“Replaced by whom?”
The water boiled. As Galina mutely watched, Sasha filled their cups and spooned in generous portions of honey.
“By Olga or Vera.”
“You must be mad!”
“I can’t prove it, but I feel it.”
“Since when have you put so much reliance in feelings? You’re always advising your staff to think before acting.”
“I’m not acting on my feeling, I am simply sharing it with you to get your reaction.”
“Well, you have it. You’re letting your dislike of Viktor lead you astray.”
“You’re probably right,” he replied and slowly stirred his tea. Galina looked off into the distance and only occasionally let her eyes settle on Sasha.
“He’s a difficult man, I know, but he’s not a bad man. After the murders, we became very close.”
“Even closer than before?”
“What does that mean?”
“Galina,” he said, with as much sincerity as he could command, “I gather that before you’d been told that Petr had died, you and Viktor were lovers.”
She impaled him with her eyes, which began to tear. Without uttering a word, she left the table, entered her bedroom, and quietly closed the door. A minute later, Alya came bounding into the farmhouse. Sasha, with a bent finger, summoned her to his side and whispered that her mamma was ill and not to be disturbed. The child made no response. Sasha hugged her, slipped a few coins into her hand, and told her to buy some candy at the country store in Balyk. He even helped her into her raincoat and galoshes, and gave her his black umbrella. At the window, he watched as she opened it and splashed through some puddles. Her free spirit made him think that only a child’s resilience could save the world.
He waited several minutes before he knocked on Galina’s door. No response. He looked at his watch and told himself he would wait five minutes and then knock again. But Galina’s door slowly opened and she appeared red-faced and disheveled. Her tears were no longer in evidence, but her uncombed and wild hair bespoke her emotional state. She wordlessly made her way to the kitchen table, where she rejoined Sasha. He waited for her to speak first. When she did, it felt to Sasha as if an age had elapsed.
Galina said simply, “We were lovers once, yes, but now it is over.” She paused. “I told him about us, and said that I wanted to make a life with you.” With undisguised derision, she added, “Comrade Click or C.C., as he’s taken to calling himself, told me that he had found another.”
“Vera Chernikova.”
“Then you know.”
“I didn’t until you said C.C.”
“It’s all part of his cloak-and-dagger posturing,” she said in a tone of weary resignation. “That’s Viktor through and through.”
“And yet you don’t believe he wants to discredit me.”
“I do admit that he’s a capable slanderer. But once he’s achieved his end, which is usually to ruin some person or group, he moves on. Most likely, he would like to see Vera Chernikova take over.” Pause. “What he sees in that string bean is anybody’s guess.”
That night Sasha and Galina made love. But this time it was different from anything they’d ever experienced. The sexual heat was there, as well as the gentleness, but in addition there was a genuine affection. In the morning, Sasha had the strange sensation that he was married, and that everything between him and Galina was understood. They were no longer tense, and they behaved as if they had been relieved of some burden. An unfortunate side effect was that Sasha now felt fiercely protective of Galina and became aggressively jealous if some man even paid her an innocent compliment. His chemical reaction was similar to the day of the murders. He acted instinctively, a throwback to primitive hominids.
With Viktor out of the farmhouse and Goran’s photo lab now removed, Sasha, Galina, and Alya fell into a domestic rhythm that pleased them all. Even the weather seemed to shine on them. The rains abated, the sun shone, Alya rode Scout in the paddock and along a short trail that circled the farmhouse, and birdsong and blossoms were a harbinger of spring. Among the religious farmers, preparations began in earnest to celebrate Easter, which Father Zossima would celebrate in some hidden cellar. The Three Musketeers, as Sasha called Bogdan, Viktor, and Goran, seemed to spend most of their time in the walled bungalow. Did they present a danger? Avram, whom Sasha still visited and watched, was the person who could best advise him. When Sasha knocked and identified himself, Avram shouted that the door was unlocked. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, and a writing board rested on his lap. He was putting away writing materials, and papers peeked out of a black leather folder. Sasha quickly came to the point, and Avram prophesied that no good would come from the Three Musketeers.
“Men with grievances feed on filth,” he warned.
“Tell me about Vera Chernikova.”
A wry smile suffused Avram’s face. He clearly knew a great deal about the chemistry teacher. “So you think she and Viktor . . .”
“I do.”
“She has an engine.”
“How so?”
Brodsky explained that Vera had prospered under the Soviets. A good student from a poor family, she was given a college scholarship and showed great promise as a chemist. She came to teaching late, after working in a lab trying to increase plant growth. She knew that the genes regulating growth were found in the cell walls of plants, but she could never gain enough knowledge to manipulate them. She had hoped to win a state prize, like the Order of Lenin or the Red Banner of Labor, but the only prize she won was a teaching position at the Michael School.
“As you know,” Brodsky mused, “she’s an attractive woman, albeit a skinny one with an unduly small head perched on a thin stem of neck. Men are drawn to her. Glinski liked her. So did one or two others.”
“It appears that Viktor fancies her.”
“She’s no fool, and once she gets the bit in her mouth, she never lets go. I warn you, she’s relentless.”
“Relentless is one thing, ruthless another. Which is it?”
“Definitely the first and occasionally the second.”
“If she wanted the directorship . . .”
“I’d watch my back. I suspect she was one of the teachers who denounced me, and when she was passed over for the directorship, I know for a fact she was outraged. Before you arrived, she was sharpening her knife.”
That evening, after school hours, Sasha pulled Vera’s files. They confirmed Brodsky’s word. She came from a background of want. Her father had worked in the shipyards at Archangel until an industrial accident left him lame. Her mother took in sewing. Two brothers never returned from the Great War, and a sister died of diphtheria. On graduating from a technical college, Vera had been assigned to an agro-factory, dedicated to increasing food output through fertilizers and plant mutation. The cellular walls of plants proved her undoing. She could not crack the genetic code, though she tried every conceivable means to tease it out. Had she not made exaggerated claims, she might have remained at the factory lab, but when her work could not be duplicated, she was pointed toward the Michael School. In her estimation, teaching was a demotion, and she, like the last leaf of fall, hung on, using the school lab to continue her research, until she finally admitted defeat. To sweeten the bitter pill of secondary teaching, she apparently hoped to rise to the role of director.
“I know you say she’s relentless,” Sasha said at his next encounter with Avram, “but she’s not young anymore.”
“With an admirer as a goad, she’s twenty again.”
The two men were drinking apple-flavored vodka. “I know what you’re going to say next,” Sasha replied with a wave of his hand. “I should denounce her.”
“You can be sure that if she hasn’t already, she’ll denounce you by Easter or May Day. It’s a Russian tradition to enliven those holidays.”
Brodsky�
��s grim irony was not lost on Sasha.
“I’d prefer a colorful Easter egg or kulich or pashka.”
“For May Day,” Avram added, “the locals will put together a ragtag march waving red banners and photographs of Stalin. They’ll congregate in the town square and sing patriotic songs. It’s not Red Square, with the Boss and his cronies standing atop the Lenin Mausoleum, but it’s the best that Balyk can do.”
Fearing the worst, Sasha asked whether Vera might be working for the secret police.
Avram’s sardonic reply was unhelpful. “Why not? All of Russia reports to the police.”
“So you think it’s a possibility?
“How would I know? In this country nothing is what it seems. There are always other levels and layers of meaning. It would take a Nostradamus to negotiate the labyrinth. But that’s just the point. None of us have the powers of prophecy, except of course the Boss. So any law, any edict, any ukase, any line in the Soviet Constitution can mean a different thing depending on the need for a certain interpretation.”
“Then words and facts are meaningless.”
“Precisely meaningless: the great oxymoron.”
14
A week before Easter, three soldiers drove into town and billeted themselves at the Balyk Inn. They had been sent to make sure that no religious observances took place on Easter. Presumably, Balyk had been singled out because of the presence of Father Zossima. Wherever an ex-priest was resident, particularly a popular one, the police or army could be found on religious holidays. The government had dedicated itself to stamping out all vestiges of religion. None other than Father Zossima had told Sasha that he understood why and that the reason wasn’t merely theoretical. Sasha and the priest had recently strolled through the woods near Father Zossima’s quarters. For his tutoring, Father Zossima received a monthly payment. Sasha always made it a point to settle their accounts in cash and away from prying eyes. On this day, with Easter approaching, the priest grew reflective, observing that the state of the church before the 1917 revolution was ignorant and cruel. He candidly admitted that the priesthood had exploited the peasants gullibility by feeding their superstitions, advertising absurd miracles, and trading in relics—the toe of a saint, a hair from the head of St. Peter, a splinter from the true cross.
“They shamefully,” said Father Zossima, “extorted money and food from the poor and kept them uneducated, uncritically served the Tsar, and fomented awful pogroms. I won’t even speak of their sexual depravities, which are too numerous to count. Their churches dripped gold, and their priestly vestments shone with jewels. In truth, they were self-serving devils who would have gone down in history as the most unsavory scoundrels in Russia had the Communist apparatchiks not eclipsed them with their cold-blooded betrayals and mindless genuflecting before Stalin.”
But even these sentiments could not have saved Father Zossima if he had been caught celebrating Mass. Although former believers were only too willing to volunteer their cellars for services, Father Zossima held his Masses in a cave, a choice that had led believers to include him among the many catacomb priests illegally conducting church services in forest retreats.
✷
Normally, Sasha took his lunch at school with the students, but when the secretary, Devora Berberova, told him that Galina had come down with a migraine and left school in the company of Viktor Harkov, he returned home to check on her health. He deliberately entered the farmhouse through the back door, the pantry door, the less conspicuous entrance. He heard voices coming from Galina’s bedroom, hers and Viktor’s. His chest tightened, gripped with jealousy. Was Galina’s headache a ruse, and had the two of them resumed their affair? If so, the recent closeness between Sasha and Galina was a sham. But why would she feign affection; to achieve what? Once again he found himself in the uncomfortable position of suspecting Galina and searching for clues. He hated such conduct. Inching toward the bedroom door, he stood close enough to listen and far enough to leave unobserved. Galina was talking.
“Don’t deny it!”
“Why should I?”
“If not for me, you wouldn’t be teaching at the school.”
“I admit it: You positioned me brilliantly.”
“For betrayal.”
“You’re being melodramatic. Just look at the facts.”
“I have, and what I see is ingratitude and deception.”
“She . . .”
“Is unworthy.”
“Compared to you . . .”
“Stop! I won’t hear of it.”
“Will you tell Sasha?”
“Not if you promise to end it.”
A minute of quiet ensued, rent only by Galina’s deep breathing.
“I promise.” Pause. “Have you heard from Petr since he left?”
“No.”
“Strange.”
Sasha heard Viktor’s click, his signature sound upon leaving, and took the clue. He eased out the back door and waited for several minutes behind the house to make sure that Viktor was well on his way back to school; he then came through the front door, making no attempt to hide his presence. Galina was leaning back in bed, her head resting on several pillows. On the nightstand rested a bottle of medicine. Her eyes were closed. She knew by the footsteps it was Sasha. He gently knocked. She smiled and invited him to come sit beside her. He asked how she felt. She ignored his question and inquired if he had passed Viktor on the path.
“I came from another direction,” Sasha replied. “What did he want?”
“He took me home when I developed a migraine. We chatted briefly and he left.”
Before Sasha could gently ease into the question haunting him—had she any romantic interest in Viktor?—he heard knocking at the door. Two soldiers, clean shaven and moderately literate, politely asked if he knew of any religious services planned for Easter, either at the Michael School or in town.
“Certainly not on the part of the school,” replied Sasha.
“And your friend, Father Zossima?” prodded one of the soldiers, obviously schooled by Filatov.
Sasha’s first impulse was to say that he and the priest hadn’t talked in months, but if someone had seen them entering the woods, he would be a suspect himself. “I speak to him occasionally, but I know of no planned religious activities. Besides, it’s against the law.”
The soldiers laughed sarcastically and departed.
Easter came and went. No church bells rang, and none of the faithful indicated that they had secretly celebrated Easter Mass in a cave. Within days, the school and village began making plans for May Day. Balyk had no official mayor, but the townspeople had decided among themselves to hold a parade, honoring not only the working class and its labors, but also Lenin and Stalin and those who took part in the Great War, the October Revolution, and the civil war. Although most of the students at the Michael School took a keen interest in the marching events, to be overseen by Viktor, Sasha had limited his role to arranging a dinner for the evening festivities. Filatov was footing the bill and composing the guest list. He had been less than candid about his motives, telling Sasha that he preferred enjoying the day in the beautiful countryside of Balyk and dining with friends to standing in a Moscow crowd cheering the Vozhd and others on the reviewing stand over Lenin’s tomb. He was, in fact, deeply troubled.
According to reports from his mole, the school seethed with intrigue. His agent had described a situation in which the teachers were compiling a dossier on Sasha in the hope of replacing him. One of the new teachers was leading the band of brigands, Ivan Goncharov, who had materialized in Balyk, it seemed, out of nowhere. A college graduate, he taught linguistics and was especially keen about click languages. Reclusive, bearded, long-haired, he claimed to have blood ties with the famous novelist, although Filatov’s agent doubted it. His loyalties were unclear. At first, he bestowed his attentions on Galina Selivanova
, then befriended one Goran Youzhny, and then fell in with the internal exile Bogdan Dolin, who gave all indications of having resumed forging passports for those who wished to flee the country, though Filatov need not worry that Father Zossima was among them. He was not.
Although he had taken a university degree in engineering, Filatov did not regard himself as an intellectual. He was suspicious of people who lived in what he called the world of airy thinness. A life of the mind was not subject to scrutiny. How could you ever know for sure what one was thinking? Teachers and professors and priests were all of a kind. They argued over nothing; the stakes, inconsequential, unless they were plotting counterrevolution. Then their thoughts became dangerous. The good thing about intellectuals, Filatov had decided a long time ago, was that they treated action as beneath them. They would generate the ideas, but implementation was the province of others. Intellectuals didn’t dirty their hands. If this fellow Ivan Goncharov, undoubtedly a pseudonym, was indeed behind the plot to replace Sasha, then he must also be responsible for all the letters of denunciation Filatov had been receiving.
✷
“What exactly,” Sasha asked Brodsky, “do you think is the point of the dinner? I know the NKVD values surprise. If you’re unprepared, you can’t escape or resist. I know how it works.”
Brodsky, as was his wont, gilded the lily. “A knock in the middle of the night. A car pulls up alongside as you are returning from work. A public denunciation at the very moment you are surrounded by your so-called comrades. That’s their modus operandi.”
Not surprisingly, the Michael School preparations were subject to Major Filatov’s wishes. With fascism in Italy and Germany becoming increasingly militant, the Politburo had directed that all May Day celebrations take for their theme the anti-proletarian nature of these regimes. Accordingly, Filatov had ordered that the school emblazon their banners with the following international slogans.
For irresistible unity of the working class.
Down with fascist aggression and war makers.
Denouncer Page 24
