He looked around; fifteen or so functionaries stood around, uncomprehending but expectant.
“Our guests would like to express their deepest apologies, but they must fly out today, since tomorrow the Central Committee of the Party will be receiving them.”
“This is an outrage! Does he have any idea what he is doing?” the official in charge whispered to Olga.
The final scene took place three days later, when Olga handed in the record of expenses to the accountant. The telephone rang.
“Karik Avetisovich would like to see you,” the accountant told Olga.
Karik was sitting behind his desk with an imperious air:
“Would you care to explain to me what happened there?”
Olga told him, being honest and forthright about it.
“Um-hmm. Well, take out a piece of paper and write a report.”
“Another report? I already submitted one.”
“That was a financial report. This one’s for the KGB,” Karik said coldly.
“What do you mean?” Olga said indignantly. “I won’t write any report! We agreed.”
“What did we agree?”
Olga put her head in her hands. What a fool she was! Now she would have to write a report, compromising her good name forever. This was how informers were born.
From her purse she fished out the sizable packet of money she had just received from the accountant. A clear conscience was worth more to her.
“Let’s just agree that I never worked here. Here’s my honorarium. Case closed.”
“Let’s go out and get some fresh air, the weather’s nice,” Karik said, pointing at the ceiling with his thumb.
Ah, so even you are afraid of listeners! Olga thought spitefully.
They went out without talking. She went first, and he followed behind her. They crossed Vorovsky Street, and turned into the first courtyard they saw on Trubnikovsky Lane. They sat down on a bench.
“What are you afraid of? These are the rules of the game, and you have to play by them. The main thing is to remain a decent person. I’ve never harmed anyone in my life. I’ve helped many. But always playing by the rules.”
Olga cursed herself under her breath: Idiot! Cretin! Sellout!
“But this Pablo has different rules, doesn’t he? Yes, he says he’s a Communist; but he fell out with all the others back home, and there are no consequences for him. He’s not afraid, because no one beat him up, no one tried to kill him. But my family had to flee Turkey; all the Armenians there were slaughtered. Do you want to know what really happened? The rich all escaped, and the poor remained. Money saved their lives. Now it won’t save them anymore. Now it’s only the authorities who can protect you and save your life. Who is this Pablo, anyway? He’s an ordinary hooligan, a con man. Morally corrupt. That’s a fact! He’s been married three times; he took prostitutes to his room in Leningrad! If you didn’t see it, you don’t have to report it! Politically, he’s sound, yes. But what kinds of sounds does he make? He hops around onstage, singing little ditties! Am I right or not? So that’s what you write—“hops around, singing little ditties.” Just stick to the facts. Well, maybe you don’t have to report the whole story, but you have to be truthful. Am I too ideological? Ideological, yes, I admit—but I don’t betray my friends. You’re silent; you’re thinking about how I had you expelled from the Komsomol? The mistake was your own. Why did you get mixed up in defending your professor, why did you sign the petition? He broke the rules, he set everyone up! How many people lost their jobs because of him, just like that … and where did he come from? You probably don’t know this, but he was working for us. He’d been working for us since the fifties! He wrote reports. I’ve seen them with my own eyes. I swear by my own mother! And where is he now?”
Olga knew that rumors like this had been making the rounds. She shrugged; she didn’t know.
“He’s been released, and is living in Paris! Because those are the rules—you can’t betray your own kind. They punished him so that justice would be served, then let him go. And so many are sitting in prison because of him to this very day! He’s a scoundrel! I have no respect for him whatsoever. You should be thankful that they stopped you before it was too late. I have no idea, perhaps at this very moment your beloved Pablo is sitting somewhere writing a report about how he was received, about who said what to whom. Because everyone lives by rules, and that’s the most important one: live by the rules.”
He actually means what he’s saying; he’s staked his life on it. Poor guy, he could have been selling vegetables or carpets somewhere—but he got caught up in all this, and this is the result. Olga observed his deeply flushed face. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, though here, on this snowy bench, it was anything but warm.
“I don’t need anything from you but a report. You were in such-and-such a place, you saw this, you said that. And that José is a sly one, too. His brother’s family lives in Russia. His brother died in the Spanish Civil War, and his nephews were evacuated, ending up here. He saw them in Moscow. You didn’t know that? Well, I’m not asking you to write about anything you haven’t seen with your own eyes. And a man came to see him in the hotel before their departure. You didn’t see him? It was his nephew. José brought money for him, and gave him his own things. You didn’t see anything? I’m not telling you—write that…”
So they knew everything. José hadn’t concealed the fact that his nephews lived in Russia. Olga had even called one of his nephews at his request. Pablo had organized this whole trip to take his Spanish friend to Russia to visit his relatives.
But Karik was telling her in no uncertain terms that he knew that she knew, and that he was not requiring her to divulge everything she knew in the report.
“Let’s go. You’ll just write one page, relating exactly what happened. Whatever you consider necessary. I won’t give you any more work if you don’t want it. If you do, I’ll keep you in mind. But you have to write a report.”
They walked down the empty corridor to Karik’s office. Everyone had already left. And no one saw her. And no one ever found out about anything. But the main thing was that Ilya should never find out.
A GOOD TICKET
By the time she was thirty, Lyudmila had come to terms with being an old maid, and even found many advantages to this state. Her married girlfriends, having given birth to children and now divorced, or joylessly bearing all the burdens of running a household, did not inspire envy in her. The years when she wanly expected first a prince, then some kind of lover, any kind at all, and, finally, just a decent man had given way to a measured, rather tedious, but completely calm existence.
Ilya had appeared gradually. She began to recognize his lanky figure and curly head of hair among dozens of regular readers at the library. Glances of recognition were replaced with nods. Once, right before the library closed, they ran into each other next to the cloakroom, and they went out together—unintentionally. They went toward the metro, conversing politely. They exchanged names: Lyudmila, Ilya.
Six months later, Ilya walked Lyudmila home. She was lugging five rather thick books home for her father. He was an academic—not a bona fide one, in Ilya’s view, since he was an agronomist. Lyudmila’s family also lived in the vicinity of Timiryazevsky Academy, which took an hour to reach by bus from the Novoslobodskaya metro station. It turned out that they lived not in an ordinary building or house but in a large old dacha, built at the end of the nineteenth century for the agriculture professors.
It was already late evening. The buses had abandoned their routes, heading back to the bus depot for the night, and Lyudmila suggested that Ilya stay the night. The professor, never having lost his rural habit of turning in early and rising at the crack of dawn, had gone to bed long before. Nanny Klava, who had raised Lyudmila after her mother died when Lyudmila was still a child, had left that day on a visit to her sister. If Nanny Klava had stayed home that day, things might have gone in quite another direction.