by Robert Moss
‘To Tatyana? Oh, three years in the camps, if she’s sensible. She could do worse, you know. She could be charged with espionage. But you needn’t concern yourself. She hasn’t said anything against you.’ The pause allowed Sasha to picture Tanya under interrogation. ‘I’m confident of your socialist sense of duty,’ Lubovin added silkily.
‘As a matter of interest,’ he continued, ‘why didn’t you report Tatyana’s activities when you first became aware of them?’
‘I — I wasn’t sure of the correct procedures. And there may have been some personal inhibitions.’
‘Not now.’
Sasha met his gaze. ‘No, not now.’
‘Well, I’ve enjoyed our little chat,’ Lubovin proceeded briskly. ‘Now let me ask you. Suppose we need help at some time. Are you ready to assist us?’
‘Of course. But I’m not quite sure —’
‘Dorogoy moy. My dear chap. We’re not asking you to become a full-time agent. I just mean, if you notice any unusual behavior, even by members of the Komsomol bureau...’ He jumped up and slapped Sasha on the shoulder. ‘I’m sure we understand each other. When you have something, just give me a buzz.’ He scribbled his phone number on a slip of paper. Like all the numbers at KGB headquarters, it began with the digits 224.
*
Sasha hadn’t called the 224 number, and had heard nothing from Inspector Lubovin, when his turn came to go to military camp. Only male students were taken, in their last year at the University. Some of the others were nervous: the instructors were said to be real bastards. But Sasha was looking forward to clean air and a release from the clammy sense of guilt that he experienced every day in Moscow, where everything held memories of Tanya. Professor Levin had gone to ask about her several times, to the mansion up the road from the Lubyanka that had once belonged to Count Rostopchin. The place was a scene out of Tolstoy: parquet floors, high molded ceilings, glittering chandeliers. Each time, they made Levin wait for an hour or two. Each time, they told him the bare minimum: that she had been sent to a labor center in Kamchatka, that she was allowed a food parcel once a month.
At the camp, they practiced trench warfare, hunkering down while old T-62s churned toward them through the clumps of pines until the treads were grinding above their heads. They were sent across a slippery log bridge over a ditch where a fire had been set with napalm. The colonel who came to watch wasn’t satisfied with the size of the blaze. ‘This isn’t a dancing class!’ he bellowed. ‘Pour the shit on!’ They did, and the nervous kid running in front of Sasha — the son of a general in the Main Political Administration — lost his balance and fell. He shrieked as the napalm stuck to his hands, his clothes, his face. Sasha helped pull him out of the ditch, ripped off his tunic, and used it as a damper, trying to ignore the sickly-sweet smell of charred flesh. The boy was rushed off to hospital as monstrous black blisters flowered on his exposed skin.
That night, while Sasha was on guard duty across the sandy road — the Commander’s Line, they called it — from the cadets’ tents, Captain Suvorin came to chat with him.
‘Question,’ Suvorin said in a theatrical hush. ‘What’s a pine tree surrounded by dead wood?’
Sasha shook his head.
‘New Year’s Eve in the officer’s mess.’ They both laughed, and Suvorin lit up a cigarette. ‘You’re a cool bastard, aren’t you?’ he said casually. ‘I was watching you today. You’re a natural soldier. You know that?’
He patted Sasha’s walkie-talkie. ‘You don’t have to be a Soldafon, you know. Me, I’ve put in for a transfer to the special forces, Spetsnaz. You’ve got the physique, and the brains. Let me know when you feel like talking about it.’
*
A telegram from his mother came that night. As usual, she had no time for emotion. The message was simply that his grandmother’s funeral would take place next Friday. There was no account of how Vera Alexandrovna had died, no expression of loss. Sasha felt surrounded by a hostile emptiness, so immense that it made his ears ring.
He felt the way he had done as a small child, when he wandered away from babushka during an outing to the center of Moscow and was lost in the vastness of gray and ochre walls that climbed toward the sun, so high that it dizzied him to look, and strangers that threatened him like moving palisades. Then she had scooped him up, and the world became near and friendly, as if she had captured the sky in the folds of her dress.
Suvorin was understanding, and arranged for Sasha to leave before the end of the training course.
He returned to Moscow by train. When he reached the building on Peschanaya Street, he found that a crowd had already gathered in the courtyard. There were many faces he didn’t recognize. He was surprised that his grandmother, always so private, so self-contained, had so many people who cared for her. The open coffin, draped with a red cloth bordered with a deep black band, stood near the main entrance.
He couldn’t take in the whole picture. The voices of the mourners fused in a muted, ominous monotone, like the drone of bees trapped inside a window. His mother was wearing a black scarf over her head and a black dress. She kissed him for the first time he could remember since he had been in the crib, a dry peck that brushed his cheek like crepe paper. There were no tears. He leaned over the coffin, and his grandmother’s face was smooth and dumpling-round. The sharp, haughty lines etched from nose to mouth were hardly visible. Vera Alexandrovna looked rather pleased to be where she was.
Men in somber clothes converged on the coffin and hoisted it onto their shoulders. One had a narrow, ratlike face, all squeezed and pointed into a snout from which brows and chin fell away. Sasha recognized Krisov, the Secretary of the Party committee in the Ministry where his mother was employed, the fellow who had organized those endless meetings that had stolen her from him when he was growing up. None too gently, Sasha moved Krisov aside and took his place as a pallbearer. A five-man band struck up the march, and the little procession shuffled off behind them toward the hearse, a squat gray bus with a blue line along the sides. Sasha, his mother, and Krisov were jammed in together on one of the benches inside, next to the coffin.
The cemetery was one of the new ones, out on Dmitrovskoye Chosse. As Sasha stood by the freshly dug grave, he tried to remember some of the words from the Bible that Vera Alexandrovna, a believer to the end, had tried to teach him. There was no priest among them — his mother would never have stood for that — but he felt that his grandmother was owed some Christian memorial.
He was still searching his memory when Secretary Krisov started up. In a high, nasal whine, he recited a string of banalities and half-truths. His voice set Sasha’s teeth on edge, like the whirr of a dentist’s drill. ‘Vera Alexandrovna, the wife and mother of socialist heroes, will live forever in our hearts,’ he wound up. Krisov stood there, all puffed up, apparently waiting for applause.
Sasha was furious. Who had asked this Party hack to say anything? Through all his childhood, this Krisov, and the Party he represented, had stood between Sasha and his mother. Now he had managed to turn Vera Alexandrovna’s graveside into a podium. Sasha wanted to smash Krisov’s face, to yell at him that none of them — not Krisov, not Suchko, not Topchy — could deprive his grandmother of her vital being, her soul. Laid out in her open coffin, she was still more real than any of them.
Someone else came forward, but not to make speeches. A very old shrunken woman came hobbling through the ranks of mourners until she was standing directly in front of Sasha, stooping over the coffin. She kissed Vera Alexandrovna’s forehead and carefully smoothed a long strip of white paper over it. This was the Orthodox passport to the afterlife, the podorozhnaya. The words, beseeching the Lord to receive His humble servant, were inscribed in Old Church Slavonic. Her duty performed, the old woman crossed herself with two fingers, in the way of the Old Believers, and shuffled away.
Krisov looked as if his collar was too tight. But some of the other mourners crossed themselves. Every Russian is Orthodox on his deathbed, Sasha though
t. It was said that even members of the Central Committee had asked to receive the last rites — insurance against the unknown.
Sasha felt a cold, stinging rain against the back of his neck. He looked down into the waiting grave, where a puddle of rain had already formed. Leaves and twigs and the bodies of dead insects bobbed about inside it. Vera Alexandrovna’s face was damp against his lips.
He heard the ringing, implacable sound of the nails being driven through the coffin lid. The undertakers laid ropes under the box and hauled it to the edge of the grave. There was a splash as it dropped to the bottom. Sasha’s mother tossed in the first sod of earth, Sasha the next. It thudded against the wood and gave back no echo.
The mysterious words that Vera Alexandrovna had read to him once from First Corinthians came back unsummoned. ‘For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.’ He understood the words no better now than as a child, but they seemed to steady him, like a railing above a darkened stairwell.
*
With graduation looming up, great things were predicted for Sasha. The Party hadn’t failed to appreciate his work for the Komsomol; he was already a candidate member, with the prospect of an influential post as an apparatchik. He passed exams with the ease that some athletes jump hurdles, and the head of the faculty assured him, in private, that he would be offered a postgraduate fellowship. Inspector Lubovin had pursued him, lightly reproaching him for never having called the 224 number. Lubovin summoned him to a reception center off Dzerzhinsky Square and told him that a career was open to him in the KGB. He seemed offended when Sasha said he would have to think about it. ‘Your friend Suchko didn’t hesitate,’ Lubovin told him. ‘You don’t think twice about an offer to join an elite force.’
But Sasha said the same thing to all of them: he would think about it.
It was Ilya Zhukovsky’s visit that settled it for him.
The poet loomed up like a specter as Sasha was leaving the building on Peschanaya Street. Zhukovsky’s appearance was as terrifying as it was unexpected. He had aged ten years in the space of two. His hair, mostly gray, was coming out in tufts. His shoulders slumped forward in front of a concave chest. There was a suppurating scab along one side of his nose. His adam’s apple stuck out like a flint.
‘Suchonok,’ Zhukovsky hissed at Sasha. ‘You little bitch.’
Sasha looked about wildly. None of the neighbors was in sight.
‘What are you looking for?’ Zhukovsky mocked him. ‘Are you thinking of turning me in again? You needn’t bother. That’s what they said. I’m not worth bothering about. That’s why they let me out early.’
His outburst collapsed in a racking cough, and Sasha realized he was dying.
Sasha said, ‘Why have you come?’
‘Why?’ It was an ugly screech, like a crow’s. ‘Because I want you to know what you did to her. I want you to have to live with that, every fucking day.’
He staggered to a nearby bench, and started fumbling for tobacco. Sasha knew that smell. It was the same shag Professor Levin smoked.
‘You saw Tanya?’ Sasha pressed him.
‘I heard all of it,’ Zhukovsky said, in little more than a whisper. ‘She was pretty — oh, God, she was always that — and some guard took a fancy to her and got her a soft assignment. They keep men and women apart, of course. But every day they would send Tanya over with a few of the lucky ones from her camp to cook for the men who were working on the pipeline. Then it all went sour. Maybe she refused to sleep with her protector, or maybe she stopped screwing him’ — he added this with malicious pleasure, as if the words were powdered glass he was blowing into Sasha’s face — ‘or maybe she was trying to organize a political discussion group. You should see our Russian thieves, our real men. They don’t take kindly to political discussions.’
He broke off in another coughing fit. The rag he pressed to his mouth came away mottled with red.
‘So you know what happened?’ Zhukovsky resumed. ‘They made a present of her, first to the vipers, then to the thieves. They threw her to them like a bowl of slops. Do you know what a streetcar means? One climbs on, then the next —’
‘Shut your mouth!’ Sasha yelled at him.
‘Or what? Would you like to beat me up? Go ahead. There’s nothing you can teach me about beatings.’
Sasha realized he had clenched his fist, and let his hand fall to his side, ashamed.
‘Is she — is she —’
‘Is she alive?’ Zhukovsky taunted him. ‘Oh, she had spirit, like a wild mare. She wasn’t easy to break, not like me. Despite you.’ His lips curled back in a risorius grin, displaying discolored, almost toothless gums. His face was a death mask as he added, ‘She never stopped loving you.’
‘Fuck your mother, tell me!’
‘Oh, she kept going for a while. She needed medical attention, of course. The methods are primitive out there, but they got her back on her feet, and packed her off to a prison factory that grinds lenses to sell to the Americans. Who says forced labor is uneconomic? After all —’
‘Tell me!’
‘She found out she was going to have a baby. Not yours, I assume. Our thieves are quite virile.’
There was murder in Sasha’s eyes, normally so remote.
‘She could have got rid of it somehow, I suppose. But at that point, something snapped. I know how that happens.’ Zhukovsky held up his arms, and for the first time, Sasha saw the ragged white scars across his wrists. ‘Tanya was more efficient,’ he went on. ‘There was some construction work going on at the camp. When nobody was looking, she got hold of a power saw.’
He started describing the type, as if he were trying to sell one.
‘Oh, God.’ Sasha’s chest heaved, and there was a pounding in his ears. Zhukovsky, the bench, the half-grown trees, and the playground beyond receded into a pink fog. In their place, he saw Tanya in a clearing behind a prison barracks, saw her switch on the saw, set it on the ground, and lower herself, stretched full length, as if she were about to do push-ups. Or make love. He saw the white gleam in her throat as she let herself fall onto the running blade.
Zhukovsky had had his revenge.
*
Sasha understood that there was only one place for him to go. He went to Captain Suvorin, the military instructor, and said, ‘Is your offer still open?’
Suvorin raced through the paperwork, eager to get Sasha’s signature on the forms. When they had finished, he produced vodka and a couple of mugs.
‘We ought to celebrate,’ Suvorin said. ‘I’m leaving the university too. I finally worked off my sentence. Budem zdorovy!’
‘Budem!’ Sasha chimed in, clinking mugs.
‘You’re a real sphinx,’ Suvorin said to him. ‘I didn’t dare ask you this until I’d got you signed up. I know what the others say. They say the army is a swamp. Most of the smart ones, the ones who can take their pick, find something better to do. Now you, you had everything open to you. Why the army?’
Because it’s in my blood, Sasha thought. Because I’m sick of betrayals. Because he wanted to lose himself in the discipline and physical exertion of army life until his sense of guilt and loss had dulled. Because he wanted to get as far away as possible from the Suchkos and the Topchys until he had the means to deal with them. Because the army is the only institution in the country that has the power — in the right hands — to crush the people who murdered Tanya and my father.
He raised his mug and said, ‘Because I like the smell of high boots.’
Chapter Two – The Aquarium
‘I do not exhort you to make war without lawful reasons; I only desire you to apply yourself to learn the art of it. For it is impossible to govern well without knowing the rules and disciplines of it.’
Peter the Great, in a letter to the Tsarevich Alexis, whom he subsequently put to death
The headquarters of the KGB is on public display, with Iron Feliks — a statue of its Polish founder, Dzerzhinsky — out in front. The s
quare on which it stands is named after him, and so is the metro station, and the nearby street where the Moscow District office and the KGB staff club are located. Though KGB officers on their way to work by taxi are inclined to direct the driver to Detsky Mir — Children’s World — the big toy shop across Dzerzhinsky Square, rather than to Number 2, still familiarly known as the Lubyanka, the Committee for State Security prefers to advertize its presence rather than conceal it. It is officially described as the Sword and Shield of the Party; the people should be reminded that it is vigilant.
The KGB’s sister-service, the GRU, is more retiring. Few Russians know that its initials stand for Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenie — the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff. Fewer still are aware that its nerve center is an office complex hidden behind the high walls of the aircraft and rocket factories that cluster around the old Khodinsk airfield. Members of the GRU call it the Aquarium. In all the years he had lived on Peschanaya Street, just a few blocks away, Sasha had never dreamed of its existence.
Except for the few weeks of the year when army units drill on the runways to prepare for the two biggest events on the Soviet calendar — May Day and the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution — life at Khodinsk airfield is mostly nocturnal. An Antonov transport plane or a fat-bellied Mi-10 helicopter may land in the middle of the night to unload a Western-made rocket engine or a mainframe computer, which will be rushed away for the defense scientists to analyze and copy. Most of the time, however, the airstrip is the preserve of packs of guard dogs, scores of them, Dobermans and German shepherds that bay in the night like wolves.
The backside of the GRU factory is visible to someone walking along Khoroshevskoye Shosse from the nearest metro station, Polezhayevskaya. It is a gray four-story brick building, caked with filth and soot, with bars in the windows like a jail or a Victorian madhouse. Inside the service, it is known as the Institute of Operational Equipment, and its experts specialize in producing one-of-a-kind gadgets for spies and assassins. Do you need an exploding lipstick or a two-layer film that allows you to conceal the negative of a top-secret blueprint under a harmless family snapshot? Apply here. Some of Russia’s most proficient professional criminals have been reprieved and assigned to the GRU factory to advise on safecracking and techniques of surreptitious entry.
