“First the painting is only a few paces wide, then a few dozen paces, then hundreds of paces. Soon the painting is miles and miles wide. Now, this is a big painting, no? Raw materials are essential to its success. The flax that would have clothed the tsar’s subjects is requisitioned for the canvas. The wood that would have built houses is requisitioned for the frame.
“When the subjects are cold, the tsar tells them to look at the painting and see the beautiful coats and furs they will soon wear. When they sleep outside, he tells them to look at the painting and see the beautiful homes they will soon live in.
“The subjects obey the tsar. They know that if they turn their eyes from the painting and see what is around them, if they see the world as it is, the tsar will make them disappear in a big poof of smoke. Soon, all his subjects are frozen in place, unable to move, just like their reflections in the painting.”
The boy stared with a bored frown. He must have been accustomed to excellent storytelling. Literature for children receives less attention from the censors than literature for adults, so naturally our best writers flock to the genre.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” I asked.
He put up three.
I slid my hand farther into his periphery. “How many now?”
He put up one.
“And now?”
He began turning his head, but I snapped. “Eyes ahead. Just like people in a painting can’t turn their heads to see who’s behind them, neither can you.”
“I can’t see how many fingers,” he said. “Your hand is too far back.”
“That’s right,” I said. “That’s where your father is. He’s there, painted in the background, back behind your head, where you can’t see. He’s there, but you can never turn to look.”
The coin scratching had silenced some time ago. When I looked up, the boy’s mother was standing in the bedroom doorway. I followed her in. The photographs were lined neatly on the desk. In each one, a single face had been so violently scratched out that the desk’s wood grain was visible through the hole. My eyes ached to see it. I closed them.
“Get photographs of your son every year,” I advised. “If you’re arrested, he’ll be placed in a state orphanage who knows where. With a recent photograph, you’ll have a better chance of finding him.”
I was already at the door when she grabbed my wrist and turned me around.
“You’re not finished,” she said. “You owe my husband more.”
“This is the best I can do.”
Her hand was on my neck. The boy just sat there, across the room, watching with dark, dumb eyes. What did he see when he saw me? You remain the hero of your own story even when you become the villain of someone else’s. His mother’s chest indented on my forearm.
“You’re in the party,” she insisted. “Do something. Move us somewhere.”
“I correct images. That’s it.”
“Then what more can we do? Tell me. When they go into an orphanage you never find them.”
Her eyes were webbed with pink and her hands cupped my cheeks, her middle fingers tucked under my earlobes. There was something foreign in the hard, dense heat of her breath on my face. I couldn’t recall the last time someone had breathed on me, nor the last time I had felt needed.
“You prove your loyalty,” I said quietly. “That can work. In my own experience it has worked.”
She looked to the boy, then took my hand. She led me past him, toward the bedroom, toward the bed still wide enough for two. All I wanted was to get out, to be rid of these people. Even so it was a relief to see that she would take her dead husband’s brother to the bedroom, a relief to know that the boy might live to become that fat and happy old man because his mother understood, as his father never had, that it is not God or gravity but grace of the state that holds us upon the earth.
I shook my hand from her grip. She turned, uncertain. I leaned toward her, so the boy wouldn’t overhear.
“You prove loyalty through betrayal.” The words traveled no farther than the length of a little finger, from my lips to her ear. “You inform on someone close to you. This is what I know works.”
TWO years have passed since that morning. A month ago the department requisitioned my small office. A mean sense of humor, if little else, has filled the vacancy between my superior’s ears: He has assigned me to continue our necessary work underground. Several hundred feet underground.
I bid the sky farewell and climb down. Amid dim electric bulbs, I imagine myself contracting within shadow, becoming Caravaggian. No matter how early I arrive, the workmen are already here: laying rail track, reinforcing tunnel cement, never raising their wary eyes to mine. I enter a sawdust swarm and on the other side emerge at the door of what will be the stationmaster’s office.
Maxim, my assistant, has beaten me here. The worktable is already prepared with nozzles, cylinders of pressurized air, paint, sealed directives, and stacked files of uncorrected photographs.
Our Younger Stalins cabinet stands in the corner. It holds photographs of our vozhd taken ten to twenty years ago. When possible, we substitute a Younger Stalin for current ones. It’s essential we convey to the people the youthful vigor of their elder statesman. The longer we do it, the further back in time we must go to find new material. Readers of certain periodicals may worry that he is growing younger with each passing year; by his seventieth birthday he will be a slender-faced adolescent.
“You’re late, Comrade,” Maxim says, speaking of slender-faced adolescents. The day we met, when the Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation first assigned him as my assistant, was the last day he saluted me. He sends letters praising the party leadership with the hope that the police will intercept, read, and record his expressions of loyalty. He makes no secret of wanting my post.
“I’m old, Comrade,” I say.
Maxim, the little brute, nods in agreement.
By lunch we have corrected by airbrush three faces from a 1930 Foreign Trade Committee portrait that has been retouched so many times it’s more painting than photograph. Or I should say, I have; Maxim contributes only cigarette smoke and a sour smirk. While concentrating on the face beneath my airbrush, I glance up to find Maxim concentrating on mine. The little brute couldn’t erase pencil lead.
We lunch alone. Maxim stays in the mercury-vapor brightness of the office, while I wander through the tunnels. I have walked for hours through these tunnels and have found no end to them. Someday trains will carry the grateful citizens of a socialist paradise through this netherworld. All the work we have done here in their name will then be justified.
In the afternoon, we turn to an Isaak Brodsky canvas depicting Lenin’s arrival at Finland Station in the city then known as Petrograd.
“Do you notice the perspective, Maxim?” I ask. “Do you see how the vanishing lines all center upon Comrade Lenin’s open mouth, to give the sense that the entire scene is delivered through his speech? The technique goes back to the Renaissance masters. Think of Leonardo’s Last Supper.”
It’s so rare to find good work.
Maxim frowns and gestures to Enemy Trotsky, lurking beside Lenin, whom we must erase, because he was never there.
“Come on,” he says, disdainful, as always, of formalism. “It will take long enough to correct the painting without the entire history of Western Art. Painting should’ve stopped with Leonardo anyway. End on a high note.”
Pity. I fear I’m among the last of the Leningrad correction artists who attended the Imperial Academy of Arts before the Revolution. The new breed, philistines like Maxim, have grown up in schools where children finger-paint watery ash over the faces of political enemies. They learn to censor before they learn to write. They were never taught to create what they now destroy, and have no appreciation of what, precisely, they sacrifice.