Felperin left us with a smile for Kuletsyn and rejoined his group of friends.
I turned back to my author. “What can be published, Valentin Sergeivich, is what is determined on high.”
“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently, “but we must break through these false constraints.”
“Neither Dr. Felperin nor myself have the power, or perhaps the courage, to ensure that the truth is accurately represented.”
He sat there glowering at me. “So, Igor Alexandrovich, you refuse to publish my book.”
“I cannot publish your book. Not in Russia.”
He got up slowly, I remember, and thanked me. I told him again that I thought the book a masterpiece. He nodded and looked around as if to say good-bye to this life he had known only in these brief minutes.
“I can never change the book, Igor Alexandrovich,” he said.
“I would have wept if you’d agreed,” I told him. “But I had to show you clearly what you are missing.”
“It will be no loss,” Kuletsyn said. He stretched out his hand to me. “Thank you, Igor Alexandrovich,” he said, “for showing me all this,” he swept his tattered sleeve around to encompass the whole room. “I shall go underground. I shall immediately start arrangements for a samizdat circulation of my book.”
I walked with him to the door. “I have already made arrangements to publish your novel in the West,” I said. “To be well known, famous even, there is your only protection against the KGB.”
“It is a Russian book,” he said, “written for Russians to read.”
“They’ll read it, Valentin Sergeivich,” I said. “It’ll be passed from hand to hand in battered, ill-typed samizdat, it’ll be copied and pored over in secret. Ten million Russians will read it. Twenty million. But you will be safe. It will be already published in the West.”
He shrugged his indifference.
“Allow me, at least, to do this for you, and for my conscience.”
For a moment he paused. “You have my authority,” he said finally.
I walked back to the clubroom. There was, of course, one other possibility that I had not mentioned to my shabbily dressed genius. And that was that our new leaders, whoever they were to be, would welcome Kuletsyn’s novel as a denunciation of the past, as part of a new, more liberal course they determined to take toward a freer Russia. A possibility I had not even mentioned to Valentin Kuletsyn for the simple reason that it was too remote to waste my breath on.
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” the Englishman Herrick had sung. For myself and the others in the Pravda dacha that night, there was no knowing what the next day or next week might bring. Any of us could be replaced without notice, flung back into the thick ooze of Soviet society, deprived of all that made tolerable the daily postures, half-truths and bare-faced lies.
That night, while sporadic fires twinkled and leapt in the Moscow suburbs a few miles away, news had reached some of the other nearby dachas that this was the place to be. Members of my own Writers’ Union came in a group of about twenty hacks. The Izvestia people brought a dozen secretaries with them. There were even a few senior Army officers with a bunch of pretty, uniformed girl lieutenants.
I said a party, but it rapidly became an orgy. Crates of Starka were dragged in from the ice-compound in the garden. The kitchens brought up roasted suckling pigs and great pots of jugged hare. The record player blasted Western rock music across the room. By midnight everybody was dancing, shouting, arguing, laughing. Men and girls rolled in the corners of the room. Stripped down to their underclothes and polished boots the pretty lieutenants were forced, not against their will, to dance on the bar top. Vodka bottles were split and gurgled spirit across the floor. Men laughed and sputtered and gorged on suckling pig.
The whole night through we sang and danced and drank. And beyond the windows of our world, across the white snowscapes, the distant fires of Moscow glowed like unheeded beacons, warning of an uncertain future…
THE LEGACY
Chapter Sixteen
At the bridge she got out and paid off the cab. A flight of stone steps descended toward the embankment walk. Her high heels clicking, she descended the steps and stood in the darkness below. Pools of light were thrown every 50 yards or so by the street lamps mounted on top of the granite balustrade. It was no longer snowing and the wind had dropped. Below her the river flowed slowly past, dark and glistening.
She knew she had been a fool. In the excitement of getting ready in the apartment in the Foreign Compound, in the even greater excitement of the casually delivered lie to her husband about her plans to visit with a girl friend that evening, she had not thought of the danger she might be in.
But in the darkness of the embankment and with the slow, sinister flow of the Moskva waters below her, she knew she was taking an enormous risk. One scurrying rush from the darkness around her and she could be hurled over the embankment and into those freezing waters below. And there would be reason to do it if Letsukov had killed the Ukrainian Stepan X. Because if he had killed the Ukrainian she was the only Westerner who could identify him, the only one who could pin the guilt for the assassination on the KGB.
What a fool she’d been to come here! Across the river the lights of the Rossiya Hotel glittered warmth and the security of other foreigners. She turned quickly away from the river and headed for the stone steps leading up to the bridge. There was a light there at the top. Two uniformed militiamen paused underneath it. She had never believed she would see those uniforms as a symbol of safety but now she hurried toward the steps. A man approaching from across the bridge was stopped for his papers by the two policemen. The lamplight fell on his bare head. Unusual for a Muscovite not to be wearing a hat or fur cap in this temperature. She reached the stone steps. She could see Letsukov clearly now handing his identity papers to the militiamen. She still had a choice. If she hurried up the steps she would reach the level of the brightly lit bridge before Letsukov was released. Or she could wait where she was, on the granite steps, clutching the cast iron rail embossed with the double-headed eagle of the past, here in the half-darkness.
Within a few moments she saw him receive back his papers and turn away from under the light. Footsteps now, the sharp ring of leather on granite. Then he appeared at the bend of the stairway, hesitated, and came down into the darkness.
It was something in the quality of the man that he offered no word of greeting. Instead he took her arm and led her back down onto the level of the embankment. No apology for being late, no conventional doubt that she would in fact come at all.
But it was almost a whole year ago, she reminded herself. In Paris, not here in Moscow. And in any case it had been one short night, nothing more.
“In this weather,” she said, “I get a terrible headache without a hat.”
He nodded. “I don’t.”
They passed under a light, walking slowly. Again it was snowing, fat flakes now, floating through the lamplight. A barge, a bright neon-red star at its bow, churned along the river. Lights shone from its net-curtained cabin windows. A dog raced back and forth along the deck barking furiously.
“As I confessed to you,” Letsukov said without preamble, “I was not in Paris as an agronomist. I was there as an investigator for the Ministry of Nationalities.”