While Arnie and Mikhail were pushing slowly through the deep snow, Arnie crossing over the bogs and Mikhail avoiding them, in the economic section of the legation, Natalya was pretending to work. She was laboriously going over Finnish government tax records to locate businesses that might have used or were currently using capital equipment that could be more useful back in Russia. Her rudimentary Finnish made it slow going.
She struggled against anxiety, wondering where Mikhail was, if he was winning, wondering if Fanya had just locked her kids in their bedroom and gone out shopping. She shook the anxiety off as typical mothers’ insecurity that happened to all mothers when they were separated from their children. Underlying all this anxiety was dread about what she’d promised Sokolov and rage that this creepy son of a bitch held such unassailable power.
When the afternoon papers were dropped on the big common table near the economic section’s door, the anxiety and anger turned to cold fear. All the Finnish dailies had a story about the race. One had even published a guessed-at route.
Fellow workers made a few wisecracks about Mikhail. Some wondered aloud what Mikhail was really up to, spinning yet another fantastic conspiracy theory. Natalya was used to conspiracy theories. In recent history, many were proven true. She knew such theories were a way for people to make sense out of senselessness. To ordinary people, it just didn’t seem possible that their political leaders could be as stupid, self-serving, or greedy as their actions made them look. There had to be some explanation behind the story, otherwise people would have to admit that their fate was in the hands of stupid, self-serving, greedy people. Who would want to believe and accept that? So, people maintained hope and the will to carry on with difficult lives by believing virtually any conspiracy theory that explained the decisions of their leaders, other than plain evil or plain stupidity.
Waiting in line during the afternoon tea break, Natalya watched the two Finnish women who were serving everyone. They both spoke Russian, so she guessed that they’d been two of the many Finnish Communists who’d fled for protection to the Soviet Union when the Winter War broke out. They were now reaping their reward with a good, secure Soviet government job.
When one of them poured Natalya’s tea she said, “We are all rooting for your husband.”
Natalya smiled and nodded.
“We don’t think the American will even finish. Their elites, like this guy, are too soft. They live off the hard work of exploited Blacks and starving workers.” She smiled, showing teeth darkened by tea and two noticeable gaps where teeth had been pulled. “Their soldiers drove to war on tanks built by Cadillac. They sit back and bomb civilians from the air. They drank and raped their way no more than a few hundred kilometers from the French coast, while our soldiers fought and bled over several thousand kilometers doing all the fighting and dying.”
Natalya nodded, reaching for the sugar cubes. Another perk of working in the legation. “Yes,” she said, smiling at the woman. “I know. By our soldiers,” she said carefully, not quite sure of the politics, “I presume you mean the Soviet Union’s.”
The woman’s head jerked back slightly. “I mean the Red Army. The army of the People. Of the people of the whole world.”
“Oh, of course. Yes, I see. Yes, our army … of the People.”
As Natalya returned to her desk with her cup of tea, she was mulling over the whole concept of “we” and “the People.” These concepts were just that—concepts—not fact, not reality. She and Mikhail and her children were reality. What were “the state” or “the Party” or, for that matter, “Communism” or “capitalism”? How could you love anything other than another human? Why would you die for anything other than another human who you loved? All her life, at least since the orphanage, she’d heard about the Party, and the People. She now had a vague, uneasy feeling. About it all. Maybe the concepts had been oversold. It, of course, wasn’t right to have these feelings. She tried to stop having them.
She held the cup of tea, staring at it, warming her hand. This cup of tea was reality. She took a sip, but even with two lumps of sugar, the tea tasted bitter. The race was clearly between us and them, not Misha and Arnie. What before had been a vague fear was now reality.