Angels on the Head of a Pin: A Novel
256
Angels on the Head of a Pin: A Novel
256eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780720616057 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Owen, Peter Limited |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2003 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 944,954 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Yuri Druzhnikov is a professor at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of a number of works of fiction and non-fiction and he was nominated by Poland for the Nobel prize.
Read an Excerpt
Angels on the Head of a Pin
A Novel
By Yuri Druzhnikov, Thomas Moore
Peter Owen Publishers
Copyright © 1979 Yuri DruzhnikovAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7206-1607-1
CHAPTER 1
At the Main Entrance
He came to a halt between the two guards and presented his dark-red identification card. While one of them studied his photograph and checked it against its original, the other one attentively looked over Igor Makartsev from head to foot. The second nodded to the first, and the first returned the document.
'If you please.'
Mechanically putting the ID into his pocket, Makartsev moved towards the exit. Before, he always used to say goodbye, but now he only nodded with dignity. As he walked, he wound his scarf around his neck and buttoned up his overcoat. Pulling the inner door towards him, he could feel the light pressure of warm air from underneath the wooden grating. Giving the outer door a shove, he went out on to the footpath.
The cold, wet air tickled his nostrils, filled his lungs. His eyes took in the Polytechnic Museum, the pot-bellied monument to the grenadiers who fell at Plevna, and Old Square, deserted – if you didn't count several special-detachment traffic inspectors – and cut off by a solid row of parked cars. To the right, overtaking one another, more cars tore along downhill to the Chinese Way. Not for the first time the fleeting thought struck Makartsev that the thoroughfare's name was a patent misnomer. The street should have been renamed long before. What nonsense: the road leading straight up to the most important building in the country being called the Chinese Way!
Makartsev's appearance on the deserted footpath didn't remain unnoticed by the traffic wardens, nor by the various people in civilian clothes standing around unobtrusively. Moreover, every passer-by was stared at by the chauffeurs who were waiting for their masters and from time to time warming up their engines. It was beginning to get dark, and a light snow was falling, but the street lights hadn't yet come on and the drivers were straining their eyes not to miss their charges.
Aleksey Dvoyeninov, brisk and sharp-nosed, now and again ran his eyes from door to door. Even though Makartsev more often than not went in and out through the main entrance, his pass let him through any of the building's entryways. Catching sight of his boss, Aleksey instantly started up the engine and turned on the heater, but he didn't open the door for Makartsev straight away because he wanted to keep the passenger cabin from getting cold. It hadn't been likely that his boss was going to show up soon. He would always say he wouldn't be long, and then he would sit around in there for two hours, sometimes up to four.
Makartsev cut across the footpath and had already stepped out on to the square when suddenly, feeling a stab in his heart, he stopped, throwing his head back. It had been acting up from time to time, and after standing still for a moment he decided against breathing too deeply. It was as if an electric current had hit him in the shoulder, the pain momentarily running down into his stomach.
Makartsev tried to moan, but all that came out was a wheeze. He clutched a hand to his chest, trying to undo a button. Spots rippled in front of his eyes, the Polytechnic building tilted over to one side and the cars started up, heading all in a bunch straight for Makartsev. He realized he was losing consciousness. Both his legs lost their strength and his knees buckled. Saving his head from hitting the pavement, he got his hands behind him and sat up. Consciousness stayed with him.
The first thing he noticed when he was on the ground was the sharp odour of urine. The wind, mixed with snow, was blowing from a corner of the Polytechnic Museum, carrying with it the fug from a public lavatory. There was nobody near him to give him a hand up or call for help. And pain, pain enough to make you gasp. His only chance of salvation was a rapid return to the door that he'd just come through.
The pain became unbearable; his arms ached. His body contorted, refusing to obey him, and Makartsev fell back. Gritting his teeth, he slowly rolled over on to one side and got to his knees. Now he had to get up on to the footpath. But the snow was melting, and his hands slipped. For an instant he felt the idiocy of his position: a man of his rank crawling into the Central Committee building on all fours. They would see him, they would spread it around, and his authority would be weakened. They might even report him to Himself. But the pain was making him forget about everything else. The important thing was to get to a doctor. They would save him! The door was heavy, it wasn't something he could just shove open. He was going to have to reach the door-handle. He moved towards the door on all fours, very slowly.
Having noticed Makartsev crossing the footpath Aleksey had turned on the engine and the heater and had bent over to open the heating vent a bit wider: Makartsev loved to warm his legs in the flow. The vent was jammed. When Aleksey, with a jerk, finally shifted it and once more looked out his boss was nowhere to be seen. Had he mistaken somebody else for him? Then he saw someone crawling on all fours in the twilight, towards the door over which, in gold letters, was written the legend 'Communist Party Central Committee'. Another few moments passed before Aleksey caught on.
With his last strength Makartsev clawed at the edge of the door, whimpering, and collapsed on to the wet, bristly mat they used to wipe their feet on. The guards stepped over and lifted him up. One of them pressed a button. Makartsev failed to notice anything else: he was unconscious.
'One of ours,' said a guard, glancing at his blackening face. The second adroitly unbuttoned Makartsev's overcoat and pulled his identification card out of his pocket. He did it as briskly and skillfully as if he'd been the one who'd put it there. He dutifully checked the photograph on it against the original lying in front of him and nodded to the doctors. 'You can take him in.'
They picked him up by the arms and legs and put him on a stretcher. He groaned. Within a minute and forty seconds they had him off the stretcher and on to the operating table in the emergency surgery, equipped with the latest American-made apparatus.
Makartsev lay there in his dark suit, clean but threadbare, ten years out of fashion. His black half-boots were neatly shined, but the heels were slightly worn. This uniform, stitched up in the Central Committee's own tailor shop, was especially for those days when he went to the Big House. It wasn't the thing to stand out, either from a too bright tie or too carefully ironed trousers, and his wife, knowing that, always ironed the trousers of his Central Committee suit with a dry cloth instead of a wet one. They covered the patient with a sheet, and two emergency doctors from the Fourth Chief Directorate of the Ministry of Health – keeping their round-the-clock duty watch here – bent over him.
Slipping into the space before the inner door, Aleksey only managed to catch a glimpse of his boss, like a dead person, being put on a stretcher and carried off.
'I need to know. I'm a chauffeur, his driver ...'
'Driver? Then get back to your car!'
'Yes, but what's going on with him?'
'They'll inform you when they can.'
He turned off his engine, and, wrapping his arms around the wheel, rested against it. Drive back to the office and tell them the chief is sick? Or first rush over to his house and inform his wife? But then I'll have to drive her here and then maybe somewhere else. He'll lie around in there for a while and then come out. His car won't be here, and there'll be a panic all over Moscow. It'd be better for me to just sit here, snooze a bit ...
Aleksey had already had enough sleep (he'd shown up early at work and slept his fill behind the wheel, in expectation of his boss's arrival), and now he'd turned on the engine six times or so to warm up. The cars parked next to him left, and others pulled in to their places. He smoked his last cigarette, although he usually always hung on to the last one, since the time the year before last he'd driven Makartsev back from a reception at the dacha of somebody in government. Makartsev, a bit tipsy, searched for a cigarette in his pockets and then asked Aleksey for one, but Aleksey didn't have any fags left either.
'What kind of a chauffeur are you if you can't hang on to a cigarette for me?' Makartsev gave Aleksey a fatherly tug on the ear.
The Volga had come to a sudden halt in front of a traffic cop – there were more of them on Uspenskoye Chaussee than there were mushrooms in the woods. Aleksey, indicating his boss with a toss of the head, asked for a cigarette. The portly lieutenant, getting on in years (on routes maintained for government use their ranks were usually higher than was indicated on their shoulderboards), looked askance at the car's license plate, with its double-zero first two digits. They had no right to stop a car with those zeroes on it, and Aleksey had a card appended to his license that allowed him to break the traffic laws, so long as he kept within the bounds of safety. Saluting, the traffic cop silently pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and Aleksey, winking, took two of them. From that day on Aleksey had always held on to his last one. But Makartsev never once asked him for a cigarette; on the contrary, he himself would give his driver a present of a pack of American ones or sometimes even two. But now Aleksey had smoked his hold-out, so he decided to drive to the office and come back again if he had to.
Because the chauffeur was alone they didn't bother switching the lights to green for him right away. Aleksey rolled along towards Dzerzhinsky Square unhurriedly, although he was used to chasing around Moscow at over sixty miles an hour. At a trolleybus stop he was flagged down by a thickset man with a suitcase who looked like someone on a business trip.
'I'll pay you to take me to Kursk Station. I'm late.'
Aleksey drove him to Kursk Station in silence. When he got close, he turned the car around on the Garden Ring and said: 'Settle up with me in advance, or someone at the station will nick me for doing a job on the side.'
The passenger nodded and held out a three-ruble note – lunch for Aleksey. Aleksey never wasted his wage-packet but saved his money for the extension to his parents' house. Not so that he could go to live in the country but so that his wife and child would have somewhere to go in summer. He didn't want to live any worse than other people. The side trip took ten minutes, no longer. Spinning his keys around a finger, Aleksey took the lift to the fourth floor, where the editor-in-chief's office was. Walking into reception, he'd already opened his mouth to say the phrase that he had ready when Anna attacked him in a whisper.
'Where did you disappear to?! You should have taken Makartsev's wife to him right away. They were looking for you all over the building and in the garage. They sent Yagubov's car, and he himself has to get to the city council right away.'
'I'll take him,' said Aleksey. 'What's the matter with him, with Makartsev?'
'Did you just come from the moon? A myocardial infarct, a bad one. The posterior wall, and something else, too ... He's in the Kremlin hospital, in a room, I've forgotten what it's called. And where have you been? Have you been moonlighting again?'
She disappeared into the office of the deputy editor-in-chief, Yagubov.
'In-farct,' Aleksey mouthed carefully, not investing the word with any understanding.
The reception area was empty. He looked at the secretary's desk. On the desk calendar today was Wednesday, 26 February 1969 – a black border had been drawn around it. Anna had already marked the day of the editor-in-chief's sudden illness for future reference. Returning, she informed him that he had to chauffeur Yagubov in ten minutes. Aleksey started telling Anna how he'd been waiting in front of the Central Committee building. Anna was supposed to be in the know about absolutely everything, and she listened attentively, memorizing the new details.
'So why did you keep quiet when I was telling you off?'
'... and he crawled like a dog up to the door,' Aleksey finished his tale, not answering her.
'And he was wise to do so,' Anna said approvingly. 'If Makartsev had stayed lying in the square a city ambulance would have had to pick him up. And it takes so long just to get one. It would have come thirty minutes later and then taken another half an hour to find space in a city hospital – he'd probably have been left somewhere in a corridor. And then if they'd transferred him to the Kremlin – he would have been jolted around. They say that if he hadn't crawled as far as that door he would never have come round again!'
'But why would he have a heart attack? He was just as happy as ever.'
She didn't answer, but he didn't repeat the question. Closing his eyes, Aleksey thought lazily of how immeasurably happier he was – an ordinary chauffeur – than Makartsev. That fellow had nothing but fuss, duties and cares – more than you could count. How much better it was to just take people somewhere and bring them back and live for yourself. No, he wouldn't want to be in the editor's place!
Despite that, Aleksey did have his own aspirations. And they were no less important than other people's.
CHAPTER 2The Rise and Fall of Aleksey Dvoyeninov
Nikanor Dvoyeninov had come back to his village from the Second World War among the first of the few villagers to return at all. The whole town had poured out on to the street when, his medals clinking, he marched up the hill to his house on the outskirts, rubbing his wounded thigh. He had left the place as a boy, but he'd gone quite bald, even though the war hadn't harmed him too much. He'd had to hang about in the military hospital for a while with a slight wound, but his life had not been in danger. His baldness had either come about from his constant fright or the hairs had simply been worn off by the winter cap he hadn't taken off once in three years.
All day until late people came from the neighbouring village of Padikovo, where Nikanor had half a street full of relatives, to touch him, the survivor. Nikanor took off his jodhpurs, keeping on only his sweat-soaked blue underpants. And suddenly Klavdiya from next door threw herself to her knees, sobbed and, embracing Nikanor's legs, started covering his scarred thigh with kisses. They barely managed to pull her off and make her drink icy spring water.
But, in any case, Nikanor – crazed with his own joy, everyone's attention and the illicitly distilled samogon vodka – was lost to Klavdiya that very evening. When they sat down to his feast she contrived to sit right next to him and never took a step away from him. Every so often, as if by accident, she would touch his thigh. She looked at him with moist, devoted eyes, and he could scarcely say a word without her bursting into laughter. Klavdiya had long ago reached womanhood and would go off into the woods with any passing stranger whenever the opportunity arose. But, owing to the total lack of men in Anosino during recent times, she was starved of sex and so was particularly hot for him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Angels on the Head of a Pin by Yuri Druzhnikov, Thomas Moore. Copyright © 1979 Yuri Druzhnikov. Excerpted by permission of Peter Owen Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
1 At the Main Entrance,2 The Rise and Fall of Aleksey Dvoyeninov,
3 A Classic Infarct,
4 Makartsev's Own Flights and Falls,
5 Icebergs,
6 The Grey Folder,
7 The Joys and Sorrows of Anna Lokotkova,
8 A Little Night Reading,
9 A Visit by the Marquis de Custine,
10 Towards Morning,
11 Who To Talk to?,
12 The Parabola of Valentin Kashin,
13 Everyone Has Their Own Functions,
14 The Free Fall of Yakov Rappoport,
15 Playing by the Rules,
16 The Planning Session,
17 The Passion of St Rappoport,
18 The Ups and Downs of Stepan Yagubov,
19 Heading Off on a Mission,
20 Ascentless, Descentless Nadya Sirotkina,
21 The Secret of the Magic Trick,
22 The Ellipse of Maksim Zakamorny,
23 School for Canaries,
24 The Theory and Practice of Sasha Kakabadze,
25 I'm a Fish,
26 The Demeanours and Misdemeanours of Special Correspondent Ivlev,
27 What Are You Scared Of?,
28 An Imperishable Thing,
29 The Sabbath,
30 Cold Glass,
31 Meeting at the Kremlin Hospital,
32 The Existence of Zina Makartseva,
33 I'm Going to Kiss You Anyway!,
34 The Circumstances Accompanying and Impeding Boris Makartsev,
35 Friday, 6 a.m.,
36 Captain Uterin's Career,
37 Got to Find Some Channels,
38 Yagubov's Hour,
39 You Have to Grumble, Even If You Don't Want To,
40 The Screws Tighten,
41 At Rappoport's,
42 The Stages of Inna Svetlozerskaya,
43 The Only Way Out,
44 The Twists and Turns of Lev Polishchuk,
45 Behind Yagubov's Back,
46 The Victories and Defeats of Delez Volobuyev,
47 Unmonitored Associations,
48 Rain,
49 Sisyphus Sagaydak, Impotentologist-General,
50 The Tenth Circle,
51 From the Life of St Alla,
52 A Shot of Tea,
53 Subbotnik at Nadya's,
54 'Excuse Me, I Seem to Be Bothering You ...',
55 The Rise of Vasilly Sirotkin,
56 Reception at the Chairman's,
57 Such Is Life in the Party,
58 777,
59 Hockey Fans,
60 Permafrost,
61 The Joys and Sorrows of Tonya Ivleva,
62 Don't Write Down Any Phone Numbers!,
63 The Typewriter,
64 The Once-Over,
65 The Return of the Prodigal Son,
66 Personal Indiscretion,
67 This Too Shall Pass,
68 Fille Fatale,
69 The Pale-Blue Envelope,
70 Tomorrow Is the Holiday,