THE COFFEE STAIN
Irina Troitskaya, just over six feet tall, nicknamed Mile, with man-sized extremities, never told anyone that her father was a general. And definitely not which department he served in. She dressed like everyone else, even though her walk-in closet in the Generals’ Building next to the Sokol metro stop contained everything a young girl could ever dream of.
She had everything a young girl could dream of, and more besides. But no one wanted to befriend her during her college years. When she approached, people would fall silent. And not only in the cafeteria; in the smoking lounge, too. They didn’t mind bumming cigarettes off her; but they still wouldn’t talk to her. Actually, not everyone avoided her—mainly the ones she would have wanted to be friends with: Olga, Rikhard, Lyalya, Alla, and Voskoboinikov. What hurt her most was that Olga’s father was also a general, Rikhard’s father was a government minister in Latvia, and Lyalya’s was an ambassador to China. Why were they so haughty and contemptuous of her? She couldn’t simply go around telling everyone right and left that although her father was a general in the KGB, he was a real heavyweight—he had been in foreign intelligence his whole life.
Her older sister, Lena, had graduated from the Moscow State University of International Relations. She hadn’t experienced anything like the kind of contempt Irina endured there. On the contrary: children of bigwigs were highly respected. The girls all got married before graduation, to suitable young men of their own caste. This was encouraged. None of the girls embarked on independent careers, but for any diplomat, a well-prepared wife was an advantage.
The most eligible boys in Lena’s year practically stood in line to ask for her hand; and students that were ahead of her in college as well. Her father joked: they’re like Orthodox priests—they won’t get ordained if they aren’t married. And marriage was indeed good for their careers; they got excellent appointments.
Her father was very smart, jovial, and handsome. Her mother deferred to him in everything—except her height. Igor Vladimirovich always said he had married his wife, Nina, to improve his stock and produce strapping boys, but she brought him only girls. What use was their height to them? They might at least have played basketball.
Both his daughters were half a head taller than their father, and their shoes were two sizes larger. They adored their father, small of stature but always fascinating. He knew something about whatever subject one broached: history, geography, literature. Their home library was like that of a university professor. He wasn’t a professor himself, but his grandfather had taught Roman law at the University of Kazan in those antediluvian times before there was any trace of Marxism-Leninism, and the founder of the backside of that future science sat on the benches among his fellow students, showing little interest in the subject.
Igor Vladimirovich insisted that his daughter study, arguing that life was far more interesting among educated people than among the uneducated.
He went up to the bookcase and pointed at the titles:
“If you can’t read them, at least study the covers: Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch. Irina will study a smattering of these at the university; but you, Lena, should read a book occasionally—it won’t hurt you.”
Lena and Irina glanced absently at the valuable books. They had known which books stood where since childhood.
The bookcases were antique, of Swedish make. The lower shelves were enclosed, and the upper shelves were covered with glass panes. On the bottom shelves her father kept special books—they were in Russian, but had been printed abroad. He brought them home from work.
Lena had no interest in them whatsoever, but Irina sometimes read them. There were many interesting books that one couldn’t find in the library: Gumilev, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Mandelstam.
It was these very books that changed Irina’s status in her department. This poetry that had been out of print for ages was the bait that lured the whole group to her side. Then she began taking other books from her father’s shelves, one by one. She didn’t inform her father, naturally. He himself, by the way, loved this rare poetry, and knew much of it by heart.
Irina Troitskaya’s prestige grew. She was clever and didn’t reveal all her treasure to them at once, but apportioned it in measured doses. She brought dangerous publications and valuable rarities with her to the smoking lounge—all brand new, and published abroad. Most of them had been published by the YMCA Press. This was the first time that Olga had ever come across the name of Berdyaev; but back then she preferred poetry. By mistake she spilled coffee on the cover of a volume of Khodasevich—now it looked like a murky tree and a road, so indistinct you could tell your fortune in it. Olga was very upset about the incident, but Irina just shrugged it off and told her not to worry.
Then the first Nabokov arrived in Russia. It was Invitation to a Beheading. The group of friends read it and were completely beguiled by it. It was a tattered copy, published in Berlin in 1936. Inside the front cover was an inscription that read: “To my dear Edwin, on his birthday. Anna.” It had been confiscated during the arrest of a German Jew who had emigrated to Russia from Germany in the thirties. The above-mentioned Edwin had studied Russian with this book; in the margins there were German annotations in pencil.
A friend of General Troitsky’s had given it to him as a gift, also on his birthday, but many years later. These books met with various fates. Some of them were destroyed; others passed from hand to hand. The Gift was one of the latter. Its readers discovered a new writer who was not to be found in any library, nor mentioned by name in any textbook.
Olga was bursting with desire to show the book to her favorite professor. She asked him gingerly about Nabokov. He raised his eyebrows. “Which book?”
“The Gift.”
The professor had himself only recently become aware of it—one of his students, a Canadian of Russian descent, had brought him his first Nabokov.
“Yes, yes.” The professor nodded circumspectly. “A remarkable writer. There has been nothing like it in Russian for many years.”
He didn’t ask: What else do you have?
Invitation to a Beheading was making the rounds of the young philologists. It put a dent in the Iron Curtain. Hands trembled, hearts skipped a beat. How to accommodate it? It required a complete revision of the entire hierarchy. A new heavenly body had appeared in the galaxy; the web of connections was disrupted, the celestial mechanism shifted before their very eyes. Half the literary canon underwent spontaneous combustion and turned to ash.
It was the purest diamond. And all courtesy of Irina Troitskaya.
By pure coincidence, that very copy of The Gift, which had passed from hand to reliable hand and had ended up in his, was confiscated from the professor during a search. Notes he had made during his reading were also found with the book. He had already begun writing an article on the book called “Return to the Homeland.” He didn’t manage to finish it. But even these hasty, incomplete notes were seized, to the professor’s chagrin.
A scandal ensued, and the professor and his co-author were imprisoned—not for Nabokov, of course, but for their own books, published in the West under pseudonyms. A petition was initiated, heads flew, students were dragged in for questioning. Olga was expelled from the university for signing a letter in defense of the teacher. No one touched Irina Troitskaya. She didn’t sign any letters, no one from Olga’s circle of friends pointed at her as the source of anti-Soviet agitation.
Irina told her father, belatedly, about her enlightenment mission. Her father did not fear much in life, but he was shaken by this information. Afterward, when everyone involved had been imprisoned, banished, or expelled, he replaced the lost copy with another. This was, however, an American edition. The general revered Nabokov as deeply as the professor did.