She was somewhere in her mid-twenties, a graduate of the University of Moscow, and although she’d been in the Czech capital only a matter of six months or so, had already adapted to the more fashionable dress that the style-conscious women of this former Western capital went in for. Besides that, Catherina Panova managed to be one of the downright prettiest girls Ilya Simonov had ever seen.
His career had largely kept him from serious involvement in the past. Certainly the dedicated women you usually found in Party ranks seldom were of the type that inspired you to romance but he wondered now, looking at this new assistant of his, if he hadn’t let too much of his youth go by without more investigation into the usually favorite pastime of youth.
He wondered also, but only briefly, if he should reveal his actual identity to her. She was, after all, a party member. But then he checked himself. Kliment Blagonravov had stressed the necessity of complete secrecy. Not even the local offices of the ministry were to be acquainted with his presence.
He let Catherina introduce him around, familiarize him with the local methods of going about their business affairs and the problems they were running into.
She ran a hand back over her forehead, placing a wisp of errant hair, and said, “I suppose, as an expert from Moscow, you’ll be installing a whole set of new methods.”
It was far from his intention to spend much time at office work. He said, “Not at all. There is no hurry. For a time, we’ll continue your present policies, just to get the feel of the situation. Then perhaps in a few months, we’ll come up with some ideas.”
She obviously liked his use of “we” rather than “I.” Evidently, the staff had been a bit nervous upon his appointment as new manager. He already felt, vaguely, that the three Russians here had no desire to return to their homeland. Evidently, there was something about Czechoslovakia that appealed to them all. The fact irritated but somehow didn’t surprise him.
Catherina said, “As a matter of fact, I have some opinions on possible changes myself. Perhaps if you’ll have dinner with me tonight, we can discuss them informally.”
Ilya Simonov was only mildly surprised at her suggesting a rendezvous with him. Party members were expected to ignore sex and be on an equal footing. She was as free to suggest a dinner date to him as he was to her. Of course, she wasn’t speaking as a Party member now. In fact, he hadn’t even revealed to her his own membership.
As it worked out, they never got around to discussing distribution of the new Moskvich aircushion jet car. They became far too busy enjoying food, drink, dancing—and each other.
They ate at the Budapest, in the Prava Hotel, complete with Hungarian dishes and Riesling, and they danced to the inevitable gypsy music. It occurred to Ilya Simonov that there was a certain pleasure to be derived from the fact that your feminine companion was the most beautiful woman in the establishment and one of the most attractively dressed. There was a certain lift to be enjoyed when you realized that the eyes of half the other males present were following you in envy.
One thing led to another. He insisted on introducing her to barack, the Hungarian national spirit, in the way of a digestive. The apricot brandy, distilled to the point of losing all sweetness and fruit flavor, required learning. It must be tossed back just so. By the time Catherina had the knack, neither of them were feeling strain. In fact, it became obviously necessary for him to be given a guided tour of Prague’s night spots.
It turned out that Prague offered considerably more than Moscow, which even with the new relaxation was still one of the most staid cities in the Soviet Complex.
They took in the vaudeville at the Alhambra, and the variety at the Prazské Variet6.
They took in the show at the U Sv Tomise, the age-old tavern which had been making its own smoked black beer since the fifteenth century. And here Catherina with the assistance of revelers from neighboring tables taught him the correct pronunciation of Na zdravi! the Czech toast. It seemed required to go from heavy planked table to table practicing the new salutation to the accompaniment of the pungent borovika gin.
Somewhere in here they saw the Joseph Skupa puppets, and at this stage Ilya Simonov found only great amusement at the political innuendoes involved in half the skits. It would never have done in Moscow or Leningrad, of course, but here it was very amusing indeed. There was even a caricature of a security police minister who could only have been his superior Kliment Blagonravov.
They wound up finally at the U Kalicha, made famous by Hasek in ‘The Good Soldier Schweik.” In fact various illustrations from the original classic were framed on the walls.
They had been laughing over their early morning snack, now Ilya Simonov looked at her approvingly. “See here,” he said. “We must do this again.”
“Fine,” she laughed.
“In fact, tomorrow,” he insisted. He looked at his watch. “I mean tonight.”
She laughed at him. “Our great expert from Moscow. Far from improving our operations, there’ll be less accomplished than ever if you make a nightly practice of carrying on like we did this evening.”
He laughed too. “But tonight,” he said insistently.
She shook her head. “Sorry, but I’m already booked up for this evening.”
He scowled for the first time in hours. He’d seemingly forgotten that he hardly knew this girl. What her personal life was, he had no idea. For that matter, she might be engaged or even married. The very idea irritated him.
He said stiffly, “Ah, you have a date?”
Catherina laughed again. “My, what a dark face. If I didn’t know you to be an automobile distributor expert, I would suspect you of being a security police agent.” She shook her head. “Not a date. If by that you mean another man. There is a meeting that I would like to attend.”
“A meeting! It sounds dry as—”
She was shaking her head. “Oh, no. A group I belong to. Very interesting. We’re to be addressed by an American journalist.”
Suddenly he was all but sober.
He tried to smooth over the short space of silence his surprise had precipitated. “An American journalist? Under government auspices?”
“Hardly.” She smiled at him over her glass of Pilsen. “I forget,” she said. “If you’re from Moscow, you probably aren’t aware of how open things are here in Prague. A whiff of fresh air.”
“I don’t understand. Is this group of yours, ah, illegal?”
She shrugged impatiently. “Oh, of course not. Don’t be silly. We gather to hear various speakers, to discuss world affairs. That sort of thing. Oh, of course, theoretically it’s illegal, but for that matter even the head of the Skoda plant attended last week. It’s only for more advanced intellectuals, of course. Very advanced. But, for that matter, I know a dozen or so Party members, both Czech and Russian, who attend.”
“But an American journalist? What’s he doing in the country? Is he accredited?”
“No, no. You misunderstand. He entered as a tourist, came across some Prague newspapermen and as an upshot he’s to give a talk on freedom of the press.”
“I see,” Simonov said.
She was impatient with him. “You don’t understand at all. See here, why don’t you come along tonight? I’m sure I can get you in.”
“It sounds like a good idea,” Ilya Simonov said. He was completely sober now.
* * * *
He made a written report to Kliment Blagonravov before turning in. He mentioned the rather free discussion of matters political in the Czech capital, using the man he’d met in the beer hall as an example. He reported—although, undoubtedly, Blagonravov would already have the information—hearing of a Polish Tri-D film which had defended the Old Bolsheviks purged in the 1930s. He mentioned the literary magazine, with its caricature of Frol Zverev, and, last of all, and then after hesitation, he reported party member Catherina Panova, who evidently belonged to a group of intellectuals who were not above listening to a talk given by a foreign journalist who was not sp
eaking under the auspices of the Czech Party nor the government.
At the office, later, Catherina grinned at him and made a face. She ticked it off on her fingers. “Reisling, barack, smoked black beer, and borovica gin—we should have known better.”
He went along with her, putting one hand to his forehead. “We should have stuck to vodka.”
“Well,” she said, “tonight we can be virtuous. An intellectual evening, rather than a carouse.”
Actually, she didn’t look at all the worse for wear. Evidently, Catherina Panova was still young enough, that she could pub crawl all night, and still look fresh and alert in the morning. His own mouth felt lined with improperly tanned suède.
He was quickly fitting into the routine of the office. Actually, it worked smoothly enough that little effort was demanded of him. The Czech employees handled almost all the details. Evidently the word of his evening on the town had somehow spread, and the fact that he was prone to a good time had relieved their fears of a martinet sent down from the central offices. They were beginning to relax in his presence.
In fact, they relaxed to the point where one of the girls didn’t even bother to hide the book she was reading during a period where there was a lull in activity. It was Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.
He frowned remembering vaguely the controversy over the book a couple of decades earlier. Ilya Simonov said, “Pasternak. Do they print his works here in Czechoslovakia?”
The girl shrugged and looked at the back of the cover. “German publisher,” she said idly. “Printed in Frankfurt.”
He kept his voice from registering either surprise or disapproval. “You mean such books are imported? By whom?”
“Oh, not imported by an official agency, but we Czechs are doing a good deal more travel than we used to. Business trips, tourist trips, vacations. And, of course, we bring back books you can’t get here.” She shrugged again. “Very common.”
Siminov said blankly, “But the customs. The border police—”
She smiled in a manner that suggested he lacked sophistication. “They never bother any more. They’re human, too.”
Ilya Simonov wandered off. He was astonished at the extent to which controls were slipping in a satellite country. There seemed practically no discipline, in the old sense, at all. He began to see one reason why his superior had sent him here to Prague. For years, most of his work had been either in Moscow or in the newly opened industrial areas in Siberia. He had lost touch with developments in this part of the Soviet Complex.
It came to him that this sort of thing could work like a geometric progression. Give a man a bit of rope one day, and he expects, and takes, twice as much the next, and twice that the next. And as with individuals, so with whole populations.
This was going to have to be stopped soon, or Party control would disappear. Ilya Simonov felt an edge of uncertainty. Nikita Khrushchev should never had made those first motions of liberalization following Stalin’s death. Not if they eventually culminated in this sort of thing.
He and Catherina drove to her meeting place that evening after dinner.
She explained as they went that the group was quite informal, usually meeting at the homes of group members who had fairly large places in the country. She didn’t seem to know how it had originally begun. The meetings had been going on for a year or more before she arrived in Prague. A Czech friend had taken her along one night, and she’d been attending ever since. There were other, similar groups, in town.
“But what’s the purpose of the organization?” Simonov asked her.
She was driving her little aircushion Moskvich. They crossed over the Vltava River by the Cechuv Bridge and turned right. On the hill above them loomed the fantastically large statue of Stalin which had been raised immediately following the Second War. She grimaced at it, muttered, “I wonder if he was insane from the first.”
He hadn’t understood her change of subject. “How do you mean?” he said.
“Stalin. I wonder how early it was in his career that he went insane.”
This was the second time in the past few days that Ilya Simonov had run into this matter of the former dictator’s mental condition. He said now, “I’ve heard the opinion before. Where did you pick it up?”
“Oh, it’s quite commonly believed in the Western countries.”
“But, have you ever been, ah, West?”
“Oh, from time to time. Berlin, Vienna, Geneva. Even Paris twice, on vacation, you know, and to various conferences. But that’s not what I mean. In the western magazines and newspapers. You can get them here in Prague now. But to get back to your question. There is no particular purpose of the organization.”
She turned the car left on Budenski and sped up into the Holesovice section of town.
* * * *
The nonchalance of it all was what stopped Ilya Simonov. Here was a Party member calmly discussing whether or not the greatest Russian of them all, after Lenin, had been mad. The implications were, of course, that many of the purges, certainly the latter ones, were the result of the whims of a mental case, that the Soviet Complex had for long years been ruled by a man as unbalanced as Czar Peter the Great.
They pulled up before a rather large house that would have been called a dacha back in Moscow. Evidently, Ilya Simonov decided, whoever was sponsoring this night’s get-together was a man of prominence. He grimaced inwardly. A lot of high placed heads were going to roll before he was through.
It turned out that the host was Leos Dvorak, the internationally famed cinema director and quite an idol of Ilya Simonov in his earlier days when he’d found more time for entertainment It was a shock to meet the man under these circumstances.
Catherina Panova was obviously quite popular among this gathering. Their host gave her an affectionate squeeze in way of greeting, then shook hands with Simonov when Catherina introduced him.
“Newly from Moscow, eh?” the film director said, squinting at the security agent. He had a sharp glance, almost, it seemed to Simonov, as though he detected the real nature of the newcomer. “It’s been several years since I’ve been to Moscow. Are things loosening up there?”
“Loosening up?” Simonov said.
Leos Dvorak laughed and said to Catherina, “Probably not. I’ve always been of the opinion that the Party’s influence would shrivel away first at its extremities. Membership would fall off abroad, in the neutral countries and in Common Europe and the Americas. Then in the so-called satellite countries. Last of all in Russia herself. But, very last, Moscow—the dullest, stodgiest, most backward intellectually, capital city in the world.” The director laughed again and turned away to greet a new guest.
This was open treason. Ilya Simonov had been lucky. Within the first few days of being in the Czech capital he’d contacted one of the groups which he’d been sent to unmask.
Now he said mildly to Catherina Panova, “He seems rather outspoken.”
She chuckled. “Leos is quite strongly opinionated. His theory is that the more successful the Party is in attaining the goals it set half a century ago, the less necessary it becomes. He’s of the opinion that it will eventually atrophy, shrivel away to the point that all that will be needed will be the slightest of pushes to end its domination.”
Ilya Simonov said, “And the rest of the group here, do they agree?”
Catherina shrugged. “Some do, some don’t. Some of them are of the opinion that it will take another blood bath. That the party will attempt to hang onto its power and will have to be destroyed.”
Simonov said evenly, “And you? What do you think?”
She frowned, prettily. “I’m not sure. I suppose I’m still in the process of forming an opinion.”
Their host was calling them together and leading the way to the garden where chairs had been set up. There seemed to be about twenty-five persons present in all. Ilya Simonov had been introduced to no more than half of them. His memory was good and already he was composing a report to Kliment Blago
nravov, listing those names he recalled. Some were Czechs, some citizens of other satellite countries, several, including Catherina, were actually Russians.
The American, a newspaperman named Dickson, had an open-faced freshness, hardly plausible in an agent from the West trying to subvert Party leadership. Ilya Simonov couldn’t quite figure him out.
Dickson was introduced by Leos Dvorak who informed his guests that the American had been reluctant but had finally agreed to give them his opinions on the press on both sides of what had once been called the Iron Curtain.
Dickson grinned boyishly and said, “I’m not a public speaker, and, for that matter, I haven’t had time to put together a talk for you. I think what I’ll do is read a little clipping I’ve got here—sort of a text—and then, well, throw the meeting open to questions, I’ll try to answer anything you have to ask.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7 - [Anthology] Page 23