She had that habit, perhaps that free American habit of any woman in love, of running toward me and throwing her arms round me when we met in the open.
I remember to this day the sound of heels approaching, the perfumed warmth of her embrace and the breathless questions as she clung to me.
“It was nothing,” I said holding her away, “a formality.”
“But you’re not called to the Lubyanka every day,” she said anxiously. “What was it?”
She already knew that I was to leave next week for a month’s visit to the Ukraine.
“It was about my trip,” I said. “I have to visit some KGB prisoners in Kiev. Apparently I have to have special permission.”
“That’s all it was?”
“KGB bureaucracy.”
She looked at me doubtfully. “You’re not holding anything from me?”
I shook my head. “The KGB are very careful about who they let see their prisoners,” I said. “But don’t forget they’ve good reasons to trust me.”
She took my hand and thrust it deep into the warmth of her silk-lined pocket. And together we walked through Moscow with the brief treacherous scent of spring in the air.
In the cities of the Ukraine that spring, the queues for potatoes were 30 and 40 yards long. When meat appeared in the State butcher shops the Militia was called to control the crowds. Factory workers protested and issued declarations and even organized lightning strikes. But the lack of worker organization made the task of the KGB easy. Yet the interrogating officers were themselves misled by the efficacy of their own methods. Under torture men confessed to membership in the Free Trade Union Movement or the Ukrainian National Army. Under more torture they indicted others. In this situation the KGB reports passed on to Moscow were bound to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yet the ferocity of the secret police methods was effective in another direction, as Letsukov was to discover in the Ukraine that spring.
It had seemed to me that, ideally placed in the Trade Union section of the Ministry of Nationalities, I would have a role in the exchange of information among the brother movements in the different republics. But of course I had not even begun to understand what it was like to live outside the law of the Soviet Union. Without underground credentials to offer, clearly no one was prepared to take a Ministry investigator into his confidence.
I took risks. In the Ukraine I visited relatives and friends of prisoners and offered help. But I had lived my life within the law, even when acting as an executioner for the State. To act as an illegal, to gain the confidence of other illegals, I slowly realized, I would first have to pay my dues.
On my last day in the Ukraine I was interviewing workers who had been arrested for calling for a strike in a small leather-making enterprise in Poltava. The affidavit of the informer, the stoat, had interested me particularly with its claim that the workers had mentioned the name of Joseph Densky. I interviewed a certain Stepan Bolek first. An older craft worker in his early sixties, with a gray stubble on his cheeks and hands as brown and tough as the leather he worked, Stepan Bolek regarded me warily in the square concrete interview room. It was a small suburban militia station, it may or may not have been wired to record conversations. But I had dues to pay. I could no longer avoid taking risks.
“Comrade Bolek,” I said to the old worker before me, “I have one question to ask you. Are you in touch with Joseph Densky’s movement in Leningrad?”
“I have never heard of this Joseph Densky,” the old man said.
“The informer claims you used his name.”
“He is lying.”
“They usually do,” I conceded to his evident surprise.
The old man watched me in silence.
“Comrade Bolek,” I said to the old man in front of me, “I wish to do you a service.”
Bolek curled his lips contemptuously. “Why should you want to do me a service, Comrade?”
“There’s no time to go into my reasons. You would like to know the name of the stoat who informed on you and your friends. I have that information. The depositions against you were all signed by Galgradsky the tanner.”
The old man shook his head. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps not. But how is this information likely to help me now?”
“It can help others. You can get the information to your friends outside.”
Bolek gestured to the bars on the high windows.
“You have means of getting a message out Galgradsky the tanner. Remember.”
“I’ll remember, Comrade.”
“And now I want you to do something for me.”
Bolek’s lips twisted. “I thought you might, Comrade.”
“I believe you are in touch with Joseph Densky’s movement. I want you to get a message to the movement. I know that first whoever is deputizing for Densky must trust me. Tell them I am willing to perform any task which establishes that trust. You understand?”
“I understand very little, Comrade Letsukov.”
“Then understand this. I am not offering myself as a sacrificial lamb. My position in the Ministry makes me more important to the Free Trade Union Movement than that. But I am prepared for sacrifice in a cause in which I deeply believe.”
“You’re talking to the wrong man, Comrade. I have never heard of Joseph Densky’s movement.”
I stood up. “If you are a member of the Free Trade Union Movement, and I believe you are, you will find a way to deliver that message to the leaders in Leningrad.” I reached forward and shook his hand. “I will be waiting for their reply, Comrade Bolek.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
There were two girls with whom Zoya had made friends. The three of them together had managed to maneuver their bunks into a corner of the hut which was recognized as separate territory by the rest of the women. Hung with gray cotton blankets, the corner became a room apart within which the three girls were able, sometimes for hours at a time, to keep reality at bay.
Anna Bratlova was the closer to Zoya in upbringing. A student of literature at Tashkent University (although of impeccable Slav origins), she had in her second year met a young Zambian student named George Maccari at the English Language Club. Maccari was very far from the browbeaten product of colonialism that she had quite naturally assumed. He accepted no condescension from Russians and frankly proclaimed that the English language had produced the richest literature in existence. Anna Bratlova was at first aghast. How could he praise the culture and thus indirectly the society of his oppressors? But George Maccari had a fiercely independent spirit. Through him Anna began to learn of the diversity of the West. And by the time she realized she was in love with him she had already departed on that journey of the spirit from which no traveler returns. Worse, she was too young to dissimulate. In the compulsory Diamat (Dialectical Materialism) paper in her third year she had attempted to discuss rather than recount. The Dean had called her before him after marking the papers. He was a gentle, hesitant man but he forced himself to talk about her relationship with George Maccari. It was, he said, clearly affecting her studies. Her low marks in Diamat had confirmed his fears. Political reasons made it difficult to ask Maccari to leave. (He was the son of Zambia’s leading Marxist.) But good sense decreed that she should stop seeing him.