Potboiler

They skipped their meeting and went back to the strip club.

The schedule repeated itself for several days running. Following a restless night spent sweating into his sheets, banging the wall, and plugging his ears with toilet tissue, Pfefferkorn would be shouted awake at dawn. The woman in the majorette hat would declare that the weather would be pleasant beyond compare, that the price of root vegetables had reached an all-time low, that miraculous advances had been made by the Ministry of Science, that the East Zlabian aggressors had been repelled and were cowering in fear. It was unclear to Pfefferkorn whom these lies were intended to fool. Still, he began to enjoy the pageantry of it. He read along from Vassily Nabochka. He sang the anthem lustily while he shaved around his moustache. He had just about forgotten it was fake.

Having established him as a friend of Fyothor’s, Yelena took more of a shine to him. She never gave him more than his ration, but she did it with a hockey linesman’s gappy smile.

He spent close to every waking moment with Fyothor. It was clear enough to Pfefferkorn that he was being watched, but as he didn’t see what he could do about it, he tried to spin it for the best.

“You know all these people and you can’t get me a new hotel room?”

“Some things are beyond even my power, friend.”

In the evenings they would dine together in the restaurant, talking about literature and polishing off several bottles of thruynichka. Then Fyothor would head home to his wife and Pfefferkorn would stop by the front desk to check for messages. The clerk would say there were no messages. Pfefferkorn would ask for a new fan. The clerk would promise it immediately.

Up the ancient elevator Pfefferkorn went, down the whispering hallway, past mumbling rooms, rooms full of ghosts, rooms more men had entered than left.

Stretched out on his bed, listening to the honeymooners getting to work, he reflected on the similarities between spying and writing. Both called for stepping into an imagined world and residing there with conviction, nearly to the point of self-delusion. Both were jobs that outsiders thought of as exotic but that were in practice quite tedious. Both tested one’s ability to withstand loneliness, although Pfefferkorn decided that in this respect, spying was harder, because it demanded that the spy resist, at every moment and with all his power, the human instinct to trust. One of life’s minor consolations was the presumption that you could ask most strangers most questions and get an honest answer most of the time. Not always, of course, but often enough. Absent that, conversation became an exhausting, depressing labor, more so in the face of the sort of unflagging cheer Fyothor threw at him. Pfefferkorn felt like he was being forced to stand on one foot for hours on end. He thought of all the faceless men and women doing their duties in hotel rooms the world over. He admired them. He felt for them. He wished them well. Their loneliness was his, and his theirs.

And he thought of Bill. In reevaluating their relationship Pfefferkorn had seen himself as the survivor of a house fire, returning to pick through the ash. There might be one or two scraps of authentic friendship, but they were buried under so much falsehood that it seemed wiser and less pathetic to let them go. But perhaps Paul had been right when he said that it didn’t have to be one or the other. Now that Pfefferkorn was a spy, he understood. He remembered Bill’s copy of his novel, the dense scribblings in the margins. What else could that be but love? He was almost afraid to accept this, because if Bill truly had loved him, the pain he must have endured in deceiving Pfefferkorn all these years was unimaginable. Heroic, even.

The clanking got louder.

Pfefferkorn turned on the television and put the volume way up.

There were three channels. Channel one was the flag. Channel two aired round-the-clock footage of Party rallies and speeches. For entertainment, it was hard to beat channel three. Pfefferkorn watched a soap opera about goatherds. He watched the news, anchored by the woman in the majorette hat. Like the rest of West Zlabia, he was waiting for the game show that came on at nine. The national curriculum included poetic composition, and teachers nominated their best students to appear before a panel of celebrity judges, who would then proceed to tear the poem apart mercilessly, reducing the student to tears and bringing burning shame upon him, his family, and their entire neighborhood. To be humiliated in this way was considered a great honor, and The Poem, It Is Bad! was the second most popular show on West Zlabian TV, its ratings topped only by those of the show that followed, a live broadcast of the teacher being flogged.

76.

“Rise, citizens of Zlabia. . . .”