Red Square (14 page)

   
As the generals formed ranks by the grave, Arkady recognized the four he had seen in Red Square. Shuksin, Ivanov, Kuznetsov and Gul looked even smaller in the daylight, as if the men he had feared and detested as a child had been magically bent and shrunk into beetles with carapaces of green serge and gold brocade, their sunken chests stiffened by tiers of campaign medals, honours and orders, a dazzling clatter of ribbons, brass stars and coins. They were all weeping bitter vodka tears.

   
'Comrades!' Feebly Ivanov unfolded a piece of paper and began to read. 'Today we say goodbye to a great Russian, a lover of peace, yet a man forged . . . '

   
Arkady was constantly amazed at people's faith in lies. As if words had the remotest relationship to the truth. This band of veterans were nothing but little butchers bidding a mawkish farewell to a great butcher. Take the arthritis from their joints and they would drive the knife home as vigorously as in their glorious youth, and they believed every lie they uttered.

   
By the time Shuksin took Ivanov's place, Arkady wanted his own cigarette and a shovel.

   
' "Not one step back!" Stalin ordered. Yes, Stalin. His name is still sacred to my lips . . . '
   

   
'Stalin's favourite general' was what his father had been called. When they were surrounded and without food and ammunition other generals would dare surrender their men alive. General Renko never surrendered; he wouldn't have surrendered if he'd had nothing but dead to command. Anyway, the Germans never caught him. He broke back through the lines to join the defence of Moscow, and a famous photograph showed him and Stalin himself, like two devils defending hell, studying an underground map to plot the shifting of troops from station to station.

   
The round Kuznetsov took his turn and balanced on the lip of the grave. 'Today, when every effort is made to libel our Army's glorious duty . . . '

   
Their voices had the hollow tremor of busted cellos. Arkady would have felt sorry for them if he didn't remember how they would troop into the dacha, like so many lesser shadows of his father, for the midnight dinners and drunken songs that ended in the Army roar, 'Arrrrrrrraaaaaaaaagh!!!'

   
Arkady wasn't sure why he had come. Perhaps for the sake of Belov, who had faithfully maintained the hope of a reunion between father and son. Perhaps for his mother. She would have to lie side by side with her own murderer. He stepped forward to brush dirt off the white marker.

   
'Soviet power, built on the holy altar of twenty million dead . . . ' Kuznetsov droned on.

   
No, not metamorphosed into beetles, Arkady thought. That was too kind, too Kafkaesque. More like hoary, three-legged dogs, senile but rabid, baying at a pit.

   
Gul wavered, his green tunic weighted with medals and hanging from his bones. He removed his hat, revealing hair the colour of ashes. 'I recall my last encounter with K. I. Renko a very short time ago.' Gul laid his hand on the coffin of dark wood with brass handles, slim as a skiff. 'We remembered comrades in arms whose sacrifices burn like an eternal flame in our hearts. We talked of the present period of doubt and self-mortification so different from our own iron resolve. I give you now the words the general gave me then. "Those who would shovel din on the Party. Those who forget the Jewish historical sins. Those who would distort our revolutionary history, debase and vulgarize our people. To them I say, my banner was, and is and always will be red!'' '

   
'Well, that's about as much as I can take,' Arkady told Belov and started back down the path.

   
'There's more.' Belov caught up.

   
'That's why I'm going.' Gul was still ranting on.

   
'We were hoping you would say a few words now that he's dead.'

   
'Boris Sergeyevich, if I had been the investigator of my mother's death, I would have arrested my father. I gladly would have killed him.'

   
'Arkasha - '

   
'Just the idea that this monster died quietly in his bed will haunt me for the rest of my life.'

   
Belov's voice dropped. 'He didn't.'

   
Arkady stopped. He forced himself to be calm. 'You said it was a closed coffin. Why?'

   
Belov had trouble drawing breath. 'At the end the pain was so great. He said the only thing holding him together was cancer. He didn't want to die that way. He said he preferred the officer's way out.'

   
'He shot himself?'

   
'Forgive me. I was in the next room. I . . . '

   
As Belov's knees gave way, Arkady eased him on to a bench. He felt incredibly stupid; he should have seen what was in the old man's face before this. Belov dug into his jacket, twisted around and gave Arkady a gun. It was a black Nagant revolver with four squat bullets as polished as old silver. 'He wanted you to have this.'

   
'The general always had a good sense of humour,' Arkady said.

There was brisk business at a kiosk beside Vysotsk’s grave when Arkady got back to the gate. Now that the sun was out, fans were buying pins, posters, postcards and cassettes of the singer, dead ten years and more popular than ever. The number 23 tram stopped right across the street; it was the handiest souvenir run in Moscow. Around the gate were beggars, peasant women with white kerchiefs and sun-browned faces, legless men with crutches and carts. They congregated around worshippers leaving the cemetery's little yellow church. Coffin lids dressed in crepe and wreaths of sharp-smelling evergreens and carnations rested against the church front. Seminarians sold Bibles from a card table, asking forty rubles for the New Testament.

   
Carrying his father's gun in his pocket, Arkady felt a little dizzy and had some difficulty in discriminating. As much as he saw the ceremonies of human grief - a widow polishing the photo on a headstone - he saw just as clearly a robin wrestling a worm from a grave. He had no sense of focus. A funeral bus pulled inside the gate and the family clambered down its front steps. A coffin was slid out of the rear, slipped and hit the ground with a bang. A girl in the family made a comic grimace. That was the way Arkady felt. Outside the gate, the Rodionov-Penyagin party was still milling around the pavement. Arkady didn't feel in decent enough shape to talk to either the prosecutor or the general, so he slipped into the church.

   
Inside there was a crowd of the worshipful, the bereaved and the spiritual tourists. All standing, no pews. The atmosphere was like a crowded, colourful train station, with incense for cigarette smoke, and instead of a loudspeaker an unseen choir whose voices hovered in the vaulted ceiling singing about the lamb of God. Ikons - Byzantine, age-darkened faces in cut-outs of bright silver - tipped down from the walls painted like pages of an illuminated manuscript. Ikon candles were wicks suspended in glass cups of oil. Strategically placed on the floor were cans of oil to keep the flames alight. Votive candles came in thirty-kopeck, fifty-kopeck and one-ruble sizes. Candles burned and sputtered in pools of pearly wax; candle stands glowed like softly burning trees. Lenin had described religion as a hypnotic flame for a reason. Women in black gathered contributions on brass plates covered with red felt. To the left, a shop sold postcards of miraculous relics. To the right, three women, also in black dresses and scarves, hands crossed on their breasts, lay in open coffins surrounded by candles on arms of wrought iron dripping wax.

   
In a chapel next to the coffins, a priest taught a boy how to bow by pushing down his head, then led him through the Orthodox manner of crossing himself, with three fingers, not two. Arkady found himself forced by the sheer press of bodies into the 'devil's corner', where confessions were heard. A priest in a wheelchair looked up expectantly, his long beard as white as rays of the moon. Arkady felt an interloper because his disbelief was not an institutional attitude, but the fury of a son who had deliberately and in a rage left his father's camp. Yet his father had not been a believer; for all the good it had done her, it was his mother who had secretly slipped like a bird into the few churches open in Stalin's Moscow. Kopecks dropped. Wax dripped. Collection plates circulated around the faithful as die glorious music unfolded, descant climbing over descant, appealing to the Almighty:
Hear us and watch over us
. No, Arkady thought, better to beg that He was deaf and blind. The voices pleaded,
And be merciful, be merciful, be merciful
. At least mercy was the last thing the general ever wanted.

Arkady looped around the horsetrack to Gorky Street, stuck the blue light on the car roof, leaned on his horn and raced down the middle lane while traffic officers, like so many semaphores in oilskins and batons, cleared the way ahead. The rain had started again, marching in gusts up the street, raising umbrellas with flower patterns on the pavement. He wasn't going anywhere in particular. It was the sound of water tearing under the wheels, the blur of a windscreen without wipers, the gondola flow of running lights, and the melting of shop windows that he pursued. At the Intourist Hotel, prostitutes fluttered for cover like pigeons.

   
Without braking, Arkady swung into Marx Prospect. Rain turned the wide square into a lake that taxis surged through like motorboats. Move fast enough and you could move through time, he thought. Gorky Street, for example, had been given back its old tide of Tverskaya, Marx Prospect was being renamed Mokhovaya, and Kalinin, just ahead, was once again New Arbat. He imagined Stalin's ghost wandering the city in confusion, lost, looking into windows, frightening babes. Or, worse, seeing the old names and not being confused at all.

   
Through the rain Arkady saw that a traffic officer had stopped a taxi in the middle of the square. Lorries blocked him on the right; to his left were oncoming cars. He hit his brake pedal and fought the squirming wheels as the faces of the officer and the taxi driver gaped in the lights. The Zhiguli skidded up to their trouser legs.

   
Arkady jumped out. The officer wore a plastic cover on his cap. A licence was in one hand and a blue five-ruble note in the other. The taxi driver had a narrow face with eyebrows frightened to his hairline. Both looked as if they had been struck by lightning and were waiting for the thunder's clap.

   
The militiaman stared at the car bumper, miraculously stopped. 'You almost killed us.' He waved the ruble note, which was damp and limp. 'Excellent, it's a bribe. A lousy five rubles. You can take me off and shoot me, you don't need to run me down. Fifteen years and I make two hundred and fifty rubles a month. You think my family can live on that? I have two bullets in me and they gave me a traffic light, as if that made up for it. Now you want to kill me over a bribe? I don't care. I no longer care.'

   
'You're not hurt?' Arkady asked the taxi driver.

   
'No problem.' The man snatched his license back and dove into his car.

   
'You, too?' Arkady asked the officer; he wanted to be sure.

   
'Yes, fuck, who cares? Still on duty, comrade.' The officer saluted. He became braver when Arkady turned his back. 'As if you never saw a little extra. The higher you go, the more you get. At the top, it's a golden trough.'

   
Arkady sat in the Zhiguli and lit a Belomor. He was soaked - soaked and probably crazy. As he put the car in gear he noticed that the officer had stopped all traffic for him.

   
He drove more carefully along the river. The major question was whether he should pull over to put the windscreen wipers on. Was it worth getting even more wet just so he could see? Was he a good enough driver for it to make a difference?

   
Clouds drifted in his way as the road dipped south by the swimming pool where the Church of the Saviour used to stand, and he found himself forced to drive on to the pavement and stop. It was stupid. Stalin had torn down the church. How many Muscovites actually remembered the Church of the Saviour? Yet that was how they identified the pool. Once Arkady got out to put the wipers on, he lost interest in the task. The car looked like a jar draped with wet leaves on the outside and airless as a grave within. He needed a walk.

   
Was he in an emotional state? He supposed so. Wasn't everybody, all the time? Had anybody ever, awake or asleep, experienced a totally
non
-emotional state? To his right, a clump of trees sank into steam flowing from the pool. He climbed down and then up through the trees using branches as handrails until he came to a real handrail of metal, cold and sweaty to the touch, and pulled himself on to an apron of concrete.

   
He walked around the locked and shuttered changing rooms until he came to the edge of the water. Vapour rose not in wisps but as white and dense as smoke off the surface of the water. This was the largest swimming pool in Moscow, a perfect factory for the fog that wrapped around him and made his eyes smart from chlorine. He knelt. The water was heated, warmer than he had expected. Although he had assumed the pool was closed, the lamps were on, sodium halos hanging in the mist. He heard the slap of water against the sides, and then not words but perhaps someone humming. He wasn't sure of the direction, but he thought he heard feet strolling around the pool's perimeter. Whoever it was hummed not so much tunelessly as idly and in snatches, in the manner of someone who believes himself or herself totally alone. Arkady guessed from the lightness of the step and voice that it was a woman, probably an attendant or a lifeguard who felt herself at home.