The Russian Affair Part 21

"No one's moving anywhere. You misunderstood. And now it's bedtime." She picked him up and put him down on the floor so that she could shake out the bed. "Time for tooth brus.h.i.+ng," she said over her shoulder.

"Are you going to bed now, too?" The boy turned toward the bathroom.

"No, I'm going to sit in the kitchen with your papa for a while."

Upon discovering that the bathroom door was locked from the inside, Petya called out, "Tooth brus.h.i.+ng!"

The latch was raised, the door opened a little, and the child slipped into the bathroom. When Leonid came out, his path and those of Anna and Viktor Ipalyevich all intersected simultaneously. The three of them stopped short. "Leo and I are going to talk for a little while longer," Anna said to her father.

"Not tonight," her husband contradicted her. "I'm dead tired."

Disappointed, Anna watched that evening's performance of the going-to-bed ballet. Her father prepared the sofa, Leonid undressed, and Petya entered from the bathroom with his pajama pants around his ankles. Viktor Ipalyevich gave his daughter a pointed look. Traditionally, he took off his clothes last, because not even members of his family had the right to see him in his underwear. But instead of tidying up the room and hitting the bunk, Anna went into the kitchen, closed the curtain, and started boiling water for tea. I can't go on like this, she thought. How were she and Leonid supposed to get back together when everything happened before the eyes of that bad-tempered old man, when Petya was constantly dancing around them? All her attempts to be alone with Leonid had fallen through; she hadn't been able to give their reunion the excitement and romance of a new love. When the kettle began to whistle, Anna could successfully ignore the sounds coming from the next room. She had a few days left. She had to find a way to bring Leonid back to her side.

TWENTY-FOUR.

Two things perplexed A. I. Kamarovsky. The first was that the reports concerning Alexey Maximovich Bulyagkov had become so innocuous. Apparent normalcy was, in the Colonel's view, a sign that something extraordinary lay ahead. The commotion over the Lyus.h.i.+n project had died down. The Minister for Research had succeeded in embellis.h.i.+ng the disappointing results in his report by correcting the date of Lyus.h.i.+n's expected breakthrough. After this cosmetic application, it seemed only logical that the Ministry should place additional funds at the disposal of the Inst.i.tute for Theoretical Physics in Dubna. The Minister had signed the authorization, and Lyus.h.i.+n had returned satisfied to his backwater north of Moscow.

After the successful adoption of the Five-Year Plan, the hectic pace of bureaucracy had slowed down, and Bulyagkov once again applied himself to his usual work, shuttling between the Ministry and the Central Committee, receiving the representatives of the various oblasts, and giving them the opportunity to present their a.s.sessment of the technological progress achieved in their region. He commended the improved performance in pesticide development and labored in vain on promoting the field of petrochemistry. The newly opened oil fields along the lower course of the Ob River were ready for exploitation, but the physicists in Murmansk were still unable to deliver the desired capacities by means of bigger power blocks. The refining of crude oil remained the problem child of the Soviet economy, and even though research funding had increased enormously, there was still no breakthrough in sight.

In his private life, Bulyagkov moved between his residence in Arbat, where he and his wife, Medea, customarily stayed out of each other's way, and the scene of his erotic adventures on Drezhnevskaya Street. Although formerly the women booked to appear there had changed every few months, in the past two years Kamarovsky had learned of Bulyagkov's involvement in no amorous affair other than the one he was conducting with Anna Viktorovna Nechayevna, the daughter of the poet Tsazukhin. Anna's reports were unspectacular; however, Kamarovsky appreciated her collaboration. Unlike others, when she had no suspicious moments to describe, she didn't make up any. He often had to deal with reports turned in by ambitious agents who invented anti-Soviet activities for the persons they had under observation in order to further their own careers. During all their time together, Alexey and Anna's affair had remained an unruffled relations.h.i.+p.

Kamarovsky found all the more interesting, therefore, the fact that Bulyagkov's wife, Medea, who was Moscow's cultural secretary and above all suspicion, had now sued for divorce. For years, she and her husband had lived such loosely connected lives that the Colonel couldn't imagine any disruption that would explain such a step. The pet.i.tion had been filed only a short time ago, but given the influence of both parties, it seemed likely that the case would be quickly settled. Yesterday, the practical first step had followed the official one. While Medea remained in the main residence, Bulyagkov had had some of his things brought to the Drezhnevskaya Street apartment, which was currently serving as his home. Kamarovsky found it difficult to believe in the so-called insurmountable antipathy that was supposed to have sprung up between the couple, but what he chiefly wondered about was why this was happening precisely now. As he saw no possibility of directly questioning Medea Bulyagkova, he awaited all the more eagerly a visit from Rosa Khleb. She'd asked the cultural secretary for an interview. There was no reason to doubt the journalistic motives behind the request; after all, Mrs. Bulyagkova was a person of public interest, she coordinated every guest performance that came to Moscow from the Soviet provinces, and her picture was often in the newspapers. Rosa had announced that she was doing a feature for the Moscow Times and called on Medea in her office in the Cultural Center.

Kamarovsky was expecting the Khleb woman to arrive in ten minutes. It seemed improper to spend the intervening time idly, but he'd cleared off his desk so meticulously that he didn't know what to do during the rest of his wait. He sat down at the piano, played the five bars he'd mastered, and came to grief with the sixth. He improvised a little, letting his thoughts drift, remembering how smoothly his female trolley conductor had taken in the pa.s.sengers' fares and returned their tickets and change, in spite of the lurching car. The mute Kremlin Bell, the biggest in the world, crossed his mind, and that sixteenth-century bronze cannon no one had ever dared to fire, for fear that it might explode. Kamarovsky strung together some melancholy chords, reducing the melody to the span of an octave. He wanted to play something more cheerful, something he could jiggle his knee to, but nothing of the sort occurred to him. At night, when everybody in the building was asleep, he'd sometimes sit at the keyboard and start banging away; he found it amusing that his neighbors in the adjacent apartments, who'd lived next door to him for decades and in that time had figured out what he was, didn't dare call the police. You're a fossil, Kamarovsky thought, born out of the fratricidal struggle between the Whites and the Reds; you think in terms of the old, long-outdated hierarchies. Look at the young people, how easily they move among our great accomplishments, how they take them for granted. They display no reverence for the privations that were the cost of every victory; they take the whole and shape it for themselves.

"The big Kremlin Bell," the Colonel murmured, lifting his fingers from the keyboard. The silence did him good. He knew what the true meaning of his words was, but instead of occupying himself with that, he returned to Comrade Bulyagkova's divorce. It was a private matter, so what was there to fathom?

Bulyagkov's career was the kind of success story you read about in books. After breaking off his physics studies, Alexey, a talented Ukrainian with dubious relatives, had met the pretty daughter of a good Moscow family. Through the girl, he'd gained admittance to the right circles; since her family recognized that she was going to marry Alexey in spite of all opposition, they decided not to exclude him, but to appropriate him. Medea's grandfather, the senior serving member of the Central Committee, had Alexey Bulyagkov's biography rewritten and his father recast as a staunch fighter against counterrevolution. After the wedding, important doors had opened to Medea's young husband, who wasn't shy about striding through them. His preparation in the natural sciences had predestined him for a.s.signment to the research sphere. He'd climbed up the hierarchical ladder, step by step, until he'd reached the second rung, from which there was no further ascent. In addition to being an alcoholic, the Minister was lazy and erratic, and it had cost Kamarovsky a great deal of effort to suppress the evidence of his weakness for minors. Nonetheless, the Minister had the best connections; from now until his retirement, n.o.body would ever contest his position. Since the opening of the Bulyagkov dossier, the Colonel had sought to prove that Alexey Maximovich found his lot as Deputy Minister intolerable and would therefore engage in some maneuver to unseat the Minister. So far, Kamarovsky's efforts had failed.

And now, this unexpected divorce. What advantage would Medea gain from altering her status? She wasn't seeking to liberate herself so that she could be with some "other man"; culture had always been her only pa.s.sion. In the course of the decades, Alexey had never eschewed cheating on Medea, but he'd always arranged matters so tastefully that she wasn't compromised. Bulyagkov was fifty-one, his wife marginally younger; what could either of them, at their age, do with their new freedom?

The big Kremlin Bell, the Tsar Bell, weighs two hundred tons, the Colonel thought. It had barely been hung when it developed an inner crack and had never sounded, not even once. Kamarovsky had had his daughter's graduation thesis, an essay on the Kremlin Bell, sent to his office and had read the doc.u.ment as though it were one of the many that constantly pa.s.sed over his desk. The text, at once precise and patriotic, was written in a flowing style; with such a thesis, obtaining her diploma would be a mere formality. And so his daughter would complete her studies at the Polytechnic Inst.i.tute a year early and begin working toward a degree in architecture at the university in the fall. Kamarovsky hadn't been in his daughter's company for eight years, nor did she attach any importance to a possible future meeting. Twenty years previously, her mother had informed him by post of the child's birth. How odd, to receive such a letter in the center of the state security apparatus. He'd offered his support, but the woman had never taken anything from him. She and, later, her daughter had been clever enough to keep themselves clear of power, knowing that it could be helpful in many instances, but that its bonds could eventually become too tight to shake off.

Now she lives with a fellow from Okhotsk, the Colonel thought glumly; he wished his daughter would get over this Greater Soviet flirtation and embark upon a relations.h.i.+p with someone from Russia proper. Then he smiled at his own chauvinism. It would have suited him to help her get a.s.signed to a nice apartment. As it was, she and her friend were living with four other people in a low-rent pad in the suburbs. Kamarovsky had once driven past it. He'd wanted to arrange a little graduation party for her, but she hadn't even answered his letter. Sometimes, unbeknownst to her, he watched her from a distance; the library where she did her cramming was only a few blocks away. She's inherited my delicate bones, he'd say to himself, with crazy pride; she'll never have wide hips like her mother. Occasionally he'd dare to get a little closer to her, and he'd believe he recognized a kindred expression in her eyes.

Kamarovsky's head sank onto his chest. He jumped in fright. No, he couldn't have a seizure now, Rosa was arriving any minute! But the sudden release of his neck muscles was a sure sign. It must be the excitement, he thought as he stood up. The reflections on his daughter, the certainty that he'd never be more than an observer of her career-that had all contributed to putting him in the kind of emotional state he hated. He knew he wouldn't be able to stay upright long enough to make it to his desk, so he dropped to his knees and began to propel himself forward, a few inches at a time. If he could concentrate on something, however gla.s.sily, he might still be able to stave off the atony. However, it was a surer thing to ... He raised his hand to the top drawer, where the little envelope with the tablets was always ready. He'd recently ordered some new ones; only two hours after his call to Doctor Shchedrin, a messenger had brought him what he wanted. On his knees, leaning his head against the cool wood of the desk, Kamarovsky pressed a tablet out of its packaging. The hand that was supposed to bring the medication to his mouth refused its duty and slid onto the floor. The Colonel stared at the useless hand. How ugly it was as it lay there; he didn't know how he could get it back. And then he let himself fall. A cheek and an ear slid across the drawer handle on their way down, and his head struck the parquet floor. Kamarovsky couldn't tell whether his hand was still holding the tablet; half fainting, he shoved his head to what seemed like the right spot. Seen from close up, the grooves between the floorboards spread out like lines of perspective and went on into infinity. He wondered why the technique for representing spatial situations, already in place by the time of the Romans' wall frescoes, had for centuries undergone no further development and had instead been displaced by symbolic perspective. The longer he jerked his head around, the smaller were his chances of coming upon the tablet. Then his ear felt, as though through wads of cotton, a small obstacle. Kamarovsky raised his head so far that his nose and mouth came to rest on the floor. Only with the help of his lips was he able to move forward. How heavy your skull could be when your neck muscles wouldn't play along. Kamarovsky pushed his open mouth over the pill. His tongue protruded and dropped downward, very slowly, until it felt the rounded shape, licked it, and gently raised it toward his mouth. The Colonel tasted dust and crumbs; when he closed his lips, his teeth grated on particles. He forced himself to bite down hard and worked his jaws to produce saliva. Then he swallowed and gagged until he was sure he'd managed to get all the medication down his gullet. Now there was nothing to do but wait. He could smell a faint scent of varnish, with which the floor had been sealed years before. He even thought he could smell his own sweat, the odor left in this spot by his feet.

By the time the doorbell rang, Kamarovsky was already capable of standing again. Groaning, though feeling steadily stronger, he rose to his feet and dropped into the chair. After the second ring, he stretched out his hand, just a little, and pressed the buzzer. Shortly thereafter, he heard the staccato sound of steps coming upstairs and entering the apartment. The Colonel made an effort to straighten his crooked spine. Rosa was wearing black; he nodded to her and motioned toward the chair across from him. She thanked him and took a seat, opening her portfolio on the way down.

TWENTY-FIVE.

The most sensible thing she could do would be to hang the curtain. Avdotya had finally finished the job, and now Anna spread the blue fabric over the table to attach the hooks. The tape had been st.i.tched across the top part of the curtain in an impeccably straight line, and the border, too, had been neatly executed. While she busied herself with the hooks, Anna became aware of an interior stillness; she wouldn't have called it calm. It wasn't the inner harmony that the performance of simple tasks sometimes produces, nor was it the peace of mind she longed for, but a void, like the grayness of the days that lay before her. Anna could do nothing but wait in anxious expectation for Leonid's decision, nothing but hang up the curtain.

She laid the fabric aside and sat on the sofa in her small apartment. Viktor Ipalyevich had gone off in search of cheap potatoes, Petya was in school, Alexey was probably being driven to some meeting, and Leonid was back on duty in the East. Suddenly, Anna couldn't help envisioning the whole country, like an enormous map, where people worked, argued, grew stronger, suffered pain. In many regions of the Soviet Union, spring had already arrived; in others, one couldn't yet begin to hope for it. The mental image of her dynamic homeland left Anna feeling empty and alone. She'd made the beds, and tomorrow she'd do so again. She was cooking something for Petya to eat, and she'd be cooking again that evening. She'd do the shopping and cleaning, as she did every day; she'd board the combine's special bus and start her s.h.i.+ft. She did all this to feed her family, to go on living, to keep the whole thing running.

Leonid had gone back a day early. Forced to depart in advance because of weather conditions, he'd declared; spring cyclones were moving from the Sea of Okhotsk toward Sakhalin, and there was a good chance that landing an airplane there would soon be impossible. Strangely enough, Anna was convinced that he'd welcomed his early departure. He'd promised to give more consideration to his notion of getting a transfer to Siberia, but she had the impression he'd said that just to placate her so he wouldn't have to talk about it anymore. Five years, she'd thought in despair as she watched her husband going down the stairs with his bag slung over his shoulder. They hadn't told Petya that his father was leaving a day sooner than planned; Leonid had put him to bed with particular tenderness and held him in his arms during the night. Still half asleep, the boy had gone off to school in the belief that his father would be there to greet him when he came back home.

Now Anna was sitting there, on an afternoon like many others, and she didn't know how much time would pa.s.s before she'd see her husband again. Until very recently, she'd believed her life was safeguarded by a solid structure, which was now volatizing into an atmosphere of wan pointlessness. Hanging a curtain was the only thing to do. She adjusted the hooks and lifted up one corner of the fabric in front of the sleeping niche.

While Anna Viktorovna Nechayevna was inserting the hooks, one after another, into the rings on the curtain rod, the majority of those present at a meeting of the Central Committee's Department of Research were voting to accept the invitation of the Swedish Science Council. Even though the invitation came from a Western nation, the department was of the opinion that a scientific exchange would be advantageous in that it would demonstrate the open, international aspect of Soviet research. After this fundamental decision, the meeting proceeded to determine not which scientists would travel to Stockholm, but which Party officials would accompany them. The proposal that the Minister in person should head the delegation found general acceptance; Deputy Minister Alexey Bulyagkov would remain in Moscow for the duration of the visit. As the next order of business, the Minister instructed the Deputy Minister to draw up a list of eminent scientists, from among whom those most appropriate for the delegation would subsequently be chosen. It went without saying that a copy of the list would be submitted to the Committee for State Security, and that the Research Department would then have to wait and see whether the names on the list met with any objections from the KGB. There being no further business, the minutes of the a.s.sembly were turned over for transcription, and the Minister adjourned the meeting. The comrades made their way back to their offices or betook themselves to an early lunch. Although Alexey was hungry, he distrusted the special of the day-meat loaf-and limited himself to a portion of caramel custard and a bottle of lemonade. After lunch, he went to his office and made telephone calls for half an hour, dictated a few letters, and rejected his secretary's undrinkable coffee. He met with a ministerial colleague to finalize the wording of an obituary for a recently deceased cosmonaut and chatted in the corridor with a couple of old companions. Eventually, he sent word to Anton to pick him up at the rear exit.

The weather had cleared up, and the afternoon was inviting. Enjoying the drive, Alexey leaned back in his seat and gazed out the window. The melting of the last snow and the awakening of the buds went hand in hand, and water was gurgling in the roof gutters. Puddles stood in green s.p.a.ces where the ground was still frozen.

All at once, Alexey changed his mind: "Let me out here."

Anton pulled over near Obukha Lane, so Bulyagkov could take a walk along a branch of the Moskva River. He liked to make decisions while out walking; in this case, he was thinking over the impending Stockholm trip and the task a.s.signed to him in that regard. The accomplishments of Soviet scientific research could be seen most clearly in the chemical industry; therefore, chemists should form the main contingent of the visiting delegation: the ammonia experts from Severodonetsk and the synthetic-fiber developers from Nevinnomyssk. The distinguished collective of bone marrow specialists from Krasnoyarsk could be brought along to represent Soviet medical science. Of course, the Swedes were most interested in exchanges in the field of nuclear research, but here the Soviets would exercise prudence. There would be no risk in allowing Comrade Budker to go to Stockholm and present his work in aerophysics. Soviet study of laserplasma interaction was old hat, Alexey thought; the Americans had long since outstripped everyone in that field. The delegation should include at least three scientists from the atomic cities of Novosibirsk and Dubna; Nikolai Lyus.h.i.+n had announced his interest, but sending him was out of the question. The man was too impulsive, unable to control his tongue, and inclined to boasting. Bulyagkov decided to antic.i.p.ate the Committee's selection criteria and nominate only scientists who had families. Besides, everything had to move quickly; when it came to issuing visas, the folks in the Lubyanka wouldn't let themselves be hurried, and the trip was already set for May.

Bulyagkov left the embankment promenade and turned into the quarter that included, on its other end, Drezhnevskaya Street. The bushes were bright green, and he bent over to examine a twig. It's the most audacious leap of my life, he thought; I don't know anyone who'd take such a risk at my age. Above his head, some black and white birds kicked up a racket, zipping from branch to branch and celebrating the warmer weather. He looked up into the still-bare crowns of the trees and saw the sky through them, so brilliantly blue that it made his heart leap.

He thought about his last gift to Medea, the two canaries. In a queer way, the birds had now acquired a deeper significance: Only the cage had made them a couple; if you opened the door of the cage, each of them would fly off in a different direction. The separation from Medea was the most difficult ordeal on Alexey's chosen path. Respect and admiration had bound them to each other for half a lifetime. Everything he had been able to attain, he owed to her. The divorce hearing would take place in a week; Alexey wished it were over now. When the big guns started firing, Medea would already be a safe distance away.

Deep in thought, he reached the little street with the illegible sign. Entering the apartment house as the owner of a clandestine hideaway adjusted to suit the wishes of a succession of female visitors was different from entering it as a simple resident, walking up the washed-concrete stairs, and opening the heavily scratched door in order to spend the night here alone. In the foyer, Bulyagkov threw off his sports jacket. After his long walk, the apartment seemed overheated. Only then did he realize that he'd had scarcely anything to eat in the cafeteria at lunch and nothing since, and suddenly he was starving. He pivoted around toward the door, but the thought of the dismal neighborhood, where there was hardly a restaurant, made him change his mind. He'd eat at home.

During the moving-in process, Anton had seen to it that the refrigerator was filled with the bare essentials; a glance inside revealed to Alexey that he'd already eaten most of them. He found eggs, a moldy onion, and half a jar of sour cream. He disliked cooking and wasn't good at it, but he surrendered to necessity, grabbed the skillet, poured in some oil, and lit the stove. Then he cut the onion into thin slices. Alexey hated the life he was leading. His profession had turned out to be the opposite of what he'd had in mind many years previously, when he'd seized the opportunity to become an administrator of scientific research. He accomplished nothing more meaningful than the paperweight on his desk did. His contempt for the pencil pushers in his department struck him as increasingly pathetic with each pa.s.sing day; he'd long since become one of them. The tool of his trade wasn't the microscope or the scalpel or the slide rule, but the rubber stamp.

Bulyagkov focused his mind's eye on the Minister, whose tactical shrewdness was exceeded only by his incompetence. He obediently distributed the funds in his budget in exact accordance with the capricious wishes of the Central Committee. n.o.body thought in wide-ranging terms or made allowances for the decades-long continuity that was a necessity in complicated research work. Today the pharmacologists got the biggest chunks; tomorrow it would be the biochemists. Had the Minister not had Bulyagkov at his side, the cases of unwarranted favoritism, haphazardness, and corruption would have been past counting. At the same time, Alexey was aware of being merely tolerated: He was the troubleshooter for his clueless boss, the fixer for the Minister's mistakes. Despite his advancement, Bulyagkov had remained the fellow who did the dirty work, a second-cla.s.s person, a man whose background barred him from ever really entering the nomenklatura. He'd always be the Deputy, surrounded by envy for his abilities and condescension regarding his past.

A crackling sound came from the frying pan, and the smell of hot oil rose to his nostrils. He quickly dumped in the onion slices and jumped away from the sputtering grease. Without Medea, I would never have come even this far, he thought, rolling up his s.h.i.+rt sleeves. The determining factor wasn't my qualifications, it was her contacts. If I hadn't let myself be blinded in my youth, if I'd gone ahead and finished my degree after all, maybe I would have been able to make the transition back into science. I could have returned to Kharkov and worked as a biophysicist; I would have had a real position in life. But for a young guy in Moscow, the allure of making a career there, Medea's charms, and the open-mindedness of her family were too tempting. In those days, Alexey had severed his roots; instead of the son of a Ukrainian renegade, he preferred being an up-and-coming n.o.body in the capital.

Bulyagkov stirred the sizzling onions, removed the skillet from the fire, added paprika and sour cream, and then broke a couple of eggs into the mixture. As he placed the pan in the oven, he tried to remember the last time Anna had fixed this for him. He'd explained that it was a dish from his homeland, and then she'd wanted to know what he'd been like as a boy. Happy, he'd told her. Yes, in spite of the war, he'd been happy back then. When the front moved near Smolensk, Alexey's father had taken them to Vyshnivets, a village deep in the forest, where one could hope that neither Germans nor Ukrainians would arrive. The land surveyor's family found welcome and shelter there for many months-indeed, for almost a year. Alexey's memories were of full days and protected nights. It was only after the victory that the hard times had begun, the stripping of his family's a.s.sets, his withdrawal from the university, the flight to Russia. He bent down and looked through the little window to see if the eggs had set yet. Too impatient to wait any longer, he s.n.a.t.c.hed the pan out of the oven. Even through the potholder, the skillet was too hot, and he had to run the last few feet to the table, drop the pan on it, and blow on his fingers. He didn't really want to drink any alcohol, but he opened the bottle from simple force of habit and poured himself a gla.s.s. After fetching salt, pepper, a knife, and a fork, he sat down and ate from the pan. Never before in these rooms had he thought of himself as a single man, depressed, solitary, unable to cope with the silence. With the first hot forkful still in his mouth, he stood up again and turned on the radio. The music was pretty. Still chewing, he walked over to the window-daylight lasted so long this time of year! He would have liked to send Anton off to pick up Anna, yet he knew his longing was only an expression of his loneliness. He was going to lose not only Medea, but also Anna. He swallowed morosely, took in the next forkful while still standing up, and considered how he might get through the interminable evening.

TWENTY-SIX.

The first month of spring brought snowstorms worse than any Leonid had ever experienced in Moscow in the dead of winter. The armored vehicles attached to his company dedicated the bulk of their time to such wintry duties as clearing the roads leading into the city. Yakutsk was almost cut off from the outside world, and food supplies were nearing exhaustion. At the hospital, Galina had the diesel generators running throughout every operation, because there was no counting on normal voltage levels. The storms piled up twenty-foot-tall snow cornices in many places; on some streets, residents had to leave their buildings from the third floor, because the ground was covered with snow two stories high.

Leonid and Galina spent more time together; however, the intense moments they'd experienced when their separation was imminent had been unique and did not come again. He'd thought that his transfer would bring tranquillity to their relations.h.i.+p, but Galina appeared to have her doubts about this unexpected togetherness. She figured her captain was just having a good time playing house with her, and she rejected any sentimental a.s.sessment of the matter, behaving as though she a.s.sumed that the arduous routine of daily life on the edge of the inhabited world would soon make Leonid reconsider his intention to sign on for five years' duty in Yakutia. Did he really believe he could be at home here? And if he did, why didn't he just sign the contract and be done with it? Why did he give such pathetic reasons for drawing out the process?

Leonid knew why. His sojourn in Moscow had left a sting in him, the pride of the formerly privileged man. What interesting lives Muscovites led, after all, what riches their city offered! Even though Leonid never visited a museum and went neither to concerts nor to the theater, he could have done so in Moscow, had he wanted to. If he lived there, he could partic.i.p.ate in the big military reviews again, too; his former battalion of armored infantry traditionally formed the leading unit in the May Day parade through Red Square. Now May was near-spring in Moscow. The captain sighed, staring out into the driving snowstorm. He envied his comrades back home, polis.h.i.+ng up the big machines, decorating the barrels of the guns, attaching the track protectors so as not to damage the streets of the capital. He'd always been happy on the days when they rolled the tanks off the base, drove the dozen miles into the city, and maneuvered into formation on the Leningrad Prospekt. As a young lieutenant, Leonid had scurried here and there among the steel treads with a tape measure in his hand, making sure the distances were correct to within a fraction of an inch. Then, when the tank command received the signal indicating that the fighters had taken off from Aerovokzal Airport, the armored unit would set out in a wide formation for the city center. Final alignments and adjustments would be made on Gorky Street, where they would already be surrounded by a sea of red flags. As they neared Pushkinskaya, the military music would begin to play, and then the convoy, its engines roaring, would roll into the square of all squares. The gunners stood in the open turrets, wearing their parade uniforms, while the drivers had to follow the spectacle through their observation slits. And for all, what an honor to be there! Leonid wasn't a man to whom pomp and ceremony meant very much, but for anyone who had ever experienced the scene, even if only once, the joyous cries, the luminous flags flying along the way past the Historical Museum, fluttering toward St. Basil's Cathedral, and up above, the comrades in their dark overcoats, standing on the platform in front of the Mausoleum and waving down, and then, at the beginning of the festivities, the bells pealing in the Spa.s.skaya Tower and the fighter squadron thundering overhead-for anyone who'd witnessed that, patriotism had stopped being just a word, and the feeling of a common bond among all free men under the sign of socialism had become a reality.

One's duty to society could be carried out anywhere in the country, no matter how remote the spot, and yet Leonid was starting to get the feeling that he'd been lucky to live close to the heartbeat of Soviet life, and that he'd gambled that good fortune away. The pay he'd received while stationed in Moscow was far lower than what he got in Yakutsk, but what was a man supposed to do with his money in an icy wasteland? In the beginning, he'd given Galina presents-a bracelet with glittering pendants, which she never wore because it got in her way at work, an electric samovar, a new mattress-until she'd admonished him, telling him he'd do better to save his money for his son's future. Leonid had the impression, however, that Galina didn't care at all about Petya; it was more as if she were preparing him for the day when he'd realize that their time together was nothing but a stage in his inevitable return journey to his son and Anna.

Maybe that was the reason why Leonid started writing the letter. He wanted to do something that would make his purpose irreversible. You didn't reach a decision of these proportions and then overturn it because of a little misgiving. Leonid wanted to see himself as a man swept away from the fat life of the capital to the periphery of the Soviet world. Pioneers were needed here, men who were idealistic and serious. Deep inside, Leonid was aware that his idealism was a mere dream and his duties as an insignificant captain limited to office work. After the adventurous Sakhalin interlude, in Yakutsk his life had settled back into monotony. The sameness of the days was disrupted only by the weather and Galina's whims.

Her doubts also affected the pa.s.sionate side of their relations.h.i.+p. As long as their time together was marked by the delirium of transience, Galina had been wild with desire; but now that Leonid treated her like "the woman at his side," her intoxication was a thing of the past, and their erotic life had become predictable. He wanted her every night, but she'd been turning him down more and more frequently, claiming that her work at the hospital left her exhausted. Leonid, however, was thoroughly committed to having made the right decision; he wanted absolute validation. He'd chosen Yakutsk for his future, and he wasn't about to let some initial difficulties push him into admitting defeat.

One afternoon when the sun was already going down outside and he was in the barracks, he began his letter to Anna. He placed his briefcase within easy reach so that he could slap it on top of the light gray letter paper quickly should his superior officer come in. The letter would close the door to Anna so irretrievably that Leonid would no longer have to fear his own fickleness.

Insensibly, the daily routine began to envelop Anna again. Petya's next visit to the doctor was coming up, and even though you needed only to look at him to see how much improved he was, Anna was anxious about the appointment. She very much wanted to bring Doctor Shchedrin something as a sign of her deep grat.i.tude; she'd bought a bundle of palm fronds from a street vendor, but upon arriving home, she'd discovered that the man had cheated her. The furry buds had frozen in transport, and once inside the apartment, they'd fallen dead from their stems.

Help came to Anna in the form of a small package. Viktor Ipalyevich received it from the postman, laid it on the table, and eyed it suspiciously. Anna, resting on the sofa before her afternoon s.h.i.+ft, raised her head and asked, "Why don't you open it?"

"Because I know what's inside." He stroked his beard.

"Who sent it?"

He held out the package, which was wrapped in brown paper. She was able to decipher the postmark: "State Publis.h.i.+ng House of the Soviet Union." "Is this ... your book?" She was already on her feet.

"They're not that far along yet. I think it must be the print proof."

"Open it!" she cried impatiently.

"I don't know ..."

"What are you waiting for?"

"I'm feeling scared about the jacket design." He ran his hand over the package, as if the reason for his fear could be felt through the paper. "Open it, daughter, and tell me what you see."

With three steps, she was in the kitchen. She came back with a knife and leaned over the table.

"No, wait, I'll do it," Viktor Ipalyevich said. "I'll open it myself." Carefully, as though disarming a bomb, he stuck the knife into the package, drew the blade slowly through wrapping paper and glue, and exposed an inner package. He partially opened this one, too, saw something red inside, and hesitated. "You do it." He handed her the knife.

Anna cut the package open at once. The cover of the book showed a black sun; bright red birds flew out of its center and turned into a girl's hair. At first glance, the picture perplexed Anna, but she liked her father's name, printed in large white letters and taking up the top third of the cover.

"No dust jacket?" The poet was standing behind her with a look of deep disappointment on his face.

"What do you think?" Her eyes moved back and forth between him and the book.

"They're printing only a paperback edition."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He s.n.a.t.c.hed the book and flexed it vehemently with both hands. "It's cheap, don't you see! It doesn't lie snugly in the hand. It feels like some ephemeral periodical-like a magazine you flip through and throw away."

"n.o.body would treat a book of yours like a magazine."

"It won't even stand up properly on a shelf!" He thrust the book into an open s.p.a.ce between two others. The little volume sagged laxly to one side and then fell over rearward. "There you go, that's what my work's worth!"

"Papa, it's a volume of poetry. Of course it's thinner and lighter than a three-hundred-page book." She laid it in the center of the table.

"Precisely, and that's why it has to have a solid cover! Poems are the compressed experience of life. They should be in books you can carry around with you and take out when you're ready for them. But this thing ... !" He opened it and immediately closed it again. "It looks like a map of the Moscow subway system!"

"You're exaggerating. See how good the t.i.tle looks? They made a real effort." She pointed to the handsome, slanted script, the letters red against the black of the sun.

"The engraving's by Khlebnikov," he said, nodding gently. "I think he's the right choice. His art's harmonious with mine."

"What does it mean-the birds, the girl's hair?"

"What does it mean? Don't have a clue," the poet growled. "Khlebnikov always was a pretty woolly-headed artist." Viktor Ipalyevich picked up the book a third time, as if it were gradually gaining in value. "They've used high-quality paper." He ran his eyes over the imprint, the t.i.tle, and the foreword, which had been written by the director of the Conservatory.

Viktor Ipalyevich Tsazukhin's legacy comprises thirty years of Soviet lyric poetry and is the expression of an epoch rich in hard-won victories as well as painful losses. Tsazukhin is a man produced by the Revolution; his striving toward the Soviet ideal, the longing in his work for justice and moral perfection, his fraught thought processes, which reflect his heart's joys and sorrows, and above all, the melody of his verses, which are attuned to harmonize with the times ...

"When will the fellow finally learn how to construct sentences that make sense?" Viktor Ipalyevich flipped past the foreword, came to the first poem, read it in silence, and in the end held the book out at arm's length away from him. He said, "I don't know how much it's worth, but it must be worth something."

"Of course it is! My compliments." Anna removed the packing paper and as she did so discovered a second copy of her father's poetry volume. "Papa ...," she said, taking up this second volume. "You could do me a great favor."

Viktor Ipalyevich gladly accepted the idea of giving his poems to the physician who'd cured Petya. "I'll write a dedication, of course. I'll think it over tonight and inscribe the book tomorrow."

Satisfied with the happy solution to her gift problem, Anna departed for the afternoon s.h.i.+ft. Interior work on the building in Karacharovo should have been completed long since, but nondelivery of materials had caused delays, and now there was an additional impediment: the impending ceremony to inaugurate the building. Since the date of the opening festivities couldn't be postponed, it was decreed that the workers would concentrate all their efforts on finis.h.i.+ng the section of the building that bore the official memorial plaque, which was to be unveiled by the Party secretary for Moscow. In order to avoid detracting from the visual effect of this ceremonial act, all scaffolding had to be dismantled, removed, and then, immediately after the event, put up again-a piece of stupidity that was the subject of lively discussion on the workers' bus.

"Couldn't we just hang white tarps over the scaffolding?" a worker cried.

Another comrade answered her: "Where are we going to get white tarps from?"

"And would someone please tell me where we're supposed to hide the scaffolding so the Secretary won't trip over it?" said a third. Several of the women laughed.

The bus turned into the briskly moving traffic of the Garden Ring near Taganskaya Square, the city gradually sank behind them, and the suburbs came into view. Anna was sitting next to a male colleague, a friend of hers, reading over his shoulder as he perused his copy of Izvestia. When he came to the foreign affairs section, her interest was sparked, and she sat up straight. She'd spotted a picture of the Minister for Research Planning, surrounded by a group of smiling male and female comrades; Alexey was not among them. LEADERS OF SOVIET SCIENCE TRAVELING TO STOCKHOLM, the headline read. When Anna's friend started to turn the page, she asked him to let her finish the article. It declared that the Swedish Academy of Sciences was most eager to learn about the recent successes of its Soviet colleagues. Scientists from the fields of chemistry, medicine, and mathematics would form the main contingent, the article stated; the group of researchers would be completed by leading physicists from the atomic cities of Dubna and Novosibirsk. Anna tried a second time to find Alexey's face among all the strange heads. Hadn't he hinted at his travel destination? "A city where it's never hot, not even in summer." Wasn't that an allusion to Stockholm? Maybe, she told herself, the original plan had been that Bulyagkov would make the trip to Sweden as the leader of the scientific delegation, and then that plan had been changed. She read the next article, which described the icebreaker Kalinin as she sailed out on her maiden voyage. Anna imagined the s.h.i.+p on its long journey east and thought of Leonid, who was serving in the Siberian wasteland. After her friend turned the page, Anna raised her eyes and looked out at the impressive series of residential developments that had been produced in recent years, living s.p.a.ce for some fifteen thousand comrades.

The bus's hydraulic doors opened with a hiss, discharging Anna and the others, who went to complex number 215 and took up their work. Why would Alexey announce that he was traveling to Stockholm and then not do it? During the past minutes, the question had kept itself hidden, but now it surfaced again and filled Anna with an uneasiness that wouldn't go away, not even when she bent over the bucket and stirred the thickened paint.

TWENTY-SEVEN.

Anna handed her gift to Doctor Shchedrin in person and was disappointed by his reaction. Such a man, she'd a.s.sumed, would be able to appreciate contemporary poetry. However, Shchedrin held the book awkwardly in his hands and said he didn't have much time for reading. Even though the ensuing examination confirmed Anna's optimism as far as Petya was concerned, she was still disappointed to discover that the person to whom she attributed "the miracle" wasn't interested in anything outside of his specialized field. The doctor scrutinized the boy's eyes, fingernails, and back and was far from stingy with the candy rewards. And yet, Anna couldn't rid herself of the impression that the physician's interest was flagging; Petya, no longer a gasping, sickly child but a normal boy who was already partic.i.p.ating in school sports again, had become for Doctor Shchedrin one patient out of many. He completed the examination quickly, lowered the dosage of Petya's medications, and dismissed Anna with the words "All's well that ends well."

She and the boy stepped out into the sunny April day. The trees in front of the Lenin Library were not only covered with green fuzz, they had also put out their first leaves, which quivered in the breeze. Petya's interest was attracted by the washed and polished limousines on the Kropotkin Quay; the beginning of spring seemed to dip even the automobiles in brighter colors. A man in a dark green suit came walking toward them. Anna was about to cross the street, but something in the man's gait brought her to a stop. He raised his head, and his eyegla.s.ses sparkled. Anna got a better grip on Petya's hand.

"Comrade Nechayevna?" Kamarovsky acted surprised, but Anna didn't believe for a second that this was a chance meeting. "Is this your little Petya?" the Colonel asked with a smile.