Anna Maccari had come to the medical hut on some official errand during the afternoon after the visit to the rye store. The evidence of her happiness was in her face.
“The whole camp’s talking about you, Zoyushka,” she bubbled. “They’re calling you the little doctor, the one who’s going to annihilate the rash.”
“Let’s hope they’re right,” Zoya said. She stood up from the worktable where she had been mixing the thick tarry ointment which the doctor had devised to treat the rash.
“I’m certain you’re right about the rye store, certain of it,” Anna said.
Zoya stretched her aching back, her arms above her head, her breasts strained against her linen camp shirt. Suddenly she was aware of Anna watching her.
As I stood there stretching I was acutely aware of Anna there beside me, of the look on her face. She moved half a step toward me and slipped her arm round my waist.
“You know I love you, Zoyushka,” she said.
As gently as I could I removed her arm. “You must choose a man, Anna. A good man,” I told her.
She gestured toward the huts outside. “I hate men,” she said, “All men.”
“Even your husband?”
“That’s another world, Zoya,” she stammered passionately. “It doesn’t exist for us. You’re always saying we must live in the world we have here, at Panaka.”
“At Panaka, at least, we have a mixed camp.”
“Is that good? Is it good to have thieves and rapists on your doorstep?”
“There are some good men here, Anna. Some men at least who are trying to remain good.”
“Anton,” she said without bitterness.
I hesitated. “Yes, Anton.”
She moved toward the door of the hut. “Tell me one thing, Zoya. If things were different, if Panaka had not been a mixed camp…”
I crossed and hugged her tight. “Anochka,” I said, “don’t ask silly questions. How can I possibly say?”
Never once after that, in all the time we were together, did she ever mention the incident again.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The announcement of bread rationing on August 1st was a more severe blow to Soviet citizens’ confidence in the Party and government than anything since the revaluation of the Stalinist past undertaken by Khrushchev. To a people who had never been told that grain purchases from abroad had been a common support of the Soviet bread supply for 15 years, it seemed inconceivable that their country could not provide sufficient bread for its people.
Against the background of this sudden shock, Soviet citizens now looked again at the increasing shortages and rising prices of vegetables and meat. Previously they had thought in terms of distribution problems which would gradually improve. Now they gradually ceased to believe in a plentiful supply and began to speculate openly on the introduction of rationing for other foodstuffs as well.
Hoarding of canned goods began. Within a month even the previously well-stocked shelves of herring and cheap, mostly unwanted fish products began to empty. In the new supermarkets which had been built to accommodate the expected plenty of the 1980s bright lights lit long empty shelves.
At the free markets prices rose in response to the new fears. Occasionally there were riots and the peasants’ produce was torn from them and carried away before the militia could reimpose order.
And with the end of summer came the announcement of draconian fuel economy measures. Factory heating levels were to be reduced by 20 percent. In the Central Asian and Caucasian Republics this would be no serious hardship, but the workers of Leningrad and Moscow, of Gorky and Pskov, knew exactly what sort of winter they had to look forward to.
Where, they asked, was that progress on the promise of which all Party propaganda had been based? Where were the consumer goods, supplies of which were supposed to be rising by eight percent per year? Long before, it had been the subject of amused comment by foreign visitors when Soviet drivers stopped their cars as it began to rain and leapt to fit the windshield wipers which they kept in the glove compartments for fear of theft. Now a truck would lose its tires in an overnight parking lot, apartments would be rifled for hoarded food and vodka, a man’s suit or his wife’s one party dress.
To Carole Yates it seemed that Muscovites had never looked more gray or had been more rudely determined in the food queues that lined many of even the most important thoroughfares.
And steadily the number of bombings increased. Westerners driving through the new districts of Moscow would often report a traffic detour or roped-off area, or would even hear an explosion and its hollow returning echo. Workers in the area adopted an attitude of callous indifference. A distant explosion would as often as not elicit a muttered “There goes another shock-worker.” The truth was there was a deep well of sympathy among Russian workers for the Rodinist attacks on the Asiatics, and even on the government offices responsible for bringing them north.
Perhaps it is not surprising, therefore, that the militia, too, in that last summer of the Soviet Union, seemed different. Before, they had strutted in Red Square and along the Kirova Ulitza, proud of their uniforms and their function as guardians of Soviet society. Now they seemed hard-eyed and sullen. If one militiaman rebuked a Muscovite for a minor offense, two other policemen would be at his shoulder in seconds, anticipating trouble.
Leaving Letsukov’s apartment one evening Carole had driven straight over to see David Butler. She had been crying in the car and it was evident to Butler as he let her in.
“I think,” he said, “we should go out for a short walk, Carole.”
In the Plevna Gardens she took his arm. “I can’t imagine,” she said, “how I ever thought I was in love with Tom. I’m beginning to understand that love is something much more bitter and necessitous than anything I felt for him.”
“Is Letsukov in love with you?” Butler asked.
“Sometimes I’m sure of it. Other times he can spend a whole evening pushing me away, emphasizing our differences. And then an hour later…”
“In bed?”
“Usually. But we’ve had much more than that between us.” She paused. “I’d leave Tom, I’d leave America, for Alex.”
“And he?”
“I wouldn’t ask anything from him. He hates the Soviet system, I know that. But he’s trapped by it.”
“It’s a world of moral choices far more complex than the world we live in, Carole.”
For a few moments they walked in silence.
“I’ve no advice to offer you, you know that,” he said.
She smiled sadly. “I suppose I was hoping. But that’s the school kid in me still.”
“I do, however, have a suggestion. That is that we go to Mother Hubbard’s and we both get blind drunk.”
“I accept,” she said.
Miserably they disentangled their limbs. Letsukov reached to the bedside table and took a packet of Belomors. Lighting one he lay back while she watched him smoke.
“We must do something to save what we had,” she said desperately.
Letsukov drew deeply on the cigarette. “We come from different parts of the world, Carole. Don’t ask too much of either of us.”
She got up and began to dress. He watched her as he always did. When he finished his cigarette he got up too and put on a bathrobe. She knew it meant that he would not come down with her to find a taxi.
In the room it was half-dark. She finished dressing and walked to the window. She felt stifled by the narrow compass of the room, and by all that had gone before.
“Shall I put on the light?” He was sitting on the bed in his robe. He had lit another cigarette.