The Russian Affair

THIRTY-EIGHT



Bulyagkov was sitting in the bar at the Hotel Riga, surrounded by professors. The establishment had closed long since; only the visitors from Moscow were still being served. The Deputy Minister understood the unconstrained exuberance displayed by the scientists, eight men and three women; they were about to put on the biggest public performance of their scientific careers. Again and again, he toasted with them, but he himself drank moderately, even though his desire for stupefaction was great. The day had included much unpredictability; for example, to Bulyagkov’s surprise, his baggage had been inspected. He’d opened his suitcase and the briefcase inside it and then looked on wordlessly as the uniformed official took out Nikolai Lyushin’s dossier. This folder contained many scientific documents, however, and the official had failed to notice the only one that was explosive. He’d leafed through the pages covered with Lyushin’s microscopic handwriting and then thrust the folder back into the briefcase. Bulyagkov had stood and watched the operation calmly, but when the Kyrgyz mathematician, waiting her turn, cast a curious glance at the document, Bulyagkov, as if inadvertently, had blocked her view with one shoulder.

After a short flight and a warm welcome by the Presidium of the Latvian SSR, the schedule had called for a bus tour of the city, which meant that Bulyagkov and the delegation were driven past the Old Town on the way to the Palace of Science. There was insufficient time for extensive sightseeing; therefore, the Deputy Minister had merely unveiled a memorial tablet to the founder of the astrophysics observatory. The Russian delegation had shaken hands with a delegation of Latvian scientists; in the brief speech of greeting, the hosts’ sorrow that not a single one of their number would represent the Soviet Union in Stockholm had been impossible to ignore. After that, the leader of the Riga City Soviet had taken charge of the group and led them on a brief walking tour, beginning at the square dedicated to the Latvian Red Riflemen. Finally, the delegation had been brought to the Riga, a bulky hotel on the Muscovite model, and Bulyagkov had taken a room on the fourth floor. After a short rest break, the delegation had been driven to an unusual building on Komjaunatnes Street that looked like a Florentine palazzo but proved instead to be the headquarters of the Supreme Soviet of the Latvian SSR, where the banquet in honor of the Russian guests had taken place.

In his speech, after first expressing regret for the Minister’s illness and apologizing for his absence, Bulyagkov had delivered a spirited paean to Latvia’s industrial achievements that had been received by the hosts with applause and brotherly kisses. Relieved at having discharged his duty, the Deputy Minister had sat still for the Party secretary’s answering address as well as four additional speeches before the meal was served.

After dinner, Bulyagkov had received his second surprise in the person of the Latvian professor Otomar Sudmalis, who’d expressed his joy at meeting the Deputy Minister, a man he knew to be in close working contact with Nikolai Lyushin, with whom the professor maintained a regular correspondence. Sudmalis, it had turned out, was well informed, dangerously well informed, about Lyushin’s work; the professor was acquainted with certain results of Lyushin’s researches about which the Ministry, thanks to Bulyagkov, had remained ignorant. He’d answered the Latvian’s questions in general terms, built a hedge of verbiage around prickly details, and pretended to be drunker than he was. In the end, although he couldn’t feel he’d satisfied the other’s curiosity, Bulyagkov believed he’d at least given him the possibility of presenting himself as an authority.

Under normal circumstances, the Deputy Minister would have stayed late on such an evening, as the secretary of the Latvian Central Committee was a man without affectations and, for a leader of the apparat, amazingly communicative. But shortly after midnight, Bulyagkov, thinking about what was to come on the morrow, had caused the delegation to leave the banquet and return to the hotel.

The next unforeseen event had occurred around one in the morning. Back in his room, Bulyagkov had already removed his tie and loosened his belt when there was a knock on his door and a visitor announced herself: Professor Tanova, the mathematician from Kyrgyzstan. When he’d opened the door, the entire delegation was there. Someone had pointed out, to general amusement, how easy it was for a woman to get into the Deputy Minister’s room. Bulyagkov had joined in the laughter and accepted the invitation to go downstairs for a nightcap.

The wallpaper in the bar was the color of ox’s blood. The Russians were still sitting there, drinking Latvian vodka and eating smoked fish, when dawn began to light the sky outside. In a few hours, they were scheduled to have breakfast with some deputation—Bulyagkov had forgotten its mission—before boarding the plane for their 12:05 flight to Stockholm. Having been born on the twelfth day of the fifth month, Alexey Maximovich took the departure time as a good omen. He knew himself well enough to be certain that he’d get no sleep this night; the liquor was good, and the Kyrgyz woman had a smile that would be able to sustain him through a few more drunken hours.

As his glass was being refilled, he forbade himself speculation about what lay ahead. He was afraid of coming to the conclusion that the weights on the scales were unbalanced, and not in his favor. Medea’s face came into his mind. At first, she’d overtly threatened to denounce him, and she would have done so, too, had she not been the one who’d lured him into his current life and watched him go to ruin in it. As lovers, they hadn’t been suited to each other, but as a soul mate, no one would ever be closer to him. It must have been an enormous sacrifice for her to have agreed to his plan, he thought, and she’d probably already begun to regret it. She might even—as soon as he reached safety—admit what she knew. Medea had never been able to live a lie. Lost in thought, Bulyagkov struggled to follow the Kyrgyz mathematician as she told a long-winded story; he didn’t fail to notice that she’d moved her hand on the couch closer to his thigh, and he hoped day would come soon.

He considered how it was possible to love a woman for nearly two years and, at the same time, callously make use of her. It wasn’t his character that he was calling into question, it was the phenomenon of deception itself. Right at the beginning, he’d told Anna that she would never have anything to fear from him, and yet he’d lied to her every time he’d seen her. His behavior seemed to him so duplicitous that he couldn’t help seeing in Anna, too, in Anna who had defied him, a woman with two faces. One was gentle, candid, the face of a woman nearing the end of her twenties who wanted more from life than climbing on scaffolding day after day. The other was the artful Anna, who, aware of her own immorality, had spied on him. In a woman like Rosa Khleb, those opposites wouldn’t have been at all incompatible: She deceived some people and played them off against other people, because the center of her interest was always and only Rosa Khleb. Bulyagkov had never known a woman so immoral. She hadn’t betrayed him and his purposes to the KGB for one reason and one reason alone: He paid her better. The cunning idea of poisoning the Research Minister two days before his scheduled departure had been Rosa Khleb’s.

Alexey shifted himself away from the Kyrgyz woman. He didn’t want to compare Anna with the Khleb, and he couldn’t equate what he was doing with Anna’s weakness. He’d probably never see her again. He peered gloomily into his glass.

You’re a monster, he thought. How often have you had slogans promoting the worldwide equality of all mankind on your lips? You used them in speeches and conversations while you were building your private, individual dream. He loosened his tie. No, that wasn’t right; he had believed, he still believed, that the world needed to be remade, and even that the Soviet empire was the right power to precipitate the revolution. But he couldn’t make out the people capable of such a feat. The petrifaction had progressed too far; the system now defined itself only by its immutability. Was it worth it to be loyal to such a power, to make sacrifices to it with an eye to future generations? He’d often discussed that with Medea, who would challenge him to think in larger historical dimensions. It would take more than a few years to transform the world, she’d say; it would take time for the good and noble forces to gather together and overcome the alliance of the exploiters. On such evenings, inspired by his wife, Bulyagkov had felt his faith restored. But the next morning, in the Ministry, the truth appeared once again before his eyes.

The big things are simple, he thought. Never in history has the development of a plan for life brought any sort of advancement to mankind. But what was Alexey Maximovich’s idea of “simple”? If I were fifteen years younger, he said to himself, it could have been a life with Anna. She was the simple solution to all the intricacies that entangled his existence. She was the warmth he longed for, the light he would have gladly followed, the love his heart so badly needed. Although fully aware of his own sentimentality, Bulyagkov called Anna’s image to his mind—her thick hair, her kind eyes, her seductive mouth. He saw her like that, standing before him, and standing at the entrance to the hotel bar.

Bulyagkov thought he’d been carried away by his fantasies, thought he was mistaken, thought his drunken eyes would soon see that the woman entering the bar was actually the waitress. It wasn’t possible that Anna was in Riga, and out of the question that she’d come into this ox-blood-red room and, stepping deliberately, approach the still-boisterous group of eleven scientists, who only now noticed her. When the head mathematician from Novosibirsk shouted a loud greeting and indulged himself in the commonplace about the latest hours that bring the prettiest guests, Bulyagkov realized that Anna Nechayevna, in the flesh, was there in front of him. Wherever she might have come from, and for whatever reasons, she’d made her way to where he was. He loved her for that, right then. But in the next moment, anxiety seized him. He raised his head to see if others had come in behind her, but she was alone. Her demeanor indicated that she was glad to have finally reached her goal.

“Where did you come from?”

The group fell silent, emanating curiosity.

“This is Comrade Tsazukhina,” he said awkwardly. “She’s brought me some papers I forgot, documents I need for the presentation in Stockholm.” He straightened his tie. “Thanks for taking the trouble to come so far.”

Anna stood there and waited for him to invent an excuse for the two of them to leave the bar.

“Well, then, we should go over them right away,” Bulyagkov said, rising to his feet. “So you can finally go to bed, Comrade.”

Accompanied by the scientists’ farewells, in which there was no lack of double entendres, and followed by the Kyrgyz woman’s disillusioned gaze, he took his leave and, with a gesture, showed Anna the way to the elevators. After a few steps, they were alone.

“You’re crazy,” he whispered, grabbing her hand.

“No, the crazy one’s you.”

He saw the seriousness in her eyes. “You know?” Then, after a breathless pause, he asked, “Who else knows?”

She pushed the button. “Come on.” The elevator doors slid open.

They kissed on the way up, not out of passion, but in order to exclude the possibility of speech from the little space they were riding in. He pressed her against him; she clung to his shoulder. They stood there like that, in the deepest despair.

While they walked through the fourth-floor corridors, he kept his eyes fastened on her. Anna didn’t return his gaze. Bulyagkov opened the door of his room, and together they walked over to the window to watch Riga wake up. The hotel stood opposite the National Opera House, and behind that was the park with the Lenin monument.

“If you’d told me yesterday I’d be seeing all this today, I would have laughed at you.”

“It’s a lovely city,” he said. “I’ve always liked it.”

He fell suddenly silent, whereupon she said, “Anton begged me to do this. He wants to warn you.”

“Why didn’t Anton come himself?”

“He tried to. He …”

After the hours she’d spent conjecturing how this meeting would go, Anna suddenly knew nothing more. The wolf was in the trap, the trappers were getting ready to come for him, and he was too tired and too old to slip away from them this time. She looked at his eyes and the purple rings around them, the sullen mouth, the bowed shoulders. She tried to look beyond all that and see the Ukrainian boy who loved mathematics beginning his university studies in science. It was of course necessary to stop Alexey from going through with his plan, but was it also right? Anna was indifferent to Kamarovsky’s interests, but she wondered whether she herself was ready to play Judas. Her breath streamed in and out; she saw the morning light reflecting off the glass table and the reflection trembling on the wall. Medea let him go, Anna thought, and she knows him better than anyone. Who am I to play the part of fate? With a sigh, she realized it was no longer a question of that. She was only the messenger who was supposed to make it easier for him to lay down his arms.

“Are they already in the hotel?” He looked at his watch.

“I don’t know.” The light hurt her eyes, and she drew the curtain partly closed. “They’ve got Rosa.”

His weary face twisted into a sad smile. “I see.” Bulyagkov slowly ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m not going to get to Stockholm. Is that right?”

Anna saw no possibility of crossing the ten feet that separated them, taking his hand, and giving him an answer that would make his situation look good. On the morning of the execution, it was hard to say anything encouraging to the condemned. Alexey had put himself on a cliff from which there was no climbing down, only plummeting.

“What do you want to know?” Asking this question, Bulyagkov seemed suddenly distant, as though he didn’t wish to be disturbed while deciding on his next move.

“I want to know why you waited until you were practically about to leave before you started your divorce proceedings.”

“Are you asking me that as a woman or as an agent for internal security?”

“As an agent, I’m supposed to ask you for the briefcase,” Anna replied. “They want you to turn it over to me.”

“And what am I offered in return?”

“Safe conduct home.”

He folded his arms in disdain. “Either you or they are unclear about the use of pressure. Where’s the advantage for me?”

“There isn’t any.”

“So why should I consider accepting?”

“Because you’re not a traitor.”

There was silence for a second. “But they’ll treat me like one.” He vented his frustration with a sharp gesture. “My case is so hopeless that it’ll be hard to find a lawyer to represent me.”

Anna touched the curtain: cheap material. “The people you’ll be dealing with are human,” she said, her face turned away from him.

He laughed. “That’s the negotiation strategy they told you to use? Humanity?”

“You’re a Russian,” she countered.

“You know I’m not.”

“You belong to this country and this society. You’re one of us. You don’t belong in Stockholm, where they’ll pay you and stick you in some hiding place. You think the dreams of your youth will come true there? It doesn’t happen like that! Whether as a traitor or a minor criminal, you won’t be young again. But you’re still the Deputy Minister for Soviet Research Planning. That’s your fate, and no one can save you from it.”

“Apparently, someone will, and pretty soon.” He put a hand over his eyes, as though suddenly exhausted.

“That’s the consequence of what you’ve done, but it’s not the end.”

He looked at her furiously. “What do you know about the end, you with your twenty-nine years?” He went into the bathroom without waiting for an answer. She could hear running water.

“Do you want to drag Medea into all this? And Lyushin?”

He dried his hands. “You’re concerned about Lyushin, a man who’s never out for anyone but himself? The die is cast.” His expression changed into a sad smile. “In love and on the run, there are always two possibilities.”

“Do you think so?”

“Do you remember the little package that was delivered to me that afternoon?”

“You mean the one Rosa brought you?”

“They’ve instructed you well.” He nodded. “The package contains a gift.”

“For whom?”

“For the captain of the transport ship that’s sailing from Riga today. Stockholm can be reached by sea, too.”

“What would that change?”

“I’m still interested in living, you see.” He went to the window again. “Going back means death.”

“How do you know that?” Impulsively, she stepped in front of him.

“Well, what does Kamarovsky have in view, then? Privileged treatment in a labor camp?”

“Why do you keep asking what others will do for you? What have you done for us?”

“Oh, Anna.” As though to distinguish her, he laid his hand on her shoulder. “You’re the best thing that could have happened to Kamarovsky. You’re someone who’s calculating and idealistic at the same time. It’s quite a stunning combination.”

“I’m someone who loves you.” She didn’t budge.

“I love you, too.” He compelled himself to be sober. “But did you really come here with the intention of talking me into giving myself up?”

Some seconds passed. “We’ve told a lot of lies in all these months. And nevertheless, we’ve stayed together. We’ve done each other good. I came here today to make an end of lying.”

“And after that?”

She took his strong hand and laid it on her cheek. “I don’t know. But I know it’s already better, now that we’re being honest with each other for the first time.”

“It’s too late for that.” He detached himself from her. “I have to get on that ship.”

She thought his brusqueness was an act. “You think you’re not free in Russia? You think going somewhere else can change anything? Have you considered the fact that you’ll be taking yourself around with you, wherever you go?”

“Stop it. Those are just words, and I’ve heard enough of them.”

“Today … no, yesterday, I saw a lot of our country,” she said. “I had no idea of the expanse of it, the light, so many impressions—”

“Save your breath,” he said dismissively. “You’re not getting me back with litanies to Holy Mother Russia.”

“Then forgive me for …” She took a step back. “For being pushy.” She waited to see whether he’d do anything to prevent her going.

The corpulent man stood at the window in his shirtsleeves. Some strands of hair hung down over his forehead, and his left hand was clenched in a fist. Anna went to the door. The sun must have risen behind the hotel, because when she looked at him for the last time, the city was colored a gleaming pink. The man’s dark silhouette was outlined against it. He turned his back to her and thrust his hands into his pockets.