Just the same the onslaughts on belief were insidious. Particularly when you were a student. Surely it was the birthright of youth to question everything. But often the ones who asked questions vanished overnight. And for a few days the rumours about Beria the Butcher and his orgies with girls taken off the streets at night, about the massacres of Jews, about the imprisonment of Russians for sins of ancestry, were hushed by fear.
And indeed none of them wanted to believe that the Nazi monster they had defeated had a blood brother in the Soviet Union. Vladimir Zhukov concluded that, even if any of the rumours had substance, they were the hangover of war; a necessary evil like the purges after the Bolsheviks seized power.
More accurately Vladimir didn’t want to know. There was nothing he could do. An ideology based on equality was the only possible solution to the world’s torment and to this he applied himself in his unspectacular way.
Once in Red Square he saw two stilyagy in American-styled beach shirts obtained from God-knows-where picked up by plainclothes police. Very frail they looked with their bright shirts flapping over their belts; the children of war. They were kicked and rabbit-punched and thrown into the back of an ancient black saloon car. It sickened him; but there was nothing he could do. Hadn’t the Nazis been worse? Weren’t the American cops just as bad? Violence and suppression were instruments of evolution: Vladimir Zhukov wasn’t born to interfere with evolution.
Occasionally he questioned the Soviet acquisition of great tracts of Europe. In the loneliness before sleep it didn’t seem much different from imperialist expansionism. And he listened gratefully to the university lectures explaining that it was no such thing: it was Socialism reaching out to embrace the world.
Gradually a small attic in Vladimir’s mind began to fill with questions not wholly answered and sentiments not fashionable in the post-war Motherland. In this attic he also stored fragments of poetry which might be considered subversive. Although he didn’t open its trapdoor very often: it contained only diversions and obstacles to purpose. Soon the hinges became rusty.
Marriage. A junior post at the Foreign Ministry. Admission to the Party. The birth of Natasha. A car after a two-year wait. A small but new apartment with bathroom not far from the American Embassy which looked like an old hospital in need of treatment.
Vladimir became a bureaucrat. But he still managed to rejoice. At the spring exuberance of his people after hibernation in the igloo of Moscow. And he argued vehemently with the Westerners he met through his job when they attacked the pattern of life: the alleged rule of the secret police, the dreary regimen.
Most of the Westerners were diplomats and businessmen seething at delays in negotiation. ‘You criticize,’ Vladimir snarled, after tilting the vodka bottle over lunch, ‘because you can’t make money here as quickly as you can in America or Britain. You criticize because you come here with preconceived ideas. You look for faults and you find them. You don’t consider the miracles that have been achieved in the thirty years since the Revolution—despite a war in between in which we lost a generation. You don’t look for the music and laughter. Instead of coming to the beaches you stay in your hotels drinking and bitching …’
And it was to the sandy river beaches of the Moscva and the Volga that Vladimir liked most to enjoy the country he’d defended. Watching the long-distance pleasure boats throb past. Bottles of beer cooling in the lapping shallows. Tents in the birch glades, volleyball and ping-pong. Pale Muscovites, emerging from winter like the first thawed insects of spring, tanning every decent inch of skin, except their noses which they covered with protectors made from Pravda or Izvestia.
There, while Valentina nursed the baby, while guitars strummed in the matchstick woods, while massive women in pink and white brassières laid out their flesh for burning, while children guzzled fizzy fruit drinks and rich ice-cream, while a breeze smelling of boats and pine frilled the water at a fat turn in the river, there while all this happened and Russia discarded the uniform by which the West recognized it, there on that sandy display case Vladimir Zhukov saw the world as it might one day be.
Promotion at the Foreign Ministry came slowly. It was as if word had gone around that in his student days, Zhukov had mildly questioned policy. (He’d shared a room in the wooden rooming house with an Armenian student whose hero was William Saroyan, an American-Armenian; the Armenian had incited argument on arctic evenings until their heated breath sent the frost patterns sliding on the inside of the windows. At lectures they had to accept ‘dialectical materialism’ or be ostracized, but not in their timbered room designed for conspiracy. Except that they hatched no plots, just growled and scoffed, always solving the equations in favour of Russia.) But questioning was akin to accusing in the ears of snoopers. Perhaps, also, they’d found snatches of his amateurish poetry while he was at classes, the poetry that in spite of his father he’d gone on writing. You could never tell how long spite could be stored; certainly it never decomposed.
Then in February, 1956, God fell. And, although dead, was duly crucified. At the 20th Party Congress Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin as a tyrant. A Hitler. The young could hardly absorb it. Their elders withdrew in bewilderment to examine the long knives in the corpse.
Vladimir and Valentina heard the news at a dacha in the forest forty miles from Moscow that a friend had lent them for the weekend. A neighbour, minding seven-year-old Natasha for the afternoon, told them about the denunciation, read at a local Party meeting, as they buckled on their cross-country skis.
‘Well?’ Vladimir asked as they pushed themselves along a trail gleaming through the ice-sheathed silver-birches.
‘It’s difficult to believe.’ She looked at home in the forest, he thought, face framed by a fur bonnet frosted by her breath.
‘But it’s true. I know that. So do you. All those rumours we heard and discarded because they were heresy—they were true, too.’
He cursed the dead dictator who’d intruded into their afternoon because all week he’d anticipated the interlude in the cocoon of winter, alone in the silence. A break in routine; an escape from Party matters which occupied more and more of Valentina’s time until sometimes, in nocturnal moments of fear, he wondered if they weren’t becoming more important to her than her family.
‘I suppose so,’ she said.
‘Anyway let’s forget about him for now.’
‘Forget? How can we do that? Stalin moulded our lives.’
‘Just for this afternoon.’
The silence beckoned them, the stillness disturbed only by the occasional clatter of glacial twigs.
The trail tilted and they accelerated a little.
Vladimir said, ‘It reminds me of the days when we used to ski down the Lenin Hills.’
She remembered too. ‘They were good times.’ Her voice was tender.
The hill straightened out and they slowed down, sliding along beside each other.
‘It hasn’t really changed so much has it?’ he said.
‘No, Vladimir. Except that we have more responsibilities. Your job, Natasha …’
‘And the Party.’ Now it was he who was disrupting the idyll.
‘That’s as it should be. We have each other. And we both have the Party.’
They skied down another gentle slope, stopping beside a frozen river, the ice deep below the snow. A mile away, on the curve of the river beside snow-bonneted cottages, they could see men fishing in round wounds in the ice.
Vladimir pulled back the hood of his blue wind-cheater and breathed deeply, feeling the air prickle in his nostrils. But his mind couldn’t stop worrying. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘if one day you had to make the decision, who would come first—family or Party?’
She shook her head impatiently. ‘That’s a stupid question. Sometimes you don’t seem to have grown up at all since the day we met.’
‘That’s good. It means you still love me.’
‘You mean you doubted that?’
‘Not really. But the Party
means so much to you.’
‘Only because it’s my work—like the foreign service is yours.’
‘I don’t think that’s quite true, Valentina.’
She thought about it. ‘No, perhaps not. It does mean more to me than it does to you. I’ve always known that, I suppose. Maybe it’s because I’m a little younger than you. While you were fighting for Socialism during the war I was just a girl. When you left the Army, a little disillusioned perhaps, I was just beginning the work of rebuilding. Then it was the women who pulled Russia through. The women backed by the Party. Young women like me. You know how it was, Vladimir, with so many men dead and wounded …’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know how it was.’
‘The Fascists were beaten leaving the ruins behind. It was then that I knew that everything I’d learned in the Komsomol was true. Socialism was the only answer. Yes,’ she told herself, ‘it means everything to me.’
‘Everything?’ A mouth of fear opened inside him, and the white afternoon that had welcomed them was suddenly hostile. A flurry of snow blew up the river hiding the crouching fishermen.
She looked at him in alarm. ‘You mean everything to me, Vladimir. You and Natasha.’
‘In what order?’
‘No order,’ she said. ‘Why are you making us fight like this? We’ve been happy, haven’t we? Wonderfully happy …. Why do you suddenly ask me to choose between you and what we both believe in. A woman wouldn’t ask a man in time of war to choose between her and his country.’
‘We’re not at war.’
‘Not with guns, maybe. But the West is always at war with us.’ The sweat was growing cold on them and the breeze following the course of the river was strengthening. Sunlight briefly found the matchstick forests across the ice and touched the old wooden cottages before being extinguished for the day. Time to move on.
But the happiness was frozen.
Vladimir said, ‘You didn’t answer my question.’
‘What question?’
‘The stupid one. Which comes first—family or Party?’
‘I don’t have to answer such questions. Why, Vladimir? Why are you behaving like this?’
‘Because a ghost has appeared from its grave. Because I remembered what we all believed in. Blindly, without questioning. If we were wrong then can’t we be wrong now?’
‘We weren’t wrong,’ she said. ‘We were wrong about one man, not about Socialism.’
‘And you won’t answer my question?’
‘To hell with your question,’ shouted his Sibiryak, tears glistening in her eyes. ‘To hell with you.’ She turned and began to ski back into the still forest.
A few flakes of snow fluttered from the sky.
‘Long live the Party,’ Vladimir yelled after her. He gave her a couple of moments, then followed. But she didn’t take the trail. He could see her ahead, a flickering shadow among the trees crowding in on her. ‘Valentina,’ he shouted. ‘Get back on the trail.’
The shadow vanished.
The mouth of fear yawned. I should never have asked such questions. The trust and love of their marriage severed: a precipice, broken skis, blood dark on snow. He felt the cruelty of the thickening dusk as he propelled himself through the thin trees, following her trail over the crust of the snow.
In front of him the forest angled away steeply, a few young pines like arrows among the birch. Faster, faster, skis whispering on the snow. Falling snow blurred his vision.
Steeper went the hillside. Then there she was lying at the foot of a tree, one ski snapped, her outline blurred in the fading light.
‘I’m all right, Vladimir,’ she said.
‘Are you sure my love?’
‘I’ve twisted my ankle. That’s all.’
He unbuckled her skis. ‘Are you sure?’
‘There’s nothing serious, anyway.’
He felt her injured ankle. No bones broken as far as he could tell. ‘Does it hurt very much?’
‘Not too much. Don’t worry, Vladimir, I’m all right.’ Blobs of snow. Aching cold. He bent and picked her up. ‘Valentina, I’m sorry.’
She said, ‘It seemed to me you were questioning our marriage. Our love. I couldn’t bear that.’
‘There’s never been another love like it,’ he said. He picked her up and took her back to the trail. Then helped her to limp back in the snow-scurrying darkness to the dacha. And that night, with the pain eased, they made love that crystallized all they had known together. All that might lie ahead.
Nine months later a novel called The Difficult March was published in Novy Mir. In it a character asked, ‘What shall I believe in now?’
But still the fall of one man could not destroy a faith. The virgin lands burgeoned, the factories thundered, the new leader made contact with the West—if a little tipsily on occasions—the good word continued to be disseminated, the dissemination occasionally accompanied by tanks.
Vladimir Zhukov rose laboriously in the ranks of the Foreign Ministry. A trustworthy if less than fanatical Party member. An incomparable English-speaker borrowed from time to time by the Kremlin leaders when they parleyed with the West at times when Churchill’s ‘balance of terror’ had to be observed in an atomic age. Valentina was promoted within the Party to the point where friends speculated that, if Vladimir were given a foreign posting, it would be his wife they were dispatching as an emissary.
Natasha became a Young Pioneer.
A world war was averted.
Khrushchev fell and the tempo of change slackened.
Despite the traumatic changes Vladimir Zhukov rarely opened the trapdoor to his attic of doubt and sensibility. Until he went to Washington.
PART TWO
8
NATASHA Vladimirovna Zhukova was picked up with a mixture of professional expertise and blatant sexual manoeuvre.
The professionalism was displayed by the man—the Russian with a doggy face who looked not unlike Brezhnev, who was following her.
He was defying the red Don’t-Walk traffic lights at an intersection down Connecticut Avenue from Dupont Circle, hurrying in front of three hooting cabs, when two cops wearing guns and sideburns, stopped him.
They told him that he was jay-walking and thereby breaking the laws and regulations of the District of Columbia and one of them began to write a warning ticket. Nicolai Grigorenko shouted in his inadequate English that he was a Russian diplomat and had immunity. But the cops didn’t seem to understand him at all and when he tried to reach for his identification papers they restrained him as if he were going for a gun.
Grigorenko, seeing Natasha Zhukova fading in the shopping crowds, kicked at a police shin. The cop helped Grigorenko’s foot on its way and Grigorenko fell, supported by big hands on his biceps. ‘You bastards,’ he shouted.
One of the cops said, ‘Knock it off fella.’
It was only when Natasha Zhukova was well clear that the misunderstanding was sorted out. Quite easily, with Grigorenko’s hand free to reach his wallet.
Apologies and oaths. ‘You will be sacked for this,’ Grigorenko told them.
‘Maybe,’ said one of the cops combing a sideburn with his fingernails. ‘Maybe not.’
‘Everybody makes mistakes,’ said his colleague.
‘Have a good day,’ said the first cop, as Grigorenko plunged through the crowds like an ageing bloodhound after a bitch on heat.
The other patrolman tore up the ticket with the words Courtesy Notice printed in red letters on the bottom.
The manoeuvre, about as subtle as a girl dropping a handkerchief, was enacted in the Rand McNally book store on the Connecticut and Eye Street corner of Farragut Square. Piles of newly-minted hardbacks, batteries of paperbacks and two dozen or so members of the public jay-reading among the covers.
Natasha Zhukova, dazed, awed and frightened, wandered in and put out a hand to pick up a book called Russians as People. She was overcome by the luxury of possession around her, by the clothes and cars, by the birthright
of elegance of some and the assumed scruffiness of others. Most of all by the actuality of what she’d read about: by her very presence here.
Another hand reached the book in synchronized movement. The young man removed his hand and said, ‘Pazholsta.’ The word fell and lingered, a friendly autumn leaf on a winter day.
She picked up the book.
The young man continued in modest Russian. ‘At least the author acknowledges that Russians are people.’
She went on thumbing the pages, reading nothing, fear pulsing.
‘You’re Russian?’
She nodded.
‘I thought so. Your clothes and your features.’
She spoke in University English. ‘I didn’t know it was so obvious.’
‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’ He returned gratefully to English. ‘I think your clothes are just great. Ours are so damned affected.’
‘I don’t think so—they are very beautiful.’
Her shyness infuriated her. Where was the liberated Natasha Zhukova whose rebel lover was currently serving two years in prison?
‘And our women are so brash,’ he added.
‘Brash? What is brash?’
‘Like that,’ he said, pointing at a girl with white-blonde hair and pink duelling fingernails leafing through a cookery book.
‘She is very attractive.’ With her braided hair and brown furcollared coat Natasha felt like a schoolgirl wearing her mother’s clothes. She put down the book, balling her hands into embarrassed fists. ‘It has been very nice meeting you. Now I must go.’
But when she reached the sunlit square he was still with her. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if you’d like to join me for a cup of coffee.’
She shook her head emphatically. ‘I cannot do that. I am sorry.’
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