Ken Kalfus - Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

The woman who had unfurled the banner was the last to go. Her shopping bag had burst, scattering onto the pavement some groceries and several pages of typescript. Both the groceries and the typescript were being frantically collected by a man in a leather jacket. The woman was also taken by the neck, but the plainclothesman holding her missed the opening into the back of the car and, quite deliberately I was sure, smashed her face into the doorframe. From where I knelt, I could hear the contest of bone against steel. Steel won. Her eyeglasses flew off her broken face and into the street. They lay there as the car drove off.

More photographs were being taken and more arrests were being made. I didn’t search for either Marina or Viktor. Now I succeeded in getting away, my face covered by the back of my arm. Fifty meters up Gorky Street I overtook pedestrians oblivious to what had just happened, oblivious to my terror. I bumped against them, a few hurled curses at me, and I continued running through the darkness. Down the stairs of an underground passageway across Gorky, I slipped on some ice and took a tumble. As I fell onto the steps, one of my hands was pulled the wrong way, delivering a sharp jolt to my wrist. When I resumed my flight, cold air whipped around my naked left knee.

I was thoroughly winded by the time I reached the union. I didn’t remove my coat—“Rem Petrovich!” shouted old Darya at the coatcheck—and went straight to my office. I collapsed at my desk and then, with the door closed and the lights off, I wept, spasmodically trying to catch my breath. The tears sluiced down my face and flowed into the mucous pouring from my nose. I tasted the salts of humiliation for the first time since I had left Tomsk.

I don’t know how long I wept. Eventually I removed my handkerchief from my jacket and wiped my face. I was still wearing my coat. I sat in the dark for a while, trying to sort out what had happened, what terrible calamity I had narrowly escaped, or perhaps hadn’t escaped at all. The photographers had been all over the place; would the KGB accept Sorokin’s explanation of my attendance? But now my thoughts departed from the practical and the actual. The moment I had taken flight I comprehended the full measure of the difference between my size and the size of the power that commanded the man who thumped me on my back. It rendered me insignificant, and all the literary pretensions I possessed—as creator, as an individual whose life was bound to his art, as heir to Pushkin, as, ha ha, the unacknowledged legislator of the world—were rendered negligible. How easily I had fallen to my knees… And then at some indeterminate time, hours later perhaps, the door to my office opened soundlessly and a shadow passed through it.

The door closed and the office was dark again. A featureless gray form hovered before me, radiating heat. For a long time I remained at my desk, waiting for the form to define itself. Finally I stood, became a form myself, and the two forms swelled toward each other. She too wore her coat. My hands slid beneath it, along the back of a damp, moist blouse. Her body quavered beneath my touch, but not from my touch. It was fear, at least at first. Her hands ran along my sides and pressed me to her. A stray photon drifted into the room and phosphoresced in a tear swelling at the surface of one of her eyes. I made out the smear of her mascara. That was the last thing I observed, because suddenly I was bereft of language, even language with which to think. Not a single word was exchanged between us.

A severe flu descended upon me the following week, and I seemed to be ill the remainder of the winter, which I spent mostly under the blankets, tending to myself. Feverish, congested, and exhausted, I lay in bed brooding about the protest and the events that immediately followed it, but in these days I could barely phrase two consecutive thoughts. I drank weak tea with honey and dried berries; then tea from lime blossoms. I drank warm milk with honey, then with butter, then with Borzhomi water. I placed mustard plaster on my chest. I hung garlic cloves around my neck and stuffed two of them up my nose. That winter I hardly went in to the office. I was waiting for the next shoe to drop, but the demonstration, although well known throughout the city by some kind of jungle telegraph—not a word about it was set into type—didn’t lead to further arrests. No action was taken against Marina, nor against Viktor. No inquiries were made about my own presence on Pushkin Square that evening.

I saw Marina on a few occasions, but not in a private setting, and neither of us took the opportunity to speak with each other. The glow of celebrity had faded from her face and her eyes had become dull. In these encounters, no matter the liveliness of the company, her expression remained pensive. She didn’t offer me any significant look except, once in the café, a kind, mournful smile. These days she seemed to be carrying something deep within her, like the intimate knowledge of her own mortality. In retrospect, I had perceived this the night of the protest. At no time had our embraces and caresses felt like something that was beginning. It had felt, right to the final shudder, like something ending. What was ending, I didn’t comprehend until later.

The confused nature of the evening’s events, and particularly their lack of record or apparent consequence, invited me to believe that they had never happened. At night I lay awake, my fever breaking once again, and tried to recall what I had seen and felt. Repeatedly I found myself in that elongated moment when the women at the base of Pushkin’s statue unfurled their banners. I stood there, squinting, trying to hold the moment long enough to read what was on the banners. Letters and words swirled along the cloth—fragments of political declarations, fragments of declarations of love, lines from poetry and novels, some of them my own—but they never remained there long enough to be understood. Always, in the end, the banner would come up empty, a stretch of white cloth, anti-Soviet merely by its existence, but offering nothing to be read.

I never said anything about the demonstration to Sorokin and he never brought it up with me. I was grateful for that. Meanwhile, Marina kept herself out of view and out of gossip. Many times I dialed the first five digits of her telephone number, merely for the pleasure of doing so, but with no intention of dialing the sixth.

Springtime came and my head began to clear. I tossed aside the notes for my novel and began anew. Then came an unusually sweltering summer, an odd summer, really, unnervingly quiet and suffused with expectation, which I mistook for anticipation of the summer Olympics to be held in early September. The press and television were consumed by oracular pronouncements on the prospects of our swimmers, our runners, our acrobats, and especially our weightlifters. Several of my better-placed friends and colleagues had wrangled assignments to cover the games or to join the government delegation to Mexico City. As I gingerly returned to social life, I found that my friends did not want to speak of literature, but rather of Janis Lusis, our promising javelin thrower.

I managed to get caught up in the pre-games fervor, at least to some extent, despite the absence of a radio at the dacha and our avoidance of the news from one day to the next. This was part of my convalescence, to seal myself in the dacha with Lydia, her gardening implements, and our books. As August wound down and the afternoons became chilly, I looked with some regret toward my return to the city. Lydia began harvesting and canning her tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, and cherries, while I watched her from over the novel I pretended to read. She wore a light, full-length dress as she leaned over the rows, not bending her knees. A breeze skittered around her ankles and for a moment plastered the dress against the backs of her legs and thighs. I rose from the hammock to walk off my hard-on and strolled over to the hedge.