“I’ve been waiting for you to come,” Letsukov’s father said to his son. “I want to hear all about the funeral. You saw the parade, Mrs. Yates?”
“I did,” Carole said. “I was lucky enough to have a seat in Red Square.”
“Red Square!” The old man was impressed.
He turned and rummaged quickly in a wooden chest. Straightening, he tucked a half-liter under his arm. Pinched in the fingers of one hand were three glasses.
“Now sit down, Mrs. Yates,” he made an attempt at an English pronunciation of her name. “This vodka is good. From the country. But not of course chilled as it should be. You, too, Alexei, sit down.” They sat round the plastic-topped table.
“You didn’t see the parade yourself?” Carole asked the old man.
“No… no. The cold… at my age.”
“My father has no Moscow residence permit,” Letsukov said. “On public occasions it would be too dangerous for him to go out.”
“I see.”
She found it impossible to guess how old he was as she sat listening to his son describe the parade. His gray hair was cropped short, his lined face was still hard and lean but the blue eyes were flecked with yellow, and set deep in shadow. He might have been sixty-five, even more.
“This could be a great time for us all, Alexei,” the old man said ruminatively.
“Let us hope,” Letsukov said.
Carole looked from one to another.
The old man laughed. “I see Mrs. Yates doesn’t know our story.”
“Tell her then,” Letsukov said.
“Just this much,” the old man emptied his glass of vodka and refilled it. “No self-pity, none. What place is there for self-pity in a man born as I was with opportunities so bright… so bright…”
Carole looked quickly at Letsukov, but his eyes were on his father.
The old man reached across the table and grasped her hand. “I was a young man in the great days of struggle, who could ask for more?”
“You were in the Army?” she asked hesitantly.
“The Army, yes. And before that even. We were building something for the rest of the world. For that great mass of victims we call mankind. No greater privilege.”
He released her hand and drank and refilled his glass of vodka.
“Of course, some things we never saw. Beria the snake. Stalin the man of incorruptible evil. But we can throw off that legacy, Mrs. Yates. My mother would have said we can still make a new New Jerusalem.”
“It would be wrong to pretend I understand,” Carole said.
“Of course, but how can we speak, other than elliptically, of these things so close to us? Where was I… let me see. Berlin, nineteen forty-five. My twenty-first birthday. An agitprop officer with a front-line unit. Such fighting we’d seen in the last three years, great armies shattered and re-formed, whole villages ablaze at night, our towns reduced to rubble and bodies everywhere — by the roadside, frozen into the ice of rivers, rolled in mud under the tracks of tanks, German bodies, Russian bodies, the price of victory and defeat. My wife had been with me. Seen and shared it all. Political officer in the same division.”
Letsukov turned toward Carole for the first time. “They both stayed on in the Army. In nineteen fifty-six they were in Hungary. Stationed just outside Budapest. I was eight years old at the time.”
The old man nodded confirmation. “Eight years old. And my Nadya, a young woman then, your age, Mrs. Yates.”
He paused, trying to recover the thread of his story. “Yes, we worked together in the political section. And then the rebellion in Budapest. I went in directly behind the leading Soviet tanks.” He shook his head. “Bad things were happening. This was not Fascist Berlin in nineteen forty-five. This was a fraternal socialist society. I felt bound to speak.”
He got up and walked the length of the tiny room. Standing near the bed, he smiled at Carole. “Headstrong young man. Didn’t think. My wife working with me, in the same unit. Too late I saw the possibility, the certainty that I would bring her down, too.”
“My father was denounced for anti-Soviet propaganda,” Letsukov said. “That’s to say he was told by a comrade that he was about to be denounced as soon as the emergency had passed.”
“Where was our new society?” the old man said, “our new Soviet morality?”
“Was your mother incriminated too?”
Letsukov shook his head. He was looking at the old man. “No. My father persuaded her to make the denunciation herself, before the emergency was over, as the only way of saving herself and me, too.”
“A child without a mother… in those days… the old man muttered.
“She was commended for her action,” Letsukov said. “My father was sentenced to twenty years in a labor camp.”
“No self-pity,” the old man repeated to himself. He seemed almost to have withdrawn from the story now.
“He was released in nineteen seventy-six,” Letsukov said.
“And your mother?”
“She lives not far from Moscow. In the country.”
Carole looked at the old man, but he had turned his face away.
“No self-pity,” he said. “Not at this time.”
Letsukov rose. “We must leave you to rest,” he said to his father.
The old man was looking down at the table. When he looked up he was smiling. He got up, leaning unsteadily on the edge of the table, and grasped Letsukov in a trembling embrace.
Letsukov and Carole descended the stone staircase and emerged into the courtyard. Crossing to a door beside the arched entrance, Letsukov took a thin wad of ruble notes from his pocket. He knelt and slipped them under the concierge’s door. Then he turned back to Carole. With his arm round her shoulders they walked through the softly falling snow.
“In nineteen eighty,” he said, “my father was living, as he lives now, as an illegal. That is to say, without permission to live in Moscow. But I had to have him close to me, so it was the only way.”
She wanted to ask about his mother but dare not.
“Last year the authorities began to step up the pressure on undesirables. They found my father. And soon discovered who was supporting him. But this time he wasn’t sent to prison. Instead a polite colonel of KGB called me to his office. He explained my father’s arrest was imminent. Yet, he said, this time it could be averted. He was an old man, this time he would never survive his sentence.
“I asked how it might be that he could remain free. They were looking for someone to send to Paris, the colonel said, an unknown face. I had just one hour to decide whether I would kill a man.”
She stopped and turned toward him. “My good God!”
“I’ve no choice but to lay these facts before you,” he said formally “You will have to decide what you will do with them.”
A green taxi sign approached through the snow. He hailed it and the cab stopped beside him. He opened the door and she climbed in beside the driver. He gave the address of the foreign compound and slammed the door closed.
Letsukov watched the taxi pull away leaving thin lines in the now heavily falling snow. Let us go directly to Letsukov’s typescript autobiography in that old blue-leather traveling trunk.
I felt deeply disturbed [Letsukov wrote of that night]. This woman represented a serious danger to myself and my family. If she decided to identify me to the American authorities, the Western press would be presented with the perfect anti-Soviet story, with all the trappings it so much reveled in. For me and my father there would be little to hope from the KGB. We would have become a severe embarrassment.