Ken Kalfus - Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

“Panteleyev’s involved?”

“Apparently. He’s a fool. His participation poses a threat to the entire writers’ union. It puts our loyalty in question. Certain members of the Central Committee already have raised their voices against ideological drift. Too much publication abroad, too many European friends, not enough editorial oversight by Glavlit. I can’t say I disagree. Who has the guts to call himself a Marxist-Leninist writer these days?”

“But Panteleyev’s acting on his own!”

“No one acts on his own. He’s a member of the union. The union gives him the right to publish, to call himself a Soviet writer. It gives him housing and social benefits, annual holidays and health care. He has responsibilities in turn, and one of them is not to bring his fellow writers into disrepute.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mean it that way,” I said lamely. “Look, I’ll call him. I’ll ask him not to attend.” This didn’t sound strong enough. “I’ll stop him.”

Sorokin examined me for a moment and then closed his heavy, warted eyelids.

“Boris Stepanovich, do you need something? Some juice?”

He didn’t open his eyes. “Just take care of it,” he said.

No one answered the telephone at Viktor’s. I let it ring ten times and then called again. Then I went down to the café, hoping to find him quaffing a drink before going out to wreck his life. He wasn’t there of course, it had been years since I had seen him in the café. A few heads turned in my direction. I offered a smile and they quickly looked away. Nearly all the tables had been taken, but the room was unusually quiet. They couldn’t speak of what they most wished to speak. Had I been the last to learn of the demonstration?

It was well past five o’clock, already dark. I went for my coat and took a taxi through the wet, pedestrianchoked streets, not directly to Pushkin Square, but down the boulevard a bit, in the hope that I would be able to intercept Viktor on his way. I stood and looked back to the statue, reverse-shadowed by a layer of fresh snow. Pushkin’s curl-topped head was bowed in contemplation. One hand rested in his gown, the other held a derby at his side. In the dark, I couldn’t read the inscription on the statue’s base, but every schoolchild knew it:Throughout great Rus’ my echoes will extend, And all will name me, all tongues in her use….

No protesters gathered. Only passersby walked through the wet, lightly falling snow. A bus huffed by in a cloud of lingering, neon blue exhaust. Two babushkas swayed across the pavement, lugging what appeared to be either a large package of fruit preserves or pickles. There was no such thing as an anti-government demonstration in the Soviet Union, just as they didn’t sell blini in the Congo.

I continued to stand there, wondering how Viktor had become embroiled in Sorokin’s fantasies. The snow collected on me while it collected on Pushkin, but my overcoat, bought in London, kept me dry. The other pedestrians were also well dressed in warm cloth coats and good boots. To what else could Russians reasonably aspire? With a minute or so left before six, a tall woman in a long black coat emerged from the static that fell across the evening’s empty screen. She was beautiful. It was Marina.

She carried a shopping bag from which emerged a long piece of kolbasa. She didn’t see me at first. When she did, from a distance of about ten meters, recognition spilled across her face like ink tipped from a bottle. She halted, but she didn’t smile. She blinked in confusion, a gesture probably reflected on my own face. Then she resumed her approach, moving briskly.

“You’re on your way home,” I called out, not sure that she would stop again.

She brusquely kissed me twice on the cheeks but continued her motion forward.

“I need to be somewhere.”

“Home?”

“Where are you going?” she asked. Our questions carried equal measures of hopefulness. Tentatively, she said, “The same place?”

“Home? Your home?” I replied, trying to banter. “Is that an invitation?”

“I have an appointment,” she said guardedly.

“At 6 P.M.? That’s an unusual time for an appointment.”

“A friend.”

“What friend?” I asked. “Somebody I know? Let’s go for a drink.” We were already crossing the street. I blurted, “Are you going to Pushkin Square?”

She smiled cautiously.

“Listen,” I said. “Don’t go. It’s dangerous.”

Her face clouded over. I tried to block her but she walked around me. I hurried after her and took her arm.

“Listen, Marina, I know what they’ve planned. If I know, don’t you think the KGB knows? Everyone knows! You’ve been set up!”

“Good. We want the KGB to know. It’s against the KGB! What would the point be if they didn’t know?”

“Marina, where do you think you live? One word from Glavlit and you’ll never be published again! They’ll remove your book from the libraries. They’ll remove you from the union—then where would you be? Kaluga? Is that what you want? Don’t you want to be a writer?”

“Leave me alone!”

Her long strides had taken us to the edge of Pushkin Square—“Who do you think you’re going to help!” I cried—and suddenly dozens of people converged upon us. It wasn’t a mere chance eddying of the pedestrian flow. For the most part, they looked like intellectuals, poorly dressed and ineptly coifed, and more than enough were Jews. Marina roughly threw off my arm and rushed to the other side of the statue, disappearing behind a line of four or five women. They were standing in some kind of formation, pale and almost mortally self-conscious.

And then several things happened in what must have been the space of a minute, though the space seemed even more compressed than that, airless and radiant.

A second hand on some unknown watch lurched into the cleavage of a twelve and the line of women marched to the base of the statue. From a worn plastic shopping bag one of them removed a long roll of white cloth on which something, some slogan, had been painted. This woman was middle-aged, squat, with heavy eyeglasses and a long, nearly simian jaw. Tight-lipped, like a high diver at the edge of the board, she passed one end of the cloth to the last woman on the line. It took a moment for them to shake out the banner; even then, even though I was only a few paces away, I could not read the words. As if in another language, or printed in invisible ink, they refused legibility.

Springing from the soil, it seemed, there were then many men with bulky, grotesquely oversized flashcameras. “They’re here!” someone shouted, and others moaned with surprise and fright. The men wore pale brown raincoats. Each time they squeezed off a picture, darting and spinning around us, they grimaced. As the evening landscape turned stark and two-dimensional, the flashes made a soft popping sound that echoed like something from a childhood memory.

It was then that I glimpsed Viktor, standing distant from the melee, a sign of his own hanging from his neck. He seemed disoriented and uncomprehending, an actual passerby. I could read his sign: “RESPECT THE CONSTITUTION!”

In these electric moments, I thought of grabbing Viktor and pulling him away, but the thought barely lasted its articulation. I stuffed my face into my coat and turned to run. Then suddenly dozens of more men, most of them in leather jackets, arrived among us, further outnumbering the protesters. They headed for the women carrying the banners, making detours to push and throw punches at other civilians. Someone I never saw thumped me on the back, a terrific, expert blow that knocked the wind from me and brought me to my knees. When I looked up, two black Volgas had arrived, and the women were being roughly shoved into them, held firmly by their necks.