The Night We Were Told Brezhnev Was Dead
by Mikhail Iossel
It was a characteristically damp and cold November morning, the third after the sixty-fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. I was nearing the end of my fourth semiweekly twenty-four hour shift as a security guard at the Roller Coaster Unit of the Krestovsky Island Amusement Sector of the Leningrad Central Park of Culture and Leisure (TsPKiO). At seven-forty, I was still fast asleep on the long and narrow leatherette couch on the second floor of the Amusement Sector’s administration cabin—the uneven, cracked black plastic-coated fabric under me; a stinking, ancient communal goatskin over me; my head propped on the pillowy lump of my rolled-up sweater—when my replacement arrived, twenty minutes ahead of schedule, and started banging on the bolted and latched cabin door downstairs. His name was Victor: a big, beefy, mean-looking fellow with a bumpy russet face, constantly chewing on a chunk of gristly raw meat and followed everywhere by a mangy black dog with spindly legs, a runny nose, and dolorous eyes. He smelled just awful. I knew from other security guards that the year before he’d spent a few months in prison for killing—by lunging on, wringing the neck of, plucking, and then cooking over an open fire and then devouring—one of the several old, people-friendly swans that swam from April through October in the narrow moat between the Amusement Sector and the rest of the park territory. The man was a piece of work.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said hoarsely. “Too many fucking thoughts. I hope you don’t mind I woke you up.” Clearly, he was not the type of man to be rebuked about anything, no matter how mildly.
“Happens to me all the time, too,” I told him, my head spinning with the previous night’s hangover (two bottles of ersatz-port with a fellow security guard from another part of the park), and then I signed off in the shift ledger without saying another word, whistling quietly under my breath the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns’s timeless opus known to every Soviet child as world’s greatest ballerina Maya Plisetskaya’s timeless performance piece “The Dying Swan.”
On the way from the Amusement Sector’s administration cabin to the bus stop, I cast a quick, fond glance at the gloomy, diplodocus-like silhouette of the city’s only, and the country’s oldest, roller-coaster, American Hills, in Russian, looming forlornly in the mist on my right. It looked perfectly unharmed, with all its faculties intact. As always in such unsettled morning moments of leaving it behind, for an instant my heart was flooded with tenderness for that stupid thing, so manifestly out of place and out of time here. I felt strong sense of spiritual kinship with it. “You be well while I’m gone, okay?” I whispered, gazing at it moist-eyed. Like me, it was all about merely existing, subsisting, just being there, stuck in one place in this unlikely remote locale and going nowhere, immobile, rooted inescapably through no will of its own. To be sure, I reminded myself with drunken pride, there were some significant differences between us, too: in addition to being its unnecessary guard, I was also a Jew, a repeated unsuccessful applicant for an exit visa from the Soviet Union —a refusenik— and a college graduate and, until recently, a young (admittedly indifferent and mediocre) engineer at a secret research institute of submarine electromagnetism; and I happened, as well, in my own modest way, to be a samizdat writer and translator and a newly minted member of The Club, the Soviet Union’s first officially registered organization of unofficial writers and poets; while that inanimate creature, the sad Leningrad roller-coaster, was none of those things. It was nothing more than itself: an antiquated amusement ride, the old American Hills, closed for the season and possessed of no desire to be anything or anywhere else… Life, life, I thought abstractly, just so as to think something in words.
Some fifteen minutes later, on a bus to the Petrogradskaya metro station, a half-hour ride, I was thinking about the reading I was going to give that night at The Club. It was to be my first there, and I felt excited, but also a little nervous. Days earlier, I had decided I would read a short excerpt from the vaguely surrealist and somewhat anti-Soviet dystopian novella I’d written on an impulse in three heady days the summer before, one narrating an entirely random, abstruse and fanciful tale of a small crew of herpetologists, or snake-milkers, gradually and irrevocably losing their minds in the mind-boggling vastness of an imaginary Central-Asian desert, and one, too, which, importantly, two months prior, had earned me the invitation to join The Club from its venerable chairman, veteran of the city’s literary underground movement and founder and coeditor of the country’s preeminent samizdat journal. Then, for some fifteen or twenty minutes, I planned to read my translations of several young American poets (Charles Simic, Robert Hass, Sharon Olds, Deborah Digges, and Michael Palmer, among others) from the thick paperback collection of new American poetry I’d found lying uselessly around on The Club’s premises, apparently left behind by some wayward member of American cultural intelligentsia, along with the much slimmer anthology of avant-garde (if that was the right term to use) American prose, called Superfiction, or The American Short Story Transformed, edited by Joe David Bellamy, which contained another text whose translation I also intended to read: the heartbreakingly beautiful story by Gilbert Sorrentino, “The Moon In Its Flight,” with its devastating final line, “Art cannot rescue anybody from anything” (Iskusstvo nikogo ni ot chego ne mozhet spasti). Finally, time-permitting, I would round out the one hour and fifteen minutes or so at my disposal with the short story I wrote a while back, while still in college, about one day in the life of a puny little Jewish kid from the outskirts of Leningrad, a third-grader inexplicably endowed with a rare and, admittedly, useless capacity for correctly spelling every word of the Russian language, all the sheer infinity of them, including the countless and indeed prevalent words whose meaning he couldn’t begin to guess, such as the fearsomely multisyllabic, foreign-rooted words culled from the thickest of Russian thesauruses. It was, to a considerable extent, an autobiographical story.
As the bus, sighing and rumbling along, wended its melancholy way through the grayness of yet another joyless, misty November morning, I also, and not for the first time, tried to sort out my thoughts and feelings concerning the unfortunate fact that, obviously, The Club owed its existence primarily to Leningrad KGB’s seemingly counterintuitive, but in reality coolly pragmatic, benevolence: such an essentially “un-Soviet” structure, an official club of unofficial people, would not have been allowed to be founded and properly registered, let alone continue receiving a steady measure of logistical support from the Leningrad Branch of the Union of Soviet Writers (the de facto literary subsidiary of the “organs”), had Leningrad KGB’s Fifth Directorate, one charged with overseeing the whole gamut of internal dissent-related issues, not concluded, in a sudden display of thinking outside the old box, that having all or the majority of them pesky samizdatchiks gathering under the same roof on a constant basis, in order to get drunk out of their minds and talk their crazy, impotently subversive talk, blabbing their mouths like there was no tomorrow, offered a much easier, more time- and energy-saving opportunity to keep tabs on the their permanently evolving illicit little schemes—of having the manuscripts of their novels or, like, sonnets or whatever smuggled abroad, usually by some idealistic, soft-hearted foreign exchange student of Russian or else some ambitious and diplomatically immunized third assistant to the fourth attaché on something-very-important at some capitalist-enemy consulate -- than the daily hassle of having to run all over the giant city in efforts to obtain the same information on each one of them underground geniuses individually. It was not all that complicated, really, and it did, of course, bother me that I was part of something facilitated by and ultimately benefitting the KGB. They were aliens to me, the evil creatures from another planet: the organs, the KGB people, onetime-ordinary human beings who for some reason had voluntarily decided to sign their hypothetical immortal souls over to the eternal forces of infinite diabolical darkness, or some such thing. They were… well, the undead among us? Sure, why not. But then, realistically speaking, without unnecessary melodrama, all of us Soviet people existed largely at the mercy of the KGB with its tacit permission or perhaps even by virtue of its disdainful oversight, with our boring little Soviet lives held aloft since birth in its monstrous paw to wax descriptive about it; so who was I to… to… I didn’t know how to finish that thought.
Before diving into the slow whirl at the entrance of the Petrogradskaya metro station, I stopped by the beer stand some fifty meters away for a small cup of warmed-up Zhigulyovskoye. Uncharacteristically—or, perhaps, so it seems to me now, through the haze of remote hindsight—there was no line in front of it. I glanced about, searching for an explanation to that oddity (if that’s what it was): everything and everyone appeared to be the same as usual, which, given the state I was in, I found to be a little strange in and of itself.
While counting out the shallow jangle of small brass coins in my cupped palm, under the beer-stand woman’s habitually hostile gaze, I felt someone’s hand tapping me lightly on the shoulder from behind. A high-pitched nasal voice then said accusingly into my back, “Young man, why are you drinking beer first thing in the morning, instead of being at work or going to one in a sober state? Don’t you have a job, or are you maybe a social parasite?”
Startled, I spun around and saw a pint-sized rodent of an old guy with a tattered and stained red satin band tied around the dirty sleeve of his ratty oversized overcoat: a druzhinnik, voluntary militia assistant, nettlesome botherer of ordinary Soviet people going about the mundane business of their lives, sometimes including that of drinking a morning cup of beer before going home after a night of sleeping in the tenebrous shadow of the city’s only American Hills. What a waste of human energy! He was staring at me with the exaggerated, almost comical severity of a self-righteous fool. I knew he wouldn’t leave me alone now, not even if I were to explain the exact nature of my so-called job to him ten times over, because in his previous life he was a goddamn blood-sucking tick and none of my words would make the slightest difference to him; and I knew, too, that if I were to try ignoring him altogether and concentrate on enjoying my beer, he’d make an ugly scene and summon, with the dirty gray plastic whistle hanging around his scrawny neck on a dirty ropey lanyard, his partner, an equally obnoxious pest (druzhinniki never walked alone) doubtless hanging around somewhere in the immediate vicinity.
“What’s it to you, old man? Screw you! Art cannot rescue anybody from anything!” I said to him, and took off briskly for the metro entry, feeling a bit displeased with myself for wasting such a beautiful line on him. The poor fool, having recovered from the initial shock, trilled his stupid helpless little whistle into the emptiness left by my departure.
Thirty-five minutes later, I emerged on the surface at my metro station: Park of Victory. In twelve more minutes, I was back home, in my cozy, densely cluttered one-room apartment. My late maternal grandparents used to live in it only very recently, too, it seemed. Taking off my shoes and my street clothes, I plopped down on the bed, face down, and fell asleep. It was about a quarter to ten in the morning.
*
Insistent phone ringing woke me up. I opened one eye and squinted at the alarm clock on the nightstand by the bed. One-thirty in the afternoon. I could’ve slept a good while longer still. My reading at The Club was not until seven. I got up, feeling groggy, unsteady on my feet, and picked up the phone, deciding for once to disregard the fact of the caller’s failure to use the admittedly childish little code, one that the KGB eavesdroppers, whether imaginary or real, certainly would have had a good imaginary or real laugh at, known to all my friends and relatives: two long rings, then hang up the phone, count to ten and redial, thus letting me know this was not someone undesirable on the other end of the line, such as the district military commandant, for instance, with an urgent inquiry about my lapsed young Army officer’s registration, or a pointlessly aggressive clerk from the Housing and Maintenance office, ZhEK, wondering when I might be kind enough to pay my phone-gas-electricity bills. Oh, but what the hell. At that instant, with my head full of fog, I felt unusually fearless. “Who is it?” I said hoarsely into the receiver. “If you’re someone wanting to speak with the person living in this apartment, he’s not here at the moment, and I have no idea when he’ll be back. I am just an acquaintance of his, visiting from Moscow, doing him a favor as his cat-sitter.”
As if on cue, my cat, a Siamese named Maya, meowed loudly in the kitchen, letting me know that in her opinion, it was high time for a feeding.
“Turn on the TV, now,” my friend SK, also The Club member and publisher and editor of the city’s only samizdat journal of foreign literary modernism and postmodernism in translation, said in a voice fairly vibrating with excitement. “And the radio, too.”
“Why? What’s happening there?” I said, yawning. “You could just tell me, no?”
“Just do it,” he said impatiently.
“OK, fine.”
Rubbing my face, I went over to the wall-mounted radio on the other side of the room and turned it on. The familiar sounds of lovely classical music filled the space: Tchaikovsky. I shuffled over to the TV, the old black-and-white Ladoga, in the opposite corner, and switched it on: two little swans, cute as buttons, were dancing there. I flipped to the second channel, then the third. Same thing there: little swans… My heart skipped a beat. Somehow, I knew right away what this meant.
“Really?” I said, returning to the phone. “Seriously? For real? Is this what I think it is?”
“Yup. Yup,” SK replied, in a giddy voice. “That’s what it is. Finally. Yes, man! There already has been an official announcement, at ten, plus many people heard about this last night, on ‘enemy voices,’ outside the city, or wherever else there’s no jamming, plus they canceled the Militia Day concert from the Kremlin last night, which of course was unprecedented and a sure-fire sign of something extraordinarily serious, so lots of people had already put two and two together. But I figured that you in your American Hills wilderness were still in the dark. This is huge, man! Immense! But wait. Wait.” He coughed into the phone a few times, indicating he was about to launch into the derisive “the organs are listening” mode. “Oh, but just listen to me! What am I even talking about? What enemy voices? Am I out of my goddamn mind? Everyone knows no decent, self-respecting, patriotic Soviet person would ever listen to those contemptible, paid capitalist liars! If I may have sounded less than crushed a minute ago, that was because of my being shocked, shell-shocked, shocked out of my mind, totally devastated, and having had a glass or two of something to soothe my nerves and un-break my heart a little, as a result. I am de… deva… stated! My friend! We’ve been, like, befallen, um, by a great tragedy, as the saying goes. We’ve been orphaned, as a nation… Yeah, that’s right: orphaned. Like goddamn motherless children.”
“Terrible, terrible!” I agreed, playing along, speaking loudly and distinctly, as if addressing a house pet or a small child. “I couldn’t even begin to tell you just how heartbroken I am. I’m like an arid desert inside right now. A desert full of venomous snakes. Yeah, that’s it. Snakes. We’ve been defanged, as a nation, so to speak.”
“Awful, just awful,” SK chimed in. “I also am extremely heartbroken. That was the right word you found. Thank you. Heartbroken. Who wouldn’t be?”
“No one wouldn’t be,” I said emphatically. “What are we going to do now? How are we going to live without . . . without . . . No, I can’t go on. Too damn heartbroken. Too hard. Tears, hot bitter tears, are constricting my throat!”
“I know, I know,” SK echoed mournfully. “You’re right: better not talk about this anymore: way too painful. Let’s change the subject: you’re reading tonight at The Club, right? Nervous?”
“A little,” I admitted. “But then, in light of . . . these new developments, maybe there won’t even be a reading tonight.”
“That’s a possible scenario,” SK agreed. “Well, we’ll see. I’ll see you there.”
I went back to bed and lay on it, facing the wall, for a long time.
Eighteen years! Eighteen years spent under that nonentity’s rule. Most of my life—almost all of it. My childhood. My youth. And now that he was gone, I felt neither jubilation nor even a fleeting twinge of condescending sadness. I’d been waiting for this day too long. I felt nothing.
*
November days are short in mad Tsar Peter’s dream city. By four o’clock, it was already pitch dark outside—and inside my apartment. Somber classical music kept playing mutedly on the radio. By six, as I walked out of my apartment building, it was darker still, it seemed: the blackness of the air was accentuated, deepened by the dimmed yellow of scattered street lanterns. There were no stars in the sky, and no moon—and there was nothing out of the ordinary about that. Everything was the same as usual. All the stores and eateries along the stretch of the Moskovsky leading to the metro were closed, but that also was par for the course. The neon slogans up on rooftops of tall buildings—The People And The Party Are One! Glory Be To The KPSU! Fly Aeroflot!—all functioned properly, more or less, with their subdued wasp-like buzzing and only a few unlit, missing letters here and there.
In the metro, too, all the passengers were their normal selves: gloomy, concerned, angry, drunk, insane-looking, lost in thought, engrossed in reading garish weekly magazines and cheap detective novels. The ruler of their and all of our lives for eighteen years, even if only half-cognizant toward the end, was dead, but one could detect neither sorrow nor excitement on people’s faces. He was dead because he no longer was alive, and that’s all there was to it.
The car was full, though not overflowing; there were no free seats, and there was nothing at all remarkable or even mildly unusual about that, either. Two middle-aged women sitting in front of the spot where I stood holding on to the overhead handrail were talking to each other, neither too loudly nor very quietly.
“He looked downright terrible, like a corpse, three days ago, on November Seventh, on top of the Tomb, barely able to wave his hand or nod his head,” one of them was saying. “It was clear as day he was out of it, completely, and didn’t really know where he was. I think they brought him a chair or something in the end, so he could sit down, and then they just led him away. When I saw him in that condition, I told my Nikolay he sure as hell was not long for this world. Everyone and their mother could tell where this was going.”
“Sad, I’m telling you, that they wouldn’t have let him retire years ago, when people say he was downright pleading with them, the Politburo, almost on his knees, sick old man like him, with a couple of strokes,” the other woman replied, shaking her head. “It’s cruel, that’s what it is; but then, on the other hand, they probably just wouldn’t know what to do without him, even if they were kind of tired of him, too. I feel sorry for him, though not really, in truth, although it sure is all the same to him now. I feel sorry for his wife, that’s who. But his daughter—she just downright raises my ire, with her… her, you know… well, you know.”
“Lovers and diamonds, diamonds and lovers and booze,” the first woman cut in angrily. “Disgusting! Don’t even get me started on her!” Then, suddenly noticing me as I leaned in toward them a tad too close for her comfort, she gave me a baleful look and said off into space, enunciating every word, “Too great for words is the tragedy that has visited us all today.”
Two routinely drunk, unkempt old geezers of indeterminate age—angled toward each other on steps directly below me on the Chernyshevskaya metro station’s upward-moving escalator—were continuing a conversation begun, apparently, some time before.
“… but what really saddens me is that women don’t smile at me anymore,” one of them said, hiccuping. “Although, to be honest, they never smiled at me in the first place.”
“Well, if I was a normal, regular-minded woman, I wouldn’t be smiling at you, either,” the other one replied. “Not while you’re still alive, at any rate. Speaking of which . . . Fucking death, man. Huh? Well, good for him, though. That’s where he belongs: nowhere. In the earth. In the dust. In open fucking cosmos. He doesn’t matter no more. Who do you think’s going to be next? Andropov? Or maybe that semi-dead fucker Chernenko?”
“Who cares,” the first man said with a sigh. “We have our own deaths to worry about. Let’s face it, our lives are practically over, and we haven’t even fucking started living yet, if we look truth in the eye. Oh life! Were you just a cruel joke played upon me by the universe? Oh death, don’t take me yet, my life has been one big mistake, give me another chance!” There was a second’s pause, and then the two burst out in a fit of drunken, cackling, coughing laughter.
*
Five minutes later, I was at the entrance to The Club: an unadorned scuffed door leading into a long semi-basement flat with many rooms in a half-occupied building two doors down from the US Consulate General. As always, approaching it, I had a mixed feeling of a fear knowing my every move was being watched and a timid thrill caused by the notion that I was someone consequential enough to be worthy of the organs’ observation, even if only a stationary and automatic, strictly impersonal one. Two burly, bulky, heftily clad armed militiamen of forbidding disposition⎯that is, the crack KGB operatives dressed up as ones⎯were always stationed in front of the Consulate: one inside a large steel booth, painted white, with an almost certainly bullet-proof window in its side, and the other standing still or walking to and fro a few steps away, at times speaking quietly into the massive walkie-talkie strapped to his shoulder. No regular, ordinary Soviet citizen was allowed to get past that booth, let alone attempt to enter the Consulate, that single spot of American territory in Leningrad, without a previously scheduled appointment with one of its relevant US personnel. It was, of course, bugged to the hilt inside and surveilled around the clock from the outside. Late at night, so others told me, the tiny glowing dots of the KGB’s infrared cameras in the apparently unpopulated building directly across the street produced a hauntingly lovely sight; and I seemed to have witnessed as much myself on one occasion, albeit while seriously inebriated. And so, automatically, simply by dint of The Club’s sheer proximity to the Consulate, along with the latter’s staff and all of its visitors, into the organs’ field of ceaseless vigilance fell also the near-always drunk and often borderline-derelict unofficial writers and poets ambling in and literally falling out of The Club’s always-open doors⎯those asocial narcissistic samizdatchiks, in the surveillants’ view, with their insane anti-Soviet talk and constant illegal determination, by a seemingly inexhaustible succession of ever-new inventive stratagems, to have their doubtless timeless, Nobel-caliber masterpieces smuggled abroad⎯a nice little bonus for the organs, if perhaps a somewhat superfluous one, since the latter had their informants on the inside, in addition to their official representatives, The Club’s KGB “curators”: two reasonably young and moderately sophisticated men with cute birdlike nom de plumes, who would be regularly visiting the premises and engaging in soulful conversations about literature and life in general with the loose-lipped habitués of the place.
The Club’s door, surprisingly, was locked. I’d only seen it open before. Some twenty or so people, by my quick count, were milling about outside -- SK and two of my other close friends among them. It was a more modest turnout than I’d expected, perhaps overoptimistically so; but then, this was not an ordinary evening—and still, its strangeness notwithstanding, several well-known underground writers, whose work had appeared virtually in every samizdat magazine of note in the country, had shown up. One of them, RK—he of the large Assyrian beard and fierce stare of a wild mare of the night—nodded at me encouragingly. A little off to the side, three young women were speaking among themselves in rapid Lithuanian: a friend of a Vilnius friend named Vita, a philologist in Leningrad for a month of research for her PhD (“candidate’s dissertation”) at the State Public Library, and two of her colleagues, or friends, presumably. I liked Vita: she was smart and pretty, and she hailed from the remote and mysterious land of Ciurlionis and the best basketball players in the Soviet Union. Lithuania, where I’d only been once before—some twelve hours by train from Leningrad—had long fascinated me, and not just because it represented both the literal and figurative end of any ordinary Soviet citizen’s journey in westerly direction, the metaphorical anteroom of the unimaginable and forbidden Western world I was unlikely ever to see, realistically speaking—but, rather crucially, too, because it had been the ground zero of the Holocaust, what with all but a tiny percent of Lithuanian Jews murdered during the first years of WWII: something I and many other Soviet Jews did know, if without quite knowing how we knew it, even though they never wrote about this in newspapers or magazines, needless to say, and the school history textbooks made no mention of it whatsoever, or of that very word, Holocaust, unfamiliar to the absolute majority of Soviet people. (And the very word “Jew,” incidentally, was one that anyone, and especially the Jews themselves, was supposed to be embarrassed by a little, ashamed of a bit, sort of, as if having been born a Jew in the USSR was a sin . . . which it was, actually, in the eyes of the country’s rulers and many millions of its people, even though we were nominal Jews, strictly speaking⎯Jews in designation only, so to speak, since hardly any one of us knew the first thing about Jewish history or a single word of the Jewish language, which was called Hebrew and was banned from private study, under penalty of law, and… But enough. This is a needless digression.)
Plus, again, Vita was lovely and smart and fun to talk to. She had a charming accent in Russian. I liked her.
I waved at her, and she saw me and waved back, with a cute conspiratorial smile.
“The door is locked!” SK shouted merrily, throwing his rumpled fedora hat up in the air and then almost-catching it. It was clear he had been coping with the tragic news of the day by drowning it in alcohol. “That’s weird! Who’s got the keys?”
“I’ve got the keys,” said, quietly and authoritatively, materializing out of the darkness around the guard’s booth in front of the US Consulate and coming over to where I stood one of The Club’s two primary KGB curators: an artistic-looking, subtle-featured man in his mid-thirties, whose nom de plume, as mentioned earlier, was derived from the name of Russia’s favorite bird of prey. He liked to visit The Club unannounced now and then, in order to discuss the latest literary developments abroad with finely cultured, if often wasted off their asses, people in the know of such developments. Frequently he would complain about the uncouthness of his Fifth Directorate colleagues, and especially those from the parallel, Second KGB Directorate, one in charge of counter-intelligence and internal political control: bruisers, hoodlums, lowbrow individuals, completely uninterested in literature and incapable of telling Philip Roth from Mark Rothko; no one to discourse with about things of intellectual nature among them! Just about the only fully sober person on The Club’s premises, he would talk little, preferring to listen to what his interlocutors had to say. He liked it when people told him stuff. He was a very good, close, sympathetic listener. Of course, being a lover of literature and on friendly terms with many of The Club members did not in any way preclude him from occasionally having some of the latter beaten up, purely for pedagogical or prophylactic purposes, by the organs-employed former boxers gone to seed and other such skilled scumbags; but it was understood by everyone to be part of his job, so there were no hard feelings. He just knew how to compartmentalize work and pleasure.
“I took the keys,” he repeated, “given the special, unprecedented tragic national circumstances of the day.” And he peered at me with exaggerated intensity, suppressing a sardonic smile.
“I see,” I said, just to say something.
“I haven’t received any concrete directives to cancel the reading,” he continued, “even though our entire nation is in spontaneous deep mourning, but it hasn’t been pronounced an official nationwide situation just yet, so it would have to be my call, for the time being. Of course, it’s a bit unfortunate that it’s you, of all people, scheduled to read tonight: a refusenik, would-be traitor to the motherland and all that. You know what I mean, as an object of attention of two directorates at once, which actually is an unfortunate situation, because everyone would have preferred if you just made up your damn mind, as to whether you’re leaving the country or participating in samizdat literature. Well, but that’s beside the point now. Topic for another conversation. The point is, you should be the last person reading tonight... But then, come to think of it, there could also be a nice, cool, counterintuitive and rebellious, in-your-face quality to that, too: some subversive Freemasonic-like frisson, rather in keeping with The Club’s nonconformist spirit. So—fine, let’s do it, until further notice. But there’ll be some ground rules, still, in view of the reality we’re in today. First off, who are those foreigners over there? What are they doing here?” He pointed with his chin at Vita and her friends, who kept on chatting animatedly between themselves. “There shouldn’t be any foreigners from capitalist countries tonight. Not tonight. Out of the question. Non-negotiable.” He paused, listening. “What language is that, anyway? Portuguese?”
“They are from Lithuania,” I said. “Lithuanians they are. Our, Soviet people.”
He chortled, cocking his head to one shoulder. “You, of all people, should be one making this determination: who is or isn’t a true Soviet citizen. And if you think they, Lithuanians, like us or being part of us, in spite of all their basketball glory and their great film stars, then I have a bridge across the Neva to sell you. They hate our guts, deep down. They fought us tooth and nail, for many years, after we liberated them from fascists. Haven’t you seen Nobody Wanted to Die?.. But fine. That too is beside the point now.” He waved his gloved hand dismissively. “Lithuanians will be fine. Unimportant. What’s more important is, what are you going to read tonight? I must warn you: no Americans. I know you love them, translate them, love your precious America, which you may or may not ever see with your own eyes, but⎯tonight is not the night for them. My superiors would be unhappy if they found out that this tragic night was sullied by dirty American-ness. It’s just not . . . Well, you understand.” He cut himself off with a lopsided grin pointedly belying the humdrum severity of his words.
We stood in silence for a few seconds, gazing at each other. “What’s the matter?” He said ironically at length. “That throws you in for a loop, my friend? You have nothing to read if you can’t read your American stuff? Without America you’re nothing? No offense, comrade, but that’s pathetic. In any event, you were also going to read your own old story, weren’t you, about that wondrous little Jewish speller? You still can read it. Your anti-Soviet nonsense snake novella won’t do, but that story will. It’s a little silly, of course, but . . . At least there is no mention of America in it.”
I stared at him wordlessly. He winked at me. “You want to know how I know all that? Well, I have my own little ways. God didn’t grant me talent for fiction writing, but he did instead give me the ability to read them writers’ minds. It’s not much, but it’s something.” He patted me on the shoulder. Involuntarily, I recoiled.
“But how would they know?” I said.
“Who?” He frowned at me. “What?”
“Your superiors. How would they know what I read tonight?
“Ah!” He threw his head back and let out a hearty laugh. Everyone turned to look at him in cheerful incomprehension. “Oh, they’ll know, don’t you worry about them,” he said, chuckling. “They’ll know. They too have their mysterious little ways about them. Let’s just say, art cannot rescue anybody from anything. Right? Am I right or . . .”
At that precise moment, suddenly and all at once, the lanterns went out all along the street, as well as on the observable part of Chernyshevsky Prospekt a stone’s throw away—and everywhere else within one’s field of vision, in every direction. Darkness enveloped the great city. It was as if a giant unseen hand had covered it, like a cage full of parakeets and cockatiels, with thick black cloth, though one still punctured by a myriad of tiny, intensely yellow window lights. A hush fell over the city. Everyone among our minute gathering stopped talking, too. Silence engulfed us.
“Well, then, that settles it,” the curator said, in a tone of palpable relief, from the newly condensed darkness next to me. “The decision has been made for us⎯and, as always, it’s the only right one. I was half-expecting this to happen. A mourning is a mourning. There can be no half-mournings. So then, no literary readings tonight by strange, asocial elements, by refuseniks and enemies of the people—no any such foolishness. Now all of us —the bad and the very bad—will go home and mourn.” He chuckled. “We’ll go and mourn the hell out of this night. In darkness. In solitude. In heartbreak. Disperse, disperse, unbeautiful losers.”
*
The metro was still working, though its entrance no longer was illuminated. Dim figures were moving around in the dark, silently. Somehow, inexplicably, even in the moonless, starless night, the as-yet-unfrozen ink-black puddles dotting the pavement still managed to hold starlight and reflect the ephemera of moon-glow, and everyone still could see (if not know, exactly) where one was going. We—six or seven of us, SK and others, including Vita and her friends—were headed to my place. SK had three bottles of Bulgarian red in his decrepit shoulder satchel, and someone else said he had something else along the same lines, plus we could count also on buying a bottle or two of vodka from night-shift cabdrivers: this had, of late, become a thing with them, their risky side-business, in the absence of any legal outlets for a thirst-addled Soviet citizen to purchase bottled alcohol at any time past seven in the evening. “Tonight, they might be more cautious than usual,” SK mused aloud, walking toward the metro station next to me. “There could be an extra number of cops and druzhinniki out. But, then again, maybe not. How can any decent national mourning be conducted without vodka? There is no way, what with there being nothing on TV and dark and cold outside. What else is there to do but drink? Cops and druzhinniki are people, too.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” I replied.
“You know what?” SK said after a pensive pause. “I think I’m going to miss the old bastard. Seriously. Just a little. Funny, isn’t it? For years you just can’t wait for him to croak, because—well, obviously… and when he finally does, it kind of hits you out of nowhere, the fact that we’ll never see the poor crazy half-dead buzzard again. You know? Like Edgar Poe’s raven: never-friggin’-more. After eighteen years. Never. That’s a scary word.”
We walked into the deep dusk of the Chernyshevskaya metro station in silence, passed through the tourniquets, and proceeded on to downward-moving escalator. It was clear to every one of us that things would be different now, that this was the beginning of something large, whose implications for our little Soviet lives we could not yet foresee or fully appreciate.
“I don’t know,” I said, more to myself, just in order to hear the sound of my own voice, than in delayed response to him. “I don’t feel much of anything right now. It’s strange. I wish I did, but I don’t. I wonder why that is. I’ll figure it out later. I guess I’m feeling happy. I don’t know. I feel nothing.”
But then, I don’t remember what I said then.
I looked at my watch, its face gleaming dully in the dark. It was exactly twelve hours since I’d been awakened that morning.
Photo cover by Julia Dragan