The Big Green Tent (36 page)

Isn't every person deserving of these special efforts of fate? Olga, yes, certainly … But Galya?

Should fate squander its efforts on an insignificant and unprepossessing couple, the daughter of the local plumber, a drunk, and the son of another such plumber from Tver, but already deceased? In fact, Galya's father, nicknamed Sir Yury Dripsandleaks, would meet a premature end. No sooner were they assigned to a new apartment than he died, to the annoyance and disappointment of the residents of the high-rise on Vosstanie Square, who would never again have such a skilled expert in all things pipes-and-leaks related, someone who knew every valve and plug by sight and by touch. In his presence, pipes seemed to join, and blockages, with a grunt, cleared up of their own volition.

And was a towheaded, suspicious, vengeful boy, the courtyard champion in long-distance pissing—no one else's stream even came close to his in the length of the arc, either in the courtyard or at school—beneath the notice of fate?

Was it possible that he, like Olga, was a darling of fate, and that it took direct aim at him, weaving its web around him, making sure he was on duty on just those days when a girl, towheaded like himself, would dart into the entrance where he was on the lookout for his target?

It's incomprehensible, improbable—but the generosity of fate also extends to the likes of these C-list extras.

*   *   *

Ilya never managed to find out which of his sins—the distribution of books, petty communications between hostile factions, his close connections to Mikha and Edik, by that time both in prison—had attracted the direct attention of the authorities. In the spring of 1971, he realized he was being watched.

For Galya, this was a fateful event.

The first time Galya saw him, they met at the entrance to the building. Small in stature, but handsome and appealing, wearing a gray cap and a long coat, he held the door open for her, and she smiled at him.

The very next day, she ran into him again in the courtyard. This time he was sitting on a bench with a newspaper in his hands, obviously waiting for someone. And Galya smiled at him again. Then, the third time, he was standing in the entrance hall, and they greeted each other. He asked her her name. At that point, Galya realized that he wasn't standing there just by chance, but was waiting for her, and she was happy. Now she liked him even more. His name was Gennady. A nice name. His appearance wasn't striking—but neither was it lacking in anything. He and Galya were similar, as they would discover, if you looked closely: their eyes were narrow-set, close to the bridge of their rather long noses, and they had small chins. They had the same coloring—his hair, of which he didn't have as much, of course, was a bit lighter. It lay smooth on his head. But he was very neat—exceptionally so. He made a very civilized impression. When he disappeared for a week, Galya's dreams were dashed. Every evening when she returned home from work, she looked for him in the courtyard, but he wasn't there.

Well, there went love
, she thought bitterly, and lived through the entire week with the nagging feeling that nothing would ever happen to her, that her life in the semibasement would never end, although everyone else had been resettled, and her family was the last, and she herself was the last and the least, as her grandmother said.

Indifferent to everything, she was walking down Gorokhovskaya Street (now called Kazakov) from the institute to Kurskaya Station, where she would get on the metro and travel five stations to her home. The whole trip would take about an hour, including the time she would need to get to the metro and then to sprint home once she got off at Krasnopresnenskaya. In spite of the bad weather, and in a bad mood, she was walking along as though her muscles had been trained to do it, her back straight, her head, in a blue beret, held high, in an old raincoat Olga had given her the previous year. Suddenly, from behind, a strong hand grabbed her by the arm. First she thought it was one of her students. She looked around and saw that it was—him!

“Galya,” he said, “I've been waiting for you for so long. Let's go to the movies.”

How had he found her? It was obvious he had wanted to! Everything that followed was like the movies. And it flashed by just as quickly. The main thing was that it was exactly the way Galya wanted it to happen: at first he took her elbow, carefully, strongly, then by the hand, then he kissed her politely, without any pawing. He embraced her—again decently, without anything obscene or dirty. A month later he proposed to her. He wanted to visit her parents, with a cake and a bottle of wine, to ask for her hand. Galya warned her father beforehand:

“If you take out the vodka and get smashed, I'll leave home.”

Her father made a dismissive gesture with his swollen brown hand:

“Oh, I'm scared! As though there's anyplace else for you to go to.”

He was right, of course. But what he didn't know was that his Galya now had an actual shield against the misfortunes of life.

The formal marriage proposal did not go as planned. Her mother was called in to work to sub for someone else on that evening. Her brother and his wife had been skirmishing to the point of fisticuffs for the past week, so Galya had to come clean about all her family circumstances. Gennady was understanding.

“Galya, mine are the same. Never mind them, the relatives … they just get in your way your whole life. We'll just get married without telling them.”

Everything about Gennady was to her liking. He was quiet, didn't ask questions, had a master's certificate in sports, by the way, with a college degree; and with a family like his, you could forget they had ever existed.

Gennady was eager to get married for his own reasons, which he informed Galya about. Through his job he was eligible to receive housing; they had promised him a one-room apartment, but if he married, they might give him a small two-room apartment, so he could start a family.

They filed the necessary papers, and set a date for the registration of their union. Galya went to Olga and told her she was getting married. She asked her to be a witness. Olga had by this time tied the knot with Ilya. Both her girlfriends were lonely and alone. Tamara at least had her hormones to make out with, but Galya was just plain alone and unloved.

Olga was happy for her, but surprised:

“What kind of friend are you! You didn't even tell me you had met someone.”

Now she just had to marry Tamara off, and everyone would be settled.

Olga didn't suspect that she had also inadvertently decided Tamara's fate. For a year Tamara had been seeing Ilya's older friend the brilliant Marlen. At Olga's birthday party, she had sat Tamara next to Marlen. They left the party at the same time, and Marlen walked her to the Molodezhnaya metro station. It turned out that they were practically neighbors. Tamara fell madly in love, igniting a mutual passion that was no laughing matter. For many years Marlen went back and forth between two homes (fortunately, only five minutes apart). In each home Marlen kept a toothbrush, a razor, and a clean pair of undergarments. He had always led a traveler's existence, though now the destination of his business trips was sometimes only as far as the neighboring house, where he hibernated in quiet retreat and in love. And, of course, in secret. Tamara took a vow of silence practically from the first day they met—not a word to anyone about Marlen, especially not to Olga and Ilya. Thus, Olga, the unwitting disposer of other people's fates, organized their lives and affairs but remained none the wiser about it herself.

*   *   *

Galya didn't have a wedding party. Gennady said that it made no sense to throw money to the wind, since they would have to buy furniture. Galya just nodded in agreement. She was disappointed about it, but Gennady was right, of course. About the furniture. They registered their marriage, and she went to live with her husband in his dormitory. The room was a decent one. He gave his old bed away to the supervisor of the dormitory, and bought a fold-out divan.

That first night on the new divan, Gennady accepted an unexpected gift from his wife, a gift that required painstaking effort from the receiver, no less than the giver. It turned out that Galya Polukhina was an upright girl; she had saved herself for her husband. Only one thing cast a shadow over this great day for Gennady: Galya's friend Olga. How on earth could he have let the wife of his target, Ilya Bryansky, whom he had been watching on and off for two years, appear as a witness on their marriage certificate? A personal connection was taking shape which was in part something of a nuisance, in part very promising.

While they were thrashing around on the new divan, while Gennady was carrying out his masculine duties and overcoming nature's difficulties, glad for the gentle participation of his wife, a small but insistent worry hovered in the back of his mind: Had Olga recognized him?

She had. After she returned home from the marriage registry, she told Ilya that Polushka had gotten married to the Rodent. That's what they had nicknamed Gennady when they discovered he was shadowing Ilya. The Rodent was one of the three outdoor surveillance officers whom Ilya knew by sight.

Ilya laughed at first—that meant he had married into the family! Then he started wondering. What was it you gave her to type?

In recent years Galya had often accepted work from them. She was a fast and accurate typist, without really understanding what she was typing.

“Oh, damn! I don't remember.”

“Think! What did you give her to type?”

“Ah, now I remember! She has my Erika typewriter, and Solzhenitsyn's
Gulag Archipelago.
”

“Get them back right away. Today.”

Olga rushed down to the semibasement, and only remembered along the way that Galya had moved in with her husband. Her drunken father, Yury, hurt that his daughter hadn't included him in the marriage arrangements, but had done everything herself, was unwelcoming. Olga asked whether Galya had left her typewriter behind.

“She took every last thing with her and cleared out. Didn't even leave an address,” her father said curtly, and slammed the door in Olga's face.

Olga went home upset, not knowing what to do next. Ilya lost no time in trying to comfort her.

“Never mind, Olga, things could be worse. Galya has been part of your family her whole life; she won't be in any hurry to denounce you. Wait awhile—before you know it we'll be drinking tea with her hubby,” Ilya said with a crooked grin.

Ilya wasn't completely off the mark about the tea; but a friendly tea party was not in the cards for years to come. A good many of them.

They told Tamara about Galya's hasty wedding to the Rodent, leaving out the part about the typewriter and the manuscript Galya was working on. Even so, Tamara was horrified.

“Don't let her into your house!”

“Are you crazy? I've been friends with her practically since the day I was born!” Olga was angry.

“It's too dangerous. How can you not see that yourself? You'll have an informer under your own roof,” Tamara said darkly.

“Nonsense! It's sickening, suspecting everyone in that way. Then I might as well start suspecting you!” Olga burst out.

Tamara turned scarlet, began to cry, and left.

The next day, Olga called Galya at work. They told her that she had gone on vacation that very day. Strange—Galya hadn't mentioned anything about a vacation. In fact, Galya herself hadn't known about this surprise from her husband. A honeymoon! Galya's mother confirmed the information, saying they had gone on a trip to Kislovodsk. Olga asked about the typewriter, saying she had lent it to Galya, and now urgently needed it back. Galya's mother, Nina, told Olga to wait a moment while she looked for it. She came back saying there was no typewriter in the house. She would have seen it—it was too big to miss.

Then she wondered whether Yury might have drunk it away. There was no telling.

The new Erika was worth a fortune, and they were nearly impossible to come by. And she needed it desperately! Olga was a good typist herself, but she didn't have the speed of a professional. She always gave large projects to Galya and others to type.

Still, the missing
Gulag Archipelago
was a more serious loss by far.

Two weeks later, Galya came over uninvited, looking very fresh and healthy, almost pretty. She was very perturbed, however. She cried when she made the honest admission that the typewriter and the manuscript had disappeared from her parents' home without a trace, and where they had gone she had no clue; she, Galya, would return the money, it would take three months or so. Everything had vanished, most likely, when they were on their honeymoon.

“No, it was before that!” Olga said. “I thought about it the day you and Gennady got married, and I went over to your parents the very next day!”

“It's impossible!” Galya said with a gasp.

The household investigation, which Galya immediately undertook, didn't yield anything. Her father was on a drinking binge, which constituted indirect evidence of domestic theft. Still, her papa went on these binges at regular intervals, right on schedule, and he had just now gotten started after a bout of sobriety.

Her brother, Nikolay, whom she tried to interrogate, grew suddenly irate, began to shake, and screamed at her to leave him alone. He wasn't quite right in the head, and the psychiatric clinic had had medical records on file for him since he was a child.

Now Olga had to comfort Polushka and give her tea to drink. She inquired about her married life. It was absolutely wonderful, her husband didn't drink and was very serious, had a good job, and even promised to try to set Galya up in a good position as well. Then Ilya and Kostya returned from the skating rink, both of them frozen and encrusted with ice. They usually went to the one on Petrovka, but this time they'd gone to a little patch of ice in the next-door courtyard, where they slipped and tumbled to their hearts' content. True, when they were already tired out from all the fun, one of the other kids pelted Kostya with an ice-filled snowball, giving him a bloody nose. They quickly stopped the bleeding with more ice, though.