The general also duly read the books written by the imprisoned writers. He told his daughter: they’re not bad, but they didn’t warrant such a fuss. Irina agonized over these events, although she remained unscathed by them. She didn’t see Olga anymore, and she regretted her disappearance. Now everyone was friends with Irina, although she no longer brought books with her to the university—her father forbade it.
Irina graduated, and she got an excellent appointment with the Foreign Committee of the Writers’ Union. An old comrade of her father’s was in charge of the union and fixed her up with the job.
In 1970, Igor Vladimirovich died suddenly of a heart attack. Not long before his death, he caught wind of a rumor that Solzhenitsyn had been nominated for the Nobel Prize. He was agitated by this news.
“What kind of outfit is this Nobel Committee, anyway? They didn’t give it to Tolstoy, but they’re giving it to Solzhenitsyn?”
After her father’s death, Irina fell into a depression: everything made her feel sick, even her wonderful job. Her sister, Lena, lived in Stockholm, where her husband was a cultural attaché in the Soviet Embassy.
It was clear that the decision of the Nobel Committee was going to cause problems for him.
Something remarkable happened to Irina that year. An elegant middle-aged woman spotted her in a crowd and invited her to come in for an audition as a fashion model. The woman turned out to be the country’s most famous fashion designer. The invitation lifted Irina’s spirits. She went in for the audition, and they took her immediately. There were no tall fashion models at the time; she would be the first.
Thanks to her family’s privileged position, Irina Troitskaya was allowed to travel abroad during the first year. She went first to Belgrade, then to Paris, and, finally, to Milan. In Milan she remained, having received an unexpected proposal from a journalist who wrote a fashion column for a provincial newspaper. He was neither handsome nor a millionaire, but they were supremely happy together in southern Italy, near Naples, where he was from. Her Italian husband soon quit both the Communist Party, of which he was a member, and his journalism job, and opened a small restaurant. Later he became mayor of the tiny town they lived in. Irina did not become a Slavist, nor did she become a translator; she never again visited Russia.
The story doesn’t end there, however—not for the rest of Irina Troitskaya’s family, in any case. The scandal caused by the Nobel Committee would have been impossible for the young diplomat to manage single-handedly; but the foreign ministry liked to apportion blame not to the highest diplomats, but to those who occupied a lower rung. They claimed that Lena’s husband hadn’t tried hard enough. And then there was Irina’s defection! The diplomat, Lena’s husband, was put through the wringer for the Nobel Prize—a matter in which he had played no part whatsoever—as well as for Irina’s defection and for his own lack of initiative. The young couple with brilliant credentials was recalled home from Sweden.
The unlucky diplomat returned home to Moscow with his family to live in the general’s apartment. The children, twin boys, liked Moscow. Lena had soup waiting for her husband every day when he returned from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he was the fifth deputy of the seventh assistant in a department that had been slated for dissolution for twenty years already. His salary was so poor that Lena finally went to teach English at a secondary school. Grandmother Nina, like an ordinary housekeeper, took the children for walks in Chapaev Park, until she came down with pneumonia and died. Everything was worse than one could have imagined possible, until Lena visited a fortune-teller. The fortune-teller was a real character, with a penchant for all things Indian. She instructed Lena to “purify her karma,” but first she told her to clean up her house, in which a great deal of “filth” had accumulated. She recommended that they remodel.
Her husband was extremely dissatisfied. As it was they could hardly make ends meet, and now—remodeling!
To save on expenses, they completed the first stage themselves. To begin with, they removed all the books from Igor Vladimirovich’s heavy bookcase before moving it away from the wall. They took the books with leather bindings to an antiquarian bookseller, who gave them a huge sum of money in exchange. He wouldn’t accept all the books, however. It turned out that many of the general’s books had library or museum stamps in them, and the booksellers wouldn’t touch those.
Lena’s husband found a large number of anti-Soviet books in the bottom section of the bookcase, including a collection of the works, complete thus far, of that very Nobel laureate who had caused him so much grief.
“Yes, Father collected books,” Lena explained. “He had access to all the books that were seized during searches. Some books were brought from abroad by his friends. He was a great collector: of coins, paper currency, stamps.”
Lena’s husband did not occupy as high a position as his late father-in-law had, and couldn’t allow such a collection to remain in the house. Late at night they took the dangerous books down to the garbage heap.
The next evening they were tearing off wallpaper when they discovered a safe in the depths of the thick supporting wall. There was no key. They were unable to open it with any household appliances, though it easily slipped out of its niche in the wall. The back of the smallish box turned out to be plywood. They ripped it off and discovered that the safe contained several stacks of old dollars, which still happened to be in circulation, and twenty-five pre-Revolutionary gold coins.
Her husband clutched at his head in consternation—but didn’t take the safe down to the garbage heap.
This is where the story of Irina Troitskaya and her family ends.
* * *
What will now be related has nothing at all to do with them. Igor Chetverikov’s shift at the boiler room ended at eight in the morning. He usually went trash-picking after six in the morning, making his rounds of the nearby garbage heaps. The Sokol district didn’t yield much of value. There weren’t many old buildings left. The houses in the neighborhood had been resettled just before and just after the war, so the local residents either threw away the Karelian birch and the French bronze before they moved in or had never had them in the first place.
Here, in what was formerly the settlement of Vsesvyatsky, if something did end up in the trash it was usually vestiges and remnants of the petite bourgeoisie. Not long ago he had found a trunk full of mid-nineteenth-century women’s clothes. Some of the contents had already been dragged off by some little girls, but Igor managed to salvage a brown frock with a crinoline, a fur wrap, and a girl’s school uniform.
This time, what he saw made him gasp. Next to the wooden bin where the residents deposited their household garbage stood some neat piles of tamizdat, books in Russian published abroad. Without examining them too closely, he took them to the boiler room and ran to the metro to make a call from a pay phone. Ilya, his former classmate, was still asleep, and answered gruffly:
“Are you nuts? Do you even know what time it is?”
“Come to the boiler room immediately. In a car.”
Ilya knew the boiler room well, since he had been responsible for getting Igor a job there after he had been expelled from the Kurchatov Institute under a cloud.
Half an hour later, Ilya arrived. They loaded the books into the car and drove them to the apartment of another general, who had at one time been enamored not of coins and books, but of old furniture. And he had preferred to live at his dacha, not in his apartment in the city.