Back from the dressmaker’s, hovering at various heights before our submarine mirror, eaten away by rust and time, she announced: “On the Fourth of July I shall go to the Yank reception ... the military attaches can all salute me....” “Watch your language,” I said in alarm. “Oh yes,” reaching behind her back for the zip, “there’s an article in the bag over there by that what’s-his-name—Pogoreltsev—who goes to the church at Sokol.”
Professor Pogoreltsev, who had done fifteen years in the camps, was the author of a scandalous book, Between Fear and Fear. The book, which had only got into print by a fluke, and was hastily withdrawn from all libraries, was officially about the culture of Tibet; in it the author said that the Christo-Piscean age came to an end in the mid-sixties, and that the Age of Aquarius now beginning would have to find some new symbolic realization. We all knew about that: the signs of the Zodiac, rising counterclockwise; the Magi, last representatives of Djinns and Aladdin’s lamps, at Christ’s cradle; the new star above them; the next two thousand years; Aquarius, the “man-angel” ...but no one knew how all this would begin to manifest itself. The professor reckoned that the appearance of people who could fly was to be expected, that it was no accident, that there was no need to fear the country would really be sealed off—he meant the bell jar. “There’s no way they can keep us under glass!” he quipped. But the most important thing Pogoreltsev wrote was that “even within the Kremlin walls, here and there people are starting to lift off from the waxed parquet, and any day now we may witness an extraordinary happening, when high above the stars of the Kremlin, so inauspicious for our age, will fly the black figure of an eminence grise and the chimes on Spassky Tower will ring in a brand new age....”
This article got the left intelligentsia all excited. Hope for a new surge of liberalism seized Moscow like a fever. The editor of The Mirror, the most widely-read underground monthly, wrote a letter to the editorial board of Novy Mir proposing that they join forces on the threshold of the new life. The painter Odnoglazov exhibited a huge canvas at the Manege: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Suvorov, the actor Smoktunovsky, even Vasilij Vasilievich Rozanov—all, from various quarters of the cloud-wreathed heavens, were converging on the Cathedral of Vassilij Blazhennij (Basil the Blessed). Katenka said it looked like a witches’ sabbath.
From my omniscient friend, as I already mentioned, I got the address of the top secret institute where I figured they had to be holding Nikolai Petrovich. During rush hours, when the streets were jammed with sullen crowds, I would affect a businesslike air and walk briskly past the faceless building. It was again spring, here and there in the grey mass of humanity you caught a fleeting smile, it was nice to hear the scrape of people’s shoes on the pavements now free of snow, there was a smell of sun-warmed dust, and from somewhere far away a mild, disturbing wind blew in upon the city. The lower stories of the spellbound building were faced with granite, and there were very solid-looking bars on all the windows. Higher up these disappeared, and the topmost story, with a balcony running all the way round and the blunt snouts of TV cameras poking out, was wide open—a trap for idiots. Below, of course, a grey Volga was doing time on the street across from the front entrance, with four heavies inside. The front doors bore the modest black-and-gold legend: “Committee on Vibrations.” The people going in and out through these doors were either as unobtrusive as mice, or in a state of feverish excitement. After a week of surreptitiously observing the general to-ing and fro-ing of officials, I picked out one seamed but still quite decent-looking face and, very nearly making a fatal mistake, set off behind the velvet coat as it mingled wearily with the crowd. In a nearby side street, lined with rotting shacks like broken-down furniture put out for sale, I was already bracing myself to pronounce the ritual phrase “Excuse me,” when suddenly I felt rather than heard a bulldoggy panting at my back and, without pausing for thought, took off like a rocket into the clear pink sky, and flew off at great speed. All I managed to see out of the corner of my watering eye were two men standing in the narrow street below, their raincoats blown open by the wind, heads thrown back and arms outstretched. It was a long time since I had last flown over open spaces, and I had grown unused to it. My head swam, and in a matter of seconds I skipped over the cornice of a twelve-story building equipped with something very much like a machine gun nest. But I had to return to life just as rapidly as I had leapt out of it. It was a dormer window in one of Stalin’s skyscrapers that saved me. There was no glass, and I flew inside with nothing worse than a scratched cheek. It smelled of dust, and enormous portraits of leaders looked down at me from every wall. Whoever was in charge of the place was clearly guilty of brazen dereliction, since he kept not only the current bigwigs, whose portraits had to be displayed on public holidays, but also the long-since superannuated. Pushing open a door thick with the dust of ages and stepping out onto a stair, I turned round—the “Kremlin mountaineer”—was casting a sidelong glance at his bald-headed successor.
Back on the street, wiping the blood from my cheek with a handkerchief, I saw the obscene dragon-fly shape of a helicopter flying impermissibly low, darkening the sky.
A few days later I received in the mail a modest slip of paper indicating that at 11 a.m. on Tuesday next I was to report to Inspector N. at such-and-such an address; it was signed with a flourish. The address, needless to say, was the very same. I did not know what to do. Katenka, fragrant, crazy Katenka, who these days was always carefully groomed and dressed, who even had her hair done and used French perfume bought one lucky day in a Ladies on Petrovka—Katenka was hanging in the corner, in a patch of sunlight, and the smoke from her cigaret traced patterns in the still air. A Wagner record—the Ride of the Valkyries—had just finished playing, and the needle ran on idly in the groove. “Don’t go,” said Katenka, “simply don’t go. They have no right. They don’t give you a clue what it’s about, or who they represent, instead of the inspector’s name there’s just an initial.” I stood beneath her for a moment, raised my face, rubbed against her hem, kissed her slender ankle. Something was happening. We both felt it. Something was bearing down on us from afar. I decided to go. But if Katenka was even then meditating my flight, my fear was that I might lose her.
So I went. I said, to hell with it, and went. I did, however, phone the one man I knew with connections in high places, explained when I was going and where. I had the idiotic illusion .that if anything happened to me he might be able to help, through his father, the General Secretary’s personal interpreter from Bengali. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder how often the General Secretary met with Bengalis.
Katenka, swaying in the doorway, said: “This isn’t goodbye, you hear?” and I set off.
Of course, I wound up at the “Committee on Vibrations,” but through a different entrance. The sign on the door, too, was different. Believe it or not, what it said—this time on a bit of cardboard, admittedly, as if only temporary, and I like a fool even thought it might be meant for me!—was: “NON-BORING-CASES: RECEPTION” and some room number. The inspector’s name, too, was scrawled beneath: Nikakov. No mention of forename or patronymic. The porter, wearing some special gear that looked more military than any actual uniform, called up the inspector, having first taken away my passport. While he was telephoning, with his back to me, I surveyed a portrait of the leader standing on the brink of a precipice: below, in the valley, lay a vast sea-girt city. It looked as if any moment the leader would either take flight, or drop like a stone. The skirts of his army greatcoat were already flung wide. There was the sound of a steel door opening, and the inspector was bearing down on me, his little grey eyes already fixed on me from afar. He was on the small side, roundish, there didn’t seem anything special about him. He wore a thin, crooked smile, the sort people used in the old days when screwing in a lorgnette. “Nikakov,” he said, not, thank God, offering me his hand. Right at the door, with its row of illuminated buttons, he suddenly rounded on me and gave me a penetrating stare. I naturally lowered my gaze. Quick as a wink he spun round again and pressed one of the buttons. The door slid back. We walked down long dimly lit corridors. The floor was covered with a soft plastic material of a dark cherry color. They say that when Professor Pogoreltsev got roughed up a bit somewhere around here, then taken off to his cell, he left behind no alarming trail of blood spots—the floor covering absorbed everything without trace.