Monumental Propaganda by Vladímir Voinóvich Page B

loaded four sheets of paper with carbon paper into his typewriter and beginning to hammer out the lines or columns of his next text with furious speed. He was working simultaneously on his lyrical verse and the allegorical poem “Dawn in Norilsk” (about the sun rising after the long winter), and the novel
The
Timber Camp
(about the work of convicts in the Khanty-Mansiisk taiga), and his memoirs under the title “Years of My Life Remembered,” and articles on questions of morality and pedagogy, which he submitted in large numbers to the central newspapers, and letters to the Central Committee of the CPSU and to Khrushchev in person, which always began with the words “Dear and Respected Nikita Sergeevich!” Antonina sat on the divan beside the table, knitting her cohabitant a cap, since not a single piece of headgear available in the shops would fit on his head. Our Soviet industry was oriented toward the head size of the average Soviet man and gross output figures, and mass production could not cater to Mark Semyonovich’s size ten.
    Antonina worked away with her needles, from time to time glancing curiously at Shubkin. Sometimes, when he fell into deep thought about something, his eyes would glaze over and his mouth would fall open and he would stay like that for many minutes, so that Tonka, frightened that Shubkin had departed for a place from which there is no return, would call out to him: “Mark Semyonovich!”
    But there were times when his trance was so deep that he was deaf to all her calls. She would repeat his name again and again, go over and shake him, shout right in his ear: “Mark Semyonovich!”
    He would shudder violently, stare at her with crazy eyes and call out: “Ah? What?” Then as he came around, he would ask: “What is it, Antonina?”
    â€œNothing,” she would reply in embarrassment and explain with a blissful smile, “it’s just that I’d like to know, Mark Semyonovich, what it is you keep thinking about all the time, racking your brains so hard.”
    â€œAh, my dear Tonka,” Mark Semyonovich would reply with a sigh. “It seems to me that our Party is overshadowed by the threat of a new Thermidor and petit-bourgeois degeneration.”
    Since she didn’t know the word “Thermidor,” he would begin to enlighten her, telling her about the Great French Revolution, and then about something else, so that everything became jumbled up together: literature, history and philosophy. He recited by heart to her Pushkin’s
Poltava
and
Eugene Onegin
and Mayakovsky’s poem
Vladimir Ilich Lenin,
related the contents of Chernyshevsky’s novel
What Is to Be Done?
or Tommaso Campanella’s
City of the Sun.
At one time he had attempted to expose Lyalya to enlightenment in a similar fashion, but while he was telling her something, she would be putting on her lipstick or trying on a new dress in front of the mirror, or she would interrupt him with remarks about some new show or snatch up the phone when it rang and generally give the impression that she knew all this stuff herself anyway. Antonina was a far more grateful listener. She gazed unblinkingly at Mark Semyonovich with her mouth wide open as he strode about the room gesturing wildly and introducing her to the myths of Ancient Greece, telling her about distant countries, about journeys and travelers, revolutionaries, dreamers and fighters for the people’s cause, about seas, stars and future flights into outer space. Unfortunately, as she said herself, she had a head like a sieve, and everything flew straight out through its holes and on out into space—not a thing was retained. Thanks to those holes, he could tell Antonina one and the same story an infinite number of times, and she always listened just as attentively.
    But educational activity wasn’t the only way Shubkin and his Antonina passed the time. In the morning she would arrive at