Vova moved into the general’s apartment, into Olga’s room. The apartment easily accommodated one more person, though they did invest in another, wider bed. Strange as it might seem, it was the general who bought it. Olga refused point-blank to take part in such an ambiguous shopping expedition, and Antonina Naumovna was up to her ears in preparations for yet another congress of Soviet teachers; or was it Soviet doctors? Afanasy Mikhailovich recalled that he had seen a furniture store on Smolenskaya Embankment, and told his wife that he would buy the bed. He went there after work. The store turned out to specialize in antiques. The general wandered among the pieces of furniture of all times and nations, and thought about his grandfather, a mahogany carver. He hadn’t thought about him for some fifty years, and, suddenly, amid the flimsy bamboo whatnots, the monumental writing desks with their secret drawers, the new forest growth of white-and-gold empire chairs and love seats, a scraggly old man, small of stature, with massive blackish brown hands, and sharp eyes with delicate, watery pouches underneath, came back to life. And the smell of his grandfather’s workshop struck his nostrils—turpentine, spirits, lacquer—so thick and palpable he could almost taste it. He remembered how his grandfather had taught him, still a little tyke, to sand, to strip, and polish …
Afanasy Mikhailovich walked and walked, forgetting why he had come. Then he remembered, and bought a Karelian birch double bed, the work of a peasant craftsman with an imaginative bent, not thinking for a minute about the two young Komsomol members, who loved sleeping under the stars in tents and would now have to labor for the future between ornate little scrolls and columns, watched over by four cherubs.
The bed, with all its whimsical splendor, made a strong impression; but it didn’t get in the way of business—his grandson Konstantin was born exactly ten lunar months after the wedding day.
But the general, after that first visit to the antiques store, had begun frequenting it. To the surprise of Antonina Naumovna, he gradually started exchanging their sturdy, Stalin-era furniture for intricate, inspired pieces of ancient vintage that he would refurbish himself.
Afanasy Mikhailovich was older than his wife by ten years. She had long begun to sense the approach of old age in him, and she viewed this new passion of his as an old man’s eccentricity—albeit a fairly harmless one. He fitted out a workshop for himself at the dacha, and puttered around in it happily; meanwhile, his military bravura and political acumen, which his wife had always admired, diminished by the day.
Antonina Naumovna was not particularly thrilled about the birth of a child so early in the marriage. Olga was not yet nineteen when they brought the bundle, wrapped up in a blue silk receiving blanket tied with a blue ribbon, home with them from the maternity hospital. The little bundle turned out to be exemplary, just like its parents: it ate, slept, and pooped like clockwork, made everyone smile, and permitted Olga to continue her literary studies without even taking maternity leave until the child learned to walk.
Faina Ivanovna, who had worked in the family since the war ended and had raised Olga from infancy, had planned to leave after the birth of the child—to work for another family of only two people, who had long been courting her, and where there would be less work—but the baby, Kostya, so captured her heart that she stayed with him until her own death.
Toward the end of her university studies, in which Olga excelled, something happened that would shatter the family’s world. Olga, herself so pure and good, had succumbed to a degenerate influence at the university. One of her teachers, secretly anti-Soviet and an enemy, it went without saying, of the people, was arrested for libel published abroad. Olga and some fellow students, misguided fools, signed a letter in his defense.
As a consequence, she and the other signees were kicked out of the university. Antonina Naumovna repented of ever having sent her daughter to the university, but it was already too late. If he had known that her venerable education would turn out this way, Olga’s courageous and manly father would doubtless have quoted, if only loosely: “Who increases his knowledge, increases his sorrows.” He didn’t know Ecclesiastes, however, and for that reason, when the pernicious influence of a university education affected his daughter so dramatically, he told his wife with bitterness:
“This is what all your university nonsense leads to. I told you that we should live more simply, closer to the people. The girl’s brains have been warped … if we had enrolled her in an engineering school, she wouldn’t have picked up any of that rot … they would have left the girl alone.”
And Afanasy Mikhailovich was most likely right about this. From time immemorial, the university had been a source of intellectual ferment, and the general condemned this not out of his sense of duty to the Party, but from personal conviction.
“Everyone is such a know-it-all,” he said angrily, each time he was faced with something he didn’t understand. And he was more and more baffled by his own daughter. She spoke about even the simplest of matters in such a way that it sounded like nonsense, just to confuse him, it seemed. His son-in-law, to give him credit, did not share Olga’s views. They quarreled now and then—about politics, since there was nothing else to complain about. They had everything they could possibly need: a nanny, a country house, grocery delivery service … and yet the situation got so bad that Vova slammed the door behind him one day, and left to go live with his parents.
If Olga had listened to her parents, if she had repented at the university meeting, cried, and signed a recantation, which is what they had demanded, her expulsion could have been avoided. However, as we know, she had been raised to be honest and principled—her parents had instilled this in her since childhood—and for this reason she refused outright to repent, to admit her mistakes, and to denounce that scum of a teacher, who was also her thesis adviser.
The teacher was arrested at the beginning of September, and Olga was summoned for the first interrogation at the end of the month. The honest girl told the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. What else could she have done? Her truth consisted in the fact that the teacher was, indeed, an outstanding scholar; that he was critical of many aspects of Soviet life, and his criticism was warranted; and that she, as his student, fully shared his views on literature and life.
Her testimony did no great harm to the arrested man, but her parents paid dearly for their daughter’s mistakes. Afanasy Mikhailovich was summoned to a secret place for a very serious conversation, where they put the screws on him (figuratively speaking). Soon afterward, he submitted his resignation and moved to the dacha. In his heart of hearts, he even felt glad about the changes. He liked living outside of town, where he could carry on the tradition of his family craft. While he nursed a quiet hurt and resentment toward his daughter, he didn’t allow his domestic troubles to poison his mood or elevate his blood pressure. What’s more, he had another diversion.
Antonina Naumovna, on the other hand, struck a preemptive blow. Even before the higher-ups could get together to shake their collective fingers at her for the way she had raised her child, she managed to publish a vicious article about the former teacher’s libelous book, and offered to testify as a citizen prosecutor at the trial of the miscreant. After this, her relationship with her daughter foundered once and for all.
Olga felt like a stranger in her own home. She never told anyone anything about herself; she came and went, sometimes taking Kostya out for a walk, sometimes disappearing altogether for a day or two. In February the trial of the teacher and his friend, also a frustrated writer, who had sent their manuscripts to the West for publication, got under way.
Olga would go to the Krasnopresnensky District Courthouse to assume her place in the crowd of young men and women, whose faces all bore intelligent and daring expressions. They all seemed to know one another. Sometimes someone would take a bottle out of his briefcase, or a flask out of his pocket, and pass it around. At these moments Olga felt lonely and unhappy: they never offered it to her. One day, when she stepped into an eatery next to the courthouse, more for the warmth than from hunger, she found herself at a table with this group of people. They accepted her as one of their own when she told them that the accused was her teacher and adviser, and that she had been kicked out of the university because of it.