The Big Green Tent (37 page)

Galya always got scared and took to her heels at the mere sight of Ilya, and this time was no exception. Olga laundered the bloody scarf and handkerchiefs. Kostya, Ilya, and Olga had dinner together. Their favorite days were like this one, when her mother stayed at the dacha. Then Olga sent Kostya off to bed.

“Ilya, the typewriter and the manuscript have both disappeared. No one knows where,” Olga said with trepidation.

“It's the Rodent! We have to clear everything out of the house,” Ilya said peremptorily.

He threw himself into the task, grabbing things off the shelves and out of hiding places, gathering all the dangerous papers. Several onionskin pages bound together with paper clips he burned in the WC. He collected all the most dangerous publications—issues of the
Chronicle of Current Events.
In her mother's bookshelves, behind the Romain Rolland and the Maxim Gorky, there were also some things stashed away. By three in the morning they had gathered up all the dangerous material and stuffed it into an old suitcase, which they stowed under a coatrack. They postponed the final decision, whether to take it all to the dacha or to Ilya's aunt's house in the country, out of harm's way, until the next morning.

They couldn't get to sleep for a long time, making all kinds of wild conjectures about what the near future had in store. They discussed whether they ought to inform the author, through Rosa Vasilievna, that the manuscript had possibly fallen into the hands of the KGB. They agreed to go to see her in the morning, to give her a detailed account of what had happened. Then Ilya discovered that Olga had fallen asleep, mid-sentence. And, like a bolt of lightning, it struck him: tomorrow they would be arrested! He even broke into a cold sweat. He had left so many tracks—his address books with all the phone numbers; and he would have to go to his mother's right away to rescue his photograph collection and hide it somewhere. And put the negatives in a separate place. No, best take it all to his aunt's in Kirzhach. If only he managed to do it in time! He'd have to get up at six and leave immediately for his mother's; and with that thought, he fell into a sound sleep.

At just after eight, Olya gave Kostya an apple and sent him on his way to school. Ilya was still asleep. Olga put some coffee on to boil. At ten after nine sharp, the telephone and doorbell rang simultaneously. Ilya woke up, looked at the clock, and realized he was too late.

“Go to the bathroom,” Olga commanded. Ilya darted into the bathroom and latched the door. Olga went to open the front door, trying to decide what she should and should not say in the short space before she got there.

She had long known how these things happened, but her first thought was: call Mama for help. She immediately felt ashamed.

Six people barged in. Not one of them in uniform. A tall man, without taking off his cap, thrust a search warrant and an ID at her at the same time. He wasn't fooling around. They opened the door to every room except the bathroom.

“Is your husband in there?” the tall one asked, finally taking his cap off. A lock of hair from his toupee rose up with the cap, and he mechanically plastered it back down to his forehead.
He looks like Kosygin
, Olga thought. Suddenly her fear melted away.

“Yes, that's him,” she said.

One of them went up to the door and rapped on it.

“Come out!”

“I'm coming,” Ilya said.

He emerged a few minutes later in the general's old bathrobe with the patches on the sleeves. He had shaved hurriedly.

Good work
, Olga thought to herself approvingly.

“You'll have to come with us to the residence where you are registered,” said another one. He exchanged glances with the tall one. Meaningfully.

Ilya got dressed without any haste.

Three of them stood in a group by the bookcase.

“Your books?” the smallest one asked.

“Oh, no,” Olga said. “Most of them belong to my mother. She's a well-known writer, of course. In the other room there are books on military construction. My father is a general and has a big collection of books on military subjects.”

Olga's mood lifted. She could feel that her voice sounded fine, and betrayed no abject trembling. Ilya realized immediately that her fear had been replaced by some complex desperation that also contained an element of amusement.

Good girl
, Ilya thought in his turn, taking heart. With that, he waved to her and went out, one goon on his right, another on his left.

Three stayed behind to search, and one more stood watch by the door.

The witness
, Olga thought.

She had no firsthand experience of the KGB herself, but she had heard stories about how these searches were carried out. They were far more polite than she had imagined they would be. One of them had a pleasant face, like a tractor driver or a farmhand. Even his skin had something rural about it—it was chapped and reddish, as if he had spent a lot of time in the cold. He tapped the books perfunctorily, seeing right away that all suspicious papers had been carefully weeded out. Then he made a discovery. In the bathroom they found an ashtray full of dead matches and paper clips.

“What you were burning?” the one with the toupee asked. He introduced himself as Alexandrov, an investigator from the prosecutor's office, but Olga forgot his name immediately. She couldn't determine whether her guests were from the police, the KGB, or the prosecutor's office. She didn't know that there were subtle differences between these raids: some of them were only looking for anti-Soviet dissidents, or petition signers; others for books, yet others only for Jews.

“We burned toilet paper to cover up the stench in the bathroom,” Olga said boldly.

“Do you wipe with paper clips?” Alexandrov poked around in the ashtray resourcefully. He had some idea about what those paper clips might have held together: protest letters with the names of signees attached, issues of the
Chronicle.

“What do you expect? Our house is full of office materials. My mother's a magazine editor.”

Arrogant bitch
, Alexandrov thought. He had a great deal of experience.

Olga tried not to look in the direction of the worn-out suitcase standing under the coatrack, half-concealed by a long overcoat of her father's and her mother's fur coat. Would they notice? Or wouldn't they?

That's when they noticed. Alexandrov, the one who looked like Kosygin, asked Olga to open the suitcase. She opened it, and he glanced casually inside. He understood immediately; then relaxed.

“Now I see how well prepared you were.”

They rummaged around for another hour and a half, just to keep up appearances. In addition to the suitcase, they took one of her mother's typewriters, her father's binoculars, Ilya's favorite camera, and all the address books, including her mother's. They even took the daily tear-off calendar from the wall. They impounded Ilya's “golden collection,” photographs of the most brilliant personages of the time: Yakir, Krasin, Alik Ginzburg, the priests Dmitry Dudko, Gleb Yakunin, and Nikolay Eshliman, the writers Daniel and Sinyavsky, and Natalya Gorbanevskaya.

This photographic archive, the only one of its kind, would later come to be called “the dissident archive.” It contained, among others, photographs that were published in the Western press. These were photographs that Ilya had sold to Klaus, a German journalist, and to one other American, as well as the photographs smuggled out through his Belgian friend Pierre, who then distributed them in the West.

When Alexandrov removed the folder containing this archive from the depths of Kostya's desk, Olga realized that Ilya was now exposed.

An official black Volga was waiting by the door, and another gray one was parked out on the street. They loaded the suitcase, the typewriters, and a sack full of papers into the gray one, and Olga herself into the black one. She sat in the backseat, two of the men pressed against her on either side. They drove her to a two-story building not far away, on Malaya Lubyanka. The building bore a sign that didn't mince words: “Office of the Committee for State Security for Moscow and the Moscow Region.”

At three in the afternoon, the real interrogation began; or so it seemed to Olga. Alexandrov was sitting in the room, together with a nearly silent captain. He was the first person she had seen that day in a uniform. She didn't realize that this was merely a conversation, not an interrogation.

What should she say? What should she avoid saying? She wasn't in the habit of lying. Ilya had warned her to keep her head; that meant she shouldn't say anything. This, however, seemed like the hardest thing of all. And Olga, despite her best intentions, did start talking—for one hour, two hours, then three. The questions seemed random and insignificant—who are your friends, where do you go, what do you read? They mentioned her former professor, who had emigrated. They knew, naturally, that she had signed letters supporting him, and that she had been expelled from the university in 1965. They even expressed sympathy with her: this guy was spewing all that anti-Soviet nonsense, what use was it to you? You come from good Soviet stock—why did you get mixed up with that sort?

Olga played dumb, without going overboard, saying something about her girlfriends, most of whom she didn't really see anymore, since they almost all had families to take care of, children, work, and so forth … among her close friends she only named, out of spite, Galya Polukhina; she didn't think she mentioned a single other person.

Olga was surprised when Alexandrov asked her about Tamara Brin.

“No, we don't see each other anymore. We used to be friends, before science became her whole life. Now she doesn't have time for anyone.”

“She doesn't have time for anyone? What about Marlen Kogan? She spends time with him. She's studying Hebrew.”

Olga's eyebrows shot up.

“Really? I had no idea.”

“I ask the questions here; you answer. You seem to consider yourself to be very smart and perceptive, Olga Afanasievna.” He smiled, showing his large teeth, and for a moment Olga was overcome by something like horror. Suddenly she felt naked, vulnerable to a bite or a needle, as soft as a mollusk without its shell. At the same moment, she realized she needed to recover her composure, and she asked to go to the toilet.

Alexandrov made a phone call, and a heavy woman with a large rump came in, then led her down a corridor with unpredictable twists and turns to a WC. There were squares of newsprint hanging from a nail in the wall. Squatting over the toilet, which was clean but had no seat, she began thinking:
I wonder what the bathrooms in the FBI look like?
Then she laughed out loud, startling her chaperone. This little breather helped her. She was able to gather her thoughts, and even felt a bit stronger. Was he lying about Tamara? Probably not. Why hadn't Tamara told her anything about herself? Strange, very strange. Could she really have some sort of relationship with Marlen? She hadn't said a word about it. Silent as the grave. And him—going on about his family obligations, observing all those religious traditions, keeping kosher. All that stuff. She recalled that Marlen never ate anything at their house. He only drank vodka. He said vodka was always kosher. He had a scraggly beard and hair, and an unwieldy body—a big head with unruly curls, broad shoulders, and stumpy legs. But he had brains, that was for sure. It was like he had a whole library in his head, organized by shelves—history, geography, literature. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant; still, it was strange that Tamara had set her sights on him. It just proved that anything was possible.

Then the captain looked at his watch, went out, and returned fifteen minutes later. He looked at his watch again, and mumbled something to Alexandrov. Alexandrov's tone changed abruptly, as though a command meant just for him were written on the watch.

“Enough of that. Let's get down to business. Do these books belong to you, or to your husband?”

“They're mine, of course. I keep my own books at home.”

“All of them are yours?”

“Well, a few of them may have been left behind by other people. Most of them are mine, though.”

“Which of these books are not yours?”

“These are all mine,” Olga said, correcting herself.

“Where did you get them?”

Olga had expected to be asked this question, and she had a ready answer.

“We buy books. We read a lot, and buy a lot of books.”

“Where?”

“Well, you know there's a black market in Moscow, you can buy anything there: foreign junk, perfume, books…”

“Where is this market?”

“Different places. Some of them I bought near the Kuznetsky Bridge.”

“Be more precise. Where exactly near the Kuznetsky Bridge?”

“There's a book market in Moscow. They sell all kinds of things there.”

“You mean people stand right there out in the open by Kuznetsky Bridge and offer to sell you stuff like this, for example?” He pulled Avtorkhanov's book out of the pile. “
The Technology of Power
?”

“Yes,” Olga said, nodding.

Then he pulled one book after another out of the pile until he lost interest. The captain went out twice; then he came back again.

“What can I tell you, Olga Afanasievna? All this book business qualifies as anti-Soviet agitation and falls under article 190 of the Criminal Code. It carries a penalty of three to five years. Perhaps you weren't aware of this?” He even seemed to express sympathy with her.

Olga, who had been showered with love, kindness, and understanding from earliest childhood, was more troubled by the ambiguity of her relations with her interlocutor than anything else. He was an unpleasant person, an enemy by definition, but she instinctively continued to rely on her own charms. Flirtatiousness and self-assurance kept breaking through the armor of restraint she had decided to adopt as her modus operandi. But the interlocutor was deaf and devoid of feeling, and she kept getting off track, catching herself in inconsistencies. It was tormenting, all the more because she had no idea how it would all end: whether they would let her go, arrest her, kill her … No, they wouldn't kill her, of course; but there were moments when she was plunged into fear, a physical, animal fear that exceeded human endurance. And it went on and on.