Read The Russian Affair Online
Authors: Michael Wallner
Viktor Ipalyevich promised and then asked, “Has the entire world gone mad?”
She embraced him, climbed into the train, and didn’t watch him as he walked with drooping shoulders to the exit.
The car doors closed automatically, and the train left the Kiev Station exactly on schedule. It was terrible to be unable to ventilate the compartment. Unrestrained by their parents, three children performed gymnastics. The grown-ups were eating kohlrabi from a plastic container on the seat between them. “You have to put lemon on it to keep it fresh,” the woman said, offering Anna a piece.
An hour passed. She didn’t stare out into the landscape rushing past or take part in the conversation around her. The trip would be long, but she wasn’t going too far away. No one had urged Anna to do what she was doing; no one would have even thought of making such a request.
“It can’t have been just a question of patriotism,” Kamarovsky had said.
Anna had gone up to the apartment on the eighth floor one last time. She’d looked out over the river; even with the balcony doors open, the apartment had been stiflingly hot.
“Bulyagkov could have escaped. If he’d really wanted to on that morning, he could have got away with it. When you’re in a seaport city, you can always find a way out.”
Feeling peculiarly at ease, Anna had sat beside the Colonel on the sofa. His reflecting eyeglasses lost their effect if you got close to him.
“He handed over the briefcase without stipulating any conditions or getting anything in return. Why, Anna?”
“I don’t know, Comrade Colonel.”
“Then all I can do is to thank you.” He laid his hand on hers. “I know that I owe you a particular debt of gratitude.”
“Why? What have I done?”
“You saved a life. In every conceivable sense. You did it for love, and apparently …” A rare smile crossed the haggard face. “Apparently, love was also the driving force for Alexey Maximovich.” He cleared his throat. “As an officer, I’m satisfied. As a man, I’m impressed.”
Anna had asked what would happen to Alexey and learned that he’d been placed under house arrest since turning in his written resignation. She’d imagined him sitting in the Drezhnevskaya Street apartment, the place they had used like a dream of exile. The doubting wolf who’d turned out to be a patriot would no longer get his meals from the fancy food shop; he’d receive them from the hands of his guards. Maybe they’d taken away his belt and shoelaces and forbidden him to lock himself in the bathroom.
“Alexey Maximovich must be purged of his doubt and punished for his attempted treason,” Kamarovsky had said, stepping behind his desk. “It has been announced that the sentence to be meted out to the patriot Bulyagkov will take the form of banishment.” As though troubled by some irregularity, he picked up a sheet of paper.
“May I see it?”
That was not allowed, and neither was a telephone call. Kamarovsky had made no objections to a written communication.
“The best thing to do would be to leave the envelope unsealed,” he’d said as she was leaving. “I shall read your correspondence with great interest.”
For a day and a night, Anna could find no words, but on the following day, she’d written the letter all in one burst. She’d dropped it,
unsealed, in the appropriate place. Twelve hours later, the reply was lying in one of the scarred mailboxes on the ground floor, where Avdotya was always busy.
With the closed envelope in her hand, Anna had run outside. She’d restrained herself from taking out Alexey’s letter until she reached the park. Then, leaning on the trunk of an elm tree, she’d begun to read.
Now, with the letter in her lap, Anna was sitting in the boisterous train compartment. Making sure her traveling companions couldn’t see, she carefully unfolded the pages for the umpteenth time. What tiny writing for someone who wrote with such a strong hand, she thought. His
m
’s were hard to distinguish from his
i
’s, and in general, as far as form was concerned, the Deputy Minister hadn’t made much of an effort.
The Deputy Minister?
Anna stared at the pages. She still thought of him in his official capacity, even though everything had changed for him. They hadn’t seen each other since their dawn meeting in Riga.
Anna yanked the door open and barged into the corridor. People were standing, sitting, and passing the time here, too. She made her way to the end of the car and stood alone on the little platform. What was she about to do? Moments from the past crossed her mind: When Viktor Ipalyevich, sitting down to work, took off his woolen jacket, and you knew that spring had come. Petya’s thrashing in his sleep, which infallibly meant that he’d tell her about a fantastic dream the next day. The joy she’d felt when the mortar on her trowel had the right consistency and went on smoothly. A life in Moscow would have lain ahead of her! She thought about the streets of the Arbat quarter in the snow, the feeling inspired by passing the illuminated Kremlin late at night.
Even as Anna was evoking pleasant memories of what she’d left behind, one thing was clear to her: She had to face the unromanticized truth. She looked more closely at the point her life had reached. Her marriage hadn’t blown up, it had simply come apart. The housing situation—the cohabitation with her father, the bed sharing with Petya—how much
longer could that have lasted? Anna was anxious about how her son would react to the new woman at Leonid’s side, and she recognized the difficulties the boy would have as the child of a broken home, but all the same, the breakup had been inevitable. She smiled at herself when the thought crossed her mind that she was following her heart, just as Alexey had done when, with full awareness of all the consequences of his actions, he’d gone back to Russia.
Anna became conscious of the fields that went on forever in the gently rolling countryside. What crops were being cultivated there she couldn’t say. When she went back to her compartment and had to ask one of the children to get out of her seat, something remarkable occurred to her. Since she’d finished her job training and married the non-Muscovite Leonid, she’d had only one goal: to obtain the right of abode in Moscow for her family. She’d filled out innumerable forms, she’d had her name and Leonid’s added to lists, she’d been friendly with office supervisors; in long conversations with her husband, she’d considered whether she’d left anything undone; the goal had justified any means. And now, when the Nechayev family’s assignment to their new apartment was only a formality, Moscow was going to have to get along without them. Leonid had settled into his new Siberian nest; Anna was about to turn her back on Russia. Only Viktor Ipalyevich remained the die-hard big-city dweller he’d always been. From now on, he’d be able to distill Four-Star Tsazukhin in his kitchen undisturbed.
Anna felt so blithe and gay that she began a conversation with the people in her compartment. They came from a small town in southern Russia and spoke contemptuously of Ukrainians, although they admitted they’d been “down there” only once.
How strange, Anna thought. We’re supposed to live in equality, but the desire to be different remains obstinately strong.
The closer they got to the border, the emptier the train became, until at last Anna was alone in the compartment. She dozed off and
started awake to see a uniformed man holding out his hand to her. She performed a hectic search for her papers and experienced a few bad moments while the border policeman paged through the document and finally handed it back. The landscape was in no way different from that on the Russian side, and yet Anna caught herself thinking that now she was in a foreign country. Half an hour later, the train reached the station that was the goal of her journey, a small town near Kharkov. She carried her suitcase along the only platform, crossed the waiting room, and emerged into the open.
She’d traveled practically a whole day to wind up now, at twilight, in such surroundings! Gray-brown buildings with missing plaster, a collapsing barbed-wire fence, a street full of potholes, the rusting skeleton of a cannibalized tractor at the side of the road. Across the street, a storefront whose sign was missing so many letters that the word
bakery
could barely be deciphered. Anna’s heart sank; in the middle of the street, she turned round in a circle. Silence reigned, but somewhere far off, a generator was running. The air smelled like fire.
Alexey had written about a house in the country, a house formerly used by the district surveyor, namely his disgraced father. As she read those lines in the letter, she’d imagined the living room with its tiled, turquoise-blue woodstove, the old-style wide floorboards, and the kitchen built out of silver fir. The water in the pipes froze regularly, he’d written, and you had to put scuttles filled with smoldering coals against the walls so the pipes would thaw and water could flow again. The toilets were outside; you had to go downstairs to the first floor and then out to the privy; on winter nights, you could find yourself walking through snow in your nightshirt. So as not to exaggerate the romantic appeal of the place, he’d said, he had to report that there was electricity and that telephone service was due to arrive at some point. Full of expectation, Anna had read that the roof ridge had borne the snows of two hundred winters without yielding and was still dead straight. Alexey had also written about the small piece of land he wanted to farm; he was thinking
about cultivating maize and beets, along with salad herbs. When she pictured the convicted former ministerial official bending over his beets, Anna had smiled, and yet everything was coming together into one image.
Now, however, Anna was surrounded by ugliness, provincialism, and decay, and all her old doubts fell back into place. How was she going to tell Petya about the new man in her life, a man only fifteen years younger than the boy’s grandfather? What was she supposed to live on? Would she try to find a house-painting job in Kharkov, say, and hire herself out for Ukrainian—i.e., starvation—wages?
In the radiant certainty of having made the wrong decision, under the sudden impulse to undo a terrible mistake, Anna turned around and started to run back to the train station … until a spot of color brought her to a halt. It wasn’t an unusual color for a car, but somehow that particular greenish-gray vehicle seemed familiar. In some confusion, Anna put down her suitcase, raised her other hand, and took a step toward the Zhiguli, whose driver was just getting out. She could see a second man in the passenger’s seat, a heavy, gray-haired fellow who in spite of the heat was wearing a woolen jacket. Anna avoided a puddle, pushed her hair behind her ears, and walked faster. Whether she wanted it to or not, her heart was laughing.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MICHAEL WALLNER is the author of the international sensation
April in Paris
. He lives in Germany, where he is an actor and screenwriter, and divides his time between Berlin and the Black Forest.
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