The Commissariat of Enlightenment (2 page)

AT
he next station, as the travelers parted to wait for their connecting train, which would take them only as far as the town of Volovo, Gribshin saw several other foreigners besides the British journalist. He counted at least three men and a woman in gray muslin and felt boots, ostentatiously plain pilgrims from abroad, as well as one or two other reporters arriving late to the story. Guarding his suitcases nearby, Professor Vorobev gave the journalists friendly, conspiratorial looks. Gribshin smoked a cigarette and contemplated the meaning of the rat.

When the train finally came, its best cars were second-class ones and they were mostly occupied. Gribshin and his two trunk-like suitcases, black like Vorobev’s but emblazoned with gold bantam roosters, were squeezed into a stuffy compartment dominated by two matronly women wrapped in scarves. They traveled with three adolescent girls. No older than the century, the youngest watched Gribshin shift and stretch as he attempted to make himself comfortable. Unaccustomed to the company of children, Gribshin tried to smile, but his expression only frightened her. He
wondered whether she saw the rest of the century in him. At Volovo, the passengers bound for Astapovo were required to disembark again.

After another hour in the frozen November twilight, an engine pulling a series of green coaches lumbered into the station: third class, no individual compartments, no heat, wooden benches. Vorobev summoned some peasants to lift his trunks onto the coach, firmly ordering them to take care.

The train plowed through the dark. Nothing Gribshin could see from its windows suggested movement. The other travelers were mostly hourly laborers, fatigued from the day’s work. The men sitting across from Gribshin passed around an unlabeled bottle of vodka. Their eyes were rimmed red, their faces flushed. An unseen woman laughed sharply, provocatively, and then the laughter vanished. It was perhaps in this very car that only a few days earlier the elderly Count had lectured his fellow passengers about Henry George’s land and tax proposals. He too had probably waited in the cold for an hour.

They halted briefly at a few dark stops, none of them Astapovo. Gribshin studied his map in the car’s murk and, measuring the distance by finger-lengths, marveled at how slow his progress had been in the last five hours: their destination was less than a hundred miles from Tula. But travel in Russia was always like this, an enterprise frustrated by the country’s inhuman distances and primitive railroads. He looked up and saw the bottle pass within Khaitover’s grasp.

The reporter almost reached for it. He was interrupted. In that moment an electric humming charged the atmosphere and Gribshin felt a tingling in his nerve tips. The rhythm of the train’s oscillations slowed. He peered through the window. A radiance
much whiter than sunlight, more the color of snow, spilled out of the sky ahead.

He didn’t imagine that they were entering a burning forest or that a new sun had risen in the East. Yet there it was, a false dawn of sorts, frigid and revealing. Now the train approached a station and Gribshin could see a few shacks and huts off the rail line, rendered one-dimensional in the pallid electric light. And then, just as Gribshin identified the light as electric and knew that they had arrived in Astapovo, something happened inside the coach. First he felt the heat. The coach’s walls burned white. Pocks on the face of an adjacent passenger seemed to be deepened by the shadows cast by the conflagration until the light became so intense that the man’s face dissolved, leaving only his eyebrows and the idea of the man. Gribshin momentarily wondered what the idea was.

The train squealed and lurched to a stop. Khaitover gripped his bag and hurried through the glare to the exit. Ahead of him were a German reporter, the professor with the rat, a few foreign pilgrims, and perhaps another half dozen Russian ones.

To step onto the platform was as if to enter daylight. Above the knots of arriving passengers, powerful Jupiter lamps hoisted on spindly towers were rendered invisible by their own radiance. Khaitover recognized the towers as moving picture equipment. Immersed, he himself was boiled down to a single dimension. On the platform several men moved about, their declarations peremptory. They fussed with cables and wires. Other men and a few women watched them work.

“Graham!” It was Runcie from the
Standard,
a stocky man with an oily black beard and a limp won reporting the war against
the Boers. He called out in good humor, “At last! I’ll let the Count know you’re here.”

The locomotive hissed and spat and jerked the line of cars taut, pulling from the station on the way to Lipetsk.

“I was delayed,” Khaitover explained lamely. “I had to make some arrangements.”

“No matter, my lad. We’ve saved you a berth in the press car.”

“What’s all this?” He pointed to the overhead lights.

“The French. A bunch of horses’ asses.”

Two cinematography cameras, each a square, highly polished mahogany box with a single lens aperture in one side and a crank emerging from another, stood on tripods on the platform. The apertures stared down the platform at a long, single-story house, modest but in good repair. Dim yellow lamps burned inside the house, causing its windows, which were obscured by newspapers, to glow around their edges.

For the moment, the cameras had been abandoned and the work of the film crew was halted as the cinematographer Meyer stopped to welcome Kolya Gribshin. Georges Meyer’s smile was wide: he had found no other Russian on whom he could so well depend. Embarrassed by the attention, Gribshin handed him the receipt that he had been given in Moscow by the film courier to Paris. Meyer studied it and asked, “He made the seven
A.M
. express?”

“Yes, sir. I saw him off. And I’ve brought you a dozen canisters of stock. And some wine.”

Another of Meyer’s assistants carried away the supplies. It was past ten and halfway across the European continent provincial Russia was shutting down for the night, but in Astapovo, a railroad junction whose resident population totaled a few hundred souls, there was a steady rustle of activity and discourse. In
Astapovo tonight you could hear as many languages as were spoken in central London and discover more numerous variations in dress and comportment. The windowless, crooked wooden tavern alongside the station rang with shouts and calls for cognac. You could purchase dollar cigars. In the last three days, an urban crime rate had descended on the village. Expensive equipment and luggage had been pilfered and more subtle modes of corruption now slinked along its unpaved streets. A detachment of gendarmes had arrived from Moscow.

Never before had a rural railway platform seen so many strangers. They swarmed up and down the platform, threatening to fall onto the tracks. Except for the Pathé men, who had been filming the arrival of the train in the hope that another notable personage or a nearly notable one would alight from it, the activity at the station seemed restless and purposeless. Men smoked. Women paraded with small leashed dogs. Off to the side a gay red-and-green circus tent had been erected. Lamps burned within. Next to the tent was a yellow coach left detached on the siding.

“They’re for the press,” Meyer explained. “You can sleep in the coach. We’ve reserved a bunk.”

“Has the Countess arrived yet?”

Meyer shook his head and grinned. “No, but when she does, she’ll be good for a full reel of film, at the very least.”

The Countess was in pursuit of Count L—T—, who a few days before had fled their estate at Yasnaya Polyana and a marriage that had tortured its two contestants for the past forty-eight years. Having left a letter that expressed his desire “to retire from the world to complete my life in solitude,” the Count had driven in secret to the local train station, near Tula, at the dawn of October 28, 1910 (Old Style), in the company of his friend and personal physician, Dr. Dushan Makovitsky. Only the Count’s youngest
and favorite daughter, Sasha, knew their indefinite plans to settle in a colony established by the Count’s adherents in the Caucasus. Recognized and cheered by the passengers in the third-class car, the white-bearded, eighty-two-year-old Count debated several contemporary social issues with them, and more generally spoke about how they should treat each other and establish a just society. At Kozelsk, the Count and Dr. Makovitsky left the train and made their way to a convent, where they spent the night. The next day they reached the monastery at Shamardino, where they said farewell to the Count’s surprised eighty-year-old sister. Sasha joined them there. Fearful that the Countess would track them down, the fugitives left early the next morning by a rattling old trap back to Kozelsk, where they caught a train destined for Rostov-on-Don, nearly a thousand kilometers to the east.

The Count, however, was not destined for Rostov-on-Don. In the unheated coach whose air was clouded by pipe and cigarette smoke, surrounded by gawking strangers, he developed a cough and in the course of the day a fever. Too ill to go further, he was removed from the train by his doctor and daughter at a stop whose name could barely be read in the evening twilight: Astapovo.

Only hours after the Count left Yasnaya Polyana the first report of his flight had appeared in the Moscow newspaper
Russkoye Slovo.
The other Moscow and Saint Petersburg newspapers published the news in their later editions that day and it was immediately telegraphed abroad by correspondents for the foreign press. After this, the newspapers reported each leg of his journey, as well as the text of his letter to the Countess and the details of the suicide that she had either attempted or had pretended to attempt in a waist-deep pond on the estate. It was from a reporter, who had
sent her a telegram requesting an interview, that she learned that the Count was lying ill at the stationmaster’s house in Astapovo. The Countess declared that her husband had left home simply for the purpose of advertising himself.

It was said that she had now hired a private rail coach to take her to Astapovo, along with several of her children, a doctor, and a nurse, in defiance of the Count’s demand that she remain at home. Her entourage was preceded by scores of reporters from Russia and abroad who had come to file telegraphic reports, often hourly, on the precipitously declining health of the greatest writer of the previous century.

Arriving with the first newspaper reporters had been several men carrying suitcases ornamented with inlaid color pictures of a bantam rooster, the “all-seeing and all-knowing” trademark of the Pathé Frères cinematography company. Their chief cinematographer, Meyer, had received his orders from Charles Pathé himself:
TAKE STATION, TRY TO GET CLOSE-UP, STATION NAME. TAKE FAMILY, WELL-KNOWN FIGURES, CAR THEY ARE SLEEPING IN
. It would require the personal intervention of M. Pathé with the highest levels of the Russian government to suspend the law that prohibited the photographic or cinematographic representation of the empire’s railway stations.

These were the last years of relative peace in the realm of Tsar Nicholas II, who had come to the throne in 1894 and had ruled his two simmering continents with brute force, fitful shrewdness, and, more dependably, incompetence. Only five years earlier the suppression of a revolution had been followed by the halfhearted granting of nominal power to an elected parliament. The current prime minister, Stolypin, whose life’s trajectory and the flight of an assassin’s bullet would shortly intersect, had lost his influence
in the Royal Court to a Siberian mystic named Rasputin. Other holy men walked the land; apocalypse was foretold; modernity pressed upon Russia like a vise. Earlier that year Halley’s Comet had made a spectacular reappearance among the constellations, threatening mankind with the noxious vapors in its tail. King Edward had died and been succeeded by George V. In America, the Negro Jack Johnson had won the heavyweight boxing championship of the world. All this had been in the papers and in the actualities and topicals whose images now flickered on screens and walls in the Kingdom of Siam, in the Belgian Congo, in Calcutta and Bogotá, in emirates and in duchies, in the pampas, in the desert, aboard ship, and across the doomed Romanov Empire.

The first films from Astapovo would reach the company’s studios in Paris within forty-eight hours for inclusion in that week’s Pathé Journal while the Count still breathed. The Count was too ill to be moved, but the doctors would not commit themselves to the hour or day of his death. With filming completed for the evening, and the Countess’s arrival time not yet known, Meyer now told Gribshin to be prepared for an early start the following morning.

Gribshin took his bag and passed through the idling strangers on the platform on his way to the coach. He looked in at the reporters’ circus tent, sliding through a glowing slit in the tent wall. Telegraph forms lay scattered across several long tables. Men were hunched at the tables, grasping stubby red pencils that, as Gribshin entered, were simultaneously poised in the air above sheets of foolscap. One of the reporters cast him an abstract look while searching the tent for a wonderfully apposite word or phrase. Along the far wall of the tent lay a line of sleeping bags and portable camp beds, some with men in them, some of the men still in their boots. The tent was warmed by a number of hissing
kerosene heaters and illuminated, somewhat incongruously and ineffectively, by Chinese lanterns. Given the widespread reverence for the Count, the circus tent was itself an incongruous manifestation; this moment early in the twentieth century was rife with incongruity.

THE
British reporter Khaitover had already reached the press car and, following his colleague Runcie, had climbed the steps. As he entered the coach he was overcome by a confusion of odors, mostly cigar smoke and sweat. A man laughed, witnessing another’s ludicrous misfortune at cards. And then there was the smell of liquor, plus the staccato cadences of a story being told in the present tense. The corridor was dark, but light showed from lanterns in some of the compartments. Khaitover glanced through a gap in the curtains of an unlamped compartment and was rewarded with a glimpse of bare flesh, white and firm. He didn’t see enough to determine which body part it comprised, but he knew the flesh was female.

“You’ve brought girls here?”

“No, they’ve come on their own. Two rubles a go. Don’t give them any more, or we’ll all have to pay.”

“It’s stuffy.”

“We open the windows during the day. Gentlemen, I present our esteemed colleague from the
Imperial.
”

One of the compartments was open and the glow from the un
evenly bright faces of men spilled from it. Faces he recognized, murmurs of acknowledgement:
Der Tageblatt, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, The Telegraph.
Each man held a glass and a fan of cards. An overturned wooden box served as their card table. On the top bunk a girl beneath a swirl of red hair snored from deep within her bronchial tubes. She was covered only by a top sheet.
The Telegraph
man said, “How nice of you to come.” Khaitover repeated that he had been delayed by business.

Runcie and Khaitover edged their way past the men to another compartment. Five of its beds were taken by bits of luggage and debris. Khaitover hurled his suitcase onto the sixth, located hardly a foot from the ceiling, and climbed up after it. He pried off his boots.

“You won’t send a cable now?”

Runcie knew that Khaitover was in trouble with his editors and had been in trouble since before he had reduced his reporting career to a sideline. Khaitover was always engaging himself in commercial business of some sort, or at least of the sort that didn’t appear to produce any profit.

Khaitover replied with his eyes shut. “The bloke’s not dead yet, is he? Once they know I’m here, they’ll want a dispatch every hour.”

Runcie turned to go, but at that moment Gribshin arrived, carrying his suitcase over his shoulder. Gribshin was a slight, dark young man for whom a smile did not come easily, and he was unmistakably a native. He looked levelly at the two Englishmen.

He said in English, “I’m from Pathé Frères. I believe that’s my bunk.”

Runcie said, “Not any more,
sir.
”

“M. Meyer said it was reserved and paid for. Fifth compartment, first
couche.
”

The two Englishmen didn’t reply. Khaitover was stretched out on the bed as if he would never leave it. He opened his eyes briefly, again didn’t recognize Gribshin as a former traveling companion, and closed them. With a mountainous impassiveness, Runcie crossed his thick arms across his chest and swelled to fill the doorway.

Gribshin was not surprised by the rebuff. He returned down the corridor to the exit, once more sidling by the card game. None of the players looked up. As he passed the gap between the drawn curtains of the next compartment, he glanced in and took note not only of the girl’s bare flesh, but also the subtle gradations of dark within the indirectly lit chamber and the way the motions of the bodies inside it rippled the dark. Dark and light, light and dark, and so the planet would turn toward morning.

Descending from the railway car, he was refreshed by the frigid air as the stink of the men, liquor, and perfume rolled off him in nearly visible waves. In the coach Gribshin had been moved by an abhorrence whose object was unclear. Although he didn’t gamble, he wasn’t opposed to gambling. As for the prostitutes, well, he himself had never held a woman who had not been paid for. Yet his disgust seemed as tangible as the ground beneath his feet.

Now the problem of finding accommodation presented itself. He moved from the glow that enveloped the coach, took two steps toward the secondary shelter provided by the circus tent, and then changed his mind. The sight of the circus tent fired within him an enraged impatience—the canvas’s shades of red and green seemed to be pitched precisely to provoke the maximum irritation. His eyes stung.

Gribshin struck out in the opposite direction, almost blindly,
away from the stationmaster’s house. A dirt path passed through a stand of small anonymous structures that probably contained railway equipment. Four or five small homes sprawled around an oily pond. The path eventually matured into an unpaved road that swung around a hill. The train station disappeared and he found himself completely alone in provincial Russia as if beneath the ocean.

The road snaked between two hard, broken fields that coyly rose and diverged from each other. All that was audible was the wind; although it barely stirred his hair, the breeze roared in his ears. Puffy luminous clouds scraped across the night sky. At this hour no one was about, neither men nor their livestock. At the edge of one of the fields a lamp illuminated the curtained window of a tidy house built from logs. He ignored the invitation proffered by the warm yellow light, certain that he needed to be even farther from the station.

The moon came into view, enormous and nearly full, riding low along the horizon. Gribshin gazed directly at the pocked globe and allowed his eyes to soak in the light. He had gone far now, already several versts, and it appeared that he had either double-backed to the outskirts of Astapovo or reached those of a neighboring village. Ahead lay some kind of settlement, with a few log homes small and square with pastel filigree on their eaves. A road become evident. This must have been the old post road, un-trafficked now that the train came through. But as he approached he was startled by traffic: the silhouetted figure of a man running along it, skittering on the half-frozen dirt, huffing. The man tripped over an exposed tree root, fell to his knees, and immediately rose to continue on his course. The man didn’t see him. Strange things went abroad tonight.

Past the homes, set off from the road, lay a structure slightly
larger than the others, two stories, with a stable on the other side of an icy courtyard. Gribshin recognized it as an old post-house, abandoned by the new century. Even before the railway it had probably been more run-down than its neighbors, since the regime nominally responsible for its upkeep had been and continued to be only nominally in favor of maintaining postal service at all. Now its windows were boarded and the roof’s missing shingles glared like the ghosts of absent teeth. Gribshin would have assumed that the house was uninhabited, if it were not for the chimney smoke phosphorescing in the moonlight. He rapped on the door, surprised at the force and weight of his fist.

At first there was no reply, and then something scurried behind the door. It sounded like a rat. A few moments passed, the door swayed open, and the rat turned into a stout old man in a thin work shirt. The man stared through Gribshin as if he didn’t see him. His rheumy eyes were set in a rough web of folds and creases.

“Good evening,” Gribshin ventured, more intimidated by this specter than he had been by the two Englishmen. “I’m sorry to disturb you.”

The man indeed seemed to be disturbed, angered by the intrusion. He murmured through clenched teeth: “Who are you?”

“I work for Pathé Frères. I’m a journalist of sorts.”

The man paused for a moment, considering this, and grunted. “I thought you were a bloody pilgrim.”

“No, no…” Gribshin began. He was desperately tired, though not so much from his rail journey, which had not been arduous. It was rather the tumult around the stationmaster’s house that had unsettled him; that and his own ambiguous visions. The train’s sudden forward impulsion still echoed in his bones.

“Send him away, you fool!” a woman cried. She came to the door, an old woman in a housecoat and crumpled sleeping cap.
“Not tonight! We’re finished for the night! Let him go to the station!”

“I need a place to sleep,” Gribshin stammered. “I’ll pay you well. I’m…” He paused, daunted by the prospect of explaining himself. “…very tired.”

“Not here!” the woman cackled. “We’re closed for the night, forever!”

But Gribshin saw that his promise had rooted the old couple to the spot. He lurched forward and the man allowed him to shoulder past. Once inside the dim, low-ceilinged front room he was embraced by the dry heat of the fire, which was cleaner and kinder than the train car’s stifling warmth. He regretted his display of weakness, but fatigue had come on like an illness. The man expressed the reluctance of his welcome by closing the heavy wooden door without a sound.

“Please,” Gribshin said.

He had entered this room before, or one very much like it; post-houses tended to be built along consistent principles. The room was dominated by a whitewashed brick stove, over which extended a sleeping-shelf. The other fixtures included two windows looking out onto the road, a long bench built into the wall, a heavy deal table, and a few stools. Ax-hewn beams supported the ceiling. The space was illuminated by a single stingy oil lamp. He couldn’t see into all the corners of the room, but he thought that someone else lurked in one of them.

The old woman reconsidered. “What will you pay?”

“Five rubles,” he said.

This was a ridiculous sum, the price of a luxe room in Moscow, but the old woman squinted hard at it.

“Six for a bed,” she replied. “And that’s alone, mind you.”

Gribshin only now identified the commerce that probably made
up for the post-house’s lost income. He nodded to clinch the deal and, in an attempt to make himself feel at ease, when in fact he wasn’t at all, he asked, almost conversationally, “No women tonight?”

Her husband muttered, “They’re all at the railway station. That’s the new bawdy house, the likes the world has never seen before.”