Behind him the wings whirred. In swift zigzag flight the snipe passed the clump of alders. He fired, wide again, then heard Bukansky or the American Hal Bashford’s shot from beyond the peat bank.
Ruefully he looked down at his empty hunting bag. Bukansky, huge as a bear, appeared over the bank, black mud to his thighs. His dog, Bob, held the snipe.
“You Germans,” Bukansky roared, slithering down the bank with Hal Bashford behind. “You didn’t miss when you had a Russian in your sights!”
The three men splashed through shallow streams toward the crumbling reed cutter’s hut where the loaders had set up lunch.
“Watch your footing,” Bukansky warned. “One rotten board and you go straight down into the water.”
It was a single-room shack with a split and rickety table in the middle, but it was piled with bottles of vodka, fruit, cheese and bread. A huge soup bowl steamed in the middle of the table and the three men ladled soup into pottery bowls while the two peasants stood by attentively.
“Help yourselves,” Bukansky waved an arm at the peasants. “Here…” He ladled out a bowl of soup and handed it to one of them, “you’ve got your feet as wet as ours. Give that to Vanya. Take this one. How’s that fish coming on, Vanya?” he shouted to the peasant turning the spit over the fire. He took his own bowl of soup across to examine the salmon roasting on the spit and turned back to pour vodka into five glasses.
“That young secretary of yours, Igor,” Hal Bashford said. “She likes Western clothes.”
“She does.”
“Do you think it’d be a good idea if I brought her back something from New York next month?”
“A good idea, brother. But it won’t get you what you want. She’s spoken for.”
The two foreigners laughed. “Now listen, friends,” Bukansky said, “all this talk of sport and women is good enough in its place. But I have more important things to discuss with you publishing gentlemen.”
“Kuletsyn’s novel, To Be Preserved Forever,” Bashford said. “I’ve already told you I agree.”
“Our translation will be completed this month,” the German said. “But from what I’ve already read, there’s no doubt in my mind either.”
“Speed, speed is what counts now,” Bukansky said urgently. “My ragged-arsed genius sends me weekly messages demanding to know what I’m doing. So?”
“I’ve already organized the serialization you want in the States and Britain. It could be serialized in December and published in the New Year,” Bashford said.
“In Germany we’ll be less than a month behind you.”
Bukansky lifted his vodka glass. “You gentlemen will earn a fortune.”
“And you?” Bashford said.
“And I will publish a great Russian novel. Albeit by proxy.”
Chapter Nine
As the cold returned sharply to western Russia that year it was announced to a stunned Leningrad that the annual November 7th parade to celebrate the October Revolution would not take place. A brief line in Leningrad Pravda mentioned the absence of army units on important maneuvers in the German Democratic Republic. Perhaps in the West only an announcement that Christmas would not be celebrated that year would produce an equivalent sense of shock and disbelief.
So totally exceptional a cancellation in the birthplace of the Revolution immediately prompted the State Department in Washington to ask that a senior official from the Moscow Embassy be sent to Leningrad to evaluate the position. It was assumed that the recent rash of small strikes and demonstrations by students had forced the authorities to cancel the parade. It normally attracted, after Moscow’s own parade, more tourists than any other event in the Soviet year.
Then on the day the cancellation was announced, a message from the imprisoned Joseph Densky to the workers of Leningrad began to circulate. It called on all workers, united in bitterness, to stage a massive march through the city on the night of November 7th.
Tom Foster Yates, arriving from the Moscow Embassy with his wife, Carole, on the morning of the cancelled parade, had every reason to feel pleased with himself. In his early forties, his previously overthin frame had filled out pleasingly and his dark hair was now flecked with gray at the temples. Carole, of course, had always attracted attention, especially the attention of men. For a moment, Tom Yates’ feeling of well-being receded as the memory of that incident in Paris last spring thrust itself into his mind. He pushed it aside resolutely. It had in any case made no difference to his expected promotion to the Moscow Embassy. His present mission indicated strongly the confidence his ambassador placed in him.
For Carole Yates the fact that she was in Leningrad was in itself a source of satisfaction. In two months she had seen most of what she wanted to see in Moscow; Leningrad, by all accounts, would offer a pleasant contrast to the brute-modern skyscrapers that increasingly dominated the capital.
I think we were already crossing the concourse [Carole wrote] when it happened. I could never have imagined before the terrifying violence of an explosion like that. Talons of black-red flame reached out toward us and a rush of hot air threw me to the ground. Perhaps I was deafened for a few moments or perhaps in their terror the people in the concourse were themselves struck dumb. Then suddenly everyone seemed to scream at once. Men howled in anguish, women shrieked their panic as they dragged themselves on broken limbs away from the point of the explosion. Glass from the roof was clattering down in great sheets; sections of splintered timber and whole panels of plastic arced slowly down on us.
In the screaming confusion I looked round for Tom. He was about five yards away, on his feet, but with a look of open-mouthed bewilderment on his face. A child of about five, his hair singed black, his clothes in tatters, collided with Tom’s legs, and ran on past him. I’m not sure that Tom even noticed.
The singing in my ears from the explosion suddenly stopped. I realized I was sitting among blood and glass, gaping like Tom, at the pain and horror all around me.
I got to my feet. My head ached unbearably. Tom suddenly was at my side.
“Are you all right, Carole?” He seemed to be shouting.
I nodded dumbly.
“Then let’s get out of here,” he said savagely. “It was a bomb. There could be another.”
I allowed him to drag me away, past the burned bodies, past men and women sobbing with their arms round each other, past even the children running in terror-stricken circles…
By midday all Leningrad knew of the incident. Word passed around that it was a student, himself killed when the bomb exploded prematurely. It was said that the airport had been chosen because it was now the main gateway into Leningrad for all those immigrant workers from the Central Asian Republics of the U.S.S.R. It was a point which escaped Western commentators, but it had not escaped students like Zoya Densky. To her the Leningrad airport atrocity marked the resurfacing of an old but ugly form of purely Russian nationalism.
No one in that uncertain summer [Zoya recounts] was more divided than the Leningrad student body, among whom in spirit I still counted myself. Night after night political meetings were held all over the University campus. Student rooms meant for two or three would have thirty crushed in, standing against the walls or squatting on the floor. It was chaos.
On one side there were the people like myself (my father’s influence, I suppose) who believed that the Soviet Union had become one vast bureaucracy, a pork barrel for any member of the Party, an easy ride if you were the son or daughter of a General or Collective Farm Chairman or toe-the-line writer or musician. We all knew how well they lived, the vlasti. After all, there were plenty of their offspring at the University in their Western jeans, cooking chicken and fillet steaks in their rooms every night. We used to call them the golden boys, although that normally means a homosexual to Russians.