Even for Moscow in December the snow was falling heavily now. Great thick flakes, swirling softly, seemed to cut me off completely from the few other passersby. I was more than a fool to have succumbed to the temptations of that chance meeting in Paris, much more than a fool. But I remember so well, even to this day, the fear and loneliness of knowing what I was about to do. Of course, in the event, it had not been so difficult. He was a proud man. He had not cringed or begged. And a religious man, too, obviously. He had made the sign of the cross just before I shot him.
And now all depended on this well-dressed, pretty American blond woman! What feeling would she take back, I wondered, to her well-heated apartment in the foreign compound? Perhaps in the back of the taxi now she was deciding my fate. My parents’ fate.
To shoot a man in cold blood takes no more than seconds, hardly time for him to make the sign of the cross. But to ask afterward why you shot him is a question that might take a lifetime to answer. I killed Stepan X to keep my father out of prison. I killed Stepan X to save myself from that long slide down, to the human rubbish tips of Soviet society…
Why had I left my father to tell the story? What twisted pride had held me back from telling all? “No self-pity,” he had said. “Not now.”
Letsukov had been just thirty years old in the summer of 1976, a Party member, an employee of the central Trades Union staff already earning nearly 1,000 rubles a month and having access to a range of foreign goods through the organization shop. His apartment was small but self-contained. Through the Trade Union House he had a choice of vacation possibilities which ranged from winter boar hunting to summers in the Crimea.
He knew well to whom he owed this life. On his twenty-first birthday his mother had poured him a large glass of vodka and sat on the side of his bed. It was six-thirty in the morning. “You’ve finished your university with credit, Alexei,” she had said. “You have been admitted to the Komsomol and will be able to go on to be a party member. This is good. But I have things to tell you about the past. And I’m telling you so that you will never forget to whom you owe your future.”
And she had told him the story of his father, who was no more than the dimmest memory by then, a memory supported only by one single faded photograph.
Three years after his father was arrested, she told him, a message came back from the camp somewhere in the far northeast that he had died in a typhus epidemic. She had traveled again and again from the village to Moscow to ask for details. But the authorities were not prepared to recognize that conditions in any camp were such as to admit typhus. No information was available, they said.
She had sat before the official in the Central Committee waiting room. “I have to know whether my husband is alive or dead,” she had insisted.
The officer repeated politely that he regretted that no information was available from special camps such as that her husband was imprisoned in.
“Then I am not to know whether he is alive or dead?”
She had left the great waiting room where the distressed of the Soviet Union called for help and information about imprisoned husbands, brothers, sons.
As she started across the street, she was aware of a man at her side, the official she had just seen in the waiting room.
“The special camp you referred to,” he said, out of the corner of his mouth, “suffered a severe outbreak of typhus two months ago.” And he plunged across the road ahead of her.
In the village in the Moscow district lived a man named Pavel Rodontov, chairman of the local collective farm, Party member for twenty-five years, a good man without a wife. Nadya Letsukov knew that without blat, influence, access to authority, her son would descend into peasantry. Five months after the message came from Siberia she married Pavel Rodontov. In the absence of confirmation of her husband’s death, she had first instituted divorce in absentia proceedings.
As she had calculated, Rodontov quickly took the young Letsukov under his wing. He was transferred to a school in the local town. As he got older he was elected to the local Komsomol. A university course was available to him.
Pavel Rodontov was a fat, bumbling man who had never lost the pleasure and pride of taking Nadya Letsukov for his wife. For her part she considered him a good friend. Uninspiring but ever patient he could see problems and their solution only in terms of the Party. On the village and small township level on which he operated he was however a master in the use of blat.
So at the age of twenty-one, Alexei Letsukov had been told the facts of his life. By his father’s self-sacrifice and his stepfather’s influence he had gained the right to a future.
And for nearly ten years it seemed he had.
Then one late summer morning in 1976 he had entered the House of Unions on Marx Prospekt at 8:45 A.M. as usual, had climbed the great eighteenth-century stairway to the office he shared with three others, and had settled down at his desk to survey the day’s work. At this time he was second administrative secretary in charge of vacation arrangements for a group of ten major enterprises in the Moscow oblast. By this point in mid-September all vacation places were normally allocated and he was no longer bombarded with telephone calls or visits from enterprise managers trying to use their blat to get a pretty girl typist on holiday with them, or to extend their family number from five to ten in order to get a whole holiday apartment in Sochi to themselves. He frankly enjoyed the authority he wielded and the bottles of vodka and the Ukrainian hams that would naturally accompany any request for help.
Then that morning in 1976 the office door opened and an old man shuffled in. He was hatless and almost bald. His cheeks were sunken and of a strange gray color. He paused at the door only long enough to slip a pair of false teeth into his mouth.
Letsukov remembered afterward one of the typists calling, “Who are you, Uncle? What is it you want here?”
And the old man’s reply. “There was nobody at the door downstairs. So, forgive me, I came straight up.”
“And what is it you want then, Uncle?”
“I’m an old soldier,” the man said, pulling at his tattered Army greatcoat as if offering evidence. “Somebody told me I have an entitlement.”
“What sort of entitlement?” Letsukov’s immediate superior, the First Administrative Secretary, intervened sharply. Any unestablished claim to an entitlement was like a red rag to a bull for him.
“To a sanatorium perhaps. In Sochi?”
The First Secretary laughed contemptuously. “We deal with working enterprises. You’re in the wrong place.”
“I was in the right place, young man, when the Fascists invaded. And you be grateful for it,” the old man said sharply.
The First Secretary rose in his seat. “Don’t come the old soldier with me. Get out of here. You’re trespassing on State property.” His voice had risen to a shout.
The old man stood his ground, slowly examining each of the people in the office in turn.
“Letsukov,” the First Secretary snapped. “Check his papers. We can’t have just any riffraff wandering in here. It’s a breach of security.”
Letsukov gestured for the old man to cross to his desk. “Sit down please,” Letsukov said. “Let me see your papers.”
The old soldier sat on the chair in front of Letsukov’s desk. He began to fumble unhurriedly in his pockets.
The First Secretary, feeling he had adequately dealt with the intruder, collected up a file from his desk and left the room.
“Do you really think you have an entitlement?” Letsukov asked the old man.