Ian Watson - Stalin's Teardrops

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Stalin's Teardrops

STALIN'S

TEARDROPS

Ian Watson

Part I: The Lie of the Land

"This is the era of clarity now, Valentin," Mirov reproved me. "I

don't necessarily like it, but I am no traitor. I have problems, you

have problems. We must adapt."

I chuckled and then said, "In this office we have always adapted,

haven't we?"

By "office" I referred to the whole cluster of studios which composed

the department of cartography. Ten in all, these were interconnected

by archways rather than doors so that my staff and I could pass freely

from one to the next across a continuous sweep of parquet flooring.

In recent years I had resisted the general tendency to subdivide

spacious rooms which, prior to the Revolution, had been the province

of a giant insurance company. For our drawing tables and extra-wide

filing cabinets we needed elbow-room. We needed as much daylight

as possible from our windows overlooking the courtyard deep below.

Hence our location here on the eighth floor; hence the absence of

steel bars at our windows, and ours alone. Grids of shadow must not

fall across our work.

On hot summer days when breezes blew in and out we needed to be

specially vigilant. (And of course we used much sealing wax every

evening when we locked up.) In winter, the standard lighting—those

big white globes topped by shades—was perfectly adequate. Still,

their illumination could not rival pure daylight. We often left the

finalization of important maps until the summer months.

Mirov's comments about clarity seemed spurious in the

circumstances; though with a sinking heart I knew all too well what

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Stalin's Teardrops

he meant.

"We have lost touch with our own country," he said forlornly,

echoing a decision which had been handed down from on high.

"Of course we have," I agreed. "That was the whole idea, wasn't it?"

"This must change." He permitted himself a wry joke. "The lie of the

land must be corrected."

Mirov was a stout sixty-five-year-old with short grizzled hair

resembling the hachuring on a map of a steep round hillock. His nose

and cheeks were broken-veined from over-indulgence in the now-

forbidden spirit. I think he resented never having been attached to

one of the more glamorous branches of our secret police. Maybe he

had always been bored by his job, unlike me.

Some people might view the task of censorship as a cushy sinecure.

Not so! It demanded a logical meticulousness which in essence was

more creative than pedantic. Yet it was, well, dusty. Mirov lacked the

inner forcefulness which might have seen him assigned to foreign

espionage or even to the border guards. I could tell that he did not

intend to resist the changes which were now in the air, like some

mischievous whirlwind intent on tossing us all aloft. He hadn't come

here to conspire with me, to any great extent.

As head of censorship Mirov was inspector of the department of

cartography. Yet under my guidance of the past twenty years

cartography basically ran itself. Mirov routinely gave his imprimatur

to our products: the regional and city maps, the charts, the Great

Atlas. Two years his junior, I was trusted. The occasional spy whom

he planted on me as a trainee invariably must deliver a glowing

report. (Which of my staff of seventy persons, busily drafting away

or practising, was the current "eye of Mirov"? I didn't give a hoot.)

As to the quality of our work, who was more qualified than myself to

check it?

"What you're suggesting isn't easy," I grumbled. "Such an enterprise

could take years, even decades. I was hoping to retire by the age of

seventy. Are you implying that I stay on and on forever?" I knew

well where I would retire to…

He rubbed his nose. Did those broken capillaries itch so much?

"Actually, Valentin, there's a time limit. Within two

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Stalin's Teardrops

years—consisting of twenty-four months, not of twenty-nine months

or thirty-two; and this is regarded as generous—we must publish a

true Great Atlas. Otherwise the new economic plan… well, they're

thinking of new railway lines, new dams, new towns, opening up

wasteland for oil and mineral exploitation."

"Two years?" I had to laugh. "It's impossible, quite impossible."

"It's an order. Any procrastination will be punished. You'll be

dismissed. Your pension rights will diminish: no cabin in the

countryside, no more access to hard-currency shops. A younger

officer will replace you—one of the new breed. Don't imagine,

Valentin, that you will have a companion in misfortune! Don't

assume that I too shall be dismissed at the summit of my career. My

other bureaus are rushing to publish and promote all sorts of

forbidden rubbish. So-called experimental poetry, fiction, art

criticism. Plays will be staged to shock us, new music will jar the

ears, new art will offend the eye. Happenings will happen.

Manuscripts are filed away under lock and key, after all—every last

item. We only need to unlock those cupboards, to let the contents

spill out and lead society astray into mental anarchy."

I sympathised. "Ah, what we have come to!"

He inclined his cross-hatched hill-top head.

"You, Valentin, you. What you have come to." He sighed deeply.

"Still, I know what you mean… Colonel."

He mentioned my rank to remind me. We might wear sober dark

suits, he and I, but we were both ranking officers.

"With respect, General, these—ah—orders are practically impossible

to carry out."

"Which is why a new deputy-chief cartographer has been assigned to

you."

"So here is the younger officer you mentioned—already!"

He gripped my elbow in the manner of an accomplice, though he

wasn't really such.

"It shows willing," he whispered, "and it's one way out. Let the blame

fall on her if possible. Let her seem a saboteur." Aloud, he continued,

"Come along with me to the restaurant, to meet Grusha. You can

bring her back here yourself."

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Stalin's Teardrops

I should meet my nemesis on neutral territory, as it were. Thus Mirov

avoided direct, visible responsibility for introducing her.

Up here on the eighth floor we in cartography had the advantage of

being close to one of the two giant restaurants which fed the

thousands of men and women employed in the various branches of

secret police work. The other restaurant was down in the basement.

Many staff routinely turned up at eight o'clock of a morning—a full

hour earlier than the working day commenced—to take advantage of

hearty breakfasts unavailable outside: fresh milk, bacon and eggs,

sausages, fresh fruit.

As I walked in silence with Mirov for a few hundred metres along the

lime-green corridor beneath the omnipresent light-globes, I reflected

that proximity to the restaurant was less advantageous today.

At this middle hour of the morning the food hall was almost deserted

but for cooks and skivvies. Mirov drank the excellent coffee and

cream with almost indecent haste so as to leave me alone with the

woman. Grusha was nudging forty but hadn't lost her figure. She was

willowy, with short curly fair hair, a large equine nose, and piercing

sapphire eyes. A nose for sniffing out delays, eyes for seeing through

excuses. An impatient thoroughbred! An intellectual. The privileged

daughter of someone inclined to foreign and new ways. Daddy was

one of the new breed who had caused so much upset. Daddy had used

influence to place her here. This was her great opportunity; and his.

"So you were originally a graduate of the Geographical Academy," I

mused.

She smiled lavishly. "Do I take it that I shall find your ways a little

different, Colonel?"

"Valentin, please."

"We must mend those ways. I believe there is much to rectify."

"Are you married, Grusha?"

"To our land, to the future, to my specialty."

"Which was, precisely?"

"The placing of names on maps. I assume you know Imhof's paper,

Die Anordnung der Namen in der Karte!"

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Stalin's Teardrops

"You read German?"

She nodded. "French and English too."

"My word!"

"I used my language skills on six years' duty in the DDR." Doing

what? Ah, not for me to enquire.

Her shoulders were narrow. How much weight could they bear?

Every so often she would hitch those shoulders carelessly with the air

of an energetic filly frustrated, till now, at not being given free rein to

dash forth—along a prescribed, exactly measured track. There lay the

rub. Let her try to race into the ambiguous areas I had introduced!

I covered a yawn with my palm. "Yes, I know the Kraut's work. He

gave me some good ideas. Oh, there are so many means for making a

map hard to read. Nay, not merely misleading but incomprehensible!

Names play a vital role. Switch them all around, till only the contour

lines are the same as before. Interlace them, so that new place names

seem to emerge spontaneously. Set them all askew, so that the user

needs to turn the map around constantly till his head is in a spin.

Space the names out widely so that the map seems dotted with

unrelated letters like some code or acrostic. Include too many names,

so that the map chokes with surplus data."

Grusha stared at me, wide-eyed.

"And that," I said, "is only the icing on the cake."

Back in cartography I gave her a tour of the whole cake. In line with

the policy of clarity I intended to be transparently clear.

"Meet Andrey!" I announced in the first studio. "Andrey is our expert

with flexible curves and quills."

Red-headed, pock-marked Andrey glanced up from his glass drawing

table, floodlit from below. Lead weights covered in baize held sheets

of tracing paper in position. A trainee, Goldman, sat nearby carving

quills for Audrey's later inspection. At Goldman's feet a basket was

stuffed with an assortment of wing feathers from geese, turkeys,

ducks, and crows.

"Goose quills are supplest and wear longest," I informed Grusha,

though she probably knew. "Turkeys' are stiffer. Duck and crow is

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Stalin's Teardrops

for very fine work. The choice of a wrong quill easily exaggerates a

pathway into a major road or shrinks a river into a stream. Observe

how fluidly Andrey alters the contours of this lake on each new

tracing."

Andrey smiled in a preoccupied way. "This new brand of tracing

paper cockles nicely when you block in lakes of ink."

"Of course, being rag-based," I added, "it expands on damp days by,

oh, a good two percent. A trivial distortion, but it all helps."

The second studio was the scale room, where Zorov and assistants

worked with camera lucida and other tricks at warping the scales of

maps.

"En route to a final map we enlarge and reduce quite a lot," I

explained. "Reduction causes blurring. Enlargement exaggerates

inaccuracies. This prism we're using today both distorts and enlarges.

Now here," I went on, leading her to Frenzel's table, "we're reducing

and enlarging successively by the similar-triangles method."

"I do recognize the technique," answered Grusha, a shade frostily.

"Ah, but we do something else with it. Here is a road. We shrink a

ten-kilometre stretch to the size of one kilometre. We stretch the next

one kilometre to the length of ten. Then we link strand after strand

back together. So the final length is identical, but all the bends are in

different places. See how Antipin over here is inking rivers red and

railway tracks blue, contrary to expectation."

Antipin's trainee was filling little bottles of ink from a large bottle;

the stuff dries up quickly.

Onward to the blue studio, the photographic room where Papyrin was

shading sections of a map in light blue.

"Naturally, Grusha, light blue doesn't photograph, so on the final

printed map these parts will be blank. The map, in this case, is correct

yet cannot be reproduced—"

Onward to the dot and stipple studio… Remarkable what spurious

patterns the human eye can read into a well-placed array of dots.

All of this, even so, was only really the icing…

Grusha flicked her shoulders again. "It's quite appalling, Colonel

Valentin. Well, I suppose we must simply go back to the original

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摘要：

Stalin'sTeardropsSTALIN'STEARDROPSIanWatsonPartI:TheLieoftheLand"Thisistheeraofclaritynow,Valentin,"Mirovreprovedme."Idon'tnecessarilylikeit,butIamnotraitor.Ihaveproblems,youhaveproblems.Wemustadapt."Ichuckledandthensaid,"Inthisofficewehavealwaysadapted,haven'twe?"By"office"Ireferredtothewholecluste...

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Ian Watson - Stalin's Teardrops

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