24
Tania Dvorkin was back in Moscow, but Vasili Yenkov was not.
After the two of them had been arrested at the poetry reading in Mayakovsky Square, Vasili had been convicted of ‘anti-Soviet activities and propaganda’ and sentenced to two years in a Siberian labour camp. Tania felt guilty: she had been Vasili’s partner in crime, but she had got away with it.
Tania assumed Vasili had been beaten and interrogated. But she was still free and working as a journalist, therefore he had not given her away. Perhaps he had refused to talk. More likely, he might have named plausible fictitious collaborators who the KGB believed were simply difficult to track down.
By the summer of 1963, Vasili had served his sentence. If he was alive – if he had survived the cold, hunger and disease that killed many prisoners in labour camps – he should be free now. Ominously, he had not reappeared.
Prisoners were normally allowed to send and receive one letter per month, heavily censored; but Vasili could not write to Tania, for that would betray her to the KGB; so she had no information; and no doubt the same applied to most of his friends. Perhaps he wrote to his mother in Leningrad. Tania had never met her: Vasili’s association with Tania was secret even from his mother.
Vasili had been Tania’s closest friend. She lay awake nights worrying about him. Was he ill, or even dead? Perhaps he had been convicted of another crime, and had had his sentence extended. Tania was tortured by the uncertainty. It gave her a headache.
One afternoon, she took the risk of mentioning Vasili to her boss, Daniil Antonov. The features department of TASS was a large, noisy room, with journalists typing, talking on the phone, reading newspapers, and walking in and out of the reference library. If she spoke quietly she would not be overheard. She began by saying: ‘What happened about Ustin Bodian, in the end?’ The ill-treatment of Bodian, a dissident opera singer, was the subject of the edition of Dissidence Vasili had been giving out when arrested – an issue written by Tania.
‘Bodian died of pneumonia,’ Daniil said.
Tania knew that. She was pretending ignorance only to bring the conversation around to Vasili. ‘There was a writer arrested with me that day – Vasili Yenkov,’ she said in a musing tone. ‘Any idea what happened to him?’
‘The script editor. He got two years.’
‘Then he must be free by now.’
‘Perhaps. I haven’t heard. He won’t get his old job back, so I’m not sure where he’d go.’
He would come to Moscow, Tania felt sure. But she shrugged, pretending indifference, and went back to typing an article about a woman bricklayer.
She had made several discreet enquiries among people who would have known if Vasili had returned. The answer had been the same in all cases: no one had heard anything.
Then, that afternoon, Tania got word.
Leaving the TASS building at the end of the working day, she was accosted by a stranger. A voice said: ‘Tania Dvorkin?’ and she turned to see a pale, thin man in dirty clothes.
‘Yes?’ she said, a little anxiously: she could not imagine what such a man would want with her.
‘Vasili Yenkov saved my life,’ he said.
It was so unexpected that for a moment she did not know how to respond. Too many questions raced through her mind: How do you know Vasili? Where and when did he save your life? Why have you come to me?
He thrust into her hand a grubby envelope the size of a regular sheet of paper, then he turned away.
It took Tania a moment to gather her wits. At last she realized there was one question more important than all the rest. While the man was still within earshot she said: ‘Is Vasili alive?’
The stranger stopped and looked back. The pause struck fear into Tania’s heart. Then he said: ‘Yes,’ and she felt the sudden lightness of relief.
The man walked away.
‘Wait!’ Tania called, but he quickened his pace, turned a corner, and disappeared from view.
The envelope was not sealed. Tania looked inside. She saw several sheets of paper covered with handwriting that she recognized as Vasili’s. She pulled them halfway out. The first sheet was headed:
FROSTBITE
by Ivan Kuznetsov
She pushed the sheets back into the envelope and walked on to the bus stop. She felt scared and excited at the same time. ‘Ivan Kuznetsov’ was an obvious pseudonym, the commonest name imaginable, like Hans Schmidt in German or Jean Lefevre in French. Vasili had written something, an article or a story. She could hardly wait to read it, yet at the same time she had to resist the impulse to hurl it away from her like something contaminated, for it was sure to be subversive.
She shoved it into her shoulder bag. When the bus came it was crowded – this was the evening rush hour – so she could not look at the manuscript on her way home without the risk that someone would read it over her shoulder. She had to suppress her impatience.
She thought about the man who had handed it to her. He had been badly dressed, half starved, and in poor health, with a look of permanent wary fearfulness: just like a man recently released from jail, she thought. He had seemed glad to get rid of the envelope, and reluctant to say more to her than he had to. But he had at least explained why he had undertaken his dangerous errand. He was repaying a debt. ‘Vasili Yenkov saved my life,’ he had said. Again she wondered how.
She got off the bus and walked to Government House. On her return from Cuba she had moved back into her mother’s flat. She had no reason to get her own apartment and, if she had, it would have been a lot less luxurious.
She spoke briefly to Anya then went to her bedroom and sat down on the bed to read what Vasili had written.
His handwriting had altered. The letters were smaller, the risers shorter, the loops less flamboyant. Did that reflect a change of personality, she wondered, or just a shortage of writing paper?
She began to read.
Josef Ivanovitch Maslov, called Soso, was overjoyed when the food arrived spoiled.
Normally, the guards stole most of the consignment and sold it. The prisoners were left with plain gruel in the morning and turnip soup at night. Food rarely went bad in Siberia, where the ambient temperature was usually below freezing – but Communism could work miracles. So when, occasionally, the meat was crawling with maggots and the fat rancid, the cook threw it all into the pot, and the prisoners rejoiced. Soso gobbled down kasha that was oily with stinking lard, and longed for more.
Tania was nauseated, but at the same time she had to read on.
With each page she was more impressed. The story was about an unusual relationship between two prisoners, one an intellectual dissident, the other an uneducated gangster. Vasili had a simple, direct style that was remarkably effective. Life in the camp was described in brutally vivid language. But there was more than just description. Perhaps because of his experience in radio drama, Vasili knew how to keep a story moving, and Tania found that her interest never flagged.
The fictional camp was located in a forest of Siberian larch, and its work was chopping down the trees. There were no safety rules and no protective clothing or equipment, so accidents were frequent. Tania particularly noted an episode in which the gangster severed an artery in his arm with a saw and was saved by the intellectual, who tied a tourniquet around his arm. Was that how Vasili had saved the life of the messenger who had brought his manuscript to Moscow from Siberia?
Tania read the story twice. It was almost like talking to Vasili: the phrasing was familiar from a hundred discussions and arguments, and she recognized the kinds of thing he found funny or dramatic or ironic. It made her heart ache with missing him.
Now that she knew Vasili was alive, she had to find out why he had not returned to Moscow. The story contained no clue to that. But Tania knew someone who could find out almost anything: her brother.
She put the manuscript in the drawer of her bedside table. She left the bedroom and said to her mother: ‘I have to go and see Dimka – I won’t be long.’ She went down in the elevator to the floor on which her brother lived.
The door was opened by his wife, Nina, nine months pregnant. ‘You look well!’ Tania said.
It was not true. Nina was long past the stage when people said a pregnant woman looked ‘blooming’. She was huge, her breasts pendulous, her belly stretched taut. Her fair skin was pale under the freckles, and her red-brown hair was greasy. She looked older than twenty-nine. ‘Come in,’ she said in a tired voice.
Dimka was watching the news. He turned off the television, kissed Tania, and offered her a beer.
Nina’s mother, Masha, was there, having come from Perm by train to help her daughter with the baby. Masha was a small, prematurely wrinkled peasant woman dressed in black, visibly proud of her citified daughter in her swanky apartment. Tania had been surprised when she first met Masha, having previously got the impression that Nina’s mother was a schoolteacher; but it turned out that she merely worked in the village school, cleaning it, in fact. Nina had pretended that her parents were somewhat higher in status – a practice so common as to be almost universal, Tania supposed.
They talked about Nina’s pregnancy. Tania wondered how to get Dimka alone. There was no way she was going to talk about Vasili in front of Nina or her mother. Instinctively, she mistrusted her brother’s wife.
Why did she feel that so strongly? she wondered guiltily. It was because of the pregnancy, she decided. Nina was not intellectual, but she was clever: not the type to suffer an accidental pregnancy. Tania had a suspicion, never voiced, that Nina had manipulated Dimka into the marriage. Tania knew that her brother was sophisticated and savvy about almost everything: he was naive and romantic only about women. Why would Nina have wanted to entrap him? Because the Dvorkins were an elite family, and Nina was ambitious?
Don’t be such a bitch, Tania told herself.
She made small talk for half an hour then got up to go.
There was nothing supernatural about the twins’ relationship, but they knew each other so well that each could usually guess what the other was thinking, and Dimka intuited that Tania had not come to talk about Nina’s pregnancy. Now he stood up too. ‘I’ve got to take out the garbage,’ he said. ‘Give me a hand, would you, Tania?’
They went down in the elevator, each carrying a bucket of rubbish. When they were outside, at the back of the building, with no one else around, Dimka said: ‘What is it?’
‘Vasili Yenkov’s sentence is up, but he hasn’t come back to Moscow.’
Dimka’s face hardened. He loved Tania, she knew, but he disagreed with her politics. ‘Yenkov did his best to undermine the government I work for. Why would I care what happens to him?’
‘He believes in freedom and justice, as you do.’
‘That kind of subversive activity just gives the hardliners an excuse to resist reform.’
Tania knew she was defending herself, as well as Vasili. ‘If it were not for people like Vasili, the hardliners would say everything was all right, and there would be no pressure for change. How would anyone know that they killed Ustin Bodian, for example?’
‘Bodian died of pneumonia.’
‘Dimka, that’s not worthy of you. He died of neglect, and you know it.’
‘True.’ Dimka looked chastened. In a softer voice he said: ‘Are you in love with Vasili Yenkov?’
‘No. I like him. He’s funny and smart and brave. But he’s the kind of man that needs a succession of young girls.’
‘Or he was. There are no nymphets in a prison camp.’
‘Anyway, he is a friend, and he’s served his sentence.’
‘The world is full of injustice.’
‘I want to know what has happened to him, and you can find out for me. If you will.’
Dimka sighed. ‘What about my career? In the Kremlin, compassion for dissidents unjustly treated is not considered admirable.’
Tania’s hopes rose. He was weakening. ‘Please. It means a lot to me.’
‘I can’t make any promises.’
‘Just do your best.’
‘All right.’
Tania felt overcome by gratitude, and kissed his cheek. ‘You’re a good brother,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’