A Very Private Plot Page 10

  “Is Tatyana up to taking on your classes?”

  Nikolai smiled diffidently. “Actually, no. She’s made strides, but she’s got a way to go before she can handle third-year English. Last night she pronounced Trafalgar Square, ‘tra-ffel geskware.’ You wouldn’t get it in Russian, but it’s funny in English.” Nikolai’s voice lowered now and he said, “I don’t look forward to giving her the news. And I don’t look forward to working every day in different quarters.”

  He thought for a moment. “Andrei, do you have your usual Thursday night date tomorrow?”

  “Of course. I would not miss it. I would have that date with my little rosebud on Mondays Tuesdays Wednesdays and Fridays too if I were a little wealthier. If I were a lot wealthier. And scaring up those one-dollar bills becomes more and more difficult. It is a good thing I have my … contacts. Why do you ask?”

  Nikolai was horrified to feel the blush on his cheeks. He looked down. “I thought to invite Tatyana to have dinner with me. Here.”

  “Oh ho! My little virgin Narodnik! The next thing we know we will have you drinking a little vodka! Well, you make yourself at home. I promise I will not return until after midnight. Do you need any practical advice?”

  “Oh shut up, Andrei. But … thanks.” He changed the subject. “There is the question of Viktor, of course.”

  “Will you be seeing Viktor?”

  “Yes. We’ll need to arrange other means of communicating, since I won’t be at Pitkin every day. I have some ideas on that front. Evidently Gorbachev got on fairly well with Reagan at Geneva. He made the usual speeches about the American strategic defense—‘space weapons,’ he calls it—but Reagan was firm. But now they’re having trouble scheduling a second summit. And the war in Afghanistan goes on. Seventeen months after Gorbachev came to power. The English radio puts at over one million the Afghan casualties, and more than ten thousand Russians dead, three times as many wounded. Have you decided finally about Pavel?”

  “Yes, I have. But the time has come for you to meet him. In my judgment he belongs with us, with the Narodniki. And although I am formally his physical education teacher in the police academy, he studied karate independently and is formidable. When his training is finished he will begin work as a police sergeant because of the seniority he earned in the army.”

  “When does he graduate?”

  “Next week. We have to hope that he is ordered to work somewhere in the vicinity of the Kremlin. Whether he is or is not, his contacts will be useful. But as I say, you must meet him. I have told him only that I share a room with a young veteran discharged on disability, and that you are very highbrow. Yes, that’s how I put it: ‘Nikolai is very highbrow. He knows everything about Pushkin, Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante—’”

  “And the Narodniki.”

  “And the Narodniki. Okay to set up a meeting? Presumably,” Andrei snickered, “not tomorrow.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  At Pitkin after the first class-break, Nikolai showed up at the windowless office of the school director, having earlier made an appointment through his secretary. The most economical way to proceed was simply to show him the letter he had received the day before from the MEIE.

  The director read it and sighed. “Typical. Absolutely typical. They remove a key member of my faculty without consulting me and with no mention of a replacement. And only yesterday”—he rummaged through a basket on his desk—“only yesterday I got this!” The director, reading the communication out loud, did a most remarkable imitation of Mikhail Gorbachev. “‘Notice to all school directors. We are advised by the educational minister at the Kremlin that every effort must be made to interest more students in the study of the English language. You are authorized to grant extra credits for the study of English and the new budget will provide for extensive Russian-English additions to the teaching library done in cassettes.’ Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Just fine. They don’t tell you how, or who is going to teach English. Well, it is not your responsibility, Trimov.”

  “I am very sorry to leave you shorthanded at the beginning of the term, Comrade Landau. If you wish, after I am told what my schedule with the MEIE is, I can see if there are open hours during which I could come to you. Of course that would depend a little bit on how far away I am posted.”

  The director said he would be grateful for this, but that after a replacement was sent there would be no budget for him. They shook hands.

  On the way to class Nikolai passed by Tatyana’s classroom. The students were assembling, talking volubly. Her eyes brightened on seeing Nikolai. She got up from her desk, and Nikolai noticed that she was wearing a flower on her lapel. He commented in a whisper on how attractive it was, and how attractive she was. She smiled. And then said in English, “Are we going to lunch today you with me?” Yes, said Nikolai. He had some important news for her. She frowned. “Bad important or good important?”

  “Both,” said Nikolai. “See you at the cafeteria at twelve-fifteen.”

  When he gave her the news he saw tears spring to her eyes, and Nikolai was sharply reminded how expressive were her features. Her whole face was a wailing wall. He consoled her by saying he might be able to come to Pitkin and teach part-time. “And in any case, of course we will see each other frequently. And that brings me to ask you, Can you have dinner with me tonight? At my apartment?”

  “With your roommate?”

  “No, he will not be there tonight.”

  “I shall have to check with my mother.”

  “Would she raise any objection?”

  “She would not want me to go alone to your apartment.” Tatyana smiled. “I will tell her I am going to a faculty function. Don’t worry. Just jot down,” she handed him a used envelope, “the exact address and the stop. What shall I wear?”

  “Nothing. I mean, anything.” Nikolai was cross with himself for the levity. He wondered if she had noticed. He suspected that she had.

  “I have discovered something very beautiful, and I want to share it with you.” She reached into her bulky handbag and pulled out a slim volume. She spoke now in English. “These are poems by Edgaar Allan Po-ey.”

  “Edgar Allan POH,” he corrected automatically.

  “You know them?”

  “I know some of them by memory.”

  “Recite one for me.”

  “Tonight. It is late. It is class time.”

  Through his wide reading Nikolai had experienced many seductions. But never a seduction done by a virgin, though he had to suppose that these were common. Andrei had told him that he had been seduced when he was fifteen—by his teacher. “She was at least thirty years old. But she approached my ignorance exactly as she approached it when teaching me geometry. Her emphasis was on repetition.” He had smiled.

  Two things Nikolai must not do, he thought: hurt her, or impregnate her. Simple enough to take precautions against the latter. On the other, he was less certain. He would need to control the lust that had raged in him ever since, two days earlier, they had sat together at the movies and, in the dark, Tatyana had allowed Nikolai’s hand to explore. He felt an urge he had a difficult time in controlling and when they left the movie house they were both silent. After he kissed her good night, he whispered, “Soon?”

  She had answered, “When you say so.”

  They had both taken to sipping a little wine, and for this special night he had singled out a bottle of Tsinandali, a common dry white wine from Georgia he knew to be popular with the students at Kiev. It was available at the state liquor store, barren now of vodka ever since Gorbachev had launched his anti-alcohol campaign. The wine cost three rubles, a day’s wages. He would let it freshen on the windowsill of number 6K. In the metro he found his mind blurring as he approached the Kievskaya stop, a few blocks from Kutuzovsky Prospekt. He gasped as, angling the bottle on the window of his apartment, he very nearly let it tip over the edge of the sill. He tied a piece of string around the bottle’s neck and closed the window over the end of
the string that protruded into the room.

  There now, the wine was safe. But as the fever mounted in his loins he calculated that he could not risk waiting alone the entire hour before she would arrive. He went down the stairs and walked at a fast pace around the block twice. With only twenty minutes left, he carefully sponged his body with water heated in the tea kettle. He pulled up his cotton trousers, left his undershorts in the drawer, and put on a clean shirt. He tried to read, but the text was blurred. He blinked his eyes repeatedly and then spoke the words aloud in a hoarse whisper:

  Why, such is love’s transgression

  Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast,

  Which thou wilt propagate, to have it prest

  With more of thine: this love that thou hast shown

  Doth add more grief to too much of mine own.

  Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;

  Being urged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;

  Being vex’d, a sea nourish’d with lovers’ tears:

  What is it else? A madness most discreet,

  A choking gall and a preserving sweet.

  Tatyana arrived promptly. His radio brought in music, and the apartment lights began to flicker in the compound. Nikolai drew the curtains, first withdrawing the bottle of wine and filling two glasses. He told her how much he loved her. She began to reply in English, but quickly abandoned it and said to Nikolai in Russian that she had never permitted herself to dream of finding a … consort as intelligent as he, as well-mannered, as wonderful to look at, as kind. Nikolai turned off the overhead light, leaving only the two reading lights, by the couch and by the bed. He kissed her deeply and soon was fondling her with mounting urgency, easing her free of her blouse, and guiding her hand. He nudged her across to the bed and carefully went on with the disrobing. She gripped him by the neck and drew him close, refusing to let him go. He whispered, “Let me, Tanyusha, remove my shirt.” He took it off, and then unbuttoned and dropped his trousers and lifted himself onto the bed beside her.

  One hour later, as they lay wordlessly together, he found himself wondering for the first time since that night at Kandãhar whether he was irreversibly pledged to give up his life, as the Narodniki had done, to pursue the dream they had in common. To give up a lifetime of what he now felt was possible with Tatyana? What madness. He probed and relished the thought of a hypothetical alternative—to slay the tyrant and to remain alive, alive to be with Tatyana for years and years.

  “You are thinking things.” He heard her voice, languorous but with a hint of gentle raillery, speaking English.

  “I am thinking, Tatyana. You don’t think ‘things,’ you just ‘think.’”

  “But,” she persisted, “if you think, it has to be that there are things at the opposite end of your thoughts, no?”

  Nikolai returned to Russian. “You are theoretically right. But in English, that’s what they say, ‘I am thinking,’ and one supposes that that person is thinking about things that have to do with the conversation or with the activity he is engaging in.”

  Back to English: “Is the activity my Nikolai is engaging in quite … delicious?”

  He leaned over and kissed her again, his ardor fully renewed.

  CHAPTER 16

  SEPTEMBER 1986

  The graduating class in which Pavel Pogodin, decorated veteran, karate expert, was prominent was given a week’s vacation after the graduates received their diplomas from the police academy. Beginning on September 12, Pavel would report for duty to the 7th Precinct, north of the Bolshoi Theatre and the Kremlin. As a sergeant, he would be given a Lada, the standard-issue state automobile. With whatever subordinate was assigned as his assistant, he would go to whatever trouble spot Radio Control directed him to. When not on a headquarters-directed mission, he was to cruise up Dzerzhinskogo past the Turgenevskaya metro stop, turn left on Sadovaya-Sukharevskaya, and then toward headquarters down Neglinnaya Street until he arrived back at his starting point; and then continue as before. The loose square described to him was about four kilometers in length. It was just north of the Kremlin, from one of whose radio towers he would receive his signals. In normal traffic it took about ten minutes to complete the circle.

  Pavel lived with his widowed mother in a large apartment building on Marshal Gretschko Prospekt, in an area reserved for first- and second-echelon diplomats, generals, and bureaucrats. Iona Dorovsky had been a child bride in the last year of the war when she married the dashing three-star general who commanded the Soviet 16th Air Army, the bomber squadron charged with devastating the approaches to East Berlin in the bloody days of March and April 1945, during which Hitler committed twenty divisions in a futile attempt to save the capital. Informed by Radio Moscow that Hitler had committed suicide on the last day in April, General Pogodin resolved to celebrate the event by personally leading what would probably be the final Allied bombing raid on Berlin. This had been ordered by Stalin, finally to discourage the resistance, in anticipation of a formal surrender by General Jodl. General Pogodin’s bomber was shot down by one of the surviving German fighter planes. He was seen by the pilots of two different Soviet planes to have ejected, his parachute to have opened up. He would have touched ground in the area of Poznan in Poland, a couple of hundred kilometers east of Berlin.

  It was a full year before Iona Pogodin, only nineteen years old, would acknowledge any possibility that her glamorous thirty-six-year-old Grigori was dead. Moreover, it was convenient that he should continue to be listed as Missing in Action, inasmuch as she was therefore permitted to continue to live in the relatively luxurious apartment, the formal address of “General Grigori Pogodin.” It had two bedrooms, a sitting room, a little dining room, and access to a private pocket-park reserved for residents of the building.

  Pavel was born fifteen years after the war, when his mother was thirty-three. She was a woman of singular beauty, of great charm, beloved of her neighbors, whom she would spare no pains to accommodate, and entirely batty. Somewhere along the line, Pavel realized that other little boys had not only mothers but also fathers, and one day he raised the question at home. His mother drew her index finger to her lips and confided to Pavel that his father was the Czarevitch Alexis, who had escaped the slaughter of 1918 at Ekaterinburg and secretly married her—who produced him, Pavel, heir to the Russian throne! Pavel was quite mystified by all this, but promised his mother he would keep her secret. He asked where his royal father was. This brought from Iona Pogodin another warning to be utterly quiet on the subject, as his royal father was every day engaged in activity that would restore the Romanovs to power. After which she, and Pavel, would move to princely quarters in the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Pavel must not expect his father to take the risk of visits home.

  For about two years, between ages six and eight, Pavel was given an intensive introductory course in the great history of Russia under the czars. His mother spoke of the explosion of literature—of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Gogol and Chekhov and Turgenev—under the czars’ benevolent patronage. She took him a dozen times to view the treasures in the Kremlin. (“Remember,” she whispered more than once, “these are all ours!”) When Pavel got to be nine or ten he began to suspect that the whole thing was a hallucination, but he was utterly devoted to his mother and never saw any reason to interfere with a fantasy that made her dizzy with pleasure and anticipation.

  And then somehow the historical orientation by his mother affected his view of Russian life. He was utterly absorbed by accounts of the last days of the czar and then of the death of the czar (“My grandfather!” he grinned, viewing the portrait in a book); and, in his teens, he felt the electrifying force of Solzhenitsyn, read in samizdat, and he read widely in great literature of dissent, wherever he could find it.

  He was by nature cautious, never initiating antiestablishment conversation. But if others brought up the subject, which happened frequently when he was at the technical college at Gorky, he would with some delicacy evaluate the ideological tempera
ture of the critic of the regime. It occurred to him along the way that he could be immensely valuable to the KGB, so pronounced had his skills become in inducing men and women of his age to say perhaps one quarter again as much as they’d have been prepared to say to others about their political grievances. He suspected that some of his friends, after a freewheeling evening, woke the next day saying to themselves, “Oh my God, did I tell Pavel that last night?” He laughed as he recalled the underground story of the Russian who rushed to the offices of the KGB to report that his missing parrot’s political opinions were in no way related to his own. Meanwhile, contemplating a career in the police, he busied himself learning penology, a field of study in which he found he had a stubborn interest, perhaps traceable to his absorption with the last days of his “grandfather” and the royal brood, and the long ensuing history of bloody oppression.

  It wasn’t until his return from Afghanistan, honorably discharged as a sergeant after a year’s service with the artillery, now feverish in his resentment of the slaughter and of the treatment of the mujahedin, that he came upon Andrei, his physical education instructor at the police academy. Pavel, by coincidence, was in appearance not unlike an adult version of the young czarevich: slight, his features aquiline, his skin a soft white, eyes light brown, his mouth naturally set in a vaguely melancholy configuration. Andrei, on the other hand, was the robust outdoors man: muscular, heavy-chested, and older by five years than Pavel. Before entering the army, Pavel had persuaded a Japanese student who was also studying penology to teach him karate. Pavel had done his exercises regularly, even during his days in the military, gradually achieving a considerable skill. Andrei, learning of this avocation of one of his police cadets, persuaded Pavel to teach him his special skills. They would stay after class in the gymnasium, devoting an hour each day to practicing karate.