“We burned toilet paper to cover up the stench in the bathroom,” Olga said boldly.
“Do you wipe with paper clips?” Alexandrov poked around in the ashtray resourcefully. He had some idea about what those paper clips might have held together: protest letters with the names of signees attached, issues of the Chronicle.
“What do you expect? Our house is full of office materials. My mother’s a magazine editor.”
Arrogant bitch, Alexandrov thought. He had a great deal of experience.
Olga tried not to look in the direction of the worn-out suitcase standing under the coatrack, half-concealed by a long overcoat of her father’s and her mother’s fur coat. Would they notice? Or wouldn’t they?
That’s when they noticed. Alexandrov, the one who looked like Kosygin, asked Olga to open the suitcase. She opened it, and he glanced casually inside. He understood immediately; then relaxed.
“Now I see how well prepared you were.”
They rummaged around for another hour and a half, just to keep up appearances. In addition to the suitcase, they took one of her mother’s typewriters, her father’s binoculars, Ilya’s favorite camera, and all the address books, including her mother’s. They even took the daily tear-off calendar from the wall. They impounded Ilya’s “golden collection,” photographs of the most brilliant personages of the time: Yakir, Krasin, Alik Ginzburg, the priests Dmitry Dudko, Gleb Yakunin, and Nikolay Eshliman, the writers Daniel and Sinyavsky, and Natalya Gorbanevskaya.
This photographic archive, the only one of its kind, would later come to be called “the dissident archive.” It contained, among others, photographs that were published in the Western press. These were photographs that Ilya had sold to Klaus, a German journalist, and to one other American, as well as the photographs smuggled out through his Belgian friend Pierre, who then distributed them in the West.
When Alexandrov removed the folder containing this archive from the depths of Kostya’s desk, Olga realized that Ilya was now exposed.
An official black Volga was waiting by the door, and another gray one was parked out on the street. They loaded the suitcase, the typewriters, and a sack full of papers into the gray one, and Olga herself into the black one. She sat in the backseat, two of the men pressed against her on either side. They drove her to a two-story building not far away, on Malaya Lubyanka. The building bore a sign that didn’t mince words: “Office of the Committee for State Security for Moscow and the Moscow Region.”
At three in the afternoon, the real interrogation began; or so it seemed to Olga. Alexandrov was sitting in the room, together with a nearly silent captain. He was the first person she had seen that day in a uniform. She didn’t realize that this was merely a conversation, not an interrogation.
What should she say? What should she avoid saying? She wasn’t in the habit of lying. Ilya had warned her to keep her head; that meant she shouldn’t say anything. This, however, seemed like the hardest thing of all. And Olga, despite her best intentions, did start talking—for one hour, two hours, then three. The questions seemed random and insignificant—who are your friends, where do you go, what do you read? They mentioned her former professor, who had emigrated. They knew, naturally, that she had signed letters supporting him, and that she had been expelled from the university in 1965. They even expressed sympathy with her: this guy was spewing all that anti-Soviet nonsense, what use was it to you? You come from good Soviet stock—why did you get mixed up with that sort?
Olga played dumb, without going overboard, saying something about her girlfriends, most of whom she didn’t really see anymore, since they almost all had families to take care of, children, work, and so forth … among her close friends she only named, out of spite, Galya Polukhina; she didn’t think she mentioned a single other person.
Olga was surprised when Alexandrov asked her about Tamara Brin.
“No, we don’t see each other anymore. We used to be friends, before science became her whole life. Now she doesn’t have time for anyone.”
“She doesn’t have time for anyone? What about Marlen Kogan? She spends time with him. She’s studying Hebrew.”
Olga’s eyebrows shot up.
“Really? I had no idea.”
“I ask the questions here; you answer. You seem to consider yourself to be very smart and perceptive, Olga Afanasievna.” He smiled, showing his large teeth, and for a moment Olga was overcome by something like horror. Suddenly she felt naked, vulnerable to a bite or a needle, as soft as a mollusk without its shell. At the same moment, she realized she needed to recover her composure, and she asked to go to the toilet.
Alexandrov made a phone call, and a heavy woman with a large rump came in, then led her down a corridor with unpredictable twists and turns to a WC. There were squares of newsprint hanging from a nail in the wall. Squatting over the toilet, which was clean but had no seat, she began thinking: I wonder what the bathrooms in the FBI look like? Then she laughed out loud, startling her chaperone. This little breather helped her. She was able to gather her thoughts, and even felt a bit stronger. Was he lying about Tamara? Probably not. Why hadn’t Tamara told her anything about herself? Strange, very strange. Could she really have some sort of relationship with Marlen? She hadn’t said a word about it. Silent as the grave. And him—going on about his family obligations, observing all those religious traditions, keeping kosher. All that stuff. She recalled that Marlen never ate anything at their house. He only drank vodka. He said vodka was always kosher. He had a scraggly beard and hair, and an unwieldy body—a big head with unruly curls, broad shoulders, and stumpy legs. But he had brains, that was for sure. It was like he had a whole library in his head, organized by shelves—history, geography, literature. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant; still, it was strange that Tamara had set her sights on him. It just proved that anything was possible.
Then the captain looked at his watch, went out, and returned fifteen minutes later. He looked at his watch again, and mumbled something to Alexandrov. Alexandrov’s tone changed abruptly, as though a command meant just for him were written on the watch.
“Enough of that. Let’s get down to business. Do these books belong to you, or to your husband?”
“They’re mine, of course. I keep my own books at home.”
“All of them are yours?”
“Well, a few of them may have been left behind by other people. Most of them are mine, though.”
“Which of these books are not yours?”
“These are all mine,” Olga said, correcting herself.
“Where did you get them?”
Olga had expected to be asked this question, and she had a ready answer.
“We buy books. We read a lot, and buy a lot of books.”
“Where?”
“Well, you know there’s a black market in Moscow, you can buy anything there: foreign junk, perfume, books…”
“Where is this market?”
“Different places. Some of them I bought near the Kuznetsky Bridge.”
“Be more precise. Where exactly near the Kuznetsky Bridge?”
“There’s a book market in Moscow. They sell all kinds of things there.”
“You mean people stand right there out in the open by Kuznetsky Bridge and offer to sell you stuff like this, for example?” He pulled Avtorkhanov’s book out of the pile. “The Technology of Power?”
“Yes,” Olga said, nodding.
Then he pulled one book after another out of the pile until he lost interest. The captain went out twice; then he came back again.