During the meal, Adamek announced a change in the afternoon schedule: The Neutron Physics Laboratory, he said, was under too much pressure at the moment; therefore, the group would go for a walk along the Volga. Almost all the delegates were relieved at this news, with the sole exception of the Aeroflot pilot, who complained. “First we’re dragged to lunch at eleven in the morning,” she said, “and now we’re sloughed off for some free time on the riverbank.” She had the impression that the visitors’ program had been inadequately prepared. “I think Dubna is marvelous,” she concluded, appeasing the wounded Adamek, “and so I want to see as much of it as possible. For example, the Institute for Theoretical Physics—why can’t we get to see the source, the place where all the research projects originate?”
Anna observed the slender woman from one side. Could she be the second horse in Kamarovsky’s stable? Could she, like Anna, have an assignment?
“The program has been set for weeks and cannot be changed,” Adamek replied.
The swinging door in the entrance opened and in came two men. The younger one wore a white shirt, black jeans, and light shoes. His blond hair hung down to his collar, and he had a weather-beaten face. The other man, who was speaking to him very intently, was Alexey. They sat at the first table they came to, but the younger man immediately sprang to his feet and dashed to the counter. In front of the menu board, he flung his arms in the air and began abusing the cooks. “You can eat this shit yourselves,” Anna understood him to say. “Do you hate hungry people, or what?” The server dished him up some vegetables. He took a bottle of beer and went back to his table, where he realized that he’d forgotten to open the bottle and, without further ado, knocked off the cap on the table edge.
All conversation among the members of the visiting delegation fell silent; everyone was observing the scene. Bulyagkov, who’d ordered some wine, took a sip, made a disgusted face, and moved the glass some distance away. His blond companion laughed gloatingly. “Can’t your department do anything about this? All we get to eat here is shit.” He noticed that they were being stared at. “Research tourists from Moscow,” he grumbled, turning his back on the delegates’ table.
The Deputy Minister let his eyes pass over the other people in the room. No expression on his face revealed that he knew Anna. When he spoke again to his companion, he used his first name: Nikolai. Electrified, Anna sat up straight.
“Are you trying to suck it out of my brain?” the younger man asked. “Well, my friend, there’s nothing there!” As he ate, the Deputy Minister watched him pensively. They continued speaking, but with much more restraint. Soon the blond laid down his knife and fork and left. Bulyagkov, who’d eaten nothing, followed him.
“Does he look familiar to you?” Adamek asked. “That was Nikolai Lyushin.”
The novelty of having just seen both a member of the Central Committee and a leading physicist was enthusiastically discussed. The critique of the visitors’ program was forgotten; everyone had the impression that the place they were in was very important. Anna ate a few bites, found the rabbit ragout good, and emptied her plate.
The Volga was so wide in that stretch that you could see the curve of its surface. Like schoolchildren who had left the duties of lesson learning behind, the members of the delegation skated onto the frozen river, held hands, formed a chain, and hauled one another over the ice. Adamek maintained the dignity of his office but let himself go so far as to sit on the riverbank and smoke an old-fashioned pipe. Group leader Popov folded his arms behind his back and described a great circle in the middle of the river. The ice sighed under his blades, and Anna’s eyes searched for dangerous cracks. The orphanage director glided up to her from one side. “Supposedly, you can go skiing over there,” he said, pointing to the hill on the opposite bank.
“How do you know that?” she asked as they returned to the group together.
“The nickname of that spot is ‘Dubna’s little Switzerland,’ ” he replied. Ice crystals trembled in his hair. “They even have a cross-country course with floodlights. Do you ski?”
She shook her head. He said, “Well, that’s too bad, but we don’t have enough time for it anyway.”
Anna wondered whether the orphanage director was flirting with her or trying to tell her something.
Nadezhda, cheeks aglow, came charging up to her two colleagues. “We’re going to have an ice race! Will you two be partners?” The members of the visitors’ delegation were dividing up by twos. The women were to hang on to the coattails of the men, who would act as carthorses.
“I don’t know,” Anna said. She looked over toward Popov, who by then had almost reached the opposite bank.
“You’ve been keeping to yourself the whole time, Princess,” Nadezhda said snidely. “Grab onto this guy and race with us!” She went back to her partner, the handsomer of the two Irkutskian delegates from the Friendship Club, and prepared for the start of the competition.
Anna said to the orphanage director, “Looks like you’re going to get your exercise sooner than you thought.” They lined up with the others, and the radio producer gave the signal.
Right at the beginning two couples collided, cursing as they fell over one another. Yelena, the schoolgirl, was so light that her partner was able to pull her into the lead. The kolkhoz farmer’s coat ripped, leaving the peace ambassadress helplessly holding the loose tails in her hand; without hesitating, he lifted her to his shoulders and carried her in the direction of the finish line. Because there were an insufficient number of men, the cashier and another, younger woman, a college student, had banded together. They proved to be a strong pair, and they gave Yelena and her partner a run for their money. The orphanage director was frailer than Anna had expected; when he stumbled near the halfway point, she changed roles with him and hauled him behind her. They were the last to cross the finish line, their breath like white clouds around their heads, but for the brief duration of the race, Anna had forgotten her assignment and the impossibility of carrying it out. The others were already conjecturing about where they could get alcohol to toast the winners with.
Adamek joined the group, smoke billowing from his pipe. “Time to go,” he said. “They’re waiting for us in the Neutron Physics Lab.”
Arm in arm and giggling, the members of the visitors’ delegation returned to the bus. Popov’s absence was noted; a long, sustained whistle informed him that departure was imminent. Then they saw him, a small gray point in the distance, hurrying over the ice.
EIGHT
Anna spent the time after the tour of the laboratory in her room. She could hear some of the others changing for dinner, and in the room next to hers, the fellow from Irkutsk was visiting Nadezhda. They spoke softly for a while, but then their conversation fell silent, something struck the wall, and there was a cry, followed by tittering.
I’ll acknowledge my failure, Anna thought. Comrade Colonel, it was not possible for me to acquire the information without arousing suspicion, she said to an imagined Kamarovsky. Then she sat down on the bed, somewhat relieved. But her comfort didn’t last long, for soon her inescapable sense of duty announced its presence. She’d be in Dubna that night and the following day; she still had time to act. Should she, on her own initiative, simply go back to the physicists’ cafeteria in the hope of finding Lyushin there a second time? She remembered the remark the orphanage director had made on the Volga, the reference to the area dedicated to winter sports on the opposite bank of the river: Would that be where she could find the opportunity she was looking for?
These and other speculations made Anna so nervous that she leaped to her feet and changed—for the second time—the blouse she intended to wear to dinner. But then she opened the physics textbook again. She chose a chapter on quantum mechanics and tried to concentrate. Why am I kidding myself? she thought, her eyes still fixed on the text. I’m a house painter, the daughter of a poet, the wife of a soldier. I could have a delightful stay here, I could enjoy the nights with Alexey, but inst
ead I’m trying to be a spy! I must be crazy, I should be punished, and one day I will be, too! She commanded herself not to waver, read the introduction in one go, and was surprised to find that she vaguely understood it.
How does Leonid put up with all this? Anna wondered as her finger slid down the page. How has he been able to keep silent for so long in the face of such cheating? Why has he decided to close his eyes to the obvious? The more intense Anna’s affair became, the more often her husband spent the night in his barracks. He assiduously overlooked every change: that she spent more time on her appearance, for example, or that she came home with things they really couldn’t afford.
One evening, after Anna had settled into the backseat of the limousine that would transport her to Alexey, she’d noticed Leonid stepping out of the shadow of an archway just as the big car was pulling away. She’d expected her husband to make her explain herself later that night, but when she came home, he was already lying in the sleeping alcove with his face turned away from her. Anna could tell by his breathing that he was still awake, and when she got into bed, she’d pushed herself under his arm. Without a word, he’d stroked her hair and then turned away. When she woke the following morning, he was already in his uniform, sitting at the table next to Petya and cutting the boy’s bread into bite-sized pieces. Leonid had stayed with his unit for the rest of the week.
He’s not a weak person, Anna thought; he knows how to assert himself, and within the limits of his possibilities, he’s single-minded. She turned the page pensively. What he was lacking was passion. The only devotion he showed was in his love for Petya. And yet, Anna would have found intolerable the unresolved condition in which Leonid had voluntarily remained for months.
Rosa, that witch, as if she were capable of gauging Anna’s desperation, had offered her help precisely when Anna had been on the point of chucking everything. She’d decided that she was willing to accept any consequences rather than to go on living a life of double deceit. And at that exact point, Rosa had proposed a meeting.
“Doesn’t it bother you, constantly having to lie to Leonid?” she’d asked innocently, but at the same time so empathetically that Anna had shared her feelings with her. Then, on the very next day, Anna had been ordered to appear in Kamarovsky’s office, and the Colonel had presented her with his plan. He’d explained that officers from Moscow who volunteered for service in inhospitable parts of the Soviet Union might hope for special privileges upon their return. “It wouldn’t be for a long time,” he’d said. “But I think it would be best for us to avail ourselves of this expedient.”
She was so far gone in deceit that Kamarovsky could allow himself to make her such a proposal, Anna thought fearfully. Shouldn’t she stand up to him, once and for all? Anna didn’t want to lose Leonid, and she didn’t want to lose Alexey. Confounded by her dilemma, and full of shame at herself for taking up Kamarovsky’s offer unresistingly, Anna had asked, “So where would he get transferred to?”
The Colonel had pulled over a map that showed the locations of the various army units and tapped on a position in the Northeast.
“Siberia?” she’d whispered. “No, I can’t do that … you can’t ask that of us.”
“How long has your husband served as a lieutenant?” After Anna told him, Kamarovsky had sat there with an impenetrable expression on his face, as though, first of all, he had to consider the matter. Then he said, “A promotion might be possible. Naturally, your husband would have to apply for his captain’s commission himself.”
She’d stared at the map and tried to comprehend the incredible distance that lay between Moscow and there. “What guarantee do I have that Leonid will be allowed to come back home?”
The Colonel’s silence had made it clear to her that haggling with him was a foolhardy undertaking. Then he said, “I’m not in command of Leonid’s army unit, but should he decide to go along with a transfer, the circumstance will be taken into account, and it will be borne in mind that you both have cooperated with the security forces.”
This answer was too vague for Anna. “When will he get an irrevocable right of abode for Moscow?”
“In a year, or at the latest, a year and a half.”
“I’ll consider it.”
While showing her to the door, Kamarovsky had reiterated, “It wouldn’t be forever.”
That evening, Anna had initiated the overdue conversation. She and Leonid hadn’t been so honest with each other in years. They’d admitted that their only remaining interaction involved organizing the day: Who was bringing Petya to the doctor, who was picking him up from school, when would his grandfather have to lend a hand? They’d calculated how long it had been since they’d made love. Anna said it was because they slept in the same room with Viktor Ipalyevich. They’d hugged and petted each other, not with passion, but rather as though each sought protection in the other. Finally, since the subject lay close to hand, Anna had indicated that there was someone else; nothing serious, she’d explained, but nevertheless, not something she could end overnight.
Even then, Leonid had shown no interest in hearing reasons or learning names; he’d even told her he trusted her! Furious, she’d moved away from him on the sofa and told him to his face that she was having an affair with a member of the Central Committee. “And I’m being required to continue it, too!”
Leonid had been neither wounded nor outraged, but merely alert. Without Anna’s mentioning the KGB again, he’d wanted to know if their conversation was being listened to. She’d laughed, but with a glance at the familiar objects around her, she’d nonetheless admitted that she’d never considered such a thing even as a possibility until that moment. Since the name of her control officer had also been dropped, Anna considered that the moment had come to present Kamarovsky’s proposal. Once again, Leonid’s reaction had been not reproachful but practical. “Ever since I became a commissioned officer, I’ve been allowed to serve in Moscow. But no one who doesn’t belong to the nomenklatura can get out of serving in the provinces at some point.” He stood up. “That means that they would surely transfer me eventually, sooner or later. Why not now?”
“Do you know what that means?” She’d taken his hands and named the place in Siberia. For the first time in a long time, she’d noticed how sinewy his lower arms were. “Nine months of winter.”
“We have a big, glorious country. Why shouldn’t I get to know more of it?” He’d gone over to the bookshelves. “We don’t have a single book about Siberia.”
Not long after that, Leonid had taken matters into his own hands. He’d started bringing home books about the North and cutting out every newspaper article he saw that described the beauty of Siberia. Anna had distrusted his optimism, thinking it was just for show, and she’d read aloud to him reports stating that the ground in Yakutia never thawed out. The houses there, she read, were built on concrete pillars to keep the heated rooms from warming the soil and causing the whole building to sink into the resultant mire. Nevertheless, Leonid’s willingness to make the move remained constant, and one morning after night duty he’d told Anna that he’d decided to try for a transfer to Minusinsk. His application was already being considered.
“Why so far away?” Anna had asked. Strangely enough, she’d felt rejected.
“Does it make a difference?”
It had been a long time since she’d seen him so self-confident. He’d looked up the place in the atlas and determined that there were five time zones between Moscow and the city on the Yenisei River. “After this, I’ll be an expert in coal mining,” Leonid had said with a laugh, reading her a statistic that estimated the coal reserves in the area at 450 billion tons.
At night, Anna had wondered how she’d let things go so far. Wasn’t her situation beyond all reason? In order to maintain an illicit relationship, she was standing idly by and watching while her husband let himself be exiled to the other side of the socialist world. She understood Leonid’s motives less and less. Instead of asserting his rights—hadn’t A
nna secretly hoped he would?—he was falling in with Kamarovsky’s perverse proposition, and he was prepared to relocate at a great distance and without resentment. She almost envied him his eager anticipation at the prospect of getting to know some of the Soviet Union’s outlying regions.
In the days after her husband’s decision, Anna’s image of him had changed more and more starkly. How generous and spontaneous Leonid was! In their thoroughly muddled situation, he remained composed and kept his sense of humor. Unexpectedly, he’d become again the person whom Anna had once liked so much. She’d even told him that, had even sought his affection, but Leonid had rejected her advances. She’d tried to give him an idea of the barren wastes he proposed to enter and asked him whether he wouldn’t curse her for having driven him into exile, and he’d responded by chiding her for being such a romantic. It was then that Anna had admitted to herself that her feelings for Alexey were fading.
Simultaneously with Leonid’s promotion to the rank of captain, the news had come that he would be transferred not to southern Siberia but to Sakhalin Island, in the easternmost part of the Soviet Union. He’d reacted calmly even to this change and explained that the pay for duty on Sakhalin, because of its extreme location, would be double what he’d been expecting, and besides, frontier troops were given preferential treatment. When Anna checked on the distances this time, she found that Moscow and the island were separated by eight time zones.
“I’ll never get so close to Japan again,” Leonid had said with a smile. “The strait between the island and Japan is barely thirty miles wide.”
He’d made an unemotional decision to go to the East, and his departure had been equally serene. He’d inculcated in Petya the notion that he must now represent his father as head of the family; with deadly seriousness, the boy had accepted the charge. When Leonid thanked his father-in-law for his support, Viktor Ipalyevich had maintained a grim silence, just as he’d done throughout the preceding weeks in the face of all the changes he found reprehensible but couldn’t comprehend.
The Russian Affair Page 10