Already the snow carried a thin crust of ice which crunched underfoot as she followed the path up toward the cabin. So many times in the recent years of her rise to power she had wondered whether her mother refused to come to Moscow deliberately. Or whether she stayed on in her timber izba in the pine woods because she knew that even after almost three-quarters of a century her St. Petersburg society bearing and her rich aristo accent could only do harm to her daughter’s progress. Approaching ninety now, she still stood unbent at the izba door as Natalya approached.
Inside it was stiflingly hot. On the glowing stove the samovar bubbled. The two women sat smiling at each other across the rough three-legged table.
“Why do you do it, Natasha?” her mother said. “I ask you not to send a ham and you sent two. I tell you I have forgotten the taste of caviar and you send a kilo. My little daughter, this is not wise, I should not be the best-fed woman in Trevchina.”
“You’re not,” Natalya said. “Whatever I have sent you, I arrange tenfold for the village chairman. For distribution, I tell him. What he does with it is up to him.”
“Those are not the politics of your father.”
“No.”
“Perhaps that’s why he was known as the lunatic baron.”
“Perhaps,” Natalya said.
The two women drank tea and talked about the village; who had died, who had given birth, last year’s crop failure, the prediction of a savage winter, the alders having lost their leaves before the hawthorn this summer.
At last the old woman said, “Now that the funeral is over, who will rule us in his place?”
“Who knows?” Roginova murmured.
“Will it be my little Natashenka?”
“Who knows.”
“Will it?” the old lady said sharply.
“Either myself or Semyon Trofimovich.”
“Then it must be you.”
“All ambition for myself apart, I believe it must be. I am the only one of us in Moscow who has a vision of the future.”
“Our vision still?” the old lady asked.
“Yes.”
“A lunatic vision,” the old lady said happily.
Dinner that New Year’s Eve at the Bennermans was for eight. Apart from the hosts, Jack and Harriet Bennerman themselves, the guests included the Larsnes from the Swedish embassy and Skip and Betty Rider from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Carole Yates and David Butler made up the eight.
The Bennermans were known for some of the most luxurious dinner parties in a town where all foreigners lived at near aristocratic level. Harriet was rich. Her stepfather, an ancient Midwest construction millionaire who doted on her, had died last year leaving her his fortune. The Bennerman marriage was still reeling under the blow. Jack Bennerman, on $29,000 a year from the government, urged restraint. Harriet, with a monthly income greater than her husband made per year, saw no reason to restrict her orders from the specialist shops in Helsinki that shipped goods to Moscow-based foreigners. Her weekly order list would include fine brandies and rare years of port and claret. She was proud of keeping what David Butler called an excellent table.
The Riders were the center of interest. They had recently returned to Moscow from a cultural visit to Azerbaijan, which happened to coincide with the funeral.
“Frankly, with the funeral coming up in a few days we’d expected the visit to be canceled,” Rider said, “but you know how these things slip through the Soviet bureaucracy.”
Jack Bennerman scribbled a note and passed it to Rider. It read: “What about Boris?”
Skip Rider shrugged his indifference. “Boris” was the common term for the listening devices installed in all apartments in the foreigners’ compounds.
Bennerman got up from the table and switched on a small radio which was perched precariously on a high pile of books. His belief was that the device in this room was located in an ornate wall-light fixture, but everybody present was aware that he may well be wrong.
“Okay,” he nodded to Rider. “Boris can relax with some music for a while.”
“We arrived in Baku three days before the funeral… great weather, well above freezing and the sun out for hours at a stretch…” Rider began.
“I’d hoped to buy some of the local shawls and bedcovers they make down there,” his wife said, “but we were plunged immediately into the usual round of visits.”
Skip Rider grimaced. “You know the sort of thing. This is the Akhundov Library. It houses three million books. Before the arrival of Soviet power illiteracy was ninety-five percent and books were the preserve of the foreign oil barons and their local lackeys. Now illiteracy is unknown and so on and so on… And where afterward? To the old city? No, to the skyscraper apartment blocks on Nizami Street, as if anyone wanted to marvel at tower blocks.”
“But, dear boy,” David Butler said. “Those tower blocks are all of twenty years old, and haven’t yet fallen down. Clearly you can’t see Soviet achievement when it stares you in the face.”
Rider smiled. “I should have realized. But the restrictions of our bourgeois world view made those first two days just about the most tedious in our lives.”
Betty Rider nodded emphatic agreement.
“By this time,” Rider went on, “the boyars had woken up to the fact that there would be foreigners about for the local funeral parade and it became pretty clear that they had no wish for us to be around. So with that delicate touch the Soviets are noted for, they inform us they have arranged a visit to Bilgya for the next day. Now I have to tell you that Bilgya is one thing only, a none too pretty bathing beach. And though this isn’t Moscow weather, we’re still only a few degrees above freezing for Christ’s sake. So we protest.”
“And how.” Betty Rider confirmed.
“So that night our guide, Anatoly, comes in, beaming relief. Protest accepted, he says, a mistake had been made. So we get to see the funeral? Betty asks him. No, he says, we are going to Kobystan to see the unique cliff-face carvings there.”
“There was nothing we could do about it,” Betty said. “The vlasti had made up their minds. No foreigners were to get to watch that funeral parade. And Anatoly just couldn’t be shaken on the point. So at six the next morning we get into the car and set off for our fifty-mile drive to Kobystan.”
“But we didn’t get very far,” her husband came in. “We’re driving along the Moskovski Prospekt when the steering goes crazy and the driver announces we’ve got a flat. Anatoly is troubled, but not too troubled until a second or two later the driver announces someone has stolen the spare. Then Anatoly loses his head and starts yelling at the Azerbaijani driver. Some very nasty little racist tidbits he comes up with, and before we know it the crowds on the sidewalk are all gathered round us and a young student type, obviously Azerbaijani himself, has got Anatoly by the scruff of the neck and is beating six bells out of him.”
“Did the crowd think you were Russian, too?” Carole asked.
“Oh no,” Rider said. “The driver took care of that. But I tell you, I’ve never seen things get out of hand that fast. Within minutes the car was on its side, the wheels were being stripped off. Two mili-men in uniform who tried to control things were getting punched out against the wall. By the time we got clear the car was on fire and the militia sirens were screaming in toward the Prospekt.”
“So you were free to enjoy the funeral?” Bennerman said.
“Exactly. And what a funeral it turned out to be…”
“The funeral of Soviet hopes in Azerbaijan,” Betty Rider said. “We hung around keeping away from the hotel and the Intourist Office while the crowds got thicker and thicker on the Lenin Prospekt, which is the main drag there. And I guess about noon the whole thing started. It was a mini May Day Parade on Red Square here in Moscow. A quarter of the flags and banners. A podium for the local boyars erected outside Subunchinsky station; an empty coffin, you know, all slightly provincial and a bit of joke. Until the bands start playing and the first regiment gets its marching orders.”