BOOK I (7 page)

"The pleasure," she chirped, adopting airs the Potter never knew she was equipped with, "is mutual."

Using a latchkey attached to a thin gold chain, Oskar let himself into an apartment on the fifth floor. The three of them groped their way along a darkened hallway toward a door. Light seeped from under it. A soft whirring sound came from beyond it. "Let me do the talking," Oskar cautioned as he ushered them into the room.

A jew wearing an embroidered skullcap and peering through incredibly thick eyeglasses sat bent over a pedal-operated prewar Singer sewing machine. Oskar muttered something in Yiddish, and the young man nodded shyly at the Potter and Svetochka. "You are the fortunate ones," he said in Russian. He stood up and came around in front of his Singer and squinting professionally through his thick lenses, sized them up. "They will look perfectly American when I am through with them," he promised.

"American!" Svetochka's eyes cocked open.

The Jew, who was in his early twenties, handed Oskar a pad and a pencil, then produced a measuring tape. "Arms up, if you please," he instructed the Potter, and he began calling out measurements-neck, shoulders, chest, waist, inseam, sleeve. "You wear your skirt too low on your hips," he commented to Svetochka as he moved around her taking measurements. To Oskar the jew said, "What will you do for shoes?"

"Only give me the sizes, I will provide them."

Later, outside the building, the Potter took Oskar aside. "What was all that about?" he demanded.

"So; you will be leaving the country in five days' time under valid American passports, Oskar explained. "It is a crucial part of the operation that you pass in every detail for Americans, yes?" And he went on to explain when, and how, they would get out of Russia.

"It is that simple?" the Potter asked in amazement.

"You would he happier crossing the border in the Arctic Circle on snowshoes, with dogs harking in the distance, yes?" Oskar emitted the only laugh the Potter was ever to hear from him. "So: it is my opinion that you have read too many cheap spy novels."

The next afternoon Svetochka withdrew two hundred rubles from her bank account and spent every last kopeck of it at the ornately decorated Gastronomi No. I on Gorky Street, popularly known as Yeliseyevsky's after the owner of the delicatessen before the revolution. Rubbing elbows with the Gastronomi's regular clients, the wives and daughters of Central Committee members, leaving large tips on every counter that she came to, Svetochka managed to get out of the store with a supply of blinis, a package of salted crackers, a container of thick cream, a tin of Beluga caviar, several fresh Norwegian herrings and two bottles of Polish Bison vodka.

"What have you done?" the Potter groaned when he saw her purchases set out on the small table in their bedroom.

"We won't need rubles in Paris," Svetochka announced innocently, "so Svetochka decided to spend as much as she could here before we leave."

"You idiot! The last thing we want to do is attract attention to ourselves." He collapsed into a wooden chair and stared at the display of luxury that any other time would have set his mouth to watering.

Crestfallen, Svetochka spread some caviar on a salted cracker, poured some vodka (which she had put outside a window to chill) into a glass and offered them to the Potter.

"I am not hungry," he grumbled.

Svetochka planted herself in a chair facing him. "What if we stimulate your appetite?" she asked suggestively, and she slowly, deliberately crossed, and then recrossed, her legs.

They made love with the light on, something they hadn't done in months.

Working the Potter's dwarfish body as if she were preparing a field for planting, faking an orgasm (and when she finally had one, exaggerating its intensity), Svetochka caused him to forget, if only for a moment, Piotr Borisovich and Oskar and the pier of old age to which he felt moored. Later, munching on biscuits coated with caviar, washing them down with chilled vodka, Svetochka blew lightly into his ear and whispered, "That is only a sample of what Svetochka will do to her Feliks when we get to Paris."

Two days before they were scheduled to leave Russia, the Potter decided the time had come to pay a last visit to Piotr Borisovich's father. Not only did he want to see the old man before he left; there was also the practical matter of recovering the package he had carefully stashed away in a secret compartment under the floorboards of his house.

The day of the visit the Potter spent several hours doing some elementary street work to make sure he wasn't being followed. It had been quite a while since he had practiced tradecraft, but the gestures he had learned as a young man, and had perfected during his four years as rezident in New York, came back fairly easily. He used reflecting surfaces-doors of polished cars, buses-as mirrors to observe what was going on around him in the street without appearing to. He made it a point to be the last one to board a trolley, and the last to leap off before it started again. He lingered in front of store windows on the Arbat and looked in them to see who else might be lingering in front of other store windows. He ducked into an underground tunnel that pedestrians used to cross October Square, hurried halfway down it and then suddenly doubled back on his tracks-and watched to see who else might double back on his tracks. He entered GUM, the archaic bazaarlike department store across Red Square from the Kremlin, through one door, allowed himself to become caught up in a mob stampeding for a counter that had just put East German umbrellas on sale, and then made his way out of another door. He ducked into a prewar apartment building near Pushkin Square, climbed to the sixth floor, where the corridor connected with an adjoining building, and emerged from an entrance of a different building on a different street. It was midafternoon before he decided his wake was clean. He caught a taxi to the Central Depot and boarded a bus for Peredelkino, a village about forty kilometers from Moscow.

In the half year since his last trip to Peredelkino, Moscow had sprawled, like a lazy lady, farther into the countryside. Prefabricated concrete apartment buildings had sprouted on either side of the road; to the Potter's eye they had the aesthetic appeal of pillboxes. Streets that had been bulldozed into existence, but not yet paved, ran off like rivulets in every direction. Beyond the last building, in still-unleveled fields covered with corn stumps, the skeletons of giant cranes, some on their sides, some upright already, hinted at the further expansion of the city limits. "There are no limits to cities," Piotr Borisovich had once remarked as he and the Potter drove through what was then the suburb into the countryside. He had thought a moment and then revised his sentence: There are no limits, he had said, though at the time the Potter hadn't been sure what he was getting at.

Now he thought he understood. And he wondered, not for the first time, whether he had been Piotr Borisovich's teacher, or Piotr Borisovich had been his.

Outside of Moscow, the first peasant cottages, looking distinctly one-dimensional through the dirty window of the bus, appeared on either side of the Minsk highway. With their painted, carved wooden shutters and carefully tended vegetable gardens-in Russia, something like half the fresh vegetables came from these tiny peasant plots-they provided quite a contrast to those pillboxes that would eventually rise in their places.

In the old days, before the revolution, the peasants going off to the fields used to leave their doors unlocked and food set out on the table in case anyone happened by. But then the Bolshevik grain-confiscating squads had happened by, and the peasants had started locking their doors. Probably because of his peasant roots, Piotr Borisovich had talked a great deal about the subject during his stay at the Potter's school. The trouble, he would say, his voice reduced to the soft purr he used when he felt deeply about something, was that the Bolsheviks, being city-bred and city-oriented, never quite knew what to do with the eighty percent of the population that lived outside the cities. The peasants were the enemy, the Potter would explode. In their heart of hearts, they were all capitalists-they wanted to own the land they worked. What they wanted-Piotr Borisovich would shake his head in disagreement-was to own the crop they harvested, and not have it carted off without compensation to feed the workers in the cities.

They hadn't seen eye to eye on everything, the Potter and Piotr Borisovich, but their differences only seemed to bind them closer together-to reinforce the notion, foreign to Soviet Russia, that holding different opinions was perfectly normal.

Arriving at Peredelkino, the Potter walked the four kilometers along a rutted road from the depot to the peasant's cottage the old man had moved into. "I always wanted to water, and be watered," he had said then, but he had been exhibiting symptoms of senility already, or at least that's what they had claimed when the theoretical journal for which he worked decided it was time for him to retire. The Potter himself had never been convinced that the old man's wandering mind-he alighted on subjects like a butterfly, and left a butterfly's imprint on them-was worn thin. It might just as well have been his way of coping with a world glued together by a peculiar attitude toward power: confronted by hypocrisy, people simply shrugged.

The old man, whose name was Boris Alexandrovich Revkin, had had a good run for his money. He had worked his way up to become a division propagandist in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War, and had gone to work after the war as an editor for a well-known theoretical journal. One of his early articles dealt with something called "left deviationism." In it, Revkin had used the expression "political narcissism" to describe the Chinese Communist leadership. When asked, at the weekly editorial meeting, where he got the expression, he had replied, "Why, where else, I invented it!" The chief editor, who had made his reputation by taking a single line from Marx and writing a four-hundred-page book on it, had laughed outright. "If all you want are lines out of Marx and Lenin," Revkin had cried indignantly, "get someone else to do it." Assuming that his audacity indicated he had friends in high places, the chief editor shipped the article over to the Central Committee for a decision. When it came back, four months later, it contained a handwritten notation in the upper-left-hand corner.

"Publish," it read, followed by an initial: "S."

Which is how Boris Alexandrovich Revkin became the Soviet Union's resident expert on "left deviationism."

His spine curved into the shape of a parenthesis by his years of harvesting cotton, the old man was on his hands and knees weeding between the green peppers in his vegetable garden when the Potter, his collar open, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder, finally arrived.

The sun, sinking through a stand of white birches, dispatched slats of yellowish light across the ground. Revkin looked up, squinting into the light, and spotted the Potter mopping the perspiration off his neck with his handkerchief. "Contrary to appearances," the old man cackled, struggling to his feet, wiping his palms on his overalls, masking behind a studied briskness his pleasure at seeing the Potter, "sunsets don't grow on trees. What brings you all this way, Feliks? You have news of Piotr, maybe?"

"No news," the Potter said quickly. "What brings me all this way is you." He fished one of Svetochka's bottles of Bison vodka from his jacket pocket and handed it to Revkin. "A small present," he mumbled in embarrassment.

"Ha! Now I know you want something!" cried the old man, hopping over a row of baby cabbages, snatching the bottle from the Potter. He led the way to his cottage, lighted the stove, put some water to boil on it.

When it grew dark he closed the shutters, served tea (which he himself drank, peasant-style, through a lump of sugar wedged between his teeth), eventually reheated some cooked cabbage with chunks of meat in it, on the assumption, which the Potter never challenged, that his visitor would stay the night. In time the vodka, served with the meal, loosened the old man's tongue and he began to reminisce, his words slurred, his voice hoarse, about what he called the bad old days: the Big Mustache (Stalin) and the Little Mustache (Hitler); the exhilarating struggle against the Nemtsi, the tongueless ones, the Germans; the endless double lines of beardless farm boys in gray caps with thick winter longcoats rolled and strapped on their backs making their way through ruined villages as delayed-action mines exploded in the distance; two teenagers with signs around their necks saying they had been collaborators, hanging by their twisted necks from tree limbs. The end of one story tugged at the beginning of another. His well of memories had no bottom.

Stretched out on a battered couch, the Potter nodded off, then woke with a start to hear the old man droning on. "I knew the Germans would lose the war," he was saying, "but not because of the reasons we used to give in our newspapers. They were going to lose the war-are you paying attention, Feliks?-because their ultimate goal wasn't to win it, but to fight it. Do you follow the distinction, Feliks? If they had wanted to win the war, you see, they would have mobilized everybody who could have helped, instead of eliminating them in death camps. To m it was always as evident as the nose on your face, Feliks. They wanted to lose the war and bring the world crashing down on their heads like dishes spilling from a shelf. They were acting out myths"-the old man poured the last of the vodka into his glass and tossed it off-"but then, in one way or another, all of us are acting out myths. You. Me." A distant look came into his ancient eyes. "Piotr even. Even Piotr." The old man cackled gleefully. "Especially Piotr. I always said he was meant to be a prince, or to kill a prince. I was never sure which. What do you think, Feliks? . . . Feliks?"

The old man gently drew a cover over the Potter, stoked the fire, carefully allotted two more logs to it, and shuffling off to his bed in the far corner of the room, drew the Army blanket that served as a curtain and went to sleep himself.

The Potter woke up in the pitch darkness and heard the old man snoring from behind the curtain. Moving quietly, he struck a match, lighted a candle and made his way into the unheated room that Revkin used to store his vegetables for the winter. He found the loose floorboard without any trouble, pried it up with a kitchen knife and retrieved the package wrapped in a woman's kerchief. He unfolded the cloth and examined the contents. It was all there. He had hidden it away years before, when he had returned from his tour in New York. At the time he had been riding high, and the precaution had been a professional reflex; an act of tradecraft that wasn't spelled out in any of the textbooks; a hedge against difficult times that was second nature to people in his business. Later, when he had been obliged to retire as novator and move into a small apartment with another family, he removed the package from its original hiding place and stashed it away under the floorboards of the old man's cottage.