He looked at the clock.
“I hope you understand that our conversation must remain strictly confidential. This is in your interests, as well as mine.”
“It’s hard to consider our conversation to be confidential, Anatoly Alexandrovich.” Ilya swallowed, and gestured toward the slightly open door.
“Don’t let that worry you. No one has seen you. And no one will see you. Stand up, please, and turn toward the window. Yes, that’s right.” Anatoly Alexandrovich, in a loud, commanding tone, said: “Vera Alekseevna, you may leave.”
He heard the click-click of high heels, then the door to the corridor opened with a creak, and the lock snapped shut.
“It’s not all as simple as it appears to you, Ilya Isayevich,” Chibikov said sadly.
Ilya said nothing.
“You must decide today. Today I can still do something for you,” the “colonel” said in a dark, velvety voice. “Tomorrow it will be too late.”
So if I say no right now, they won’t let me out of here. And they have all my things, anyway. If I agree, I can continue to live as before—but I will be working not for myself, but for them. No, I can’t imagine this kind of life …
“Moreover—and here I just want to convey the full picture—if I don’t intervene right now and the matter resumes its…”
Pause.
“… former course, you and your wife will be held liable. We can say that you brought the books into the house single-handedly; but the typewriter is hers. And Solzhenitsyn’s manuscript was in her possession. You’re putting not just yourself in jeopardy, but her, too. Just between ourselves, you were the one who dragged her into this risky business. And that’s a serious argument. While I still have the wherewithal to intervene in the matter.”
They’ve got me. There’s no way out. It’s a Fool’s Mate. My dear girl, I will never betray you.
“This is a gentlemen’s agreement. I’ll give you my phone number. At home. We won’t keep up regular contact. You will call me when something interesting arises. You will print as many copies as you consider necessary for your work, and you will hand over the negatives to me.”
“The negatives! That’s asking too much,” Ilya said sharply.
But the “colonel” already knew he had won. He laughed.
“You’re twisting my arm!” he said.
“No, if we’re talking about a gentlemen’s agreement, I have to defend my interests,” Ilya insisted.
Chibikov looked at him with new respect.
“All right. You keep the negatives. The last thing I need is your signature.”
“But it’s a gentlemen’s agreement!” Ilya protested.
“I have to defend my interests, too,” Anatoly Alexandrovich said, smiling.
Between them they had smoked both packs of cigarettes. The boys were still pulling on their nets behind the shimmering pall of smoke.
When Ilya left, it was already dark. And the autumn rain, an insistent drizzle, was still falling.
THE ANGEL WITH THE OUTSIZE HEAD
“It’s improbable, completely unlikely,” thought Tamara early the next morning, before she had even opened her eyes, reflecting on the evening before. For so many years she had kept her rotten secret about her great and forbidden love to herself, like a jar of preserves, and now it had burst open. She had told all to the person whom she had her whole life considered superfluous, alien, a chance appendage to her existence. For so many years she hadn’t breathed a word about it: not to her mother, so as not to disappoint her; not to Olga, so as not to break the ban; not to Vera Samuilovna Vinberg, her best friend and teacher, so that the secret wouldn’t erupt into someone else’s life and shake the happy equilibrium of another family … And suddenly, out of nowhere, she had gone and told everything to Galya, the wife of a KGB agent. Now it seemed that everything that had come before was no longer relevant.
No, that wasn’t quite true—she had confessed the whole story once before, before she was baptized, to her priest. He had listened patiently, without betraying any emotion, and had then said, smiling:
“That’s all in the past now. A new life begins with baptism; you will become an innocent babe again. This is one of the advantages of being baptized when you are older. It is a conscious choice. You are being offered a new purity, and you must look after it.”
Her new purity faded rather quickly. Her former life didn’t just disappear, and it cast a long shadow over the future. Until he died two years later, even the old Robik, whom Marlen had left behind, continued to sleep on the rug he had occupied every Shabbat eve for many years waiting for his master. The dog kept silent, and Tamara did, too.
But the evening before, the dam had broken and she had told Galya everything. Why? No, no—it was what it was. It had to happen the way it did, and she would have lived her life the same way again. She was sorry for her mother. Raisa Ilinichna had cried. No, not about the Korovin, nor about the Borisov-Musatov—but about the small, almost perfunctory study by Vrubel. It was a large head and a wing, contradicting all known laws of anatomy. Though who had ever been able to observe the anatomy of angels? All the paintings had belonged to her grandmother. They were originally from the Gnesins, and had been given to her over the years. Elena Fabianovna had been her best friend since childhood. Grandmother had devoted her life to this family, and there were still many traces and tokens of the girls’ friendship in the house: teacups, postcards, feathers, books inscribed with loving sentiments in neat, small letters, with flourishes of signatures. But those three paintings were gone. Without a trace. No, no, she had no regrets about them. Far worse were the fevered years of eclipse, the burning passions, of which nothing remained but a feeling of bereavement. No, no, no—she wasn’t talking about that.
Everything had already been terrible. Marlen was fired from his job. He had been denied a visa to leave the country over and over again. They had dragged him to the Lubyanka, threatened to imprison him. And at the very end, he confessed that his wife was pregnant and was just about to give birth. He always spoke so disdainfully about his wife and so warmly about his daughters that Tamara had formed a picture in her mind of a family life in which a new baby was somehow conceived out of thin air. He was so much her husband and hers alone. And, suddenly, here was another wife, a pregnant one …
He lost weight, and his skin took on a yellowish cast. Tamara even took him to the lab for tests. But his blood was in order, his liver just where it should be. And still they denied him the exit visas. The former obstacles had resolved themselves and vanished. His poor handicapped sister died, followed by his mother, who didn’t want to hear a word about Israel. She hated that enemy country that caused so many so much grief. It was impossible to budge her from her position on the matter. And she would never have given her permission for her son to emigrate.
On the penultimate Shabbat of December, Marlen visited Tamara. His dog could hardly drag himself along for the visit. Robik, the only witness of their love, had grown old and decrepit. They were not embarrassed in front of him.
They had no reason to feel embarrassed in front of Raisa Ilinichna, either—in all these years she had never once laid eyes on Marlen. Before he arrived, she would sequester herself in her tiny room. They even resurrected her grandmother’s chamber pot and put it under her bed.
The worse the circumstances, the hotter their embraces. Now, years later, Tamara began to feel a belated perplexity: Why had she been so completely taken over, to the exclusion of everything else, by this simple, mechanistic ritual, this here, there, and back again? How was it she had soared to such ineffable heights, when it was all just a matter of two steroid rings, one attached to the other, and one more on the upper right side, with a half-ring to the side, and a commotion of radicals forming around them? Who understood better than she the biological formula that dominates our bodies and souls so absolutely …