Дмитрий Савицкий: Waltz for K.

Back on the street, wiping the blood from my cheek with a handkerchief, I saw the obscene dragon-fly shape of a helicopter flying impermissibly low, darkening the sky.

A few days later I received in the mail a modest slip of paper indicating that at 11 a.m. on Tuesday next I was to report to Inspector N. at such-and-such an address; it was signed with a flourish. The address, needless to say, was the very same. I did not know what to do. Katenka, fragrant, crazy Katenka, who these days was always carefully groomed and dressed, who even had her hair done and used French perfume bought one lucky day in a Ladies on Petrovka—Katenka was hanging in the corner, in a patch of sunlight, and the smoke from her cigaret traced patterns in the still air. A Wagner record—the Ride of the Valkyries—had just finished playing, and the needle ran on idly in the groove. “Don’t go,” said Katenka, “simply don’t go. They have no right. They don’t give you a clue what it’s about, or who they represent, instead of the inspector’s name there’s just an initial.” I stood beneath her for a moment, raised my face, rubbed against her hem, kissed her slender ankle. Something was happening. We both felt it. Something was bearing down on us from afar. I decided to go. But if Katenka was even then meditating my flight, my fear was that I might lose her.

So I went. I said, to hell with it, and went. I did, however, phone the one man I knew with connections in high places, explained when I was going and where. I had the idiotic illusion .that if anything happened to me he might be able to help, through his father, the General Secretary’s personal interpreter from Bengali. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder how often the General Secretary met with Bengalis.

Katenka, swaying in the doorway, said: “This isn’t goodbye, you hear?” and I set off.

Of course, I wound up at the “Committee on Vibrations,” but through a different entrance. The sign on the door, too, was different. Believe it or not, what it said—this time on a bit of cardboard, admittedly, as if only temporary, and I like a fool even thought it might be meant for me!—was: “NON-BORING-CASES: RECEPTION” and some room number. The inspector’s name, too, was scrawled beneath: Nikakov. No mention of forename or patronymic. The porter, wearing some special gear that looked more military than any actual uniform, called up the inspector, having first taken away my passport. While he was telephoning, with his back to me, I surveyed a portrait of the leader standing on the brink of a precipice: below, in the valley, lay a vast sea-girt city. It looked as if any moment the leader would either take flight, or drop like a stone. The skirts of his army greatcoat were already flung wide. There was the sound of a steel door opening, and the inspector was bearing down on me, his little grey eyes already fixed on me from afar. He was on the small side, roundish, there didn’t seem anything special about him. He wore a thin, crooked smile, the sort people used in the old days when screwing in a lorgnette. “Nikakov,” he said, not, thank God, offering me his hand. Right at the door, with its row of illuminated buttons, he suddenly rounded on me and gave me a penetrating stare. I naturally lowered my gaze. Quick as a wink he spun round again and pressed one of the buttons. The door slid back. We walked down long dimly lit corridors. The floor was covered with a soft plastic material of a dark cherry color. They say that when Professor Pogoreltsev got roughed up a bit somewhere around here, then taken off to his cell, he left behind no alarming trail of blood spots—the floor covering absorbed everything without trace.

In his office, having seated me on a hard, straight chair, Nikakov sprawled in a leather armchair opposite and immediately seemed to fill out and grow Digger. Above him hung another portrait °f the leader. This time the leader was standing on the very brink of the Kremlin wall. Far below, red-bannered crowds flowed past, and the sky was thick with aircraft. It seemed as if with one more gust of wind the leader would take off. The skirts of his grey gabardine raincoat were already spreading, wing-like. “Can you guess,” said Nikakov, pushing across cigarets and an ashtray, “why we have invited you here?”

The conversation was like the onset of flu. I felt hot and uncomfortable in the thick sweater I had instinctively put on that morning, together with winter socks, although the whole boulevard was already turning green. I kept breaking out in a cold sweat, I was all shrinking from the terribly strange things the inspector was saying. He had genuine mastery of an art unknown to me: taking ordinary Russian and turning it into stiff, rote-learned phrases, rusty but full of barbs. These phrases got inside my head and messed it up. I gurgled something in reply. “Your close friend,” Nikakov was saying, “Nikolai Petrovich Smolensky, has broken away from the masses. You understand what I mean, of course, when I say ‘broken away’? What he wanted, Okhlamonov, to speak plainly, was to elevate himself, as it were, to rise above his native land, above the working collective, above the Party, too, for that matter.... This, at least, is how he did feel.... Now he has repented his errors, now he has fully acknowledged them and taken them into account, thought things through and got to the bottom of things, now he has sobered up and woken up and cleared things up, now he groans with compunction.... “—some mechanism in Nikakov had jammed, but he gave his shoulders a shake, grimaced spasmodically, and got himself back under control, though still skidding a bit behind the facade—41... has reflected and now regrets his errors, has analyzed his errors and is now punishing himself....” Nikakov kept fiddling with a pencil, but although it twisted and turned every which way, at regular intervals its sharp, black point was aimed directly at me. “You were a friend of the accused, were you not?” asked the inspector. “Yes,” I said, “we were friends. I respected his talent.” Nikakov spun around once in his swivel chair like a child, showing a ham-colored bald patch, then set off again. His little smile, like a laddered stocking, split open stitch by stitch across his scrubbed face: “So we may conclude from the aforesaid”—I swear the words “my dear boy” were trembling on his lips—”that you were not only his admirer, drinking companion, and perhaps something else as well that we have not yet ascertained, but, to put it mildly, his pupil”

This was so stupid that I was suddenly bored, bored to death, and not for the first time that false spring. You know how it is when absolutely everything you look at makes you sick. Under my jacket I could feel the warm bulk of a flask—my sweet Katenka had slipped a flask of cognac into an unsuspecting pocket. 1 wished Nikakov would go to the lavatory, or to see his boss, so I could have a drink. And, as if someone had read my mind, there was a buzz from some apparatus with lots of buttons bearing the legend “Bell System” and Nikakov, saying something into the machine, got up and walked to the door. “1 have to leave you for a minute,” he said.

The office was painted a vile official color—lettuce-green, as the poet Oshanin put it. A brown border ran along the top. On one wall there was a long, unusually horizontal mirror. There were no bars on the window, but each pane had a pale triangle stamped in one corner—the kind of glass they say you can’t break even by hitting it with a stool. The table had nothing on it but a calendar, and n copy of Pravda with a leading article entitled “Dig Deeper Roots in our Native Soil,” I got up and stretched. The flask glowed amber when I drank in front of the mirror. There was a mysterious, even whirring and clicking sound from one corner. I felt sleepy, either from the cognac or from the strain on my nerves. I went over to the window and leaned my forehead against the glass. It gave onto an inner courtyard. I could see the planked footway of an exercise area, with a barred roof overhead and netting along the sides. A couple of soldiers stood smoking by the massive gates. A sick pigeon with a festering beak cooed on the window ledge. The glass was damp and I recoiled in horror, realizing that the inspector’s breath had participated in the formation of this moisture.