The Russian Affair

FIFTEEN



March was uncommonly mild. Now that it was getting dark later and later, Anna found her workdays longer than usual. She caught herself holding a dripping brush in her hand and gazing out of the window openings of her worksite, searching the treetops for signs of the first green fuzz. A long spring lay ahead of her, followed by a difficult summer, and an interminable stretch of time would pass before the leaves would begin to change color again. In the bus on the way back, she enjoyed the last rays of the sun and told herself as persuasively as she could that something had to happen during the coming season, something that would steer her life in a new direction. But didn’t everyone wish for that at the beginning of every spring?

When she got home, she didn’t feel like cooking, so she put some bread and sausage on the table. Petya was having an afternoon nap. As though they were on a picnic, Viktor Ipalyevich took out his clasp knife and started cutting the sausage into thin slices.

“Do you remember the show trials?” Anna asked as she stirred the buttermilk.

“What put that in your head?” He looked at her with red-rimmed eyes; since his volume of poetry had started to take shape, he often worked until dawn.

“What was it like, when they were going on? I really don’t know anything about them.”

He peeled back the sausage casing so that he could cut more slices.

“You were a prominent person. Weren’t you ever called before any of the tribunals?”

“Who would want to question a poet?”

“You were the ‘Voice of Smolensk,’ the ‘Conscience of the Comintern Youth,’ ” Anna said, quoting from the inscriptions on his decorations. “Your testimony carried weight.”

“I’d like to know what kind of significance that still has today,” he said, instinctively lowering his voice.

She poured out the buttermilk. “Who else can I ask, Papa? Nobody talks about those things.”

“What would be the point? That’s all in the past. The Party healed itself from within a long time ago.” The sausage slices were getting thinner and thinner.

“Politicians’ platitudes,” she said, teasing her father with one of his own favorite expressions.

“I never gave testimony at any trial.” Viktor Ipalyevich thought for a moment and then added, “However, my doctor was arrested.”

“What do you mean, your doctor?” Neither of them had yet touched any of the food on the table.

“Doctor Mikhoels. He removed my ganglion.” Viktor Ipalyevich showed Anna his right hand. “It was on my middle finger. I could hardly hold a pen. The doctor was pretty arrogant, but a good surgeon. It was the only time I was ever questioned.” He held up a slice of sausage to the light. “Respected physicians were accused of forming a conspiracy. It was said that their goal was to poison the Party leadership.”

“Why in the world would they have wanted to do that?”

“It’s hard to understand without some historical context. The fact that they were doctors wasn’t really the point.” Viktor Ipalyevich took a bite and chewed it. “In 1948, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved. From that time on, Pravda referred to Jews as ‘rootless cosmopolitans.’ Of the thirteen physicians who were arrested, eleven were Jews. Doctor Mikhoels was among the accused.”

“And did you testify?”

He shook his head. “That wasn’t required of me. There were plenty of others available for that.”

“What happened to Doctor Mikhoels?”

“He remained alive, but he had to leave Moscow. They took him somewhere.”

“But … haven’t you ever wondered … ?”

“No.” He threw himself against the back of his chair. “I’m an artist. I represent my own minority.”

“What happened to Doctor Mikhoels’s family?”

“I have no idea. His family—what does that matter to you?”

“Were they deported, too?”

Her father was getting exasperated. “The man operated on my ganglion! How should I know what happened to his family?”

Anna spread butter on a piece of bread and cut it into small pieces. “If a non-Russian had a family member who was convicted in one of those trials, what would have been his lot? The survivor’s, I mean. What do you think would have happened to him?”

“A non-Russian? No, no. Most of the Jews who were executed were native Russians.”

“But let’s suppose a Hungarian—or a Ukrainian, say—had someone in his family who—”

Viktor Ipalyevich laid both hands noisily on the table. “Enough. I don’t know where we’re supposed to be going with all this. Let’s eat, and then Petya and I are going for a walk.”

“What’s a Jew, Grandpa?” The gentle voice came from the depths of the sleeping alcove.

“That’s what you get,” Anna’s father grumbled to her. Then he called out, “If we come across one, I’ll show him to you.”

The small, tousled head appeared. Petya climbed up onto his chair, and his mother served him his bread and butter. “How are you today?” she asked, stroking his head.

“I feel good. Can we go to the park?” he asked Viktor Ipalyevich.

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“I think I’ll have a bath today.” Anna examined her fingernails. If she soaked in the tub long enough, the paint spatters would (she thought wistfully) go away.

A short while later, she heard the two walkers heading down the stairs. Anna was glad to have some quiet minutes alone in the apartment. The water wasn’t as hot as she’d hoped; she heated some in the kitchen, added it, and dropped her clothes. Although the bathtub was too short, she lolled in the water as best she could. Her plashing echoed from the tiled walls, and she quickly grew weary. She soaped her hands and laid them on her stomach. What if—she wondered—what if Alexey made his confession to forestall mine? The thought was there suddenly, as if it had arisen from the steam. Anna breathed more slowly. Had he figured out what she wanted to confide to him, perhaps because he’d known it for some time already? She raised her head, and water dripped from her hair. The idea seemed so ridiculous that she laughed out loud. Why the devil had he told her about his father’s trial? Alexey Bulyagkov was a Deputy Minister: For the first time, Anna pondered why, when he actually made more decisions concerning research planning than the Minister himself, Alexey was still that Minister’s deputy. Did the reason have to do with his family background, with his father’s long fall from grace? A non-Russian, she thought: a Ukrainian. When she was a Pioneer Girl, she’d been taught the doctrine of the different national paths to socialism. In her workaday life, she’d realized that the lovely theory she’d learned had been supplanted by the concept of Russian primacy. Even in such a subsidiary structure as Anna’s building combine, the nationalistic hierarchy was unmistakable: Although Valdas, the Lithuanian, coordinated every building project the combine undertook, the Russian, Yarov, remained the foreman. When the materials elevator broke down, it wasn’t the Russian women you saw hauling the heavy buckets, it was the Kazakh women. In the light of this observation, Anna found it remarkable that a foreigner, a Ukrainian who’d fled to Russia, had made it all the way into the Central Committee’s inner circle.

She noticed the wrinkled skin on her fingers; her bath had cooled. Since she couldn’t get any warmer water to flow out of the faucet, she reached for a bath towel. She’d just finished drying her legs when the telephone rang. Of late, most calls had been for Viktor Ipalyevich; the government press had questions about setting the poetry volume, and the poet was under pressure to deliver the completed manuscript. Expecting that she would have to apologize for her father, she picked up the phone.

The man at the other end of the line spoke Anna’s name without introducing himself. “I’m in Moscow,” he said, as though this piece of information alone sufficed to explain his call.

Had she not seen that television program a few days previously, she wouldn’t have had the remotest chance of identifying the caller by his voice.

“Don’t you know who I am?” Nikolai Lyushin asked, practically insulted.

“How did you get this number?”

“You can figure that out yourself, Comrade.” He laughed harshly. “I know hardly anybody in Moscow, and I have no plans for this evening. Therefore, I’m taking the liberty of inviting you to come out with me.”

“Why would you ask me out?”

“During our little quantum chat, you showed that you were a gifted student. And so I thought you might wish to delve into the subject a little more deeply.”

The safest answer would have been a no, but Anna’s time in Kamarovsky’s service had taught her to sense, behind every event, the presence of another event. Lyushin’s proposal had a deeper meaning, and it was her duty to fathom that meaning. Therefore, she said, in a slightly friendlier voice, “It’s already pretty late.”

“Don’t they say that the Moscow night never ends? I’m sitting in the Ukraina hotel, and I’m bored to death. Just a little drink, Comrade—what do you say?”

“I have to wait until my son comes home. Can you call back in half an hour?”

Delighted by her apparent change of heart, he said, “I’ll reserve the best table!”

She stood before the sofa, lost in thought. Although the floor was wet under her feet, she didn’t go back into the bathroom, but instead opened her telephone book. There was only one person she could ask for advice. Anna looked up the number of the Moscow Times. She hadn’t talked with Rosa since Dubna, and so some flowery greetings would have been in order, but Anna skipped all courtesies and went directly to Lyushin’s offer.

Rosa asked, “Has he said what he wants?”

“At first, I thought he’d come here on account of this television program, The Open Ear. Don’t you and your colleagues know why he’s in Moscow?”

“So Lyushin turned on the charm for you, did he?” Rosa asked, ignoring Anna’s question. “But he knows about you and Bulyagkov.”

“Should I turn down the invitation?”

“Well, he can hardly start fumbling with your underclothes in the restaurant of the Ukraina hotel.”

“It’s not so far from the restaurant to his room.”

Rosa laughed. “You mean you’d like to go there?”

The question was a provocation, and still it caught Anna off guard. At that moment, it became clear to her that she had a real desire to put a few scratches on Nikolai Lyushin’s dandified facade. She asked, “Shall I inform Kamarovsky?”

“I’ll take care of that,” came the immediate reply. “You should go to the Ukraina. Wouldn’t you enjoy turning one of the most brilliant heads in Russia? Order the most expensive things on the menu, bleed the fellow dry, thank him for a pleasant evening, and leave the restaurant.” She hesitated, as if there were still something she wanted to say. “Call me up afterward, no matter how late it is.”

While Anna, now dressed in a bathrobe, was wiping up the wet floor, she heard the light footsteps and the heavy footsteps mounting the stairs together. She went to the little vestibule, opened the door for father and son, and looked for her blue dress in the wall closet. Petya told her about a dog that had almost been run over. When Viktor Ipalyevich saw that Anna was making preparations to go out, he turned ostentatiously to his poems.