The Moscow Doorkeeper

Stretching his hands toward the heat of the samovar as he gazed from the window of the doorkeeper’s room at the pallid complexion, with two red blotches on the cheeks (a true “Kremlin complexion,” he used to say), of the assistant director (Anatoli Lozovski, who set foot in the institute no more than two or three times a year, bringing general trepidation), Andrei thought back to the times when those who followed the coffins had faces empty of all sentiment, ready to die in the daily routine of the revolution. Since then, words had settled into a sludge, clammy at first, now hardened and covered by a thin (almost invisible) layer of dust. Leaving the cramped and musty rooms of the city was, for a moment, like being thrust toward certain streets in Asia, but soon, even there, you would come across the ghosts of those twenty-five-foot-thick walls of the chilly, and distant, monasteries that received the souls of prisoners (among them was his son, fifteen years old) before burying them, like the carcasses of domestic animals in a farmyard. Sitting in his doorkeeper’s room, dulled by the absence of alcohol, given the hour of the morning, before the offices filled up, Andrei gazed at the portion of yellowish gray wall beyond the window and felt the languor of forgotten space, overgrown by vegetation. Like all of us, he was attracted by far-off places, almost as if every remote and invisible thing suffered from his absence and was calling him. But he had learned to distrust those chasms that opened every so often within him as naturally as a closing door. Alcohol, contrary to what happens in imperialist countries, helped him above all to control his feelings, to fill up the gaps, to establish a continual and oppressive flow that enabled him to carry out his doorman’s duties unnoticed and, above all, to get through the nights, which drew him back toward the steppes and those vast and tender places where, still twenty years before, he had lent his services as an Improver. But the hardest time was first thing in the morning, when he risked being struck down by sobriety. And sobriety was bound up with hatred, which wasn’t natural for him, but he was forced to absorb it from the walls around him. Hatred disturbed him, however hard he tried to anchor it to the depths of the sea. Frequently he found solace in the thought that, living there, in the doorkeeper’s room of the Gorky Literature Institute (in September 1929 Gorky had written to him from Moscow: “Despite your great sensitivity in portraying characters, you nevertheless color them ironically, so that they appear to readers not so much as revolutionaries but as half-sick in the mind”), was in the end the closest approximation he had been allowed, in the city, to a life he had always respected: the pensive existence of the railway crossing keeper. Railway embankments had always seemed calm and intelligent in their isolation. There, of course, in the doorkeeper’s room, he had no chance to see trains—driven, most probably, by his father, Railway Mechanic Platon Platonov, who had been the first person to explain that the Resurrection of Bodies would take place in the graveyard for motor cars. Repairing locomotives: a heavenly task. They would never have allowed him to do such a job, not just because of his tuberculosis and the alcohol, but because it would have been wrong to put Soviet transport, which is “the way forward for the locomotive of history” (he recalled a small poster glued to a pole in Central Asia), in the hands of a podonok (“scum”—that’s what Stalin himself had written in the margin of one of Andrei’s stories in 1931).