The meeting broke up shortly after midnight. Although supposedly a totally informal occasion, we waiting secretaries could see the members holding back to let Kuba and Roginova leave first. They passed through the door together as they had entered, one smiling, the other looking grim. But we all knew we had a long way to go yet before the shape of the Soviet future became clearer.
Chapter Fifteen
West of Moscow, in the rolling hills near Zhukova, the dachas of the great and powerful of the Soviet Union stood each in their extensive grounds behind high railings and stone gate-posts like exclusive golf clubs in Connecticut or Vermont. The ever-present guards were housed discreetly in charmingly antique gatehouses packed with modern electronic anti-intruder equipment. Here were not only the dachas of powerful individuals but of the high institutions of Communism as welclass="underline" trade union dachas which no ordinary worker would ever see the inside of, the College of Soviet Surgeons’ dacha, the dachas of the scientific establishment, of the senior officers of the Army, Navy and Air Force, and one of the most luxurious of these country clubs of high privilege, the dacha allocated to the senior staff journalists of the Soviet daily, Pravda.
Igor Bukansky was a frequent visitor. Although as editor of the nation’s most important literary magazine his own club was the Writers’ Union dacha at Borodino, he used, as was his privilege, the Pravda club because it lay on his way home to the new Swedish-designed house which he had just been allowed to buy.
It was not difficult to reconstruct the scene at Zhukova on the evening of the funeral. Too many journalists in later years described it in articles and memoirs. Most of them make the point that when Bukansky entered the long bar with the weird, shabby figure of Kuletsyn in tow, the writer’s air of surprise, shock even, was evident for all to see. It seems that on the car journey out to the dacha, Bukansky had said nothing about their destination. In this long elegant room (it had been built by the architect Megelev in 1721) with the elaborate stucco walls and the decorated ceiling, Kuletsyn had stood, his head jerking from side to side, glaring at the group of journalists at the cold meats table, at the trim, short-skirted waitresses or the group of high-heeled club girls at the bar.
Standing there in the middle of the room [Bukansky wrote in his memoir], he looked like the wrath of God. He turned on me, those long spindly fingers grabbing my coat. “How dare you bring me to your whorehouse!” he bawled in my face.
Just the reaction I expected. I knocked his hands down easily enough. “Come and drink, Valentin Sergeivich,” I told him. “You’ve jumped the first hurdle, but I’ve got a lot more in store for you.”
The frown lines across his forehead were like sand ribs left by the receding tide. He didn’t know what to make of it.
I walked to the bar and the girls twittered around, all excited at the prospect of trouble. But Kuletsyn followed me like a lamb.
Of course everything’s free: drinks, food, girls — a room for the night. I sat Kuletsyn down with a big plate of smoked sturgeon and a half-liter of iced Starka. This man needed a talking to…
Kuletsyn’s view of what followed appears in a scene from his Publication Notes to his novel To Be Preserved Forever.
Amidst these dim red lights, whorishly inappropriate to the grace and delicacy of architect Megelev’s salon, Igor Bukansky hunched his great shoulder toward me. “All this, Valentin Sergeivich,” he said, “could be yours. This is what I’ve brought you here to show you.”
How could I tell him that I rejected utterly this sybaritic life of the corrupt scribblers I saw all around me? How could I tell him of the nauseous contempt with which I viewed his friends and colleagues as they poured Starka down their ever open gullets, as they munched the food of the Russian people and pawed at the skirts of the painted prostitutes provided for their pleasures?
Bukansky’s message to me was clear. I could write a different novel, a Soviet novel. By which he meant a sycophantic, lying panegyric to the system. By which he meant a betrayal of that Russia deep inside every honest Russian. By which he meant a novel that would buy me, Valentin Kuletsyn, the entrée to this scarlet life of guiltless repose.
I would have nothing of it. I admired Bukansky for his early front-line poetry. I despised him for the compromise he had made. I saw sitting beside me a once great, now addled genius. And I saw the direction in which his fat, beringed finger was pointing.
The food and drink I left untouched. I feared even the corruption of my boots’ contact with the thick carpet as I strode from the whorehouse…
Not surprisingly, in the light of later events, Bukansky had a different view of what happened.
Well, I did my best. I had brought him to the club and showed him the life of ease that was his for the taking — if he wrote a Soviet novel. I talked of the cars, houses, dachas, first-class medical care, holidays, access to foreign literature, travel, everything that could be his if he reached out those thin bony fingers to grasp it.
I remember the expression on his face as I talked. I thought then, as I have so often thought since, that this man knew little or nothing about the labyrinthine paths of Soviet administration. He had spent a lifetime of suffering in labor camps and he imagined that I, as a powerfully placed figure in the literary bureaucracy, could decide to publish his book or not, as I chose. I looked around me as we sat there and saw across the room my old friend Dr. Jacob Felperin. I called him over and introduced Kuletsyn. “This author,” I said, “has written a great book. A great Russian book. He believes that if I, Bukansky, decide to publish it, it will be published.”
Felperin smiled. “Ah, then your friend Kuletsyn has lived a long life in the woods, I’m afraid.”
“Truer than you can possibly know,” Kuletsyn snarled.
“Tell him,” I said to Felperin, “about your statistics.”
“I have no interest in statistics,” Kuletsyn said. “I am a writer. I deal not in masses but in individuals.”
“I am a doctor,” Felperin said. “I, too, try to deal in individuals.”
“Listen carefully, Kuletsyn,” I insisted. “This could be your first lesson in Soviet reality.”
“You will not be unaware that alcoholism and related disease is a massive problem in our society,” Felperin said, speaking directly to Kuletsyn. “But tell me, do you know what percentage of our hospital admissions are due to alcohol-related problems?
“This, as doctors, is our problem: In its wisdom the Health Ministry has decided that no more than ten percent of admissions can be for alcoholism. Consider, Mr. Kuletsyn, no larger percentage would be acceptable in Soviet society. Yet the figure is larger, by how much nobody knows because a doctor is forced, in order to obey the directive, to misrepresent the nature of an admission once the magic ten percent has been reached in his hospital. Thus our alcoholism statistics are made useless by decree. But not only the statistics on alcoholism, because consider also that every time a doctor misrepresents a patient’s problem as thyroid, industrial accident, bronchitis, emphysema or whatever, those statistics also become inaccurate. This then is a burden of Soviet life. Practice must be straitjacketed by theory. There is nothing I can do, senior consultant that I am at Moscow Hospital, to make those statistics conform to life. The figures have already been determined far above my head, long before some derelict Soviet citizen collapses drunk and dies of hypothermia on a freezing sidewalk. Or industrial accident as perhaps I’m forced to record it.”