The Russian Affair (10 page)

“Was that bad?” The doctor daubed a drop from the little bottle onto the wound.

“What kind of allergy could it be?” Anna asked, watching as her son’s arm was covered with precisely placed drops.

“There are many possibilities, almost as many as the marks I’m going to make.” Shchedrin threw the small knife into the trash basket and pulled out a new knife. “Grasses, flowers, dust mites. Moscow air isn’t good for our lungs. It’s particularly hard on children.”

Anna had never heard anyone say openly what everyone knew: that the air pollution in the capital was harmful to your health.

“I can’t change the air,” Shchedrin went on, “but we should make sure that Petya doesn’t come into contact with irritants. In addition, there’s a new medication available. If the tests show what I think they will, I’ll give him a prescription for it.”

Anna gazed at the doctor with warmth that bordered on affection. Medicine that really helped? It was too good, too rare, to be true. Her gratitude extended to the man who had made this happiness possible, to A. I. Kamarovsky, who’d done nothing but write a note.

A nurse brought the instruments for the blood test. Before she left, she asked Anna, “Would you perhaps like some tea, Comrade?”

Anna nodded gratefully. Doctor Shchedrin took the next little bottle out of the case.

FIVE

T
he earflaps of Anna’s fur hat were down as she approached the six-story building. She had left Petya with his grandfather and set out on her search, beginning behind Red Square. After a whole day of thawing, sleet had fallen that morning, and pedestrians were stalking along the walkways as if they had artificial limbs, slipping and sliding, clinging to walls and traffic signposts. Anna had to laugh at the crazy ballet being performed by people around the Central Committee building, who danced with their briefcases pressed tightly under their arms. The weather was Anna’s ally. Everyone was concentrating on reaching his goal without falling down, and nobody observed the young woman who was visiting, one by one, the six entrances to the building complex. The gates were made of steel, the underground levels protected by concrete ramps. Anna’s attention was directed toward the vehicles that approached the CC complex and disappeared inside or stopped nearby. Without exception, the automobiles were black, with license plates that began with the letters MO. The Volgas and Chaikas aroused no interest in her, but if a ZIL drove by, Anna made an effort to get a look at the back of it. She reached the windowless annex to the main building; there were many ZILs parked outside, one behind the other. Struggling to keep her balance, Anna moved along the pavement, looking at the limousines’
ice-covered rear ends and rectangular taillights. Her eyes were seeking a broken brake light with a dent in its metal housing. The damage had been done during her last ride in the car. More hastily than usual, Anton had turned off the Mozhaisk Chaussée and failed to notice a concrete pillar. There had been an unpleasant crunching sound, and Anton had leaped out with a flashlight in his hand and run to the back of the car. “They’ll be laughing at me in the garage,” he said when he got in again. “I’m the driver with the most accidents.” He winked at her in the rearview mirror. “I’m not going to take it to the repair shop just for a dent. Don’t give me away, Comrade.”

Since the announcement of the Five-Year Plan would be made very shortly, Alexey had to go to the Central Committee every day, and right about this time, too; Anton must park the car somewhere around here, she thought. At the third ZIL, Anna hesitated and bent down for a closer inspection. It wasn’t a dent, just the remains of some ice still clinging to the rear fender. The security officer on duty at the gate noticed her and approached. Anna pretended to straighten her cap, using the car window as a mirror, and skidded away. When she reached the main entrance for the second time, the number of policemen there had doubled; one of them pressed his walkie-talkie to his ear. The steel panels of the gate parted, the policeman stopped the ordinary traffic, and a convoy of four limousines appeared, their rear-window curtains all closed. The first car drove into the inner portion of the complex, followed by all the others; none of them slowed down. The gate closed, and the policemen disappeared back into their sentry boxes. Anna imagined that she had seen Brezhnev himself being driven to work. Since the assassination attempt on him a few years before, it was said that the General Secretary always traveled in a convoy so that nobody would know which limousine he was riding in. Anna looked over the square. She could have been watching the arrival of any CC member, she thought; what difference did it make?

After an hour, she admitted to herself that with so many ZILs about,
it was naive of her to think she’d be able to find the very one that Anton drove. In the end, the weather and the chaos on the streets made Anna give up and sent her on her way back to the bus stop. Later, loaded down with purchases from various shops, she entered a telephone booth and dialed the number of the apartment on Drezhnevskaya Street. As she had expected, there was no reply. It was clearer to her than ever before that the Deputy Minister could get in touch with her at any time, but the reverse was impossible.

Some days later, Anna was informed that the visitors’ committee was having a preparatory meeting. Its purposes: introduction to the work of the science city, illustration of the basic concepts of physics, distribution of informational material.

After the early shift, Anna set out for a meeting house of the Moscow City Soviet. There she was given a laminated card that declared her an official member of the “Dubna Visitors’ Committee.” In an overheated room on the fourth floor, most of the other members of the delegation were already present, among them a young woman who was a budding Aeroflot pilot, the forewoman of a factory that made finished building parts, a slender blonde in training to become a peace ambassador of the Soviet Union, a schoolgirl named Yelena, and a cashier who’d attracted notice because of her unusual mathematical abilities. Among the men, there were two Irkutskians from the International Friendship Club, a young farmer from Karabanovo, the director of a Moscow orphanage, and a producer at a radio station. Anna presented herself with her job title, and a woman with dyed black hair stepped forward and shook her hand. “I’m Nadezhda from combine four-four-seven,” she said. She had small eyes, and her face appeared to be stamped with a permanent grin. “So you’re the girl who’s going with us instead of Raisa.” Nadezhda took a seat in the middle of the first row and offered her colleague the place next to her.

“What happened to Raisa?”

“She was replaced all of a sudden. No reason was given.” Nadezhda gazed mockingly at Anna. “Have you come directly from work?”

Someone came into the room. His shirt and tie looked new, and there were sharp creases in his trousers. “Good day, comrades. I am Mikhail Popov, group leader for our three-day excursion to Dubna,” he said. His voice sounded like a sewing machine.

The members of the delegation interrupted their conversations. Popov draped his overcoat across the back of a chair, stepped to the podium, and opened a document folder. “The acquisition of knowledge requires human courage,” he began without a transition. “The Soviet scientists chose a deserted area, a marsh, as the place to build the biggest research center in the world. It serves exclusively peaceful purposes.” As he read, he held a finger under each successive line. “The city of Dubna is surrounded on three sides by rivers—the Volga, the Dubna, and the Sestra—and on the fourth by the Moscow Canal. These waterways were of the utmost importance for the transport of heavy equipment. The land where laboratories and apartment houses now stand was originally under water; the engineers took boats to the various worksites.”

When Popov turned the page, it sounded like a whiplash. He looked up, and his eyes met Anna’s. She nodded, showing her interest, and at the same time wondered whether he might be the minder whom Kamarovsky had certainly assigned to her.

“On the fourteenth day of December 1949, the synchrocyclotron began its work. The main building required more than seven hundred thousand cubic feet of concrete; the walls are more than one hundred feet high; the ceiling alone weighs ten thousand tons.” Mechanically, as though trained to do so, Popov tilted his head to one side. “Imagine a magnet that weighs seven thousand tons. Three Volga limousines could comfortably park on each of its poles.” He responded with satisfaction to his audience’s mild tittering; yes, his look seemed to say, science has its lighter side, too. Then he went on, describing the efforts made by the
building collective in 1949 to fulfill its duty of putting all machines in operation before the government’s stipulated deadline. “Enthusiasm and the creative spirit of the Soviet engineers led to success.” At this point, Popov began to read a list of technological research achievements that had been produced in Dubna.

Anna stretched her back—her shoulders ached. The substance of Popov’s lecture would surely be in the materials up there in the box, ready for distribution. She looked behind her, and she had the impression that most of those present found nothing new in his revelations. The pilot was playing with a button on her jacket; the peace ambassadress, lost in thought, ran her fingers through her hair; only the forewoman was leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and listening. Anna was sure that Kamarovsky had smuggled in another “member of the delegation,” someone tasked in his or her turn with reporting on Anna’s conduct and methods. She knew that she was starting to judge reality according to a scheme learned from the Colonel. She’d grown adept at machinations, she was acquainted with the means of gaining advantages for herself, and she was preparing to use people the way Kamarovsky did. Wasn’t she even making use of Kamarovsky himself? Hadn’t she foreseen that he’d be able to find her and her son a decent doctor? It had cost him nothing and made Anna happy. She thought of the little presents for Petya that Anton had picked up in specialty shops; now they were probably lying on the backseat of the limousine. Anna was afraid of her own hedonism, but at the same time, she didn’t know how to curb its growth. She’d already taken on too much. With a sigh, she slumped against the back of her chair. She’d lost the thread.

SIX

T
he following day, she urged her father not to forget to call Doctor Shchedrin that Wednesday, when the results of Petya’s tests would be in. She admonished the boy not to make things difficult for his grandfather and implored Viktor Ipalyevich to keep television watching within reasonable limits.

The bus stopped on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, about a ten-minute walk from Anna’s apartment. The checkered travel bag bounded off her thighs as she walked. She hadn’t had enough sleep and felt generally confused, troubled by her vague sense of what lay ahead. When she reached the square, it didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for. The banner was legible from far away:
WELCOME PIONEERS! OFF TO DUBNA, THE SCIENCE CITY!
The words covered the whole side of the bus. Anna chose a window seat and wedged her bag into the space beside her feet. The orphanage director sat across the aisle and wanted to chat; Anna’s answers were so meager that he gave up. Most people climbed into the bus during the last ten minutes before its departure; the Aeroflot pilot was even a little late. With the help of her bulky bag, Anna kept the seat next to her empty. She wanted to sleep, she wanted to reflect, and she had to get busy with the book Kamarovsky had sent her.

It was still pretty dark outside—full daylight was a long way off, but
some dawn grayness filtered through the window. The bus had hardly started moving when Anna laid her head back and closed her eyes. In a last flash of awareness, she recognized that they were swinging onto Dmitrovsky Chaussée; from there they would access the expressway and head north. The roar of the traffic was transformed into the shrieks of birds, ugly creatures that fluttered and flapped around her; their cries sounded like accusations. Although dozing, not fully conscious, Anna was nonetheless aware that an argument had flared up around her. The forewoman was of the opinion that Soviet science was ten years in advance of the Americans. When the orphanage director pointed out that the researchers who’d won the Nobel Prize in recent years had come overwhelmingly from the West, the slight fellow stepped into a crossfire aimed at him by the others. Wasn’t he aware that Stockholm was situated in the West? Had he ever taken a close look at the members of the Nobel committee? A person would have to be blind not to notice the tendency toward provocation in the selection of winners. And besides, as early as 1945, the Americans had started recruiting Nazi scientists, regardless of whether they were war criminals or not. “U.S. technology is nothing more than Nazi technology in its mature form,” the forewoman said, summarizing her position. “Soviet achievements, on the other hand, are a real result of cooperation among socialist states.”

The orphanage director was so bold as to observe aloud that in Dubna, despite the many socialist nations with scientific programs, the percentage of researchers from the DDR was disproportionately high. “I would assume that these people also worked for Hitler in the old days.”

There was something decidedly physical about the storm of objections to this remark. The members of the delegation crowded around the orphanage director, giving him pieces of their minds. When the bus unexpectedly turned off the main highway and came to a stop, the squabblers thought Popov had ordered the halt by way of calming things down. But this was, in fact, the first item on the day’s program: “Breakfast in Dmitrov, City of the Revolution.”

On the double, the former Pioneers were led into an unprepossessing wooden house, which accommodated a nursery school. Two rows of little children, wearing heavy clothes and holding hands, formed a guard of honor for the guests from Moscow. Inside, the headmistress of the school greeted them and invited them to sit at tables already prepared for their visit. The coffee was fresh, and the bread was still warm. Everyone tucked in hungrily; Anna refilled her coffee cup twice. As the guests ate, the headmistress explained that they were on historical ground: Prince Peter Kropotkin, an eminent forerunner of anarchist communism, had chosen this simple house for his residence when he returned to Russia from his long exile abroad. The guests hardly had time to finish their meal; still clutching their cups, they were escorted into Kropotkin’s study, which had been preserved in its original condition. Group leader Popov expressed his thanks in the name of the delegation, and everyone walked out past the guard of freezing children and climbed back aboard the bus.