“I’ve come to speak to the wife of Joseph Densky,” Letsukov said.
“Then you’ve come to speak to me.” She was a tall, slender woman, somewhere in her early fifties.
“May I come in?”
“If Kuba’s gentlemen downstairs have allowed you to pass, how can I refuse?”
She held the door open and he walked past her into a two-room apartment. A kitchen door stood between two rough-timber empty bookshelves.
“My name is Letsukov,” he said. “I am an official of the Nationalities Ministry, Trade Union Section.”
“My name is Densky,” she parodied. “I am the wife of a prisoner of the Militia, KGB Section.”
“Please tell me your forename and patronymic,” he said.
She gestured for him to sit down. “I am Leonida Donsova Densky.”
“Thank you. I saw your husband this morning,” he said.
“Is he…”
“Well? Yes. Even aggressively so. He has a scar over one eyebrow which is now healing. Apart from that he shows some physical signs of having been beaten. But most certainly no other signs.”
She frowned, already finding his openness disturbing. “I thought that beatings were agreed to be illegal.”
“Of course. But we all know they happen.”
“It’s not something I would expect you to admit.”
He took out a packet of Belomors and offered her one. She shook her head.
“May I?”
She laughed. “Smoke, Comrade Letsukov? The men downstairs have allowed you up. You can do as you please, obviously.”
He put away the packet of cigarettes.
“Is your husband’s movement widespread?”
“I hope so.”
“But you don’t know.”
“I know nothing. I am a chattel, the woman of a monstrous wife-beating bigot, whom I happen to love to distraction,” she was laughing at him.
He smiled. “I don’t see you as a chattel, Leonida Donsova. I don’t see Joseph Densky as a man who would keep a chattel.”
“Smoke your cigarette, Comrade Letsukov,” she said lightheartedly. “Give me one, too. I see you’ve come here to be subtle with me. Well, why not?”
She got up and produced a liter and two glasses from a corner cupboard. “It’s seldom I have the chance to entertain one of Semyon Kuba’s gentlemen. But one should take what opportunities are presented. After all, you are playing host to my husband. I’m sure he’s eating adequately in his squalid prison cell.”
Letsukov took out the cigarettes. He watched her pour the vodka. She took a cigarette and sat down again.
“I need not have come here today,” he said.
“Or any day.”
“I mean that I have come here under cover of official business. My department is concerned with any… unorthodox trade union activity. So I have the excuse ready-made.”
“Why should you think of it as an excuse?” She inhaled her cigarette inexpertly.
“I came here because, after speaking to your husband, I felt I wanted to know more about his movement. For my own purposes, not for official reasons,” he said clumsily.
“Comrade, my daughter and I have been questioned at least twenty times since my husband’s arrest. I have nothing to say about my husband’s activities.”
“Can you believe I have come as a friend?”
“No.”
They were, he thought, an indomitable couple, Joseph Densky and his wife.
“Your husband is not the only one who has doubts about the exercise of Soviet power.”
“Most people would be shocked to hear you say so,” she said, her eyes sparkling.
“I am one such, Leonida Donsova,” he said.
“A member of the Party?”
“Yes.”
“Then this is serious,” she drank her vodka in one gulp with a rapid movement of the wrist and smiled at him. “Very serious.”
“Leonida Donsova, I can understand your fears about me. I come to your house under the umbrella of the men who have imprisoned your husband. But I ask you to listen to me. After that you can decide whether or not it is safe for you to have more to do with me.”
She put out her cigarette and sat back in her chair. Her fingers locked in her lap.
“Like your husband,” he began…
“I had the impression you were to talk about yourself, Comrade Letsukov. Not my husband.”
“Very well,” he said. “I did not come here to make a confession. But I see that circumstances force it upon me. You wish me to speak of myself. I am a senior official in a Union Ministry. I no longer believe in all that the Ministry or indeed the Soviet government stands for. There, I’ve spoken openly.”
“Perhaps.” Her eyes were fixed on his.
“Like your husband I now see flaws in the Communist ideal.”
“My husband is a Communist. Do you understand that, Comrade?”
“I think I do.”
“Do you believe it?”
“If you say so, yes.”
“What else is there to be after all?” She opened her arms wide. “Are you then not a Communist, Comrade Letsukov?”
“I have been all my life.”
“That is an ambiguous answer.”
“Yes, it is. Communism was good to me, Leonida Donsova. I prospered. I was happy.”
“Until?”
“I found the path was not straight and strewn with flowers as I had imagined.” He hesitated. “I was asked to go to Paris to kill a man.”
She looked at him for a moment, her lower lip tucked pensively under her teeth. She was not shocked. “The KGB asked you?” she said.
“Yes.”
“You refused,”
“No. Without giving you all the details, I agreed.”
Perhaps she was shocked now.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I am telling you because I know no other way of persuading you that I am your husband’s friend.”
“Go on.”
“It was a political murder.”
“But you don’t think of yourself as a murderer.”
“More and more,” he said.
‘You did it for someone else?”
“Perhaps. Leonida Donsova…” Letsukov leaned forward in his chair. “I no longer know whether I am a Communist. Most certainly I am not one of those who dotes on Western ways. In any case I am convinced that Russia must find her own way through the dark woods.”
She smiled. “My husband reads Dante, too. Through his Inferno Joseph Stalin lights the way, holding high the glowing severed head of Kirov.”
“And yet your husband calls himself a Communist.”
“He is a Communist,” she insisted. “He believes that Communism expresses a deep truth about human nature. What confuses and depresses him is that it has always exalted the power of the lie.”
“More than Western capitalism?”
“Far, far more, Joseph says. Capitalist lies are of course more subtle, but the system still allows for their rejection. Our system depends for its existence on the lie. Mendacity is the foundation stone, far more than terror has ever been.”
“The Free Trade Union Movement then is a Communist movement?”
“Yes.”
“It is one I would like to join,” Letsukov said.
“But how can we trust you?”
“I am an official, a reasonably highly placed official. I travel throughout the Union. I have a certain freedom, like now, to investigate so-called anti-trade union movements. For your communications you need someone like me.”
“That may or may not be true, Comrade Letsukov. For all your past, you seem a decent man. But if the KGB were worried, as they are, about the growth of free trade unionism among the nationalities, then surely you are just the man they would send to just this house.”
“That is so.”