Document Z (18 page)

She groaned. ‘I have witnesses,' she said. ‘Anna and Pipniakova.'

The call came that night from Kovaliev. A Party disciplinary session would be held in the morning at eleven o'clock. Volodya thanked him gruffly, not allowing Evdokia anywhere near the phone.

The meeting was convened around a large table in the embassy's formal room. Generalov was in his uniform, medals boasting on his chest. The curtains were drawn, smothering the daylight, and the artificial lighting, Evdokia thought, made the room seem airlessly enclosed.

Generalov spoke first, pausing occasionally for Karasev, the service attaché, who'd been assigned to record the minutes. He told them this meeting was for a special purpose that would soon be made horrifically clear. Certain things had come to his attention—various undercurrents in this embassy, which, as ambassador and a communist, he could no longer allow to proceed. He had considered declaring this an open forum, such was the weight of the problem.

Evdokia shifted in her seat. She had Anna's testimony in her pocket, ready to declare Generalova's accusations false.

The ambassador droned on. He had his knuckles pressed to the table. ‘Serious charges are to be made,' he said. ‘Shocking behaviour that deserves to be ruthlessly exposed.' He glared at Kislitsyn, the second secretary toying with the pencil in his hand. ‘Let us begin.'

Evdokia stood up. ‘I will speak,' she said.

Their eyes fixed on her, necks craning one by one.

Generalov cocked an eyebrow. ‘Nothing has yet been said, Petrova.'

‘I wish to make it known,' she declared, ‘that outrageous lies are circulating with intent. Pie throwing. What lunacy. It is an infantile falsehood whose fabricator evidently lacks the courage to appear at this meeting and must therefore stand condemned.'

She had expected the ambassador to sit and hear her out. He stayed standing. She declared quickly that she had witnesses. People in direct contact with the time and the place and the personalities around which the incident revolved.

‘Evdokia Alexeyevna,' Generalov interrupted, ‘your insolence towards my wife is not our concern today.' He gestured that she sit. ‘True,' he said, ‘you are an expert at splitting the collective. Causing divisions. Encouraging dissension. You are loud-mouthed, which some might dismiss as merely an unfortunate element of your character, not realising the cold and calculated scheming it truly is.' She moved to protest but he silenced her with his finger. ‘It is apparent, now,' he continued, ‘that your outbursts are not innocent but deliberate and contrived. They are the plottings of a sinister miscreant. Part of a subversive agenda to which you,'—he turned slightly—‘and your husband hold.'

She looked to Volodya whose arms were hugged to his chest.

Generalov went on. ‘Many have wondered about anti-social behaviours in this outpost, failures to fit with the collective, antagonisms exhibited. Always these have been believed to be conflicts of personality or some such benign thing, vacant of political content. But suddenly we find ourselves enlightened. We charge that they are part of a campaign. A crusade to ruin the good working order of this station, to disrupt and dislocate our functioning parts. An action of sabotage. It has its political motivations: a Beria faction. That is right. A cancer in this very embassy, seeking to usurp the power of the Foreign Ministry and to establish an order headed by the MVD.'

Kovaliev's head bobbed, his eyes pinned to Karasev's notes.

‘We must name the perpetrators,' Generalov declared. ‘We will out them and hope they die of shame. The Petrovs— Comrades Vladimir Mikhailovich and Evdokia Alexeyevna, who are far from comrades at all. We say they are saboteurs. Husband and wife; organisers of a Beria group; conspirators with the aim of elevating the MVD to a position above myself as the ruling authority of this outpost.'

‘Ambassador—'

‘From the outset they have attempted to destabilise us, pursuing the reactionary aims of their treacherous former head!'

‘You are wrong,' Evdokia half-shouted. ‘That is slander. Groundless! Beria must answer for his crimes! It is nothing to do with us.'

‘On the contrary,' said Generalov. ‘It is everything! Who here will speak?'

Kovaliev jumped to the call. He rose from his chair, half-stuttering as if the words had jammed. ‘I . . . Ah . . . It is true! Your mission has been to degrade us, to disparage Stalin, may he rest in peace. We have witnessed your theatrics and orchestrations, your derelictions and their subversive intent. These have been your outward behaviours, trying to bend the collective to your will. But who knows what has happened in secret; what influences you have peddled behind the scenes? Shall we ask? Will you furnish the truth? You are a danger. You have made intrigues against the proper lines of control. Ambassador Lifanov understood your deleterious effect. He may not have known your motivations, but now your treachery, long suspected, is exposed.'

Volodya was sitting in his chair, arms crossed. Evdokia waited for him to interject as Kovaliev sprinted on.

‘Beria loyalists,' the attaché shouted. ‘Loyalists to the core!'

‘These are lies, Nikolai Grigorievich!' she said. ‘You are fabricating at such speed you can hardly keep pace with yourself.'

Suddenly, Kharkovetz, the press attaché, was on his feet. His mouth was dry and it clicked as he spoke. ‘I agree with this process.'

‘What process?' she asked.

He ignored her, addressing the ambassador. ‘If these two are a Beria faction, they must be heartlessly unmasked.'

‘Who else?' said Generalov. ‘Who supports this charge? Vislykh?'

‘Yes,' said the secretary. ‘If they are guilty, I support it.'

‘But we are not guilty,' said Evdokia. ‘The charge is convenient and absurd.'

‘It is serious,' said Kovaliev, still stammering.

‘Oh, desperately.'

The ambassador called on Kislitsyn. The MVD man leaned back in his chair and gave no reply. Still Volodya was silent. His eyes were on Karasev, whatever it was he was writing down.

Kovaliev rambled on with another indictment, footnoting various incidents, incitements to unrest.

‘This is not a hearing,' said Evdokia. ‘This is an ambush. We are not followers of Beria. We are respected Party members with long careers.'

Generalov laughed. ‘Evdokia Alexeyevna, we know your record, the black stains on your Party history.'

‘The Party knows who I am and is comfortable, Ambassador. I think there are men in this room with questionable histories who should be the last to throw stones.'

Kovaliev went to protest but she cut him off. ‘This charge is a falsity,' she said. ‘Let us dismiss it and end this meeting.'

‘If the Petrovs won't admit their betrayals, we must test them by formalising the charge,' said Kharkovetz.

‘That's right,' said Kislitsyn, putting the pencil behind his ear. ‘This is all hearsay. If the ambassador believes it, let him command the charge and afford a proper prosecution and defence. If he believes it.'

Generalov glared at his second secretary.

Kovaliev lifted a book of protocol from his bag. ‘There are rules,' he said. ‘Without Moscow's permission, no process can be made. As secretary, I can take an agreement to petition them. If the Petrovs won't admit the charge, this is the only way we can begin.'

‘Now you are being ridiculous,' Evdokia said. ‘You know Moscow will grant you no such thing.'

‘We must follow the regulations. I am secretary. This is what the regulations state.'

Generalov called on Prudnikov, who was sitting quietly at the end of the table. ‘Petr, what is your opinion of all this?'

The cypher clerk looked fearful. He muttered about the regulations, taking refuge in them, saying there should be a strict observance of the rules.

‘Alright,' said Generalov. ‘Kovaliev will petition Moscow. He will collect signatures from those who support the charge.'

‘We will include a protest that what is alleged is nonsense,' Evdokia said.

‘You cannot protest a petition,' Kovaliev told her.

‘We will protest it.'

‘The rules are plain. You may protest at a later stage.'

Evdokia went to speak once more, but Kovaliev and Gener-alov stood, declaring the meeting closed. Karasev packed his minutes into a satchel, which Kovaliev took.

‘You must write to Moscow,' said Kislitsyn, when everyone had gone.

‘All this writing,' said Volodya.

‘The facts may make no difference, but then again they might.'

‘He's thought hard about this, the prick.'

‘Two pricks. Scheming.'

‘Is this the kind of thing that makes it them or us?'

‘What do you think?'

‘We are completely untenable. How is Doosia supposed to work?'

‘Shoulder to the wheel. Follow the rules.'

‘Six feet from bedlam.'

They looked to her. She wasn't talking. She pulled the strings on the nearest curtain, struck by nausea in the sudden bright light.

Anna Kislitsyna broke away. Their walks and shopping excursions stopped, Evdokia's telephone calls went unreturned. Evdokia understood, or thought she did. Theirs was an ordinary friendship and what was an ordinary friendship when you had a family to protect? It was an intellectual understanding and it didn't help the hurt. If they saw one another at the embassy, Anna gave her a distant smile and nothing more.

Masha wasn't afraid. They ate their lunch together at the end of the orchard in the shadow of the hedge or out of it. An hour in the afternoon sun; the smell of citrus and the cigarettes they smoked.

Others sniped. Karaseva spat into the garden if their paths crossed. Someone made pig noises under her office window then disappeared. Someone wrote ‘whore' on the roster by her name. When she left a room, she stood outside the doorway, quietly hovering, listening for laughter or any comments made.

Volodya stayed a week in Sydney. She wanted to know what they were going to do about this, the situation. He rang her once and wouldn't discuss it.

Ethel Rosenberg was executed. President Eisenhower rejected her last-minute letter requesting clemency. She made no statement before dying. There were riots in Rome and Paris.

Generalov demanded to be told what was wrong when Evdokia rang in sick. ‘Fever,' she said. ‘I won't bring it to the embassy.'

She stayed in the house for two days, the curtains drawn, sleeping with the lights on, not bothering to watch the street.

She cooked soup and reheated soup and fed some soup to Jack. The dog tongued the bowl across the floor, upended it and licked the spilled liquid from the lino.

The hum of the Powerhouse was one of those distant things— could she really hear it or was she listening to the wind?

She was sacked, finally, which was something she had seen coming. The ambassador called her to his desk and closed the door.

‘Evdokia Alexeyevna,' he said. ‘I am terminating your work as my assistant. You are dismissed as accountant. You will make sure your records are in order and hand them to me. Vislykha will take the role.'

‘You don't have the authority,' she protested. ‘Moscow assigned me the position. I follow the regulations and the rules.'

He looked at her in silence. He told her she would bring him the records in an hour.

She cleared the photographs from her desk. She left the whittled pencils and the notes and sums she'd scribbled. She wanted Vislykha to realise her intrusion, to know that the space she was inhabiting was not a vacant, nullified place. You are profiting from a casualty, the desk said.

She went upstairs to tell Kislitsyn what had happened. The door of his office was locked. She hovered for a time before collecting the MVD channel from Prudnikov. She asked whether Kovaliev's petition had received a reply. ‘Not yet,' said the clerk, though she wondered whether he would tell her, whether things were now so lost that he had chosen the ambassador's camp.

She took the MVD cables to Volodya's room. Easy to lose herself decyphering, running like an automaton, vanishing her conscious parts. Subtract this column from this. Substitute the codewords. The messages uncovered felt as though they were spoken in a godly voice. The way the words were housed inside themselves, secretly bound up in reassortments unbreakable to anyone else.

Moscow Centre wanted Kislitsyn to track down a military man named David Morris, an undercover communist and a tank researcher once on the general staff in Melbourne. They wanted the current address and living circumstances of a lawyer named Finnard, graduate of Sydney University, interested in questions of Marxist philosophy. They sought information on one Fitzhardinge, a librarian at the National Library and a consultant to parliament whom they thought might provide useful advice.

She felt reassured by this humdrum noise. The mundane rattle of intelligence work, pedestrian and routine questing of the unremarkable kind. Disarmed, she was midway through the last instruction before she realised what her decrypting had made. It was an order to Volodya:
Return to Moscow. Brief us here, directly,
on the progress you and your detachment have achieved.

She felt ill.

They wanted him on a plane via London and Zurich at the earliest. Unthinking, she picked up the phone on the desk and asked for a trunk call. The Buckingham Hotel told her that a Mr Petrov wasn't registered. Were they sure? She described her husband physically: not short but short-looking, not fat but somewhat round. ‘Glasses,' said the clerk. He knew of the chap referred to but he was certainly not booked in.

She tried Bialoguski. The doctor answered the phone out of breath, and was elusive about her husband's whereabouts, telling her that if he saw Vladimir anywhere he'd tell him to call.

Ivan Golovanov was below the window, pushing the mow-ing contraption and swearing. Evdokia went home in the mid-afternoon. The phone was ringing as she walked in. It was Volodya.