Document Z (7 page)

Volodya shrugged. ‘We crossed a creek.'

‘You were hunting?'

‘Doing errands.'

‘Errands, but crossing creeks?'

‘Yes.'

‘With dogs and rifles?'

‘Just cover. Hunting as cover.'

She knew that was a lie. ‘You decided to go hunting and forget the garden box,' she said.

‘No.'

‘Tell the truth.'

‘You don't know, Doosia. I needed to do some things, country things, I needed Jack for a story.'

‘You took Kislitsyn too? Did you take Zizka?'

‘Of course not.'

‘Perhaps I will ask them. Whether, this holiday, they were at home with their wives?'

He stood up from the table and changed the tuning of the radio, giving the dial a violent jerk.

‘What will you do in Sydney?' she asked.

He collected his plate to leave the room. ‘That is official,' he told her. ‘Not yet any business of yours.'

The ambassador laughed into the phone. Evdokia was taking notes while he spoke with his Swiss counterpart. The Swiss man was now making jokes. Lifanov's laugh started and ended in his gut, lifting him from his seat. On telephone calls, his habit was to jam his finger under the cradle, as if the spring in the mechanism might fail at any moment and the cradle give way under its own weight, disconnecting him.

At the conversation's end, he had Evdokia read him back the notes. On her way out, she said to him, ‘Nicolai Nikhailovich, I hope you are not angry about the dog trials. The men were very drunk. It would have been dangerous for them to drive.'

He laughed happily and looked at her. He said that Vasili Sanko had driven safely. The chauffeur's wife had promised the ambassador the chance to cut off her husband's head should the pair arrive anything less than sound. They'd sung a song and negotiated the corners slowly.

‘You arrived safely then?'

‘Sanko has a head.' The ambassador smiled.

That afternoon she went upstairs. The silence of the secret section was the same silence you heard in the corridors of Dzer-zhinsky Square. She worked quietly at the administrative desk, tabulating the results of a stocktake of MVD equipment, cataloguing anything of security interest that couldn't be burnt.

2 × Nagant M1895 revolvers

1 × radio receiver (dismantled)

4 × official MVD seal

1 × photographic enlarger . . .

Suddenly, Prudnikov was whispering from the door. The chief cypher clerk had one foot in the hall and was holding a square of paper. They were the only two in the section. ‘Nina and I are sorry,' he said. ‘About what is happening. We must follow the ambassador's lead.' He looked down the corridor, towards the stairs. ‘But we are friends, we hope you know. Volodya is in Sydney?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then I will show you this so that you may know.'

The page he held was a private cable from Lifanov to Moscow. It said that Third Secretary Petrov was drunk on duty and disobeying direct orders.

‘I am cyphering this,' said Prudnikov. ‘It will go tomorrow.'

She thanked him. He put the cable into a folder and disappeared.

Volodya rang from the Oriental Hotel. Sydney had seen sun showers, which was the impossible situation of rain on your face and the sun on your skin. It was seven o'clock now. He was going to have dinner. He sounded crisp and a little contrite.

‘Mirabel,' he said.

‘Mirabel?'

‘That child. The daughter at 16 Lefroy Street.'

Evdokia knew the girl. Six or seven years old, brown hair, little red sandals. She walked by the house every morning on her way to the Telopea Park school. She played sometimes with the boys in the street, and she'd come to their door once, without escort, selling tickets for a raffle.

‘I think we should ask her parents whether we can adopt her,' said Volodya.

Evdokia was silent.

‘I think it is a good idea,' her husband continued. ‘We can promise she will be well looked after. We can tell her parents that she will be given a good home and a good education in Russia.'

She had been going to tell him about Lifanov. Instead, she stood there somewhat stunned.

‘When I am back,' Volodya said before disconnecting. ‘We will talk more about it then.'

She walked through the house, switching on all the lights. It was a crazy idea, Mirabel in their apartment in Moscow, a novelty Australian daughter. Was Volodya serious, or was he simply up there in Sydney halfway drunk? Thinking it over, it eventually occurred to her that his suggestion was probably an attempt at making amends for his hunting. An apology of sorts. The idea was actually quite galling—Volodya presenting the possibility of a child to her as if the suggestion of a daughter was a peace offering equivalent to bunched flowers, a piece of jewellery or some coffee. It stung. It was infuriating. She began thinking about Irina—the slight that her husband had just delivered on herself and her daughter both. Then she pictured Volodya's face again from that day's end; his arrival at her apartment, her struggle to relay the news and his developing of that crippled look that she'd never forget, her daughter's lifeless body in its bed. The forty strange hours of flu and fever; the nausea, the cold limbs and the flights through delirium; the lucid hours that were perfect resurrections until each time the fever hit again and with increased vigour. Until the last.

It was difficult to reconcile Volodya's kindness at that time with now. Still, she thought their marriage was strong. In the beginning, after their wedding in Moscow, he'd directed upon them a focus that was at times overbearing, their lives overlapping to the degree that she often complained she needed release. But it was an intensity that had had its uses, allowing her to cope. Perhaps it was just the natural way of things that, since then, his attentions had been slowly travelling beyond them. She thought he was increasingly self-focused, progressively more foreclosed. On their excursions or at the gatherings they attended as a couple, there was a developing sense of his acting alone, of needs that excluded her, a selfish-ness in his behaviour that wasn't malicious but that was there all the same. The secrecy did not help. In Sweden, and here in Australia, he seemed to know full well that he could cloak whatever he wished by evoking the MVD's name. Still, none of this concerned her too much. She thought that these were ordinary pressures—the same as those on any union. What husband wasn't selfish and unthinking at times?

She had arrived at the window of the spare bedroom. About to draw the curtains, she saw through the window two human shapes: two pin-prick glints of cigarette, two men sitting outside in a car—the car where you'd park if you were trying to surveil or intimidate the house.

She was being paranoid, she knew. She closed the curtains and went and reheated some stew; dropped bits of potato into Jack's mouth while listening to a news broadcast on the radio. Returning to the bedroom, she looked through the gap between the curtains, with the light off. The car was still there.

Modes of fear. She wasn't afraid to begin with, but as time wore on a nervousness set in, a tightening sensation in the blood. She rang the operator and asked the girl to pass a message to the police: a suspicious car on Lockyer Street. Prowlers?

The police came in a gleaming white utility with a loudspeaker on its roof. One officer, turning into the street from Canberra Avenue, parking right behind the car with his headlamps ionising the back bumper. He spent a few moments at the wheel of the utility, as if pondering the object in front and gathering his thoughts. Then he got out and walked up the gutter and leaned into the car. The conversation lasted a few minutes. The policeman wrote something on a pad and went back. He sat in the utility—Evdokia thought maybe talking on his radio—then he cut half the power to his headlamps and drove away.

The car remained. One figure looked directly at the house now, the other behind and around.

There was a heavy spanner in the bathroom where Volodya had been changing washers. She stood with this weapon in one hand and Jack's collar in the other. Jack knew that something was happening but not quite what. He pulled against her grip, low vibrations in his throat. The people in the car wound down their windows. She decided to switch on the outdoor light. Its glow fell weakly on the road, hardly more than a gravesman's lamp.

Even as the engine started, the car's occupants seemed coolly unperturbed. They moved slowly to Lefroy Street, turning right, headlamps off. She was taking a long breath at the window when she had the feeling that there was someone in the room. Jack barked. The sound rang out like a shot in an enclosed space and she dropped the spanner and swung around.

There was no one. She cursed the dog quietly as her heart came to rest. She cursed and patted him at the same time.

At the back door she checked the bolts. She went to their bedroom and set down a towel. The flex cord on the telephone extended a few inches under the door. She moved it into the room, put the reading chair against the door, the dog on the towel and the spanner by the bedside lamp. These were practical precautions. She was no longer afraid. Life had just seen enough trouble caused by men breaking through doors in the middle of the night not to act in cases of fair warning.

They met at the Canberra railway, a station like a weatherboard homestead, black tar on the platform and a cracking concrete area for travellers' cars, turning circles marked by white stone. It was only a few hundred metres from the house. Volodya carried his suitcase, Evdokia his satchel.

Crossing the avenue, she informed him of the ambassador's report.

‘He's sent it already?' Volodya said.

‘Yes.'

‘It will be alright.'

‘No, it won't.'

‘Well.'

‘You gave him things to cite. Drunkenness, refusing his command. You were foolish.'

Volodya unlocked their front door. ‘Who is Lifanov to command?' he spat. ‘Which of us is the fearsome MVD?'

‘He is winning.'

‘We need something on him. If necessary, we'll make it up.'

‘I don't want this again.'

‘It's alright. I'm not your last husband, a weak target. I am different. You will see.'

They went to bed.

She didn't like Volodya talking about Irina's father that way but she said nothing. It was cruel to suggest that the arrest was Alexei's fault: the random nature of the terror; you couldn't assign blame, and you couldn't truly think that weakness made a difference. But then again, perhaps it did. Take herself as the example. Her husband arrested in their flat after midnight, never to be heard of again: it should have been a fate shared by association, but in the weeks following she'd put up a terrific fight for herself, for Irina, had proved them strong enough to survive.

She'd done the necessary things, visited the right people with the right powers, committed acts that needed strength. She'd been so focused that there had been no time to fret over Alexei's vanishing. He was gone; no point in asking questions, in dwelling on him as if he might somewhere still exist. In fact, to do so could have been dangerous. Not so strange then, that her memories of him now were split from her memories of Irina; two entities, unrelated, existing in the same lifetime, the same places, the same flat, but in wholly different lives, no bridge between; Alexei hanging so far from everything that most times, when encountered in some accidental thought, the man was a complete surprise.

She wasn't sure what to make of it, the fact he could be so easily erased. She'd been young when she'd moved in with him. She had felt that she loved him fiercely. He was bright: only twenty-two and already researching and teaching in a university, a respected radio engineer, part of a specialist team developing a new and more reliable form of valve. It was a project that the military had an interest in, and secrecy prevented him telling her much about it, but he would bring drawings home to amend and she would watch his careful diagramming from the other side of the room, eventually seeking to distract him by standing behind him, placing an arm along his, or leaning her weight against him. He was an intense and quiet person, which was what Volodya meant by weak. They had been living together for two years before the arrest. She had come to suspect that the event had something to do with the project—a jealous member of the team, perhaps, putting Alexei in: a target who as a result of his introverted nature appeared isolated, more disconnected than others, a man who could disappear with little consequent fuss. But who really knew? Years later, she saw a former colleague of his who told her that he was in a prison not far from Moscow. By this time she was married to Volodya and, within this new existence, the idea of Alexei had become abstract. Perhaps, at the time, Volodya's voluble, borderless personality had swallowed quiet Alexei up.

6

S
aturday night and Doctor Bialoguski was at the Russian Social Club, wearing a grey suit and a red bow tie, sitting against the wall, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, listening to the jump and swell of the band; a poor lot of musicians to his mind, completely uninventive and not particularly well rehearsed.

The club was in the basement of a building on George Street. It was one cavernous space and a few smaller rooms, thick velvet curtains—draped with Soviet flags—over the walls, which gave the music a muggy tone and swallowed the noise of conversation.

Tonight, he had a good spot for observing. The crowd was a large one, even by weekend standards. The club had recently been banned by the Labor Party, who were now considering it a communist front. The news had made the papers. It seemed the publicity was serving it well.

Across the room, he saw Bela Weiner. The girl was entertaining a table of young men, sailors probably, all seemingly transfixed by her diminutive and quite intoxicating Jewish features—good wrapping for the eloquent communism that was her inner light. He had to admire Bela. She would have recruited these boys off the ship this morning, entranced them, handed them a card for the club. She was a prolific promoter, spoke several languages, and he respected her commitment— even if she was deluded—to the communist cause.