A Very Private Plot Read online

  He took another draft from his glass.

  A half-hour later they had finished their meal. Cooking by Nikolai, dishwashing by Andrei. They sat now, both of them, on the couch. It was here that Andrei would sleep until Sunday night, after which the bed would be his for a week, the couch Nikolai’s. It was here that they pooled their thinking, here that Nikolai stoked their commitment to their purpose.

  Most afternoons, before taking the metro to come to number 2, Nikolai would go to a library, frequently the great library at the University of Moscow, which was said to contain twenty-five million volumes. He had gone there the day before to search out a volume by the American, Whittaker Chambers.

  Chambers had been a Soviet spy but he had broken with communism, after which break he testified against former colleagues, most spectacularly sometime U.S. State Department official Alger Hiss. At college in Kiev, Nikolai had read and reread Witness, Chambers’s autobiography, and he had narrated its story in some detail to Andrei. He was left in awe of its author, of his singular poetic grasp of the evil Nikolai was now pledged to combat.

  He had learned a few days earlier about a second volume by Chambers, told of it by a colleague at the Pitkin People’s School, a young historian who taught while pursuing graduate studies in Russian history at the university. Viktor Pletnev had last Monday startled Nikolai by mentioning, in connection with his studies of pre-revolutionary Russia, the “Narodniki.” He had heard it said, Pletnev told Nikolai, that Lenin had once singled out the Narodniki for special praise. But search though he had in the Lenin division of the library, Viktor had been unable to find any such citation; then a fellow Muscovite who was studying at the University of California in Berkeley had written and related that he had come upon substantial paragraphs on the Narodniki in a book by Whittaker Chambers, a book of letters written to an editorial colleague during the few years preceding Chambers’s death in 1961. Viktor Pletnev hoped that Nikolai would look up the book and translate the passage, inasmuch as Pletnev’s knowledge of English was insecure. A favor, scholar to scholar.

  Viktor Pletnev could not have known that in mentioning the Narodniki he had set down a word that electrified Nikolai Trimov. It was the vision of the Narodniki, stumbled upon in his discursive reading in Kiev, that he had attempted to communicate to Andrei, but to come upon an adequate encapsulation of their historical and spiritual meaning had proved all but impossible; they were a legend, a legend known to only a very few. But in Kiev he had come upon one such, and that old scholar’s brief description of the mission of the Narodniki had been for Nikolai an epiphany.

  So that it was with great eagerness that Nikolai set out that Sunday morning, when freed from school duties, to the great library, to do his friend’s bidding. He was elated to find a library card establishing that, indeed, the Chambers volume was there. He ordered up the book and sat down to read it. Well into the second hour he reached his goal. The passage began on page seventy-six.

  No schoolboy searching out a book detailing the mechanics of sexual union had ever been more excited. Nikolai read the substantial passage through twice. Then he removed his large notebook from the canvas tote bag he had walked away with when discharged from the army. He filled four pages of his notepad, translating the text line by line. The book was Restricted, which meant that only university faculty could take it away from the premises. Nikolai would tell Viktor the next day that he had established that the book was there as part of the library’s collection, but that a faculty member had removed it. He would promise to try again the following Sunday.

  “Then you did not finish reading the book?” Andrei asked.

  “No. It is important that I read it all before I alert Viktor to the passage on the Narodniki. I don’t want to run the risk of Viktor telling other people about it, and maybe I’d have to wait months to get the book again to finish reading it. I will finish it next week. It required a good two hours just to translate the passage on the Narodniki.”

  Nikolai leaned down and took his pad from the canvas bag. His hand was trembling.

  “Now listen, Andrei. Chambers is writing to his young friend about the forces that brought him to the Party in the early thirties. Here is the passage. Listen:

  “‘I came to Communism under the influence of the anarchists: Kropotkin, Tolstoi, and Edelstadt. But, above all, I came under the influence of the Narodniki—’”

  Nikolai paused, an excited smile on his face as he looked up at Andrei. “Again, listen:

  “‘It has been deliberately forgotten, but in those days, Lenin urged us to revere the Narodniki—“those who went with bomb or revolver against this or that individual monster.”’

  “Andrei, those are Lenin’s own words! They no longer exist in the established libraries! ‘Who went with bomb or revolver against this or that individual monster’!”

  “Go on, go on, Nikolai.” Andrei was caught up with the meaning of the words he had heard. Lenin! Sanctioning individual acts of what would now be denounced as terrorism.

  “‘Unlike most Western Communists, who became Communists under the influence of Social Democracy, I remained under the spiritual influence of the Narodniki long after I became a Marxist. In fact, I never threw it off. I never have. It has simply blended with that strain in the Christian tradition to which it is akin.’”

  Again Nikolai paused. “Do you recognize the importance of that, Andrei! ‘… to which it is akin.’ The spirit of the Narodniki and the spirit of Christianity!” He bent his young head again to his notepad, the picture of a student entranced by his notes:

  “‘It shaped the particular quality of my revolutionary character that made me specially beloved (of course, it is wrong to say such things, but it is true) even among many of the crude, trifling American Communists. To the Russians it made me seem a freak of nature—an American who was almost a Russian; a fact that endeared me to them while it perplexed and troubled them. And, of course, it was the revolutionary quality that bemused Alger—mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.’”

  “What is that?”

  “It is Latin, meaning ‘my fault, my most grievous fault.’ It is a line from the Christian contritional liturgy. I’ll go on.

  “‘I remember how Ulrich, my first commander in the Fourth Section, once mentioned Vera Zasulitch and added: “I suppose you never heard that name.” I said: “Zasulitch shot General Tropov for flogging the student, Bogomolsky, in the Paviak prison.” And I remember the excited smile with which he answered, “That is true. But how do you know that?” For the spirit of the Narodniki, all that was soldierly and saintly in the revolution, found its last haven, O irony!, in the Fourth Section (one purpose of the Great Purge was to kill it out once for all).’”

  Andrei interrupted. “But the Great Purge was—”

  “Wait, wait, Andrei. Listen …

  “‘Like Ulrich, I may presume in supposing that the name of Ragozinikova is unknown to you. But the facts are these. In 1907, the Russian government instituted a policy of systematically beating its political prisoners. One night, a fashionably dressed young woman called at the Central Prison in Petersburg and asked to speak with the commandant, Maximovsky. This was Ragozinikova, who had come to protest the government’s policy. Inside the bodice of her dress were sewed thirteen pounds of dynamite and a detonator. When Maximovsky appeared, she shot him with her revolver and killed him. The dynamite was for another purpose. After the murder of Maximovsky, Ragozinikova asked the police to interrogate her at the headquarters of the Okhrana. She meant to blow it up together with herself; she had not known any other way to penetrate it. But she was searched and the dynamite discovered. She was sentenced to be hanged. Awaiting execution, she wrote her family: “Death itself is nothing. Frightful only is the thought of dying without having achieved what I could have done. How good it is to love people. How much strength one gains from such love.” When she was hanged, Ragozinikova was twenty years old.’”

  Nikolai stopped, laying down the notepad on his lap as
though it were the Sacred Host.

  He looked up at Andrei and saw, for the second time, a tear in his eyes.

  Neither of them spoke. Until Andrei said, “Twenty years old. Your age, Nikolai.”

  “Yes,” said Nikolai. “My age. We, you and I, are Narodniki.”

  CHAPTER 10

  SEPTEMBER 1985

  It was early in September and the weather in Moscow was, as Tatyana had put it in English, “strutting its very stuff.” Tatyana taught the second-level classes in English and French. The more advanced students attended Nikolai’s English classes in the adjacent room.

  Tatyana was fiercely ambitious. Two weeks after they began their duties she confided to Nikolai—he an injured veteran from the Ukraine, with a slight but distinct limp, she a spirited Muscovite, the daughter of civil servants—that her intention was to work very hard for five years. If, at that point, she achieved the school’s gold medal, and if she passed the advanced examinations, she would apply to spend one year studying English in Great Britain or in America. She would continue to work on her French, but, she explained, the demand for civil servants fluent in English greatly exceeded the demand for French-speaking Russians, so she would put special emphasis on the one language. She conveyed all of this as naturally as she might have answered the question of what she had taken for breakfast.

  “Five years is a very long time to wait, is it not, Tatyana?” Nikolai asked.

  “In five years I’ll be twenty-five. That’s not so old. How old are you?”

  “I am—the same age, twenty.”

  “You look older than twenty.”

  “You look younger than twenty.”

  She smiled, and agreed, when asked, to lunch with Nikolai the following day. “There is a great deal I need to talk to you about,” she said. “I want to know especially how you learned to speak English. I heard you lecturing to your students. The door to your classroom was slightly open yesterday and my class had let out. I just stood there in the hall and listened. It is quite extraordinary.” Nikolai acknowledged the compliment, and changed the subject.

  —Tried to change the subject, as he discovered the next day at lunch. To do that, he ascertained after a half-dozen lunches shared together, would not be easy.

  Tatyana …” Tatyana with the light brown hair,” she quietly hummed the words. “Have you heard the tune?”

  No, Nikolai said, he had not.

  “I have a collection of English and American records, and I listen to them all the time and try to imitate the words. I know most of the words of ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair.’”

  Tatyana was single-minded in her pursuit of English. One day Nikolai found her waiting outside his classroom for the hour to end. She was tapping her foot in anxiety. “Nikolai, I need to know. What exactly is the difference between the English ‘alternative’ and the English ‘alternate?’”

  Nikolai smiled, but he was careful not to appear condescending. He furrowed his brow.

  “I wouldn’t know exactly how to define the difference, but here are two sentences in which the words are properly used. One, ‘Viktor and Lev are alternates at the factory. One works in the morning, the other in the afternoon.’ Two, ‘Viktor asked Lev if he could think of an alternative to working at the factory.’… Does that help?”

  Tatyana breathed more easily.

  He marveled at her absorption with the language, an absorption that appeared to exclude any other interest. Her dress was unvaried, not all that different when arriving at the classroom, after changing into the neat blue cotton school uniform that reached down below her knees, from what she had worn in. But Nikolai had noticed from the very beginning a scent; not perfume—schoolteachers could not afford to wear perfume every day. It reminded Nikolai of the moment in Brovary when spring came. It came in Brovary suddenly, decisively. There was never any mistaking it. One morning Nikolai would wake and think, Spring is here! It was that scent, a freshness that went with Tatyana’s wholesome absorption in life and language, a suggestion that growth and blooms were in the offing.

  They began to stay on at the cafeteria after school hours with their tea—at the Pitkin School, as it came to be known, there was always tea in the faculty lounge. Nothing else, but always tea. No sugar, unless the teachers brought their own, except for one lump per day provided by the school, which was handed out to the teachers as they walked by with their trays for the noon meal. After that one lump there would be no more, not until the next day. When Nikolai commented on the scarcity, Tatyana replied that she would explain her own curiosity on the subject, but she would like to do so speaking in English, and he was to correct any mistake she made. “Are you ready?”

  “I am ready.”

  Tatyana looked up with excitement and then closed her eyes in concentration. “It iss most bizarre because we have so very much sugar which Fidel Castro makes in hiss country and transports it to us because we transport to him in … in exchange … our oil. So it iss most bizarre that we have not so much sugar ass the people would wish to have sugar.” She opened her eyes. Her smile was triumphant, the expression beatific.

  She paused. “Was that pretty … okay?”

  Nikolai told her that it was very, very good, that he had absolutely no doubt whatever that in five years she would be as fluent as Yevtushenko. True, the English and the Americans had certain … idiomatic ways of saying things, as she of course knew, but these would soon come to her automatically, he had no doubt, and before too long he would feel absolutely confident, if one day he were sick or whatever, turning his advanced class in English over to her to coach.

  She looked at him adoringly. She closed her eyes again just slightly, this time to reach over—the only mark of reticence he had ever spotted in her—and place her right hand in his. He felt the pressure, and returned it. And felt suddenly a wave of feeling he had experienced only in a few isolated moments in his busy young life, years during which he nursed only the one abiding passion, unrelated to what he felt now. They both recognized at this moment that they were heading, inevitably, toward the consummation of a passion new to both of them. It would have to happen—when it could not be denied.

  He allowed himself to analyze it. Nikolai Trimov, he did not mind admitting to himself, was as self-disciplined a young man as anyone he had ever known: self-disciplined at Brovary, at Kiev, in the army. Nothing was allowed to distract him from the evolution of his mandate, one whose meaning he had spent his young lifetime struggling fully to discern. All those years spent in internalizing a compulsion seeded when he was fourteen years old, a compulsion he had fondled so diligently, if speculatively, through the fairy-tale, magic-dragon phase (I will wave my magic wand and the bad men will crumble to ashes!), on to the David and Goliath phase on which he was now embarked. A passion that had crystallized into high resolution on the evening—March 24, 1985—when he saw the news documentary depicting the head of the Soviet state declare his wholehearted commitment to fight on in the holy war against the people of Afghanistan in the name of communism …

  She sensed his distraction and reverted to English: “Is Nikolai unhappiest?”

  He woke quickly from the trance. “‘Is Nikolai unhappy?’ Tatyana. That is all you need to say. ‘Unhappiest,’” he explained in Russian, “is the superlative form.”

  She put on the facial contortion she had trained herself to exhibit when one of her students flagrantly misspoke an English passage. “Iss Nikolai on-heppee with Tatyana?”

  He renewed the pressure on her hand and said in English, “No, Nikolai is not unhappy with Tatyana. Nikolai loves Tatyana very much. Do you think you can remember that phrase in English? It will take us very far.”

  Yes, she said, she would commit the words to memory.

  CHAPTER 11

  SEPTEMBER 1985

  The school clock rang at three, signaling the end of the class hour. The bell was especially welcome when fall was moving in, with its exhilarating cool, and only just a hint of the winter ahead.
Viktor Pletnev, short, slender, direct, his eyes light blue and reflective, hurriedly told the students to read the next two chapters in the text in preparation for class on Wednesday. He then sped down to the faculty room to pick up his fortnightly paycheck and any reading matter placed in his open wooden mailbox.

  There was a message for him. Professor Shalamov, the chairman of the history department at the university, had called. Pletnev was to report to him as soon as possible.

  As he embarked on the long metro ride carrying him to the opposite end of Moscow from where he lived with his parents, Pletnev wondered what Shalamov, the grand martinet, wanted to see him about. It was not grossly inconvenient to go to him now—Viktor would have traveled to the university in any event for his regular night classes, but not until 7 p.m. Now he would have to while away the time between his meeting with the department chairman and the start of his own classes. It did mean that he would need to pay for his own supper instead of taking it at his mother’s table. Well, he had his fresh paycheck.

  He did not look forward to his session with the department chairman. Shalamov was a bloated, baby-faced zealot given to ideological pettifoggery. From time to time he would descend on one of the dozen professors who served under him and catechize him on historical rectitude, as defined the day before by the official press of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He was drawn to do this by random reading in the papers of the graduate students, whom he would also chastise.

  And yes, it transpired that Viktor was today’s aberrant. Chairman Shalamov had asked to see papers done for the history class devoted to the events of 1917, beginning with the abdication of the Czar and going to the arrival of Lenin at the Finland Station in what was then Petrograd. Shalamov was clutching Pletnev’s paper, and his disfavor was choleric. Pletnev had written that Trotsky’s surreptitious help had been indispensable in arranging safe passage for Lenin through Germany. Now Shalamov was screaming that Trotsky had only pretended to be cooperative, that in fact he had all along been secretly scheming to take power from Lenin for himself, resulting—as of course everybody now knew—in his exposure and subsequent exile, and, ultimately, in his assassination, in Mexico, by a valiant Bolshevik who, to be sure, was operating on his own initiative.