Now Olga, with her slightly chapped lips, her pale freckles sprinkled over her white skin, the center of his life, its very heart, stroked his face. He would still have to deal with the branch, but he was determined to keep Olga out of the affair at any cost.
When Antonina Naumovna returned home from work, she received a full account of what had happened from her daughter. Antonina clutched first at her heart, and then at the telephone receiver. She made an appointment the next day with General Ilienko, who was the Writers’ Union liaison with the most vitally significant state organs. They had been on amicable terms since the thirties, when she was just starting her career. They survived the purges, then carried out purges themselves, making short shrift of the formalists, and working together on the Ehrenburg case.
It was hard work, and very unrewarding. Though of the utmost importance. Antonina had no doubts about that.
Ilienko always helped his own people, and now he helped Antonina Naumovna in her hour of need.
The general introduced her to another general, who spoke to her in what she could only feel to be a condescending manner; but in the end, her plea met with success. They returned her typewriters, the old Underwood and the new Optima, the address books, and the manuscripts that had been confiscated during the search. Among the things they gave back to her were some books of Ilya’s—pre-Revolutionary religious texts that Antonina Naumovna was loath even to touch. Most unexpectedly, they even gave back Ilya’s cameras and enlarger. Olga’s Erika was the only thing that wasn’t returned right away. She managed to get it back three months later, by special request. How it had ended up there, who had informed on them, she wasn’t told.
Antonina Naumovna was not given to scandal and emotional upheaval. Moreover, after Olga’s expulsion from the university, she had experienced the bitterness of rupture in the spirit of Fathers and Sons. For this reason she didn’t reproach her daughter. Any hope of a meeting of minds had been uprooted from her heart long before, though she had raised the girl according to her own lights, her own best pedagogical insights. What would Olga say about her grandparents, those misguided religious fanatics?
Antonina’s eyes burned with a dry flame; her lips pursed together once and for all—in her veins ran severe and obdurate Greek blood. When she was young, she had often been mistaken for a Jewess, which caused her a great deal of consternation. Now, later in life, she had acquired a likeness to a Byzantine icon: a fiercely spiritual countenance, devoid of pity or compassion. A Paraskevi of Iconium or St. Irene … though instead of a halo she wore a coarsely crocheted beret or an Astrakhan hat from the Literary Fund store.
Antonina Naumovna’s first thought was to exchange her apartment for two smaller ones. Then she wouldn’t have to see either her daughter or her son-in-law. She reconsidered, however: Would the second apartment go to the state after her death? What about her grandson? He was a good boy, and very attached to his grandfather. Why should he be cheated of his inheritance? No, that wouldn’t do. Besides, someone had to keep an eye on them, the old writer decided. She had long known that the government was watching her lousy son-in-law and Olga at the same time.
After this, Antonina Naumovna changed her schedule. She went to the dacha on weekends and holidays, but not every weekday. Several times a week she visited the young family—always without warning, so that they knew she might drop in at any moment and wouldn’t dare indulge in any anti-Soviet revels and mayhem at home.
Faina continued to work for them. She freed up the careless and irresponsible parents in the evenings, and even allowed them to stay out overnight. Olga and Ilya roamed around from house to house, visiting old friends and meeting interesting new ones.
Life drove a wedge between the old girlfriends. They saw one another now once a year, on Olga’s birthday, June 2. They called one another rarely. This estrangement was naturaclass="underline" each of them had her own life, her own secrets to keep. Their school years were the only thing the girlfriends had left in common, and those memories became ever more faded and insignificant.
In addition to her beloved science, Tamara now had her beloved Marlen. And Galya, besides her husband and her job, had a secret pastime: she was getting treated for infertility, making the rounds of all kinds of medical clinics, homeopaths, herbalists, and even charlatans of every stripe and color.
These were the happiest years in Olga’s life. It was like skating on thin ice: dangerous and exhilarating. The professor who had brought Olga and Ilya together outside the courthouse had served his seven-year prison term, had been released, and had then emigrated.
Neither Olga nor Ilya had been able to see him in the months before his departure, which they both regretted. But he had been inaccessible. Perhaps he didn’t want to see anyone himself; perhaps his wife had erected an iron curtain around him. He left very quietly, almost surreptitiously—the authorities were clearly glad to be rid of him. Moreover, dark rumors about his involvement with the KGB were making the rounds.
During those years, members of the underground, readers and creators of samizdat alike, had quarreled among themselves and broken up into small groups, into sheep and goats. True, it was impossible to distinguish between them, to decide who was a sheep and who was a goat. Even within the small herds and flocks there was no concord. Parallels with the “men of the sixties” of the nineteenth century—“Westernizers” and “Slavophiles”—were too remote to seek. Now everything was much more complicated and splintered. Some were for justice, but against the Motherland; others were against the authorities, but for communism; others wanted true Christianity; still others were nationalists who dreamed of independence for their Lithuania or their western Ukraine; then there were the Jews, who wanted only one thing—to leave the country …
And there was the great truth of literature—Solzhenitsyn wrote book after book. They came out in samizdat, passed from hand to hand in the time-honored pre-Gutenberg manner, on loosely bound, soft, hardly legible pages of onionskin paper. It was impossible to argue with these pages: their truth was so stark and shattering, so naked and terrible—truth about oneself, about one’s own country, about its crimes and sins. And over there, already an emigrant, Olga’s professor, an underground writer with a soiled reputation, but with Western glory, as shrewd, acerbic, and spiteful as a devil, made his damning, ignominious pronouncements, calling Russia a “bitch” and the great writer an “undereducated patriot.”
Tea and vodka poured out in rivers, kitchens basked in the fervent steam of political dispute, so that the dampness crept up the walls to the hidden microphones behind the tiles at the level of the ceiling.
Ilya knew everything and everyone. He was calm and conciliatory in arguments, because he always had his “on the one hand” and “on the other hand” at his disposal … And he told Olga:
“You know, Olga, any position you take limits you, makes you dumber. Even this stool has four legs!”
Olga could only guess at what he was trying to tell her, but she agreed with him in her heart of hearts: the idea of stability appealed to her.
Meanwhile, Tamara, under Marlen’s influence, had temporarily become a Zionist; but endocrinology prevented her from immersing herself completely in the Jewish movement. Her dissertation was almost finished, and the results of her laboratory research were astounding. The hormones had been synthesized, and were working away like good little things in test tubes; all that remained was to test them on a living organism, if only a rabbit.
Vera Samuilovna was thrilled with her former graduate student, who, after graduating from the institute, took a lowly job as a senior lab assistant, with a likewise paltry income, but had nevertheless blossomed into a full-fledged scientist.