Free Monumental Propaganda by Vladímir Voinóvich Page B

novel
Not by Bread Alone,
which had been rejected by the Soviet public, and he distributed this novel among the wards of the children’s home; he also paid too much attention to western literature. Chikurin took no notice of these warnings; he merely shrugged, as if to say, Let him do as he wants. Especially since interest in literature among the pupils had clearly increased, they were studying better and their discipline had improved.
    For the October festivities Shubkin and his pupils organized a large amateur concert which was attended by the bosses from the tannery and the Victory collective farm and also, naturally, the entire staff of the children’s home.
    Aglaya also came to the concert. She ended up in the middle seat in the third row, next to the chairman of the Victory collective farm, Stepan Kharitonovich Shaleiko, a thick-set, shaven-headed man about forty years old, whom she knew from the time when she was the Party secretary. She thought he was from the same district as Nechitailo; in any case, they spoke the same way, in a language that wasn’t really either Russian or Ukrainian. At one time it used to be called the Little Russian dialect. In Ukraine this language is known as surzhik, and surzhik is a hybrid of wheat and rye. Shaleiko himself was like a hybrid of a man and some plant, perhaps some kind of baobab tree—bulky and gnarled, with coarse facial features and a drooping nose like an immature eggplant. He was dressed in the already almost outmoded fashion of the rural bosses of those times: a diagonal-weave Stalin field jacket with external pockets and box calf boots. He smelled of Chipre eau de cologne, shoe polish, sweat and agricultural activity.
    Shaleiko greeted Aglaya pleasantly, almost even rising from his seat.
    â€œI haven’t seen you in a long time,” he said with a good-natured smile. “How are things?”
    â€œSo-so,” Aglaya shrugged.
    â€œI heard about your spot of trouble,” he said in a low voice and sighed. “You’re a woman of principle, inflexible. But it’s the time of the flexible people now, the ones who know how to bend at the right moment. Especially since everything’s changing now. Changing down here, changing up there.”
    He pointed upward with his eyes. She followed his glance and saw two portraits of Soviet leaders above the stage. There had always been two portraits hanging there. But before, they had been portraits of Lenin and Stalin, and now . . . what incredible impudence . . . Lenin and Khrushchev! Or “that Baldie,” as she referred to Nikita Sergeevich. Aglaya was outraged to the very depths of her soul. She had managed to come to terms with Baldie’s attacks on Stalin, but she hadn’t expected him to take his insolence this far and set himself in Stalin’s place. Beside Lenin. Who, by the way, was also bald and whom, without really admitting it to herself, she also did not like very much.
    Sometimes Aglaya was overwhelmed by such paroxysms of fury that she quite literally began to shake. She clenched her fingers into tight fists, pressed her elbows against her sides and shuddered, feeling her heart pounding with incredible force. Once she had even tried to explain her condition to a neuropathologist. She had been afraid he would laugh at her, but he listened to her attentively and advised her to be wary of such occasions of extreme stress and shun them.
    â€œForgive me,” he said, “but I am a doctor and I must speak frankly. Your problem is that you’re an angry person. And the first person the feeling of anger destroys is the one in whom it arises. You’re the one who experiences this feeling inside yourself, it’s your heart and nobody else’s that pounds so furiously, and entirely without any point. And the person you’re so angry with might not even notice. I advise you very strongly, try not to be so angry, be kinder to people, not for their sake,