by Robert Moss
‘Please get off the line,’ Nikolsky said.
But he was stuck with her, so he began giving her messages to relay for him. It was terribly important, he kept trying to explain. He wasn’t sure whether she had understood when the connection was broken, and the men in fur hats were shoving him into a big gray bus, like the one the Mission used in New York. There vv,:re lots of bruisers inside, sprawled out on the floor, leaving no room to pass; he tripped over their legs as he was pushed through one compartment into another.
Someone shouted, ‘Here’s the whiphouse!’ and he was thrust into a tiny, filthy lavatory with a heavy metal door that could be forced open only a few inches before it slammed shut. The ginger-haired psycho was roaring with laughter.
Then, all at once, they had dragged him into a huge room, packed with men who had an unpleasant, greenish sheen to their faces and clothes. He could see Drinov sitting in a place of honor, smirking. A chubby fellow in the front row bounced up. He had a long, crumpled piece of paper, like a laundry list, in his hand, and Nikolsky realized that it was the list of accusations against him. ‘My name is Krupchenko,’ the fat man began.
Nikolsky felt them grab him by the shoulders, and yelled, ‘Not yet!’ He woke to find Olga peering into his face.
‘Are you sick, Feliks? It’s not like you to talk in your sleep.’
‘What did I say?’ He was suddenly awake.
‘I couldn’t make it out.’
‘Go back to sleep.’ He kissed her.
But the baby started wailing in the next room, and she got up to see to it.
He made himself coffee in the kitchen and laced it with a couple of fingers of brandy. When she came in to rinse the baby’s bottle, Olga said, ‘Is it something at the office?’
‘Just a bad dream.’ Nikolsky smiled at her. What made their marriage perfect, Nikolsky reflected, was that Olga would never insist. He didn’t have to tell her that the inquisition into the Hansen fiasco was still going on, and that Drinov was determined to cut off his balls. Still, old Ike, his boss in New York, had stood up for him. There was a chance, just a chance, that they’d post him abroad again soon just to smooth everything over. He knew there was a vacancy coming up in London. If they offered it to him, he would grab it. Maybe he ought to grab it and never come back. Maybe that’s what the dream was telling him. The coffee or the thought made him shudder, and he dribbled a bit more brandy into his mug.
Olga didn’t pass judgment. She never did. But she said, ‘Are you going to be late tonight, Feliks?’ She was looking as flirtatious as she could manage with her hair still in curlers and a drab flannel night-gown that didn’t disguise how much her body had thickened since her last pregnancy.
‘Sasha’s been promoted,’ he told her. ‘We’re going to celebrate.’ He didn’t have to tell her not to wait up. But he squeezed her and said, ‘You’re a good kid,’ before kissing the children and helping himself to another slug to get him through the dry morning out at the Village.
*
If you were going out on the town with Feliks, it was not a good idea to drive, especially in Moscow, where Sasha’s special license tags could not be relied upon to have the same magical effect on the militia that his DPL plates had had on the police in New York. Things had happened quickly since Sasha’s convalescence. He had been sent to the General Staff academy, and when he came out, it was to find the country with a new leader and his father-in-law, Marshal Zotov, poised to take the final, decisive step toward control of the armed forces. Feliks had been proved right. Using the files of the KGB to mute dissent, Andropov had managed to steal the succession from his many rivals. The last obstacle in his path was cleared when he managed to seal a pact with the Defense Minister. It didn’t escape Sasha’s attention that the army was already beginning to be acknowledged as a kingmaker.
So the country, having been exposed to the spectacle of old Leonid Ilych dying in front of television cameras and massed crowds over a period of years, was now privileged to hear rumors of Brezhnev’s successor wasting away behind closed doors. Such rumors were already circulating — rumors, about the arrival of kidney dialysis machines from West Germany, doctors from Sweden. How it would end was a matter of speculation. There was Askyerov, wheedling and conspiring at Andropov’s elbow, trying to recruit a loyal cabal of supporters. The KGB, which the two of them represented, had never been so influential. Even the ministry of interior had been handed over to a general of the KGB. But the power of the army had grown too.
‘We put Yuri Vladimirovich where he sits,’ the Marshal had bragged to Sasha after his graduation from the staff college. ‘And he’d better remember it. He’s not our man, of course, not a bit, but he’s the smartest of that bunch.’ Zotov was contemptuous of Brezhnev’s cronies; the Banda, or ‘gang,’ a yes-man and a slogan-maker who had spent his entire life in Brezhnev’s shadow, since their early days together in Moldavia, a fistful of real estate on the borders of the Ukraine that Stalin had snatched from Rumania at the end of the war. Chernenko had been Andropov’s chief rival until the high command decided to follow the example of the KGB and throw its support behind the former Chairman of State Security. Deals had been made with the Defense Minister and the Chief of Staff, and Zotov, seeing which way the wind was blowing, had gone along with them. But in private, as he said to Sasha, Vindropov is a dying man resting on a house of cards. One puff —’ He blew out the air like a bellows.
Lydia had come into her own in the weeks Sasha had spent rebuilding his strength at the dacha in the Silver Forest, fussing over him like an indulgent nanny.
‘You see, you need me when you’re down,’ she would say to him, before regaling him with the latest Moscow gossip or a long jeremiad about how Petya was becoming unmanageable, forever scrapping with his schoolmates, or how reliable household help was impossible to find.
She was proud of Sasha’s wartime exploits, and showed him off to her friends as if he were an exhibit. Her patriotism was of the raw, old-fashioned kind. It sickened him to hear her recounting a romanticized version of his Afghan campaigns to Petya and her visitors, but he lay silent until he was strong enough to go off on long solitary rambles among the birches.
I’ve gained more than I lost, he reassured himself. He had found others in the army who were angered by the waste and shame of a war fought by stupid means for stupid reasons. That anger, if harnessed properly, would help to change Russia. He was less alone than before.
He expressed something of this to Zotov after his graduation from the staff academy. He was expecting one of the Marshal’s eruptions. Instead, the older man heard him out patiently.
‘I hear you,’ was all the Marshal said by way of comment. ‘I was at the front myself, don’t forget.’
The next day, Zotov made his proposal. Characteristically, he delivered it in the form of an order. ‘You’ll come and work for me at the General Staff. As my personal assistant.’ Sasha had started to point out that this might be less than politic, given their family relationship. Mightn’t those who were jealous of Zotov, or nervous of his power, complain that he was practicing nepotism, favoring his own family in just the way that the Brezhnev clique had made notorious?
‘You’re talking cunt!’ Zotov had cut him off. ‘Let them think I’m vulnerable. Let Askyerov go crawling to Yuri Vladimirovich if he likes. That’s fine. It will make all that gang feel more secure. I need a man beside me I can trust completely. I can’t tell you everything yet, Sasha. It would be premature. But you’ve got a good nose. I still remember our little talk at Livadia. You sniffed out Andropov, and Askyerov. You have an instinct for events that have barely begun to shape themselves, trends that others don’t see. And since you got your whiff of gunpowder fighting the black-asses in Afghanistan, you’ve got a sense of the kind of men we need to run things. I know I can count on you.’
In his usual style, the Marshal didn’t leave space for argument.
He merely added, ‘Naturally, we’ll have to do something about th
ose shoulder straps of yours. It wouldn’t do for the First Deputy to the Chief of Staff, a Marshal of the Soviet Army, to have a mere colonel as an assistant.’
So Sasha became a major-general, and the numbers on the license plate of his black Volga had the prefix ‘MO’ that was reserved for senior officials of the General Staff. But he wasn’t driving tonight.
It was an easy walk from the yellowish mock-Grecian portals of the vast General Staff complex that sprawled along Gogol Boulevard to the beer-bar Zhiguli, where Sasha and Nikolsky had arranged to meet. But Sasha had gone home first to change out of his army uniform, with its intimidating — and possibly compromising — new badges of rank, and re-emerged from the Arbat metro station. Walking along Kalinin Prospekt, with its continuous glass-and-aluminum facade under the stark white tower blocks, Sasha always experienced a vague sense of loss for the priceless architecture that had fallen to the wrecker’s ball when he was a boy, being steered around the city in the firm grip of his grandmother.
As always, there was a long line outside the Zhiguli, mostly composed of out-of-towners, stamping their feet to keep warm. Their breath condensed in front of their faces like ectoplasm. They looked at Sasha’s foreign-made overcoat resentfully.
A taxi pulled up, and Nikolsky jumped out.
‘Good evening, General!’ he called out cheerily. ‘You see, I was calling you the right thing all the time.’
Sasha felt real pleasure as Feliks grabbed him in a bear hug. But he was shocked at the way Nikolsky looked. His face was puffier than before, and unnaturally flushed, except for the bags under his eyes, which were fishbelly color. He was nattily turned out, like he used to be, but his suit had horizontal creases around the middle, as if the buttons needed loosening.
He’s in a corkscrew dive, Sasha thought.
Nikolsky squired Sasha up to the glass doors of the bar. Some of the people waiting in line started to grumble and swear as Feliks eased his way through.
‘Izvinite,’ he mumbled. ‘Excuse me. Our friends are inside.’
The doorman greeted Nikolsky like an old comrade and ushered them in. Nikolsky shook hands with him, leaving a rouble in his palm. The drunk in charge of the cloakroom barely stirred as they deposited their coats, after carefully stuffing their hats inside the sleeves — an indispensable precaution if you expected to see your hat again.
A thin wooden partition screened the drinking area from the crowd outside. It was dim under the muddy orange lights. The patrons were packed in around square oak tables. But three or four tables were vacant, reserved for special friends of the house — which really meant special friends of the waiters since, in a Soviet hostelry, the waiter is god.
Feliks winked at a tall man in a white jacket who was tramping around the tables with a dozen pint-mugs of beer on a tray. The waiter was florid and big-bellied, but he stomped along like a parade-ground cadet, his spine ramrod straight.
He got rid of his load, and came over to them.
‘This is Volodya,’ Nikolsky introduced him to Sasha. ‘We all call him Pauk, Spider. Pauk is a man with almost as much influence as the Central Committee. You’d better be careful what you say to him.’
Pauk gave them the best table, over by the left wall, equidistant from the bar at the front and the kitchen at the back.
Feliks winked at the waiter and said, ‘Po-chut-chut? A little something?’
Pauk came back with two frothing mugs of beer and a bottle of vodka in a paper bag. Officially the Zhiguli sold only beer, excellent bitter that you could be sure wasn’t watered down because they delivered it from the brewery in vats that were hooked up directly to the pumps at the bar. This explained the Zhiguli’s popularity: honest beer, at forty-seven kopeks a pint. A favored customer, like Feliks, could naturally arrange to get a bottle of vodka or brandy, but nobody would dream of flaunting this privilege by putting it on the table. This wasn’t for fear of the law. In respect of the law, the Zhiguli was well set up. There, sitting by himself across the room from Sasha and Nikolsky, was the beer-bar’s mascot, a heavyset MVD man in plainclothes, getting quietly sozzled. No, it was just that you didn’t show off in public. Otherwise, you risked getting your face smashed in by somebody who had had a couple of beers and was fed up with queues and empty shelves. So Nikolsky stowed the paper bag away between his feet, tore off the top of the bottle, and poured for himself and Sasha under the table.
‘Pauk went to school with me,’ Nikolsky said, nodding his chin at the waiter. ‘He was quite a roughneck. The teachers were scared to chew him out. I thought he would turn out a crook or end up wearing high boots like you, General. But you became a real aristocrat, didn’t you, Pauk?’ he addressed the waiter as he returned with a big plate of appetizers, dry salted fish and raki, tasty river crabs. ‘Now you can turn up your nose at anyone.’
‘How did he get to be a waiter?’ Sasha asked as Pauk hurried off to see to a minor disturbance that had broken out at a table over by the kitchen, where a drunken patron had grabbed his companion by the throat. The militiaman wasn’t taking any interest. He went on drinking steadily while Pauk and another waiter frog-marched the drunk out the back. That was the way things were at the Zhiguli. Just try complaining about the bill and the waiters would explain it to you with their boots, out in the men’s room.
‘Well, Pauk did his military service, of course. Believe it or not, he’s a general’s son. They made him a guard at one of those test sites they build like stage sets. You know the ones.’
Sasha nodded. He had visited one of the nuclear test areas with the Marshal. It was built like a replica of an American town, with live animals in place of people, to check blast and fallout effects.
‘After the army,’ Feliks went on, ‘Pauk just bummed around for a while. He was a taxi driver for a while, then he landed a job as a telephone repairman at the Centralni Telegraf on Gorky Street.’
This detail pricked Sasha’s interest. The Centralni Telegraf was Moscow’s main telephone exchange. It might be useful to have someone who knew the layout.
‘But Pauk wasn’t made for regular work. He started hustling, buying blue jeans from the tourists. No doubt he would have ended in a bad way except he fell in with another of our school chums, a real crook, called Arkady, who told him that a waiter in a place like this can rake in two or three hundred roubles a night, what with the tips and the way they figure out the bills. Hey, Pauk!’ He called his friend back to illustrate his point. ‘What’s this charge for?’
Pauk squinted at the indecipherable scrap of paper.
‘Oh, that.’ He grinned. ‘That’s my collar size.’
‘Have you got anything planned for tonight?’
The waiter consulted his watch. ‘I was fixing to leave early and go to Ismailovsky Park. How about you?’
‘We’re with you.’ Nikolsky turned to Sasha. ‘What do you say?’
‘Whatever you like.’ Sasha shrugged. By night, Ismailovsky Park, in the north of the city, was a favorite haunt for dating couples, and the restaurant there had a certain reputation as Moscow’s version of a singles bar. ‘I’d better call Lydia.’
They went on drinking and talking about inconsequential things until around ten, when Pauk made his arrangements with the head waiter. It was always possible to get a couple of hours off if you had a spare ten roubles. So far, Sasha and Nikolsky had steered well away from the things they had talked about quite freely in New York — the changes in the leadership, the conditions inside the army and the KGB, the people on their mutual shit-list. They even avoided Afghanistan. Feliks cracked one joke after another, but his humor that night seemed forced.
The taxi ride to Ismailovsky Park took forty minutes. The Restaurant Lesnoi stood alone among the oaks and elms, ringed with private cars, including a big white Mercedes. From the outside, it looked like a modern bistro in Brussels or Cologne, a one-story building with too much glass. Inside, it was a hunting lodge. In the lobby, Nikolsky made a deep bow to a stuffed gray wolf before tossing
his fur hat in the direction of its head. The hat missed the ears, slid down the muzzle, and remained suspended from the nose. There was already a pile of coats on the wolf’s back, to which Sasha added his own.
Inside, the police were already at work, evicting the patrons from their tables. Officially, the establishment shut down at 10:30.
‘Drink up and get out!’ a burly militiaman bellowed at one group. As the people rose to leave, he grabbed the glasses that were still part full and finished off the contents himself.
But the militiamen didn’t fuss with the drinkers in the booths. Rules were elastic; they stretched or contracted depending on who you were dealing with. They were a colorful crowd, the people in these booths fashioned to look like rustic cabins, walled with raw logs crisscrossed and bound tightly together. There were plenty of Georgians, the kind who are never short of cash. There were some Italian tourists; the band at the Lesnoi was renowed for its version of Italian pop music, and had a singer who did a passable impression of Adrianna Chilintana, who was all the rage in Moscow. These tourists were always well received, because they were bound to have something to trade, if only a pair of decent shoes or a transistor radio. The girls who were squeezed into the booths came from just about anywhere.
