“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I said. I guess...I guess I just needed somebody to tell me everything’s going to be all right. It’s a father’s job, you know.”
Reese smoothed back her hair.
“Damn you,” she said.“Couldn’t you lie about it? Just this once?”
Leaving Blok and Valentin in the kitchen, Mayakenska closed herself in the rear bedroom and unfolded her keyboard.
The few pieces of yellow plastic furniture in the house were coated with dust.The air, newly pumped in on Blok’s instructions, had the metallic tang of the chemistry labs at the university.The keyboard hung over both sides of the flimsy desk, and she had to perch on a corner of the bed to play.
Her brief spasms of guilt had given way to a sense of mortality. If the dome were destroyed, she would die with it, probably in a flash of light and pain as an expanding embolus of nitrogen tore out a piece of her brain.Was that an excuse for her part in it?
She plugged in her headphones and tried to capture the cool discipline of Brubeck’s “Picking Up Sticks.”
A perfect world would not demand such decisions; but then, a perfect world would have given her longer fingers, a better ear, an earlier start, would have made her a real pianist instead of a clumsy imposter.
When the second revolution came to Russia, Mayakenska had been in bed with Valentin, her cosmonaut lover. She had brought him to her Zhukovka dacha for the weekend, despite gossip that she was taking advantage of her position to prey on the young, politically susceptible men of the space program she controlled.
The gossip failed to annoy her.There was nothing so sincere, she believed, as a fully erect penis.
The first time the phone rang she was preoccupied by the delicious anguish of Valentin’s teeth on her nipple.When it rang a second time, waking Valentin from a vodka stupor, she knew it had to be serious. Hardly anyone used the phone in Soviet Russia; because it was so little used, it was low on the government’s priority for repairs, perpetuating a vicious circle.
She pushed Valentin aside and got to the phone by the fourth ring. “Allo?” she said, and a male voice at the other end echoed her,“Allo?’
Fear of telephones, Mayakenska thought, will one day destroy us. “This is Mayakenska,” she said tiredly.“What do you want?”
“Petrov here,” the voice said.“Listen, I thought you should know. Everything is...it’s crazy here. Novikov is dead.”
“Dead?” she repeated. He’d been premier less than three weeks, not even long enough to solidify his power.“Assassinated?”
“Arrested.”
“You’ve got to be joking.Arrested by whom?”
“The Army. He was charged with sedition and, uh,‘shot while trying to escape’ or something.We think there was meant to be a trial and somebody just screwed it up. Everything’s changing so fast.”
“What about the Cheka?” Mayakenska asked. It was unthinkable that the kgb could have allowed Novikov to be taken so easily.
“Don’t you get it? There is no more Cheka. The Army is in.The Party is out. Everything is upside down. I just wanted you to know. Be ready for anything.” The line went dead.
Outside the open window she could see a jay, shifting from one leg to the other on a narrow branch. She could smell pine needles and spring grasses and the cool dampness of the Moscow River, beyond the edge of the woods.
And yet, she thought, less than 40 kilometers away, the entire world is coming apart.
Just the day before she had been reading an article on Novikov in Literaturka. The illustration showed Novikov’s bald head and hollow cheeks defaced by a staff artist, with Stalinesque eyebrows, mustache, and monolithic hair crudely penciled in.The masses, Literaturka said, remembered Stalin only as the krepki khozyain, the firm master who brought discipline to the young and efficiency to the factories. Novikov had first called attention to himself with his zeal in exceeding the government’s Plan, in one case doubling December production in his entire district.
The Army had been alarmed by his belligerence toward China, although the quantum leaps the Chinese had taken in biotechnology had frightened and embarrassed all the world powers. Literaturka had made cautious references to Stalin’s decimation of the military high command; the censors had passed them, probably because Novikov appreciated the importance of a well-placed threat.
And so, Mayakenska thought, forcing a glass of hot tea into Valentin’s hand, the Army had taken Novikov seriously. Between Chinese threats of aggression in North Africa and the ongoing collapse of the Americans, there were ample opportunities for a war, but it was clearly a war the Army did not want to fight. Nothing had been said in the press about the mass desertions, mutinies, and racial tensions, but they were common knowledge among the military elite, even for someone like Mayakenska, whose rank was purely honorary.
She had no way of judging what the news would mean to her career, but it would doubtless mean shortages and total confusion in her personal life.
She hurried Valentin into his clothes, keeping the keys to his Zhiguli for herself. She forced herself not to hurry as she led Valentin, cursing and befuddled, out to the car; forced herself not to spray gravel as she pulled out of the driveway.
At the cinderblock village store, called the Krushchev store as long as Mayakenska could remember, the black Zils and Zhigulis already filled the parking lot.The store was reserved for the nomenklatura, and access to information was the most valued privilege of the elite.
I should have answered the phone, she thought, the first time it rang.
In the end she did come away with some cheese, bread, and canned meat, but the news she’d learned was more important than steaks or vegetables.
“Have you heard the latest?” someone she knew only vaguely asked her as they waited in the long queue at the cashier.
“Which latest?”
“The mutinies.” It was the first time Mayakenska had seen him in anything but a dark suit and tie. Rumor had it he was highly placed in the Cheka, and his sudden casual clothing seemed to confirm it.“All the non-Russians—the Uzbeks, the Yakuts, the Lithuanians, draftees, all of them—they’re refusing to fight.”
Back in the car, Mayakenska let her head fall forward onto the wheel, unwilling even to start the motor until she could make a decision.
“What’s going on?”Valentin asked.
“It’s over,” she said.“It’s all over.All that’s left is to save what we can. Whatever we think is important enough.” That put it in focus for her. She turned east, toward Moscow.
“Where are you going? Are you crazy? Aren’t you going back to the dacha?”
“No time,” Mayakenska said.“We’re going to Zvezdagrad.”
“And we’re going to drive there? You are crazy.” The Russian secret launch complex was in Kazakhstan, thousands of kilometers from Moscow.
“No,” Mayakenska said.“We take a helicopter from Kaliningrad.”
“That’s on the other side of Moscow.We don’t know how bad it is in the city.They could be rioting there.”
In Valentin’s groping for excuses she saw the weakness of the age. It was the legacy of the west, this loss of moral certainty. Mayakenska had never understood it or had any patience with it. For her the difficulty lay in finding the correct path to follow. Once the choice was made, the required actions were mindless and simple.What difference did a little hardship make, if hardship was what was required?
“Rioting?” she teased him.“Are you implying the masses are not happy with the socialist state?”
Valentin stared at her for an instant with bloodshot eyes, then turned away to watch the thick pine forest whip past the car.“That’s really funny,” he said, eventually.“Sometimes you really make me laugh.”