Ken Kalfus - Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

I forced myself to finish breakfast, not fully understanding what I had just heard (but understanding enough). I dressed and hurried to the metro. The train arrived as I reached the platform and I was carried by the masses into the central car, whose atmosphere was thick with the odors of garlic and sour milk. Pressed against my body, the other passengers showed me their faces of ash and their blind, watery eyes. They were not only my compatriots, they were my readers. Emerging from the Krasnopresnenskaya metro station, I deeply inhaled but failed to taste fresh air. Inside the Rostov mansion reigned a deep, muffled silence. A few colleagues crossed my path, but they didn’t look my way. Something had slightly altered the building’s dimensions, narrowing the foyer corridor and deepening the tread on the little steps down to the café. Desperate, I went to the publications office and found Anton Basmanian at a desk, studying a sheet of galleys.

He had gained some unbecoming weight in the last few years, especially in his jowls and belly. With his head down, the thinning of his hair was apparent. It was probably just as well that his wife had come up from Yerevan. Meanwhile, he had kept control of his journal by fluttering it to the right side of the innocuous.

“Anton,” I said.

He kept his eyes fixed on a line of type.

“Rem.”

“Tell me. What did I hear on Radio Beacon?”

“A Bach cantata, perhaps. ‘Sleepers Awake.’” Now he put down his pencil and looked up. He strained out a smile. His teeth were as gleamingly white as ever. “She wrote a so-called open letter to the Politburo. She appears to be a bit put out by Czechoslovakia.”

“It was published?”

“In Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, the New York Times, Die Zeit.”

The title of each foreign publication struck me like a body blow. I collapsed into a folding chair. I had known that she had done something terrible, but nothing as terrible as this.

My mouth was parched when I spoke next. “Well, she’s finished.”

Anton chuckled, monstrously. “No, she’s just beginning. I haven’t told you the best part.”

“What?”

“The letter was written in Paris. She has a visiting lectureship at the Sorbonne. On what subject, I don’t know. In Kaluga she taught arts and crafts to twelve year olds.”

My brain had slowed nearly to a stop; I could barely make out Anton’s words. I felt as if I were still in the metro, surrounded by strangers. I closed my eyes and felt a filament of steam from a cup of espresso tickle my nostril hairs.

“She’s not coming back.” I tried to make it sound like a declarative sentence, but there was a childish, hopeful interrogative rising at the end.

He laughed at the possibility. She had already been stripped of her Soviet citizenship, of course.

Anton said, “I suppose you haven’t talked to Sorokin, or been by your office, have you?”

“I’ve just come in.”

“There’s a union petition against her. You’ll have to sign. And I suppose there’ll be a pro forma expulsion. That’ll be on the agenda, a real spectacle I’m sure.”

I slumped my shoulders.

“And let me give you some advice, Rem, my friend.”

I looked at him dejectedly.

He said, “It won’t hurt for you to be the one to submit the resolution. People have memories, you know. They know about the role you played in her career.”

“I hardly had anything to do with her. Anyway, she’s in Paris now. People should forget her.”

“You don’t understand, the entire union is under a microscope. Not just the leadership: the rank and file too. They’re talking about a new censorship regime, closing literary journals, ending foreign travel.”

“Because of a single letter in Le Monde?”

“It’s the whole international situation. They’re going back through everything that’s been written in the past ten years, looking for divergences from Party views. Suslov’s involved! The pressure’s incredible. The union has to respond in a positive way.”

“Fine, I’ve got no objection to that.”

“Look, Rem, all they’re asking for is a little self-criticism. It’s nothing.”

“For what? For reading her work?”

“For recommending her for publication. You know, write about how your proletarian vigilance had been relaxed, about how you were misled.”

“But you published her!”

“I’m also writing a letter of self-criticism. I’m pouring a bucket of shit on my head.”

“And you had an affair with her! You spent a week with her in Tashkent!”

“That’s personal. It had nothing to do with politics,” Anton said. The recollection brightened his smile.

Later that day, the text of Radio Beacon’s attack on Marina Burchatkina was posted in the glassed-in bulletin board in the lobby outside the café. It was signed and ostensibly written by six Heroes of Socialist Labor, members of the mechanics’ union at the Zil Autoworks.

In September 1944, as the Red Army pressed on toward central Europe, an ineptly planned uprising by Slovak partisans was countered by the 357th German Infantry Division and the 108th Panzar Division. Rushing to the Slovaks’ aid, the Red Army descended from its positions in the Carpathian mountains and met the Germans in and around Krosno. Two days of close fighting ensued. As it advanced into the Dukla Pass, the 38th Red Army’s first Guards Calvary received orders to open a narrow corridor, less than 2000 meters wide, between the villages of Lysa Gura and Gloitse. Leaving behind its heavy weaponry and much of its ammunition, the Soviets passed through a zone raked by machine-gun and mortar fire. My father, a young lieutenant who had won decorations at Lvov, took a sniper’s bullet in the throat. It was not necessarily a mortal wound, members of his company said later, but without quick medical attention he bled to death on the pass’s wooded slopes.

As our government propagandists reminded us, the Soviet people had paid a high price for the liberation of Czechoslovakia. Even among my liberal friends, there were now murmurs that Dubcek had left us no alternative.

Meanwhile, news of Marina Burchatkina had, by way of returning travelers and those who had access to Western media, filtered through to the Rostov mansion. She had appeared on French TV. From there she went to America. It was said that her publisher offered her a lucrative contract for her next work, a book of political essays. She became romantically linked to a famous Hollywood director.

Every piece of news was treated with ironic contempt by my colleagues, but I kept my silence, trying to identify the precise nature of my loss. I now spent hardly any time at the union, not even in the café. I worked every day at home, when I did any work at all. In the evenings I stayed home too; suddenly, there were no parties, no salons, no encounters with foreign guests. Out at the dacha, I mentioned Marina’s spectacular defection to Lydia, but she shrugged it off. For her, the invasion of Czechoslovakia had more serious consequences: the flow of foreign books into Russia, whether authorized or not, was slowed to a desperate trickle.

I had never told her about Pushkin Square. Now I didn’t tell her that I had been asked to sign another petition, nor that it had been suggested that I sponsor a resolution. The only piece of writing that I produced that autumn was a lengthy and flamboyantly damning letter of self-criticism, which I tore into little pieces and flushed down the toilet.

A few weeks after my encounter with Anton, I was called into Sorokin’s office. He shoved a piece of paper across the desk.

“Read this.”

Marina Burchatkina’s open letter to the Politburo, published all over the world, had been printed on a numbered document that was labeled the property of the Committee for State Security. I had not heard of anyone who had actually seen the letter, among neither travelers to the West nor the privileged recipients of foreign newspapers. I took a seat and read it, aware that Sorokin was closely reading my face, on which I had pasted a stern, worried expression. I immediately recognized that the letter was no great advance in the literature of political philosophy; it was an absurd amalgam of special pleading and whiffy analysis, to which were tacked irrelevant quotations from Gandhi, Tolstoy, the Czech statesman Jan Masaryk, and Lenin himself, and then John Lennon. When I reached the end (“Comrade Brezhnev, please give peace a chance!”), I said, “It’s vile.”