So in that summer of 1976 Letsukov’s father came back into his life. With the money he had received on discharge from the Gulag (one ruble a day for 7,300 days came to an impressive sum in 1976), Letsukov’s father was able to bribe his way into a single room which the janitor of the building recorded as a broom store. In those days this was the way an illegal lived.
In the years that followed Letsukov could see the changes in his father. That fierce determination which had led him to the Gulag and then enabled him to survive it, began to lose its sharp edge. Living alone, he began to drink. His life was spent looking forward to the visits of his son and the monthly meeting with Nadya. He was not unhappy but it was as if the immense efforts of his will of the past twenty years were now beginning to take their toll.
Yet those times, too, before Afghanistan and Poland and the Soviet oil shortages, had been the halcyon days of the Soviet Union. While the West struggled with its problems of rising oil costs and ever spiraling inflation, the Soviet Union seemed blissfully exempt. The Chairman of Gosplan, the State Planning Board, had sat at his desk in the great red and gray building on Marx Prospekt and announced with confidence that the Soviet Union suffered neither inflation, energy shortage, nor unemployment — thanks to the State Planning Board.
In those years Alexei Letsukov had received steady promotions. In 1979 he had been head-hunted for a new section of the Nationalities Ministry which would be dealing exclusively with his own specialty, Trade Unions. It was a significant promotion. It required him to travel throughout the Soviet Union and from time to time to deal on the highest level with the local Party and government. Among the people he came in touch with, many local politicians and bureaucrats noted his name. Everybody liked to keep in with a man with a bright future.
The future, of course, depended on it not being discovered that his father was an escaped exile, illegally in Moscow and visited and supported by Letsukov himself. Even in those years of the good life, that fact cost Letsukov many sleepless nights. Yet the years passed and nothing went amiss. The janitor at his father’s building proved completely reliable. Within a small area the old man could shop without danger. It was a sort of life.
It lasted for almost ten years. Then, like other Muscovites with connections with an illegal, Alexei Letsukov heard that the militia and KGB were conducting a sweep throughout the city. KGB men openly referred to a rat-hunt, unconscious of the irony of using an old Gestapo term.
Inevitably the day arrived when two militiamen stood in the tiny room, one watching Letsukov’s father while the other thumbed through his internal passport to the page stamped “Exiled.”
Letsukov had received a telephone call at the Nationalities Ministry that same day. A woman had asked him to come to KGB office 163 at the Lubyanka after work. Her tone was briskly informative rather than unfriendly. “We are holding a man here,” she said. “We have reason to believe he is your father.”
Alexei Letsukov had never been through the gates of the prison at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square before. He had given the room number to which he had been called to one of the gate-guards and after a telephone call to confirm his appointment had been escorted across the cobbled courtyard.
They entered the modern part of the building built by convict labor after World War II. Before Letsukov stretched a long corridor, pale green in color and illuminated by a series of white globes suspended from the ceiling on a chromium rod. Uncertain of Letsukov’s status, the escorting guard treated him with careful politeness, opening the door at the end of the corridor and half-bowing as he closed it behind him.
Letsukov found himself in a small room with a high ceiling. Painted the same pale green as the corridor, it was lit by the same white overhead globe. A scratched wooden desk and a cheap chair faced an older upright chair like doll’s house furniture alone on the polished parquet.
After five minutes the door opened and a young man in civilian clothes entered. He was brisk in his introduction of himself as Colonel Pleskov, brisk in his offer of a cigarette and his request for Letsukov to be seated.
“The janitor has confessed that your father has been living at the house for four years. Since his release, in fact. He also informs us that you visit him regularly.”
“Colonel, my father is dead…”
The Colonel waved his hand impatiently. “I don’t have to prove what I know. Kindly be silent until I have finished.” And equally briskly he had put the proposition. In return for Letsukov’s agreement to his proposal he would retain his post in the Ministry of Nationalities, his father would continue to live, as an illegal, certainly, but at least in Moscow rather than in a camp in the northeast. In the nature of the assignment, nobody outside these offices would know any more than they know now. The record would be filed “Maximum Security.”
One hour to decide.
In that pale-green painted office in the Lubyanka it had seemed easier to say yes. The weapon training and briefing had passed in a haze of vodka. Only on the way to Sheremetyevo Airport did Letsukov begin to ask himself who he was doing this for. It was a question that would not leave him for the rest of his life.
“What did you do tonight?” Tom Yates said as he came out of the shower.
She was sitting up in bed reading a magazine. “Nothing much,” she said. “Just talked.”
“With Nancy?”
“Who else?” she said. “Howard never has a lot to say.”
He sat on the edge of the bed. “Where were you tonight, Carole?”
She continued to flick over the pages of the magazine. “You know where I was. Why do you ask?”
He lifted the magazine from her hands and placed it on the bed beside her. “Was it anyone I know?” he asked.
She looked at his face, flushed red from the hot shower. What point was there in lying?
“No,” she said. “No one you know.”
“A Russian, then?”
She hesitated. “Don’t make something of it, Tom. It was just a drink. We took a drink in a restaurant he knew. A couple of cups of lousy coffee and talked.”
“Russians and Americans don’t just talk in Moscow.”
“We talked about the funeral parade for Christ’s sake. About my having a Russian mother. About his family. In a couple of hours, what else is going to happen?”
He shrugged.
“Come on, Tom.”
“Okay, Carole. He was just a nice-looking guy with an interesting family story.” He reached over and turned off his light. Into the half-darkness he said, “Will you tell me if you plan to meet him again?”
“I don’t.” She stretched a hand to his unresponsive shoulder.
Chapter Seventeen
In the wilderness winter reigns. As the year ends, blizzards sweep across the land in a thousand-mile-long wall of swirling snow, an impenetrable white night.
And as the year progresses and the blizzards fade, this land becomes the frost’s dominion. On still, brilliant nights a cold of forty, fifty, sixty degrees below zero numbs the endless snowscapes, freezing great rivers and the tears that start from men’s eyes. The birch bark cracks; the hare runs its loops toward the waiting wolf; and the lights of man twinkle feebly, always in the distance.