“What can I tell you, Olga Afanasievna? All this book business qualifies as anti-Soviet agitation and falls under article 190 of the Criminal Code. It carries a penalty of three to five years. Perhaps you weren’t aware of this?” He even seemed to express sympathy with her.
Olga, who had been showered with love, kindness, and understanding from earliest childhood, was more troubled by the ambiguity of her relations with her interlocutor than anything else. He was an unpleasant person, an enemy by definition, but she instinctively continued to rely on her own charms. Flirtatiousness and self-assurance kept breaking through the armor of restraint she had decided to adopt as her modus operandi. But the interlocutor was deaf and devoid of feeling, and she kept getting off track, catching herself in inconsistencies. It was tormenting, all the more because she had no idea how it would all end: whether they would let her go, arrest her, kill her … No, they wouldn’t kill her, of course; but there were moments when she was plunged into fear, a physical, animal fear that exceeded human endurance. And it went on and on.
They questioned her repeatedly about Ilya. About his job. He had a more or less official cover—a document stating that he worked as a research assistant. He was already on his third patron. After his first arrangement with his father-in-law, an academic in the field of agriculture, he had a short stint with a cranky old man, a writer, who broke off relations with him after six months. Now he had an agreement with another writer, a decent sort, who lived in Leningrad. If a ruse became necessary, it was that he was carrying out research for him in the Moscow libraries.
Olga answered all the questions about Ilya with one phrase that was difficult to refute: I don’t know, my husband never spoke to me about it. She gave the impression of an obedient, submissive wife.
“Think hard, Olga Afanasievna. It’s probably best not to cross us. I’m sure your parents would be disappointed, too. Today we were just having a little talk, getting to know each other. Your books will remain here, of course. There are plenty of them—they’ll suffice for five years of prison. Here’s the list of the books. Yes, yes, I know you’ve already signed it. Think about everything we’ve discussed here. We’ll meet again soon, there are still some things we need to talk about. We understand that your husband dragged you into this anti-Soviet activity. Now you must think about it, decide who you … and sign here, too. A nondisclosure clause, about our little conversation.”
Matters seemed to be drawing to a close. The clock on the wall read quarter to eleven.
Alexandrov scribbled something on a piece of paper, and gave it to a woman who had been sitting in the room for a long time. This turned out to be a permit for her to leave. The corridor was a veritable labyrinth, breaking off, turning, then veering off again at strange angles. The length of the journey to the exit didn’t correspond to the rather modest dimensions of the building on the outside.
When she emerged onto the street, she wanted to get a taxi. Not a single car stopped, and she dragged herself, exhausted, through the whole expanse of Dzerzhinsky Square to the metro.
Her parents’ house had been turned inside out, shaken down, violated. How had they managed in such a short time to destroy the propriety and dignity of their well-maintained household? There were footprints all over the parquet floors, books were strewn about everywhere in heaps, a trail of the general’s underwear—piles of long johns and undershirts that had been accumulating on the shelves since the war—fanned out through the spacious hallway. It was a good thing that her mother was already at the dacha for the third night running and didn’t have to witness any of this.
Ilya wasn’t home. Faina Ivanovna, the housekeeper, had left a note on the table: “Olga! I picked up Kostya from school and took him to my house. He’ll spend the night here. I’ll take him to school in the morning. Call me when you get in, Faina.”
If only she had had a mother like Faina—she always did just the right thing, no questions asked. She had raised Olga without a single extra word, and she was helping out with Kostya like no one else in the world knew how. What luck that her mother had gone straight to the dacha after work without stopping off at home!
She called Faina.
“Faina, you’ve been saving me my whole life. I can’t thank you enough.”
Faina grumbled a bit, and cursed under her breath, saying that if Olga kept this up she would leave them.
“If only for the child!” she said, before hanging up the phone. Pure gold. She was pure gold.
After some hesitation, Olga decided to call Maria Fedorovna, Ilya’s mother. She dialed the number, but when no one picked up right away, she hung up. Her exhaustion outstripped her anxiety. She collapsed on the divan and fell asleep immediately. Fifteen minutes later she woke up, choking with fear. It was as though she hadn’t slept at all.
At half past two in the morning, she began to clean up. By morning she had put the house in order.
What could have happened to Ilya? The question gnawed at her and gave her no rest.
She called Galya at work, saying they had to meet right away. An hour later, Galya was sitting in Olga’s kitchen.
“Galya, our house was searched. Do you realize that this all started with the typewriter?” No sooner had Olga begun to talk than Galya broke into tears. “Tell me honestly, did you tell your husband what you were typing? That you had borrowed the typewriter from me?”
Galya swore that her husband knew nothing about the typewriter, nor that she earned extra money as a typist. Moreover, she hadn’t told a single person in the world about it. She swore so vehemently that it was impossible not to believe her. It was a mystery how everything had ended up with the KGB. And why had they waited so long, why hadn’t they come right away?
“Olga, please understand one thing; now I have to tell Gennady everything. Otherwise, it’s as if I set everyone up: you, and Antonina Naumovna, and Gennady, too. He could get into trouble! What else can I do, go out and kill myself? Maybe you think I’m ungrateful—do you think I don’t know how much your family has done for me? But Gennady doesn’t know about that. It has nothing to do with him. He lives a completely different kind of life, his views on everything are different. He has strong ideological principles! Who was the secretary of the Komsomol organization at school, was it me? No, it was you! You were the most Soviet of all of us! Tamara, though she never said it out loud, was anti-Soviet. And I had nothing at all to do with any of that—after I turned twelve all I ever thought about were the uneven bars and the balance beam!”
At that moment, the lock clicked, and Ilya stumbled in. Ilya and Olga embraced as though after a long separation, then clung to each other in exhaustion.
Galya put on her coat and slipped out shrewdly.
“When did they let you go?” Ilya asked, still holding Olga to him.
“At eleven last night. Did they keep you all this time?”
“At first they drove me to my mother’s, and they cleaned everything out. Everything. My darkroom is gone. Then they took me to Malaya Lubyanka. That’s where I’ve been till now.”
After Kostya had started school and they moved to Olga’s Moscow apartment, Ilya had transferred the darkroom to his mother’s, to the broom closet.
“That two-story building? That’s where I was, too.”
“Yes, it’s the Moscow branch. To hell with them. They can all go to hell,” Ilya muttered. And nothing mattered to him just then except his clear-eyed Olga, his wife, his beloved, who was worth more than all the world to him … he’d tried to keep Olga out of it, and to take all the blame upon himself. After all, he was the one who had brought the books into the apartment! He’d tried to extricate Olga from the mess. He could wriggle out of it somehow; if only Olga didn’t have to suffer for it.