Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,17

Why not a liberal democracy? Then: Why not Bolshevism? In 1917 he gave his support to Kerensky. But Kerensky kept fucking up. He, Leonid Kuznetsov, advised Kerensky to cease Russia’s participation in the war, bring the Russian army home, and do something meaningful for the people. Put food in their stomachs, give them hope. What did Kerensky do? Nothing. He seemed paralyzed with fear of the generals. When Lenin came back to Russia—brimming with energy, bullheaded, not eloquent, exactly, but forceful in his speeches—he made people believe in him. Kuznetsov saw that Lenin was the future. Lenin did what Kerensky had been incapable of doing and brought the soldiers home from the front. Leo said he had seen what he must do and had collaborated with Lenin on the drawing up of a new constitution. He accepted responsibility for culture, for libraries and free universities. Exhausting work but good. He wouldn’t go through it again. His political beliefs had narrowed. Or had they grown wider? He believed government had one obligation—to ensure that the citizens in a democracy could live in peace, read a newspaper at a café, stroll in a park, go home to a pleasant meal, raise a family: selfless love. Like in Dostoyevsky.

“Some would call that revolutionary,” Miklós said.

“Yes. First you would need to eliminate the egoists and the ideologues.”

One year, he said, when Zita was small, he had taken her on vacation to the Crimea. They walked in a citrus grove at dawn. He picked oranges off a tree for her. He cooked fish over an open flame on the beach in front of their dacha. He read Russian folktales to her.

His hair lay in a damp fringe around his face, which had a coppery, masklike sheen. He quoted Solan, the Athenian, who had said: “No one can be called happy till he is dead and buried.” The hour of his own death was known to him, Leo told Miklós, and he named a date. He was nearly right, almost to the day.

Miklós found him in his bed, as if asleep. His reaction surprised him; he fell to his knees, tears came to his eyes. He bowed his head and remained like that, as if waiting for Leo to awaken, his dark eyes glittering, and say, What, did you think I was dead?

It was evening. Zita was not at the number she’d given him. He asked the long-distance operator to keep trying. He sat beside Leo’s bed. What was he to do about the body? In the morning, he at last spoke to Zita. She returned immediately from Oxford. On the phone, her grief had seemed restrained, but she broke down completely when she saw him. He didn’t know how to comfort her. Without her father she had no one, she kept saying. Manifestly untrue, Miklós had said. He was there, he would take care of her. “I’m not a child,” she retorted. “I’m not an invalid.” Then she said, “Miklós, please hold me.”

Several months passed before he broached the subject of marriage, which seemed to him an obvious solution and a very happy one. Zita said marriage was an institution devised by the state to keep women silent and subservient. Marriage was a linchpin—was that the word she wanted?—in the capitalist system. It would be more honest, she said, if they lived together. She moved into his third-floor apartment in the Tiergarten borough. It was a small apartment, gemütlich, cozy. They owned one desk, a table, two typewriters, many books. Two editions of Das Kapital; two of The Communist Manifesto; duplicates of Emma Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia; and Ten Days That Shook the World, by John Reed. Several copies of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Maxim Gorky. Gogol. Pushkin. Turgenev. Several books on Russian civil and criminal law, the property of Leo Kuznetsov, with his annotations in the margins. Zita’s leather-bound set of Dickens’s novels, which she requested to have buried with her, saying that at least in the grave she would be able to read in peace. At night Miklós stayed up late working on a novel. The clatter of typewriter keys disturbed Zita; his cigarette smoke made her throat raw. He tidied up, took the sheets and pillowcases to a laundry, cooked supper; he became proficient at housewifery and enjoyed it. You could clean and think, cook and be at peace with yourself. Zita propped a book on a loaf of bread and read while she ate. She was a mistress of abstraction;