The Russian Affair (6 page)

“Where do you have to go? I can take you part of the way.”

Had Anna been able to imagine the consequences of this offer, she would have run out into the rain without replying. Instead she gazed at the lovely things the blonde was wearing. “You’ll ruin your dress,” Anna said.

“I want to go to that café.” Arm in arm, protected by the umbrella, and running in step, they set out.

When they reached the door of the bar, the unknown woman asked, “Shall we go in and have some tea?”

Anna, breathless, stood there without speaking.

“Without you, I would have got soaking wet,” said the woman, smiling. “And by the way, my name is Rosa.”

The meeting that took place one week later marked the first time that Anna stepped into the trap. For a long time, her family had enjoyed a privilege: During the 1940s, when Viktor Ipalyevich was at the height of his fame, he had purchased a grave in one of Moscow’s central cemeteries. And so Anna was among the few who, when they visited their dead, could do so inside the city; most people had to go to the urn graves located on the outskirts. On that particular afternoon, having picked up some spike broom and some forget-me-nots, Anna had passed through the cemetery’s main portal and watched the crows, which seemed to be attacking the graves. It was hot and sunny. Many visitors were kneeling on the marble gravestones, scrubbing them with brushes or putting plants on them. Anna reached the grave that was her goal and greeted a couple who had set up a table on their son’s gravestone and were having lunch.

“We’ve brought Sasha some of the things he used to like.” With a gesture, the father invited Anna to share their meal:
pirozhki
, hard-boiled eggs, pickled mushrooms, and fish. Regretfully, Anna pointed to the neglected adjacent grave and held up a hand rake. “First I have to tidy up Mama’s place.”

“The winter made a real mess.” The neighbors kept eating.

Anna went down on her knees. Her grandparents’ marker had been moved farther back, and in the middle stood a stone of polished granite
bearing a picture of her mother. The photograph showed a pretty woman with her hair pinned up high on her head. The look on the youthful face gave Anna a pang; in reality, Dora Tsazukhina had been a slight, inconspicuous woman, somewhat shorter than Viktor Ipalyevich. She’d worked for the Writers’ Association as one of a hundred typists and had met, at a reception, the poet whose work she’d revered even as a girl. Viktor Ipalyevich was divorced, and he enjoyed being revered by women for his poetry. He’d seduced Dora that very night and visited her a few times after that at the Writers’ Association, but without considering the matter very important. Soon afterward, a lover of many years’ standing left him for a sculptor who won the Lenin Prize. Finding himself empty-handed in every way had dealt a sharp blow to Viktor Ipalyevich’s self-confidence. As chance would have it, the editing of his latest volume of poems had recently been completed, and Dora was typing up the revised manuscript, so that the two of them had professional reasons for spending time together. The poet had instinctively understood that in securing Dora he would be drawing to his side a lifelong admirer, someone who would always subordinate her existence to his needs and who (this consideration was not to be disdained) earned a respectable income. Dora and Viktor were married during a heavy March rainstorm; at the end of November, Anna came into the world. “She’ll be an idealist,” her father had declared, and he’d given her the name of the protagonist in Tolstoy’s famous novel. The allocation of a larger apartment was achieved without difficulty, and Viktor, Dora, and the infant moved into their new home near Filyovsky Park. Dora wasn’t robust, but nobody found her delicacy worrying; for Viktor Ipalyevich, all it meant was that he would go on his long hikes through the hills around Zagorsk alone or choose easier routes. On one such excursion, Dora had slipped and, although she didn’t fall, broken her shinbone. The fragility of her bone structure aroused surprise; a medical examination revealed that she had cancer of the bone marrow. At the time when her mother was hospitalized, Anna was a fourteen-year-old Pioneer Girl. For three years, Dora had fought
her illness with a determination that commanded Viktor Ipalyevich’s deepest respect; in the final months, however, both he and his daughter had wished that the sick woman’s ordeal might be over soon. Anna’s mother died in the household; outside, as on her wedding day, there was a terrific downpour. The normally complacent Viktor Ipalyevich had mourned his wife’s death more deeply than Anna would have thought him capable of doing, and during this period he’d produced his most beautiful poems: not elegies, but vibrant declarations of love to Dora. Shortly afterward, Anna had left school and accepted a trainee position in the building combine.

Now she knelt at her mother’s grave. While casting hungry glances at her neighbors’ picnic, she’d dug little hollows in the soil and planted the forget-me-nots in a circle around the gravestone. Then she’d swept all the blackened leaves off the grave and polished its brass ornamentation, and as she was kneeling there quietly for a moment, a cloth pattern came into her field of vision—a summer dress that Anna recognized. It was the same woman she’d met during the cloudburst outside the bakery.

“Anna?” the woman asked warily, as if she weren’t sure of the name.

“Rosa!”

“What a coincidence!” the woman said, laughing. Her hair shimmered in the midday sun.

“Who do you have in here?” Anna asked, tamping down the earth around the forget-me-nots.

“My paternal grandparents.” Rosa pointed to the cemetery’s main avenue.

“My mother,” Anna said, pointing to the photograph.

“You look like her.”

“She died when I was seventeen.”

“I’m doubly happy to see you again,” Rosa said, extracting her wallet from her purse.

Anna remembered how embarrassed Rosa had been in the tearoom. She hadn’t had enough money, and she’d been unable to pay her share;
Anna had even been obliged to lend her subway fare. “Forget it,” Anna said. “It was my treat.”

Rosa insisted on immediate reciprocation. She accompanied Anna as she poured stale water out of a vase, carried the vase over to a faucet, and filled the vessel with fresh water. When she placed the spike broom blossoms behind her mother’s picture, flowers surrounded the gravestone like a yellow corona. Then Anna and Rosa strolled away together down the central avenue of the cemetery, followed by the curious eyes of the old couple.

“Just a moment,” Rosa said, slowing her pace. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to …” She pointed to the little church that gave the cemetery its name, and Anna realized that the cross around Rosa’s neck was no mere adornment. They both covered their heads with scarves. It was cold in the chapel, and the space was filled with the singsong prayers of some old women. Rosa bought a candle, took out a small piece of paper, and wrote the names of her dead on it. After a short prayer, she laid the chit on a stack near the altar. Anna watched these proceedings with sympathy, which she was only later to understand was exactly what Rosa had wished to elicit. By performing a reactionary act in Anna’s sight, she was giving her friend a sign of trust.

In the tearoom after the earlier cloudburst, Rosa had mentioned that she worked as a journalist for the English-language daily, the
Moscow Times
. Now, as they left the church, she told Anna of a telephone call to the newspaper that morning: During some demolition work in the Arbat quarter of Moscow, an old storeroom, unopened since the war, had been discovered. Her editor, Rosa said, had assigned her to report on this discovery, and she invited Anna to accompany her on the assignment.

The building complex was on the boundary of the Arbat quarter. At first glance, the high fence surrounding the complex made it seem inaccessible. The photographer, a stout fellow with curly hair, was already waiting. He yanked two boards aside, allowing the women to enter the
worksite. The converted lobby, its windows blacked out by decades of dust, was on the second floor. When the photographer opened the iron door, Anna just stood there, speechless. She felt as though she’d entered some monumental film like the ones that used to be shown to her and her fellow Pioneer Girls. The gray concrete ceiling was thickly hung with huge crystal chandeliers that sparkled in the light of a heavy-duty, upward-pointing halogen lamp. The sight before Anna’s eyes surpassed everything that she’d been taught about the wasteful extravagance of the feudal barons. Who had possessed the resources, not to mention the room, required to hang such luxury from their ceilings? For whom had workers’ hands suspended countless rhinestones from little wire hooks and assembled chandeliers as tall as two stories in a modern building? Hesitantly, as if she might be called to account for every step, Anna entered the scene, while Rosa questioned the worker who had come upon the hidden treasure. The photographer worried about the quality of the light and shot pictures from every possible angle.

The report on “Stalin’s Lamp Shop” had never appeared. Those who knew about the collection had preferred to help themselves to it. With a smile, Rosa had assured the head of the demolition firm that he’d be compensated for his discovery if he conducted himself appropriately. Even so early on, it should have made Anna suspicious to see a young woman, a journalist, in a position to make such an offer. Blinded by the hanging splendor, Anna had looked on, and the question never crossed her mind.

“Which one do you like?”

Anna’s eyes had wandered to a wall chandelier with a gilt arm; Rosa had nodded in agreement. Once, some time later, Rosa had told Anna that the small lamps, the ones that could be carried off in a crate or a box, had disappeared soonest. For the middle-sized chandeliers, trucks with their tailgates down had pulled up in the parking area; the monsters, the largest of the treasures, had hung there for some time, and then someone had decided to dismantle them and sell their individual parts.

That was the day when Anna accepted the first gift, the first time she associated herself with someone she barely knew in order to obtain some benefit. Much later, a good while after the two had become the closest of friends, Rosa admitted to Anna that no member of her family had ever been buried in the Vaganskovskoye Cemetery.

“You look like an illegal street vendor,” Rosa Khleb said, snatching Anna out of her memories. “Why didn’t you wait inside?”

“There’s … nothing there,” Anna said, pointing in the direction she’d come from.

Rosa took her friend’s arm, and together they turned back to the man with the bundled twigs. She was a head taller than Anna, and she was wearing a fur-trimmed coat and black leather gloves. She bought two bundles, one oak and one birch, and entered the passage that led to the building’s inner courtyard. There was a cashier in one of the rear stairwells.

“As a club member, I’m allowed to bring a guest,” Rosa said, paying for them both.

“What kind of club is this?” Anna followed her inside through a normal apartment doorway.

“You’ll like it. Every now and then, when I have more time than I do now, I stay here for a full three hours.”

The dressing room smelled as though sweaty laundry were being boiled somewhere nearby. Rosa surrendered her watch, her briefcase, and a gold bracelet to a woman in a white smock. Anna hastened to put her own things in the woman’s hands. She received their coats and hats and handed them two tokens.

“The second one is for the towels,” Rosa explained.

They entered a room whose elegance had faded. A carved mantelpiece crowned the walled-up fireplace. A sleepy old woman was sitting in front of a massive mirror; a copy of the house rules was fastened to the
mirror’s frame with thumbtacks. One of the regulations stated: “Anyone seen consuming alcohol must be reported at once.” The woman showed them to a changing room. The coat hangers, the benches, and the shoe racks, but above all the moist, warm air, made it clear to Anna what sort of place they were in. Rosa loosened her hair and began to get undressed; Anna admired her ivory-white underwear.

“What are you waiting for?”

Anna let her pants, sweater, and shirt fall to the floor. When she was naked, she covered herself with the bath towel.

“I have to sweat out yesterday’s office party,” Rosa said, going ahead of her. “A couple of our correspondents were still going strong at dawn. Good thing we publish only twice a week—otherwise, there would have been no edition of the
Moscow Times
today.”

Once they were through the next door, the temperature and the humidity rose sharply. Several women stood under showers and soaped themselves. For a long moment, Anna felt inhibited among strangers; at the washstands in the building combine, people rarely appeared unclothed.

“I thought you didn’t have much time,” Rosa said to encourage her. Anna stepped under the jet of lukewarm water.

“Prepare yourself for feudalism in its most horrible form!” Rosa said, indicating with an outstretched arm the steam bath’s inner sanctum.

They entered a room whose contours could only be guessed, because it was full of steam. Along the wall, Anna could make out slabs of black marble for reclining, and in the middle of the room a bathtub that seemed to have been chiseled out of a single block of stone; two women were sitting in it, chatting. On the marble slabs, too, women were sitting and talking. Water and sweat ran along their shoulders and breasts and dripped onto the floor.

“Are you ready for the gallery?” Rosa smiled in a way that made Anna curious. They approached the last door together. A wave of hot, moist air took Anna’s breath away and scorched her lungs. A lightbulb illuminated
the square room, in which there were three tiers of benches, the highest tier right under the ceiling. In this chamber there was only one other person, a woman of extravagant proportions, snoring in her sleep. Anna and Rosa chose the middle tier and sat there for a while in silence, trying to get used to the climate.

“So how are things going for you, Comrade?”

Anna waited until the moisture on her nose formed a droplet and fell onto her knee. “I miss my husband.”