Mother Russia by Robert Littell Read Free Book Online Page A

question withdrawn,” he fumbles, smiling nervously.
    “Lenin lives,” the master embalmer spits through clenched lips, hefts his briefcase, darts off down the alley, scattering the pigeons in his path.
    “What’s itching him?” Ophelia wonders, throwing a handful of crumbs to the pigeons filtering back in twos and threes toward the porch in Makusky’s wake.
    General Shuvkin, crew cut and ramrod straight in a pressed three-piece civilian suit with the left sleeve doubled back and neatly pinned to the shoulder, struts onto the porch, gives a last-minute shine to his shoes by rubbing them on the back of his trousers. His eyes wander over Pravdin, take in his sneakers, the Eisenhower jacket (vaguely familiar)and come to a staring stop at the Order of Lenin dangling on his chest.
    “Shuvkin,” the general snaps, offering his only hand.
    “Pravdin,” Pravdin fires back. They shake once.
    “Campaigns?” the general demands.
    Pravdin permits his eyes to water at the thought of comrades dead and buried in far off fields. “Stalingrad under Chuikov, Belorussia under Cherniakhovsky, Berlin under Zhukov, comrade general.”
    The general nods knowingly; his lips purse; his mind’s eye summons up row upon row of grave markers meandering like furrows in the caked Ukrainian earth. “My car’s at the foot of the alley,” Shuvkin orders. “I offer you a lift.”
    Waving to Ophelia, Pravdin falls into place on the general’s left side, does a little jig to get into lock step with him. Shuvkin asks where he is going. Pravdin tells him about the breakfast for the Lithuanian physicist at the Metropole.
    “So you are a physicist then,” Shuvkin notes; he guessed that the eccentricity represents genius, not power.
    “In a manner of speaking,” Pravdin replies vaguely. His voice conveys that there are things one doesn’t talk about, even with generals.
    Shuvkin picks up the hint. “I understand completely,” he says.
    The general’s orderly holds open the rear door of the shiny black Volga with shirred curtains on the windows and a discreet plastic flag with two stars on the right front fender. Pravdin, his corporal instinct surfacing, ducks and enters first, settles into a seat on the street side, fidgets (generals are not his cup of tea), brushes off the shoulders of his Eisenhower jacket specks that aren’t there. The Volga pulls away from the curb. Through the front window Pravdin can see uniformed policemen flagging down cross traffic as soon as they catch sight of the general’s two-star flag on the fender. Tomake conversation, Pravdin tells Shuvkin about an old idea of his (Hero of Socialist Labor! Order of the Red Star!! And so forth and so on) to publish an illustrated book of Red Army exercises. Reducing is an idea whose time has come, Pravdin begins. Warming to the subject, he goes on to spell out the advantages: Russian women will become slimmer and more attractive than their capitalist sisters; as women slim down they will require less room, thus alleviating the housing shortage; their stomachs will shrink, thus alleviating pressure on the agriculture sector of the economy and permitting the funneling of agriculture funds into military hardware. As the state withers away, Pravdin argues passionately, so too will the excess fat; Russia will become a trim muscular nation of builders of communism.
    “Interesting,” comments Shuvkin. “What was the reaction to your proposal?”
    “An All-Union Sports functionary sipped carrot juice and listened politely,” Pravdin recalls, “but decided he couldn’t make a move without the approval of the Ministry of Defense. The Ministry of Defense people drank kvass from paper cups and concluded that anything that had to do with the Red Army, including its exercise programs, was classified information requiring Central Committee clearance. The Central Committee’s second Directorate drank imported Scotch on the rocks in crystal glasses and said they couldn’t proceed