Karik echoed her sentiments, then turned the conversation to more mundane topics: What, how, with whom?
“The same as before, only with a different husband.”
“What about a job?”
“Hmm, that’s more difficult. I have to chase around to find work, of course. I don’t go to an office—I write reports, teach a bit, do some translation.”
“Oh, what languages do you know? French, wasn’t it?” Karik said.
“My French is decent; I can do simultaneous interpreting, and written translation. My Spanish isn’t as good, but it’s passable. And my most recent love is Italian. It’s more like music than like language. I’m teaching myself. I mastered it in about a year. But you know how it is—I don’t have steady work; it’s either feast or famine.”
“Do you know Spanish Spanish, or Cuban Spanish?” he said.
“My Spanish is Spanish,” she said, and sighed. “But I don’t have a diploma, Karik. Perhaps you recall that I was expelled in my fifth year?”
Karik laughed.
“How could I forget, when I’m the one who caused it. I was the Komsomol organizer, and I was just in the process of getting admitted to the Party. You understand what I mean—I was about to defend my thesis, but I don’t have five languages under my belt, like you do. In fact, I’ve always had problems with languages. Armenian is my native language, and I know some Azerbaijani from playing with other kids in the neighborhood. I learned Russian at school. And also in the neighborhood. But we Caucasians can never get rid of our accents. I’ll be honest with you, I worked in England for a year, but nothing helped. They couldn’t make a spy out of me.”
“Well, never mind. You still became a good KGB man, didn’t you?” Olga said, laughing.
“Olga, didn’t your father work in the same capacity?” Karik said, smiling, not in the least put out by her comment.
“No, my father is a military man, in the construction department. He’s retired now. My mother is active in the Party, though.”
“Yes, I remember that someone in your family had a high position. My grandfather was a shepherd, and my father baked lavash at the market. There were eight of us children at home. Do you sense the difference?”
Olga felt uncomfortable. She did sense the difference between his background and hers.
“But I can help you out with work. I’m an administrative officer at the Writer’s Union, on the Foreign Committee. I can’t get you a staff position, but I can set you up with some freelance jobs. Our translator just resigned—you must know her, she was from your year: Irina Troitskaya. There is a Latin American writer arriving in two weeks. He’s already almost a classic. The job will involve travel to either Leningrad or Tashkent. You’ll have to accompany him, attend meetings with him, and so on. Would you be up to that? You won’t let me down?”
Oh, so he does have a conscience after all! He’s trying to make up for past sins.
They had already made their way to Dzerzhinsky Square. Olga was cold, and wanted to take the metro. He walked her to the entrance and they parted ways. They didn’t exchange phone numbers.
Karik called her two days later, after Olga had already forgotten about their conversation. She still remembered everything about Hamlet, though; she couldn’t stop talking about it. In fact, all of Moscow was abuzz with it. It was the premiere of the season, a major event. Everyone was in a hurry to see it, because Lyubimov’s productions were always getting shut down, or even banned during rehearsals.
Karik asked her to stop by his office on the same day. Olga was just three minutes away by foot if she went through the main entrance. Even less if she went by way of the courtyard.
He was wearing a striped suit. Olga could tell immediately that it had been made by the Writer’s Union tailor. His tie was also striped. Later, when they went down to the cafeteria, and he sat down, crossing one leg over the other, she noticed that his socks were striped, too. But she held her tongue and refrained from making any cutting remarks about it to herself, reminding herself again: his grandfather was a shepherd, and his father baked bread at a market …
“There will be two of them. One a writer, and the second a professor, both of them very well known. The writer is from Colombia, and the professor is Spanish. We’ll draw up a part-time contract; I’ll give you all the necessary instructions, and then we’re good to go! They should arrive on February first.”
That day there was a big hullabaloo at the Foreign Committee. The day before, they had received a West German poet, a young leftist who enjoyed great renown. It was a farewell party for him, since he was flying back to West Germany that evening. The writer, whose face had a provocative SS pallor, had been flown to a writers’ conference in Baku. There he started an affair with the daughter of his translator, and now the entire Foreign Committee was at sixes and sevens.
On the previous evening, this young whippersnapper of a girl, whom he had brought along with him to the official farewell ceremony, had stuck to him like a burr. At the end, he sat her on his bony, five-foot-tall knee. Her mother, herself a poet and a recipient of the Stalin Prize, had translated his “Mayakovskian” verse into Russian from someone else’s literal crib. Her face was an unhealthy beet-red color, and she was pretending not to notice anything.
In view of these upsetting circumstances, no one paid any attention to Olga. Olga, by the way, knew the daughter of this translator very well, first from the exclusive Artek Pioneer Camp, where privileged children of prominent parents were sent, then from the Peredelkino dacha settlement for writers, and finally from the philological department.
Karik came back, accompanied by an older woman with a dissatisfied expression on her face.
“Olga, this is Vera Alekseevna, the goddess of our accounting department. She’ll give you money for expenses and will explain everything. Come to see me afterward.”
The following ten days shook up Olga’s world and turned it inside out. The writer, a robust, bearded fellow, looked like a cross between Hemingway and Fidel Castro. He greeted her effusively, with a phrase Olga didn’t understand until later:
“O Madonna! I thought we’d be in the care of some KGB agent, but they’ve sent us an angel instead! Too bad there’s only one of you for both of us!”
Olga thrust a small, businesslike hand at him, and he kissed her on the forehead. The professor looked on disapprovingly, refusing to get into the act.
Olga took them to the Metropol Hotel in an official car. In the lobby, she asked them whether they needed anything, and handed them two folders and two envelopes with small sums of money for expenses. She asked them to put their signatures on some documents.
The writer whispered something into the professor’s ear. He turned green and whispered back something that Olga couldn’t make out. The only word she understood was mierda—shit.
The writer guffawed, and gently nudged the professor in the stomach with his elbow. Olga filled out the necessary paperwork at the reception desk, and they received their keys.
“I’ll wait for you here, and then we’ll go have dinner.”
Olga sat on a velvet couch by the wall and reflected on the situation. It was all quite exciting, but she shouldn’t have taken the job. It was ridiculous, sitting here and waiting like a servant, at their beck and call. There was something humiliating about it.
The first to come down was the bearded one. He immediately dispelled all these thoughts.
He smiled amicably, and bent down to her confidingly.