The Commissariat of Enlightenment by Ken Kalfus Read Free Book Online Page B

image muddled further and acquired a solid clairvoyance. Russia would be dashed to pieces. Soon he found himself being tugged awake by the morning light.
    The room was no more charming than it had been in darkness: the walls were still stained and cracked and the room stank of tobacco. The icon had lost its moonlit radiance. The house was quiet. Woolly-headed from sleep, Gribshin washed his face with cold water from the basin.
    In the front room the old couple who had given him admittance the night before were gone. Gribshin’s nose twitched, unsuccessfully fishing for the scents of breakfast. As he was about to open the door outside, he noticed a human figure perched on a stool in the corner’s shadows, studying her hands intently, as if wondering how they had come to be attached to her wrists. She seemed unaware of his existence.
    Her face’s passive, self-indulgent expression and her un-combed brown hair suggested that she was about thirteen. It occurred to Gribshin that the girl might be mentally deficient—and then also that she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Thirteen was young to be a mother, even in Russia. Yet some of the prostitutes he had known in Moscow had hardly been older; none had been very much older. Gribshin supposed that the child’s father was unknown. An epidemic of bastards had descended upon the country.
    “You there,” he said. “Good morning.”
    The girl didn’t raise her head. Unlike the rest of her body, her hands were delicately formed, with long, uncalloused, vividly articulated fingers.
    “Dear, is it possible to get some tea? I’ll pay for it. Please, I beg you to bring me the samovar.”
    The girl offered no indication that she heard him. He gave up and left the post-house, looking around the yard for the old man and the woman. The little settlement off the road seemed deserted now. Gribshin shook his head at the lack of tea and walked back to the railway station.
    When he arrived he found that the scene had changed little in a few hours, except for the even greater number of journalists and curiosity-seekers on the station platform and around the stationmaster’s house. In the grayness of the morning the faces of Astapovo’s visitors were imbued with a puzzling luminosity. It came from expectation, Gribshin supposed, and also from being at the center of global scrutiny. The Count hadn’t died that night, but that was all that was known of his condition.
    The Pathé film crew was to be found in the passenger waiting room, installing a cinematography camera in preparation for the morning medical report. Distracted by the failure of an interior stage light, Meyer nodded absently when Gribshin told him that he had been refused lodging in the press car. Gribshin went towork replacing the ruined lamp with one from the precious cache of Jupiters with which they always traveled.
    As he descended from the ladder, reporters filed into the room, scores of them, mostly Russians, but also representatives of the press from throughout Europe, as well as from America, Japan, and even India. Soon they exceeded the designated capacity of the waiting room, which until this week had never seen anything close to its designated capacity and was more accustomed to giving shelter to a solitary peasant with a twine-bound satchel on his way to the next station.
    The reporters did not speak to each other about their competition for standing space, but the first ripples of jostling motion stirred through them. The tension in the packed room swelled and seemed to liquefy, pooling around Meyer’s big cinematography camera, which had been placed toward the front of the room and now blocked the view of the reporters pushed behind it. Smaller puddles of restlessness accumulated around the conventional cameras that other newspaper representatives had placed by the lectern. The reporters sweltered in the heat generated by the stage lamps and the mass of rank human flesh wrapped in overcoats. Their murmurs