Ken Kalfus - Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

The street was quiet. A lone babushka, Vadim Surkov’s mother-in-law, pulled a wagon up the street, laying in her firewood early. She was an elderly woman, bloated beneath her housedress, a squall of wrinkles around her toothless mouth. We had never spoken, though Surkov’s dacha was located two doors down. Now as she spotted me, her eyes danced beneath her cataracts.

She laughed, a kind of mad cackle, and shouted, “The fascists are in for a hot time now. The whole lot of them.”

I smiled. “What fascists?”

“You know, sonny, the counterrevolutionaries. The wreckers. The Right Oppositionists.”

The phrase made me smile again. I assumed she had become distracted from the exertion of pulling the cart, or simply from being old, and had imagined herself to be living in another time. It was a remarkable phenomenon, entirely forgivable, and I thought of all that her generation had seen and suffered. I should have offered to help her with the cart. Instead, to draw her out, to keep the dream going for my own instruction, I asked her, “These Right Oppositionists, who might they be?”

“Dubcek,” she spat. “And his ilk! They’ve locked ’em up, all of ’em! The bastards will hang from the lampposts.”

Muttering and sniggering, she made her way down the street. I turned to Lydia, who was working so intently that she had not heard the remark. Her face was entirely composed, self-contained, satisfied with the dirt under her fingertips. Without a word I hurried from the garden, down the block in the opposite direction, to Sasha Nasedkin’s dacha.

This had been the scene of a particularly raucous party just the week before. We had attended it, but left early: by chance, Lydia and I had looked up at the same time and communicated to each other the urgent desire to read for a half hour before turning in. This murmured agreement—this congruency of desires—surprised us. We giggled at it. The party had continued in our absence and, like every great party in those last days, had ended at least one marriage and did not wind down until the morning sun had lifted itself above the treetops.

Now the house had the air of centuries-long abandonment. No one was in the untended garden, where some chairs had been tipped over and an empty vodka bottle lay in a vine-choked, crumbling fountain. The windows to the house were closed, but the doorway gaped like a vacant tooth.

“Sasha? Hello? Anyone home? It’s me, Rem!”

The inside of the dacha smelled of trash and spoiled food. Papers were scattered everywhere, on the kitchen table and on the windowsills. I found something odd at the foot of the warm stove: half a typed manuscript, the bottom half, charred around the upper edges. In the next room there was an insistent radio buzzing noise, which I recognized at once as the sound of the BBC being jammed.

“Sasha?”

Between a bottle of Gordon’s gin and one of Schweppe’s tonic, a juice glass was filled to the top. Sasha stared at it, ignoring me. He was disheveled, in some ratty dressing grown, unshaven and red eyed. The BBC rattled in the radio like a trapped bee.

“It’s Dubcek?” I asked. “I just heard.”

Sasha gave a little half laugh.

“Rem Krilov, always well connected and well informed… Not to worry, ha ha. Our good Czechoslovakian friends… fraternal brothers, friendly friends… socialist allies. They’ve invited us to a party. They asked us to bring our tanks… I’m such a great literary critic, how come I couldn’t read the writing on the wall?”

“When did this happen?”

“Can’t you tell by how drunk I am? Two days ago.”

I pointed into the next room. “And the manuscript?”

“Nothing really, Rem. Just some housecleaning. Just cleaning house, getting ready for the next decade, ha ha. But I don’t have the balls for cleaning house. I pulled it out of the fire. What can they do to me? I haven’t invited them, ha ha.”

Before I left I squatted by the stove and picked up the remains of the manuscript. It was a memoir. Balanced on my haunches, able to read no more than ten or eleven lines of each page, I nonetheless recognized that it was a work of enormous accomplishment, honest and unrestrained, like nothing that had ever been published in our literature. Its phrases even now resonate in my head (later I tried to copy the words into my notebook, but could never get them exactly right). I read the manuscript to the very end, taking perhaps more than an hour, never changing my position. Occasionally I heard Sasha stir behind me. He stretched a leg, he picked up his glass, he sighed, he drummed his fingers on the table. The BBC continued to hiss and moan. When I finished the manuscript, I opened the stove door and gently deposited the pages into the dimming fire.

I returned my stiff back and numb left leg to our dacha. Lydia was in the kitchen, preparing a ragout from a recipe in an Italian cookbook. The cookbook was one of several brought to Moscow by a visiting Italian publisher in the correct expectation that he would be showered with lapel pins and would want to give something in return. Lydia had made his acquaintance at a party and, though no lapel pins had been exchanged, the book became one of Lydia’s earthly treasures. When I told her the news, she raised her hand to her face and made a little soundless moue of pain. She looked back at the recipe. Stained and swollen, evidence of cosmopolitan tastes and foreign contacts, the book was now enveloped in the aura of samizdat.

Anyone who had spent an entire life in the Soviet Union—indeed, a week would have served, and been far more convenient—knew at once that the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia would be accompanied by a crackdown at home. I realized now that we had been expecting this always, even counting on it. The expectation had fevered our social gatherings, our love affairs, and, especially, our work. Night would follow day; it always did.

Most of the trips to Mexico City were canceled. The apartments of dissidents were searched, as were those of nonconformist journalists, lawyers, and trade unionists. A demonstration in Red Square lead to seven arrests, including the arrest of a woman wielding an empty baby carriage. On the carriage was hung the banner: “To Your Freedom and Ours!”—Aleksandr Herzen’s cry in defense of Polish rebels a century before. First Secretary Alexander Dubcek and his colleagues were abducted to Moscow and forced to recant the heresy of reform communism.

Even in the best of times, our news reports were delivered by radio and television in a harsh drone nearly devoid of information. Across the airwaves, the standard words and phrases churned and boiled like the Baltic in winter. After heralding the delivery of “urgent aid to the fraternal Czechoslovak people,” “in defense of peace,” a harsher tone was taken, with many references to “traitors” and “agents of world capital,” but the roar itself remained constant, an almost soothing accompaniment to one’s breakfast or dinner. This is how it had always been. And then one September morning, in this ocean of radio noise, the words “Marina Burchatkina” surfaced like an enemy submarine.

I was home, making coffee in my bachelor kitchen and glumly looking ahead to my day’s work, which had faltered since my return from Peredelkino. Taking the broadcast of Marina’s name as an aural hallucination, I decided that my obsession with her had finally overcome my senses. I could still feel her touch echoing off my skin.

This acknowledgement meant that my life would be different now. I would have to pursue her, win her, and marry her; otherwise I would know no mental ease. I loved her. The hallucination then deepened, deforming reality itself. I heard the following:

“…outrage at her selfish and criminal anti-Soviet actions. We cannot understand how someone raised under Soviet rule, whose education and professional status were provided by the toil of common laborers, can so unscrupulously libel our way of life. Burchatkina’s letter serves only the interests of Western reactionary circles opposed to the efforts of the Soviet Union to foster peaceful coexistence. She who blackens her country and people and tries to turn back history deserves only contempt and indignation.”