The Commissariat of Enlightenment (19 page)

AND
where had Comrade Astapov been during the Bolshevik coup? In truth, nowhere—he hadn’t yet become Comrade Astapov, but rather existed in a state that was gray, indeterminate, and nameless. While the young man cranked his camera, the Great War had gone by in an inchoate roar. Throughout it, the cine-man waited to be summoned and was disappointed when he was not. Yet he was always confident that the Caucasian had not forgotten him. The Caucasian was a man who didn’t forget. And the youth sensed that he was being watched. This sense might have been conjectural or metaphysical, unsupported by tangible evidence, yet time and again he would receive small mysterious signs: a pass or a railroad ticket would materialize, a revolutionary tract would be left by his bedside while he slept, he would learn in advance of particularly photogenic strikes and political demonstrations.

Once the Tsar abdicated, the cine-man was sure that his moment had come, but even then he wasn’t called. After his visit to his cousins’ estate, he said farewell to his father and returned to the embroiled Petrogradian capital. That summer a swarm of rev
olutionary factions competed for power. The young man couldn’t predict which would prevail, though he knew that it would be the one that included the Caucasian in its subterranean ranks. Unable to acquire film stock, he carried the cinematography camera with him anyway, as an emblem or a talisman. He knew that he was in transformation then, while Russia was being recast as an entirely different nation, with a new name, a new flag, and a new calendar. In that interval he felt himself riven, part of his character plunging irrecoverably into a past as opaque and deep as the ocean. His personal history now belonged to someone else, hardly more than an acquaintance. Old Style/New Style.

When the Caucasian finally reached him, the revolutionist didn’t show his face or reveal his name. Through intermediaries the young man was given in these days of great events an assignment that was curiously trivial: to lead the expropriation of a cinema located off Nevsky Prospekt. This was done without mishap the night Ilich assumed command of the government. Of course, only bourgeois films were available for exhibition. The cine-man ran them as before—burlesques like the one about a horse unwilling to be shod (a man in a frock coat chases him around the yard, falling over buckets and feed troughs)—but the new advertising hoardings were ornamented with revolutionary slogans. “The Internationale” was played before the performance. The horse suddenly had reasons of class interest for his recalcitrance. The audience didn’t laugh; it cheered. Notification of the cinema’s liberation was sent to the intermediaries and the telegram was signed:
ASTAPOV
.

Tonight he crossed Red Square on his way home, as he always did, and as always he took courage from the cobblestone traverse: this
symbol of the Russian nation and its state now belonged to the Bolsheviks. By some alchemy brewed in the offices of Enlightenment, in cabalistic collaboration with Foreign Affairs, the medieval square was fast being transmuted into the supreme symbol of the modern world proletariat. The walls of the fortress stretched across pages in the international rotogravures; Saint Basil’s Cathedral had been simplified, stylized, and archetyped.

The imperative, Astapov believed, was to do the same for yet another piece of the square, some raised ground near the center of the Kremlin wall: a little hill that tradition called the Place of the Skull, around which the flow of pedestrians was now deflected. In the reigns of Ivan and Peter, respectively Terrible and Great, the mound had been the site of state executions, over which the tsars presided from one of the Kremlin turrets. The peasant insurrectionist Stenka Razin was beheaded here. When Moscow became the millennial Third Rome, it had been foretold, the Place of the Skull would be the locus from where its judgments to mankind would be issued, the center of the earth.

Astapov had proposed that a commemorative structure be erected on the mound: a sky-puncturing wireless tower lofted by a lattice of riveted beams. At night it would be caressed by roving spotlights. His memorandum had bubbled up through Enlightenment until a few months ago, when it reached Comrade Krupskaya, Illich’s wife, who rejected the idea and then invited him to her office to explain it. A stolid, gray-hued woman with a prominent goiter riding up above the collar of her blouse, she was stone-faced throughout his presentation, which he made standing before her desk. He wondered if her husband had been the one to demand that the proposal get a hearing. Astapov was staggered by the possibility that one of his own thoughts had somehow flitted through Ilich’s brain, if only momentarily.

Despite her lack of interest in the wireless tower, Krupskaya concluded the interview by asking Astapov to join her aboard the agit-train
The Ilich
on its tour through the southern provinces. Astapov marveled at the honor and again wondered if Ilich himself was behind this—until he realized that, no, this was all somehow Stalin’s doing. Stalin had whispered something to somebody, or made a promise or a threat, or most surely both, and some deceit had been skillfully practiced. The Caucasian would find employment for an agent in Krupskaya’s entourage.

Although Astapov was only one of several assistants aboard the agit-train, his cinema experience finally came to her attention, as perhaps Stalin had foreseen that it would. The propaganda
agitki
films had recently been placed under Krupskaya’s extramural education subministry, in a subsection called the All-Russian Photo-Cinema Department. As
The Ilich
hurtled east, forcing less urgent trains onto remote shuntings, Astapov screened for her some of the films whose production he had organized, including
The Frightened Bourgeois, For the Red Flag, Peace to the Shack and War to the Palace,
and
Children: The Flower of Life.
Krupskaya watched each several times, all the while talking back to it, bitterly criticizing its ideological solecisms. But Astapov knew she was impressed.

The Commissariat of Enlightenment was now the fastest growing ministry in the Soviet government, with a claim on the national budget superseded only by the army. Cadres were being hired at every
agitpunkt.
Even with the Civil War won, Ilich foresaw that the Revolution could still be stymied by superstition, backwardness, and paradox. The paradox was this: On the one hand, Marxism claimed that its ideology was a product of the worker’s toil. But Marxism was a science, accessible only to those who studied it properly. Propaganda resolved the conflict by pro
viding the workers with the intellectual tools to translate their daily experience into political consciousness.

The job was all uphill. The word
Bolsheviks
impressed few Russians, who considered their new leaders interchangeable with their former masters. They distrusted educated talk. They couldn’t believe in a future materially different from the present. When Astapov had arrived at the station for his departure on the agit-tour, he discovered that the illustrations painted on the outsides of the coaches had been obscured. The fantastic revolutionary paint-work, approved by the Commissariat, had been replaced by representational art more consonant with peasant tastes. Even so, a delegation of Don Cossacks would complain a week later that the horses depicted on the dining car had been wrongly shod.

A cartoonish painting of Ilich, his neoformitively long arm raised in argument, was slathered on the head of the locomotive. Although disappointed by the crude portrait, Astapov suggested—but not to Krupskaya—that an image of a gray-haired woman appear alongside him. It was done. Astapov wrote texts for the placards, posters, and broadsheets to be distributed by the cadres. No one before Astapov had given a thought about what
The Ilich
agit-tour
meant.
Working quietly, he rededicated its mission, which would be to present Ilich’s wife to the Soviet masses.

Krupskaya would have thought the idea preposterous or, worse, insulting and an invasion of privacy or, much worse, vaguely counterrevolutionary, even if she couldn’t prove it with the proper textual reference. She considered herself merely another Bolshevik comrade—true, a comrade supremely entrusted with Ilich’s health and well-being—but not a comrade of any importance in her own right. Astapov nevertheless wrote a script for a Krupskaya moving picture and arranged some unobtrusive filming in her public appearances, when she shook hands with local of
ficials and, at Astapov’s shy request, inspected machinery whose workings were totally mysterious to her. Although she rarely smiled, hardly a moment when she did smile was not secured on film. He kept the camera on the side opposite the goiter. She never recognized her portrait on the locomotive.

In a people’s democracy, political power would not derive from God. It had to be authorized by celebrity. Leaders would have to be more than known: their characters would have to be forged by narrative.

From Comrade Krupskaya, through Astapov, Stalin learned what Ilich was writing and on whom (besides Stalin) the leader was depending to carry out his orders. Krupskaya acquired little intelligence in return. In their evenings aboard
The Ilich,
as the agit-train rocked across the steppes, she questioned Astapov mostly about whether his wife Zhenya was pregnant, when he intended for her to become pregnant, and how many children he expected to have. Even after the agit-train’s return to Moscow, she had continued her inquiries. Childless herself, she had asked him again this morning. Astapov had reddened and was barely able to reply; in any case the answer would have been in the negative.

Zhenya. The higher you climbed in the theoretically non-hierarchical ranks of the Party, the greater was your responsibility to provide a model of moral socialist living. When Astapov had turned thirty the year before, his colleagues had remarked his lack of a wife and after prolonged discussion within the Commissariat, it was informally but imperatively resolved that he should have one. This proposition was presented to him in a blunt sermon by Krupskaya herself. Very shortly afterward Zhenya was introduced to him as a suitable match, the daughter of a Party cadre. He
bowed and then looked her over. She had a broad, peasant torso, despite having been born in Moscow, and her wide, round face was oddly vacant. In the light of his regard, it eventually produced an embarrassed smile. She would cook, clean, gather provisions at the Party commissary, and submit absolutely to Astapov’s carnal demands.

Much to his surprise, Astapov came to like the girl. She kept the apartment tidy and was quiet without being taciturn or severe. At the close of day he would find himself hastening up the three flights of unlit stairs to their apartment. As his head cleared the third-floor landing, he would gaze at the door as if something luminous lay behind it, the radiance spilling from under the door, around the jambs, and from within the keyhole. The affection was puzzling. Tonight, perhaps a bit unbalanced by the day’s incidents, Astapov paused on the floor below so that he could un-characteristically inquire of himself the origins of his intense, almost giddy anticipation. He found no answer. In any event, he expected that these emotions would vanish the moment he crossed the threshold and she would prove, as she did every evening, to be an ordinary simple-minded girl from the Presnya district.

Astapov knew little of Zhenya’s interior life. She rarely began a conversation about anything save household matters. Although her revolutionary credentials had been stringently verified, she demonstrated no interest in political affairs. She hardly ever read a newspaper and it seemed that her only acquaintances were those rationed out by the Commissariat. She moved through their Party-supplied home on light, nearly weightless feet—he couldn’t hear her in the next room. He came to suspect that she harbored secret religious feelings and was perhaps even praying alone during the day.

He entered the apartment. Waiting in the foyer, Zhenya nodded hello. Right away she served him a steaming bowl of mushroom soup and took a chair against the wall. This was what she did every evening, as if by Party directive. He smiled, a gesture she barely recognized, and he wondered if there was anything he could do that would make this evening different from the ones that preceded it. The long troublesome day demanded something new, he thought.

Finally, he said, “I had the most peculiar encounter today, it happened on Durnovski Lane.”

She was listening with interest, but he didn’t continue. Zhenya couldn’t possibly comprehend the wonder entailed by his vision of Comrade Stalin reading a newspaper on a street corner. Astapov couldn’t explain—and if he had explained his business with Stalin, he would have had no confidence that she would have kept the secret or that she would have understood the intent of their collusion.

He would have done better to have asked whether she had menstruated yet: that was what he wanted to speak about most. She wouldn’t say without prompting. They waited for her period every month grimly confident that it was imminent and that nothing would impede it. Childlessness had descended upon them like an oily, poisonous fog. The fog would obscure Astapov’s accomplishments. While the Party intensified its efforts to limit population growth in the country’s famine-stricken provinces, Krupskaya had launched a private mission to encourage child-bearing among the cadres. Zhenya herself desperately wanted to have children for reasons beyond the needs of the Party. She was mortified by her barrenness. She cried often, retreating to the water closet. Astapov would stand by the door, trying to think of something consoling, but no words came. Now, this evening, after mentioning
Durnovski Lane, it made no sense to discuss menstruation. She waited timidly for him to go on.

He plunged another dollop of sour cream into his soup, which was unquestionably delicious—until he was married he had never really tasted his food; nor, until the Commissariat had returned him to Moscow, had he gained access to quality meat and produce. This was ordinary mushroom soup,
gribnoi,
but it had been seasoned with rare spices, or at least some that were hard to find. He thought there was dill in the vapors rising from his bowl and perhaps cumin. Another aroma present was even more mysterious—it was something he strongly associated with Zhenya, tasting it in her hair and on her skin.