The Russian Affair

by Michael Wallner

  “You’ve found yourself a good spot, at the feet of the great philanthropist. Nobody wants to act heartless here. You’ll find compassion here, little one, yes, that tastes good, doesn’t it?” As the old woman took another potato out of her bag, she noticed that she was being observed. “My Tasha died,” she went on, as if she’d included Anna in the conversation right from the start. “A female poodle, she was. I made lots of pretty things for her—I didn’t want my Tasha to be cold, ever. All the same, she often got sick, her eyes never stopped running. She died from something else, though.” The dog gave the woman a nudge, because she’d forgotten to keep feeding him. “I don’t have any more,” she said, patting him hard on the head. “Tomorrow there’ll be a little canned fish. Are you coming again tomorrow, my little friend? Well, I am, too, so we have a date, right?”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “We’re seeing each other for the first time today.” The old woman snapped her bag shut. “And he surely won’t be here tomorrow.” She looked at the dog reproachfully. “Street mutts are faithless.” She scooted clumsily to the edge of the pedestal. “The dogcatcher may pick him up before morning. Right, sweetheart? If you don’t watch out, you’ll wind up in some research lab where they’ll operate on you and stick tubes in you.” The dog wagged his tail attentively. “At least you’ve had enough to eat this one time.” She jumped down from the pedestal, pulled her bag after her, and disappeared into the foggy darkness. The mongrel didn’t follow her; he laid his head between his paws and had a digestive nap.

  The statue loomed blackly above Anna. It was high time for her to leave. She thrust her hands into her sleeves and tried to count the lighted windows in the apartment building across from her; like a trellis of light, they rose up out of the darkness and cast shadowy reflections on the frozen river.

  Anna didn’t want to deceive Alexey; the shamefulness of it festered in her like an ulcer. A solution would require but a single step: She would have to leave him. For doing that, she could have named a hundred reasons, among them the truth. In the beginning, she’d believed that time was on her side; everything had seemed amusing and easy at first. Anna tilted her head back.

  She hadn’t fallen in love with Alexey, she didn’t lust after him, and yet the evenings she spent with him felt to her like excursions to an exotic island. Once a week, usually Thursday, she was picked up by Anton and brought to the Drezhnevskaya apartment. It was as if Anna were going out to a play in which she had the main role. They would always start by chatting about everyday things over a drink or two; eventually, Anna would go into the bathroom, undress, and return naked to the living room, where Alexey would already be stretched out on the sofa. He’d tell her of his travels, and thus she heard about remote regions of the Soviet Union, about people whose way of life differed utterly from that of the Muscovites. Once Bulyagkov evoked a happy memory, an incident from his childhood in rural Ukraine, and his tale made Anna think of one of her father’s poems. Since she didn’t know it by heart, she paraphrased some of the verses in her own words. Alexey liked this and asked her to do it on other occasions, turning the play of her thoughts into a game. Under normal conditions, she would have found it ridiculous to speak in images and to invent individuals and circumstances that didn’t jibe with reality. But Anna was naked, she was a nymph in summer, improvising for the delight of her listener. Wearing an open white shirt, Alexey would loll on the sofa, sipping his drink and watching her as she darted around barefoot, took a book from the shelf, gazed at pictures, tracked the sun’s path over the rooftops. Sometimes Anna would sit down beside him and he’d lay his hand on her hip or grasp her knee and lavish her body with loving gestures composed entirely of words. During their erotic fantasies, they’d remain completely serious, which aroused Anna all the more. They escalated into wild and lusty orgies that the aging man and the house painter would scarcely have been capable of carrying off in reality. Alexey told Anna that he seldom slept with Medea, not because of aversion or habit, but as one might forget something that had never been important. Anna asked whether he’d entertained other women in that apartment, and Alexey did not deny it. On those Thursdays, Anna’s life was carefree, filled with a lightheartedness she’d never known before, something simultaneously lascivious and innocent. Those had been wondrous weeks, they had made the summer pass swiftly, and little by little, Anna had admitted to herself that she felt a deep love for Alexey. She recognized that the evenings with him were what she yearned for most, that the course of her week was directed toward them, and that in the hours before Anton picked her up, she could undertake nothing of any importance. She took great care to be assigned to the early shift on Thursdays, she got home with time to spare, and she made sure she looked her best.

  “An entire bottle of shampoo in a month,” Viktor Ipalyevich said one day. “Good thing I’m bald. Otherwise, our family collective would be given a deadline and ordered to justify this extravagance.” When Anna only laughed, he spoke more pointedly: “How handy for you that Leonid spends so many nights in his barracks.” Her answer was a scared look, to which he replied, “Leonid’s not dumb, you know. And he loves you to boot.”

  “I love him, too,” she said.

  In actual fact, Anna wasn’t unfaithful; she and Alexey didn’t sleep together. However, the rules of their society forbade what they did do: They constructed a private dream, an individual world. Their conduct was “unidealistic” and “morally defective.” When a man like Bulyagkov, who had access to all privileges, engaged in such behavior, it didn’t have the consequences that would threaten a working woman. Toward the end of that summer, Anna had for the first time imagined the day when Alexey would drop her. The following Thursday, he found her uneasy; when he asked her why, she made no secret of her fears. They were drinking port wine, and Anna was fully dressed. Alexey took the glass from her hand, drew her head close to his, and kissed her for the first time.

  “I love you,” he said, as naturally as if he were asking her to open the window. “You have nothing to fear from me, not now, not ever. And if, in spite of that, you decide to break it off someday, I’ll accept your decision.”

  “Why don’t you sleep with me, Alexey?”

  “So we can be like every other couple? So we can finally have a normal affair?”

  “No. Because you love me.”

  They went into the bedroom together. As always, the bed was unmade. “I hadn’t expected to adopt such concrete measures,” he said.

  “Makes no difference,” she replied, pulling him onto the mattress.

  Anna had seduced him and enjoyed it, but at the same time, she’d felt that she was ruining something. She’d gotten closer to the man, but she’d let the keeper of the dream escape. She’d allowed everyday air into their rarefied world. They had lain beside each other on the bed, naked. Horsehair protruded from the mattress here and there. The Deputy Minister had liver spots; his legs were sinewy and marked with blue veins. Afterward, Anna had grown sad. She’d felt that, instead of strengthening their relationship, she’d made its end more palpable. While she was in the bathroom, Alexey had put on a record; it was Shostakovich, somber music that sounded to Anna like a reproach. She’d taken her leave earlier than usual and—with her eyes—begged Alexey to pardon her.

  Anna stood up and walked away from the statue. It had begun to snow; ice crystals smudged the points of light in the windows across from her. She moved toward the building with slow steps. Her affair with Alexey had endured for a year and nine months already, longer than many marriages. And for almost that entire length of time, her “relationship” with the other older man, the one who wore the dark green suits and the eyeglasses that twinkled like stars, had been in existence as well. When they met for the first time, she thought, how paternally he’d acted toward her.

  It had been in August of that first year. On her way to meet Rosa in Arkhangelskoye Park, Anna had descended from the street into a low-lying garden, where thickly blooming flower beds
and dwarf palms enlivened the grassy space. A man in a summer shirt was tearing roses off a climbing bush; on the pond, a woman was sitting in a boat and reading a closely printed manuscript. The summer was almost over, and anyone with sufficient time had hastened to the park in order to take in as much as possible of what might have been the last of the long, hot days.

  Rosa and Anna had arranged to meet near the children’s playground, where children were climbing through brightly colored pipes and whirling around on a wooden disc. The woman whom Anna sometimes thought of as “the Khleb,” wearing a short red dress, came walking down the promenade.

  “Which of them is Petya?”

  “I didn’t bring him,” Anna replied in surprise. “I thought you said—”

  “Oh, right. You shouldn’t have taken that so seriously.” Rosa took her arm. “My girlfriend has two of these little monsters. When they’re around, there’s no way to have a rational conversation with her.”

  While Rosa chatted, Anna wondered why someone like Rosa Khleb would want to be friends with her. What could she tell a journalist about? There was nothing special about her life; every day, she stood on her scaffolding, painted walls, hurried home, cooked meals for her father, son, and husband, if he was there, and got a little fatter, because she couldn’t pay attention to her figure. What was so interesting about Anna that Rosa devoted so much time to her?

  When the two reached the triple-spiral staircase, like a colossal braid linking the upper and lower levels of the park, Rosa stood still. “That can’t be …” she said. She took a lateral step, and Anna followed her eyes to the profile of a gentleman in his fifties who was sitting at a table and drinking lemonade. Long after this meeting, it would occur to Anna that all the tables around him had been empty.

  “Do you know him?”

  “My teacher.” Rosa had lowered her voice, as if she didn’t want to disturb the lemonade drinker. “He hardly ever comes to Moscow.”

  “Don’t you want to say hello to him?”

  “Not now. We have an appointment later.”

  Rosa wanted to go on, but Anna held her back. “Go ahead, we’ve got lots of time.”

  “Kamarovsky doesn’t like surprises.”

  It was the first time that Anna had heard this name. In her memory, it seemed to her that she herself, not Rosa Khleb, had instigated the meeting. “Go tell him hello.” She’d led her friend into the park café and over to the man, who’d looked up only when the two women were standing in front of him.

  “Rosa.” He hadn’t seemed surprised in the least. Sparks flashed from his eyes; the lenses of the glasses he was wearing had been ground and polished repeatedly.

  To Anna’s amazement, Rosa didn’t explain that they had been walking there merely by chance. Instead, she took a seat next to him. “This is Anna,” she said.

  He gestured toward the chair across from him. Anna sat down and introduced herself with her full name. She’d expected that student and teacher would have things to talk to each other about, but he appeared to be interested only in Anna. “I take it you’re married,” he said.

  She wore no ring; was it so easy to spot her as a wife?

  “Anna has a five-year-old son,” Rosa interjected.

  “So he’ll start going to school this autumn.”

  Anna acknowledged the truth of this observation and answered further questions, all of them courteously posed; and yet she found that Kamarovsky’s behavior went beyond a stranger’s common curiosity. “You were Rosa’s teacher?” she asked.

  “Is that what she says?” His glinting glasses hid his eyes.

  Anna wondered whether the man had been Rosa’s mentor in journalism school or at the newspaper. She said, “I don’t know anything about the newspaper business.”

  “And what do you know something about, Comrade?”

  “Lime,” she replied. “Emulsion paint. Oil paint. I’m pretty familiar with undercoat plaster and finishing plaster, and I even know how to do marbling.”

  “Have you seen the big hall in the Ostankino, which has just been reopened?”

  “Only in photographs. I’ve never been there.”

  “During the restoration, it was discovered that the painters who decorated the hall a long time ago had used an unknown binder, and their pigments were considerably brighter than the ones used today. The chemical composition of the old pigments was studied in the laboratory, and they were found to include linseed oil, aluminum oxide … and animal urine.” Kamarovsky nodded, as though he’d delivered some significant news.

  “Are you an art historian?”

  “In a former life. What else occupies your time, Anna?” His tone of voice had grown warmer. “What does your husband do?”

  “He’s a first lieutenant in the army.”

  “Stationed in Moscow?”

  Anna named Leonid’s unit and said where it was based.

  “And you live with him and your little boy?”

  “We live with my father.”

  “Right.” Kamarovsky emptied his glass. “Your father is Viktor Ipalyevich Tsazukhin.”

  Anna’s blood had shot into her cheeks. All at once, it was clear to her: This was an arranged meeting. She and Rosa had not just happened to pick Arkhangelskoye Park, had not randomly chosen the path to the steps; the man in the dark green suit wasn’t sitting here in the sun for no reason; and above all, he was more than a teacher.

  In the same soft voice as before, he’d asked, “Does your father know you’re committing adultery?” And when Anna made no reply, he added: “You allow yourself to be seduced by the Deputy Minister for Research Planning.”

  “No, I seduce him, comrade,” she’d said. She didn’t know where such cheekiness came from; she knew only that she didn’t want to be interrogated anymore. The interrogator made a sign, and the waiter hurried over to their table.

  “Lemonade?” Kamarovsky inquired, as though Anna had passed the first test. A couple who’d been strolling around the terrace tried to sit at the next table, only to be told that it was reserved. Anna gradually realized that Rosa had maneuvered her onto an island. She tried to look into Rosa’s eyes, but they remained impenetrable.

  “Why have you gotten involved with Bulyagkov?” Kamarovsky had asked. “Is it his position? Do you hope to obtain privileges through him?”

  “No.”

  “It can hardly be his charm.”

  “I got involved with him because he asked nothing of me.”

  “Alexey Maximovich is in the public eye. Special security precautions are taken for him, measures intended to preserve his personal safety as well as his reputation.” The waiter brought Anna’s drink, and Kamarovsky paused.

  “May I ask who you are?”

  “We’ll get to that later.” He invited her to taste her drink. “Does your husband have any inkling of your relationship?”

  “No.”

  “Then can you explain why he chooses to spend his nights with his unit, even though maneuvers came to an end some time ago?”

  Anna had certainly noticed that Leonid wasn’t coming home three or four nights a week. She’d consoled herself with the thought that comradeship had always been important to him.

  “Leonid is either too proud or too cowardly to talk to you about all this,” Kamarovsky said pointedly.

  She hadn’t mentioned Leonid’s name, so she assumed the man in the green suit must know him. “Have you spoken with Leonid?”

  “We won’t intrude upon your married life unless it becomes necessary to do so. What we’re interested in is the Deputy Minister’s reputation.”

  “Alexey’s careful.”

  “That’s not the point.” Kamarovsky gripped the side of his eyeglasses. “Alexey Maximovich Bulyagkov is a bearer of the Soviet Union’s state secrets. Therefore, it matters with whom he speaks, whom he meets, with whom he sleeps. In order to ensure his safety, Alexey Maximovich must be kept under surveillance.” He lifted his glasses. “Do you understand, Comrade?”

&nbs
p; Warm and at the same time penetrating eyes were directed at Anna. Age had dimmed their brightness, and the glasses had left marks on the bridge of his nose.

  “Do you understand me?”

  “Not entirely.”

  “Once a week, you’re alone with the Deputy Minister. You share intimate moments with him, and you learn what he thinks, what burdens weigh on him, what dangers he sees for himself.”

  “We’ve never spoken about anything like that.”

  “We can protect Alexey Maximovich only when we know his fears, only when we know where he expects danger to come from. It’s the same in a doctor’s office,” Kamarovsky added. “If the physician knows where the trouble is located, the cure is easier.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Inform us.” For the first time, he’d included Rosa in his meaning. “Tell us about your meetings with him.”

  “He doesn’t tell me any secrets!” Anna cried, deeply agitated.

  “Oh, you can’t know that.” He put the glasses back on. “A remark, perhaps, a swipe at his colleagues, a political observation—all of that can be helpful in keeping trouble away from Alexey Maximovich.”

  Anna had said nothing—because she understood. Because fear of the unseen overcame her. She’d stepped into the trap that made an undisturbed life impossible. She’d caught the attention of those whose interest one must never under any circumstances arouse. “I don’t think I can be of any use to you,” she’d said. How weak her attempt to resist had sounded.

  “You underestimate yourself,” Kamarovsky had replied. “And you haven’t yet recognized the advantages that such cooperation will bring you.”

  “Advantages?”

  “Your father’s poems are being examined by the Glavlit. If you were to help us, I feel certain that the examination could be expedited. Viktor Ipalyevich would have really deserved no less, and it’s time for a new volume of his work to appear.” Kamarovsky leaned forward. “Naturally, your husband’s ignorance of your relationship will continue to be tolerated.”