Tanya Dvorkin was back in Moscow, but Vasili Yenkov was not.
After the two of them had been arrested at the poetry reading in Mayakovsky Square, Vasili had been convicted of “anti-Soviet activities and propaganda” and sentenced to two years in a Siberian labor camp. Tanya felt guilty: she had been Vasili’s partner in crime, but she had got away with it.
Tanya assumed Vasili had been beaten and interrogated. But she was still free and working as a journalist, therefore he had not given her away. Perhaps he had refused to talk. More likely, he might have named plausible fictitious collaborators who the KGB believed were simply difficult to track down.
By the spring of 1963 Vasili had served his sentence. If he was alive—if he had survived the cold, hunger, and disease that killed many prisoners in labor camps—he should be free now. Ominously, he had not reappeared.
Prisoners were normally allowed to send and receive one letter per month, heavily censored; but Vasili could not write to Tanya, for that would betray her to the KGB; so she had no information; and no doubt the same applied to most of his friends. Perhaps he wrote to his mother in Leningrad. Tanya had never met her: Vasili’s association with Tanya was secret even from his mother.
Vasili had been Tanya’s closest friend. She lay awake nights worrying about him. Was he ill, or even dead? Perhaps he had been convicted of another crime, and had his sentence extended. Tanya was tortured by the uncertainty. It gave her a headache.
One afternoon she took the risk of mentioning Vasili to her boss, Daniil Antonov. The features department of TASS was a large, noisy room, with journalists typing, talking on the phone, reading newspapers, and walking in and out of the reference library. If she spoke quietly she would not be overheard. She began by saying: “What happened about Ustin Bodian, in the end?” The ill treatment of Bodian, a dissident opera singer, was the subject of the edition of Dissidence Vasili had been giving out when arrested—an issue written by Tanya.
“Bodian died of pneumonia,” Daniil said.
Tanya knew that. She was pretending ignorance only to bring the conversation around to Vasili. “There was a writer arrested with me that day—Vasili Yenkov,” she said in a musing tone. “Any idea what happened to him?”
“The script editor. He got two years.”
“Then he must be free by now.”
“Perhaps. I haven’t heard. He won’t get his old job back, so I’m not sure where he’d go.”
He would come to Moscow, Tanya felt sure. But she shrugged, pretending indifference, and went back to typing an article about a woman bricklayer.
She had made several discreet inquiries among people who would have known if Vasili had returned. The answer had been the same in all cases: no one had heard anything.
Then, that afternoon, Tanya got word.
Leaving the TASS building at the end of the working day, she was accosted by a stranger. A voice said: “Tanya Dvorkin?” and she turned to see a pale, thin man in dirty clothes.
“Yes?” she said, a little anxiously: she could not imagine what such a man would want with her.
“Vasili Yenkov saved my life,” he said.
It was so unexpected that for a moment she did not know how to respond. Too many questions raced through her mind: How do you know Vasili? Where and when did he save your life? Why have you come to me?
He thrust into her hand a grubby envelope the size of a regular sheet of paper, then he turned away.
It took Tanya a moment to gather her wits. At last she realized there was one question more important than all the rest. While the man was still within earshot she said: “Is Vasili alive?”
The stranger stopped and looked back. The pause struck fear into Tanya’s heart. Then he said: “Yes,” and she felt the sudden lightness of relief.
The man walked away.
“Wait!” Tanya called, but he quickened his pace, turned a corner, and disappeared from view.
The envelope was not sealed. Tanya looked inside. She saw several sheets of paper covered with handwriting that she recognized as Vasili’s. She pulled them halfway out. The first sheet was headed:
Frostbite
by Ivan Kuznetsov
She pushed the sheets back into the envelope and walked on to the bus stop. She felt scared and excited at the same time. “Ivan Kuznetsov” was an obvious pseudonym, the commonest name imaginable, like Hans Schmidt in German or Jean Lefevre in French. Vasili had written something, an article or a story. She could hardly wait to read it, yet at the same time she had to resist the impulse to hurl it away from her like something contaminated, for it was sure to be subversive.
She shoved it into her shoulder bag. When the bus came it was crowded—this was the evening rush hour—so she could not look at the manuscript on her way home without the risk that someone would read it over her shoulder. She had to suppress her impatience.
She thought about the man who had handed it to her. He had been badly dressed, half starved, and in poor health, with a look of permanent wary fearfulness: just like a man recently released from jail, she thought. He had seemed glad to get rid of the envelope, and reluctant to say more to her than he had to. But he had at least explained why he had undertaken his dangerous errand. He was repaying a debt. “Vasili Yenkov saved my life,” he had said. Again she wondered how.
She got off the bus and walked to Government House. On her return from Cuba she had moved back into her mother’s flat. She had no reason to get her own apartment and, if she had, it would have been a lot less luxurious.
She spoke briefly to Anya, then went to her bedroom and sat down on the bed to read what Vasili had written.
His handwriting had altered. The letters were smaller, the risers shorter, the loops less flamboyant. Did that reflect a change of personality, she wondered, or just a shortage of writing paper?
She began to read.
Josef Ivanovich Maslov, called Soso, was overjoyed when the food arrived spoiled.
Normally, the guards stole most of the consignment and sold it. The prisoners were left with plain gruel in the morning and turnip soup at night. Food rarely went bad in Siberia, where the ambient temperature was usually below freezing—but Communism could work miracles. So when, occasionally, the meat was crawling with maggots and the fat rancid, the cook threw it all into the pot, and the prisoners rejoiced. Soso gobbled down kasha that was oily with stinking lard, and longed for more.
Tanya was nauseated, but at the same time she had to read on.
With each page she was more impressed. The story was about an unusual relationship between two prisoners, one an intellectual dissident, the other an uneducated gangster. Vasili had a simple, direct style that was remarkably effective. Life in the camp was described in brutally vivid language. But there was more than just description. Perhaps because of his experience in radio drama, Vasili knew how to keep a story moving, and Tanya found that her interest never flagged.
The fictional camp was located in a forest of Siberian larch, and its work was chopping down the trees. There were no safety rules and no protective clothing or equipment, so accidents were frequent. Tanya particularly noted an episode in which the gangster severed an artery in his arm with a saw and was saved by the intellectual, who tied a tourniquet around his arm. Was that how Vasili had saved the life of the messenger who had brought his manuscript to Moscow from Siberia?
Tanya read the story twice. It was almost like talking to Vasili: the phrasing was familiar from a hundred discussions and arguments, and she recognized the kinds of things he found funny or dramatic or ironic. It made her heart ache with missing him.
Now that she knew Vasili was alive, she had to find out why he had not returned to Moscow. The story contained no clue to that. But Tanya knew someone who could find out almost anything: her brother.
She put the manuscript in the drawer of her bedside table. She left the bedroom and said to her mother: “I have to go and see Dimka—I won’t be long.” She went down in the elevator to the floor on which her brother lived.
The door was opened by his wife, Nina, nine months pregnant. “You look well!” Tanya said.
It was not true. Nina was long past the stage when people said a pregnant woman looked “blooming.” She was huge, her breasts pendulous, her belly stretched taut. Her fair skin was pale under the freckles, and her red-brown hair was greasy. She looked older than twenty-nine. “Come in,” she said in a tired voice.
Dimka was watching the news. He turned off the television, kissed Tanya, and offered her a beer.
Nina’s mother, Masha, was there, having come from Perm by train to help her daughter with the baby. Masha was a small, prematurely wrinkled peasant woman dressed in black, visibly proud of her citified daughter in her swanky apartment. Tanya had been surprised when she first met Masha, having previously got the impression that Nina’s mother was a schoolteacher; but it turned out that she merely worked in the village school, cleaning it in fact. Nina had pretended that her parents were somewhat higher in status—a practice so common as to be almost universal, Tanya supposed.
They talked about Nina’s pregnancy. Tanya wondered how to get Dimka alone. There was no way she was going to talk about Vasili in front of Nina or her mother. Instinctively she mistrusted her brother’s wife.
Why did she feel that so strongly, she wondered guiltily? It was because of the pregnancy, she decided. Nina was not intellectual, but she was clever: not the type to suffer an accidental pregnancy. Tanya had a suspicion, never voiced, that Nina had manipulated Dimka into the marriage. Tanya knew that her brother was sophisticated and savvy about almost everything: he was naïve and romantic only about women. Why would Nina have wanted to entrap him? Because the Dvorkins were an elite family, and Nina was ambitious?
Don’t be such a bitch, Tanya told herself.
She made small talk for half an hour, then got up to go.
There was nothing supernatural about the twins’ relationship, but they knew each other so well that each could usually guess what the other was thinking, and Dimka intuited that Tanya had not come to talk about Nina’s pregnancy. Now he stood up too. “I’ve got to take out the garbage,” he said. “Give me a hand, would you, Tanya?”
They went down in the elevator, each carrying a bucket of rubbish. When they were outside, at the back of the building, with no one else around, Dimka said: “What is it?”
“Vasili Yenkov’s sentence is up, but he hasn’t come back to Moscow.”
Dimka’s face hardened. He loved Tanya, she knew, but he disagreed with her politics. “Yenkov did his best to undermine the government I work for. Why would I care what happens to him?”
“He believes in freedom and justice, as you do.”
“That kind of subversive activity just gives the hard-liners an excuse to resist reform.”
Tanya knew she was defending herself, as well as Vasili. “If it were not for people like Vasili, the hard-liners would say everything was all right, and there would be no pressure for change. How would anyone know that they killed Ustin Bodian, for example?”
“Bodian died of pneumonia.”
“Dimka, that’s not worthy of you. He died of neglect, and you know it.”
“True.” Dimka looked chastened. In a softer voice he said: “Are you in love with Vasili Yenkov?”
“No. I like him. He’s funny and smart and brave. But he’s the kind of man that needs a succession of young girls.”
“Or he was. There are no nymphets in a prison camp.”
“Anyway, he is a friend, and he’s served his sentence.”
“The world is full of injustice.”
“I want to know what has happened to him, and you can find out for me. If you will.”
Dimka sighed. “What about my career? In the Kremlin, compassion for dissidents unjustly treated is not considered admirable.”
Tanya’s hopes rose. He was weakening. “Please. It means a lot to me.”
“I can’t make any promises.”
“Just do your best.”
“All right.”
Tanya felt overcome by gratitude, and kissed his cheek. “You’re a good brother,” she said. “Thank you.”
• • •
Just as the Eskimos were said to have numerous different words for snow, so the citizens of Moscow had many phrases for the black market. Everything other than life’s most basic necessities had to be bought “on the left.” Many such purchases were straightforwardly criminal: you found a man who smuggled blue jeans from the West and you paid him an enormous price. Others were neither legal nor illegal. To buy a radio or a rug, you might have to put your name down on a waiting list; but you could leap to the top of the list “through pull,” by being a person of influence and having the power to return the favor; or “through friends,” by having a relative or pal in a position to manipulate the list. So widespread was queue-jumping that most Muscovites believed no one ever got to the top of a list just by waiting.
One day Natalya Smotrov asked Dimka to go with her to buy something on the black market. “Normally I’d ask Nik,” she said. Nikolai was her husband. “But it’s a present for his birthday, and I want it to be a surprise.”
Dimka knew little about Natalya’s life outside the Kremlin. She was married with no children, but that was about the extent of his knowledge. Kremlin apparatchiks were part of the Soviet elite, but Natalya’s Mercedes and her imported perfume indicated some other source of privilege and money. However, if there was a Nikolai Smotrov in the upper reaches of the Communist hierarchy, Dimka had never heard of him.
Dimka asked: “What are you going to give him?”
“A tape recorder. He wants a Grundig—that’s a German brand.”
Only on the black market could a Soviet citizen buy a German tape recorder. Dimka wondered how Natalya could afford such an expensive gift. “Where are you going to find one?” he asked.
“There’s a guy called Max at the Central Market.” This bazaar, in Sadovaya-Samotyochnaya, was a lawful alternative to state stores. Produce from private gardens was sold at higher prices. Instead of long queues and unattractive displays, there were mountains of colorful vegetables—for those who could afford them. And the sale of legitimate produce masked even more profitable illegal business at many of the stalls.
Dimka understood why Natalya wanted company. Some of the men who did this kind of work were thugs, and a woman had reason to be wary.
Dimka hoped that was her only motive. He did not want to be led into temptation. He felt close to Nina just now, her time being near. They had not had sex for a couple of months, which made him more vulnerable to Natalya’s charms. But that paled beside the drama of pregnancy. The last thing Dimka wanted was a dalliance with Natalya. But he could hardly refuse her this simple favor.
They went in the lunch hour. Natalya drove Dimka to the market in her ancient Mercedes. Despite its age it was fast and comfortable. How did she get parts for it, he wondered?
On the way she asked him about Nina. “The baby is due any day,” he said.
“Let me know if you need baby supplies,” Natalya said. “Nik’s sister has a three-year-old who no longer needs feeding bottles and suchlike.”
Dimka was surprised. Baby feeding bottles were a luxury more rare than tape recorders. “Thank you, I will.”
They parked and walked through the market to a shop selling secondhand furniture. This was a semi-legal business. People were allowed to sell their own possessions, but it was against the law to be a middleman, which made the trade cumbersome and inefficient. To Dimka, the difficulties of imposing such Communist rules illustrated the practical necessity of many capitalist practices—hence the need for liberalization.
Max was a heavy man in his thirties dressed American style in blue jeans and a white T-shirt. He sat at a pine kitchen table drinking tea and smoking. He was surrounded by cheap used couches and cabinets and beds, mostly elderly and damaged. “What do you want?” he said brusquely.
“I spoke to you last Wednesday about a Grundig tape recorder,” said Natalya. “You said to come back in a week.”
“Tape recorders are difficult to get hold of,” he said.
Dimka intervened. “Don’t piss about, Max,” he said, making his voice as harsh and contemptuous as Max’s. “Have you got one or not?”
Men such as Max considered it a sign of weakness to give a direct answer to a simple question. He said: “You’ll have to pay in American dollars.”
Natalya said: “I agreed to your price. I’ve brought exactly that much. No more.”
“Show me the money.”
Natalya took a wad of American bills from the pocket of her dress.
Max held out his hand.
Dimka took Natalya’s wrist to prevent her handing over the money prematurely. He said: “Where is the tape recorder?”
Max spoke over his shoulder. “Josef!”
There was a movement in the back room. “Yes?”
“Tape recorder.”
“Yes.”
Josef came out carrying a plain cardboard box. He was a younger man, maybe nineteen, with a cigarette dangling from his lip. Although small, he was muscular. He put the box down on a table. “It’s heavy,” he said. “Have you got a car?”
“Around the corner.”
Natalya counted out the cash.
Max said: “It cost me more than I expected.”
“I don’t have any more money,” Natalya said.
Max picked up the bills and counted them. “All right,” he said resentfully. “It’s yours.” He stood up and stuffed the wad into the pocket of his jeans. “Josef will carry it to your car.” He went into the back room.
Josef grasped the box to pick it up.
Dimka said: “Just a minute.”
Josef said: “What? I haven’t got time to waste.”
“Open the box,” said Dimka.
Josef took the weight of the box, ignoring him, but Dimka put his hand on it and leaned on it, making it impossible for Josef to lift it. Josef gave him a look of blazing fury, and for a moment Dimka wondered if there would be violence. Then Josef stood back and said: “Open the damn thing yourself.”
The lid was stapled and taped. Dimka and Natalya got it open with some difficulty. Inside was a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The brand name was Magic Tone.
“This is not a Grundig,” Natalya said.
“These are better than Grundigs,” Josef said. “Nicer sound.”
“I paid for a Grundig,” she said. “This is a cheap Japanese imitation.”
“You can’t get Grundigs these days.”
“Then I’ll have the money back.”
“You can’t, not once you’ve opened the box.”
“Until we opened the box, we didn’t know you were trying to defraud us.”
“Nobody defrauded you. You wanted a tape recorder.”
Dimka said: “Bugger this.” He went to the door of the back room.
Josef said: “You can’t go in there!”
Dimka ignored him and went in. The room was full of cardboard boxes. A few were open, showing television sets, record players, and radios, all foreign brands. But Max was not there. Dimka saw a back door.
He returned to the front room. “Max has run off with your money,” he told Natalya.
Josef said: “He’s a busy man. He has a lot of customers.”
“Don’t be so fucking stupid,” Dimka said to him. “Max is a thief, and so are you.”
Josef pointed a finger close to Dimka’s face. “Don’t you call me stupid,” he said in a threatening tone.
“Give her the money back,” Dimka said. “Before you get into real trouble.”
Josef grinned. “What are you going to do—call the police?”
They could not do that. They were engaged in an illegal transaction. And the police would probably arrest Dimka and Natalya but not Josef and Max, who were undoubtedly paying bribes to protect their business.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Natalya said. “Let’s go.”
Josef said: “Take your tape recorder.”
“No, thanks,” Natalya said. “It’s not what I want.” She went to the door.
Dimka said. “We’re coming back—for the money.”
Josef laughed. “What are you going to do?”
“You’ll see,” Dimka said weakly, and he followed Natalya out.
He was seething with frustration as Natalya drove back to the Kremlin. “I’m going to get your money back,” he said to her.
“Please don’t,” she said. “Those men are dangerous. I don’t want you to get hurt. Just leave it.”
He was not going to leave it, but he said no more.
When he got to his office, the KGB file on Vasili Yenkov was on his desk.
It was not thick. Yenkov was a script editor who had never been in trouble nor even under suspicion until the day in May 1961 when he had been arrested carrying five copies of a subversive news sheet called Dissidence. Under interrogation he claimed he had been handed a dozen copies a few minutes earlier and had begun to pass them out under a sudden impulse of compassion for the opera singer who had pneumonia. A thorough search of his apartment had revealed nothing to contradict his story. His typewriter did not match the one used to produce the newsletter. With electrical terminals attached to his lips and his fingertips, he had given the names of other subversives, but innocent and guilty people alike did that under torture. As was usual, some of the people named had been impeccable Communist Party members, while others the KGB had failed to trace. On balance, the secret police were inclined to believe Yenkov was not the illegal publisher of Dissidence.
Dimka had to admire the grit of a man who could maintain a lie under KGB interrogation. Yenkov had protected Tanya even while suffering agonizing torture. Perhaps he deserved his freedom.
Dimka knew the truth that Yenkov had kept hidden. On the night of Yenkov’s arrest, Dimka had driven Tanya on his motorcycle to Yenkov’s apartment, where she had picked up a typewriter, undoubtedly the machine used to produce Dissidence. Dimka had hurled it into the Moskva River half an hour later. Typewriters did not float. He and Tanya had saved Yenkov from a longer sentence.
Yenkov was no longer at the logging camp in the larch forest, according to the file. Someone had discovered that he had a little technical expertise. His first job at Radio Moscow had been studio production assistant, so he knew about microphones and electrical connections. The shortage of technicians in Siberia was so chronic that this had been enough to get him a job as an electrician in a power station.
He had probably been pleased, at first, to move to inside work at which he did not have to risk losing a limb to a careless axe. But there was a downside. The authorities were reluctant to permit a competent technician to leave Siberia. When his sentence was up, he had applied in the usual way for a travel visa to return to Moscow. And his application had been refused. That left him no choice but to continue in his job. He was stuck.
It was unjust; but injustice was everywhere, as Dimka had pointed out to Tanya.
Dimka studied the photograph in the file. Yenkov looked like a movie star, with a sensual face, fleshy lips, black eyebrows, and thick dark hair. But there seemed more to him than that. A faint expression of wry amusement around the corners of his eyes suggested that he did not take himself too seriously. It would not be surprising if Tanya were in love with this man, despite her denials.
Anyway, Dimka would try to get him released for her sake.
He would speak to Khrushchev about the case. However, he needed to wait until the boss was in a good mood. He put the file in his desk drawer.
He did not get an opportunity that afternoon. Khrushchev left early, and Dimka was getting ready to go home when Natalya put her head around his door. “Come for a drink,” she said. “We need one after our horrible experience in the Central Market.”
Dimka hesitated. “I need to get home to Nina. Her time is near.”
“Just a quick one.”
“Okay.” He screwed the cap onto his fountain pen and spoke to his secretary. “We can go, Vera.”
“I’ve got a few more things to do,” she said. She was conscientious.
The Riverside Bar was patronized by the young Kremlin elite, so it was not as dismal as the average Moscow drinking hole. The chairs were comfortable, the snacks were edible, and for the better-paid apparatchik with exotic tastes there were bottles of Scotch and bourbon behind the bar. Tonight it was crowded with people whom Dimka and Natalya knew, mostly aides like themselves. Someone thrust a glass of beer into Dimka’s hand and he drank gratefully. The mood was boisterous. Boris Kozlov, a Khrushchev aide like Dimka, told a risky joke. “Everybody! What will happen when Communism comes to Saudi Arabia?”
They all cheered and begged him to tell them.
“After a while there will be a shortage of sand!”
Everyone laughed. The people in this group were keen workers for Soviet Communism, as Dimka was, but they were not blind to its faults. The gap between party aspirations and Soviet reality bothered them all, and jokes released the tension.
Dimka finished his beer and got another.
Natalya raised her glass as if about to give a toast. “The best hope for world revolution is an American company called United Fruit,” she said. The people around her laughed. “No, seriously,” she said, though she was smiling. “They persuade the United States government to support brutal right-wing dictatorships all over Central and South America. If United Fruit had any sense they would foster gradual progress toward bourgeois freedoms—the rule of law, freedom of speech, trade unions—but, happily for world Communism, they’re too dumb to see that. They stamp ruthlessly on reform movements, so the people have nowhere to turn but to Communism—just as Karl Marx predicted.” She clinked glasses with the nearest person. “Long live United Fruit!”
Dimka laughed. Natalya was one of the smartest people in the Kremlin, as well as the prettiest. Flushed with gaiety, her wide mouth open in a laugh, she was enchanting. Dimka could not help comparing her with the weary, bulging, sex-averse woman at home, though he knew the thought was cruelly unjust.
Natalya went to the bar to order snacks. Dimka realized he had been here more than an hour: he had to leave. He went up to Natalya with the intention of saying good-bye. But the beer was just enough to make him incautious and, when Natalya smiled warmly at him, he kissed her.
She kissed him back, enthusiastically.
Dimka did not understand her. She had spent a night with him; then she yelled at him that she was married; then she asked him to go for a drink with her; then she kissed him. What next? But he hardly cared about her inconsistency when her warm mouth was on his and the tip of her tongue was teasing his lips.
She broke the embrace, and Dimka saw his secretary standing beside them.
Vera’s expression was severely judgmental. “I’ve been looking for you,” she said with a note of accusation. “There was a phone call just after you left.”
“I’m sorry,” said Dimka, not sure whether he was apologizing for being hard to find or for kissing Natalya.
Natalya took a plate of pickled cucumbers from the bartender and returned to the group.
“Your mother-in-law called,” Vera went on.
Dimka’s euphoria had now evaporated.
“Your wife has gone into labor,” Vera said. “All is well, but you should join her at the hospital.”
“Thank you,” said Dimka, feeling that he was the worst kind of faithless husband.
“Good night,” said Vera, and she left the bar.
Dimka followed her out. He stood breathing the cool night air for a moment. Then he got on his motorcycle and headed for the hospital. What a moment to be caught kissing a colleague. He deserved to feel humiliated: he had done something stupid.
He parked his bike in the hospital car park and went in. He found Nina in the maternity ward, sitting up in bed. Masha was on a chair beside the bed, holding a baby wrapped in a white shawl. “Congratulations,” Masha said to Dimka. “It’s a boy.”
“A boy,” Dimka said. He looked at Nina. She smiled, weary but triumphant.
He looked at the baby. He had a lot of damp dark hair. His eyes were a shade of blue that made Dimka think of his grandfather Grigori. All babies had blue eyes, he recalled. Was it his imagination that this baby seemed already to look at the world with Grandfather Grigori’s intense stare?
Masha held the baby out to Dimka. He took the little bundle as if handling a large eggshell. In the presence of this miracle, the day’s dramas faded to nothing.
I have a son, he thought, and tears came to his eyes.
“He’s beautiful,” Dimka said. “Let’s call him Grigor.”
• • •
Two things kept Dimka awake that night. One was guilt: just when his wife was giving birth in bloodshed and agony, he had been kissing Natalya. The other was rage at the way he had been outwitted and humiliated by Max and Josef. It was not he but Natalya who had been robbed, but he felt no less indignant and resentful.
Next morning on the way to work he drove his motorcycle to the Central Market. For half the night he had rehearsed what he would say to Max. “My name is Dmitri Ilich Dvorkin. Check who I am. Check who I work for. Check who my uncle is and who my father was. Then meet me here tomorrow with Natalya’s money, and beg me not to take the revenge you deserve.” He wondered whether he had the nerve to say all that; whether Max would be impressed or scornful; whether the speech would be threatening enough to retrieve Natalya’s money and Dimka’s pride.
Max was not sitting at the pine table. He was not in the room. Dimka did not know whether to be disappointed or relieved.
Josef was standing by the door to the back room. Dimka wondered whether to unleash his speech on the youngster. He probably did not have the power to get the money back, but it might relieve Dimka’s feelings. While Dimka hesitated he noticed that Josef had lost the threatening arrogance he had displayed yesterday. To Dimka’s astonishment, before he had a chance to open his mouth Josef backed away from him, looking scared. “I’m sorry!” Josef said. “I’m sorry!”
Dimka could not account for this transformation. If Josef had found out, overnight, that Dimka worked in the Kremlin and came from a politically powerful family, he might be apologetic and conciliatory, and he might even give the money back, but he would not look as if he were afraid for his life. “I just want Natalya’s money,” Dimka said.
“We gave it back! We already did!”
Dimka was puzzled. Had Natalya been here before him? “Who did you give it to?”
“Those two men.”
Dimka could not make sense of this. “Where is Max?” he said.
“In the hospital,” said Josef. “They broke both his arms, isn’t that enough for you?”
Dimka reflected for a moment. Unless this was all some charade, it seemed that two unknown men had beaten Max severely and forced him to give them the money he had taken from Natalya. Who were they? And why had they done this?
Clearly Josef knew no more. Bemused, Dimka turned and left the store.
It was not the police who had done this, he reasoned as he walked back to his bike, nor the army nor the KGB. Anyone official would have arrested Max and taken him to prison and broken his arms in private. Someone unofficial, then.
Unofficial meant gangland. So there were nasty criminals among Natalya’s friends or family.
No wonder she never said much about her private life.
Dimka drove fast to the Kremlin but still he was dismayed to find that Khrushchev had got there before him. However, the boss was in a good mood: Dimka could hear him laughing. Perhaps this was the moment to mention Vasili Yenkov. He opened his desk drawer and took out Yenkov’s KGB file. He picked up a folder of documents for Khrushchev to sign, then he hesitated. He was a fool to do this, even for his beloved sister. But he suppressed his anxiety and went into the main office.
The first secretary sat behind a big desk speaking on the telephone. He did not much like the phone, preferring face-to-face contact: that way, he said, he could tell when people were lying. However, this conversation was jovial. Dimka put the letters in front of him, and he began to sign while continuing to talk and laugh into the mouthpiece.
When he hung up, Khrushchev said: “What’s that in your hand? Looks like a KGB file.”
“Vasili Yenkov. Sentenced to two years in a labor camp for possessing a leaflet about Ustin Bodian, the dissident singer. He’s served his time, but they’re keeping him there.”
Khrushchev stopped signing and looked up. “Do you have some personal interest?”
Dimka felt a chill of fear. “None whatsoever,” he lied, managing to keep the anxiety out of his voice. If he revealed his sister’s link to a convicted subversive it could end his career and hers.
Khrushchev narrowed his eyes. “So why should we let him come home?”
Dimka wished he had refused Tanya. He should have known Khrushchev would see through him: a man did not become leader of the Soviet Union without being suspicious to the point of paranoia. Dimka backpedaled desperately. “I don’t say we should bring him home,” he said as calmly as he could. “I just thought you might like to know about him. His crime was trivial, he has suffered his punishment, and for you to grant justice to a minor dissident would accord with your general policy of cautious liberalization.”
Khrushchev was not fooled. “Someone has asked you for a favor.” Dimka opened his mouth to protest his innocence, but Khrushchev held up a hand to silence him. “Don’t deny it, I don’t mind. Influence is your reward for hard work.”
Dimka felt as if a death sentence had been lifted. “Thank you,” he said, sounding more pathetically grateful than he wished.
“What job is Yenkov doing in Siberia?” Khrushchev asked.
Dimka realized that the hand holding the file was trembling. He pressed his arm against his side to stop it. “He’s an electrician in a power station. He’s not qualified, but he used to work in radio.”
“What was his job in Moscow?”
“He was a script editor.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Khrushchev threw down his pen. “A script editor? What the hell use is a script editor? They’re desperate for electricians in Siberia. Leave him there. He’s doing something useful.”
Dimka stared at him in dismay. He did not know what to say.
Khrushchev picked up his pen and resumed signing. “A script editor,” he muttered. “My arse.”
• • •
Tanya typed out Vasili’s short story, “Frostbite,” with two carbon copies.
But it was too good merely for samizdat publication. Vasili evoked the world of the prison camps with brutal vividness—but he did more. Copying it, she had realized, with an ache in her heart, that the camp stood for the Soviet Union, and the story was a savage critique of Soviet society. Vasili was telling the truth in a way that Tanya could not, and she burned with remorse. Every day she wrote articles that were published in newspapers and magazines all over the USSR; every day she carefully avoided reality. She did not tell outright lies, but she always skirted around the poverty, injustice, repression, and waste that were the actual characteristics of her country. Vasili’s writing showed her that her life was a fraud.
She took the typescript to her editor, Daniil Antonov. “This came to me in the mail, anonymously,” she said. He might well guess that she was lying, but he would not betray her. “It’s a short story set in a prison camp.”
“We can’t publish it,” he said quickly.
“I know. But it’s very good—the work of a great writer, I think.”
“Why are you showing it to me?”
“You know the editor of New World magazine.”
Daniil looked thoughtful. “He occasionally publishes something unorthodox.”
Tanya lowered her voice. “I don’t know how far Khrushchev’s liberalization is intended to go.”
“The policy has vacillated, but the overall instruction is that the excesses of the past should be discussed and condemned.”
“Would you read it and, if you like it, show it to the editor?”
“Sure.” Daniil read a few lines. “Why do you think it was sent to you?”
“It’s probably written by someone I met when I went to Siberia two years ago.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “That would explain it.” He meant Not a bad cover.
“The author will probably reveal his identity if the story is accepted for publication.”
“Okay,” said Daniil. “I’ll do my best.”