The Russian Affair (17 page)

While he was explaining his diagnosis and the treatment he proposed, Anna became increasingly aware of a nagging discrepancy. On the one hand, merely gaining access to such methods had to be considered practically miraculous; on the other, it entailed a new dependence. “Doctor,” she began. Through the open door, she could see her son. “I don’t know how I can pay for all these things.”

“That’s the least of your problems.” He nodded to a nurse who was calling him to the telephone.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s already taken care of.” The nurse held out the receiver to him. “Everything’s been arranged.”

Observing the doctor’s composure as he spoke on the telephone, Anna wondered what kind of agreement Kamarovsky and Shchedrin had reached. A little later, as she and Petya were heading for the exit, she had the Colonel’s image before her eyes. Despite Anna’s confidence in the physician, Kamarovsky’s involvement in Petya’s recovery filled her with anxiety.

On the way home, she considered how she should reveal to her sensitive father the special privilege Kamarovsky was granting him. Father and daughter’s pact of silence, Viktor Ipalyevich’s resolute overlooking of the obvious, required a complex ritual, with whose help he was able to justify to himself his double way of thinking. Anna bought meat, vegetables, and—even though it exceeded her household budget—a can of peaches in syrup.

“I have a pork shank for us,” she called out when she entered the apartment. “I’m going to cook it to celebrate this day.” She went into the kitchen and set about putting her words into action.

Although Viktor Ipalyevich had contempt for the economy of privilege in a state whose foundation was equality, he accepted Anna’s privileges, through which he lived a comfortable life free from material cares. He smoked cigars that couldn’t be found in any ordinary Moscow shop, and he wore arch supports in his shoes; under normal circumstances, he would have had to wait until his splayfeet became chronic before his application for such a luxury as shoe lifts would have been approved. The box of pills that Anna had obtained from Shchedrin’s private dispensary was not a mere convenience, it was a distinction; such a gift couldn’t be dismissed as a bribe, like real coffee or cotton towels. Her little boy’s life was about to undergo a vast improvement.

Now Viktor Ipalyevich started trying to figure things out: It was an ordinary weekday, and in a few hours, his daughter’s afternoon shift would begin. There had been nothing in the mail that could explain
Anna’s words. What reason was there to celebrate? He went through the family birthdays; none of them fell in March. “So what’s the occasion?” he asked, as mildly as possible.

“Be patient!” Anna called out, relieved to find that he was playing along without resistance, but still searching her imagination for a way to avoid bruising his class warrior’s pride. She boned the meat, tied it around a bundle of herbs and vegetables, seasoned it, browned it with garlic and onions, and put it all in the oven. After scrubbing the onion smell off her hands, she took the bottle of Soviet Champagne out of her shopping bag and gathered up two large glasses and a shot glass for Petya.

“That’s all for today,” she said by way of inviting her father to remove his writing materials from the table, which she then began to set.

“Smells great,” Viktor Ipalyevich declared. He went to the sofa, sat down, and paged through his notes, all without looking at her. After she returned to the kitchen, he followed her movements through the open door. She added tomato puree and caraway seeds to the roasting meat, cuddled with Petya, who had come running into the kitchen, sat him on the work surface, and let him watch as she cut up the pork. After arranging it on the porcelain dish with the violet pattern, she called to her father to open the Champagne. Viktor Ipalyevich popped the cork. The wine spilled over the rim of Petya’s little glass, and the boy contorted himself to lick it.

“To the health of a distinguished poet—my father.”

“I’m not going to respond to you until you explain the reason for this mysterious announcement.”

She served father, son, and herself some meat, put the rest on the stove to keep warm, and came back into the room with one hand behind her back.

“You’ve got mail, Papa.” She laid the Glavlit decision on the table next to his plate.

For a moment, he considered challenging her lie—he knew their mailbox had been empty—but his curiosity was too great, and it was
followed by disbelieving amazement. With his fork in one raised hand and the document in the other, the poet read the news of his pardon.

“This is almost three weeks old,” he said, pointing to the issuance date and trying to cover up his emotion by being gruff.

Anna, too, had noticed that Kamarovsky had apparently held on to this reward for her work until he thought the proper time had come to reveal it. “You know how bureaucrats are,” she said.

“Good God,” her father murmured. He pressed his lips together, but his agitation, hot and irrepressible, overcame him. He stood up, laid the document on the middle of the table, and took off his cap. Gray, frizzy hairs stuck up in all directions, and his white pate contrasted with the brown skin of his forehead. Shaken, his shoulders slumping, the poet stood over the table, supporting himself on its top and muttering while a thread of saliva dripped from his mouth. His grandson gave Anna a perplexed look as his own small lips began to tremble. Happy though she was, Anna wouldn’t give in to sentimentality; instead she cried, “But that doesn’t mean the food should get cold!”

Viktor Ipalyevich sank down onto his chair as though a hand had been laid on his shoulder. He cut himself a bit of pork and took a bite. Tears ran down his cheeks. After a while, he spoke. “I must … before anything else, I have to …” he said. “The proper sequence!” He raised his head. “The proper sequence is very important. Will you help me, Petya?”

“With what, Dyedushka?”

“We have to get our poems out. We’ll look at every single one of them—no, even better, you’ll read them to me. What do you think? And after that, we’ll decide which one should come first, which one second, and so on. And in the end—you understand, Petya?—we’ll have a whole book full of poems.”

The boy nodded and said, “I’ll read them.” Then, to give himself strength, he said it again: “Yes, I’ll read them. When do I start?”

“This very evening!” His incredulity mingling with the recognition
of what a profound and thorough change that piece of paper signified for him, Viktor Ipalyevich renewed his assault on the pork, chewed a mouthful, and emptied his glass in one gulp. In his excitement, he dunked one corner of the Glavlit document in tomato sauce.

Anna recalled that there was something else she’d intended to do that evening. The reason behind her intention lay in the last question Shchedrin had asked her: “Has there been any family incident that might have distressed Petya?” As she sat there in confused silence, the doctor had explained his query: “Allergy sufferers need a calm, secure environment. Distress or anger can intensify their allergies or even cause allergies to break out. Have you and yours undergone some sort of change that has disturbed Petya? It could be something that happened months ago.”

Anna had begun to perspire, and the floor had seemed to be shaking beneath her. “My husband’s a soldier,” she’d answered. “He was transferred out of Moscow almost a year ago.”

“Did father and son have a good relationship?”

Anna had done some mental reckoning: Petya’s symptoms had manifested themselves after Leonid’s departure. The relationship between the two of them was not merely good, but intimate, playful, filled with deep trust. One heart and one soul—that’s what they actually were. A telephone call is expensive, Anna thought, basically beyond our means, but this evening, she would call Leonid and tell him about Petya’s illness. She’d put the boy on the telephone and let them chat with each other. It was the least she could do.

ELEVEN

L
eonid hung up. For a long moment, he stood still, his back to the desk in the military guard post. The soft voice still sounded in his ears. It was eight o’clock in the morning, and therefore midnight in Moscow; if Anna let Petya stay up so late, the thing must mean a lot to her. Leonid thanked the sergeant for having notified him, buttoned his overcoat all the way up, and left the central barracks. The windstorm was so strong that it pressed him against the wooden hut’s exterior wall. Leonid pulled down his ear flaps and fastened them under his chin. Bent forward, holding his arms tightly to his sides, he struggled on. There was nobody else on the parade ground; most of the barracks had wooden planks across the windows, screwed into place to keep the gusts from bursting the glass panes.

Leonid shivered. In this weather, he was supposed to assemble a technical squad and see to the cutter that had gone aground with its cargo of scrap iron during the night. Here, at the southernmost point of Sakhalin Island, most ships anchored at a respectful distance from the coast, for the sea was treacherous. The Three Brothers, three jagged reefs thrusting up out of the water, became invisible in heavy seas. The coastline consisted of dark inlets whose rock formations had formerly been exploited for their coal beds. In the winter months, the sharp-edged forms were
veiled by storms and snow flurries, and the cold temperatures burst the sewer pipes that emptied into the sea at this point. Waves as black as night broke over the decks of the patrol ships; that morning, they had been unable to sail because the cutter was blocking their passage.

“How did the boat even get into the prohibited area?” the major had asked Leonid at morning roll call.

“The southwest drift turned east overnight,” Leonid replied. “When the ship became disabled, the captain let it be driven into the bay and stranded so it wouldn’t sink in the open sea.”

“Check the ship’s papers, the nationalities of the sailors, and their Party membership, if any, and examine the bill of lading and the cargo,” the major had ordered. “I don’t want to be fooled by some damned Jap.”

“The cutter sailed from Vladivostok three days ago.”

“How do we know she didn’t make an intermediate stop in Japan? Pay close attention to the tachograph.” With this final instruction, Leonid was dismissed.

When he got close to the crews’ quarters, the one-story building, anchored to the ground with steel cables, protected him from the wind. Now able to walk upright, Leonid continued on. The major was well aware that the freighter, which had picked up its cargo of scrap iron along the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, was no spy ship. The reefs off Korsakov had brought many a vessel into distress, either because the ships lacked the necessary navigation equipment or because they were overloaded and could no longer be steered. By this time of year, it was possible that the sea a few hundred miles to the north would be unnavigable for a vessel without ice-breaking equipment, so the stop in Korsakov was to have been the last for the cutter with the scrap-iron cargo before her return journey; but the Three Brothers had seen to it that this would be the freighter’s last journey of all.

The technical section’s offices were located off to one side of the post. The advantage of this position was that the soldiers of the unit could guard their camp themselves. Had the guard detachment been under
company command, it wouldn’t have been long before individual pieces of equipment started to appear on the black market. The disadvantage of the little cluster of huts was that they stood so close to the edge of the cliff; one false step or strong gust of wind, and one could vanish into the void. Leonid grasped the steel cord that served as a handrail and moved along it, hand over hand, taking care to avoid the slippery seaweed that the storm tide had washed up three hundred feet high.

The technical service considered itself an elite unit. Its personnel, exclusively seamen, had managed to acquire, piece by piece, the most modern equipment for their detachment. The fact that Leonid, the landlubber, was their commanding officer had to do with the death of Captain Ordzhonikidze, who’d fallen off the cliff during a risky operation; the search for his body had only recently been called off. The Korsakov military base was chronically understaffed, it hadn’t been possible to mobilize a specialist from any other garrison, and so Captain Leonid Nechayev had been transferred there, temporarily, it was said. Leonid knew that such temporary arrangements sometimes lasted until the soldier in question retired from the army.

The transfer to a unit that actually had a mission was a surprise and even an irritation to him. Monotony had been the most characteristic feature of his previous years of service. While many officers suffered from such a state of affairs, Leonid had found it to his liking. Not out of dullness or laziness, but because symmetry, equilibrium, fascinated him. Even though he didn’t think in terms of such comparisons, he experienced the daily repetition of life as a monkish activity and the barracks as the scene of a cloistered existence: the early morning siren, like a gigantic rooster; the men standing shoulder to shoulder and washing themselves; the indistinguishable, dull gray, badly shaved faces in the mirrors; the preapportioned breakfasts. The sausage rounds on each plate were as identical as the men who swallowed them. At morning roll call, officers stood on one side and men on the other, but these could not exist without those, and vice versa. There were indeed differences in
the work—one man sat in the supply room, another was assigned to the paymaster or performed guard duty—but, strictly speaking, what did they do? They punched holes in papers and filed them away in pasteboard binders, or someone drew up lists, another checked them, and a third checked the checker. Lunch, dinner, latrine break one hour after each meal, Party indoctrination in the evening, close of duty, taps: The same sequence was followed today, as it would be tomorrow and the rest of the week, of the winter, of the year. Even the nightly booze-up brought the day to an end in friendly monotony; everyone drank his half-liter bottle, became mellow and jovial, spoke sentimentally, and fell onto his bunk in a daze. It pleased Leonid to see so many men, different in age, temperament, and nationality, welded together into a single cohort. Their thoughts and hopes—pay, women, leave, family—resembled one another like eggs in a basket. Everywhere outside of the army, results had to be achieved and plans carried out; jobs were specialized and required individual commitment. The Red Army defined itself through its steadfastness. Its task consisted in being monolithic, in raising the unchangeable to the level of a principle. Should the army one day give up this position, it would be all over with security, and, above all, with the security in people’s heads.