The Russian Affair (7 page)

“How much time does he have left?”

“You say that as if he were serving a jail sentence.”

Rosa lay down at full length on her stomach. “I say that because I know you know the exact day when his time is up.”

“His year on Sakhalin ends in March. Then he gets a six-day vacation.” Anna leaned back against the stone wall. Her towel slipped off her breasts, and Anna spread it out under her.

Rosa put a hand on Anna’s thigh. “Look at it this way: At that point, your situation will be settled. Leonid will get an official right of abode for Moscow, and you’ll finally be allocated an apartment.”

“Papa will be happier than anybody else when we leave him in peace inside his own four walls.”

“Without you, your father wouldn’t have any more walls at all. And furthermore, his books would be—”

Knowing what was coming next, Anna interrupted her with a gesture. “Viktor Ipalyevich isn’t a nanny. He needs concentration for his work.”

Rosa grinned. “Is there a selflessness medal? If there is, you ought to get nominated for it.”

“I’m not selfless,” Anna replied. “I’m anything but that.”

The pipe behind them roared and steam, coming from the opening in bursts, enveloped them. The fat woman heaved a noisy sigh, rolled off her bench, and disappeared outside. The bath attendant passed with a small bucket and sprinkled water on the hot stones.

“And how is the Deputy Minister?”

Anna watched the attendant until she was out of sight. Then she said, “Alexey is wrestling with his ghosts.”

“Which ones this time?”

“The demons of the Five-Year Plan. The Deputy Minister finds the figures that the CC plans to publish …” Anna waved one hand, slowly. “Too optimistic.”

“Who believes figures? Everybody knows they’re a fetish with Kosygin. He’ll just give a pretty speech.” She leaned forward, spread her legs, and slid to the step below her. “If that’s all Bulyagkov has to worry about, he’s in an enviable position.”

Anna said softly, “He hates his job.”

This remark made Rosa sit up and take notice. “What makes you think so?”

“He’s never told me a single pleasant story about the Ministry. You know, the sort of thing you hear on the news. He’s got the power to influence the scientific life of our country, and it doesn’t seem to mean anything to him.”

Rosa sat in pensive silence for a few seconds. Then she said, “He’s like all men.” She smiled. “When they go home in the evening, they like to gripe to their wives about their work. Bulyagkov, apparently, does the same thing with his lover.”

Anna shrugged her shoulders.

“I think you’re just about hard-boiled now, my dear. When I came here for the first time, I couldn’t take more than five minutes in the gallery.”

Rosa was dripping out of every pore, Anna noticed, while her own skin seemed only a little damp. She said, “Those of us in construction are used to tougher conditions than you in your chic editorial offices. In summer, I often have to work for hours in attics and dormers where the temperature must be one hundred and twenty degrees.”

Rosa took up one of the bundles of twigs, signaled to Anna to turn over, and struck her, first gently, then harder and harder, on her back and
her legs. Anna flinched at the initial blow but quickly began to feel an agreeable tingling and closed her eyes. After a while, she rolled onto her back, and Rosa continued the procedure. It didn’t bother Anna to feel her friend’s eyes on her body. Eventually, Rosa dropped the twigs and lay down on the stone herself. Anna seized the bundle of oak twigs and brought them down sharply on Rosa’s posterior.

“Harder.”

Anna struck harder. A while passed in which the only audible sounds were Rosa’s quickened breathing and soft groans. Anna brushed the twigs over her friend’s flat belly, over her muscular thighs and calves.

“Star-Eyes wants to see you,” Rosa said. The bundle of oak switches stopped in midair, shivering. “I was going to call you today. You beat me to it.”

“About what?”

“Your report.”

“But just last week …” Anna laid the twigs aside.

“He has questions.” Rosa sat up. “You behave like somebody afraid of failing an exam. Star-Eyes is satisfied with you.”

“Where?”

“You’ll learn that later.” Rosa licked her lips. “We should have brought something to drink. They sell bread and chicken in the foyer.” She stood up and wrapped the towel around her chest. “How would you like a bottle of beer?”

“Isn’t alcohol prohibited?”

“For a Russian, you know surprisingly little about the difference between utopia and reality. They sell vodka in half-liter bottles, too, and with any luck there will even be some lemons.”

Anna watched Rosa disappear into the steam and then followed her, as though walking into clouds.

THREE

A
nna stopped in front of the Pushkin monument. During the day, the sun had melted the snow on the pedestal, and now the stone looked clean. She sat down. She still had errands to run, soon the shops would close, and yet she lingered on the dark stone. She couldn’t yet bring herself to enter the building on the quay and go up to that eighth-floor apartment where everything appeared normal and logical and was in fact the opposite. Anna needed more time.

Suddenly, she heard a woman’s voice: “My sweetheart, you poor little thing, you must be all worn out, and so tired, so sad. Come on up.”

Pushkin’s bronze trouser legs concealed the speaker. Anna leaned over, propping herself on her elbows, and saw a heavily dressed woman with a knitted scarf on her head. She was bending forward and helping someone to climb up beside her. Anna thought she might be a grandmother on an outing with her grandson, but in the next moment a mongrel dog leaped into sight, his hind legs slipping helplessly on the smooth stone.

“That’s too high for you, all stiff and frozen as you are.” The woman grasped the dog’s chest with both hands and pulled him up. “I’m helping you, look, I’m helping you, my little friend.” Befuddled by his new vantage point, so high above the ground, the dog shook himself and looked at the old woman. She stroked his head between his shaggy ears,
opened her cloth bag, and took out some food scraps. Anna watched as the woman, chattering nonstop, fed the dog bread and cold potatoes.

“You’ve found yourself a good spot, at the feet of the great philanthropist. Nobody wants to act heartless here. You’ll find compassion here, little one, yes, that tastes good, doesn’t it?” As the old woman took another potato out of her bag, she noticed that she was being observed. “My Tasha died,” she went on, as if she’d included Anna in the conversation right from the start. “A female poodle, she was. I made lots of pretty things for her—I didn’t want my Tasha to be cold, ever. All the same, she often got sick, her eyes never stopped running. She died from something else, though.” The dog gave the woman a nudge, because she’d forgotten to keep feeding him. “I don’t have any more,” she said, patting him hard on the head. “Tomorrow there’ll be a little canned fish. Are you coming again tomorrow, my little friend? Well, I am, too, so we have a date, right?”

“Does he have a name?”

“We’re seeing each other for the first time today.” The old woman snapped her bag shut. “And he surely won’t be here tomorrow.” She looked at the dog reproachfully. “Street mutts are faithless.” She scooted clumsily to the edge of the pedestal. “The dogcatcher may pick him up before morning. Right, sweetheart? If you don’t watch out, you’ll wind up in some research lab where they’ll operate on you and stick tubes in you.” The dog wagged his tail attentively. “At least you’ve had enough to eat this one time.” She jumped down from the pedestal, pulled her bag after her, and disappeared into the foggy darkness. The mongrel didn’t follow her; he laid his head between his paws and had a digestive nap.

The statue loomed blackly above Anna. It was high time for her to leave. She thrust her hands into her sleeves and tried to count the lighted windows in the apartment building across from her; like a trellis of light, they rose up out of the darkness and cast shadowy reflections on the frozen river.

Anna didn’t want to deceive Alexey; the shamefulness of it festered in
her like an ulcer. A solution would require but a single step: She would have to leave him. For doing that, she could have named a hundred reasons, among them the truth. In the beginning, she’d believed that time was on her side; everything had seemed amusing and easy at first. Anna tilted her head back.

She hadn’t fallen in love with Alexey, she didn’t lust after him, and yet the evenings she spent with him felt to her like excursions to an exotic island. Once a week, usually Thursday, she was picked up by Anton and brought to the Drezhnevskaya apartment. It was as if Anna were going out to a play in which she had the main role. They would always start by chatting about everyday things over a drink or two; eventually, Anna would go into the bathroom, undress, and return naked to the living room, where Alexey would already be stretched out on the sofa. He’d tell her of his travels, and thus she heard about remote regions of the Soviet Union, about people whose way of life differed utterly from that of the Muscovites. Once Bulyagkov evoked a happy memory, an incident from his childhood in rural Ukraine, and his tale made Anna think of one of her father’s poems. Since she didn’t know it by heart, she paraphrased some of the verses in her own words. Alexey liked this and asked her to do it on other occasions, turning the play of her thoughts into a game. Under normal conditions, she would have found it ridiculous to speak in images and to invent individuals and circumstances that didn’t jibe with reality. But Anna was naked, she was a nymph in summer, improvising for the delight of her listener. Wearing an open white shirt, Alexey would loll on the sofa, sipping his drink and watching her as she darted around barefoot, took a book from the shelf, gazed at pictures, tracked the sun’s path over the rooftops. Sometimes Anna would sit down beside him and he’d lay his hand on her hip or grasp her knee and lavish her body with loving gestures composed entirely of words. During their erotic fantasies, they’d remain completely serious, which aroused Anna all the more. They escalated into wild and lusty orgies that the aging man and the house painter would scarcely have
been capable of carrying off in reality. Alexey told Anna that he seldom slept with Medea, not because of aversion or habit, but as one might forget something that had never been important. Anna asked whether he’d entertained other women in that apartment, and Alexey did not deny it. On those Thursdays, Anna’s life was carefree, filled with a lightheartedness she’d never known before, something simultaneously lascivious and innocent. Those had been wondrous weeks, they had made the summer pass swiftly, and little by little, Anna had admitted to herself that she felt a deep love for Alexey. She recognized that the evenings with him were what she yearned for most, that the course of her week was directed toward them, and that in the hours before Anton picked her up, she could undertake nothing of any importance. She took great care to be assigned to the early shift on Thursdays, she got home with time to spare, and she made sure she looked her best.

“An entire bottle of shampoo in a month,” Viktor Ipalyevich said one day. “Good thing I’m bald. Otherwise, our family collective would be given a deadline and ordered to justify this extravagance.” When Anna only laughed, he spoke more pointedly: “How handy for you that Leonid spends so many nights in his barracks.” Her answer was a scared look, to which he replied, “Leonid’s not dumb, you know. And he loves you to boot.”

“I love him, too,” she said.

In actual fact, Anna wasn’t unfaithful; she and Alexey didn’t sleep together. However, the rules of their society forbade what they
did
do: They constructed a private dream, an individual world. Their conduct was “unidealistic” and “morally defective.” When a man like Bulyagkov, who had access to all privileges, engaged in such behavior, it didn’t have the consequences that would threaten a working woman. Toward the end of that summer, Anna had for the first time imagined the day when Alexey would drop her. The following Thursday, he found her uneasy; when he asked her why, she made no secret of her fears. They were
drinking port wine, and Anna was fully dressed. Alexey took the glass from her hand, drew her head close to his, and kissed her for the first time.

“I love you,” he said, as naturally as if he were asking her to open the window. “You have nothing to fear from me, not now, not ever. And if, in spite of that, you decide to break it off someday, I’ll accept your decision.”

“Why don’t you sleep with me, Alexey?”

“So we can be like every other couple? So we can finally have a normal affair?”

“No. Because you love me.”

They went into the bedroom together. As always, the bed was unmade. “I hadn’t expected to adopt such concrete measures,” he said.

“Makes no difference,” she replied, pulling him onto the mattress.

Anna had seduced him and enjoyed it, but at the same time, she’d felt that she was ruining something. She’d gotten closer to the man, but she’d let the keeper of the dream escape. She’d allowed everyday air into their rarefied world. They had lain beside each other on the bed, naked. Horsehair protruded from the mattress here and there. The Deputy Minister had liver spots; his legs were sinewy and marked with blue veins. Afterward, Anna had grown sad. She’d felt that, instead of strengthening their relationship, she’d made its end more palpable. While she was in the bathroom, Alexey had put on a record; it was Shostakovich, somber music that sounded to Anna like a reproach. She’d taken her leave earlier than usual and—with her eyes—begged Alexey to pardon her.

Anna stood up and walked away from the statue. It had begun to snow; ice crystals smudged the points of light in the windows across from her. She moved toward the building with slow steps. Her affair with Alexey had endured for a year and nine months already, longer than many marriages.
And for almost that entire length of time, her “relationship” with the other older man, the one who wore the dark green suits and the eyeglasses that twinkled like stars, had been in existence as well. When they met for the first time, she thought, how paternally he’d acted toward her.