Then she wondered whether Yury might have drunk it away. There was no telling.
The new Erika was worth a fortune, and they were nearly impossible to come by. And she needed it desperately! Olga was a good typist herself, but she didn’t have the speed of a professional. She always gave large projects to Galya and others to type.
Still, the missing Gulag Archipelago was a more serious loss by far.
Two weeks later, Galya came over uninvited, looking very fresh and healthy, almost pretty. She was very perturbed, however. She cried when she made the honest admission that the typewriter and the manuscript had disappeared from her parents’ home without a trace, and where they had gone she had no clue; she, Galya, would return the money, it would take three months or so. Everything had vanished, most likely, when they were on their honeymoon.
“No, it was before that!” Olga said. “I thought about it the day you and Gennady got married, and I went over to your parents the very next day!”
“It’s impossible!” Galya said with a gasp.
The household investigation, which Galya immediately undertook, didn’t yield anything. Her father was on a drinking binge, which constituted indirect evidence of domestic theft. Still, her papa went on these binges at regular intervals, right on schedule, and he had just now gotten started after a bout of sobriety.
Her brother, Nikolay, whom she tried to interrogate, grew suddenly irate, began to shake, and screamed at her to leave him alone. He wasn’t quite right in the head, and the psychiatric clinic had had medical records on file for him since he was a child.
Now Olga had to comfort Polushka and give her tea to drink. She inquired about her married life. It was absolutely wonderful, her husband didn’t drink and was very serious, had a good job, and even promised to try to set Galya up in a good position as well. Then Ilya and Kostya returned from the skating rink, both of them frozen and encrusted with ice. They usually went to the one on Petrovka, but this time they’d gone to a little patch of ice in the next-door courtyard, where they slipped and tumbled to their hearts’ content. True, when they were already tired out from all the fun, one of the other kids pelted Kostya with an ice-filled snowball, giving him a bloody nose. They quickly stopped the bleeding with more ice, though.
Galya always got scared and took to her heels at the mere sight of Ilya, and this time was no exception. Olga laundered the bloody scarf and handkerchiefs. Kostya, Ilya, and Olga had dinner together. Their favorite days were like this one, when her mother stayed at the dacha. Then Olga sent Kostya off to bed.
“Ilya, the typewriter and the manuscript have both disappeared. No one knows where,” Olga said with trepidation.
“It’s the Rodent! We have to clear everything out of the house,” Ilya said peremptorily.
He threw himself into the task, grabbing things off the shelves and out of hiding places, gathering all the dangerous papers. Several onionskin pages bound together with paper clips he burned in the WC. He collected all the most dangerous publications—issues of the Chronicle of Current Events. In her mother’s bookshelves, behind the Romain Rolland and the Maxim Gorky, there were also some things stashed away. By three in the morning they had gathered up all the dangerous material and stuffed it into an old suitcase, which they stowed under a coatrack. They postponed the final decision, whether to take it all to the dacha or to Ilya’s aunt’s house in the country, out of harm’s way, until the next morning.
They couldn’t get to sleep for a long time, making all kinds of wild conjectures about what the near future had in store. They discussed whether they ought to inform the author, through Rosa Vasilievna, that the manuscript had possibly fallen into the hands of the KGB. They agreed to go to see her in the morning, to give her a detailed account of what had happened. Then Ilya discovered that Olga had fallen asleep, mid-sentence. And, like a bolt of lightning, it struck him: tomorrow they would be arrested! He even broke into a cold sweat. He had left so many tracks—his address books with all the phone numbers; and he would have to go to his mother’s right away to rescue his photograph collection and hide it somewhere. And put the negatives in a separate place. No, best take it all to his aunt’s in Kirzhach. If only he managed to do it in time! He’d have to get up at six and leave immediately for his mother’s; and with that thought, he fell into a sound sleep.
At just after eight, Olya gave Kostya an apple and sent him on his way to school. Ilya was still asleep. Olga put some coffee on to boil. At ten after nine sharp, the telephone and doorbell rang simultaneously. Ilya woke up, looked at the clock, and realized he was too late.
“Go to the bathroom,” Olga commanded. Ilya darted into the bathroom and latched the door. Olga went to open the front door, trying to decide what she should and should not say in the short space before she got there.
She had long known how these things happened, but her first thought was: call Mama for help. She immediately felt ashamed.
Six people barged in. Not one of them in uniform. A tall man, without taking off his cap, thrust a search warrant and an ID at her at the same time. He wasn’t fooling around. They opened the door to every room except the bathroom.
“Is your husband in there?” the tall one asked, finally taking his cap off. A lock of hair from his toupee rose up with the cap, and he mechanically plastered it back down to his forehead. He looks like Kosygin, Olga thought. Suddenly her fear melted away.
“Yes, that’s him,” she said.
One of them went up to the door and rapped on it.
“Come out!”
“I’m coming,” Ilya said.
He emerged a few minutes later in the general’s old bathrobe with the patches on the sleeves. He had shaved hurriedly.
Good work, Olga thought to herself approvingly.
“You’ll have to come with us to the residence where you are registered,” said another one. He exchanged glances with the tall one. Meaningfully.
Ilya got dressed without any haste.
Three of them stood in a group by the bookcase.
“Your books?” the smallest one asked.
“Oh, no,” Olga said. “Most of them belong to my mother. She’s a well-known writer, of course. In the other room there are books on military construction. My father is a general and has a big collection of books on military subjects.”
Olga’s mood lifted. She could feel that her voice sounded fine, and betrayed no abject trembling. Ilya realized immediately that her fear had been replaced by some complex desperation that also contained an element of amusement.
Good girl, Ilya thought in his turn, taking heart. With that, he waved to her and went out, one goon on his right, another on his left.
Three stayed behind to search, and one more stood watch by the door.
The witness, Olga thought.
She had no firsthand experience of the KGB herself, but she had heard stories about how these searches were carried out. They were far more polite than she had imagined they would be. One of them had a pleasant face, like a tractor driver or a farmhand. Even his skin had something rural about it—it was chapped and reddish, as if he had spent a lot of time in the cold. He tapped the books perfunctorily, seeing right away that all suspicious papers had been carefully weeded out. Then he made a discovery. In the bathroom they found an ashtray full of dead matches and paper clips.
“What you were burning?” the one with the toupee asked. He introduced himself as Alexandrov, an investigator from the prosecutor’s office, but Olga forgot his name immediately. She couldn’t determine whether her guests were from the police, the KGB, or the prosecutor’s office. She didn’t know that there were subtle differences between these raids: some of them were only looking for anti-Soviet dissidents, or petition signers; others for books, yet others only for Jews.