It was a moment Zoya Densky never forgot in every detail of the bareboarded office, the misted windows and the woman with the flying strands of gray hair.
I turned [she wrote afterward] and ran from the office. Perhaps the doctor thought I was going straight to the colonel to beg him to keep her at Panaka, I don’t know. I was too ashamed for myself and mortified for another human being to think. I ran to the gate and blurted out to the guard that there had been an accident at the river bend location. He looked at me quickly, not even thinking to ask how I knew. Opening the side gate, he let me through.
Perhaps I kept running to burn the shame out of me. I knew, good as that woman had been to me, that I would never let her take my place.
At the river I stopped. Leaning against a tree trunk I coughed and spluttered, my head hanging. After a few moments I sat down. Birds flitted from one high branch to another. A faint sweet smell of decaying leaves rose all around me. The great river Ob, flowing north from the middle of Siberia, was here a broad untroubled stream so clear that I could see the long fingers of dead branches reaching up from far below the surface.
Slowly I recovered my breath. A squadron of swans sailed majestically toward me. I watched them as, on some unheard command, the long necks stretched, the beaks pointed and the huge wings beat the surface of the river. From the confusion of great white wings and churning waters they rose into the air, suddenly graced again with that serenity, as in languid flight they banked across the birch treetops on their long journey west.
From within the wood Anton’s voice called me. Had he seen the swans’ flight too?
I got to my feet and reached the path he was following.
“Did you see the swans?” I asked.
He smiled. “Yes,” he said. “It means winter is coming.”
“Where do they go, do you know?”
“All the way to Western Europe. Denmark… some of them even to the coast of Britain.”
“Denmark… Britain… Would they cross Leningrad?”
“Perhaps. Close enough to look down on the Nevsky Prospekt or Vasilyevsky Island.”
“Do you know why I asked you to come here?”
He rested his long back against a tree and slid down into a sitting position. “Laryssa managed a few words with Bubo. She says there’s to be a General Amnesty for the Penal Brigades.”
“And the politicals and criminals in Panaka One are being sent east.”
“And if we wanted to, we four could stay?”
“We four and Anna,” I said.
“If we stayed we don’t know how long it would be for.”
“No. Perhaps a month. Perhaps all through the winter.” I hesitated. “If we were sent east there’s no guarantee we would go to a mixed camp. There are very few.”
He nodded. “I know.”
I sat down next to him. “This way,” I said, “we can stay together.”
He turned onto one elbow and reached out to put his arm across my waist. “And that’s important to you?” he said.
“More important than anything.”
He was looking up at me. “For me, too,” he nodded gravely.
I think the floodgates opened then. I threw my arms round his neck and we were kissing and rolling in the hollow between the trees.
It was a release from everything, from dirt and corruption and slavery and Panaka and from the pathetic woman begging for her life in the medical hut.
Deep in the growth of green river grasses we rolled together and stopped.
“First,” he said, “we must be married.”
I sat up, brushing grass and twigs from my hair. “Married, how?”
He reached out and stroked my face. “When they sent us here to Panaka,” he said, “they put us beyond all laws of states or churches. They took one sort of freedom from us, but in doing that, they gave us another.”
I looked at him, questioningly.
“If we choose to get married,” he said, “we will.”
I took his hand. “I choose.”
He covered my hand with his. “I also choose.”
“Zoya Ovsenkovna.” In these wide woods I whispered my new name.
“Can you hear the sound of bells ringing, Zoya?”
“Yes.”
“And the clatter of the dishes as the wedding feast is laid?”
“Yes.” I reached out and plucked a piece of grass. “In my grandmother’s village, the bride’s mother would twist a piece of grass like this, and say, ‘May my Zoya handle her Anton as I twist this grass around my finger.’”
“Then so be it,” he smiled and pulled me toward him.
That afternoon we consummated our marriage among the high birchwoods until the blasts of the guards’ whistles were carried on the wind, summoning us back to our other life.
Chapter Thirty-Three
In late September General Semyon Kuba received a report he had anxiously awaited. In consultation with the Moscow procuracy one of his most trusted assistants at the Lubyanka, Colonel Y, had reached the following conclusion: that it would be entirely possible to bring former Minister Natalya Roginova to trial for anti-Soviet activities given several broad conditions:
I. That the trial, but not the summing-up and verdict, should be held in camera on the grounds that matters of Soviet security were being considered.
II. That charges of exploiting her position to maintain an un-Soviet and luxurious lifestyle be dropped as politically inflammatory at this time.
III. That the chief witness be hospital patient Bukansky.
IV. That the witness Bukansky should make a statement to the Western press confessing to his contact role between Natalya Roginova and certain Western governments and agencies.
Kuba initialed the document. Before sending it back to Colonel Y he scrawled across the bottom: “Ensure that Bukansky is prepared to make the necessary statement.”
At the Lubyanka Colonel Y received Kuba’s reply by afternoon messenger and ordered his car immediately. Arriving at Hospital 36, he was quickly shown into the office of the senior psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist was not reassuring. “Patient Bukansky cannot be said to be responding to treatment. He remains pathologically unrepentant. I must tell you, Colonel, that the Soviet doctor Timofeyev describes dissidence as ‘a disease of the brain which develops slowly.’ In other words, the Patient Bukansky not only shows no sign of repentance, he’s getting worse.”
Nevertheless the colonel insisted on seeing Bukansky, and to the doctor’s intense irritation, alone.
“May I say that for a patient you’re looking remarkably fit, Igor Alexandrovich,” the colonel said after he had introduced himself.
“I’m in excellent hands, Colonel.”
“That’s as may be,” the colonel said briskly. In a few sentences he told Bukansky of Roginova’s forthcoming trial and the role he was expected to play. “Within a month of the trial,” he added, “I can assure you you will be out of here. You will then be free to live wherever you choose in the Soviet Union as long as it is outside the tourist areas.”
“I am then to be the principal witness.”
“There will be a large number of supporting affidavits. But the greater part of the trial will be held in camera. Your evidence will be given a prominent place in the summing-up and a select number of Western journalists will be allowed to visit you immediately afterward.”
“For confirmation of my evidence.”
“Yes.”
“All very well, Colonel,” Bukansky said. “But what conceivably can my evidence be worth?”
“Leave that to us.”
“You don’t understand me, Colonel. On September eighteenth of this year I was officially declared by a properly constituted Soviet court, non-accountable. Insane. I hardly think the Western press will find me an impressive witness!”