by Robert Moss
It was a hack job. Sasha set himself on automatic pilot and wrote a whole speech for Suchko in less than an hour. Suchko got a pat on the back from the Party committee, and was suitably grateful to his ghostwriter.
‘Come on,’ he said to Sasha. ‘I owe you a drink.’
Suchko’s room smelled of soiled bedsheets and congealed fat. They drank vodka with beer chasers, at a pace that made Sasha feel queasy.
‘I know how to look after my friends,’ Suchko assured him. ‘You don’t need to waste your time burrowing in all those fat books. I’ve dropped your name to the right people. It’s all arranged. We’re going to elect you to the Komsomol bureau. You’re good with words. We’ll put you in charge of ideological discipline. Now what do you say to that?’
It was working according to plan, even faster than Sasha had expected. He affected not to be interested.
‘Don’t talk garbage!’ Suchko interrupted him. ‘We’ll tell you who to look out for. Scum like that snotty-nosed Zhukovsky. I’ve got his number, all right!’ He belched comfortably, and added, ‘You’re one of ours, I can tell. Not like those fucking kikes who are causing all the trouble.’
*
He met Tanya in the Alexander Gardens. She seemed distant, and didn’t respond to his embrace.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her.
‘There’s a nasty story going around.’
‘What story.’
‘They say that you’ve joined the bitches.’
‘Bitches?’ Sasha flung the foul word back to her. ‘Who’s been telling you that? Wait — I know the answer. It’s Zhukovsky, isn’t it?’
He thought of the poet with a bleak hatred. Zhukovsky was a fop, in that beret of his, sporting a moustache that he probably imagined made him look like Lermontov. His poems weren’t even any good.
Tanya wouldn’t face him. ‘Is it true that you’ve joined the Komsomol bureau?’ she addressed a fat pigeon waddling across the grass.
‘And what of it?’
‘You know what it means, don’t you? They say you’ve made yourself Suchko’s pimp.’
‘It’s not like that at all.’ He tried not to vent his anger on her, but was shocked by her lack of faith. Zhukovsky had obviously given her a good working over. He’d seen the way the poet looked at her; he was after more than a new convert.
‘Did they force you?’ she pursued.
‘Listen, we won’t be students forever. We have to think about the future, start acting like adults.’
She sighed and rose from the bench, pale and beautiful.
‘Let’s go to your place,’ Sasha proposed. ‘We can talk about it there.’ He knew that her mother and stepfather were away. Erinshteyn was spending three months at the Black Sea, courtesy of the Writers’ Union, to seek inspiration.
‘Not tonight,’ Tanya said. ‘I’m going to a meeting.’
Zhukovsky again, he thought.
*
‘You’re the man to deal with this Zhukovsky business,’ Suchko told him a few days later, in his most confidential manner. ‘This time, he’s gone too far. Important people have decided to put a stop to it.’ Zhukovsky’s group had handed out leaflets inside the Moskva cinema, denouncing the KGB.
Sasha didn’t resist the proposal as hard as he might have, maybe because he resented Zhukovsky’s hold over Tanya, maybe because he had already made his choice, and the first betrayal is the hardest.
‘The meeting is set for Thursday,’ Suchko told him. ‘You will present the bureau report. I’ve got a few pointers for you.’
He gave Sasha a typed sheet summarizing the charges against Zhukovsky. There was no indication of its provenance.
‘I know you’ll give a virtuoso performance,’ Suchko said.
Sasha wrote several drafts of his speech against Zhukovsky, and didn’t like any of them. The real charge against Zhukovsky was that the man was a vain fool. But they wanted him to make out that Zhukovsky was a tool of Western special services. The only evidence was that some of his samizdat had filtered out to Amnesty International and the foreign press. Suchko was asking Sasha to deliver a catalog of lies. Well, what had he expected? The system was founded on lies. This was the price of admission. Besides — he tried to rationalize — he was just a passive instrument. If he didn’t do the dirty work, someone else would. Zhukovsky was finished, and he had only himself to blame.
But he couldn’t bring himself to share these thoughts with Tanya. ‘I’ll break it to her tomorrow,’ he told himself each night. Then the morning of the Komsomol meeting came, and he still hadn’t owned up to her.
The lecture hall was crowded, and on the platform were several older men with bulging, self-important faces whom Sasha had never seen before.
When his turn came to speak, he started wading through the prepared text — edited and improved by Suchko and those who gave him his orders — without raising his eyes from the pages. A duplicate of one of the pages had been interleaved by mistake, and the ironclad phrases were so monotonous that Sasha read the first sentence before he recognized his error. Nobody seemed to have noticed.
‘Student Zhukovsky’s anti-Soviet activities,’ he wound up, ‘can benefit only our imperialist enemies. Our bureau proposes that he be expelled from the Komsomol and that the case should be submitted to the Prosecutor-General in order to determine whether Zhukovsky and the members of his underground organization have engaged in anti-state activities as well.’
This was received with decorous applause from the platform, weakly echoed by the mass of students in the hall. The roof of Sasha’s mouth was dry and sore, as if he had been smoking too heavily. He returned to his seat and avoided looking at Zhukovsky, who was sitting in the front row, legs crossed, head flung back, as if the proceedings had nothing to do with him.
The rest of the session proceeded like a steam locomotive shunting between stops. Other prepared speeches were delivered in tones that ranged from stage fury to the hum of a telephone receiver left off the hook. The resolution to expel Zhukovsky from the Komsomol was passed unanimously.
One of the large, comfortable men from the presidium took Sasha’s arm and praised his speech. ‘You’re one of us,’ he said cheerfully.
Afterward, Sasha hung around inside the lecture hall until the students had dispersed. When he went outside, a few students in Western jeans were gathered around the statue of Lomonosov — the Psychodrom, they liked to call it. There were a couple of ersatz hippies who had taken off their shoes and smeared their faces with bold makeup or poster paint. They paid no attention to Sasha. He crossed the drive, and walked through one of the gateways leading out into Prospekt Marx.
A shadow crossed his path, and he stopped short. It was Tanya. She was very pale, and her skin had an odd, matte texture, as if the life had been drained from it. But her eyes burned into him.
‘You — you —’ she stammered at him. Unable to complete her thought, she swung the heavy textbook she was carrying at him. He made no effort to stop her. The book thwacked against his rib cage.
She let the book fall and started slapping him. The blows stung, but he stood there unmoving until she had exhausted herself.
‘It’s over between us,’ she panted. ‘I don’t care if I never see you again.’
She turned to go, and he grabbed at her arm.
She wheeled on him and said, ‘Ilya was right. You’ve joined the bitches. I hope they do to you what you’ve done to him.’ The tears welled up and flowed over her cheeks. She broke free and started running up the street, veering from side to side to dodge the pedestrians. He watched until she was lost in the crowd.
He turned to find Suchko lolling against the faculty gate, with a faint smirk on his lips. He came up and took Sasha’s arm.
‘Forget your little Jewess,’ Suchko counseled. ‘There are plenty of girls who are willing. You’re on the way up.’
The Komsomol secretary’s oily face gleamed in the sunlight, and Sasha wanted to drive his fist through it. He mumbled
something and started hurrying through the crowd in the same direction as Tanya, toward the metro.
*
He bought a bottle of vodka that cost two roubles and eighty-seven kopeks, the cheapest rotgut in the shop. He found a solitary corner of a playground, tore off the throwaway top, and swilled more of the liquor than he could stomach. By the time he got home, his mind was swinging about like the needle of a broken compass. He ignored Fufkov’s drunken bellowing from the kitchen, told his mother he was ill, and threw himself into bed. He stayed there for two days.
When he returned to the Faculty, he appeared totally collected. He had built a wall between himself and Tanya. It mightn’t be solid enough to lean on yet, but he kept reminding himself that he had set himself an objective that was more important than his happiness, or Tanya’s. One day, he would be able to explain to her. One day, she would understand. Until then, it was better to forget her.
He found release on the hockey rink and in some of his classes in the military cathedra. All students were required to do military training. On graduation from Moscow University you were given the rank of reserve lieutenant in the armed forces. But few of the students _were interested in a military career. Behind their backs, they called their instructors ‘High Boots,’ — Sapagi, — or Soldafon, a made-up word that implied that if you listened to the man’s brain working, you’d hear a dial tone. But there was one instructor they all liked, especially the girls, a certain Suvorin. He was young but weathered; he gave the impression of a man with a past. There was a story that Suvorin had been assigned to the university as a punishment, that he’d been involved in secret work in the Middle East, but had got blind drunk and left his briefcase in a Moscow taxi. He was obviously as bored as his students with the theoretical sessions on Marxist-Leninist doctrines of warfare.
Sasha enjoyed the practical sessions, stripping down a kalashnikov or shooting at targets with a makarov pistol. He was the best shot in the class, better even than Suvorin. The instructor began to pay special attention to him.
*
They put Zhukovsky on trial in a drab stone courthouse in Lyublino, in the southeast suburbs of the city. Tanya and others from the group were kept outside, behind a tall green picket fence and a solid wall of militiamen and civilian toughs who jeered and jostled. Freight trains whistled nearby. In Soviet justice, the purpose of a trial is to make public a judgment that has already been reached. In the case of Ilya Zhukovsky, the only uncertainty was whether he would be sent to a psychiatric institution to be treated for ‘sluggish schizophrenia’ — a wondrous malady, discovered by the celebrated Professor Snezhnevsky, that had no clinical symptoms — or consigned to the labor camps. As it proved, Zhukovsky was more fortunate than some. He got three years in the camps for disseminating fabrications designed to bring the Soviet state and social system into disrepute.
Tanya hurled herself into the work of the defense committee. She tried to organize a demonstration, but hooligans broke it up. She would go to the Hammer and Sickle factory and try to hand out leaflets to the workers at the end of their shift. She had a violent quarrel with her stepfather and took to roaming the city like a nomad, camping out on the floor in other students’ rooms — and sometimes in their beds. She accosted foreign correspondents quite openly, pressing them to write stories about the dissident movement.
She was asking to be arrested. It was Suchko who broke the news. ‘They’re all going to be rounded up,’ he told Sasha breathlelssly. ‘All the members of Zhukovsky’s group.’ He confided that he had received instructions to arrange the expulsion of several students from the Komsomol. Tanya was at the head of the list. ‘The Committee’s involved,’ Suchko went on, using the standard euphemism for the KGB. ‘They’ve been watching them all along, playing them like fish on a line.’
The news blew a hole in Sasha’s calculations. He could rationalize what had happened to Zhukovsky, but he couldn’t stand passively on the sidelines and let Tanya share Zhukovsky’s fate. He had resolved to stop loving her, but he couldn’t accept that he had lost her beyond recall.
He rushed home to the room on Peschanaya Street. His mother kept her savings in a cookie jar hidden away on top of a wardrobe. Standing on tiptoe, he could just manage to reach it. There was more money than he had expected, tightly wadded in bundles and tied up in rubber bands. He wouldn’t need all of it.
He took a taxi to the Yaroslaysky station and stood in line at the ticket office.
‘Vladivostok,’ he said thickly when his turn came. ‘One way.’ They didn’t ask for his papers. In those days people were more relaxed at railroad stations than at the airports.
Armed with the ticket and the remaining cash, he went looking for Tanya. He tried the apartment on Smolenskaya Street. Tanya’s mother was haughty but scared. ‘There’ve been phone calls,’ she told him. ‘They wouldn’t give their names.’
By process of elimination, Sasha tracked her down to a girlfriend’s place out in the Lenin Hills, near the main campus. He heard voices inside the apartment raised in argument before he knocked. A nervous, mousy girl with cropped hair came to the door. She told him that she didn’t know where Tanya was, but when he threatened to push his way into the apartment, Tanya herself came out onto the landing and closed the door behind her.
‘What do you want?’ she said, trying to sound casual as she talked around a glowing cigarette. ‘I thought you’d be busy drinking with your pal Suchko.’
‘I came to warn you. You’re going to be arrested.’
‘Who’s going to press charges — you?’
She turned her back on him and peered out the window, across a desolate expanse of concrete.
‘Listen, your only chance is to get away from Moscow, somewhere they won’t look for you. I’ve arranged everything.’ He produced the railroad ticket, and made her look at it.
She stared at the destination. ‘Vladivostok?’ she said derisively. ‘So you want to send me to the other end of the earth. Why not Kolyma? It’s on the way.’ Kolyma was famous for its gold mines and the severity of its labor-camp regime.
‘Others have got away with it,’ he explained. ‘I have a cousin in Vladivostok. I know he’ll help you. He’s a good man, an engineer. He can get you work. You’ll have to change your name. But I promise they won’t find you. In the end, they’ll forget about you. Everything will blow over.’
Her laugh was short and brittle.
‘You must understand,’ he pleaded with her. ‘They’ll send you to the camps. Your father knows what that means. It’s beyond imagining.’
At that moment, Sasha was ready to throw up everything if he could only persuade her to save herself.
‘I’ll come and join you as soon as I can,’ he went on. ‘We’ll be together again.’
Perhaps the force of his emotion communicated itself to Tanya, because her sarcasm dried up. But she wouldn’t be swayed.
‘I’m not going to run out on my friends,’ she said. ‘And what about my father? If I run away, they’ll come for him. They’ll claim he was my accomplice.’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Sasha argued. ‘The families aren’t always punished.’
‘Come on, my father’s been in the Gulag already. The men who put him there have long memories. And they’re back in their old jobs. Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me?’
‘Yes — but —’ Abruptly, Sasha changed tack. ‘At least we can talk to your father,’ he suggested, hoping the professor would see things his way. ‘Will you do that?’
She hesitated.
‘I’ll take you there now,’ Sasha pressed her.
‘All right. But wait for me outside.’
She doesn’t want the others to see her going with me, Sasha thought, because they think I’m a stoolie.
He idled on the corner, in a pool of shadow beyond the sulfurous glow of the street lamp. For a crazy moment, he wondered whether he could somehow force her on to the train.
There she was at the doorwa
y, moving with that sinuous, feline grace. He started to walk toward her, just as two men ahead of him leaped out of a parked car. He saw them wrestle with her, pinioning her arms. A third man flung open the back door of the car — a black Volga — and they hustled her inside. A deep voice commanded, ‘Put your hands on the back of the seat in front of you.’
Nobody paid any attention to Sasha. He walked away, his legs as heavy as a pig iron, as the KGB driver started the engine.
Sasha didn’t look back.
*
A few days after Tanya’s arrest, Suchko asked Sasha to meet him in a room that the Komsomol used for committee meetings. There was a stranger there, a rangy, loose-jointed fellow with alert, cobalt-blue eyes.
‘Alexander Sergeyovich, delighted to meet you,’ the stranger greeted him familiarly, gripping his hand like a metal clamp. ‘I’m Inspector Lubovin of the Committee for State Security.’ He flourished his red identity booklet.
‘I feel I know you already,’ Lubovin went on. ‘I’ve heard so much about you from our friend here. By the way’ — he turned to Suchko — ‘I mustn’t detain you. Comrade Preobrazhensky and I have things to discuss in private.’
Trying not to look affronted, Suchko took his cue and left.
‘Well, here we are,’ Lubovin said. ‘There’s a delicate matter I have to raise with you.’
‘Yes?’
‘Just by chance, it came to our notice that Tatyana Levina was at one time your close friend. She’s very attractive, in her way.’
Sasha sat absolutely still.
‘I don’t want to cause you any embarrassment. We know everything about you, you can be quite sure of that. Did you get a refund on the railroad ticket?’
The KGB man watched for Sasha’s reaction. None was visible.
‘We’re all human, of course,’ Lubovin said indulgently. ‘You’re not under suspicion, rest assured.’
‘What will happen to her?’ Sasha said softly.