Vasin thought of Butyrika prison, the faces he had seen peering through the hatches in the battered old doors. Most were uncomplaining men, doomed to be abused, men to whom things simply happened. Their grandfathers had been someone’s property, serfs, and so on back for a hundred generations. These men had inherited the bovine resignation of ancient Russia. But there were others, men whose reason rebelled. You could tell them immediately. A snap in the glance. The way they straightened when the handcuffs came off in the interrogation room. A lingering dignity in the spread of their shoulders. The prison guards saw it, too, of course, with their scavengers’ instinct for scents of weakness, or dangerous strength. Proud men always had it hard, at the beginning. Then, in time, their fellow inmates would accord them a grudging space, as a race apart.
How had he become a man who knew such things? wondered Vasin with a sudden flash of revulsion. This knowledge of the degraded subtleties of prison society. How had he become a gatekeeper to this filthy world? Its interpreter?
“Mama, I am going to be a policeman.” Even his mother, this woman for whom the Soviet State could do no wrong, had flinched at the idea. The way she had paused, halfway across the communal kitchen, taken a moment to compose a brave smile.
“It’s not like Uncle Styopa, you know.”
Uncle Styopa, the kind neighborhood cop in the patriotic children’s poems that she had read to him. Tall, blond, and strong, Uncle Styopa had prevented train crashes, helped firemen, punished a school bully. He was a fighter against injustice and a hero to all Young Pioneers. She knew him as only a mother could. Of course Uncle Styopa was exactly what Vasin wanted to be. And even, then, what he thought it would be like.
“It will be an honor for you,” his mother had said, eventually. “Your father would be proud.”
Vasin had no way of knowing how his father would feel. He remembered a warm, ironic smile, the feel of the rough cloth of his father’s uniform tunic on his childish face. A week or so before his father had left for the front for the last time, his mother had taken Vasin to watch the troops parade. She had waved excitedly as his father’s unit passed, and the boy Vasin had waved and cheered too. But the truth was that he had not been able to recognize his dad among the rows of rhythmically high-stepping soldiers. It was as though the man had already been absorbed into the khaki mass, dissolved into the collective. His father had become part of a machine, an unrecognizable dot in a sea of identical faces.
In death, Vasin’s father had been doubly taken from him, no longer a private man but transformed into an archetypal war hero. One of the glorious dead who were everybody’s common property. His father’s apotheosis had automatically made him a patriot, a mute statue onto which the world would hang its placards.
“He defended our Motherland,” his mother concluded, finding a trite label for her feelings as usual. “Now it is your turn.”
Vasin had known he made a mistake the moment he walked into the Police Training Academy. Not an escape from school but a nightmarish replay of it. The shaven-headed, low-browed faces of his classmates, scowling at him with an instinctive knowledge that the new boy was not one of them. A smart one, this. Thinks a lot. Even his instructors had mocked him. Cadet Vasin, you know all the answers. Vasin will know this, he has spent the vacation reading the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The plodding sarcasm of a mediocre world. Only the women instructors who taught forensics and fingerprinting had admired him. Always so smartly turned out. An example to you all, boys. The others had sniggered and picked their noses.
* * *
—
Vasin struggled to wrench his thoughts back to the present. He concentrated on the dust dancing in a beam of morning sunlight that pierced the blinds. Particles rising and falling in space, in eternal random motion. God’s feeble way of entertaining bored physics students.
Adamov and his entourage appeared at the end of the corridor, the great man himself striding in front and his coterie of white-coated assistants following behind, moving with great urgency. Vasin stood. Adamov’s plain brown suit was stained with chalk, and his knotted tie was askew. His face wore its usual mask of stony seriousness, but the eyes were exhausted. The Professor fixed Vasin with a beady stare. As Vasin stepped forward into the Professor’s path, the white-coated assistants moved to surround him like white blood cells attacking a germ. A burly lieutenant colonel in an engineer’s uniform body-blocked Vasin.
“Not now.” The officer’s voice was hoarse and his eyes rimmed with red from lack of sleep. “Get lost.”
“Professor,” Vasin called over the man’s shoulder. “A word in private. It’s important.”
Adamov stopped and blinked in the neon glare of the Institute corridor, a bright white against the dull early morning’s effort beyond the windows. The nervous energy of the group focused into a jittery hostility at Vasin’s insolence. An older scientist in a stained lab coat spoke up.
“The Professor has no time. We have important work to do.”
“Two minutes, Comrade Professor. What I have to say is most urgent and concerns you, personally.”
Adamov did not accord Vasin the courtesy of going into his office. He merely swung open the nearest door and with a scowl sent the occupants scurrying for the exit like cockroaches in the light. As the room emptied, Adamov scanned some documents on a clipboard he held, as if bothering to look Vasin’s way would be a waste of a precious second.
“Speak. The device must be ready for transportation by the end of tomorrow.”
The Professor whipped a pencil from his breast pocket and made a note on his clipboard. Some men had a gift of quiet. In their presence, intimacy grew, and tendrils of doubt and confession like softly climbing plants. Adamov was the opposite. His silence was violent, a storm of tension building like a charge in a machine that would soon emit a devastating snapping arc of static electricity.
“I know Academician Arkady Petrov denounced you in 1937, Professor.”
Gradually Adamov’s stillness became awesome. He turned his head away, and the light fell on the square cage of his temples and jaws and the trapped and furious eyes within it. The terrible power of secrets. It had given Vasin power over Masha and now, over this great man. He felt shame. It was like knifing a man in an honest fistfight. Dirty dealing. He was not equal to the weight of the weapon he held in his hands.
The Professor’s answer, when it eventually came, seemed to echo from far away.
“Arkady Petrov.” Nothing in Adamov’s flat repetition gave any clue as to whether this was a confirmation of what he knew or a revelation. “With whom have you shared this information?”
“Maria Vladimirovna. Would you like to know what she said?”
Masha’s shadow fell between them like a sword. Vasin remembered the flutter of her eyelashes, the knowledge thudding into her chest like a blow from a club, the weight of her body against his.
Adamov exhaled. He looked at Vasin as though truly seeing him for the first time. In the crowded world of Adamov’s mind, Vasin imagined that he had finally broken through the screen of the insignificant to become real in the Professor’s eyes.
“Why?”
There was genuine pain in Adamov’s voice. So Masha was the key to him. Far adrift in his ocean of abstractions, Adamov still had love in him. He had not yet reached the freezing point of absolute loneliness. Only the man with love in him carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation. Vasin saw it, and hated himself for seeing it.
“To ask her if you could kill Fyodor Petrov, the son of the man who denounced you. If you were capable of poisoning the man during dinner at your own house.”
Adamov deflated, a man worn thin as paper.
“And what did my wife say to you, Major Vasin?”
“She said that you were incapable of such violence. But…” Vasin forced himself to press on. �
��I also know that immediately after the death of Petrov, you changed a specific part of the design of RDS-220. The tamper, designed by your dead colleague. Why?”
A quiet thickened between them. But this was not a silence of hostility. Now their time, the measure of their silences, belonged for a moment to Vasin. The Professor took a long moment to reassemble himself, to recover his authority. Their eyes locked once more. Adamov had donned a poker face a corpse would envy. But his moment of vulnerability had made Adamov’s voice softer, his adamantine carapace temporarily set aside. Though Vasin remained in no doubt that, at his core, his adversary was as hard as flint.
“You are not a fool. I’ll grant you that.”
“Your answer, Professor.”
“You cannot see what we see. There are matters here which you may not comprehend.”
Indignation erupted inside Vasin. These were also Orlov’s words.
“ ‘We know better than you’?” Vasin’s voice had chilled. “ ‘We sit higher, we see further’? Professor, you sit high and see far. But from where I sit and from what I see, you had the motive and the opportunity to kill Fyodor Petrov.”
Before Vasin could continue, Adamov, still looking away, began to speak.
“Young man. In the middle years of my life, after the camps and before I was allowed to return to Leningrad, I lived on half a hectare of land in Tambov Province. A peasant’s wooden cottage with a vegetable patch fertilized with my predecessors’ shit, which I dug out from the latrine. There was a meadow, completely enclosed by forest. It teemed with creatures: deer, squirrels, songbirds, crows, mice, a hawk. Except for the crows and the hawk, the carrion bird and the predator, every one of those animals constantly and fearfully watched over its shoulder lest it be caught, torn, and eaten alive. From the animals’ point of view, my little paradise was a space of violence and death. Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.”
Adamov had let his arm dangle free, the file held so loose in his fingers that Vasin thought he might let it drop to the floor.
“What do you mean, sir?”
The Professor continued talking as though Vasin had not spoken.
“In nature every creature lives its life in a permanent state of terror. Terror, and vigilance. To live to the end of every day he must fight to find sustenance, and to avoid death. Even the predators must kill or themselves die. The carrion birds depend on the murders of others. Why do we assume that the human world must be different?”
“I don’t understand.”
The Professor suddenly seemed to become aware once more of Vasin’s presence and turned his head to speak to him with a terrifying directness.
“What do we mean by ‘understanding’ something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes ‘the world’ is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by ‘fundamental physics.’ But even if we know every rule, what we really can explain in terms of those rules is very limited. Because almost all situations are so enormously complicated that we cannot follow the plays of the game using the rules. Much less tell what is going to happen next. We must, therefore, limit ourselves to the more basic question of the rules of the game. If we know the rules, we consider that we ‘understand’ the world. And do you know the rules? Any rules? I doubt it. So I may say two things to you now with certainty: You do not comprehend what happened then and you do not comprehend what is happening here, now.”
“Then enlighten me.”
“You have dug up a single piece of ancient history from the files and you are spinning tales. That is all. What is your evidence for the rest of what you suggest? There is none.”
Vasin hesitated for a moment too long. The evidence that could convict or exonerate Adamov lay below them, deep in the vaults of the Institute, among the laboratory records of Petrov’s experiments, which Axelrod insisted had been faked. But Vasin could not put his hand on them. And to ask Adamov for permission to view them would be to invite their immediate destruction, if the Professor was indeed guilty.
“You’re wrong, Professor Adamov. Your colleagues…”
“Have denounced me? Again? Is this your evidence? Major, this folly must go no further. You must stop. Now. But perhaps there are some things that you need to know. So, Comrade Not-fool, I offer you this. I have no more time now. By tomorrow night we will have completed the final assembly. Come to my apartment. We will have tea and I will tell you some things that you will find illuminating. But in the meantime you will not mention these accusations of yours to anybody. Especially none of your damn bunglers in the kontora. To nobody at the Institute. You will keep your silence for a day. Your word?”
The image of Adamov, Maria, Korin, and Petrov sitting under the pooled light of the Adamovs’ dining table on the final night of Petrov’s life jumped into his mind. They had all been drinking tea.
“My word, Professor.”
III
From the corridor, the computer room sounded more like an industrial laundry than a temple of high technology. When he swung open the double doors, Vasin was assaulted by a wave of heat and noise. A long hall was filled with banks of steel-cased machines, each composed of decks of glowing electrical valves. Banks of lights flickered on the displays, and the place was hot as a sauna. Overhead, giant air-conditioning ducts poured in cool air, the pumps thrumming like a ship’s diesels.
Along one side of the room were a row of glass-walled offices. Vasin spotted Axelrod gathering up a printout many meters long. He tapped on the thick glass, wasn’t heard, and then banged on it with the palm of his hand. Axelrod, turning, went white at the sight of him. Like a cartoon character he turned left and right, but there was nowhere to hide in the glass cubicle. Axelrod dropped the spooling roll of paper and made a desperate gesture, flapping his hands to shoo Vasin away. Shaking his head frantically, he mouthed the word no.
Looking about him, Vasin spotted a group of white-coated men huddling over one of the machines. One of them was pulling out a tray from the computer with heat-proof gloves. The section trailed wires like the arteries of an extracted organ. Nobody was paying them any attention. Vasin turned back to Axelrod and dropped his hands to his fly, mimicking pissing. With a swing of his head he summoned Axelrod to follow him.
In the men’s lavatory the two of them stood in awkward silence, side by side by the washbasins, as they waited for someone to finish noisily defecating. Eventually an elderly engineer lumbered out of the cubicle, smiling in comradely greeting as he took his time washing his hands. Vasin waited for the man’s footsteps to recede down the corridor before turning the taps on full.
“Why did you come here?” Axelrod said, his eyes flitting around the empty lavatory.
“You told me you were running some tests. What have you found?”
“I’m being followed.”
“Calm down.” Vasin tried to keep the impatience from his tone. Everyone in Arzamas was being watched by someone. “What’s happened, Axelrod?”
“Last night, someone followed me all the way home. He was sloppy and kept ducking behind trees whenever I turned around. I don’t think he was…one of yours. From the kontora.”
“It could have just been a thief.”
“A mugger in Arzamas? Are you insane?” Axelrod struggled to catch his breath. “Who did you tell about the tamper?”
“Nobody. I have told nobody, Axelrod.” Only Korin, and Adamov.
They both froze into silence as the door swung open. The young man, seeing them locked in intense conversation, hesitated before entering.
“
Get lost.” Vasin flicked his red ID card from his pocket and flashed it at the boy like a talisman.
The door slammed shut on its powerful spring.
“Vasin, I can’t be seen talking to you.”
“Nonetheless, I need to know what you have discovered.”
Axelrod puffed in exasperation.
“My computer simulation will be done in forty minutes. The first set of results will prove how seriously Adamov has sabotaged the device. Come to my apartment on Builders’ Street in one hour.”
* * *
—
When Vasin stepped out onto Kurchatov Square, a single Volga was parked by the curb, the driver reading a newspaper while the passenger kept lookout. Another car would probably be circling the square. Vasin loitered for a moment to make sure that the kontora men had spotted him, then strolled to the corner of Marx Boulevard. The traffic policeman, pleased to have someone to talk to, gave him overcomplicated directions. The Volga idled by the curb, then kept pace with him, trailing at a distance.
Vasin passed women in head scarves hurrying to do some lunchtime shopping. A pair of young men in new suits greeted each other with a bear hug. On the boulevards young mothers gossiped as they rocked prams. At the window of a shoe shop, Vasin stopped to check the display, watching for someone to double back or pause to tie a shoelace. Nobody did. No followers on foot, then. A steam whistle sounded from the railway, and from a courtyard came the whoop of boys playing football. Vasin walked mercifully incognito in his civilian clothes through an ordinary Friday afternoon in a city that was anything but ordinary.
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