“The bitches are coming!”
After which I would once more inspect the bolts and retreat to the kitchen. As far away from the front door as possible.
As the unit pulled away, I would peek out from behind the curtain. In the distant window opposite, Smirnov paced. He would salute me with his bottle…
On the eleventh day I began having hallucinations. These weren’t demons, these were your garden-variety cats. White and grey. Several of them.
Then I got caught in a downpour of little worms. Red spots appeared on my stomach. The skin on the palms of my hands started to peel.
The booze ran out. The money ran out. I didn’t have the strength to go anywhere or do anything.
What was left for me to do? Get into bed, pull the covers over my head and wait. Sooner or later all this had to end. My heart is strong. After all, it had seen me through a hundred benders.
The motor is good. Too bad the brakes are missing. I stop only when I hit a ditch.
I pulled the covers over my head and lay still. Mysterious slimy things swarmed around my feet. Faint little bells jingled in the gloom.
Numbers and letters marched in formation over my blanket. From time to time they formed short sentences. One time I read:
“Only death is final!”
Not such a silly thought, if you think about it.
At this moment, the phone rang. I knew who it was right away. I knew it was Tanya. I just knew and that’s all.
I lifted the receiver. Out of the chaos came Tanya’s calm voice:
“Hi! We’re in Austria. Everything’s fine… Were you drinking?”
I got angry:
“Who do you take me for?”
“We were met at the airport. There are a lot of friends here. Everyone sends their regards.”
I was standing barefoot by the phone without saying anything. A radiogram roared outside the window. There was a reflection of an old coat in the mirror.
I only asked:
“Will we see each other again?”
“Yes… If you love us…”
I didn’t even ask where. It didn’t matter. In heaven, perhaps. Because heaven is just that, a meeting place and nothing more. A general holding cell where you can meet your loved ones…
Suddenly I saw the world as a whole. Everything was happening at the same time. Everything was unfolding before my eyes…
My wife said:
“Yes, if you love us…”
“What does love have to do with it?” I asked.
And added:
“Love is for the young. It is for soldiers and athletes… Things are much more complicated here. It’s beyond love. It’s fate…”
Then something clicked and there was silence.
Now I would have to go to sleep in an empty and stuffy room…
– June 1983
New York
Afterword
“POLITICAL WORK OUGHT TO BE CONCRETE”: this is one of the rousing Soviet mottos recalled in Sergei Dovlatov’s novel, The Zone. Ironically, it is also what is said about good writing, and can one think of a more concrete contemporary writer than Dovlatov? Sentences compacted to aphoristic ingots: “One is born either poor or rich. Money has almost nothing to do with it.” Paradox, sharp wit, and swift one-liners: “Boris sober and Boris drunk are such different people, they’ve never even met.” Or: “What could I say to him? What do you say to a guard who uses after-shave only internally?” Fierce, precise snapshots, illuminated by absurdist flashes: “Cars streamed past us like submarines holding each other’s tails.” Dialogue almost Waugh-like in its tart comedy:
“You’ve just forgotten. The rudeness, the lies.”
“If people are rude in Moscow, at least it’s in Russian.”
“That’s the horrible part.”
And people, things, clothes, memories, stories – all seized and made instantly vivid:
Indistinct memories came to him.
…A square in winter, tall rectangular buildings. A few school-boys surround Vova Mashbits, the class telltale. Vova’s expression is frightened, he wears a foolish hat, woollen drawers… Koka Dementiyev tears a grey sack out of his hand. Shakes a pair of galoshes out onto the snow. After which, faint with laughter, he urinates into the sack. The schoolboys grab Vova, hold him by the shoulders, shove his head into the darkened sack. The boy stops trying to break loose. It’s not actually painful…
Reading Dovlatov is a joyous, thrilling, usually hilarious experience, in large part because he has such a talent for making stories so concrete: he collects vignettes, loud portraits, bitter jokes, comic tales, absurd episodes, black anecdotes, and then delights in bringing them out of the ether of hearsay or memory and giving them new life in print. He captures, and he frees: his work bursts with this captured, freed life. There is the prisoner Makeyev, in The Zone, who climbs onto the roof of the prison camp to watch the woman he has fallen in love with, a schoolteacher named Isolda Shchukina. [119] He is unable to make out her features or even her age. He knows only that she wears two dresses, a green one and a brown one: “Early in the morning, Makeyev would crawl onto the roof of the barracks. After some time, there would be a thunderous announcement: ‘Brown!’ This meant that Isolda had gone out to visit the toilet facilities.” [119] There is the story, from The Suitcase, of the Lenin statue that went wrong. People gather for the unveiling of the new monument; a band plays, speeches are given. And as a drum rolls, the cloth is lifted – to reveal Lenin in familiar pose, his right arm pointing “the way to the future” and his left in the pocket of his open coat. The music stops, and suddenly someone laughs. “A minute later, the whole crowd was laughing… What had happened? The poor sculptor had given Lenin two caps, one on the leader’s head, the other one clutched in his fist.” [24] In the same book, Dovlatov remembers being asked to play Old Grandfather Frost in a New Year’s show for a school. He is promised three days off and fifteen rubles. On stage, he appears in a beard, a white hat, and bearing a basket of gifts. “Hello, dear children! Do you recognize me?” And the yelled reply comes from the front rows: “Lenin! Lenin!” [115]
There are the sparkling sketches, in A Foreign Woman, of Russian émigrés in New York – like Fima Druker, a famous bibliophile when he lived in Leningrad, now running a publishing company called Russian Book, which struggles to survive in America, and which is eventually renamed Invisible Book (apparently now specializing in erotica); or Zaretsky, a journalist notorious in the Soviet Union for his “voluminous” work published in samizdat, Sex Under Totalitarianism, “which claimed that ninety per cent of Soviet women were frigid.” [8] At one point in the novel, Zaretsky attempts to do some sex research on the novel’s heroine, an émigré named Marusya Tatarovich: one of his questions involves asking her if she lost her virginity “before or after the Hungarian events.” [48]
Sergei Dovlatov was born in 1941, in Ufa, in the Republic of Bashkiria; his family had been evacuated there from Leningrad during the Second World War. His mother was Armenian, his father Jewish and a distinguished theater director. His intensely autobiographical work – warmly and casually mixing fiction and fact; often jocosely combining fiction with what postmodernism calls metafiction (that is, commentary on fiction-making) – offers the reader a vital picture of the usual bald biographical summary. In his writing, including this book, we learn about the many phases of his short life (he died in 1990, in New York City): about his parents and their work in the theater (the wonderful story, “Fernand Léger’s Jacket”); about the time he spent, in the early 1960s, as a prison guard in the Soviet camp system (The Zone); about his work as a journalist, in Leningrad and Estonia (The Suitcase and The Compromise); the summer he spent as an official guide at the Pushkin Preserve, south of Pskov (Pushkin Hills).