The Russian Affair

TWENTY-SEVEN



Anna handed her gift to Doctor Shchedrin in person and was disappointed by his reaction. Such a man, she’d assumed, would be able to appreciate contemporary poetry. However, Shchedrin held the book awkwardly in his hands and said he didn’t have much time for reading. Even though the ensuing examination confirmed Anna’s optimism as far as Petya was concerned, she was still disappointed to discover that the person to whom she attributed “the miracle” wasn’t interested in anything outside of his specialized field. The doctor scrutinized the boy’s eyes, fingernails, and back and was far from stingy with the candy rewards. And yet, Anna couldn’t rid herself of the impression that the physician’s interest was flagging; Petya, no longer a gasping, sickly child but a normal boy who was already participating in school sports again, had become for Doctor Shchedrin one patient out of many. He completed the examination quickly, lowered the dosage of Petya’s medications, and dismissed Anna with the words “All’s well that ends well.”

She and the boy stepped out into the sunny April day. The trees in front of the Lenin Library were not only covered with green fuzz, they had also put out their first leaves, which quivered in the breeze. Petya’s interest was attracted by the washed and polished limousines on the Kropotkin Quay; the beginning of spring seemed to dip even the automobiles in brighter colors. A man in a dark green suit came walking toward them. Anna was about to cross the street, but something in the man’s gait brought her to a stop. He raised his head, and his eyeglasses sparkled. Anna got a better grip on Petya’s hand.

“Comrade Nechayevna?” Kamarovsky acted surprised, but Anna didn’t believe for a second that this was a chance meeting. “Is this your little Petya?” the Colonel asked with a smile.

She encouraged Petya to give the stranger his hand, which the boy did without shyness.

“We should have another talk soon,” Kamarovsky said. “Would tomorrow after work be all right with you?”

In that case, Anna thought, I’ll have to fix dinner ahead of time. She nodded in assent.

“Good, then.” The Colonel wished them a good day and walked on in the direction of the Lenin Library.

“Who was that?” Petya asked.

Anna made up a lie and set out for home, depressed. Her anxiety continued into the evening, while she sat silently on the sofa and watched the chess game between grandfather and grandson. It took her a long time to fall asleep. After the Colonel’s announcement that the Bulyagkov dossier would soon be closed, and especially after her discussion with Alexey, she’d hoped that she was entering a final, calm stage, which would last until the men took up their inscrutable game again, but without her. In the darkness of the sleeping alcove, she thought about her meeting with her case officer, scheduled for the following day: For the first time, she would be reporting to Kamarovsky in the knowledge that Alexey, the man under observation, had turned the tables on the Colonel from the beginning. Even though the past two years had taught Anna to lie routinely and keep her camouflage in place at all times, she was afraid she might not be able to deceive Kamarovsky’s searching eyes. She cast about for excuses not to go to the building on the quay, yet at the same time, she knew that such a move would only arouse the Colonel’s mistrust. With a sigh, Anna put an arm around her sleeping child.


“For the mission I have in mind this time, I’m counting on your special intuition.” In contrast to the other occasions when Anna had been in this apartment, for this visit the samovar was singing. Kamarovsky, who’d never offered her anything to drink before, busied himself with dishes, apologized for having only four sugar cubes in the house, and served her a glass of tea. Not immediately accepting his invitation to sit on the couch, she stepped over to the window and took a few sips. The room was flooded with light; for the first time since Anna had been making reports here, the curtains were completely open. The magnificent bridge soared over the black river, which was swollen by snowmelt and flowing with a mighty surge through the steel arches. The windows of the Comecon building reflected the sun in a rainbow of colors; the Hotel Ukraina was a gleaming silver tower.

“We need information about the Bulyagkov couple’s divorce.” The Colonel was standing behind her. His words penetrated Anna’s consciousness so gradually that she held her breath for a moment. Kamarovsky stared at her attentively. He wasn’t mistaken; Anna was surprised by the news. “So you didn’t know?” he asked.

She slowly shook her head.

“He didn’t drop any hints? Never talked about insurmountable difficulties at home? You never had to listen to the complaints of a frustrated husband, seeking solace with his young lover?”

Kamarovsky’s sarcasm alarmed Anna; normally, he limited himself to asking questions and evaluating data.

“I can’t believe he wants to separate from Medea,” she said truthfully.

“I want you to get to the bottom of this … discrepancy.” He was a dark silhouette in front of the glittering balcony door.

“What discrepancy?”

“Alexey Maximovich has a wife who’s one of the most influential people in Moscow society, a woman to whom he owes his entire political career. How does he let her go? How, after so many years of reciprocal tolerance, have they come to a point where ‘insurmountable obstacles’ make it impossible for their marriage to continue?”

To avoid having to answer at once, Anna took a swallow of tea. “Maybe the divorce is to Medea’s advantage. Maybe there’s another man in her life.”

He went to his desk and leafed through the notes that Rosa Khleb had turned over to him. The interview with Medea Bulyagkova had been unproductive. Moscow’s cultural secretary had adroitly limited the conversation to cultural affairs and thoroughly described her concept for Voices of the Soviet Republics; in answer to personal questions, however, she’d added nothing to what was already in the mutual divorce petition.

“I need background material—some incident, some point of contention that makes this seem like a reasonable step.”

“When it comes to love, not everything is reasonable.”

How could she let herself be so carried away that she’d mouth a statement like that? Kamarovsky gave her a derisive look, whereupon she turned her back to the window and sat down.

“How’s your husband?” the Colonel asked, unerringly.

“He’s started his tour of duty at his new station.”

“And how’s he getting on there?”

“Well, I think.”

“He applied for the five-year stipulation, right?” Kamarovsky leaned forward, hands on his desk.

“He did, but he hasn’t signed it yet.”

“How do you feel about this prospect?”

She shrugged.

“Five years is a very long time,” the Colonel said. “And I want you to know,” he added empathically, “we have nothing to do with it.”

“What am I supposed to do with Alexey?”

“Meet him and talk about his divorce.”

“With what justification?”

“You’re the partner in Alexey Maximovich’s longest-running affair.” The Colonel tilted his head to one side. “Shouldn’t you be getting your hopes up, now that he’s going to be a free man again soon? In the meantime, he’s moved out of the conjugal residence.” Noticing that Anna’s thoughts were elsewhere, Kamarovsky raised his voice. “We’re interested not only in the reason but also in the point in time. As far as we know, there has been no recent occurrence in the Bulyagkov marriage that could explain this precipitous breakup.”

“I met Alexey just last week.” She got to her feet and placed the half-full tea glass on the desk. “What justification do I give for visiting him again?”

“You’re right.” The Colonel took care to see that the veneer wasn’t suffering any damage from the hot glass. “So far, there’s been no official statement about the divorce. So how could you have learned about it?”

Anna realized that, for the first time, she was a step ahead of Kamarovsky. Couldn’t she go to Alexey and say, “The Colonel’s doing a lot of speculating about your divorce. What would you like me to tell him?” At the same time, she was as baffled as Kamarovsky about what was going on. Alexey’s revelation that he’d seen through Anna’s double game from the beginning had sealed her eyes to whatever lay behind that disclosure: a second truth, a veil Alexey spread over his real motives. She believed his declaration of love, but she more and more doubted whether she had his trust.

On the way home, she thought about how adroitly Alexey kept the balance between trust and secrecy, how he gave the appearance of letting Anna in on his private affairs and at the same time measured out his truths in the doses that best served his purposes. What purpose was served, she wondered, by the announcement that he was going on a trip when he was apparently staying home?

She reached her building and slinked past Avdotya’s door to avoid the seamstress’s questions about the new curtain. Even though Viktor Ipalyevich came down for the mail during the day, Anna usually checked the mailbox. Winter hadn’t done the lock any good, and she could barely turn the key. Inside was a letter from the building association; a renovation of the heating pipes had been pending for a long time. Also, there was something, probably an invitation, addressed to her father from the Guild of Young Soviet Poets; ever since the announcement that his volume of poetry was in line for imminent publication, Viktor Ipalyevich’s social life had grown increasingly active. Oddly, the smallest envelope was the fattest. Who crammed so much paper into such a little envelope? When she saw the army postmark, Anna’s face broke into a smile, and a glance at the return address confirmed her guess. A letter from Leonid was as rare as snow in August; it made her even happier to think that her husband had taken the time to write at such length. She attributed the letter’s bulk to the barrenness of his surroundings, to the amount of idle time he had, and, above all, to the fact that he missed her. So the few, conflict-filled days of his home leave had eventually had the desired effect on him. How could a comparison between Moscow and Siberia turn out otherwise? As Anna thrust her finger under the seal, it occurred to her to let Petya open the letter. More quickly than they ordinarily did after work, her legs carried her up the stairs and onto the fourth-floor landing, where she immediately unlocked the apartment door. The place was unusually cold. Viktor Ipalyevich was wearing a thick sweater and sitting in the living room with a blanket over his knees, and a rustling sound was coming from the sleeping alcove.

“What’s going on?” She hid the mail behind her back.

“The building management turned off the heat without saying why,” the poet growled. “They could at least have waited until summer.”

Anna pulled out the association’s mimeographed letter, which informed residents that heat in the building would be temporarily shut off for maintenance work on April 11 and 12. She handed her father the letter. Without taking off her shoes and jacket, she went to the nook and bent over her son. “Look here, Petyushka,” she said tenderly.

The dark-haired head emerged from the bedclothes, and then Petya shined a flashlight in his mother’s face. “If I read under the covers, it gets warm right away.”

She smiled at the flushed, childish face. “I think something’s come for you,” she said, presenting the letter.

“What is it?” He examined the envelope earnestly. “Who’s writing to me?”

“To us, Petya.” She laid the letter on his lap. “Papa’s writing to us.”

“Papa,” he repeated with great reverence. “From Yakutia?”

She nodded. “This letter has traveled a long, long way to reach us. Would you like to open it?”

“Is he writing to tell us when he’s coming back?” The child’s finger traced the edges of the stamp. “Is he writing about the animals out there where he is? Did he put a present in with the letter?”

“Hurry up,” Anna said with a laugh. “You remind me of old Avdotya, trying to imagine what Metsentsev’s going to write to her about.”

The child plucked cautiously at a corner. The paper didn’t give way immediately, so he pulled harder and soon had several snippets in his hand.

“Stop,” his mother said, laying her hand on his. “We don’t want to tear it to pieces.”

“In my day, we used letter openers,” came the voice from the dining table.

“Very good idea.” Letter in hand, Anna ran into the kitchen. She made one careful cut, and now she could pull out the pages—how many there were! She unfolded and smoothed them as she went back to Petya. “Now we’re going to see how well you can read.”

He scooted to the edge of the bed; Anna threw the blanket over his bare feet and sat next to him. Petya ran his tongue over his lips as though a hard task lay before him.

“ ‘My dear wife. I’m sitting in the office here on the base and imagining you taking these pages into the kitchen and drawing the curtain across the doorway, curious to see what’s awaiting you.’ ” Petya looked up. “Papa’s writing to you, not me, just you.”

“I’m sure he writes something to you in the next line or two.”

“Besides, we’re not in the kitchen, and we haven’t closed the curtain.”

“Then let’s just close this one.” She slipped off her shoes, knelt next to Petya on the bed, and pulled the blue fabric across the alcove. The gliding curtain made the lamplight dance on the pages; the ballpoint pen had been pressed deep into the paper.

“ ‘I’ve been sitting on these lines for six days, dear Anna,’ ” Petya went on. “ ‘My wastepaper basket is filled with failed attempts. I’ve never found anything so difficult.’ He’s not saying anything to me!” Petya scooted away from his mother. “What does that mean, ‘failed attempts’?”

“That’s when you first try to do something, before you know how it goes,” she answered randomly. Her mind was focused on the reason behind Leonid’s introduction. She paled at the thought that he was writing to tell her he’d signed the five-year stipulation. How could he have chosen this way to announce a decision about something so important? Why hadn’t he telephoned her?

“You know what?” Anna announced, suddenly uneasy. “Let’s do it the way Papa says.” She opened the curtain. “I’ll go into the kitchen and read the letter by myself, and after that we’ll read it again together.”

“But I want to read it now! I want to read it now!” Petya couldn’t manage to disentangle himself from the blanket in time, and Anna was able to jump out of the bed. Ignoring her father’s alert gaze, she hurried past him. “Is the gas on, at least?” she asked, drawing the kitchen curtain between herself and the others.

“We made tea.”

Anna heard the quick, small steps as Petya ran across the living room, heard them stop suddenly as her father caught his grandson and tried with soothing words to prevent him from following her.

“But it’s from Papa!” This protest was followed by a skirmish that ended only when Viktor Ipalyevich proposed an extraordinary, pre-dinner game of chess. Anna bent over the letter.

“… I’ve never found anything so difficult,” she read again, in her husband’s forceful handwriting. “Let me simply describe what happened, and then you’ll understand.”

As Anna read on, she pulled up the chair and even had the presence of mind to light the gas with a match. She decided not to put the teakettle on to boil. When she was finished with each page, she laid it atop a neat stack, stopped once to decipher the word inexplicable, read the last lines and the greetings to Petya, and pushed the stack away. She leaned back and looked at her actual surroundings—the spice rack, the coating of grease on the heating pipe, the flecks of tomato sauce here and there. Looking out the window, she saw the swaying branches below her, the green that signaled the return of warm weather—in contrast to her cold apartment.

With one spring she was in front of the curtain; with two more steps, she reached her shoes and slipped into them. “I have to go back down … I forgot …” Without ending the sentence, she stepped out the door. On the second floor, she remembered that she’d left the gas burner on; her father would notice it before long, she thought. Bounding as though for joy, she dashed across the entrance hall and out into the street.

Spring had taken hold of the city and was tightening its grip a little more every day, making evenings like this one bright and warm. Despite the lateness of the hour, the sun was still sending out a few rays, the sky remained deep blue; it was the time of year everyone had been waiting five months for. Anna removed her felt jacket and slung it over her shoulder; in her flat shoes, she could walk fast. She crossed the Chaussée against the red light, got honked at, and a minute later reached the park. Even though the big trees hadn’t yet leafed out fully, green had already won the ground battle, the forsythias were blooming, and there were primroses on the park lawns. Anna couldn’t stand still; if she wanted to let the news she’d just read sink in all the way, remaining in constant motion was her only option. Leonid had gone on at great length and filled many pages to avoid the truth, but in the end he’d come out with it. The effect was powerful and simple at once. An emergency solution meant to take him away from Moscow temporarily had turned into Leonid’s new future, a situation he desired, a complete change of direction. Oddly enough, Anna’s first concern was the application for the apartment in Nostikhyeva, which she would now have to withdraw, because apartments of that size weren’t granted to single mothers. At the end of his letter, Leonid, too, had mentioned a practical consideration: how to arrange for a seven-year-old to make the journey to Siberia alone. Leonid ruled out the possibility of his getting leave to fetch Petya from Moscow every time. He’d formulated his idea—the boy would spend the warmer months in Yakutsk—as vividly as if there were no doubt about its realization. He’d remained vague on the matter of whether or not divorce should follow their de facto separation. How heavily all this must have been weighing on his mind, Anna thought, and what kind of woman could have motivated him to make such a momentous decision? While marching at double time through an alley of acacias, Anna tried to picture the woman she’d just learned about for the first time. How extraordinary this Galina must be, she thought, to put the sober Leonid in such an agitated state.

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.