Good People (9 page)

Somebody had to stop it.

Instead of turning into Liteiny Prospect, the automobile turned south.

‘Aren't we going to
bolshoi dom
?' Sasha asked the agents.

‘Did you hear that?' the driver's companion chuckled. ‘Comrade Weissberg wants to go to
bolshoi dom
.'

‘Are we going there or not?' she asked sternly.

‘Comrade Weissberg,' the driver intervened in a conciliatory tone,
‘your meeting will take place elsewhere. When we get there, they'll explain everything.'

He sped up. She was silent, and the agents also stopped talking. Two planes flew over them. The agent in the passenger seat pointed at them with enthusiasm. The moon pierced the dome of clouds, and silvered the wings of the planes, which looked as though they were flying directly into it. Darkness fell on the road. She wasn't disturbed by the change in plan. It was a foolish thought that he or his men might harm her: he wouldn't allow anything to happen to her. The car slowed, turned into a narrower road, and glided into an unpaved lot where other black vehicles were parked in tight rows. She got out and followed the two men at a distance. They took a sloping path, and when she looked down at the parking lot, perhaps the darkest piece of ground she'd ever seen, she remembered the visions that her mother would conjure up when she wanted to scare her: the black-robed horsemen of the apocalypse, having gathered in their final assembly, would soon storm the world with bows, arrows and swords, but first they would take care of naughty twelve-year-old girls who allowed Maxim Adamovich Podolsky to fondle their breasts.

She trailed after the agents. Her scalp felt hot and itchy. She poked a finger under the scarf, scratched vigorously, and in her heart she cursed the bastards. An annoying eddy of air hovered across the path and buffeted her. Why did the agents look so tall? Her back and calves hurt, but she hurried after them.

‘Comrade Weissberg, almost there,' the driver called.

The winds strengthened. Their shriek was piercing. Her panting sounded ugly to her.

He was standing around a sharp bend, hidden from the climber's eye. She almost collided with him. A woollen coat rested on his shoulders like a stylish robe. Behind him loomed a broad and silent building, whose illuminated windows cast pentagons of light onto the courtyard, which the night didn't touch at all.

His proximity surprised her, and she flinched. He placed a hand on her hips, and she pushed it away, but his other arm was already
encircling her body, pulling it close to him.

Maxim Adamovich Podolsky winked at her. ‘Alexandra Andreyevna,' he laughed, ‘be careful not to fall and hurt yourself. Hosts of men will take to the streets to avenge you if we lose you.'

‘Hello, Comrade Podolsky,' she said. Here, in the company of his colleagues, she addressed him formally.

‘Comrade Weissberg,' he replied in an official tone and brought his lips to her ear. His breath warmed her earlobe. ‘I apologise for dragging you out here. This weekend there's going to be an assembly of our people from the whole district. It's a convenient, quiet place, as you see, and there are enough bedrooms for everyone. I gathered from your message that our meeting couldn't be postponed.'

‘Correct,' she said.

‘Anyway, I'm sorry you had to walk up here. Those weren't my instructions. I intended to meet you down below.'

He was lying, she decided. He had been waiting for her around the bend, and those had been precisely his instructions.

Podolsky reached his hand out to her with the familiar peacock-like gesture that he affected sometimes to amuse himself, copied out of books for foppish noblemen. Had he ever wondered why he chose that particular gesture? Maxim Podolsky was a man whose body was always stiffened with compressed power, confident that his every deed was for the good, rooted in noble motives, in his pure desire to benefit the people around him. He once quoted Mephistopheles from Goethe's
Faust
:

That was four years earlier, on the first day of their last year of school. Each of the students had been asked to bring a quotation that described who they were. She had chosen lines by Nadyezhda Petrovna:

‘Your mum is a smart woman,' said Podolsky. They stepped back down the path, leaving the circle of white light, and Sasha felt as if she had escaped from a trap.

‘I've already heard that tonight.'

‘Very smart,' Podolsky repeated. ‘To the best of my understanding, she set up the little meeting in your house this evening so that our informer would lead us to the connection between Nadyezhda Petrovna and Bliumkin, and from there to the Trotskyites. An excellent trick. You should have seen the report that was handed to us.'

‘Osip Borisovich?' she asked weakly. Sometimes even treachery that you expect can be painful.

He ignored her. ‘The agents here were very excited. Reznikov from the second department was shouting like a madman.' Podolsky pulled a face and pranced around her. ‘“Give me those traitors! Let me get my hands on them!”'

Sasha shuddered. ‘So maybe it will help. Bliumkin?'

‘It wasn't a bad idea to send us in that direction,' Podolsky mused. ‘Bliumkin was eliminated even before Nadyezhda knew your father. The problem is that your father's name already showed up in the Pyatakov affair, and now it's showing up again.'

He linked his arm in hers. The steep path she remembered from her climb up had flattened out. They neared the black cars. In the dark, from slightly above, the parking lot looked like a field of greenish-black trees, like the forests you see stretching away from the train window into another country.

‘If you listen, you can hear planes from here,' he said, but she couldn't hear anything. The way that aeroplanes, or, to be more precise, parachuting out of them, excited young men was irritating.

They walked between the cars. Podolsky lit a match and looked
into the windows, checking the back seats.

The asphalt in the schoolyard—warm, rough, strewn with trampled leaves. The first autumn of the fourth grade. Podolsky and his mates, a bunch of kids in grey trousers, ignite old rags dipped in turpentine, and the air above them bulges upwards. She and her friends, in their brown dresses, watch the antics from the second-floor windows. Behind the schoolyard gate stands the old man who sells beer. Podolsky collects coins from the other kids. He's taller and stronger than all of them. His eyes shine as if they'd been rubbed with oil. He has a mane of red hair. Sasha takes her friend Zhenya's hand, and they race down the corridor. A nasal welter of shouts and whistles. Children are playing a jousting game, her arm is pushed into Zhenya's face, the principal keeps an eye on things through a crack in his office door, Zhenya shouts, but Sasha drags her outside. They're already in the courtyard, approaching the knot of children.

‘We want beer too!' she calls to the ruck of kids.

Maxim Podolsky emerges. His neck is red, and white foam clings to the hair on his upper lip. ‘What will you give us for it?'

She snatches the bottle from his hand and drinks, enjoying the knowledge that his lips were there a moment ago. A bitter taste on her tongue. Maxim Podolsky examines her, working out how to react. For a moment she's frightened. Will he hit her? She saw him poke an elbow in a boy's face in the jousting game, and, when his nose began to bleed, Podolsky said, ‘Kids make too much fuss about a little blood.' Obviously someone like that, whose father was a Chekist and tortured people, wasn't afraid of blood.

Podolsky looked at her and made a servant-like gesture. ‘My dear lady,' he said, ‘the bottle is my gift to you.'

Now she wanted to hold him. She repressed the urge. If she showed weakness, he might decide that his job was to protect her, and then he wouldn't tell her the truth.

‘Tell me,' she said. ‘Was Pyatakov really guilty?'

‘You're asking whether Pyatakov, the Assistant People's Commissar
for Heavy Industry, really planned to sabotage the ventilation system in the Kemerovo coal mines? Your dad was sitting at home, listening in outrage to the radio broadcast of Vyshinsky's prosecution, and he said that Moralov and Radak and Pyatakov were fools. We know this trick: to describe clever defendants as fools, meaning you think their trial is unjust.'

‘My dad didn't say anything like that,' she said, but she was impressed: the account was precise.

‘I wasn't referring necessarily to your dad, but to people like him, for example those who admired Pyatakov and worked with him.' Podolsky laughed. ‘Really, dear Sasha, I'm a little insulted by your question. You don't understand that I only want what's good for you. And you don't understand that I'm talking to you with the sincerity that you can only show to marked people, the ones no one will believe. So it's possible that Pyatakov didn't sabotage the ventilation in the mines so the workers would die and hatred would be aroused against the government. But Pyatakov had a lot of complaints, and it's quite likely that some criminal thought crossed his mind, and Moralov also talked too much. I have studied history well. Ideologies and fashions come and go, people believe in one thing and then its opposite, and all that stays the same is the startling elasticity of our souls. Sasha, people are contemptible. They always want to change things, to betray others. They dream of a better world, and then recklessly try to make their dreams come true. We're not interested in actions or consequences: people ought to fear their every criminal thought, to suspect everyone, to be secretive and to remember that no place is so dark that we won't find them.'

She leaned wearily against a car. He looked in another rear window, and cursed. When something happened that Podolsky had anticipated he cursed. Then he was inside the car, and when he emerged beside her he was holding a beer bottle. Sasha automatically snatched it away. It was their ritual. Not to perform it would mean the betrayal of everything that was between them.

‘All this is too familiar and not our old story,' she grumbled. She
drank some of the beer. How many nights like this had they spent together? Climbing garden fences, hiding behind the walls on the banks of the city's canals, wandering the streets, assembling dreams about countries beyond the Baltic Sea. In high school, it was clear to them that nothing would separate them.

Podolsky leaned on the car opposite her. He lit one match after another and watched the flame as it died. His face was illuminated by each little spurt of light. It had become leaner, so the delicate lines of his cheekbones were emphasised. She knew that all his speeches about power and fear were for show. Maxim Podolsky wasn't a man thrilled by power. He had inhaled more than enough of it when his father had been one of the heads of the Cheka in Leningrad and was ferried about in a chauffeur-driven limousine: invitations to a dacha on the coast, the best seats at the theatre, expensive presents for the new year, a spacious four-room apartment. In the Podolsky home the children ate delicacies that others could not even dream about. Drunk on his father's power, little Maxim behaved as if he controlled the fate of everyone he knew, including his friends' parents and his teachers. Then the party was over. Veteran members of the Cheka were discharged and accused of all sorts of crimes. Some were exiled, while others were purged.

Maxim's father lost his job; they were lenient with him. For years he sat at home and waited to be prosecuted or restored to the service, writing letters of complaint to all the institutions. He was not the only one. Millions of letters flooded the country: from the accused, their relatives, the relatives of their relatives, from citizens of good will, and informers. Later they evicted the Podolskys from their apartment. They moved into a shared flat. Maxim's father would sometimes pick his son up from school. He would stand next to the gate in a fine woollen coat, his hair combed elegantly. He kept his head up, but every girl who ran into him immediately noticed that he trembled, his eyes were red, his face lined and his hair flecked with grey.

All that year, the last year of high school, Sasha was trapped in her web of sadness. She couldn't remember a single moment of grace. She
and Maxim grew distant and she mourned every day for what they had lost.

They reached the last row of cars. The sky was folded across the horizon. Podolsky told her that an American they had interrogated said that in a city near New York there was a large parking lot where young couples sat in cars and watched movies on an enormous screen. It was cheap entertainment, just a few cents. He liked the idea of watching a movie and being alone at the same time. Even the most corrupt of capitalists can sometimes have bright ideas.

The image cheered her up: couple after couple sitting in their black cars and watching a new film. It was strange how Maxim calmed her down, dulled her senses. More than anything, she wanted to lie down on the hood of one of the cars and look at the clouds. The first sentence that occurred to her was: ‘Maxim, if we walk in a straight line, do you think we'd get to the sea?' And at once she heard Nadyezhda's warning voice: ‘Resist the charms of nostalgia.'

‘Is Nadyezhda Petrovna all right?' she asked.

‘She was in solitary for a while. She quoted a line of Khlebnikov to Reznikov, who was interrogating her.'

‘The police station—a splendid place! The place for my appointment with the state,'
Sasha said under her breath. She always planned to recite that line when she was arrested.

‘Yes, despite everything, it amused him. But the next day in her cell she met two young Jewish girls who were accused of leading a counter-revolutionary Zionist organisation, and she explained to them what Zionism was. They recited the lesson she had given them, and when the interrogators discovered where they had heard this, they accused her of everything. Later she even told Reznikov that an upright fellow and investigative magistrate like him ought to understand that those two calves didn't know a thing about Zionism. They had been planning to confess, but they were afraid their answers would be no good and they'd be shouted at, so she helped them out with some ideas. Reznikov screamed that she was insinuating that they were fishing for false confessions, and threw her into the cellar.'