“No.”
“Wasn’t it your duty?”
“Yes. But I felt sorry for her.”
“Sorry.” Korin’s voice was flat with disbelief. “I’m sure you will put this experience you had with Comrade Adamova to its proper use.”
Vasin knew better than to bother protesting his good intentions to a hard old bastard like Korin.
“Spit it out, man. Why are you really here?”
“You saw Fyodor Petrov at the Adamovs’ the night he died.”
“I did.” Korin’s voice betrayed nothing.
“Just before he went home and committed suicide.”
“If you say so.” Korin gave a contemptuous grunt. “Major, are you planning to take me in for questioning?”
“No.”
“Then that will be all. I have to be back at the workshop.”
Vasin turned his cap in his hands. He’d encountered men of Korin’s type before. A survivor of the NKVD’s torture cellars, if he had to guess. Unbending as an old oak.
“You were in the camps, Colonel.”
“What’s it to you?”
“Kolyma? Magadan?”
“Does it make any difference?”
“Would you believe me if I said that those times are past? I was a cop until a couple of years ago. A police detective, not KGB.”
Korin remained silent.
“I don’t think Fyodor Petrov killed himself.”
Again, silence.
“Was he close to Adamova?”
“Leave Maria alone.”
“I believe that you and she are good friends. She told me she admires you. So I’m asking you if she was involved with Petrov.”
Korin ran a stubby hand through his beard.
“If I tell you, will you promise to stay away from her?”
“I’m not here to lie to you, Colonel. I can’t in conscience promise that.”
To Vasin’s surprise, Korin grinned, and slipped into the familiar form of address.
“Conscience, eh? You wouldn’t have lasted long in ’thirty-seven, little pigeon. You ‘can’t in conscience’! Ha! That isn’t the way you Chekists used to talk.”
“Times change. Even the kontora changes.”
“Listen to me then, Major, if times are so different. I’ll tell you why you should stay away from Masha, and we’ll leave it to your conscience to decide. Okay?”
Korin made his way stiffly to the kitchen area at the back of the hut and rummaged for a tin of tea. He pointed to a Primus stove, even more battered than the one in Arzamas. Vasin noticed that three fingers of his left hand were missing their tips.
“Light that.”
He tossed Vasin a box of matches and held up his damaged hand.
“Frostbite. Fiddly thing, that stove.”
Korin brewed his tea strong and black. Vasin noticed that he held his mug on the insides of his cupped hands. An old convict habit born in freezing places where every gram of heat is precious.
They sat on a pair of sagging armchairs in front of an incongruously splendid new radio.
“Masha lost her family in the war. I lost my family in the war. But she was a smart one. Just after the war I agreed to teach an evening class for an old professor of mine who was sick. Foundation course in applied mathematics at the Engineering Institute in Leningrad. Masha was the bright button of the class. Good heart too. About the same time, Adamov was looking for people to come to Arzamas to build the first generation of…devices. I agreed to come and introduced the two of them after a lecture. She caught his eye. Long story short, they got married. We all ended up in Arzamas. So now we’re family, Masha and me. Did you know that she survived in Leningrad through the German blockade?”
Vasin briefly considered trying to bluff, but instead shook his head.
“During the heroic siege, the whole city was cut off by the Fascists for nine hundred days. Millions of people were trapped without food. Masha’s parents starved to death. Left her alone to fend for herself. Do you know how people survived? You don’t, because it’s not in any history you would have read. They ate corpses, boy. By the time the authorities rounded up all the children at the end of the blockade, they were wild as rats, and twice as hungry. When I first met Masha, she looked like a scarecrow. Pair of green eyes on a sack of bones. Her stammer was so bad she could barely speak. I’d give her chocolates and she’d turn away and wolf them down. In the classroom she was quiet and attentive. But outside she would get into fights. When Adamov brought her to Arzamas, she didn’t trust anyone. Tough as you like, in many ways. But her mind is…broken. Even after all these years, she’s still on the verge of a collapse. That’s why you need to leave her alone.”
Korin continued before Vasin had a chance to speak.
“If what you say is true, Major, you did a good thing when you brought her to my place instead of handing her over. I’m telling you this so that you understand. Because if those headshrinkers and trick cyclists ever get hold of her, they’ll lock her up and electrocute her brain. Make her one of the living dead. The old man wouldn’t be able to bear it.”
“The old man?”
“Adamov needs Masha. And we need Adamov. The whole world needs Adamov.”
Korin’s words hung in the air.
“The world?”
“Young man, either you’re stupid or you’re playing a game that’s too clever for me. Why? Because of RDS-220. The Big Bomb, the kids call it.”
“How is it different from all the other bombs?”
The old man wiped a hand across his face.
“Where did you say you’d come from?”
“I didn’t. Moscow sent me. Special Cases.”
“I have a special case for you. Stoke up that stove. The wood’s outside, under the porch.”
The split pine logs were full of sap, and left white stains on the wool of Vasin’s greatcoat. A group of soldiers slouched past, smirking, as Vasin stumbled up the steps, dropping logs as he went.
“Where did you spend the war, little pigeon?”
“At school in Moscow. My father was a military engineer.”
“One of us! Where did he study?”
“Moscow Higher School of Aviation Construction. On Leningradsky Prospekt.”
“Ha. In the thirties? I might well have taught him.”
Korin took out a papiros, the worker’s cigarette that consisted of a long cardboard tube with five centimeters of powerful dark tobacco at the end. The brand, Belomorkanal, was named for Stalin’s great canal from the White Sea to the Baltic, built by convict labor. Punishment put to the good of the Motherland. Vasin had met some old convicts who’d worked on it. Korin puffed the papiros into life, moving it from one side of his mouth to the other as though he were chewing a straw.
“I was sent to Murmansk in ’forty-two. Assembling American Douglas bombers after they arrived from Scotland on the Arctic convoys. Getting them into the air. Training our pilots to fly them, our mechanics to arm them, adapting them to carry our heavy munitions. Not a bad job, while it lasted. But one day I flew a mission running air support for a British convoy. The pilot was an American kid, younger than me. He was teaching us to use the bomb-sighting apparatus to spot U-boats and drop depth charges. You’ve got to fly in low, surprise ’em and catch ’em before they dive. But we found a German destroyer instead, and it raked us with antiaircraft fire. Dan Bilewsky was the Yankee pilot’s name. His people were Poles, I suppose. Anyway, we were a few miles south of Tromsø with the starboard engine on fire. Bilewsky managed to gain enough height to get us back to the coast. Best piece of flying I’ve ever seen. Corkscrewed up on one engine. As soon as we were over land, he ordered us all to bail out. We were low—only about two hundred meters—but we jumped. I was the last out befor
e the engine detached and put the crate into a left-hand spin. Uncontrollable. Threw me upward on the roll. I thought, Well, that’s your luck, Korin. You jump out of a fucking plane and fly up instead of down. Anyway, my parachute just had enough time to open, and I landed in a snowdrift. Walked away with bruises.”
“And the pilot?”
“Killed, of course. Don’t interrupt, listen. My point is from that day onward, I saw war. The Norwegians took us prisoner. Me, the two bombardiers, gunner, navigator. Handed us over to the Germans. Our navigator had broken his collarbone, so an SS sergeant shot him in the face. Casual-like, as if he had other things on his mind. Then they put us on a stinking freighter to Riga, where they needed slave labor. We were with a hundred other Soviet prisoners. None of us had any food for a week. When we arrived, they put us to work digging mass graves. Burying the corpses of partisans and Jews. Cold. Hunger. You don’t know what those words mean. But I do.
“Anyway. By the next fall our armies were pushing down from Leningrad. Our aviation blasted the shit out of the port of Riga for three weeks straight. You could get warm just by standing in the cindery wind that blew from the city. The Fascists were panicking, scrambling to save their backsides. One morning we woke up in the cattle shed where we’d been billeted and discovered our guards had gone. Just like that. They couldn’t even spare the bullets to shoot us.
“Our guys were exhausted and starving, ready to die where they lay. I took up with a group of Yakuts. Tough bastards, these Siberian hunters. They robbed our sick of whatever food they could find hidden in their filthy clothes and we struck out to find our lines. I tell you, when I saw that first red star on a Soviet fur cap I cried like a baby. Malyshev’s boys, the Fourth Shock Army. The officer was from Odessa, and he gave us some pork fat they’d captured and propped us in a row by a fire. We leaned against each other like frozen laundry. I ate like a wolf, then puked it all up again. It was the happiest hour of my life. Until you sons of bitches came. The Chekists arrested us for desertion. But that’s a different story. The point is: I know what war is.”
“And now you make bombs.”
Korin spat out a piece of tobacco and leaned forward so that his face was centimeters from Vasin’s.
“We make bombs so that there won’t be another war.”
The words came with such vehemence that Vasin felt Korin’s spittle landing warm on his face.
“RDS-220 will be the biggest thermonuclear bomb ever built. Three thousand times more powerful than the Yankees’ Hiroshima bomb. At least. Maybe five thousand. A hundred megaton yield. That’s what Khrushchev ordered up. That means it has the explosive force of a hundred million tons of high explosive. Twenty times bigger than any atom bomb that’s ever been detonated before. A bomb that can kill every living thing in a two-hundred-kilometer radius.”
Vasin struggled to take in the numbers.
“And why are we making this infernal machine? Because it will be the end of war. You only fight if you think you can win. RDS-220 transforms war into suicide. There can be no victory, only total annihilation. Do you see? We are nearly there. Peace, forever. This is why the world needs Adamov.”
The old man swigged the dregs of his tea.
“What has this to do with Maria Adamova and Fyodor Petrov, Colonel?”
“Maria is a good and faithful wife. That’s all you need to know. It’s also the truth.”
Korin put his empty mug down on the table with an emphatic clunk. The conversation was over. Obediently, Vasin stood.
“Just one thing more, Colonel. Was Adamov in the camps as well?”
“Of course he fucking was.”
“What for?”
Korin jerked to his feet, looming over Vasin and sending his tin mug rolling across the floor.
“Same reason any of us was in the camps. Some ambitious little fucker denounced him. Some Chekist had a quota to fill. That’s what for.”
The old man’s eyes were blazing.
Vasin bowed his head. “Thank you, Colonel.”
“You leave Masha alone.”
“There may be a killer in Arzamas. You don’t think it’s important to find him?”
“Did nothing I told you sink in, boy? The only thing that matters in Arzamas is the bomb.The bomb that will end war. Forever. Can you think of anything more important that that?”
“I got it, Colonel.”
“He got it.”
Korin muttered the last words to himself. Exhausted, the old man subsided back into his chair, closed his eyes, and in a second was asleep. A snore rumbled inside his chest like a growl. Vasin loaded the stove with more logs, pushed the damper half-closed with his toe, and left the Colonel snoring in the warming room.
Outside, the pale Arctic sun appeared for a moment high above the surrounding buildings. But it gave no warmth.
PART TWO
BURNED AND BLINDED
We stopped at a checkpoint where we were issued dustproof jumpsuits and dosimeters. We drove in open cars past the buildings destroyed by the blast, braking to a stop beside an eagle whose wings had been badly singed. It was trying to fly, but it couldn’t get off the ground. One of the officers killed the eagle with a well-aimed kick, putting it out of its misery. I have been told that thousands of birds are destroyed during every test; they take wing at the flash, but then fall to earth, burned and blinded.
—ANDREI SAKHAROV,
Memoirs
CHAPTER FIVE
TUESDAY, 24 OCTOBER 1961, EVENING
SIX DAYS BEFORE THE TEST
I
As the Antonov-8 dropped beneath the low cloud cover, Vasin saw that Arzamas had been transformed by the day’s snowfall. The airfield was a white scar across the black of the forest. Beyond, the city was visible as a lonely island of light in an ocean of woodland. The pilot fought crosswinds all the way down, landing in a jolting skid that had Vasin grasping the canvas of his seat. As the rear doors opened, a chill blast of wind sent pain throbbing across his bruised face.
To his relief, Vasin found no reception committee waiting for him. Zaitsev and his boy Efremov would doubtless be scouring the town for him but clearly hadn’t yet checked the airport’s movement orders. Good. He might be able to steal a couple more hours of freedom.
Vasin hitched a ride into town with a group of fellow passengers. After the numbing cold of the aircraft, the fierce heat of the little bus stupefied the group into the companionable silence of bathers in a hot sauna.
Vasin disembarked at Lenin Square. Evening was already closing over the city, and the trams were crammed with citizens hurrying home. The high windows of the Adamovs’ apartment on Marx Street were dark. Vasin waited at the flimsy shelter of a bus stop at the end of the block. She was easy to spot, her stride as upright and self-conscious as that of a schoolgirl stepping up to the podium to collect a prize. She was dressed formally in a smart topcoat and head scarf, and under her arm she carried a fresh loaf wrapped in paper. She walked right past him, her gaze fixed on some point in the middle distance, not on the ground in front of her like the other pedestrians. Vasin caught up with her as she was about to turn in to the apartment building
“You look well, Maria Vladimirovna.”
She seemed unsurprised to see him.
“You look like someone kicked the shit of you.”
“Someone did.”
Maria pursed her mouth and glanced up and down the street.
“Better come inside. You need to clean that up.”
They mounted the steps in silence. The apartment was dark and silent.
“Professor Adamov?”
She answered with an eye roll and pushed the door shut with a backward kick.
“At work.”
Snapping on the lights as she went, she led Vasin through the dining ro
om and into a large, white-tiled bathroom.
“Sit.”
Vasin obediently perched on the edge of the cast-iron tub. Maria opened a large medicine cabinet and began rummaging inside. The shelves were crammed with medicine bottles, some with the plain typed labels Vasin recognized as being from the Kremlin Polyclinic, others in their original American bottles with the bright logos of Bayer and Merck. He peered over her thin shoulder at the labels: phenobarbital, phenothiazine, chlorpromazine. Tranquilizers.
Maria picked out a bottle of iodine. As the cabinet door clicked closed, her face appeared in the mirror, and for a long moment she paused to look at herself. Vasin, out of her eyeline, could not stop himself from staring at her reflection. Fine mousy hair, cropped short like that of a French tomboy film star. Thin, sharp little features. High cheekbones supporting those huge eyes, too big for her head. And her head too big for a thin neck and narrow shoulders, like a child’s. Seeing Vasin watching her, she grimaced briefly. Tipping iodine onto a wad of cotton wool, she set to swabbing Vasin’s temple with brusque, businesslike movements. The spirit burned hot on the bruise.
“You didn’t report me?”
“I did not.”
“And now you’ve come to present the bill. Let me guess.”
“No, there isn’t going to be a bill. I know what the nuthouse is like.”
“Sure, you are a very knowledgeable man. That is obvious to everyone.”
She recorked the iodine bottle with a sharp slap and turned back to replace it in the medicine cabinet. Next, Vasin knew, she would ask him to leave. He felt a sudden, piercing urge to return to the complicity they had shared in Korin’s barrack.
“My sister died in an asylum. They tied her down and electrocuted her.”
Masha froze in mid-movement, her back still to Vasin.
“I haven’t told many people that.”
“So why did you tell me?”
“I don’t know why,” Vasin said. “I wanted you to know I understand.”
Maria nodded. She seemed to be turning his words over in her mind, like a magpie examining a bauble. Vasin felt suddenly stupid, exposed. This is work, fool, he told himself. A wash of pain from his temple mercifully interrupted that train of thought. It had been a mistake to come here straight after Olenya. The conversation with Maria had wriggled suddenly from his grasp, like a stick in a fairy tale that turns into a serpent. He stood.
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