The Russian Affair

by Michael Wallner

  “Isn’t that more like a gift for a child?” Anna asked.

  “Medea wants a living creature in the house.” Alexey stood in the midst of innumerable cages and looked around. “As I said, I know I’m not being very gracious, taking you along with me to buy a birthday present for my wife. She wants someone to be glad when she comes home. Since that someone’s obviously not me …” He was drawn to the bright, colorful parrots. “Medea’s afraid of dogs, rabbits shit everywhere, and so I was thinking about a bird, maybe one like this.” He waved a finger at a red bird with a black beak, which bent down from its perch and snapped at him.

  “And who’s going to take care of it, then? Animals need attention.” An affectionately mocking look from Bulyagkov spurred Anna to defend her point of view. “If you’re never home and neither is Medea, that’s animal abuse.”

  “Then I’ll get a pair.” He took a few steps to where the songbirds were. Green, yellow, and white, many with raised crests, they sat in their cages.

  “I’ve heard those are illness-prone.”

  “So why are they singing in the cold?” Bulyagkov inquired about the price of a pair of young woodcocks, but in the end he opted for two nondescript canaries because the vendor threw in five packages of birdseed. Anton paid, picked up the cage, and followed Anna and Alexey as they continued to stroll around the enormous market. They passed paddocks with sheep and goats; a young elk was on display as an attraction. Anna was beginning to fear that she’d never have a chance to speak about the real reason for their meeting when Alexey took her hand. “How much time do you have?” he asked. “Shall we get something to eat?” He turned to Anton: “Do you know a restaurant around here?”

  “I’d like to speak to you in peace,” Anna said.

  “You can’t do that while we eat?”

  “Couldn’t we sit in the car?”

  “Then Anton will have to pick up something for us,” Alexey said, grumpily complying with her request. “Where did we leave the car?”

  Anton went ahead of them, clasping the birdcage to his chest. The black ZIL was parked in a side street.

  “Make sure you get some shashlik,” Alexey said to Anton as Anna climbed into the limousine. “And beer would be a good idea, too.”

  Anton put the birdcage on the front passenger’s seat. Suddenly plunged into semidarkness, the birds fell silent. The Deputy Minister sank down on the seat next to Anna, and the door closed. “These Central Committee sessions are killing me,” he muttered. “I never used to be affected like this. I could work night and day when we were preparing a Five-Year Plan.” He turned his head. “Can you tell me why I’m so tired?”

  “You eat the wrong things.” She noticed how heavily he was perspiring and pulled the scarf off his neck.

  “I’ve done that forever. It’s never hurt me.”

  “When the Party Congress is over, you should go out to the dacha and take some time off.” Anna was nervous; one ill-judged word in the beginning could ruin everything. “Spring’s coming,” she said, stroking his temples. “Maybe what you’ve got is springtime lethargy.”

  “In March? That would be strange.”

  Anna made a first, oblique attempt to steer the conversation: “Have you ever hinted to Medea that you see other women?”

  “Why should I?”

  “You mean you’ve never had the urge to tell her the truth?”

  He raised his head. “And who’d be served if I did that?”

  “Isn’t the truth desirable in itself?”

  “In most cases, the truth hurts. It can only benefit the person who tells it.”

  His sober tone unsettled her, as did the way he suddenly started scrutinizing her.

  “It takes strength to keep quiet, Anna.” He drew her to him; her head sank against his shoulder. “Maybe keeping your mouth shut is a stupid male virtue, but it’s a virtue all the same.”

  She was tempted to leave it at that. Why did she want to ease her conscience? Because she was hoping for Alexey’s forgiveness. Would she actually be telling him anything new? Of what use would it be to him to know that Anna reported their conversations to the KGB? And yet, it didn’t make very much sense to keep up a lie just because the truth was unattractive.

  She tried another tack: “The only person I ever see around you is Anton,” she observed. “Don’t you have any protection besides your driver?”

  “How do you mean?” He smiled, but she could sense the alertness in his gaze.

  “I never see any security people around you.”

  “Do you have the impression that I’m in danger?”

  In the long silence that followed this question, Anna realized that the time for innocent chatter had passed, and that she couldn’t go back. “After all, you’re … you’re an official of the Soviet Union, a bearer of state secrets.”

  “I was in danger once upon a time, many years ago now. And ever since then, everything that’s come afterward has seemed harmless.” He undid the top button of his shirt. “I’ve never told you about my family.”

  His offer to talk about himself was so unexpected and direct that Anna could muster only a mute nod.

  “My father was a civil servant in Kharkov, in Ukraine. He carried out the land surveying for the kolkhozes in an enormous area between the Donets and the Don. His frequent travels and his influence as a survey official made him a prominent person. He was a veteran member of the Party and presided over the provincial government.” Alexey looked outside, where a group of young people was strolling toward the limousine. Not imagining that they were being observed through the window, the youths stopped right in front of Bulyagkov.

  “Then came the time when Vradiyev’s show trial was being prepared. He’d been relieved of his positions as premier of the Ukrainian SSR and chairman of the Economic Affairs Council, accused of nationalistic deviation and factional activity, and called upon to perform unsparing self-criticism. Our family had the bad luck to be related to Vradiyev on my mother’s side. At every show trial, care was taken to produce a series of subordinate accomplices who were prepared to testify against the main defendant. My father was assured that the Party was aware of his achievements and that the court would declare a verdict in appearance only; as soon as the dust settled, he would be granted a pardon. When my father declined to take part in the deception, he was arrested.”

  Alexey kept his eyes fixed on the window, so that he seemed to be telling his story to the young people outside.

  “My father was chained hand and foot and put in an underground cell. His jailers pumped in cold water through the ventilation flaps and threatened to drown him. There were other tortures, and he held out against them all for three months before he signed the first confession. In the meantime, we had no news of him. My mother asked all his old Party friends for help; they either remained silent or pretended they were out. She received a single letter from the prison. The handwriting was my father’s, and the letter stated that he wasn’t afraid. He was a true communist, he wrote, and as such had nothing to fear from the state security agency, which was the iron fist of the people’s democracy and struck only its enemies. When she read that letter, my mother knew he was lost. She sent my sister and me to an uncle who lived outside Ukraine. Because my uncle forbade me to show myself in public until everything was over, I had to break off my pursuit of a degree in physics.” Alexey turned to Anna. “For a whole year, I did nothing but wait.”

  “What happened to your father?”

  “He had to go through the whole procedure. Right on cue, before the trial began, the state security headquarters turned into a convalescent home; the accused were given medical care and nursed back to health. In the meantime, a committee of experts had underpinned the vague accusations against Vradiyev with technical details. He was now accused of economic sabotage. The defendants who’d been selected for the show trial were assigned teachers, with whose help they learned question-and-answer texts and—above all—their confessions, verbatim and by hea
rt. The same scripts were distributed to the judges. The trial took place in the Great Hall of the People’s Army Retirement Home in Kharkov. The only spectators allowed in were dependable factory delegates, people from the kolkhozes, and some selected journalists. The proceedings were broadcast on the radio.”

  Outside, one of the young people inadvertently bumped against the window. His friends suggested that he should watch what he was doing and pulled him away in the direction of the market. Meanwhile the impact had awakened the birds, which ventured a duet of tentative peeping.

  “First, Vradiyev’s prestige was dragged through the mud,” Bulyagkov went on. “He was ‘convicted’ of being a separatist of long standing who’d collaborated with fascist stool pigeons in the early forties. But before he admitted his guilt and requested the severest penalty, the squad of co-defendants had to perform. My father spluttered during his confession and lost his power of speech. The court was obliged to have the confession that had been tortured out of him read aloud.”

  The two birds were now merrily chirping away; inside the automobile, their singing sounded unusually loud.

  “Vradiyev was sentenced to death by hanging. Many of the others received a sentence of life imprisonment. My father got twenty years of forced labor.” Bulyagkov leaned toward the cage and tapped its bars with one finger.

  “And then?” Anna gazed at the white nape of his neck.

  “It was a good year, nineteen hundred and fifty-three,” he said, smiling and turning around. She didn’t grasp his meaning right away. “On the fifth of March, nineteen hundred and fifty-three, Stalin died. The following December, my father was rehabilitated. Not long after that, in an anti–show trial, the Ukrainian chief prosecutor, as well as the head of the secret police, was condemned and executed.”

  “And how about you?” she asked, touching his shoulder. “Did you go back to Kharkov?”

  “I went to Moscow with my uncle.”

  “Why? I don’t understand … When did you see your father again?”

  “We buried him a month after he was set free.”

  The birds had fallen silent; tilting their little heads, they stared at the big human finger that was stroking the bars of their cage.

  “His back was completely crooked, he had a broken thigh bone that never healed right, and he couldn’t digest solid food anymore. He died from a rapidly spreading deterioration of his mucous membranes. Soon after his funeral, my mother and sister left Kharkov, never to return.”

  Anna removed her hand from his shoulder and leaned against the car door. “Why are you telling me this, Alexey?” She examined the man beside her: bent forward, sweat running down his temples.

  “To make it clear to you how much better everything is these days. Up until the end, my father remained a fervent member of the Party, because he believed in its self-healing powers. Today, things like what happened to him don’t happen anymore. Checks on governmental entities are strict and correctly applied. Such an arbitrary power apparatus would be impossible in our Soviet Union.”

  Anna nodded, but the situation made her uneasy. She’d wanted to make a confession and unexpectedly found herself listening to his. The shadowy, enclosed space, the frightened birds, and Alexey, divulging incidents that, in current practice, remained unmentioned … Why this sudden openness? What was his purpose in revealing himself to be the son of a convicted enemy of the people? Back at their first appointment, Alexey had suggested that he’d climbed as high in the nomenklatura as a non-Russian could. Didn’t his story throw a different light on his career? Anna sat there, rigid with concentration, while a silhouette approached the car.

  The front door opened and Anton climbed in. He was balancing two paper plates of shashlik in one hand.

  “No beer?” Bulyagkov asked.

  Anton handed them the food and then pulled two bottles out of his overcoat pockets. “There aren’t any glasses.”

  The Deputy Minister thanked Anton and told him to drive off; they’d eat on the way, he said.

  “Careful, hot,” said Anton, then he closed the door and started the engine.

  FIFTEEN

  March was uncommonly mild. Now that it was getting dark later and later, Anna found her workdays longer than usual. She caught herself holding a dripping brush in her hand and gazing out of the window openings of her worksite, searching the treetops for signs of the first green fuzz. A long spring lay ahead of her, followed by a difficult summer, and an interminable stretch of time would pass before the leaves would begin to change color again. In the bus on the way back, she enjoyed the last rays of the sun and told herself as persuasively as she could that something had to happen during the coming season, something that would steer her life in a new direction. But didn’t everyone wish for that at the beginning of every spring?

  When she got home, she didn’t feel like cooking, so she put some bread and sausage on the table. Petya was having an afternoon nap. As though they were on a picnic, Viktor Ipalyevich took out his clasp knife and started cutting the sausage into thin slices.

  “Do you remember the show trials?” Anna asked as she stirred the buttermilk.

  “What put that in your head?” He looked at her with red-rimmed eyes; since his volume of poetry had started to take shape, he often worked until dawn.

  “What was it like, when they were going on? I really don’t know anything about them.”

  He peeled back the sausage casing so that he could cut more slices.

  “You were a prominent person. Weren’t you ever called before any of the tribunals?”

  “Who would want to question a poet?”

  “You were the ‘Voice of Smolensk,’ the ‘Conscience of the Comintern Youth,’ ” Anna said, quoting from the inscriptions on his decorations. “Your testimony carried weight.”

  “I’d like to know what kind of significance that still has today,” he said, instinctively lowering his voice.

  She poured out the buttermilk. “Who else can I ask, Papa? Nobody talks about those things.”

  “What would be the point? That’s all in the past. The Party healed itself from within a long time ago.” The sausage slices were getting thinner and thinner.

  “Politicians’ platitudes,” she said, teasing her father with one of his own favorite expressions.

  “I never gave testimony at any trial.” Viktor Ipalyevich thought for a moment and then added, “However, my doctor was arrested.”

  “What do you mean, your doctor?” Neither of them had yet touched any of the food on the table.

  “Doctor Mikhoels. He removed my ganglion.” Viktor Ipalyevich showed Anna his right hand. “It was on my middle finger. I could hardly hold a pen. The doctor was pretty arrogant, but a good surgeon. It was the only time I was ever questioned.” He held up a slice of sausage to the light. “Respected physicians were accused of forming a conspiracy. It was said that their goal was to poison the Party leadership.”

  “Why in the world would they have wanted to do that?”

  “It’s hard to understand without some historical context. The fact that they were doctors wasn’t really the point.” Viktor Ipalyevich took a bite and chewed it. “In 1948, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved. From that time on, Pravda referred to Jews as ‘rootless cosmopolitans.’ Of the thirteen physicians who were arrested, eleven were Jews. Doctor Mikhoels was among the accused.”

  “And did you testify?”

  He shook his head. “That wasn’t required of me. There were plenty of others available for that.”

  “What happened to Doctor Mikhoels?”

  “He remained alive, but he had to leave Moscow. They took him somewhere.”

  “But … haven’t you ever wondered … ?”

  “No.” He threw himself against the back of his chair. “I’m an artist. I represent my own minority.”

  “What happened to Doctor Mikhoels’s family?”

  “I have no idea. His family—what does that matter to you?”

 
“Were they deported, too?”

  Her father was getting exasperated. “The man operated on my ganglion! How should I know what happened to his family?”

  Anna spread butter on a piece of bread and cut it into small pieces. “If a non-Russian had a family member who was convicted in one of those trials, what would have been his lot? The survivor’s, I mean. What do you think would have happened to him?”

  “A non-Russian? No, no. Most of the Jews who were executed were native Russians.”

  “But let’s suppose a Hungarian—or a Ukrainian, say—had someone in his family who—”

  Viktor Ipalyevich laid both hands noisily on the table. “Enough. I don’t know where we’re supposed to be going with all this. Let’s eat, and then Petya and I are going for a walk.”

  “What’s a Jew, Grandpa?” The gentle voice came from the depths of the sleeping alcove.

  “That’s what you get,” Anna’s father grumbled to her. Then he called out, “If we come across one, I’ll show him to you.”

  The small, tousled head appeared. Petya climbed up onto his chair, and his mother served him his bread and butter. “How are you today?” she asked, stroking his head.

  “I feel good. Can we go to the park?” he asked Viktor Ipalyevich.

  “Sir, yes, sir!”

  “I think I’ll have a bath today.” Anna examined her fingernails. If she soaked in the tub long enough, the paint spatters would (she thought wistfully) go away.

  A short while later, she heard the two walkers heading down the stairs. Anna was glad to have some quiet minutes alone in the apartment. The water wasn’t as hot as she’d hoped; she heated some in the kitchen, added it, and dropped her clothes. Although the bathtub was too short, she lolled in the water as best she could. Her plashing echoed from the tiled walls, and she quickly grew weary. She soaped her hands and laid them on her stomach. What if—she wondered—what if Alexey made his confession to forestall mine? The thought was there suddenly, as if it had arisen from the steam. Anna breathed more slowly. Had he figured out what she wanted to confide to him, perhaps because he’d known it for some time already? She raised her head, and water dripped from her hair. The idea seemed so ridiculous that she laughed out loud. Why the devil had he told her about his father’s trial? Alexey Bulyagkov was a Deputy Minister: For the first time, Anna pondered why, when he actually made more decisions concerning research planning than the Minister himself, Alexey was still that Minister’s deputy. Did the reason have to do with his family background, with his father’s long fall from grace? A non-Russian, she thought: a Ukrainian. When she was a Pioneer Girl, she’d been taught the doctrine of the different national paths to socialism. In her workaday life, she’d realized that the lovely theory she’d learned had been supplanted by the concept of Russian primacy. Even in such a subsidiary structure as Anna’s building combine, the nationalistic hierarchy was unmistakable: Although Valdas, the Lithuanian, coordinated every building project the combine undertook, the Russian, Yarov, remained the foreman. When the materials elevator broke down, it wasn’t the Russian women you saw hauling the heavy buckets, it was the Kazakh women. In the light of this observation, Anna found it remarkable that a foreigner, a Ukrainian who’d fled to Russia, had made it all the way into the Central Committee’s inner circle.