From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 6/25/2005 5:39 PM

A Still Small Voice

It takes a simple cleaning woman from the corridors of power to bear witness to the madness and melancholy of Stalin's rule in Gillian Slovo's new novel.

By Jerome Charyn
Published: June 24, 2005

In "Ice Road," Gillian Slovo's tenth novel, we meet a very odd angel -- Irina Davydovna Arbatova, a cleaning woman at the Smolny Institute, Leningrad's Communist Party headquarters. "I'm no storyteller," she tells us. "I look only to the facts." But Irina's the one who carries the music of the novel; her voice presides over the mysterious and brutal events in this city of resistance and revolution, where Lenin sculpts the first six months of Soviet Russia from a small office at the Smolny, and where the blokadniki, those proud, starving Leningraders (including Irina), defy the German war machine for nearly 900 days during World War II.

Born in 1900, she's a child of the 20th century. "I'm not a joiner," Irina says. "What I do is watch," like any angel who is witness to the madness and melancholy of humankind. The wife of a wife-beater, Irina never learned to read, but she has learned the trick of staying alive: She's convinced that no one of power at the Smolny would ever be interested in a woman whose job it is to wield a broom.

But Irina's fate is determined in a broom closet. It almost feels like seduction. Perhaps it is. Boris Aleksandrovich Ivanov, a member of the nomenklatura who has his own chauffeur and an office at the Smolny, stumbles upon Irina inside the closet and recommends her as a "stewardess" aboard the Chelyuskin, a ship on a scientific expedition to the Arctic Circle. It's 1933, and Irina is having the first real adventure of her life -- and her greatest tragedy, much more seductive and dangerous than the Arctic ice. The Chelyuskinists teach her how to read, and in so doing, give her the terrors that language can bestow. Language fuels her imagination, allowing her to articulate all her old wounds, and the archetypal conundrum of the Soviet citizen aboard an ice ship "that wasn't built to handle ice."

Before the Chelyuskin, Irina had been taught to look down, never to see, but she no longer has the comfort of blindness. Her own images haunt her. The ice becomes a "monster on the move," a monster that can scream and nearly crush everyone on board; the Chelyuskinists have to abandon ship. They're finally rescued and Irina returns home a hero. "I'm no longer just any other woman. I am a survivor of the Chelyuskin." But did she really survive, or is she only one more of "the speaking dead"? Her new contemplative imagination has aroused Irina and destroyed her. She's become a kind of sibyl who cannot detach herself from Boris Aleksandrovich, his family and his friends, cannot have her own passions, her own secret life. "I rescue people, educated people with opportunities ... who leave to me the act of rescuing them from themselves."

Like Boris Aleksandrovich's temperamental daughter, Natasha, and Boris' old friend, Anton Antonovich, a scholar of medieval manuscripts, and Anya, a wild child, a waif Anton brings home with him and decides to adopt. But Irina cannot rescue everyone. Sergei Mironovich Kirov, Leningrad's dynamic Party boss, is murdered inside the Smolny, not very far from Irina's broom closet, and this is the start of a long, long bloodbath staged by Stalin, Russia's own angel of death. Though it looks as if it was Stalin who had his former protege killed, the leader goes on to attack Kirov's murderers, meaning all his other rivals, real and imagined, until he nearly destroys the entire state.

Slovo gives us a powerful and subtle portrait of this reign of terror, this Red Death, during which Irina's newfound language fails her. She returns to the land of the blind: "Keep your head down (or else a horse might trample you). Not a bad motto, now I come to think of it, for our whole nation. We are people of lowered heads. Eyes that turn away. Lips that tighten. Ears that close."


Itar-Tass

"We are people of lowered heads," Irina says plainly as Leningrad bows under Stalin's purges and Hitler's siege.
    
But that's not the only loss of language. The book itself seems to tighten every time we leave Irina's music and move into an objective void, a voice without a voice, which shuttles from character to character -- from Natasha to Anton to Boris, without any real bite. Natasha never has the same appeal as Irina, because we cannot hear her. We can feel her anger, her frustration, her hardship, as she stands in line waiting for news of her husband, Kolya, who was torn from her, arrested for no reason. Yet she isn't graced with her own music or lashed with her own rhythm, and we examine her as if she were inside a glass bowl. Luckily, it isn't a fatal flaw.

"Ice Road" still gives enormous pleasure, particularly when the setting itself is a literal "ice road," whether it's the insane journey of the Chelyuskin into the blinding whiteness of the Arctic, or the road that the blokadniki have to build across Lake Lagoda in order to bring supplies into the starving city. The book seems to find its own voice during the blockade, as brave young men charge into the enemy line with "homemade swords," slowing down the German assault, or when someone trying to stop a building from burning down suddenly finds himself "alight, rolling across his roof top with the fire, away from it if he can, pursued by fire and bringing fire with him." Or else we see the dead strung out like scarecrows "stiffened with ice," or birds freezing as they fly, or German pilots terrorized "at our pilots' tactic of ramming them in midair."

Ice is the central image of the novel, since Russia under Stalin's thumb had become "random ... like the ice, out of man's control." But it's more than that, and therein lies the novel's magic. The world of ice is where Irina discovers herself; it's the void, the empty spaces between each sentence, the place that humbles us until "we are nowhere and we are everywhere."

The ice that can squeeze a ship to death has its own relentless music, surrounding us with a necessary "nothingness." It's imagination itself, the same imagination that Stalin and his policemen tried to kill but couldn't. While she's aboard the Chelyuskin, Irina realizes that everything has changed: "I got educated and stranded on the ice." But education is being stranded on the ice, where we can hear the howling inside our head, and, for a good part of the novel, Slovo takes us outside trumpery, outside the prettiness of style, and into that land of ice where the best fiction lies.

Jerome Charyn is Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at The American University of Paris. His most recent novel, "The Green Lantern: A Romance of Stalinist Russia," was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. "Savage Shorthand," his study of Isaac Babel, will be published by Random House in October.
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/06/24/106.html