The Russian Affair

by Michael Wallner

  TWENTY-NINE

  The narrow street behind the Mozhaisk Chaussée was now so brightly lit at night that getting into the car under cover of darkness was no longer a possibility. While Anna watched the ZIL approaching, it occurred to her that in spite of all the changes, this one thing had remained constant; she might have broken up with Alexey, but Anton was still picking her up and bringing her to her unflappable lover.

  “As punctual as clockwork,” Anton said in his melodious voice.

  “I’ve never said this to you, but you would have made a first-rate singer.” She had her heart on her sleeve.

  “To be honest, Comrade, I’ve done that.” He turned around and drove onto the crepuscular boulevard.

  “You’re a singer, Anton? Really?” She laid her arm along the top of the seat, almost touching his shoulder.

  “Once upon a time.”

  “In a chorus?”

  “It was a provincial troupe. We brought a quite respectable performance of Boris Godunov to the stage. I was Boris.”

  “Anton, I’m amazed!” She tried to picture the inconspicuous, always clean-shaven man costumed as the imposing, bearded Godunov. “Why did you give it up?”

  “There were several reasons …” He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “And I’d rather not talk about any of them.”

  Anna took the lipstick out of her purse, re-reddened her lips with the help of her reflection in the window, and pushed her hair behind her ears. There she was, being driven to her Arctic wolf, as happy and excited as if she hadn’t told him, not a very long time ago, that it was all over. “Where are we going?” Anna asked, closing her purse.

  “I was sworn to silence on that subject.” Anton drove a short distance along the Smolensk Quay, avoided Kalinin Prospekt, and took the Garden Ring to Mayakovsky Square; on the left and on the right, Gorky Street glittered. He stopped in front of a building that Anna knew only by name and accompanied her inside. They crossed an elegant beige foyer. The staff of the Peking Hotel nodded to Anton as he accompanied Anna to the elevator, pressed the button for the top floor, and stepped back. The doors closed on his friendly face and moments later opened on an elegantly furnished vestibule. In the reflection of a gold-framed mirror, Anna saw Bulyagkov coming toward her. He was wearing a three-piece suit of dark wool that made him look thinner. Before either spoke the first word, Alexey embraced the painter, and they stood for a while in the little foyer with their arms around each other.

  “Where are we?” She wiped lipstick from the corner of his mouth.

  “Through a piece of especially good luck, I got the tower.”

  “The tower?” She let him lead her inside and stood before the most beautiful view she’d ever seen. Not far away, she recognized the tall buildings of MSU, the Moscow State University; Gorky Street was like a long wedge of light. Anna could see the Kremlin, with its glowing red star, and behind it the narrow streets where old wooden buildings pressed close to one another.

  “Usually, this is a privilege granted only to the inner circle,” Alexey said. “Or to foreign guests of the State.”

  “How wonderful,” Anna said, embracing him a second time.

  “People will think we’re still a couple. The food in the Peking is supposed to be very respectable indeed.” He tried to draw her into the dining niche, where a light meal awaited them.

  “I don’t want to eat now,” she said, standing her ground. “I’d like to enjoy the moment.”

  “And might your enjoyment be enhanced by a little something to drink?” He pointed to a battery of bottles. “Even I don’t know what some of this stuff is,” he said, picking up a bottle at random. “You sounded so urgent on the telephone.” He turned around. “Why?”

  “Leonid left me.”

  It was so easy to say that, without tears, without loading the sentence with unhappiness. Alexey, however, seemed much shaken and inattentively set down the unopened bottle, which fell over onto the plush carpet but did not break. “But how can he … it’s impossible,” was all he managed to say.

  “A whole year of separation is a long time.” She found it amusing that she had to break the news gently to him. “There are beautiful women in Siberia, too.”

  “Siberia? I thought it was Sakhalin.”

  She told him about Leonid’s furlough and his cowardly refusal to tell her the truth to her face.

  “Wasn’t he supposed to be granted his right of abode in Moscow this year?”

  “Apparently, there are charms that can compete with that.” Anna was pleased to think that she appeared strong and relaxed, while the news was having an amazingly strong effect on Alexey.

  “I can only tell you how sorry I am,” he said. He picked up the fallen bottle.

  “Why? What does that change for you … or for us?”

  “A great deal,” he answered warmly. “I would have liked to know that everything was sorted out for you.” He fell silent, uncorked the dark beverage, and sniffed it. “Old port wine, I believe. Give Leonid time.” He took two inverted glasses from a shelf. “In a few months, everything could be back the way it was.”

  “A few months.” It sounded worse when he said it. “So now we’re fellows in misery,” she observed, shifting without a preamble to the other subject she wanted to talk about.

  “What do you mean?” He poured some wine and tasted it.

  She waited until he’d swallowed. “Why are you getting a divorce, Alexey?”

  He stared pensively at the bottle, as if it were an object of great interest. “Kamarovsky?” he asked in an undertone. Anna nodded. All at once, the Deputy Minister’s features relaxed. “Well, of course—the brotherhood must find that just fascinating.”

  “You never spoke a word to me about it. Why the sudden separation?”

  “Nothing lasts forever.” He could tell from her look that this trite observation wasn’t going to satisfy her. Bulyagkov realized how close he’d let Anna get to the truth. If she wanted to, she’d be capable of correctly identifying the connections linking various events. He could act like a lumbering old bear, but now there were some holes in his coat, and Anna could already see through them. The splendors and delights of the Peking Hotel hadn’t blurred her sight. Nor was her own pain leading her to talk only about herself; no, Anna looked more alert than ever. Bulyagkov considered this without fear and without any weakening of his feelings for her; but for the first time, he saw that the house painter represented a risk. “Medea and I will go our own ways from now on. There’s absolutely no drama, you understand?” He went up two steps into the alcove and sat on a long couch with curved armrests. “Remember, I told you I was going on a trip?”

  “Yes?” She followed him to the couch.

  “I leave tomorrow. I’m leading the delegation to Stockholm.” A mischievous look flitted over his face. “Why not come with me to the city where it’s never hot, not even in summer?”

  Her voice became unusually clear. “You’re leading the delegation? I thought the Minister himself …”

  Bulyagkov moved away from her. There was a short, aggressive silence.

  “The Minister has fallen ill. An unforeseeable indisposition. Therefore I have to take his place.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s got some stomach or intestinal problem. That is to say, he’s puking his guts out. Maybe he ate something he shouldn’t have.”

  “It’s remarkable that he’s come down with whatever he’s got barely two days before such an important mission.” He turned his head, and she stopped talking.

  “You think he’s not really sick?”

  “Don’t you know?” While Anna drank the heavy port, while he bent her back a little and kissed her temples, while she scrutinized the first-class wallpaper, whose seams were as good as invisible, she was tormented by the question of how Alexey could already have known a week ago that he was going to go on the trip if the Minister had fallen unforeseeably ill only yesterday.

  “So you’r
e off to Stockholm.” As Anna cast about for a solution, she was slowly absorbed by the thought that Medea’s fate and hers were beginning to resemble each other. She noticed that Alexey wasn’t stopping at a little friendly snuggling and in fact had skillfully opened the hooks and pulled down the zipper on her skirt. Anna tried to hold on to her thoughts and resisted giving in to his caresses. Before her mind’s eye, she passed in review the persons who were keeping the wheels of this whole business spinning. The Minister and his Deputy, Medea, and Lyushin, too, belonged among them, and of course Rosa and the Colonel, but as hard as Anna tried to give to each of them a shape in keeping with his or her function, they soon merged with the amorous play that Alexey was drawing her into. For the first time, he exposed himself to her, removing his jacket and vest and undoing his trousers. With his tie hanging over his shoulder, he surged over her, bracing his elbows against the couch’s dainty backrest and keeping one foot on the floor. Surprised and excited, she accommodated him. Actually, she had come looking for consolation from her paternal friend, and now the old fellow, her wolf, was on top of her, penetrating her with his piercing eyes, kissing her earnestly, offering her his heavy body. The wallpaper had a pattern of crowns, which Anna found peculiar—obviously a failure of oversight when the choice was made. The crowns—dark blue against a pale red background—looked a little like flowers, too. Maybe, she thought, the paperhanger had hung the wallpaper wrong, and blossoms had become crowns. She whispered Alexey’s name, and since the armrest was bruising her spine, she let herself slip to the floor. He lay on his back and, unembarrassed and playful, allowed Anna to caress him, raising his head to watch what she was doing; the lights of the capital shimmered behind her.

  The tower, Bulyagkov thought; the pleasure of being with her here, with time and place joined in the best possible relationship. Coordination had ever been his greatest talent. He was humbly grateful to Anna, and he loved her for the year and nine months she’d given him.

  THIRTY

  At the same time, and yet eight hours later, Leonid detached himself from Galina after a long embrace. He couldn’t use the dawn as an indication of how early or late it was; at that time of year in the North, dawn lasted half a day. She’d been sad the previous night; with greater detail than usual, she’d described her efforts to save an old man’s life. He was a nomad by birth and a day laborer out of necessity, he had no place to stay, and the approach of the warmer season was his only prospect. But the nine months of winter had so consumed his strength that when the police picked him up in a tractor hangar, he’d collapsed and lost consciousness. When they brought him to the hospital, the police lieutenant had snidely remarked that it didn’t look as though there was much to be done for him. Galina had given him a cardiotonic injection, put him in a clean hospital bed, and hooked him up to an intravenous drip. He was given chicken broth and bread. During the night, however, he’d undergone a remarkable transformation. Instead of drawing new courage to face life from the care and security he was receiving, the man had relaxed his grip on the last bands that held his existence together and, in the truest sense, surrendered. Combed and fed, and closely observed by the nurses, he’d appeared like a man resolved on his own death. His heartbeat and breathing slowing down, the man had lain there with a queer smile on his face and looked first at the worried night nurse and then at Galina. She’d cried out to him, begging him to stop acting like that and go on living. When his breathing stopped, Galina had considered a tracheotomy, but a comment made by the most senior station nurse had tipped the scales in favor of letting him go. He knows his time has come, the nurse had said. He’d died around eleven o’clock in the evening; his death was registered, and barely an hour later, his body had been transferred to the crematorium.

  Leonid quietly rolled out of bed. It must be around five in the morning, he thought; he was supposed to muster the men for roll call at six. That didn’t leave him much time, because the road to the base wasn’t snow-free yet.

  While he dressed, his eye fell on a cartoon in a magazine: A man, hanging over a pit where predatory teeth snap up at him, feels the branch he’s clinging to breaking and remarks, “Good thing everything in life is temporary.” As he left the house, Leonid wondered whether that wasn’t exactly the situation he was in: unstable and temporary. Everything could change completely again at any time. Or could he start to look upon his hours with Galina, their nights in Yakutsk, as the beginning of a new future?

  Anna’s silence regarding his letter relieved him. At the same time, he found it unfathomable that she hadn’t called or sent him a telegram or written. It wasn’t in her nature to let things slide.

  While Leonid waited in front of the house for the transport vehicle to pick him up, he was annoyed at both the women to whom he’d given control of his fate. Hadn’t it been because of pressure from Anna that he’d moved away from Moscow, where he could have had a good life in an agreeable division? Didn’t she bear the chief responsibility for the confusion that everybody—including, unfortunately, Petya—now had to deal with? And what about Galina’s obstinacy in wanting to live here, of all places, here where her roots were and nowhere else? A good surgeon could find a position anywhere, including Moscow. Leonid had shaped a future for himself, but in reality, didn’t it look as though he was letting the women make the decisions he should have been dictating to them? Was he a weak man, “henpecked,” as in the old Yakutian fairy tale?

  The captain stood still. The sense of being trapped and the shock of realizing how deep his doubts ran had made him shiver. He’d read and reread a great many fairy tales of late; of the three books in Galina’s library, two were medical books, and the third was a collection of Siberian legends and fairy tales. In “The Tale of the Henpecked King,” the king of the birds—the eagle—obeys his domineering wife’s command to build her a special nest for her brooding time. He summons the birds of every kind, has a hole drilled in the beak of each one, and binds them together, so that Madam Eagle can brood comfortably on their plumage. When he counts the bound birds, he ascertains that one, the owl, is missing; he sends out messengers and has the owl brought before him. The owl excuses his absence by explaining that his eyes aren’t fit for flying in daylight, and that night travel takes a great deal of time. However, he declares, on his way, he’s had a chance to look around and see what’s going on in the world. This makes the eagle curious; he wants to know whether the dead outnumber the living on the earth.

  “If you count those who are asleep as dead,” the owl replies, “the dead are in the majority.”

  “Is it more often day than night?” the eagle asks, and the owl replies, “If you count the dark Siberian days as nights, it’s more often night than day.”

  “And now, tell me,” the eagle continues. “Are there more men or more women on our earth?”

  The owl thinks for a moment and answers, “If you count the henpecked men as women, there are more women on the earth.”

  The king of the birds starts, realizing that in order to be of service to his wife, he has tortured his fellows. Without hesitation, he sets all the birds free; in all their variety, they soar heavenward. And so it is that the owl, alone among birds, has no holes in its beak.

  Leonid stamped his booted feet. Where was the damned car? It was almost time to sound the assembly, and here he was, walking up and down on the outskirts of this faceless city. I must take things into my own hands, he thought; I must find a way to stand my ground. Either I travel to Moscow and try to bring about a reconciliation with Anna, or I inform Galina that she can’t count on me unless we relocate to the capital. Did I break my back trying to get a right of abode in Moscow for nothing? Did I make sacrifices for Anna so I could rot out here? A captain in exile isn’t any better off than an ordinary soldier.

  Leonid turned around. He’d walked some distance, and now an army vehicle was parked in front of building number 119 with the motor running. The driver wasn’t looking out past the hood of his engine; instead, he was tak
ing advantage of the officer’s absence to have a smoke.

  “Hey, soldier!” Leonid shouted, so loudly that an echo ran up and down the street. The driver clenched the cigarette between his lips and drove toward the captain.

  Maybe, if we both make an effort, going on with Anna isn’t hopeless, Leonid thought, but at the same time, he felt the impossibility of doing without Galina’s warmth, her humor, her lustiness. He remembered the tension and gloom that had characterized the days he’d spent on leave in Moscow. Things can’t remain as they are, he thought. He climbed into the vehicle and looked disapprovingly at the driver. I can’t go back, and I don’t know where I’m going if I go on.

  “Go on,” he growled to the corporal.

  The latter kept his eyes ahead of him and steered around a wall of ice that the snow plow had shoved to one side of the road.

  THIRTY-ONE

  It was only as a private citizen that A. I. Kamarovsky found himself inside the Lenin Library. He’d changed from his winter-weight dark green suit to a dark green suit made of lighter material, but with spring windstorms in mind, he was also wearing his long scarf. A few yards away from him sat a young woman who had, he kept telling himself, his eyes. In addition, she wore steel-rimmed eyeglasses, just as he did. To avoid the fuss of borrowing a book from the reference shelves, Kamarovsky had brought one with him. He sat at one of the long tables. Rows of fluorescent tubes bathed the reading room in a sallow light that made him tired and offered no possibility of hiding in shadow should the student happen to turn her head in his direction.

  The book was an advance copy of a volume of poetry, sent to Kamarovsky at his request. It was a slim volume, and the cover showed a flock of red birds flying out of a black sun. Why hadn’t they put a hard cover on the first edition? Kamarovsky wondered; this floppy little book couldn’t be displayed upright. Even though it was outside his authority, he resolved to make a telephone call to the state printing office. Why use half measures when it was a matter of lifting a writer out of obscurity?