw raised a faint crease along the base of her left temple, her moral fiber made visible.
The gross tangibility of this image gave me pause. I had to concede something to the vision of the artist, even if he were merely a workaday magazine illustrator. Action was character. The actual Marina Burchatkina was not the person that, entangled by desire, I thought I had known. I gazed into the printed eyes, unable to turn away. Sorokin spoke over my shoulder, his voice thick.
“That’s their new heroine, their Joan of Arc. She pours lies and filth on the name of the Soviet people. They won’t rest until the Soviet Union is destroyed.”
I studied the picture, trying to commit it to memory. I thought it was the last thing I would ever know about her.
“No, Brezhnev’s destroying it himself,” I murmured, not bearing to look at Sorokin. “This invasion puts back the political development of our country twenty years. It’s a disaster for my generation.”
This was the first time I had ever articulated this thought. It was not even something I had known I believed. The force of my belief made me dizzy.
Sorokin belched. It came out in a growl.
“Rem, you’re so fucking smart. Tell me then, how did I learn in advance about Pushkin Square?”
I turned to face him. He was leaning on the desk, towering over me.
“I don’t know. From one of the security organs, I suppose.”
“Damn straight I did. But who in the security organs?”
“How would I know? I don’t care. I have no idea how the KGB operates. They must have placed an informer among the demonstrators. I know they have contacts in the union.” I waved vaguely with my hand, not wanting to directly accuse him.
Sorokin continued to stare, his eyes brimming with disgust.
“What?” I said.
He didn’t reply.
“Bullshit,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”
Now Sorokin’s expression turned smug. He enjoyed this, it recalled the literary wars of his youth, against Zamyatin, against Babel, against Akhmatova. The color that had come into his face made him look healthier than he had in years.
“It’s impossible,” I protested. “She was probably one of the ringleaders.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“What’s right?”
“She was a ringleader, she was an agent provocateur. She smoked out the so-called dissidents. Too bad you didn’t stop Panteleyev. We wanted to keep the union out of it.”
“How can that be! She just defected! She wrote an anti-Soviet letter to Le Monde!”
“That’s what’s so despicable. Here is someone, a supposedly loyal citizen of the state who, after years of delicate cooperation, suddenly has a so-called ‘crisis of conscience.’ She changes sides, acts the pure innocent, the defender of liberty against the very system that helped bring her to prominence in the first place. She planned this, she knew she was going to defect when she applied for the trip to Paris. She wasn’t coming back. The KGB searched her flat. It was cleaned out, not a single manuscript or notebook or address.”
My voice was no more that a whispered croak: “When did she apply?”
He was distracted by his anger and didn’t answer at once, not understanding the import of my question. I repeated it.
“Last winter. Right after Pushkin Square.” Glaring, he said, “Write your own statement.” He added sarcastically, “I want that you should be satisfied with the wording.”
He returned the magazine to his safe.
Fourteen
The resolution had been circulated among the executive members of the Secretariat several days before the meeting, but had been left unsigned. Anton told me that he offered to sponsor it, but the offer was refused: First Secretary Fedin demanded a higher-ranking official. Anton said that Sorokin demanded me—“Idiot, she’s in California! What do you care? They can’t touch her!”—but I wasn’t approached again. Indeed, hardly anyone spoke to me that week. Now Anton avoided me as well. I gave off the odor of bodily corruption. At the very last moment an unknown children’s poet was flown in from Irkutsk, presumably on the principle that if rank would not serve, then “the people” would. In the poet’s address, she expressed the indignation of all the Far East writers of children’s literature at Marina Burchatkina’s “betrayal of high principles,” which aimed to “mislead and pervert incorruptible Soviet youth.”
As the evening wore on, the speeches became more hysterical. Marina was called “a prostitute” and “a traitor”; the threat she “and her masters” posed to the Union of Soviets was as great as that of the armies of the Third Reich. I hardly paid attention to the crash and pounding of the rhetorical surf. Instead I took into account the ten hours’ time difference and, assisted by several glasses of whiskey administered shortly before the start of the evening’s program, I saw Marina waking late at her director’s Pacific beach house. She luxuriated for several minutes in the big bed and soft white linen, marveling at the paleness of the light playing against the room’s trim, understated furnishings and fixtures. (At the microphone, someone cried, “Marina Burchatkina, did you receive your thirty pieces of silver?”) Placed in a sunny mood by her surroundings, she rose from the bed, wearing the director’s pajamas, slipped her feet into an ex-wife’s slippers, and summoned one of the servants to serve her coffee on the terrace. She brought her expensive fountain pen (a gift from the director) and a tablet of writing paper (I assumed she had purchased that on her own) out to the glass café table and, after sipping the coffee and smiling at some seagull swooping over the water in search of its own breakfast, she began her day’s work.
There was an end to the speeches and then the hall was quiet. Sorokin spoke from his place on the dais: “Any more comments?” His gaze passed across the surface of the audience like a spotlight. It avoided me, but I felt its heat just the same. This was my last chance to make amends. Hiding in the third or fourth row, I kept my gaze straight ahead, at a portrait of Gorky on the wall behind the dais, and tried to demonstrate my obliviousness.
After a while a vote was taken. It was unanimous. From exhaustion, even I raised my hand in favor, though the official observers of the vote would have recorded that my arm was not fully extended and by how much. I knew that my friends at the meeting, Anton and the others, who had chosen not to sit with me, would be relieved: a difficult chapter was closed. I sought relief as well, but was instead visited by a strange foreboding.