The Russian Affair (13 page)

These and other speculations made Anna so nervous that she leaped to her feet and changed—for the second time—the blouse she intended to wear to dinner. But then she opened the physics textbook again. She chose a chapter on quantum mechanics and tried to concentrate. Why
am I kidding myself? she thought, her eyes still fixed on the text. I’m a house painter, the daughter of a poet, the wife of a soldier. I could have a delightful stay here, I could enjoy the nights with Alexey, but instead I’m trying to be a spy! I must be crazy, I should be punished, and one day I will be, too! She commanded herself not to waver, read the introduction in one go, and was surprised to find that she vaguely understood it.

How does Leonid put up with all this? Anna wondered as her finger slid down the page. How has he been able to keep silent for so long in the face of such cheating? Why has he decided to close his eyes to the obvious? The more intense Anna’s affair became, the more often her husband spent the night in his barracks. He assiduously overlooked every change: that she spent more time on her appearance, for example, or that she came home with things they really couldn’t afford.

One evening, after Anna had settled into the backseat of the limousine that would transport her to Alexey, she’d noticed Leonid stepping out of the shadow of an archway just as the big car was pulling away. She’d expected her husband to make her explain herself later that night, but when she came home, he was already lying in the sleeping alcove with his face turned away from her. Anna could tell by his breathing that he was still awake, and when she got into bed, she’d pushed herself under his arm. Without a word, he’d stroked her hair and then turned away. When she woke the following morning, he was already in his uniform, sitting at the table next to Petya and cutting the boy’s bread into bite-sized pieces. Leonid had stayed with his unit for the rest of the week.

He’s not a weak person, Anna thought; he knows how to assert himself, and within the limits of his possibilities, he’s single-minded. She turned the page pensively. What he was lacking was passion. The only devotion he showed was in his love for Petya. And yet, Anna would have found intolerable the unresolved condition in which Leonid had voluntarily remained for months.

Rosa, that witch, as if she were capable of gauging Anna’s desperation, had offered her help precisely when Anna had been on the point
of chucking everything. She’d decided that she was willing to accept any consequences rather than to go on living a life of double deceit. And at that exact point, Rosa had proposed a meeting.

“Doesn’t it bother you, constantly having to lie to Leonid?” she’d asked innocently, but at the same time so empathetically that Anna had shared her feelings with her. Then, on the very next day, Anna had been ordered to appear in Kamarovsky’s office, and the Colonel had presented her with his plan. He’d explained that officers from Moscow who volunteered for service in inhospitable parts of the Soviet Union might hope for special privileges upon their return. “It wouldn’t be for a long time,” he’d said. “But I think it would be best for us to avail ourselves of this expedient.”

She was so far gone in deceit that Kamarovsky could allow himself to make her such a proposal, Anna thought fearfully. Shouldn’t she stand up to him, once and for all? Anna didn’t want to lose Leonid, and she didn’t want to lose Alexey. Confounded by her dilemma, and full of shame at herself for taking up Kamarovsky’s offer unresistingly, Anna had asked, “So where would he get transferred to?”

The Colonel had pulled over a map that showed the locations of the various army units and tapped on a position in the Northeast.

“Siberia?” she’d whispered. “No, I can’t do that … you can’t ask that of us.”

“How long has your husband served as a lieutenant?” After Anna told him, Kamarovsky had sat there with an impenetrable expression on his face, as though, first of all, he had to consider the matter. Then he said, “A promotion might be possible. Naturally, your husband would have to apply for his captain’s commission himself.”

She’d stared at the map and tried to comprehend the incredible distance that lay between Moscow and
there
. “What guarantee do I have that Leonid will be allowed to come back home?”

The Colonel’s silence had made it clear to her that haggling with him was a foolhardy undertaking. Then he said, “I’m not in command of
Leonid’s army unit, but should he decide to go along with a transfer, the circumstance will be taken into account, and it will be borne in mind that you both have cooperated with the security forces.”

This answer was too vague for Anna. “When will he get an irrevocable right of abode for Moscow?”

“In a year, or at the latest, a year and a half.”

“I’ll consider it.”

While showing her to the door, Kamarovsky had reiterated, “It wouldn’t be forever.”

That evening, Anna had initiated the overdue conversation. She and Leonid hadn’t been so honest with each other in years. They’d admitted that their only remaining interaction involved organizing the day: Who was bringing Petya to the doctor, who was picking him up from school, when would his grandfather have to lend a hand? They’d calculated how long it had been since they’d made love. Anna said it was because they slept in the same room with Viktor Ipalyevich. They’d hugged and petted each other, not with passion, but rather as though each sought protection in the other. Finally, since the subject lay close to hand, Anna had indicated that there was someone else; nothing serious, she’d explained, but nevertheless, not something she could end overnight.

Even then, Leonid had shown no interest in hearing reasons or learning names; he’d even told her he trusted her! Furious, she’d moved away from him on the sofa and told him to his face that she was having an affair with a member of the Central Committee. “And I’m being required to continue it, too!”

Leonid had been neither wounded nor outraged, but merely alert. Without Anna’s mentioning the KGB again, he’d wanted to know if their conversation was being listened to. She’d laughed, but with a glance at the familiar objects around her, she’d nonetheless admitted that she’d never considered such a thing even as a possibility until that
moment. Since the name of her control officer had also been dropped, Anna considered that the moment had come to present Kamarovsky’s proposal. Once again, Leonid’s reaction had been not reproachful but practical. “Ever since I became a commissioned officer, I’ve been allowed to serve in Moscow. But no one who doesn’t belong to the nomenklatura can get out of serving in the provinces at some point.” He stood up. “That means that they would surely transfer me eventually, sooner or later. Why not now?”

“Do you know what that means?” She’d taken his hands and named the place in Siberia. For the first time in a long time, she’d noticed how sinewy his lower arms were. “Nine months of winter.”

“We have a big, glorious country. Why shouldn’t I get to know more of it?” He’d gone over to the bookshelves. “We don’t have a single book about Siberia.”

Not long after that, Leonid had taken matters into his own hands. He’d started bringing home books about the North and cutting out every newspaper article he saw that described the beauty of Siberia. Anna had distrusted his optimism, thinking it was just for show, and she’d read aloud to him reports stating that the ground in Yakutia never thawed out. The houses there, she read, were built on concrete pillars to keep the heated rooms from warming the soil and causing the whole building to sink into the resultant mire. Nevertheless, Leonid’s willingness to make the move remained constant, and one morning after night duty he’d told Anna that he’d decided to try for a transfer to Minusinsk. His application was already being considered.

“Why so far away?” Anna had asked. Strangely enough, she’d felt rejected.

“Does it make a difference?”

It had been a long time since she’d seen him so self-confident. He’d looked up the place in the atlas and determined that there were five time zones between Moscow and the city on the Yenisei River. “After this, I’ll
be an expert in coal mining,” Leonid had said with a laugh, reading her a statistic that estimated the coal reserves in the area at 450 billion tons.

At night, Anna had wondered how she’d let things go so far. Wasn’t her situation beyond all reason? In order to maintain an illicit relationship, she was standing idly by and watching while her husband let himself be exiled to the other side of the socialist world. She understood Leonid’s motives less and less. Instead of asserting his rights—hadn’t Anna secretly hoped he would?—he was falling in with Kamarovsky’s perverse proposition, and he was prepared to relocate at a great distance and without resentment. She almost envied him his eager anticipation at the prospect of getting to know some of the Soviet Union’s outlying regions.

In the days after her husband’s decision, Anna’s image of him had changed more and more starkly. How generous and spontaneous Leonid was! In their thoroughly muddled situation, he remained composed and kept his sense of humor. Unexpectedly, he’d become again the person whom Anna had once liked so much. She’d even told him that, had even sought his affection, but Leonid had rejected her advances. She’d tried to give him an idea of the barren wastes he proposed to enter and asked him whether he wouldn’t curse her for having driven him into exile, and he’d responded by chiding her for being such a romantic. It was then that Anna had admitted to herself that her feelings for Alexey were fading.

Simultaneously with Leonid’s promotion to the rank of captain, the news had come that he would be transferred not to southern Siberia but to Sakhalin Island, in the easternmost part of the Soviet Union. He’d reacted calmly even to this change and explained that the pay for duty on Sakhalin, because of its extreme location, would be double what he’d been expecting, and besides, frontier troops were given preferential treatment. When Anna checked on the distances this time, she found that Moscow and the island were separated by eight time zones.

“I’ll never get so close to Japan again,” Leonid had said with a smile. “The strait between the island and Japan is barely thirty miles wide.”

He’d made an unemotional decision to go to the East, and his departure had been equally serene. He’d inculcated in Petya the notion that he must now represent his father as head of the family; with deadly seriousness, the boy had accepted the charge. When Leonid thanked his father-in-law for his support, Viktor Ipalyevich had maintained a grim silence, just as he’d done throughout the preceding weeks in the face of all the changes he found reprehensible but couldn’t comprehend.

At the last moment, Anna had felt suddenly afraid and implored Leonid to reconsider. Tears weren’t appropriate for their situation, he’d replied amicably; they would see each other again in a few months. Assailed by the thought that she’d made the worst of all possible choices, Anna had watched in panic as her husband picked up his suitcase, threw his better uniform, still on its hanger, over his shoulder, and left the apartment. An army police vehicle had taken him to the airport.

During the first days, Anna had received no news of him; all she knew was that the journey took thirty-six hours and that he would have changed planes in both Omsk and Khabarovsk. She had felt as though she were paralyzed; she’d cursed Kamarovsky’s plan, but most of all, she’d cursed herself, and she’d canceled two dates with Bulyagkov.

After nearly a month, she’d received an enthusiastic letter from Leonid. Sakhalin lay in the same latitudes as the Mediterranean Sea, he told her, but the climate was incredibly harsh and unpredictable; for the first time in his life, he saw himself completely at the mercy of Nature. He’d done some reading about the time before the Revolution, when Sakhalin was the worst penal camp in tsarist Russia and millions of people had literally rotted there. Today, he pointed out, it was the site of a first-class fishing industry, and the military bases were well organized. He went on to say that the civilian population living on the island was made up mostly of women, because the men were off working on the mainland or had simply cleared out for good. When Anna read that, her loneliness
had been augmented by jealousy. The whole time, she’d looked upon Leonid as the one who’d been cheated on and treated like dirt; now, in her mind’s eye, she saw him as a brand-new captain in a snappy uniform, cruising an island full of women!

Anna had spent a sad winter. Bulyagkov, sensing that she was at her wit’s end, had behaved with surprising consideration. For even though Leonid’s departure had technically simplified the affair for Alexey, something fundamental had changed, and the two of them had reverted to the earliest form of their relationship: dinner and chatting on the corner seat. During the course of these conversations, strangely enough, the Deputy Minister had given Anna advice about her marriage, pointing out to her that longing was the strongest engine of any passion. And so it was Alexey, the cause of all the confusion, who gradually helped her to get over it. The spring had turned lush and heavy. When Anna turned out the light in Moscow, for Leonid, six thousand miles away, it was time for morning roll call.

Anna lurched upright and listened. No more sounds came from the neighboring room. Resolutely, she clapped her physics tome shut, washed her face, brushed her hair, and went to dinner. The atmosphere in the dining room was as relaxed as it had been at lunch. Anna took her seat between the orphanage director and the blissful Nadezhda. Dinner consisted of pork and potatoes, and someone had scared up some red wine. Anna drained her glass in one gulp and accepted a refill from the orphanage director. The Aeroflot pilot had successfully insisted that the radio be taken from the lobby and set up in the dining room; the Irkutskians quarreled over the station of choice. Anna had received no message from Alexey and didn’t know whether or not Anton was waiting for her outside. Eating calmed her nervousness, the wine made her weightless; she began to enjoy herself and kept on drinking. In the meanwhile, the peace ambassadress was dancing with the kolkhoz farmer, and
Nadezhda fetched her Irkutskian and laid her arms around his neck. The next time Anna looked up, the tables were empty, and everybody who had a partner was swaying to the music.