CHAPTER 12

Tyumen, June 1982

Every summer, the major magazines, especially the ones aimed at young people, sent out groups of employees to all the ends of the vast Soviet homeland to perform for the laborers of the towns and villages, thus winning over potential subscribers. Subscribers and circulation numbers were a matter of prestige, not commerce. Neither salaries nor author fees depended on circulation numbers. On the other hand, high numbers allowed an editor in chief to shove the circulation numbers of his “leftish” publication in the face of his ideological bosses and say, “See, the people read us, so our policy must be correct!”

Naturally, the Party and Young Communist leadership and the editors in chief all knew perfectly well that the people were irrelevant, but no one had the nerve to violate this sacred ritual, which was strictly observed by the people’s servants, even among themselves.

Everyone knew the people were irrelevant, but no one would say that out loud, especially the people themselves. Everyone knew and understood everything—but tacitly.

Department heads and editorial staff preferred to promote subscriptions in southern and coastal regions. Freelancers, and especially student interns, were sent to Siberia, the Far East, and other nonresort spots. Actually, the freelancers and interns didn’t mind.

The Soviet homeland was great and multifaceted. There were lots of interesting things in Siberia and the Far East, especially if you were a twenty-something magazine salesperson traveling for free, with all your expenses paid by the state. The per diem of two rubles and sixty kopeks was more than enough for them to eat three times a day, and as representatives of the foremost nationwide youth magazine, the organ of the Young Communists’ Central Committee, they were officials—so they were met, housed, fed, and driven around.


Lena Polyanskaya and Olga and Mitya Sinitsyn sat on a bench at the Tyumen airport, smoking and letting the hot Siberian sun bathe their faces. They were discussing whether they should wait for their ride or catch a bus to the Young Communist Committee office.

The Committee’s promised car hadn’t met them. They took a gloomy look at the long line at the bus stop.

“How can they not meet us?” Mitya asked anxiously.

“Don’t panic,” Lena reassured him. “The main secretary called me in Tyumen to say that three of her colleagues were on their way, but didn’t give me any more information than that.”

“How are they going to put us up?” Mitya wouldn’t let it go. “It’s fine for you. You’re interns here on official business. I’m just tagging along, hoping to play a few songs. They’ll probably put me in a room with some stranger who’ll turn out to be an alcoholic or some kind of maniac.”

“You are such a pest, Brer Rabbit.” Olga sighed.

“No, I’m not a pest. I’m a well-grounded human being. I like to know everything in advance. You probably didn’t even bring an immersion heater or tea or sugar, while I took the trouble to bring two cans of condensed milk and a can of beef stew.”

“Well, they’ve definitely got stew here,” Lena grinned.

“Care to bet?” Mitya sulked.

“Bet what?”

“Well,” Mitya paused. “A can of condensed milk.”

“He’s betting you a can of condensed milk.” Olga grinned.

“You can tease me all you like, Sis.” Mitya shook his head. “All right, I’m prepared to bet a can that they don’t have beef stew here. At most, they have ‘tourist breakfasts’—fish balls made of ground-up fish bones and rice that looks like mealworms. If I lose, the condensed milk’s yours. But if I win, what can you give me?”

“Two packs of Rhodopes or some ground coffee.”

“What do I care about your Rhodopes when I’ve got my own cigarettes?” Mitya snorted. “And you’re not going to be drinking any coffee without my sugar and immersion heater anyway!”

“All right, boys and girls. That’s enough silliness. We’re all going to eat, drink, and smoke together in any case. Look, I think the Young Communists are here!”

A khaki-colored car stopped on the square and out of it jumped a young man wearing a formal charcoal-gray suit, despite the heat, and a shiny Young Communist lapel pin. The young man headed decisively for the terminal looking from side to side.

“Let him look for us. He’s the one who’s late,” Mitya gloated. “When did our flight come in? An hour and a half ago! He can wait for us now.”

A few minutes later, a voice boomed over the airport loudspeaker: “Attention journalists from Moscow! They’re waiting for you at the information desk. I repeat…”

Snatching up all their things and throwing his guitar strap over his shoulder, Mitya headed for the information desk with Olga and Lena behind him.

“You’re brother really is a gentleman,” Lena remarked.

“I’m educating him.” Olga shrugged.


“It’s been decided to send you first to Tobolsk and then to Khanty-Mansiysk,” the Committee’s second secretary told them.

“We’ll try to sort out the hotel issue,” he said as he handed back their travel vouchers, after the secretary took note of them. “Go for a walk and take a look at the city. You can leave your things in my office. Come by in a couple of hours. We should have your hotel sorted by then. We have a conference of reindeer herders going on and rooms are tight.”

“I’m sorry, Volodya, but what do you mean by ‘sort out’?” Lena asked the Young Communist in a formal tone. “As I understand it, we have a television appearance today and an event with vocational school students. Moreover, the television event is in an hour, and we need to rest and take a shower beforehand.”

“Hey, what’s with the bourgeois manners?” Volodya frowned. “What shower? Lower your expectations. Remember, you’re not going to have a room with a shower anyway. Tyumen hasn’t had hot water for a year, and you’re not even the editor in chief.”

Olga stepped in. She was good at dealing with these kinds of Young Communist louts.

“Let’s put it this way, Volodya,” she said softly and gently. “Either you pick your fat ass up off that chair right now and don’t ‘try to sort out’ but actually sort out the question of a decent hotel or else we’re going to the Party committee and telling them you can’t cope with your ideological obligations. If that’s not enough, we’ll call our offices in Moscow and have our editor in chief get in touch with the Young Communist Central Committee immediately. Do you want the hotel issue decided on that level? If you do, I’m happy to make that happen.”

Fifteen minutes later they were taken to the Hotel East.

“Curious,” Lena said pensively as she examined the double room. “Why isn’t there a single Hotel West in this country? There’s the Hotel North, the Hotel South, and the Hotel East, but not a single Hotel West. As if there were no such part of the world.”

Tyumen had indeed done away with hot water as a class enemy. But in the intense heat, you could splash yourself perfectly well with cold. They’d been given a room with a shower after all. Mitya did have to share a room with someone, but he was a quiet, educated old man, a supplier from Barnaul. Not an alcoholic and not a maniac, at least not at first glance.


The local TV people were much nicer than the Young Communists. Although, before the taping, the director asked Mitya to sing her the songs he was planning to perform.

“At least give me the lyrics,” she said, embarrassed. “And you, Olga, if you can, would you show me the poems you’re going to recite?”

“But it’s not live television. If something goes wrong, you can cut it afterward.”

“If something goes wrong, they’ll rip my head off,” the plump and weary middle-aged woman said. “Before I have the chance to cut it.”

They had their typewritten texts with them.

“Mitya, please, this song here, don’t sing ‘the train station stank of whores and prison,’” she commented, not taking her eyes off the page. “The rest is fine. And you, Olga, this poem about the migrant worker, ‘I’m a migrant, a black seed’—it’s very nice, but please don’t read it.”

Here the ideological censorship ended. There was none at their next stop, the vocational school. The song about the train station and the poem about the migrant worker received loud applause from the students. After the performance, they were invited to stay for a dance, but they refused. They were tired and wanted only to eat and sleep.

They walked back to the hotel. The stores were already closed, as were the cafés and cafeterias.

“My thrifty brother, you could at least have thought to buy a little bread,” Olga said. “I’d rather starve than eat your beef stew without bread.”

“So starve.” Mitya gave his permission. “All the more for me and Lena.”

“No one’s going to starve,” Lena told them happily. “The dumpling shop over there is open!”

“I love Siberian dumplings.” Mitya actually moaned. “Love, love, love.”

But there weren’t any dumplings left. The menu listed ten varieties—dumplings filled with venison, bear meat, salmon. “We’re out… Out… Out of that, too,” the waitress replied sleepily.

“What do you have?” Olga asked sadly.

“Northern Lights mutton soup from the day before yesterday, Tenderness veal cutlet, and Romance and Friendship sandwiches,” the waitress told them reluctantly.

“Bring it all! We’ll have Tenderness and Romance and Friendship under the Northern Lights,” Mitya rejoiced. “Three portions of each!”

“I don’t advise the Lights,” the waitress commented. “It’s starting to smell.”

“Okay. Bring the rest. And lots of bread!” The Tenderness veal was an enormous lump of dough, burned on the outside and completely raw inside. In the very middle, a tiny piece of dark gray ground veal hid shamefully. It came with limp macaroni seasoned with lard.

Romance was a cooked smoked sausage that oozed yellow grease and was inedible. Only the dried-up but familiar melted Friendship cheese on a piece of bread met their expectations.

They raked all the bread off the table and into a bag and headed for the hotel, still hungry. Along the way they came across an ice cream stand.

“The ice cream’s melting,” the vendor warned them.

“How’s that?” Lena didn’t understand.

“Just what I said. The freezer broke down.”

“Fine, fill a cup,” Mitya said.

The vendor scooped out the white muck and poured it into a cardboard cup.

“Nine kopeks.”


Tyumen’s June nights were long and bright.

Communist slogans hung on the five-story prefab apartment buildings: “ONWARD, TO THE VICTORY OF COMMUNISM!” “LONG LIVE THE INDESTRUCTIBLE BROTHERHOOD OF THE GREAT SOVIET PEOPLE!” “THE PEOPLE AND PARTY ARE ONE!”

Giant, square-muscled men and women workers on posters three meters tall raised their huge fists over the quiet, dirty streets of the sleepy Siberian city.

“If I were a director,” Mitya said, “I’d definitely shoot a film of those red-fisted monsters coming to life at night, climbing down from the posters, and marching between the prefab buildings in terrible, silent formation, sweeping everything from their path. It would be a horror film.”

“There is no such genre in Soviet cinema, and there never will be.” Olga chuckled.

His hands were shaking badly. He thought that dance was never going to end. He peeked cautiously through the doorway and sought her out, his girl. She was shaking and twisting to a two-year-old hit.

I beg you, at this rosy hour,

Sing to me oh so softly,

How dear the land of birches

In the raspberry-colored dawn.

The girl was wearing a short raspberry-colored skirt that hugged her strong, curvy hips, and a bright pink, short-sleeved blouse. She had full lips thickly smeared with raspberry lipstick and a slight smile. A cheap pendant—nickel silver and enamel, a small heart, and inside, a raspberry rose with a green leaf—swung and hopped on her perfect, milk-white neck.

He absolutely had to see what color her eyes were. Gray-blue shadows on her trembling eyelids rolled up tight under eyebrows plucked to nothing. Straight, peroxided hair in a bowl cut. It was a hairstyle that had become fashionable after the French singer Mireille Mathieu visited the country and gave a series of concerts.

This was the third dance she’d danced with the same guy, a skinny, long-haired macaque. He hunched clumsily, shook his narrow, sloping shoulders, and danced low over his partner as if he were trying to lie down on top of her. He stuck out his scrawny ass in his baggy Soviet “Texas” trousers and shuffled his feet incoherently to the up-tempo music.

If he decides to see her home, I’ll have to put it off until tomorrow, he thought. Or choose someone who’s going home alone. But I don’t know the other girls’ routes, and this one has to cross the vacant lot behind the construction site. She has no other choice. It would be too bad if this long-haired Jap decides to see my girl home.

He felt the pleasant weight of the small tourist knife in the inside pocket of his track jacket and looked from the dark twilight into the brightly lit school auditorium, where sixteen-year-old Natasha Koloskova was wriggling passionately and rhythmically. Natasha was the only daughter of Klavdia Andreyevna Koloskova, a forty-year-old single mother who had sewn both the short skirt and the blouse of pink crepe de chine Natasha wore. The girl had to have something to shine in at dances. She so loved to dance.

When they announced that the next dance would be the last, an indignant howl went up. Then Alla Pugacheva’s song about the crane started:

Take me with you…

I want to see the sky.

The couples swayed slowly, embracing.

“Natasha, can I walk you home?” Long-haired, narrow-shouldered Petya Sidorkin whispered into his partner’s ear.

“We’ll see.” She shrugged vaguely and peeked at the couple next to them.

She wanted handsome, broad-shouldered Seryozha Rusov to walk her home. But Seryozha was tenderly embracing the slender waist of Marina Zaslavskaya.

“Uh-uh, Natasha.” Petya shook his loose curls, noticing her look. “He hasn’t come up to you once. He and Marina have been going steady since the winter.”

“Why are you sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong?” Natasha cried in a whisper. “I can manage without you.”

She disengaged Petya’s hands from her waist and quickly cut through the dancing couples toward the exit.

“Natasha!” Petya ran after her. “Natasha, wait!”

“Go away! I’m sick of you!” she said loudly, and she slipped into the gathering dusk.

She walked through the deserted streets, swallowing her tears. Ever since that first year, that first day, she’d liked Seryozha Rusov so bad it hurt. But he would never look her way. She had nothing on Marina! Marina looked like Mireille Mathieu. She was the prettiest girl at the school.

Natasha had had such high hopes that at today’s dance Seryozha would finally notice her and ask her for at least one dance. Her mama had made her this great skirt and blouse. Her mama’s friend had given her a pretty heart pendant for her birthday, and it looked so stylish with her pink blouse. She had gotten her hair cut like Mireille’s, and everyone said it suited her and made her face slimmer and more interesting. But Seryozha only had eyes for Marina.

Natasha felt so sad that she didn’t notice anything around her, didn’t hear the cautious steps that had been following her since she had left the school, never once looked around to see the tall, broad-shouldered figure of the young man in the dark, loose, waterproof nylon jacket.

All of a sudden an iron hand was covering her mouth and nose. They were on the edge of the vacant lot, near the deserted construction site, and there wasn’t a soul around. Natasha didn’t even have time to cry out.

“That’s enough sleep, lazybones!” Mitya threw open the door to their room, carrying a large package, from which he took out a tin of sugar, an immersion heater, and pieces of yesterday’s bread.

“You could have knocked.” Lena sat up in bed, yawning sweetly, and stretched. “What time is it?”

“Eight thirty. They’re picking us up at nine fifteen. Get out your coffee and we’ll have breakfast.”

“Hey, where’s your famous condensed milk?” Olga slipped out from under the blanket and shuffled barefoot to the bathroom.

“You’ll get your condensed milk. Only not right now. Tonight we’re leaving for Tobolsk, and how am I supposed to pack an open can?”

“You’re a cheapskate, Brer Rabbit,” Olga told him from the bathroom, with a toothbrush in her mouth. “So go to the buffet and buy us something. Man cannot breakfast on bread alone.”

“All right. But you’d both better be washed and dressed and have the coffee made when I get back.” Mitya put his one-liter metal mug out on the table.

“Yes sir, Herr General!” Lena saluted.

“Down the rabbit hole, Brer Rabbit!” Olga mumbled from the bathroom with a mouth full of toothpaste.

There were very few people in the hotel’s second-floor buffet. While the server was weighing the sausage she’d cut and wrapping the hard-boiled eggs in paper, Mitya looked out the window.

The window looked out on the small square in front of the hotel. There was a police van and an ambulance right at the entrance. Mitya saw two medics carrying out a stretcher with someone covered in a sheet up to her chin.

“Did something happen?” he asked the server. “The police and an ambulance are here.”

“Yes.” The server heaved a deep sigh. Mitya noticed she had red tear-stained eyes and rivulets of dried tears on her cheeks.

“They found the body of the daughter of one of our maids early this morning in a vacant lot,” the server said, sobbing softly. “The girl was raped and murdered. The police came for her mother to take her away to make the identification, and her heart couldn’t take it. They called the ambulance and now they’re taking her away.”

“Lord,” Mitya whispered.

“The girl, Natasha, only just turned sixteen. She’d been given an enameled pendant, a heart with a rose, and she was so happy. Her mama, Klava, and I have been friends since school. She raised Natasha alone.” Another sob escaped the server. She wiped her puffy, teary eyes with the sleeve of her white coat. “A year ago something similar happened. Only the girl was from the teachers college, eighteen years old. And the police aren’t exactly itching to solve it. They couldn’t care less if all our kids get killed off.”

“Hey, Tamara Vasilievna, quit running your mouth,” an authoritative male voice came from the buffet room.

Mitya looked around. A fat man wearing a white shirt and tie sat at a table drinking tea.

“I have nothing to fear!” Tamara put her arms akimbo. “I’m telling the truth. There’s a maniac in town killing our children. There was a similar case in the spring. They could at least write in the newspapers and tell people over the radio not to let their children out of their sight! But no, they don’t say anything. It’s as if nothing were happening. You have two daughters, don’t you, Petrovich?”

“And they’re right not to say anything,” Petrovich said authoritatively. “The last thing we need is to start a panic. The police know their business. They’ll catch the killer.”

“Sure!” the server snickered. “They’ll catch him! But not before he murders more of our children.”

“You’ve got a son. What are you so worked up about?” Petrovich slurped his tea and wiped his sweaty bald spot with his handkerchief.

“You’re an idiot, I swear!” The server shook her head. “You may be a Party instructor, but you’re an idiot! There’ve been two cases in Tobolsk where some monster raped the girls and killed them”—she turned to Mitya—“and no one gives a damn.”

“You mean there have been four murders in the province altogether?” Mitya asked softly.

“Four now. Natasha Koloskova’s the fourth. She never came back from the dance they had at her school yesterday. Klava, her mama, waited up until two in the morning and then got worried. She ran to her neighbor’s, whose son is Natasha’s classmate. As soon as she found out the dance had ended at eleven thirty, she went straight to the police. But they wouldn’t even take her statement. They said two hours was too soon. ‘Your daughter’s gone out with her boyfriend.’ Workers on the construction site discovered her body this morning.”

“What’s got you so down?” Olga asked when Mitya came back from the buffet with a sack of food. “Coffee’s ready. Sit down and have your breakfast.”

“There’s a nightmare going on here,” Mitya said softly, and he took a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit up.

“Smoking on an empty stomach!” Olga exclaimed, and she clipped her brother on the back of his head, took the cigarette out of his mouth, and snuffed it out. “So what is this nightmare?”

Mitya told them everything he’d just learned.

Before he could finish, there was a knock at the door. Standing on the threshold was Volodya, wearing the same gray suit with the lapel pin.

“Good morning, Volodya,” Olga greeted him politely. “Would you like coffee?”

“Thank you, I won’t say no. Only we have to be quick. The car’s waiting.”

Sipping hot coffee from a thin hotel glass, he gave Lena and Olga a critical look, shook his head, and asked, “Can you wear something different?”

“Why?” Lena was surprised. “What don’t you like about our clothes?”

“You’re showing too much leg, and Olga—excuse me, of course—is showing a lot on top,” he informed them without embarrassment.

Lena and Olga exchanged indignant looks, and right then Mitya stepped in. “Listen, my Young Communist Pierre Cardin. Don’t you think it’s up to them how they dress? They’re dressed perfectly decently. Not only that, in this oven, not everyone can go around in formal suits!”

“You Muscovites are so thin-skinned!” Volodya shrugged. “I’m just giving you advice. I’m not the one performing at the prison today, you are.”

“Where?” the three asked in chorus.

“The prison. If I were you, I wouldn’t be parading my legs and breasts in front of the inmates. Dress more soberly, girls. Please.”

Olga was indignant. “I wonder whose big idea it was to send us to a prison?”

“The head of the prison put in a request. Last year a group came from Youth magazine and performed for them. Singers, lecturers, everyone performs. Inmates are people, too.”

“Fine, Young Communist. You convinced me.” Lena gave up. “You and Mitya step out for a minute and we’ll change.”

Olga and Lena headed out to perform for the inmates wearing long skirts and long-sleeved blouses. When they got to the prison, they realized the Young Communist was right. An outfit that in summertime Moscow had looked perfectly ordinary and proper looked completely different here in Tyumen—especially in a prison.

Lena was struck by the peculiar, heavy smell. Standing onstage in front of the microphone, she surveyed the audience with dismay. Every last one of them had a shaved head and was wearing a navy peacoat. Lena thought it was probably best to start the performance with one of Mitya’s songs.

“Hi!” She smiled at the audience. “I have no doubt you all know and like our magazine. We get a lot of letters at our office. You ask questions and send in your poems and stories. Today we have an opportunity to interact face-to-face instead of through the mail. Right now a famous Moscow singer-songwriter, Mitya Sinitsyn, is going to perform for you.”

The audience was grateful and responsive. Mitya’s songs, Olga’s poems, and Lena’s stories about the magazine, about the work of its departments, and various amusing epistolary incidents provoked shouts and applause. They wouldn’t let them leave the stage. They kept shouting out questions and sending up handwritten notes.

Can I come onstage and recite a poem I wrote myself?

Unfairly convicted. Blindboy.

After reading this note, Lena picked up the microphone.

“Someone who calls himself Blindboy wants to recite his poem from the stage,” she told the hall. The hall roared and chuckled.

“You don’t want to hear your comrade’s poem?” Olga asked into the microphone. “If that’s what he wants, he should read.”

The hall burst into guffaws.

“Let the fag have his dance!” said a powerful, gold-toothed inmate sitting in the first row—spread over two chairs, spitting juicily. He wore a gold cross aound his neck, and on his right and left sat two goons a little younger, flashing their steel teeth.

Silence hovered in the hall. It was clear that the gold cross was the top gun.

“Hey, go on, shake your ass, Marusya,” someone’s hoarse falsetto rang out in the silence.

A strange scuffling started in the back rows, and the guard standing nearby was about to take a step in that direction but thought better of interfering, gave up, and turned away, spitting through his teeth exactly like an inmate.

A minute later they dragged a scrawny, round-shouldered kid of twenty or so onto the stage. His face was covered in scars from teenage pimples. All of a sudden Lena realized why they’d nicknamed him Blindboy. His eyes were tiny and deep set. You could barely see them under his overhanging, eyebrow-less brows. When he got onstage, you could tell his eyes were some odd, very light color, and his pupils were pinpoints. White eyes. Blindboy.

“Hello.” Lena gave him the friendliest smile she could. “For starters, let’s introduce ourselves. What’s your name?”

The small head covered in blond stubble dropped very low.

“Vasily Slepak,” he mumbled. So the nickname wasn’t just about his eyes. “Slepak” has the same root as slepoy—blind.

“Very nice to meet you,” Lena said loudly into the microphone. “Now our poet Vasily Slepak will recite a poem.”

She stuck the microphone into his shaking hands and clapped softly. Olga and Mitya clapped, too.

The audience didn’t. Lena felt the tension of that silence on her skin. It was a nasty, explosive silence. Vasily squeezed the microphone in his sweaty hand. All of a sudden a voice strangely low for such a frail complexion rang out in the silence:

I know you don’t love me,

Won’t see or caress me,

You’ve married another,

A bad man, a crook…

The audience burst out laughing. But the low voice at the microphone outshouted their laughter and recited one line after another.

So don’t mock me

With your unbearable truth,

I’m paying a harsh price

For the right to call you my love…

Quickly, Vasily walked over to Lena, handed her the microphone, hopped off the stage, and ran through the whistling, laughing hall. Someone stuck out a foot and he tripped and went sprawling.

“Vasily!” Lena said into the microphone. “Your poem was wonderful! I’ll try to get it published in our magazine.”

“Are you crazy?” She heard Olga’s whisper from behind. “Why are you promising him? It’s the usual graphomania!”

“Vasily!” Lena went on, watching the skinny, round-shouldered figure get up from the spit-covered floor. “You keep writing and send your poems to the office, to the Literature Department! Just don’t give up. Write your poems. You’re a talented man.”

The laughter and whistling died down and the hall started buzzing in amazement.

“I should write to you instead.” The hulk in the first row flashed his gold teeth. “Let’s you and me get to know each other. We can be pen pals. How about giving me your home address?”

Lena didn’t even look in his direction and calmly spoke into the microphone.

“Comrades, this is where our gathering ends. All the best. Thank you for your attention.”

“Hey, Gray Eyes!” The voice from the first row rang out in the deathly hush. “I asked you a question. Give me your home address?”

“The address of our offices is printed in every issue of the magazine.”

“Fuck your offices,” Gold Teeth spat.

Lena set the microphone aside. She was afraid to look down at the first row. She noticed one of the guards saying something quickly to another, who went out, and a minute later several soldiers with submachine guns streamed through both doors of the auditorium.

“Answer when someone asks you a question!” one of Gold Teeth’s buddies added.

“I just want to be friends. Be my friend, Gray Eyes! Right now. I know a good spot. Don’t worry, we can be alone here, too.”

The two goons rose lazily, as if reluctantly, and took a step toward the stage. Simultaneously, Mitya and Olga flanked Lena on either side. There was no passage behind the stage; the only way out was by descending into the auditorium.

A minute later the three of them were surrounded by soldiers, and only in that way, in a solid ring, did they exit the auditorium.

In the prison warden’s office, Lena gulped down a glass of water from a pitcher and lit a cigarette. Only then did she stop shaking.

“Can you explain to me what I did wrong?” she quietly asked the warden, an elderly colonel.

“Actually, you didn’t do anything wrong. They have their own laws here, and you’re not expected to know them. It’s just that Vasily’s a prison bitch. The most despised individual there can be. Gritsenko, the guy in the first row, is the boss. You defied him by praising someone you can only mock. You broke their law. Don’t worry, though. Last year, one writer who came with Youth magazine had the bright idea of reading a story with an explicit sex scene. Very explicit.”

“What happened?” Mitya asked.

“They rushed the stage, and there were two women there, one middle-aged, the department chief, the other, a young reporter. We had to intervene. It was a real mess, and today was nothing compared to that.”

“If it’s so dangerous, why do you invite people to perform?” Olga wondered.

“Well, there’s no particular danger.” The colonel grinned. “There’s an armed guard and everything’s under control. Prison’s prison, but there are human beings here, too.”

“What’s Slepak in here for?” Lena asked.

“Article 161a. He and a buddy robbed a shop.”

They were supposed to go to Tobolsk that night. They only had an hour to rest up and pack after their performances. Not that they had much to pack.

They were having tea in their room when Volodya walked in. Next to him was a tall, broad-shouldered blond of twenty-five or so with a pleasant, intelligent face and green-blue eyes. He had a small red Young Communist pin on the pocket of his dark blue windbreaker.

“Meet Veniamin Volkov, Culture Department head for the Tobolsk Young Communists Committee,” Volodya introduced him. “He flew in on business this morning and he’ll be your escort to Tobolsk today.”

“Pleased to meet you,” the Tobolsk Young Communist introduced himself, shaking everyone’s hand.

He had a guileless, rather enchanting smile and a soft, gentle baritone. He was a lot nicer than Volodya.

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