The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  “Galya, mine are the same. Never mind them, the relatives … they just get in your way your whole life. We’ll just get married without telling them.”

  Everything about Gennady was to her liking. He was quiet, didn’t ask questions, had a master’s certificate in sports, by the way, with a college degree; and with a family like his, you could forget they had ever existed.

  Gennady was eager to get married for his own reasons, which he informed Galya about. Through his job he was eligible to receive housing; they had promised him a one-room apartment, but if he married, they might give him a small two-room apartment, so he could start a family.

  They filed the necessary papers, and set a date for the registration of their union. Galya went to Olga and told her she was getting married. She asked her to be a witness. Olga had by this time tied the knot with Ilya. Both her girlfriends were lonely and alone. Tamara at least had her hormones to make out with, but Galya was just plain alone and unloved.

  Olga was happy for her, but surprised:

  “What kind of friend are you! You didn’t even tell me you had met someone.”

  Now she just had to marry Tamara off, and everyone would be settled.

  Olga didn’t suspect that she had also inadvertently decided Tamara’s fate. For a year Tamara had been seeing Ilya’s older friend the brilliant Marlen. At Olga’s birthday party, she had sat Tamara next to Marlen. They left the party at the same time, and Marlen walked her to the Molodezhnaya metro station. It turned out that they were practically neighbors. Tamara fell madly in love, igniting a mutual passion that was no laughing matter. For many years Marlen went back and forth between two homes (fortunately, only five minutes apart). In each home Marlen kept a toothbrush, a razor, and a clean pair of undergarments. He had always led a traveler’s existence, though now the destination of his business trips was sometimes only as far as the neighboring house, where he hibernated in quiet retreat and in love. And, of course, in secret. Tamara took a vow of silence practically from the first day they met—not a word to anyone about Marlen, especially not to Olga and Ilya. Thus, Olga, the unwitting disposer of other people’s fates, organized their lives and affairs but remained none the wiser about it herself.

  * * *

  Galya didn’t have a wedding party. Gennady said that it made no sense to throw money to the wind, since they would have to buy furniture. Galya just nodded in agreement. She was disappointed about it, but Gennady was right, of course. About the furniture. They registered their marriage, and she went to live with her husband in his dormitory. The room was a decent one. He gave his old bed away to the supervisor of the dormitory, and bought a fold-out divan.

  That first night on the new divan, Gennady accepted an unexpected gift from his wife, a gift that required painstaking effort from the receiver, no less than the giver. It turned out that Galya Polukhina was an upright girl; she had saved herself for her husband. Only one thing cast a shadow over this great day for Gennady: Galya’s friend Olga. How on earth could he have let the wife of his target, Ilya Bryansky, whom he had been watching on and off for two years, appear as a witness on their marriage certificate? A personal connection was taking shape which was in part something of a nuisance, in part very promising.

  While they were thrashing around on the new divan, while Gennady was carrying out his masculine duties and overcoming nature’s difficulties, glad for the gentle participation of his wife, a small but insistent worry hovered in the back of his mind: Had Olga recognized him?

  She had. After she returned home from the marriage registry, she told Ilya that Polushka had gotten married to the Rodent. That’s what they had nicknamed Gennady when they discovered he was shadowing Ilya. The Rodent was one of the three outdoor surveillance officers whom Ilya knew by sight.

  Ilya laughed at first—that meant he had married into the family! Then he started wondering. What was it you gave her to type?

  In recent years Galya had often accepted work from them. She was a fast and accurate typist, without really understanding what she was typing.

  “Oh, damn! I don’t remember.”

  “Think! What did you give her to type?”

  “Ah, now I remember! She has my Erika typewriter, and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.”

  “Get them back right away. Today.”

  Olga rushed down to the semibasement, and only remembered along the way that Galya had moved in with her husband. Her drunken father, Yury, hurt that his daughter hadn’t included him in the marriage arrangements, but had done everything herself, was unwelcoming. Olga asked whether Galya had left her typewriter behind.

  “She took every last thing with her and cleared out. Didn’t even leave an address,” her father said curtly, and slammed the door in Olga’s face.

  Olga went home upset, not knowing what to do next. Ilya lost no time in trying to comfort her.

  “Never mind, Olga, things could be worse. Galya has been part of your family her whole life; she won’t be in any hurry to denounce you. Wait awhile—before you know it we’ll be drinking tea with her hubby,” Ilya said with a crooked grin.

  Ilya wasn’t completely off the mark about the tea; but a friendly tea party was not in the cards for years to come. A good many of them.

  They told Tamara about Galya’s hasty wedding to the Rodent, leaving out the part about the typewriter and the manuscript Galya was working on. Even so, Tamara was horrified.

  “Don’t let her into your house!”

  “Are you crazy? I’ve been friends with her practically since the day I was born!” Olga was angry.

  “It’s too dangerous. How can you not see that yourself? You’ll have an informer under your own roof,” Tamara said darkly.

  “Nonsense! It’s sickening, suspecting everyone in that way. Then I might as well start suspecting you!” Olga burst out.

  Tamara turned scarlet, began to cry, and left.

  The next day, Olga called Galya at work. They told her that she had gone on vacation that very day. Strange—Galya hadn’t mentioned anything about a vacation. In fact, Galya herself hadn’t known about this surprise from her husband. A honeymoon! Galya’s mother confirmed the information, saying they had gone on a trip to Kislovodsk. Olga asked about the typewriter, saying she had lent it to Galya, and now urgently needed it back. Galya’s mother, Nina, told Olga to wait a moment while she looked for it. She came back saying there was no typewriter in the house. She would have seen it—it was too big to miss.

  Then she wondered whether Yury might have drunk it away. There was no telling.

  The new Erika was worth a fortune, and they were nearly impossible to come by. And she needed it desperately! Olga was a good typist herself, but she didn’t have the speed of a professional. She always gave large projects to Galya and others to type.

  Still, the missing Gulag Archipelago was a more serious loss by far.

  Two weeks later, Galya came over uninvited, looking very fresh and healthy, almost pretty. She was very perturbed, however. She cried when she made the honest admission that the typewriter and the manuscript had disappeared from her parents’ home without a trace, and where they had gone she had no clue; she, Galya, would return the money, it would take three months or so. Everything had vanished, most likely, when they were on their honeymoon.

  “No, it was before that!” Olga said. “I thought about it the day you and Gennady got married, and I went over to your parents the very next day!”

  “It’s impossible!” Galya said with a gasp.

  The household investigation, which Galya immediately undertook, didn’t yield anything. Her father was on a drinking binge, which constituted indirect evidence of domestic theft. Still, her papa went on these binges at regular intervals, right on schedule, and he had just now gotten started after a bout of sobriety.

  Her brother, Nikolay, whom she tried to interrogate, grew suddenly irate, began to shake, and screamed at her to leave him alone. He wasn’t quite right in the head, and the psychiatric c
linic had had medical records on file for him since he was a child.

  Now Olga had to comfort Polushka and give her tea to drink. She inquired about her married life. It was absolutely wonderful, her husband didn’t drink and was very serious, had a good job, and even promised to try to set Galya up in a good position as well. Then Ilya and Kostya returned from the skating rink, both of them frozen and encrusted with ice. They usually went to the one on Petrovka, but this time they’d gone to a little patch of ice in the next-door courtyard, where they slipped and tumbled to their hearts’ content. True, when they were already tired out from all the fun, one of the other kids pelted Kostya with an ice-filled snowball, giving him a bloody nose. They quickly stopped the bleeding with more ice, though.

  Galya always got scared and took to her heels at the mere sight of Ilya, and this time was no exception. Olga laundered the bloody scarf and handkerchiefs. Kostya, Ilya, and Olga had dinner together. Their favorite days were like this one, when her mother stayed at the dacha. Then Olga sent Kostya off to bed.

  “Ilya, the typewriter and the manuscript have both disappeared. No one knows where,” Olga said with trepidation.

  “It’s the Rodent! We have to clear everything out of the house,” Ilya said peremptorily.

  He threw himself into the task, grabbing things off the shelves and out of hiding places, gathering all the dangerous papers. Several onionskin pages bound together with paper clips he burned in the WC. He collected all the most dangerous publications—issues of the Chronicle of Current Events. In her mother’s bookshelves, behind the Romain Rolland and the Maxim Gorky, there were also some things stashed away. By three in the morning they had gathered up all the dangerous material and stuffed it into an old suitcase, which they stowed under a coatrack. They postponed the final decision, whether to take it all to the dacha or to Ilya’s aunt’s house in the country, out of harm’s way, until the next morning.

  They couldn’t get to sleep for a long time, making all kinds of wild conjectures about what the near future had in store. They discussed whether they ought to inform the author, through Rosa Vasilievna, that the manuscript had possibly fallen into the hands of the KGB. They agreed to go to see her in the morning, to give her a detailed account of what had happened. Then Ilya discovered that Olga had fallen asleep, mid-sentence. And, like a bolt of lightning, it struck him: tomorrow they would be arrested! He even broke into a cold sweat. He had left so many tracks—his address books with all the phone numbers; and he would have to go to his mother’s right away to rescue his photograph collection and hide it somewhere. And put the negatives in a separate place. No, best take it all to his aunt’s in Kirzhach. If only he managed to do it in time! He’d have to get up at six and leave immediately for his mother’s; and with that thought, he fell into a sound sleep.

  At just after eight, Olya gave Kostya an apple and sent him on his way to school. Ilya was still asleep. Olga put some coffee on to boil. At ten after nine sharp, the telephone and doorbell rang simultaneously. Ilya woke up, looked at the clock, and realized he was too late.

  “Go to the bathroom,” Olga commanded. Ilya darted into the bathroom and latched the door. Olga went to open the front door, trying to decide what she should and should not say in the short space before she got there.

  She had long known how these things happened, but her first thought was: call Mama for help. She immediately felt ashamed.

  Six people barged in. Not one of them in uniform. A tall man, without taking off his cap, thrust a search warrant and an ID at her at the same time. He wasn’t fooling around. They opened the door to every room except the bathroom.

  “Is your husband in there?” the tall one asked, finally taking his cap off. A lock of hair from his toupee rose up with the cap, and he mechanically plastered it back down to his forehead. He looks like Kosygin, Olga thought. Suddenly her fear melted away.

  “Yes, that’s him,” she said.

  One of them went up to the door and rapped on it.

  “Come out!”

  “I’m coming,” Ilya said.

  He emerged a few minutes later in the general’s old bathrobe with the patches on the sleeves. He had shaved hurriedly.

  Good work, Olga thought to herself approvingly.

  “You’ll have to come with us to the residence where you are registered,” said another one. He exchanged glances with the tall one. Meaningfully.

  Ilya got dressed without any haste.

  Three of them stood in a group by the bookcase.

  “Your books?” the smallest one asked.

  “Oh, no,” Olga said. “Most of them belong to my mother. She’s a well-known writer, of course. In the other room there are books on military construction. My father is a general and has a big collection of books on military subjects.”

  Olga’s mood lifted. She could feel that her voice sounded fine, and betrayed no abject trembling. Ilya realized immediately that her fear had been replaced by some complex desperation that also contained an element of amusement.

  Good girl, Ilya thought in his turn, taking heart. With that, he waved to her and went out, one goon on his right, another on his left.

  Three stayed behind to search, and one more stood watch by the door.

  The witness, Olga thought.

  She had no firsthand experience of the KGB herself, but she had heard stories about how these searches were carried out. They were far more polite than she had imagined they would be. One of them had a pleasant face, like a tractor driver or a farmhand. Even his skin had something rural about it—it was chapped and reddish, as if he had spent a lot of time in the cold. He tapped the books perfunctorily, seeing right away that all suspicious papers had been carefully weeded out. Then he made a discovery. In the bathroom they found an ashtray full of dead matches and paper clips.

  “What you were burning?” the one with the toupee asked. He introduced himself as Alexandrov, an investigator from the prosecutor’s office, but Olga forgot his name immediately. She couldn’t determine whether her guests were from the police, the KGB, or the prosecutor’s office. She didn’t know that there were subtle differences between these raids: some of them were only looking for anti-Soviet dissidents, or petition signers; others for books, yet others only for Jews.

  “We burned toilet paper to cover up the stench in the bathroom,” Olga said boldly.

  “Do you wipe with paper clips?” Alexandrov poked around in the ashtray resourcefully. He had some idea about what those paper clips might have held together: protest letters with the names of signees attached, issues of the Chronicle.

  “What do you expect? Our house is full of office materials. My mother’s a magazine editor.”

  Arrogant bitch, Alexandrov thought. He had a great deal of experience.

  Olga tried not to look in the direction of the worn-out suitcase standing under the coatrack, half-concealed by a long overcoat of her father’s and her mother’s fur coat. Would they notice? Or wouldn’t they?

  That’s when they noticed. Alexandrov, the one who looked like Kosygin, asked Olga to open the suitcase. She opened it, and he glanced casually inside. He understood immediately; then relaxed.

  “Now I see how well prepared you were.”

  They rummaged around for another hour and a half, just to keep up appearances. In addition to the suitcase, they took one of her mother’s typewriters, her father’s binoculars, Ilya’s favorite camera, and all the address books, including her mother’s. They even took the daily tear-off calendar from the wall. They impounded Ilya’s “golden collection,” photographs of the most brilliant personages of the time: Yakir, Krasin, Alik Ginzburg, the priests Dmitry Dudko, Gleb Yakunin, and Nikolay Eshliman, the writers Daniel and Sinyavsky, and Natalya Gorbanevskaya.

  This photographic archive, the only one of its kind, would later come to be called “the dissident archive.” It contained, among others, photographs that were published in the Western press. These were photographs that Ilya had sold to Klaus, a German jou
rnalist, and to one other American, as well as the photographs smuggled out through his Belgian friend Pierre, who then distributed them in the West.

  When Alexandrov removed the folder containing this archive from the depths of Kostya’s desk, Olga realized that Ilya was now exposed.

  An official black Volga was waiting by the door, and another gray one was parked out on the street. They loaded the suitcase, the typewriters, and a sack full of papers into the gray one, and Olga herself into the black one. She sat in the backseat, two of the men pressed against her on either side. They drove her to a two-story building not far away, on Malaya Lubyanka. The building bore a sign that didn’t mince words: “Office of the Committee for State Security for Moscow and the Moscow Region.”

  At three in the afternoon, the real interrogation began; or so it seemed to Olga. Alexandrov was sitting in the room, together with a nearly silent captain. He was the first person she had seen that day in a uniform. She didn’t realize that this was merely a conversation, not an interrogation.

  What should she say? What should she avoid saying? She wasn’t in the habit of lying. Ilya had warned her to keep her head; that meant she shouldn’t say anything. This, however, seemed like the hardest thing of all. And Olga, despite her best intentions, did start talking—for one hour, two hours, then three. The questions seemed random and insignificant—who are your friends, where do you go, what do you read? They mentioned her former professor, who had emigrated. They knew, naturally, that she had signed letters supporting him, and that she had been expelled from the university in 1965. They even expressed sympathy with her: this guy was spewing all that anti-Soviet nonsense, what use was it to you? You come from good Soviet stock—why did you get mixed up with that sort?

  Olga played dumb, without going overboard, saying something about her girlfriends, most of whom she didn’t really see anymore, since they almost all had families to take care of, children, work, and so forth … among her close friends she only named, out of spite, Galya Polukhina; she didn’t think she mentioned a single other person.