“Vasily, you always appear in my life when it is falling to pieces; you are my rescuer. But, forgive me, you are also the sign and the embodiment of my failure and misfortune…”
This is what Vasily Innokentievich recalled in the midst of the wondrous chorus of voices. He didn’t give a single thought to the military decorations belonging to someone else that were weighing down his pocket. He had completely forgotten about them.
* * *
Peter Petrovich was arrested in Minsk on the day after his departure. On the same day they came to his house and searched it. There was nothing in the house, but they ransacked it, nevertheless, turning everything upside down. They took away some small tokens—autographed books from experts in his field from before the war, lecture notes.
Zoya was glad that the military decorations had been removed from the house. In fact, the medals were not really even valid. It had been one thing after another: the general had been reduced to the ranks, stripped of his military honors, he was an ex-con, and had been pronounced insane. She knew, of course, that there was nothing wrong with Peter—it was the country that was insane.
* * *
As for Tonya Mutyukin, it was a long time before she realized that she was only keeping watch over empty boxes in her house, and that the decorations had disappeared. This was revealed when her older brother, Tolya, came back from doing time with a pile of money, bought everyone presents, and gave the rest of the money to his mother. His mother bought a new wardrobe with it. She began throwing out junk from the old one, and that was when Tonya realized that the military decorations were missing. She was beside herself. First she suspected Tolya, since she knew that those medals were worth a lot of money.
But Tolya had had nothing to do with it.
Anyway, why even bring him into it—two months later he was picked up again, because the money for the presents was stolen after all.
Vitka was the one who suffered most. He hardly remembered his father, and now, just as he was starting to get used to him, he disappeared again.
The decorations were returned to the general’s home again through a chain of acquaintances and half-strangers. “Naked,” deprived of their little handcrafted coffins, they were wrapped up in cellophane and placed in an iron skillet for safekeeping. Then they were committed to the ground, buried at the dacha of Zoya’s niece near Kratovo Station, on the Kazan railroad line, behind two pine trees holding up a child’s swing. Awaiting better days.
And better days did, in fact, come. In the end, the general was reunited with his decorations. The general lived in a country where you have to live for a long time. He lived until he was ninety, and thus managed to die a hero. He was buried in 1991, and all his medals and decorations, once wrapped up in worn-out underwear with a nap, even the American medal, were displayed on a pillow in front of his coffin. And the pillow was red, just as it was supposed to be.
THE IMAGO
Everything was just as it had been before—the courtyard, the neighbors, the broken floorboard in the corridor, the saleswomen in the bakery and the fish store, the building manager. Yet it seemed to Mikha as though thirty years had passed, and not just three. One false move and everything might split open with a resounding crash—the house, the courtyard, his little daughter, his wife, and the whole city, and April, so warm and welcoming this year. Cautiously, gingerly, he made his way around the room, the apartment, and his surroundings, doing what he had to do.
He first went to see Anna Alexandrovna. Then to the police, to have his passport registered. They said he had to find a job within thirty days.
Then he went to the History Library, almost certain they wouldn’t admit him. But they just told him he needed to reregister his library card.
Several weeks later, after Anna Alexandrovna’s death, he went to see Ilya and Olga. He rarely visited this strangely eclectic apartment—an admixture of Communist asceticism and Russian Empire style—on Vorovsky Street. Olga had never really warmed up to Alyona, but she adored Mikha.
Olga kissed him, and pulled out of the refrigerator some parchment paper bundles of pâté, Wallachian salads in little tartlike pie crusts, cold cuts, herring, and who knows what other marvels, all from the Prague confectionery and delicatessen. She laid it all out on translucent plates, and, blowing a kiss good-bye, ran off to finish a translation that had to be completed by the morning. Ilya took out a bottle of Armenian cognac. Mikha could hardly drink a thing, and he ate sparingly as well, expecting the pains in his stomach to start up again at any moment.
They sat down and looked at each other closely. Ilya was afraid to say anything out of place or unnecessary. He wasn’t terribly sentimental, but he was overcome with a feeling for Mikha that he had rarely even felt toward his disabled son. His eyes and nose stung.
“Did you see it last night?” Mikha asked.
Ilya nodded.
“Of course. All of Moscow watched it. Everyone was expecting something like this.”
“Expecting it? And I could never have imagined that he would do anything of the sort…”
“Ingenious, in its own way,” Ilya said.
The trial of Chernopyatov and his two closest friends had ended the night before. There had been an unprecedented television broadcast—a press conference with Chernopyatov. Sergei Borisovich had repented of all his sins against the Soviet authorities for an hour and a half. And he did this with real talent—if one can be said to have a talent for baseness and treachery. The most surprising thing was that he introduced himself as the head of the “Democratic Movement,” its leader, and its main ideologue; and as self-proclaimed leader of the movement he called upon his followers to reexamine their actions. Everyone who was even remotely involved understood very clearly that there was no unified movement to speak of, that there were various groups of people with their own concerns and “interests,” which sometimes coincided and sometimes did not, who were united only in their rejection of the current authorities and their hunger for change. And the change they wanted varied from group to group, person to person …
Many people discussed the previous day’s broadcast. The similarity with Dostoevsky’s The Possessed was not hard to see. People with a pragmatic bent feared an unleashing of wholesale repression against any nonconformist thinker. People who took a more philosophical view asked more abstract questions: Had the great Dostoevsky discovered a particular elemental force in the Russian character, this possession by revolutionary fervor, or had he unwittingly created it, along with his literary protagonists Stavrogin and Pyotr Verkhovensky?
He and Mikha talked about this all evening, without coming to any hard and fast conclusions. There was too much of the story that still remained obscure.
It was impossible to fathom what had happened to Chernopyatov himself. He had been the most steadfast of them all, wise and experienced. He had survived the children’s penal colony, Stalin’s labor camps, and exile … And he had a clear-cut enemy: the Soviet authorities, Stalinism. What could have happened to him to make him turn around so abruptly, so radically?
“Ilya, a month and a half before my release they brought me face-to-face with him. I didn’t know that he had been arrested and was naming names. A frank confession, they call it. Dozens of names. He betrayed nearly the whole Chronicle: editors, writers, compilers. This was the last thing I expected. Sergei Borisovich told me that I was making a mistake, that I needed courage to admit my mistakes, that I had to seek a new path. They tried to pressure me into going down that path with him. I refused. They told me they would send me up for a second term if I didn’t cooperate. I was certain they would never let me out after that. But they did. They made me sign a paper saying I wouldn’t engage in anti-Soviet activity, and let me go. What happened to him I really don’t understand. Maybe there is something we don’t know. They have so many methods at their disposal, besides beatings.”