The weather had cleared up, and the afternoon was inviting. Enjoying the drive, Alexey leaned back in his seat and gazed out the window. The melting of the last snow and the awakening of the buds went hand in hand, and water was gurgling in the roof gutters. Puddles stood in green spaces where the ground was still frozen.
All at once, Alexey changed his mind: “Let me out here.”
Anton pulled over near Obukha Lane, so Bulyagkov could take a walk along a branch of the Moskva River. He liked to make decisions while out walking; in this case, he was thinking over the impending Stockholm trip and the task assigned to him in that regard. The accomplishments of Soviet scientific research could be seen most clearly in the chemical industry; therefore, chemists should form the main contingent of the visiting delegation: the ammonia experts from Severodonetsk and the synthetic-fiber developers from Nevinnomyssk. The distinguished collective of bone marrow specialists from Krasnoyarsk could be brought along to represent Soviet medical science. Of course, the Swedes were most interested in exchanges in the field of nuclear research, but here the Soviets would exercise prudence. There would be no risk in allowing Comrade Budker to go to Stockholm and present his work in aerophysics. Soviet study of laser–plasma interaction was old hat, Alexey thought; the Americans had long since outstripped everyone in that field. The delegation should include at least three scientists from the atomic cities of Novosibirsk and Dubna; Nikolai Lyushin had announced his interest, but sending him was out of the question. The man was too impulsive, unable to control his tongue, and inclined to boasting. Bulyagkov decided to anticipate the Committee’s selection criteria and nominate only scientists who had families. Besides, everything had to move quickly; when it came to issuing visas, the folks in the Lubyanka wouldn’t let themselves be hurried, and the trip was already set for May.
Bulyagkov left the embankment promenade and turned into the quarter that included, on its other end, Drezhnevskaya Street. The bushes were bright green, and he bent over to examine a twig. It’s the most audacious leap of my life, he thought; I don’t know anyone who’d take such a risk at my age. Above his head, some black and white birds kicked up a racket, zipping from branch to branch and celebrating the warmer weather. He looked up into the still-bare crowns of the trees and saw the sky through them, so brilliantly blue that it made his heart leap.
He thought about his last gift to Medea, the two canaries. In a queer way, the birds had now acquired a deeper significance: Only the cage had made them a couple; if you opened the door of the cage, each of them would fly off in a different direction. The separation from Medea was the most difficult ordeal on Alexey’s chosen path. Respect and admiration had bound them to each other for half a lifetime. Everything he had been able to attain, he owed to her. The divorce hearing would take place in a week; Alexey wished it were over now. When the big guns started firing, Medea would already be a safe distance away.
Deep in thought, he reached the little street with the illegible sign. Entering the apartment house as the owner of a clandestine hideaway adjusted to suit the wishes of a succession of female visitors was different from entering it as a simple resident, walking up the washed-concrete stairs, and opening the heavily scratched door in order to spend the night here alone. In the foyer, Bulyagkov threw off his sports jacket. After his long walk, the apartment seemed overheated. Only then did he realize that he’d had scarcely anything to eat in the cafeteria at lunch and nothing since, and suddenly he was starving. He pivoted around toward the door, but the thought of the dismal neighborhood, where there was hardly a restaurant, made him change his mind. He’d eat at home.
During the moving-in process, Anton had seen to it that the refrigerator was filled with the bare essentials; a glance inside revealed to Alexey that he’d already eaten most of them. He found eggs, a moldy onion, and half a jar of sour cream. He disliked cooking and wasn’t good at it, but he surrendered to necessity, grabbed the skillet, poured in some oil, and lit the stove. Then he cut the onion into thin slices. Alexey hated the life he was leading. His profession had turned out to be the opposite of what he’d had in mind many years previously, when he’d seized the opportunity to become an administrator of scientific research. He accomplished nothing more meaningful than the paperweight on his desk did. His contempt for the pencil pushers in his department struck him as increasingly pathetic with each passing day; he’d long since become one of them. The tool of his trade wasn’t the microscope or the scalpel or the slide rule, but the rubber stamp.
Bulyagkov focused his mind’s eye on the Minister, whose tactical shrewdness was exceeded only by his incompetence. He obediently distributed the funds in his budget in exact accordance with the capricious wishes of the Central Committee. Nobody thought in wide-ranging terms or made allowances for the decades-long continuity that was a necessity in complicated research work. Today the pharmacologists got the biggest chunks; tomorrow it would be the biochemists. Had the Minister not had Bulyagkov at his side, the cases of unwarranted favoritism, haphazardness, and corruption would have been past counting. At the same time, Alexey was aware of being merely tolerated: He was the troubleshooter for his clueless boss, the fixer for the Minister’s mistakes. Despite his advancement, Bulyagkov had remained the fellow who did the dirty work, a second-class person, a man whose background barred him from ever really entering the nomenklatura. He’d always be the Deputy, surrounded by envy for his abilities and condescension regarding his past.
A crackling sound came from the frying pan, and the smell of hot oil rose to his nostrils. He quickly dumped in the onion slices and jumped away from the sputtering grease. Without Medea, I would never have come even this far, he thought, rolling up his shirt sleeves. The determining factor wasn’t my qualifications, it was her contacts. If I hadn’t let myself be blinded in my youth, if I’d gone ahead and finished my degree after all, maybe I would have been able to make the transition back into science. I could have returned to Kharkov and worked as a biophysicist; I would have had a real position in life. But for a young guy in Moscow, the allure of making a career there, Medea’s charms, and the open-mindedness of her family were too tempting. In those days, Alexey had severed his roots; instead of the son of a Ukrainian renegade, he preferred being an up-and-coming nobody in the capital.
Bulyagkov stirred the sizzling onions, removed the skillet from the fire, added paprika and sour cream, and then broke a couple of eggs into the mixture. As he placed the pan in the oven, he tried to remember the last time Anna had fixed this for him. He’d explained that it was a dish from his homeland, and then she’d wanted to know what he’d been like as a boy. Happy, he’d told her. Yes, in spite of the war, he’d been happy back then. When the front moved near Smolensk, Alexey’s father had taken them to Vyshnivets, a village deep in the forest, where one could hope that neither Germans nor Ukrainians would arrive. The land surveyor’s family found welcome and shelter there for many months—indeed, for almost a year. Alexey’s memories were of full days and protected nights. It was only after the victory that the hard times had begun, the stripping of his family’s assets, his withdrawal from the university, the flight to Russia. He bent down and looked through the little window to see if the eggs had set yet. Too impatient to wait any longer, he snatched the pan out of the oven. Even through the potholder, the skillet was too hot, and he had to run the last few feet to the table, drop the pan on it, and blow on his fingers. He didn’t really want to drink any alcohol, but he opened the bottle from simple force of habit and poured himself a glass. After fetching salt, pepper, a knife, and a fork, he sat down and ate from the pan. Never before in these rooms had he thought of himself as a single man, depressed, solitary, unable to cope with the silence. With the first hot forkful still in his mouth, he stood up again and turned on the radio. The music was pretty. Still chewing, he walked over to the window—daylight lasted so long this time of year! He would have liked to send Anton off to pick up Anna, yet he knew his longing was only an expression of his
loneliness. He was going to lose not only Medea, but also Anna. He swallowed morosely, took in the next forkful while still standing up, and considered how he might get through the interminable evening.
TWENTY-SIX
The first month of spring brought snowstorms worse than any Leonid had ever experienced in Moscow in the dead of winter. The armored vehicles attached to his company dedicated the bulk of their time to such wintry duties as clearing the roads leading into the city. Yakutsk was almost cut off from the outside world, and food supplies were nearing exhaustion. At the hospital, Galina had the diesel generators running throughout every operation, because there was no counting on normal voltage levels. The storms piled up twenty-foot-tall snow cornices in many places; on some streets, residents had to leave their buildings from the third floor, because the ground was covered with snow two stories high.
Leonid and Galina spent more time together; however, the intense moments they’d experienced when their separation was imminent had been unique and did not come again. He’d thought that his transfer would bring tranquillity to their relationship, but Galina appeared to have her doubts about this unexpected togetherness. She figured her captain was just having a good time playing house with her, and she rejected any sentimental assessment of the matter, behaving as though she assumed that the arduous routine of daily life on the edge of the inhabited world would soon make Leonid reconsider his intention to sign on for five years’ duty in Yakutia. Did he really believe he could be at home here? And if he did, why didn’t he just sign the contract and be done with it? Why did he give such pathetic reasons for drawing out the process?
Leonid knew why. His sojourn in Moscow had left a sting in him, the pride of the formerly privileged man. What interesting lives Muscovites led, after all, what riches their city offered! Even though Leonid never visited a museum and went neither to concerts nor to the theater, he could have done so in Moscow, had he wanted to. If he lived there, he could participate in the big military reviews again, too; his former battalion of armored infantry traditionally formed the leading unit in the May Day parade through Red Square. Now May was near—spring in Moscow. The captain sighed, staring out into the driving snowstorm. He envied his comrades back home, polishing up the big machines, decorating the barrels of the guns, attaching the track protectors so as not to damage the streets of the capital. He’d always been happy on the days when they rolled the tanks off the base, drove the dozen miles into the city, and maneuvered into formation on the Leningrad Prospekt. As a young lieutenant, Leonid had scurried here and there among the steel treads with a tape measure in his hand, making sure the distances were correct to within a fraction of an inch. Then, when the tank command received the signal indicating that the fighters had taken off from Aerovokzal Airport, the armored unit would set out in a wide formation for the city center. Final alignments and adjustments would be made on Gorky Street, where they would already be surrounded by a sea of red flags. As they neared Pushkinskaya, the military music would begin to play, and then the convoy, its engines roaring, would roll into the square of all squares. The gunners stood in the open turrets, wearing their parade uniforms, while the drivers had to follow the spectacle through their observation slits. And for all, what an honor to be there! Leonid wasn’t a man to whom pomp and ceremony meant very much, but for anyone who had ever experienced the scene, even if only once, the joyous cries, the luminous flags flying along the way past the Historical Museum, fluttering toward St. Basil’s Cathedral, and up above, the comrades in their dark overcoats, standing on the platform in front of the Mausoleum and waving down, and then, at the beginning of the festivities, the bells pealing in the Spasskaya Tower and the fighter squadron thundering overhead—for anyone who’d witnessed that, patriotism had stopped being just a word, and the feeling of a common bond among all free men under the sign of socialism had become a reality.
One’s duty to society could be carried out anywhere in the country, no matter how remote the spot, and yet Leonid was starting to get the feeling that he’d been lucky to live close to the heartbeat of Soviet life, and that he’d gambled that good fortune away. The pay he’d received while stationed in Moscow was far lower than what he got in Yakutsk, but what was a man supposed to do with his money in an icy wasteland? In the beginning, he’d given Galina presents—a bracelet with glittering pendants, which she never wore because it got in her way at work, an electric samovar, a new mattress—until she’d admonished him, telling him he’d do better to save his money for his son’s future. Leonid had the impression, however, that Galina didn’t care at all about Petya; it was more as if she were preparing him for the day when he’d realize that their time together was nothing but a stage in his inevitable return journey to his son and Anna.
Maybe that was the reason why Leonid started writing the letter. He wanted to do something that would make his purpose irreversible. You didn’t reach a decision of these proportions and then overturn it because of a little misgiving. Leonid wanted to see himself as a man swept away from the fat life of the capital to the periphery of the Soviet world. Pioneers were needed here, men who were idealistic and serious. Deep inside, Leonid was aware that his idealism was a mere dream and his duties as an insignificant captain limited to office work. After the adventurous Sakhalin interlude, in Yakutsk his life had settled back into monotony. The sameness of the days was disrupted only by the weather and Galina’s whims.
Her doubts also affected the passionate side of their relationship. As long as their time together was marked by the delirium of transience, Galina had been wild with desire; but now that Leonid treated her like “the woman at his side,” her intoxication was a thing of the past, and their erotic life had become predictable. He wanted her every night, but she’d been turning him down more and more frequently, claiming that her work at the hospital left her exhausted. Leonid, however, was thoroughly committed to having made the right decision; he wanted absolute validation. He’d chosen Yakutsk for his future, and he wasn’t about to let some initial difficulties push him into admitting defeat.
One afternoon when the sun was already going down outside and he was in the barracks, he began his letter to Anna. He placed his briefcase within easy reach so that he could slap it on top of the light gray letter paper quickly should his superior officer come in. The letter would close the door to Anna so irretrievably that Leonid would no longer have to fear his own fickleness.
Insensibly, the daily routine began to envelop Anna again. Petya’s next visit to the doctor was coming up, and even though you needed only to look at him to see how much improved he was, Anna was anxious about the appointment. She very much wanted to bring Doctor Shchedrin something as a sign of her deep gratitude; she’d bought a bundle of palm fronds from a street vendor, but upon arriving home, she’d discovered that the man had cheated her. The furry buds had frozen in transport, and once inside the apartment, they’d fallen dead from their stems.
Help came to Anna in the form of a small package. Viktor Ipalyevich received it from the postman, laid it on the table, and eyed it suspiciously. Anna, resting on the sofa before her afternoon shift, raised her head and asked, “Why don’t you open it?”
“Because I know what’s inside.” He stroked his beard.
“Who sent it?”
He held out the package, which was wrapped in brown paper. She was able to decipher the postmark: “State Publishing House of the Soviet Union.” “Is this … your book?” She was already on her feet.
“They’re not that far along yet. I think it must be the print proof.”
“Open it!” she cried impatiently.
“I don’t know …”
“What are you waiting for?”
“I’m feeling scared about the jacket design.” He ran his hand over the package, as if the reason for his fear could be felt through the paper. “Open it, daughter, and tell me what you see.”
With three steps, she was in the kitchen. She came back with a knife and leaned over t
he table.
“No, wait, I’ll do it,” Viktor Ipalyevich said. “I’ll open it myself.” Carefully, as though disarming a bomb, he stuck the knife into the package, drew the blade slowly through wrapping paper and glue, and exposed an inner package. He partially opened this one, too, saw something red inside, and hesitated. “You do it.” He handed her the knife.
Anna cut the package open at once. The cover of the book showed a black sun; bright red birds flew out of its center and turned into a girl’s hair. At first glance, the picture perplexed Anna, but she liked her father’s name, printed in large white letters and taking up the top third of the cover.
“No dust jacket?” The poet was standing behind her with a look of deep disappointment on his face.
“What do you think?” Her eyes moved back and forth between him and the book.
“They’re printing only a paperback edition.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He snatched the book and flexed it vehemently with both hands. “It’s cheap, don’t you see! It doesn’t lie snugly in the hand. It feels like some ephemeral periodical—like a magazine you flip through and throw away.”
“Nobody would treat a book of yours like a magazine.”
“It won’t even stand up properly on a shelf!” He thrust the book into an open space between two others. The little volume sagged laxly to one side and then fell over rearward. “There you go, that’s what my work’s worth!”
The Russian Affair Page 28