disUNITY

Part One-2

When he found out why, the cup fell from his hands and a dry brown tea stain appeared on the carpet. The same stains and puddles were spread over the floor of the institute, except that those were dark red, not brown. The institute had been stormed by armed men who had shot dead two guards and the director, wounded his secretary and then mercilessly clubbed nearly a dozen others who got in their way. On the television the wounded were being led out of the building, then the bodies were carried out, covered in sheets, some white, some blood-spattered.

White as snow, Arefiev sat in his armchair glued to the screen. The old woman worked her jaws, unruffled.

“At three o’clock today, in the institute…” the television was saying.

Arefiev remembered that he had left early that day, at a quarter to three. Fifteen minutes had separated him from…

6.

Bullets were singing in thin air… People were only just starting to get used to contract killings in Russia. It was later that bankers, bandits, politicians and passerby, the ones who had seen something and the ones who hadn’t, were culled on a daily basis, and it is still going on; there’s no end to it. And there’s no point in asking why, because there’s always a weapon and a target; as many targets as you can think of. Not to mention that it’s a well-paid job, and one doesn’t even have to perfect his shooting skills, as he can always take a few pot-shots – just to be sure.

Those killed were buried with much weeping and wailing. And the weeping and wailing rose up under the clouds and then throughout all the years to come it would swoop down onto our good old Earth more often than you could imagine. Listen – it is still there, biding its time!

Then it occurred to him: the man from the forest knew! “As for concrete reality, you will see it on the television this evening…” When was that said? At three o’clock? Slightly later? Yes, that’s right. How could he have known? Or had he played an active part in those events? Arefiev felt uneasy. He realised that something hidden, something terrible was going on, and that some unknown entity had given him a particular role in it all.

As always, he soothed himself with music. The cherished chest with its gleaming golden ribs opened up and produced Schubert’s quartets. Arefiev donned gigantic headphones, which were more akin to some antiquated apparatus for deadening noise than to headphones, and immersed himself in “Death and the Maiden.” An odd name, he pondered, thinking about his own life. He’d had enough death in his life, but as for maidens… And he began to remember all the girls for whom he’d felt anything, even a little, starting from when he was sixteen. He didn’t have a good word for any of them now. Not one of them had appreciated him. They had all been so self-absorbed. And apart from certain fluctuating emotions, he was mainly self-absorbed, too. Life is a feast of egoism, he thought. The chest with its LPs exuded unsung peace, and Schubert was intimating some other life which flowed with beauty and harmony.

7.

Sounds are formed by colours. This secret is known only to the most skilful sound painters. Black is stillness, and white is the whole orchestra. A day sometimes reveals itself as a green andante played by a violin, and sometimes as a brown solo of a flute.

That harmony was infiltrated by something persistent and not entirely harmonious; Schubert had clearly written nothing of the kind.

Arefiev half raised his headphones. The telephone’s raucous ring came pouring in. He grabbed the receiver.

The hush of offices seeped into the room, offices with unpleasant portraits and clocks with golden pendulums, and with never-ending cellars burrowing into the innards of the earth.

Can we keep someone out of our lives if he, or they, really want to burrow into them? Alas, we cannot.

“You don’t like the portraits on our walls, do you?” enquired a pleasant, gravelly, inanimate voice. “Let’s say the choice were yours. Who would you suggest?”

“Malyuta Skuratov,”* Arefiev blurted out with not a moment’s hesitation.

“I suppose you think that’s awfully ironic, but in fact he could easily hang here. Well, who would you put forward as a positive role model? In your opinion, whose portraits should hang in government offices?”

Whose indeed? Arefiev pondered. Peter the Great? Suvorov and Kutuzov**? You couldn’t put writers here – imagine for a moment that Solzhenitsyn were watching from the walls and you could read in his stern eyes exactly what he thought about this establishment…

“Aha, keeping quiet, are we?” the voice laughed gloatingly. “Well then, come on over and we can discuss it.”

“Is it compulsory?” Arefiev said after a pause.

“No, quite voluntary,” said the receiver soothingly. “We are part of history after all, and as Lincoln said: “we cannot escape history”.”

“You are quoting Lincoln?” Arefiev was taken aback.

“We like to study our enemies,” said the voice. “And our friends, too. Believe me, we know a lot about you. So come on over – let’s say, tomorrow, at around ten-ish. No-one’s working in your institute now anyhow. They are all listening to music. This kind of music…”

And music came down the telephone. It was the Allegretto from Beethoven’s seventh symphony, which some think of as funeral music. There are some who think any music except the hit parade is funeral music, thought Arefiev as he listened to the music over the phone and wondered whether it was Toscanini conducting or Furtwängler. At around bar sixty-four a click was heard and the line went dead.

8.

The following morning Arefiev walked straight out of his house and into the sunshine. Screwing up his eyes against the dazzle, he headed into the forest and opened his eyes, only to discover that he wasn’t in the forest at all. In fact, he had no idea where he was. He found himself in the midst of a painted landscape: the grass was coloured in with felt-tip pen, the crooked apple trees were festooned with unrealistically bright fruit, and a painted green sun hung in the sky. Arefiev could have sworn he had not gone more than 50 paces from his house.

A little white track stood out in the middle of the drawing and Arefiev set out along it. It led to a white cottage with a thatched roof. The roof was coloured in orange for some reason. Arefiev had just begun to wonder whether there was a door when one materialised, complete with a doorknocker in the form of a lion’s face. Arefiev grasped the knocker. The bronze lion yawned and said: “Aha, so an entrance has come to light.”

Arefiev froze on the spot and stood there for a long time because the picture, too, froze on the paper – Someone-Who-Wanted-To-Look was approaching. But Arefiev didn’t see who it was as he suddenly felt very weak and sat down, right in front of the door. He put his head on his knees and fell asleep. The last thing he saw was a real dog chasing a rabbit as it scurried across the picture-perfect lawn. The dog apprehended the rabbit and was frogmarching it into the kennel.

“Well?”

“He’s asleep, Comrade Captain.”

“Where?”

“In the cell. He’s leaning against the wall, asleep. Maybe he’s dreaming.”

“Maybe he is, but he’s not telling us.”

“We didn’t ask.”

“We asked all right. With instruments.”

“Of course, it is possible he doesn’t know anything.”

“Anything’s possible, but it’s not clear how he could be in the thick of it all and not notice anything.”

“He probably doesn’t want to notice.”

“Mmm…”

It was not, as you might expect, people who were talking, but uniforms.

What was inside those uniforms is quite another matter. But it doesn’t matter anyway, of course, since whoever was idling in those uniforms was nothing more than a uniform-filler.

9.

Arefiev dreamt that he got married and that his wife was a corpulent, inwardly noisy woman in a gaudy, variegated dress who wanted to make a famous professor out of him and who forced him to meet various evergreen people which meant he had no time for himself when he could listen to his records. To cap it all, when they argued, she made her point by producing a little red pass with a golden coat of arms from some secret place and showing it to him. Of course, everyone knows that a pass like that from the police or the secret service is the pride and joy of every Russian soul, Arefiev thought. Actually, it would be nice to wake up, even in the cellars of the Lubyanka.* And with that second thought he did indeed wake up. But not where he had feared, nor in the picture garden; he woke up in his own bachelor’s bed at home. For some reason the clock said it was already evening.

He should at least have lunch. He had bought in some sausages, but there was nothing to go with them. He liked to eat off multicoloured plates since his food looked really rather wretched on a white plate. Scientific researchers aren’t well paid, he thought as he gnawed a tomato, especially since the inflation of the early nineties when they’d added so many zeroes to each note and money just slipped through your fingers. He wondered what the figure on his next wage packet would be and whether it wouldn’t just remain exactly that – a figure on paper. And I have Mother to feed, too. Just as well she doesn’t need much.

Just then a suspicious sound came from the corner, followed by a wild squeal. A mouse had got caught in the spider’s web and Arefiev would not have liked to be in its place.

He had supper before going to bed. He served up silence. Under his knife the silence fell away into pieces of china sound, sliced air, and a rustle beyond the window. The leaves were evidently begging to be included in the salad, but the window pane kept them out. Offended, they formed a green conspiracy and spread themselves out as a mosaic on the glass to prevent Day from getting in the next morning. Their fingers were slipping over the cold, greenish surface, their flat bodies bristled with cold, but they didn’t just curl up and give in. What was it they had drawn on the glass? That life is a punishment, and we don’t even know for what?

10.

The Institute of Useful Mutations where Arefiev worked was established in the mid seventies. This is how it came about: Early one morning, the phone rang in the apartment of academician Churbasov, who had the pleasure of being personal physician to Leonid Illyich Brezhnev. It was so early that the academician was still somewhere in the cherished depths of sleep. But the telephone didn’t let up.

“Yeah…” The enormous academician, waking in a cold sweat, finally raised the receiver to his small, myopic little head: he was vaguely reminiscent of a diplodocus which had somehow acquired glasses.

“We have to create him, my dear fellow,” came the obscure rumble.

“Create who, Leonid Illyich?”

“You know, the young builder of Communism.”

Having over-eaten the night before, Brezhnev had woken up at five in the morning and couldn’t get off to sleep again. Vexed, he fumbled through some papers on his bedside table and picked up the first one which came to hand. By sheer chance it turned out to be the

“Code of the Young Builder of Communism.”

Brezhnev yanked the light switch and a lamp in the shape of a five-pointed star came on. It was pink, oddly enough. At first he read half-heartedly, but soon became absorbed.

“But how can we create him, Leonid Illyich?” said the academician, somewhat at a loss.