Nikolay Mikhailovich examined them for a long time, groaned, sniffed, then said drily:
“Boris, I had no idea what a real draughtsman you were. Of course you can’t remain here any longer. I don’t know what you have in mind, how you intend to live your life further, but I’m taking these drawings with me to Moscow. I’ll keep them safe until you return…” He smiled. “If I can stay safe myself.”
“Do you really think they’re any good? I wasn’t thinking about that—whether they were good or not. Don’t keep them at home, though. Give them to Ilya. Maybe he’ll find a place for them,” Boris Ivanovich said.
He was very, very happy. Nikolay Mikhailovich was highly respected among artists, known for his severity of judgment and his scant praise.
They left the next day, Nikolay Mikhailovich and his son in the direction of Moscow, Boris Ivanovich in the direction of Vologda.
Boris Ivanovich evaded arrest for four whole years. He had already grown used to the thought that they would catch him in the end, anyway, and he lived recklessly, frivolously, first in the Vologda region, then for three months or so in the city of Tver with the vivacious and full-throated Anastasia. Then, growing bolder, he moved back closer to Moscow and lived in a relative’s dacha outside of town. Then it occurred to him: maybe no one was looking for him after all.
His friend Ilya helped him enormously—he kept his entire collection, except for the works he had managed to deliver safely to the West. Everything was going beautifully there. At the end of 1976, an exhibit was organized in Cologne with the title “Russian Nature Laid Bare.” The old women, naked and terrible, frolicked. They were enjoying themselves.
And that’s when it happened. They caught him, four years after his timely flight.
They only gave him two years, and they came up with an astonishing charge: pornography. They didn’t nail him for the anti-Soviet salami, or for the sausage mausoleum, or even for the shocking portrait of the Leader made of ground sausage and holding a cut-off piece of ear on the tines of a fork. No, they nailed him for pornography! Considering that no one had ever been imprisoned in the USSR for pornography, it was some sort of record.
After spending two years in a camp near Arkhangelsk, he was released, and soon after that he emigrated to Europe with his new wife, Raika, a small Jewess, as agile, neat, and compact as a little boat, and somewhat reminiscent of the long-lost Anastasia. Until recently they lived there still.
The lovely Natasha also fared well. While Boris Ivanovich was on the run, she found herself a completely ordinary engineer, with whom she had a daughter of the same Kustodiev-type Boris Ivanovich had once liked. Maria Nikolayevna looked after her granddaughter and prepared their meager meals. She liked her current son-in-law—he was a decent person—but he didn’t measure up to Boris Ivanovich!
All the old women in Danilovy Gorki died long ago.
Everything is just as it should be.
THE DELUGE
The girl, it seemed, had called from a pay phone near the entrance to the building, because she was at the door in the space of two minutes.
Ilya had been at their house a few times before her parents were sent to prison, but he either hadn’t noticed her, or she hadn’t been home at all. Or maybe she had already gone to bed.
Olga was certain that she was seeing the girl for the first time. She had the kind of face one doesn’t forget—small and thin, with eyes that were pale and somehow flattened out, and too big for the rest of it, and a tiny nose with a collapsed bridge. A strange physiognomy! Ilya had once mentioned her, saying she had a vicious character, and that no one could handle her. Olga had heard a great deal about her father, Valentin Kulakov, however. He was a Marxist who proclaimed himself to be Marx’s true successor, accusing all others who had entrenched themselves within the walls of the Institute of the Workers’ Movement and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism to be falsifiers, if not downright traitors.
Olga didn’t remember the details about where he had been expelled from, and why, before ending up in prison. He’d branded his enemies by any means available to him; he’d even written letters to the Central Committee of the Party, but they refused to listen to him. Then Kulakov single-handedly multiplied his battle cries for truth on a government copy machine, and began writing daring and irresponsible letters to the International Communist Party, the Italian branch, or the Austrian—or maybe both at once.
It must be said that the authorities tolerated his escapades for a long time, but when they finally expelled him from the Party and his institute, he became unhinged. He started an underground Marxist magazine and even tried smuggling it abroad, which was completely unacceptable to the authorities. That was when they threw him in prison. At the same time, they imprisoned his wife, Zina, who, though she was all thumbs, somehow copied and bound the publication herself, and was not a whit less dedicated than her husband on an ideological level.
He was, as they say, a foremost specialist on Marx and Engels, and at the institute there weren’t many scholars who could measure up to him. Inspired by Marx-Engels, he learned German. His goal was to read the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 in the original before he died. There was something in them about which Marx didn’t speak in his later years. When Hitler came to power, the German socialists had managed to smuggle these manuscripts into Moscow.
“What was the point? They’re languishing there under lock and key, and they won’t let anyone read them,” Valentin complained to Ilya.
Those were the days when Valentin and Ilya communicated most often, usually in the smoking lounges of various libraries. It was also when Ilya visited their home for the first time, and photographed both Valentin and Zina. Olga remembered the photograph—it was in one of the folders of Ilya’s archive. They made a funny couple. He had thick hair, parted in the middle and falling in two waves from the top of his head down to his ears. His wife had short, sparse wisps of hair, like a child after a long illness, and a doll-like face.
And now their scruffy daughter, wearing a child’s jacket with sleeves too short for her and a threadbare collar, was standing at their door. A medium-size dog with thick, light gray fur, a curlicue tail, and a pleasant expression on its face (unlike his mistress) was sitting next to her obediently. It was a northern breed, a laika. Both the collar and the leash were made of good-quality leather.
“I’m Marina. Did Ilya tell you I was coming?” She kept standing in the doorway without trying to enter.
“Yes, please come in.”
Marina made a little sound like a cough, and the dog went through the door ahead of her. The girl was carrying a rucksack.
Ilya came out into the hall and greeted her.
“Sit!” the girl said in a commanding tone. The dog sat and watched its mistress with an expression that seemed to say, Will there be anything else, ma’am?
Marina unhooked the leash and gave it to Ilya.
“Now she’ll only go out with you. Not with anyone else. If you say the word, you know, spazieren … she’ll come.”