A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,30

The boy used his voice like a rubber mallet; can I was the only question that escaped his mouth, never what or how or why. Ramzan wasn’t clever or kind or imaginative, or even overly obedient or cruel or dull, and Khassan built his aversion upon the empty cellar of what his son was not. In the historical sources there were kings and princes whose distaste for their progeny took more sadistic forms than Khassan’s indifference; compared to Ivan the Terrible, he was a paradigm of good parenting. You can choose your son no more than you can choose your father, but you can choose how you will treat him, and Khassan chose to treat his as if he wasn’t there. He chose to write when he should have spoken, to speak when he should have listened. He chose to read his books when he should have watched his son, to watch when he should have approached. One day when Ramzan was eight he entered Khassan’s office and asked his father to teach him to ride a bicycle. “You’ll fall,” Khassan said, without looking up from the page. The moment would haunt him later. What if he had looked up?

Brezhnev appeared to be on his deathbed ten years before he finally passed, but on November 10, 1982, the country’s beloved grandfather smoked his last white-filtered Novost cigarette. Brezhnev was buried in his marshal’s uniform along with the two hundred medals—everything from Hero of the Soviet Union to the Lenin Prize for Literature—he had accrued in his eighteen-year tenure as General Secretary. Watching the mournful proceedings with his family (they all searched for Galina Brezhneva among the mourners to see if she would cause scandal even at her father’s funeral), Khassan finally accepted the futility of his endeavor. He had traveled farther than Herodotus but had written no Histories, had witnessed more combat than Thucydides but had written no History of the Peloponnesian War. His son sat on one side, his wife on the other, and they watched the tributes paid to a man whose tepid mediocrity encapsulated the era. For years he had relegated history to the past, where it was time-dulled and safe and ever-receding, but history was right there, in that moment, on the television screen, where balding and bejowled politicians paid their respects before determining the shape of the empire, where the flat, embalmed face of the beloved grandfather went translucent under the spotlights, and where finally they caught a glimpse of the daughter of the departed, her dress a scandalous pink.

Yuri Andropov replaced Brezhnev, only to die fifteen months later, and Konstantin Chernenko replaced Andropov only to die thirteen months after that. Again Khassan watched the funerals with his family; state funerals were the only times they came together. He couldn’t have known this would be the final televised funeral of a General Secretary, but later, when remembering the gloomy cavalcade, he would imagine that the entire Soviet state was buried in Chernenko’s casket. Gorbachev at least looked like he might live more than a year on the job, and soon after his ascension to General Secretary, Khassan received a call from a new, reform-minded editor, who had deposed Khassan’s previous editor. The reform-minded editor had found Khassan’s original manuscript from 1963 and thought it a more accurate and readable document than any of his subsequent revisions. “All that’s left is honing and updating,” the editor said. “Now is the time. A few years ago you would have been sent to Siberia. Today you’ll be lauded.”

Even the renewed fervor of his revisions couldn’t keep pace with the deluge of declassified information released by state agencies. For a quarter century his book hadn’t been published because it was too accurate. Now it wouldn’t be published because it wasn’t, and couldn’t be, accurate enough. A three-thousand-page draft took years to write. He couldn’t possibly analyze and incorporate the disclosures that, on a daily basis, changed the way a Soviet historian was allowed to interpret his material. Even so, he finished a draft he was reasonably pleased with in the late summer of 1989. A few months later, when the Berlin Wall fell, not even a news agency as reliably incompetent as Pravda failed to speculate on its consequences. The reform-minded editor loved the new draft and wanted to schedule publication for the following year, but Khassan demurred. The morning headlines made the previous day’s work obsolete; publishing the book now would be like building nine-tenths of a roof.