The Russian Affair

by Michael Wallner

  “You’re Comrade Anna Tsazukhina?” the uniformed manager asked, holding out an envelope. “This was left at the desk for you.” Having turned over the envelope, he began to compare Popov’s list with his own and to hand out the keys.

  Avoiding the eyes of those around her, Anna retreated to a chair near a window. She opened the sealed envelope, which bore her name, and unfolded the sheet of paper inside. “Welcome, Pioneer Girl,” she read. The words were written in the Deputy Minister’s sloping hand. “Your program ends today at nine. Anton will be parked at the rear entrance.”

  She turned around. Couldn’t everyone see how the hot flush spread over her face?

  Nadezhda approached her. “Something unpleasant?” she asked.

  “On the contrary.” Anna quickly shoved the note back into the envelope, picked up her bag, and returned to the waiting line. At that moment, though she could not have said why, Alexey’s lines made her unspeakably happy, so much so that her eyes became moist. She forgot the delegation, her new surroundings, even Kamarovsky’s assignment. She was going to see him again, Alexey, her big, clumsy wolf; somewhere in this settlement in the woods, he was waiting for her with cooled wine and some delicacy to eat. His simple message proved to Anna that it had really been his idea to fetch her to this place. He missed her; for the sake of her company, he’d organized a complicated process and used his influence, just for two nights with her. She stuffed the envelope into her coat pocket. In a year and a half, she and Alexey had never yet spent an entire night together, and Anna was looking forward to the experience. At the same time, it made carrying out her assignment even more repugnant. She stood there, deep in thought, surrounded by the other “distinguished visitors,” who were comparing their room numbers, stowing their baggage, and making plans for lunch. Popov, standing on the stairs and speaking loudly, informed them that their first activity would be a visit to the synchrocyclotron.

  “Tsazukhina,” the receptionist said, holding up the key to room number seven. Anna nodded and took the key. This time, she permitted the orphanage director to carry her bag.

  The main course had just been served when Czestmir Adamek entered the dining room. The scientific guide spotted Popov at the Aeroflot pilot’s table, slipped past the other tables, all of them occupied by members of the visiting delegation, and hissed something in the group leader’s ear. Popov wanted to finish his meal, but he rose to his feet when Adamek gestured toward the clock on the wall.

  “Everyone listen up!” Popov said. He informed his group that the sightseeing tour had been rescheduled. “We meet at the bus in five minutes.” Popov wiped his hands on the tablecloth, assumed that everyone would comply with the new instructions, and hurried to the exit. When he looked back, he saw that only the bus driver had stood up.

  “You’re not at some coffee klatch!” Adamek cried out. “The science center is a high-precision operation. Every man-minute costs the State a million rubles. Your conduct is harmful to Soviet research!”

  As though they were puppets on a string, the members of the delegation stood up and pressed toward the door. No one thought about their coats; dressed as they were, they rushed through the dining room and into the open. Because of the cold, the bus wouldn’t start right away, and the driver kept looking apologetically at Adamek and pleadingly at his dashboard. At last, the diesel engine sputtered to life, and the bus swung away from the hotel and onto the main road. The snow lay a yard thick on the roofs of the Institute. Something was glinting among the bare larches; Adamek confirmed that the Volga, at that time of the year still covered with thick ice, was what they were seeing through the trees.

  They reached a complex that looked like a factory building; as they got closer, it became clear that the structure was about one hundred feet high and entirely of concrete. The Pioneers sprang from the bus and followed Adamek through a steel door, into a stairwell, and up the stairs, their boots resounding militarily in the narrow space. In an anteroom, Adamek had everyone stop and pointed to a radioactivity-measuring device set in the wall. The needle was at rest in the green area.

  “We’re taking advantage of a pause between two work processes to view the accelerator. We shall move in an exactly straight line, very close together. There will be no talking.” Adamek pressed a button, the door clattered, and a high-pitched acoustic signal sounded; some visitors held their ears. An Asian man in light gray overalls and a close-fitting hood that left only his face uncovered was awaiting them. He distributed caps and overshoes, all of the same white, synthetic material.

  “The air around the accelerator is purified,” Adamek explained. “Hurry up and put those things on. Work time on a synchrocyclotron is worth more than gold.”

  The Asian shoved a box toward them. “For the watches,” he said.

  Adamek was the first to remove his from his wrist. “The magnetic field hasn’t been neutralized yet. The mechanism of your watches would go crazy in there.” At the next door, he stopped yet again. “The nuclear spectroscopy section has just completed a test. You will observe how the researchers dismantle their target, which has just been bombarded with protons. From this point on, there must be absolute silence.” He entered and stood next to the door until Popov had ushered the group inside.

  SEVEN

  Anna was in her hotel room. She’d locked the door, and now she was staring out the window. The streetlights dyed the terrain a dismal orange. She was disillusioned. Certainly, the platform and roof of the accelerator were colossal in size, extending for hundreds of feet, but in the center all that could be seen was a control console, set in concrete, with dials and instruments whose illuminated arrows quivered in different positions. All at once, loud detonations like gunfire had sounded from down below, and everybody had flinched. Discharges, Adamek had explained. While the electromagnetic bursts followed one another more and more closely, a team of researchers had come out onto the platform. They were wearing protective suits that covered them completely, including their faces, and they carried a cloth about ten square feet in size, mounted on supports. An unscientific observer might have thought that the researchers were bringing in their dirty laundry to be cleaned. Before they reached the control center, Adamek had already ordered his group to leave. Inaudible in their synthetic slippers, the visitors had hastily marched to the exit; in the passage, the Asian had given them back their watches.

  Anna was exhausted. Since early morning, she and the others had been bombarded with impressions, had seen things the likes of which few Soviet citizens would ever get to see in their entire lifetimes. Despite her weariness, she sat at the table and took from her bag the book she’d brought along. It was a standard text in theoretical physics for students in their first semester.

  “In the condensed phase, matter appears as either a solid or a liquid. Free atoms form a crystal, producing a binding energy of an order of magnitude equivalent to …”

  Anna considered the sequence of signs that followed and then read them aloud: “A hundred kcal divided by mol equals one hundred times two point six times ten to the twenty-second power divided by six times ten to the twenty-third power eV …” It was the first formula in the book, and one of the simplest.

  “The empirical fact that the band structures of free electrons diverge shows that valence electrons are only weakly scattered on ionic cores.”

  Discouraged, Anna slammed the book shut. Reading it was pointless. Even if she were to get close to the physicist who was the subject of her assignment, even if she should manage to have a conversation with him, she wouldn’t understand the information she obtained! She paced helplessly around the room: wallpaper, closet, bed, her bag, and, outside, the silent street. She felt dead tired and, at the same time, exceedingly nervous. From childhood on, she’d been taught this principle: Every individual must undertake and carry out tasks assigned by the Party. Today, however, Anna wanted to slip out of her otherwise so reliable skin and admit to herself that there was no coping with her present assignment.r />
  Sounds from outside her door indicated that dinner was imminent. She felt hungry, but when she looked at the clock, she realized that it wasn’t worth the trouble to go to the dining room, because Anton would be picking her up very soon. Anna opened the closet; the short dress would be inconspicuous under her coat. She undressed and washed her face in front of the mirror.

  Punctual to the minute, the black ZIL turned into the rear courtyard. Anna was waiting on the steps. The kitchen was at its busiest, the windows were open, but no one observed the member of the visiting group who slid onto the backseat of the limousine and pulled the door shut behind her.

  “Today we don’t have far to go,” said Anton, nodding to her in the rearview mirror.

  They drove past two blocks of houses on the main street, turned into the riverfront promenade, and stopped in front of a one-story villa.

  “Who lives here?”

  “The house belongs to a member of the Academy who’s seldom in Dubna.” Anton got out, opened the gate, and drove onto the grounds.

  Alexey received Anna neither outside the house nor at the front door. Curious, she stepped into a comfortable room; there was a wing chair close to the fireplace. Alexey sat in the chair with one hand pressed against his forehead and the other raised in a formal gesture of greeting. Anna laughed—Alexey was imitating a famous painting of Stalin. “Little Father, how are you?” she asked, giving the Pioneers’ hand signal and stepping before the Great Leader.

  “One grows old, Comrade,” he answered in the familiar rasping intonation. “It does one good to see you young activists, your fresh faces.” Bulyagkov sprang to his feet. “And your splendid bodies!” He took Anna in his arms and stroked her hair. Composed as always, Anton brought in a load of firewood and disappeared.

  “So this is the way our worthy Soviet scientists live?” she asked, looking around.

  “This is the way I live when I visit our worthy Soviet scientists.” Alexey went to the table, a cork popped, and Sovetskoye Shampanskoye—Soviet Champagne—sizzled in the glasses. Anna knelt down and felt the fine, silvery threads of the carpet. Alexey brought her drink; still kneeling, she clinked glasses with him and watched his bobbing Adam’s apple as he swallowed.

  “How wonderful that you’re here,” he said, sinking down next to her. His belly spilled over his belt. “Were you surprised when you got my note?” She embraced him; his stubbly beard scratched her. “It’s a good thing you got something to eat in the hotel,” he said over her shoulder.

  “Why?”

  “The Dubna grocery warehouse was already closed. Not even my influence could make it open again this evening.” He shrugged. “I dined out with the physicists.”

  Anna thought about the pike in aspic that was being served in the hotel dining room, and her mouth watered. “You mean you don’t have anything at all here?”

  “Don’t they give you enough to eat in the hotel?”

  “I just thought … because otherwise, this bubbly will go to my head.”

  “What if it does?” He poured her some more from his glass.

  “Tomorrow I have to understand some really difficult things.”

  “Who cares if you don’t understand them?”

  Alexey’s dismissal of the official reason for her sojourn as unimportant infuriated her. “I want to take advantage of the opportunity! This is a fabulous place, and I want to learn as much as possible!”

  “And so you should,” he said, appeasing her. “So you should, Annushka. During the day, I’ll leave you to the protons and the transuranic elements. But in the evening, when the researchers are dreaming about discovering number one hundred and fourteen, you belong to me.”

  “A hundred and fourteen?”

  “Didn’t you know that most of the elements after the hundred and second were discovered here in Dubna?” He leaned back, propping himself on his elbows. “A hundred and three lived practically forever, a full eight seconds. His brother a hundred and four disintegrated after only three tenths of a second.” Alexey nodded sadly, as if he’d lost a beloved relative.

  Anna’s assignment sprang into her mind. “Is that why you’re here? Is some new discovery about to take place?”

  “No. The accelerator and its successes are the Minister’s department. My area of responsibility concerns the theoreticians.”

  “You understand their research? You know what it’s about?” The bubbly wine made her bold.

  “Of course not. Since my student days, a revolution has taken place in this field. It’s fascinating—I wish I had more time to look into it.”

  At that moment, he looked quite young to Anna; all the heaviness seemed to have fallen from him. She asked, “What part of it fascinates you the most?”

  “The language of mathematics! It contains the only truth known to me, the only one I revere.”

  “Why didn’t you become a scientist?”

  “Had my life run in a different course, nothing could have prevented me from becoming a scientist.” He refilled their glasses. “I’m afraid, though, that I wouldn’t have been more than mediocre at doing science.”

  Anna tried to imagine him as a young man. What ideals had he followed? What had he looked like as a boy? He never spoke about his past; their common ground was limited to the present. After the next glass, she went looking for the bathroom, undressed briskly, and lay down naked on the carpet next to him.

  “How warm it is,” she said with a smile. “Is that all from this fire?”

  Alexey looked into the flames. “This house has thirteen radiators. Otherwise, in your present condition, you’d get chilblains.” He nestled against her breast.

  Anna awoke in her hotel room. There was a sound of hurrying footsteps in the hall; she’d overslept. She felt hot and nauseous, and when she stood up—too quickly—everything spun. Bent over from the waist, she waited until the room slowed down and stopped. The sweet, fizzy wine—Alexey had insisted on opening the third bottle, too—and then the vodka … she retched, but she had nothing to throw up. I need a piece of white bread, she concluded, and got dressed in spite of her trembling limbs. Alexey had informed her that some physicists were coming to breakfast; Anton had driven her back to the hotel in the dim light of early dawn.

  Everyone was in good spirits in the dining room. The members of the delegation had used the preceding evening to get to know one another better. The peace ambassadress allowed the nice kolkhoz farmer to pour her some coffee; the Aeroflot pilot had changed seats, and she was now in conversation with the radio producer. Looking offended, Adamek was sitting at a small table, alone. Anna swayed a bit as she headed for her seat; when she tuned in to the ambient conversations, she heard people calling one another by their first names. The orphanage director wanted to know where she had been the previous evening. When he started to serve her some ham, Anna waved it away and asked for tea and white bread. She sipped the hot drink and hoped for relief. Soon Adamek announced that it was time to go. Without argument, the whole company made for the bus. Popov ate a buttered roll as he walked.

  After they were under way, Adamek announced that they were going to have a chance to admire an innovation of worldwide significance, the completion of a unique research instrument. The bus passed a flat-roofed building located behind some bare shrubs. “Which institute is that?” she asked. The hoarseness of her voice scared her.

  “That’s where the international collective of theoretical physicists works,” Adamek answered, visibly pleased that someone was showing interest in his explanations.

  “When will we visit it?”

  “You’d be disappointed,” Adamek replied. “There’s nothing there but blackboards, mainframe computers, and thinking cubicles for the comrades.”

  “Who’s the head of the institute?”

  “Nikolai Lyushin. His name isn’t as well known as the names of the scientists who work with accelerators, but their successes are often based on his theoretical insights.”

  Anna let herself
sink back in her seat. For the first time, someone had named the man who was the subject of her assignment. The bus swung into the next curve, and the flat-roofed building vanished.

  Not long afterward, the group was watching the presentation of a device that bore some resemblance to an orange. This instrument, which was used to examine the radiation spectra of short-lived isotopes, was an “iron-free toroidal beta spectrometer,” but Adamek affectionately called it “our citrus.”

  Standing before a schematic depiction, Adamek gave a lecture. “All nuclear energy is based on Uranium-235,” he said. “A tiny amount of U-235 is present in common uranium, but supplies are dwindling, and uranium mining is becoming more and more expensive. The starting point of the series of tests that we’re going to see is the bombardment of depleted uranium with proton bundles, whereby some of the uranium is changed into plutonium, the basic material of our nuclear power plants.”

  An hour later, they were still listening to their scientific guide, who was discoursing upon a shadowy green point that was visible on a monitor. In her weakened state, Anna found the lecture fatiguing. She leaned against the wall and struggled against her nausea, which wasn’t going away. Surprisingly, Adamek announced that they would now have lunch. Asked about the unusually early hour, he explained that the delegation would have the honor of dining in the physicists’ cafeteria, but that the visitors would have to be finished with their meal before the scientists arrived; the capacity of the cafeteria’s kitchen was limited.

  The radiators in the ground-level dining room were covered in dust, the ceiling lamps flickered, and there was nothing to suggest that every day, the most brilliant minds gathered to eat in this place. The women in the kitchen served the members of the delegation a dark stew that the menu called “Rabbit Ragout.” Anna’s stomach wasn’t yet up to that, so she sipped her tea and looked around. A bald man was lighting his next cigarette with the end of his current one; a woman with her hair in a bun hesitated, obviously wondering whether or not to sit at his table, because his expression said that he wanted to be left in peace. Three female scientists came in wearing classic white lab coats. A pin on the chest of one of the three began to blink; she turned around, put her tray back in the rack, and left the room.