“Your safety depends on it,” I say to him. “They will not arrest a man well known in the West. You can go on writing.”
“Already,” he says, “I have had Western motorcars in my village. Is invasion by the press the only Western measure of success?”
“No,” I said, “dollars too.”
He stiffens, turning his head from the thought.
“You’ll be a rich man, Valentin Sergeivich,” I tell him. “You’ll find the Soviet government will be very pleased to let you bring your dollars home. Ill-gotten gains though they are in the eyes of the censor.”
“I have no use for dollars.”
I stand up, angry. “Yes, Valentin Sergeivich, we Socialist artists are all deeply offended by the reek of dollars. When you inform me that you’ve given all yours to the Egyptian poor, I’ll believe that you’re as different from the rest of us as you believe you are.”
He stands before me in bedraggled clothes. His claim, of course, is to be the conscience of old Russia. And I in my thick carpeted office with the Italian furniture, I believe in this scarecrow genius. I believe in his passionate denunciation of the Soviet system, even of people like me. And yet he isn’t, in the sense I am, a true peasant born. His father was a mathematician, a schoolteacher. What does he know about peasant Russia, about the spring stirrings in our land? More than me, I’m sorry to say. Oh, his details can be wrong. But the heart’s right. Am I to play the envious Lippo Lippi to his Raphael? No. I have taken my decision. The man before me is the greater patriot, the greater writer. I have no wish to offend him. Or rather I try to suppress it.
“Most of all, you will remain free, free to write,” I urge him.
Ah, that sardonic smile.
“I can go on writing in a labor camp,” Kuletsyn informs me.
“But not under six feet of earth.” I am angry and humble. Why is genius so often vouchsafed to the self-obsessed? Am I too kind for genius? Is that the fatal flaw?
Alone again, I ring the desk bell and, when she comes in, I tell Lydia to bring me a bottle — and herself.
She is looking at me strangely. “Igor Alexandrovich, there must be no bottle for you. You must go immediately to the banya, take the hottest steam you can bear.”
“Lydochka,” I tell her, “I am celebrating a triumph. A secret triumph.”
“I can guess,” she said. “But this is more important. General Strelin’s aide just phoned. The general invites you to dinner tonight. A private room in the Officers’ Club. I am to inform you that Natalya Roginova will be present.”
Some 20 miles west of Moscow city center the silver aspen onion domes of a small white-painted country church seem, by some trick of the light, to float unsupported, like inverted balloons above the snowscape. Here at Archangelskoye, on an estate once owned by the princely Golitsyn and Yusupov families, stands a magnificent yellow-ocher palace set in a great park and approached by a series of Italianate terraces. Until the early 1980s visitors from Moscow would wander through sumptuously furnished public rooms past paintings by Tiepolo and Van Dyck, part of the great art collection of the Prince Yusupov who rebuilt Archangelskoye.
But the conveniently short distance from Moscow, the comparative ease of security arrangements and the facilities for government meetings had attracted some functionary of the Kremlin majordomo’s office. In the summer of 1983 the last tourists were ushered from the grounds, chainlink fencing was erected to enclose the great park and only the floating dome and gables of the church remained visible to the ordinary mortals who rode the 541 bus from Tushinskaya.
On the morning of December 20th, the park and terraces lay under a thick blanket of snow, but the drive from the main gate had been cleared early, long before the first of the sleek black official cars would begin to arrive.
We administrative secretaries [recounted Peter Rinsky] had been at Archangelskoye since early the day before and a whole army of butlers, valets, cleaners, cooks, waiters and maidservants had arrived almost a week earlier. We had been told to prepare for a meeting which might take one day or equally six. Rest rooms and offices had been allocated to the principal ministers, suites to the members of the Politburo, and the conference sessions themselves were to take place in the elegant, galleried Oval Hall.
My friend would smile wickedly at the name. Must we always insist on outdoing the Americans? he’d ask.
By six o’clock that morning when I came down into the forehall the chaos was indescribable. It was the security men’s fault as usual. They were insisting on checking every document box that the various ministry secretaries were bringing in; the secretaries were equally insisting that KGB junior officers lacked sufficient security clearance to examine the boxes. KGB colonels and above were dragged from their beds in Moscow to arrive unshaven, their uniforms unbuttoned, swearing and cursing at everybody in sight.
In the midst of all this the cleaners, a group of the toughest women you’re likely to see even in Moscow, were pushing their vacuums like bulldozers before them, their long electric leads tripping anxious political secretaries and caterers dragging in crates of champagne. The din was unbearable. Threats of immediate arrest by the KGB colonels were openly laughed off by the women cleaners. (I would not have liked to arrest one of them.) The majordomo, mad with panic, checked his watch against the great sunburst clock every thirty seconds and begged, pleaded and screamed at everyone to clear the forehall immediately.
The Oval Hall was no better. Here Security was supposedly making a final check for electronic devices but seemed more intent on a shouting competition between themselves to confirm the identity of each other.
There was apparently some ludicrous rumor (Oh, how I wished I’d started it! sighed my friend) that the Americans had installed an electronic listening device in the Oval Hall. Some lunatics actually wanted to tear down plasterwork when their detecting devices located a deeply implanted eighteenth-century iron nail. The majordomo, back to the wall, arms thrown wide defensively against the plasterwork, forbade KGB technicians to approach. The women cleaners laughed and cheered.
By nine o’clock all the junior ministers had arrived with their droves of secretaries and personal assistants. By nine-thirty the senior ministers had arrived and been installed in the suites of rooms on the ground floor. At ten exactly the last cavalcade purred along the drive and silence fell in the forehall where the ministers were lined up, like the domestic serfs of some aristocratic household, to receive the members of the Politburo.
Roginova and Kuba entered first, the others straggling in an octogenarian gaggle behind them. Coats were taken and the vlasti, the powers that be, moved along the line shaking hands, embracing, and exchanging a few words with each of the senior ministers. Naturally we guessed that Roginova planned a bombshell, but we were ignorant of the details.
They filed into the Oval Hall. Coffee and cherry cake was served. The waiters were ushered out by majordomo Pletnakov. Relief showed on his bulging red cheeks as he closed the huge double doors.
Inside the Collective Reporting began.
Now we administrative secretaries who were the senior civil servants present were each, as I mentioned earlier, attached to one of the Party or ministry figures in the Oval Hall. Most of us, of course, were highly experienced in such meetings and had frequently drafted the speech of the minister concerned. Thus we knew, within a matter of minutes, how long any presentation might take.
On this occasion Minister Bukin was to speak first. His particular responsibility was oil energy exploration and production and his administrative secretary assured us that a minimum three and a half hours would be necessary for his presentation. This of course would be the usual three hours of self-adulation and a half-hour of distorted statistics threaded in. Nobody expected the truth, so nobody told the truth. Image and reality.