Shklovsky: Witness to an Era. Serena Vitale

last thing I felt like doing. I cut up one of my pajamas and wrapped the strips around my chest, howling with pain. Shklovsky called: “. . . My God, I made you cry, forgive this crabby old man. I’ll expect you tomorrow.”

      I asked if I could dine in my room: “We don’t do that here.” I went down to the restaurant and for a nominal fee of fifty rubles they put me at a small table off to the side; as usual, I ordered soup and Peking chicken, and for once, a double vodka (200 grams). I went back up to my room, lay down for about half an hour, and went back down just in time to sip the broth with bits of Chinese mushrooms floating among the traditional pelmeni. The orchestra was playing “Midnight in Moscow.” Back in my room, I rested again, and then went back for the second course. Seeing me heading for the elevator again, the guard for that floor asked me: “Is there something wrong? Up and down, up and down . . .” “Is that not allowed?” “No, but it makes our job difficult.” He didn’t specify which.

      December 30. 34° below zero. Serafima Gustavovna draped a blanket over her husband’s body like a peplos, brought in an electric heater, and then got into bed, in her clothes, under two tartan blankets. She was snoring by the time Viktor Borisovich finished his long, sad tale. As I was softly saying good-bye and asking about the plan for the following day, Shklovsky interrupted me: “Serenochka, tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, I want to give Sima a present. With the royalties from my translations abroad I’ve been able to stash away a little money, that is, tsertifikaty, but I’ve never set foot in a Beryozka. My Sima neither. And she dreams of having a dublyonka. They sell them at the Beryozka by the Novodevichy Monastery, she found out. Would you be willing to take her?” “Now???” “No, she’s tired, poor thing. Tomorrow. Since it’s a holiday the store will be almost empty, you’ll be able to take your time.” “And how will we get there and back?” He struggled to free his right arm from under the blanket, grabbed an address book and handed it to me. “You look, please, I don’t want to get my other glasses. Under V: Veselitsky, Afanasy Veselitsky, Writers’ Union.” Stunned, I replied: “Veselitsky? Do you know him, what kind of guy he is, how much he drinks?” “Of course. No less than the Central Committee put him in that position; he could drink even a whole distillery of vodka and no one would be able to move him from that chair. But he’s useful, and he can get us a car from the Union—am I or am I not a living icon?” He cleared his throat, summoned his threatening Dantonesque tone, and dialed the number. “Shklovsky here . . . Afanasy Aleksandrovich, tomorrow I need a . . .” After he hung up, he told me that a car would come pick us up at two on the dot.

      Who’d have ever thought—even the eighty-something Serafima Gustavovna had been seduced by the dublyonka. The original sin came from Lelouch and the film A Man and a Woman: the sheepskin overcoat Anouk Aimée wore became the dream of Soviet women for years (though the men’s version was also much sought-after), a symbol of western chic, privilege, affluence.

      “What a horrible day you picked!” Afanasy said to me as he helped Serafima Gustavovna into the car. “I had to make a hundred telephone calls to find a driver . . .” It was a miracle that he’d found one, he added, so he would take advantage and run a few errands; he would be back to pick us up at five sharp.

      During the trip to the Novodevichy Monastery (an ancient, splendid convent, where Chekhov and Gogol are buried: the ghost of the latter no doubt wandered around the “hard currency” store nearby to rob the fortunate clients of their warm, elegant overcoats), I turned two or three times to look out the back window. The Petenky and Vovochky were still there. Afanasy, who must have downed at least one vodka already, didn’t notice a thing.

      Around the Beryozka the snow had been cleared to make paths for vehicle access. Cars were scarce, as were customers, and Serafima Gustavovna had at least three salesgirls at her disposal to try on the dublyonki for sale. She couldn’t find one like she wanted—with a hood and not too dark, “otherwise it would age me.” We moved on to the hats, without much luck. As a gesture to the sales-women, who had been unusually kind, I bought a kind of fur turban: it made me look vaguely like Josephine Baker, but it paid off in warmth when we left the store at five—but no Afanasy and no car. We waited between the two doors, where we could feel some of the heat from inside, but after five minutes poor Serafima Gustavovna could hardly stand up. “That’s what I get for trying to look stylish at my age,” she mumbled, trembling. I took her back inside and asked for a chair. After we’d lost an hour and all hope (Afanasy’s errands must have been of the alcoholic variety, perhaps the driver had taken him to the hospital—if he wasn’t drunk himself!), I realized that I absolutely had to catch a taxi, hail down a car: planting my feet firmly in the hard snow I went down the path to the street and stood there, waving my right hand persistently. I couldn’t stand it for long, and after a few minutes I went back inside the Beryozka. Every time I came out, from the parallel paths, the Petenky and Vovochky put their cars into first and moved forward toward the street, only to reverse when I went back into the shop, completely frozen. I asked if I could call the Writers’ Union. Nobody picked up, of course. I resumed the quest: it was pitch dark, no cars except for my escorts’. Consumed with a desperate rage, I suddenly turned toward the Petenky on my left and practiced in my head what I was going to say: “At least let an old woman in your car to get warm, she could catch pneumonia. That would be a way to serve the State too!” Seeing me approach, the Petenky at the wheel of the 54-69 moved forward. In all honesty, I don’t know how it happened—they slid on the ice, or he was caught off guard, or he wanted to punish me for the unexpected insubordination, or the path was too narrow . . . When the Moskvich and I were side by side, the Petenky swerved toward me, forcing me to lunge onto a heap of snow so as not to be hit head on. By then the snow had become solid hard ice, rocklike . . .

      I limped back to the shop. I slipped, I said. One of the salesgirls felt bad for us: if we waited until closing, her husband, a taxi driver, would help us when he came to get her. I called Shklovsky to tell him we would be late.

      I managed to get Serafima Gustavovna back home and return to my hotel. No doctors at that hour, that night. After less than thirty minutes (they were even nice at the switchboard on New Year’s Eve), I got through to an Italian journalist friend who was in town. Surprised, he asked me how much I had drunk (if I’d been calling from Italy, it would have been well after midnight); he listened when I asked him for help, using “butterfly code”: I-fi am-fam in-fin big-fig trou-fruh ble-full, etc. The thought of a decoder trying to understand the secret language of my childhood made me smile, despite my aches and my hunger.

      The next morning my room was host to a real parade. First, the doctor. “Well, what have you been doing, you’re one big bruise. You drink too much. Stay in bed for at least two days and put some ice on your hip and thigh.” Then it was the man in the gray coat’s turn: “Technical assistance. I have to fix the phone.” “But it works just fine!” “That was the order. If you could please leave the room for a moment.” I revealed what bandages I could. “Don’t worry, I won’t look.” But I did: he casually unscrewed the receiver, inspected it, took something out, put something else in . . . The butterfly language must have made some ears burn. Third, my Italian friend arrived. “Let’s go to the foreigners’ hospital,” he limited himself to saying, and on the way (“you can talk, the car is safe”) he listened to my story. He had been in Russia for ten years and had never heard of anything like that happening . . . And to a foreigner . . . “Is your room clean?” “Spotless.” “Then be careful, something’s up. As soon as you get back to your hotel, don’t leave your room. They could slip drugs into one of your books, in a drawer. And leave as soon as you can.” He had a friend at Alitalia who could change my ticket. After the doctor’s visit (just two cracked ribs and some contusions on my left leg), he took me back to the Pekin and made sure that nobody had paid me a visit while I was out.

      Shklovsky called. Afanasy had gone over to apologize; the car had run out of fuel and he’d gotten stuck outside of town. “You can imagine—he smelled like Tsar Nicholas’ wine cellar. But he didn’t get off scot free, I whacked him with my cane . . .” He thanked me for getting Sima home safe and sound and ordered me not to come see him for at least two days, so I could rest and get better.

      I grabbed