Corn gave the Minister a Moscow propiska , together with a comfortable apartment in a Ministry building and all the prestige and relative riches of an established government post. But the memory of his childhood dreams of artistic creativity and the accompanying ache of remorse increased in proportion to his advance up the ministerial hierarchy. 'They g-give you a car and a fat salary, a-all k-kinds of privileges - t-together with a terrific sense of g-guilt.’
The Minister seemed less unhappy at plying a trade in which he had no real interest than having become accidentally a considerable success at it. He couldn’t make up his mind how to react to this: resign once and for all, or work even harder to justify his privileges. In fact, he did the latter. He was always rushing from one conference to the next, fumbling in transit with a briefcase that swelled daily with ever more reports. But none of the meetings he attended, resolutions he signed, decisions he approved -nothing he did all day changed a single thing on a single farm. His job was a Dante-esque ordeal of perpetual bureaucracy; his working day a vicious cycle of more and more
meetings - that is, of squandered time.
To make things worse, his wife loved the life. She had been a year ahead of him at Yerevan’s agricultural institute; they met during a field seminar on silage. After graduation she worked as a dairy technician - in other words, cow-barn boss. When the Minister was called to Moscow, she decided it was unseemly for a wife of ministerial rank to soil her now-manicured hands with work.
Moreover, the moment she sampled lady-of-leisure life, she discovered that she was not only made for it but appreciated its subtlest refinements. She acquired a taste for chocolates, liqueurs and canasta, which she played most afternoons with the wives of the Minister’s ministerial superiors. Soon she, like they, had hired a domestic for the cleaning - having developed a loathing for dirt and all other reminders of farms - and was collecting bits and pieces of an imported wardrobe. If the Minister, as she reminded him every morning when he brought in the tea, would only behave like a normal human being with certain people at certain parties, he too might go abroad next year to some kind of conference, and bring her back a proper outfit - co-ordinated with matching coat and dress - like the wives at the Ministry of Heavy Industry were wearing.
It was his lack of refuge that disturbed the Minister most. His home was no more his castle than his work was a source of pride. The bitterest pill was the use made of him by three of the Minister of Agriculture’s highest aides. They operated large tracts of Ministry land, officially set aside for experimental soil control, as private hunting parks for themselves and their cronies. The Minister had been designated to deal with the necessary paper work, making him an accomplice in a fraud he especially despised.
Almost every time he told his story, the Minister quoted a passage from Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich about a certain Tsarist privy councillor who was a ‘s-s-superfluous m-m-member of v-various s-s-s-superfluous in-in-institutions’. Such men are ‘obviously unfit to hold any responsible posi-64
tion, and therefore posts are specially created for them, which though fictitious, carry salaries of from six to ten thousand rubles that are not fictitious and in receipt of which they live on to a great old age\
‘You can’t improve on Tolstoy for delineation of character’, he stuttered. ‘The point is, some of those p-privy councillors probably wanted to do s-something meaningful with their fives, and s-simply didn’t know how. Oh, w-what’s the use of b-boring youT
At this point I would try to calm the Minister. This wasn’t as improbable as his station in life might have made it seem, for most Russians - apparently Armenians too - have a broad childish streak. Sometimes this manifests itself in simplicity and artlessness; at other times in a very embarrassing inferiority complex, even, or especially, on the part of the bureaucratic elite. The Minister would wait for my words, as if I had something important to tell him about how to arrange his life. And when it turned out to be something trite and unhelpful, he pressed my arm and smiled, as if I’d been trying to be kind by showing him I too could be banal.
What I usually talked about was my two post-college years in a cold-water Chicago tenement. Under the influence of an inspiring seminar in American literature, I’d decided to become a writer and was at work on my first novel. It was the low point of my life, for reasons involved with a pretense that it was the high point. I wore a trench coat and black polo-neck sweater; I waited for people to ask what I did, and answered ‘I write’ with overtones of melodrama and nonchalance. All the necessary props were there to enhance the romantic figure I fancied myself, including a girl friend: my first real companion, as well as lover. She was a kind of ingenue - too innocent to recognize that anxieties about my manhood and place in the world forced me to be unkind. When she went to five with a professor twice my age, I was actually young enough - insensitive enough and deranged enough - to feel relief instead of
grief. When the bubble burst, and I found I had nothing to say, I stayed in bed for weeks. Finally I was well enough to win a job on a four-page weekly.
The Minister would listen in a kind of reverie. Once his notes fell from his knees onto the floor. ‘Very few of our contemporaries fulfilled our own notions of our own promise/ I said. ‘Perhaps this will sound terribly callous; I know Stalinism caused unimaginable suffering. But in a way, it relieved some other people of bitter disappointment - of discovering their own limitations, I mean. I think I’d have welcomed some kind of external tragedy to let me drop writing without facing my lack of talent. Well, maybe not. . . .’
The Minister would shift in his chair and put his floppy hand on mine.
‘Anyway’, I continued, to lead us away from our awkward introspection, ‘anyway, the trouble with our century is that we all encountered magnificent, inspiring literature in our youth. This fooled us into believing we should be able to produce art of the same level - like a Sunday tennis player watching world champions in a stadium. It looks so easy that he runs home for his racket to do it himself.’
By contrast, Oktyabrina - when she was with us - said little. She would lift the tip of the Minister’s moustache and peck five quick kisses on the comers of his lips. The Minister’s heavy-set face immediately flushed with affection and relief. The five kisses were a kind of ritual, followed by loud sighs, romping squeezes and a standard fragment of dialogue.
‘Is it going to be all right, my dauntless one?’ Oktyabrina would ask.
‘B-but I t-told you f-f-from the f-first m-moment on the t-train. It’s g-g-going to be perfect.’ Then it was the Minister’s turn: ‘Is it g-g-going to be a-a-all r-right, my p-princess?’
‘It’s going to be super*
‘When?’ they shouted together.
‘Now!’ they shouted louder. Then they embraced clumsily
but enthusiastically - the Minister seemed puzzled about where to position his long, loose arms - and Oktyabrina rubbed her cheek on the fur of his overcoat and laughed a real laugh.
She was calmer with the Minister than I’d seen her before. On Sundays, we often went on an outing to the woods north of Moscow, and I think the silent, melancholy countryside calmed her too. As soon as we crossed the city limits, she was like a country girl romping up the lane to her village after years away, and rejoicing when she hears the bark of her old dog.
The Minister had the use of a well-equipped dacha in a huge, high-fenced government reserve, but we went instead to a tiny room of an unpainted cottage he’d rented privately from a peasant family. It was agreed that should we encounter one of the Minister’s colleagues, Oktyabrina would be presented as my friend, and I as a journalist from one of the ‘democratic’ countries - East Germany, say, or Poland.