The Russian Affair

SEVEN



Anna was in her hotel room. She’d locked the door, and now she was staring out the window. The streetlights dyed the terrain a dismal orange. She was disillusioned. Certainly, the platform and roof of the accelerator were colossal in size, extending for hundreds of feet, but in the center all that could be seen was a control console, set in concrete, with dials and instruments whose illuminated arrows quivered in different positions. All at once, loud detonations like gunfire had sounded from down below, and everybody had flinched. Discharges, Adamek had explained. While the electromagnetic bursts followed one another more and more closely, a team of researchers had come out onto the platform. They were wearing protective suits that covered them completely, including their faces, and they carried a cloth about ten square feet in size, mounted on supports. An unscientific observer might have thought that the researchers were bringing in their dirty laundry to be cleaned. Before they reached the control center, Adamek had already ordered his group to leave. Inaudible in their synthetic slippers, the visitors had hastily marched to the exit; in the passage, the Asian had given them back their watches.

Anna was exhausted. Since early morning, she and the others had been bombarded with impressions, had seen things the likes of which few Soviet citizens would ever get to see in their entire lifetimes. Despite her weariness, she sat at the table and took from her bag the book she’d brought along. It was a standard text in theoretical physics for students in their first semester.

“In the condensed phase, matter appears as either a solid or a liquid. Free atoms form a crystal, producing a binding energy of an order of magnitude equivalent to …”

Anna considered the sequence of signs that followed and then read them aloud: “A hundred kcal divided by mol equals one hundred times two point six times ten to the twenty-second power divided by six times ten to the twenty-third power eV …” It was the first formula in the book, and one of the simplest.

“The empirical fact that the band structures of free electrons diverge shows that valence electrons are only weakly scattered on ionic cores.”

Discouraged, Anna slammed the book shut. Reading it was pointless. Even if she were to get close to the physicist who was the subject of her assignment, even if she should manage to have a conversation with him, she wouldn’t understand the information she obtained! She paced helplessly around the room: wallpaper, closet, bed, her bag, and, outside, the silent street. She felt dead tired and, at the same time, exceedingly nervous. From childhood on, she’d been taught this principle: Every individual must undertake and carry out tasks assigned by the Party. Today, however, Anna wanted to slip out of her otherwise so reliable skin and admit to herself that there was no coping with her present assignment.

Sounds from outside her door indicated that dinner was imminent. She felt hungry, but when she looked at the clock, she realized that it wasn’t worth the trouble to go to the dining room, because Anton would be picking her up very soon. Anna opened the closet; the short dress would be inconspicuous under her coat. She undressed and washed her face in front of the mirror.

Punctual to the minute, the black ZIL turned into the rear courtyard. Anna was waiting on the steps. The kitchen was at its busiest, the windows were open, but no one observed the member of the visiting group who slid onto the backseat of the limousine and pulled the door shut behind her.

“Today we don’t have far to go,” said Anton, nodding to her in the rearview mirror.

They drove past two blocks of houses on the main street, turned into the riverfront promenade, and stopped in front of a one-story villa.

“Who lives here?”

“The house belongs to a member of the Academy who’s seldom in Dubna.” Anton got out, opened the gate, and drove onto the grounds.

Alexey received Anna neither outside the house nor at the front door. Curious, she stepped into a comfortable room; there was a wing chair close to the fireplace. Alexey sat in the chair with one hand pressed against his forehead and the other raised in a formal gesture of greeting. Anna laughed—Alexey was imitating a famous painting of Stalin. “Little Father, how are you?” she asked, giving the Pioneers’ hand signal and stepping before the Great Leader.

“One grows old, Comrade,” he answered in the familiar rasping intonation. “It does one good to see you young activists, your fresh faces.” Bulyagkov sprang to his feet. “And your splendid bodies!” He took Anna in his arms and stroked her hair. Composed as always, Anton brought in a load of firewood and disappeared.

“So this is the way our worthy Soviet scientists live?” she asked, looking around.

“This is the way I live when I visit our worthy Soviet scientists.” Alexey went to the table, a cork popped, and Sovetskoye Shampanskoye—Soviet Champagne—sizzled in the glasses. Anna knelt down and felt the fine, silvery threads of the carpet. Alexey brought her drink; still kneeling, she clinked glasses with him and watched his bobbing Adam’s apple as he swallowed.

“How wonderful that you’re here,” he said, sinking down next to her. His belly spilled over his belt. “Were you surprised when you got my note?” She embraced him; his stubbly beard scratched her. “It’s a good thing you got something to eat in the hotel,” he said over her shoulder.

“Why?”

“The Dubna grocery warehouse was already closed. Not even my influence could make it open again this evening.” He shrugged. “I dined out with the physicists.”

Anna thought about the pike in aspic that was being served in the hotel dining room, and her mouth watered. “You mean you don’t have anything at all here?”

“Don’t they give you enough to eat in the hotel?”

“I just thought … because otherwise, this bubbly will go to my head.”

“What if it does?” He poured her some more from his glass.

“Tomorrow I have to understand some really difficult things.”

“Who cares if you don’t understand them?”

Alexey’s dismissal of the official reason for her sojourn as unimportant infuriated her. “I want to take advantage of the opportunity! This is a fabulous place, and I want to learn as much as possible!”

“And so you should,” he said, appeasing her. “So you should, Annushka. During the day, I’ll leave you to the protons and the transuranic elements. But in the evening, when the researchers are dreaming about discovering number one hundred and fourteen, you belong to me.”

“A hundred and fourteen?”

“Didn’t you know that most of the elements after the hundred and second were discovered here in Dubna?” He leaned back, propping himself on his elbows. “A hundred and three lived practically forever, a full eight seconds. His brother a hundred and four disintegrated after only three tenths of a second.” Alexey nodded sadly, as if he’d lost a beloved relative.

Anna’s assignment sprang into her mind. “Is that why you’re here? Is some new discovery about to take place?”

“No. The accelerator and its successes are the Minister’s department. My area of responsibility concerns the theoreticians.”

“You understand their research? You know what it’s about?” The bubbly wine made her bold.

“Of course not. Since my student days, a revolution has taken place in this field. It’s fascinating—I wish I had more time to look into it.”

At that moment, he looked quite young to Anna; all the heaviness seemed to have fallen from him. She asked, “What part of it fascinates you the most?”

“The language of mathematics! It contains the only truth known to me, the only one I revere.”

“Why didn’t you become a scientist?”

“Had my life run in a different course, nothing could have prevented me from becoming a scientist.” He refilled their glasses. “I’m afraid, though, that I wouldn’t have been more than mediocre at doing science.”

Anna tried to imagine him as a young man. What ideals had he followed? What had he looked like as a boy? He never spoke about his past; their common ground was limited to the present. After the next glass, she went looking for the bathroom, undressed briskly, and lay down naked on the carpet next to him.

“How warm it is,” she said with a smile. “Is that all from this fire?”

Alexey looked into the flames. “This house has thirteen radiators. Otherwise, in your present condition, you’d get chilblains.” He nestled against her breast.


Anna awoke in her hotel room. There was a sound of hurrying footsteps in the hall; she’d overslept. She felt hot and nauseous, and when she stood up—too quickly—everything spun. Bent over from the waist, she waited until the room slowed down and stopped. The sweet, fizzy wine—Alexey had insisted on opening the third bottle, too—and then the vodka … she retched, but she had nothing to throw up. I need a piece of white bread, she concluded, and got dressed in spite of her trembling limbs. Alexey had informed her that some physicists were coming to breakfast; Anton had driven her back to the hotel in the dim light of early dawn.

Everyone was in good spirits in the dining room. The members of the delegation had used the preceding evening to get to know one another better. The peace ambassadress allowed the nice kolkhoz farmer to pour her some coffee; the Aeroflot pilot had changed seats, and she was now in conversation with the radio producer. Looking offended, Adamek was sitting at a small table, alone. Anna swayed a bit as she headed for her seat; when she tuned in to the ambient conversations, she heard people calling one another by their first names. The orphanage director wanted to know where she had been the previous evening. When he started to serve her some ham, Anna waved it away and asked for tea and white bread. She sipped the hot drink and hoped for relief. Soon Adamek announced that it was time to go. Without argument, the whole company made for the bus. Popov ate a buttered roll as he walked.

After they were under way, Adamek announced that they were going to have a chance to admire an innovation of worldwide significance, the completion of a unique research instrument. The bus passed a flat-roofed building located behind some bare shrubs. “Which institute is that?” she asked. The hoarseness of her voice scared her.

“That’s where the international collective of theoretical physicists works,” Adamek answered, visibly pleased that someone was showing interest in his explanations.

“When will we visit it?”

“You’d be disappointed,” Adamek replied. “There’s nothing there but blackboards, mainframe computers, and thinking cubicles for the comrades.”

“Who’s the head of the institute?”

“Nikolai Lyushin. His name isn’t as well known as the names of the scientists who work with accelerators, but their successes are often based on his theoretical insights.”

Anna let herself sink back in her seat. For the first time, someone had named the man who was the subject of her assignment. The bus swung into the next curve, and the flat-roofed building vanished.

Not long afterward, the group was watching the presentation of a device that bore some resemblance to an orange. This instrument, which was used to examine the radiation spectra of short-lived isotopes, was an “iron-free toroidal beta spectrometer,” but Adamek affectionately called it “our citrus.”

Standing before a schematic depiction, Adamek gave a lecture. “All nuclear energy is based on Uranium-235,” he said. “A tiny amount of U-235 is present in common uranium, but supplies are dwindling, and uranium mining is becoming more and more expensive. The starting point of the series of tests that we’re going to see is the bombardment of depleted uranium with proton bundles, whereby some of the uranium is changed into plutonium, the basic material of our nuclear power plants.”

An hour later, they were still listening to their scientific guide, who was discoursing upon a shadowy green point that was visible on a monitor. In her weakened state, Anna found the lecture fatiguing. She leaned against the wall and struggled against her nausea, which wasn’t going away. Surprisingly, Adamek announced that they would now have lunch. Asked about the unusually early hour, he explained that the delegation would have the honor of dining in the physicists’ cafeteria, but that the visitors would have to be finished with their meal before the scientists arrived; the capacity of the cafeteria’s kitchen was limited.

The radiators in the ground-level dining room were covered in dust, the ceiling lamps flickered, and there was nothing to suggest that every day, the most brilliant minds gathered to eat in this place. The women in the kitchen served the members of the delegation a dark stew that the menu called “Rabbit Ragout.” Anna’s stomach wasn’t yet up to that, so she sipped her tea and looked around. A bald man was lighting his next cigarette with the end of his current one; a woman with her hair in a bun hesitated, obviously wondering whether or not to sit at his table, because his expression said that he wanted to be left in peace. Three female scientists came in wearing classic white lab coats. A pin on the chest of one of the three began to blink; she turned around, put her tray back in the rack, and left the room.

During the meal, Adamek announced a change in the afternoon schedule: The Neutron Physics Laboratory, he said, was under too much pressure at the moment; therefore, the group would go for a walk along the Volga. Almost all the delegates were relieved at this news, with the sole exception of the Aeroflot pilot, who complained. “First we’re dragged to lunch at eleven in the morning,” she said, “and now we’re sloughed off for some free time on the riverbank.” She had the impression that the visitors’ program had been inadequately prepared. “I think Dubna is marvelous,” she concluded, appeasing the wounded Adamek, “and so I want to see as much of it as possible. For example, the Institute for Theoretical Physics—why can’t we get to see the source, the place where all the research projects originate?”

Anna observed the slender woman from one side. Could she be the second horse in Kamarovsky’s stable? Could she, like Anna, have an assignment?

“The program has been set for weeks and cannot be changed,” Adamek replied.

The swinging door in the entrance opened and in came two men. The younger one wore a white shirt, black jeans, and light shoes. His blond hair hung down to his collar, and he had a weather-beaten face. The other man, who was speaking to him very intently, was Alexey. They sat at the first table they came to, but the younger man immediately sprang to his feet and dashed to the counter. In front of the menu board, he flung his arms in the air and began abusing the cooks. “You can eat this shit yourselves,” Anna understood him to say. “Do you hate hungry people, or what?” The server dished him up some vegetables. He took a bottle of beer and went back to his table, where he realized that he’d forgotten to open the bottle and, without further ado, knocked off the cap on the table edge.

All conversation among the members of the visiting delegation fell silent; everyone was observing the scene. Bulyagkov, who’d ordered some wine, took a sip, made a disgusted face, and moved the glass some distance away. His blond companion laughed gloatingly. “Can’t your department do anything about this? All we get to eat here is shit.” He noticed that they were being stared at. “Research tourists from Moscow,” he grumbled, turning his back on the delegates’ table.

The Deputy Minister let his eyes pass over the other people in the room. No expression on his face revealed that he knew Anna. When he spoke again to his companion, he used his first name: Nikolai. Electrified, Anna sat up straight.

“Are you trying to suck it out of my brain?” the younger man asked. “Well, my friend, there’s nothing there!” As he ate, the Deputy Minister watched him pensively. They continued speaking, but with much more restraint. Soon the blond laid down his knife and fork and left. Bulyagkov, who’d eaten nothing, followed him.

“Does he look familiar to you?” Adamek asked. “That was Nikolai Lyushin.”

The novelty of having just seen both a member of the Central Committee and a leading physicist was enthusiastically discussed. The critique of the visitors’ program was forgotten; everyone had the impression that the place they were in was very important. Anna ate a few bites, found the rabbit ragout good, and emptied her plate.


The Volga was so wide in that stretch that you could see the curve of its surface. Like schoolchildren who had left the duties of lesson learning behind, the members of the delegation skated onto the frozen river, held hands, formed a chain, and hauled one another over the ice. Adamek maintained the dignity of his office but let himself go so far as to sit on the riverbank and smoke an old-fashioned pipe. Group leader Popov folded his arms behind his back and described a great circle in the middle of the river. The ice sighed under his blades, and Anna’s eyes searched for dangerous cracks. The orphanage director glided up to her from one side. “Supposedly, you can go skiing over there,” he said, pointing to the hill on the opposite bank.

“How do you know that?” she asked as they returned to the group together.

“The nickname of that spot is ‘Dubna’s little Switzerland,’ ” he replied. Ice crystals trembled in his hair. “They even have a cross-country course with floodlights. Do you ski?”

She shook her head. He said, “Well, that’s too bad, but we don’t have enough time for it anyway.”

Anna wondered whether the orphanage director was flirting with her or trying to tell her something.

Nadezhda, cheeks aglow, came charging up to her two colleagues. “We’re going to have an ice race! Will you two be partners?” The members of the visitors’ delegation were dividing up by twos. The women were to hang on to the coattails of the men, who would act as carthorses.

“I don’t know,” Anna said. She looked over toward Popov, who by then had almost reached the opposite bank.

“You’ve been keeping to yourself the whole time, Princess,” Nadezhda said snidely. “Grab onto this guy and race with us!” She went back to her partner, the handsomer of the two Irkutskian delegates from the Friendship Club, and prepared for the start of the competition.

Anna said to the orphanage director, “Looks like you’re going to get your exercise sooner than you thought.” They lined up with the others, and the radio producer gave the signal.

Right at the beginning two couples collided, cursing as they fell over one another. Yelena, the schoolgirl, was so light that her partner was able to pull her into the lead. The kolkhoz farmer’s coat ripped, leaving the peace ambassadress helplessly holding the loose tails in her hand; without hesitating, he lifted her to his shoulders and carried her in the direction of the finish line. Because there were an insufficient number of men, the cashier and another, younger woman, a college student, had banded together. They proved to be a strong pair, and they gave Yelena and her partner a run for their money. The orphanage director was frailer than Anna had expected; when he stumbled near the halfway point, she changed roles with him and hauled him behind her. They were the last to cross the finish line, their breath like white clouds around their heads, but for the brief duration of the race, Anna had forgotten her assignment and the impossibility of carrying it out. The others were already conjecturing about where they could get alcohol to toast the winners with.

Adamek joined the group, smoke billowing from his pipe. “Time to go,” he said. “They’re waiting for us in the Neutron Physics Lab.”

Arm in arm and giggling, the members of the visitors’ delegation returned to the bus. Popov’s absence was noted; a long, sustained whistle informed him that departure was imminent. Then they saw him, a small gray point in the distance, hurrying over the ice.