The character of Armand also raises some questions. Was she contemptuous of convention as a matter of ideology? Was she indeed defending a woman’s right to free love by her own personal example? Or was she merely a lady of easy virtue, an adventuress of the age-old species that has always clung to great historical figures, as, for example, Madame de Pompadour did?
One day history will pronounce its verdict, and give us the answers.
A penniless French girl arrives in Russia. She insinuates herself as a governess and gains the trust of the filthy rich Russified Armands. She marries the elder brother and immediately sets up an illicit printing press in her father-in-law’s basement. Clandestine meetings, conspiracy — those are her passions. Among her various secret activities, she manages to produce four babies and seduce her brother-in-law. Then she abandons her children, absconds with the brother-in-law, 11 years her junior, and with him has a fifth child. Does that make the fifth at once a cousin and a sibling of the other four? But she doesn’t stop there. She ultimately finishes her second husband off by getting herself arrested and exiled to Siberia, where he follows her, catches cold, and dies. A truly revolutionary life and temperament!
Well, now you understand why we handled Azelea so gingerly. What if she was related to Inessa? From time to time our Azelea dropped hints to that effect, but mostly it was her swagger — the way she flashed her eyes, swayed her hips, prompting us to find similarities and invoke Armand’s biography. To make it even more suspicious, Azelea taught French, as I’ve already said. Why not English or German or Spanish, if the two women really did have nothing to do with each other?
It was a mystery, a hall of mirrors.
No wonder we played it safe, mostly leaving Azelea alone, especially when it came to staff meetings.
On average, there were ten hours of meetings a week: early morning briefings for faculty, weekly political information sessions for the students led by the faculty, separate sessions for faculty led by the head of the department deputy, five-hour work evaluation sessions, and late evening Socialist Competition reviews.
In the six years we were acquainted with her, Azelea showed up for meetings only three times. The first one suggested Cleopatra disembarking from a gilded barge with royal sails unfurled. And it was an important meeting, too. Not only was the head of the department there, but so were the union people and the local Communist Party chair. So in she strolled well after the meeting had begun, announcing her entrance with the usual clicking of her bangles. The chairs in the main recital hall were all of the folding variety. Unabashed, she ambled to the front row, selected a chair, and sat down with enough fussing to let everybody know that the queen had arrived. Worse, she had nothing with her except a pencil and a notebook. Crossing her legs, she opened the notebook and started sketching various speakers with rapid glances back and forth between it. Looked like it wasn’t she who had been summoned to the meeting, but we who had been brought there for her sketching pleasure taking our turns at the lectern so she could see us better, like animals in a zoo, a parade of macaques, say. One of the women furtively hinted with her eyebrows that Azelea try to be more discreet and conceal the notebook. To no avail.
After the meeting she went over to the members of the presiding panel and handed out caricatures of each of them: the First Secretary of the Communist Party, the Union Chairman, the language department chair. And then with a shake of her bangles, she took her skirts in her hands and was quickly out the door.
The second time wasn’t a meeting but a professional development workshop just before the winter break. When everybody was ready to go home, spend time with their kids, and catch up on all the domestic chores left unattended during the semester. Blizzards, temperatures of minus 30, lines for groceries, whining kindergarten kids with runny noses. We women have always counted on the winter break for our survival. But no, the order came down that it was instead to be time to demonstrate our technological superiority to the West by switching over to computers! That was the early eighties, when none of us had ever seen a computer with our own eyes.
We had one typewriter at the foreign language department and a secretary to go with it (if everybody started typing whatever they needed, how would you keep track of it?). The rest of us, 50 female instructors, plus two lost male birds, used chalk and a blackboard. Mimeograph machines, let alone photocopiers, were not something we ever saw either. Old blackboards and textbooks were our only instruments of enlightenment.
So here’s the question. If there were no computers anywhere to be seen, how could you teach a group of mostly middle-aged, worn-out women, instructors of foreign languages, to use the things? The answer is: you put them through a crash course in computer programming. You feed them FORTRAN, COBOL, PROLOG, and the rest of it. So there we all sat after being herded into a large amphitheatre, and diligently copied down the impenetrable hooks, ticks and strokes — the Egyptian hieroglyphs that some young guy was scribbling on the blackboard, after announcing that there would be a test at the end. Our pens squeaked, flies dropped out of the air from boredom, and then suddenly, in the middle of all that tedium, came the familiar sound of clicking bangles. It was our Cleopatra making her appearance 40 minutes into the ordeal.
This time instead of a note pad she had brought a wicker basket full of poisonously red yarn. Swinging her skirts as usual and crossing one knee over the other in her nonchalant way, she began to knit in full view of all. What made it so hard to stomach was that we knew that she was knitting just for the fun of it. There was no way she could be a good housewife. Besides, she was single at the time.
The test day arrived. We were all bent over our text booklets and struggling to make sense of the dreaded questions. Azelea, however, merely glanced over hers. Then she got to her feet and, knitting basket in hand and her heels clicking, descended the amphitheatre steps to the examiner’s table. We lifted our heads to watch.
“You don’t really expect me to answer this rubbish, do you?” she said with narrowed eyes to the young instructor. “You haven’t once shown me a computer. Here, take this. It will protect your brain from further damage.” The examiner stared at her like a young bull at a new gate. She pulled a red watch cap over his head. And then after a lilting “Ciao, mio caro!” she sailed from the room.
But it was after the third meeting she came to that the back of our patience finally broke. I, as a instructors’ supervisor, was responsible for the students’ political information sessions, which meant that I had to keep track of everything that went on which I did, partly with a couple of students who provided me with the details about who had said what and why.
It was around that time that the Americans succeeded in growing the AIDS virus in their secret labs. At the routine information sessions (each monitored by an instructor), the students took turns briefing each other about what had happened in the world over the past week.
One of Azelea’s students was giving a report on a new network of underground labs in Vermont, personally financed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had settled in the state expressly for that purpose. The CIA was planning to use the virus as a new biological weapon against the Soviet people, and Solzhenitsyn had contributed his Nobel Prize money to finance the enterprise.
As the student spoke, Azelea stared out the window with her chin resting on her palm, as if that vile imperialist plot were the least of her concerns. She was obviously off in some dreamland, the student later told me, contemplating peaches and lemons ripening somewhere in the Caucasus. According to a rumour that Azelea herself had spread, she was on the verge of eloping with a violinist lover, a romantic soul leaving his wife. But we knew for certain that that was just a smokescreen. No peaches or lemons and no lovesick violinist were waiting for her anywhere. At her own tiny one-bedroom apartment shared with her two sons, she was nothing more than a single mother. And if she wasn’t hard up, why else would she teach both morning and night classes and also bring
her badly behaved seven-year-old to work with her? No, Azelea didn’t have any rivers flowing with milk or honey waiting for her, and so had no right to belittle her student the way she did. The Vermont Labs had brought her back from dreamland, apparently, for she abruptly turned away from the window and snapped at the student.
“You believe all that?”
“Believe what?” he asked.
“About the CIA, growing the AIDS viruses.”
“It’s in the paper,” the student said, pointing to the front-page editorial. The class was as still as grass on the moon. “What about you? Are you saying you don’t believe it?”
“If they write that fish use umbrellas when it rains, should I believe that too?” That’s actually what she said, according to the student, who would never have made it up.
I sounded the alarm. I informed the head and got things rolling. Azelea was immediately called in for a good thrashing. She didn’t show up, of course. We sent her another summons, this time also calling her around midnight as a warning. At the time we had a back-up plan in place to fire her, although there were some who objected. If she was a real Armand, there was a risk that it could backfire. In any case, it couldn’t be done in absentia; we would need to have her signature.
We waited for her to show up, pretending that we had other important matters on our agenda. But she never came. Neither that day, nor any other. We were upset. She had pushed us to the limit of human patience and we wanted to take her apart piece by piece, so to speak. Our subsequent phone calls produced no result. She seemed to have vanished from the face of this earth. As always happens in such cases, the number of rumours increased, each one more absurd than the last. The violinist has finally divorced his wife and was now making out with Azelea on a sunny beach of the Gurzuf resort in Crimea. Or she had escaped abroad by marrying some filthy-rich foreigner and was now loafing about Biarritz or else somewhere on the Riviera. We expected anything from her, but not what really happened. That’s why when our Head was summoned to the First Department and informed that our Botikova had applied for the immigration visa to Israel, his reaction was stupor and disbelief. What have the relative of Inessa Armand to do with Zionists? the head asked. Azelia’s real name was Armuller, the First Department explained dispassionately. Her father had managed to change his last name during the war by faking his own birth certificate. But Armuller or not, how could you have allowed this to happen, that’s what we need to know. Where were you all looking?
I don’t think the head was able to provide any answers to that.
The truth is that decent people don’t put their colleagues in harm’s way applying for an exit visa. They quit their job first. Azelia wanted to let us have it, and she did. Since technically she wasn’t fired yet, we, administration, had to take all the blame for her betrayal of her country.
As expected, the heads — I mean, our heads — began to roll. The top administration was relieved of their positions, and I was sent to an early retirement.
In the hindsight, we should have got rid of her quietly, and soon.
But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
EXPULSION
1
OF THE 15 problems Alexandra was supposed to solve for math, she had done only three. It was already five o’clock, and at roughly 30 minutes per problem there was almost no chance, with time out for supper, that she would finish the set until well after midnight. She gazed at the muslin curtains billowing in the afternoon breeze and then down at her math text, where a train carrying neither passengers nor cargo was hurtling from Point A to Point B, while another, its identical twin, was hurtling in the opposite direction. What was the point of calculating the distance, velocity, and time if the trains were going to collide anyway?
A moth had got into the vase Alexandra’s father brought back from a conference in Venice. She watched its dull thrusts against the red glass and then tilted the vase just enough for the moth to see a way out before she set it upright again and covered the opening with a piece of blotting paper.
Then she skipped ahead to the next problem, which involved the flow of water from one pool into another. Five pages in the other direction two empty elevators were moving up and down their shafts. Inside the Venetian glass, the moth’s wings glowed red. Under the table, Alexandra’s dog, Kerry, shifted in his sleep. She’d had a fever the day before but was sent to school anyway, since she couldn’t afford to miss math. This morning she had a pre-emptive attack of vomiting and was allowed to stay home. The trick was simple enough. All she had to do was stare for a while at the marks in her exercise book. 2, despite its presumed superiority to the scrawny 1, was really the lowest, a mother-infuriating failing mark. It sent a wave of nausea up her esophagus. 3, just barely passing, played its own nasty part by aping the shape of 5, the highest mark and forever beyond her reach.
Whose fault was it that she wasn’t any good at math? Or at much else, for that matter? If fairies brought talents to newborns, they had arrived at her cradle nearly empty-handed, having already given their bounty to her bother, an athlete, chess-player, and champion of the USSR Math and Physics Olympics.
When Alexandra was born, her brother’s name, with a slight adjustment, was given to her too in hopes of passing on with it the family’s wunderkind gene. True, she was born a girl, but let her try anyway. And so she did, for ten years and more, disappointing everyone but her brother, who had long left such things behind.
Alexandra never got to meet him. She was born eight months after he dove off a cliff above the Istra River near their summer dacha and hit his head on a steel rod sticking out of the river’s sandy bottom. Ever since, Alexandra’s mother had begged her father to trade the ill-fated dacha for another uncontaminated by memory and, ideally, capable of being reached by a different rail line entirely. Her father’s unvarying response was to take his Adam’s apple between his thumb and forefinger as if he’d just swallowed a fish bone and then rapidly chew on his lower lip, something he did whenever faced with a situation he regarded as hopeless.
Alexandra’s father, the esteemed Professor Bolt, was a leading specialist in neurophysiology and developmental psychology, a follower of the famous Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria, and a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences. And for his outstanding achievements and service he had been assigned a choice dacha by the state. Not only was swapping it for another impossible under the circumstances, but its continued availability might even be at risk thanks to the wobbly architecture of the Bolt family history.
Along with other peasants skilled in wine making, his ancestors had been brought to Russia from Switzerland by Catherine the Great. For nearly two centuries they raised grapes on land they had been given near the city of Odessa. But when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, two of Alexandra’s great-uncles had, like many others of Swiss colonist descent, fled the country for Switzerland. Even though all contact with them and their children had as a result been severed, whenever Professor Bolt was required to fill out an official form, his “no” to the question, “Do you (or your spouse) now have (or did you ever have) relatives living abroad?” would make his stomach churn. For a “yes” could have meant the instant collapse of his career and the loss of the family’s apartment and dacha.
For three years after Alexander’s death, the dacha remained unused and neglected, with rank weeds and rampant morning glories gradually obscuring all signs of the Bolts’ former presence. Alexandra’s mother refused to set foot in the place where he son’s life had been taken, and so they spent their summers at a Black Sea resort for distinguished scientists instead. Occasionally, in the winter when the temperature dropped below freezing, her father would visit the dacha by himself to make sure the pipes hadn’t burst or that the roof hadn’t fallen in after a heavy snowfall.
Alexandra’s mother had adored her talented son, and not least because he looked nothing at all like her or his father. They,
like Alexandra, lived inside large, lazy, doughy bodies topped with oblong heads and pale pudgy faces. Alexander, however, had somehow come from different stock, with an olive complexion, dark eyes, and curly jet-black hair. “One of our peasant ancestors must have taken a Cossack bride,” Professor Bolt liked to joke in his lighter moments.
In the sepia photograph on their parents’ dresser, the gaze of Alexander’s dark, sensual eyes fringed with long girlish lashes was bold and direct. A young man with a face like that could have charmed his way around just about any adversary, his sister thought whenever she stopped to examine his familiar features. He must have been fearless, since he wasn’t looking down or off to the side the way the other family members did.
Alexander’s birthday in December was always celebrated. He would have been 22 this year. Katya, the Bolts’ housekeeper, passed back and forth between the dinner table and the oak sideboard, the sound of her steps muffled by the apartment’s soft Bukhara carpets. A starched hand-embroidered cloth covered the table, set with their best silverware and crystal and a large vase of flowers in the centre. Savory pastries stuffed with cabbage, mushrooms, and sautéed onions, Alexander’s favourites, lay on a blue plate at the head of the table before an empty chair. Alexandra’s mother, her pinkie extended, spread red caviar on a slice of rye bread, just the way Alex liked it. Then she resumed her seat and, sitting upright, signalled with downcast eyes the start of a Minute of Silence. Inaudible before, the hissing of tires on the street outside was suddenly heard. A hiccup from the refrigerator helped fill the memorial interval, along with the sound of trash being dumped into the hallway chute by someone upstairs. Steam rose from the chicken broth with dumplings and fresh dill that had just been spooned into separate bowls. Alexandra’s mother then broke the silence. She stood up with a goblet in her hand. “For our boy, our special boy . . . Today he would have . . .” Her voice trailed off and she began to sob.
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