‘I should drink it if I were you,’ Richter said. ‘Then we’ll get the hell out of here.’
Zhukov looked into the one eye regarding him from behind the deformed sunglasses. He thought: I want to help you. That’s all I want to do. Who is the enemy?
‘You goin’ to drink?’
Zhukov shook his head again, shocked by his insane perversity.
‘Fuck you.’ The Negro swung the bottle. Zhukov ducked and the bottle smashed against the wall, California champagne foaming down the paint-flaked bricks.
But the explosion of the bottle was drowned by a roar of flames from the blazing store.
The Negro fell forward, hitting his head on the wall, sliding to the ground where he stayed, his one visible eye closed.
‘Okay,’ Richter said. ‘Enough is enough. We were crazy coming here.’
They sought escape among the firemen. But the drunks had joined the fire-fighters and were throwing bottles into the flames.
Somewhere above bricks grated.
A loudspeaker opened up, nasal voice calm. ‘Please clear the street. Please clear the street. The wall of this store is in danger of collapsing. Please clear the street immediately. I appeal to you for your own sakes—clear this street.’
Again the crepitus of bricks.
The cops moved in to clear the happy looters away from the sacked liquor store. They dragged the living empties away, but the livelier ones didn’t want help.
They fought with wild swings, blurred black punches, kicks as slow as they were vicious. The Civil Disturbance Unit, trained for riot duty, moved in. Truncheon against skull; slurry snarls.
Then from somewhere among the legs a small boy emerged. Eyes wild in the firelight, hands pushing aside the legs; a cut on his fuzz of hair.
The wall bulged.
The firemen retreated. The cops retreated and the drunks got the message through their retreat. The child ran on towards the building.
Zhukov went after him. Cops, firemen, rioters were shouting at him. But you didn’t stop, did you?
He could see the wall leaning outwards. A couple of bricks fell slowly like drops of molten metal.
He grabbed the boy and ran on hearing the groan and the sigh and the crumbling roar behind him. A brick clipped his shoulder—but they were clear.
The firemen moved back. One patted Zhukov on the shoulder. Zhukov leaned down to the boy and asked, ‘Where are you trying to get to?’
The boy started to cry, skinny fists knuckling his eyes in his skinny face.
‘Where do you want to go to?’
A woman with a frightened face grabbed the boy’s arm. ‘What you doin’ with my kid, white man?’
‘I wasn’t doing anything.’
She pulled the boy away. ‘This ain’t your night, white man. Get out of here. Get your hands off our kids. This is where the poor blacks live. Get back to your side of the town.’
Two cops, blank-faced robots in their visors, came up. ‘Better do as she says. This is no place for a white man. You’re only making our job tougher than it is.’
Zhukov nodded. ‘All right.’
Richter joined him. ‘As they say—there ain’t no justice.’
‘I don’t care,’ Zhukov said. And he thought: I have participated.
They walked briskly down 14th towards the stately homes and the dirty book shops. Soon they were back in the white ghetto.
12
THE white china bowl of stew stood in the kitchen with a tidemark a quarter of an inch above the solidifying surface where Valentina Zhukova and Natasha had sampled it without appetite. A beautiful stew, enough for a dozen, with its cubes of cheap steak, stock, mushrooms, potatoes, carrots, and an archipelago of dumplings. Two bottles of Scotch, and some Rhine wine bought extravagantly and—it seemed to Valentina—disloyally for guests developing Westernized tastes.
But the Russian guests plus two obedient Hungarians (a Czech and his wife had declined the invitation) hadn’t come because of the disorders. Natasha had taken to her room where Valentina had recently found novels by Updike, Bellow and Malamud.
Vladimir was missing and Valentina was worried.
From their very first meeting—their youth was now a separate entity with middle and old age coalescing—she had discerned his weaknesses. Crystals of spurious gold in granite. And she had accepted her responsibility to guide him through the long loving conversation of marriage.
Hadn’t she once confronted herself? The wild Sibiryak with the easy ways that had hurt Vladimir, his teenage romanticism unexpended because of the war. (Childhood was now a photograph of a little girl standing amid snow-heavy firs with a laika hunting dog. A schoolroom and a red Young Pioneer scarf.) Duty had prevailed over wild instincts. Implanted by parents sowing Socialism in the virgin lands; accepted unwittingly in the red-scarved Pioneer play camps; carried proudly aloft in the earnest, energetic endeavour of the post-war Komsomol. And finally the Party.
In their Muscovite apartment in the heart of Washington Valentina Zhukova turned the dial of the old TV seeking distraction. Riots and fires interrupted by commercials for detergents and anti-perspirants. (One commercial for insurance nicely following a blazing ghetto store.) Rival newscasters, each with the same voice. Then, with the last click of the dial, redskins instead of Negroes rioting, with James Stewart shooting them off their horses while he waited for the cavalry. She let him wait there, rifle stuck through a crack in a fence, because she had to admit that she enjoyed a Western.
Where was Vladimir?
Since they’d arrived in America suspicions had begun to assemble about her husband, good man that he was. We will give him the Washington post, they had told her, because together you are strong. They must have had a lot of faith in their union to toss him into the Embassy circuit of gossip and decadence.
Something akin to jealousy stirred. To be put down instantly. Duty, such duty. The familiar glow of self-sacrifice spread its halo.
An ad for a breath freshener appeared forcing James Stewart to wait a little longer for the cavalry. Valentina went into the kitchen to make some tea with lemon. She called out to Natasha asking her if she wanted some; Natasha’s voice, distant from reading or thought, said no she didn’t.
Valentina cut a slice of lemon. It isn’t as if I don’t have temptations. The clothes and cosmetics, Vogue fashions and uplift bras, women driving the second car, the hairdressers, the houses with their drives, attendant gardeners and smug composure. But it was the gadgets that tempted her most. Electric mixers, dishwashers, can-openers, spits, floor-polishers, air-conditioners.
Yes, she would have dearly loved a good gadget as a toy. But gadgetry had to be put aside; symbolic of the Americans’ ingenuity in cultivating idleness. While families in upstate New York (so she had read) existed without indoor toilets, factories manufactured electric carving knives to ease the burden of the rich man tacking his Sunday roast.
Such were the bizarre inequalities which would one day be erased from the world. Not in her lifetime, perhaps. But the satisfaction of helping to found a new civilization of equality was there.
The cavalry arrived in the nick of time. Valentina switched back through riots and newscasters grim at their global desks.
Where was Vladimir?
In their bedroom she picked up an early portrait of him. Brilliantined hair brushed straight back, square strong face with the giveaway mouth. The face of a soldier composing sonnets in the trenches. How she had loved him, his weakness the catalyst, maybe, to attraction. Frozen there in studio lights on the dressing-table, half-smiling into the hesitant future which she had helped to stabilize. Her warrior, her child.
She switched on the radio. Riots. Alarm for his safety began to override fear for his soul. Surely he wasn’t fool enough to go anywhere near the ghetto? She looked at her wristwatch. Eight o’clock. He had been gone eight hours. She switched off the radio and fed her worry.
You couldn’t tell with a man like Vladimir. In everyone there is
a chamber to which no stranger has access. You couldn’t tell what he had kept locked away—even from himself. What key had been turned in this ruthless, window-dressed country.
A woman?
Perhaps she hadn’t been such a good wife to him lately. But she had presumed that he understood her mature attitudes. And hadn’t he agreed that the role of women had changed since pre-Revolutionary days when they were either peasants with a load of brushwood on their back or fragile playthings sighing their way from courtship to pampered motherhood? (In her early reading Valentina had searched for the heroic qualities of Russian women, finding them in the Olga of Oblomov, even in the pure souls of Turgenev whose courage dwarfed the frailty of their men.)
She had been fortunate enough to be born into an emancipated age when she could implement qualities corseted for so long. Article 122 of the Constitution: ‘Women in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are accorded equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, governmental, cultural, political and other public activities.’
So sterner duties had to be set after the first passions of love had been spilled. Even if your own body sometimes urged you on to a surfeit of pleasure. (Such oiled depths, such tender cruelty in the wooden rooming-house that first time; such sweet fulfilment in the dacha in the snow.) No, you had to curb self-indulgence, or so it had seemed as she peered into middle-age.
She returned to the bedroom stroked the dust from his posing face as if she were trying to erase mistakes.
Then she went to the window and saw the glow beneath the smoke beneath the stars. This time love vanquished duty, propelled by the worry of lost sharing. She sat at his hospital bedside, wept at his grave.
Unless he was at some party given by a red-taloned, swan-necked hostess …
From the drawer of the desk—the key of which she kept in a secret place—she drew the report she had begun to write that afternoon. She wrote a few words, but duty was a poor second this evening. She replaced the report, but, because of her worry, forgot to lock the drawer.
In the mirror she regarded her worried face. Hardly heroic. Hair, powder and white blouse a uniform. A few ski-trails of grey in the hair thrust back dutifully into a tortoiseshell comb. Where was your wild Sibiryak now? Breasts spreading, relaxing, waist conceding; a servant’s figure. Daughter of the Revolution, mother of an ideology.
She thought with wretched clarity: You couldn’t blame Vladimir if he were unfaithful.
But I can. Two decades of devotion. To what?
She pushed her hair forward at the ears, feeling it pull through the comb. Moistened her finger and smoothed her unplucked eyebrows. Undid the top button of her regulation blouse.
I love him and it is up to him to understand the nature of my love.
She heard a crack like a pistol shot and the clatter of breaking glass. But there was nothing to see outside the window except the empty lamplit street.
There were his newspapers filled with boasts. (Although they did seem to be remarkably honest about defeats in Vietnam.) There were his schoolboy piles of matches. She picked up one from a bar called the Black Rose. She wondered who her husband had met there in these new sacrificial duties that brought him home the worse for liquor twice, sometimes three times, a week.
The apartment looked very drab, even the sugar-coated red-currant sweets had lost their whiteness. She saw him in a luxurious apartment with crystal cocktail shakers, hi-fi and the elegant hostess just changing into something simpler.
Craftily circumstance, worry and duty nudged a preposterous question: Was it possible that Vladimir Zhukov could ever defect? At this she smiled, touching his photograph again. No, not Vladimir Zhukov, hero of Leningrad, faithful servant of the Party. Warrior, husband, child.
She knocked on the door of her daughter’s room and said, ‘May I come in?’
Natasha lay fully-dressed in her new clothes on the bed. Beside her lay a fashion magazine. It didn’t look as if it had been opened. ‘Where’s father?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. I’m worried.’
‘You don’t usually worry when he’s out late. At least you don’t seem too.’
‘Your father can be a headstrong man. He may have got himself involved in the troubles.’
‘He’ll be all right. He’s a big tough bear. And in any case we’ve all been told to keep away from the riots.’
‘Perhaps your father is not so obedient.’
Natasha looked surprised. ‘He’s always seemed obedient enough to me. That’s why they sent him here, isn’t it?’
‘There may be rebellion underneath. But it is futile to be a rebel when we’re all working for a common cause.’
Natasha sat upright. ‘For God’s sake, mother, this common cause of yours is the result of a rebellion. Your mother and father were rebels. It’s born in some men to be rebels.’
‘But only to rebel against injustice …’
‘And isn’t there any injustice in Russia today?’ Her liberalized hair veiled her face, making a secret of it.
Valentina sat in a protesting wicker chair beside the bed. ‘Don’t talk like that or they’ll send you back to Russia.’
The veil parted. ‘You sound as if that would be a punishment. Are you becoming influenced by this bourgeois society?’
‘I thought you might regard it as a punishment to be parted from your parents again …’
Natasha nibbled at a chocolate bar. ‘It would. I’m sorry.’
‘I’m worried about you, Natasha.’
‘I’ll be all right.’
‘There are many temptations in this country.’
‘I can resist them.’
Valentina wanted to point out that Natasha hadn’t taken long to succumb to a girl’s biggest temptation. But nor had she for that matter. There was nothing wrong with experiments in sex—as long as Natasha kept them in their right perspective. But there was a lot of Vladimir in their daughter, his romanticism perhaps.
Natasha said, ‘Don’t think I’m going to start smoking pot, or anything.’
‘Pot?’
‘Yes, pot. Marijuana. Grass I believe they call it. As for sex … well, you know all about that. A very full report, I gather. They don’t miss anything, do they Mother?’
‘I’ve forgiven you that. It had to happen some time.’
‘No, you didn’t mind that. What you minded was me sleeping with a dissident. A traitor. An enemy of the State. Poor Georgi—just a student behaving like a student and they lock him up for two years. That wouldn’t happen here, Mother.’
Valentina moved as if to put her hand over her daughter’s mouth. ‘Please don’t speak like that, Natasha. Please, I beg of you.’
‘But it wouldn’t, would it?’
Valentina slumped in the chair, worry churning into nausea. ‘Perhaps not. But in this country a student can be shot down in a riot. He can become a drug addict. He can be posted to Vietnam and die there for a worthless cause. Or he can escape and be on the run for the rest of his life. Is any of that so much better?’
Natasha broke off a piece of chocolate. ‘But he can write what he pleases, read what he pleases. Choose his own destiny.’ She chewed thoughtfully. ‘What would you say if I were pregnant by Georgi?’
‘Are you?’
She shook her head, hair moving glossily. ‘I thought I was but I’m not.’
‘Are you sorry?’
‘You mean would I have liked to have his child? No, it’s a nice martyred idea. But I wouldn’t. I’m not that much of a fool.’ She swallowed the last of the chocolate. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’s ironic what’s happening to you. All of a sudden your daughter is exposed to everything you and all your kind have warned me about all my life. What all Soviet kids are warned about. And you think you can see it affecting me already. It doesn’t say much for your system, does it Mother, if you are frightened that I will run to Capitalism and embrace it on sight.’
‘You are still young,’ Valentina said. ‘You are impressio
nable. Your values have not formed yet.’
‘I can’t see anything wrong with being impressionable. I’ve been impressed all my life with one system. Now I’m seeing the other. The values should sort themselves out very neatly in my young impressionable mind! You shouldn’t have brought me over here, Mother.’
‘Your father wanted it,’ Valentina said. She looked at her watch again. Nearly nine. If he didn’t come soon, she would call the Embassy; although she didn’t want to get him into trouble.
‘My father’s wishes wouldn’t influence anyone very much.’
‘Don’t talk like that about your father.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that. I love my father. I love you both—you know that. All I meant was that the opinion of one junior diplomat doesn’t hold much sway with the Kremlin. Are you sure there’s not some other reason for me being here?’
‘Other reason? Not that I know of. What other reason could there be?’
‘I don’t know. I wondered. It seems odd to be rewarded for being suspended from the university.’ She swung her legs over the side of the bed and faced her mother. ‘And why am I followed every time I leave this place?’ She searched her mother’s face for dishonesty.
‘If you are being followed it’s just a precaution. To see that you don’t get into any trouble. To see that you don’t get attacked …’
Natasha smiled.
‘Is that so funny?’
‘Not really. Except that I don’t think that’s the reason. Anyway,’ she flung herself back on the bed triumphantly, ‘I usually manage to give him the slip. I wonder why he doesn’t report it? I suppose he’s afraid to get into trouble. Like that big doggy man Grigorenko.’
Valentina held up her hand. ‘Please.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘If you want to stay here with us do not say these things. You do want to stay here, don’t you, Natasha?’
Natasha’s mood changed suddenly. ‘Yes. Yes, of course I want to stay.’ She stared at and beyond her mother.
Valentina’s maternal reflexes reacted. ‘What is the real attraction here, Natasha?’
‘It’s a beautiful city. I’m educating myself.’
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