The Russian Affair

EIGHT



Anna spent the time after the tour of the laboratory in her room. She could hear some of the others changing for dinner, and in the room next to hers, the fellow from Irkutsk was visiting Nadezhda. They spoke softly for a while, but then their conversation fell silent, something struck the wall, and there was a cry, followed by tittering.

I’ll acknowledge my failure, Anna thought. Comrade Colonel, it was not possible for me to acquire the information without arousing suspicion, she said to an imagined Kamarovsky. Then she sat down on the bed, somewhat relieved. But her comfort didn’t last long, for soon her inescapable sense of duty announced its presence. She’d be in Dubna that night and the following day; she still had time to act. Should she, on her own initiative, simply go back to the physicists’ cafeteria in the hope of finding Lyushin there a second time? She remembered the remark the orphanage director had made on the Volga, the reference to the area dedicated to winter sports on the opposite bank of the river: Would that be where she could find the opportunity she was looking for?

These and other speculations made Anna so nervous that she leaped to her feet and changed—for the second time—the blouse she intended to wear to dinner. But then she opened the physics textbook again. She chose a chapter on quantum mechanics and tried to concentrate. Why am I kidding myself? she thought, her eyes still fixed on the text. I’m a house painter, the daughter of a poet, the wife of a soldier. I could have a delightful stay here, I could enjoy the nights with Alexey, but instead I’m trying to be a spy! I must be crazy, I should be punished, and one day I will be, too! She commanded herself not to waver, read the introduction in one go, and was surprised to find that she vaguely understood it.

How does Leonid put up with all this? Anna wondered as her finger slid down the page. How has he been able to keep silent for so long in the face of such cheating? Why has he decided to close his eyes to the obvious? The more intense Anna’s affair became, the more often her husband spent the night in his barracks. He assiduously overlooked every change: that she spent more time on her appearance, for example, or that she came home with things they really couldn’t afford.

One evening, after Anna had settled into the backseat of the limousine that would transport her to Alexey, she’d noticed Leonid stepping out of the shadow of an archway just as the big car was pulling away. She’d expected her husband to make her explain herself later that night, but when she came home, he was already lying in the sleeping alcove with his face turned away from her. Anna could tell by his breathing that he was still awake, and when she got into bed, she’d pushed herself under his arm. Without a word, he’d stroked her hair and then turned away. When she woke the following morning, he was already in his uniform, sitting at the table next to Petya and cutting the boy’s bread into bite-sized pieces. Leonid had stayed with his unit for the rest of the week.

He’s not a weak person, Anna thought; he knows how to assert himself, and within the limits of his possibilities, he’s single-minded. She turned the page pensively. What he was lacking was passion. The only devotion he showed was in his love for Petya. And yet, Anna would have found intolerable the unresolved condition in which Leonid had voluntarily remained for months.

Rosa, that witch, as if she were capable of gauging Anna’s desperation, had offered her help precisely when Anna had been on the point of chucking everything. She’d decided that she was willing to accept any consequences rather than to go on living a life of double deceit. And at that exact point, Rosa had proposed a meeting.

“Doesn’t it bother you, constantly having to lie to Leonid?” she’d asked innocently, but at the same time so empathetically that Anna had shared her feelings with her. Then, on the very next day, Anna had been ordered to appear in Kamarovsky’s office, and the Colonel had presented her with his plan. He’d explained that officers from Moscow who volunteered for service in inhospitable parts of the Soviet Union might hope for special privileges upon their return. “It wouldn’t be for a long time,” he’d said. “But I think it would be best for us to avail ourselves of this expedient.”

She was so far gone in deceit that Kamarovsky could allow himself to make her such a proposal, Anna thought fearfully. Shouldn’t she stand up to him, once and for all? Anna didn’t want to lose Leonid, and she didn’t want to lose Alexey. Confounded by her dilemma, and full of shame at herself for taking up Kamarovsky’s offer unresistingly, Anna had asked, “So where would he get transferred to?”

The Colonel had pulled over a map that showed the locations of the various army units and tapped on a position in the Northeast.

“Siberia?” she’d whispered. “No, I can’t do that … you can’t ask that of us.”

“How long has your husband served as a lieutenant?” After Anna told him, Kamarovsky had sat there with an impenetrable expression on his face, as though, first of all, he had to consider the matter. Then he said, “A promotion might be possible. Naturally, your husband would have to apply for his captain’s commission himself.”

She’d stared at the map and tried to comprehend the incredible distance that lay between Moscow and there. “What guarantee do I have that Leonid will be allowed to come back home?”

The Colonel’s silence had made it clear to her that haggling with him was a foolhardy undertaking. Then he said, “I’m not in command of Leonid’s army unit, but should he decide to go along with a transfer, the circumstance will be taken into account, and it will be borne in mind that you both have cooperated with the security forces.”

This answer was too vague for Anna. “When will he get an irrevocable right of abode for Moscow?”

“In a year, or at the latest, a year and a half.”

“I’ll consider it.”

While showing her to the door, Kamarovsky had reiterated, “It wouldn’t be forever.”


That evening, Anna had initiated the overdue conversation. She and Leonid hadn’t been so honest with each other in years. They’d admitted that their only remaining interaction involved organizing the day: Who was bringing Petya to the doctor, who was picking him up from school, when would his grandfather have to lend a hand? They’d calculated how long it had been since they’d made love. Anna said it was because they slept in the same room with Viktor Ipalyevich. They’d hugged and petted each other, not with passion, but rather as though each sought protection in the other. Finally, since the subject lay close to hand, Anna had indicated that there was someone else; nothing serious, she’d explained, but nevertheless, not something she could end overnight.

Even then, Leonid had shown no interest in hearing reasons or learning names; he’d even told her he trusted her! Furious, she’d moved away from him on the sofa and told him to his face that she was having an affair with a member of the Central Committee. “And I’m being required to continue it, too!”

Leonid had been neither wounded nor outraged, but merely alert. Without Anna’s mentioning the KGB again, he’d wanted to know if their conversation was being listened to. She’d laughed, but with a glance at the familiar objects around her, she’d nonetheless admitted that she’d never considered such a thing even as a possibility until that moment. Since the name of her control officer had also been dropped, Anna considered that the moment had come to present Kamarovsky’s proposal. Once again, Leonid’s reaction had been not reproachful but practical. “Ever since I became a commissioned officer, I’ve been allowed to serve in Moscow. But no one who doesn’t belong to the nomenklatura can get out of serving in the provinces at some point.” He stood up. “That means that they would surely transfer me eventually, sooner or later. Why not now?”

“Do you know what that means?” She’d taken his hands and named the place in Siberia. For the first time in a long time, she’d noticed how sinewy his lower arms were. “Nine months of winter.”

“We have a big, glorious country. Why shouldn’t I get to know more of it?” He’d gone over to the bookshelves. “We don’t have a single book about Siberia.”

Not long after that, Leonid had taken matters into his own hands. He’d started bringing home books about the North and cutting out every newspaper article he saw that described the beauty of Siberia. Anna had distrusted his optimism, thinking it was just for show, and she’d read aloud to him reports stating that the ground in Yakutia never thawed out. The houses there, she read, were built on concrete pillars to keep the heated rooms from warming the soil and causing the whole building to sink into the resultant mire. Nevertheless, Leonid’s willingness to make the move remained constant, and one morning after night duty he’d told Anna that he’d decided to try for a transfer to Minusinsk. His application was already being considered.

“Why so far away?” Anna had asked. Strangely enough, she’d felt rejected.

“Does it make a difference?”

It had been a long time since she’d seen him so self-confident. He’d looked up the place in the atlas and determined that there were five time zones between Moscow and the city on the Yenisei River. “After this, I’ll be an expert in coal mining,” Leonid had said with a laugh, reading her a statistic that estimated the coal reserves in the area at 450 billion tons.

At night, Anna had wondered how she’d let things go so far. Wasn’t her situation beyond all reason? In order to maintain an illicit relationship, she was standing idly by and watching while her husband let himself be exiled to the other side of the socialist world. She understood Leonid’s motives less and less. Instead of asserting his rights—hadn’t Anna secretly hoped he would?—he was falling in with Kamarovsky’s perverse proposition, and he was prepared to relocate at a great distance and without resentment. She almost envied him his eager anticipation at the prospect of getting to know some of the Soviet Union’s outlying regions.

In the days after her husband’s decision, Anna’s image of him had changed more and more starkly. How generous and spontaneous Leonid was! In their thoroughly muddled situation, he remained composed and kept his sense of humor. Unexpectedly, he’d become again the person whom Anna had once liked so much. She’d even told him that, had even sought his affection, but Leonid had rejected her advances. She’d tried to give him an idea of the barren wastes he proposed to enter and asked him whether he wouldn’t curse her for having driven him into exile, and he’d responded by chiding her for being such a romantic. It was then that Anna had admitted to herself that her feelings for Alexey were fading.

Simultaneously with Leonid’s promotion to the rank of captain, the news had come that he would be transferred not to southern Siberia but to Sakhalin Island, in the easternmost part of the Soviet Union. He’d reacted calmly even to this change and explained that the pay for duty on Sakhalin, because of its extreme location, would be double what he’d been expecting, and besides, frontier troops were given preferential treatment. When Anna checked on the distances this time, she found that Moscow and the island were separated by eight time zones.

“I’ll never get so close to Japan again,” Leonid had said with a smile. “The strait between the island and Japan is barely thirty miles wide.”

He’d made an unemotional decision to go to the East, and his departure had been equally serene. He’d inculcated in Petya the notion that he must now represent his father as head of the family; with deadly seriousness, the boy had accepted the charge. When Leonid thanked his father-in-law for his support, Viktor Ipalyevich had maintained a grim silence, just as he’d done throughout the preceding weeks in the face of all the changes he found reprehensible but couldn’t comprehend.

At the last moment, Anna had felt suddenly afraid and implored Leonid to reconsider. Tears weren’t appropriate for their situation, he’d replied amicably; they would see each other again in a few months. Assailed by the thought that she’d made the worst of all possible choices, Anna had watched in panic as her husband picked up his suitcase, threw his better uniform, still on its hanger, over his shoulder, and left the apartment. An army police vehicle had taken him to the airport.

During the first days, Anna had received no news of him; all she knew was that the journey took thirty-six hours and that he would have changed planes in both Omsk and Khabarovsk. She had felt as though she were paralyzed; she’d cursed Kamarovsky’s plan, but most of all, she’d cursed herself, and she’d canceled two dates with Bulyagkov.

After nearly a month, she’d received an enthusiastic letter from Leonid. Sakhalin lay in the same latitudes as the Mediterranean Sea, he told her, but the climate was incredibly harsh and unpredictable; for the first time in his life, he saw himself completely at the mercy of Nature. He’d done some reading about the time before the Revolution, when Sakhalin was the worst penal camp in tsarist Russia and millions of people had literally rotted there. Today, he pointed out, it was the site of a first-class fishing industry, and the military bases were well organized. He went on to say that the civilian population living on the island was made up mostly of women, because the men were off working on the mainland or had simply cleared out for good. When Anna read that, her loneliness had been augmented by jealousy. The whole time, she’d looked upon Leonid as the one who’d been cheated on and treated like dirt; now, in her mind’s eye, she saw him as a brand-new captain in a snappy uniform, cruising an island full of women!

Anna had spent a sad winter. Bulyagkov, sensing that she was at her wit’s end, had behaved with surprising consideration. For even though Leonid’s departure had technically simplified the affair for Alexey, something fundamental had changed, and the two of them had reverted to the earliest form of their relationship: dinner and chatting on the corner seat. During the course of these conversations, strangely enough, the Deputy Minister had given Anna advice about her marriage, pointing out to her that longing was the strongest engine of any passion. And so it was Alexey, the cause of all the confusion, who gradually helped her to get over it. The spring had turned lush and heavy. When Anna turned out the light in Moscow, for Leonid, six thousand miles away, it was time for morning roll call.


Anna lurched upright and listened. No more sounds came from the neighboring room. Resolutely, she clapped her physics tome shut, washed her face, brushed her hair, and went to dinner. The atmosphere in the dining room was as relaxed as it had been at lunch. Anna took her seat between the orphanage director and the blissful Nadezhda. Dinner consisted of pork and potatoes, and someone had scared up some red wine. Anna drained her glass in one gulp and accepted a refill from the orphanage director. The Aeroflot pilot had successfully insisted that the radio be taken from the lobby and set up in the dining room; the Irkutskians quarreled over the station of choice. Anna had received no message from Alexey and didn’t know whether or not Anton was waiting for her outside. Eating calmed her nervousness, the wine made her weightless; she began to enjoy herself and kept on drinking. In the meanwhile, the peace ambassadress was dancing with the kolkhoz farmer, and Nadezhda fetched her Irkutskian and laid her arms around his neck. The next time Anna looked up, the tables were empty, and everybody who had a partner was swaying to the music.

“You look like you’re somewhere else,” the orphanage director said. “Why are you always so aloof?”

“Leave me alone,” she said, slamming her glass on the table.

“Come on,” he said, and stood up.

“Shit music.” She shook her head.

“As loaded as you are, what difference does the music make?”

Anna felt that she was being helped to her feet. The man who’d seemed so frail to her grabbed under her arms and pulled her around the table. “If you don’t watch out,” she said, “I’m going to throw up on your shirt.”

“Just as long as you’re having a good time.” He put his arm around her neck. Her feet slid across the floor. She sank against the male chest and stopped thinking altogether.

Anna knew neither how long she’d danced nor with whom, but in the end, she must have wound up in Popov’s arms, because she remembered that the group leader had seen her to her room. She’d dropped her blouse and skirt near the bed and slept in her underwear.

That morning, Anna’s hangover, oddly not as bad as the one the previous day, faded quickly after some coffee and salted herring. The group breakfast was a rather silent affair. It was obvious that not one of the delegates felt the slightest desire to visit the day’s main attraction, the phasotron. Even Popov had exceeded his limit the night before and made no attempt to hurry the group along. Only Adamek’s appearance set everyone in motion.

Pallid and gray, the members of the visiting delegation stared out the bus windows while being driven to the other end of Dubna. Anna’s head bobbed up and down with every bump. It was clear to her that she’d let the entire evening slip by without doing anything to carry out her assignment. The visitors were led into a large shed, where protective goggles were distributed to them to shield their eyes against the dazzling light radiating from the welding torches in the main hall. The reactor was not yet finished, Adamek said, which meant that they had a unique opportunity to peer into the bowels of the gigantic machine. The Aeroflot pilot found it disappointing to be presented with a worksite instead of particles in rapid motion. The others trotted along behind their scientific guide, who introduced them to a female scientist named Stretyakova, the designer of the complex.

“In a few weeks, particles will be hurtling through these channels at close to the speed of light,” she said in a high-pitched voice that seemed incongruous with her stout physique. The delegation stared into open tubes with pipes that could just as well have been connected to the sewage system. “Anyone who gets dizzy easily should stay down here,” Stretyakova declared, and then she started to mount a narrow ladder that led to the ceiling of the reactor hall. Given their weakened condition, each of the visitors, as individuals, would have declined to participate in such a climbing party, but no one wanted to be shown up in front of the others. And so they made an orderly ascent, first the peace ambassadress, then the Irkutskians, followed by Nadezhda, and so on until Adamek, who went up last, his eyes unobtrusively fixed on Anna’s rear end.

When they had gathered on the circular steel walkway, the visitors were shown the reflector and the yard-thick concrete wall that provided protection from radiation. Leaning far over the railing, the scientist pointed out the bottomless shaft into which the control rods would be inserted. “Below us, it’s ninety feet straight down to the zero mark.”

Most members of the group believed her without staring into the abyss.

“With the help of decelerated-neutron irradiation chambers, one can see through living cells without harming them,” explained Stretyakova. For the first time, therefore, high-speed neutrons were going to be used in biological research.

The group was spared the climb down the ladder; they were released through a door into the open. A blast of icy air struck them as they emerged. They went down the exterior steps to the foot of the reactor and walked beside frozen bulldozer tracks to the laboratory huts.

“I thank you for your attention, and I wish you a good trip home.” Stretyakova’s lecture passed so seamlessly into a farewell that even Adamek took a few seconds to understand that they were being dismissed.

“We thank the Comrade Doctor for her precious time,” he said, led the members of the delegation in a brief round of applause, and then signaled to them to bestir themselves. The bus driver had not been informed of their movements, so the little group had to make their way to the parking area over icy sand heaps and through defoliated undergrowth. During the ride back to the hotel, the atmosphere was tense; Popov’s expression showed that he was ashamed of his team.


A message from Alexey was waiting for Anna at the front desk. He complained about having been stood up the previous evening and ordered her to come to lunch at his borrowed house. Anton had another errand to perform, he said, so she must come on foot. Anna was none too pleased at the prospect of this visit. Flustered and sleep-deprived, she hurried to her room, showered, and—without informing Popov—set off on her walk.

The way was unfamiliar in daylight; all the houses on the riverfront promenade looked alike. In the end, she found the villa only because Alexey was in the garden.

“I wanted to split some firewood,” he said as he pulled open the iron-barred gate. “But there’s not an ax to be found anywhere on the premises.”

She went ahead of him toward the house. He caught up with her on the shoveled path. “Where were you?”

“I got no message at all from you.”

“Am I supposed to send you a love letter every evening?”

“I didn’t see the car.” As she spoke, she hung up her coat.

“It’s too bad the evening was spoiled.”

“Yes, it is,” she said, closing the subject.

“Wine?”

“I’d rather not.” She turned off the harsh ceiling lights and sought out a spot in the dimly lit alcove.

“You look pale.” He remained in front of the cold fireplace.

“We’ve got a pretty hard-drinking delegation, you know.”

“You were partying while I sat here bored?” He was obviously in a complaining mood, but after keeping it up for a bit, he eventually went into the kitchen. “Would you like something to eat? Anton picked up some cold cuts.”

Anna greatly needed something warm. “Do you have any eggs? Shall I fix us some eggs and sausage?”

“Will you do that?” he asked, suddenly the mildest of men, and showed her the pantry. Then he waited in silence while Anna rummaged around.

“I’m awfully tired, Alexey,” she said over her shoulder. “These scientific lectures … can we sleep a little?”

As though she’d spoken a magic word, he hugged her from behind and pressed his unshaven cheek against her ear. “Yes, let’s sleep, Annushka, I’m tired, too … God, am I tired.”

“First we eat,” she said, pushing him aside. The sausage had a strong smell.

When they were seated at the table, she asked, “How much time do we have left?”

“My work in Dubna is done.”

“Our group still has to visit …” She wiped the egg yolk from her plate. “I have no idea what we’re going to visit.”

Anna left half of her meal untouched and went into the bedroom. Alexey followed her, pulled his suspenders off his shoulders, and watched Anna slip into the bed in her underwear. “Oh, this feels good,” she said. She turned on her side and drew up her legs.

“Shall I set the alarm clock?” Unable to bend over and untie his shoes, he sank down onto the edge of the bed.

“I don’t care.”

“Some Pioneer Girl you are.” Still wearing his shirt and pants, he lay down, got under the covers, and stretched out his hand until it came to rest under Anna’s thigh. Then everything grew still.

Even in her dozing state, Anna’s sense of duty tormented her. Could she in good conscience waste her last hours in Dubna sleeping? She saw herself standing on the mighty reactor’s cover plate, surrounded by scientists with masks covering their noses and mouths. The roof began to shake, then positively to rattle, but nobody seemed to take this state of affairs at all seriously. Don’t you hear that? Anna cried. Can’t you feel it, any of you? Everything’s exploding! She opened her eyes and saw that Alexey was on his feet. “But we haven’t been in bed five minutes yet,” she whispered.

“Someone’s here.” He stepped to the window and pushed the curtain aside.

No reason on earth could give her the strength to sit up. “Is it Anton?”

“Good God,” Alexey growled. “Him, of all people.”

She rolled over onto her back.

“You stay in bed,” the Deputy Minister ordered her. “Don’t make a sound. I’ll get rid of him as fast as I can.”

“Who?”

“That madman Lyushin.”

The bedroom door had not yet closed when Anna sat bolt upright. Sleep filled her head and made her limbs heavy; nevertheless, she forced herself to think clearly. If she still had one chance left to tackle her assignment, that chance had now come. Anna threw off the blanket. Her thighs, white and widely spread, lay on the sheet; her feet were covered by blue socks. By then, Alexey had admitted the visitor. She hurried into the bathroom to wash the sleep from her eyes. There was a broom leaning behind the door; she saw it too late. It slid along the door panel, crashed against the wainscoting, and made a bright, sharp sound when it struck the tiled floor. She stood stock-still; the conversation in the neighboring room had ceased. “No listeners,” someone said, and the bedroom door was yanked open.

From close up, Nikolai Lyushin seemed smaller. He hadn’t taken off his overcoat, under which he wore no jacket, only a white shirt. The hair on his temples was damp, as if he’d been running.

“Oh,” he said. “Well. Good day, Comrade.” He turned back into the living room. “I’m sorry, Bulyagkov, really. Don’t be angry.”

Anna waited for Alexey to appear in the doorway—she was standing in the bathroom, and Lyushin just outside of it—but nothing stirred. She took the woolen blanket from the bed, wrapped it around her shoulders, and walked past the scientist into the living room.

Alexey was sitting in his armchair. “As you see, we’ll have to have this conversation another time,” he said.

“Please introduce me,” Lyushin said, stepping in behind Anna.

“The comrade is part of the group that’s visiting from Moscow.”

“Nikolai Lyushin,” the blond man said.

“The quantum physicist?” she asked, looking at Alexey.

“You know who he is?” Bulyagkov seemed more curious than surprised.

“How do you know me?” Lyushin came so close to her that she could smell his aftershave lotion.

“From the material they handed out to prepare us for our study trip.”

“And you are what … a student?”

“I’m a house painter.” She noted the exchange of glances between the two men.

“I’m afraid I may be intruding,” said Lyushin, as though it weren’t obvious.

“We were trying to take a nap,” Anna said coolly.

“How about something to drink?” Before Bulyagkov could stand up, Anna had already grabbed the bottle from the shelf; the blanket slipped off her shoulder.

“Let’s sit down.” He poured the drinks, and Anna slid onto the settle.

Lyushin remained on his feet while he tossed back his first glass. “My place isn’t so comfortable,” he said.

“That’s because you’ve got skis standing around everywhere.” Alexey clinked glasses with Anna. “Professor Lyushin was the Soviet champion in the triathlon.”

“In the days of my youth.” Without hesitation, he sat next to Anna.

“Where do you ski?” she asked, although she guessed the answer.

“Across the river.” Lyushin indicated the direction with his head. “There’s a first-class cross-country course. You can even ski it at night.”

“I thought scientists were on the whole … unathletic people.”

“Stupid prejudice. Most of the ones here are ace athletes. You should see the river in summer. Covered with sails, and water-skiing is the latest rage.” He poured himself another drink. “We even have a soccer team. They have a game soon against the atomic city of Novosibirsk.”

“In summer, it’s really …” Alexey sought the right word. “It’s really idyllic here. Twenty years ago, this area was uninhabited.”

“Why was Dubna built here, of all places?” Anna was conscious of the unreal situation. The nuclear scientist and the Deputy Minister were sitting on either side of a woman wearing a woolen blanket. She nodded to one and then to the other, as her two male companions took turns telling the story of Dubna’s early years. The place called Novo-Ivankovo lay in the area later to be submerged when the “Moscow Sea” (the Ivankovo Reservoir) was filled. Novo-Ivankovo was torn down and rebuilt stone by stone next to Dubna; after that, the waters that would form the reservoir came pouring into the valley. Today, the reservoir’s gigantic power plant provided electricity to the capital as well as Dubna itself.

“The people of Moscow were nervous,” Lyushin said. “In those days, not very much was yet known about the power of the atom.” He tilted his head to one side. “For reasons of radiation safety, Dubna had to be sufficiently far from the capital, which is why they drained the swamp where the city now stands.” He asked Anna what facilities the delegation had visited; Anna named the cyclotron, the nuclear spectroscopy laboratory, and the worksite where the phasotron was being built. Then she asked, “Why can’t we visit your department?”

“We’re the ugly ducklings of scientific research,” Lyushin said, wheeling his glass on the table edge. “Nothing radiates where we are; no circulating particles approach the speed of light. We just sit with our slide rules and try to get our teeth into the uncertainty principle.”

“You can imagine it in more modern terms,” Alexey said to Anna. “These days they use big computers instead of slide rules.”

“Otherwise, however, little has changed since Bohr and Heisenberg,” Lyushin insisted.

“What are you working on?” The question was out before Anna could consider the consequences. The two men looked at each other. She expected to hear something about state secrets and security regulations.

“The probability that nucleons will be present in a localized region of space,” said Lyushin, as naturally as if he were giving out a cooking recipe. “If e is smaller than v, then the probability of presence tends toward zero. Therefore, the kinetic energy would be negative and the speed imaginary, which is of course nonsense, and nevertheless, the energy values are positive.”

“All right, now we know,” Bulyagkov said with a smile. “And now you understand why your bus keeps driving past the theoretical physics building without stopping.”

“It’s too bad, all the same,” said Lyushin. His face lit up. “We have a beautiful new coffee machine. That alone would be worth a visit.”

“I’d like to learn more about the subject,” Anna said, her back turned to Alexey.

“Do you have some understanding of quantum mechanics?” Again, the men exchanged surprised looks.

“I’ve read about electron diffraction.”

“Tell us.” It wasn’t so much an invitation to take a pop quiz as the expression of a specialist’s amused curiosity at the prospect of having a conversation about his chosen field with a half-naked woman. Anna searched her memory for whatever fragments remained from her perusal of the physics textbook.

“Under certain circumstances, electrons behave as though they’re not particles of matter, but waves.”

“So far, so good,” Lyushin said, nodding.

“But one can’t predict whether they’ll appear as matter or as waves.”

“Sometimes the damned things behave like both at once,” Lyushin agreed.

“And therefore quantum mechanics can only determine the probability of a particular event, it can’t offer a precise result.”

Lyushin smiled at Bulyagkov. “First semester theoretical physics, passing grade,” he said. They clinked glasses together.

Strangely enough, being consigned to a marginal role in the conversation didn’t seem to bother Alexey. He didn’t play the master of the house, nor did he encourage the uninvited guest to leave, but rather stood up and fetched another kind of vodka. Meanwhile, Lyushin talked about the angular momentum of composite particles and the quasi-stationary state of neutron spin and ended with a reference to his current work, which concerned the uncertainty principle and perturbation theory. “An exact solution to the Schrödinger equation can be found only for a few very simple cases,” he said, tousling his hair. “Most problems lead to series of equations so complicated that they can’t be solved exactly. We think approximate calculations are the only way to reach a result, and therefore lower-order terms must simply be left out.” His straw-colored hair was now standing up in all directions.

“And does that work?” Anna posed the decisive question as though it were one of many.

He exhaled forcefully through his nose. “Do you know what the scientist’s three capital Fs are? Failure, failure, and failure.” He sighed and leaned back.

“Have you failed, Professor Lyushin?”

The blond-haired man gazed at her. “It looks that way at the moment.”

Anna felt Alexey freeze beside her.

“My department must retreat several steps,” Lyushin continued. “All the way back to an equation that we developed a year and a half ago.”

“That’s no failure. It’s just a backward step.” She pulled the slipping blanket higher.

“But it costs money,” he said, smiling at her. “Money that the Ministry for Research Planning doesn’t want to make available.” The scientist looked over at Bulyagkov. “Is she really a house painter?”

“You’re surprised?” Alexey asked, grinning. “She represents the general cultural level of our working men and women!”

Anna stood up and went to get dressed.

“Do you have to leave very soon?” Lyushin called to her. “I wanted to show you our coffee machine!”

“We’re going back to Moscow today. I really can’t stay any longer.” She closed the bedroom door and slipped quickly into her clothes. Lyushin offered her a ride back to the hotel.

“I’d better not accept,” she said. She gave Alexey a regretful look, expressing sorrow that their last date had taken such an unusual form, and put on her coat. “It would be better for me to show up unaccompanied.”

The two men followed her to the door. “Thanks,” she said as she took her leave. “Today’s lecture was certainly the most interesting of all.” She gave her hand to Lyushin and a fleeting kiss to Alexey, whose relaxed cheerfulness persisted undiminished.

Anna stood in the snow. Then she walked slowly to the gate, but as soon as she was through it, she hurried along the riverfront promenade and the main street, broke into a run at the sight of the flags over the hotel entrance, ignored the front desk manager’s look, and rushed up to her room. Her hand flew over the page as she jotted down as much as she could remember, making a special effort to record technical terms. When she laid down her pen, she heard the members of the delegation hurrying down the hall outside her room. Suitcases were being shifted, doors were slamming closed; their departure was imminent. Anna considered what excuse she might use to soothe Popov, who would want to know why she’d been absent from the official farewells. Before tossing the physics textbook into her bag, she gave the volume an affectionate pat.