The Russian Affair

by Michael Wallner

  When the scent of her perfume awakened him and he looked up, Galina Korff was standing over him. “Is this your idea of performing night duty, Comrade Captain?”

  Leonid tried to leap to his feet, but his smooth boot soles slid on the synthetic floor covering; he barely stood up, and then he was lying down again.

  “If one were to gauge the condition of our armed forces by your appearance, I should think the estimate of our military strength would be distinctly low.”

  He didn’t know anyone who expressed herself the way Galina did. Leonid was used to the barking of the men in his battalion, who spoke a good deal but hardly ever said anything. Sometimes he even forgot that there were other ways of speaking Russian besides soldiers’ slang.

  “Well, what shall I do with you now, my stalwart drum major?”

  He was upright again, but his head was still heavy with sleep. “So you were very busy?” It was all he could think of to say.

  “Two premature births brought on by the mothers’ overwork.” She started toward the exit. “I was able to save one of the babies.” She waited for him to push open the swinging door. “Then there was a thumb amputation, followed by a case I’d rather not describe to you if we’re going to get something to eat.”

  They stepped outside. The streets of the capital were empty.

  “Two-thirty,” Galina said, looking up at the illuminated hospital clock. “We won’t find anything open.” Pensively, as if there were a range of possibilities, she peered down the street. “What do you say to the following option? I invite you to my place.”

  The night had turned a murky gray that the streetlights made even murkier. An icy half hour later, they were sitting at the cozy table in Galina’s apartment, which would not have been out of place in a novel from before the Russian Revolution. The double windows had been handmade by joiners who’d skillfully fitted the component parts together without using either nails or screws. Leonid marveled at the construction of the inner sashes, into which a tiny, rectangular opening had been set for purposes of ventilation. The living room was paneled in a way he’d never seen outside of a museum. Within minutes, the small, coal-burning stove had diffused so much heat that Leonid removed his uniform jacket. “How did you find this jewel?” he asked.

  “Find it? I rescued it.” She brought beer, some green liquid, and water to the table. “The housing combine was just about to tear out all this junk, as they called it, and replace it with modern materials. I had to sign a statement in which I agreed to accept various anachronistic items.” She poured him a drink. “It breaks my heart to give up this apartment. I won’t find anything like it in Yakutia.”

  “When’s your duty here over?” He watched as she diluted the green liquor.

  “In four days,” Galina sighed. Noticing his curious gaze, she held her glass against the light. “The green fairy in absinthe. Have you never tried it?”

  He took a sip and grimaced in surprise. The thought that this was probably their last meeting made him gloomy. “Where did you learn to talk like that?” he asked. “I don’t know anybody who gets so much out of our language. Who taught you that?”

  “My head.” Galina sank back in her chair. The strain of a long day fell away from her.

  “Your head may be the tool, but who sharpened it?”

  “A dangerous counterrevolutionary,” she said with a smile. “At the time, he was already a very old man, and I was just a tiny little thing. My grandfather, the former governor-general. I learned everything about poetry and about our writers from him. My outlawed dyedushka even taught me the little I know about playing the piano.” She threw two lumps of coal into the stove. “I was born in Yakutia. By that time, my family had already come to the end of their odyssey. It had led them through several prisons and an eastern Siberian penal camp that must have been truly awful, because not one of my people ever told me anything about it. In the end, since my family had accepted everything without protest and Grandfather had affirmed from the bottom of his heart that the epoch-making, revolutionary changes that had taken place in our country were nothing short of fantastic, the powers that be apparently grew tired of punishing us for having been born with silver spoons in our mouths. My father was banished to the most desolate corner of the world and given an underpaid job, and there, finally, my grandparents were allowed to live in peace. Soon, however, the war broke out. It probably would have gone unnoticed in Siberia if the demand for coal hadn’t doubled. And not long afterward, I came into the world.”

  She went to the kitchen to prepare some soup. Leonid stretched out his legs; it had been a long time since he’d felt so comfortable. The fog outside, the noiseless night, the woman busy at the stove—he got up and went to her, hugged her from behind, and clasped her breasts. She stood still for a moment before returning to her culinary activities. A little later, the barley soup was on the table. Galina put a spoonful of sour cream on each portion.

  She stood beside his chair. “Well? That was all?”

  He pulled her down on his lap, the spoon fell to the floor, sour cream spattered the floorboards. Galina kissed more wildly, more playfully than Anna; her mouth seemed to be everywhere at once. Her pelvis never stopped moving the whole time she was sitting on him, so he lifted her up and tried to carry her into the next room. But Galina insisted that they eat first; she wanted him to appreciate her soup.

  “Take that off,” she said, pointing to his wedding ring.

  Their embrace was wonderful, weightless; their bodies intertwined in total intimacy and remained entangled long after they collapsed and lay panting. He’d often wished that something of the sort would happen with Anna, but it had seemed an empty fantasy, and he’d told himself that he wasn’t capable of transporting a woman to such a height of passion. With Galina, everything had happened effortlessly. He couldn’t stop caressing her; he’d had to travel five thousand miles from home in order to meet someone like this. Everything felt warm to him; it was as if he’d seen the pattern in this carpet or his toes at the end of this bed a hundred times before; even the way to the toilet seemed familiar. When Galina fell asleep in his arms and her breathing grew regular, he gave no consideration whatever to leaving and thought only briefly about the excuse he’d offer for having missed the morning roll call. Then, gently, he woke Galina up, and they made love again. When the inexorable brightness of dawn appeared, she pulled the thick curtains closed and announced with a sigh that now she must sleep for a few hours. Leonid got up. As he put on his uniform, he found every movement difficult, and the prospect of saying good-bye to her seemed impossibly daunting.

  “Today’s my birthday,” he said suddenly, speaking into the chilled air of the apartment.

  “Then you were born under the sign of the fishes,” Galina murmured, already half asleep. “I’m a scorpion.”

  He pulled on his second boot, kissed her thick, naked foot, and left. He had breakfast in the city, followed by a shot of liquor for his birthday. Then he went back to the base. A long letter from Anna had come for him; in it, she told him how much she wished they could be together on that day. She’d enclosed a drawing, made by Petya, which depicted an oversized soldier on a tiny island. Only when Leonid washed his hands that evening did he notice that he’d left his wedding ring at Galina’s. He knew the date when she was leaving, he was aware that he had only a few days to get the ring back, and yet he let the time pass.

  Leonid spent the melancholy day of Galina’s departure in his office on the edge of the cliff. As the hours passed, he came to the realization that his betrayal of Anna’s trust meant nothing to him. He almost wished that Galina would take the ring with her to Yakutia.

  One week later, a small package came to Leonid in the military mail. He assumed it was from Anna, but the return address was the hospital in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. He knew what the contents would be. One does not forget such a thing, Comrade! These words were written in a vigorous hand on the sheet of paper the ring was wrapped in. At the bottom of the p
age, easy to overlook, was an address: 119 Cosmonauts Street, Yakutsk. No salutation, no hopes to meet again; and yet, for Leonid, that address was the origin of a temptation that grew stronger and stronger with every day he spent on Sakhalin Island. Cosmonauts Street, number 119, was on the mainland, far away, yet it soon came to represent for him the focal point of his deepest longing; he would have preferred to die than never to see Cosmonauts Street. So when his turn to take home leave approached, it was only logical that he should put in for a week not in Moscow but in Central Siberia. The major asked no unnecessary questions and signed Leonid’s pass.

  A transport plane that picked up foodstuffs for Sakhalin Island brought him to Khabarovsk. From there, it was another fifteen hundred miles to Yakutsk, the capital and chief city of Yakutia, where he landed on a gloriously sunny morning. On the drive to the city center, he saw some of the so-called Yakutsk Cripples: houses whose heat had melted the ground under them. As a result, their cement piers had sunk into the mud, and the structures leaned in all directions. Only when he stepped out into the open air could Leonid feel how dry and cold it was; the first sign came from the tiny hairs in his nose, which froze at once and began to bend and crackle with every breath he took.

  He’d sent Galina a letter a week before and waited until his departure for an answer, but in vain. From Sakhalin, a room had been reserved for him at the Red Army Officers’ Residence in Yakutsk; he dropped off his luggage there and made inquiries in the motorized unit concerning the address on Cosmonauts Street. While speaking with the comrades, Leonid noticed that every vehicle in the yard had its motor running. “In the winter, they run twenty-four hours a day,” a driver explained. “Sometimes we have to light a fire under the engine block so they don’t freeze solid.” He laughed merrily. “So what? We have more than enough oil around here.”

  One of the trucks was headed in the direction Leonid wanted, and the driver gave him a ride. The town looked featureless, he thought; all the architecture served but one purpose, namely, to keep the frost out. On the roadside, he saw cars whose tires had burst from the cold. The windshields of vehicles contained double layers of glass; house windows had triple layers. People on the streets were so thoroughly wrapped in warm clothing that only their eyes showed. At a mobile street stand, milk was being sold in frozen blocks; for easier transport, wooden handles were frozen into the milk.

  “What I don’t understand, brother,” said the driver, yanking Leonid out of his contemplation, “is why a man on leave would come here, of all places.”

  “I’m visiting someone.”

  “A relative?”

  Leonid nodded to forestall further questions. They turned into a wide, tarred road lined with apartment blocks. Leonid thanked the driver and jumped out. He’d been warned not to take leather boots to Yakutia, because leather freezes and cracks apart in extreme cold, so he’d had the wardrobe officer give him some felt boots. Shod with this ungainly footwear, he stamped down Cosmonauts Street. He had to walk a long way, because every building had only a single house number; 119 was almost past the city limits. By the time he finally reached it, his face had gone numb. The nameplates and doorbells were behind a protective door; in semidarkness, he searched for Galina’s name. When he finally found it, a peculiar feeling of nervousness overcame him. He pressed the button, but there was no sound to indicate that his pressure had triggered a signal in one of the apartments. After several tries, he pressed the button next to Galina’s. A female voice cautiously responded, and Leonid said that he wished to speak to Doctor Korff.

  “Is it you who’s running around on foot outside?” asked the voice in the loudspeaker, and before he could answer, a buzzer sounded.

  On the second floor, a door opened as Leonid approached. “How can anyone be so reckless?” said a thin-faced woman. She was wearing so many layers of clothing that everything on her person flapped a little. “Comrade Korff doesn’t sleep here very often,” she said, offering Leonid a seat on a kitchen chair.

  “Does she spend the night at a friend’s place?” he asked. The thought had occurred to him before, but now, for the first time, he feared that his journey to Yakutsk had been a mistake.

  “When she works late, there’s no transportation available, so she sleeps in the hospital.” Galina’s neighbor shook her head. “You’re a madman. At this time of day, most people are at work. You could have frozen to death with nobody around to help you.”

  “I don’t find it so cold.” Leonid put his fingers up to his cheeks but couldn’t feel his own touch.

  “People have died just from breathing. The moisture in their breath turns to ice, they swallow it, and it chokes them,” the woman said. She poured him some tea. “Where did you come here from?”

  “Sakhalin.”

  “Don’t tell me fairy tales.” She offered him sugar.

  “Before that, I lived in Moscow.” Even though Leonid was burning to see Galina as soon as possible, no matter where he had to go to do so, courtesy required him to satisfy the woman’s curiosity about the distant capital.

  “We’re not barbarians here, either,” was her reply after Leonid had described the theaters, movie houses, and nightspots of Moscow. “Our surroundings may be harsh, but we have culture.” She showed him a monthly magazine, in which some dates were marked. “In April, the ballet is coming to Yakutsk, and our own symphony orchestra will perform the music.”

  “Yes, it’s a big country,” he replied, rather inconsequentially.

  “And we’re the biggest region in the biggest country on earth.”

  By this point, Leonid had completely thawed out; his cheeks and nose were burning, and he felt twinges in his fingertips. The neighbor lady explained to him where the hospital was but forbade him to set out for it on foot. She hung a red flag out of her window, and after that, they simply waited until a vehicle drove up to the building.

  “That’s the way we do it here when somebody wants to go somewhere.” She accompanied Leonid to the door. “Say hello to Galina for me. And tell her I have some mail for her.” The woman picked up a stack, and Leonid’s letter was on top.

  He walked outside and climbed into the car. The driver dropped him off near the hospital, and sooner than he expected, Leonid laid eyes on Galina. “I have to go away,” was the first thing Doctor Korff said. She was so bundled up that he recognized her only by her voice.

  “For how long?” His disappointment made him angry.

  “Three days.”

  “Are you going far?”

  “Six hundred miles.” As she spoke, Galina checked the equipment that was being loaded into crates of some synthetic material. “Keep the ambulance warm,” she ordered. “The instruments mustn’t be allowed to freeze.”

  “Six hundred,” Leonid stammered. “You’re going to drive six hundred miles in an ambulance?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re flying. The pilot knows the route, and the weather’s supposed to remain good.”

  “Galina …” She was bustling here and there, but Leonid stepped in her way. “I have only four days’ leave. Can’t you wait until tomorrow?”

  “If the woman isn’t operated on today, she dies,” Galina said, cutting him off. “There’s room in the ambulance. Come on, you can ride with me to the airport.”

  More taken by surprise than persuaded, he agreed. They hurried to the entrance hall; the ambulance was waiting outside, its blue light turning and flashing.

  Now that their brief reunion was about to come to such an austere end, the two of them sat unspeaking in their seats as the vehicle took them back to the place where Leonid had arrived only a few hours before. At last, Galina said in an accusatory tone, “You might have written.”

  “My letter’s lying unopened in your neighbor’s apartment.” He told her of his visit to the apartment building on Cosmonauts Street. Then he asked, “Aren’t there any doctors in the place you’re flying to?”

  She took off her hat. The look in her eyes struck him like a blow. �
�Have you looked at the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on a map? There’s nothing here. And this gigantic nothing is virtually uninhabited. It’s less expensive to fly doctors to where they’re needed than to station them in such extremely remote places.”

  The ambulance rolled into a sharp curve. The crates were tied down tightly, but Galina and Leonid were flung into a corner of the seat. She didn’t seem to register their brief touch. Then Leonid spotted the turboprop aircraft, which was being towed with rotating propellers to the inspection building.

  “That’s one of our planes!” Leonid cried in surprise.

  “Of course.” She buttoned her coat all the way up. “Do you think physicians have private jets at their disposal? We almost always fly in military aircraft.” She knocked on the interior window. “Get the crates inside the plane, fast!” While the turboprop and the ambulance were being brought as close together as possible, Leonid became aware of a huge machine that was also being rolled up to the airplane. Long hoses disappeared into the hatch, which a compressor was keeping warm.

  “Galina!” Leonid jumped out of the ambulance after her. “I was looking forward so much to being with you!” The noise of three different engines made every word nearly inaudible. “I don’t know … when we’ll see each other again!”

  “For an officer, you are remarkably out of touch with reality.” Her hands, buried inside thick fur, reached for his.

  “We’re right here, right now! That’s reality!” He tried to pull her against him, but Galina was inhibited by the presence of the workers. She ran toward the gangway that led to the airplane’s passenger door. The pilot appeared at the top of the ladder to oversee the de-icing procedure. Galina clambered up beside the pilot, pointed at the equipment that was being loaded inside the plane, and gave him instructions. Leonid was freezing; the feeling of having no feeling in his face struck him as a metaphor for this brainless trip. All around him, the work teams were exchanging rapid handshakes in order to escape the cold as quickly as possible. The hoses were removed from the aircraft, the ambulance’s rear doors were shut; Galina sprang from the gangway and went running up to Leonid.