The Stone Bridge

The Sea

THE SEA

For the duration of my work on the great stone bridge I had to rent an apartment. I slammed the atlas of Moscow shut and chose the city of Feodosia, at the end of spring.

I flew there to bury my 37 years.

The plane descended: I could see the roofs of barns, garages and houses, cars, a sprinkle of graves, and another sprinkle of sheep. When I landed and walked down the endless Fedko Street, I was stunned by the undisturbed silence of the city: the rare passers-by did not wear heels, the air thickened, barbed wire slithered across the tops of fences, and at eight in the evening Feodosia was serenely asleep. The gutters had the smell of the nearby sea, and there was silence in the yards and gardens, an intoxicating silence broken once by the call of a seagull that swooped above me.

For some reason I went down to the sea instead of going straight to the hotel, and there the city opened up like a flower in springtime. Strings of lights were already blazing in empty cafés and bars, taxi drivers were waiting at their customary corners, music blared in empty discos, and waiters dressed as cowboys loitered before the evening rush of diners. The sea breathed, cold, calm and joyful. I walked like a traveler on another planet.

I shut myself in my room to read.

When I start a new job, I always read the lives of the fathers.

It is given to a particular class of righteous to record the acts of all the righteous: “A difficult time began, characterized by distrust in people, especially those who had lived abroad for a lengthy period of time. Six months later, Muravkin was arrested by the NKVD. His subsequent fate is unknown.” Of the first eight chiefs of Soviet foreign intelligence, seven were shot, and one died in a car accident — like the apostles!

Those who survived (“Ivan Andreevich Chichaev died on 15 November 1984 in his small apartment in a building on Serpukhovsky Val. At the funeral, his state awards were carried behind his coffin on scarlet cushions — the Order of Lenin, two Orders of the Red Banner, and the Order of the Red Star”), had to work their pens as payment, and paint, as it were, the metaphorical locomotive of the Revolution so it looked the way it should, so that it could barrel on, carrying the next generation whose turn it was to look into its hellish firebox.

I read these obligatory writings for the sake of their first lines. You see, the writers found it awkward to start with the dictated text right away; they couldn’t quite open with such steely phrases as, “by order of the court,” or “the decision was made to establish the facts, detain in secret and process for rendition,” or “in the course of the interrogation Dagen categorically denied that he had spied for a foreign nation, and ten days later he died after falling from the tenth floor of the building where his office was located.”

Instead, to gain some momentum, the writers had to add something of their own, and they permitted themselves a few idle phrases about nothing. And in these careful embellishments are contained the wind, the smell of lilacs, dry dandelion fluff flying through the air, carrying seeds. Such was all mere guileless invention, but it was in the invention itself that something survived which wasn’t meant to: the unofficial and therefor superfluous parts of the lives being described:

It was a stuffy August evening in 1950. On the streets of Tel Aviv people moved slowly, like disoriented flies. Perhaps the only person in the entire city who did not notice the heat or the humidity was the resident agent of the Soviet foreign intelligence in Israel, Vladimir Ivanovich Vertiporokh…

Or:

A summer day in 1934 was drawing to a close. The head of the Foreign section of the Unified State Political Department A.G. Artuzov went to the windows, closed the curtains and turned on the table lamp with the green lampshade…

And again:

January is not the best time of year in Shanghai. Cold winds from the ocean blow through the enormous city, and the streets are often drenched in rain and snow. On a dreary day in January 1939, the Soviet intelligence agent Nikolai Tishchenko went outside, drawing his leather coat tight around himself…

I left my room and got the keys to the business center from the front desk. When I sat down and searched for “Great Stone Bridge,” I got more than 2,000 results. I clicked on a random link. It was a long article published in the newspaper Top Secret, a story about a building on Romanov Lane (called Granovsky Street in the Soviet period), where Stalin’s Marshals and People’s Commissars lived, and after them their children and grandchildren. I read:

It is not out of the question that one of these children could have been carrying a pistol. The boy, Volodya, was the 15-year-old son of the head of the aviation industry, Shakhurin, a tall, blond man. The boy fell in love with the daughter of the diplomat Umansky, who was appointed Ambassador to Mexico. The girl’s name was Nina, she was also fifteen. Her family lived in a different building, the so-called House on the Embankment, where the apartments were larger, guests were not accosted by overzealous door-men, and where the residents had inherited from the old Bolsheviks the habit of honest poverty and the reading of books.

Nina and Volodya had their fateful conversation on the Great Stone Bridge, halfway between these two buildings, on the stairs that lead down to the Variety Theater. He may have asked her not to leave. Or he was jealous. Or was simply showing off. In short, Shakhurin Jr. shot the girl, point-blank. Then he shot himself, and died a day later. This was in 1943.

The neighbors were scandalized — look what the bosses’ spoiled brats did!

Stalin said, “Wolf cubs.”

The boy had seemed all right, but everyone was immediately appalled by what he did. Nonetheless, Volodya was given a lavish funeral, with the building’s entire courtyard covered in wreaths, although some said that his mother did not mourn him for very long: soon there were parties and Gypsy songs that could be heard in the entire building. The boy lies in Novodevichy cemetery, the girl’s ashes are in an urn bricked into the wall there, with her father and mother next to her, having been killed in a plane crash in 1945.

I closed the browser window, went back to my room and looked out the window, into the night. The stars shone brightly as if freshly scrubbed. I lay down, turned off the light, and pulled the phone closer on the nightstand. I tried to think of happy, bright things, but I couldn’t, it was all bleak. I had nothing: no home, no family, no woman, no parents, not even a job I loved. I might as well have been a limo driver for hire.