Дмитрий Савицкий - Waltz for K.

Nikakov returned an hour later. Saying nothing he sat down at the table, opened a drawer, got out what appeared to be a standard questionnaire and began rapidly filling it out. His questions now were dry, ordinary, and I answered automatically. The pencil lay lifeless on the table. From the yard below I could hear tramping sounds and the shouts of guards. The whirring noise had also stopped. A very palpable hatred was simmering quietly inside me. Nikakov finished writing. “Sign here,” he said. I read through the statement, which said that I was a friend of Kolenka, was an admirer of his poetry, but had never taken part in any of his experiments. “Take it next door to be stamped”—Nikakov handed me a pass—”someone will see you out.” His voice rose to a squeak, and he himself seemed to shrink and dwindle in size, just as if someone had let the air out of him.

I left the office and knocked on the next door. Inside there was a glass partition; a man in a white coat stuck his head through the window like a cuckoo. Preferring the pass, I involuntarily glanced inside. God! the room next door to Nikakov’s office was a laboratory! Reels of pink and silver film lay heaped on the floor, lights winked on and off, screens gleamed all around. Along one wall ran a darkened horizontal window with a curtain drawn back half-way—this was the “mirror” in the neighboring office! They had been checking up on me....

A hand gave me back my pass and pointed to another door. An electric lock clicked. I took a chance and, with a cheeky grin, asked: “What? Won’t I do?” The white coat, returning to the reels of film, replied with his back to me: “We get your kind in here by the truckload. You weigh plenty, kid.”

Downstairs, handing over the pass in exchange for my passport, I surveyed the State Seal bearing sword and two crossed wings; and it was shortly after that, in the metro, that I tumbled to the rest of it: left alone, I was supposed to panic and give myself away, like scratching a forbidden place, was supposed to lose control if only for a second. and take off, if only a millimeter. “You weigh plenty!” They had been checking to see if I would lose weight!

From that same samizdat, from the same dressmaker (Katenka had made herself a golden gown out of a silk curtain; I once photographed her in it at sunset, hanging sadly above the cross atop a village church—her last photo in Russia), about a month later, reading the sixth blurred carbon copy, we learned that Kolenka had outwitted his jailers: had agreed to experiments and, when they transferred him from his cell (ceiling about 20 meters high) to a laboratory the size of an aircraft hangar, and freed him of everything but telemetry leads, had plunged from fifty meters up onto the only solid object—the professor’s table—everything else having been providentially upholstered in that same soft cherry-colored material—and died on impact. In Sweden a committee had already been set up to defend him. Radio Liberty regularly gave readings of his poetry, two young Americans had handcuffed themselves to the Emperor Cannon in the Kremlin in protest, but it was too late.... In May, when the first thunder storms were breaking over the city and the oak trees were in blossom, an article appeared in the Moscow Evening News calling Kolenka a charlatan who had fleeced his friends by promising to teach them something that does not exist. He was also, of course, described as suffering from the delusion that he was a great writer. The article was signed by a well-known poet.

At the very end of the month, when the few surviving front gardens were already ablaze with lilacs, Katenka dragged me off to the country. We went a long, long way out, to our beloved Nikolsky woods. There no one could see us, but for some reason she tenderly refused to do it in the air, as we had used to, but insistently drew me down onto the grass. She hugged me fiercely, with a new ardor, wound her legs around me, her embrace almost squeezed the breath out of me, her fragrant sweat, mingled with mine, bathed her face ... it was all more powerful than it had ever been before.

That day we definitively decided to fly away.

“Lead boots will soon be all the rage,” joked Katenka. She wasn’t far from the truth. Here and there “socially conscious” pensioners, not waiting for instructions from above (I suddenly realize that “from above” sounded ambiguous in those days) started putting up notices: FLYING STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. They were already drafting new legislation against “anti-social breaking away from the collective,” setting prison terms, etc., etc. It was even suggested that parents were responsible for their children, no matter if they themselves were incapable of rising above the prosaic realities of our native land.

In Tsvetnoy market the Georgians were selling tomatoes for exorbitant prices, someone had brought some plump gladioli into town, and the Prime Minister of Australia was due to arrive on an official visit, and an aphorism by the mayor of the city made the rounds of Moscow, to the effect that if anyone flew during the visit, heads would fly too—in a word, a pal! of ennui and desolation had descended, and Katenka and I finally got two plane tickets to Simferopol; from there we would make our way by road to Yalta, rest a while, take a look round. and, going out to sea one night on a pleasure boat, leave the country for ever.

Kolenka’s warning—not to fly over large expanses of water—naturally made us a bit apprehensive, but we had no choice. The Western frontiers were now being patrolled in earnest.

Do you know what Yalta is at night? No, not Soviet Yalta, full of drunks and street brawls, reeking of cheap perfume and suntan oil! A different Yalta. Mute, dwindling, sprawled on its side like a distant dying campfire. A city from which so many have fled.... A last memory, spiced with cheap jokes....

It was a close, moonless night. I had a child’s compass, bought at the last minute. I was so afraid the pointer would come off the needle‑‑‑‑‑

Again I go back to the photographs from those years—black and white, of course; color film from the West I got only rarely, it cost the earth. Here is Katenka bearing a tray of coffee through the air—a heavy tray from our grandmother’s day. She is finding it heavy going, so her naked little form is pitched downward, her legs pointing skyward, I can see the twin hills of her buttocks, the tender confluence of her breasts. Her hair is uncombed, carelessly pinned to one side. Her downy mound still to this day gives me the shakes. Katenka under a river bridge, in one hand she is holding a rolled-up newspaper and tooting on it like an archangel. Katenka upside down in our little apartment; her hair completely covers her face, her dress too has fallen back, only her legs stick straight up like a fountain.

I have one particular photo that fills me with particular sadness—Katenka is pulling back the shade: a winter window, snow-covered branches, a sparrow, the feeble sun, wires. She is wearing an old dressing gown. Holding it at her throat with one hand, as if something were strangling her. Sometimes I think that even then she knew what was going to happen.

The most surprising thing about this picture is that Katenka is standing on the floor.

I’m reaching for the matches.

How we got ourselves to Paris is another story. We undertook no more long flights. Except Turkey, which we cut across in three hot nights alive with the incessant buzzing of cicadas. The U. S. consul in Athens issued us our first Western documents. Of course they wanted to know all about us, but we concocted a simple-minded tale involving an inflatable dinghy, supplies of drinking water, and Lady Luck. Once launched, this idyllic fiction circulated for years through all the prefectures of Europe. Pretty soon I managed to sell a dozen or so of my photos to a French agency, received an advance—it was this, incidentally, that decided our choice of a country; they had promised us the rest on arrival in Paris—and we timidly rushed out to spend what was for us an enormous amount of money. The pictures, which showed up a week later on the front covers of various thick magazines, were the sort of thing I’d been doing all my life: streets, people, mainly people. I had taken only the last few from high up—there was one of Moscow slanting away below, bristling with the sinister spires of its dwarf skyscrapers, crushed beneath the funereal weight of administrative buildings.