The guests of the Marshals of the Soviet Union made a half-circle round the two men. The sound of clapping was like the beating of the wings of doves rising in the air.
They sat in front of the stove in his apartment off the Arbat. In the two evenings he had brought her here since their meeting at the airport she had come to feel more for the tiny kitchen and the cramped space of the one living room than for her own spacious apartment in the foreigners’ compound. The feeling was just another sign to Carole that the danger she had spoken of in Gorky Park was already upon her. Although Letsukov had not so much as kissed her, every small physical contact between them had become charged with anticipation.
It was clear to her that Letsukov had decided that she must make the first move. He seemed content for them to sprawl on the bed together (there was no room for a sofa or armchairs in the living room) and talk and listen to music. They were, of course, both waiting until the memory faded of their anonymous coupling in Paris. And both knew that it was for Carole to give the sign.
Two nights before the new year as they sat after dinner with glasses of the whisky Carole had brought, Letsukov had got up and gone to the small bureau in the corner of the room. Opening the drawer he took out a small package wrapped in brown paper and handed it to her.
She was sitting on the side of the bed. “What is it, Alex?”
“A New Year’s present.”
She lay the brown package in her lap. She knew he was ready to talk about Paris.
He leaned his back against the wall. “When I returned to Moscow,” he said, “I could barely remember the name of the American woman I had slept with that night. Even now I remember nothing of being in bed with you. Nothing important. But I had sacrificed the life of an unknown man. I was required to do it by a KGB officer. But this officer served the same State I served.”
He crossed the room and sat down next to her. “You can have no idea of how easy it is for us to avoid thinking. For us, Russians, it’s the same thing as avoiding madness. We’ve somehow learned to live both with our pride in Soviet achievements and the daily evidence of Soviet failure. For many years I was no different from any other Russian. The two-headed eagle was the symbol of the Czars. But that ability to look both ways at once was even more necessary for Soviet man. I’m not condemning it. I’m not defending it. It’s the way I was, too.”
She took his hand. “Until Paris.”
“No. I want you to know the truth, Carole. Perhaps even after I arrived back in Moscow I could still have played the Soviet game. I knew no other. The shame I feel is not just for what I did in Paris. The real shame I feel is because I know that I could have still, even then, have pushed that from my mind.”
Tears had filled her eyes. He put his arm around her and pulled her close to him. For a moment they sat with their heads touching.
“Last summer,” he said, “I had to go to Leningrad to interrogate a prisoner. A man with one head, not two, looking left and right at the same time. I’ve not got far yet. But I know now that there is a road for me.” He paused. “I wanted to tell you that before you opened your present.”
She turned in the crook of his arm and reached up a hand to his face. Her long fingers stroked the line of his mouth. “Shall I open the present now?”
“Open it now.”
She sat round to face the stove and unwrapped the brown paper. Inside was a star-shaped brooch, enameled white and royal blue within its gold mounting.
“I saw my mother yesterday,” he said, “I told her about you.”
Carole’s eyes were still on the brooch. “What did she say?”
“She said, as all mothers do, be careful. And she gave me my grandmother’s brooch to give to you.”
She laid the brooch aside and reached out for him. With their arms round each other they fell back on the bed.
When he kissed her she had no memory of his kisses in Paris. When her hands reached inside his jeans she had no memory of the warm contours hardening in the palm of her hand. When he entered her, it was for both of them, as if for the first time.
Along the banks of the frozen Vega River the branches of the alders were heavy with rime. Sedge and rushes rising spikily from the ice crunched underfoot. A pair of ducks flew low, their necks outstretched, wings beating furiously.
Member of the Politburo, Deputy Prime Minister, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federated Republic, Natalya Roginova, stood alone by the riverside. Her eyes followed the line of the stone packbridge and the road, barely discernible under the snowdrifts, to the cluster of wooden houses on the hill. The twin onion domes of the church gleamed blue and gold in the last rays of the afternoon sun. She knew every wooden izba in the village, every inch of unpaved road, every man, woman and child who worked the farm there. She knew even of the visiting priest and of the secret reconsecration of the church last year.
It was her village. Fifty-four years ago she had been born there in the stable block of the great ruined mansion which had once been the center of her father’s estate. As the daughter of an aristocrat she could hardly have been expected to have thrived in those hard years, but her father had been no ordinary aristocrat. Long before the October Revolution he had proclaimed his belief that the land of the Russians should be for Russians. He had distributed his lands to the peasants in the villages he owned. He had moved with his young wife into the stable block of the mansion and with his own hand burned down the great house one bright night in the summer of 1910. His brothers and uncles had denounced him as a lunatic when he had hired himself as a laborer to one of his own peasants. Yet his young wife, Natalya’s mother, had refused to leave the lunatic. She, too, the family said, was touched with madness. The Czar’s police took an interest in the case. For seven years the young couple were exiled to Siberia. In 1917 they returned in triumph, unique almost in those days, as aristocrats welcomed back by the local Party Committee.
In the starving, war-torn twenties the lunatic rose to be General Secretary of the oblast. Natalya was born in 1932, five days after her father was executed for anti-Party activities. Reaching her early twenties, a deprived, second-rate citizen of the Union, a worker on the local collective, Natalya Roginova, one day in 1953, was informed that her father was to be rehabilitated. Joseph Stalin had died earlier in the year. The new men were to make amends. From a name unmentionable in the village, except in whispers, Roginova’s father was accorded a small stone monument and his wife and daughter the honors and privileges of a hero of the Revolution.
She seized her chance with both hands. The local Party, in ideological disarray after Stalin’s fall from grace, welcomed her as first a member, then an activist, then as First Secretary. In her thirties she was a tall, passingly attractive girl who used her talents, her sex and her utter ruthlessness on occasion, in relentless pursuit of advancement.
As a woman in that land of equal rights, nobody took her seriously. They believed that an insurmountable natural barrier existed. Time and time again, with one Party appointment after another, Natalya Roginova proved them wrong.
She turned now from the riverbank. She had left her carload of personal guards up on the road outside the village. They were strictly forbidden to show themselves in the vodka-house. She liked to preserve her reputation as one who could be among the people as her father had been, safe in their affections. And in truth she was.
Through the whitened pines smoke rose from the chimney of a log cabin and in the twilight afternoon a paraffin lamp gleamed at the single window.