“You’re sure I didn’t?”
“Yes. By now I would have known.”
She drank her vodka and placed the glass back on the scarred wooden table.
“Do you have friends?” she asked him.
“Not many.”
“Perhaps Soviet life doesn’t encourage friendships.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“What are we, Alex? Not really friends. Certainly not lovers.”
“No.”
“So why did you even bother to approach me at the airport? I hadn’t seen you. You could have walked away.”
“Yes,” he smiled. “But I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Why lie to you of all people?” he said, suddenly cheerful. “I didn’t walk away because the moment I saw you I wanted to sleep with you again.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment, “that was insulting. I assumed too much.”
“Yes.”
“What I said was nevertheless true.”
She shrugged.
“You want something from me,” he said suddenly, “I can feel it, but I can’t guess what it is.”
“I want to know how you felt after Paris.”
“About you?”
“About what you did there.”
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
He paused. “Because it goes beyond shame, Carole.”
They left the kvas bar and took a taxi to Gorky Park. The pathways, hosed down with water by the city authorities, are converted by the winter cold to long skating alleys.
“Would you like to try?” he asked her, looking at the couples skating hand in hand through the avenues of frosted branches.
They hired skates and set off toward the Krimsky Val. After a few moments he took her hand. He skated with slow, easy movements matching his pace to hers, supporting her whenever she seemed about to lose her balance.
The cold wind brushed her face, but the effort of skating warmed her. A pale sun was setting somewhere behind the Kremlin, lights flickered in the branches of the trees and cast long shadows across the snow on either side of the frozen pathways. Couples with hands or arms entwined floated by them, their skates hissing gently over the ice. Despite the change of season she found it easier to imagine that they were again in Paris together, skating through a snow-covered Bois de Boulogne.
It was past dark when they handed in their skates. Standing beside the wooden hiring hut, they watched for a few moments the figures floating silently through the avenues of treetop lights.
“I would like to see you again, Carole,” he said slowly. “But I don’t need to be reminded this isn’t just Paris all over again.”
“No, it’s not just Paris all over again.”
They began to walk arm in arm toward the exit from the park.
“When we first met in Paris,” she said, “I thought I still loved my husband. I don’t any longer. It means I’m vulnerable, Alex. What I’m saying is that even now I know how dangerous it would be for me to meet you again.” She stopped walking and turned to face him. “I know how ridiculous I must seem, anticipating this sort of danger.”
“This sort of danger being that we fall in love?” he said.
“That I fall in love,” she smiled.
“Risk it,” he said. “I will.”
“Yes,” she said. “Me too.”
Chapter Nineteen
In the last days of December, General Semyon Kuba was invited to the Soviet Marshals’ dacha at Klim in circumstances of some secrecy. Attending the Bolshoi program of Russian Dance that evening, he had left in the middle of the last act.
Officers of his own KGB had cordoned off a small area behind the theater and here Kuba had changed from his limousine into an altogether less impressive vehicle, a gray Rumanian Fiat.
At the Marshals’ Club Kuba was welcomed by old Marshal Kolotkin. There were no young admirals of the Soviet Navy nor were there any of the younger Air Force Marshals present in the assembly room. There were, however, among the uniformed officers, a number of civilians whom Kuba immediately recognized. Most prominent among them was the burly shape of V.S. Bukin, the Petroleum Minister. Beside him, the rumpled face of Nikolai Baibakov, Chairman of the State Planning Committee. There were others, too, men from the Party apparatus and some of the older members of the Soviet Academy.
Kuba knew, without being told, that one strand held together all these men of power in the Soviet system. They believed that since the death of Stalin the Soviet Union had lost its way. Above all they blamed Nikita Khrushchev. They blamed him first and foremost for his speech to the 20th Party Congress denouncing the crimes of the man who had led them since the death of Lenin. They blamed Khrushchev for his wild boasts and for his peasant fooling before the world at the United Nations in New York.
There were men among the group assembled to meet Kuba who could barely remember the Stalin days. There were older men who had been deeply involved in all the leader had done. But there was no division of feeling between them. They believed the Soviet Union must be led back on the right track. They believed in a strong leader. They wanted to believe in Semyon Trofimovich Kuba.
Champagne was served by the Marshals themselves. When every glass was filled, old Marshal Kolotkin, senior surviving soldier of the Patriotic War, Hero of the Soviet Union, raised his glass to Semyon Kuba. His old eyes, yellow and tear-filled, squinted across the room. He seemed to be having difficulty with his speech. His jowls flapped noiselessly.
“Comrades,” he said in a voice heavy with emotion. “Salute with me this man. And…” He raised a hand to stop them. “And, in that salutation, honor the person of another man, dishonored in our times.”
They drank and responded enthusiastically. Again Kolotkin gestured for silence.
“I am eighty-nine years old,” he said. “But I care as deeply today about our glorious Soviet power as I did when I was a young man at the barricades. In those days we Bolsheviks placed our Soviet power in the hands of an almost equally young man. This was a responsibility known to none before him. A sixth of the earth’s surface, a hundred and a half million people. He did not flinch. The leader I speak of took the Czar’s Russia by the scruff of its neck and made of it in twenty years the mightiest power on earth. There are two sides of a gold piece, fear and respect. Our leader did not flinch.
“I will not talk in the same breath of the leader who followed him. But I am forced to talk of the events of three days ago. Comrades, a number of senior officers of the Soviet Army were addressed in the strangest conditions. Some might say in conditions chosen deliberately to exclude certain of the most senior officers present this evening.
“Comrades, it was put to them that Soviet power was in a decline. Comrades, it was put to them that adjustments would have to be made. Comrades, it was put to them that the vision of our youth was no more.”
The old Marshal swayed in anger. His face reddened.
“Comrades, it was put to them that the achievements of J.V. Stalin had no place in our Soviet future,” he thundered.
Overcome with emotion now, Kolotkin took the arm of one of the younger technocrats and waved for his glass to be refilled. He was breathing heavily and, all in the room could see, unlikely to be able to finish his speech. He raised his glass again. “There is another future…” He was staring at Kuba, not three paces in front of him. “Lead us into that other future, Semyon Trofimovich. Lead us along that path which the father of the Soviet Union trod.”
The old man staggered forward and clasped Kuba, spilling champagne down the back of his jacket.