The Russian Affair (30 page)

“Isn’t your year on Sakhalin almost up?” Anna asked in surprise.

“Yes … that is, no. It’s not yet decided.”

“But you must know what your new post is going to be.” She sat on the edge of the bed.

“Let’s talk about it after breakfast.” He lifted Petya from his lap, turned him on his stomach, and began to pinch and tickle him. It was a game they’d used to play for hours at a time. On this occasion, however, the giggling wouldn’t start; the boy sensed that the game was a diversionary tactic.

“There’s no way we can eat here.” Anna gestured toward the general mess. “I don’t have anything but the leftovers from yesterday.” Reluctantly, she pondered whether it would be possible to make a breakfast out of those.

“We’re off!” said Leonid. “Get dressed, Petyushka. We’re going out.”

“Yes!” The youngster’s shout echoed around the room. On the sofa, Viktor Ipalyevich belched but didn’t wake up.

More quickly than was his wont when getting ready for school, Petya threw on his clothes, even tying his own shoelaces, and stood at the door, wriggling impatiently while his mother packed the bare necessities for a Sunday outing. Although the wet, gray weather persisted, Leonid got his spring suit out of the closet. They left the apartment on tiptoe, as if anything short of cannon fire would have been capable of waking Viktor Ipalyevich. They didn’t start to plan their excursion in detail until they were on the stairs. A trip along the Moskva River struck them as an unimaginative choice, and Krasnogorsk was too far away.

“I wonder if Vorontsovsky Park has thawed out yet.”

Anna fell in with the suggestion immediately. “We’ll certainly see the first flower buds there,” she said.

The subway brought them to the train station. They drank cocoa with Petya and found an open bakery. The train was running late. By the time they got off a little south of the park, the sun had broken through the clouds.

“It’s about time for spring,” Anna said, smiling and taking Leonid’s arm. Leonid relieved her of the bag she was carrying. It felt good to stand blinking in the sunlight. They climbed the hill where the pastoral landscape began. It was hard to believe that there was still frost within Moscow’s city limits.

Anna was burning to learn where Leonid would be stationed next. She was sure he knew where he was going, even though he hadn’t spoken of it; his reticence could bode well or ill, she thought. Maybe his transfer back to Moscow was a foregone conclusion, and soon they could start thinking about the apartment in Nostikhyeva.

Petya ran a little ahead of them, fell back, scampered about, but never got too far away—until the pond appeared. “Look, no more ice!” he cried, and then he dashed down the slope.

“Be careful!” Anna and Leonid shouted, as though with one voice.

A black dog, incited to action by the galloping youngster, left his owner’s side and sprinted toward the pond, too. Petya noticed the dog in time and came to a full stop, but the animal rushed on and plunged without stopping into the water, spraying it in all directions. At first, seeing a vicious beast charging down upon their defenseless child, Leonid and Anna had sprinted side by side to the bank; now they were laughing with Petya and the dog’s owner at the perplexed animal, which had rocketed out of the icy pond and stood some distance away, shaking himself and shivering frightfully. “He’s harmless,” said the man. He seized his dog by the collar and led the beast into the sunlight.

For no particular reason, Anna felt a sudden urge to make some sort
of impression on her husband, the powerful man with the absent smile who’d come back to her, despite everything the past year had brought them. After making sure she’d brought a towel, she removed her jacket and sweater. “If a dog can do it, so can we,” she cried out. She kicked off her boots, dropped her pants, and snatched off her shirt, and in an instant she was up to her thighs in the water.

“It can’t be more than forty degrees in there!” Leonid yelled. Squealing for joy at the sight of his daredevil mother, Petya became so excited that his father had to make restraining the boy his first priority. The cold took Anna’s breath away. So as not to lose her resolve, she leaped forward and disappeared into the brackish water. When she surfaced, she heard applause coming from the opposite bank, where passersby had stopped to watch. She paddled around in a circle, remembered the ice diver she’d seen in the Moscow River, and ended her swim as quickly as she could. As far as Petya was concerned, her ploy was a total success; he was thrilled by her exploit and described it as though no one had seen it but him. Shaking his head, Leonid held out the towel and rubbed Anna’s shoulders.

“Now you need to swallow something hot,” he said as Anna was fastening her jacket. Her teeth were chattering.

“There’s only one place where we …” She clamped her shivering jaw shut and pointed in the desired direction.

They entered a gloomy establishment, whose proprietress looked as though Sunday walkers, like everything that had to do with the advent of spring, disgusted her. The menu was limited to red beet soup and bread with cheese. While they refreshed themselves and Anna warmed up, her impatience to learn Leonid’s news grew. Eating made Petya sleepy, and when they went outside, Leonid had to carry him. They walked a short distance into the woods. In a clearing, Anna spread out the indestructible blanket that had served her and Leonid well the very first time they’d engaged in amorous play together, years before. The grass was still brown but dry. The sun glinted between bare birches and lit up the
little hairs in Leonid’s ears. He took off his scarf and opened his jacket and shirt. When he turned his head, Anna noticed the powerful tendons in his neck and realized how suntanned his face and chest were. Petya fell asleep at once. Anna propped herself on her elbows, breathed in the fresh air, and squinted at her husband.

“Did you miss me?” It sounded vain; she’d only wanted to say something that would show him how welcome he was. “I wish you didn’t have to go back.”

“Well, at least we have six days together,” he said, keeping his face turned toward the sun.

His answer disappointed her. “Your year’s just about over,” she said softly. “We’ve made it through, you and I. Now everything’s going to be normal again.”

Her face looked relaxed, but one of her fists was clutching the blanket. He picked up a dead twig, broke it in half, and cleaned his teeth with it. “Normal?” His chest expanded, as though he wanted to go on talking, but no sound came from his moving lips. He poked at his gums until the twig was red with his blood. “Isn’t everything normal?”

“We live six thousand miles apart.” Anna leaned against his back. “Petya needs you.” He froze, letting her know she’d chosen the wrong bait.

“I’ll always be there for Petya.” He looked over his shoulder to see if the boy was really asleep. Anna had brought up the unresolved issue, the question that Galina, too, had asked him again and again. How could a man be a father to his child if there was so much distance between them? Galina had been married before, but without children; because of her transfer to Sakhalin, her divorce had gone through without a hitch. It had been years, she said, since she’d wished for children; given her unpredictable profession, she probably wasn’t cut out to perform very well as a mother, anyway. As for Leonid’s performance as a father, he’d left his son in the hands of the boy’s curmudgeonly grandfather for a year. Except his feelings for the child, what spoke for Leonid as a father?
Even if the whole mess had started with Anna’s infidelity, he himself was acting a hundred times more irresponsibly.

“A possibility has come up.” He had Galina’s name on the tip of his tongue, swallowed hard, and threw the twig away. “There are still some things to verify.” His gums itched; he spat blood onto the grass. “But the potential income is outstanding.”

“Income.” Her answer sounded flat and disappointed.

As he felt immeasurably in the wrong, Leonid began to speak with greater vehemence. “Just for accepting such a transfer, I get forty percent more than a captain’s regular pay.” After a cowardly few seconds, he turned to Anna. “And after six months, there’s an additional ten percent bonus.”

“Transfer to where?” Her voice was sad already; she’d understood.

“Probably Yakutsk.” What was an optimistic way of pronouncing that name? “Maybe even farther east, on the Sea of Okhotsk.”

“That’s … I don’t know where that is.” Anna’s Sunday was over. “For how long?”

“That’s what I want to discuss with you.” It cost him an effort to reach for her hand. “We’ll see each other more often than we did this past year. I get forty days’ annual leave and a round-trip ticket for my family to anywhere in the Soviet Union.”

She thrust her fingers between his. “How long, Leonid?”

“If I sign up for five years, my pay is doubled.”

“Five! Petya will already be in high school!”

“We’re still young, Anna.” Why was he trying to placate her? Why didn’t he get it over with? On the flight to Moscow, he’d made a detailed plan: Petya would spend the warm months with him; the rest of the year, he’d live with Anna. Wasn’t it desirable for the boy to get to know their great country at an early age? They wouldn’t be the only couple that ever came to terms with such a compromise. Was Leonid supposed to live the rest of his life unhappily married to the wrong woman? After all, wasn’t Anna really to blame for everything? Hadn’t she driven him away?

“When do you have to decide?”

He stroked Petya’s hair. Three days previously, he’d cleaned out his locker in the technical section’s office on Sakhalin; his successor was already in place. His men finally had a genuine sea wolf for a commander. As an officer unattached to any unit, Leonid would have to persevere for another month on the island base; after that, the post in Yakutsk would be free. By coincidence—which he saw as destiny—the new barracks was only a few miles from Galina’s hospital.

“As I said, they’re checking my request,” he murmured. “Above everything else, I wanted to see you and …” The words grew heavy on his tongue. “Isn’t that unhealthy, to let Petya sleep for so long on the damp grass?” When Anna made no reply, he filled in the silence: “You know what I feel like doing? I haven’t been in a movie theater since I left Moscow!”

Anna grasped at the straw and remarked that there were some interesting new films. On the way back, she said, they could pass by the Pushkinskaya Cinema. Then she remembered the chaos at home. “I’ll be through cleaning up by this evening … yes, a movie’s a good idea!” She tossed her hair back from her forehead. She felt that she had to be alone with him in pleasant surroundings. Six days weren’t many, but they offered time enough for her to dissuade him from his plan. She’d prove to him that he didn’t have it so good anywhere else as he did with her. Forget the higher pay and all the benefits! An apartment in Nostikhyeva was waiting for them, a new and better home. Anna resolved to go out there with him in the next few days and have a look at the ongoing construction. Leonid was a practical man; when all was said and done, he’d understand that Moscow was the only city where life was worth living.

TWENTY-ONE

T
here were two new movies showing in the big cinema on Pushkinskaya Square:
The Seventh Bullet
and a drama entitled
Without Fear
. Leonid and Anna were looking for lighter fare, so they moved on to two other theaters without finding a film they wanted to see. Dusk was already falling as they strolled past the Operetta Theater. The poster in front announced the comedian Yuri Nikulin’s show
Attack on the Laugh Muscles
. The two turned away from the display cases.

Anna was exhausted. Although the family had helped with the cleanup operation, she’d wound up doing most of the work. The broken chair could probably be glued back together, but she’d had to throw away the floor lamp and the charred tablecloth. Eventually, the apartment had been returned to its former state, more or less, but as far as Anna was concerned, a kind of contamination remained, as if the place now bore a wound of indiscretion, inflicted on it by the Moscow literary world. Anna had put together an evening meal from the remains of the buffet. Viktor Ipalyevich, suffering the consequences of too much alcohol, had sought to regain control of his weakened body by moving very slowly and with great concentration. The poet was sincerely overjoyed at Leonid’s return and curious to observe the affection between the father
and son. When Petya learned that his parents were going out that evening, he’d started to whine, but he’d been consoled by Leonid’s promise of a visit to the Red Army Museum.

As they walked down a winding street not far from the wall of the Kremlin, Anna and Leonid discovered a dimly illuminated sign for
CINEMA UNDER THE ROOF
and a poster that proposed
A Long Night: Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace
. A starstruck look came over Leonid’s face. “Do you remember?” he said, as though speaking to himself.

The film was several years old but still popular, and Anna knew that Leonid had taken part in it—along with ten thousand other soldiers in the Red Army. They exchanged looks, and the decision was made. Since the showing had already begun, they had to ring a bell for the cashier, who graciously sold them two tickets. Every seat in the screening room, a reconstructed attic, seemed to be occupied; not wishing to disturb anyone by searching for their places, Anna and Leonid sat on the steps in the aisle. Leaning against each other, they let themselves be carried away by the large, colorful images.

Every hour of procrastination, every hour when he didn’t say what he had to say, increased Leonid’s discomfort. At the same time, he admitted to himself that the many long months he’d spent living in barracks had made him almost forget the comforts of family life. With Galina, passion had swum into his ken; now he was thinking that he’d also earned a bit of tranquillity. Accordingly, he’d wait for the right time to make his disclosure. It might, he knew, cause the edifice of his former life to come tumbling down, but even so, the upheaval should not occur wantonly or before its time. And until then, who could deny him the right to play the home-comer, the welcome husband and father?