“I want it all ways, Carole. Who doesn’t?”
They both pushed their stew aside and Bennerman ordered a half pint of vodka.
“If Tom asks for a divorce,” Carole said, “that’s okay with me. Perhaps I’ll even ask him first, I don’t know. But I don’t want to leave Russia just yet and so I’m happy enough to hang on in.”
“So we’ve both got our reasons for turning a blind eye to what’s happening.”
“I suppose so.”
“We ought to see more of each other, Carole, you and me.”
“To go over the latest evidence? No, I don’t think so, Jack.”
“Just to see each other,” Bennerman said.
She looked at him uncertainly. “We see each other on the party circuit almost every week.”
He shrugged. “You and me…”
“No, Jack.”
“You’ve still got this Russian going?”
“No, that’s long finished.”
“So why do you want to stay on in Moscow?”
“I don’t know, Jack. In many ways I hate the city. I hate the life I have here. I hate the drabness all around me, the queues, the rationing… I’m exasperated by Russians in the street or the Metro… but I still feel I want to stay. Perhaps it’s because I’m part Russian, or part Slav, anyway. I feel there’s something happening here. I feel I want to stay to see it.”
After she left Jack Bennerman, she walked through Red Square. The Kremlin was no longer open to visitors but she could see from where she stood at the far end of the crenellated wall the rising colorful domes of the churches around her. She was American, she told herself, she didn’t believe in anything but a commonsense destiny, demystified, more Anglo-Saxon likelihood than anything else. And yet she could not, standing in Red Square, believe her future lay anywhere else but in this city, or at least in this country. She knew how much her feelings were shaped by the wish to see Letsukov again, but even so she found the idea of a return to her old life intolerable.
Compared with the great dissident trials of the last two or three years, it is sadly true that Bukansky’s coming ordeal was exciting little comment in the West. And for Kuba’s men that is what counted. For the objectives of the trial were purely domestic. First, while Natalya Roginova remained under household arrest and had not yet been brought to trial, Igor Bukansky would serve as a proxy for her, a warning to any of her supporters who might think the Kuba regime was weakening. Second, the trial was intended to administer to all those in literary authority — publishers, editors and journalists — a timely warning that it was dangerous to stray from the narrow Party route to literature and to indulge in excesses of the imagination which had nothing to do with socialist realism.
The big question mark was Kuletsyn. In less than a year his fame in the West had grown prodigiously. To Be Preserved Forever had been translated into almost every known language. In the English-speaking world the paperback sales were now being counted in millions; in Germany, Italy, France and Scandinavia the novel was a massive bestseller, so that even under the Kuba regime, Kuletsyn’s position had become almost impregnable.
But for almost six months now he had refused to speak to anyone. Western journalists received a flat refusal when seeking interviews. It was believed that he was writing a second book. But nobody could be sure. Those relatively few western newspapers which reported the coming trial of Bukansky, however, had no doubt that only Kuletsyn’s intervention would ensure the worldwide publicity that Bukansky would need if he were not to end his days in a labor camp.
It was for this reason that on a late autumn morning Lydia took the train from Moscow’s Belorussia Station out to the village of Barskoye beyond the Lenin Hills. She had pondered her strategy for several days. He was, after all, her uncle. If she arrived at the little station at Barskoye and telephoned him, he would be bound to see her.
The train as usual was late. But it was a matter of indifference to the stationmaster. In the hot summer days he sat outside the station hut, his leather cap tipped over his eyes, a glass of kvas raised to his lips. For the rest of the year he remained inside, except on Mondays when a mail package would be hurled from the guard’s van.
Today he stood in the clapboard hut watching the train pull away. He sucked on his long-stemmed pipe. For a few moments he allowed himself to think of the train’s destination. Minsk, the Belorrussian capital… he had fought there in the war, retreating and advancing. Forty years ago, as a 19-year-old village boy. To this day he wore his long gray Army greatcoat, the one they’d issued for the great parade in Moscow. It was tattered now around the sleeves and belted with an old necktie, stained and with a few buttons missing, most of them even. But it enabled him to identify himself as an old soldier, who had drawn the lot of honor and taken part in that great Red Square parade before Joseph Stalin.
Out of the corner of his eyes the stationmaster saw a movement. He knew immediately who this Western-dressed young woman had come to see. Who else but the famous author who lived in the woods beyond the village? The fact that his book was unavailable in the Soviet Union never occurred to the stationmaster. He assumed it was queued for in all the big Moscow bookshops. Any author who had Western journalists telephoning him all the time could hardly have less of a success in his own capital city.
The telephone link, he explained to the young woman, was an ex-Army fitting. Before the war there had been no telephone in Barskoye. Now there were two, one to the chairman of the collective farm and the other to the Comrade Writer Kuletsyn. He opened the connection and vigorously turned the handle on the side of the instrument.
He handed the old brass-ended telephone to Lydia. She listened for a few minutes to the strange emptiness of the line, then the receiver was lifted from the hook.
“Yes?” She recognized her uncle’s voice.
“Uncle Valentin, it’s Lydia, your niece…”
“Yes.” She could see the frown.
“I’m at the station at Barskoye village. I want to come out to see you.”
“Out of the question.”
“It’s vitally important.”
“I’m working, Lydia.”
“You know why I want to see you?”
“No.”
“I have to come, somebody depends on it.” She put down the phone and turned to the stationmaster who had been openly listening on the extension.
“Can I get a taxi?”
“He doesn’t want you to come,” the stationmaster said gravely. “The wishes of an important writer should be respected.”
Lydia gave him a frosty, Moscow glare. “A taxi, is there one?”
“That facility we don’t possess as yet,” the stationmaster said.
“How far is the house?”
The stationmaster hesitated. He was impressed by the tone. He decided it would not be wise to fall foul of so imperious a young woman.
“How far is the house?” she repeated.
“A half-mile or so on the other side of the village. And the road is still good, there’s been no rain yet this autumn.”
The peasants of Barskoye talked about it for weeks afterward. Estimates of the value of her clothes varied from exaggerated to astronomical. Wise old women said she was an American despite the stationmaster’s assurance that she spoke Russian and was the gospodin writer’s niece. Some of the men claimed they had definitely seen her on television. This was considered a more reasonable explanation and the event was known henceforth as “the day the television lady came from Moscow.”
The road was as the stationmaster had predicted, still hard from the summer, the dust damped down by autumn dews. Lydia followed the track along the edge of the birchwood, astonished at the number of birds flitting across her path, hovering in the air above the meadows or singing among the trees.