“In my day, we used letter openers,” came the voice from the dining table.
“Very good idea.” Letter in hand, Anna ran into the kitchen. She made one careful cut, and now she could pull out the pages—how many there were! She unfolded and smoothed them as she went back to Petya. “Now we’re going to see how well you can read.”
He scooted to the edge of the bed; Anna threw the blanket over his bare feet and sat next to him. Petya ran his tongue over his lips as though a hard task lay before him.
“ ‘My dear wife. I’m sitting in the office here on the base and imagining you taking these pages into the kitchen and drawing the curtain across the doorway, curious to see what’s awaiting you.’ ” Petya looked up. “Papa’s writing to you, not me, just you.”
“I’m sure he writes something to you in the next line or two.”
“Besides, we’re not in the kitchen, and we haven’t closed the curtain.”
“Then let’s just close this one.” She slipped off her shoes, knelt next to Petya on the bed, and pulled the blue fabric across the alcove. The gliding curtain made the lamplight dance on the pages; the ballpoint pen had been pressed deep into the paper.
“ ‘I’ve been sitting on these lines for six days, dear Anna,’ ” Petya went on. “ ‘My wastepaper basket is filled with failed attempts. I’ve never found anything so difficult.’ He’s not saying anything to me!” Petya scooted away from his mother. “What does that mean, ‘failed attempts’?”
“That’s when you first try to do something, before you know how it goes,” she answered randomly. Her mind was focused on the reason behind Leonid’s introduction. She paled at the thought that he was writing to tell her he’d signed the five-year stipulation. How could he have chosen this way to announce a decision about something so important? Why hadn’t he telephoned her?
“You know what?” Anna announced, suddenly uneasy. “Let’s do it the way Papa says.” She opened the curtain. “I’ll go into the kitchen and read the letter by myself, and after that we’ll read it again together.”
“But I want to read it now! I want to read it now!” Petya couldn’t manage to disentangle himself from the blanket in time, and Anna was able to jump out of the bed. Ignoring her father’s alert gaze, she hurried past him. “Is the gas on, at least?” she asked, drawing the kitchen curtain between herself and the others.
“We made tea.”
Anna heard the quick, small steps as Petya ran across the living room, heard them stop suddenly as her father caught his grandson and tried with soothing words to prevent him from following her.
“But it’s from Papa!” This protest was followed by a skirmish that ended only when Viktor Ipalyevich proposed an extraordinary, pre-dinner game of chess. Anna bent over the letter.
“… I’ve never found anything so difficult,” she read again, in her husband’s forceful handwriting. “Let me simply describe what happened, and then you’ll understand.”
As Anna read on, she pulled up the chair and even had the presence of mind to light the gas with a match. She decided not to put the teakettle on to boil. When she was finished with each page, she laid it atop a neat stack, stopped once to decipher the word inexplicable, read the last lines and the greetings to Petya, and pushed the stack away. She leaned back and looked at her actual surroundings—the spice rack, the coating of grease on the heating pipe, the flecks of tomato sauce here and there. Looking out the window, she saw the swaying branches below her, the green that signaled the return of warm weather—in contrast to her cold apartment.
With one spring she was in front of the curtain; with two more steps, she reached her shoes and slipped into them. “I have to go back down … I forgot …” Without ending the sentence, she stepped out the door. On the second floor, she remembered that she’d left the gas burner on; her father would notice it before long, she thought. Bounding as though for joy, she dashed across the entrance hall and out into the street.
Spring had taken hold of the city and was tightening its grip a little more every day, making evenings like this one bright and warm. Despite the lateness of the hour, the sun was still sending out a few rays, the sky remained deep blue; it was the time of year everyone had been waiting five months for. Anna removed her felt jacket and slung it over her shoulder; in her flat shoes, she could walk fast. She crossed the Chaussée against the red light, got honked at, and a minute later reached the park. Even though the big trees hadn’t yet leafed out fully, green had already won the ground battle, the forsythias were blooming, and there were primroses on the park lawns. Anna couldn’t stand still; if she wanted to let the news she’d just read sink in all the way, remaining in constant motion was her only option. Leonid had gone on at great length and filled many pages to avoid the truth, but in the end he’d come out with it. The effect was powerful and simple at once. An emergency solution meant to take him away from Moscow temporarily had turned into Leonid’s new future, a situation he desired, a complete change of direction. Oddly enough, Anna’s first concern was the application for the apartment in Nostikhyeva, which she would now have to withdraw, because apartments of that size weren’t granted to single mothers. At the end of his letter, Leonid, too, had mentioned a practical consideration: how to arrange for a seven-year-old to make the journey to Siberia alone. Leonid ruled out the possibility of his getting leave to fetch Petya from Moscow every time. He’d formulated his idea—the boy would spend the warmer months in Yakutsk—as vividly as if there were no doubt about its realization. He’d remained vague on the matter of whether or not divorce should follow their de facto separation. How heavily all this must have been weighing on his mind, Anna thought, and what kind of woman could have motivated him to make such a momentous decision? While marching at double time through an alley of acacias, Anna tried to picture the woman she’d just learned about for the first time. How extraordinary this Galina must be, she thought, to put the sober Leonid in such an agitated state.
She looked up. The deep blue of the sky was tinting the treetops, and all at once evening flooded the park. In spring, of all seasons, she had to get dumped! The fearful certainty that the whole thing was her fault, that she bore all the guilt for it, suddenly gave way to self-pity: Was she jinxed, or what? Could anyone imagine worse confusion than what she was floundering in? Was there an unluckier person in the whole blessed city of Moscow?
“The wind’s going to carry you away, girl!” she heard a powerful voice say.
The fact that someone had called her “girl” made Anna turn around. Not far away, she saw a couple, the weatherproof kind of people who come out when the seasons change. Snow still lay in spots shielded from the sun, some patches of ice were not yet completely thawed, but these two had already come out to the park and built a fire, and now they were roasting shashlik on spits and baking potatoes over the hot embers; a supply of dry branches lay nearby, fuel for the fire. The two were comfortably ensconced in a pair of lawn chairs.
“Come over here! Why are you running around like that?” the woman said. “Sooner or later, you have to come to a stop, so why not here?”
Before she knew it, Anna had taken the first steps toward the fire.
“That’s better.” Despite the man’s furrowed face, there was no telling whether he was forty or sixty; his beard grew from his throat to his cheekbones. “We’ll eat in a minute. How about a little drink first?”
They pointed to the bottles standing at the ready behind them. There was no reason to refuse, not today, and so Anna allowed a beer to be pressed into one hand and a generous glass of home-brewed liquor into the other.
“What could make a pretty comrade run around in circles instead of strolling calmly on this lovely spring evening?”
“My husband wants to leave me.” The answer was out before she’d formed the thought.
“What a dumb guy he must be!” the woman answered impassively. “Doesn’t he have eyes in his head?” She cast a meaningful glance at her own husband. “A few
years ago, this comrade here thought about moving on to greener pastures, too.” She pointed a shashlik spit at her husband.
“That’s not true anymore, hasn’t been true for a long time,” the bearded man said soothingly.
“What did you do about it?” Anna asked the woman.
“I let him starve.” The woman held the meat over the flames. “The pantry was off-limits to him. If he needed food, let him get his fill from the other woman! You can’t imagine how fast he came back.”
“Obviously, none of that is true.” The man clinked glasses with Anna. “The only reason I’m keeping quiet is so I won’t spoil my darling’s lovely story. Do I look like a man who would cheat?”
“You all cheat when you get the chance.” The woman coerced Anna into lifting her glass. “If a pretty little mouth attracts you, or a skirt is lifted a few inches, you all start running like donkeys chasing carrots.”
“My case is more complicated.” The warmth of the liquor spread through her like a shiver, and Anna squatted down on her haunches.
“No, it’s not,” her hostess contradicted her. “It all just seems complicated. Men’s heads are constantly throbbing with the fear of missing something. The gentlemen get a nice hen to share their nest, but after a few years, they want to see whether they’ve still got some rooster credibility. They flap around and crow, their combs swell, and they’re grateful if they can mount another hen.”
“The way you talk, Galina, light of my life. Always full of surprises.” The bearded man opened his next beer and drank from the bottle in gurgling swallows.
“Galina?” Anna looked up at the woman, who was looming over her, brandishing her skewers like a sword fighter.
“And you, sister, what’s your name?”
Anna laughed. “Is your name really Galina?”
“What’s funny about it?”
“Galina is also the name of the woman who turned my Leonid’s head.”
Now the woman with the skewers laughed, too. “It wasn’t me, that’s for sure! You see,” she said, teasing her husband, “there are tramps named Galina, too. What a lucky man you are!”
“That must be about ready to eat,” he said, changing the subject.
The woman sniffed the meat, then blew on it and tasted it. “Just another minute, no more. The marinade is a poem!”
“Garlic and wine?” Anna asked.
“And red peppercorns.”
The man spread a cloth on the young grass and put out a couple of glass jars containing pickled vegetables, followed by a loaf of bread. With a narrow, oft-sharpened knife, he cut off large chunks of the bread and gave one to Anna. “It’s lovely to have company today. Don’t be gloomy, my girl. Things will get straightened out, one way or another.”
“Straightened out,” Anna murmured. She broke off a piece of the freshly baked bread and chewed it slowly.
TWENTY-EIGHT
In the following days, the duty to carry out her mission for Kamarovsky merged, for Anna, with her need to talk to someone she could feel understood by. She thought about the mad coincidence that had made her and Alexey fellows in misery. Here was the jilted house painter, whose captain preferred his Siberian love, and there was the Deputy Minister, living on his own now that the influential cultural secretary wanted nothing to do with him. Had the consequences of all this turmoil not been so unsettling, Anna could have laughed at it. But they were, and so, one morning, heedless of her usual caution, she dialed the number of the telephone in the Drezhnevskaya Street apartment. The receiver was picked up on the second ring, and a muffled voice said hello.
“Have I … Is this Alexey Maximovich’s apartment?”
“Anna?” said the voice on the other end.
“Yes. I apologize for disturbing you at this … you sound strange.”
“I’m brushing my teeth,” he mumbled. Various sounds followed: the receiver being laid down, footsteps, running water. “All done,” he said cheerfully.
“I apologize.”
“No, I’m glad to hear your voice. If you only knew how glad, Annushka.” Before she could reply, he suggested a meeting. “When do you have time? This evening? Tomorrow? Don’t say no. Should we meet here … no, that’s not a good idea. Somewhere else, some magical place … Hello, Anna, are you still there?”
Now that the meeting she’d wanted to engineer was going to take place without any effort on her part, Anna became wary.
“Let me arrange something for tomorrow,” he insisted. “Let me surprise you.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“Of course it isn’t necessary,” he said with a laugh, “but it will make me happy. I’ll send Anton to you. Shall we say around seven?”
Anna agreed, said good-bye, and hung up.
Bulyagkov buttoned his shirt, tied his tie in front of the mirror, and noted that his double chin was becoming more unsightly every day. He gazed nervously at the telephone; he was expecting a call and had purposefully kept the conversation with Anna short. His cheeks burned from the shaving; he went back into the bathroom and applied the French cream. As he was rubbing it in, the telephone rang again. Bulyagkov took a deep breath and answered the phone.
“Alexey Maximovich?” said an unpleasant voice on the other end of the line.
“Yes.”
“Something’s come up. How soon can you be in the Ministry building?”
He named a time and hung up. The caller’s unwillingness to say anything more made Bulyagkov confident that the something that had come up was what he’d hoped it would be. He left his apartment, watched the black ZIL pull up at the curb, and climbed in. Anton drove out of the narrow street and onto the Chaussée.
At the Ministry, Bulyagkov was welcomed by a hastily formed committee and informed that the Minister had fallen ill overnight with a severe case of intestinal flu. His physician had made an initial diagnosis of food poisoning, but the Minister couldn’t remember eating anything he shouldn’t have. The exact cause of his condition was still to be determined, but in any case, he was confined to his bed and, according to the doctor’s report, in no condition to travel to Stockholm.
“Cancel” was the Deputy Minister’s response. Without the top man, he said, the excursion made no sense; an international research exchange without the Minister for Research was an absurdity.
The committee granted Bulyagkov’s point but objected that preparations for the trip had already consumed a considerable amount of funding, and that moreover the members of the scientific delegation had all arrived in Moscow already; how great their disappointment would be if they were now sent back to their research stations. Finally, they weren’t going to Sweden merely to present their own science; in return, they expected to receive interesting information about various Western technologies.
Bulyagkov remained adamant. He’d only seen to the organization of the visit to Sweden, he said; he was unprepared in the science of the various fields and considered himself incapable of giving a proper speech of greeting.
The committee resorted to flattery. It declared emphatically that the Deputy Minister, with his background in the natural sciences, was the only person versed in all the department’s interests. And even should he be compelled to improvise, he knew a lot more about chemistry, mathematics, or nuclear physics than any other official in the Ministry. Without naming the Minister, Bulyagkov’s colleagues evoked his relative competence and made clear their belief that, when it came to science, the chief couldn’t hold a candle to his deputy. Their adulation reached such a level that Bulyagkov stood up, walked pensively around the conference room, and stopped at the big window. He looked down to the street, his view of it already blocked here and there by a canopy of leaves. Alexey knew what his colleagues feared above all: They feared that his refusal could result in their being deprived of the amenities offered by a trip to the West. They weren’t interested in science; they kept their eyes fixed on their privileges as Soviet representatives.
“What about the speech
to the Swedish Academy?” he asked, acting hesitant again.
“Why not give the speech that was written for the Minister?”
“I can do that only if I do it in his name.”
“Of course! Good idea! Respectful gesture!” some of the officials cried. They saw a ray of hope, but Bulyagkov announced that he would accept the mission only on condition of a unanimous resolution of the Chamber. This proviso was met with agitated objections: The scheduled departure was only forty-eight hours away, and it would be impossible to convene the entire Chamber in such a short time. The Deputy Minister appreciated that, but he insisted that there be a memorandum recording the proceedings in detail and ratified in writing by the members of the Politburo. His colleagues, feeling that success was near, promised to provide him with such a document, and then someone remembered that two of the high-ranking comrades had profited from the spring weather and taken a jaunt to the Black Sea.
While the committee was discussing how the required memorandum could be ratified “telegraphically,” Bulyagkov was overcome by a serenity that he’d long had to do without. He’d assessed the men around him correctly and laid so many obstacles in their way that his departure would arouse no suspicion. These Russians, with their panicked need to shed the most flattering light on their performances in the little positions they’d striven so doggedly to occupy, would do everything to persuade him to agree to something that had been his plan from the very beginning. In these minutes, he saw the future in a larger dimension, and despite pangs of anxiety before the unknown, he felt that he was simultaneously at the end and at the beginning of something. He thought warmly about Anna’s call, shook off a brief moment of suspicion about her motives, and considered the possibilities for the following evening. He wanted their date to be splendid and affectionate, impressive and intimate. When he thought of the right place, he cracked a narrow smile. He announced to his colleagues that he would await further developments in his office. By way of precaution, he would have the Minister’s twenty-six-page speech of greeting sent to him, but he especially wanted to contact the Minister by telephone and offer him his sympathy and best wishes for a speedy recovery. The comrades in the conference room hailed this gesture.
The Russian Affair Page 30