The Russian Affair

TWENTY-TWO



Anna could barely make out the sign for the narrow and dimly lit street: DREZHNEVSKAYA ST. She turned into it furtively, like an adulteress. She’d insisted that she didn’t want Anton to drive her. She wanted to go to the meeting alone, say to Alexey what needed to be said, and disappear into the darkness again.

During the course of the day, familiar things had cheered her—the ladder, the paintbrush with the broken handle. She’d hung her bucket on a hook and painted the wall from top to bottom. By noon, three rooms were finished, and her shoulders ached from painting surfaces above her head. When her shift had ended, she’d been happy to be so exhausted; weariness reduced her nervousness.

She rang the bell. A while passed before the buzzer sounded. On the stairs, she considered whether there wasn’t something she hadn’t thought about. This would be their last time together; they’d drink a few glasses of wine, and she’d give Alexey her “farewell gift.” Had the situation not been so dangerous, Anna would have found it more strange than anything else. She was acting like a double agent: Instead of reporting to her case officer with information, she was about to give it to the person under observation.

Although Alexey must have known that she was waiting outside his door, he didn’t open it until she rang again. He looked haggard, his face was drawn, and he hadn’t shaved for their appointment as he usually did. “There you are,” he said. He sighed and without embracing her led the way into the apartment. She closed the door and took off her coat.

“Have I come at a bad time?” she asked, glancing into the kitchen, where this time no wine was standing ready.

“You’re probably the only thing that hasn’t come at a bad time today,” he said with a tired smile.

“The Five-Year Plan?”

“It’s finally concluded, over and done with.” He turned to the glasses, and had Anna not sprung into action, his coattails would have swept the plate with the tsarina’s portrait from the sideboard to the floor. Alexey took advantage of Anna’s nearness to give her a quick kiss. “Excuse me—there are too many things going through my head.” He opened the refrigerator, took out a half-empty bottle of white wine, and left it to Anna to bring the food.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, too,” she said, introducing her subject. She put the dish on the table and arranged the little sandwiches more attractively.

Alexey poured the wine, and they took their first sips.

“Leonid has come home,” Anna said, sitting down across from Alexey.

He scrutinized her, not like the “other man” in her love triangle, but rather like a trainer wondering whether his fighter has the stuff to go the distance. “Has Leonid come home for good?”

“No.” A cold spot in the pit of her stomach began to spread out. “He’s trying to get transferred to Yakutsk.”

Alexey’s eyes narrowed. He wasn’t prepared for such a conversation, and the prospect of it certainly gave him no pleasure, so Anna came swiftly to the point: “I don’t want to lose him.”

Alexey picked up his glass and made the liquid sparkle in the light. “Looks to me as though your captain doesn’t exactly yearn to come back to you.”

He made the remark jokingly, but it went through her like a knife. “For a year, Petya’s had no father, and I’ve had no man.”

“No man.” They exchanged a brief glance, and Bulyagkov nodded. The lack of physicality in their relationship had never been an issue for them; now they were both thinking the same thing.

“We both knew we couldn’t last the way we were. Something had to change one day.” She put her hand on his.

“And now it’s over?” Was his weird calm due to exhaustion?

“My love, my dearest,” she said sadly. His sallow face, his disordered hair, the old eyes, and the melancholy that filled them combined to take Anna’s breath away. “We were a good team.”

“Are you breaking off our friendship, too?”

“Our friendship, never,” she answered vehemently. He’d understood what she meant; why didn’t she confess that she’d come expressly to break it off? “But I don’t know where that will lead us. We were never what’s called a couple.”

“I suppose not.” He leaned back with a look of serious consideration on his face. “I love you, Anna. Maybe I love you so much because we were never able to spend much time together. Maybe things were good for us for so long because there was always the temptation of thinking something more might come of them.”

She thought about Kamarovsky, the other creator of this relationship, and about Leonid, who, this one time, knew where she was spending the evening. Alexey’s woefulness overcame her, too.

“I’ve been saddled with taking a trip,” he said in a different tone of voice. “I’ll have to leave very soon.”

“A trip? Where?” The change of subject had rattled her.

“Please let everything remain the same between us until I get back.”

“Why? What’s the difference if we say good-bye now or then?”

“A big difference, as far as I’m concerned.” He rolled his wineglass around on its base. “Could you do that for me?”

“My husband’s back at home, playing with our son. I want to straighten everything out.” When he said nothing, she went on: “I can’t do what you want me to do unless you tell me the reason for it.”

Cautiously, as though he were afraid of breaking it, he placed the glass to one side. “I wouldn’t like to cause Comrade Kamarovsky any unnecessary concern.” The eyes of the Arctic wolf gazed at her.

The hanging lamp suddenly seemed to Anna like a sun shining in her face. Her mouth went dry. She stared at Alexey as though, in that instant, he’d been transformed into a dangerous predatory beast.

“Since when … ?” she whispered.

“Since when have I known?” He reached for her hand; she jerked it back. “Since before you knew, Anna.”

In the silence, the room seemed to dissolve. “But then … everything was a game, a setup from the start?” She shook her head several times, as though trying to get an unpleasant sound out of her ear. “How could you love me, if you … ?”

“That’s what’s so marvelous.” He reached for her hand a second time. “That first time, when I saw you on the ladder, in your overalls, with paint on your nose—that first time, you conquered me.”

“Stop making jokes!”

“When it came to you, I was always serious.” He kissed the base of her thumb. “At our second meeting—you remember, your father’s reading—my heart was beating in my throat when I spoke to you. I was just an old guy, fat and worn out, and I had my eye on the beautiful, married house painter. I was in love for the first time in years, for the first time again, full of longing, and I felt so young it was mortifying even to me.” With every sentence, he drew closer to her face. “Do you know how much I desired these lips, these eyes, your hair, every inch of your neck? It was childish and maybe unreasonable, but wonderful, too.”

“But why …” She realized that she was incapable of doing justice to his passionate words. “Why didn’t you ever want to make love to me?”

“That didn’t mean I loved you any less.” He stroked her cheek. “We did make love,” he said with a smile. “I was embarrassed in front of you. I still am.”

“And what about Kamarovsky?” she asked brusquely. Alexey’s unexpected declaration had thrown her into total disarray.

“I knew the Colonel would set somebody on me.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what they do to anyone who has a kind of power they can’t assess. Science is such a power, Anna.” He pondered for a moment. “But maybe my dubious past was reason enough.”

“Your father?”

He shrugged. “I’m not a Russian. That’s still a defect, even today.”

Involuntarily, she moved closer to him. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“I didn’t want to put you in a false position. It was obvious to me that if you knew what was going on, Kamarovsky would notice. He would have seen through you at once. Your ignorance was important to him.” He added, lowering his voice, “And to me.”

“You used me the whole time.”

In the silence, they heard an automobile stop in front of the building. Alexey stood up and pushed the curtain to one side. “I hope we can do without reproaches. Couldn’t you have said ‘No’ when Kamarovsky asked you to be his spy? You decided to do something for your father—and for Petya. I know very few people who would have refused.”

Even though he was expressing what Anna had thought a hundred times, hearing it from him enraged her. “I can’t go on like this. It has to come to an end today, right now. That’s what I came here to tell you. Can’t you just let me go?”

He closed the curtain. “All right. If nothing can dissuade you, it’s over as of today.”

Anna heard the car drive off. As the sound of the engine faded, Alexey picked up a sandwich and bit it in half.

She couldn’t believe she’d gained his assent so easily. “Really, Alexey?”

He swallowed and took a sip of wine. “On one condition: Let’s keep up appearances until after I return from my trip. I once told you that you’d never have anything to fear from me. Won’t you just trust me?”

“How can I, after two years that were one big lie?”

Anna had never heard the doorbell ring inside the apartment. It was a loud, piercing sound, incongruous with this clandestine place. Alexey stood up and said, “Excuse me. This won’t take long.” He stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him.

Anna guessed that he’d been expecting this visit. She heard the front door open and listened in vain for words of greeting; there was only silence. What was going on? Why wasn’t there the slightest sound of communication between Alexey and his visitor? Now she heard steps. She started to go into the next room, but the front door closed with a gentle click. She ran back and peered cautiously through the ornamental glass panes of the door to the hall. It was empty.

Precisely then, when Anna needed a clear head and all her reasoning power to consider the situation, her nerves gave way. Suddenly, everything she was going through seemed overwhelming, and she was racked by sobs that had lain silent in her for a long time, waiting to be set off. The hand she clapped against her mouth couldn’t repress a gush of phlegm and saliva; she swallowed hard, coughed, ran stooping into the kitchen, washed her hands, and splashed water on her face. Her tears didn’t stop right away, and as she stood there weeping, trying not to make any noise, she fixed her blurred gaze on the kitchen door.

Alexey had confessed his deep feelings for her and, in the same breath, revealed himself as a coldly calculating man. He’d taken a lover in the knowledge that such a step would drive her into the hands of the KGB. He’d been prepared to accept the breakup of her marriage and the ruin of her family in order to achieve a single goal: deceiving Kamarovsky. While Alexey voluntarily and apparently casually divulged to Anna information concerning the inner workings of his Ministry, he was providing the Colonel with facts whose analysis had resulted—at this realization, Anna caught her breath—in Kamarovsky’s overlooking the real facts! Was it possible that the phlegmatic wolf had outsmarted the hard-bitten security officer?

Her weeping subsided, giving way to feverish cogitation. What sense could she make of all this? Didn’t the high-ranking comrades all work in concert? Wasn’t the KGB the Central Committee’s instrument, its listening ear, its hidden eye, its torture tool? Hadn’t Alexey himself asserted that the Party had abandoned its unjust practices and instituted stricter internal monitoring in order to eliminate the possibility of rule by individual diktat? Or was it naive to believe that the struggle for power within the walls of the Party’s headquarters wasn’t being carried on as fiercely as ever?

Anna’s reflections went even further. If Bulyagkov had actually staged their entire time together, didn’t that mean he’d brought her to Dubna deliberately? And could Kamarovsky really have failed to discern that the Deputy Minister for Research Planning had smuggled the house painter into the atomic city for other than romantic reasons? Had Bulyagkov, rather than Kamarovsky, intended for Anna to meet Lyushin?

“But why?”

She flinched at the sound of her own voice. She’d been staring at the enamel clock, whose ticking had never before seemed so intrusive. After trying for three days in Dubna, Anna remembered, she’d given up all hope of running into Lyushin again. And then, on the last afternoon, no less, mere hours before Anna was to leave Dubna and return to Moscow, the nuclear physicist had shown up in the very place where she was. Why hadn’t Alexey made any effort to get rid of his uninvited guest? Because he wasn’t uninvited! Nor had Alexey objected when she and Lyushin had a conversation about a field of research that was subject to the highest level of secrecy. Back on that afternoon, Anna had been proud of herself for understanding enough about quantum physics to follow what Lyushin was saying. But hadn’t it been the other way around? Hadn’t Lyushin kept his remarks as simple as possible so that he could be sure she understood? And if that was the case, it meant that both Bulyagkov and Lyushin had wanted Anna to receive some specific information, take it back to Moscow, and report it to Kamarovsky. In fact, she’d returned with only one piece of news, namely, that Lyushin’s research project had failed.

She put her hand on the dripping faucet and turned it all the way off. The dripping continued; there was a washer problem here, too. Bewildered, she recalled that one purpose of her visit had been to confide to Alexey what she knew about Lyushin. She’d come within a hair of making a dangerous mistake. The less she knew, the less she said, the more dispensable she’d seem to the contending parties, and the sooner she’d get her wish: to be released from all this into the normality of her former life.

A glance at the hands of the clock showed Anna that only three minutes had gone by. She dried her eyes again, ran her fingers through her hair, and went back into the living room. Then she stepped into the hall and listened. Someone outside spoke, just for a moment, and then a key was thrust into the lock. Just as she closed the glass door, Anna thought she heard a woman’s voice in the stairwell. Medea? Would Alexey’s wife arrive here without notice? Anna dropped onto the corner seat, picked up her glass of wine, and drank half of it.

He returned with a little package. “My apologies,” he said, and carried the package into the back room. “Are you hungry at all?” he asked from there.

“No omelet without eggs,” Anna muttered. She wouldn’t be taking his innocuous act at face value anymore.

“What?” He came back into the living room and closed the curtain.

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” She stood up. “I have to go.”

“Already?”

“Hasn’t everything been said?” She was itching to dash to the window and see who was stepping out of the building at that very moment.

Alexey appeared to read her impulse and placed himself in the way. “You haven’t given me your answer yet.”

As he spoke, she sensed how dangerous he was, the man she’d seen so often in his homely cardigan, slightly tipsy or exhausted from work. One false word now and she’d be in danger. Apart from Anton, nobody knew where she’d gone, and nobody had seen her arrive. Who would ever think about looking for her here?

“Good,” she said, apparently casual. “Let’s leave everything where it is.”

“Do you mean that?” It wasn’t a question; it was, unmistakably, pressure.

“Yes.” She turned toward the door, and he let her pass. “Will I see you before you leave on your trip?”

He followed her and helped her into her coat. “That would be lovely.”

“May one know where you’re going?”

He smiled thoughtfully. “A city where it’s never hot, not even in summer.”

Don’t know, don’t guess, Anna thought. As though she wanted to prevent him from talking anymore, she flung her arms around his neck, pressed herself against him for a long time, longer than usual, and ran out of the apartment and down the stairs without turning around.