The streets are a place visited now and then in early hours, buildings towering gravely, streets that are spectral and awash with light. She is here to walk along Great Lubyanka Street. A changing distance: sometimes only a block or two, sometimes close to a mile.
There are the Moscow crowds. Children, adults. They are at once easy and hard to hear, voices like the mutterings of ghosts.
In each recurrence of this world she is a visitor without identity, lacking papers, a passport. She is desperate to blend in, desperate to reach the building at the end of the street, a hotel turned tenement rising six storeys high, a place here but half anywhere, no glass in its windows, and from each gap the sound of conversation, words indecipherable, as if spoken through cloth.
Why is she here? What is she seeking?
If she needs access to this building, its corridors, its stairwells, the body-strewn rooms she knows are inside, it is not granted. It is her fate to stand before it. Outside it, looking up.
It is a dream long suffered. A secret in her sleep, a kind of stitching, she thinks, between lives.
When the historian visits, he sets a microphone on the table and she speaks—an old woman—for the National Library. It is a week-long task. The historian’s questions give her the space to betray Volodya, to admit his faults, to commit herself, finally, to the truth. She doesn’t. The record is no all-important thing, and what exactly would be the point?
The journalists continue to come, sitting darkly in their cars, spurred by the anniversary of Cold War events.
‘Mrs Petrov? Are you Mrs Petrov?’
She calls the police. The matter is brought up by a politician in parliament on her behalf.
Which is why, at 5 a.m. on a day in 1996, she checks the street carefully before going to the taxi. Just an old woman, a nobody headed to Tullamarine without a suitcase.
‘Meeting someone?’ asks the driver.
‘Yes. My sister.’
She waits in the Qantas lounge. Sets eyes on Tamara for the first time in four decades. And the moment is like air. In their embrace is the heat of all things lost that cannot be regained. They spend the afternoon in the backyard, drinking tea and talking, their voices carrying on the wind. An afternoon long dying. Long veins of grey cloud turning red.
Author’s note
This is a work of fiction. While it draws upon historical events and personalities, its characters are speculative versions of their real-world counterparts and many of their traits and actions have been exaggerated or wholly invented. Much of Document Z is based on archival sources: either on the records of the 1954 Royal Commission on Espionage, or on the reports, recordings and other files later released by ASIO and now held by the National Archives (some of which can be viewed online at www.naa.gov.au). I am also indebted to the viewed online at www.naa.gov.au). I am also indebted to the accounts of the affair written by those at its centre, specifically accounts of the affair written by those at its centre, specifically Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov’s Empire of Fear (London: Andre Deutsch, 1956), Michael Bialoguski’s The Petrov Story (London: William Heinemann, 1955) and Michael Thwaites’ Truth Will Out (Sydney: Collins, 1980). I am grateful for Robert Manne’s The Petrov Affair (Sydney: Pergamon, 1987), the authoritative history to which those seeking to know more about the affair should turn.
Acknowledgements
Document Z began as a PhD thesis and I would like to thank Tony Birch and Ken Gelder for their invaluable guidance and advice over a rewarding four years.
For their knowledge, enthusiasm and expertise transforming Document Z from manuscript to book, my thanks to Annette Barlow, Catherine Milne, Alexandra Nahlous, Renee Senogles and all at Allen & Unwin.
For her careful editing, insights and suggestions, I am indebted to Nicola O’Shea.
For their long-standing commitment to Australian writing, thanks to The Australian and Vogel’s.
Lastly, for all their support, thank you to my family—Roger, Margaret, Helen and Alice—and to Molly Peterson, not least for her unwavering encouragement.
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