Читать книгу Shklovsky: Witness to an Era - Серена Витале - Страница 6
ОглавлениеNew Preface or A Preface Not about the KGB
Winter 1978–79: the coldest of the century, they said, except maybe the one in ’39. In Moscow, in late December, in the middle of the day, the temperature was as low as -20°C. Everyone in the streets was enveloped in little white clouds of vapor, the heating pipes had burst in many buildings, local authorities advised children and the elderly to stay in their homes. And on the morning of December 22, I went to the home of the eighty-six-year-old Viktor Shklovsky to finish making arrangements for the interviews he had agreed to do with me, out of which I planned to make a short book.
“You’re going to see Shklovsky?” many Russian friends asked me in amazement, with a touch of disdain, as if I were going to bring carnations to Lenin’s mummy. They hadn’t forgiven him for publicly renouncing his ingenious, tumultuous origins, for giving in; they looked down on his later work—the literary theory, memoirs, critical essays: “He’s repeating himself.” “But,” I protested (unsuccessfully), “he wrote Zoo, or Letters Not about Love . . . But he was the one who helped Mandelstam when everyone else had shunned him like he was a leper . . . Growing old isn’t a crime.”
“Where are you going?” asked the old woman in charge of the elevator (and surveillance), popping out of her little basement room and blocking my way. “To see Shklovsky.” “He’s busy right now.” “But I have an appointment.” She checked my identification and let me go.
“You’ve come at a delicate moment, the TV people are here. They were late and my husband is going out of his mind,” said Serafima Gustavovna Shklovskaya, helping me with my fur coat, hat, scarf, and various layers of jackets and sweaters. I could hear shouting inside. “How old are you, sonny? . . . I worked with Pudovkin, with Eisenstein, and you want to show me how to pose in front of the camera?” I peeked in from the foyer: almost concealed by the tall stacks of books on the table (other piles on the floor obliged the crew to move carefully through the small room), his shiny bald head shielded by a beret, checkered flannel slippers on his feet, Shklovsky was shaking his cane at the hapless crew members. “You’re giving me orders like a corporal does with new recruits. Profil! En-face . . . ! I look better in three-quarter profile. ‘With a quarter-turn, oh sorrow, you look back at the indifferent.’ . . . Who wrote those lines? Mandelstam. Do you know who he was, at least?” At that, the crew excused themselves from the interrogation: “All right, Viktor Borisovich, we’re done!” They said good-bye; the cameraman went out into the hall and whispered to another member of the crew: “He’s gone completely senile!” and to me: “Watch out! He’s in a mood today.”
We moved to the bedroom, which also served as a living room and dining room. Shklovsky sank into an armchair and slowly read through the Russian copy of the contract. “Worthy of Stellovsky!” he exclaimed. “You know who he is?” Fortunately, I did: Dostoyevsky’s money-grubbing editor . . . And it was Anna Akhmatova looking back at the indifferent in Mandelstam’s poem. He looked at me with astonishment. “Well . . . I’m impressed!” But then: “A book in less than two weeks? Impossible. I’ll never do it.” Hoping to appease him, I said: “But you dictated Zoo in nine days . . .” “True, but you’re no Anna Snitkina, let alone an Elsa Triolet!” He had a point. “Grant rights for fifty years? You know how old I am?” “Those are standard provisions, Viktor Borisovich.” “Learn to renew your conventions, you automatons! Fine, I’ll give you a day, and then we’ll see.” I returned to my hotel, my body frozen and my spirits dampened—dealing with Shklovsky wasn’t going to be easy. He’d been the enfant terrible, the loose cannon of formalism, he was made the protagonist of a novel called Skandalist—rabble-rouser, troublemaker. You couldn’t say that the years had mellowed him, that’s for sure. But now, that menacing, thunderous tone, like a despot’s, those outbursts . . .
I returned the following day (the guard/attendant: “Where are you going?” “To see Shklovsky.” “Ah.”), armed with patience and a tape recorder. If it was all right with him, I explained to Viktor Borisovich, my questions would more or less go in chronological order. That was fine, he grumbled. We began with his youth, the stir caused by the emergence of formalism, the revolution, the war, Persia, the clandestine fight between the different factions of socialist revolutionaries, duels, his escape to Finland, then Berlin, his return to Russia. He would say: “I’ve already written about that” or “I don’t know, I can’t remember anymore.” Or talk about something else entirely. Or out of the blue: “You know how an armored car is made?” and without waiting for my probable “no,” he started going on with obscure information about turrets, machine guns, combat chambers . . . He was still a master of digression. We could continue, he told me, as our first day of work came to a close.
“Where are you going?” “To see Shklovsky.” “Again?” “Yes . . .”
That day, I took the flattery approach: “Viktor Borisovich, today you’re an icon, you’ve regained the renown you once had—” He didn’t let me finish. “The only thing I need to be fully appreciated is death. Actually, maybe that’s what other people need, I don’t need anything.” Gathering my courage, I asked about the past: What did he think now, almost forty years later, of his 1931 “Monument to a Scientific Error” in which he recanted formalism? “Important discoveries can come from an error that is opportunely revealed and taken to its logical extremes.” Not another word. Moreover, many of his short, sibylline responses tended toward the aphoristic: “I never had talent, just displaced fury”; “There are only two ways to survive: write for yourself and earn money from some other occupation, or lock yourself in your house and contemplate the meaning of existence. There is no third way. I chose the third.” I wondered whether these were spontaneous quips or if he had a whole repertoire prepared—to impress his audience, to avoid the more uncomfortable questions.
After three days, his elusive store of knowledge began to show itself: he must have gotten tired of playing the role of the angry Patriarch. And his voracious curiosity got the better of his reticence. Now he was the one asking me questions: on the Red Brigades (“Will there be a revolution? God save you!”), on President Pertini, on the Polish Pope . . . And what was the name of that Roman trattoria where he’d gone with that great poet, the one who was also a director? . . . “Sima!” he called his wife, who was usually sitting with us—“What was his name?” “Who, Pasolini?” “That’s it. The trattoria was on one of the central streets, actually it was on a piazza. It was excellent. And I was so astonished: there were open bottles of wine on the shelves and nobody took them. And there wasn’t a single drunk around . . . But you have to know it, it had a beautiful name.” I improvised: “Osteria da Vittorio.” “Vittorio? I think you’re trying to trick poor old Viktor . . .” Then, quoting Pushkin: “It’s not difficult to deceive me! Yet I’m glad to be deceived.” He broke into laughter. While the sheet of ice that held Moscow hostage had reached eighty centimeters, the one between us was finally beginning to crack. I was able to confess my love for his explosive, spare writing (though I didn’t mention that I’d particularly admired it in his early work). The term “parataxis” slipped out of my mouth: “Parataksis? What the devil is that? A pair of taxis? Or basset hounds (taks)?” He laughed some more. “I write short sentences out of laziness . . . And also because they don’t risk being cut by the censors . . . One of them said to me—it must have been 1925, they still published me then—that my work gave them no satisfaction . . . Other writers, however . . .” “About other writers, Viktor Borisovich—what do you think of so-and-so’s latest novel?” “Nothing. Because, among other things, he’s one of my neighbors and he might be able to hear us. You see, a hundred and forty writers live in this building. They put us all together to keep an eye on us more easily. Like in 1984, except that instead of television screens we have elevator patrols . . . You know, I believe I’ll make it to the year 1984 . . . I would like that. I want to live. Even though I’ve lost all my contemporaries . . .”
“Sima” (Shklovsky’s second wife—a diminutive old woman with hunched shoulders and dull eyes; she had been, people said, a stunning woman) began inviting me to have tea afterward; sometimes they even asked me to stay for dinner. Forgetting the interview, and perhaps even me—I switched off the tape recorder for discretion’s sake—Viktor Borisovich gave himself over to his memories. They went back far, to painful places where self-censorship had long dictated the rules; at times his voice would crack or get stuck in his chest only to emerge, with difficulty, in a barely perceptible murmur. And more than once tears came to his eyes.
“In 1933, Gorky decided to show writers and journalists the canal that was going to connect the White Sea and the Baltic Sea, so that they could sing the praises of this great accomplishment of the new Soviet state. A grand, colossal work, a dream of Peter the Great’s, and the new slaves building it were all prisoners, some of them political prisoners. I knew that my brother was among them; I eagerly accepted the invitation to see that ‘creative mission.’ We set off in a group of over a hundred and twenty—illustrious figures and others not so illustrious, practically unknown. They drove us far and wide, encouraged us to talk to the prisoner-workers—mostly common criminals with short sentences to serve. They all claimed to be happy that they could rehabilitate themselves through work. For at least a few weeks, in anticipation of our visit, they had been given more substantial food than their usual meager rations. For us, there was an unbelievable spread—sturgeons with sprigs of parsley in their mouths, roasted pig, sausage, ham, cheese. And bottles of vodka, wine, champagne, Borjomi water. That banquet—while the Great Famine raged in the South—took away my appetite the whole time I was writing for Belomorkanal, a collective work, very instructive . . . But you won’t find it in the library, I don’t even have a copy myself. The book was taken out of circulation as soon as it came out: in the meantime Yagoda had already been taken out and some authors had died as well—not of natural causes, you understand: Jasensky, Sviatopolk-Mirsky, Averbakh . . .
“They only let us see the inmates who had been prepared for the meeting, but with a few trinkets from Moscow I managed to unearth my brother.” “Nikolai?” “What are you talking about! Nikolai was executed in 1919 . . . My brother Vladimir, a great philologist. He knew thirty languages. He translated De vulgari eloquentia. I learned so many things from him. He was a deeply religious man. He knew the camps—he was in Solovki from ’22 to ’25 . . . When they arrested him, in 1929, he was working for Academician Marr. We hadn’t been in contact for ages; he knew he was the object of keen interest on the part of the GPU and didn’t want to put me in jeopardy—you know, with my history. I held back tears when I saw him. I whispered: ‘Do you recognize me?’ ‘No,’ he replied, in a firm voice—he was afraid for me. Or of me? I gave him a pack of cigarettes; he accepted them, he said, for his companions . . . The guard who had escorted me asked: ‘And now, how do you feel after your reunion?’ ‘Like a live fox in a fur shop’ . . . I never found out the day, or even the year, of his death. They arrested him again (for the seventh time) in ’39 and after that I didn’t hear anything. They told me he had been sentenced to ten years in the camp without the right to correspondence: at the time no one dared imagine what was hidden in that sinister phrase. I should have realized—the dead can’t write. He died in 1938—I only found out after he had joined the ranks of the ‘posthumously recovered.’ But I still don’t know where he’s buried.” He took a sip of water. “It’s a horror, isn’t it? Old people crying. It puts me off too.”
“Where are you going?” “To see Shklovsky.” “Again?” . . .
Proud that Viktor Borisovich had placed his trust in me, pleased that he addressed me as “Serenochka,” I ventured: “How would you explain why the younger generations consider you a writer, so to speak, of the establishment?” His face drained, his stern and forbidding Dantonesque voice returned, and he shook his cane at me. “Get out of here!” he yelled. That same evening, he called to apologize.
“Where are you going?” “To see Shklovsky.” “You’re working today too?” “No, I just have to ask for forgiveness.” The elevator attendant shrugged.
“I wrote so much just to survive. I’ve written mediocre, even terrible things. There’s only one thing future generations will never find my name on: reports and denunciations. You must certainly think I’m a very healthy man, given that I’ve reached such a ripe old age. I have to disappoint you: I’ve been ill so often in the last thirty years that I should have been put underground long ago. My health got worse, for example, when they called meetings to expose, to censure a fellow writer. I wasn’t always able to get out of them. Nor did I always want to. In ’43, I too defined Zoshchenko’s Before Sunrise as a work not ‘in accordance with the interests of the people.’ Zoshchenko, my pupil, one of my Serapion ‘brothers.’ And when they gave Pasternak the Nobel I happened to be in Yalta. I sent him a telegram with my congratulations. But then the storm broke: a ‘traitor for the foreigner’s coin,’ they called him. And I wrote a letter to the editor at a small local newspaper allying myself with the general indignation. Why? The most terrible thing is that I don’t remember anymore. The times? Sure, but we’re the times, I am, millions like me. One day everything will come to light: the records of those meetings, the letters from those years, the interrogation procedures, the denunciations—everything. And all that sewage will also dredge up the stench of fear.”
“Where are you going?” “To see Shklovsky.” “But what-all do you have to say to each other?” I brushed off the old busybody.
Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky died in December of 1984. Recently a letter surfaced that he wrote to try to save one of his students at the Literature Institute, Arkady Belinkov, who was arrested in 1944 at twenty-three for the manuscript of Chernovik Chuvstv (A Notebook of Feelings), the novel he wrote for his thesis. Shklovsky wrote to the powerful writer Aleksey Tolstoy, the “Red Count,” knowing that every letter sent to him was read at the Lubyanka first; his intervention saved the young man from execution, and he was only (only!) sentenced to eight years in the gulag. And in ’49 he appealed to the writer Konstantin Simonov, secretary of the Writers’ Union, advocating a commutation of Belinkov’s sentence: “This is a person of talent. Literary talent is not very common, people who possess it shouldn’t be wasted . . .” There’s a hint of goodness there, in those old papers.
From the Record of Case no. 71/50
Interrogation of February 15, 1944. Begun at 10:00 A.M. Concluded at 10:30 P.M.
Investigator: When did you meet Shklovsky?
Belinkov: In July or August of 1943.
Investigator: Under what circumstances?
Belinkov: The Literature Institute encouraged us to consult writers for advice on our work.
Investigator: Why did you choose Shklovsky?
Belinkov: Because he’s my favorite writer.
Investigator: What was Shklovsky’s opinion of your A Notebook of Feelings?
Belinkov: He didn’t consider it a success, but he did not say that it contained anti-Soviet material.
Investigator: Did you let Shklovsky in on your anti-Soviet ideas?
Belinkov: Yes, I did.
Investigator: How did Shklovsky react when you revealed these ideas?
Belinkov: He criticized them.
Investigator: Are you certain of that?
Belinkov: I’m certain.
Investigator: Did Shklovsky systematically declare his anti-Soviet views on literature and the world?
Belinkov: I repeat, when he spoke with me, Shklovsky never indulged in any anti-Soviet criticism.
Interrogation of April 12, 1944. Begun at 10:30 A.M. Concluded at 5:00 P.M.
Investigator: How did you meet and become acquainted with the writer Shklovsky?
Belinkov: In late May or early June 1943, when I was finishing at the Literature Institute and preparing to present my thesis, I was obliged to consult the writer Shklovsky for advice on my thesis, which consisted of the novel A Notebook of Feelings. The choice was entirely my own, and I decided to consult Shklovsky for two reasons: 1) I intended to devote myself not only to writing but also to literary theory. 2) In that period, my ideas corresponded with Shklovsky’s, Tynyanov’s, and Eikhenbaum’s, much more than they did with other writers’.
Investigator: All three ringleaders of formalism . . . But Soviet criticism condemned formalism long ago as an enemy of the real world and socialist realism in literature . . . It is commonly known that Shklovsky has a hostile stance towards the world around him and it is also commonly known that he has engaged in anti-Soviet activities for some time. It is also commonly known that after a certain point your relationship with Shklovsky had the same anti-Soviet character. I advise you to testify honestly and openly about this matter during your next interrogation . . .
December 29, 1978; 29 degrees below zero. “Better to die of fear than of cold,” I decided, leaving the hotel and heading for the Mayakovskaya metro station (which was thirty-three meters underground). This novelty—usually I walked back and forth in front of the hotel for ten minutes or so waiting for a taxi—alarmed my escorts. For a week, eight young men in fake leather jackets (lined, I assume, but how on earth did their legs, their behinds, not freeze?) had been following me in a pair of mouse-colored Moskviches. Every morning they followed me all the way to the courtyard in front of the Writers’ House, and when I left the Shklovskys’ in the afternoon or evening, I would find them just where I had left them. Then they followed me back to the “Pekin,” (a KGB-cooperative hotel, right in the center of town on the corner of Sadovaya and Gorky). I had learned the pointlessness of “whys” by then, and as an official guest of the Union of Soviet Writers, complete with a contract from the VAAP (All-Union Copyright Agency, Literary Branch of State Security) and the approval of Counselor Veselitsky, I felt almost at ease. He had come to pick me up at the airport, almost solemn, and after a courteous squeeze he led me to “Table no. 1” at customs—the one reserved for diplomats and distinguished guests, where nobody got searched. Furthermore, meteorological conditions kept me from going out at night, and when I called friends I certainly wasn’t talking about Sakharov or Bukovsky. The only thing that worried me was that these bloodhounds carried out their task in such a brazenly obvious way, making no attempt whatsoever to keep a low profile—when I took a taxi they didn’t even follow at a safe distance. One day, after checking the rearview mirror several times, the elderly driver burst out: “Oh fuh . . . ! Your syphilitic mother should have aborted you! Antichrists! Satan’s hemorrhoids! Sacks of stinking vomit . . . Let’s lose ’em.” “No, please.” Why complicate my life even more?
The Petenky (that’s what I called the four in the Moskvich with license plate 79-54) returned happily to their toasty car, which they always kept running, while the Vovochky (the ones with plate number 59-60) trailed me on foot, much less happily, to the metro. I was able to get a look at them: light eyes, high cheekbones, hard Slavic features, blank and icy stares.
It was noon when Shklovsky threw me out: “Get out of here!” Upset, my tears hardening into crystals on my cheeks, I headed straight for the Aeroport metro stop. Once again, my escort split up—this time it was the Petenky’s turn to follow me through underground Moscow. They must not have enjoyed the ride on the crowded train; at the Mayakovskaya stop they escorted me off with a shove. As I fell to the ground, I felt—through several layers of wool and a fur coat—a colossal kick on my right side. I was on the ground when I came to, surrounded by concerned bystanders. Two police officers arrived. “What’s going on here? Is she drunk?” “She’s not,” one lady answered, “but those four huligany who knocked her down certainly were, I saw them with my own eyes, they’re right over there.” I lifted my head a little: the Petenky were standing a few meters from our huddle and for the first time their lips stretched into little smiles. I saw the militsionery’s boots march over to the would-be thugs and come back in less than a minute: the KGB badge terrorizes even the police. One of them took me back to my hotel. An hour later, a doctor came. A broken rib, most likely. “Apply this ointment and bandage your chest tightly.” “With what?” “It’s up to you; if you prefer, you can go to the trauma ward, but I’d advise against it—with this cold, you’d have to wait for hours at the emergency room. Most importantly, be careful not to laugh.” That was the last thing I felt like doing. I cut up one of my pajamas and wrapped the strips around my chest, howling with pain. Shklovsky called: “. . . My God, I made you cry, forgive this crabby old man. I’ll expect you tomorrow.”
I asked if I could dine in my room: “We don’t do that here.” I went down to the restaurant and for a nominal fee of fifty rubles they put me at a small table off to the side; as usual, I ordered soup and Peking chicken, and for once, a double vodka (200 grams). I went back up to my room, lay down for about half an hour, and went back down just in time to sip the broth with bits of Chinese mushrooms floating among the traditional pelmeni. The orchestra was playing “Midnight in Moscow.” Back in my room, I rested again, and then went back for the second course. Seeing me heading for the elevator again, the guard for that floor asked me: “Is there something wrong? Up and down, up and down . . .” “Is that not allowed?” “No, but it makes our job difficult.” He didn’t specify which.
December 30. 34° below zero. Serafima Gustavovna draped a blanket over her husband’s body like a peplos, brought in an electric heater, and then got into bed, in her clothes, under two tartan blankets. She was snoring by the time Viktor Borisovich finished his long, sad tale. As I was softly saying good-bye and asking about the plan for the following day, Shklovsky interrupted me: “Serenochka, tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, I want to give Sima a present. With the royalties from my translations abroad I’ve been able to stash away a little money, that is, tsertifikaty, but I’ve never set foot in a Beryozka. My Sima neither. And she dreams of having a dublyonka. They sell them at the Beryozka by the Novodevichy Monastery, she found out. Would you be willing to take her?” “Now???” “No, she’s tired, poor thing. Tomorrow. Since it’s a holiday the store will be almost empty, you’ll be able to take your time.” “And how will we get there and back?” He struggled to free his right arm from under the blanket, grabbed an address book and handed it to me. “You look, please, I don’t want to get my other glasses. Under V: Veselitsky, Afanasy Veselitsky, Writers’ Union.” Stunned, I replied: “Veselitsky? Do you know him, what kind of guy he is, how much he drinks?” “Of course. No less than the Central Committee put him in that position; he could drink even a whole distillery of vodka and no one would be able to move him from that chair. But he’s useful, and he can get us a car from the Union—am I or am I not a living icon?” He cleared his throat, summoned his threatening Dantonesque tone, and dialed the number. “Shklovsky here . . . Afanasy Aleksandrovich, tomorrow I need a . . .” After he hung up, he told me that a car would come pick us up at two on the dot.
Who’d have ever thought—even the eighty-something Serafima Gustavovna had been seduced by the dublyonka. The original sin came from Lelouch and the film A Man and a Woman: the sheepskin overcoat Anouk Aimée wore became the dream of Soviet women for years (though the men’s version was also much sought-after), a symbol of western chic, privilege, affluence.
“What a horrible day you picked!” Afanasy said to me as he helped Serafima Gustavovna into the car. “I had to make a hundred telephone calls to find a driver . . .” It was a miracle that he’d found one, he added, so he would take advantage and run a few errands; he would be back to pick us up at five sharp.
During the trip to the Novodevichy Monastery (an ancient, splendid convent, where Chekhov and Gogol are buried: the ghost of the latter no doubt wandered around the “hard currency” store nearby to rob the fortunate clients of their warm, elegant overcoats), I turned two or three times to look out the back window. The Petenky and Vovochky were still there. Afanasy, who must have downed at least one vodka already, didn’t notice a thing.
Around the Beryozka the snow had been cleared to make paths for vehicle access. Cars were scarce, as were customers, and Serafima Gustavovna had at least three salesgirls at her disposal to try on the dublyonki for sale. She couldn’t find one like she wanted—with a hood and not too dark, “otherwise it would age me.” We moved on to the hats, without much luck. As a gesture to the sales-women, who had been unusually kind, I bought a kind of fur turban: it made me look vaguely like Josephine Baker, but it paid off in warmth when we left the store at five—but no Afanasy and no car. We waited between the two doors, where we could feel some of the heat from inside, but after five minutes poor Serafima Gustavovna could hardly stand up. “That’s what I get for trying to look stylish at my age,” she mumbled, trembling. I took her back inside and asked for a chair. After we’d lost an hour and all hope (Afanasy’s errands must have been of the alcoholic variety, perhaps the driver had taken him to the hospital—if he wasn’t drunk himself!), I realized that I absolutely had to catch a taxi, hail down a car: planting my feet firmly in the hard snow I went down the path to the street and stood there, waving my right hand persistently. I couldn’t stand it for long, and after a few minutes I went back inside the Beryozka. Every time I came out, from the parallel paths, the Petenky and Vovochky put their cars into first and moved forward toward the street, only to reverse when I went back into the shop, completely frozen. I asked if I could call the Writers’ Union. Nobody picked up, of course. I resumed the quest: it was pitch dark, no cars except for my escorts’. Consumed with a desperate rage, I suddenly turned toward the Petenky on my left and practiced in my head what I was going to say: “At least let an old woman in your car to get warm, she could catch pneumonia. That would be a way to serve the State too!” Seeing me approach, the Petenky at the wheel of the 54-69 moved forward. In all honesty, I don’t know how it happened—they slid on the ice, or he was caught off guard, or he wanted to punish me for the unexpected insubordination, or the path was too narrow . . . When the Moskvich and I were side by side, the Petenky swerved toward me, forcing me to lunge onto a heap of snow so as not to be hit head on. By then the snow had become solid hard ice, rocklike . . .
I limped back to the shop. I slipped, I said. One of the salesgirls felt bad for us: if we waited until closing, her husband, a taxi driver, would help us when he came to get her. I called Shklovsky to tell him we would be late.
I managed to get Serafima Gustavovna back home and return to my hotel. No doctors at that hour, that night. After less than thirty minutes (they were even nice at the switchboard on New Year’s Eve), I got through to an Italian journalist friend who was in town. Surprised, he asked me how much I had drunk (if I’d been calling from Italy, it would have been well after midnight); he listened when I asked him for help, using “butterfly code”: I-fi am-fam in-fin big-fig trou-fruh ble-full, etc. The thought of a decoder trying to understand the secret language of my childhood made me smile, despite my aches and my hunger.
The next morning my room was host to a real parade. First, the doctor. “Well, what have you been doing, you’re one big bruise. You drink too much. Stay in bed for at least two days and put some ice on your hip and thigh.” Then it was the man in the gray coat’s turn: “Technical assistance. I have to fix the phone.” “But it works just fine!” “That was the order. If you could please leave the room for a moment.” I revealed what bandages I could. “Don’t worry, I won’t look.” But I did: he casually unscrewed the receiver, inspected it, took something out, put something else in . . . The butterfly language must have made some ears burn. Third, my Italian friend arrived. “Let’s go to the foreigners’ hospital,” he limited himself to saying, and on the way (“you can talk, the car is safe”) he listened to my story. He had been in Russia for ten years and had never heard of anything like that happening . . . And to a foreigner . . . “Is your room clean?” “Spotless.” “Then be careful, something’s up. As soon as you get back to your hotel, don’t leave your room. They could slip drugs into one of your books, in a drawer. And leave as soon as you can.” He had a friend at Alitalia who could change my ticket. After the doctor’s visit (just two cracked ribs and some contusions on my left leg), he took me back to the Pekin and made sure that nobody had paid me a visit while I was out.
Shklovsky called. Afanasy had gone over to apologize; the car had run out of fuel and he’d gotten stuck outside of town. “You can imagine—he smelled like Tsar Nicholas’ wine cellar. But he didn’t get off scot free, I whacked him with my cane . . .” He thanked me for getting Sima home safe and sound and ordered me not to come see him for at least two days, so I could rest and get better.
I grabbed my brightest, shiniest sweater, went out, locked the door, and with clear tape I attached two hairs, crossed, over the keyhole (which I’d seen in a spy film). A bribed waitress brought me provisions for two days. On January 3, after pulling out two more of my hairs, I went back to Shklovsky’s for what would be, I announced, our last conversation: I had to go back to Italy—serious family problems—but I had gathered enough material . . . The pained look of those two was touching. When his wife left the room to prepare the tea, Viktor Borisovich said to me: “You’re terrified, Serenochka, I know that look in your eyes very well. I have for fifty years. You don’t have to tell me anything, but for the love of God, leave, go back to Italy. Nadezhda Mandelstam once said that we were living in a torture chamber. Today I call it an operating room. Every day they give us the anesthetic of fear, an ether that paralyzes the soul.”
The morning of January 4, Afanasy drove me to the airport. Queasy again, with a few more bandages than before, I remained silent the whole ride. Once we reached Table no. 1 he pulled out his own identification and mine. The Petenky and Vovochky pounced on us like starved vultures. Afanasy’s eyes bulged, the employee at Table 1 paled. A Petenka gestured for me to open my suitcase, then to follow him to a room where I was met by a woman in uniform. Once the door was closed, the policewoman (?) said to me politely: “Please, if you’re hiding something—jewelry, drugs, papers—tell me, I don’t want to have to search you.” I emptied my pockets and my purse. That didn’t convince her. “Since you don’t want to cooperate, please remove your clothes.” Later, the same woman took me to passport check and from there to the exit; my bags, she explained, would be returned to me on the plane.
I was alone on the bus and on the ramp. On the plane I was greeted by the sarcastic applause of the other passengers, who had been waiting over four hours on the runway. The flight attendant quickly ushered me to first class—empty, or emptied, for the occasion.
Back home, I found a piece of paper in my suitcase with a pencil sketch of my hair dryer and four pages on which someone had diligently copied the names up to “B” from my address book, including their phone numbers and addresses. Careless, the KGB! And what a disappointment: everything by hand, no photocopies . . . Even the legendary KGB, I now realized, suffered the inexorable constraints of the Soviet defitsit.
2003. Vladimir Voynovich’s “Dossier n. 34840” is made public:
“ . . . After that nobody touched me again, physically, but there were assaults on those who came to see me, even on those who didn’t. The Italian Slavicist Serena Vitali [sic] was the guest of my neighbor Viktor Shklovsky, and when she left and got on a trolleybus, she was hit in the head with something heavy wrapped in a newspaper. During the attack they said to her: “If you see Voynovich one more time, we’ll finish you off.’”
Was Voynovich—ever since Private Chonkin, in open battle with the regime—the real reason for my little (you know, word travels, information gets exaggerated . . .) mishap? Out of respect for the much more vicious attacks others went through, due to my now firm disbelief in a logic to violence, out of laziness, ultimately, I never asked to see my file when the Lubyanka opened its archives. The Petenky and Vovochky? I can see them now, bodyguards for some powerful nouveau riche. Or perhaps they have gotten rich themselves and they ride around in black six-door limousines. Or they scrape by with the modest pension afforded even the most idiotic KGBists, no longer of use to anybody . . .
SERENA VITALE, 2010
