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blatancy of the evidence suggested that the boy was trying to give himself away, but when Lev Davidovich raised this during a prison interview to prepare the defense, his questions about motive eUcited only shrugs.
"You don't have much chance," said Lev Davidovich in the jail's special cubicle. "Do you know what will happen to you now?"
"They'll shoot me. Got a cigarette?"
Oleg, who also faced certain execution, cried.
When Lev Davidovich has disappeared into his metro station, I spy a telephone booth. No answer at Zhenya's studio, but since once is never enough on Moscow's telephone system, I dial twice again. The final time, the receiver is lifted on the tenth ring, but my greeting goes unanswered. "Zhenya?" I ask the ominous blankness. I'm tense again: who's on the other end? Possibly a KGB captain supervising a raid. I wonder whether to call Leonid, the clique's Jewish sidekick, who introduced me to Zhenya months ago.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," says a gravelly voice. "C'mon over. Still a few things to pack."
I underestimated the filth. Without the sketches and paintings that formerly covered its walls, the studio seems solely grime. Mice droppings and jars of putrid pickle brine are exposed in corners once stacked with canvases. Two hangings remain, one a drawing of the world floating in a lake that Anastasia bought, paid for with her own money, and never collected. (Nor did Zhenya remind her.) The other, centered on the most prominent wall, is a quotation lettered on rice paper—to help, Zhenya claimed, see the surrealism in daily life.
THE CLEAVAGE BETWEEN PROGRESSIVE AND REACTIONARY TENDENCIES IN LANDSCAPE PAINTING NOW BECAME PARTICULARLY SHARP. REACTIONARY CRITICS OF THE 1890s TRIED TO PRETEND THAT THE LANDSCAPE WAS AN ART FORM FREE FROM THE IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE.
— Russian Art from Ancient to Present Times Moscow, "Art" Publishing House, 1972
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Zhenya too, and his rank beard, seem larger than ever against the bareness. Or maybe it's because he is full of himself. Tackling last-minute tasks with a hammer and chisel, he recounts his triumphs in the concluding stages of his emigration battle. Never mind that early this very morning, his courage had so failed him that he took refuge in a friend's flat, which explained the studio's desertion when I arrived and his later telephone precautions. Now his own dauntlessness inspires him.
In defiance of logic—they are trying to leave the country, not enter—prospective emigrants must produce letters of recommendation from the Party committees and state agencies that have supervised their lives. The clinic to which Zhenya applied for his tuberculosis certificate declared itself out of film; just as predictably, his cash bribe quickly produced the desired X-ray. But if such successes were commonplace, others demonstrated his keen mercantile imagination. Although his studio was merely on loan from the Union of Artists, he managed to sell an unsuspecting Russian artist nonexistent rights to it, using the profits to meet the blood-money charges for his exit visa and the necessary renunciation of his citizenship. Matching the government's thousand-ruble extortion with his own fraud of the same proportions heathily reinforced his self-esteem.
"I never mind their chiseling. As long as Russians stay so easy to swindle back."
The telephone rings. As with my first calls, Zhenya doesn't answer—but perhaps now out of unwillingness to be distracted rather than fear of KGB subterfuge. For he is recounting his proudest coup: "How He Evaded The People's Theft of his Paintings." It is a typical beat-the-bureaucracy tale by an opponent not branded "enemy" because in grasping for his selfish interests—behavior the authorities understand—he made no noises about struggling for freedom. Zhenya's game has always been to break the rules, not fight them.
The instrument of expropriation was the prohibition against anyone, even the creator himself, exporting an original work of art without ministerial permission. If this seemed mad with respect to Zhenya's nonconformism—what rational government simultaneously prevents the exhibition of "decadent" art and its departure abroad as a "national treasure"—it was only an
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extension of the policy under which masterpieces by Kandinsky, Chagall, Lissitzky and others are carefully preserved in storerooms closed to the public. Zhenya knew both the hopelessness of protesting on principle and the foolishness of submitting without deviousness of his own.
To the Tretyakov Gallery, seat of the commission for initial review of export requests, he sent his dutiful sister bearing fifty of his best compositions. "It's just my scribbling and scrawling," she mumbled as coached. "Souvenirs of physical therapy sessions; as you see, the stuff lacks artistic value."
The secretary suggested she go home and fetch Zhenya. Had she not personally known his work—several of his drawings were in the closed graphics repository of the Tretyakov Gallery itself—the ruse might conceivably have worked at this stage. But even the typist recognized Zhenya's use of perspective.
Arriving at the Tretyakov—with an additional hundred canvases, completing the oeuvre he wanted to take—he was greeted by the same secretary and a member of the commission, who also prized his work. Zhenya took the offensive.
"Listen, friends. If I want, I can get all my things out without you." (Part bluff and part bargaining point, this was a hint about Western customers with access to diplomatic pouches.) "I only came here to do things legally, which could save us all some bother if you're square with me."
"Listen, Zhenya," the young official answered. "If it were up to us, we could set a duty of one ruble apiece and write passes for the whole hundred-and-fifty. But you know the Ministry reviews everything. Let's be sensible and avoid attracting their suspicions, which'd be bad news for all of us."
Opening positions thus established, the two sides settled down to bargain about the collected compositions. Word spread of this last chance to see Zhenya's work, drawing members of the Tretyakov staff into the room like an auction audience. Controlling his vanity, Zhenya haggled. Setting aside only a few works as unsuitable for export, the commission fixed duty of from five to fifteen rubles on the others, and everyone present offered Zhenya handshakes and good luck.
When he arrived for his appointment at the Ministry of Culture, the list had been reviewed and prices raised by twenty
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per cent, in keeping with the general policy of squeezing harder. A staff expert had attended to this; the Deputy Minister himself, a veteran Party official, knew as much about contemporary art as about Harlem jargon. But it was he Zhenya demanded to see upon learning that another forty paintings had been judged too abstract to leave the country at any price.
"For God's sake, I want to export them, not bring them in. If they're dangerous, you should be happy to unload them."
The bureaucrat lit a cigarette and searched in a drawer. When it came, his response was in the voice of a gatekeeper whose authority to check cars had been challenged.
"What you think is irrelevant; you're not running this country. The Soviet people have a nose for your kind of depravity. And . . . you're not as smart as you think."
He called Zhenya back for his afterthought. "It's not as easy to fool me as you 'artists' think. You want to get your junk out and sell it to some 'exhibition' to discredit the Motherland. Not while I'm in charge of vigilance. Now out before I change my mind about the rest."
The following evening, Zhenya actually treated his friends to a bottle of wine. Not only had he got permission to take out more works at a lower cost than anyone had expected, but he sneaked out most of the embargoed ones too. Calculating that customs officials would be unable to distinguish one painting from another—yet unwilling to admit this—Zhenya simply crated the prohibited compositions together with the authorized ones. Sure enough, while the belongings of cowed emigrants before and after him in the freight depot were ransacked for diamonds and manuscripts, no one checked his canvases against the long, vague inventory. Nor was his exchange with the Deputy Ministry in vain: recounted in the West, it would enhance the value of his works. The whole scene in the Ministry was a smokescreen to mask his crating scheme, and the provincial thickwit suspected nothing.