Ivan paid his bill and left, sure of his argument and of the fact that he had been grievously swindled.
Ivan went to his men and gave them great quantities of beer and wine. “The king has turned my salt to gold, and I shall return the favor. Drink up, my comrades.”
That night while the kingdom slept, Ivan and his men left their ship in its moorings and silently stole through the city, their bladders full. They broke into all the places where salt was stored. They either urinated on the salt or in some other ways befouled it. On Ivan’s instructions, only a single thimble of the good Russian salt was saved. It was spirited away under his cloak.
In the morning, an alarm was raised and the pirates found. A terrible battle ensued in which the city was destroyed and Ivan’s ship was sunk, plunging his gold into the murky depths of the lagoon. The king’s army cornered Ivan and his men on a bluff overlooking the water and beyond that the ruined, smoking streets of the city, whose people had suddenly been impoverished.
As the king and his men advanced, Ivan removed the thimble of salt from his cloak and held it above the lagoon. The king ordered his men to stop.
“Behold,” said Ivan, “this is what’s left of your salt. By the iron laws of economics, here is the wealth of your kingdom coalesced into a single thimble. This is the sum of your dreams and ambitions, your scheming and manipulations. Take one more step and it will be lost forever.”
In exchange for the remaining salt, the king agreed to
spare Ivan’s life. But with his ship sunk, Ivan could not return home. Nor could he recover his gold. He wondered whether he had made another bad transaction, rendering his life equal to a thimble of salt.
After neither a short time nor a long time, another traveler arrived in the kingdom. Upon learning of Ivan’s predicament, he offered to organize the men and equipment to lift the gold from the lagoon’s floor, even though Ivan was now penniless. The stranger asked only for half the gold that would be recovered.
If Ivan had not been held back by his men, he would have killed the stranger. It was, after all, Ivan’s gold. Why should a stranger, this vulture, get any piece of it at all? The king tried to persuade Ivan to change his mind, saying that he would get no use from the gold as long as it was trapped under water. “On the contrary,” Ivan replied. “It’s as safe there as it would be in a vault.”
Despite Ivan’s rebuff, the traveler did not leave the city, but employed local artisans to draw up plans for the ship’s salvage and to construct the necessary equipment. The traveler financed this by selling to speculators shares of his nonexistent share of Ivan’s gold, a swindle that infuriated Ivan, especially because it was accomplished so openly. By some evil wizardry, founded on the chance that Ivan would someday change his mind, the city returned to prosperity. Meanwhile, the traveler and his emissaries plied Ivan with gifts and favors, seeking permission to raise his ship.
Ivan’s resolve remained firm until the morning he spied the king’s beautiful daughter spinning a length of golden thread. He decided to perpetuate a swindle of his
own. He offered his gold to the king, who believed it could still be recovered, even though it was long out of sight beneath the lagoon’s burgeoning layers of silt, drifting down into the underworld of memory and longing, a mere concept of a symbol. In exchange Ivan asked to marry the princess, as well as for a good, fast ship.
The king clapped his hands. “Done,” he cried.
That night there was a wedding banquet, attended by the king’s court and nobility. Jugglers, acrobats, and dancing bears provided merriment. The guests feasted on savory dishes prepared with the last thimbleful of good Russian salt. Toast after toast was raised to Ivan’s health and good fortune. At dawn Ivan and his bride set sail for home.
The ship sailed for neither a long time nor a short time and was then becalmed on the desert sea. The princess, wearing a white cotton tunic, sat at the prow of the ship. Her eyes were as bright as the word incandescent and her lips were as red as the idea of red. She stared at the endless sea, her profile etched against the sky. Her hair was the color of gold.
The princess was beautiful, it was said. Ivan had tasted the salt on her skin at the nape of her neck. But what did her beauty consist of? A certain vividness to her features, an unblemished skin, a posture that conformed to banal notions of aristocratic birth, a particular shine to her hair? These qualities meant nothing beyond themselves. A pair of lustrous eyes did not denote passion but was something strictly physiological, arising from the eyes’ pigmentation and the flow of moisture from their tear
ducts. It had no practical consequence. And perhaps her hair was not really the color of gold; one might just as easily have called it yellow. A woman declared to be beautiful was only a symbol of real beauty, which itself remained imperceptible to human vision.
Her attractive features were as transitory as they were arbitrary. Her supposed beauty was fading at that very moment, as it had been fading since the night of the wedding banquet. Soon she would be drained, transformed into an empty symbol like a coin declared counterfeit. The memory of the banquet’s great festiveness instilled in Ivan an equivalent amount of regret and bitterness. He recalled the king’s parting smile.
Ivan now ordered his men to reverse course, back to the king’s city. At once the wind picked up and the sails billowed and grew taut.
NOVELLA
Peredelkino
ПереДелКИHO
One
Just as in our dreams, a fist thumped at the door, and I opened it and there stood a greatcoated lieutenant of the Committee for State Security. He was at least a head taller than me; that head was blond and square-jawed, without a blemish. Frigid, almost transparent blue eyes floated in their sockets.
“Documents.”
I handed over my passport as he allowed himself into the flat. He compared my photograph to my face and then examined the stamp that gave me the right to live in the capital, a right that had degenerated into the occupancy of this tottering apartment building on the outskirts. After checking my face again, he opened a leather purselike bag at his side and removed a sheaf of papers.
I became aware that the apartment smelled of fried eggs. In advance of his arrival I had tried to put the place in order, but the sagging bookcases and the pile of unmarked student composition books gave evidence of its chronic dishevelment. These days I taught literature at the Pedagological Institute.
“Sign here,” the lieutenant said, pointing a manicured finger at the top sheet of his papers. “Here. Here. Here.”
Another officer of lesser rank stepped into the flat. He carried a brown cardboard carton that later proved to be quite heavy, though he himself didn’t show any strain. The lieutenant waved at the table in the little room on the other side of the entrance foyer. The officer deposited the carton there and left, not once looking at me.
The lieutenant inspected my signature and then found another half-dozen places for me to sign on the other pages. As I leaned over the credenza in order to write my name, the lieutenant walked deeper into the cramped, overstuffed flat. He stopped at a photograph of me and Varvara, taken in the Crimea, and then at some unanswered personal mail on a chair. He was most interested in the locked, glassed-in bookcase and its shelf of notebooks. He studied their bindings for a minute.
“My personal journals,” I confessed.
He examined them a moment longer and then reclaimed his papers. After patiently confirming that my signature was at each required place, he returned the papers to his pouch and, with a barely perceptible nod of acknowledgement, departed as well.
I remained several minutes in the foyer, breathing deeply, trying to shake off the image of the lieutenant’s lacquer-clear fingernails. When my composure had returned, I telephoned Anton Basmanian at his office.
“They’ve arrived,” I said, looking at the carton on the table.
“All right, shall we say”—he paused while, I presumed, he looked at his calendar—“December 3? A first draft, reviewing the trilogy as a whole. Twenty pages doublespaced at a minimum.”
“That’s fine. That’s great. I’m looking forward to reading the books.”
“Rem,” he said sternly, detecting sarcasm where there was none. “Many on the board were opposed to giving you this assignment. I’ve gone out on a limb, you know. But it’s time to get you back into print, to forget the past. This could be the beginning.”
“Believe me, Anton, I’m grateful. Don’t worry, I’ll do a good review.”
“Do a responsible review.”
I returned the telephone to its hook and went to the table. Inside the carton, encased in gleaming, wine red leather, lay the books
Malaya Zemlya, Rebirth,
and the about-to-be-issued, still-classified conclusion to the trilogy,
Virgin Lands.
Their author was L. I. Brezhnev. I pulled the first volume from the box. As I lifted its warm, supple cover to my face, I could almost smell the cow chewing her cud. The cow groaned with pleasure as I opened the book. In contrast to the extravagance of the binding, the paper within the book was nearly tissue thin and the type laid upon it was small, about eight-point, and ungenerously leaded. I wondered what portion of these books, the subject of my first writing for publication in ten years, I would actually read.
My stomach turning, I realized that to find the right words of praise, to modulate my lauds into plausibly critical language, to prove my tough-mindedness by offering a few trivial caveats that I would immediately renounce, to concede generously that my own novel on a similar theme could not be rightfully compared with Comrade Brezhnev’s achievement, to announce, as I undoubtedly
would, that Comrade Brezhnev had raised the art of historical fiction to new and commanding heights—in short, to write an article in which every glimmer of doubt or irony had been eradicated—I would need to read every page of the trilogy, perhaps even twice. The desperate shreds of my ambition would demand it.
Despite the significance it carried for my future, I did not immediately fall upon the general secretary’s work. Returning to the hallway where the lieutenant had paused in his inspection of my bookcase, I assumed the same detached and suspicious stance that he had. Relics of a life so distant as to seem nearly prehistoric, the journals ran across the top shelf from left to right. The species had evolved from a single cardboard-bound book that I had been given for my seventeenth birthday. Its cheap binding had broken and now the pages were kept within the covers by force of habit and nostalgia. It was succeeded by three or five very faux-leather notebooks, the detritus of my university years, and then a series of teal, pretentiously unpretentious softbound composition books, which had served me early in my professional career. Then came a long line of black-and-red hardbound diaries that I had purchased twelve years before, in 1966, in a neighborhood stationery store in London. Their confident march into posterity was abruptly broken, and the teal composition books, now simply unpretentious, my pretensions shattered, resumed their course.
Placing my tips of my fingers against the glass at the spot where the English journals were arrayed—the glass was warm, the books smoldered—I marveled anew at the naive confidence of my fourth decade and the century’s
seventh. And then, as if driven by an itch, the fingers were pushed to the left, to the first set of teal composition books, where I knew, somewhere, lay the notes of my critical conversation with Viktor Panteleyev.
I did not need to fish out the key to the bookcase from my desk: I knew what was in the journals. The bindings were sufficiently mnemonic.
Two
It had been a miserable, brooding weekend under concrete skies, out in Peredelkino. Lydia, my first wife, showed little interest in my quandary. “Do whatever you like,” she said. Lydia considered the petition a distraction, a waste of time, yet another seduction to which I was hurrying to succumb. As if she possessed only a single photograph of me, hunched over my desk, she believed I should work every minute of the working day. Time was running out, she always said, not portentously, but as a matter of scientific, cosmological fact. As for herself, she foresaw the diminishing future as a place where she would occupy our newly acquired dacha year-round, tend to the garden, make small repairs, jar preserves, do some translation work, and, above all, read. Her only life ambition was to read every good book that had ever been published.
The text of the petition lay on the kitchen table all that long weekend, pushed aside by the salads and the roast, imprinted by rings of bottles, smeared by cigarette ashes and jam. The cat sniffed at it and slinked away. Viktor had always been a lazy writer. “Beseeching the
most respected First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers,” “stressing the undersigned’s conformity to Marxist-Leninist principles in service to the state,” “begging for the careful reconsideration of the case of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vishnevsky,” and “reviewing for the First Secretary’s benefit the salient facts as we understand them,” the petition was like one of Viktor’s novels, sentimental and over-participled. I could, on the basis of literary squeamishness, refuse to attach my name to it. The weekend passed into overtime, a tense, loose-boweled Monday.
Yet on Tuesday, back in Moscow, I telephoned.
“Let’s meet.”
“All right,” Viktor replied slowly and thoughtfully, to indicate that he understood the implications of my invitation.
“At the union,” I said, and then, with a pretense of casualness, I added, “Would you like to come up to my office?”
Given my low rank and the office’s consequent humility, I rarely met people there. The sweep of the door nearly obliterated the room’s walking space. The aged, lumpy divan’s only charm was its reputation for having once been slept on by Isaac Babel. But the office was adequately lit and well stocked with books and liquor. I found the room a pleasant enough place to write and to attend to union business, especially that requiring discretion. It moreover offered a bright portal onto Gertsena, the always churning street named after Aleksandr Herzen. My pursuit of this office had been uncontested. Most of my
colleagues preferred the view of the courtyard, with its statue of Leo Tolstoy.