A Very Private Plot (5 page)

The rector faced a problem he had faced only once before—a fifteen-year-old academically qualified for university training. The time before, it had been a disaster, because the girl could not adjust to the company of young men and women three, four, five years older than she. He had sent her away after two months, back to her village. It would not be easy to predict whether young Nikolai would get along with the older students. The rector decided to begin by probing the boy's mind and his capacity to handle himself.

“Is it so, Nikolai, that you have read all the books in the library at Brovary?”

“I think so, Comrade Rector. At least I cannot find any book I have not read. Of course, I haven't read every word in the Soviet Encyclopedia, although I consult it often.”

The rector reflected that a student bent on reading any edition of the entire Soviet Encyclopedia would have to rush to do so before a revised Soviet Encyclopedia came in, according as this revisionist in Moscow prevailed over that one. “Have you read Marx?”

“Oh yes, Comrade Rector. Although I cannot say that I fully understand him. But of course that must be the reason why Marx is taught all the way up”—Nikolai gestured with his hand pointing to the ceiling—“through graduate school.”

“Do you have any difficulty in understanding the central thrust of Marx-Lenin historical imperatives?” Perhaps that would slow the boy down, the rector thought.

“Oh no, Comrade Rector. None at all. Marx and Lenin divined the secrets of history, and we need now only to wait until historical evolution validates, as it must, their thought.”

The rector eyed Nikolai Trimov. The rector was on guard. Nikolai's responses might have been written for a student prepared to be exhibited to visiting ideologues. But there was no trace in Nikolai's face of disingenuousness, let alone cynicism.

“You realize that the Soviet state is being asked to bear the very considerable burden of sending you to a university where all your expenses are paid, and where you are provided with free room and board?”

“Yes, Comrade Rector.”

“What is it you wish most to study?”

“Anything, Comrade Rector. I am interested in every subject, and will be glad to specialize in any field you recommend.”

This boy is … the rector was inclined to smile, but he was accustomed to suppressing such temptations. There was clearly no point in questioning Nikolai Trimov's capacity to mix with older students. If anything, he would find them childish.

The rector dispatched Nikolai home to Brovary. Three weeks later, Nikolai was back in Kiev, moved into a dormitory with twenty other students, each with his own cubicle. Nikolai had his own desk and a small locker, a bed and a lamp, and this room he occupied for five years. At first he was the object of much raillery from lusty eighteen-year-olds who thought him a quaint biological anomaly, a fifteen-year-old with the manners of a confident but self-effacing young man. He accepted their taunts, but his behavior was altogether conventional. In two respects he dissimulated. When he played chess, he would often contrive to lose to his competitors. And when, at the end of the first semester, the time came for posting grades, Nikolai requested an audience with the rector. His plea was straightforward, and modestly put. Might it be contrived to reduce his grades by one or two levels? The rector's astonishment Nikolai had anticipated. He gave his reasoning before being asked to do so. He said that at his age it was difficult as it was to be in competition with young men and women who were older. If his grades were dramatically in the first rank, this would make social adjustments even more difficult. The rector smiled inwardly—he almost never smiled on the outside.

He said quite simply that he would confer with the relevant faculty and see what could be done. This meant, when spoken by the rector, that what would be done was what the rector ordained would be done. When the grades were posted, Nikolai Trimov got straight B's. In fact he led his classmates in every subject. In his third year, the rector summoned Trimov and told him that as a practical matter, he needed to decide in which subject he would acquire professional accreditation. Nikolai replied that he would do as counseled: In which field of studies did the rector think he might be most useful to the Soviet state, which was treating him so generously? The rector responded that students should never forget the apothegm so firmly grounded in Soviet legend, Lenin's doctrine that communism was Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.

It followed that Nikolai should become, by training, an electrical engineer. He would not be discouraged from developing his other affinities, most especially the study of foreign languages, in which he was singularly gifted.

The years went by, and Nikolai not only was accepted by his classmates but became a favorite. He was nominated for president of his class when he was a junior but declined, pleading that he did not feel that at his age he was equipped to assume any position of leadership in dealing with his elders. His withdrawal from candidacy as president was accepted as another token of the young man's modesty. But when time came to begin the military training in which all the students participated, he was not able to shrink from the responsibilities that attached to someone of his standing: He was required to accept officer training. He did his work as an officer candidate with characteristic calm and proficiency.

What seemed a mere season went by quickly: five years, at the end of which he received two certificates on the same day. He was now an electrical engineer and a second lieutenant. He could not know when he would be put to work as a professional, but it was instantly clear that no time would be lost in dispatching him to duty as a soldier. The need for platoon leaders on the Afghanistan front was acute. After a two-week leave spent with Titka in Brovary, he reported for duty. He found himself, with the soldiers assigned to him, on a troop train headed for Kabul.

It had been a tortuous journey of very nearly 4,200 kilometers, even though the distance as the crow flies was only 3,500 kilometers. Kiev, Nikolai calculated, was closer to London than to Kabul.

The trip had begun on March 2. On March 11, 1985, Lieutenant Nikolai Trimov and his relief company of infantrymen reported for duty, and Mikhail Gorbachev, a junior official in the Kremlin, was named General Secretary of the Communist Party.

CHAPTER 6

MARCH 1985

Nikolai had read reports about Soviet wounded in Afghanistan in the great military offensive under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev that dismayed those who believed Soviet expansionism had finally ended with Moscow's consolidation of its hold over Eastern Europe. But the reports that reached Soviet citizens were oblique and muted. At Kiev, Nikolai had seen at first hand a dozen disabled veterans. One he saw struggling across the cobbled pavement of Lenkomsomol Square, trying to get used to artificial legs. Another, a startlingly young-looking boy, blind, being led by a young woman through the market while he maneuvered his long, slender white cane, feeling out, tentatively, the contours of the ground.

And there had been all those whispers at the university. He had enrolled in January of 1980, only one month after Brezhnev began the military operation, after solemnly announcing that the Afghan government had petitioned for help against fascist elements. It was everywhere assumed that the war would quickly be over, given the preponderance of Soviet arms. But by the third year, at the end of which Andropov succeeded Brezhnev, fighting was still going on and triumphant reports in the Soviet press about front-line activity were increasingly rare, supplanted more and more by rumors of extraordinary Afghan resistance. The students drew the obvious inferences.

In Nikolai's fifth year at college, Andropov died and the doddering Chernenko became General Secretary. The dominant rumors were to the effect that the old man would find a means to acknowledge that the Afghan venture was no longer, well, required, even under the Brezhnev Doctrine, which held that any land once governed by Soviet socialism would forever be socialist. But there was no sign of decreased military activity or of official irresolution, and the war went on and on, and relief units like the unit Nikolai was now attached to were sent down regularly to the front.

As the capital city of Kabul came finally into view after the long journey from Kiev, Nikolai sensed that he might come upon discouraging sights. Carrying his full field pack, leading his platoon toward the assigned barracks, he found himself marching parallel to the hospital unit. He had been prepared for the wounded, but he now got a sensation of the scale of the suffering. The army “hospital” was one barracks building after another, converted from their use as shelters for able-bodied soldiers into shelters for soldiers who were casualties. Nikolai counted thirty-two such buildings in a row, and at that, he could not tell whether the parallel lines of barracks were also being used for the wounded. His platoon followed him, in loose formation. As they walked along the length of the barracks, Lieutenant Trimov attempted to mute the sounds they heard from within the hospital by gradually widening the distance between his unit and the hospital complex. But he had to follow the jeep with the guide from headquarters, which was showing him the way to his platoon's quarters. He could hardly ask the driver and warrant officer kindly to move out of earshot of the moaning and screaming they now heard even through the husky wooden barracks walls, designed to shield soldiers from the fabled Kabul winter.

They arrived at last. After seeing that his platoon was housed and that arrangements were made to feed his men, Nikolai walked to the bachelor officers' quarters, into the room he had been assigned. He opened the door and saw a very large figure entirely naked, straining, before a small mirror fastened to the wall, to trim his mustache. The man turned his head slightly, seeming to keep one eye on the mirror, and said, “You Trimov?”

“Yes,” Trimov said, tossing his heavy pack on the unoccupied bed.

“They told me I'd be sharing a room. If you don't mind my saying so, Trimov, I rather wish you were a girl.” He laughed as he snipped the final hair on his mustache and put down his scissors. “Belinkov. First Lieutenant Andrei Belinkov, when I have my uniform on.” He extended his hand, and Nikolai took it.

“I suppose,” Belinkov continued while dressing, “that at some point we can become acquainted. But my suggestion is that we go now to the field club and have a vodka before supper. It is quite necessary, Trimov—your first name?”

“Nikolai.”

“It is quite necessary, Nikolai, to have some vodka before you eat. Otherwise you will not ingest, to say nothing of
digest
, the food they serve here. In fact, it would be quite useful if you brought a blindfold into the mess hall. The food tastes better if you do not view it.”

Nikolai said he would be glad to accompany Belinkov. “But I shan't join you with the vodka. I have never taken vodka.”

Belinkov, struggling to put on his trousers, stopped in mid-motion, unbelieving. “
You have never taken vodka
? Eighteen weeks of basic training and no vodka?” He paused. “What did you do before basic?”

Nikolai explained that he was a university student, that his monthly allowance had been barely sufficient to buy him an occasional foreign book—

“You know a foreign language?”

Nikolai said that in fact yes, he had studied foreign languages.

“Foreign
languages
? What languages have you studied?”

Nikolai had once or twice before run into this problem. Either he would tell the truth or, for fear of being thought a braggart, he would dissimulate. The fatiguing experiences of the three hours since getting off the transport bus at Kabul impelled him to recklessness. “I have studied English and German. Also French and Italian.”

Belinkov completed pulling up his pants, reached for a shirt, and, finally, spoke softly. “
Can you understand English when it is spoken
?”

“Yes. Provided it is not too rapid.” The hell with it, Nikolai thought. He would tell the whole truth. “But even if it
is
rapid, I can understand quite well.”

Belinkov leaned over to his locker, dug his large hand deep within it, and came up with what was discernibly a portable radio. “The Russian-language channels from England and America are blocked. But at ten-thirty at night and six-thirty in the morning there is a news broadcast in English. It will tell us what is going on. Or at least, that is what old Foxov told me he heard from one of the doctors who was English; the poor dumb bastard, why didn't he stay English?”

“Who, Foxov?”

“No!” Belinkov exploded with frustration over such a gross misunderstanding. “The
doctor
who heard the broadcasts and who told Foxov—
he
was raised in England. Foxov is dead. Maybe the doctor is dead also. But the English broadcasts continue, they are not dead. Every now and then I tune in, just to check that they are still there.” Belinkov was dressed now, and while he talked, Nikolai had prepared himself—he threw off his bulky jacket and put on a lighter parka—to go to the club and the mess hall.

At the club they occupied a small corner of the crowded room. Belinkov had a half pint of vodka, Nikolai a bottle of ginger beer. Andrei Belinkov was beginning his second year of duty, he revealed, and would serve as company commander of the unit, one platoon of which would be led by Nikolai. “I will not tell you about conditions out in the field, because what you are drinking is not enough to anesthetize you to what I would describe. You will of course get the regular indoctrination from General Zaitsev—you will be interested to know that officers who have been in combat not only aren't invited to be present at indoctrinations of new officers, they are not permitted. Such …
manure
as they will give you. Much good it does, since it will be only a matter of weeks—who knows, maybe days—before they move us all out; and then you will see for yourself.” He stared into his glass. “But sometimes I wish to scream because the same human beings, flesh and blood, who fill those festooned uniforms know exactly what is going on, and what use is it for them to think they can hide it from such as you, when you will see it yourself, taste it yourself, in no time at all? What did you study at the university? I mean, besides Dutch, Urdu, and Romansch?”