Edge of Eternity (52 page)

“There's a guy called Max at the Central Market.” This bazaar, in Sadovaya-Samotyochnaya, was a lawful alternative to state stores. Produce from private gardens was sold at higher prices. Instead of long queues and unattractive displays, there were mountains of colorful
vegetables—for those who could afford them. And the sale of legitimate produce masked even more profitable illegal business at many of the stalls.

Dimka understood why Natalya wanted company. Some of the men who did this kind of work were thugs, and a woman had reason to be wary.

Dimka hoped that was her only motive. He did not want to be led into temptation. He felt close to Nina just now, her time being near. They had not had sex for a couple of months, which made him more vulnerable to Natalya's charms. But that paled beside the drama of pregnancy. The last thing Dimka wanted was a dalliance with Natalya. But he could hardly refuse her this simple favor.

They went in the lunch hour. Natalya drove Dimka to the market in her ancient Mercedes. Despite its age it was fast and comfortable. How did she get parts for it, he wondered?

On the way she asked him about Nina. “The baby is due any day,” he said.

“Let me know if you need baby supplies,” Natalya said. “Nik's sister has a three-year-old who no longer needs feeding bottles and suchlike.”

Dimka was surprised. Baby feeding bottles were a luxury more rare than tape recorders. “Thank you, I will.”

They parked and walked through the market to a shop selling secondhand furniture. This was a semi-legal business. People were allowed to sell their own possessions, but it was against the law to be a middleman, which made the trade cumbersome and inefficient. To Dimka, the difficulties of imposing such Communist rules illustrated the practical necessity of many capitalist practices—hence the need for liberalization.

Max was a heavy man in his thirties dressed American style in blue jeans and a white T-shirt. He sat at a pine kitchen table drinking tea and smoking. He was surrounded by cheap used couches and cabinets and beds, mostly elderly and damaged. “What do you want?” he said brusquely.

“I spoke to you last Wednesday about a Grundig tape recorder,” said Natalya. “You said to come back in a week.”

“Tape recorders are difficult to get hold of,” he said.

Dimka intervened. “Don't piss about, Max,” he said, making his voice as harsh and contemptuous as Max's. “Have you got one or not?”

Men such as Max considered it a sign of weakness to give a direct answer to a simple question. He said: “You'll have to pay in American dollars.”

Natalya said: “I agreed to your price. I've brought exactly that much. No more.”

“Show me the money.”

Natalya took a wad of American bills from the pocket of her dress.

Max held out his hand.

Dimka took Natalya's wrist to prevent her handing over the money prematurely. He said: “Where is the tape recorder?”

Max spoke over his shoulder. “Josef!”

There was a movement in the back room. “Yes?”

“Tape recorder.”

“Yes.”

Josef came out carrying a plain cardboard box. He was a younger man, maybe nineteen, with a cigarette dangling from his lip. Although small, he was muscular. He put the box down on a table. “It's heavy,” he said. “Have you got a car?”

“Around the corner.”

Natalya counted out the cash.

Max said: “It cost me more than I expected.”

“I don't have any more money,” Natalya said.

Max picked up the bills and counted them. “All right,” he said resentfully. “It's yours.” He stood up and stuffed the wad into the pocket of his jeans. “Josef will carry it to your car.” He went into the back room.

Josef grasped the box to pick it up.

Dimka said: “Just a minute.”

Josef said: “What? I haven't got time to waste.”

“Open the box,” said Dimka.

Josef took the weight of the box, ignoring him, but Dimka put his hand on it and leaned on it, making it impossible for Josef to lift it. Josef gave him a look of blazing fury, and for a moment Dimka wondered if there would be violence. Then Josef stood back and said: “Open the damn thing yourself.”

The lid was stapled and taped. Dimka and Natalya got it open with some difficulty. Inside was a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The brand name was Magic Tone.

“This is not a Grundig,” Natalya said.

“These are better than Grundigs,” Josef said. “Nicer sound.”

“I paid for a Grundig,” she said. “This is a cheap Japanese imitation.”

“You can't get Grundigs these days.”

“Then I'll have the money back.”

“You can't, not once you've opened the box.”

“Until we opened the box, we didn't know you were trying to defraud us.”

“Nobody defrauded you. You wanted a tape recorder.”

Dimka said: “Bugger this.” He went to the door of the back room.

Josef said: “You can't go in there!”

Dimka ignored him and went in. The room was full of cardboard boxes. A few were open, showing television sets, record players, and radios, all foreign brands. But Max was not there. Dimka saw a back door.

He returned to the front room. “Max has run off with your money,” he told Natalya.

Josef said: “He's a busy man. He has a lot of customers.”

“Don't be so fucking stupid,” Dimka said to him. “Max is a thief, and so are you.”

Josef pointed a finger close to Dimka's face. “Don't you call me stupid,” he said in a threatening tone.

“Give her the money back,” Dimka said. “Before you get into real trouble.”

Josef grinned. “What are you going to do—call the police?”

They could not do that. They were engaged in an illegal transaction. And the police would probably arrest Dimka and Natalya but not Josef and Max, who were undoubtedly paying bribes to protect their business.

“There's nothing we can do,” Natalya said. “Let's go.”

Josef said: “Take your tape recorder.”

“No, thanks,” Natalya said. “It's not what I want.” She went to the door.

Dimka said. “We're coming back—for the money.”

Josef laughed. “What are you going to do?”

“You'll see,” Dimka said weakly, and he followed Natalya out.

He was seething with frustration as Natalya drove back to the Kremlin. “I'm going to get your money back,” he said to her.

“Please don't,” she said. “Those men are dangerous. I don't want you to get hurt. Just leave it.”

He was not going to leave it, but he said no more.

When he got to his office, the KGB file on Vasili Yenkov was on his desk.

It was not thick. Yenkov was a script editor who had never been in trouble nor even under suspicion until the day in May 1961 when he had been arrested carrying five copies of a subversive news sheet called
Dissidence.
Under interrogation he claimed he had been handed a dozen copies a few minutes earlier and had begun to pass them out under a sudden impulse of compassion for the opera singer who had pneumonia. A thorough search of his apartment had revealed nothing to contradict his story. His typewriter did not match the one used to produce the newsletter. With electrical terminals attached to his lips and his fingertips, he had given the names of other subversives, but innocent and guilty people alike did that under torture. As was usual, some of the people named had been impeccable Communist Party members, while others the KGB had failed to trace. On balance, the secret police were inclined to believe Yenkov was not the illegal publisher of
Dissidence.

Dimka had to admire the grit of a man who could maintain a lie under KGB interrogation. Yenkov had protected Tanya even while suffering agonizing torture. Perhaps he deserved his freedom.

Dimka knew the truth that Yenkov had kept hidden. On the night of Yenkov's arrest, Dimka had driven Tanya on his motorcycle to Yenkov's apartment, where she had picked up a typewriter, undoubtedly the machine used to produce
Dissidence.
Dimka had hurled it into the Moskva River half an hour later. Typewriters did not float. He and Tanya had saved Yenkov from a longer sentence.

Yenkov was no longer at the logging camp in the larch forest, according to the file. Someone had discovered that he had a little technical expertise. His first job at Radio Moscow had been studio production assistant, so he knew about microphones and electrical connections. The shortage of technicians in Siberia was so chronic that
this had been enough to get him a job as an electrician in a power station.

He had probably been pleased, at first, to move to inside work at which he did not have to risk losing a limb to a careless axe. But there was a downside. The authorities were reluctant to permit a competent technician to leave Siberia. When his sentence was up, he had applied in the usual way for a travel visa to return to Moscow. And his application had been refused. That left him no choice but to continue in his job. He was stuck.

It was unjust; but injustice was everywhere, as Dimka had pointed out to Tanya.

Dimka studied the photograph in the file. Yenkov looked like a movie star, with a sensual face, fleshy lips, black eyebrows, and thick dark hair. But there seemed more to him than that. A faint expression of wry amusement around the corners of his eyes suggested that he did not take himself too seriously. It would not be surprising if Tanya were in love with this man, despite her denials.

Anyway, Dimka would try to get him released for her sake.

He would speak to Khrushchev about the case. However, he needed to wait until the boss was in a good mood. He put the file in his desk drawer.

He did not get an opportunity that afternoon. Khrushchev left early, and Dimka was getting ready to go home when Natalya put her head around his door. “Come for a drink,” she said. “We need one after our horrible experience in the Central Market.”

Dimka hesitated. “I need to get home to Nina. Her time is near.”

“Just a quick one.”

“Okay.” He screwed the cap onto his fountain pen and spoke to his secretary. “We can go, Vera.”

“I've got a few more things to do,” she said. She was conscientious.

The Riverside Bar was patronized by the young Kremlin elite, so it was not as dismal as the average Moscow drinking hole. The chairs were comfortable, the snacks were edible, and for the better-paid apparatchik with exotic tastes there were bottles of Scotch and bourbon behind the bar. Tonight it was crowded with people whom Dimka and Natalya knew, mostly aides like themselves. Someone thrust a glass of
beer into Dimka's hand and he drank gratefully. The mood was boisterous. Boris Kozlov, a Khrushchev aide like Dimka, told a risky joke. “Everybody! What will happen when Communism comes to Saudi Arabia?”

They all cheered and begged him to tell them.

“After a while there will be a shortage of sand!”

Everyone laughed. The people in this group were keen workers for Soviet Communism, as Dimka was, but they were not blind to its faults. The gap between party aspirations and Soviet reality bothered them all, and jokes released the tension.

Dimka finished his beer and got another.

Natalya raised her glass as if about to give a toast. “The best hope for world revolution is an American company called United Fruit,” she said. The people around her laughed. “No, seriously,” she said, though she was smiling. “They persuade the United States government to support brutal right-wing dictatorships all over Central and South America. If United Fruit had any sense they would foster gradual progress toward bourgeois freedoms—the rule of law, freedom of speech, trade unions—but, happily for world Communism, they're too dumb to see that. They stamp ruthlessly on reform movements, so the people have nowhere to turn but to Communism—just as Karl Marx predicted.” She clinked glasses with the nearest person. “Long live United Fruit!”

Dimka laughed. Natalya was one of the smartest people in the Kremlin, as well as the prettiest. Flushed with gaiety, her wide mouth open in a laugh, she was enchanting. Dimka could not help comparing her with the weary, bulging, sex-averse woman at home, though he knew the thought was cruelly unjust.

Natalya went to the bar to order snacks. Dimka realized he had been here more than an hour: he had to leave. He went up to Natalya with the intention of saying good-bye. But the beer was just enough to make him incautious and, when Natalya smiled warmly at him, he kissed her.

She kissed him back, enthusiastically.

Dimka did not understand her. She had spent a night with him; then she yelled at him that she was married; then she asked him to go for a drink with her; then she kissed him. What next? But he hardly cared
about her inconsistency when her warm mouth was on his and the tip of her tongue was teasing his lips.

She broke the embrace, and Dimka saw his secretary standing beside them.

Vera's expression was severely judgmental. “I've been looking for you,” she said with a note of accusation. “There was a phone call just after you left.”

“I'm sorry,” said Dimka, not sure whether he was apologizing for being hard to find or for kissing Natalya.

Natalya took a plate of pickled cucumbers from the bartender and returned to the group.

“Your mother-in-law called,” Vera went on.

Dimka's euphoria had now evaporated.

“Your wife has gone into labor,” Vera said. “All is well, but you should join her at the hospital.”

“Thank you,” said Dimka, feeling that he was the worst kind of faithless husband.

“Good night,” said Vera, and she left the bar.

Dimka followed her out. He stood breathing the cool night air for a moment. Then he got on his motorcycle and headed for the hospital. What a moment to be caught kissing a colleague. He deserved to feel humiliated: he had done something stupid.

He parked his bike in the hospital car park and went in. He found Nina in the maternity ward, sitting up in bed. Masha was on a chair beside the bed, holding a baby wrapped in a white shawl. “Congratulations,” Masha said to Dimka. “It's a boy.”