The Russian Affair (38 page)

She looked up. The deep blue of the sky was tinting the treetops, and all at once evening flooded the park. In spring, of all seasons, she had to get dumped! The fearful certainty that the whole thing was her fault, that she bore all the guilt for it, suddenly gave way to self-pity: Was she jinxed, or what? Could anyone imagine worse confusion than what she was floundering in? Was there an unluckier person in the whole blessed city of Moscow?

“The wind’s going to carry you away, girl!” she heard a powerful voice say.

The fact that someone had called her “girl” made Anna turn around. Not far away, she saw a couple, the weatherproof kind of people who come out when the seasons change. Snow still lay in spots shielded from the sun, some patches of ice were not yet completely thawed, but these two had already come out to the park and built a fire, and now they were roasting shashlik on spits and baking potatoes over the hot embers; a supply of dry branches lay nearby, fuel for the fire. The two were comfortably ensconced in a pair of lawn chairs.

“Come over here! Why are you running around like that?” the woman said. “Sooner or later, you have to come to a stop, so why not here?”

Before she knew it, Anna had taken the first steps toward the fire.

“That’s better.” Despite the man’s furrowed face, there was no telling whether he was forty or sixty; his beard grew from his throat to his cheekbones. “We’ll eat in a minute. How about a little drink first?”

They pointed to the bottles standing at the ready behind them. There was no reason to refuse, not today, and so Anna allowed a beer to be pressed into one hand and a generous glass of home-brewed liquor into the other.

“What could make a pretty comrade run around in circles instead of strolling calmly on this lovely spring evening?”

“My husband wants to leave me.” The answer was out before she’d formed the thought.

“What a dumb guy he must be!” the woman answered impassively. “Doesn’t he have eyes in his head?” She cast a meaningful glance at her own husband. “A few years ago, this comrade here thought about moving on to greener pastures, too.” She pointed a shashlik spit at her husband.

“That’s not true anymore, hasn’t been true for a long time,” the bearded man said soothingly.

“What did you do about it?” Anna asked the woman.

“I let him starve.” The woman held the meat over the flames. “The
pantry was off-limits to him. If he needed food, let him get his fill from the other woman! You can’t imagine how fast he came back.”

“Obviously, none of that is true.” The man clinked glasses with Anna. “The only reason I’m keeping quiet is so I won’t spoil my darling’s lovely story. Do I look like a man who would cheat?”

“You all cheat when you get the chance.” The woman coerced Anna into lifting her glass. “If a pretty little mouth attracts you, or a skirt is lifted a few inches, you all start running like donkeys chasing carrots.”

“My case is more complicated.” The warmth of the liquor spread through her like a shiver, and Anna squatted down on her haunches.

“No, it’s not,” her hostess contradicted her. “It all just seems complicated. Men’s heads are constantly throbbing with the fear of missing something. The gentlemen get a nice hen to share their nest, but after a few years, they want to see whether they’ve still got some rooster credibility. They flap around and crow, their combs swell, and they’re grateful if they can mount another hen.”

“The way you talk, Galina, light of my life. Always full of surprises.” The bearded man opened his next beer and drank from the bottle in gurgling swallows.

“Galina?” Anna looked up at the woman, who was looming over her, brandishing her skewers like a sword fighter.

“And you, sister, what’s your name?”

Anna laughed. “Is your name really Galina?”

“What’s funny about it?”

“Galina is also the name of the woman who turned my Leonid’s head.”

Now the woman with the skewers laughed, too. “It wasn’t me, that’s for sure! You see,” she said, teasing her husband, “there are tramps named Galina, too. What a lucky man you are!”

“That must be about ready to eat,” he said, changing the subject.

The woman sniffed the meat, then blew on it and tasted it. “Just another minute, no more. The marinade is a poem!”

“Garlic and wine?” Anna asked.

“And red peppercorns.”

The man spread a cloth on the young grass and put out a couple of glass jars containing pickled vegetables, followed by a loaf of bread. With a narrow, oft-sharpened knife, he cut off large chunks of the bread and gave one to Anna. “It’s lovely to have company today. Don’t be gloomy, my girl. Things will get straightened out, one way or another.”

“Straightened out,” Anna murmured. She broke off a piece of the freshly baked bread and chewed it slowly.

TWENTY-EIGHT

I
n the following days, the duty to carry out her mission for Kamarovsky merged, for Anna, with her need to talk to someone she could feel understood by. She thought about the mad coincidence that had made her and Alexey fellows in misery. Here was the jilted house painter, whose captain preferred his Siberian love, and there was the Deputy Minister, living on his own now that the influential cultural secretary wanted nothing to do with him. Had the consequences of all this turmoil not been so unsettling, Anna could have laughed at it. But they were, and so, one morning, heedless of her usual caution, she dialed the number of the telephone in the Drezhnevskaya Street apartment. The receiver was picked up on the second ring, and a muffled voice said hello.

“Have I … Is this Alexey Maximovich’s apartment?”

“Anna?” said the voice on the other end.

“Yes. I apologize for disturbing you at this … you sound strange.”

“I’m brushing my teeth,” he mumbled. Various sounds followed: the receiver being laid down, footsteps, running water. “All done,” he said cheerfully.

“I apologize.”

“No, I’m glad to hear your voice. If you only knew how glad,
Annushka.” Before she could reply, he suggested a meeting. “When do you have time? This evening? Tomorrow? Don’t say no. Should we meet here … no, that’s not a good idea. Somewhere else, some magical place … Hello, Anna, are you still there?”

Now that the meeting she’d wanted to engineer was going to take place without any effort on her part, Anna became wary.

“Let me arrange something for tomorrow,” he insisted. “Let me surprise you.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Of course it isn’t necessary,” he said with a laugh, “but it will make me happy. I’ll send Anton to you. Shall we say around seven?”

Anna agreed, said good-bye, and hung up.

Bulyagkov buttoned his shirt, tied his tie in front of the mirror, and noted that his double chin was becoming more unsightly every day. He gazed nervously at the telephone; he was expecting a call and had purposefully kept the conversation with Anna short. His cheeks burned from the shaving; he went back into the bathroom and applied the French cream. As he was rubbing it in, the telephone rang again. Bulyagkov took a deep breath and answered the phone.

“Alexey Maximovich?” said an unpleasant voice on the other end of the line.

“Yes.”

“Something’s come up. How soon can you be in the Ministry building?”

He named a time and hung up. The caller’s unwillingness to say anything more made Bulyagkov confident that the something that had come up was what he’d hoped it would be. He left his apartment, watched the black ZIL pull up at the curb, and climbed in. Anton drove out of the narrow street and onto the Chaussée.

At the Ministry, Bulyagkov was welcomed by a hastily formed committee and informed that the Minister had fallen ill overnight with a severe case of intestinal flu. His physician had made an initial diagnosis
of food poisoning, but the Minister couldn’t remember eating anything he shouldn’t have. The exact cause of his condition was still to be determined, but in any case, he was confined to his bed and, according to the doctor’s report, in no condition to travel to Stockholm.

“Cancel” was the Deputy Minister’s response. Without the top man, he said, the excursion made no sense; an international research exchange without the Minister for Research was an absurdity.

The committee granted Bulyagkov’s point but objected that preparations for the trip had already consumed a considerable amount of funding, and that moreover the members of the scientific delegation had all arrived in Moscow already; how great their disappointment would be if they were now sent back to their research stations. Finally, they weren’t going to Sweden merely to present their own science; in return, they expected to receive interesting information about various Western technologies.

Bulyagkov remained adamant. He’d only seen to the organization of the visit to Sweden, he said; he was unprepared in the science of the various fields and considered himself incapable of giving a proper speech of greeting.

The committee resorted to flattery. It declared emphatically that the Deputy Minister, with his background in the natural sciences, was the only person versed in all the department’s interests. And even should he be compelled to improvise, he knew a lot more about chemistry, mathematics, or nuclear physics than any other official in the Ministry. Without naming the Minister, Bulyagkov’s colleagues evoked his relative competence and made clear their belief that, when it came to science, the chief couldn’t hold a candle to his deputy. Their adulation reached such a level that Bulyagkov stood up, walked pensively around the conference room, and stopped at the big window. He looked down to the street, his view of it already blocked here and there by a canopy of leaves. Alexey knew what his colleagues feared above all: They feared that his refusal could result in their being deprived of the amenities offered by a
trip to the West. They weren’t interested in science; they kept their eyes fixed on their privileges as Soviet representatives.

“What about the speech to the Swedish Academy?” he asked, acting hesitant again.

“Why not give the speech that was written for the Minister?”

“I can do that only if I do it in his name.”

“Of course! Good idea! Respectful gesture!” some of the officials cried. They saw a ray of hope, but Bulyagkov announced that he would accept the mission only on condition of a unanimous resolution of the Chamber. This proviso was met with agitated objections: The scheduled departure was only forty-eight hours away, and it would be impossible to convene the entire Chamber in such a short time. The Deputy Minister appreciated that, but he insisted that there be a memorandum recording the proceedings in detail and ratified in writing by the members of the Politburo. His colleagues, feeling that success was near, promised to provide him with such a document, and then someone remembered that two of the high-ranking comrades had profited from the spring weather and taken a jaunt to the Black Sea.

While the committee was discussing how the required memorandum could be ratified “telegraphically,” Bulyagkov was overcome by a serenity that he’d long had to do without. He’d assessed the men around him correctly and laid so many obstacles in their way that his departure would arouse no suspicion. These Russians, with their panicked need to shed the most flattering light on their performances in the little positions they’d striven so doggedly to occupy, would do everything to persuade him to agree to something that had been his plan from the very beginning. In these minutes, he saw the future in a larger dimension, and despite pangs of anxiety before the unknown, he felt that he was simultaneously at the end and at the beginning of something. He thought warmly about Anna’s call, shook off a brief moment of suspicion about her motives, and considered the possibilities for the following evening. He wanted their date to be splendid and affectionate, impressive and
intimate. When he thought of the right place, he cracked a narrow smile. He announced to his colleagues that he would await further developments in his office. By way of precaution, he would have the Minister’s twenty-six-page speech of greeting sent to him, but he especially wanted to contact the Minister by telephone and offer him his sympathy and best wishes for a speedy recovery. The comrades in the conference room hailed this gesture.

TWENTY-NINE

T
he narrow street behind the Mozhaisk Chaussée was now so brightly lit at night that getting into the car under cover of darkness was no longer a possibility. While Anna watched the ZIL approaching, it occurred to her that in spite of all the changes, this one thing had remained constant; she might have broken up with Alexey, but Anton was still picking her up and bringing her to her unflappable lover.

“As punctual as clockwork,” Anton said in his melodious voice.

“I’ve never said this to you, but you would have made a first-rate singer.” She had her heart on her sleeve.

“To be honest, Comrade, I’ve done that.” He turned around and drove onto the crepuscular boulevard.

“You’re a singer, Anton? Really?” She laid her arm along the top of the seat, almost touching his shoulder.

“Once upon a time.”

“In a chorus?”

“It was a provincial troupe. We brought a quite respectable performance of
Boris Godunov
to the stage. I was Boris.”

“Anton, I’m amazed!” She tried to picture the inconspicuous, always clean-shaven man costumed as the imposing, bearded Godunov. “Why did you give it up?”

“There were several reasons …” He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “And I’d rather not talk about any of them.”

Anna took the lipstick out of her purse, re-reddened her lips with the help of her reflection in the window, and pushed her hair behind her ears. There she was, being driven to her Arctic wolf, as happy and excited as if she hadn’t told him, not a very long time ago, that it was all over. “Where are we going?” Anna asked, closing her purse.

“I was sworn to silence on that subject.” Anton drove a short distance along the Smolensk Quay, avoided Kalinin Prospekt, and took the Garden Ring to Mayakovsky Square; on the left and on the right, Gorky Street glittered. He stopped in front of a building that Anna knew only by name and accompanied her inside. They crossed an elegant beige foyer. The staff of the Peking Hotel nodded to Anton as he accompanied Anna to the elevator, pressed the button for the top floor, and stepped back. The doors closed on his friendly face and moments later opened on an elegantly furnished vestibule. In the reflection of a gold-framed mirror, Anna saw Bulyagkov coming toward her. He was wearing a three-piece suit of dark wool that made him look thinner. Before either spoke the first word, Alexey embraced the painter, and they stood for a while in the little foyer with their arms around each other.