The telephone rang. She picked it up, and someone shouted down the line: “Turn on CNN! There’s a coup in Moscow!”
“There’s a coup in Moscow,” Lyuda said in a faltering voice. “That’s something new for you.”
Scattered fragments of a news bulletin flashed across the television screen. Some kind of civil emergency, ugly thuggish faces, thick-voiced, with corruption written all over them, like ill-fitting false teeth.
“Where do they find these ugly mugs?” Alik wondered aloud.
“And the ones here are any better?” Lyuda burst out with unexpected patriotism.
“Yes they are,” Alik thought a little. “Of course they’re better. They’re all crooks here too of course, but at least they’re ashamed. Those ones have no shame.”
It was impossible to make sense of what was happening. Gorbachev apparently had a health problem.
“They’ve probably killed him by now,” Alik said.
The telephone rang incessantly. An event like this was impossible to keep to oneself.
Lyuda moved the television to make it easier for Alik to see.
Her ticket was for 6 September. She must change it immediately and go back. Go back to what, though? Her son was here, her husband would do better to join them. But what could they do here, without the language, without anything? At home they had their books and their friends, a thousand dear people. Now all of them were swept up in this transient cloud on the screen.
“I said something would happen before that treaty was signed,” said Alik with satisfaction.
“What treaty?” said Lyuda, who didn’t follow politics because they repelled her.
“Wake Nina up,” Alik begged her.
But Nina was already creeping into the bedroom.
“Mark my words, everything is being decided now,” said Alik prophetically.
“What’s being decided?” Nina was flustered and still halfasleep; all events outside the apartment were equally remote to her.
By evening a mass of people had gathered again. The television was carried from the bedroom and put on the floor of the studio, and everyone surged away from Alik and crowded around it. Something incomprehensible was happening: a twitching marionette popped up, a bathhouse superintendent, a moustached man with a face like a dog, half-devils, half-people, phantasmagoria from the dream sequence in Evgeny Onegin, and the tanks. Troops were entering Moscow. Huge tanks were sliding through the streets of the city, and it was unclear who was fighting whom.
Lyuda clutched her temples and groaned: “What’s happening? What will happen next?”
Her son, a young computer-programmer, had got off early from work and was sitting next to her a little embarrassed. “What will happen? There’ll be a military dictatorship of course.”
They tried to get through to Moscow, but all the lines were busy. No doubt tens of thousands of people were dialling Moscow numbers all at the same time.
“Look, look, the tanks are passing our building!”
The tanks were moving down the Garden ring road now.
“What are you crying about? Your son’s here, you’ll stay and that’s that,” Faika tried to console Lyuda.
“Father probably retired long ago,” Nina said irrelevantly.
Only Alik understood the relevance of this remark: Nina’s father was a dedicated, high-ranking KGB man who had renounced her when she left Russia, and had forbidden her mother to write to her.
“To hell with it, the regime’s a bitch and all the vodka’s gone!” Libin jumped up and ran to the lift.
Gioia, who read Russian quite well but whose understanding of the spoken language was poor, suddenly found her ears opening in these hours and each word spoken by the announcer she caught on the wing. She was one of those people who, without ever visiting it, fall in love with a foreign country and know it from old books, and in bad translations at that. Now, by some unexpected inspiration, she understood everything in the announcer’s script. Rudy the painter gawped at the screen and fidgeted, tugging at her elbow and demanding a translation.
What was going on in Moscow was so hard to understand that it seemed as if everyone needed a translation.
People forgot about Alik for a while, and he closed his eyes. The events on the screen moved before him like flashing spots. By evening he was tired, but his mind was still clear.
Maika sat beside him on the arm of the easy chair, and stroked his shoulder. “Will there be a war in Russia?” she asked him quietly.
“War? I don’t think so. Unhappy country.”
Maika wrinkled her forehead. “I’ve already heard that. Poor, rich, developed, backward, okay. But unhappy country? I don’t get it.”
“You’re clever, Teeshirt, you know that?” Alik looked at her with astonishment and satisfaction, and that she understood.
All the people sitting here who had been born in Russia differed in their gifts, their education and human qualities, but they were united by the single act of leaving it. The majority had emigrated legally, some were non-returnees, the most audacious of them ran away across the borders. Yet however their life in emigration had worked out, however much their views differed, they had this one thing in common: this crossed frontier, this crossed, stumbling lifeline, this tearing up of old roots and putting down of new ones in new earth, with its new colours, smells and structures.
As the years went by, even their bodies changed their composition: the molecules of the New World entered their blood and replaced everything old from home. Their reactions, their behaviour and their way of thinking gradually altered, but the one thing they still needed was some proof of the correctness of what they had done. The more complicated and insurmountable the difficulties they faced in America, the more necessary this proof was for them. Consciously or not, the news from Moscow about the growing stupidity, lack of talent and criminality of life there during these years provided the proof they needed. But none could have imagined that what was happening in that far-off place which they had all but erased from their lives would be so painful for them now. It turned out that this country sat in their souls, their guts, and that whatever they thought about it—and they all thought different things—their links with it were unbreakable. It was like some chemical reaction in the blood, something nauseating, bitter and terrible.
For a long time Russia had existed for them only in their dreams. They all dreamed the same dream, but with different variations. Alik had once collected and recorded these dreams in an exercise-book which he called “An Émigré’s Dream-book.” The basic structure of the dream was as follows: they arrived back to find themselves in a closed building, or a building without doors, or a rubbish-container; or something happened that made it impossible for them to return to America: losing documents or being sent to prison, for instance; one Jew had even seen his dead mother, who had tied him up with a rope.
Alik had had an amusing variant of the dream. He was back in Moscow, everything was bright and beautiful, and his old friends were celebrating his return in a large flat, which was familiar yet dreadfully neglected. This friendly scrum of people then accompanied him to Sheremetevo airport, but it was nothing like the heart-rending farewells of past years when everything was for ever, until death. When the time came for him to board the plane, his old friend Sasha Nolikov suddenly appeared and pushed some dogs’ leads into his hand. On the end of them a pack of variously coloured little mongrels jumped about, with husky blood in their veins and with curly tails like pretzels. Sasha disappeared and all of Alik’s friends departed, leaving him alone with the dogs. There was nobody he could give them to, and the check-in for New York was already closing. Then an airline official came to tell him the plane was in the air, and he stayed with the dogs in Moscow knowing that this was for ever. He worried only about how Nina would pay the rent on their Manhattan studio, and in his dream he could smell the lift, the loft, the unavoidable odour of rough tobacco …