Ian Watson: Stalin's Teardrops

At last, rounding a certain corner, I sprinted ahead and darted behind a shuttered kiosk. Waiting, I heard her break into a canter because she feared she had lost me. By now no one else was about. Leaping out, I caught her wrist. She shrieked, afraid of rape or a mugging by a hooligan.

"Who are you?" she gasped. "What do you want?"

"Look at me, Grusha. I'm Valentin. Don't you recognize me?"

"You must be… his son!"

"Oh no."

The distortions wrought by age, the wrinkles, liver spots, crow's feet and pot belly: all these had dropped away from me, just as they always did whenever I took my special route. I had cast off decades. How else could I enjoy and satisfy a mistress such as Koshka?

Grusha had also shed years, becoming a gawky, callow girl-who now clutched my arm now in awkward terror, for I had released her wrist.

"What has happened, Colonel?"

"I can't still be a Colonel, can I? Maybe a simple Captain or Lieutenant."

"You're young !"

"You're very young indeed, a mere fledgling."

"Was it all done by make-up-I mean, your appearance, back at the Centre? In that case how can the career records…?"

"Ah, so you saw mine?" Despite the failing light I could have sworn that she blushed. "Make-up, you say? Yes, made up ! My country is made up, invented by us map makers. We are the makers of false maps, dear girl; and our national consciousness is honed by this as a pencil is brought to a needle-point against a sand-paper block, as the blade of a mapping pen is sharpened on an oil stone. Dead ground occurs."

"I know what 'dead ground' means. That merely refers to areas you can't see on a relief map from a particular viewpoint."

"Such as the viewpoint of the State…? Listen to me: if we inflate certain areas, then we shrink others away to a vanishing point. These places can still be found by the map-maker who knows the relation between the false and the real; one who knows the routes. From here to there; from now to then. Do you recognize this street, Grusha? Do you know its name?"

"I can't see a signpost…"

"You still don't understand." I drew her towards a shop window, under a street lamp which had now illuminated. "Look at yourself!"

She regarded her late-adolescent self. She pressed her face to the plate glass as though a ghostly shop assistant might be lurking inside, imitating her stance. Then she sprang back, not because she had discovered somebody within but because she had found no one.

"These dead zones," she murmured. "You mean the gulags, the places of internal exile…"

"No! I mean places such as this. I'm sure other people than me must have found similar dead zones; and never breathed a word. These places have their own inhabitants, who are recorded on no census."

"So you're a secret dissident, are you, Valentin?"

I shook my head. "Without the firm foundation of the State-as-it-is-without the lie of the land, as Mirov innocently put it-how could such places continue to exist? That is why we must not destroy the work of decades. This is magical-magical, Grusha! I am young again. My mistress lives here."

She froze. "So your motives are entirely selfish."

"I am old, back at the Centre. I've given my life to the State. I deserve… No, you're too ambitious, too eager for stupid troublesome changes. It is you who are selfish at heart. The very best of everything resides in the past. Why read modern mumbo-jumbo when we can read immortal Turgenev or Gogol? I've suffered… terror. My Koshka and I are both honed in the fires of fear." How could I explain that, despite all, those were the best days? The pure days.

"Fear is finished," she declared. "Clarity is dawning."

I could have laughed till I cried.

"What we will lose because of it! How our consciousness will be diminished, diluted, bastardised by foreign poisons. I'm a patriot, Grusha."

"A red fascist," she sneered, and started to walk away.

"Where are you going?" I called.

"Back."

"Can't do that, girl. Not so easily. Don't know the way. You'll traipse round and round."

"We'll see!" Hitching herself, she marched off.

I headed to Koshka's flat, where pickles and black caviar sandwiches, cold cuts and mushroom and spirit were waiting; and Koshka herself, and her warm sheets.

Towards midnight, in the stillness I heard faint footsteps outside so I rose and looked down from her window. A slim shadowy form paced wearily along the pavement below, moving out of sight. After a while the figure returned along the opposite pavement, helplessly retracing the same route.

"What is it, Valentin?" came my mistress's voice. "Why don't you come back to bed?"

"It's nothing important, my love," I said. "Just a street walker, all alone."

When Peterkin was a lad, the possibilities for joy seemed limitless. He would become a famous artist. He dreamed of sensual canvases shamelessly ablush with pink flesh, peaches, orchid blooms. Voluptuous models would disrobe for him and sprawl upon a velvet divan. Each would be an appetizing banquet, a feast for the eyes, as teasing to his palate as stimulating of his palette.

Why did he associate naked ladies with platters of gourmet cuisine? Was it because those ladies were spread for consumption? How he had lusted for decent food when he was young. And how he had hungered for the flesh. Here, no doubt, was the origin of the equation between feasting and love.

Peterkin felt no desire to eat human flesh. He never even nibbled his own fingers. The prospect of tooth marks indenting a human body nauseated him. Love-bites were abhorrent. No, he yearned-as it were-to absorb a woman's body. Libido, appetite, and art were one.

Alas for his ambitions, the requirements of the Party had cemented him into a career niche in the secret police building in Dzerzhinsky Square; on the eighth floor, to be precise, in the cartography department.

Not for him a paint brush but all those damnable map projections. Cylindrical, conical, azimuthal. Orthographic, gnomonic. Sinusoidal, polyconic.

Not Matisse, but Mercator.

Not Gauguin but Gall's Stereographic. Not Modigliani but Interrupted Mollweide.

The would-be artist had mutated into an assistant in this subdivided suite of rooms where false maps were concocted.

"My dreams have decayed," he confided to friend Goldman in the restaurant one lunchtime.

Around them, officers from the directorates of cryptography, surveillance, or the border guards ate lustily under rows of fat white light-globes. Each globe wore a hat-like shade. Fifty featureless white heads hung from the ceiling, brooking no shadows below, keeping watch blindly. A couple of baggy babushkas wheeled trolleys stacked with dirty dishes around the hall. Those old women seemed bent on achieving some quota of soiled crockery rather than on delivering the same speedily to the nearest sink.

Goldman speared a slice of roast tongue. "Oh I don't know. Where else, um, can we eat, um, as finely as this?"

Dark, curly-haired, pretty-faced Goldman was developing a hint of a pot-belly. Only a proto-pot as yet, though definitely a protuberance in the making. Peterkin eyed his neighbour's midriff.

Goldman sighed. "Ah, it's the sedentary life! I freely admit it. All day long spent sharpening quills for pens, pens, pens… No sooner do I empty one basket of wing feathers than that wretched hunchback porter delivers another. Small wonder he's a hunchback! I really ought to be out in the woods or the marshes shooting geese and teal and woodcock. That's what I wanted to be, you know? A hunter out in the open air."

"So you've told me." Peterkin was lunching on broiled hazel-hen with jam. However, each evening-rain, snow, or shine-he made sure to take a five-kilometre constitutional walk, armed with a sketchbook as witness to his former hopes; rather as a mother chimp might tote her dead baby around until it started to stink.