The Russian Affair Part 1

The Russian affair.

Michael Wallner.

ONE.

Anna laughed and pivoted to the left, turning her back to the harsh wind. The man in front of her folded his handkerchief, laid it across his empty shoes, and stepped to the brink. Instead of using water to wet himself down, he scooped up some snow and rubbed his chest with it. Then, accompanied by the bystanders' expressions of compa.s.sion and encouragement, he arched his back, sprang forward, and disappeared into the black water. Small chunks of ice bobbed against one another. Anna watched as the man swam underwater to the far end of his improvised swimming pool and surfaced there. His beard, white and unkempt a moment ago, was now gray and plastered to his cheeks.

"He ought to get a life guard's badge," the woman next to Anna cried out, pulling the fur trim of her cap down over her ears. "That way he could charge admission."

"The Moskva River belongs to everybody," a man wearing eyegla.s.ses replied. The snowy wind bent his umbrella to one side. Anna dodged the pointy wire ribs and watched the bearded swimmer as he propelled himself through the water with increasingly powerful strokes. She pushed her way out of the group of spectators and hurried along the riverbank. Under the Krasnopresnenskaya Quay, she climbed up the icy steps and soon reached the bus stop. On the ride home, people on the bus discussed the weather. It was getting warmer, they said; tomorrow the temperature was supposed to rise above twenty below zero. That meant that the cold holidays would be ending soon, and the schools would open again. The thought elicited a satisfied nod from Anna. When Petya didn't have to go to school, everything was thrown into disorder.

With a jerk, the bus moved out of the middle lane. Anna noticed the policeman who was waving the heavy vehicle to one side; at the end of the avenue, a large, dark automobile appeared and rapidly came closer. The bus rolled into the right lane. The Chaika was already right behind it. When the big car pulled alongside, Anna could see a lady in the backseat, her hair waved, a magazine on her lap, and then the Chaika shot past. Although the policeman, too, must have noticed that the car carried only a female pa.s.senger, he saluted it as it sped away.

Anna got off the bus at the Filyovsky Park stop. The queue of people waiting on the corner indicated that the canned peaches must have finally arrived. Should she get in line? It would be her fourth queue of the day. Anna banished all thoughts of peach compote, turned into her street, and entered Residential Building Number Seven. On the fourth floor, she unlocked the door to her apartment.

"Did you get toilet paper?" her father asked.

"No, Comrade, I have procured no toilet paper," Anna answered, in her best Communist-youth-organization voice.

"If you think we can keep on using newspaper, you're wrong," Viktor Ipalyevich said, stretching out both arms and pointing from one end of the apartment to the other. "The paper in the windows was letting in drafts, so I had to replace it."

"In the living room, too?" Anna asked, putting her purse on the table.

"In the living room, in the kitchen, wherever it was." Since his daughter was paying his gesticulations no heed, he let his arms drop, took the dark brown chessboard from its shelf, and began setting up the pieces. His peaked cap, which he wore even inside the apartment, made him look younger; only his goatee betrayed the fact that the poet Viktor Ipalyevich Tsazukhin had gone gray.

Anna raised her nose. "Have you been distilling again?" Her eyes narrowed, and the blue irises grew dark.

"That's no reason to glare at your own father as though he's some sort of reprobate."

He tried to bar her way to the kitchen, but Anna was faster. On the stove, she found the telltale system of metal pipes: a many-dented teapot served as a condenser; above, in another pot, the first distillation was cooling. In the next stage of the process, the once-distilled liquor would be sent through the labyrinth again.

"Even when you close the window, the neighbors can still smell it," Anna said, looking at the elbow joint where the last pipe emptied into a converted paint can.

"And will the neighbors run to the police on account of a little gla.s.s of Four-Star Tsazukhin and denounce Viktor Ipalyevich as an unproductive Soviet citizen? Or will they hope to be invited into the courtyard on the next sunny day and served by Viktor Ipalyevich in person?"

Refusing to engage in a rhetorical battle with her father, Anna turned off the gas flame that kept the mechanism in operation. He said, "That's the way to turn Four-Star Tsazukhin into rotgut," and went into the living room, shaking his head. The velvet curtain that hid the sleeping alcove moved and a small hand appeared, followed by a child's face-the image of Anna when she was a young girl. The child's hair covered his ears and was cut straight across his forehead, just above his eyebrows. Long lashes screened his light eyes; he had a strong nose, and his mouth was a little too big.

"Are you finished now, Grandfather?" the boy asked.

Anna stepped into the living room. While the poet was announcing that the game could begin, he answered her anxious look with a nod. She formed the word temperature with her lips; her father pointed a finger upward and answered inaudibly, "Ninety-nine point seven."

"You can play only until dinner," Anna told her son by way of greeting.

Petya clambered out of the bed where they both slept and embraced his mother. In his dark blue pajamas, he resembled a miniature sailor. He jumped up onto the chair, squatted down, and moved a white p.a.w.n two squares forward. Anna carried her shopping bag into the kitchen, took out two cans, placed one between the windows, and opened the other. In order to prepare the soup, she had to move Viktor Ipalyevich's private distillery to one side.

"I have to go out later," she called into the living room. "Will you put Petya to bed?"

"You're going to the combine again?" Anna's father asked absently. "I wish I knew why you have to attend every meeting."

"To get a Category One." She dumped the red beets into the pot.

"And what's the difference between a Category One painter and the rest of them?"

Anna looked at her hands, at her gray, chapped skin, at the cracks around her wrists. "A Category One painter doesn't have to put her hands in lime anymore."

The soup began to boil. She stirred it, remembering that the meeting of the building combine wasn't scheduled to take place until the following week. The thought of her real purpose made her feel languid. She could heard her boy wheezing in the next room; the game excited him.

Shortly before seven o'clock, Anna left the apartment. The collar of her overcoat was turned up, and her fur hat was pulled down on her forehead. No one could have maintained that the cold wasn't the reason for these precautions. On the ground floor, old Avdotya, a fellow resident, was fiddling with the mailbox. "Anna Tsazukhina, I'm at my wits' end!" she cried out. Avdotya was nearly deaf. Since everyone spoke loudly to her, she took that for normal procedure and bawled at everyone in her turn.

"Have you misplaced your key again, Avdotya?"

"Indeed not! There it is!" The old woman looked up imploringly.

Anna considered the little metal drawers. Rust had made some of their numbers unrecognizable. "Isn't yours seven-oh-six?"

"Seven hundred and six, exactly!" Avdotya pointed to her key ring, which was hanging awry from one of the little doors.

"But you're trying to get into seven-eight-six." Anna stuck the key into the right hole and turned the lock. The mail drawer was empty.

"I'm waiting for a letter from Metsentsev!" Avdotya explained, without looking into the mailbox. "He's going to write me about ..."

But Anna had stepped out of the building, and the closing door swallowed Avdotya's last words. Anna left her street behind, turned into Mozhaisk Chaussee, and crossed to the side where the streetlights were no longer functioning. In such cold weather, fewer people than usual were out and about, but Anna kept her eyes open for someone standing still where there was nothing to see, someone who slowed his pace in the icy wind. Only when she was certain that everything on the avenue looked normal did she slip into an alleyway on her left, a narrow pa.s.sage that was closed to traffic. And yet Anna knew that at the end of the alley, for the past several minutes, a black automobile had been waiting with its engine running; the driver didn't want to get cold while he waited. She hadn't taken more than a few steps on the hard-trodden snow before the car's headlights flared and a rear door opened.

"Good evening, Anton," she said, settling into the backseat.

The driver tilted his rearview mirror so that he could see her. "You're early. That's good." His full, deep voice always caused Anna to wonder if he'd once been a singer.

"Why is that good?" She took off her cap.

Anton didn't answer as he made a skillful turn in a small s.p.a.ce and drove out onto the avenue. He paid no heed to the onrus.h.i.+ng traffic; as he expected, all vehicles braked when their drivers realized that a ZIL government car was jumping into the inside lane. Anton accelerated, the limousine hurtled forward, and Anna was thrust back in her seat. She was so warm that perspiration ran down her spine. A bright light made her look up; Anton was overtaking the bus for Nagatino. Pa.s.sengers sat in pale light. Some of them stared after the long automobile; ZIL limousines had "Special Right-of-Way." Except for weddings, driving a black automobile was forbidden. Anna smiled: If you got married, for a few hours you enjoyed the privileges of a prominent road user. She watched the bus getting smaller, certain that the weary shapes it carried figured her for a woman who was being driven, at state expense, to visit her hairdresser or pick up packages in Granovsky Street.

Anna put a hand over her eyes. Once upon a time, she would have set out on this drive full of happy expectation; she would have gazed at her reflection in the pa.s.senger's window and fixed her lipstick and adjusted her hair. Two years ago, when she was twenty-five, and after three years of marriage, her husband Leonid had finally been transferred to Moscow. To avoid having to live in a shared flat on the outskirts of the city, they had accepted Viktor Ipalyevich's offer and, together with Petya, moved in with him. Anna had obtained a good position with the building combine, earning more than her husband, who drew a lieutenant's pay; it was she who took on the chief financial burden of her four-person household.

Then, in April of that same year, her building combine had been ordered to paint the facades of several buildings along Kalinin Prospekt for the May Day celebrations. Yarov, her foreman, had opined that a new coat of paint made no sense if the rust on all metal surfaces were not removed first. There wasn't enough time for that, he was informed, and he should use colors that guaranteed anti-rust protection. Anna had kept Yarov from gainsaying this instruction, and work had begun. The plaster was loose and dry rot had invaded many walls; nevertheless, the building combine's skilled workers covered the facades in friendly shades of yellow and light gray. In order to meet the deadline, they had worked in four s.h.i.+fts. On the afternoon of April 30, a committee that included the government's Deputy Minister for Research Planning inspected the results. Anna didn't know who the powerful man with the greasy hair was, but the fine fabric of his overcoat gave him away as a member of the nomenklatura. While scaffolding was being dismantled and hauled away on all sides, Anna gave the arch she was working on a final stroke of her brush. Alexey Maximovich Bulyagkov stepped under her ladder and praised her flawless brushwork as the other members of the committee formed a group behind him. The Deputy Minister wanted to know how long it took for a person to learn to make such a perfectly straight stroke.

"At twelve, I joined the Pioneer Girls," Anna answered properly. "When I was sixteen, the combine offered me a trainee position. I received training to become a skilled worker, and two years ago, I pa.s.sed my qualifying examination." She straightened her headscarf; her work clothes were tight on her, because under them she was wearing her heavy sweater and a pair of pajama pants. While she was trying to remember some of her building combine's outstanding accomplishments, Bulyagkov asked her name.

Anna came down the ladder. "My name is Anna Tsazukhina, and I'm twenty-seven years old."

"Are you related to Tsazukhin, the poet?"

Anna could not have said why she'd introduced herself by her maiden name. "He's my father."

Two members of the committee put their heads together.

"I'm an admirer of his work," Alexey Maximovich said, setting his foot on the ladder's lowest rung. "Of some of his work." He held out his hand; although her own was covered with flecks of paint, Anna laid her brush aside and clasped hands with the Deputy Minister.

"All the best, Anna Tsazukhina," he said, gazing at her with merry eyes. Then he turned, and he and his colleagues moved on from the archway.

Six weeks later, Anna had accompanied her father to a poetry reading; after some brief resistance, Leonid had agreed to go along as well. They had taken the subway to the Pushkinskaya station and climbed up into the light of a bright June evening. Viktor Ipalyevich bit his lower lip and nervously chewed his beard, which he'd trimmed the previous day.

Viktor Tsazukhin was a veteran of Soviet literature; his early poems had evoked the Red Army's battle for Berlin. He was known as a forerunner of the artistic generation produced by the Revolution, and his a.n.a.lytic, future-oriented style had served as a model for many later poets. In recent years, his publications had become rarer and their print runs smaller. The state publis.h.i.+ng house no longer printed his volumes, which now appeared through the auspices of a small house dedicated to "special Soviet literature." Since Viktor Ipalyevich lived a secluded life with his family, he had no idea whether or not he still had a following as a poet and, if he did, no idea how his descriptions of the present found their way into his readers' hands.

When Viktor, Anna, and Leonid reached the area in front of the Conservatory building, the poet was overwhelmed. Countless young people were causing such a tumult that ushers and police were having great difficulty in keeping the entrance open to ticket holders only. Groups of female students, hoping they might still be able to secure tickets, gathered around latecomers. Automobiles were thickly parked up and down Gorky Street; drivers just arriving were waved on.

Someone recognized Tsazukhin, and within seconds, the crowd began to close in on him and Anna and Leonid in such numbers that the three were unable to take another step forward. People greeted the poet; those standing nearby asked him to take them with him into the auditorium. Helpless with happiness, Viktor groped for his daughter's hand, while Leonid directed his efforts toward opening a pa.s.sage for them. But they needed help from some of the policemen, who steered them away from the colonnaded doorway to a smaller entrance nearby, where a door opened for a moment to admit them. The poet, his two companions, and a nimble student-a girl in a plastic raincoat-slipped inside; the door closed at once, separating them from the throng of people trying to press in behind them. Doctor Glem, the chairman of the artistic board, was waiting for Viktor Ipalyevich and his family on the stairs. The chairman exchanged hasty greetings with the poet and his family, in which, without many words, the student was included. While an a.s.sistant showed Tsazukhin's companions to the box a.s.signed to them, Doctor Glem escorted Viktor Ipalyevich backstage.

Leonid helped Anna out of her jacket. Enjoying her elevated vantage point, she let her eyes wander over the auditorium. Usually, the large hall was used for concerts, with room for seven or perhaps eight hundred people; tonight, there were surely a thousand, and more were still shoving their way inside. In the parquet section, she recognized Plissetskaya, the ballerina from the Bolshoi Ballet, and not far from her, the comedian Rodion; Brezhnev's personal interpreter took a seat in the middle. Older gentlemen were standing in the aisles and ascertaining who had come besides themselves; above all, however, Anna saw sons and daughters. The moment touched her, and when she sat down next to her husband, her face was burning. There below her sat Moscow, not some small collection of admirers still loyal to a forgotten poet, but the citizenry, come to hear her father. When the lights dimmed and the applause began, Anna realized that her father had made his entrance onto the stage. Doctor Glem offered Viktor Ipalyevich the seat reserved for the guest of honor and stepped to the lectern. The audience, however, would not allow the chairman of the artistic board to speak; the clapping grew so unanimous that Tsazukhin had to get to his feet again and make another bow. Even now, his peaked cap remained on his head. Minutes pa.s.sed before Doctor Glem could deliver his speech of greeting. It consisted of a patriotic profession of faith in the new Soviet lyric poetry, properly declared and congenially applauded. Glem thanked the audience, introduced Viktor Ipalyevich, and left the stage. Anna's father slowly walked forward. The folder he placed on the lectern remained closed. He pushed back his cap, which left a red stripe across his forehead. Wide-eyed, he peered into the darkness of the parquet and at the packed rows of seats beyond it.

"The weatherc.o.c.k rotates. That's his line of work ..." he began. The microphone sent his words all the way to the last row.

Anna leaned on the bal.u.s.trade. Viktor Ipalyevich wasn't like the young Moscow literati who looked upon the cat-and-mouse game with the Soviet state censors as good sport and were content to publish clandestinely. He wasn't one of those writers whose works appeared as closely printed typescripts and got pa.s.sed from hand to hand and whom neither jail sentences nor publication bans could intimidate. Viktor Ipalyevich Tsazukhin figured in official Soviet literature; the state had seen itself represented and embellished by his work. Anna knew the program for the reading. In accordance with the wishes of the literary committee, her father was to begin with the conformist verses of Sling and continue with some longer pa.s.sages from The Red Light. Now, however, he was declaiming a poem, "The Weatherc.o.c.k," that he'd only recently written. No one had ever heard these verses.

Tsazukhin's voice rose as he spoke the last lines: I do not hold

with the c.o.c.k on the roof,

yet I know which way the wind blows.

The silence in the auditorium was palpable. He marked a pause, and then, when he opened the folder to begin the scheduled reading, spontaneous applause interrupted him. This time, he didn't accept it, waving the plaudits away and reading the first lines while some in the audience were still clapping. The people understood: first a bit of provocation, followed by adherence to conventions. The official program was under way.

During the intermission, Anna and Leonid strolled around the upper foyer. Leonid wanted to get them something to drink, so he joined the line for the bar. Anna took a few steps with him and then stood still, listening to what the people around her were saying. "Viktor Ipalyevich challenges our feelings," she heard someone say. "He elicits our humor." A man quoted a pa.s.sage in which the poet brought his irony to bear on the tactic employed by people who, while waiting in a line, jot down their place number on their wrist so as to keep pushy interlopers from getting ahead of them. Amused, Anna turned her head and saw a large, powerful man with a blue tie bearing down upon her.

"Are you enjoying the evening?" he asked.

She needed a few seconds to recognize him as the man who had stood under her ladder a few weeks earlier.

"Your father is an exceptional poet," said Alexey Maximovich Bulyagkov.

"Do you like his poems?"

"I don't think I do." He examined the people around him. "But they touch me. Judge for yourself which is more important."

At that moment, Anna felt as though a ray of light had gone through her. It came from the magnificent chandeliers, from the excited chatter of the large crowd, and, above all, from the marvelous experience she was sharing with her father. At the same time, she wondered how the Deputy Minister had recognized her without her work overalls on and with no scarf on her head; she was wearing the lime green dress she'd bought with a month's salary.

"Are you here alone?"

"My husband's over there." She pointed to the commotion in front of the drinks bar.

"What does your husband do?"

"He's an officer in the armored infantry, stationed in north Moscow."

Bulyagkov bowed and walked over to a lady in a floor-length gown, who greeted him volubly.

Two weeks later, Anna received a small parcel in the mail, a copy of a volume called My Beloved Does the Wash, which was a collection of all her father's love poems. When she deciphered the sender's name, she hurried to the apartment and withdrew into the sleeping alcove. Leonid was sitting at the table with Petya, cutting his bread into bite-sized pieces; two arm's lengths away, Anna read the Deputy Minister's letter. He requested that her father write a personal dedication and sign the book, and he suggested that Anna look at the poem on page 106. Strangely excited, she turned to the page and read these verses: Come see us tomorrow, uplift and gladden us!

Today's rain refreshed us, and the forecast is glorious.

And should we want stormy weather,

We'll make some together!

There was a handwritten note on the margin of the page: "Would you return this volume to me personally tomorrow evening at seven o'clock?"

Anna and Leonid had been married for three years; Petya had come into the world a few weeks after the wedding. Neither of them had ever made the other feel that their little boy was the only reason they were still together. Leonid behaved himself, drank little, and treated her father with respect. Anna didn't dream about anything out of reach; she wanted a good education for her son, her own apartment, and perhaps, eventually, a car. And she had never, at least until that day, knowingly done anything wrong. She was forced to think about some of her colleagues, who reported on casual flings that apparently enlivened their marriages. Such accounts were accompanied by declarations that an affair didn't mean that much these days; there was a real thirst for life in the city of Moscow. Anna resolved to take the Deputy Minister's note as a joke and his offer not very seriously. However, when she climbed out of the alcove, she avoided Leonid's eyes and hid the book in her bag.

The following day, she worked the early s.h.i.+ft and was home by three. At dinner with her family, she pushed the volume of poetry across the table to Viktor Ipalyevich and said, "A girlfriend from the site asked me to get your autograph."

Still chewing, her father took his fountain pen out of his breast pocket. "For whom shall I sign it?"

"Just your name's good enough. It's going to be a gift." Anna held the book open to the first page to avoid the possibility that he'd flip through it to the telltale note.

"Even on worksites, people are reading my poems," he said. Smiling, he wrote, "With Best Wishes, Viktor Ipalyevich Tsazukhin." Anna blew on the ink, closed the volume, and laid it on the bookshelf.