Red Square (9 page)

   
The bread was fresh and the cheese was sweet. A breeze drifted in at the open window and the curtain stirred like a skirt.

   
'A Red Army spokesman admitted today that Afghan insurgents have penetrated the Soviet border. Since Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan, the border has become accessible to drug runners and to religious extremists who are urging Central Asian republics to begin a holy war against Moscow.'

   
The sun hung on the northern horizon, onion domes and chimneypots. Her voice was a shade huskier and her Siberian accent sounded more schooled and sophisticated. Arkady remembered her gestures, sometimes flamboyant, and the colour of her eyes, like amber. Listening, he found himself leaning towards the radio. He felt ridiculous, as if he should be holding up his side of the conversation.

   
'Miners in Donetsk yesterday demanded the resignation of the government and the removal of the Party, and announced the start of a new strike. Work stoppages have also begun in all twenty-six mines in the Karaganda Basin and in twenty-nine mines in Rostov-on-Don. Mass rallies in support of the strikers were held by miners in Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk and Vladivostok.'

   
The news was not important; he hardly heard it. It was her voice and breath transmitted across a thousand miles.

   
'Last night in Moscow, the Democratic Front rallied outside Gorky Park to call for the "de-legalization" of the Communist Party. At the same time, members of the right-wing "Red Banner" met to defend the Party. Both groups demanded the right to march in Red Square.'

   
She was Scheherazade, Arkady thought. Night after night she could tell tales of oppression, insurrection, strikes, and natural disaster, and he would listen as if she were spinning stories of exotic lands, magical spices, flashing scimitars and pearl-eyed dragons with scales of gold. As long as she would talk to him.

Chapter Seven

At midnight, Arkady waited across from the Lenin Library, admiring the statues of Russian writers and scholars that hovered along the roofline. He remembered what he had heard about the building being ready to collapse. True enough, the statues looked ready to jump. When a shadow emerged and locked the door, Arkady crossed the street and introduced himself.

   
'An investigator? I'm not surprised.' Feldman wore a fur hat, carried a briefcase and looked like Trotsky, down to a goat's beard of snow white. He started a vigorous shuffle towards the river and Arkady fell in step beside him. 'I have my own key. I didn't steal anything. You want to search?'

   
Arkady ignored the invitation. 'How do you know Rudy?'

   
'It's the only time to work. I thank God I'm an insomniac. Are you?'

   
'No.'

   
'You look like one. See a doctor. Unless you don't mind.'

   
'Rudy?' Arkady tried again.

   
'Rosen? I didn't. We met once, a week ago. He wanted to talk about art.'

   
'Why art?'

   
'I'm a professor of art history. I told you I was a professor on the phone. You're a hell of an investigator, I can tell already.'

   
'What did Rudy ask?'

   
'He wanted to know everything about Soviet art. Soviet avant-garde art was the most creative, most revolutionary period in history, but Soviet man is an ignoramus. I couldn't educate Rosen in half an hour.'

   
'Did he ask about any paintings in particular?'

   
'No. But I catch your point and it is amusing. For years, the Party demanded Socialist Realism and people hung paintings of tractors on their walls and hid avant-garde masterpieces behind the toilet or under the bed. Now they're dragging them out. Suddenly Moscow is full of art curators. You like Socialist Realism?'

   
'Socialist Realism is one of my weakest areas.'

   
'Are you talking about art?'

   
'No.'

   
Feldman regarded Arkady with a more wan', interested eye. They were in the park behind the library, where steps ran between trees down to the river near the southwest corner of the Kremlin. Spotlights made the lower branches into lattices of gold that turned to black.

   
'I told Rosen that what people forget is that there actually was idealism at the beginning of the Revolution. Starvation and civil war aside, Moscow was the most exciting place in the world to be. When Mayakovsky said, "Let us make the squares our palettes, the streets our brushes," he meant it. Every wall was a painting. There were painted trains, boats, aeroplanes, balloons. Wallpaper and dinner plates and gum wrappers were all created by artists who genuinely thought they were making a new world. At the same time women were marching for free love. They all believed anything was possible. Rosen asked how much one of those gum wrappers would be worth now.'

   
'The same question occurred to me,' Arkady admitted.

   
Feldman stomped down the stairs in disgust.

   
'Since avant-garde art was not approved, you chose a fairly suicidal speciality. Is that how you got used to working late at night?' Arkady asked.

   
'Not a totally stupid observation.' Feldman stopped short. 'Why is red the colour of revolution?'

   
'It's traditional?'

   
'Prehistoric, not traditional. The two earliest habits of the apeman were cannibalism and painting himself red. Soviets are the only ones who still do it. Look what we did to the genius of the Revolution. Describe Lenin's tomb.'

   
'It's a square of red granite.'

   
'It's a Constructivist design inspired by Malevich. It's a red square on Red Square. There's more to it than just Lenin laid out like a smoked herring. Art was everywhere . in those days. Tatlin designed a revolving skyscraper taller than the Empire State Building. Popova drew high fashions for peasants. The artists of Moscow were going to paint the trees of the Kremlin red. Lenin did object to that, but people thought that anything was possible. Those were days of hope, days of fantasy.'

   
'You lecture on this?'

   
'No one wants to hear. They're like Rosen, they only want to sell. I spend all day authenticating art for idiots.'

   
'Rosen had something to sell?'

   
'Don't ask me. We were supposed to meet two days ago. He didn't come.'

   
'Then why do you think he had something to sell?'

   
'Today everyone is selling everything they have. And Rosen said he'd found something. He didn't say what.'

   
At the embankment Feldman looked around with such fervour that Arkady could nearly imagine painted trees in the Kremlin gardens, amazons marching on Gorky Street, dirigibles towing propaganda posters under the moon.

   
'We live in the archaeological ruins of that new world that never was. If we knew where to dig, who knows what we would find?' Feldman asked and trudged on alone across the bridge.

Arkady wandered along the embankment wall towards his flat. He didn't feel sleepy, but he didn't feel like an insomniac. Just the word made him restless.

   
He found no amazons along the river. There were fishermen baiting hooks. A couple of years of his exile had been spent on a Pacific trawler. He had always appreciated how at dusk the rustiest, most nondescript ship became a dazzling and intricate constellation of stars, with fishing lights on masts, booms, gunwales, bridge, ramp and deck. It occurred to him now that the same could be done for Moscow's nocturnal fishermen, with batteries and lamps on their hats, belts and the tips of their poles.

   
Maybe the problem wasn't insomnia. Maybe he was crazy. Why was he trying to find out who killed Rudy? When an entire society was collapsing like so many rotten beams, what difference did it make who murdered one black-market speculator? Anyway, this wasn't the real world. The real world was out there where Irina lived. Here he was one more shadow in a cave, where he couldn't sleep anyway.

   
Straight ahead the silhouette of St Basil's stood like a crowd of turbaned Moors bacldit by the all-night floodlights of the square. In shadow at the stone base of the cathedral were about a hundred soldiers from the Kremlin barracks in full field gear with radio packs and submachine guns.

   
Red Square itself rose as a vast hill of cobblestones. To the left, the Kremlin was illuminated, bricks nearly white, with swallowtail battlements that were grace notes on a fortress that seemed to stretch as far as the Chinese Wall. The spires above the gates looked like churches that had been captured, roped, dragged from Europe and erected as trophies to a tsar, topped now by ruby stars. Shimmering in upturned lights, the Kremlin was midway between reality and dream, an immense, oppressive vision. From the gate at Spassky Tower a black sedan issued like a bat and flitted across the stones. Far off, at the head of the square, a four-storey banner for Pepsi covered the facade of the Army Museum. To his right the classical stone face of GUM, the world's largest and emptiest department store, shrank into the dark. From the roof of GUM and from the Kremlin wall, cameras constantly monitored the square, but no floodlights were bright enough to penetrate the valley of shadow in the centre of the square, where Arkady was. No individual there would be more than a blip on a grey screen. The sheer size of scale and awesome vacuum of the square didn't so much uplift the soul as both hide it and suggest how inconsequential it was.

   
Except for one soul. When Lenin lay dying, he begged for no memorials. The mausoleum Stalin built for him was a vengeful pile of crypts, a squat ziggurat of red and black under the battlements of the Kremlin wall. Empty tiers of white marble flanked it, the area where dignitaries would sit for the May Day parade. Lenin's name was inscribed in red letters above the door of the tomb. At the door, two guards of honour, boy sergeants with white gloves and faces as pale as waxworks, swayed with fatigue.

   
Ordinary traffic was barred from the square, but as Arkady turned away from the tomb a black Zil rolled out of Cherny Street and, racing at official speed, crossed in front of GUM towards the river and sank into the dark around St Basil's. Tyres squealed, a sharp sound of protest that reverberated the length of the square.

   
The Zil came back. Because the car's headlights were dark, it was too late when Arkady realized it was coming straight at him. When he started to run for the museum, the Zil followed, its bumper almost on his heels. He darted left towards the tomb and the big car roared by and cut in front. He dodged the rear bumper and headed for Cherny Street. The Zil tipped, settled and lumbered towards him in a wider circle, the car's centrifugal force accelerating.

   
When his escape intersected the car's arc, Arkady dove. He rolled, rose and started dizzily back towards St Basil's but slipped on the stones. Headlights rose up. He fell to one knee and raised his arm across his eyes.

   
The Zil stopped directly in front of him. Four uniforms emerged from the halos exploding in his eyes. General's dark-green dress uniforms with brass stars, fringed shoulder boards and mosaics of medals behind ropes of golden braid. As his vision returned, Arkady saw that the men inside the uniforms were strangely shrunken, holding each other up. As the driver got out he almost fell. He wore a civilian sweater and jacket, topped by a sergeant major's cap. He was drunk and his eyes were leaking tears that rolled from his eyes to his jowls.

   
'Belov?' Arkady asked as he stood.

   
'Arkasha.' Belov's voice was as deep and hollow as a barrel. 'We were at your address and you were not at home. We went to your office and you weren't there. We were just driving around when we saw you, and then you ran.'

   
Arkady dimly recognized the generals, though they were grey and stunted versions of the tall, impressive officers who used to trail behind his father. Here were the staunch heroes of the Siege of Moscow, the tank commanders of the Bessarabian offensive, the vanguard of the push to Berlin, each of the four properly wearing an Order of Lenin awarded for 'a decisive action that significantly altered the course of the war'. Except that Shuksin, who had always slapped his boots with a crop, was now so shrivelled and bent that he was hardly much higher than the top of those boots, and Ivanov, who had always claimed the privilege of carrying his father's field case of plans, was as stooped as an ape. Kuznetsov had turned as round as a child, whereas Gul was a skeleton, his vigour and ferocity reduced to bristles of hair jutting from his eyebrows and ears. Though Arkady had hated them all his life - despised them, really, because they abused him out of sycophancy rather than evil - he was astonished at their feebleness.

   
Boris Sergeyevich was different. He had been Sergeant Belov, his father's driver, the very same bodyguard who had escorted the young Arkady to Gorky Park. Later Boris became Investigator Belov, though his gift was less for legal scholarship than for devotion to orders and ironclad loyalty. His attitude towards Arkady had never been less than adoration. Arkady's arrest and exile was something Belov had never grasped - like, say, French or quantum mechanics.

   
Belov removed his cap and placed it under his left arm as if reporting for duty. 'Arkady Kyrilovich, it is my painful task to inform you that your father. General Kyril Ilyich Renko, has died.'

   
The generals advanced and shook Arkady's hand.

   
'He should have been Marshal of the Army,' Ivanov said.

   
Shuksin said, 'We were comrades in arms. I marched into Berlin with your father.'

   
Gul waved a rusty arm. 'I marched here in this same square with your father and laid a thousand Fascist flags at Stalin's feet.'

   
'Our most sincere condolences for this immeasurable loss.' Kuznetsov sobbed like an aunt.

   
Belov said, 'The funeral is already arranged for Saturday. That's soon, but your father left instructions for everything, as usual. He wanted me to give you this letter.'

   
'I don't want it.'

   
'I have no idea of the contents.' Belov tried to push an envelope inside Arkady's jacket. 'Father to son.'

   
Arkady knocked Belov's hand away. He was surprised by his own brusqueness to a good friend and by the depth of his revulsion towards the others. 'No, thanks.'

   
Shuksin took a wobbly step towards the Kremlin. '
Then
the army was appreciated. Soviet power meant something.
Then
the Fascists shit in their pants whenever we blew our nose.'