at me intently. Ancient Athenian, I thought, why won’t you tell me what you know?
‘There’s going to be a meeting in Bucharest,’ he said. ‘A friend of mine who’s a member of the Central Committee of the Greek Party passed the information to me. You’re not in the loop?’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘No!’
And it was true: I knew nothing about any meetings coming up in Bucharest or Warsaw. But if I’d heard about them I don’t think I’d have been whispering and making such a drama of it as he was. There were gatherings of that kind almost every month in one or other of the socialist capitals.
‘Apparently, here in Moscow as well,’ he went on, in the same near-whisper, ‘there’s going to be a conference alongside the festivities for the anniversary of the October Revolution.’
‘Really?’
‘And it’s already a while since they appointed the central committee and the preparatory subcommittees – the political subcommittee, the economic and cultural subcommittee . . .’
What subcommittees? Why did hearing about them make me shiver?
‘Ah! You don’t know anything. You didn’t know that Vukmanović-Tempo has just been in Moscow as well, did you?’
‘I did,’ I said. ‘You told me.’
‘Of course. I’d forgotten.’
I was on the point of telling him what Maskiavicius had told me two days earlier about the alternately smiling and scowling faces of Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung that had been shown on posters after their meeting a few weeks earlier in the airport at Beijing, but thought better of it. What’s the point? I thought. It’s probably just gossip.
He seemed about to tell me something else, or maybe not. He paused, then said, ‘Tomorrow we shall drink.’
‘Yes. Tomorrow,’ I repeated.
While we were in the café we said the word ‘tomorrow’ many times in a particular way, almost with a kind of relief. Occasionally it seemed to me – and maybe to Antaeus as well – that we were piling into it, as into a dustbin, all our unexpressed thoughts, all our hopes, our flaws and our mutual suspicions.
*
Sometimes Sunday seemed so palpable to me that I almost believed it was embossed and in colour. I could even feel it moving and sliding away under our skis, beneath our feet. I felt as if in this endlessly white and undulating area it had always been Sunday, since the time of the tsars and even further back, that it had been Sunday since the year 1407 or 1007. How many times had Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and even savage Tuesdays come close? They’d prowled around silently in the hope of getting on to the plateau – to no avail. They eventually understood there was no easy way in for them and had discreetly withdrawn from an area where Sunday had reigned supreme for centuries.
Grey izba s dotted the landscape beneath a uniform sky about which I had written a hendecasyllabic line some time before: The formless sky is like an idiot’s brain. In Russian translation it sounded even more grisly:
Бeзфopмeннoe нeъo кaк мoзг тулици
Yнылый дoждь зaливaeт улицы
I’d been harshly criticised for it in the poetry seminar.
The day was rushing away beneath my feet. Among the hummocks of snow, people with odd fixtures on their skis came and went, then dropped in at the Writers’ Club and reappeared with greater ease in their movements, having downed a dram without even taking off their skis.
In fact, with a few exceptions, nobody knew how to ski properly, but none of us ever took our skis off. Taburokov even tried to go to the toilet with his on.
They all looked drunk. But it wasn’t just the vodka. They were under the influence of the uninterrupted sky, the sadness of the horizontal beams of the izba s, and the snow, which made it so easy to laugh (Kurganov said that only in snow can people laugh one hundred per cent, especially if their feet are strapped into skis).
We spent the whole day going round in unending circles, with the
‘There’s going to be a meeting in Bucharest,’ he said. ‘A friend of mine who’s a member of the Central Committee of the Greek Party passed the information to me. You’re not in the loop?’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘No!’
And it was true: I knew nothing about any meetings coming up in Bucharest or Warsaw. But if I’d heard about them I don’t think I’d have been whispering and making such a drama of it as he was. There were gatherings of that kind almost every month in one or other of the socialist capitals.
‘Apparently, here in Moscow as well,’ he went on, in the same near-whisper, ‘there’s going to be a conference alongside the festivities for the anniversary of the October Revolution.’
‘Really?’
‘And it’s already a while since they appointed the central committee and the preparatory subcommittees – the political subcommittee, the economic and cultural subcommittee . . .’
What subcommittees? Why did hearing about them make me shiver?
‘Ah! You don’t know anything. You didn’t know that Vukmanović-Tempo has just been in Moscow as well, did you?’
‘I did,’ I said. ‘You told me.’
‘Of course. I’d forgotten.’
I was on the point of telling him what Maskiavicius had told me two days earlier about the alternately smiling and scowling faces of Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung that had been shown on posters after their meeting a few weeks earlier in the airport at Beijing, but thought better of it. What’s the point? I thought. It’s probably just gossip.
He seemed about to tell me something else, or maybe not. He paused, then said, ‘Tomorrow we shall drink.’
‘Yes. Tomorrow,’ I repeated.
While we were in the café we said the word ‘tomorrow’ many times in a particular way, almost with a kind of relief. Occasionally it seemed to me – and maybe to Antaeus as well – that we were piling into it, as into a dustbin, all our unexpressed thoughts, all our hopes, our flaws and our mutual suspicions.
*
Sometimes Sunday seemed so palpable to me that I almost believed it was embossed and in colour. I could even feel it moving and sliding away under our skis, beneath our feet. I felt as if in this endlessly white and undulating area it had always been Sunday, since the time of the tsars and even further back, that it had been Sunday since the year 1407 or 1007. How many times had Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and even savage Tuesdays come close? They’d prowled around silently in the hope of getting on to the plateau – to no avail. They eventually understood there was no easy way in for them and had discreetly withdrawn from an area where Sunday had reigned supreme for centuries.
Grey izba s dotted the landscape beneath a uniform sky about which I had written a hendecasyllabic line some time before: The formless sky is like an idiot’s brain. In Russian translation it sounded even more grisly:
Бeзфopмeннoe нeъo кaк мoзг тулици
Yнылый дoждь зaливaeт улицы
I’d been harshly criticised for it in the poetry seminar.
The day was rushing away beneath my feet. Among the hummocks of snow, people with odd fixtures on their skis came and went, then dropped in at the Writers’ Club and reappeared with greater ease in their movements, having downed a dram without even taking off their skis.
In fact, with a few exceptions, nobody knew how to ski properly, but none of us ever took our skis off. Taburokov even tried to go to the toilet with his on.
They all looked drunk. But it wasn’t just the vodka. They were under the influence of the uninterrupted sky, the sadness of the horizontal beams of the izba s, and the snow, which made it so easy to laugh (Kurganov said that only in snow can people laugh one hundred per cent, especially if their feet are strapped into skis).
We spent the whole day going round in unending circles, with the
Similar Books
