Moscow Rules

by Robert Moss

  Marshal Zotov gave it precisely a quarter of an hour, counting off the minutes on his wall clock. Then he rose from his desk — topped with green baize and bristling with model tanks and planes, trophies from Warsaw Pact armies — as if to dismiss his visitors. With his massive shoulders and heavy jowls, propping himself up on his fists, Zotov looked rather like the old mastiff he kept at his dacha in the Silver Forest.

  ‘I’m leaving early,’ he told Sasha, as Colonel Topchy handed the young general some standard forms relating to the transfer of the new KGB section chief to Kavrov. ‘I won’t be back until late tomorrow,’ the Marshal added. ‘I have been summoned to attend a special extended meeting of the Politburo. So I rely on you to hold the fort.’

  The Marshal avoided looking at Sasha as he said this.

  Topchy smiled and nodded, as if to indicate that he, too, was in on the secret of the Politburo meeting.

  Sasha knew — because a man had called him with the code word Bangladesh — what was on the agenda for the Politburo session. They had pronounced the General Secretary dead, and were going to pick a new one. He wondered whether the doctors had already shut off the life-support systems in that secluded ward among the white birches, or whether that would come later.

  Sasha left the Marshal’s office first. Topchy lingered for a moment. He made sure that Sasha was still within earshot when he remarked to Zotov, ‘You know, of course, that some people criticized you for appointing your son-in-law to such a senior post on the General Staff.’

  Zotov scowled, and the KGB man quickly added, ‘Of course, they were wrong. Preobrazhensky is an exceptional officer.’ Again, there was that cutting edge of irony in his voice.

  ‘Oh, yes, exceptional,’ Marshal Zotov grunted, ignoring the innuendos, impatient to be rid of his KGB guest.

  This exchange convinced Sasha that the danger was imminent, and that Topchy’s main motivation for visiting General Staff headquarters that afternoon was to play cat-and-mouse with them before coming in for the kill. Topchy was no stranger to killing. Now Sasha felt certain that Topchy was amusing himself, while awaiting his moment to return to the building with an order to take him to Lefortovo prison.

  As he hurried back to his own office, Sasha brooded over the apparently disconnected remarks that the KGB man had thrown out in the Marshal’s office. The questions about New York and the Americans, seeming casual, made him most uneasy. In his own room, he threw open the window, despite the chill in the air and the noise of the traffic on the left side of the building, facing Gogol Boulevard. There was a wide-meshed net tacked to the window frame, as in many of the offices in the building. It was not meant to keep bugs out, but to catch documents that might get caught up and blown away by a sudden breeze. This was a rational precaution; only a handful of generals and marshals rated air conditioning, and in the depth of summer, many of the windows were opened to get relief from the stifling heat. Sasha stared out through the mesh of the net, almost wide enough to stick a hand through, and suddenly he realized the point of the KGB man’s questions about America. For an instant his stomach clenched up inside like a fist.

  He went to the safe, unlocked it, and took out his pistol and one of the boxes of ammunition he kept on the same shelf. The pistol was a P-6 with a built-in silencer, like the ones the Spetsnaz commandos used. Methodically, he fitted in the magazine, tested the weight of the gun in his palm for a moment, then slipped it into his pocket and closed the door of the safe.

  Whatever the night held for him, it was not going to end Topchy’s way.

  Chapter One – Discoveries

  ‘I love my country, but with a strange love: my reason cannot fathom it.’

  Lermontov, My Country

  It had begun a quarter of a century before, with an accident on the fifth-floor landing of the featureless gray apartment block where he lived with his mother and grandmother. He had just turned sixteen, though he looked older. It was Saturday, and he had been sent to fetch groceries from the local gastronom, whose big glass windows were filled with dusty plastic replicas of cuts of meat and with pyramids of blue-and-silver cans of caviar. When he got home, his grandmother did not let him leave immediately, but sniffed at everything, as usual, complaining that the sour cream was no longer thick and fat, the way it used to be, and that the beef looked and smelled as if it had been left lying around for days for the flies to inspect.

  Finally released, Sasha went racing down the stairs that spiraled around the elevator shaft, his boots slung over his shoulder, worried he was going to be late for his hockey game. He could see the metal roof of the elevator cage in the shaft two floors down. Either it wasn’t working, he thought, or else repairmen were moving their equipment in. Most of the tenants complained of leaks; there were buckets and basins all over the place. The building committee had been trying for months to get something done.

  Sasha was already over six feet tall, not stocky but tightly knit, a hard man to stop on the hockey rink. He swung down onto the fifth-floor landing at the same moment that a stooped, angular man came out of the lift, cradling a pile of books. Sasha swerved to avoid him, but the older man shuffled sideways in the same direction, so they became tangled up in each other’s legs. Both they and the books went flying.

  Sasha was up again in an instant, red-faced, muttering apologies as he helped the older man to his feet. He could see now that the stranger was at least fifty. Sasha could feel the man’s bones, close to the skin. They seemed loose and brittle, like a wounded bird’s. The stranger’s hair and his wispy beard had once been reddish. His eyes were an indeterminate color, between hazel and slate, blinking up through the little round glasses he was trying to hook up over the bridge of his nose.

  Instead of blustering, as Sasha expected, the stranger peered at him thoughtfully.

  ‘I hope I didn’t hurt you,’ Sasha said.

  ‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing.’ The stranger set about collecting his books, handling them as gently as old parchment.

  ‘Here, let me help you,’ Sasha volunteered. He noticed that most of the books were works of history. Some were in French and other foreign languages Sasha did not recognize.

  He followed the man to the open door of his apartment, and paused at the threshold. Books rose in teetering piles high above the windowsill, blanketed the narrow, iron-framed bed against the wall, burst out of an old glass-fronted cabinet, the kind you couldn’t find anymore.

  ‘Give those here,’ the stranger said sharply, rushing to take charge of Sasha’s cargo, as if frightened that the boy might deface his precious books. His hands were shaking as he reached out, and Sasha saw that his fingers were stained a deep tawny yellow, all the way to the joints. He started wheezing, and then a noise rose out of his chest that was more like a creaking door than a cough. He lunged for the table and stuck a butt in his mouth. The room began to stink with the smoke. It was not an ordinary cigarette, but some awful black shag.

  ‘Old habits,’ the man muttered, conscious of the boy’s attention.

  Sasha turned to leave, but the stranger called out, ‘Wait a minute. You live here, I suppose?’

  Sasha nodded.

  ‘Well, we must make proper introductions. I am Arkady Borisovich Levin.’ He stuck out his hand, and Sasha took it. There was surprising force in the old man’s grip. The boy looked at him with increased curiosity. He knew only one other Jewish family in the building. The son, Yuli, had been one of his classmates until all the rumors began to circulate about how the Jews were plotting to murder the father of the country, Great Stalin. Then, every recess, the other boys had started beating up Yuli in the schoolyard. They broke his nose, and his glasses, but he kept coming to class every day. Sasha didn’t join in the beatings, but he stopped walking to school with Yuli. Like the others, he was filled with rage and terror at the thought that the Jews were trying to kill the country’s leader. What would happen to them all without Stalin? But Stalin died anyway, and life went on as before. Now Stalin’s name was n
o longer mentioned in school, and Yuli was left alone.

  Levin was looking at him expectantly.

  ‘Preobrazhensky,’ the boy said formally. ‘Alexander Sergeyovich.’

  His seriousness must have seemed comic to Levin, who gave a lopsided smile that did not completely mask his ruined teeth. The man was a shambles, Sasha thought, with his bones sticking out and his collapsing lungs and his broken teeth. But there was a mystery about Levin that attracted him, not to mention the books. That disheveled library, whose musty, mothballed odor mingled with the reek of Levin’s makhorka, seemed tantalizing and illicit.

  Preobrazhensky?’ Levin was frowning now as he repeated the name. ‘There is something —’ he started muttering to himself, and went rummaging among his books. He went from one carton to another, blowing dust off the old bindings. Sasha hesitated. If he waited any longer, he was sure to be late for the game.

  Levin emerged with an ancient tome. The covers were cracked, but it had marbled endpapers and the pages were gilded with gold leaf, not just at the top but down the side as well. Sasha had never seen such a book.

  ‘Here, here.’ Levin was holding it open at one of the plates, which showed an officer with a curling moustache in a bottle-green jacket, reviewing a line of soldiers. ‘Your namesakes. The Preobrazhensky Guards. The household regiment of Peter the Great. But I expect you know all about that.’

  ‘I know a bit,’ Sasha said cautiously. He stared at the picture. Shave off the moustache and the officer, with his arrogant good looks, strongly resembled the photographs of his father in the apartment upstairs.

  ‘With a name like that, I suppose your father is a soldier,’ Levin suggested.

  Sasha’s face clouded. ‘My father is dead,’ he explained. ‘He was killed fighting the Germans.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ The professor watched him with an odd expression, a mixture of cunning and alarm. Sasha began to distrust him. Levin said, ‘I’m sure your father was a very brave man.’

  ‘He was a Hero of the Soviet Union,’ Sasha announced proudly. ‘Ah. Was he killed in Russia?’

  ‘My father was killed in the front line in Germany at the end of the war.’

  Levin took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He let his hand linger across his brows. It trembled violently, like a shade in an open window caught by the wind.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Sasha asked.

  ‘No. That is —’ He slapped his hand flat on the writing table, as if to subdue it. ‘You must forgive me. It’s just — there were so many good people who died. It was a time of madness.’

  Sasha started to warm to him again. Obviously the professor had also lost people close to him during the war, perhaps his entire family.

  ‘Well, it was nice to meet you,’ Sasha said politely, turning to leave.

  ‘Stay for a minute. Do you know the name of your father’s unit?’

  ‘He was in the artillery.’ Sasha began to recount the story of how his father won the star of a Hero of the Soviet Union. His grandmother never tired of telling it. His father was a captain commanding a battery of antitank guns on the borders of East Prussia, when a Panzer column mounted a desperate counterattack. When the lead tank opened fire, every man in the battery was killed or disabled except Captain Preobrazhensky. Alone, he managed to aim and fire one of the guns. But he had to lean in close to the armoured shield to see through the sights, while reaching across to jerk the firing cord at the same time. He was unable to back away to escape the recoil of the gun. Each time he fired, the shield scraped across the side of his face like a blunt razor. Blood streaming down his face, numbed to the pain of the lacerations, he kept on firing until eight of the enemy tanks were knocked out. From a trench in the rear of his position, a high officer from the General Staff watched the battle through a periscope. Afterward, he had Sasha’s father, swathed in bandages, brought to him from the field hospital and pinned the coveted star on his chest.

  Sasha’s voice rose as he told the story. Levin fidgeted and patched together another rough cigarette from a wad of shag. He looked tortured, as if he were sharing the pain of Sasha’s father.

  ‘And you,’ Levin resumed his questions. ‘You were born before the war?’

  ‘At the end of it,’ Sasha corrected him. ‘I never knew my father.’ He stared at the worn carpet on the floor. Why did he have the feeling that Levin knew more about his father than he did?

  Preobrazhensky. That name —’ Levin began. Then he paused, seeming to twist his thought in midsentence. ‘— is a responsibility.’ The detached phrase was almost lost in a new coughing fit.

  ‘Were you in the army?’ Sasha asked him.

  ‘I was engaged in Party work,’ Levin said quickly. ‘Then at the university. I was — I am,’ he corrected himself, ‘a professor of history.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sasha’s tone betrayed his disappointment. Party work and the practice of history. Now, there was a good combination for you. At school, history was his least favorite subject. He preferred languages, for which he had a flair, and mathematics, which was neutral and exact. History was all learned by rote. You memorized dates and formulas, and rehearsed them like a catechism. For a while, when he was younger, Sasha had found it reassuring. All of history was moving inexorably toward the triumph of socialism, his teacher insisted, and Stalin was the incarnation of the socialist idea. History was something certain; you could lean on it, like the trunk of a sturdy oak.

  But without warning, the timber split. Overnight Stalin shrank to the stature of a petty tyrant and the female history teacher set them new lines to learn. This was the same fat cow he remembered blubbering in class the day Stalin’s death was announced and the factory sirens started wailing and the schoolchildren were released to join the crush outside the Hall of Columns where the leader’s body was lying in state. One day he and some of the other boys in the class had hidden at the foot of the stairs and peered up, sniggering, as she waddled down, her skirts billowing out. She had caught on to what was happening and sent them all to the headmaster. So much for the inexorable laws of Soviet history!

  The professor looked suddenly exhausted, as if he could read Sasha’s thoughts but lacked the energy or conviction to take issue with them.

  ‘You can borrow this if you like,’ he said, holding out the book about Peter the Great. ‘We’ll talk some more, now we are neighbors.’

  *

  Number 14, Sasha’s apartment, was on the seventh floor, and was shared with three other families. Your head rang at night with the sound of pans banging and doors slamming shut and voices raised in argument or song in the communal kitchen. Fufkov, the resident bully, a red-faced, sweaty son of the workers who had arrogated a few scarce cubic meters of communal space by installing his own refrigerator in the kitchen (the others with fridges kept them in their own rooms), often got drunk and lectured anyone who couldn’t escape on how things were going to the dogs since Stalin died. Down below in the courtyard, you could usually hear the shrill voices of women neighbors engaged in a squabble, or of packs of boys brawling in the playground. This playground was equipped with a plank table for ping-pong whose corrugated surface made it so hard to control the movement of the ball that you either became stunningly professional or gave it up.

  Everywhere you turned, you were jammed up against other people. There was nowhere to be alone. The authorities claimed that the housing problem had been solved, but Moscow seemed to be bursting at the seams. Still, the block on Peschanaya Street, near the aircraft plants around the old Khodinsk airfield, was a big improvement over the first place Sasha remembered as home. Before the Great Patriotic War, his grandmother, Vera Alexandrovna, had had a whole apartment to herself in a little yellow-stuccoed house in one of the snaky streets behind the Arbat, in the heart of the old Moscow. Sasha’s first memories of that apartment dated from the end of the war, when it seemed that the whole of Russia was moving to Moscow. Vera Alexandrovna found that her apartment was being occupied by half a dozen families o
f evacuees from the front-line zones who showed no inclination to move out. For a time they camped among the rest, and Vera Alexandrovna got used to the sight of her best sheets being laid out to dry over a paraffin stove in the kitchen and the sound of her best crockery being dropped on the floor. Finally, Sasha’s grandmother bowed to superior odds and went out ringing doorbells all over the city until she found them the place on Peschanaya Street. That was his grandmother’s way. However many times she was knocked down, she would be up on her feet again.

  The things about their room in Number 14 that made it personal were Vera Alexandrovna’s doing. There was a dark, round table in the middle that displayed her prize possession, a vintage Singer sewing machine, made before the Revolution, that had been passed down to her by her own grandmother and remained in perfect working order. She used it to mend clothes for Sasha and to make dresses for herself, always the same: shapeless, drab, and dark brown, hanging down over her calves like tents. She had a collection of family photographs. There was a grainy photograph of Vera Alexandrovna with her school classmates on the wall, and two pictures of the father Sasha had never known — smiling in an open-necked shirt at a river beach before the war; fierce and proud in the uniform of an army lieutenant on his way to the front.

  The room was exactly twenty-four meters square. It had good high ceilings with a center light in a big cloth lampshade that hung low over the table. The wallpaper was pale green, sprinkled with gold flowers. Vera Alexandrovna slept on the big camelback sofa on the left side, next to the heavy sideboard they used to store dishes and cutlery. At night, babushka would put up a folding screen; an old woman was entitled to a little privacy. Nina, Sasha’s mother, slept on the other side, next to the wardrobe. Sasha’s bed was at the far end, beside the door that opened onto their tiny balcony. If he put his head up against the frame, he could see the sky above the roof-tops.