“Real literature,” she echoed, “without fear or lies…”
The aged, exhausted face blanched with something like fright. In a different voice, as though speaking in public, Lobanova pronounced: “In my opinion, the wartime labor of the Writers’ Union has been exemplary… Always inspired by the directives of the Party and the Party’s Leader.”
Daria nodded vigorously at this. She managed a diffident smile.
“May I come and see you again?”
“If you like. There’s no need. I’m sure you have better things to do. Tell that child out there to bring me my soup.”
That morning, she’d had a curious interview with Major Makhmudov. This fat man with an ivory-pink cranium addressed her politely, coolly, not unaffably but with authority: “Are you married?” “De facto, yes.” “So I’ve discovered. It is not in your dossier. I should reprimand you. The personnel in this service are expected to apply for a marriage license, and to inform me of any changes to their civil status… However, your husband is a very highly regarded element among the subaltern cadres. I wish you both the best. Have you told him of your past?” “No.” “I see…” He surveyed her heavily. “I needn’t remind you of the rules of discipline…” “No, Comrade Major.” Daria looked squarely back at him. This is how things stand. “Very good, dismissed…”
She spent the day in the office. Some shells landed not far away. At dusk she set off home via a long detour, feeling obscurely anxious but telling herself it was nothing. The frozen Neva appeared wider than usual. People followed paths over the ice like columns of slow, dull, plodding ants. The snow turned dark beneath their footfalls. Everything was sluggish, low, muted, dingy, and white. The sporadic explosions likewise. The tall gilt spires of the old imperial fortress, built level with the white river, had lost their shine. Women clustered lethargically here and there around holes in the ice; some were staggering away under buckets and jerry cans of green water strewn with floating frost needles. The sky was bluish-yellow above these open stretches. Daria realized she barely had strength enough to think, that her ideas were unraveling into wisps the color of this sky and that some of them were oppressive, to be pushed back… So Illarionov is dead. A despicable character, though he had tremendous gifts… Sacha used to say: “As a human being he’s a nonentity, with next to no inner life, he’s heavy, he’s common: a bank account and a digestive tract. As a writer he might well be great, the remarkable parasite on vegetative man… Prisoner of the man, the writer tries his utmost to be a coward — he would like to specialize in novels written to order, fitting the ideological requisites of the season. And he writes them superbly, but here’s where the real plot thickens. The parasite writer is far more intelligent and less groveling than the vegetative host; he is even prone to bursts of bold, sentimental, convoluted genius, and likes to imagine that the authorities don’t really understand what he’s doing. Even his most official works contain a subtle undercurrent of vitality, making them suggestive of something other than their apparently orthodox line… The bureaucrats at the Literature Office tear at their hair over them. They implore our Illarionov to change twenty-seven passages, and he does, goddamn it — by getting totally drunk! And there are still bits that get away, overlooked by the censors… The censors are afraid of him. He’s undermined the careers of some of their top men. Illarionov is trembling as well, he drinks to reassure himself, but then in his cups he says things that could get him deported for life. After the hangover he’ll dash off a raft of mean, vacuous articles against all and sundry: colleagues whom he accuses of lukewarm ideological commitment, or blindness to the times we live in, or not admiring him enough. His friends no longer know whether they should shake his hand or not; but being the champion of political orthodoxy, it’s not a good idea to fall out with him. ‘You sure come off as some strange kind of bastard!’ I once told him fondly at the end of a gala dinner. Illarionov began whining, with tears in his eyes, that the essence of the old man is the old bastard… We were both drunk.”
Daria tried in vain to piece together a rounded picture of Illarionov. All she could recall was a boorish face, a conical forehead, a portly presence that looked at women as though they were for sale… But he did dress well. Unhealthy to remember the dead, they are all connected, they call out to one another, they congregate inside you, they are too many, too alive. There’s no getting rid of them once they have got possession of your soul, instead it’s they that banish sleep, derail the train of thought, lead you where you have no wish to go. Some of them would have known better how to defend this city, our land, our blood, our idea than many who are alive today… They defend us still. Their soul is present. Every one of our promises for the future was seeded by them…
“Am I still thinking within the materialist truth of history?” In wrestling with this question, Daria recalled with pleasure this phrase from Marx: “The tradition of dead generations weighs like a bad dream on the minds of the living…” It was from The Eighteenth Brumaire… While tradition is a nightmarish dead weight, it can also illuminate like a shaft of healing clarity: witness the Marxian tradition itself. Such is the mystery of consciousness… What did Sacha say about that, in our tan-upholstered café in Paris?
Our millions of dead are lost, a third of the city’s living are half dead, the Klims are lost, and yet we are saved, the stagnant war is beginning to turn our way, with the Nazis running out of steam, the American engine revving up — but how shall we be saved? As a luminous force or a persistent nightmare? The very question is treason, but how can I avoid asking it? Anguish is a betrayal of life only if it cries quits, anguish is a sacred warning: Beware the chasm, beware of what you may become! We alone know the nightmare we are trapped in, the ugly underside of our debilitated strength, and that our only hope lies in a resurrection from among the dead: from among defunct ideas and murdered ideologues… That’s why people talk so little nowadays. Klim hardly talks. Lobanova talks, the better to perfect her silence. Makhmudov never talks. Colonel Fontov talks to himself. Captain Potapov talks only to teach, as rarely as possible… To talk is to work on behalf of hope. People at the brink of exhaustion know the futility of this work, last hopes don’t need it. Where there is anguish and hunger, silence is more eloquent. It wastes less breath and it’s safer.
Climbing the stairs, Daria strained toward Klim. Klim whose muscles and sinews knew all that was amiss and made it all right, without a word… A thickset form was blocking the landing, dressed in black, surmounted by a black fur hat whose folded flaps exposed a white wool lining. Moving from foot to foot, the man cleared his throat and said, “I recognize you… It is you, isn’t it? Klim sent me.”
What had happened? Sick? Killed? (Bombs were falling to the west, earlier…) Arrested? Gone? In any case, say nothing. Daria was calm as she always was in the face of misfortune. She did not doubt that misfortune had struck.
“So,” she said. “What?”
“He won’t be back tonight… Nor the coming nights either.”
“When, then?”
“He doesn’t know… maybe two months, if all goes well.”
The darkened landing was like the bottom of a pit.
“Is it orders?”
The soldier hesitated.
“Put it this way… we’re always under orders…”
“How dangerous is it?”
“No more than usual…”
“He didn’t give you any message? Nothing for me?”
“He’s not allowed. He’ll try to write… sometime soon… He’ll never forget you.”