The Commissariat of Enlightenment (17 page)

“Praise God,” said the priest.

“What are you doing?”
Astapov said down to Nikitin, in a searing whisper.

“It’s a miracle,” Nikitin mumbled, looking away.

“
What
miracle?”

The church was hushed. Not a baby stirred in his mother’s arms. Astapov stood among the bowed peasants and soldiers as if in a pool of waist-deep water. The heat of the lamps brought perspiration to his forehead. Now when he gazed at the lights his eyes were pained, shot through with electricity. He looked above the lamps. Painted on the inside of the dome, the severe Byzantine Jesus stared back.

“Get
up!
” Astapov cried. “Are you
serfs?
You’re bowing to a pile of bones!”

“Saint Svyetoslav of Gryaz,” murmured the archpriest. “The incorruptible saint.”

“There is no saint!” Astapov reached into the crypt, furious.
He pulled out a tibia, at whose broken end a length of tattered rag was hung. The bone surprised him with its heft and inherent warmth; it unnerved him. He swung it over his head like a flag and the rag flew off, landing at the feet of the peasant who had retrieved the chipped stone. The man snatched it. Astapov declared, “There is no miracle. Svyetoslav was eaten by rats and maggots. This is the proof.”

The archpriest responded in a near-whisper that carried throughout the church.

“No. It’s a greater miracle than Gryaz had ever hoped or prayed for. We’re a small, impoverished parish long irrelevant to worldly affairs, made up of hardworking people who can barely raise their faces to the sun. Yet our devotion, good works, and suffering have been recognized by God.”

“What? How?”

Again the priest crossed himself and bowed. “In the moment that you opened the crypt, Saint Svyetoslav of Gryaz flew to heaven and was replaced by this straw and things.”

Astapov gaped at the priest. Again the odors of the scorched icons occupied Astapov’s nostrils. He thought he saw a smile flicker across the cleric’s face. He shut his eyes for a moment and was rewarded not with repose, but with an image of Yelena cavorting on the screen in the agit-train.

He turned to Nikitin. “Do you believe that’s what happened?” he demanded sharply.

“No sir, of course not,” said Nikitin, still on his knees. His face had blanched, betraying his extreme youth. “But really, comrade commissar, there’s no other rational explanation.”

Commander Shishko had gone quietly to his feet. He was ready to give further orders now and appeared invigorated by the prospect. The commissars had been trumped. Astapov made a
slight motion of acknowledgement, but without looking him in the face, so that the gesture remained ambiguous, without concession. He was reminded again that the army couldn’t be trusted. He would have to speak first.

“Everyone can go home now, in peace and safety.” Astapov intended to add something here, some cry on behalf of Soviet power and rural electrification, but he faltered. The cloud of dust was still rising into the dome, conjuring a distant recollection from a vanished pile of wood-chips. “Go,” he said.

There was no immediate response from the assembly. The peasants remained kneeling, many of them submerged in prayer. Astapov reached again for his gun: the gesture was becoming a nervous reflex, a tic. Finally and with a vivid display of effort, the archpriest rose, made some sign that Astapov did not witness, and the peasants began to shuffle from the building.

Shishko made no attempt to disguise his satisfaction in Astapov’s defeat. Emboldened by this demonstration of futile meddling, the commander intended to file a complaint that would free him of the commissars forever. His men waited by the iconostasis for Shishko’s orders. Sighing, the priest returned to kneel and pray by Saint Svyetoslav’s busted crypt.

“Let them out,” said Astapov. “Then burn it all.”

Shishko squinted hard.

“Everything,” insisted Astapov. “The paintings and icons, the crosses, the candlestick holders, the iconostasis. It must all be destroyed. Smash the doors and set fire to everything that will burn.”

Shishko objected, “Gryaz is taken. The church is emptied. From a military point of view, it’s worthless—”

Astapov had stepped back and raised his pistol. It was light, a Belgian Nagant, nearly buoyant in the incense-laden atmosphere.
Shishko’s assumption had been correct: Astapov had never once fired the gun in battle. But he had dreamed of the gun. The archpriest knelt before the crypt, his back turned, unaware. Astapov’s hand wavered for a moment—had an angel sought to divert it?—and the bullet pierced the priest’s black cloak behind his right shoulder-blade. You could see how it rippled the fabric. The shot made no sound at all nor any recoil. The priest continued praying, his voice unchanged, his address unbroken. The Reds stood around him for several minutes, listening to the mumbled liturgy that many now recalled from before the wars, from their ancient childhoods. Then when he had completed his prayer and had breathed the final amen, the priest lightly lowered his chest to the floor of the church and his soul left from the little hole that had been made for it.

The commissar was aware that his face was hot and also that something was wrong with his hearing. He brought the gun down, almost as an afterthought.

“Destroy the church. This is a political decision, authorized by the Commissariat of Enlightenment,” he said roughly, removing a notepad and a pencil from his hip pocket. “I’m giving you a written order. Allow no hindrance from the clerics. Shoot hostages if necessary. Apply military justice to resisters and traitors in your ranks. Use cannon against the outer walls. Leave only enough ruins to show that we were here.”

A new light appeared in the commander’s eyes. Astapov was victorious; Shishko had become a prisoner of fear and hatred. The Bolsheviks would not be defeated—not by peasant ignorance, not by its own army, and not by the conventional notions of right and wrong. Astapov foresaw the night that lay ahead in the room that Enlightenment had requisitioned for him in Lomov. He would lie awake until dawn, smoking cigarettes, and turning over in his
mind, like panning for gold, the events of the past day. By then his bitterness would have subsided, if it had not subsided already. Stretched out in the bed, the linen gray from his ashes, he would be overcome by something that was like joyousness, something that might even be called joyousness in some dictionary of the future. Even now joy coursed through him like a serum and he could taste the cigarette. The smoke would coil and bubble inside his lungs. Already it spoke to him, here in the church of the Saint Svyetoslav of Gryaz monastery. The word was this:
liberty
. Now the word was inscribed on the surface integument of his heart. In his notebook, Astapov penned the orders, taking care to make them legible and for his signature to be distinct. Some more deaths would ensue: three or four. With the iron determination of the Revolution itself behind the orders, Shishko would have to comply.

1921

PLACED
in the center of Moscow, less than a kilometer from the Kremlin, the alleys and lanes of the Arbat district spread like cracks in a windowpane, or like the threads of a spider’s web tangled by a powerful and defiant fly, with only Arbat Street running true, from Smolenskaya to the Arbat Square. Some of the thoroughfares doubled back on themselves; others petered out in desolate courtyards. The ancient streets’ disarray gave the neighborhood an Asian cast, the expectation that anything might yet happen, especially if it were offensive. The buildings tottered over the intermittently paved streets. Rubbish lay in the gutters nearly indistinguishable from the occasional drunk. In this fresh, already-disappointed spring, nearly all the local shops, taverns, bakeries, and bookstores were closed. A man could get lost here, if he wished to.

On this morning it seemed as if many men had come to the Arbat to get lost. They shuffled along the street with their heads down, their expressions forced into blankness and their eyes
made blind. This was the safest posture in a season that carried the weight of the Cheka on its back. How quickly this posture had been learned. Wages had declined to one third of what they had been at the start of the Great War. Rations for industrial workers had been cut to a thousand calories per day. Wooden houses throughout the capital were being dismantled for fuel. Famine and epidemic raged across the landscape. Only the Cheka, the Extraordinary Commission, could maintain the physical laws of a universe in which these circumstances coexisted with continued government authority. Last month Red sailors had mutinied at the Kronshtadt naval base on an island in the Gulf of Finland near Petrograd. The population gave them material support until troops led by Trotsky charged across the ice, slaughtering hundreds—while the Cheka kept its machine guns trained on
these
troops, in the event that they too would desert. Other Chekists held the machine-gunners in their sights, and so on, the chain of coercion vanishing into the cold ocean mists.

At the end of the chain, if you were so inclined and foolish enough to follow it, and sufficiently indestructible, you would find the sole master of the last machine gun, Ilich, but just before that you would encounter a snarling, raging pack of men, scuffling to grasp the next-to-last link. They were Trotsky, Bukharin, and Zinoviev. They were irrelevant. Astapov knew that it was Stalin, standing off to the side, who was becoming indispensable to the Soviet state. Stalin had taken on the difficult, uninteresting, vital assignments, not least of which was the ministerial post of People’s Commissar for the myriad non-Russian populations. He had seeded his own men throughout the commissariats. He had compiled dossiers and assembled obligations. Astapov knew his own
dossier was among them and was perhaps more extensive than the contents of his own memory.

Comrade Astapov was studying the faces of the pedestrians now. The men did not reveal them willingly. Here was a middle-aged, baggy-eyed veteran hiding a parcel beneath his torn army coat. It probably contained food; what else was worth hiding these days? In repose, in a secure place, the face might have been a warm, self-satisfied one, with a cigar fastened to it. Behind him another man’s handsome, almost dignified countenance had hardened into an inhuman mask. Many men obscured their expressions behind beards; a few sported mustaches. Astapov was undecided about whether he sought a man with a mustache. He was engaged in a very delicate operation.

A stooped elder begged in front of a dimly lit shop that sold glasses of
varenyetz,
a kind of fermented, boiled milk. The police were supposed to regularly sweep the streets of beggars, but they usually failed, reduced to indigent circumstances themselves. This one was a gray-bearded religious fellow from the country. He crossed himself with great determination, his eyes wet and his face as gray as cement. Perhaps he wanted to purchase a glass of
varenyetz.
These shops were the only ones that had gone into business this winter, mysteriously summoned into existence by the brutal economics of War Communism.

Astapov had nearly passed him by, but he was tugged now by something familiar in the beggar’s face. The beggar was a broad-framed, elderly peasant, not the man Astapov required, but Astapov nevertheless stopped and studied him. These beggar-peasants—how did they get here, past the roadblocks? It was as if they had arisen from the city’s cellars, transformed from rats.

“You,” Astapov addressed him.

“My lord, a few rubles…May God and Ilich preserve you…”

“How about a thousand rubles?”

The beggar shook his head with surprising vigor. “No sir, I’m no highwayman, I need only a few rubles. That’s enough.”

“Come tomorrow to the Alexander Gardens, around ten in the morning. There’ll be honest work for you there.”

The man snorted. “Honest? Then surely it’s against the law.”

Astapov regretted his impulse to speak with the man. It was a mistake to come here, to this district. The Arbat’s raveled streets provoked undesirable, antisocial behavior. Within its disorder was written the characteristic ungovernableness of Russian life. Astapov had studied the problem, corresponding with Enlightenment agents in foreign capitals who sent him data on the widths of their cities’ sidewalks and intersecting streets’ angles of incidence. It had been established that the design of a city, any city, transmitted coded commands to its residents: whether to be garrulous or taciturn, how conscientiously to work, with how much loss of self to fall in love. If the city were large and imperially diverse, as were Paris and Moscow, for example, the communication might be particularized by neighborhood. In the Arbat the whispers were subversive, anti-Bolshevik. Someday the entire precinct would have to be demolished, replaced with a single wide boulevard that would not allow for human weakness. Astapov frowned and reached into the pocket of his coat, where he felt the rough edges of a coin now valued less than the scrap metal used to mint it, valued less even than the amount of food you would need to consume to obtain the energy to lift it from your pocket. The peasant reached out a rough, blackened hand. Undecided, Astapov played with the coin for another moment and then let it
drop back into his coat. It tinkled there. Despite the rebuff, the man bowed and crossed himself.

“Tomorrow at ten,” Astapov said. “There’ll be someone in charge.”

Astapov went on his way, annoyed by the encounter. The peasant clung to the corpse of the old regime: the servility, the obduracy, the baseness, the ignorance. This despite the Revolution’s successes announced so triumphantly by the Commissariat’s agitprop units. Gleaming harvesting machines cut through limitless fields of waving wheat; grain gushed into boxcars from stainless steel hoppers; saucy, buxom milkgirls swung full buckets from their shoulders, careless with their abundance; dark-eyed youths scaled Cheopian pyramids of melons; slaughterhouse workers in crisp white smocks danced gaily beneath overhanging carcasses. The city replied: films are not enough, the cinema audience has to be fed. These complaints were echoed in the chambers of the Kremlin, where Astapov, soliciting equipment and funds, argued back that it was only through the Commissariat of Enlightenment that the people would be motivated to produce the food they needed to be fed. And until then, he maintained, the proper image coupled with the proper narrative would make them swear that they
had
been fed.

He returned to the carriageless, motorless Arbat Street and was startled. He saw a man who would have been perfectly suitable, if he had not been so perfectly suitable. Comrade Stalin was reading a newspaper posted on a wall at the corner of Durnovski Lane. It wasn’t Stalin, of course, this man was much younger and his face was more drawn, and Stalin would never walk the streets unprotected from would-be assassins, whose numbers grew daily. Yet the resemblance was remarkable, even potentially dangerous.
The man reading the paper not only had the Caucasian’s mustache, but also the characteristic crinkling of the skin around his eyes. Astapov stared.

The man seemed oblivious to the examination as he read Stalin’s speech yesterday to the trade union of sheetmetal workers. No, he wouldn’t do. Astapov needed someone who would only hint at Comrade Stalin. Perhaps the newspaper reader’s features could be altered…the eyebrows shaved, for one thing, and perhaps an entirely different haircut. But the man’s resemblance would still be too obvious…. Again Astapov marveled at the sensitivity of this operation and cursed himself for conceiving it in the first place.

He went on, now somewhat regretfully. Could he possibly find anybody at all before tomorrow morning? Could he postpone the filming? If he did, through some bureaucratic deception, Comrade Light would be made suspicious. The further Astapov traveled up Arbat Street, the more certain he was that he had forfeited his best chance back at Durnovski Lane. He stopped at the end of the street, by the once-elegant Praga restaurant, and looked back against the even flow of pedestrians. In the past fifteen minutes a light snow had begun to fall on the Arbat, disputing the arrival of the equinox. You couldn’t see more than a few blocks. Astapov wondered if he could find the newspaper reader again. He took several steps in that direction, but before he reached the next cross-street he stopped once more. Another thought had come to mind.

The man reading the newspaper had indeed been Comrade Stalin. He had been out taking some fresh air a few blocks from his office in the Commissariat of Nationalities, or hiding in plain sight, or gauging the mood of the masses, or showing solidarity with them, or flushing out his enemies, or taunting them, or checking up on his operative planted within the Commissariat of
Enlightenment. All this was possible. Stalin moved occultly, in the shadows, through walls, through other peoples’ dreams. He pulled invisible strings. Astapov was only a single string and wouldn’t know the others.

In that event, it was best not to go back. When he next met Comrade Stalin, he would make no mention of the encounter. Stalin would probably say nothing either, in order to keep the ground soft beneath Astapov’s feet. Stalin had not spoken when Astapov had come to him with his proposal. In the People’s Commissar’s close, overheated office, carpeted with rugs from throughout the empire, Astapov had explained the most current psycho-social theories of subliminal perception, pattern recognition, and cryptic allegory. Stalin had smoked his pipe without interruption and at the end of the presentation only nodded ambiguously, but Astapov left the office subliminally aware, through the past pattern of events, that his proposal had been cryptically accepted.

Now, through the indirect steps he had taken across the Arbat district, he found himself at the backstage door to the Global Proletarian Art Theater, located modestly in the basement of a former cinema. He was a frequent visitor to the Global Proletarian, always in a reluctant official capacity. Rapping sharply on the door, he wondered how this affair would turn out and what it would mean for his confederacy with the Caucasian. Astapov prodded his facility for clairvoyance, but no picture came. He would have to forget the encounter on Durnovski Lane, force it from his memory.

The stagehand who opened the door didn’t recognize him. With grave authority Astapov pushed past the youth into the theater, onto one of the wings. He was about to ask for the director, but saw that the stage was lit and occupied by several actors.

The actors turned to look at him. The four were uncostumed, holding scripts.

“Carry on. I’m looking for Levin.”

“I’m here,” replied a voice in the darkened seats below the stage.

“The commissar enters, stage right,” said one of the actors, the Armenian who had made a triumphant debut the previous fall in a drama directed by Meyerhold. He was dark and good-looking and his many love affairs had been duly catalogued by the Cheka. “I like that. Let’s write it into the script.”

One of the actresses, the famous Valeria Golubkova, smiled warmly and suggested, “Perhaps Comrade Astapov would care to play the role.”

“No, he’s too short,” said the Armenian.

The others did not laugh.
Red Virgin Soil,
writing about Meyerhold’s drama, had declared that the Armenian’s performance “heralded the arrival of New Soviet Man on the world stage.” Trud had gushed that his “calloused hands have seized the wheel of Theatrical Revolution.” The city’s Party apparatus had provided the actor with a three-bedroom apartment overlooking Patriarch’s Pond and he had received a complimentary letter from the head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, People’s Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky. Giddy with success, the Armenian overestimated the immunity conferred by his fame. Valeria, who had been sleeping with him off and on all winter, now forswore further assignations. Astapov barely heard the jibe.

“I need to speak with you, Comrade Levin. It’s an urgent matter.”

“Of course,” said Levin, standing with a script in his hands. He motioned to his office and announced, “We’ll take a break!”

“It’s not necessary, comrades,” said Astapov, raising his hands. “You may continue. ‘He who does not work does not eat!’”

The actors didn’t respond to this, but looked to Levin for direction. Levin smiled, a bit anxiously, and said after a moment’s thought, “Yes, go ahead. It’s quite all right.”

“And Comrade Levin,” said Astapov. “Please bring your casting book with you. All of them, if you would be so kind.”