The Russian Affair (43 page)

“It really blows hard out here,” she murmured, observing a tree bent diagonally by the west wind. Something was being hawked on the side of the road, but Anton was driving too fast for Anna to be able to make out what the offered wares were.

“The train would have been another possibility,” Anton said, resuming the small talk. “The Baltic Railroad, Moscow to Riga in one day.”

“Why didn’t we just take the train, then?”

“We still can if something goes wrong with the car. I’ve learned one thing from Alexey Maximovich: ‘In love and on the run, you must always have two ways out, Antosha.’ ” In sudden high spirits, Anton leaned on the horn. “Words to live by,” he said.

“He chose a single way this time,” Anna pointed out. “With no turning back.”

“I don’t know. You may well be right, Comrade.”

“Please call me Anna, like everyone else.”

“I can try.” He smiled. “But habit, Comrade, habit’s a big, strong horse that pulls in only one direction.”

Now that she was talking to him at some length for the first time, Anna realized that Anton was no urbanite; he was a country boy, and his years in Moscow hadn’t succeeded in driving that out of him.

They reached Volokolamsk and shortly thereafter left it behind. Anna saw the golden towers of a cathedral shining between houses, and then a swanky house, once a noble’s residence, that had been turned into a club
building for the agricultural combine. Beyond the town limits, Anna admired the private vegetable gardens, where bean plants and lettuces were sending their first shoots up into the light. Anton took the feeder road to the big highway, and their pace increased substantially.

“Do you know what’s special about Volokolamsk? When the Nazi troops were advancing on Moscow, this was the farthest they got.”

“Here? I thought that was Yakhroma. On the trip to Dubna, we were told—”

“Yakhroma? Nonsense!” he said vehemently. “It was Volokolamsk, I can assure you. I know the history. Twenty-eight soldiers under General Panfilov managed to destroy dozens of Nazi tanks before they themselves were killed. There’s a monument to the twenty-eight heroes in Volokolamsk.” He gave Anna a penetrating look. “
Here
is where the Wehrmacht was brought to a standstill, not Yakhroma!”

They left the Moscow administrative division, crossed into the Tver oblast, and an hour later were nearing the town of Rzhev. Anna grew tired and even briefly fell asleep. A noise as loud as an ongoing explosion made her start awake in terror. “What is it?”

“Sukhoi Su-9,” he said, smiling at her and pointing skyward.

The sound faded away and came back. Another black fighter plane swept across the clear sky, leaving its noise far behind.

“Where are we?”

“There’s an air force base a few miles from here,” Anton said, shouting over the roar of the jet engines. “That one was a Tupolev.” He leaned forward and struck the dashboard. The temperature gauge needle bounced. “I think it could use a little drink,” Anton said. He patted the steering wheel. “It won’t be long, my thirsty friend.”

The town lay a little distance off the M9. Anton stopped in front of a simple house on the outskirts. A woman was outside, weeding her vegetable garden. “It’s better if you ask her for some water,” Anton said, handing Anna a jerrican.

She got out, stretched, and walked toward the fence. “Excuse me, Comrade …”

The woman, bending to her work, hadn’t heard Anna coming and jerked herself upright. As a sign of her innocuous wish, Anna held up the container. “Could you give us some water?”

“Water? How about a glass of lemonade?” She stuck her little knife into her pocket and opened the garden gate for Anna.

After a brief glance at Anton, Anna followed the woman into the house and entered a living room where her eye was struck by something she would never have expected to find in such a place: silver-gray wallpaper with a white pattern, perfectly hung and cleanly finished at the top, a hand’s width below the ceiling. Light, freshly washed curtains were suspended from gleaming, gold-colored rods, meticulously aligned with the top line of the wallpaper, and alongside them hung drapes with a dark brown pattern. Anna noticed a television set, a house plant, and even central heating.

“You’ve got a lovely place here,” Anna said. “How did you get ahold of this first-class wallpaper?”

“My brother’s the local priest,” the woman explained. “I’m his housekeeper.”

Behind her, Anna spotted a cross and some pictures of martyrs. “Your brother?”

“Our members spend generously,” she said, plucking at the lace tablecloth until it lay smooth. “Are you hungry, my girl? I’ve stuffed some hardboiled eggs.”

“Thanks, but we’re in a hurry.” Anna turned toward the kitchen.

“The wallpaper was a gift from God’s children in our kolkhoz,” she said. Then she laid her hand on the samovar. “But surely you’ll drink some tea, won’t you?”

“Many thanks, but no. Maybe on the way back.” Anna pointed to the jerrican.

“We could have filled that in the garden,” the woman said, clearly irritated by the rejection of her hospitality. She gruffly ran her hand over the cherrywood sideboard, as if she’d discovered a speck of dust on it. Then she accompanied Anna outside again, turned on the water faucet at one corner of the house, and, while the container was filling up, peered at Anton. “Yours?” she said, meaning the man.

“His,” Anna answered, pointing at the automobile. Just then, Anton lifted the hood.

“Where are you headed?” The woman tried to decipher the license number.

“To visit some friends.”

When Anna brought the water, Anton thanked the woman with a nod. Apparently forgetting her garden work, she went back inside the house.

“What took you so long?” Anton asked, closing the hood.

“She has beautiful wallpaper on her walls.”

By the time they passed Rzhev, the day was drawing to its close. Anna tried to sleep, but the road had become worse, and she was constantly shaken awake. Anton looked at his watch. “We won’t reach the border before midnight,” he said.

The landscape turned monotonous; Anna’s happy feeling had vanished. She thought about the hours that lay before her; she’d see Alexey again, but she wasn’t expected this time, and the circumstances were thoroughly transformed.

“Didn’t you say you’d taken delivery of some documents for Alexey?” Anton nodded. “And so you turned those documents over to him?”

“When I drove him to the airport.”

“But then …” She sat upright as though jolted. “Then you had time to warn him in Moscow!”

“No,” he said softly.

“I don’t understand.” A pothole made Anna’s chin bounce off her chest.
“You knew Kamarovsky saw you. Why didn’t you tell Alexey before he got on the plane?”

“Unfortunately, I didn’t know that.” He clicked his tongue. “She didn’t call me until later, when Alexey Maximovich was gone. She told me about Kamarovsky.”

“Who?”

And so Anna learned that the agent for internal security, Rosa Khleb, whom Anna liked to think of as a modern witch, was capable of even more artfulness than she’d imagined. Anna listened in amazement as she learned that the Khleb and Bulyagkov had been in contact for at least a year, and that it was she who had worked out his escape plan via Stockholm. Anton was even able to report that an untimely overlap had taken place the last time Anna visited the Deputy Minister in the Drezhnevskaya apartment: The mysterious visitor was Rosa; she was the one who’d brought Bulyagkov the little parcel, and it was her footsteps that Anna had heard sounding in the stairwell.

They passed villages and little towns; the sun shone red in their faces and finally disappeared; Anton began to smoke, which was the only hint he gave that he might be getting tired; and while all this was going on, Anna was arriving at the realization that she, who had considered herself so clever and calculating, who had even reproached herself for her great cunning, was nothing but a beginner. The game had gone on without any participation from her. She hadn’t even known the rules—she was just a piece that had fit in. She’d done exactly what she’d been expected to do. And at this moment, Anna saw that as her greatest defeat.

THIRTY-FIVE

T
he Kremlin stands above the city; above the Kremlin stands only God. The fortress was rebuilt eighteen times; why eighteen, the man in the pale blue hospital gown wondered. The first stone wall was erected in 1366; Ivan III’s architects put up twenty towers, a palace, their city’s first fortification. Kamarovsky was gratified to ascertain that his eyeglasses had been taken away from him; the unreliable things only stopped him from seeing connections properly. They were Italians, he thought; in those days, the Italians were the best builders. They put twenty streets and ten squares inside the Kremlin walls—a tour de force of fortification architecture. Why did Napoleon have all that burned down? Out of vexation, Kamarovsky thought, nodding. Who wouldn’t be vexed, after dismantling the biggest country on earth, to wait in vain for someone to come and submit to him? One of the people in the room giggled, and Kamarovsky looked around; that was no giggling matter. Napoleon must have felt like a spurned lover, sitting there in the Kremlin, with not a single Russian showing up for a rendezvous. While he let his
capitaines
plunder the city, he overlooked the fact that it was already the middle of September: time to start getting ready for winter. The fire he lit in Moscow wasn’t hot enough to warm his army. He who burns something down makes a site for reconstruction, Kamarovsky thought.
Thicker walls this time, and then, later, they set shining, red-ruby-colored stars on the tops of the towers. “Ruby stars”—the words resounded in him. The sound evoked something like beauty, still incomprehensible, but it announced its presence. The beautiful, the great—it flowed into him like a stream, penetrating him. He took several deep breaths.

“In the past we had no fatherland, nor could we have one,” Kamarovsky said. “But now that power is in our hands, in the hands of the workers, we have a fatherland, and we will defend its independence.” The Colonel made a great effort to recall who’d said those words. Not Vladimir Ilyich, the patient was sure of that, but of course it had to do with him, as did everything else. Kamarovsky nodded: Everything else. No, those words came from the great speech given in the Grand Kremlin Palace to the graduates of the Red Army Academy on May 4, 1935. I was there, the patient thought. By that time, Vladimir Ilyich was long dead. I heard the speech, and I understood. Why was it so important to remember the Kremlin and the beautiful stars shining on its towers? Red stars, ruby stars, the Colonel thought; in the past, he’d sometimes called her
Rosa, my ruby star
. Whoever saw her today would hardly have been able to envision how bright this Russian soul, how beautiful this most beautiful of Soviet girls, had been.

He struggled to keep his thoughts from falling into confusion again; he dared not go back there, where they all became one. Kamarovsky propped himself on his elbows. The cathedral, he thought, built in 1457 under the direction of the Italians—here stood Ivan’s throne under the carved pavilion roof. The bell, the Tsar Bell! Remembering the bell was important. It was supposed to sound out from the Tsar’s Tower, but that never happened.

“It never happened!” he shouted into the room, trying to avert another collapse. “Right from the start, the master founders struggled with difficulties in the casting. Who would build such a monstrosity? Over twenty feet in diameter, just imagine, to this day the biggest bell in the world!”

The bell meant—he sank back down onto the pillows—the bell
meant a certain place. Not the Kremlin, not the pit where it was cast, not the pedestal where it still stood. The bell meant … the library! Of course, the library. Kamarovsky had been there and observed a young woman who knew all about the Kremlin Bell, who’d studied it closely.

Now the Colonel was waking up and calming down. The multiple ideas in his head fell together and made room for the one idea that he could grasp. He let the calm sink into him more and more deeply, and behind it he could feel himself reviving. A. I. Kamarovsky looked around. His vision was still blurred, obviously, because he didn’t have his glasses. It wasn’t about the bell, he realized, nor was it about the young woman in the library that bore Vladimir Ilyich’s name. But in its halls, yes, Kamarovsky had seen someone. His memory came back slowly, gradually, and in the end he knew that the person he’d seen had been Rosa, his
ruby star
. After he was sure he’d identified all the connections properly, he rang for the nurse and had her call Doctor Shchedrin.

“I want my car,” he told his old friend.

“Some other time, my dear Antip Iosifovich,” the doctor said. “You can go for a drive some other time. Not today.”

“On the contrary,” the Colonel said with a smile. “Some other time, you’ll keep me here, maybe forever, if it comes to that, because I surely can’t take many more attacks like this last one. But today, my friend, even with the best will in the world, I can’t stay.”

“And where do you want to go, Antip?” the doctor asked, looking at him earnestly.

“What’s today?” Kamarovsky thrust his hands behind his back, trying to reach the strings of his hospital gown.

“Wait, I’ll help you. Today’s Tuesday.”

“If today’s Tuesday …” Unceremoniously, the Colonel allowed his friend to undress him and watched as the nurse, at Shchedrin’s behest, fetched the green suit from the closet. “If it’s Tuesday, I don’t need a car, I need a helicopter. I have to get to Riga as quickly as possible.”

“Ah, Antip Iosifovich, that’s not good for you.” The doctor put together the necessary medications for his friend and in the end gave him back his spectacles.

As they approached Novosokolniki, the darkness became definitive. Anna couldn’t have said whether the incessant rolling and thumping and rumbling was caused by the road or by the throbbing pressure in her head. The distance they’d come seemed immeasurable, the distance yet to go endless. She stopped looking at the odometer; it was too disappointing to see how slowly they were approaching their goal. Stupid fantasies fluttered through her brain, probably because of an offhand remark Anton had made. As they were leaving the metropolis behind, he’d called the provinces west of Moscow “the Land of the Old Believers” and told her that the people here made no distinction between life and death and would secretly keep their dead loved ones in their homes.