A Hero's Daughter

2

During the summer of 1980 Moscow was unrecognizable. People who lived in the rest of the country were not allowed into the capital. Most of the children were sent off to Pioneer camps. Long before the summer a serious «purge had been carried out, in which all "antisocial elements" had been expelled. There was no sign now of lines in the shops, nor of jostling on the buses, nor of the glum throng of people from the provinces coming in with their big bags to do their shopping.

The cupolas of ancient churches had been hastily whitewashed, and members of the militia had been taught to smile and say a few words in English.

And the Moscow Olympic Games began. Everywhere buses could be seen coming and going, carrying the athletes to the events, while foreign tourists idly called out to one another in the deserted streets, busying themselves with guides and interpreters.

From this summer, from these games, from this influx of foreigners, everyone expected something extraordinary, a breath of fresh air, some kind of upheaval, almost a revolution. For the space of a few weeks Brezhnev's Moscow, like a vast, spongy slab of floating ice at the time of the spring floods, nestled up to this colorful Western life, grinding its gray sides against it, and then drifted off bombastically on its way. The revolution did not take place.

Olya Demidova was totally caught up in this Olympic bustle, allowing herself to fall into a frenzy of happy exhilaration. She had completed her third year at the Institute and had reached that stage in English and French where you are suddenly seized with an irresistible desire to converse. She already spoke with the hesitant freedom of a child who is just learning to run and enjoying the ability to keep her balance.

The interpreters hardly slept now. But their youth and their feverish excitement kept them on their feet. It was such fun in the morning to leap onto the platform of a bus, to see the athletes' young faces, to respond to their jokes and then go flying through Moscow 's resonant streets. In the evening the atmosphere was quite different. Inside the bus, heated up during the day by the burning sun, there hovered the acrid smell of "Western deodorants and muscular male bodies exhausted by their efforts. The streets slipped past and the cool evening twilight swept in at the windows of the bus. The men, slumped in their seats, exchanged idle remarks.

Sitting next to the driver on a seat that swiveled round, Olya glanced at them from time to time. They made her think of gladiators, resting after the fight.

One of them, Jean-Claude, a typically Mediterranean young man (she was working with a French team), sat there with his head thrown back and his eyes half closed. She guessed he was watching her through lowered eyelids. He smiled as he watched her, and when the coach stopped at the Olympic Village he was the last to get off. Olya stood beside the bus door, taking leave of the athletes and wishing each of them a good night. Jean-Claude shook her hand and remarked carelessly, but loud enough for this to be heard by the keeper who escorted them: "I've got something that needs translating. Could you help me? It's urgent."

Olya found herself in his room, surrounded by all those beautiful coveted objects that for her symbolized the Western world. She understood at once that the translation was only a pretext and that something was going to happen which, only a short time before, had still seemed unthinkable. To quell her fear she repeated like an incantation: "I couldn't care less. It's all the same to me. If it happens, it happens…"

When Jean-Claude came out of the shower she was already in bed. Stark naked and swathed in a pungent cloud of eau de cologne, he crossed the room in darkness, and tossed a sports shirt or a terry towel onto the edge of the balustrade. Then he stopped before a tall, dark mirror and, as if lost in thought, ran his fingers several times through his damp hair, on which the blue light of a street lamp glinted. His skin also shone, with a dark, luminous glow. He closed the door to the balcony, and made his way toward the bed. It felt to Ol as if the ceiling were gently caving in on her, in a chamber made of synthetic foam.

After the third night, she had just emerged from the building in the early hours of the morning when the man who oversaw the interpreters loomed up in front of her. Without greeting her, he barked: "I see you know how to mix business with pleasure! Do I have to drag you out of bed to send you to work? What's going on? Is this the Olympic Games or a brothel? Report to the Organizing Committee. They'll soon deal with you!"

During those three days Olya had been so wildly happy she had not even given a moment's thought to seeking any justification or to preparing a plausible story. On their last night together Jean-Claude was intoxicated with happiness. He had come in second and won a silver medal. He drank, talked a lot, and looked at her with rather crazed eyes. It all involved a firm he had a contract with and a sports complex he would now be able to open. He talked about money without any embarrassment. He became so excited as he talked about all this that Olya said to him, laughing: "Just listen to you, Jean-Claude, you sound as if you were on drugs!" Pretending to take fright, he put his hand over her mouth, pointing to the radio: "They're listening to all this." Then he put his arms around her and pressed her back on the pillows. Recovering his breath, immersed in silent exhaustion, he murmured in her ear: "Yes, I am on drugs… you're my drug!"

At the Organizing Committee, it all began with shouting. A shriveled old official of the Komsomol, with a clammy bald head, dressed in a suit with bulging pockets, methodically tore into their three days of happiness. "It's not just us you're dragging through the mire," he yelled. "You bring shame on the whole country. What are they going to think of the USSR in the West now? Well, what do you suppose? That all the Communist Youth are prostitutes, like you? Is that it? Don't interrupt. And the daughter of a Hero of the Soviet Union, what's more! Your father gave his blood… And what if this incident reached the ears of the Central Committee? Have you thought of that? The daughter of a Hero of the Soviet Union! Coming from such stock, to soil yourself like that! Well, we have no intention of covering up for you. Make no mistake about that. They'll kick you out of the Institute and the Komsomol. As they say among your young friends: 'Pleasure has to be paid for.' There's no point in crying now. You should have thought of it before."

After this tirade he removed the stopper from a carafe with a dry creak, poured out a glassful of tepid, yellowish water and drank it with a grimace of disgust. He went over to the window and drummed on the grayish windowsill, waiting for Olya to stop crying. The heat in the office was stifling. A red butter-fly with tattered, tarnished wings struggled inside the double glazing. Nauseated, he studied the dusty glass, the dark poplars outside the window. He turned back to Olya, who was screwing up a little damp handkerchief. "That's ah. You can go. I have nothing else to say to you. What happens to you is up to the competent authorities. Report to the third floor, Room Twenty-seven. They'll deal with you there."

Olya stumbled out and climbed up to the third Hoor, where, blinded by tears, she could scarcely find the door he had indicated. Before going in she took a quick look in her little pocket mirror, fanned her swollen eyes with her hand and knocked.

Behind the desk a handsome man in his forties was talking on the telephone. He looked up at her, greeted her with a nod, and, smiling, indicated the armchair. Olya sat down timidly on the edge of the seat. While continuing to give laconic replies, the man took out a bottle of water from under the desk and deftly opened it with one hand. He poured some into a glass and slid it gently across toward Olya, blinked, and smiled at her again. "He doesn't know why I'm here yet," she thought, swallowing a little sparkling mouthful. "When he discovers he'll yell at me and throw me out."

The man put down the receiver, extracted a sheet of paper from a drawer and scanned it quickly. He studied his visitor and said: "Good. Olya Ivanovna Demidova, if I'm not mistaken? Well, Olya, let's get to know one another." And he introduced himself: "Sergei Nikolaievich." Then he paused, sighed, rubbed his temples and went on, as if regretfully: "You see, Olya, what took place is without any doubt unfortunate and, I fear, heavy with consequences for you. As a man, I can understand you: youth's the season made for joy, of course. You yearn for new sensations… Essenin, you remember, calls it 'the flood tide of feelings' – that's his phrase, isn't it? But that's the poet speaking. And you and I are living in the world of political and ideological realities. Today your Frenchman is throwing the javelin or doing the high jump. Tomorrow he's being trained for some kind of intelligence work and comes back here as a spy. Well, I'm not going to make a speech. You've already had an earful. I'm just going to say one thing to you. We, for our part, will do everything possible to get you out of trouble. You understand, no one wants to cast a shadow over your father; and you yourself, we don't want to ruin your future. But for your part you must help us. I shall have to talk about this whole business to my superiors. And so, to make sure that I don't give them a cock-and-bull story, we're going to put it all down in black and white. Right, here's some paper. As to the form of words, I'll help you."

When Olya emerged from Room 27 an hour later, she felt as if, with a kick of her heels, she could have taken flight. How ridiculous he seemed to her now, chat Komsomol official with his glistening pate!

She had just had fleeting contact with the mechanism of real power in the country. Filled with wonder, she found a way to spell out to herself in naive but accurate enough terms all that had happened: "The KGB can do anything."

That evening, however, she was seized by an impression quite different from that of the morning. She recalled a sentence she had written in Room 27. Describing that first evening with Jean-Claude she had written: "Finding myself in the bedroom of the French athlete, Berthet, Jean-Claude… I engaged in intimate relations with him." It was that sentence that jarred. "Intimate relations," she thought. "What an odd turn of phrase! And yet, basically, why odd? That's all it was. Certainly not love, in any event…"

She only saw Jean-Claude one more time and, as the polite man in Room 27 had advised, said a few friendly words to him and slipped away.

On the day before the athletes left she came across him in the company of a friend. The two men passed quite close by without noticing her. The friend was patting Jean-Claude on the shoulder and he was smiling with a contented air. Olya heard Jean-Claude remarking somewhat languidly, drawing out the syllables:

"You know, I think I'm going ahead with that property in the Vendée. They simply hand the house over to you, with the keys: no problem."

"Is Fabienne happy with that?" asked the other.

"Absolutely! She adores sailing!"

In the spring of 1982 no one in the country yet knew that it was going to be a quite extraordinary year. In November Brezhnev would die and Andropov would accede to the throne. The liberal intelligentsia, gathered in their kitchens, would begin to be tormented by the worst forebodings. Everyone knew he was once the head of the KGB. He's bound to crack down hard. Under Brezhnev you could still risk opening your mouth frqm time to time. Now there's going to be a reaction, that's for sure. They say he's already ordering police raids in the streets. You step out of your office for five minutes and the militia pounce on you. Let's hope it's not going to be another 1937…

But History, as likely as not, had had enough of the dreary monolithic solemnity of those long decades of socialism and decided to have a bit of fun. The man whose character the alarmed intellectuals identified as that of another "Father of all the Peoples," or even another "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky, turned out to be a mortally weary and sick monarch. He knew that the majority of the members of the Politburo ought to be put up against a wall and shot. He knew that the Minister of the Interior, with whom he chatted amiably on the telephone, was a criminal against the state. He knew how much each of his colleagues in the Politburo had in Western bank accounts. He even knew the names of the banks. He knew that a feudal system had long since been reinstated in Central Asia and that the right place for all those responsible was prison. He knew that in Afghanistan the American scenario in Vietnam was being replicated. He knew that in the villages in the whole of the northwest, there was a shortage of bread. He knew that for a long time now the country had been run by a small family mafia who detested him personally, and who despised the people. He knew that if the ruble had been convertible half the country's rulers would have decamped to Miami or elsewhere long ago. He knew that the dissidents in prison or in exile did not know the hundredth part of what he knew and that the things they commented on were small potatoes. He knew so many things about this society that one day at the Party Plenum he let slip: "We have no cognizance of the society in which we live."

History had its little joke. The terror this man inspired in some and the hope he inspired in others, both arose, as it were, from beyond the grave. He was dying of nephritis and in his moments of lucidity used to derive amusement from a story he had been told by the Kremlin doctor. It tickled him greatly. It happens during a meeting of the Politburo. They are all discussing who is to succeed Brezhnev. Suddenly the door is flung open and Andropov bursts in, accompanied by Aliev. Brandishing a revolver, Andropov shouts: "Hands up!" All the old men raise their trembling hands. "Lower the left hand!" commands Andropov. Turning to Aliev, he says: "Make a note! A unanimous vote for Andropov!"

History delighted in making a mockery of those who thought they could determine its course with impunity. Andropov died. Chernenko followed him. With the indecent haste of a comic strip, all of Brezhnev's entourage were dying off. They celebrated funeral rites to the tune of Chopin's funeral march on Red Square so often that the people of Moscow found themselves whistling the tune as if it were a current popular song.

But in the spring of 1982 no one could even imagine that History might be up to such tricks.

In March the head of the transport organization called Demidov into his office. "You've got visitors, Ivan Dmitrevich. These comrades are going to make a film about you." Two television journalists from Moscow were there, the scriptwriter and the director.

The film in question was to be devoted to the fortieth anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad. They had already shot the scenes of the memorial ceremony where, beneath the enormous concrete monuments, veterans from all four corners of the country wandered like ghosts from the past.

They had rediscovered documentary footage from the period, fragments of which they intended to use in the course of the film. They had already interviewed the generals and marshals who were still alive. What remained to be filmed was, in the eyes of the director, a very important episode. In this scene the principal role fell to Demidov. The director saw it like this: after the dachas on the outskirts of Moscow and the spacious Moscow apartments, where the retired marshals, buttoned up tight in their uniforms, command armies and juggle with divisions in their memory, there appear the twisting streets of Borissov and a truck splashed with mud driving into the entrance of a garage. A man gets down from the truck, without turning toward the camera, wearing a battered cap and an old leather jacket. He crosses the yard, littered with scrap iron, and makes his way over to the little office building. A somewhat metallic voice-over raps out the citation of the Hero of the Soviet Union: "By the decree of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for heroism and bravery displayed in battle…"

The truck driver hands in some papers at the office, nods to a colleague, shakes hands with another and goes home.

In the course of this scene Demidov's voice, a simple, informal voice, talks about the Battle of Stalingrad. The sequence of shots that follows is in the context of a home: the celebratory meal, a spread-out copy of Pravda on a set of shelves; yellowing photographs of the postwar years on the wall.

But the high point of the film was elsewhere. From time to time the story of this modest hero "who saved the world from the brown plague," as the commentary put it, breaks off. The Soviet foreign correspondent in one or another European capital appears on the screen, stopping passersby and asking them: "Tell me, what does the name of Stalingrad mean to you?" The passersby hesitate, make inept replies, and laughingly recall Stalin.

As for the correspondent in Paris, he had been filmed in melting snow, chilled to the bone, trying to make himself heard above the noise of the street: "I'm standing just ten minutes' walk away from the square in Paris that bears the name of Stalingrad. But do the Parisians grasp the significance of this name, so foreign to French ears?" And he begins to question passersby, who prove incapable of giving an answer.

When they showed this scene for the first time at the studio one of the bosses asked the director: "So why couldn't he go to the square itself? What's all that about just ten minutes' walk away from'? It's like doing a report on Red Square from Gorky Park!"

"I already asked him that…" The director tried to excuse himself. "According to him, there's not a Frenchman to be found in the square. Nothing but blacks and Arabs. Yes, that's what he said. I give you my word. He said, 'They'll all think it was shot in Africa and not in Paris at all.' That's why he moved closer to the center to find some whites."

"Unbelievable!" bayed an official in the darkened auditorium. And the showing continued. The camera focused on a huddled clochard and a row of gleaming shop windows. And then once more there appeared yellowing shots of documentary footage from the period: the gray steppe, tanks bobbing up and down, as if at sea, soldiers captured, still alive, on camera.

And Demidov appeared once more, no longer in his grease-stained jacket but in a suit, wearing all his decorations. He was in a classroom, seated behind a desk that was decked out with a little vase containing three red carnations. In front of him schoolchildren were religiously drinking in his words.

The film ended with an apotheosis: the gigantic statue of the Mother Country, holding a sword aloft, towered up into the blue sky. Then the Victory Parade taking place on Red Square in 1945. The soldiers throwing down German flags at the foot of the Lenin Mausoleum. Hitler's personal standard could be seen in the foreground as it fell. After that, against the exultant sound of music, Stalingrad-Volgograd, in all its splendor, arises once more from the ruins, filmed from a helicopter.

And everything concluded with one final chord: Brezhnev appearing on the platform at the Twenty-sixth Party Congress, talking about the Soviet Union 's policies for peace.

By about the middle of April the film was ready. Demidov had patiently endured the excitement of the filming and, in answering questions, had even managed to include the story of the little wellspring in the wood.

"Well now, Ivan Dmitrevich," the director said to him, when it was time to say goodbye. "On Victory Day, May ninth, or perhaps the day before, you must sit down with all the family in front of the television."

The film was called: The Heroic City on the Volga.

On the afternoon of May 8, Ivan Dmitrevich was not working. He had been invited to the school for the traditional chat. He gave his usual talk and returned home with the three carnations in his hand.

Tatyana was still at work. He puttered about in the apartment. Then he draped his best jacket, with its armor plating of medals, over the back of a chair, switched on the set and settled himself down on the divan. The film about Stalingrad was due to start at six.

The workshop foreman flourished the bottle and began pouring alcohol into the glasses: "Very good, my friends, one last nip and we all go home…" They all drank, slipped what remained of the food into their bags and left. In the street the women workers wished one another a happy holiday and went back to their lodgings.

Tanya – no longer a girl, she was now known as Tatyana Kuzminichna – consulted her watch. "I have just enough time before the film to go to the store and pick up the veterans' parcel." Like all those who had served in the war, she would receive this package in the section of the store closed to ordinary mortals. People would watch the line of veterans there and quietly grumble.

This time it was a real holiday parcel: four hundred grams of ham, two chickens, a can of sprats, and a kilo of buckwheat flour. Tatyana Kuzminichna paid, loaded it all into her bag and started for the door. One of the veterans called out to her.

"Hi there, Kuzminichna. Is it a good one, today's parcel?"

"Yes, not bad. But there's no butter."

"There's butter to be had across the road today, at the Gastronom. But there's a line a mile long!"

Tatyana went over to the Gastronom store, saw a motley, winding line, looked at the time. The film was due to start in fifteen minutes. "Why not try to avoid standing in line?" she thought. "After all, it's my right."

She took her veteran s pass out of her bag and began to push her way toward the cashier.

The tail end of the line swarmed out into the street and inside the store everything was dark with people. They pressed against one another, beating a path toward the counter. They shouted, they hurled insults at one another. The ones who had already made their purchases were weaving their way toward the exit, their eyes shining feverishly

"How many packs per person?" the people at the end of the line called out from the street.

"Two each," replied the people in the middle.

"Give me six," whined a woman close to the counter. "I'll take my children's as well."

"So where are they, your children?" asked the exasperated salesclerk.

"Well, here she is, this little girl!" exclaimed the woman, tugging at the hand of a frightened schoolgirl with a satchel.

"And where's the other one?" insisted the sales-clerk.

"Out there in the street, in the stroller."

The woman, who had finally got her way, rushed toward the exit, clutching the six packs of butter to her chest.

A somewhat tipsy little bystander called out merrily: "But they're not her kids! I know her. She doesn't have any kids. She's borrowed them from her sister! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

The line gave a spasmodic shudder and moved a pace forward. The manager appeared from the doorway to the storeroom, walked through the store and called toward the end of the line that was getting longer: "Don't count on it at the back there. The butter's almost run out. Only three more cases. It's not worth your waiting. There won't be enough for everyone, that's for sure. You're wasting your time."

But the people kept flocking up, asking who was the last and joining the line. And each of them was thinking: "Who knows? Maybe there'll still be enough for me!"

Tanya reached the cashier and, over the head of another woman, held out a crumpled three-ruble note and her veteran's pass. She was not expecting such a unanimous explosion. The crowd seethed and bellowed with one voice: "Don't let her go in front of the others!"

"Isn't that just typical! These veterans! Let them buy their butter in their own store!"

"They already give them parcels. And we've been waiting here with the kids for three hours!"

"My son was killed in Afghanistan. But I don't put on airs. I wait my turn like everyone else."

"Don't give her anything! They already get enough privileges."

Someone gave her a shove with a shoulder, the crowd gave a slithery twitch and slowly edged her away from the till. Tatyana did not argue, gripped the money and the book in her injured hand, and went back toward the exit to join the line. The crowd was so dense that different lines were mingling together. Afraid of losing their places, people pressed against each other. Suddenly someone tugged at Tatyana's sleeve.

"Kuzminichna, come in front of me. Maybe we can get some of this butter."

It was the old caretaker from their factory, Aunt Valya. Tatyana stood beside her and, so as to lull the vigilance of the people behind, they began chatting quietly together. After a moment Tatyana slipped into the throng without anyone noticing. Aunt Valya was halfway along.

"It's not too bad. This lot won't take more than an hour," she remarked. "We'll get there before they close. As long as there's still some butter left!"

Tatyana looked at her watch. It was six o'clock. "It's a shame, I'm going to miss the film about Ivan," she thought. "But it's on again tomorrow morning."

"That's odd," thought Ivan. "Tatyana's still not back. She must be traipsing around the shops. Never mind. She'll see it tomorrow."

On the screen a marshal was already talking in a solemn bass voice and a restless reporter with prying eyes was asking him questions. This was followed by the jerky sequence of documentary footage from the period: the buildings of Stalingrad gently collapsing amid black clouds, as if in a state of weightlessness, beneath silent explosions.

When these shots were shown Ivan could not hold back his tears. "I've become an old man," he thought, biting his lip. His chin trembled slightly. From time to time he made silent comments to the soldiers running across the screen: "Just look at that idiot running along without keeping his head down! Get down, get down for heaven's sake, imbecile… Pooh! And they call that an attack! They're rushing straight into the enemy machine gun fire without artillery support! By the look of it, there are so many people in Russia that soldiers don't matter!"

At length Ivan himself appeared on the screen. He froze, listening to every one of his own words, not recognizing himself. "And then, after that battle," he was saying, "I went into… there was this little wood there… I look and what I see's a spring. The water's so pure! I lean over and see my own reflection… It was very strange, you know. I'm looking at myself and I don't recognize myself…" Here his story broke off and the voice-over, warm and penetrating, took up the tale: "The native soil… the soil of the Mother Country… this was what gave strength to the weary soldier, this was the truly maternal care that nurtured his courage and bravery. It was from this inexhaustible wellspring that the Soviet fighter drew his revivifying joy, the sacred hatred of the enemy, the unshakeable faith in Victory…"

The salesclerk, trying to be heard above the noise of the crowd, shouted in a strident voice: "The butter's finished!" and, turning toward the cashier added, in even more ringing tones: "Lyuda, don't make out any more tickets for butter."

Tanya was handed two packs from the bottom of the third case. The last two went to Aunt Valya. They smiled at each other as they put them into their bags and began to elbow their way toward the exit.

The disappointed crowd froze for a moment, as if unable to believe that all that time had been spent in vain, then shook itself and began to trickle slowly through the narrow door. Meanwhile there were people trying to squeeze in from outside who did not know the sale of butter was finished. At that moment a rumor began to circulate. Sausage had been delivered. The whole crowd flowed back toward the counter, forming into a line once more. More people than ever piled in from the street.

The news reached the manager's ears. She emerged from the storeroom again and bellowed out in a mocking voice, as if she were speaking to children: "What's all this then? You must be out of your minds. What's all this about sausage? There's not a scrap of sausage here. And anyway, we're closing in half an hour."

And now all anyone could think of doing was getting away. It was stiflingly hot in this compact mass of humanity. Tatyana was trying not to lose Aunt Valya, who was weaving her way very adroitly toward the door.

Everyone was infuriated. They took a malign pleasure in jostling one another, eager for an opportunity to exchange insults. Tatyana was already close to the exit when she was swept away, as if by a whirlwind, and pinned up against a wall. Someone's shoulder – she was aware of a woman's blue raincoat – pressed hard into her breast. She tried to break free but did not succeed, so densely packed was the crowd. Her very powerlessness seemed to her ridiculous. She tried to transfer her bag to her other hand, but just at that moment was surprised to feel she could no longer breathe. Suddenly there was a silence, as if deep under water, and now she could make out all too clearly the gray cloth of the coat barring her way. When, with the time lag of a distant explosion, the pain swept over her, she could not even utter a cry.

She was borne to the front of the building by a closely packed crowd… No one had noticed a thing. It was only on the steps that, as it dispersed, the crowd let her go. Tatyana collapsed gently. The butter and the veteran's pass fell out of her bag. People stumbled against her body. Some moved away hastily, others bent over her. The merry little bystander roared with laughter: "Well, what do you know? The little mother's taken a drop too many in advance of tomorrow's celebration!" Aunt Valya pushed aside the gaping onlookers, came up to her and called out in piercing tones: "Help! Look! This woman's been taken ill! Quickly, someone call an ambulance!"

Ivan arrived at the hospital wearing the jacket of his best suit. He had hurried through the evening streets accompanied by the jangling of his decorations. He was not allowed into intensive care. He stared at the doctor who was making reassuring remarks to him but took nothing in. His Gold Star, which had turned back to front as he ran, looked like a child's toy.

The following morning, May 9, the same doctor, reeking of» tobacco, his face hollow from being on night duty, emerged and sat down in silence with Ivan on the wooden benches in the corridor. In some arcane corner of his mind, Ivan had already had time, not to consider what his life would be like without Tatyana, but to have a sharp and desperate presentiment of it. As this feeling welled up, the echoing void terrified him. He sat there without asking the doctor anything, following with an absent gaze the actions of an old cleaning woman as she wiped the dusty windows.

Finally the doctor gave a sigh and said softly: "She should never have risked herself in our crowds. For her even wiping a window was dangerous."

Olya arrived the next day. She was so beautiful it was almost unseemly. She herself felt uneasy with her tight skirt and the sound of her high heels in their now silent flat amid the whispers of people dressed in black whom she hardly knew. One of the women gave her a black head scarf for the funeral. But even with this scarf her beauty was astonishing. She wept a great deal. What devastated her was not so much the grim, emaciated face of her mother as the fragility of everything she had believed to be so natural and solid. Everything was crumbling before her eyes. From being a dashing hero, her father had turned into an old fellow with all the stuffing knocked out of him and red eyes. Now her parents' lives struck her as unbelievably drab. A wretched, starved childhood, the war, more starvation and then right up to old age – no, right up to death itself- that absurd furniture factory, and that truck driver's cab stinking of diesel oil. Olya looked around her in astonishment. The television her parents sat in front of each evening. The sofa bed where they slept. A photo on the bedside table: the two of them, still very young, before she was born, somewhere in the south, during the course of the only vacation trip of their lives. And just this photo, her father's sandals – horrible sandals, reminiscent of dog muzzles-just her mother's gesture, hiding her right hand, all this was enough to break her heart.

Ivan hardly saw anything of his daughter. It was only on the last night, when the weary relatives had left them, that he came face to face with Olya. They were sitting one each side of the coffin, completely exhausted by the ceaseless agitation of the women fussing around, by the day's endless and meaningless whisperings. Ivan looked at his daughter and thought: "She's a woman now. She's of an age to get married. It seems only yesterday that Tatyana was wrapping her in swaddling clothes. How time flies! Nursery school, grade school, and now Moscow, the Institute… She needs to find a good man, one who doesn't drink… a soldier… Although those guys hit the bottle nowadays like nobody's business…! I must speak to her. Now that we're burying her mother…"

It was only at the station, when they were waiting for the Moscow train that Ivan said to her: "You must work hard, Olya. Just…" Olya laughed sweetly.

"But Dad, I've only got a few more weeks of classes. I'm just about to do my final exams."

"Oh, really?" said Ivan, amazed and embarrassed. "So where will you go after that?"

"Wherever my Country calls me to serve," joked Olya.

She kissed Ivan and boarded the train. She waved to her father through the window for a long time, as he stood motionless in his tired dark suit on the platform flooded with sunlight.

Olya already knew where her Country would call her to serve… Some of the students in her year expected to make a painless transfer from lecture room benches to well-upholstered chairs, lined up for them by their relatives in high places. Others resignedly prepared themselves for the drudgery of technical translations in a dusty office. Yet others dreamed of immersing themselves as soon as possible in the whirl of Intourist, anticipating with delight the cavalcade of European faces passing by too rapidly to grow wearisome, thrilled, in advance, to think of all those little gifts and the mirage of Western life.

For Olya it was quite different. Sergei Nikolaievitch of Room 27 had long since been replaced by his equally impressive colleague, Vitaly Ivanovich. It was when she met him in April that Olya learned where her Country would call her to serve.

They were in a hotel room, which was where their meetings often took place. Vitaly Ivanovich was smiling mysteriously and rubbing his hands, like a man who has a pleasant surprise up his sleeve. They were talking about their current business, the foreigner whom Olya was taking care of at the time. Then, as if he had suddenly remembered something, Vitaly Ivanovich exclaimed: "Listen, Olya! You'll soon be finished at your Institute. Then it'll be time for appointments. Have you already had preliminary appointments…? So, what sector have they assigned you to…? Well, obviously! Technical translation relating to patents in a factory. It's not the greatest fun in the world. What are you planning to do…? But no, listen. You shouldn't be such a pessimist. There'll be time enough for you to bury yourself in all that dust. I've talked about this with my superiors. Your services are greatly appreciated. That's why it's been decided to recommend you – not officially, you understand – for work as an interpreter at the International Trade Center… Hold your horses, don't get carried away. Save your thanks for later. I don't think there's any need for me to explain to you that at the Center there are hundreds and thousands of foreigners. And so, our specific work, intelligence and counterespionage, as they call it in the detective stories, takes precedence…"

Olya went out feeling slightly dizzy. She walked along the gray April streets where the red flags for the May celebrations were already unfurled. On the front of a big department store workmen were putting up an enormous banner with portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The red canvas was not yet stretched taut and the April wind was making it belly out in little ripples. At one moment the prophets of Marxism were gazing out over the roofs of Moscow toward the radiant future, the next they were winking ambiguously at the passersby.

Olga walked the full length of the Kalininsky Prospekt in a state of blissful giddiness. Now even its hideous concrete skyscrapers seemed to her graceful. She descended toward the Moskva River and climbed up on the bridge. Everything in this part of Moscow is on a gigantic and inhuman scale. The 700-foot pyramid of Moscow State University can be seen silhouet- ' ted against the skyline. On the other side of the river, with the same exuberance of Stalinist gothic, the huilding of the Ukraiha Hotel thrusts upward into the sky. Behind it glitters the COMECON skyscraper's open book. On the opposite bank, facing the Ukraïna, stands a collection of gray-green buildings with orange windows. It is precisely there that the International Trade Center is located.

On the bridge a strong and supple wind was blowing. Olya felt as if her short hair were billowing out like a long silken train. She had never felt so young and free. All over again she was thinking, with a smile of admiration; the KGB can do anything!

During those two years that had followed the Olympic Games Olya had come to understand what Vitaly Ivanovich had referred to as the very "specific" nature of the work. Now she knew what interested him and his colleagues. And she knew how to extract this skillfully from a foreigner. How ridiculous that ruse of |ean-Claude's seemed to her now, suddenly needing a translation! She used it herself quite often these days, in order to establish contact with "interesting" foreigners. But she had a great many other tricks, too. The names of her foreign acquaintances made up a continual procession: each one might last for a week, or a month, or a year. There was a certain Richard, an Alain… a John, a Jonathan, a Steven… Indeed, there were even two Jonathans, one English, one American. Their voices jostled one another in her memory in a confused chorus. Snatches of their confidences rose to the surface. One of them bore the title of "Honorable" and was very proud of it. Another was an enthusiastic mountaineer and went rock climbing in New Zealand. Another used to assert that everywhere you go in the USSR you run into people from the KGB. All of this and much more besides was passed on in the reports Olya diligently submitted to Vitaly Ivanovich. And sometimes details no one had any use for resurfaced, even though the people to whom they belonged had become confused in her memory: a shoulder covered in freckles, the glow from a face that resembled a pale mask in the heavy darkness of the bedroom…

Sometimes, waking in the small hours, the favorite time for suicides, she was almost physically aware of the echoing void entering her eyes. She would prop herself up on one elbow, contemplating with alarmed amazement a head, a somewhat prominent ear, a half-open mouth from which a quiet little whistling sound emerged. Then her glance would turn toward the pile of crumpled clothes on the chair and meet the languid eye of a saxophone player with dark slicked back hair, smiling at her from the wall. "Gianni Caporale," she read on the poster. Sometimes in this darkness her stare would encounter that of a voluptuous half-naked beauty, or else that of Lenin, stuck above the bed by a facetious Westerner. "Gianni Caporale," she read silently and took fright at her own internal voice. "What am I doing here?" The question echoed in her head. And each time this "I" reminded her of their apartment in Borissov, the particular smell and light of their rooms. Also of a winter's day with sparkling sunshine, and a gleaming slope, with skiers and children on toboggans racing down it. That day – it must have been a Sunday – her parents were out for a walk with her. When she became tired of her toboggan Ivan thought it would be fun to invite her mother to have a ride. And, elated by the sun and the sharp, icy air, she laughingly agreed. They plunged down, so huge and so comic on the little toboggan! At the bottom they had turned over and climbed back up the slope hand in hand, reappearing at the summit with rosy cheeks and shining eyes.

Olya looked again at the person sleeping beside her. She called him silently by his name, remembering what she knew of him in an effort to bring him to life, to bring him closer to herself, but it all remained empty of meaning.

"I'm nothing but a whore," she said to herself. But she knew very well this was not true. "What do I get out of all this?" Tights from the Beriozka store. That filthy makeup you can buy from any black market dealer… I should really stop this at once. Vitaly Ivanovich? Well, so what? I could go and see him and tell him point blank: 'I've had enough of this. It's finished. I'm getting married.' They wouldn't put me in prison for that…"

These nocturnal reflections calmed her somewhat. "I'm complicating my life," she thought. "I'm filling my head with all this nonsense. As Mayakovsky said, 'What is good? What is evil?' And after all, where's the harm in it? The girls at the Institute hang around in restaurants for months before landing themselves some grubby little Yugoslav. While here there's something to suit all tastes… Take Milka Vorontsova, a beautiful girl with real class, a princess. She found herself a husband, an African, without batting an eye!"

Olya remembered that after the three days of wedding celebrations Milka had gone back to the Institute. In the intervals between classes her fellow students had clustered around her and, with many a mischievous wink, had begun to ask her questions about the initial delights of conjugal life. Without any embarrassment and indeed welcoming this curiosity, Milka instructed them thus: "Listen to me, you future 'heroic mothers.' The golden rule with an African husband is never to dream of him at night."

"Why not?" the voices asked in amazement.

"Because he's so ugly that if you see him in your dreams there's a good chance you'll never wake again!"

There were peals of laughter. When the tinny sound of the bell rang out the students hastily stubbed out their cigarettes and made their way back to the lecture room. Olya asked Milka: "Listen, Milka, are you really going to become African and live in Tamba-Dabatu?" Milka looked at her with her clear blue eyes and said softly: "Olyechka, any town in the world can be a staging post to somewhere else!" Outside the window the day was beginning to break. The head on the pillow murmured something in French and turned over on the other cheek. Olya stretched out as well, unfolding her weary elbow with relief. The suicides' hour receded, as did the dark shadow of night.

In her new life at the Center Olya's first "client" was the representative of an English electronics firm. She made contact with him by telephone and introduced herself, saying that she was going to be his interpreter. The voice on the telephone, was calm, self-confident, even a little authoritarian. She imagined a face in the manner of James Bond, with graying temples and a suit as dark as if it had been carved out of a block of granite glinting with mica. "He's an old hand," Sergei Alexeievich, the KGB officer who worked with her at the Center had remarked of this Englishman. "He knows the USSR very well and speaks Russian. But he pretends not to…"

But the imposing tones of the voice on the telephone had misled her. They were simply the tones formed by his profession. When a dumpy bald man clad in a checked jacket detached himself from the wall and came toward her in the lobby with a somewhat embarrassed smile, Olya was dumbfounded. He was already nodding his head and holding out his hand as he introduced himself while she continued to stare at him. At that very moment a metal rooster began leaping up and down on its perch in the middle of the lobby, announcing twelve noon by flapping its wings. "What an odd representative," thought Olya in the elevator.

When taking his shower that morning, the Englishman had lost a contact lens. Feeling around in the shower tray for it, he had lost the other one. Once dressed, he had extracted his glasses case from the bottom of his suitcase, taken out his glasses nervously, and dropped them on a marble ashtray. "How can one present oneself in such a state?" thought Olya in amazement. He cast rather confused glances at her: the right lens of his spectacles was missing and his eye peered through the empty circle in a blurred and timid manner.

"I can understand almost everything in Russian," he had said in the elevator, "but I'm out of practice and I speak it very badly." He would say: "I telephone to you," and, something that particularly amused Olya, "Would you like to close me the door?" He was staying at the Intourist Hotel. On the third evening they had dinner together at the restaurant and she stayed with him.

And once more she experienced that hollow wakefulness early in the morning at the suicides' hour. But also on this occasion a calm, desperate serenity. She realized that what tormented her was not futile remorse but the inevitable disappointment of an absurd hope. It was something she had already experienced when she was at the Institute and was now encountering again at the Center.

She used to meet a new "subject" and, in spite of herself, without being conscious of it, would begin looking forward to some miraculous change, a completely new life that would be quite unlike the old one.

But nothing would change. Sometimes she would go with her acquaintances to the airport. Sluggishly, as if in an underwater kingdom, the announcements at Sheremetevo would make themselves heard. And already on the far side of customs, her "subject" would be waving good-bye to her and disappearing amid the colorful crowd of passengers. She would walk away slowly toward the bus stop.

Nothing did change.

And now, waking up beside this Englishman, fast asleep with his face in the pillow, she finally understood that she should expect nothing. That all this was futile. Futile, this hoping for something. And sometimes there was this feeling of pity for the "subject," a sentient human being, after all. And a vague sense of shame.

She had to press on, knowing her place in the long, invisible chain that disappeared into the labyrinth of political games and technological theft and ended up somewhere in the capitals of Europe and the Americas. It was not her business to think about all these machinations. Her business was to assess her "subject" in a swift exchange of words and looks and, within a given time, to act out all the scenes of the stipulated love drama. Her business, when she encountered a representative like this in a checked jacket, was to make him forget that his damp reddish hair barely covered his bald head and that his right eye was peering out hazily and timidly, and that, in unbuttoning his crumpled shirt beneath his belt, he had laid bare his white belly and tried to cover it up and then, having caught her look, been horribly embarrassed.

In this first role at the Center Olya played her part so well that the Englishman did not dare to give her money. When she went with him to Sheremetevo he awkwardly presented her with an extremely costly perfume with the price ticket from Beriozka scratched off.

She remembered him well, this first client, and could recall some features of the next two. As for the rest, they soon became mixed up in her memory.

With her colleague, Svetka Samoilova, Olya had rented two rooms, not far from the Belayevo area. Svetka had already been working at the Center for two years. She was exceptionally greedy for Western currency and lingerie but at the same time extravagant and generous to a fault, in the Russian manner.

She had a beautiful and opulent physique. If she had not succeeded in holding herself in check in Moscow, she would long since have turned into an Arkhangelsk matron, a human mountain, robust and warmblooded. In Moscow, on the other hand, and especially at the Center, she had been obliged to go against all the dictates of her nature. She was constantly on a diet, forced herself to drink tea without sugar and, in particular, exercised with a hula hoop at every free moment. The fashion for this had passed years ago, but it was not a question of fashion. Svetka had pierced a hole in her hula hoop, slipped half a pound of lead into it and sealed it up again with adhesive tape. It had become a weighty contraption. She spun it in the kitchen when stirring clear semolina, on the telephone, in her room in front of the television.

They often spent their free evenings in Svetka's room, chatting or watching the innumerable episodes of some adventure film. Olya occasionally went in there when Svetka was away, sometimes to borrow the iron, sometimes to leave on the bed a letter bearing the crude postmark of a village to the north of Arkhangelsk.

At such moments Svetka's room appeared to her in a completely different, unaccustomed light. Her gaze took in the narrow worktable, the side table piled high with old Western magazines, the arabesques on a thick carpet. And she no longer recognized any of it.

There was the chipped bottom half of a Russian doll, bristling with pencils, a glass saucer glittering with bracelets and earrings, and, open on a pile of magazines, a little book printed on gray paper, Autumn Cicadas.

Olya bent over it. A three-line stanza had a mark in the margin against it made with a fingernail.

Life is a field in which, as darkness falls Close to the footpath, there amid the com, A tiger watches, eagerly alert.

Olya studied everything around her with uneasy curiosity. It was as if the things all took pleasure in the places where they had been put. Among these objects Olya had a presentiment of hope for some alleviation, the possibility of becoming reconciled to all that she lived through each day. To her amazement she seemed to be making a strange excursion into this anticipated future, without knowing if this was encouraging or a cause for despair.

She found herself picking up the heavy hula hoop behind the dressing table and, for amusement, tried to spin it round, imitating Svetka's gyrations. She recalled her friend's joking observation: "Do you remember who coined this gem? Was it Breton? Aragon? 'I saw a woman-waisted wasp pass by.' "

"Absolutely. One with hips like an Arkhangelsk milk delivery woman," Olya had teased her.

"You may laugh! But when you're older you'll understand that real men always appreciate the poetry of contrast!"

And Svetka had made her contraption spin so fast that it hissed with the menacing fury of an aggressive insect…

On Svetka's dressing table, among the bottles and the jars of makeup, there was a piece of paper covered in figures. Every week she measured herself. Sometimes Olya added a few wild zeros to the figures, or altered centimeters to cubic centimeters. Which sent them both into fits of laughter.

Amid the disorder of all the objects accumulated on Svetka's dressing table stood two photos in identical frames. The first showed an elegant sunburned officer with one eyebrow slightly raised. At the bottom of the photo the white lettering stood out clearly: "To my dear Svetka, Volodya. Tashkent 1983." In the other one a man and a woman, not yet old, pressed awkwardly shoulder to shoulder, were looking straight in front of them, without smiling. Their peasant faces were so simple and so open – almost unfashionable in this simplicity – that Olya always felt embarrassed by their silent gaze…

"It's curious," she thought. "What if Svetka's foreign clients should one day ever see this hula hoop, this photo, this ' Tashkent 1983'? And that, too: 'A tiger watches, eagerly alert'?"

Nevertheless from time to time Svetka's diet was put on hold. Noisily, and bringing the smell of snow with them, the guests would start to pile in, the table would be covered with food and wine. There was pale pink meat from the Beriozka store, caviar and fillet of smoked sturgeon brought in from some ministry's private supply. Svetka pounced on the pastries, and cut herself a slice from a tart with baroque decorations, exclaiming with reckless bravado: "What the hell! you only live once!"

The guests thronging around this food were colleagues from the Center, people in business and men from the KGB who saw to the alcohol. On mornings after feasts like this they got up late. They went to the kitchen, brewed up very strong tea and spent a long time drinking it. Sometimes, unable to restrain herself, Svetka opened the refrigerator and took out some wine: "To hell with them, all these pathetic representatives! What kind of a life is this? We can't even drink to get rid of a hangover…" And on this pretext they took out the rest of the cake, and the remains of the elegant tart, whose decorations were now in ruins…

During these vacant Sundays, Hungarian Ninka, a prostitute from the Center, often came to see them. She was called that because her father had been a Hungarian member of the Komintern and it was claimed that he was related to Bela Kun. He had been in prison under Khrushchev and after his release had had time, a year before his death, to marry and have a child, and this was Ninka.

She passed on all the gossip from her world: the caretaker was becoming a real bastard! To let you into the Center he now took fifteen rubles instead of ten! Broad-hipped Lyudka had managed to get herself married to her Spaniard… It was rumored they were going to close the Beriozka stores…

These winter days passed slowly. Outside the windows occasional sleepy flakes fell from a dull sky. Under the window they could hear people from the apartments beating their carpets on the snow. Children shouted on the frozen slide.

Sometimes, by way of a joke, Ninka and Svetka would start arguing: "You've got it made," the Hungarian would say. "You sit there in the warm. Your paycheck arrives once a month. They bring you a client on a silver platter: 'Here you are, Madam. Be so kind as to bid him welcome and take care of him.' While we freeze to death just like those poor wretched whores at railroad stations. The cops take their three rubles from us. And our sisters, the goddamned bitches, are forever ratting on us to cut out the competition…"

"You're breaking my heart! We've heard all that before… The poor little orphan from Kazan," Svetka cut in. "I guess you'd like an extra milk allowance for dangerous work as well, wouldn't you? Meanwhile, you're a bunch of millionaires. You talk about a paycheck… But that hardly keeps us in toilet paper. And you charge a hundred dollars for ten minutes. You said it yourself, you know, that one – what's her name, now? The one with big boobs. She sleeps on a mattress stuffed with hundred ruble notes."

"A mattress?" gasped Olya.

"Yes," Ninka took up the tale. "She was scared to deposit her money in the savings bank. You see, in theory she was working as a cleaner at the children's nursery, and she was worth maybe half a million… But where to hide it? So she began stuffing notes into the mattress. Her dream was to work like a horse till the age of thirty, then find a guy, start a family, and have a cushy life. But of course it was her boyfriend who really screwed her. As well as her foreigners, she had this Vladik, a Russian, all to herself, for a bit of romance. One night he can't stop fidgeting, something's getting to him, poking him in the ribs, crackling under him… And in the morning he has a brainstorm! He waits for Sonka – Sophie, we call her – to go out and he undoes the stitching. And there, for God's sake!- beneath a layer of foam, are hundred ruble notes and foreign currency – packed so tight you couldn't count them! But he was clever, the pig. No question of taking it all. Sonka's friends would have moved heaven and earth to hunt him down. He started taking it out a little bit at a time. And that's how he lived. She was earning it; he was burning it."

"Men! They're all vampires!" Svetka sighed.

"So what happened in the end," Olya wanted to know.

"It finished the way it was bound to, of course! Using her money, he picked up a girl and flew off to the Crimea with her for the weekend. He passed himself off as a diplomat. And why not? He was flashing wads of those mattress-stuffing dollars. Why shouldn't it be true? When Sonka found out, at first she wanted to strangle him on that goddamned mattress that very night. But then she went all soft and forgave him everything!"

The gray winter's day sank gently into a silent and peaceful evening. And they were still chatting in the kitchen. Outside it began to freeze and voices sounded clearer and more resonant.

Hungarian Ninka was telling stories about her summer trips to Sochi, her quarrels with the local girls, and how one day some completely drunken Finns had thrown her out into the corridor stark naked.

"And their lady wives, by the way, developed a taste for coming to stay here. They come to Leningrad for the weekend as tourists and then instead of visiting the cruiser Aurora, they pick up clients by the shovelful. It was a girlfriend of mine who told me – they take all their trade. The militia leaves them alone. And that reminds me, she told me a good story. Four prostitutes meet: a Frenchwoman, an Englishwoman, a German, and a Russian. They start arguing around which of the four is best at picking up men. They're all lined up on the corner of Gorky Street and Marx Avenue, near the Hotel National…"

At that moment a car started honking noisily outside in the street. Ninka jumped up and ran to the window.

"Oh my goodness. My little friend's arrived. Right. I'm off."

She finished the story in the hallway as she slipped into her fur coat and put on some lipstick.

"Hey, are you going to walk around barefoot all winter?" Svetka exclaimed in astonishment, looking at her delicate ankle boots. "Take care or your toes will freeze and then no more dollars to fill your mattress! And then what will you sleep on with your little friend?"

Adjusting her fox fur hat in the mirror Ninka answered carelessly: "Oh, you big softies! You princesses with your peas! You sit there in your offices next to your radiators. It's easy for you. You get to be driven all the way to the bedside in an official car. But we're out there on our feet in all weather, like the sentries at the Mausoleum. Never mind ankle boots! Let me sell you my patent formula. When they kick you out of the Center, you'll need it!"

"So what's this patent formula?" chorused Olya and Svetka in amazement.

"The patent formula. You buy a pepper poultice from the drugstore, you cut it to the size of the sole of your foot, and, presto, you stick it to your foot. It works like a mustard plaster but it lasts longer and it doesn't burn so much. It's thirty degrees below outside but you can go out in elegant shoes. You feel as warm inside as if you'd had a good nip of vodka. That's how it is, my pampered friends. It's different from lolling around at the Kontik Hotel sipping cocktails."

Under the window the car kept on honking. "Ah right, I'm coming," grumbled Ninka. "He can't stand being kept waiting, that one. Ankle boots from abroad. I've put them on specially for him. Maybe he'll marry me, the fallen woman…"

They chuckled heartily as they kissed and Ninka raced down the stairs, her heels clattering.

Outside the evening was turning blue. Olya washed the dishes. Svetka sat slowly drinking what was left of the flat champagne and scrabbled about in the cake box for the little nuts that had fallen off.

"It's the last glass," she excused herself "Tomorrow I'm starting a new life. Help! That parfumier's coming from Paris tomorrow and I have to get up at half-past five…"

In the course of these evenings together Olya longed to talk openly to Svetka, to confide in her. To ask her, "What about you, Svetka? Do you like this life? Aren't you ever scared? Scared of your youth passing away… And this whole routine… From the first meeting when everything is official, the black shoes, the severe suit, the professional woman, Soviet style… until we get to the bed with Intourist sheets. Just the smell of them makes me want to throw up. Doesn't it scare you when you get one of these old fellows, you know, just on the brink of retirement, with an anemic body and scrawny armpits that already smell of the grave? The time it takes to get him warmed up, you're sweating like a masseuse or a nurse in intensive care. For the past ten years he's only been cheating on his wife with porn magazines, and now he's hungry for exotic Moscow nights, luscious Russian kisses… Doesn't all that make you want to throw up, Svetka? And yet with the young ones, it's even worse. At least the old guys don't take themselves too seriously. And they pay well. But these sons of bitches think they're giving us a thrill with their biceps that stink of deodorant. And on top of it they're so cheap! They're all penny pinchers. You'll never believe this. One day I was watching an Italian packing his bags. There was half a can of meat pâté left over from our breakfast. You know what? He wrapped it in plastic and slipped it into his suitcase. I said to him, Td get rid of that! It'll go bad in the plane!' But that cut no ice with him. He laughed. 'I'll have it for dinner tonight in Rome…' You go on waiting. You go on waiting, like an idiot.

It's the same with you, Svetka, you're waiting too, only you won't admit it. And you go on spinning your hula hoop like a robot…"

But Olya did not dare to say this to her so baldly That evening she skated around it, making a joke of it. But Svetka understood at once what she was driving at.

"Olyechka, that's the semi-Muscovite coming out in you. Ninka was right: all on a silver platter! Moscow? Well, excuse me! The Institute? Help yourself! The International Trade Center? Come right in! You should have lived in the village of Tiomny or like me, up near Arkhangelsk, then you wouldn't be wallowing in this morass of existentialism. An eight-mile walk to school each day and it was so cold that when you spat it froze in the air and made a noise as it landed. When you started taking in the laundry off the line it snapped in half. You take it into the house, you look at it, and presto, the shirt's lost its sleeves. And the people! Total savages! You can't imagine. Everyone's drunk. We had a neighbor. He and his wife were completely drunk every day. And a child every year. They had nine in all. All a bit cracked, of course. Thanks to the vodka, the parents had become complete zombies. A new child arrives and they give it the first name that comes into their heads. Afterward they find they've got two Sergeis and two Lyudkas… And you talk about being scared? Now this is scary. Nothing in the stores but canned mackerel in tomato sauce and weevily millet. That's all there is! And vodka, of course. The whole village goes to bed dead drunk every night and the wolves snatch the dogs from their kennels. You talk about 'our youth passing away.' Well, where doesn't it pass away? An anemic body… Well, get her…! A smell of the grave… You do talk a lot of rubbish, especially at bedtime. Now, just suppose you were married to a little Muscovite executive on a hundred and fifty rubles a month, do you think that'd be more fun? He'd never stop reminding you about his Moscow residence permit and his paltry square meters of living space. And where would you work? At the factory? Translating patents for a hundred and thirty rubles? At the end of a week you'd have such existential angst, you'd go and work as a cleaner at the Center. You need to simmer down. No one's keeping you here. The KGB? Oh sure, you bet they need you! They only have to whistle and people will come running from all over the Soviet Union to get their hands on your nice little job. They'll find more exciting girls than you to do it! You'd better believe it. You're too spoiled, that's your trouble. Look at Hungarian Ninka. No father or mother from the age of seven, brought up in an institution. And that's where one of the teachers assaulted her when she was fourteen, she told me. He took her into the shower and you can guess what happened next. In her place another woman would have become a drunkard and a wreck long ago, but she's as tough as nails… She's treating herself to a cooperative apartment in Yassenievo, buying herself a Volga, the latest model. She'll get married and everything'll be fine. She has about three hundred thousand rubles in different savings banks. While you're moaning away about your pointless existence and the futility of waiting, she sticks mustard plasters on her feet and off she goes, all flags flying! So what about my Volodya, you say? But what difference does it make to him? Foreigners are work, not a love affair. And apart from them there's no other man in my life, you know that. Volodya has his military service. I can't go running after him to Afghanistan. And over there, by the way, you get promoted fast. In no time at all he'll have his colonel's three stars. Then we'll get married. And there'll be no more talk of foreigners. I'll ask for an office job at the Center. Even now he's like a pig in shit. When he comes home on leave I stuff him with caviar and he gets to drink wine you won't find in most ministers' houses. And furthermore I'm a woman who gives him first-class service. So it'd be a great mistake for him to complain. Right, Olya. We've talked enough. Let's go watch the news on TV. It's odd – there's been no sign of Andropov for a long time. They say he's very sick. Oh look, you've washed all the dishes. You are sweet!"

Then, half stretched out on the divan, glancing ab-sentmindedly at the screen from time to time, she went on in a dreamy voice: "You know, I sometimes get fed up with all this myself, too. The feeling that I've had enough. It all wells up inside me. You're in bed with this wretched capitalist and every time he exhales he breathes right in your ear… What a pain! You tell yourself: 'I was a schoolgirl in a white smock, I was waiting for Prince Charming in a star-spangled cloak…' Oh and talking of princes, how's your prince from the World Youth Organizations Committee? You realize what a fiance I've introduced you to! And here you are, always complaining… A gift from the gods, a fiance like that! Parents at COMECON, a four-room apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt! You need to hold on to him tight. Don't let him fly away. You won't find yourself another one like that. A future diplomat!"

The weather forecast came on.

"Oh lordy!" groaned Svetka. "Down to minus twenty-five. Tomorrow I'm going out to buy some mustard plasters."

"Everything's fine," thought Olya. "I did well to talk to Svetka. She's right, I think too much. Too much food spoils my appetite…"

She had gotten to know this prince from the World Youth Organizations Committee, Alexei Babov, during the autumn. Svetka had invited him to their noisy parties. Since then Olya often went to meet him and sometimes he spent the night at her place. Occasionally she visited him at his apartment. In his room there was a violin in its case on top of the wardrobe.

"Do you play?" she asked him one day.

"No, it was a youthful whim," he remarked carelessly

He tried to seem older than he was. His parents had rushed him into a career and this rapid ascent did not match his age. He dressed stylishly, mixing and matching imported clothes with one another as if in a mosaic; he sought out everything, down to his cuff links. He had black hair, blue eyes, and extremely soft skin on his cheeks. In their lovemaking Olya was at first surprised by the methodical nature and complexity of the positions he dreamed up. It was erotic acrobatics. One day, when looking through his library, she found a book on the very top shelf, between a volume of international law and Youth Organizations in France. It was in French: Le savoir-faire amoureux. It went through the most improbable couplings with a succession of diagrams, like wrestling techniques. The door banged, Alexei was returning. Olya quickly put the book back and jumped down off the chair…

Yes, truly, everything was going well. A lively job, a constant stream of faces and names, the upheavals that were a prelude to the new year. It felt good to give pleasure, to see this in the way well-groomed, self-confident men eyed her. Good to be aware of her young, firm body, to picture her own face, her eyes, amid all this human activity in the capital. And to feel herself to be adult, independent, and even a little aggressive.

Olya was unaware that, seen in profile and against the light, the glow of her face appeared almost transparent and juvenile in its delicacy, evocative of her mother's face at the same age. But that was something only her father saw. And even when he saw it his perception was filtered through such bitterness about the past that, in spite of himself, he would shake his head, as if to banish the fragile resemblance.