Ken Kalfus - Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

There was more business at hand, of course, including a report on our accounts, a report about our increased membership, and even a resolution lauding the Czechoslovak writers’ union, which had been brutally reconstituted after the invasion, for its “brave defense of national sovereignty.”

Then the floor was opened to “questions from the floor,” and someone I didn’t know approached the microphone, a hefty dark man in a gray pullover. He identified himself as a poet-miner from Kemerovo. I idly wondered how many words rhymed with “shovel” and “bituminous.” As I began making a list of rhymes, as I had done with the aid of my father’s dictionary when I was first seized by the idea of becoming a poet myself, I became conscious of the furtive looks again glancing off me from around the hall. The attention was disturbing, but not as much as the furtiveness. The miner predictably encountered difficulty reading his own speech, mispronouncing and replacing many words, but it seemed to be in general praise of the Soviet medical profession.

A hospital had been built in Kemerovo, providing free medical care to all workers. The miner-poet went on for some time about the hospital and about the general advances in medical care throughout the Soviet Union, rambling a bit and thus giving evidence that he might have written at least part of the speech himself. My attention abated again, but part of me continued to follow in parallel his spiraling oration down some very nasty hole.

It reached the bottom of its descent when he warned against “gross libel of the Soviet psychiatric profession.” He reminded us that, while psychiatric care in the West was a luxury of the rich and pampered, Soviet psychiatry served “working-class men and women with working-class problems.” During the Great Patriotic War, honorable men of the psychiatric profession had served on the front lines against the Nazis, risking and often sacrificing their lives to treat the psychological effects of war on the heroic defenders of liberty. Was this the reason “shell shock,” as it was called in the West, was virtually unheard of in the Red Army? Today Soviet psychiatric medicine was poised to advance to the furthest reaches of human consciousness, promising relief from anxiety, stress, and neurosis, if only it were not impeded by the forces of reaction.

When Viktor Panteleyev’s name was read out by the miner, I knew that all was lost. My name and a few others, belonging to men who were far more surprised than I was, shortly followed. The air in the room turned cold; there were gasps of surprise. Sorokin asked if anyone wished to speak on the question. No one did, not even those who had been named. Viktor, of course, had not bothered to attend the meeting. The news of his expulsion from the union would come to him in a registered letter, which he might well neglect to open. When eventually arrested for “social parasitism,” he would go without protest. This time the vote was opposed by a few liberal stalwarts with secure reputations, but it passed easily. Men rose from their seats. As if the vote had somehow reversed evolution, not one stood fully erect. They staggered from the hall.

This was expected of me as well, but I found myself paralyzed and my vision dimmed. Sorokin stood at the podium in a shaft of avenging light, the dome of his massive head radiant. He glowered at me, focusing all the attention in the hall. He had silenced the audience, even their incidental coughs and rustling of papers. At last I climbed from my seat, tripped over some legs, crawled out into the aisle, and left.

I struggled up the carpeted, chandeliered stairway to the third floor. As I entered the corridor in the afterhours murk, I could see four large cardboard boxes neatly stacked outside my office. I approached them warily, my legs shaking. My home address was neatly printed on the top box. I opened the door to the office and flicked on the light. The room was perfectly empty, much larger than I had remembered it. The office needed a new paint job, but it would have taken the most rigorous forensics to determine that I had ever inhabited it.

I returned downstairs, claimed my coat (Darya Sergeyevna gave it up reluctantly, scowling), and left the building.

The snow was falling thickly by the time I disembarked at Peredelkino, the only passenger stepping from the dark and frigid train. When I reached the end of the platform I turned and saw that the snow had already covered my tracks. The streets of the village were unlit except by the radiance of the snow itself, which swallowed the sound of my footfalls.

Once the train had pulled from the station, the village offered the illusion of being completely detached from the world. It was self-sufficient: fed, heated, and powered by the imaginations of its inhabitants. I crossed over the frozen brook unwinding along the station and headed up the hill. The air was scented with sweet chimney smoke. Someone was burning cedar, an extravagance. The lovingly maintained fiction was that this village was a republic. Its only currency was language, and its military was composed of readers, partisans who would defend it at any risk to themselves. Its laws were just and mostly grammatical, but no less severe for that. The village was a confident one and defiant in its knowledge that it had chanced upon the most perfect political economy.

As I crossed our gate, I suffered a premonition that I was about to be surprised for the second time that evening. I stopped at the window, expecting to see Lydia in Vadim Surkov’s embrace.

But Lydia was alone, sitting in her upholstered chair, fixed in the amber cone of the reading light. A fat book rested on her lap. It was mine, The Northern Lights. She was entirely motionless, as if holding her breath. I could not make out the movement of her eyes. After a while she turned the page. She would not have seen me even if she had looked up, because I was standing in the dark behind the glass, in the dark nowhere place from where authors always watch their readers. To disturb her would have been as if to ripple the surface of a clear mountain lake in which the moon and the cosmos were perfectly reflected. I knew that shortly there would be many explanations to be made, however imperfectly, and then confessions and recriminations, protestations of grief and loss, and then at last hard, practical calculation. Before that, I wanted to absorb—place into words I would always be able to summon—an image of her like that, the passionate reader. I watched for a long time, letting the cold seep through my coat and skin. The snowflakes, like a precipitation of type, collected in my hair and upon my eyelashes.

Because these stories are fiction, I should probably limit my acknowledgements of credit to the relevant Muse. But several friends have provided invaluable assistance in researching the material for these stories, and it’s the author’s prerogative to express his gratitude to them. These friends introduced me to the charms and peculiarities of Russian life, carefully read my work, and pointed out its solecisms—some of which, for my own perverse reasons, I have allowed to stand.

Alla Bourakovskaya read each of these stories with a sharp eye for its literary as well as factual qualities and gave me continued guidance on how things work, or don’t, in Russia. Valentina Markusova, Natasha Perova, Masha Lipman, Viktoria Mkrtchan, and Aleksandra Sheremeyeva also provided significant comment.

In the Jewish Autonomous Republic, I enjoyed a productive interview with David Vaiserman, whose book Kak Eto Bil proved very helpful. My example of socialist klezmer is based on a song that appeared in Ruth Rubin’s book Voices of a People .

In regards to “Anzhelika, 13,” I wish to acknowledge the precedence of Ludmilla Ulitskaya’s story “March 1953,” which appeared in Glas 6 .