Honey for the Bears by Anthony Burgess

Author:Anthony Burgess [Burgess, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: culture, fiction, historical, literature, Russia, satire
ISBN: 9780393346381
Google: ATQhNjbpmfwC
Amazon: 0393346382
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

2

PAUL WALKED NONE TOO STEADILY (HE WONDERED IF HE had been eating enough lately) to the Baltic Station. In the entrance-hall he nodded briefly at the bas-reliefs of Ushakov, Lazarev, Kornilov, Nakhimov and Makarov—Russian admirals all, and they looked it. He was getting to know them well. The ocean-coloured marble from the Urals in the underground hall, the ceiling that billowed like a sail, ‘The Shot from the Aurora’ represented in Florentine mosaic—these made his nausea seem marine and healthy. But on the brief journey (there was only Narvskaya Station in between) to the Kirov Works stop, he had a sensation of quarrying going on in the Urals of his brain, or rather a bas-relief of the true Paul Hussey being laboriously hammered, also urgently (day and night shifts) because the unveiling to slow hand-claps and ironical Prokofiev music was not far off. It was not right that a time for downright no or yes should have dawned when he had never been more aware of everything necessarily containing its opposite. What was he, then, and what was he in the world for? He had a partial answer to that: there had to be people presiding with rubbed hands and smiles (part-false) over dust accumulating, veil over veil over veil, on Elizabethan pennies in plush, sailing-ships in bottles, some volumes of Jacobean and Caroline sermons, a page—framed—of a Civil War Courier, a Roundhead pennant: ‘I AM A JEALOUS GOD’, a beautiful oak sideboard of 1689, some genuine Queen Anne silver candlesticks, a set of The Rambler, a first edition of Cowper, a Regency brocade waistcoat and a battered Regency striped sofa, some regimental table-pieces showing tarnished silver savages subdued by gun or Bible, whatnots, meticulous taxidermy, a sadistic and a sentimental Landseer, starry Pre-Raphaelites with very strong female noses …

Kirov Works Station. Up to light-grey Caucasian marble, the fluorescent square ceiling lamps like natural daylight; the workers like so many papiros-smoking Bottoms amid the airy delicacy. Then out into sunlight and, soon, the familiar landmark of the eleven-storey tower of the Kirov District Soviet; there was a cinema there, and that was where Anna, the dark mistress of Alexei Prutkov, had once worked as a projectionist. Alexei had told some story about her snarling up several thousand feet of some epic of the steppes during a gala performance or something; now she helped clean up the tiny workshops of the Children’s Technical Station at the Kirov Works Club. Ah, Russia.

Paul walked near the thirty-acre Ninth of January Park, where the workers of the Narvskaya Zastaya had assembled to take a petition to the Tsar and had been shot down instead. (The slim shiny topboots, the careful aim, the Eisenstein black holes of bloody mouths and the cracked steel-rimmed spectacles.) It was all a fair, modern, smiling district, but the flat-block Paul now approached dated from the nineteen-thirties and had become as sorry, stained, peeling, as anything built in England during that flimsy period. Crowning the edifice was the bas-relief image of some hero in overalls, his face nibbled away and his body striated with weather-stains.

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