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A Novel of Dissimulation
by Robert Littell
Book Reviewed by:
1993: THE CONDEMNED MAN CATCHES A GLIMPSE OF THE ELEPHANT
THEY HAD FINALLY
GOTTEN AROUND TO PAVING THE SEVEN
kilometers of dirt spur connecting the
village of Prigorodnaia to
the four-lane Moscow-Petersburg highway. The local priest,
surfacing
from a week-long binge, lit beeswax tapers to Innocent of
Irkutsk, the saint who in the 1720s had repaired the road to
China
and was now about to bring civilization to Prigorodnaia in the
form
of a ribbon of macadam with a freshly painted white stripe down
the
middle.
The peasants, who had a shrewder idea of how Mother
Russia
functioned, thought it more likely that this evidence of
progress, if
that was the correct name for it, was somehow related to the
purchase,
several months earlier, of the late and little lamented Lavrenti
Pavlovich Beria's sprawling wooden dacha by a man identified only as the Oligarkh.
Next to nothing was known about him. He came and
went at odd hours in a glistening black Mercedes S-600 sedan,
his
shock of silver hair and dark glasses a fleeting apparition
behind its
tinted windows. A local woman hired to do laundry was said to
have
seen him angrily flick cigar ashes from the crow's-nest rising
like a turret
from the dacha before turning back to issue instructions to
someone.
The woman, who was terrified of the dacha's newfangled electric
washing machine and scrubbed the laundry in a shallow reach of
the
river, had been too far away to make out more than a few words—
"Buried, that's what I want, but alive . . ."—but they and the
'
Oligarkh's
feral tone had dispatched a chill down her spine that made
her shudder every time she recounted the story.
Two peasants cutting firewood on the other side of the river had caught a
glimpse of the
Oligarkh from a distance, struggling on aluminum crutches along the path
behind his dacha that led to the dilapidated paper factory disgorging dirty
white smoke from its giant stacks fourteen hours a day, six days a week, and
beyond that to the village cemetery and the small Orthodox church with the faded
paint peeling away from its onion domes. A pair of Borzois rollicked in the dirt
ahead of the Oligarkh as he thrust one hip forward and dragged the leg
after it, then repeated the movement with the other hip. Three men in Ralph
Lauren jeans and telnyashki,
the distinctive striped shirts that paratroopers often
continued to wear after they quit the army, trailed after him,
shotguns
cradled in the crooks of their arms. The peasants had been
sorely
tempted to try for a closer look at the stubby, hunch-shouldered
newcomer
to their village, but abandoned the idea when one of them
reminded the other what the Metropolitan come from Moscow to
celebrate
Orthodox Christmas two Januaries earlier had proclaimed
from the ambo:
If you are stupid enough to dine with the devil, for Christ's
sake use
a long spoon.
The road crew, along with giant tank-treaded graders and
steamrollers
and trucks brimming with asphalt and crushed stone, had
turned up during the night while the aurora borealis was still
flickering
like soundless cannon fire in the north; it didn't take much
imagination
to suppose a great war was being fought beyond the horizon.
Casting elongated shadows in the ghostly gleam of headlights,
the
men pulled on tar-stiff overalls and knee-high rubber boots and
set
to work. By first light, with forty meters of paved road behind
them,
the aurora and the stars had vanished, but two planets were
visible in
the moonless sky: one, Mars, directly overhead, the other,
Jupiter,
still dancing in the west above the low haze saturated with the
amber
glow of Moscow. When the lead crew reached the circular crater
that
had been gouged in the dirt spur the day before by a steam
shovel,
the foreman blew on a whistle. The machines ground to a halt.
"Why are we stopping?" one of the drivers, leaning out the cab
of
his steamroller, shouted impatiently through the face mask he'd
improvised to filter out the sulfurous stench from the paper
factory.
The men, who were paid by the meter and not the hour, were
anxious
to keep moving forward.
Excerpted from Legends by Robert Littell. Copyright 2005 by Robert Littell. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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