I think there was food at some point. A policeman patrolling a railroad station snack-bar looking for drunks demanded our papers quite late at night, and saluted nervously when, after minutes of fumbling, the Minister produced a cardboard document from inside his coat. The counter girl plunked three hunks of smelly fried fish on scraps of paper for us. Before we could eat it, the driver accused her of tipping the scale with her finger to double the price of the fish. The policeman returned for more explanations.
The Minister had long been trying to tell a joke, but was constantly interrupted by someone or something, often himself. Finally he shepherded us back to the car and started from the beginning again. The story was about a proud new
Second Lieutenant just assigned to his first post, guarding the Motherland with a border division in East Germany. He was a model soldier in every way, except for a thumping stutter. On the first evening, he assembled his platoon and carefully rehearsed the sentries’ arrangements.
‘A-a-and re-re-remember, m-men,’ he repeated. 'The p-p-password is, the p-password is B-b-blue B-b-boy. B-blue b-boy.’ He drew a deep breath and rallied. 'B-but if th-there’s no a-a-answer r-r-right a-a-away, d-d-don’t sh-sh-sh-shoot. D-d-don’t sh-shoot - it m-m-may b-b-be m-m-me!
Something ruthless as well as ingratiating sounded in the drivers roaring laughter. Perhaps sensing this, he told a joke of his own, directed at himself. What’s the transitional period, he asked us, from socialism to Communism? We dutifully said we did not know.
'The transitional period from socialism to Communism,’ he repeated. ‘Alcoholism!’ He tipped his bottle to his lips.
The driver’s physical stamina approached the heroic. Miraculously, he piloted the car without mishap - although he’d reverted to vodka, as any upstanding Russian proletarian would have, and downed half a bottle alone. Somehow, he found his way to my building. Before I got out, he had begun to promise the Minister that he’d never sign a denunciation about the evening. He would never report a single thing about me - not even that we’d met.
‘They can cut me up into little pieces - I won’t know anything. Anyway, this American’s the good type!’ Then he began confessing to the Minister that he was paid - kopeks! - to spy on him. Not spy on him exactly, but keep an eye on him; and from a fat organization like the KGB, the money was insulting. ‘It’s a gross case of exploiting the workers -as usual.’
The Minister failed to react because the news was stale; the driver, he informed me, made this confession every time they drowned sorrows together. He told the driver he knew perfectly well he was under-paid, both for driving and the ‘other thing’, and assured him again that he would never 60
denounce him for stealing gas and the Volga s spare parts. Or for lifting certain sacks of experimental com seed from a laboratory and shipping them to his village.
The driver, nearly weeping now, said it wasn’t really stealing - it was for the private plots of his hungry relatives on a sad collective farm. And wasn’t it terrible anyway, he continued, that he and the Minister had got themselves hooked into agriculture instead of something profitable like stockings or sweaters.
‘For God’s sake,’ the driver continued, hoarse with suspect sincerity. ‘I grew up on a farm, I know it’s hopeless. The only way to solve the agricultural problem is to smash every collective farm fast, and have every man for himself.’
At that moment every man in the car was far from for himself, but overwhelmed by the troubles of the others. We sat in a kind of stupor, gazing at a clanging snow-removal machine and night-crew of women wielding battered shovels and brooms. The snowflakes made a steady patter hitting the windshield. Finally we got out, shook hands all around, threw our arms round each other in a close embrace of overcoats and paunches, and pumped hands again vigorously. As always on that kind of night, there was a feeling of sublime comradeship, utter understanding. I was making my way to the door when the Minister lurched forward to present me with a symbol of all this - his clip-on tie. I gave him a packet of Gillettes.
After that, I saw the Minister often. Each time, he added new details to the unhappy tale of his life. The final injury was that even this story was ordinary: it lacked the makings of genuine tragedy - which the Minister might have achieved had he not been ‘f-f-fated to b-be th-the m-man in the m-m-middle, n-not f-fish or m-m-meat’.
It started in a sun-baked hut on what was then the outskirts of sleepy, dirty Yerevan. The Minister, twelfth of thirteen children, was an awkward and withdrawn boy, struck by the stutter on his first day of school. But in school
he was befriended by the physics teacher, a kindly man who owned a real camera and lent the Minister back copies of the new Soviet photography magazine. This gift would sustain him in all his solitary hours. He was not yet ten years old when his passion for films sired a hunger to create. While his fellow pupils talked of soccer and girls, he was consumed by thoughts of his adult mission: translating his own truths for the cinema.
In Yerevan s donkey lanes of the 1920s, film was a new world, an unprecedented vehicle for artistic enrichment and enlightenment. And in the Soviet Union as in no other country, this vehicle would bring truth and beauty to the masses who had so little of either — to the children of forgotten people, like the Minister himself. He was going to be a director, Eisenstein’s first Armenian disciple. He was destined to make honest and memorable revolutionary films. His ragseller parents gave him to know that he was a special boy whose aspirations would be fulfilled, precisely because they were so exalted. Even now his daydreams were scenes from his own abortive scripts.
But fate was already mocking him. By the time the Minister finished secondary school, the Eisenstein era had ended, the entire Soviet artistic world had been Stalinized’, and the only films produced were sterile potboilers glorifying Five-Year-Plan, Motherland and Leader. After a paralyzing crisis of conscience, he resolved to abandon his calling. On the morning of his twentieth birthday, his application papers to Moscow’s Film Institute were burned in an outhouse. The act required supreme resoluteness - ‘w-w-which p-p-perhaps explains why s-so 1-1-little r-remained f-for f-f-future years’.
After the bitter decision, there was a shortlived, tragicomic attempt to transfer his creative impulses to the violin. Then he tried his hand at half a dozen unskilled jobs in as many factories and warehouses. The war descended, and the Minister survived six years of it in and around Vladivostok; he was officially a medical corpsman and actually a 62 7
General’s flunkey. Back home, faute de mieux , he entered the local agricultural college, wh-which t-t-took anyone w-w-who c-could wr-wr-write his n-name and w-w-wasn’t a t-t-total sp-spastic’.
After graduation, his career was a series of minor admini^* trative billets in obscure provincial offices, befitting an above-average product of a third-rate institution. But in 1956, Khrushchev assumed full command of Party and state and he, the Minister, was summoned to Moscow. Khrushchev plucked him from obscurity, as he plucked so many other old cronies and new hopefuls, and made him a kind of Knight of the Order of the Socialist Economy. For he had written his undergraduate thesis on the advantages of com as livestock fodder, and Khrushchev had a vision that com and com alone was the panacea for Soviet agriculture. The Minister was made a standard-bearer in the race to overtake the West.