Дмитрий Савицкий: Waltz for K.

I listened to their tipsy conversation in a welter of perspiration. My eyes went completely out of focus and swam in a luminous mist. Many things began to be revealed to me. After all, I have never pondered the matter deeply. There was a second when it became my life, an everyday thing, a gift. I had never felt anything other than the simple possibility of moving resiliency through the air. It was my secret freedom—and Katenka’s too, of course. And that’s all!

They finally sensed my presence. Turning round at once, both somehow darkened, and the first—glasses and a crooked beard—said in a phoney voice: “And it was she herself who put it to him. In the doorway. She has a husband at home. Dead drunk, as usual....”

They had taken me for an informer.

On my way out of the cafe, feeling their eyes on my back, I rose up in the doorway, hung there for a bit, just long enough for them to get a good look, pushed the door to, and flew off. Well, what else could I have done to help them?

Along Sadovoye Koltso the wind chased dry, swirling leaves. The puddles were frozen over. The evening crowd flowed heavily along the street, swirled in grey eddies, spitting out individuals who had lost the rhythm. A moustached militiaman stood heavily, his big boots planted wide apart. A woman climbed heavily—though still young—onto a bus. A grey wino breathed heavily on the corner, as he rested with an enormous string bag bulging with empty bottles. Even a snot-nosed urchin, though one of nature’s sparrows, trudged along on elephantine feet. Oh, if only they would—just for a second—switch off the gravity generator at the center of our happy globe! If only everyone were allowed to become weightless every Friday! I envisioned the empty canyons of the streets, the sky speckled with flyers. Shame on you, I said to myself, shame on you, Okhlamonov, for this lapse into old-fashioned sentimentality. I turned off toward Nikitsky Gate. In a back alley near the School of Music, someone had scrawled in big black letters: “TO EACH HIS PLACE SOME LOW SOME HIGH.”

The phone rang one dark, dank morning. Katenka was singing in the bathroom. Her little bits of washing, her ability to keep house without fuss and bother, filled me with admiration. I went over to the phone. The caller did not give his name, but I immediately realized it was one of Kolya’s neighbors in the communal apartments, an old grouch, a retired jerk of an army captain. “That smart-ass friend of yours,” he whined, “they’ve taken the scribbler and put him where he belongs!” and gave a phlegmy snigger.

It was the beginning of the end. I knew nothing as yet, but ice suddenly flowed in my veins.

You didn’t have to be a Spinoza to guess that Kolenka had not been seized for writing poetry, though it too was far from innocuous. Here is how it came out later: the yard concierge, an old witch paid to spy on the tenants, glanced through the window one evening and saw Nikolai Petrovich resting above the table. He was dozing, poor fellow, an open book in his hand threatened to slip down, kept its word, and fell with a soft thud. Kolenka awoke and dove head first after the faithless book. The woman started back from the fogged-up window and, clutching her broom like a flagstaff, rushed off to telephone the appropriate quarters. In the appropriate quarters there had long been a research center to deal with such problems in the appropriate manner. A sort of Scientific Research Institute for the Study of the Surreal.... Nikolai Petrovich was taken away forthwith. They say he was flanked by two heavy-set characters, both handcuffed to the poor poet—in case he tried to fly away.

Russian-language broadcasts from abroad, too, were full of incredible news. The BBC reported it had been learned from diplomatic circles in Moscow that the Central Committee was definitely concerned about the situation in the country. The announcer even declared that the appearance of people who could fly was directly connected with the dissatisfaction and the desire of millions of people for freedom. The Voice of America was now broadcasting a daily fifteen-minute program entitled “The Wings of Freedom,” and assured its listeners that the population of the USSR was at last emerging from a period of weakness of will, blindness, and humiliation by violence, and was now ready to go flying off all over the world. It was rumored that Washington had held secret talks with its allies on the number of flyers who might defect and methods of putting them to use. It was proposed to revive a project, put on ice in the late seventies, for the construction of artificial floating islands. The CIA calculated the percentage of potential agents insinuated among the mass of defecting flyers, but the Swami Vivekananda occult centre just outside the U.S. capital immediately issued a statement saying that no orthodox servant of the regime would be capable of getting off the ground by even the thickness of a party card. West Germany, taking no part in the disputes, began building an enormous tent city. Along the borders of the satellite countries, directional arrows were now lit up at night. France splurged on colored lights and half the night sky of Paris blazed out the message: WELCOME!

All these strange tidings seeped through the chronic bronchitis of my old radio; but not, as yet, one single report of a successful defection by flight.

In January we hardly flew at all. It had become too dangerous. Anyway, it was difficult to stay up for long in the snow-laden air, despite our fur coats and hats. Katenka tired quickly, snow got in our eyes, and we might be spotted, even in the woods. Katya suggested sewing us some white suits. This would have been wonderful, but we had almost no money at all.

The frosts of Epiphany arrived with a bang. On St. Tatiana’s day I learned exactly where they were holding Kolenka. I looked in at Lukov Street, the neighbors showed me the sealed door with joyous trepidation. I had expected scarlet sealing wax, the National Emblem, like on a general’s button; instead there was a slip of paper and faded blue seals. There had been no search—too many books. I was told they would now be given to the Lenin Library. They only took away papers lying on the table and, strange as it may seem, the cat. The bit about the cat I don’t believe, incidentally. The neighbors had long wanted to do him in. Poor old puss. Formally, Kolenka was charged with the usual thing, breach of public order, although phrases like “losing touch with reality” were slipped in. He could be held only in a cell or in a camp enclosed in some sort of special netting. But in the final analysis, even this charge was flim-flam. What they wanted from him was just one thing: how?

I can vouch for Kolenka, I am quite sure that no amount of neuroleptic drugs could drag out of him those utterly simple yet incredibly deep explanations with which he changed my life forever, in the spring. Kolenka was as soft as wax, tender-hearted, loving; but like everyone else he hated what was going on, he didn’t even hate it, he rejected it biologically.

At last I understood the meaning of the message he sent on with Katenka: “It’ll be better this way....”

Rumors began to circulate that they were closing the country in earnest, that taxes would be raised, vodka would go up yet again, even whale meat would cost twice as much, while the military budget was to be sharply increased so as to carry out a colossal project: something like enclosing the whole country under one gigantic bell jar. There were arguments about ultraviolet radiation, about photosynthesis, all sorts of things connected with the sun’s rays, respiration, and so on. A friend of mine, a pilot in civil aviation, told me what I have no doubt is true: that the Western frontiers were already being patroled by aircraft flying in pairs with a kilometer-long net strung between them. There was talk of the problem of birds. The West also began to take the whole business a lot more seriously. NATO began to fear that the Soviet army would harness the experience of the flyers and war would assume an entirely new character. The possibility of a completely new and appallingly concrete isolation from the rest of the world was becoming more and more real. Although for me, who had never been further afield than Tallin, it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. It was in those fleeting, chaotic days that I chanced upon a somewhat confused article by Professor Pogoreltsev.