I had always half-believed that David was a member of the Intelligence section in the British Embassy, although his official title was cultural attaché. When I asked him pointedly if his security people knew he came to Mother Hubbard’s, he raised his hands in horror. “Darling,” he said, “I’d be shot at dawn if they knew I frequented places like this!”
But I still didn’t entirely believe him.
Mother Hubbard had left us to greet other guests. I was still busy looking around at my first glimpse of gays with 50- inch chests and broad Slavic features.
“Tell me about Alex Letsukov,” David Butler said.
I had drunk Scotch and wine and cognac at Harriet Bennerman’s. I’d drunk vodka with Mother Hubbard. Perhaps if I’d been sober I would have said nothing, or little. As it was, when David Butler asked, I told him.
He sat for a long time without speaking. I found I more and more admired this man. “What have you told your husband?” he asked after another sip of vodka.
“He knows I met someone from Nationalities after the party they gave. He doesn’t know it was the man I met in Paris in the spring.”
“Have you faced the fact that he’s probably KGB?”
“I don’t have to face the fact,” I said dishonestly. “I use him for sex.”
“Don’t be a silly bitch,” Butler said. He wasn’t smiling now. “If he’s KGB, only one side of this relationship is being used, you.”
“I have an instinct about this man,” I said.
“Infallible.” He signaled for more vodka.
“You think I’m wrong?”
“How could I pretend to know. The KGB use sex as they use psychiatry and beatings and blackmail. You have to be an eighteen-year-old bourgeois Marxist to believe anything else.”
“And his father? He was real enough.”
“I agree the mise-en-scène sounds a little too subtle for the Bureau. But it’s not inconceivable that they’ve at last recruited one creative spirit.”
“You’re angry.”
“I think your husband’s a nice man. I think you’re frigging around with things you don’t understand. I am also… inordinately fond of you.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying be careful, for God’s sake. There’s too much Russian in you, Carole.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s not by chance that they play card games for lives. It’s not by chance that they invented Russian roulette. Anything can be a game to them — life, sex, death. Perhaps because in their history almost everything has had to be a game.”
“For Christ’s sake David, you’re drunk. I don’t understand you.”
He sat back. “I’m drunk. But I still mean what I say. Give up your Letsukov. Stop playing your Russian games.”
“I’m an American, damn you,” I said. “I don’t understand all this talk of games.”
“There is a manual,” he said, “published by dissidents now in the West. It suggests how, as a psychiatric prisoner, you should answer the questions the doctors put to you. Never use a common expression like ‘It’s enough to give you nightmares’ they say.”
“Why not?”
“Because the doctor’s next question will be about these obviously serious nightmares you suffer.”
“Is this true?”
“It’s true. But what’s important is that the dissident authors cannot escape from the purely Russian idea that the patient is playing a game, however deadly. After all, that doctor doesn’t need your answers. He can go away and write up a whole batch of answers for you. But you see, Russians savor the game.”
“I’m leaving,” I said. “I’m drunk and unhappy and I’m leaving.”
He stood up. He was swaying slightly. Outside, in the basement area, with the snow falling on our shoulders, he said, “Could you accept the remote possibility that a man could love all men, and one woman?”
I slid my arm through his. “No, David, I’m sorry, I can’t.”
Chapter Twenty
It was late when Natalya Roginova left her mother’s izba. She walked alone carrying a lantern on a stick like any peasant from the village. Briefly in the 1970s, electric flashlights had deposed the lanterns, but batteries had become unobtainable and the old lantern pole, the base fitted snugly into a leather cap on the belt, had made its return.
She reached the bridge across the frozen Vega and stopped to lean against its low stone wall. On the hill the streetlamp at each end of the village glittered in the cold, dry air. At the meeting of the Politburo tomorrow the issue of the First Secretaryship of the Party would be resolved. She knew that she had built up sufficient following to make the post hers. And then, provided the military remained neutral, she would deal with Kuba’s leadership of the State Security Ministry. By the New Year her position would be indisputable. And then? A lunatic vision her mother had said. But to Natalya Roginova her vision was a solid, practical necessity which happily married well with her own deep love of Russia.
The world would reel as the shape of the Soviet future became clearer. But she must carry the Army with her, that she knew.
She continued on up the narrow path through the birch-woods. In summer the brightness of the greenery was breathtaking. As a young girl she would stand here near the top of the hill and look out across the rolling landscape unchanged by Czar or boyar or commissar. This was the Russia she loved, the Rodina of her dreams. She understood clearly how even defectors to the West might take with them in their hastily packed bags a casket of its soil.
Ice cracked on the branches above her head. The lantern ring squeaked on the pole. The light fell yellow on the banked snow. She found the path she was looking for. She had decided not to pass through the village again on her way to the car. Old Petya would insist on taking her to the vodka-house and it was a point of honor to her to drink like a man. But tonight she needed a clear head.
She stumbled through the thick snow, the lantern swinging wildly above her head. Somewhere to her right a boar crashed through the frozen thicket and ran along the edge of the wood.
She was aware suddenly of a nagging sense of unease. The boar? Why should that alarm her. She had seen and heard a thousand boars. Except during the rutting season they fled at the first sign of human beings. As this had done.
As this boar had done? She stopped dead. The lantern jerking forward. The boar had turned along the edge of the wood. There, on her orders, should be waiting her three carloads of personal guards. On a fine night like that some at least of the guards would be lounging against the vehicles smoking and talking. And yet the boar had run that way! Her countrywoman’s instincts told her that that was impossible, that the only explanation was that the guards were no longer there.
She lowered the lantern and turned down the wick until the yellow flame guttered and disappeared. She had no doubts what was happening. Nobody could live through the days of Stalin and still have doubts. She must get to the village. Old Petya would find a way to get a message to the oblast Party headquarters. She had been an overconfident fool to expose herself in this way.
She turned back down the path. The frozen thickets shook again, this time with the weight of a man. A torch beam crossed the snow and settled on her face. Two other men stepped forward with bright lights in her eyes.
“Natalya Roginova,” one of them said, “by order of Comrade General Kuba, you are requested to come with us.”
She turned bitterly without speaking and continued on up the path, the three men ranged uneasily around her. At the edge of the wood she glanced quickly in the direction of the boar’s run. Her cars had gone. Around the tire marks the trampled snow was stained red.