Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [34]
“The same question occurred to me,” Arkady admitted.
Feldman stomped down the stairs in disgust.
“Since avant-garde art was not approved, you chose a fairly suicidal specialty. Is that how you got used to working late at night?” Arkady asked.
“Not a totally stupid observation.” Feldman stopped short. “Why is red the color of revolution?”
“It’s traditional?”
“Prehistoric, not traditional. The two earliest habits of the ape-man were cannibalism and painting himself red. Soviets are the only ones who still do it. Look what we did to the genius of the Revolution. Describe Lenin’s tomb.”
“It’s a square of red granite.”
“It’s a Constructivist design inspired by Malevich. It’s a red square on Red Square. There’s more to it than just Lenin laid out like a smoked herring. Art was everywhere in those days. Tatlin designed a revolving skyscraper taller than the Empire State Building. Popova drew high fashions for peasants. The artists of Moscow were going to paint the trees of the Kremlin red. Lenin did object to that, but people thought that anything was possible. Those were days of hope, days of fantasy.”
“You lecture on this?”
“No one wants to hear. They’re like Rosen, they only want to sell. I spend all day authenticating art for idiots.”
“Rosen had something to sell?”
“Don’t ask me. We were supposed to meet two days ago. He didn’t come.”
“Then why do you think he had something to sell?”
“Today everyone is selling everything they have. And Rosen said he found something. He didn’t say what.”
At the embankment Feldman looked around with such fervor that Arkady could nearly imagine painted trees in the Kremlin gardens, amazons marching on Gorky Street, dirigibles towing propaganda posters under the moon.
“We live in the archeological ruins of that new world that never was. If we knew where to dig, who knows what we would find?” Feldman asked and trudged on alone across the bridge.
Arkady wandered along the embankment wall toward his flat. He didn’t feel sleepy, but he didn’t feel like an insomniac. Just the word made him restless.
He found no amazons along the river. There were fishermen baiting hooks. A couple of years of his exile had been spent on a Pacific trawler. He had always appreciated how at dusk the rustiest, most nondescript ship became a dazzling and intricate constellation of stars, with fishing lights on masts, booms, gunwales, bridge, ramp and deck. It occurred to him now that the same could be done for Moscow’s nocturnal fishermen, with batteries and lamps on their hats, belts and the tips of their poles.
Maybe the problem wasn’t insomnia. Maybe he was crazy. Why was he trying to find out who killed Rudy? When an entire society was collapsing like so many rotten beams, what difference did it make who murdered one black-market speculator? Anyway, this wasn’t the real world. The real world was out there where Irina lived. Here he was one more shadow in a cave, where he couldn’t sleep anyway.
Straight ahead the silhouette of St. Basil’s stood like a crowd of turbaned Moors backlit by the all-night floodlights of the square. In shadow at the stone base of the cathedral were about a hundred soldiers from the Kremlin barracks in full field gear with radio packs and submachine guns.
Red Square itself rose as a vast hill of cobblestones. To the left, the Kremlin was illuminated, bricks nearly white, with swallowtail battlements that were grace notes on a fortress that seemed to