In this excerpt from part one of the novel, Misha Gvirtsman, a student at the Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History in Moscow, faces the threat of expulsion from the Institute, after having been wrongly accused of harassing a female student. A meeting of the student body has been convened so that the complaint brought against Misha can be discussed and acted upon.      

Pages 50-59.

Someone had forced her to make the allegation, he rightly surmised – but whose toes had he trodden on, to make them want to do that?

            “Comrades,” said Draganov in a high-pitched, scoffing voice, stepping out onto the podium. “I asked you to gather here today so that we could respond as a matter of urgency to a complaint brought by Komsomol member Miss Krapivina, the widow...or rather, the girlfriend of our student Nikolai Tuzeyev, who was killed in battle near Suoyarvi. Miss Krapivina was subjected to harassment of the rudest form on the part of one of our students, one of our comrades” – he paused, just long enough for everyone to wonder, in horror: It wasn’t me, was it?! No, don’t be daft – not guilty even in thought, let alone deed! – “Mikhail Gvirtsman.”

There was a sharp intake of breath around the auditorium – or rather, the release of it, in a collective sigh of relief: no-one imagined Gvirtsman could have done anything violent, and consequently, there was no cause for alarm. Misha started smiling with shame, blushed, and suppressed a desire to take a bow. A fellow called Soifert even winked at him. This might all come to nothing, it really might. 

“I am not going to ask Komsomol member Krapivina to share details of the circumstances. Take my word for it, they took place, I have studied the situation. We shall listen to what Comrade Gvirtsman has to say, and he will set it all out to us in person. I propose that we then express our views on the essence of the matter.”

“How can we talk about the essence?” people shouted out from their seats. “We didn’t see anything!”

“Gvirtsman should be given a pat on the back!” someone shouted from their seat in a facetious voice. “He doesn’t pay women enough attention, it’s insulting!”

“I should like to call upon you to take this matter seriously,” Draganov intoned, as if preparing to turn this kangaroo court into a farce at any moment. “Comrade Krapivina feels she has been insulted!”

“Let’s hear Krapivina’s side of the story!” a clamour of voices demanded. 

“I don’t know, comrades, whether she would feel comfortable...Are you willing to speak, Comrade Krapivina?” Draganov asked courteously.

“Yes, I am,” Valya said, and she got to her feet. “I’d prefer not to come up to the front though!”

“Of course,” Draganov nodded, “of course.”

“On the third,” said Valya, then she fell silent. “Of this...of the present…year,” she went on, “we were at Klara Nechaev’s place. Everyone had had a bit to drink. No-one was drinking heavily though.”

A murmur of approval rippled around the auditorium once again.

“Always the way, when there isn’t enough alcohol,” the same wit as before shouted out. 

“A few individuals were out of control, though, and then Gvirtsman,” Valya said, and then she fell silent again. “While people were dancing…he took the liberty…there have never been any ties between us at all. I haven’t let anyone so much as...as you know. But Gvirtsman, all of a sudden...he didn’t give me any warning about anything.”

“What was he playing at!” a female voice cried out – Sasha Brodskaya, Misha reckoned.

“And then it happened,” Valya muttered, haltingly. “He tried to kiss me, I pulled away. He tried to hug me, I pulled back further. People noticed, it caught their attention. I don’t know what they must have thought of me. I wanted to give him a slap, but I stopped myself. He got the message without that being necessary. And since I think that it’s immoral, I’d like to see him censured. Censured by everyone.”

“She’s an outright deviationist if you ask me,” Poletaev whispered to Misha, leaning back over his chair.

“Well comrades, you have now heard the whole story and you may express your views,” Draganov suggested. 

After raising her hand like a schoolgirl and not waiting to be given permission, Golubeva stood up, all red in the face and jerky in her movements, a slightly putrid smell forever issuing from her mouth. Misha was convinced she was about to speak out in his defence, and he felt ashamed at having recalled her bad breath.

“I can hear people sniggering right now,” Golubeva started saying, scarcely able to hold back her sobs. “And yet, comrades, I don’t know what there is to laugh about. It stems from the patriarchal way of life, this disrespect for women, and all this talk about how if a woman says ‘no’, she really means ‘yes’. Regrettably, I see these phenomena here among us, too. Here, where we ought, one would think, to be experiencing a new way of life, in the twenty-third year of the revolution, we are witnessing the most unbridled shamelessness. It’s not even a petty bourgeois phenomenon, it’s lumpenism, comrades. And the idea that a so-called poet should take the liberty of…I for one never saw that coming. But if you think about it, comrades, I did see it coming. I ought to have seen it coming, because I keep seeing manifestations of this sort of thing. I know that a lot of girls are simply too ashamed to make allegations. But as I see it, there is nothing to be ashamed of!”

“Down with shame!” the self-appointed jester called out – but no-one laughed: things had taken a serious turn.          

            “Allow me,” said Kruglov, a serious young man, and aptly named since he did indeed have round cheeks[1], and looked like Delvig – apathetic, but capable of sudden brusqueness. “The way I see it, comrades,” he said, running his hand through his hair, “we have somewhat, er, strayed into a sphere that is not ours to explore. One can go back as far as Engels, who warned against putting people’s private lives up to scrutiny.”

“Where did he say that?” someone asked from their seat. Misha suspected that Engels had not made any such warning and that such an idea had never even occurred to him – he couldn’t possibly have imagined an event like this twenty-three years into the dictatorship of the proletariat – but Kruglov could cite most of the useful quotations, and if really pressed, he would have been able to invent the requisite passage.

“In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” Kruglov declared, rapping out every syllable. “He directly states that matters from people’s private lives should not be examined at public gatherings. Morality is not something that is formulated based on a majority share of the vote. I was not, so to speak, present at the time, I was not in the room, so to speak. It seems to me that comrade Krapivina would have been well-advised to have discussed the situation with Gvirtsman in person, perhaps even given him the slap that she so pusillanimously refrained from giving him, and then we wouldn’t need to be wasting time today denouncing a kiss – a kiss that, as far as one can tell, didn’t even take place anyway.”

Kruglov was a popular fellow, and a few of the students even applauded his contribution. You could see from the look on his face that he could get away with being like that, that he had been given permission; one can always tell when someone feels they have permission to do as they please, even if that permission was given to them by no-one but themselves. And after that, the whole thing might have fizzled out, because that was the outcome Draganov himself wanted – Misha could tell. He was already getting ready to summarize the proceedings, give him a reprimand, call on everyone to redouble their efforts to behave appropriately, and so on and so forth. But at that moment Nikitin stood up, and set in motion a chain of events which, even now, Misha could not recall without feeling a sense of revulsion. 

He could never have expected such a thing of Nikitin (he was no Golubeva, after all). Nikitin was a twitchy, anaemic, spineless fellow, with clammy hands and a nervous tick. Everyone disliked him, but they did so the way people dislike a significant phenomenon, one that leaves you with no choice but to put up with it. He was writing something, a work that was eternally unfinished, but, it was rumoured, remarkable. He had read Joyce. Misha had once read a bit of Joyce in an edition of International Literature and understood that it was art for the top ten thousand, and, in the grand scheme of things – of no real use to anyone. Nikitin was always coming out with stupid utterances, but making them sound deep and meaningful. Misha’s attitude towards him was one of forbearance. Nikitin was sort of a prime candidate to fail in every subject, the most vulnerable and pitiful of all the students on campus, but that pity was the very thing that protected him better than any special patronage would have done. It was as if everyone was afraid of crushing him completely. And so it was inconceivable that a blow should be struck by Nikitin – who was he to talk?! – although Misha immediately saw the flawless logic of it: Nikitin had to deflect attention away from himself and, at any cost, make someone else the odd one out. 

And so, adjusting his spectacles incessantly with his sticky thumb and forefinger, he began by saying that “it is all well and good to have a laugh, but the reason for doing so, in this case, is no laughing matter. I shall not go into the women’s issue now, private matters, all that malarkey. But there is a category of people among us who are always sneering. I have personally heard our comrade Gvirtsman, I have heard him on several occasions, making fun of students who are, probably, less well-informed. What can one expect, Gvirtsman has lived in Moscow, he’s the son of a doctor, I believe, he had the opportunity to study at an excellent school. But the point of our institution is to teach those who are less knowledgeable and have not had such good schooling, and when has Gvirtsman ever educated anyone? To whom has he offered help? I have only heard him, among a crowd of other equally condescending alumni of Moscow schools, making fun of provincials, including comrade Tuzeyev, who is no longer with us. And it may be,” at this point Nikitin glanced up and looked straight at Misha, and it was the look of a triumphant cobra just before it launches itself at its prey – “it may be that comrade Tuzeyev’s verse was indeed slightly less than perfect. Not like that of Gvirtsman, for instance, who has mastered the technical aspects of poetry. He has mastered them, let us admit that. Let’s give him his due. But he has nothing to say, for he has seen nothing of life and has no wish to do so. And when Tuzeyev, whose verse, I repeat, was, sure, less than perfect, stepped forward and signed up as a volunteer – there was more poetry in that one act alone than in all the slick and highly literary works of Gvirtsman and his supporters.” (What supporters, thought Misha, what on earth is this drivel? Is he referring to Boris?!) “Why was it, after all, that Gvirtsman allowed himself to commit such a brazenly boorish – if we’re frank about it – act? The only reason he did so was that he genuinely does consider himself to be on a higher plane – above the law, the collective, Tuzeyev, Krapivina… And that mockery, that separateness, that narrow circle – how can all that be tolerated? Why is it that someone, on the basis of being personally fortuitous, as a birth-right, I would dare say, can, in this country…”

And on and on it went. 

For a while, Misha listened and tried to make sense of what he heard, but after a while he understood only that there was a general desire to drown him, and that a quiet dislike of him that went way, way back, and that he had always sensed, had finally come crawling to the surface; hadn’t there been times when he had felt people eyeing him with hostility, and whispers being exchanged, as clammy as Nikitin’s fingers. And he could not understand why he had to put up with all that, but now he suddenly got it. The Queen of Spades stands for the resentment that we secretly harbour against others. That was what that whole, strange tale had been about – a story that was so un-Pushkinlike, really, one that had come out of nowhere. It had always seemed to him to be no more than a bagatelle, but Pushkin had felt a secret resentment being harboured against him his entire life. Everyone looked on him disapprovingly, in the expectation that, one day, this golden boy, this idle roisterer, would eventually implode. That was what Valya Krapivina had accomplished: she had dragged all this up to the surface. For all it mattered, Misha might just as well not have kissed her – or indeed done anything at all; they would merely have seized upon the way he tied his shoelaces, and claimed there was something untoward about it. 

“That,” Nikitin concluded, “that is what I wanted to say, and it is no joke.”

And it was then that Goltsov came crawling out. 

Oh, Goltsov. The funniest part was that for a moment, Misha felt a little surge of hope. The thought occurred to him that it was clammy, faded, unstable types that had problems such as a secret resentment of others, and that Goltsov was different, straightforward and strong, and he would come to his defence. He would say what needed to be said. And Misha attempted to smile at him, but, fortunately as it turned out, Goltsov was looking the other way.

He started speaking in his customary manner straight away, nipping all hope in the bud. Needless to say, there was nothing humane in what he said. The novelty lay in the fact that he and Nikitin were acting in tandem. They had probably plotted this in advance, and the result really was an effective one-two combination: one of them laid down the theoretical groundwork, the other delivered the blow with proletarian fury. The only thing that made no sense was how Misha, of all people, had managed to rub them up the wrong way: he had never gone anywhere near Nikitin, and had barely even noticed Goltsov. Apparently, though, they had somehow sensed that the less there was of Misha around the faculty, the more there would be of them. Goltsov simply swung his axe, proletarian style. 

“I, comrades, am not going to enter into all that petty whiffle, from the classics and all that,” and he nodded in the direction of Kruglov. 

Goltsov had clearly had the cheek to rehearse this in advance and construct the required image: this sort of thing could not have just come into being by itself, without artifice! Even the most natural-looking horticultural object is the culmination of the gardener’s efforts, over many years, to cultivate it. 

“I am not going to dissect the arguments and identify all the right ones, but I will say this. Nikitin is spot on. He is spot on, comrades, in that what we are dealing with here is a straight-up insult. And it is not Krapivina that has been insulted, comrades, it is us. And I sensed there was something rotten right from the start, because Gvirtsman is not part of the collective, and because, when the volunteers set off for the war, he was doing his thing, sniggering in the corner, back then too! Even now, look at him, he can’t look you in the eye. Right now, he can’t look the collective in the eye and he can’t say anything! Because he doesn’t even know how to speak, all he does is equivocate and sneer, and it’s the same in his poems. Now I may not be an overly sophisticated fellow” – at this point he went into a sort of trance, and Misha could distinctly feel the pleasure, a pleasure not far short of ecstasy, with which Goltsov was working himself up – “I’m of the simple sort, like Krapivina over there, and, comrades, I feel her pain. But it is high time we got rid of this lordly attitude, you know, this scornful condescension! It has only just come up to the surface, but it has always been there. And I will even go so far as to say, albeit some may take offence, comrades, there’s no harm in that – I will say that the more there is of this cultural sophistication, all this high-brow sparkle, at the top, the more common-as-muck, brutish boorishness there is lower down, comrades! Boorishness of the very worst kind, plain and simple. And I propose that we purge the ranks once and for all, because it is an oversight on our part, we need to admit to ourselves that we are guilty of an oversight. Yes.”

Goltsov would have gone on talking for a lot longer, but at that point Misha sensed that the situation had changed drastically, that he really was doomed and that he had only himself to blame. He had tolerated what was happening for too long and had raised no objections. And when Goltsov got back onto the subject of his glossy veneer and lordliness for a third time, Misha leapt from his seat like a coiled spring, and started shouting: “Comrades, what the hell is all this?! Are you listening to this nonsense he’s spouting?”     

Pages 207 – 211.

            Misha’s blood ran cold: it was to be the worst-case scenario, then; but he got a grip on himself, for he was a fallen angel now and he could not expect life to be plain sailing. And it was good that it was happening straight away, like this. One sensed one was dealing with an organisation that was not messing about.

            “I’ll be reinstated at the university,” he said suddenly, in a quiet little voice; what a rotten bit of villainy this was!

            “Of course you will!” the lieutenant said in a warm, amicable tone. He couldn’t be much older than Misha, in fact the two of them might well be the same age. Misha had now been swallowed whole and almost digested; it was okay to be a little more friendly towards him. “You’ll serve your time and then go back to university. You’ll be a whole new man. Now get on over to the medical commission, forward arsch.”

               Misha and the other naked conscripts – they looked a little younger than him, as if they had come straight from school – underwent a medical examination. He had a heart murmur, of course, and he declared as much straight away, along with the consequences of numerous sore throats as a child, and the physician nodded sympathetically. Given the circumstances we find ourselves in, though – well, you don’t need me to tell you…

            Misha was to be conscripted immediately; they had for some reason told him the number of the directive that said so, but he was blowed if he could remember it. Without knowing why, Misha found himself thinking that this was all down to her, down to Valya. If she hadn’t pierced my protective bubble so horrifically, I might still be flying under the radar today. But there had been a flashpoint between us, our own Northern Lights, a magnetic disturbance, and I discovered myself. And but for that, no-one would have spotted me, and no-one would have drafted me into the army, and I would have carried on working as a nurse for as long as I wanted, right through until the summer, then until the autumn, then until my student days are over…

            He was handed a health certificate stating that he was ‘Fit for service’ and, after two hours of being shuttled around from office to office in the altogether, he was brought before the lieutenant’s desk again.

            “Put your clothes back on and you’re good to go,” the lieutenant said. “You will resign from your job and come back here tomorrow. And say your goodbyes, and all that. But don’t overdo it on the drinking front, if you want my advice. You’ll have a headache and all that afterwards. Forward arsch.”

            He was terribly pleased with life. There was some sort of merriment emanating from him, a degree of contentment only normally seen in pigs.

            Misha left the military commissariat. Snow was falling gently, and he fluttered around exactly like a little schoolboy, and everything was so quaint, it really was, just like in childhood, when all the decisions are taken for you; like anyone who has been dealt a crushing blow to the head, Misha felt a slight sense of satisfaction, of serenity, of being temporarily resigned to his fate. And sitting there just as quaintly, amid this quaint snow, on the bench outside the military commissariat, was Nikitin, his hands shoved in his pockets. He had for some reason been waiting for Misha to emerge.

            “Gvirtsman, hello there,” he said, and he stood up, looking as though he were about to make a speech, but then suddenly at a loss as to what to say. “I have been waiting for you, Gvirtsman,” he suddenly uttered, although that was the last thing that needed articulating, given how blindingly obvious it was. The formal tone with which he spoke was odd, too. The two of them had never exchanged a word in their lives, yet here he was being all formal – what unnecessary etiquette.

            “So I see,” Misha said brusquely.

            “Gvirtsman, I expect you hate me, but that’s a mistake on your part,” Nikitin said in a dull voice.  

            “I don’t really remember you all that well, to be honest,” Misha said, telling a barefaced lie.

            “Well that’s regrettable, you would do better to remember me. Let’s go for a stroll.”

            “Why does it behove me to take a stroll anywhere with you?”

            Try as he might, Misha could not strike the right tone, for if he revealed too much enmity towards Nikitin, it would mean that he did in fact remember him, and the attitude Misha was going for was one of boundless indifference.

            “It doesn’t behove you to do anything, but we would be better off going for a walk,” Nikitin said, almost merrily. Let’s go and get some tea, I’m freezing.”

            And they set off, like two best friends, towards a nearby bakery. This whole absurd episode, from the draft notice in the thick of winter to the sudden appearance of Nikitin, who, evidently, simply lived in the area and was registered at the same military commissariat, was dragging on and taking on a whole new breadth, and by now, there was nothing remarkable about the fact that Misha was walking along next to his enemy, on his way to partake of some tea and bread rolls with him.

            “This is on me,” Nikitin said hurriedly, as if to make the miracle complete.

             Misha shrugged his shoulders.

            “Gvirtsman, I ought really to have met up with you some time ago,” Nikitin started saying, after a short pause during which they both took bites out of their freshly-baked rolls, helped down with gulps of hot, if rather tepid, tea. Everything about the bakery was as insipid as Nikitin, in fact, and the tables had that same sticky quality that he had about him, too. “I ought to have explained things to you, but I hoped you would understand.”

            “I don’t need any explanations from you,” said Misha. “They won’t lend any beauty to your actions, so don’t bother.”

             “That’s as maybe, but it’s not for the sake of beauty that I wanted to talk to you.” Niktin smiled, looking unaccountably smug. “It’s not my beauty that interests me, but yours.”

            And he burst out laughing, his laughter sounding somehow deranged.

            “It occurred to me that it wouldn’t be right for someone like you, a man of talent, to stay on at that university. A gifted man, I would even say,” Nikitin added, sipping his tea. “And a real chucky egg,” he added inexplicably, taking another sip of tea.

            “But it’s right that you should stay on there?” Misha shot back at once.

            “Why talk about me, I’m a finished man, as someone once said. I need to be somewhere, and I’m where chance has put me. You, however, can still be someone, and I decided that there was no sense in you hanging around there, on a palliative.”

            “And what makes you think you’ve the right to decide anything on my behalf?” Misha asked, very calmly, without raising his voice. Even as he asked the question, he was thinking about how satisfying it would be to throw a bucket of boiling water all over Nikitin’s ugly mug.

            “Nothing, but a man has to take a decision sometimes. Now, I can’t create situations like that myself, I’m a sick man, and my capabilities are limited. If a situation comes about on its own, though, like the one Krapivina set up for you – you can’t think, surely, that I ought to have let you off the hook, to go on living that life, as it were? I am an artist of life, Gvirtsman, that’s the next stage of being a man of letters. One can’t have literature as one’s thing nowadays anyway – so I’m an artist of life. It’s the only genre that isn’t prohibited in this country. If you want to denounce me – go ahead. I can speak openly about it, there’ll be no unpleasant consequences for me. Do you know what you’re going to say next? That, unlike me, you aren’t an informer. And all I can say is: you’re really missing out. It’s a wonderful new genre, a very under-developed one in Russian literature. Chekhov said: write everything you can, except for poetry and denunciations. But I don’t mind telling you, it’s plainly a distinct genre, and it has a future. When there are no normal genres left, the ones on the fringes will flourish. Had you written a denunciation of me, now that might have been literature. Rather than all that doggerel.”    

Pages 230 – 232

            His mother put all the warm clothing that was to hand, including the quilted trousers his father wore when he went fishing, into a rucksack – and, try as Misha might to convince her that it would all be taken off him anyway, kept holding it out to him without a word, so that, to save her from having to stand there holding such a heavy weight, he had no choice but to take it. Walking with the rucksack on might be easier, anyway, he reasoned. It would teach him some discipline.       

            Misha walked briskly to the military commissariat, as if he were hurrying to a party rather than signing up for service. He was expecting to see a crowd of people just like him, but there were just five people sitting outside the lieutenant’s office, all of them complete greenhorns, schoolboys who had come to be registered. Misha knocked and went in without waiting in line. The lieutenant looked up from his desk, his eyes pale.

            “What brings you ’ere then, Gvirtsman?” he asked.

            “My call-up, you told me to come today, didn’t you?”

            This was probably some sort of initiation, he reckoned: making it look as though they were not at all pleased to see him, so that he wouldn’t get any ideas about the Motherland being in dire need of his services.

            “Forward, arsch,” the lieutenant said. “It’s been cancelled.”

            “In what sense?” Misha said, confused.

            “In the sense that your call-up is cancelled, you can stand down until the special call-up comes.”

            “And when will that be?” asked Misha, scarcely believing his good fortune and wanting to arrive at some certainty straight away. He already knew that in any dealings with the state, one had to get right to the bottom of things, until one had complete clarity, for if any areas of vagueness were left unexamined, they would inevitably work against him.

            “Whenever it is deemed necessary. But for now, you’re free to go. You must come back as soon as you’re summoned. Forward, arsch!”

            And Misha, still unable to comprehend what was happening, and with his stupid rucksack on his back, walked out onto the porch.

            And he promptly broke down, for no reason whatsoever. A veritable torrent of tears came pouring down his cheeks. No explanation could be given for this, other than perhaps one, the most shameful one of all: he had suddenly been pardoned, and a burden of which he had not even been aware had fallen from his shoulders. Had it not been for the rucksack, for which he now felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude towards his mother – cause enough to weep on its own – he would quite simply have defied gravity and floated away, good god! He would have flown into the sky, a sky that was by now almost vernal. And he felt ashamed, and wondered: had I really been that afraid, had this cancelled call-up into an army not currently engaged in any fighting at all really brought him to tears – childish, girlie, shameful tears? And yet he couldn’t recall anything sweeter than these tears in his entire life, because he had had returned to him something that had already been taken away, and he did not know what name he ought to give that ‘thing’: freedom? This occasion needed to be celebrated somehow, the news needed to be shared at once, and he set off at once, almost at a run, to Kolychev’s place, but then remembered that he ought to let his parents know about this miracle he’d been given – Misha never found out what it was all about, by whose sudden whim his February call-up had been announced and then immediately revoked, and whether it had been the same story at all the military commissariats or whether he alone had got lucky.       

            Where could he call them from? He noticed a chemist’s and fairly flew inside and up to the woman at the counter, asking: “Can I use your phone?” and was given very short shrift; only then did the intoxicating sense of bliss start to diminish. He realised that life was carrying on as normal, that its familiar templates still applied, that he had not arrived at Polycrates’ permanent state of happiness – for had the pharmacist on Kirovskaya Street beamed at him from ear to ear and said: “Be my guest!” it would have meant that he had far exceeded his quota of mercy, and that he would therefore have to pay a terrible price, a price beyond all measure. He nodded gratefully at the woman and ran home.

Pages 245 – 247.

            Could he be cured of it? No, there was no cure for it, as far as he knew, and in any case, the people at the clinic would immediately inform his employers. Even if he were to recover from it, the stain on his reputation would last a lifetime. There was a monstrous injustice about the fact that the first woman he had ever been with had infected him with the most terrifying disease known to man. And all because he had failed to recognise that she would be the death of him: after all, she had already ruined his life twice before – and now it was ‘third time lucky’! She might, of course, have infected him that previous time, at New Year’s, but for some reason he felt sure it had happened that time on the stairs. The incubation period could be fairly long, though. There was no-one else from whom he could have caught it, the only other explanation was that it had been passed on from some other resident of his apartment building, but for that to have happened he would have needed to use someone else’s towel, and who on earth would have lent him their towel – the Balandins?! Fat chance. He knew one thing for sure now: he would make her name known to the whole world, even if it meant he would meet his own demise as a result. Before leaping into action, however, and taking revenge on her for everything she had done, he decided to ask her one last question.

            He set off for Valya’s place. He remembered the date clearly afterwards – the sixteenth of March.

            It was the first sunny, sky-blue, dew-drop day that month. Misha had decided to keep watch for her outside her hall of residence. He knew all about her now, had joined all the dots. And the way he had drawn her in his mind was how she would ultimately be ingrained in his memory – he remembered that clearly. Here came Valya now, accompanied by two girlfriends and laughing loudly. She was the most attractive of the trio, the most uninhibited, the most impudent. She had acquired a chic handbag, clearly a gift from her bosses. What did she need a bag like that for? She hardly ever wore make-up. But the bag was a kind of instrument for her nattering, adding to it, and her appearance was provocative: she was like a vanquisher, in a triumphant victory parade. Misha moved away from the wall, and she caught sight of him, but she did not seem surprised to see him.

            “You’ve got an admirer, Valencia!” one of her friends – the slightly fatter and uglier one – cried out. And he instantly hated this new moniker, Valencia, too.

            “Yeah, an admirer,” Valya replied uncertainly. “Let me talk to him, you go on ahead.”

            For the first twenty seconds they stood in silence.

            “Well, where’s your army then?” Valya asked facetiously. She was behaving as if she knew something about him, something of which he had no inkling yet.

            “They let me go,” Misha said even more facetiously. “Said they’d manage without me.”

            “Oh yeah,” said Valya. “Well they’re right. But I reckon this call-up never happened, Gvirtsman. You just wanted to get laid, and no-one else was willing, am I right?”

            “Oh sure, that’d be right,” said Misha, quickly losing his rag. “No-one else turns me on, I only go for girls with syphilis.”

            She was blindsided by this, and wobbled a little, as if literally knocked sideways.

            “What?!”

            “You heard!” Misha replied, in a venomous whisper. “You infected me. And I don’t know who you bloody got it from, but there’s a rash all over my body that can only mean one thing. And all the other signs are there too.”

            “You didn’t get it from me,” she said quietly. He instantly sensed that she had gone on the defensive.            

            “Oh, you think so? I’m not like you, with a dozen different candidates!”

            “I haven’t got any diseases, I don’t know where you got it from…”

            “There’s nowhere else I could have got it from!” Naturally, Misha did not admit that he hadn’t been with any other girls before her. “Since that time with you I haven’t had any other…”

            “You piece of trash!” Valya threw herself at him, but he grabbed her arm. “You wanna know something? Do you? I’m pregnant!”

            Now he was the one retreating.

            “What do you mean, pregnant?”

            “You’d better believe it! I’m two weeks late with my period!” 

PART 2

In this excerpt from part two of the novel, our new protagonist, a man named Boris (or Borya) Gordon, is visiting his parents in a city called Gomel (now part of Belarus, but part of the Soviet Union in the late 1930s when this part of the novel is set). He is accompanied by Alya, the new woman in his life (he has already been married once), who is keen to make a good impression on Borya’s parents. Alya and her family spent part of their lives in Germany but have now returned to the Soviet Union.   

Pages 335 – 345.

            It was then that he swore to himself that he would never leave Alya, and it was after a visit to his parents that things took on a whole new level of seriousness.  

            He drove Alya to Gomel in July 1938. His mother had been asking him to come for ages; his father was never one to complain, but it was clear he was in pretty poor health. Chekhov once said: if your lungs still work, then everything works; but his father was now coughing all the time, refused to go for a check-up, and was smoking as much as ever, proclaiming himself to be well past the age at which one could pick up new habits or give up old ones. Borya took Alya with him because some sixth sense told him he might never get another chance to introduce her to his father. On top of that, he was vaguely hoping he might be able to persuade his parents to move to Moscow. He would find a way to set up a home for them somewhere; Gomel was five hundred kilometres from the border and was becoming a dangerous place – the idea of a war with Germany was a recurring theme in the latest novels and stage plays. For all the talk about how we would never let the Germans penetrate deep into our territory, the fact was that anything could happen. A lot of people in his circle were panicking and had brought their parents to Moscow, even from safe places like Bryansk.      

            They arrived one crisp, wet afternoon, when the trees were a vivid green and the sky was lilac-grey and billowing. Warm rain kept starting to fall and then stopping. Their pharmacy was now named after Azriel Zharkovsky, who had never lived there and had done precious little living at all, having been killed in 1921 while fighting with Strekopytov’s divisions. Alya was making a conscious effort to like the place, as she strove to please Borya, and Borya could not find a way to tell her that he felt no real love for the city at all, that he had always been desperate to get away from it and that he had never been able to be entirely himself here. Yes, it had the charm of western Russia and yes, there had been every opportunity for playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’ – even now, Boris was convinced that the war between the reds and the whites had been nothing more than a continuation of the wars between the native Americans and the white men, which had taken all of Russia’s adolescents by storm at the start of the century; and why had that been? Because the stories of James Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Mayne Reid had been published as newspaper supplements in the 1880s, so there were copies of them in every household. But life had been boring, with the city changing hands umpteen times, in a way that was downright silly, before the start of 1919, and he had left at the first opportunity. He had felt sorry for his parents, and to begin with, in the first few years, he had visited them frequently; later he visited them once a year, then once every three years. Nowadays, his father liked to joke that he had followed his son into journalism: he had written articles on local natural history that were printed in Gomel Pravda, helped by the knowledge he had picked up in the days when he worked as an architect. He and Borya’s mother were growing old gracefully, without any grumbling, keeping up with the news from Moscow, reading everything Borya sent them, trying to remind him of their existence less often and asking only for him to hurry up and give them some grandsons.

His father met them at the station, embraced Alya, and refrained from asking them any questions about anything. All the wonders of his mother’s home-cooking awaited them at home: her dumpling soup, the equal of which Boris had never found anywhere in the world, stuffed fish, apple strudel with cinnamon, meatballs, and a decoction made with pears; Alya praised everything in exaggerated fashion, so that Borya felt a little awkward on her behalf, if anything – she really was too keen for them to like her. When lunch was over, she set about helping his mother with the dishes in an easy, natural way, and his mother accepted her help; his father adjourned to his study, beckoning to Borya to follow him. Borya knew that the conversation would now turn to politics, but he was not about to decline the invitation: he liked the study, and as a child he had loved to lie beside the bookcase while his father sat working, and read quietly, chewing away at something; dried cherries had always suited this pastime particularly well. 

The apartment had not changed at all, his parents had not any square metres of living space removed, and had had nothing taken from them – his father was in credit, not least because he had managed to get in the good books of the shoemaker Kaganovich, who had brought order among the local Communists in 1918. His father had, essentially, lived a remarkably pure life. He wasn’t much interested in money, although he had always done well for himself – there was no shame in that, as he himself used to say; Judaism, like everything that one could be born into and that was inherited, didn’t interest him in the slightest. He was also completely free of the stupid, bootlicking Jewish adoption of Russian traits of the 1910s. There was nothing extraneous in his study, either: a noble simplicity made itself felt in everything, even his sketches of benches on the riverbank – they withstood all cataclysms with the utmost serenity.

It was with the cataclysms that Borya began the conversation: without waiting for his father to start asking him all about the latest affairs in Moscow, imagining as he did that his son was privy to all the secrets – he asked him straight up: how about moving to the capital? If you want to work, you will do so, and I promise you, I’ll get you a room in a nice part of town. His father shook his head, as if to say: what nonsense. 

“I want to talk about something serious,” he said. “What’s going on with Tukhachevsky?”

“You’ve waited a year to ask me about that?”

“One can’t ask about such things in a letter, as you well know.”

“Tukhachevsky is a traitor,” Borya said. 

“Do you believe that?”

“I believe it one hundred percent,” said Borya. “He was a repulsive, vainglorious fellow. Do you know what you get if you add a kilo of marmalade to a kilo of muck?”

His father didn’t know.

“Two kilos of muck,” said Borya. “And what I really can’t stand, you know, is a steely general sugarcoating himself like that. Befriending artists, playing the violin… A colleague of mine was despatched to have a chat with him, and we asked him for his impressions of the man: he said he’d never spoken to such a bombastic fellow, with so much self-regard, in his life. And by the way, I happen to believe that in his youth, Tukhachevsky drove two soldiers to commit suicide, with his relentless fault-finding.”

“That so?” said his father dubiously. “Well, all right, but if you all realised that, then why on earth didn’t…”

“What could we have done?”

“Anything. Written something, asked the question.”

“You know I’m no expert on military matters.”

“There are other military experts out there, though. I mean, did he have to have actually done something suspicious?”

“The moment he did, he was immediately transferred, and then they took him in.”

“But I read that he was turned pretty much straight away in Poland…’’

“Not in Poland, later,” Borya said, sounding like a teacher instructing his pupil. “He was supposedly turned back in ’28. But he was careful, and in any case, the army’s the best possible environment for a plot. Everything’s very private. Special authorization was needed to eavesdrop on all the conversations. He was under heavy surveillance for two years.”

“That so?” his father countered once again. “From here, I can see an alternative scenario more clearly.”

“I hope you don’t discuss things like this with Varshavsky?” Varshavsky was their former neighbour, who had now moved out of town.

“You’re the first person I’ve discussed it with. But up till now, the whole course of events leaves me convinced that the treason is rooted in a different place altogether.”

“Oh yes? And where might that be?”

“Right there, you know where. Voroshilov is completely clueless, only a blind man could fail to see that. I don’t know the first thing about military matters, but I can still more or less work out who’s got half a brain and who hasn’t. Tukhachevsky was intelligent, for all that you seem to think military men don’t need to be clever.”

“I don’t think that.” Now Borya was defending himself against his own father. One could not afford to give an inch in any conversation these days, and by now this had become second nature.

“Well, you say that he shouldn’t play the violin, or make friends with artists… He’s a strategist, there aren’t any others like him. And all this – it’s a clearing of the road, ahead of some immense reckoning. You’ll see. Everything that’s going on now is the cleaning up of space. I’ve seen it locally, too. Anyone who’s smart gets fired or taken away. And it always turns out that there was good cause, of course. Good cause can always be found with the smart ones. And then they replace them with the ones who haven’t got a clue about anything. They’re preparing a reckoning, a big reckoning.”

“A reckoning for whom?”

“I can’t say for sure. But I think,” his father said, lowering his voice still further, “it might be the Germans.”

“Why, and in what form? I’m sorry, but I think you’ve completely lost the plot if that’s what you believe.”

“I don’t know what form it would take. And that’s not what matters. But the Germans have penetrated very deeply, and they’re pulling the wool over our eyes. All these conversations about how Britain is threatening us are nonsense. Britain needs to get a grip on its colonies first and foremost. I once spent six months in Britain, by the way.”  

“Dad, that was back in ’95.”

“Doesn’t matter. The Brits will never attack Russia, they’re an island state. Islands only ever think about defending themselves.”

“Oh, sure. Particularly in the Transvaal.”

“Uprisings had broken out in the Transvaal.”

“Of course. The British mobilized on the border and meddled in internal affairs, after which it’s hardly surprising there were uprisings.”

“Let’s not argue about this, Boris. The Brits pose no threat whatsoever to Russia, they’ve got no borders. As for France, the very idea is ridiculous, they fought worse than anyone else in 1914.”

“We fought worse than anyone else in 1914.”

“Not a bit of it. If you really want to know, the Germans fought worse than anyone else. And the Germans want revenge, and they’ll have it. It’s scary how far they’ve got. You don’t know, but I still remember. German foreign intelligence laid the groundwork back in 1915.”

“Rather a lot has changed since then.”

“Some things have, but not everything. Did you know that Dymshitz has come back?”

“Dymshitz?” Borya couldn’t remember anyone by that name. 

“That fellow from round here, the dentist. His son went off to Germany, supposedly to train to be a railway engineer. I don’t know, perhaps that really was why he went. Then he came back, in around 1913. And now he’s been transferred here, he and his father have both arrived. He got himself a job at the station. And I think there’s more to it than meets the eye. I’m not saying he’s been turned, and I’m not going to write any letters to anyone about it, of course not. But our hub is a major one, it’s the direct line to Moscow. And the fact that they sent someone who got his training in Germany...it all seems highly suspicious.”

Father has lost his marbles, thought Borya. 

They’ve all lost their marbles, it’s a collective neurosis, it couldn’t just stop and go away. When the whole country is catching spies, the old men are the first to lose their minds.

“You haven’t been spying on him, I hope?” Borya asked, in the most carefree tone he could muster.

“As a matter of fact, I have, would you believe. And I already know enough. He’s friends with Brekhunov, and Brekhunov is the man responsible for all the water pipelines, I’ve known him for years. People sometimes come to me for consultations. Believe it or not, your father has done one or two things for this city. But that was all afterwards, that’s not what I want to talk about. You do realise that literally everything has been infiltrated by the Germans? You mark my words, in less than a year’s time, we’ll be in an alliance with the Germans.”

“Dad, there was a time when I thought we might form an alliance. But a lot has changed since ’33. We’ll never ally ourselves to anti-Semites.”

Because – he almost added – how would we then be any different from them?

“Open your eyes, man!” his father whispered at him, with all the force of a loud shout. “An alliance with anti-Semites! Who are we, if not anti-Semites!”

“Oh sure, you and I in particular.”

“You know perfectly well what I mean!”

“No, Dad, I don’t understand anything you’re saying right now. All I know is it’s high time you moved to Moscow, or else you’ll go on stewing in your own juices here.”

“Tukhachevsky simply found out,” his father went on relentlessly. “He simply cottoned on. And that’s why he was got rid of.”

“If you say so. Allow me to refrain from discussing the matter. I’m sure you can see everything more clearly, from up here.”

He wanted to go into the kitchen and help Alya, to tear her away from his mother’s embraces and show her the town, but his father held him back.

“I can’t tell you the whole story right now. But believe me, if something should happen to me, it means they’ve got to me. You don’t know. But there was an outbreak of typhus here in the spring.”

“What’s typhus got to do with anything? Where did it come from?”             

“From over there. People were drinking water from the river and getting infected. It can’t be anything other than sabotage, believe me, I know. It’s them.”

“But the Sozh is a filthy river, Dad…”

“There’s been no typhus here for fifteen years. I had a word with Brekhunov. And he told me that in February, a new employee was brought to him for an induction. In the water purification department. A fellow by the name of Grekov. I asked him to dig up all the information he could. Turns out that the uncle of this Grekov,” he raised his finger, “the uncle of this Grekov was arrested on espionage charges last year. He stated this in his application form, because he couldn’t avoid doing so. He would have concealed it if he’d been able to, of course. But for the time being they’re keeping close tabs on him. Moscow’s taken its eye off the ball, you see.”

“All right,” said Borya, “I get it. If something happens to you, I’ll know Grekov’s to blame.”

“Not Grekov – them! And mark my words, they’ve sent their agents to all corners, and a year from now, at most, they’ll be in power here. We should move, you say – but where to? There’s nowhere you can move to that will keep you safe from that.”

Damn, thought Borya. I can’t imagine what kind of enormous catastrophe it would take for them to all come to their senses. But what was I expecting – what were we all expecting? After all, we’re all undergoing a slow change of state too, like a frog in boiling water. If you turn up the heat gradually, it won’t jump out, and it will be cooked. When they took Tukhachevsky, I didn’t believe what my mind was telling me either, at first, although I realised he was getting his just desserts. In fact, none of the people taken so far have been people for whom I’ve felt any love. But have I ever felt any love for anyone, is there anyone left, here, to love?        

            Alya was sitting opposite his mother at the table, gazing lovingly at her. His mother had set out a game of patience on the table, made up of photographs. This was something Borya couldn’t stand. 

            “Let me take your domestic slave-girl out for a while,” he ordered. “We’ll go and take a look at the scenes of my former glory.”

Once they were downstairs, Alya attempted to sing an ode to his parents, but Borya cut her short.

“Dad has lost his mind,” he said. “I think he’s completely off his rocker. It’s awful to see it, he’s always been an intelligent man, and a rather cold one, even.”

“What’s happened?”

“He thinks that Germany is surrounding him with spies, that Tukhachevsky was killed by spies, that the plumber’s a spy. It’s a good thing he doesn’t know anything about you.”

“But I told your mother everything,” Alya said; her eyes widened and there was a look of such innocence on her face that he burst out laughing. 

“Well, so what if you did. Let’s hope Mama, for the time being at least, is still in her right mind. By the way, there was a girl that used to live across from here who was the spitting image of you.”

“She must have been an emissary. Didn’t you know? A true wife always sends out emissaries.”

In this next section, also from part two of the novel, Alya has been spirited away by the intelligence services. Borya goes to see his employer, to find out whether anything can be done about this. 

Pages 404-406.

            “Well, what is it?” he asked in a malicious tone, guessing, apparently, what had brought him here. 

“I’m here about ___________” – Borya named Alya by her surname. 

“I’m aware of the situation.”

Borya couldn’t quite be sure what that meant. 

“And what can be done about it?”

“You,” said Yeremeyev, putting strong emphasis on the word, “you oughtn’t to be doing anything about it. From now on, everything that needs to be done will be done.”

It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to measures the authorities were going to take regarding Alya, or a possible intervention on his part that might alter her fate.

“I’m pretty close to her, though.”

“I’m aware of the situation,” Yeremeyev said again, making no attempt to hide his contempt now.

“And I can confirm...you know me too, after all...that there’s nothing in it and there couldn’t have been anything in it.”

“You don’t know anything,” said Yeremeyev, in the same loud tone. It wasn’t clear who he thought was listening – the two of them were alone in his office – but, apparently, he needed to dispel any notion of a conspiracy; he was speaking in an even, official-sounding tone, and Borya could not request a more informal meeting, for Yeremeyev had clearly been infected now.

“No, I know for sure. There are some things, some people, that you can never doubt.”

“She could have brought you to wrack and ruin, and not just you but all of us, and it may yet transpire that she has done so. She has hung both of us out to dry. You probably don’t even have the slightest idea of the sheer magnitude of all this. I am not accusing you of anything for the time being; I, too, failed to see it...but I am not going to engage in any conversations whatsoever on this matter. She is the one that has sinned, it is for her to repent. We’re done here, get back to work.”

And it wasn’t that Borya was unprepared for a reaction like this: he had steeled himself, in fact, for an even worse one. The fact was, though, that now, Alya had vanished so completely that it was as if she had never even existed, and none of the people at work, for whom she had brought in blouses, suggested better ways of phrasing things, and corrected lacklustre texts, said a word to him. The only person who did was Lyonya, whom he found waiting for him at the exit, and who offered him a lift. 

For a while, neither man spoke.

“Comrade Gordon,” Lyonya began. “There’s not a whole lot I can do about things, but if anything needs to be said to them, or shown, or confirmed – you can rely on me.”

At first, Borya’s mind went to the darkest scenario – that Lyonya was willing to testify against Alya – but after a moment he was ashamed of the thought.

“I remember everything she did,” Lyonya said. “How she fought on our behalf, over that room, how she went all over town… No-one has ever helped me the way she did. You may not be aware, but I came from a children’s home…”  

            “I know,” Borya lied, though how could he possibly have known that?

            “There you are, you see,” Lyonya said, and he nodded. “Yes, of course you know, it’s your job to know… And no-one ever helped me like that, I swear. I said to her at the time: “Ariadna Sergeyevna, if you ever need anything, just write to me, I’ll do all I can. Just bear that in mind.”    

In the next excerpt, Borya has a conversation with Gorelov, a character who appears to work for the intelligence services. Borya hopes that Gorelov will be able to arrange for him to visit Alya.

Pages 409 – 417.

The meeting with Gorelov was scheduled for the following Friday. Borya hoped that Gorelov would be the first to bring up the subject of Alya and update him, but Gorelov either knew nothing, or was pretending to know nothing. 

“Now then,” said Gorelov with his customary, businesslike laziness, as though he was asking about something of secondary importance, like fishing. “What have folks been saying?”

“That’s just it, no-one’s been saying anything,” Borya replied, very calmly. “You and I are going to talk about it now, but that’s it; the others are saying nothing.”

“Well, let’s the two of us talk about it then,” Gorelov proposed. “You must have some thoughts about all this, after all?” 

Once again, Borya demonstratively allowed the serve to go past him without hitting it back. 

“About the pact, you mean?”

“Yes, yes, about the pact.”

“I personally have very few thoughts about the pact,” Borya said cautiously. “Or perhaps, just one – that, in this way, a war is being prevented.”

“Well quite,” Gorelov said distrustfully. “Boris Ilich, we were saying recently, weren’t we, about how honest these chats of ours are. Otherwise we would be of no use to you, and you would be of no use to us.”

This was a direct hint: they were using Alya as a bargaining chip, it appeared, and information about her could be bought in exchange for being honest. And Borya began to express his views – carefully at first, then getting increasingly carried away – about how, without a war, nothing good would come of it all; about how a war would cement everyone together; about a last chance – but Gorelov found this boring.

“Alright,” he said, “but have there by any chance been times when you’ve heard views like this?” And he handed him a piece of grey paper with typewritten text on both sides, the lines of text packed densely together, leaving no gaps. 

“How fiercely instructive it is that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was ratified by Stalin’s parliament on the very day that Germany invaded Poland! The general causes of the war are wrapped up in the irreconcilable contradictions of global imperialism. The immediate prompt for the initiating of military actions, however, was the concluding of the Soviet-German pact. In the months that preceded it, Goebbels, Forster and other German politicians kept insisting that the Führer would soon name “the day” for decisive actions. It is now abundantly clear that what was meant by this was the day when Molotov would put pen to paper on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This is a fact that no power on earth can ever erase from history!

It is not that the Kremlin feels closer to totalitarian states than to democratic ones – far from it. This is not how the course to be steered, in international affairs, is chosen. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is, in the fullest sense of the world, a military alliance, for it serves the purposes of an offensive, imperialist war. In the last war, Germany was defeated primarily as a result of a shortage of raw material and foodstuffs. In this war, Hitler is confidently reckoning on the USSR’s raw material. It is no accident that a trade deal was concluded just before the political pact was signed. Moscow is a long way from the idea of reneging on it. Litvinov has been replaced by Molotov, who is not bound by anything other than the naked interests of the ruling caste. The policy of Chicherin, i.e. of Lenin, essentially, was long ago declared a policy of romanticism. For a while, the policy of Litvinov was deemed to be a policy of realism. The Stalin-Molotov policy is a policy of naked cynicism.

Look at what Molotov said three months ago in the Supreme Soviet: “On the unified front of those peace-loving states that are genuinely opposed to aggression, the Soviet Union cannot but have a place in the front ranks.” What sinister irony there is in these words now! The Soviet Union has taken up a place in the rear ranks of those states which, until recent days, it has tirelessly branded as aggressors. 

It will be remembered that soon after the Munich agreement was signed, the secretary of the Comintern, Dimitrov, set out – doubtless on Stalin’s instructions – a precise timeline of Hitler’s future operations as regards the capturing of territory. In this plan, the occupation of Poland is scheduled for the autumn of 1939. There then follows: Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, France, Belgium… Finally, in the autumn of 1941, Germany would launch an offensive against the Soviet Union. This revelation was based, no doubt, on information obtained by the Soviet intelligence agencies. The precise schedule cannot be taken literally, needless to say: the course of events would be bound to alter all the calculations made in the planning stage. The first link in the chain, however – the occupation of Poland in the autumn of 1939 – is being confirmed even now. It is entirely probable that the two-year interval identified in the plan, between the crushing of Poland and an assault on the Soviet Union, will also prove to be not far wide of the mark. The Kremlin cannot have failed to realise this. It is not for nothing that the words “peace cannot be divided up” have been proclaimed there dozens of times. If Stalin does, nonetheless, turn out to be Hitler’s intended target, this means that the ruling caste is no longer in a position to be able to think about tomorrow. Its motto is the motto of all dying regimes: après moi le deluge.

One of the greatest differences between the current war and the last one is the radio. Thanks to the radio, the peoples of the world will be far less dependent than in the last war on the totalitarian information of their own governments, and the prevailing moods in other countries will be far more contagious. In this field, the Kremlin has already suffered a heavy defeat. The Comintern, the Kremlin’s most important tool for influencing public opinion in other countries, was in actual fact the first victim of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The fate of Poland has yet to be decided. But the Comintern already lies dead. It is being abandoned by patriots at one end, and internationalists at the other. Tomorrow, we will doubtless hear over the radio the voices of yesterday’s Communist leaders, who, in their governments’ interests, and in all the languages of the civilized world, including Russian, will be laying bare the Kremlin’s betrayal.

The collapse of the Comintern will do irreparable damage to the ruling caste’s authority in the minds of the peoples of the Soviet Union itself. The policy of cynicism, which was intended to strengthen the position of the Stalinist oligarchy, will in reality hasten its downfall. 

War will sweep away a great many things and a great many people. No-one will be able to evade its fearful judgment through cunning, sleight of hand, pretexts, or betrayals. Yet our article would be radically misunderstood, if it were to prompt readers to conclude that all the new things that the October Revolution introduced to the life of mankind will be swept away. The author is firmly convinced of the contrary. The new forms of farming, liberated from the unbearable gaze of bureaucracy, will not only withstand this trial by fire, but will also serve as the basis of a new culture, which, let us hope, will do away with war once and for all.”    

“Anyone been saying anything like that?” Gorelov asked.

Borya was at a loss as to what to do. On the one hand, this psychotherapist had just presented him with his own thoughts, almost all of them, right down to the hopes expressed about the universal adoption of the radio; on the other hand, the style of the text could belong to only one person, no-one else, and Borya would have been a pretty poor newspaper man had he failed to recognise it.

There had been a time when he had idolised the person in question. There had also been a time of sobre rejection of him, and perhaps even of disappointment in him. There had been a time of vengefulness, the kind that is always directed at our former idols. But even now, Borya could not stop shuddering at the instant precision of the assessments, and intonations, of his own thoughts, which this person had expressed in the best possible way. It then dawned on him that the person had always been a trenchant, provincial peddler of sociopolitical journalism and nothing more, for he had not seen the raw, deep essence of all the things here and still held out hope for something. This deep level was shut off to him (but it was not shut off to Borya, Borya had learnt how to see a lot over the last five years). But at his level, the initial level, his instinct was, as ever, impeccable; it was just that the raw and bloody nature of what was happening locally repelled him, he couldn’t see eye to eye with it, his temperament had been honed by the desert, not the swamp.

“No,” Borya said at last. “That’s not what people are saying. But it’s probably what they’re thinking. I, for one, to be honest with you, have found myself thinking the odd thing that chimes with that.”

“Quite right too,” Gorelov commended him. “He talks sense. It’s just a pity that in this country, there’s no-one for us to say this to. But I mean it was clear straight away that historically speaking, it was our destiny to act together. And in order to extract our enemy’s weapon from him...it would be a good thing if someone here explained that out loud, don’t you think?”

“You mean me?”

“Not necessarily you specifically! But someone from among your subordinates. Submit an article. Explain the historical roots. Show that this is predetermined, and that National Socialism is socialism, too. In any case, we have more in common with them than we do with the rest of Europe. You can see this as me giving you a summary of the article.”

“Wait a moment,” said Borya, not understanding. “After publishing an article like that…’       

“No harm will come to the author of such an article,” Gorelov explained with indifference. “But right now, the article is needed. As for later...who knows what might happen later. First, we’ll carve up Europe with them. Then, perhaps, we’ll carve up everything else as well. And then we’ll destroy them, because we can’t be defeated, we’ve got more space than the enemy can cover. As has been demonstrated multiple times. We’re invincible.”

“But having them as an ally…’

“A matter of tactics,” said Gorelov. “Right now, those are our tactics. But anyway, wasn’t it immediately apparent that we’re cut from the same cloth as them in terms of class, and so on and so forth. The only matter on which we differ is the Jewish question, but that isn’t of fundamental importance right now. The key thing now is that the Brits and Americans are our mutual enemy. Explain that – or have someone else do so.”

He had said everything that mattered and now appeared to have drifted off to sleep right there at the table. His sort clearly had a lot of work on right now.

“I’ll see it’s all done,” said Borya. “But I want to ask you something. They’ve taken my fiancée away from me.”

“Your fiancée?” Gorelov raised his eyebrows and appeared to look interested. “So you’re getting divorced first, I take it?”

“Yes. We were planning to marry in one month’s time. I told you about her.”

“I remember. She’s the one who lived abroad and came back, right?”

“That’s right. It happened a week ago, I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Nonsense, call me when you need to. You’ve got my number after all. Give me all the info about her.”

Borya dictated it to him.

“It’s just a check, I reckon,” said Gorelov, clearly looking to avoid a more serious discussion. 

“A check wouldn’t have lasted this long. It seems to be linked to her foreign affairs.”

“Perhaps, perhaps. Did her father come over here too?”

“The whole family moved here a year ago.”

“Well, I think you’ll get an answer via her father.”

“But as regards seeing her... I wanted to request a meeting…’

“A meeting could take place once there’s been a court hearing, but right now we don’t yet know whether there’s going to be one. In any case, her father will find out everything in a week’s time.”

It was a dead end. Borya said goodbye and stepped out into the rain. It was likely that, had he known the exact meaning with which Gorelov had wanted to imbue his reply, he would have punched him in the face. Or then again, maybe not. Probably not, actually. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had punched anyone.

PART THREE

The third part of the novel tells the story of a man who has an uncanny ability to influence people through the power of words, using a strange system whereby the vowels and consonants must be put in the right order in order to achieve the desired effect.

Pages 453 – 454.

            As for Ignaty Krastyshevsky, he had nothing but free time, and yet he did not really have any time at all. 

            He had the ability to influence people through the power of words, but what he did wasn’t writing but, to use the term he himself preferred, super-writing. It was an ability that he had discovered in the eighth grade, when, with the help of an essay entitled “What can we learn from the Greeks and the Romans?”, he had planted in the mind of his literacy teacher, a pathological sadist with a xenophobic hatred of Poles, the idea of rotherr suicide – a scheme that had ultimately fallen through. Krastyshevsky was young and inexperienced back then.

The idea of exerting an influence on one’s reader directly, and not by means of telling stories, was one that lay on the surface, but, as we know, a little dose of pathology is required for any discovery. Dmitry Mendeleyev, for instance, had a searing passion for manufacturing suitcases, and it was specifically the desire finally to create a suitcase into which the whole Universe might fit that dictated the creation of the Periodic Table. That was a joke. Ignaty Krastyshevsky’s particular pathology was his claustrophobia. He was haunted by dreams about enclosed spaces, about fleeing down corridors and passageways, about the oppressive white vaults, inside which most of the history of the Russian court had played out, and about prison cells, in which, despite not having committed any crime, he had to languish for an infinitely long time without any hope of being set free; and for some reason these cells were partially underwater, and for some reason he did not perish in them straight away, but rather, went on living in them. That was the most unbearable part of all.

[…]

Pages 459 – 460.

Krastyshevsky composed his first incantation while comforting his son when he had a fever, and somehow managed to lower his temperature – he wasn’t even sure himself how he did it. At times like this, incidentally, unknown powers are awakened inside the body. Chukovsky, who for a while was a neighbour of his on Leshtukov Sidestreet, composed his best poem for children when he, too, was trying to create an incantation that would rid his son of the pain and high temperature from which he was suffering. That terrifying inspiration is impossible to recover afterwards; indeed, it is a kind of inspiration that does not obey any laws.

It should be noted that the spoken word did not have the desired effect every time – far from it. In 1919, Krastyshevsky was attacked by muggers in Moscow’s Petrovka Street, and although, calmly and with complete conviction, he uttered the words: “Simply take a mountain on an open path, black, moustachioed, add plenty of salt”, the mugger simply looked at him as if he was an idiot and continued to take an inventory of his pockets. When it came to the written word, things were simpler: one could not be let down at the last by one’s voice, and intonation played no role. It would be silly, of course, to think: “There, I’ve composed something, now I can sit back and let it take effect.” It was roughly akin to poetry. We are all familiar with the laws of versification, but by no means all of us would be capable of writing the aforementioned poem by Pushkin, Ya pomnyu chudnoe mgnovenie[2]. If mere knowledge of versification alone bestowed on people the ability to write poetry, all the chef-d’oeuvres would already have been written, and yet extracting them remains a difficult task. Krastyshevsky’s method, in the form it had taken by the early 1930s, made it possible to achieve certain results if applied regularly to a recipient identified in advance, but did not guarantee anything. What an excellent business super-writing would become, if, with its help, one could win over any woman, flatter one’s superiors, and secure a pay-rise! Life would be turned into one long competition between poets, and all interaction would be boiled down to an exchange of incantations, such as: 

“Bring forth your grievances, remove my diseasances, set sail on the ocean blue, the trocean true, the clotian clue.”

“Yell, my odour, tell, my toader, over fine-splained gravel, over tongue-tained chavel!”

Krastyshevsky wasn’t interested in money-making ventures, however, and as far as women were concerned, the whole enterprise would have been too easy. In the 1920s, women had been submissive to a hysterical extent, because there were so few men left, and men with good jobs, and indeed men in general, had been fought over tooth and nail. Krastyshevsky had scant regard for such easy prey. He had left his wife in 1923, when he realised that he had acquired a happy rival. To tell the truth, he had fled in relief. The man who possessed the biggest secret in language, of which the great Khlebnikov had merely arrived at an approximation, and which Jakobson had not even come close to, had no need for distractions.

By 1933 – the start of his most fruitful period – Krastyshevsky was a solitary controlling editor at the publishing house Encyclopedia, and he also edited film-scripts: with the arrival of the ‘talkies’, there was a need for a professional capable of adapting the uninspiring language of the screenwriter to suit the mores of the era in question. Krastyshevsky had one concern, and one concern only.   

Krastyshevsky becomes fixated with the idea of preventing the cataclysmic war that seems imminent, by contriving to get a message, encrypted using his ‘super-writing’ method, to the only real decision-maker in the land.

            [...]

Pages 468 – 469.

            Some people might ask: what, is he completely ruling out the idea that an aggressor might attack Russia first? That the decision to go to war might be taken by another party, and that it is that party that you need to influence? No, Krastyshevsky did not consider that to be a possibility at all. It was a matter of logic and common sense. 

            [...]

Pages 470 – 471.

            It made no sense to attack Russia, not least because Russia could not be defeated; one would have to be mad to invade her, and Krastyshevsky was very good at recognizing madness in others, because...because… In a word, he couldn’t see anyone with such suicidal tendencies around him. The last war in the history of mankind could only be started by the current master of Russia, because otherwise, no good would come of anything. All the pointers were suggesting that a war was in the offing. All the songs being sung were about war, all the films being made were about war, all the most important plays were about it, and whenever the half-forgotten legacy of the classics was brought up, this was done within the framework of the same military propaganda: we are Russian, everything we produce is Russian. The word “Russian’ had been rehabilitated, while Demyan’s name had been smeared in excrement.

By this time, Krastyshevsky had already sent four messages. Occasionally he fell into despair, for he could not see any results, but he stuck at it. 

In general terms, his modus operandi was a tried and tested one. More about it below. For the time being, he needed to decide on his approach, on the one specific channel that would guarantee he would reach the very top. Krastyshevsky only needed to send out a signal once every six months. In truth, once a year would have been an entirely acceptable pace too, but he had decided to leave less room for doubt. What he needed to do was find the crevice, the trapdoor, the one and only scenario whereby, once every six months, the handful of pages he wrote – their number would be calculated in strict accordance with each case – would be placed on the most important desk of all. There had been no other decision-makers since 1929.

Krastyshevsky could not just write things off the cuff, in the hope that each individual letter, among tens of thousands of others, would ‘gravitate’, as they used to say in the editorial offices, towards the intended recipient. Each letter took many months’ worth of toil to prepare. Imagine a poet laying siege to his beloved’s heart and, to that end, composing the only message possible given all her biographical data, the slightest ups and downs in her mood and even, last but not least, her physiological characteristics. It is a task more difficult than the sestina – the most complicated of all the verse forms. It is not the kind of task an ordinary person can do. God knows what kind of a task it is. And he could not allow himself to throw all that work into a Venetian-style boche de leon[3] – he had to be sure that his letter had definitely been read by its sole intended recipient.

[.....]

Pages 472 – 474.

He had found a way in, though, a trapdoor at which he needed to hammer with pinpoint accuracy; and all thanks to the silver screen. Once every six months, a report was placed on the most important desk in the land on the export of Soviet art: the number of paintings bought, books translated, authors invited to international congresses. At first, as Krastyshevsky rightly surmised, this had been an indicator of prestige: what did the world want from us, what did they like about us. Later – starting roughly around the time Sovkino turned into Soyuzkino – it was about checking for potential spies: who are they inviting over there, who are they a little too keen to see? From that time onwards, any success overseas was like having a sentence already hanging over you, although previously it had been interpreted as yet more affirmation of our values. Shumyatsky, like all the ‘ploughies’ – that was Stechin’s nickname for the common folk working at the plough-tail – trusted the literate, and was indeed a lover of culture, even though he stamped down on it relentlessly; it was the ones in whom he sensed a proletarian spirit that he stamped down on, though, he never touched the true specialists, and in fact he feared them. And Krastyshevsky had carefully insinuated himself into Soyuzkino – as an editor, no more than that; a trifling role, a civil servant’s work. He prepared reports on foreign trips, on the exporting of Soviet-produced movies, and on film festivals, to which figures from the Soviet film industry were invited. He felt at home in this world, for it was a world in which good manners had been preserved, the kind of manners that had long since disappeared – if they had ever been present at all – from literature. He was loved in this world. He was almost one of their own.

So that was how easy it was, it transpired, to play on the world’s strings: one merely had to light upon the sole scenario whereby your composition, irrespective of genre and content, found its way under the gaze of the fellow right at the top. Krastyshevsky could probably have used his codes to land a job as a minister, or make his boss quit his job and go off to a monastery, or bring down any top civil servant who appeared to him to be a saboteur. But none of these trifling tasks were of any interest to Krastyshevsky. He was busy saving mankind, by blocking the idea of war, putting an end to it, instilling a panic-stricken fear of it. Monomania has its advantages: a man who is entirely consumed by a single idea has no need for a family, extraneous concerns are alien to him, he finds wealth and avarice ridiculous. The monomaniac beats away at the same spot relentlessly, refusing to let anything distract him. If you think about the same thing for ten years, you’ll eventually think up a solution.

[...]

Pages 474 – 477.

So then, the first of the rules governing the controlling text, which we shall henceforth refer to as the CT, was that it must contain some self-writing – that is how the mechanism is launched. The second characteristic feature of the CT is its structure, which should ideally be in four parts. The second part should be half as long as the first, the third – roughly one third as long as the second; as for the fourth part, it contains the premise and is four times shorter. These perfect proportions constitute the golden ratio of any text. The order to be conveyed directly to the reader must be encoded in each part in a strictly defined way: in the first part it is present in the form of “signal’ words, whose distribution is built up in the brain on a first reading on the basis of phonetic similarity. In the second part it is encoded at the level of the letters, whose pattern is inserted into the brain in an independent, deliberate way, since the right vowels are stressed, and the consonants are injected. In the third part, the sentence required is present in full, but it consists of antonyms, presented as if in negative. In the fourth part it is stated correctly, hidden in the form of a quotation. Setting the encoded sentence in its right context is a particularly tricky task. The extraneous consonants have the function of providing colour, colouring the way the order is perceived; the vowels lend it a major or minor intonation, creating the emotional context.

            Krastyshevsky would sometimes spend months fine-tuning his five-page reports, calculating the letter-based codes twenty times over, sitting up into the small hours to get it right. Every surface in his bedroom was covered with grids containing little circles and arrows, and he copied his most valuable results straight onto the wallpaper. He never had any visitors, so there was no-one who might gaze on all this in amazement. Twice a year the chauffeur, Lyonya, would collect his report, full of crossings-out, and take it to the editorial offices of “USSR under construction”, where the summary report was compiled, ready to be submitted to the Very Top: it was into this report that all the data about Soviet art overseas was inserted. This summary was drawn up personally by the responsible secretary, and it was passed on by him to another secretary. Krastyshevsky never let Lyonya the chauffeur come into his apartment, handing him his sheaf of papers downstairs at the main entrance to the building instead. No-one must see the grids on the wallpaper; Krastyshevsky, by contrast, needed to see it before him every day, so that the ability to follow the letter-based rhythms got into his very bloodstream.

            Outwardly there appeared to be nothing unusual about the text, and only the most experienced linguist – the aforementioned Strelnikov, for instance – could have suspected that there was something ever so slightly off about the synonyms used. The Controlling Text (or CT) was always designed like a mosaic, whose pieces were too bright to form a homogeneous surface; and indeed, there were times when Krastyshevsky required synonyms for the words one might ordinarily choose. They were not highlighted in the text in any way, of course, but we shall highlight them here, so that the nuts and bolts of his method might become clearer. “As a BLACK cloud makes its way MORE OR LESS RAPIDLY over Europe, the WORLDWIDE interest in oUr rotherraphy is rother clearer than DAY. The humanity and the NECESSARY orientation of Soviet cinema has rother the Western viewer, lISTener, rothe, again and again, TIME AFTER TIME, with that indubitable, OBVIOUS truth, that man is a rother to his fellow-man. BLUE, YELLOW, GREEN – all of these colours are having to make way for red, which, with time, will take up a leading position on the map.” Anyone with the slightest ability to read between the lines and at least a basic grasp of the rudiments of linguistic influence will be able to read, in this passage, the phrase Aravi tari omi, or “No war’ in the native language of the intended recipient.

It would be the easiest thing in the world to say that Krastyshevsky had lost his mind, and one could even make a sort of rhyme about it. There once was a man named Krastyshevsky, it turned out he’d Lost-his-headsky. And it would probably be better for everyone to think exactly that. There are some secrets that do not help one gain any spiritual clarity when one comes within their orbit. But Krastyshevsky’s formula had been tried and tested, and it had been tested using a method which left no room for ambiguity. He would not have been able to invest all that effort into something devoid of any real depth. The fate of the world was on the map, as the newspapers would have it; but it was not marked on the map in the newspapers, it was here. Krastyshevsky had initiated an experiment, and it would not be possible for the results to be open to two different interpretations: he had needed an opportunity to verify his method once and for all, and that was precisely what he had got.

[...]

Near the end of the novel, Krastyshevsky has a change of heart: he realises that war is inevitable, for the darkness of the Nazis must be defeated, whatever the cost.

Pages 502 – 503.

            And it was then that Krastyshevsky made up his mind to put his last ace in the hole.

            An explanation would appear necessary at this point. Although, come to think of it, no explanation is needed at all. Like anyone who has worked on something for a long time and with great determination, he had realised long ago that the world wasn’t just here by chance, that it hadn’t sprung into being of its own accord, that the world was a kind of handwriting, and the presence of this handwriting indicated that some act of creation had taken place. But it was not the case that there were just people on the one hand, and just a creator on high on the other, this was the important point to remember: there were also mediators, intermediaries like Lyonya. They had a language of their own, the remnants of which had dissolved into the most ancient languages on earth, such as Sanskrit. Krastyshevsky knew enough Sanskrit to have been able to explain his ideas to the first native speaker he would have come across, had the India he had dreamed of, where Sanskrit was spoken, really existed. It was not a made-up language, but one that had come down from the heavens. Its phonemes had a meaning all of their own. And Krastyshevsky had the idea of appealing to all the mediators – to the Emissaries, as they were usually known – at a time when the Emissaries would all be listening – namely, 3am. The most suitable place for a conversation with the Emissaries was somewhere high up, and in the open. Getting onto the roof via the fire-escape was a piece of cake. Krastyshevsky stood above the city as it lay there, asleep and transparent. It was starting to get light. The air was thick with odours and emissaries. Only on rare occasions did they happen to smell, above this city, something so wonderful, an ever more malodorous sweat, the sweat of horror and guilt. Now, though, they were hurrying to get their fill of the fragrant aromas of jasmine, and bird cherry, and the lilac that was already in bloom, and the lime trees that were only just preparing to flower. The air surrounding Krastyshevsky was a deep light-blue, and even blue-black, and he opened his mouth to speak. 

“Azhgukkhr! Akhrr! Akhrr!”

These were the words of a battle-cry, a call to be fully ready for battle; it called on those listening to destroy themselves, to hurl themselves into the abyss. They were the words of resistance. They were the kind of words after which no-one would dare to suggest a capitulation, to request a postponement, to hold out hope. They were the words of the very darkest decisiveness, designed to wake the dead.

“Azhgun! Grrakhr! Shrrruggr!”

Krastyshevsky heard a policeman blowing his whistle down below, and that meant he had to get a move on. 

“Grrastr! Trrubr! Andadavr!”

Someone was already on their way up to the roof to get him. Krastyshevsky pressed himself against a pipe. “Whatever happens now – I’ll accept it,” he thought. They had received the message loud and clear – only, the other lot had received it loud and clear too. He heard something in the air – he was not sure what exactly, but it was definitely something – that seemed to be saying to him: yes, yes, yes.   

Epilogue

            Early one Sunday morning, Lyonya set off into the woods with his wife and daughter. Natasha had been asking whether they could go on a trip to the woods for some time, and although it was still too early for mushroom season, he simply couldn’t say no. She had never been in a real wood before, and she imagined it would be rather like the realm of Baba Yaga – or Baba-Yagantic, as she liked to call her. She loved to mispronounce words in comical fashion, and always with a view to enlarging the things they connoted. Potato was potatormous; the black husky, Bagira, that belonged to one of their neighbours, was Bagirasaurus.

            They had travelled out to a holiday cottage in the countryside on the invitation of Lyonya’s boss at the garage, an old Bolshevik named Kosarev. Kosarev had rented a cottage in Kratov and invited Lyonya and his family to stay for the weekend. There was an area of mixed woodland that began right beside the station, with three footpaths that went off in different directions from the same root, as it were; and Lyonya set off down the one on the right. They soon came to a clearing filled with wild strawberries. Little Natasha wanted to rush around picking them, but had nothing to put them in. “Store them in your tummy,” Lyonya advised her, and she giggled. Lyonya had been surprised when he learned, just recently, that these small berries that grew in the woods and the fields were known as klubnika, whereas the ones folks grew in their gardens were zemlyanika. He wasn’t about to start relearning everything he thought he knew, though. Zemlyanika strawberries were small and sour, but you could taste the flavour of the forest in them, a flavour that was missing from garden strawberries. There was still dew on the grass, and the smell of wet bark was in the air; the little yellow birch leaves, scalded by the sweltering heat of early June, had already fallen to the ground; then the rains had come, softening everything, and now a fresh wave of heat had arrived. Lyonya was glad about that, though: the only thing he couldn’t stand was the cold.

            There was something remarkable about this particular morning, unless it was just that he hadn’t been out in the countryside for so long. He hardly ever got the chance to drive out of the city, all he ever saw was tarmacked roads, and there really was something extraordinary about this place, as if it were a special gift bestowed on him for forty-eight hours. The clouds in the sky were wide and sweeping, and seemingly tiered. They were moving, but ever so quietly, and they were changing shape, sailing into one another and merging together. It occurred to Lyonya that it was impossible to keep them fixed in one place, unless one took a photograph of them of course; two weeks ago, on his birthday, his wife had given him an FED[4] which, though it was second-hand, was a thing of beauty; he loved the smell of it. Only, why would one want to take photos of clouds? Lyonya didn’t even value his own life all that highly, let alone a humble cloud in the sky. One should never try to cling onto anything, he had learned that at the children’s home. That way, one wouldn’t feel the loss of anything – and what was he at risk of losing anyway? None of this was going anywhere, after all.

            All things considered, life was going pretty well. He liked his job, he had been given a pay-rise, he loved his wife, and his daughter’s health was improving. People weren’t too fond of her for some reason in the block where they lived, and she was spending more and more time at home, reading her books: she could already read, at four, albeit only children’s books thus far, but she had asked for some books for slightly older children too. The woman next door had given her some old books, from the pre-revolutionary days. This particular neighbour spent quite a lot of time with her, and was a good influence on her; she said the little girl was very capable, and that before long she would teach her French and that she was going to have a real Parisian accent, because Natasha mispronounced her ‘r’s – not all that noticeably, but a little.

            Natasha had eaten her fill of strawberries and was now looking for mushrooms, but there weren’t any, of course. Then she started picking flowers. The forest was now drawing close to her, unveiling all its new aromas at once, and making her all excited, like a dog on its first hunt. A dog was exactly what she imagined herself to be, in fact, one that was being taken for a walk by her father, and she started pulling at his trouser-leg. At that point he hoisted her onto his shoulders, but she soon jumped off and started running around in circles.

             The forest kept on deceiving Natasha. First she came across a leaf that was pretending to be a beetle, then suddenly a butterfly flew up towards her, when there had been no sign of it just a moment ago. Then, via a narrow strip of woodland, they came out into a field, in which Natasha promptly got lost. Her father could see where she was, needless to say, but from her perspective it felt as though no-one would ever find her now. There were tall stalks all around her, drinking in the rain that had recently fallen, and suddenly she came upon an array of bellflowers, a vast bellflower kingdom. The bluebells that she was used to seeing in the yard were as nothing in comparison to these ones. Those ones were mere guests, whereas the ones here were hosts. There was no way of knowing where so many of them had come from, or who had planted them. There were many different varieties – dark lilac, pale, and some that were almost light blue; they were floating in from all directions, and Natasha lost her way among them. They had no scent at all, but there was a bitter smell of grass and, for some reason, of honey, and this honey aroma was carried by a wind that came from goodness knew where. It was as if the honey had dissolved directly into the wind. After that the bellflowers ended and something yellow and captivating began, something very bright – her mother said it was probably field mustard, but her father said it was yellow rocket cress. Whatever it was called, though, it had a definite smell, unlike the bellflowers, and Natasha walked a little further with this smell around her, until she reached some raspberry, red and lilac flowers – Natasha already knew that they were field daisies, there were some like this outside Kosarev’s dacha. She had wanted to pick them too, but had then shown them mercy. They were the most beautiful flowers of all. The butterflies here were different, not like the ones in the forest: they were bigger and brighter, and one flew up right in front of her, a really extraordinary one, silvery-green in colour. Natasha had never seen any like this in her life, nor did she ever see one like it again, and she remembered its silver and green hues for the rest of her life, as vividly as a dream. And afterwards, each time she told someone about this butterfly, they would all say the same thing: that one like that simply had no business being in the area, that it belonged in the jungle, and that it was a complete mystery that it happened to fly into that particular meadow, on that particular day.

            The field then came to an end, and they came to a dusty road leading to a village. Her father put her on his shoulders once again. They walked along beside a pond, a long one that went on forever, then alongside a railway line. Her father promised to buy some steaming, freshly drawn milk when they got to the village. She pictured some sort of steam made of milk – not just any old milk, but a curd-like milk that would taste sweet.

            The road was deserted, there was no-one around. A strange brown bird was flying high in the sky above the field, screeching. Her mother said it was a baby hawk, an eyas. Even the air here was completely different from the air in Moscow: sounds carried a remarkably long way through it, pure and unadulterated. A train roared past and Natasha waved at it. Its passengers were on their way to intriguing destinations, places that Natasha and her parents would one day visit too. A fresh wave of that aroma of honey was in the air, now mingling with the hot smell of the train, the summer sleepers beneath the tracks, which smelled so reliable and businesslike, unlike any of the odours she could remember from the city – and it occurred to Natasha that she couldn’t remember having ever felt as good as she did today, either, but that from now on she would doubtless feel as good as this on many occasions.

            When they entered the village, Lyonya was struck by how empty the place felt. There was no-one around to sell them any milk. He walked on a little further and saw that all the villagers were standing around a radio loudspeaker that was attached to a tall yellow pillar. The loudspeaker was playing joyful, upbeat military music, and the people were listening attentively to it for some reason; they were all rooted to the spot. Their faces all looked ashen, as if this was a dream; Lyonya had never seen faces like that before. Nobody was saying anything, and there were no words coming from the loudspeaker either, there was nothing to go on at all save for the music; but he guessed what had happened.             

[1] Kruglov’s surname is derived from the adjective krugly, meaning round

[2] One of Pushkin’s most famous poems; the title translates as I remember that wondrous moment.

[3] Literally ‘lion’s mouth’ – a kind of letter box found in 14th-century Venice, into which citizens could put letters accusing others of plotting coups, or other crimes. The letter box would have a figure carved on it, typically a lion.

[4] The FED camera, named after Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (the founder and first leader of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka), was mass-produced from 1934 until the early 1990s.

The copyright to this sample translation is owned by Huw Davies.