Empire V, Page 2

  It was the first time I heard the kind of obscene word that well-brought-up children in the era of perestroika usually learned from sniggering peers in the kindergarten dorm. My mother, whenever she played this tape recording, felt it necessary to explain that the obscenity was justified by artistic necessity and by the context. As for me, I found the word ‘context’ even more puzzling than the word ‘cunt’ since the whole scene was dimly suggestive of the mysterious and threatening grown-up world towards which the winds of change issuing nightly from the TV were imperceptibly wafting me.

  My mother’s pro-human-rights cassette had been recorded many years before I was born. It would seem that marriage, a state of life crowned by my appearance in this world, was the cause of her abandoning an active role in the struggle. But her propinquity to revolutionary democracy, which irradiated my childhood with a romantic glow, went apparently unremarked by a regime already sliding into its dotage.

  On the wall to the right of my bed were two small identically sized pictures. Forty centimetres wide by fifty centimetres high, they were the first objects I measured with the ruler in the geometry set that I received as a gift in my first grade of school. One picture depicted a lemon tree in a tub, the other a similarly planted orange tree. The only difference between them was the shape and colour of the fruit: the yellow ones elongated and the orange ones spherical.

  Directly above the bed hung a wicker fan in the shape of a heart – purely decorative because it was too large to be of any use. In the hollow between the two knoll-like ventricles was a round knob, making the whole thing resemble a gigantic bat with a tiny head. In its middle was a blob of red lacquer paint.

  I was convinced that this fan was actually a flying vampire-dog (a creature I had read about in a magazine called Around the World) which during the day was at rest on the wall but came to life at night. As with a mosquito’s abdomen, I could see through his skin the blood he had drunk: this would be the origin of the red stain in the centre of the fan.

  The blood, I assumed, was mine.

  I realised my terrors were an echo of stories I had heard at summer camps (they tended to be repeated unchanged for years on end). Despite this, I was regularly visited by nightmares from which I would awaken in a cold sweat. Eventually, so concrete did the presence of the vampire-dog spreadeagled against the wall become, and so afraid of the dark was I, that I had to switch on the light to make the dog once again assume the form of a fan made of palm leaves. I knew it would be no good confiding my terrors to my mother. The only thing I could think of was to fix the fan firmly to the wallpaper with superglue. Once I had done that, the terror left me.

  Another idea I took from those summer camps was my earliest conception of the physical world. At one of them I saw a remarkable fresco. It showed the earth as a flat disc resting upon three whales swimming in a pale blue ocean. Trees grew upwards from the earth, telegraph poles poked skywards, and there was even a jolly red tram bowling along between a higgledy-piggledy jumble of identical white buildings. Round the front edge of this terrestrial disc were spelt out the letters U S S R. I knew that I had been born in the USSR, and that sometime later it had disintegrated. This was very puzzling, because whereas the houses, trees and trams were still where they always had been, the solid ground on which they stood had evidently vanished … However I was still very little, and my mind accommodated itself to this paradox as it did to hundreds of other imponderables, all the more so as I was already beginning to grasp the true bottom line of the Soviet economic catastrophe: a country that finds it necessary to have two police officers in civilian clothes spying on people who would, in a normal society, be receiving unemployment benefit, could hardly be expected to end otherwise.

  But these were vague, phantom shades of childhood. The moment at which my childhood came to an end was my first truly personal memory. It occurred while I was watching an old cartoon film on television, Dunno in the City of the Sun. Marching across the screen was a column of cheerful, tubby little midgets from Soviet comics. Waving their arms in glee, they sang:

  And then along came Mr Frog,

  His tummy brightest green,

  His tummy brightest green.

  He swallowed up a grasshopper,

  Who had no time to think, no time to guess,

  What was about to come,

  What was about to come,

  That all would end like this …

  I knew without a doubt who was the grasshopper they were singing about, the tiny insect Russians for some reason call the ‘little smith’. He was the muscular forger of the new world, seen on all those old posters, tear-off calendars and postage stamps, swinging his hammer high in the air. The jolly little midgets were waving a final salute to the Soviet Union from the safety of their City of the Sun, the road to which the Soviet people had so miserably failed to find.

  Seeing the beaming faces of the diminutive marchers, I burst into tears. My grief had nothing, however, to do with nostalgia for the USSR, which I barely remembered. No, the tiny figures marching along through enormous bluebells half as high again as they were, reminded me of something simple that I knew to be of fundamental significance, although I could no longer remember what it was.

  The loving, gentle world of my childhood, where every object seemed as huge in scale as these giant flowers and where there were as many happy sunlit paths as in the cartoon film, now lay forever in the past. It was lost in the long grass that had been home to the grasshopper, and now I knew that henceforth it would be the frog I must deal with. The longer this went on, the more indissoluble would be the relationship.

  The frog’s belly was indeed green, but it had a black back and on every street corner an armour-plated outpost known as an exchange bureau. Grown-ups believed implicitly in the frog, and only in the frog, but I had a feeling that at some time in the future the frog would betray them too, and then there would be no bringing back the little smith …

  The cartoon midgets were the only people who were concerned to bid farewell to the ridiculous country in which I had been born. Even the three whales on whose backs it had rested now pretended that they had had nothing to do with it, and opened a furniture store which they advertised with an endlessly repeated TV jingle: ‘Three whales, three whales, they’re the best, forget the rest …’

  Of my own family’s history I knew precisely nothing. But some of the Lares and Penates with which I was surrounded bore the imprint of something dark and mysterious.

  First, there was an old black and white print of a lion-woman with a languorously thrown back face, naked breasts, and paws armed with powerful claws. This print hung in the hallway, below a wall light reminiscent of an icon lamp. The feeble illumination it provided in the half-darkness caused the image to take on a fearsome, magical aspect.

  In my imagination some such creature must lie in wait for people beyond the ‘threshold of the grave’. This expression, frequently to be heard on my mother’s lips, I learnt by rote before I had any notion of what it meant: to imagine a concept as abstruse as ceasing to exist was beyond my powers. My idea of death was of being translated to another location, probably the place at the end of the path that led up between the paws of the Sphinx in the black and white print.

  Another message from the past was contained in the silver knives and forks emblazoned with a crest consisting of a bow and arrow and three cranes in flight, which I found one day in the sideboard my mother usually kept locked.

  Once she had done bawling me out for inquisitiveness, my mother informed me this was the family crest of the Baltic Barons von Storckwinkel, the stock from which my father was descended. My own surname was the rather less aristocratic Shtorkin. According to my mother, during the years of War Communism it was common practice to have one’s name surgically operated on, in the hope of concealing its social origins.

  My father left the family hearth immediately after I was born. Despite all my efforts,
this was the only information I succeeded in gleaning about him. I had only to touch on the subject for my mother to turn pale, light a cigarette and repeat the same phrases, quietly at first but gradually rising to a scream:

  ‘Get out of here, do you hear? Be off with you, you loathsome scum! Leave me alone, you criminal!’

  I assumed that her reaction was connected in some way with a dark and mysterious secret. But when I entered the eighth grade, I learnt more about my father as a result of my mother having to resubmit the paperwork for our living accommodation.

  He was a journalist on a leading newspaper. I even found his column on the Internet: a bald man with an ingratiating smile lurking behind gig-lamp specs. The gist of the article was that Russia could not hope to become a normal country until her people and the powers-that-be recognised other people’s property rights as deserving of respect.

  As a concept it made complete sense, yet for some reason it failed to inspire me. This may have been because my father was overfond of using expressions I did not at the time understand (‘plebs’, ‘responsible elites’). The smile on the paternal visage was obviously addressed not to me but to the ‘responsible elites’ whose comfortable substance I was being exhorted to respect.

  Approaching the end of my school days, I began to think about a profession. Glossy magazines and advertisements vaguely indicated the direction I should take to succeed in life, but the nature of the recommended steps that would lead to the achievement of my goal remained, so far as I could see, a closely guarded secret.

  ‘If the quantity of fluid passing through a pipeline per unit of time remains static or increases only in a linear progression,’ my physics teacher was fond of intoning during lessons, ‘it is only logical to assume that it will take a long time for the number of people with access to the pipeline to increase.’

  The theorem had the ring of plausibility, but rather than encouraging me to join the lemming rush towards the pipeline in question, it made me want to distance myself as far as possible from it. I decided to enter the Institute of African and Asian Countries, to learn some exotic language and work in the tropics.

  The course of study needed to gain admittance to the Institute was expensive, and my mother categorically declined to pay for tutors. I appreciated this was due not to simple miserliness but to the lack of money in the family budget, and did not make too much of a fuss. A suggestion that I might approach my father precipitated the usual row, my mother declaring that a real man ought to be able to make it from scratch on his own.

  I would have been happy to make it from scratch on my own, but the problem was that I could not see how, or where, to start scratching. The thick fog all around was not in itself the problem: I simply had no idea in which direction I should set off in search of sun and money.

  I failed at the first hurdle, an examination essay. The exam was, for some reason, based in the physics faculty of Moscow State University, and the subject was: ‘The Image of the Motherland in my Heart.’ I wrote about the cartoon film in which the small tubby characters had sung about the grasshopper, about the sliced-up hockey puck labelled ‘USSR’, and about the smart, conniving whales … Needless to say I knew in my bones that in any attempt to enter such a prestigious Higher Education establishment it would be suicidal to speak the truth, but I had no choice. What sealed my fate, so I was informed, was a phrase in my essay: ‘Despite everything, I am a patriot: I love our cruel, unjust society living in conditions of permafrost.’ The word ‘society’, apparently, should have been followed by a comma.

  On my way to the final interview with the entrance application panel, I caught sight of a drawing on the door depicting a happy-looking snail (its smile, as with the photograph of my father on the Internet, directed at someone else). Below it was a verse from an ancient Japanese poet:

  Oh snail!

  When climbing to the top of Mount Fuji,

  there is no need to hurry …

  Taking out a pen, I added:

  There are enough snails

  on the top of Mount Fuji

  as it is.

  The rejection letter was the first real reverse of my life. My response to fate’s decree was to take a job as a lorry unloader at the supermarket not far from our house.

  For the first few days I felt as though I had sunk to the very dregs of existence, below the level at which the laws of Social Darwinism could begin to operate. But I soon came to realise that no chasm, no ghetto, could be deep or isolated enough to insulate one against these laws, because any individual cell in the social organism functions according to principles identical to those of society as a whole. I even recall the circumstances in which this became clear to me (I was at the time teetering on the brink of clairvoyance, although this was to become clear only much later.)

  I was watching an English film, Dune, in which interstellar travel is accomplished by beings called Navigators who routinely consume a special narcotic that transforms them into a creature halfway between man and pterodactyl. The Navigator would spread his membranous wings, in so doing shrinking space and enabling a flotilla of cosmic ships to transport itself from any part of the cosmos to any other … It occurred to me that somewhere in Moscow a similarly evil species of web-winged creature had spread its wings over our world. People did not notice but continued ant-like to crawl about, preoccupied by their own affairs without realising that they no longer had any affairs to speak of. Excluded from the loop, they had no idea they were already living in another universe where different laws applied.

  These laws operated in the world of the unloaders. There was an accepted level of stealing (neither too far below nor too far above the norm) and a common fund of stolen goods from which distributions were made in equitable proportions. One had no choice but to fight for a place nearer the invisible sun – to fight, moreover, not just any old how but according to the prescriptions of a time-honoured choreography of body movements. All in all, it was a place with its own Mount Fuji, however paltry and vomit-spattered.

  Here also, I should mention, my social origins were against me. Supervisors took to assigning me to consecutive night shifts, night after night on the trot, and dropping me in it with Management. The prospect of ending up as a loser even among unloaders was intolerable, and the second summer after leaving school I quit the job.

  While it lasted, the money I had earned from the supermarket – including my ill-gotten proceeds, which amounted to a tidy sum – left me in a position to maintain a reasonable degree of independence from my mother and to restrict contact with her to a minimum. For all practical purposes, this was confined to a single ritual exchange: every now and again my mother would stop me in the hallway and say, ‘Well, go on then, look me straight in the eye!’

  She was convinced that I was using drugs and believed herself capable of determining at any given time whether I was stoned or not. As a matter of fact I did not use any illegal substances at all, but in my mother’s eyes I was under the influence of a whole cocktail of narcotics almost every day. Her assessments were based not on any objective measurements such as the dimensions of the pupil or the condition of the whites of the eyes, but on certain specific indices known only to her – which helpfully prevented me from learning techniques to conceal them. For this reason it was impossible to contest my mother’s expertise in this field. It was a contest that in any case I declined, aware that the only result would be to provide yet more evidence to support the justice of her attitude. (‘It’s dreadful how aggressive you get when you’ve taken drugs!’)

  In addition to these gifts, my mother possessed remarkable powers of hypnosis. It was enough, for instance, for her to say, ‘See, there you go again, gabbling your words,’ for me to begin doing exactly that, although I had not hitherto even known what the expression meant. Therefore, whenever my mother got too much for me, I would clam up and leave the house for hours at a time.

  One summer’
s day we had our usual row about my taking drugs. On this occasion, it was unusually stormy and I felt I absolutely had to get out of the house. As I went through the door, I lost control and said: ‘That’s it. I won’t live here any longer.’

  ‘Good news,’ replied my mother from the kitchen.

  Needless to say, neither of us really meant it.

  It was nice in the centre of town, quiet and not too many people around. I wandered through the little streets between Tverskoi Boulevard and the Garden Ring. I was not thinking very clearly, but it occurred to me that the reason Moscow in summer is so beautiful owes less to its streets and its buildings than to the obscure promise of escape it harbours. This promise was all around – in the breeze, in the fluffy white clouds, in the puffballs floating down from the poplar trees that this year had flowered early.

  Suddenly my attention was attracted to an arrow drawn in green chalk on the pavement. Beside it, written in the same green chalk, were the words

  Your chance to join the elite

  22.06 18:40–18:55

  A genuine unrepeatable opportunity

  My watch showed a quarter to seven. Also, it was 22 June, the day of the summer solstice. The arrow, already all but erased by the feet of passers-by, was obviously part of a game someone was playing. But whoever the instigator was, it was a game I felt drawn to play.

  I looked around. The few passers-by were absorbed in their own affairs and no one paid any attention to me. Neither was there anything of interest to be seen in the windows of the nearby buildings.

  The arrow pointed towards a shabby archway into a courtyard. I went through and saw another green arrow pointing to the farthest corner, this time with no accompanying inscription. I went on a few paces and saw a small, depressed-looking yard with two old cars, a large waste container and a back door in the middle of a painted brick wall. On the asphalt in front of the door was another green arrow.

  There were more arrows on the staircase. The last was on the fifth floor, and it pointed towards a steel-reinforced back door to a large flat. The door was half-open. Holding my breath, I looked through the crack and immediately recoiled in fright.