Olga was surprised when Alexandrov asked her about Tamara Brin.
“No, we don’t see each other anymore. We used to be friends, before science became her whole life. Now she doesn’t have time for anyone.”
“She doesn’t have time for anyone? What about Marlen Kogan? She spends time with him. She’s studying Hebrew.”
Olga’s eyebrows shot up.
“Really? I had no idea.”
“I ask the questions here; you answer. You seem to consider yourself to be very smart and perceptive, Olga Afanasievna.” He smiled, showing his large teeth, and for a moment Olga was overcome by something like horror. Suddenly she felt naked, vulnerable to a bite or a needle, as soft as a mollusk without its shell. At the same moment, she realized she needed to recover her composure, and she asked to go to the toilet.
Alexandrov made a phone call, and a heavy woman with a large rump came in, then led her down a corridor with unpredictable twists and turns to a WC. There were squares of newsprint hanging from a nail in the wall. Squatting over the toilet, which was clean but had no seat, she began thinking: I wonder what the bathrooms in the FBI look like? Then she laughed out loud, startling her chaperone. This little breather helped her. She was able to gather her thoughts, and even felt a bit stronger. Was he lying about Tamara? Probably not. Why hadn’t Tamara told her anything about herself? Strange, very strange. Could she really have some sort of relationship with Marlen? She hadn’t said a word about it. Silent as the grave. And him—going on about his family obligations, observing all those religious traditions, keeping kosher. All that stuff. She recalled that Marlen never ate anything at their house. He only drank vodka. He said vodka was always kosher. He had a scraggly beard and hair, and an unwieldy body—a big head with unruly curls, broad shoulders, and stumpy legs. But he had brains, that was for sure. It was like he had a whole library in his head, organized by shelves—history, geography, literature. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant; still, it was strange that Tamara had set her sights on him. It just proved that anything was possible.
Then the captain looked at his watch, went out, and returned fifteen minutes later. He looked at his watch again, and mumbled something to Alexandrov. Alexandrov’s tone changed abruptly, as though a command meant just for him were written on the watch.
“Enough of that. Let’s get down to business. Do these books belong to you, or to your husband?”
“They’re mine, of course. I keep my own books at home.”
“All of them are yours?”
“Well, a few of them may have been left behind by other people. Most of them are mine, though.”
“Which of these books are not yours?”
“These are all mine,” Olga said, correcting herself.
“Where did you get them?”
Olga had expected to be asked this question, and she had a ready answer.
“We buy books. We read a lot, and buy a lot of books.”
“Where?”
“Well, you know there’s a black market in Moscow, you can buy anything there: foreign junk, perfume, books…”
“Where is this market?”
“Different places. Some of them I bought near the Kuznetsky Bridge.”
“Be more precise. Where exactly near the Kuznetsky Bridge?”
“There’s a book market in Moscow. They sell all kinds of things there.”
“You mean people stand right there out in the open by Kuznetsky Bridge and offer to sell you stuff like this, for example?” He pulled Avtorkhanov’s book out of the pile. “The Technology of Power?”
“Yes,” Olga said, nodding.
Then he pulled one book after another out of the pile until he lost interest. The captain went out twice; then he came back again.
“What can I tell you, Olga Afanasievna? All this book business qualifies as anti-Soviet agitation and falls under article 190 of the Criminal Code. It carries a penalty of three to five years. Perhaps you weren’t aware of this?” He even seemed to express sympathy with her.
Olga, who had been showered with love, kindness, and understanding from earliest childhood, was more troubled by the ambiguity of her relations with her interlocutor than anything else. He was an unpleasant person, an enemy by definition, but she instinctively continued to rely on her own charms. Flirtatiousness and self-assurance kept breaking through the armor of restraint she had decided to adopt as her modus operandi. But the interlocutor was deaf and devoid of feeling, and she kept getting off track, catching herself in inconsistencies. It was tormenting, all the more because she had no idea how it would all end: whether they would let her go, arrest her, kill her … No, they wouldn’t kill her, of course; but there were moments when she was plunged into fear, a physical, animal fear that exceeded human endurance. And it went on and on.
They questioned her repeatedly about Ilya. About his job. He had a more or less official cover—a document stating that he worked as a research assistant. He was already on his third patron. After his first arrangement with his father-in-law, an academic in the field of agriculture, he had a short stint with a cranky old man, a writer, who broke off relations with him after six months. Now he had an agreement with another writer, a decent sort, who lived in Leningrad. If a ruse became necessary, it was that he was carrying out research for him in the Moscow libraries.
Olga answered all the questions about Ilya with one phrase that was difficult to refute: I don’t know, my husband never spoke to me about it. She gave the impression of an obedient, submissive wife.
“Think hard, Olga Afanasievna. It’s probably best not to cross us. I’m sure your parents would be disappointed, too. Today we were just having a little talk, getting to know each other. Your books will remain here, of course. There are plenty of them—they’ll suffice for five years of prison. Here’s the list of the books. Yes, yes, I know you’ve already signed it. Think about everything we’ve discussed here. We’ll meet again soon, there are still some things we need to talk about. We understand that your husband dragged you into this anti-Soviet activity. Now you must think about it, decide who you … and sign here, too. A nondisclosure clause, about our little conversation.”
Matters seemed to be drawing to a close. The clock on the wall read quarter to eleven.
Alexandrov scribbled something on a piece of paper, and gave it to a woman who had been sitting in the room for a long time. This turned out to be a permit for her to leave. The corridor was a veritable labyrinth, breaking off, turning, then veering off again at strange angles. The length of the journey to the exit didn’t correspond to the rather modest dimensions of the building on the outside.
When she emerged onto the street, she wanted to get a taxi. Not a single car stopped, and she dragged herself, exhausted, through the whole expanse of Dzerzhinsky Square to the metro.
Her parents’ house had been turned inside out, shaken down, violated. How had they managed in such a short time to destroy the propriety and dignity of their well-maintained household? There were footprints all over the parquet floors, books were strewn about everywhere in heaps, a trail of the general’s underwear—piles of long johns and undershirts that had been accumulating on the shelves since the war—fanned out through the spacious hallway. It was a good thing that her mother was already at the dacha for the third night running and didn’t have to witness any of this.
Ilya wasn’t home. Faina Ivanovna, the housekeeper, had left a note on the table: “Olga! I picked up Kostya from school and took him to my house. He’ll spend the night here. I’ll take him to school in the morning. Call me when you get in, Faina.”
If only she had had a mother like Faina—she always did just the right thing, no questions asked. She had raised Olga without a single extra word, and she was helping out with Kostya like no one else in the world knew how. What luck that her mother had gone straight to the dacha after work without stopping off at home!
She called Faina.
“Faina, you’ve been saving me my whole life. I can’
t thank you enough.”
Faina grumbled a bit, and cursed under her breath, saying that if Olga kept this up she would leave them.
“If only for the child!” she said, before hanging up the phone. Pure gold. She was pure gold.
After some hesitation, Olga decided to call Maria Fedorovna, Ilya’s mother. She dialed the number, but when no one picked up right away, she hung up. Her exhaustion outstripped her anxiety. She collapsed on the divan and fell asleep immediately. Fifteen minutes later she woke up, choking with fear. It was as though she hadn’t slept at all.
At half past two in the morning, she began to clean up. By morning she had put the house in order.
What could have happened to Ilya? The question gnawed at her and gave her no rest.
She called Galya at work, saying they had to meet right away. An hour later, Galya was sitting in Olga’s kitchen.
“Galya, our house was searched. Do you realize that this all started with the typewriter?” No sooner had Olga begun to talk than Galya broke into tears. “Tell me honestly, did you tell your husband what you were typing? That you had borrowed the typewriter from me?”
Galya swore that her husband knew nothing about the typewriter, nor that she earned extra money as a typist. Moreover, she hadn’t told a single person in the world about it. She swore so vehemently that it was impossible not to believe her. It was a mystery how everything had ended up with the KGB. And why had they waited so long, why hadn’t they come right away?
“Olga, please understand one thing; now I have to tell Gennady everything. Otherwise, it’s as if I set everyone up: you, and Antonina Naumovna, and Gennady, too. He could get into trouble! What else can I do, go out and kill myself? Maybe you think I’m ungrateful—do you think I don’t know how much your family has done for me? But Gennady doesn’t know about that. It has nothing to do with him. He lives a completely different kind of life, his views on everything are different. He has strong ideological principles! Who was the secretary of the Komsomol organization at school, was it me? No, it was you! You were the most Soviet of all of us! Tamara, though she never said it out loud, was anti-Soviet. And I had nothing at all to do with any of that—after I turned twelve all I ever thought about were the uneven bars and the balance beam!”
At that moment, the lock clicked, and Ilya stumbled in. Ilya and Olga embraced as though after a long separation, then clung to each other in exhaustion.
Galya put on her coat and slipped out shrewdly.
“When did they let you go?” Ilya asked, still holding Olga to him.
“At eleven last night. Did they keep you all this time?”
“At first they drove me to my mother’s, and they cleaned everything out. Everything. My darkroom is gone. Then they took me to Malaya Lubyanka. That’s where I’ve been till now.”
After Kostya had started school and they moved to Olga’s Moscow apartment, Ilya had transferred the darkroom to his mother’s, to the broom closet.
“That two-story building? That’s where I was, too.”
“Yes, it’s the Moscow branch. To hell with them. They can all go to hell,” Ilya muttered. And nothing mattered to him just then except his clear-eyed Olga, his wife, his beloved, who was worth more than all the world to him … he’d tried to keep Olga out of it, and to take all the blame upon himself. After all, he was the one who had brought the books into the apartment! He’d tried to extricate Olga from the mess. He could wriggle out of it somehow; if only Olga didn’t have to suffer for it.
Now Olga, with her slightly chapped lips, her pale freckles sprinkled over her white skin, the center of his life, its very heart, stroked his face. He would still have to deal with the branch, but he was determined to keep Olga out of the affair at any cost.
When Antonina Naumovna returned home from work, she received a full account of what had happened from her daughter. Antonina clutched first at her heart, and then at the telephone receiver. She made an appointment the next day with General Ilienko, who was the Writers’ Union liaison with the most vitally significant state organs. They had been on amicable terms since the thirties, when she was just starting her career. They survived the purges, then carried out purges themselves, making short shrift of the formalists, and working together on the Ehrenburg case.
It was hard work, and very unrewarding. Though of the utmost importance. Antonina had no doubts about that.
Ilienko always helped his own people, and now he helped Antonina Naumovna in her hour of need.
The general introduced her to another general, who spoke to her in what she could only feel to be a condescending manner; but in the end, her plea met with success. They returned her typewriters, the old Underwood and the new Optima, the address books, and the manuscripts that had been confiscated during the search. Among the things they gave back to her were some books of Ilya’s—pre-Revolutionary religious texts that Antonina Naumovna was loath even to touch. Most unexpectedly, they even gave back Ilya’s cameras and enlarger. Olga’s Erika was the only thing that wasn’t returned right away. She managed to get it back three months later, by special request. How it had ended up there, who had informed on them, she wasn’t told.
Antonina Naumovna was not given to scandal and emotional upheaval. Moreover, after Olga’s expulsion from the university, she had experienced the bitterness of rupture in the spirit of Fathers and Sons. For this reason she didn’t reproach her daughter. Any hope of a meeting of minds had been uprooted from her heart long before, though she had raised the girl according to her own lights, her own best pedagogical insights. What would Olga say about her grandparents, those misguided religious fanatics?
Antonina’s eyes burned with a dry flame; her lips pursed together once and for all—in her veins ran severe and obdurate Greek blood. When she was young, she had often been mistaken for a Jewess, which caused her a great deal of consternation. Now, later in life, she had acquired a likeness to a Byzantine icon: a fiercely spiritual countenance, devoid of pity or compassion. A Paraskevi of Iconium or St. Irene … though instead of a halo she wore a coarsely crocheted beret or an Astrakhan hat from the Literary Fund store.
Antonina Naumovna’s first thought was to exchange her apartment for two smaller ones. Then she wouldn’t have to see either her daughter or her son-in-law. She reconsidered, however: Would the second apartment go to the state after her death? What about her grandson? He was a good boy, and very attached to his grandfather. Why should he be cheated of his inheritance? No, that wouldn’t do. Besides, someone had to keep an eye on them, the old writer decided. She had long known that the government was watching her lousy son-in-law and Olga at the same time.
After this, Antonina Naumovna changed her schedule. She went to the dacha on weekends and holidays, but not every weekday. Several times a week she visited the young family—always without warning, so that they knew she might drop in at any moment and wouldn’t dare indulge in any anti-Soviet revels and mayhem at home.
Faina continued to work for them. She freed up the careless and irresponsible parents in the evenings, and even allowed them to stay out overnight. Olga and Ilya roamed around from house to house, visiting old friends and meeting interesting new ones.
Life drove a wedge between the old girlfriends. They saw one another now once a year, on Olga’s birthday, June 2. They called one another rarely. This estrangement was natural: each of them had her own life, her own secrets to keep. Their school years were the only thing the girlfriends had left in common, and those memories became ever more faded and insignificant.
In addition to her beloved science, Tamara now had her beloved Marlen. And Galya, besides her husband and her job, had a secret pastime: she was getting treated for infertility, making the rounds of all kinds of medical clinics, homeopaths, herbalists, and even charlatans of every stripe and color.
These were the happiest years in Olga’s life. It was like skating on thin ice: dangerous and exhilarating. The professor who had brought Olga and Ilya together outside the courth
ouse had served his seven-year prison term, had been released, and had then emigrated.
Neither Olga nor Ilya had been able to see him in the months before his departure, which they both regretted. But he had been inaccessible. Perhaps he didn’t want to see anyone himself; perhaps his wife had erected an iron curtain around him. He left very quietly, almost surreptitiously—the authorities were clearly glad to be rid of him. Moreover, dark rumors about his involvement with the KGB were making the rounds.
During those years, members of the underground, readers and creators of samizdat alike, had quarreled among themselves and broken up into small groups, into sheep and goats. True, it was impossible to distinguish between them, to decide who was a sheep and who was a goat. Even within the small herds and flocks there was no concord. Parallels with the “men of the sixties” of the nineteenth century—“Westernizers” and “Slavophiles”—were too remote to seek. Now everything was much more complicated and splintered. Some were for justice, but against the Motherland; others were against the authorities, but for communism; others wanted true Christianity; still others were nationalists who dreamed of independence for their Lithuania or their western Ukraine; then there were the Jews, who wanted only one thing—to leave the country …
And there was the great truth of literature—Solzhenitsyn wrote book after book. They came out in samizdat, passed from hand to hand in the time-honored pre-Gutenberg manner, on loosely bound, soft, hardly legible pages of onionskin paper. It was impossible to argue with these pages: their truth was so stark and shattering, so naked and terrible—truth about oneself, about one’s own country, about its crimes and sins. And over there, already an emigrant, Olga’s professor, an underground writer with a soiled reputation, but with Western glory, as shrewd, acerbic, and spiteful as a devil, made his damning, ignominious pronouncements, calling Russia a “bitch” and the great writer an “undereducated patriot.”
The Big Green Tent Page 29