Read Online The Sisters by Robert Littell - Free Book Online Page B

symptoms of senility already, or at least that's what they had claimed when the theoretical journal for which he worked decided it was time for him to retire. The Potter himself had never been convinced that the old man's wandering mind-he alighted on subjects like a butterfly, and left a butterfly's imprint on them-was worn thin. It might just as well have been his way of coping with a world glued together by a peculiar attitude toward power: confronted by hypocrisy, people simply shrugged.
    The old man, whose name was Boris Alexandrovich Revkin, had had a good run for his money. He had worked his way up to become a division propagandist in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War, and had gone to work after the war as an editor for a well-known theoretical journal. One of his early articles dealt with something called "left deviationism." In it, Revkin had used the expression "political narcissism" to describe the Chinese Communist leadership. When asked, at the weekly editorial meeting, where he got the expression, he had replied, "Why, where else, I invented it!" The chief editor, who had made his reputation by taking a single line from Marx and writing a four-hundred-page book on it, had laughed outright. "If all you want are lines out of Marx and Lenin," Revkin had cried indignantly, "get someone else to do it." Assuming that his audacity indicated he had friends in high places, the chief editor shipped the article over to the Central Committee for a decision. When it came back, four months later, it contained a handwritten notation in the upper-left-hand corner.
    "Publish," it read, followed by an initial: "S."
    Which is how Boris Alexandrovich Revkin became the Soviet Union's resident expert on "left deviationism."
    His spine curved into the shape of a parenthesis by his years of harvesting cotton, the old man was on his hands and knees weeding between the green peppers in his vegetable garden when the Potter, his collar open, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder, finally arrived.
    The sun, sinking through a stand of white birches, dispatched slats of yellowish light across the ground. Revkin looked up, squinting into the light, and spotted the Potter mopping the perspiration off his neck with his handkerchief. "Contrary to appearances," the old man cackled, struggling to his feet, wiping his palms on his overalls, masking behind a studied briskness his pleasure at seeing the Potter, "sunsets don't grow on trees. What brings you all this way, Feliks? You have news of Piotr, maybe?"
    "No news," the Potter said quickly. "What brings me all this way is you." He fished one of Svetochka's bottles of Bison vodka from his jacket pocket and handed it to Revkin. "A small present," he mumbled in embarrassment.
    "Ha! Now I know you want something!" cried the old man, hopping over a row of baby cabbages, snatching the bottle from the Potter. He led the way to his cottage, lighted the stove, put some water to boil on it.
    When it grew dark he closed the shutters, served tea (which he himself drank, peasant-style, through a lump of sugar wedged between his teeth), eventually reheated some cooked cabbage with chunks of meat in it, on the assumption, which the Potter never challenged, that his visitor would stay the night. In time the vodka, served with the meal, loosened the old man's tongue and he began to reminisce, his words slurred, his voice hoarse, about what he called the bad old days: the Big Mustache (Stalin) and the Little Mustache (Hitler); the exhilarating struggle against the Nemtsi, the tongueless ones, the Germans; the endless double lines of beardless farm boys in gray caps with thick winter longcoats rolled and strapped on their backs making their way through ruined villages as delayed-action mines exploded in the distance; two teenagers with signs around their necks saying they had been collaborators, hanging by their twisted necks from tree limbs. The end of one story tugged at the beginning of another. His