by Robert Moss
She recognized the yellow hulk of General Staff headquarters from her drive with Guy Harrison. She caught a passing glimpse of the statue of Gogol, and found it unsettling. She remembered reading an account of the writer’s final decline into madness. Gogol had succumbed to the influence of a monk who preached black reaction and told him that his books were a sin against God. He had ended by burning the manuscript of his last masterpiece. The story had shocked her. Russia, she thought, was a country of violent excess, even in atonement.
She heard gunshots from the direction of the river, and looked at her escort. He seemed to be fighting to stay awake.
There was a barricade and a machine gun post at the end of Frunze Street, and the officer in charge called someone on his field telephone before letting them drive through. As soon as the Chaika stopped, Orlov jerked into action. He rushed her up the steps, between massive columns, into a lobby that was swarming with men in uniform. All of them were armed, and they all seemed to be moving at a half-run, the heels of their polished boots clattering against the floor. There was something else that was odd, but she couldn’t place it until Orlov had cleared a path for her and propeled her into a reserved elevator. There were no flags, no emblems, no photographs, as if the walls had been swept clean.
A sergeant in battledress watched them, unsmiling, as they rode up to the fifth floor. He was cradling a kalashnikov.
They emerged into a waiting area that was as bustling as the loLoy below. Couriers raced back and forth, and several men in generals’ uniforms were arguing with an impassive major about their rights to an immediate audience with someone.
Orlov took her arm and steered her around the crowd. ‘Tell the Chairman she’s here,’ he called to the major, who abandoned his desk and vanished through a great padded leather door.
Elaine was conscious that all the eyes in the room had been turned on her. There was a buzz of speculation, some of it obscene. Elaine’s command of colloquial Russian was not sufficient to catch all the nuances, but she caught the general drift, and turned her back on the men. Orlov growled something, and the voices fell silent.
The major came back, followed by a plump-faced man about Sasha’s age who smiled at her and said, ‘He’s waiting for you.’ Seeing her hesitate in front of the door, he nudged her gently forward.
She was reaching for the handle when the door was flung back and Sasha was standing in front of her. He seemed enormously tall, even in that huge room with its high ceilings, and he had lost weight, so that there were shadows under his cheekbones. He was pale, as if he had been living in that room, with the drapes closed, since he had turned on his heel and left her in the parking lot near the Visotny Dom.
Her throat felt constricted. She could barely utter the two syllables of his name.
He reached behind her and swung the door shut. It blotted out the noise of the outer office, and for a moment all she could hear was her own breathing and the low hum of some electrical device.
She met his eyes, and they frightened her the way they had done at their first, unlikely encounter in Bloomingdale’s. There was the same intensity, the same mixture of puzzlement and recognition. He scanned her face as if he was trying to make sure who she was.
They moved closer together, not in a sudden rush, but as if compelled by a magnetic force. When he put his hands on her upper arms, it was not clear whether it was to draw her closer or to hold them apart. But even through the thickness of her floppy sweater, she felt his touch as an electric charge, and her whole body quivered.
We are the same, she told herself. The world has changed, but not us.
He leaned over her, and her lips parted. She felt his breath on her cheek, the firmness of his body as they came together; she smelled woodsmoke and old leather. Then he pulled back with the sudden, curving motion of a pine tree whipsawed by the wind.
‘Sit with me,’ he said, leading the way to a pair of armchairs flanking a tall window covered by heavy red drapes.
He could hardly bear to look at her. In her sweater and slacks, with her hair grown out of the geometric planes she had once favored and tumbling down to her shoulders, she was Tanya as well as Elaine. She was everything that meant happiness and peace.
He gripped the armrests of his chair as if he meant to drive his fingers through the fabric.
‘What has happened, Sasha?’ she asked, breaking the silence. ‘What’s happened to you? I heard them call you Chairman.’
‘There are eight of us,’ he said absently, as if the subject had nothing to do with him. ‘We call ourselves the Military Revolutionary Committee. I don’t suppose Orlov told you very much.’
‘He might as well have been mute.’
‘Do you remember the story of the French Revolution? Louis XVI was roused by his valet and he demanded to know what the disturbance was. Is it a revolt? And the valet replied, No, sire, it is a revolution.’
‘You mean, you’ve made a revolution?’
‘We have begun,’ he said with renewed passion. ‘We can no more turn back than a bullet can return to the barrel of a gun. We have to succeed, to give meaning to the lives that have already been broken.’
She saw again the man with the laughing eyes who had been tortured because he tried to help her.
‘Feliks was your friend, wasn’t he?’
She told him how Nikolsky had died with his head in her arms, and she watched Sasha turn away, closer to tears than she had ever seen him. She went over and sat on the arm of his chair, stroking his hair lightly with her hand. There was more gray in it than before. She wanted to hold him, to comfort him. He still wouldn’t look at her.
‘Sasha,’ she murmured. ‘I love you. It’s the only thing I’ve had to hold on to.’
He put his arms around her then, and pulled her down so that her head was resting against his chest. She could hear his heart beating, too quickly.
‘Tell me what you want of me,’ she said. ‘I’ll do anything if you just hold me. I’ve been so cold without you, Sasha.’ She began to nuzzle his neck, to trace lines down his chest with her fingers, and felt his body beginning to respond, and for a wild, exquisite moment she thought, We don’t have to hide anymore, not even here.
Then she felt him tense and disengage.
‘Sasha, what’s wrong?’ she said anxiously. It’s because of Feliks, she thought. Because he died trying to save me. Because it wouldn’t have happened if I had been able to keep away from you.
‘Don’t blame yourself for anything,’ he said, as if reading her thoughts. ‘We can only go forward, not back. And you have to go back to New York.’
She felt an overpowering sense of vertigo, of spinning downwards from a great height, like the bleak ziggurat of her recurring dream. She managed to say, ‘I don’t understand.’
He enclosed her hands with his. He said, ‘I can only be happy with you. But my destiny is not to be happy.’
‘Haven’t we earned the right to be happy?’
‘My destiny is something else. It is here, in the service of my people, and it will consume all of my energy. To make them free, I must reject any hope of freedom for myself. There is no place for us, no time. If we tried to pretend it was otherwise, I would end by destroying you.’
‘It’s not fair,’ she protested. ‘You deny me any power of choice.’
‘Neither of us has the power to choose,’ he said simply. ‘Orlov will take you to the airport.’
‘Sasha.’ She looked into his smoky eyes, and knew she couldn’t fight him. In place of the bitter words she had framed, she said, ‘Kiss me.
His mouth sought hers, and she was falling again. She clutched at his neck, drawing him tighter, until she couldn’t breathe. His warmth seemed to spread to every part of her body.
He said, ‘You take my heart with you.’
He watched her rearrange her clothes, walk stiffly to the door, and pause before turning the handle. She looked back at him over her shoulder for barely more than a heartbeat, and he had to
force himself not to call out to her.
The door swung open, and the Chief of Staff’s office was invaded by the racket from outside before it closed behind her.
Sasha recited in Russian the last lines of Vissotsky’s ballad about the wolves:
Today, I am not the same as yesterday —
hunted, hunted —
and the huntsmen are left with empty hands.
He buried his face in his hands.
*
Guy Harrison roamed the streets of Moscow and saw them change. He was limping a bit, more from his gout than the episode on the road to the airport. The neon lights on the huge billboard in Mayakovsky Square, across from the cinema, no longer flashed out party slogans. The placards of Lenin had come down. The statue of Dzerzhinsky, in the square named after him, had been torn from its plinth. Churches that had been closed since Stalin’s time, or even earlier, were opened again, and there were lines of people out in the street waiting to attend service, the way there had once been in front of Lenin’s mausoleum. The Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church inside Russia, a man who was widely believed to have worked hand in hand with the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, had retreated to a seminary. Underground priests had come out of hiding.
There was a fair amount of looting going on, even though the military authorities had threatened summary execution. The favorite targets were the abandoned apartments of the former Party elite. Squatters had moved in to some of the famous buildings on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Street peddlers offered souvenirs of the former regime: only ‘five dollars American’ for a genuine Order of the Red Banner, fifty for a cigarette case with Askyerov’s initials. Harrison invested in the cigarette case, after some haggling. The initials might not be authentic, but the gold plating looked real enough.
Pravda and Izvestia and all the other Soviet publications had been suspended. In their place, the new authorities put out a fairly drab newssheet entitled Rodina, or ‘Motherland,’ which mostly confined itself to reprinting government decrees and listing charges of fraud and corruption that were being brought against former officials. The day Sasha had Elaine brought to him at Gogol Boulevard, Rodina carried a group portrait of the members of the Military Revolutionary Committee. Sasha was sitting in the front row, along with Zaytsev, Vlassov, and Leybutin. Guy Harrison thought they looked rather awkward, like schoolboys being forced to pose for a class photograph.
Various luminaries of the defunct Writers’ Union were on the phone to Harrison day and night imploring him to find jobs for them in the West. A former editor who used to look down his nose at everyone turned up on Harrison’s doorstep with his bags already packed, insisting that Guy should arrange to spirit him out of the country so that his literary skills would not be lost to mankind. Remembering how Erinshteyn had used to preach that exile was too good for people like Solzhenitsyn and Lev Kopelev, Harrison suggested that he should apply to the Bulgarian Embassy, where several apparatchiki were reputed to have claimed asylum.
Harrison went to lunch at one of his favorite spots, the Uzbek restaurant where he had gone with Elaine. The place seemed to be in complete disarray. But he could at least get a drink. He sipped it and wondered what had become of her. She probably knew more about what was going on than any of them. While he was sitting there, a large, boisterous Russian came in and greeted him as an old friend.
‘Kozlov, Yevgeny Kozlov,’ he introduced himself, pumping Harrison’s hand.
Someone else who wants an exit visa, Harrison thought. Then the name clicked. ‘You’re the new head of television,’ he said.
‘Just so, just so. I was thinking about you.’
‘My dear chap. I’m flattered.’
‘Are you still writing for the London papers?’
‘And New York. When your blessed junta chooses to let me file.’ The first reports by Western correspondents based in Moscow were beginning to trickle out. But the authorities insisted that everything had to be screened by a military censor.
‘Things will get easier,’ Kozlov assured him. ‘Be sure to watch the TV news tonight. I think you’re going to enjoy it.’
*
It was dusk when the General Secretary’s Ilyushin jet, escorted by the brace of F-15 fighters that had joined it along the coast of Newfoundland, made a slightly jerky landing at Andrews Air Force Base.
Washington was enjoying the dying days of an Indian summer; men went about in seersucker suits, their jackets slung from their shoulders. But the Secretary of State stood formal and correct in his pinstripe as he waited for the special envoy from Moscow to disembark. Admiral Lutz, the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood beside him in full dress uniform. There was a Marine honor guard lined up along the tarmac. Given the new complexion of the Russian leadership, the Administration had decided not to skimp on the military decorum.
The steps were rolled up, and a man in the uniform of a Russian airborne officer descended briskly, followed by two men who were obviously bodyguards.
Then a girl appeared at the top of the steps, fragile and beautiful, her dark hair streaming in the wind. She made an attempt to flatten it back into place before she started to walk down. She had an attache case in her hand.
‘She looks American,’ Admiral Lutz observed.
‘Must be the interpreter,’ the Secretary of State commented.
She had reached the foot of the steps. She stood there, looking at the American delegation, while they looked at her. Kolya Vlassov, slightly uncomfortable in a civilian suit, followed her down the steps, with a couple of aides in uniform at his heels.
‘I’m just a passenger,’ Elaine said to the State Department functionary who intercepted her. She started walking briskly away from the reception line.
A man went running after her.
‘Elaine, wait. I have to talk to you.’
She didn’t slow her pace as Luke Gladden came abreast of her.
‘General Vlassov speaks very good English,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he can answer all your questions.’
‘Elaine, are you okay? We didn’t know what the hell had happened to you.’
‘Yes.’ She mumbled something into the wind as she quickened her stride.
‘What did you say?’ Gladden shouted at her.
‘I said you could call it hell.’
She let the glass door to the VIP lounge slam shut in his face.
*
An hour after Kolya Vlassov left the Oval office, the President of the United States, acting in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, ordered his armed forces to stand down. He nominated Admiral Lutz to head a special commission that would leave for Moscow as soon as possible to negotiate on the basis of the Russian government’s proposals. There were already confirmed reports of mass rioting in Berlin and a rebellion in the western provinces of Cuba. A CIA intercept suggested that the Rumanian leader was preparing to flee to Switzerland with his family on a special plane. The Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations warned his American colleague that the Russians were mounting ‘a crude imperialist provocation’ and that Peking would take drastic, but unspecified, action if Washington entered into new strategic accords with Moscow.
Admiral Lutz sniffed the morning air at Andrews Air Force base before boarding his plane and said, ‘Good hunting weather.’
*
The men of Leybutin’s Anti-Corruption Command raided a lavish penthouse apartment not far from the Visotny Dom that had been the Moscow home for a famous American capitalist who had been doing business with the Soviet leadership for half a century. He lived in a style worthy of the Tsars, courtesy of a grateful Soviet government. He bestowed some of the art treasures he had been permitted to export from Moscow on kings and heads of state abroad to buy entree to their banquets and receptions. Those in the West who had followed his fortunes with suspicion said that he was the prototype of the kind of businessman Lenin expected to ‘sell the rope’ with which he would be hanged. Leybutin, dazzled and disgusted by the treasures that he found in the pe
nthouse, saw a different pattern of light and shade as his investigators showed him the evidence of fantastic kickbacks that had been paid to members of the Soviet government. It was of no interest to him what this entrepreneur’s loyalties may have been, if he had any beyond self-interest to begin with. What mattered was that, for Russia, he had acted like a malignant distemper.
Kozlov invited Guy Harrison to attend the filming. General Leybutin was going to be there in person, to make a brief statement.
Leybutin arrived late and angry, and hurled his briefcase with such force at a Louis XV chair that its gilded arm cracked ominously.
Kozlov rushed up to him. ‘What’s wrong?’
All Harrison could make out to begin with was a long string of curses.
‘I should have squashed him on the spot, that greasy slug!’
It gradually became clear that Leybutin was complaining about the Deputy Trade Minister, Askyerov’s Armenian. He had eluded arrest for the first couple of days after the coup, but the anti-corruption squads had tracked him down to one of his lairs, the dacha of an over-the-hill girlfriend, the widow of a Ministry of Interior official who had died under mysterious circumstances. It turned out that the Armenian and his lady friend were at the center of a very lucrative racket, smuggling vast quantities of roubles to Kabul, where they could be sold for hard currency in the bazaar. The dollars and pounds sterling and Deutschmarks, in turn, could be used to buy up black market goods, from scotch whisky to video cameras, for resale in Moscow. Askyerov, the godfather of the whole operation, was taking the biggest cut.
When Leybutin, who had been wounded in Afghanistan and watched several of his friends die there, heard the details of this smuggling ring, he was ready to kill the Armenian on the spot. When the Armenian tried to bribe his way out of his difficulties by offering Leybutin ‘one million American,’ the general went berserk. He seemed to be trying to tear the man limb from limb, and would probably have succeeded if his men hadn’t managed to restrain him.
Leybutin obviously needed time to recover. Kozlov left him alone and wandered over to where Guy Harrison was standing idly inspecting the American millionaire’s collection of Fabergé eggs.
