I could not conceive (none of the guests at the Wigwam could) that ten years later cracks would start appearing in Planet Nyet, that fifteen years later it would shatter, losing its allies, its vassals, its frontiers, and even its name. And that one would then be able to write whatever one wanted without fear of censorship. One could linger beneath the broken skylight in a loft, at night in a sleeping city, feel powdery snow on one’s face flushed with wine, reflect on the fleeting nature of our passage through the lives of other people…
But in this future, exactly as it was in the past, it would be just as difficult for a poet to speak of these simple things: love for a woman who has ceased to love, snow on a March night, the condensation from a breath as it vanishes in the cold air and makes us think: “That’s my life,” that tenuous haze of anxiety and hope.
In fifteen years’ time, the regime would no longer exist, but stanzas would not have an easier birth because of it, nor would poems be read more. No American journalists now to listen to the lines of verse being declaimed by tipsy poets, no danger now for the bold. And even the moaning behind the unfinished canvases would lose its shrill, provocative savor.
During that night of the last great frosts, I believed I had understood the aggravating paradox of art under a totalitarian regime: “Dictatorship is often conducive to the tragic creation of masterpieces…”
“You know, when there’s no watchtower or gallows in prospect, poets become bourgeois.” It was Arkady Gorin who said this. A bottle of alcohol in his hand, he came to join me in the kitchen, and, as happens to men who are tipsy, we felt as if we were speaking with one voice, reading one another’s thoughts, transmitting them through the telepathy that is such a distinctive feature of the glazed drunkenness of the small hours. “Once in the West, I’ll be stricken with poetic impotence, you’ll see…” he added with a tragicomic sigh.
“So what are they up to over there?” I asked, interrupting him.
He might have understood me to mean: over there in the West. But, thanks to the alcohol, he knew I meant the people we had just walked away from.
‘Over there, Chutov is reading the second part of his ‘Kremlin Zoo.’ But no one’s listening, because your girlfriend’s having another fuck behind the abstract art. With the American. He’s using a pretty pale blue condom. They say that in the West they have rubbers that smell of fruit as well. Even taste of fruit. I wonder if the American… Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… Would you like me to go and smash this bottle over the fat imperialist shark’s head? Fine… Well, let’s go!”
And, when we were out in the street, he added: “The day after tomorrow I’ll be in Vienna. But, you know, what I’m going to miss is the snow swirling around the lampposts. And the dirty streets. And the hallways in apartment blocks that smell of cat piss.”
Suddenly he began shouting, waving his arms about and throwing his head back: “Oh happy day! I’m getting the hell out of here! I’m leaving this shitty country I’m going to live in the West! I’ll have dollar bills crackling in my sensitive intellectual’s fingers! Bills greener than the tree of life… I’m free! To hell with all the slaves who live around here!”
In fact, our two voices chimed as one, hurling abuse into the night. Mocking the dark windows in the apartment blocks, the sleep of all those “slaves” of the regime, cowards who did not dare to shout like us, giving full throat to their disgust. And who, by their resignation, reinforced the prison society in which we lived. They were our enemies. Drunk as we were that night in March, we believed this. It enabled us to forget our failures: in his case, a botched farewell to the Wigwam; in mine, the pattern of beauty spots on the legs of the woman I loved and had just lost.
We ran into these enemies of ours in the first local train heading for Leningrad. There they all were, a tightly packed crowd of them, undifferentiated, a sluggish mass of blank faces, bodies numb with lethargy, crudely dressed, with no scrap of imagination. These were not even the proletarians glorified by ideology, the “toiling masses” portrayed at every street corner on enormous propaganda posters. No, this was an underclass of humble cogs in the system: elderly women on their way to scrape up filth in smoke-filled factories with metal brooms, men on their way to load industrial trucks with rusty scrap or to trudge around concrete factory enclosures at thirty below, with ancient rifles on their shoulders. Creatures invisible in daylight hours who could only be observed in the still nocturnal darkness of a winter morning on this very first train of the day.
We remained standing, the better to observe them. Our aggressive bawling of a moment ago modulated into malevolent whispers. There before us, packed together on the benches, they formed a tableau vivant of what the regime could do to human beings: depriving them of all individuality, drilling them to the point where, of their own free will, they read Pravda (there were several papers open here and there), but, above all, cramming into their skulls the notion of their own contentment. For who among these somnolent cogs would have failed to perceive himself as happy?
“Just look at how drab they all look,” snorted Arkady. “If the Germans invaded again, you could send them straight out to dig trenches. Or into the camps. They wouldn’t even have to adjust.”
“Into the camps?” I added, taking my tone from him. “They look as if they’ve just come out of them.”
“And do you know what? If, instead of taking us to Leningrad, this terrible snail of a train turned and headed off toward Siberia, not one of them would dare ask why”
Suddenly we noticed this man’s hands.
He was holding open a copy of Pravda by gripping it firmly between his thumbs and what was left of his hands, stumps from which all four fingers were missing.
I heard Arkady give a discreet cough and remark in a low, somewhat tremulous voice:”A machine-gunner… In the war, you know, they had those great machine guns, with shields that protected the head from shell splinters. But the grip left the hands totally exposed. The steel only covered the thumb. So when there was a burst of shrapnel…”
The man turned the page very nimbly with his stumps.
We looked at the passengers’ hands. They greatly resembled one another. Men’s hands, women’s hands, almost the same; heavy, the joints swollen from work, dark in hue from wrinkles stained with grease. Some of these hands clutched a book or newspaper, others, resting palm upward on knees, seemed, by their stillness, to be making a grave, simple statement. The faces, sometimes with closed eyes, also reflected this calm gravity.
The man with Pravda folded up his paper and, like a handicapped magician, stuffed it into his coat pocket. The train stopped, he got off.
“In the end, you know,” murmured Arkady, “it’s thanks to these people we can read out our rah-rah-rah-revolutionary poems and get laid using exotic fruit-flavored rubbers. Thanks to their wars. The fingers they lost…”
I made no reply, reflecting that among these elderly passengers there were doubtless some who in their youth had defended Leningrad during the siege. People under bombardment for more than two years, in freezing cold apartments, in streets dotted with corpses. And very likely working in the same factories they were still traveling to now. Accusing no one. Uncomplaining. I had always taken this resignation for a servility skillfully imposed by the regime. For the first time, in this suburban train, I thought I could discern something else in it.