There was a bench by the wall at the end of the
dacha’s grounds, overlooking a wheat field. Sometimes tourists came walking
along the field-path, and wanted to have their photos taken with him, when they
found the former First Secretary sitting there. Nobody was on the path today.
There was just the grey heat of August, and himself sitting in his shirt and
his hat, with his shortwave radio and the tape recorder his son had given him
to record his memoirs. Kava the rook was scratching at the ground by his feet.
He had expected, when they first sacked him from the Presidium, that he would
at least be allowed to help with the Party work at the lowest level, back in
the most local cells, or committees, or whatever they were called nowadays. He
ought to know the name but the org chart had changed so many times while he was
living up in the high, fruit-bearing canopy of the Party. He had just had a
nostalgic memory of the way the meetings had been, at the beginning, in some
raw-built concrete room under a bare bulb, with a newly-literate secretary
stumbling proudly through the big words of the agenda; and he had hoped that
he’d find something like that again, if they let him join in once more with the donkey work of
painting May Day banners, and giving speeches in lunchrooms, and visiting
kindergartens, and expounding Pravda
editorials to workers at shift-ends.. (Make them laugh, that was the secret.)
But none of that had happened. The word had gone out: he was untouchable.
Nobody was to go near. Nobody was to speak to him, write to him, phone him; and
though now and again it would be made distinctly clear that his former colleagues
were still thinking about him, still including him in their calculations, he
never learned about it directly. The consequences would filter down, in some
little change of regimen he lived under, or in a favor done for his son.
So the days stretched out, extraordinarily long and
extraordinarily empty. HE had gardened like crazy at first. Laying out long
ambitious vegetable beds, pruning and composting from dawn till dusk, except
when Nina Petrovna called him to meals – but it grew old, after a while. And
you couldn’t fill a mind with such things. Before, whenever he doubted, he had
worked. Whenever he had been troubled by a memory, he had worked, telling
himself that the best answer to any defect in the past must be a remedy in the
future. The future had been his private solution as well as a public promise.
Working for the future made the past tolerable, and therefore the present. But
now no one wanted his promises. The
hours gaped. There was too much time to think, and no means to lose the
thoughts again in action. He couldn’t rid
himself of what he thought now. Little by little, in the most undisciplined
way, things he had never wanted to remember drifted up from the depths; foul
stuff, past hours and minutes it did nobody any god to recall, leaving their
proper places in oblivion and rising up into the mind, like muck stirred up
from bottom of a pond to stain the clean water above.
He did his best to keep his thoughts in order, for self-pity would be
disgusting, and he had the example of Nina Petrovna’s Bolshevik calm always
before him. If she could manage the change in their lives, the change in her
duties, without ever once complaining, so could he, surely. He could repair his
mental filters and get through each day. But he understood now why, according
to the rumor, that foul-mouthed block of beef Frol Kozlov should have ended
upon his deathbed, calling for a priest. God forbid that he himself should ever
be so weak: but he could see now the appeal of the idea of being purged of it
all, of it all somehow being taken magically away, so you could leave this life
as innocent as you entered it. It was this damnable idleness, that was what it
was. Klozlov too must have lain in bed in the months after his stroke, with
nothing to do but think. Perhaps he should have visited him. Too late for that;
too late for anything but to haul himself onward through the days. Sometimes
the struggle in his head seemed so disconnected from the eventless world around
him that it felt as if the whole thing, the whole bloody history, the whole
vast country out there beyond the wheat field, might have been a dream of his,
one of those particularly intricate and oppressive fever dreams whose parts you
struggle over and over to put into order, yet never can; as if there had never
been a Soviet Union at all , except in his head, only this field of Russian
wheat.
It was worse if he was stupid enough ever to watch a war film on the giant
television receiver in the living room, still with the engraved plate under the
screen declaring that it was a birthday gift ‘from your colleagues in the
Central Committee and the Council of Ministers.’ Knowing what they did to him,
he never meant to look; yet somehow the tidy heroics drew him in, seeming to
offer a sort of ease, a chance to be as comfortably proud of the past as the
film. And there were things to be
proud of, after all, about the war. All those brave boys they had bludgeoned on
towards the enemy - well, the bravery had been as real as the bludgeoning; real
enough to make you weep. And they had rid the world of a great evil. That was
true. While he was actually watching, he felt only a veteran’s mild,
containable annoyance at the things the director had got wrong. It was later
that it would all turn poisonous: in the night, in the still solitary center of
the night. He would dream all the vile detail of war that the film had let out,
and when he awoke, beside the steady
breathing of Nina Petrovna, he would find the images he had dreamed of still
vivid in his mind’s eye; and hoisting up unstoppably behind them, lifted from
the murk as if on hooks, out would come other memories. Behind the picture of
the piece of human gut frozen into the path to the forward bunker in Stalingrad,
like mottled brown piping, the groaning trees in the the Western Ukraine in ’45,
when the NKVD hangmen had been at work, and the sight through an incautiously
opened door in ’37 where an interrogator had been demonstrating the
possibilities of a simple steel ruler, and the starveling child vomiting grass
during collectivization. And more; and worse.
So much blood. And only one justification for it, Only one reason it could have
been all right to have done such things, and aided their doing: if it had all
been a prologue, only the last spasms in the death of the old, cruel world, and
the birth of the kind new one. But without the work it was so much harder to
believe. Without the work the future had no heft to keep the past at bay. And
the world went on the same, so it seemed, unchanged, unredeemed, un-transfigured.
The same things went on happening, the same old necessities bit just a hard. The
garden came no closer, where the lion would lie down with the lamb and could
play with criticism, after dinner, if they a mind to. Today the radio was reporting that Budapest
had come around again, just like the time he had sent the tanks in; only this
time it was Prague, this time it was the Czechs who needed the fraternal am
across the throat to keep them in line. Cheering on the streets, said the radio.
Everywhere the workers welcoming the soldiers. Oh yes. before Prague, Budapest;
before Budapest, East Berlin. It all happened over and over again. Over and over
and over, with the garden at history’s end scooting ahead, forever out of
reach, as much of a justification as it had ever been, and as little of one. He
fumbled with the tape machine, and found the RECORD key his son had showed him.
‘Paradise’, he told the wheat field in baffled fury, ‘is a place where people want
to end up, not the place they run from. What kind of socialism is that? What kind
of shit is that, when you have to keep people in chains? What kind of social
order? What kind of paradise?’
He pressed STOP. Covered his mouth with his hand. And then, since he was tired
of fear, of feeling it and of causing it, the retired minster sat very still on
the bench by the field. A little wind came arrowing across the wheat and swayed
the birches over his head. And the leaves of the trees said: can it be otherwise?
Three thousand kilometers east it was already night, but the same wind was blowing, stirring the dark
branches of pines around the upstairs window where Leonid Vitalevich is sitting
by himself, optimizing the manufacture of steel tubes. Five hundred producers.
Sixty thousand consumers. Eight hundred thousand allocation orders to be issued
per year. But it would all work out if he could persuade them to measure the
output in the correct units. The hard light of creation burns within the
fallible flesh; outshines it, outshines the disappointing world, the world of
accident and tyranny and unreason; brighter and brighter, glaring stronger and stronger
till the short man with square spectacles can no longer be seen, only the
blue-white radiance that fills the room. And when the light fades the flesh is
gone, the room empty. Years pass. The Soviet Union falls. The dance of
commodities resumes. And the wind in the trees of Aklademgorodok says: can it
be otherwise? Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford.
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