Olga begged Ilya to wait another year. He was in a feverish haste: they had to leave; it was now or never. And he had reason to be nervous about his situation. Unpleasant rumors about him were making the rounds, and he was afraid Olga would get wind of them. One day, almost on the spur of the moment, he announced, without going into much detail, that if Olga couldn’t go with him because of Kostya, they would have to divorce immediately.
For Olga this was akin to a disaster—but a strange one, somehow unnecessary, or avoidable. It wasn’t at all clear why Ilya was so adamant about leaving all of a sudden. If they waited a year, Kostya could go with them. Many of their friends had already emigrated to all corners of the earth. There really wasn’t any hurry.
Finally, things broke down, and they filed for a divorce. Now a honeymoon began, only in reverse. The expectation of having to part ways—for one year? maybe two?—lent a bittersweet poignancy to their relations. Even Kostya was overcome by these tangled emotions. He had reached the age when he should have felt most alienated from his parents, but he clung to Ilya so stubbornly that he proved a constant threat to their solitude and emotional intimacy.
In these trying circumstances, their love reached such a fever pitch that their nocturnal passion destroyed the last boundaries between them—they made crazy vows to each other, oaths and promises so outlandish and unrealizable that they seemed to be fifteen years old rather than forty. They swore that no matter what obstacles arose, they would devote the rest of their lives to reuniting with each other.
The mechanism of departure was set in motion. The process was an unusually speedy one. Two weeks after submitting his documents, Ilya received permission to leave. He flew by the conventional route: through Vienna, then on to anywhere in the world. He had his sights set on America. A place far away.
His going-away party was held at the apartment of some friends. The general’s apartment in Moscow wasn’t suitable for any number of reasons.
The send-off was noisy, with peaks and valleys of emotion—sometimes it felt like a funeral, sometimes like a birthday party. In a way it was both.
At Sheremetyevo Airport, Ilya stood out in the crowd of people who were abandoning the country forever. They were nervous, sweaty, and burdened with children, the elderly, and piles of luggage. He wore a serene expression and carried no luggage. He had sent his collection of books ahead of him in a diplomatic mail pouch, arranged through a friend who worked at an embassy. The same friend had also sent the negatives from Ilya’s photo archive. Colonel Chibikov was unlikely to have been privy to this information.
Many facts remained obscure. Why, for example, had Chibikov, who was by then already a general, helped him to emigrate? What did he stand to gain by it? Was Ilya’s job at Radio Liberty a happy escape into freedom or a continuation of the ambiguous game he was mixed up in until the moment of his death?
It was unlikely that anyone would ever know.
Ilya receded into the black hole that yawned beyond the border guards. A camera with no film dangled from his neck—the film had been confiscated by the officials. A half-empty backpack was slung over his shoulder. In it was a change of underwear and an English grammar book, which he had been carrying around with him for two years.
During the night, after Ilya’s departure, Olga started bleeding profusely. She was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. The illness, which had in fact begun long before, had chosen this day to manifest itself.
The first year of Ilya’s absence was marked by feverish correspondence as well as bouts of fever. Olga lost her appetite, grew alarmingly thin, and had to force herself just to eat three spoonfuls of oatmeal a day. Her old friends rallied around her in sympathy. Antonina Naumovna also felt sorry for Olga, and the more she pitied her, the more she hated her former son-in-law.
Ilya had already made it to America by this time. Things were far worse there than he had imagined they would be. Moreover, the German to whom he had entrusted his collection of avant-garde literature, which he had begun amassing in his school years, was dragging his feet about sending it on to him. The value of the books, according to the auction catalogs, was far greater than Ilya had supposed.
Ilya wrote infrequently, but the letters were fascinating. Olga lived from one letter to the next. She inundated him with her missives, paying no heed to the vagaries of postal delivery: for every one he sent, she replied with ten.
A year later, Olga received a terrible blow. Some mutual friends of theirs informed her that Ilya had gotten married. She wrote him a wrathful letter. She got a tender and repentant letter in reply: yes, he had gotten married, the flesh is weak, his marriage was virtually fictitious, he wasn’t actually living with his wife, since she lived in Paris. And she, Olga, must understand—here in America things were just not working out. He had to try to relocate to Europe. Marrying a Russian-French woman would give him that opportunity. It was the only way out.
Then there was a little throwback to the past/glimpse of the future: it was a temporary detour, unavoidable, their happiness still lay ahead of them … and a gentle reproach: you could have left Kostya there for a year, and we would have come back for him …
Olga was consumed with jealousy: Who was this woman, what kind of woman was she, where had she come from? She found out her name from her friends. She had been born in Kiev, had married a Frenchman, lived many years in France, and was then widowed. She was obviously no longer young. That was the only information she could dig up. Olga decided to go to Kiev, where they had mutual acquaintances galore. Truthful by nature, she nevertheless started lying to her Kiev friends right and left, and they told her everything she wanted to know. She even managed to wheedle a photograph of the newlyweds out of one of the bride’s more gullible friends. The photograph showed a plump, middle-aged woman, her fleshy hand resting brazenly on the shoulder of a smiling Ilya. It had been taken at the Paris City Hall. This hand became the primary piece of documentary evidence in the case against him.
Olga carried out a full investigation and uncovered a plethora of details and facts. She returned home, reeling from the heaps of contradictory information, but certain that Ilya had deceived her and that the marriage was in no way fictitious.
When she got back to Moscow, she ended up in the hospital again. More hemorrhaging. The doctors removed a large part of her stomach, a measure that was necessary to save her life. But the main culprit, the biggest ulcer, was the colored photograph of the newlyweds, wrapped up in a plastic bag and tucked away in her cosmetic case. The misdeeds of her ex-husband were all she could talk about. When she came out of the anesthesia, the first thing she said to her friend Tamara, who was sitting next to her and taking care of her, was:
“Did you see the flowers in the picture? That bouquet was huge, wasn’t it?”
The doctors had taken out a part of her stomach, but they couldn’t remove the bleeding wound of her heart.
Olga expected the whole world to take her side in the conflict. Really there was only one side to take: a divorced man had gone away and married someone else at the other end of the earth. The promises, oaths, and vows of eternal love didn’t add up to a side in the conflict at all; they were just words …
In the meantime, Olga’s son, Kostya, was preparing to deal her another blow. He had fallen in love with a girl he had met in college, and they were going to live together for all eternity. The most improbable, and perhaps banal, part of this whole story is that Kostya and Lena, his first and only love, are still living in the general’s Moscow apartment today, with their already grown children.