The Yermakov Transfer

by Derek Lambert

  After a while she said: “It’s good again, isn’t it, Viktor?”

  He said it was.

  “Perhaps I should concentrate less on my work.” She sat up, looking down into his face, pale hair falling over her eyes. “Perhaps you should too.”

  He spoke lazily, stroking her back. “Perhaps.” He didn’t commit himself because there was a lot to be done that had nothing to do with his work. “Our trouble,” he said, “is that we’ve got too many brains between us.”

  She bent and kissed him. When she straightened up her expression was gentle. “What we should do,” she said, “is have a third brain.”

  Viktor answered cautiously because he didn’t want an argument this cloying, indolent day. When they got married they had agreed to have a child in five years time. “The child will be an infant progidy,” he replied. “A walking brain.”

  “When?” She stroked his chest and he felt his desire swell. “When, Viktor?”

  “We agreed on five years.”

  “That was when we married.”

  “It isn’t five years yet.”

  “We’ve both done well. We’ve got a beautiful apartment, a car. Why do we have to wait?”

  He kissed her, not replying. Throughout his life Viktor Pavlov had put the cause first. If he ever came close to weakening – and he never acknowledged that he did – then it was now. Suddenly he understood the extent of his sacrifice.

  He said: “I love you.” His love was the most any man can hope for and yet he was going to discard it, a cold-blooded killing.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” she said.

  What wife really knows her husband? The adulterer, the pervert, the thief returning to her warm bed to bury his guilt between her breasts.

  My child, he thought, would have Jewish blood. The progeny of a Jew and a Siberian princess producing a strain superior to any of Hitler’s crazed Aryan dreams. Would the child be dark or fair? A dark girl, he reasoned, with lustrous black hair, or a boy with arctic eyes and blond hair.

  “What are you thinking about?” She was still gazing down at him.

  I’m going to betray you, he thought, staring into her blue eyes in which he could see flecks of sunlight. And my child: it would grow up with a stigma worse than any Jew, or mongrel-Jew, has ever known. He heard the children in the playground. “Did you know her father was Viktor Pavlov, the man who kidnapped Yermakov?”

  He pulled Anna down to him, kissing her hard. Then he ran down to the river, past women sunbathing in brassieres, past a family secure and united, over a sandcastle, into the water, wading out with foam surging around his thighs, diving into the brown depths and swimming until his lungs ached. When he surfaced the beach lay behind him unchanged, children’s voices reached him across the water: a scene in which he had no part.

  He swam slowly back, pulled the beer bottles from the shallows and returned to Anna. She laid their lunch on a tablecloth spread on the sand. Smoked sturgeon, green salad, new potatoes sprigged with parsley, black bread, a smoky cheese, Crimean champagne and coffee.

  She smiled at him as though, tacitly, they had reached a decision. Let us have this one day, he thought.

  As he drank his beer Pavlov looked at his wife, seeing her oil-sleek limbs, her flat belly and full breasts in the black one-piece bathing costume with the fish-net at the waist. One day she would belong to another man; he pushed his plate away and uncorked the champagne.

  * * *

  In bed that night the sun and the beach were still with them. Grains of sand in sheets and their bodies glowing. The window was open and the curtains moved in the gentle breeze.

  She undressed in front of him as he lay beneath the sheet and he smiled as he saw the white shadows where her costume had been. It made a woman more defenceless, a lover, not a sexual combatant. She was naked now, standing beside the bed, the patch of blonde hair near his face. He could smell her, taste her. My wife. Lover.

  She slipped back the sheet and gazed at him erect. This was love and lust, he thought. The amalgam. Perfection. Wife and mistress. With a wife like this you never needed a whore. Other men thought: With a whore like this why have a wife?

  And so much more. The sharing – sunsets, meals, movies, laughter. There was only ever one and it was a miracle if you found each other. No shame, no triumph in his hardness; no triumph, no supplication in her wetness.

  She stooped and kissed his hardness. She went on kissing him, turning so that he could kiss her. Then again she turned, pausing above him, then sinking down so that he was deep inside her.

  They reached a shuddering climax together, looking into each other’s eyes, seeing the sex in each other’s faces.

  And it was only much later, when they lay in each other’s arms, that they arrived at the pre-ordained climax of this sensual day. The thunderstorm terminating the heat.

  Her body was against his, her breath on his cheek when she said softly: “I know, Viktor.”

  “Know what?” The stars had assembled in the sky and, from a diplomat’s apartment, they could hear music, a tinny crossing of the space between the blocks.

  “That you have Jewish blood,” she said.

  He was quiet for a few moments. He wasn’t sure if he was shocked: it had always been a possibility. “So you found out,” he said after a while. He reached for a cigarette and lit it. He lay still again, blowing the smoke at the ceiling. “How long have you known?” he asked.

  “Only since yesterday.”

  “I see. Where does that leave us?”

  She kissed him with a touch of desperation.

  “What did you do?” he asked. “Trace my ancestry? Find my ritual murder kit in the bathroom?”

  Even then everything might have been all right if she hadn’t said: “I want you to know that it makes no difference.”

  He moved away from her, wishing he were dressed. “I’m glad,” he said. He wanted to turn on her, grab her by the throat and shout: “Why the hell should it make any difference?” It makes no difference. … God! As if I were a rapist, a leper; the sort of remark a noble girl makes to an impotent lover.

  She was scared now. Desperately seeking the right words. “I’ve got nothing against the Jews.…”

  “That’s very understanding of you.” He swung himself out of the bed and pulled on his underclothes.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To wash,” he said. “I think I should have a wash.” He glanced at her scared, pale face. A part of him knew that she was sincere; that her words derived from the teachings of hatred from the first day she attended school. “Perhaps you should have a wash, too,” he said, “having just made love to me.”

  She was starting to cry as he went into the bathroom. He took off his underclothes and had a shower, feeling the water like ice on his body. He could hear the music from the diplomat’s party. American, British, French, German; getting drunk on tax-free liquor; trying to isolate the available secretaries and nannies as soon as possible because there was a shortage of girls, their small-talk strangled by the stilted language.

  At this moment Pavlov wanted to be with Israelis. Walking down Dizengoff in Tel Aviv; he had read about this street, Israel’s Piccadilly or Champs Elysées, and he wanted to mingle with the soldiers, the proud girls, the Jews who had returned home from the diaspora. To walk through the twisted streets of Jerusalem to the Western Wall. To drive across the desert. He saw himself in combat uniform, an Uzi sub-machine in his hands, racing up the stairs of an apartment block in Beirut; he saw the shock on the Palestinian’s face as the bullets pumped into him.

  He turned off the shower, knowing that he would never see any of these things.

  He wrapped himself in a bath towel and went back into the bedroom. She had stopped crying and was sitting up in bed with the sheet pulled around her. “Viktor,” she pleaded, “I want to explain.”

  “Explain then,” he said, sitting on a chair.

  “I know everything I say sounds wrong. But
there’s no other way to say it. You’ve got to understand that a lot of it sounds wrong because of what’s inside you.” She paused, searching for words. “Your Jewishness doesn’t matter to me. Why should it? The Jews are as much a part of the Soviet Union as the Georgians, the Kazakhs, the Ukranians, the Uzbeks.…”

  “Except,” Pavlov interrupted, “that a Georgian or a Kazakh has a somewhat better chance of getting a place at university than a Jew. Except that he doesn’t get beaten up because he’s a Ukranian or an Uzbek.”

  She faltered, then strode on. “What I’m trying to say is that we’re all the same people. I’m a Siberian, you’re a Jew. It doesn’t matter, Viktor, it doesn’t matter. All the hate is in the past. You should have told me when we met. It would.…”

  “… have made no difference.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “No difference. There’s nothing wrong in that. It’s what’s inside you that makes it sound bad. It’s as if you want to hold on to this hatred. To cultivate it.”

  “Look,” Pavlov said, “I’m only ashamed of one thing. Do you know what that is?” She shook her head, staring at him. “That I’m not totally Jewish.”

  “Aren’t you proud to be Russian?”

  “Why should I be? What have the Russians ever done for the Jews except massacre them? Or send them to Siberia.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “about you not being proud of being Russian. Not necessarily a communist. Just a Russian.”

  My country, he wanted to say, is a long way from here on the shores of the Mediterranean. But I mustn’t give too much away.

  In the other block the party was livening up. Girls laughing, glass breaking. The younger guests would be getting bold and indiscreet now – to hell with the hidden microphones. Tomorrow their hangovers would be complicated by fear and worry.

  He got his dressing-gown from the wardrobe and slipped it on. “How did you find out?” he asked.

  She said: “Gopnik.”

  “Ah.” He sighed. “Professor David Gopnik.” He tightened the belt of his dressing gown. “Caution, caution,” he murmured. “How did you come to meet the professor? Or did he come to see you?”

  “No,” she told him. “I met him in a café near the Tretyakov Gallery.” She hesitated. “I think he followed me there.”

  “Just to tell you that your husband was a Jew? Like some men tell a wife that their husband has got a mistress.”

  She reached for her cigarettes. She said: “No, it wasn’t like that at all.”

  “What was it like then?”

  “He’s a very worried men. He wants to go to Israel and they won’t let him.”

  “And you feel sorry for him?” Pavlov was astonished.

  “I feel sorry for him because he wants to go. He doesn’t understand. His mind is all figures and symbols. He can’t see the truth.”

  “What did he want?” Pavlov asked harshly. “Apart from revealing my ancestry.”

  “He said you were involved with some sort of organisation. He said you would ruin everything. He pleaded with me to ask you to abandon whatever you’re doing.” She got out of the bed and crossed the room, clutching the sheet to her breasts. She stood in front of him, looking down at him. “It’s not true, is it, Viktor? Gopnik – he’s crazy, isn’t he?”

  Pavlov stood up and paced the room. After a while he said: “It’s true that I think the Jews should be allowed to return to their own country. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s all there.”

  “But this is their country.”

  “A lot of them don’t think so.”

  “Most of them do.”

  “Sixty per cent of all immigrants to Israel are Russian. We helped to found Israel, now we are filling it.”

  “We” The sheet fell away exposing her breasts; she pulled it up again. “We, Viktor. But you’re Russian,” she beseeched him.

  “A Russian Jew.”

  “And a Zionist?”

  Pavlov moved to the window, staring down at the foreign cars, the floodlit playground. The nights were short these brief summer months and already there was a rim of green on the horizon, dawn and sunset chasing each other. At the exit into Kutuzovsky he saw the sentry, and suddenly he thought: Perhaps I was allocated this apartment for a reason. Perhaps they wanted to keep me under surveillance like the Western diplomats and journalists.

  “Zionism is treachery,” Anna said. “They have been born, nurtured, educated here. Why should we let them leave?” She spoke eagerly. “You should come to Siberia with me, Viktor. Then you would see the spirit of Russia. We, too, make the desert blossom. Then you’d see it my way. Young people building cities in the ice. Earning good money – twice, three times, what they get in Moscow. The battle between man and nature – that’s what they love. Such a great feeling working together, dancing, singing. The blue skies, the snow.…”

  Pavlov turned from the window. “Are you sure you aren’t more of a Siberian than a Soviet citizen? Aren’t you finding your Israel to the east?”

  She shook her head. “Moscow is my capital,” she said with finality.

  He could have argued with her. Siberians were famous for their independence. But it didn’t matter.

  “Will you come with me?” she asked. “I have to make a trip next week. We could stop at Lake Baikal.…”

  He spoke slowly and brutally. “My promised land,” he said, “is Israel. If Zionism is treachery then I am a traitor.”

  She shrank from him, moaned softly and ran to the lounge trailing the sheet behind her. He heard her lock the door.

  It’s over, he thought. I have committed my first murder.

  Across the courtyard someone threw a plate out of the apartment where the party was being held; it smashed the headlamp of a new Mercedes owned by a German first secretary.

  * * *

  It wasn’t difficult to find Gopnik. If he was in Moscow then he was attending the scientific conference at the Palace of Congress inside the Kremlin.

  He found him during the morning recess in the coffee bar of the vast, glacial hall. He slid into a chair beside him and said: “Good morning, Professor.”

  Gopnik swung round, spilling some coffee. “Hallo, Viktor, “he said, glancing uneasily around him. He seemed to have shrunk, looking more like a tortoiseshell than before.

  “How’s the campaign going?” Pavlov asked. He ordered coffee. They were surrounded by scientists; pale faces, a preponderance of spectacles, shabby clothes, the brains of Soviet scientific progress.

  “What campaign?” Gopnik peered at him anxiously.

  “The campaign. The cause. The great escape.”

  “Please,” Gopnik pleaded. “Not here. You never know.” He acted like a fugitive. “I must see you, Viktor,” he said.

  “Must?”

  “It’s very important.”

  “So important that you’ve been in town five days and haven’t bothered to look me up.”

  “I …”

  “Except of course, that you’ve seen my wife.”

  “She told you, then.”

  “Yes,” Pavlov said. “She told me.”

  “Tomorrow,” Gopnik said. “By the space obelisk. Eleven o’clock.” He swallowed his coffee and scuttled away from invisible pursuers.

  The obelisk was a high, shining edifice with a space rocket perched on top probing the clouds, the whole structure sweeping upwards like the prow of a ship. It was at the exhibition grounds where they had first talked, near the Ostankino TV tower.

  Gopnik was waiting for him, his lightweight suit crumpled, sweat on his deceptively low forehead. They walked beside green banks cushioning the base of the obelisk.

  Pavlov pointed at it. “Did Anna choose this spot – to remind me of heroic Soviet achievement?”

  “No, it was my idea. I’ve never denied the Russians’ achievements,” he said anxiously.

  “Neither have I.” Pavlov quickened his pace. “Now tell me how the campaign’s going.”

  “Th
at’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Gopnik said, puffing along beside him. “I’ve made five more applications since I saw you. Now, at least, there’s hope.”

  “So,” Pavlov remarked, “you’ve grovelled five more times.”

  “The last time was at Lubyanka. With two members of the K.G.B. They interrogated me for six hours. Why had I indulged in anti-Soviet activities? Why didn’t I like this country? Did I think everything was so much better in Israel? Did I know that under Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code I was liable to punishment ranging from two years exile to seven years imprisonment plus five years exile? ‘What for?’ I asked. ‘For anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,’ they replied.” Gopnik staggered slightly and sat on a bench. “On and on it went without food or drink. I thought I was going to faint and had to stick my head between my knees. Then suddenly it was all over. They asked me – actually asked me – to tell my friends that there was nothing of an anti-Semitic character about the interrogation.”

  “And was there?” Pavlov wasn’t sure what he felt for the man beside him. Pity, contempt – both.

  “Nothing anti-Semitic,” Gopnik said eagerly.

  Above them, a TU 104 was beginning its descent into Sheremetyevo.

  “They were pro-Jewish, were they?”

  “Anti-Zionist,” Gopnik mumbled. “Not anti-Jewish.” He gazed up at the jet catching the sunlight on its fusilage. It became a symbol for him. “But at last there’s a chance. I’ve got to see Madame Akulova at OVIR. So you see,” he said, tugging at Pavlov’s arm, “that’s why I wanted to see you. If anything happens – you know, if there’s any trouble – then they’ll stop my visa. But I’m not just speaking on my own behalf. I know I’m a little pathetic. It’s been so long. So many applications, so many interviews. I’m asking you for the sake of all the good, strong Jews who want to go back to their country. The ones who’ve kept on trying and kept their dignity, their pride. On their behalf I beseech you not to do anything that will wreck their dreams. They’re doing it the only possible way.” Gopnik wiped sweat from his forehead. “And we – they – are winning. Now they’ve dropped the education tax.…”

  “Of course they have,” Pavlov said. “Because the Americans threatened to cancel their new trade agreements if they didn’t.”