She could already smell wood-smoke when she heard the axe. A small track led off through the wood and she decided to take it. Immediately she was plunged into scented shadow. The sound of chopping was louder now. She walked on over the thick springy ground, her high heels digging deep into the mulch.
The drift of smoke was steel-blue in the shafts of sunlight. Misted by sun and smoke she saw a figure swinging an axe at the base of a dead tree.
He stopped as she called to him and stood waiting for her to pick her way into the clearing.
“I asked you not to come,” he said.
“You can spare me a few minutes, Uncle Valentin,” she said placatingly.
“You interrupt the rhythm of my work.”
“You were chopping trees,” she said accusingly.
“It constructs the rhythm of my day’s work. It’s as much part of working as running a pen across paper.”
She thought how bizarre he looked. In the West, she supposed he was already a millionaire, yet he wore old Army breeches and boots and a gray collarless shirt under an open waistcoat. Perhaps he was not allowed to bring his foreign fortunes into the Soviet Union?
“I’m here now,” she said. “Offer me a glass of tea at least. It’s warm weather for this time of year.”
“After the tea you must go.”
“Willingly. I can’t wait to get back to Moscow.”
He gave her a withering look. He disapproved of almost everything about this girl, her morals, her lack of seriousness, her aping of Western fashions, her un-Russianness…
“Why have you come to see me?” They were walking side by side through the wood.
“You must know,” she said.
“I know nothing of the life beyond Barskoye. What is there to know?”
They passed the fire he had made from the smaller branches of cut trees and the air became suddenly clearer. A wooden hut could be seen at the end of the path, the window and door lintels carved and painted.
“Igor Bukansky is to be put on trial next month.”
“Yes?”
She felt a surge of anger. Carefully modulating her voice, she said, “He needs your help.”
They reached the hut and he pushed open the door, leading the way inside. It was dark and smelled of flour and kerosene. He opened one of the shutters. “How can I be of help? He needs a lawyer, a well-prepared defense.”
“You know that that could only reduce a sentence by a few years. No, he needs you to speak out for him.”
He stood facing her, his head to one side, his blue eyes sharp above the slightly hooked nose. “Like the Western journalists, you are trying to make of me something that I am not. You are trying to make me into a political influence. I mean political in the narrowest sense. Party political.”
“A man’s liberty may depend on you speaking for him.”
“The maintenance of my own sense of values may depend on my not becoming involved.”
She sat down suddenly. She had never liked this man, this remote, posturing uncle, her mother’s younger brother. But she knew she had to try.
“Let’s not talk about politics or values,” she said quietly. “I don’t understand your point of view. I only understand simple things. Igor Bukansky is a good man. He has helped many people. Ordinary people like the doorman at our office when his small child needed special treatment for a postoperative infection…”
“This has no relevance to our discussion,” Kuletsyn said.
“Then tell me what has, Uncle Valentin? I think I must be too young to understand.”
He poured tea into two glasses. “Igor Bukansky was once a poet,” he said. “Sometime in his youth, he chose a different route. He chose to join the Party, to have Western-style offices, secretaries…” he waved his arm toward her, “a country dacha… This was his choice. I chose to travel a different, harder route. While he drank champagne, I drank the water from the well, while he flew the world a free man, I was the despised zek, the prisoner. But even in the camps I kept my freedom. Even as he traveled the world he lost his.”
He had begun to pace the bare wooden floor. “What you are asking is that I give up the freedom, the independence, that I have carefully carved from the hard material of my life. You are asking me to join Bukansky’s world. To make a political plea for mercy.”
She shook her head.
“A writer must keep his eyes on higher things,” he insisted. “His responsibility is not with politics, which is the ephemeral art of the present. His responsibility goes both backward and forward in time. It is to preserve the emotion of the past and construct the spirit of the future.”
She was crying.
“You will not understand, my niece, because you have already delivered yourself into Babylonian captivity. For your Western finery you have offered your body to our masters…”
“No.”
“How can you deny it? The very chains hang round your neck.”
A butterfly landed on the windowsill, its large pale-blue wings heaving as if with the efforts of flight.
“Will you speak for Bukansky?” she said.
“I will not.”
She stood up. “I beg you,” she said.
Kuletsyn stood opposite her, across the table. “Igor Alexandrovich made his choice. I cannot allow it to alter mine.”
The sunlight fell on her hair and on the movement of her shoulders. “I’ve nothing to offer you, have I?”
The butterfly flitted across the room, circling their heads before it disappeared through the door. She took a half-pace toward him.
“How dare you! Get out of here, you whore,” he said. “Get out of here and leave me in peace!”
Chapter Thirty
On September 18th, in the preliminary hearing of the closed court in the case of Igor Alexandrovich Bukansky (in absentia) it was judged that the defendant was non-accountable. In the underground newspaper Iskra the judgment was condemned as a travesty of justice. In Pravda Bukansky was accorded five lines.
After the hearing it was recommended by the doctors who gave evidence that Bukansky should be transferred to Moscow Psychiatric Hospital 36 where facilities existed for the specialist treatment of psychopathic negativism from which the defendant was suffering.
Each week Lydia had applied to the local militia station for the date of his trial. But not until seven days after the hearing had she discovered the trial had already taken place. She had returned to her apartment and sat for over an hour in the deepest depression. Since her visit to her uncle she had not been able to fight off these depressions. Sometimes she would go to bed at six or seven in the evening and stay there until the next morning when it was time to work. She found no interest in television or in friends. She missed Bukansky in ways she never conceived possible. She would wake up in the night crying at the enormity of her helplessness.
The police had not left her alone, either. On most occasions now when she returned home she would find some strange object in the apartment, a man’s cap in the bathroom, five or six cigarette ends stubbed out and crushed into the carpet, or worst, most sinister, a glove between the sheets of the made-up bed. It was, she knew, the KGB’s doing, but it worked. She found more and more that she preferred not to come home to the apartment. Instead she would stay with her elder sister on the other side of Moscow.
Within a few weeks she found herself unable to go to work. She ate little now but drank at least a half-liter of vodka every evening to help her go to sleep. Every Wednesday she returned to the militia station to ask for permission to visit the hospital and every Thursday she went to the hospital with the same request. Each told her it was necessary to seek permission from the other. Her head spun after three visits and she returned home to open another bottle. Only now it was a liter bottle and she began drinking earlier in the day.