The Big Green Tent

GIRLFRIENDS

Galya Polukhina, nicknamed Polushka, and Tamara Brin, whom Olga affectionately called Brinchik, had always felt a bit constrained in Olga’s presence. She was the only friend either one of them had. They felt they should avoid saying too much. But not for any other reason than that they loved her, and didn’t want to disappoint their girlfriend with insufficiently high-minded, or even downright vulgar, thoughts and opinions.

Both girlfriends were devoted to Olga, and apart from the irrational aspect of their love, which it was senseless to question, each of them had her own reasons, and very clear-cut ones, for admiring her.

Galina Polukhina came from a poor family. She lived in a semibasement apartment in Olga’s venerable building. She wasn’t particularly pretty, and was an average student—and even that took some effort. In the third grade, Olga was appointed to the task of “pulling up” Galya to improve her grades, and Olga was full of sympathy for her. Olga’s magnanimity was selfless. There was no condescension of the rich and beautiful to the poor and mediocre; this poor and mediocre creature wound around the thick stem like a vine, clinging with its aerial rootlets and sucking gently. Olga, with her superabundant gifts and talents, didn’t notice this.

Polushka was a placid soul. She didn’t know the meaning of envy, she had no insight into the dynamics of human interrelationship, and she was filled with grateful adoration.

Things were different with Tamara Brin. In contrast to Olga, who was diligent and disciplined, Tamara was an “effortless” A student. She appraised the scholastic wisdom on offer with a single glance of her dark eyes, and imbibed it, with a flutter of the sad wings of her eyelashes. Her appearance was striking and strange. She looked like an Assyrian king from the textbook of ancient history; except that the crimped beard of the king, which descended below his lower lip, changed places on Tamara. She had a bush of hair that rose straight up from the top of her forehead. She was, in her own way, a beauty. A beauty for the connoisseur. As a Jew she inhabited a cocoon of untouchability and bore the universal repudiation bitterly but with dignity. Toward Olga she felt a certain kind of rapturous gratitude. In the winter of 1953, when the terrible word was constantly whispered behind the back of the nine-year-old Tamara, Olga was the only one in the class who rushed to the defense of the ideal of internationalism and multiculturalism, and in particular, to the defense of Tamara. When she heard the word kike thrown at Tamara, she cried out through hot tears:

“You’re Fascists! Monsters! Soviet people don’t act that way! You should be ashamed of yourselves. In our country, all cultures and nations are equal!”

Tamara never forgot Olga’s characteristic unadulterated fury, and only due to the righteous wrath of the best girl in the class was she able to come to terms with the horrible school, with the world of enmity and humiliation.

As the years passed, Tamara valued Olga’s independence of spirit and her courage more and more. Olga never lied, and she said what she thought. What she thought was almost always right, and it was what she had been taught at home. Tamara, because of her origins, her family history, and her not entirely Soviet upbringing, couldn’t share Olga’s convictions, or her enthusiasm and emotion. But Tamara would never have dared contradict her by even a single word, for fear of losing her friend, and because she didn’t want anyone—Olga above all—to be moved by her tragic alienness.

The friendship among the three of them continued all through their years at school. It was strong, but very lopsided: Olga talked, and her girlfriends listened and kept silent; one in rapture but without understanding, the other restrained and skeptical.

Tamara allowed herself to voice her thoughts—independently and compellingly—only in discussions about theater and literature, and about the trivial but fascinating goings-on at school: the history teacher’s new shoes, or the insidious behavior of Zinka Shchipakhina, a traitor and a cheat. Galya and Tamara tolerated each other for Olga’s sake.

In the fifth grade, Galya entered a class where her own true talent emerged: She was an athlete. She trained as a gymnast, and after the sixth grade she joined a team, first in the second-class division, and soon in the first. In the eighth grade she began training to receive the title of Master of Athletics. She had fulfilled all the requirements by the time she was fifteen, but she had to wait six months to receive the title officially, as it was only awarded to sixteen-year-olds. She became a school celebrity, though her grades were too poor for her to enjoy real renown. She was still a mediocre student, always looking over Olga’s shoulder.

Upon graduating from school, the unexpected happened: all three girlfriends got into college. Olga was accepted at the university (which in itself was completely predictable). Tamara, with her silver honors medal, was accepted at the Institute of Medicine. This was an exceptional achievement in the prevailing circumstances of the time. Galya, who had joined the Moscow youth team in artistic gymnastics, but still had a strained relationship with grammar, had been accepted at the Institute of Physical Education and Sports.

To celebrate this triple victory, a party was organized for their classmates at Olga’s home. Antonina Naumovna ordered all kinds of delicacies from the buffet of the House of Writers—pies, tarts, and canapés (only they would have known what these were!)—and nobly retreated to the dacha. Olga’s faithful knight Rifat, who had graduated two years before, volunteered to supply real pilaf. At exactly eight in the evening, he delivered it to the apartment in an enormous cauldron, hired from a restaurant at the Exposition of National Economic Achievements. His father was an Azerbaijani government official, with connections from the very highest to the very lowest levels.

The party was a complete success. Two boys and one girl got completely smashed. Vika Travina and Boris Ivanov finally went all the way, an achievement that had eluded them for a year and a half, despite wholehearted attempts. Another couple quarreled and broke up, which both of them regretted for the rest of their lives. And Raya Kozina broke out in hives for the first time—a malady that would beset her until her death.

Many, many things of great significance took place that night, but only one person, the hostess herself, failed to notice them. That night, she realized for the first time that she had been lucky from birth—whether endowed by nature, by the stars in the heavens, or by her genes. Until this day she had never been aware of her enviable lot. Now she was absolutely certain that there were many achievements in store for her, many victories, even triumphs. And the three handsomest boys—Rifat, the Persian prince, his mustache bracketing his mouth; his friend Vova, a student at the Moscow Aviation Institute, broad-shouldered and tallish, with a blond wave of hair above his eyes, like the popular poet Sergei Esenin in the early photographs where he is wearing a peasant blouse, but no jacket and tie; and Vitya Bodyagin, who had been stationed on a submarine for four years, newly discharged, with a striped sailor’s jersey under his dress shirt, in funny trousers with children’s clasps at the sides, and who would soon be starting at the faculty of philology with Olga—all of them looked at Olga with the hungry eyes of men, and with various shades of meaning: demanding, beseeching, searching, bold. With love, with propositions, with promises.

That would be something else! To think that I could just up and marry any one of them. Anyone I want! Olga was intoxicated with success and made a bet with herself that she would marry the one who would ask her for the next dance. She danced better than anyone else—both rock and roll and tango. And her waist was the slenderest, and her hair was the longest—though she had cut off the long braid she had grown tired of. But her hair, which still reached nearly to her waist, was reddish, with sparkling highlights. She looked at herself from the side and very much liked what she saw. Everyone liked her, the boys, and the girls, and the neighbors, and even the mothers on the parents’ committee.

They put on “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets—Rifat had brought the record. And everyone went wild. They soared to the music as if they were being carried off by the wind. The driving sounds and rhythms seeped into them. It wasn’t about gentle touching, but about collisions, outbursts, and yet more collisions, and the broad-shouldered Vova seemed to be throwing her from arm to arm. But had he asked her to dance? Four months later she would marry him.

They danced and drank, smoked on the balcony and in the kitchen. Then everyone got tired. Some people left late at night, others stayed till morning. Vika and Boris fell asleep in the parents’ bedroom, stunned by the earth-shattering event—their coitus, in other words. A long and happy marriage lay ahead of them, though they didn’t know this, not yet. On the rug in the living room there was a pile of people, about five of them, who hadn’t been as lucky. It reeked slightly of vomit.

Finally, everyone cleared out except the reliable Tamara and Galya. The girlfriends helped clean up all the traces of youthful reveling. They made coffee. They drank it like grown-ups out of the best tiny cups, but they still felt like they were just playing house, especially Galya. Toward evening, the two girlfriends left to go home, planning to get together again the following week. But the next time they saw each other was at the beginning of the following year. After graduation, life began spinning by at a breathless pace.

Tamara’s house on Sobachya Square was slated to reach the end of its life span, and the residents were removed. Tamara’s family was resettled in the distant outskirts of the city, in Workers’ Village, past Kuntsevo. The Molodezhnaya metro station was at that time still just a point on the blueprints of city planners.

Tamara energetically shuttled back and forth between her new home, her new job, and the medical institute. The year that they moved, Tamara’s beloved grandmother Maria Semenovna died. She had been a lifelong friend of the pianist Elena Gnesina; she had spent her whole life around this renowned family, working as a secretary in their musical sanctuary, the Gnesin Institute of Music. But the old lady from the Arbat was carried off by the catastrophe of resettlement.

The civil memorial service was held at the Gnesin Institute. Tamara, who had known this remarkable family since childhood, now saw what remained of them—there, in a wheelchair, sat the great Elena Fabianovna, founder of the only empire, a musical one, that had withstood the rise of Soviet power, and what’s more—something absolutely unthinkable at the time—survived it.

It was a gathering of musicians, but among the mourners were also people from “the audience,” participants in the world of music, which seemed to exist above the Soviet world of collectivization and industrialization, all the official state upheaval and frenzy, which appeared so paltry against the background of Beethoven, Schubert, Shostakovich, and even Misha Gnesin, an utterly forgotten composer, younger brother of the celebrated Gnesin sisters.

Tamara was astonished. She had known many of her grandmother’s “old-lady friends,” but here, at the graveside, she finally understood what kind of world her grandmother, who went around in a stretched-out sweater with pieces of dried egg stuck to the collar and a skirt that sported all manner of stains in varying hues, had inhabited.

Almost all the “old-lady friends,” except perhaps for Anna Alexandrovna, who lived on Pokrovka, were local, from the Arbat neighborhood. They came on foot and stood in a small group nearby. They were not exactly members of the family’s inner circle, not teachers or performers, but “initiates” …

They mourned in a musical key, performing the music of Mikhail Gnesin, written for Meyerhold’s staging of Gogol’s play The Inspector General. This was a gift of love to the departed Maria Semenovna from the Gnesin family, who were also dying out.

Then the elderly musicians all came up to Tamara and Raisa Ilinichna, her mother, to say a few words about Maria Semenovna, about music and about friendship. And it seemed that they invested these ordinary words with completely new meaning. Anna Alexandrovna also came up to them, asking them not to forget Maria Semenovna’s friends, and to come to visit her. And she stroked Tamara’s head, running her hand over Tamara’s rough hair.

The old apartment was reproduced inside the new one. In the large walk-through room stood the piano, with the dusty divan, covered with a worn red rug, next to it. Above it hung all the same pictures from the house on the Arbat, in the same arrangement as before. Only her grandmother, who had played on the piano, was missing. Tamara soon moved from the divan in the walk-through room into her grandmother’s room, the best one in the apartment. And she inadvertently became the head of this new household, which tried so hard to be indistinguishable from the old one.

Raisa Ilinichna, who had spent her whole life taking up as little space as possible, moved into the smaller room by the entrance door. Timid and unlucky, during the span of her life she had accomplished one major deed: having a child, which was Tamara, out of wedlock. The move and the death of her mother broke Raisa Ilinichna’s heart. Always defenseless against the blows that life dealt, she now became nearly immobilized by grief. She was not yet fifty, but to her daughter she seemed old and completely washed out. Raisa Ilinichna had the same opinion of herself.

In the new place, without the guiding hand of her mother, she felt unmoored. She couldn’t get used to the new neighborhood, and for a long time she traveled all the way back to the Arbat to buy bread. When she got home, she would sit in her narrow little room all by herself and weep, trying to hide the tears from her daughter.

But Tamara wasn’t aware of this, and even if she had noticed, she would not have attached any significance to the weak-willed and pointless tears. Tamara’s new life was a rich whirlwind of activity. The drowsy languor of the last years in high school vanished, and all the gears went into overdrive. Days passed in a flash, and she could hardly catch her breath. She was unaccountably, improbably lucky. Her studies were interesting, her job even more so. The academic adviser that had been assigned to her, Vera Samuilovna Vinberg, was heaven-sent. An extremely bright older woman, who had survived the labor camps, she became a mainstay in the complex picture of Tamara’s life. The void was filled, all her questions answered and her fears dissipated.

As tiny and dry as a flea, Vera Samuilovna, shaking the tight stainless-steel curls that escaped onto her forehead and neck from the large cluster atop her head, would instruct the new lab assistant in a manner that implied that she knew beforehand what a remarkable scientist and researcher she would become. Vera Samuilovna looked at Tamara’s luxuriant hair, at her small, agile fingers, and noted her keen intelligence—and thought that the girl could have been her own daughter; or, more likely, her granddaughter.

Vera Samuilovna even planned to invite Tamara to her home, to introduce her to her husband, to bring her into the family. But for the time being, it was merely a vague intention. Her husband, Edwin, for all his outward amiability, didn’t take easily to new people.

Meanwhile, fate was busy laying down byroads upon which Tamara might meet the love of her life. The Vinbergs’ home was one of the places that Tamara’s lover-to-be regularly frequented.

But for now, the things that interested her most were concentrated in the old textbook of endocrinology that Vera Samuilovna presented to her lab assistant, saying:

“Tamara, dear—learn this by heart. For a start. We’ll take on chemistry later. First you have to understand the connections that exist in this wisest of all systems.”

Vera Samuilovna was crazy about endocrinology. In her laboratory, she synthesized artificial hormones, which she viewed almost as the key to immortality of the human species. Vera Samuilovna believed in hormones as though they were the Lord Above. She would solve all earthly problems with the help of adrenaline, testosterone, and estrogen.

A new picture of the world opened before Tamara. The human being appeared to her now like a marionette governed by hormone molecules, on which depended not only size, appetite, and mood, but also mental activity, habits, and fixations. Vera Samuilovna considered the director of this whole theater of life to be the pineal, a tiny gland hidden in the depths of the brain. A wonderful, mysterious insight afforded only to initiates! Other scientists gave priority to the pituitary gland; but in this sphere of activity, they didn’t send you to prison for the error of your ways.

Tamara’s personal endocrine system worked like clockwork: her pineal gland (what else?) sent out exciting signals; her adrenal gland pumped out adrenaline; her thyroid sent out serotonin for the urgent replenishment of supplies. How could her boundless energy have been explained any other way? A surplus of estrogen made little pimples bloom on her forehead. There weren’t many of them—they could have been covered up with her bangs—but the hair insisted on sticking straight out and up, so she had to wrestle it down with hairpins. Everything was perfect. Only there was never enough time …

Galya never had enough time, either. Nor did she have any extra energy—it all went into her training. They didn’t teach the athletes too much at the institute. They weren’t in the business of training teachers, but of producing champions. At first everything went very well. She went from small triumphs to greater ones; she dreamed of Olympic gold, or silver at the very least. What followed, however, was a serious injury.

In her fourth year, Galya took part in the Moscow championship. When she dismounted from the parallel bars, having completed the routine without a hitch, she landed so awkwardly that she fractured her knee, severely damaging the joint. After that her career prospects as a champion evaporated, though she had almost made the national team. She spent three months in the Institute of Traumatology, where Dr. Mironova, their best surgeon, operated on her twice. Her knee became functional again, but the articulation of the joint was inadequate for an athletic career.

The heady life of training sessions, competitions, and promise had ended. They didn’t expel her from the institute, however. Galya dove into her textbooks, but floundered. She still lived in her semibasement, but no one took any interest in her now. Her glory had been short-lived, and she again felt insignificant, unattractive, and worthless. Plain old Polushka she had been, and Polushka she was destined to remain.

With her unflagging energy and concern, Olga decided to take her friend under her wing. She even asked her mother’s advice. Antonina Naumovna, sympathetic within reason, solved the problem: she arranged for Galya to take an evening course in typing.

“If she learns to type well enough, I’ll hire her at the magazine.” She immediately had second thoughts. “Though Galya’s grammar isn’t very good, is it?”

When she had graduated from the institute, Galya stayed on in the dean’s office. Her position was not a very rewarding one—she was a secretary. Her achievements were paltry, and she had a salary to match. Still, thanks to the evening typing course, she could supplement her earnings. She was a fast typist, and she moonlighted. True, she didn’t own a typewriter, so she had to use the one at work and put in long, very late hours.

When Galya’s affairs had fallen into place, Olga distanced herself again. Her own life was elevated and meaningful. Even the unpleasantness that came her way was exceptional, not like what others had to contend with—she was expelled from the university under scandalous circumstances, then she broke off relations with Vova (Galya saw right away that it was a very stupid mistake, of course); but no sooner had Vova been forced to bow out than a new man appeared. Olga told Galya this and that about herself, cursorily, without going into detail; and what was surprising was that despite all the unpleasantness, her eyes still shone as before, and her hair, her smile, even her dimples were all aglow.

This was when Galya envied her for the first time. She herself had become the poorer for her misfortunes; she shed and wilted, and even started aging prematurely. Poor Galya.

Galya, naturally, knew nothing of the terrible secrets and dangers that filled Olga’s life. In Galya’s view, Olga’s new pseudo-husband couldn’t hold a candle to Vova. This Ilya fellow was also tall, and he had curly hair; but he wasn’t dashing in the way Vova had been. However, Olga’s son, Kostya, was all over him. As a father, Vova was a disciplinarian and treated his son with military severity; but Ilya and Kostya played noisy games together, romped around and turned somersaults, and were always exploring some new interest. Ilya was more like an older best friend. And with Kostya, Ilya was able to experience vicariously all the childhood joys that he couldn’t experience with his own unhappy and constrained son. Kostya simply adored him. His own father, who saw him once a week, understood that Kostya was being “led astray,” resented it, and was more and more reluctant to spend time with him. And the feelings were mutual.

Galya didn’t know any of these details. Nor did she know that Olga and Ilya had quietly gotten married, without going public about it. She was hurt when she found out by chance, six months later. The event of marriage had nearly cosmic significance for her. But they hadn’t even organized the most modest wedding party. She didn’t even dream of ever finding a marriage partner for herself. She was twenty-nine years old, and since her career had collapsed, not a single colleague, or student, or even passerby had given her so much as a glance … meanwhile, in a roundabout way, through Olga, fate was preparing a valuable gift for her that would last her whole life.

* * *

It’s fascinating to trace the trajectories of people destined to meet. Sometimes such encounters happen without any special effort of fate, without elaborate convolutions of plot, following the natural course of events—say, people live in adjacent buildings, or go to the same school; they get to know each other at college or at work. In other cases, something unexpected is called for: train schedules out of whack, a minor misfortune orchestrated on high, like a small fire or a leaky pipe on an upper floor, or a ticket bought from someone else for the last movie show. Or else a chance meeting, when a watcher is standing in one spot, on the lookout for a target, and suddenly a girl glides by out of nowhere, once, twice, a third time. And there’s a weak smile, and then, suddenly, like dawn breaking—she’s your own dear wife …

Isn’t every person deserving of these special efforts of fate? Olga, yes, certainly … But Galya?

Should fate squander its efforts on an insignificant and unprepossessing couple, the daughter of the local plumber, a drunk, and the son of another such plumber from Tver, but already deceased? In fact, Galya’s father, nicknamed Sir Yury Dripsandleaks, would meet a premature end. No sooner were they assigned to a new apartment than he died, to the annoyance and disappointment of the residents of the high-rise on Vosstanie Square, who would never again have such a skilled expert in all things pipes-and-leaks related, someone who knew every valve and plug by sight and by touch. In his presence, pipes seemed to join, and blockages, with a grunt, cleared up of their own volition.

And was a towheaded, suspicious, vengeful boy, the courtyard champion in long-distance pissing—no one else’s stream even came close to his in the length of the arc, either in the courtyard or at school—beneath the notice of fate?

Was it possible that he, like Olga, was a darling of fate, and that it took direct aim at him, weaving its web around him, making sure he was on duty on just those days when a girl, towheaded like himself, would dart into the entrance where he was on the lookout for his target?

It’s incomprehensible, improbable—but the generosity of fate also extends to the likes of these C-list extras.

* * *

Ilya never managed to find out which of his sins—the distribution of books, petty communications between hostile factions, his close connections to Mikha and Edik, by that time both in prison—had attracted the direct attention of the authorities. In the spring of 1971, he realized he was being watched.

For Galya, this was a fateful event.

The first time Galya saw him, they met at the entrance to the building. Small in stature, but handsome and appealing, wearing a gray cap and a long coat, he held the door open for her, and she smiled at him.

The very next day, she ran into him again in the courtyard. This time he was sitting on a bench with a newspaper in his hands, obviously waiting for someone. And Galya smiled at him again. Then, the third time, he was standing in the entrance hall, and they greeted each other. He asked her her name. At that point, Galya realized that he wasn’t standing there just by chance, but was waiting for her, and she was happy. Now she liked him even more. His name was Gennady. A nice name. His appearance wasn’t striking—but neither was it lacking in anything. He and Galya were similar, as they would discover, if you looked closely: their eyes were narrow-set, close to the bridge of their rather long noses, and they had small chins. They had the same coloring—his hair, of which he didn’t have as much, of course, was a bit lighter. It lay smooth on his head. But he was very neat—exceptionally so. He made a very civilized impression. When he disappeared for a week, Galya’s dreams were dashed. Every evening when she returned home from work, she looked for him in the courtyard, but he wasn’t there.

Well, there went love, she thought bitterly, and lived through the entire week with the nagging feeling that nothing would ever happen to her, that her life in the semibasement would never end, although everyone else had been resettled, and her family was the last, and she herself was the last and the least, as her grandmother said.

Indifferent to everything, she was walking down Gorokhovskaya Street (now called Kazakov) from the institute to Kurskaya Station, where she would get on the metro and travel five stations to her home. The whole trip would take about an hour, including the time she would need to get to the metro and then to sprint home once she got off at Krasnopresnenskaya. In spite of the bad weather, and in a bad mood, she was walking along as though her muscles had been trained to do it, her back straight, her head, in a blue beret, held high, in an old raincoat Olga had given her the previous year. Suddenly, from behind, a strong hand grabbed her by the arm. First she thought it was one of her students. She looked around and saw that it was—him!

“Galya,” he said, “I’ve been waiting for you for so long. Let’s go to the movies.”

How had he found her? It was obvious he had wanted to! Everything that followed was like the movies. And it flashed by just as quickly. The main thing was that it was exactly the way Galya wanted it to happen: at first he took her elbow, carefully, strongly, then by the hand, then he kissed her politely, without any pawing. He embraced her—again decently, without anything obscene or dirty. A month later he proposed to her. He wanted to visit her parents, with a cake and a bottle of wine, to ask for her hand. Galya warned her father beforehand:

“If you take out the vodka and get smashed, I’ll leave home.”

Her father made a dismissive gesture with his swollen brown hand:

“Oh, I’m scared! As though there’s anyplace else for you to go to.”

He was right, of course. But what he didn’t know was that his Galya now had an actual shield against the misfortunes of life.

The formal marriage proposal did not go as planned. Her mother was called in to work to sub for someone else on that evening. Her brother and his wife had been skirmishing to the point of fisticuffs for the past week, so Galya had to come clean about all her family circumstances. Gennady was understanding.

“Galya, mine are the same. Never mind them, the relatives … they just get in your way your whole life. We’ll just get married without telling them.”

Everything about Gennady was to her liking. He was quiet, didn’t ask questions, had a master’s certificate in sports, by the way, with a college degree; and with a family like his, you could forget they had ever existed.

Gennady was eager to get married for his own reasons, which he informed Galya about. Through his job he was eligible to receive housing; they had promised him a one-room apartment, but if he married, they might give him a small two-room apartment, so he could start a family.

They filed the necessary papers, and set a date for the registration of their union. Galya went to Olga and told her she was getting married. She asked her to be a witness. Olga had by this time tied the knot with Ilya. Both her girlfriends were lonely and alone. Tamara at least had her hormones to make out with, but Galya was just plain alone and unloved.

Olga was happy for her, but surprised:

“What kind of friend are you! You didn’t even tell me you had met someone.”

Now she just had to marry Tamara off, and everyone would be settled.

Olga didn’t suspect that she had also inadvertently decided Tamara’s fate. For a year Tamara had been seeing Ilya’s older friend the brilliant Marlen. At Olga’s birthday party, she had sat Tamara next to Marlen. They left the party at the same time, and Marlen walked her to the Molodezhnaya metro station. It turned out that they were practically neighbors. Tamara fell madly in love, igniting a mutual passion that was no laughing matter. For many years Marlen went back and forth between two homes (fortunately, only five minutes apart). In each home Marlen kept a toothbrush, a razor, and a clean pair of undergarments. He had always led a traveler’s existence, though now the destination of his business trips was sometimes only as far as the neighboring house, where he hibernated in quiet retreat and in love. And, of course, in secret. Tamara took a vow of silence practically from the first day they met—not a word to anyone about Marlen, especially not to Olga and Ilya. Thus, Olga, the unwitting disposer of other people’s fates, organized their lives and affairs but remained none the wiser about it herself.

* * *

Galya didn’t have a wedding party. Gennady said that it made no sense to throw money to the wind, since they would have to buy furniture. Galya just nodded in agreement. She was disappointed about it, but Gennady was right, of course. About the furniture. They registered their marriage, and she went to live with her husband in his dormitory. The room was a decent one. He gave his old bed away to the supervisor of the dormitory, and bought a fold-out divan.

That first night on the new divan, Gennady accepted an unexpected gift from his wife, a gift that required painstaking effort from the receiver, no less than the giver. It turned out that Galya Polukhina was an upright girl; she had saved herself for her husband. Only one thing cast a shadow over this great day for Gennady: Galya’s friend Olga. How on earth could he have let the wife of his target, Ilya Bryansky, whom he had been watching on and off for two years, appear as a witness on their marriage certificate? A personal connection was taking shape which was in part something of a nuisance, in part very promising.

While they were thrashing around on the new divan, while Gennady was carrying out his masculine duties and overcoming nature’s difficulties, glad for the gentle participation of his wife, a small but insistent worry hovered in the back of his mind: Had Olga recognized him?

She had. After she returned home from the marriage registry, she told Ilya that Polushka had gotten married to the Rodent. That’s what they had nicknamed Gennady when they discovered he was shadowing Ilya. The Rodent was one of the three outdoor surveillance officers whom Ilya knew by sight.

Ilya laughed at first—that meant he had married into the family! Then he started wondering. What was it you gave her to type?

In recent years Galya had often accepted work from them. She was a fast and accurate typist, without really understanding what she was typing.

“Oh, damn! I don’t remember.”

“Think! What did you give her to type?”

“Ah, now I remember! She has my Erika typewriter, and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.”

“Get them back right away. Today.”

Olga rushed down to the semibasement, and only remembered along the way that Galya had moved in with her husband. Her drunken father, Yury, hurt that his daughter hadn’t included him in the marriage arrangements, but had done everything herself, was unwelcoming. Olga asked whether Galya had left her typewriter behind.

“She took every last thing with her and cleared out. Didn’t even leave an address,” her father said curtly, and slammed the door in Olga’s face.

Olga went home upset, not knowing what to do next. Ilya lost no time in trying to comfort her.

“Never mind, Olga, things could be worse. Galya has been part of your family her whole life; she won’t be in any hurry to denounce you. Wait awhile—before you know it we’ll be drinking tea with her hubby,” Ilya said with a crooked grin.

Ilya wasn’t completely off the mark about the tea; but a friendly tea party was not in the cards for years to come. A good many of them.

They told Tamara about Galya’s hasty wedding to the Rodent, leaving out the part about the typewriter and the manuscript Galya was working on. Even so, Tamara was horrified.

“Don’t let her into your house!”

“Are you crazy? I’ve been friends with her practically since the day I was born!” Olga was angry.

“It’s too dangerous. How can you not see that yourself? You’ll have an informer under your own roof,” Tamara said darkly.

“Nonsense! It’s sickening, suspecting everyone in that way. Then I might as well start suspecting you!” Olga burst out.

Tamara turned scarlet, began to cry, and left.

The next day, Olga called Galya at work. They told her that she had gone on vacation that very day. Strange—Galya hadn’t mentioned anything about a vacation. In fact, Galya herself hadn’t known about this surprise from her husband. A honeymoon! Galya’s mother confirmed the information, saying they had gone on a trip to Kislovodsk. Olga asked about the typewriter, saying she had lent it to Galya, and now urgently needed it back. Galya’s mother, Nina, told Olga to wait a moment while she looked for it. She came back saying there was no typewriter in the house. She would have seen it—it was too big to miss.

Then she wondered whether Yury might have drunk it away. There was no telling.

The new Erika was worth a fortune, and they were nearly impossible to come by. And she needed it desperately! Olga was a good typist herself, but she didn’t have the speed of a professional. She always gave large projects to Galya and others to type.

Still, the missing Gulag Archipelago was a more serious loss by far.

Two weeks later, Galya came over uninvited, looking very fresh and healthy, almost pretty. She was very perturbed, however. She cried when she made the honest admission that the typewriter and the manuscript had disappeared from her parents’ home without a trace, and where they had gone she had no clue; she, Galya, would return the money, it would take three months or so. Everything had vanished, most likely, when they were on their honeymoon.

“No, it was before that!” Olga said. “I thought about it the day you and Gennady got married, and I went over to your parents the very next day!”

“It’s impossible!” Galya said with a gasp.

The household investigation, which Galya immediately undertook, didn’t yield anything. Her father was on a drinking binge, which constituted indirect evidence of domestic theft. Still, her papa went on these binges at regular intervals, right on schedule, and he had just now gotten started after a bout of sobriety.

Her brother, Nikolay, whom she tried to interrogate, grew suddenly irate, began to shake, and screamed at her to leave him alone. He wasn’t quite right in the head, and the psychiatric clinic had had medical records on file for him since he was a child.

Now Olga had to comfort Polushka and give her tea to drink. She inquired about her married life. It was absolutely wonderful, her husband didn’t drink and was very serious, had a good job, and even promised to try to set Galya up in a good position as well. Then Ilya and Kostya returned from the skating rink, both of them frozen and encrusted with ice. They usually went to the one on Petrovka, but this time they’d gone to a little patch of ice in the next-door courtyard, where they slipped and tumbled to their hearts’ content. True, when they were already tired out from all the fun, one of the other kids pelted Kostya with an ice-filled snowball, giving him a bloody nose. They quickly stopped the bleeding with more ice, though.

Galya always got scared and took to her heels at the mere sight of Ilya, and this time was no exception. Olga laundered the bloody scarf and handkerchiefs. Kostya, Ilya, and Olga had dinner together. Their favorite days were like this one, when her mother stayed at the dacha. Then Olga sent Kostya off to bed.

“Ilya, the typewriter and the manuscript have both disappeared. No one knows where,” Olga said with trepidation.

“It’s the Rodent! We have to clear everything out of the house,” Ilya said peremptorily.

He threw himself into the task, grabbing things off the shelves and out of hiding places, gathering all the dangerous papers. Several onionskin pages bound together with paper clips he burned in the WC. He collected all the most dangerous publications—issues of the Chronicle of Current Events. In her mother’s bookshelves, behind the Romain Rolland and the Maxim Gorky, there were also some things stashed away. By three in the morning they had gathered up all the dangerous material and stuffed it into an old suitcase, which they stowed under a coatrack. They postponed the final decision, whether to take it all to the dacha or to Ilya’s aunt’s house in the country, out of harm’s way, until the next morning.

They couldn’t get to sleep for a long time, making all kinds of wild conjectures about what the near future had in store. They discussed whether they ought to inform the author, through Rosa Vasilievna, that the manuscript had possibly fallen into the hands of the KGB. They agreed to go to see her in the morning, to give her a detailed account of what had happened. Then Ilya discovered that Olga had fallen asleep, mid-sentence. And, like a bolt of lightning, it struck him: tomorrow they would be arrested! He even broke into a cold sweat. He had left so many tracks—his address books with all the phone numbers; and he would have to go to his mother’s right away to rescue his photograph collection and hide it somewhere. And put the negatives in a separate place. No, best take it all to his aunt’s in Kirzhach. If only he managed to do it in time! He’d have to get up at six and leave immediately for his mother’s; and with that thought, he fell into a sound sleep.

At just after eight, Olya gave Kostya an apple and sent him on his way to school. Ilya was still asleep. Olga put some coffee on to boil. At ten after nine sharp, the telephone and doorbell rang simultaneously. Ilya woke up, looked at the clock, and realized he was too late.

“Go to the bathroom,” Olga commanded. Ilya darted into the bathroom and latched the door. Olga went to open the front door, trying to decide what she should and should not say in the short space before she got there.

She had long known how these things happened, but her first thought was: call Mama for help. She immediately felt ashamed.

Six people barged in. Not one of them in uniform. A tall man, without taking off his cap, thrust a search warrant and an ID at her at the same time. He wasn’t fooling around. They opened the door to every room except the bathroom.

“Is your husband in there?” the tall one asked, finally taking his cap off. A lock of hair from his toupee rose up with the cap, and he mechanically plastered it back down to his forehead. He looks like Kosygin, Olga thought. Suddenly her fear melted away.

“Yes, that’s him,” she said.

One of them went up to the door and rapped on it.

“Come out!”

“I’m coming,” Ilya said.

He emerged a few minutes later in the general’s old bathrobe with the patches on the sleeves. He had shaved hurriedly.

Good work, Olga thought to herself approvingly.

“You’ll have to come with us to the residence where you are registered,” said another one. He exchanged glances with the tall one. Meaningfully.

Ilya got dressed without any haste.

Three of them stood in a group by the bookcase.

“Your books?” the smallest one asked.

“Oh, no,” Olga said. “Most of them belong to my mother. She’s a well-known writer, of course. In the other room there are books on military construction. My father is a general and has a big collection of books on military subjects.”

Olga’s mood lifted. She could feel that her voice sounded fine, and betrayed no abject trembling. Ilya realized immediately that her fear had been replaced by some complex desperation that also contained an element of amusement.

Good girl, Ilya thought in his turn, taking heart. With that, he waved to her and went out, one goon on his right, another on his left.

Three stayed behind to search, and one more stood watch by the door.

The witness, Olga thought.

She had no firsthand experience of the KGB herself, but she had heard stories about how these searches were carried out. They were far more polite than she had imagined they would be. One of them had a pleasant face, like a tractor driver or a farmhand. Even his skin had something rural about it—it was chapped and reddish, as if he had spent a lot of time in the cold. He tapped the books perfunctorily, seeing right away that all suspicious papers had been carefully weeded out. Then he made a discovery. In the bathroom they found an ashtray full of dead matches and paper clips.

“What you were burning?” the one with the toupee asked. He introduced himself as Alexandrov, an investigator from the prosecutor’s office, but Olga forgot his name immediately. She couldn’t determine whether her guests were from the police, the KGB, or the prosecutor’s office. She didn’t know that there were subtle differences between these raids: some of them were only looking for anti-Soviet dissidents, or petition signers; others for books, yet others only for Jews.

“We burned toilet paper to cover up the stench in the bathroom,” Olga said boldly.

“Do you wipe with paper clips?” Alexandrov poked around in the ashtray resourcefully. He had some idea about what those paper clips might have held together: protest letters with the names of signees attached, issues of the Chronicle.

“What do you expect? Our house is full of office materials. My mother’s a magazine editor.”

Arrogant bitch, Alexandrov thought. He had a great deal of experience.

Olga tried not to look in the direction of the worn-out suitcase standing under the coatrack, half-concealed by a long overcoat of her father’s and her mother’s fur coat. Would they notice? Or wouldn’t they?

That’s when they noticed. Alexandrov, the one who looked like Kosygin, asked Olga to open the suitcase. She opened it, and he glanced casually inside. He understood immediately; then relaxed.

“Now I see how well prepared you were.”

They rummaged around for another hour and a half, just to keep up appearances. In addition to the suitcase, they took one of her mother’s typewriters, her father’s binoculars, Ilya’s favorite camera, and all the address books, including her mother’s. They even took the daily tear-off calendar from the wall. They impounded Ilya’s “golden collection,” photographs of the most brilliant personages of the time: Yakir, Krasin, Alik Ginzburg, the priests Dmitry Dudko, Gleb Yakunin, and Nikolay Eshliman, the writers Daniel and Sinyavsky, and Natalya Gorbanevskaya.

This photographic archive, the only one of its kind, would later come to be called “the dissident archive.” It contained, among others, photographs that were published in the Western press. These were photographs that Ilya had sold to Klaus, a German journalist, and to one other American, as well as the photographs smuggled out through his Belgian friend Pierre, who then distributed them in the West.

When Alexandrov removed the folder containing this archive from the depths of Kostya’s desk, Olga realized that Ilya was now exposed.

An official black Volga was waiting by the door, and another gray one was parked out on the street. They loaded the suitcase, the typewriters, and a sack full of papers into the gray one, and Olga herself into the black one. She sat in the backseat, two of the men pressed against her on either side. They drove her to a two-story building not far away, on Malaya Lubyanka. The building bore a sign that didn’t mince words: “Office of the Committee for State Security for Moscow and the Moscow Region.”

At three in the afternoon, the real interrogation began; or so it seemed to Olga. Alexandrov was sitting in the room, together with a nearly silent captain. He was the first person she had seen that day in a uniform. She didn’t realize that this was merely a conversation, not an interrogation.

What should she say? What should she avoid saying? She wasn’t in the habit of lying. Ilya had warned her to keep her head; that meant she shouldn’t say anything. This, however, seemed like the hardest thing of all. And Olga, despite her best intentions, did start talking—for one hour, two hours, then three. The questions seemed random and insignificant—who are your friends, where do you go, what do you read? They mentioned her former professor, who had emigrated. They knew, naturally, that she had signed letters supporting him, and that she had been expelled from the university in 1965. They even expressed sympathy with her: this guy was spewing all that anti-Soviet nonsense, what use was it to you? You come from good Soviet stock—why did you get mixed up with that sort?

Olga played dumb, without going overboard, saying something about her girlfriends, most of whom she didn’t really see anymore, since they almost all had families to take care of, children, work, and so forth … among her close friends she only named, out of spite, Galya Polukhina; she didn’t think she mentioned a single other person.

Olga was surprised when Alexandrov asked her about Tamara Brin.

“No, we don’t see each other anymore. We used to be friends, before science became her whole life. Now she doesn’t have time for anyone.”

“She doesn’t have time for anyone? What about Marlen Kogan? She spends time with him. She’s studying Hebrew.”

Olga’s eyebrows shot up.

“Really? I had no idea.”

“I ask the questions here; you answer. You seem to consider yourself to be very smart and perceptive, Olga Afanasievna.” He smiled, showing his large teeth, and for a moment Olga was overcome by something like horror. Suddenly she felt naked, vulnerable to a bite or a needle, as soft as a mollusk without its shell. At the same moment, she realized she needed to recover her composure, and she asked to go to the toilet.

Alexandrov made a phone call, and a heavy woman with a large rump came in, then led her down a corridor with unpredictable twists and turns to a WC. There were squares of newsprint hanging from a nail in the wall. Squatting over the toilet, which was clean but had no seat, she began thinking: I wonder what the bathrooms in the FBI look like? Then she laughed out loud, startling her chaperone. This little breather helped her. She was able to gather her thoughts, and even felt a bit stronger. Was he lying about Tamara? Probably not. Why hadn’t Tamara told her anything about herself? Strange, very strange. Could she really have some sort of relationship with Marlen? She hadn’t said a word about it. Silent as the grave. And him—going on about his family obligations, observing all those religious traditions, keeping kosher. All that stuff. She recalled that Marlen never ate anything at their house. He only drank vodka. He said vodka was always kosher. He had a scraggly beard and hair, and an unwieldy body—a big head with unruly curls, broad shoulders, and stumpy legs. But he had brains, that was for sure. It was like he had a whole library in his head, organized by shelves—history, geography, literature. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant; still, it was strange that Tamara had set her sights on him. It just proved that anything was possible.

Then the captain looked at his watch, went out, and returned fifteen minutes later. He looked at his watch again, and mumbled something to Alexandrov. Alexandrov’s tone changed abruptly, as though a command meant just for him were written on the watch.

“Enough of that. Let’s get down to business. Do these books belong to you, or to your husband?”

“They’re mine, of course. I keep my own books at home.”

“All of them are yours?”

“Well, a few of them may have been left behind by other people. Most of them are mine, though.”

“Which of these books are not yours?”

“These are all mine,” Olga said, correcting herself.

“Where did you get them?”

Olga had expected to be asked this question, and she had a ready answer.

“We buy books. We read a lot, and buy a lot of books.”

“Where?”

“Well, you know there’s a black market in Moscow, you can buy anything there: foreign junk, perfume, books…”

“Where is this market?”

“Different places. Some of them I bought near the Kuznetsky Bridge.”

“Be more precise. Where exactly near the Kuznetsky Bridge?”

“There’s a book market in Moscow. They sell all kinds of things there.”

“You mean people stand right there out in the open by Kuznetsky Bridge and offer to sell you stuff like this, for example?” He pulled Avtorkhanov’s book out of the pile. “The Technology of Power?”

“Yes,” Olga said, nodding.

Then he pulled one book after another out of the pile until he lost interest. The captain went out twice; then he came back again.

“What can I tell you, Olga Afanasievna? All this book business qualifies as anti-Soviet agitation and falls under article 190 of the Criminal Code. It carries a penalty of three to five years. Perhaps you weren’t aware of this?” He even seemed to express sympathy with her.

Olga, who had been showered with love, kindness, and understanding from earliest childhood, was more troubled by the ambiguity of her relations with her interlocutor than anything else. He was an unpleasant person, an enemy by definition, but she instinctively continued to rely on her own charms. Flirtatiousness and self-assurance kept breaking through the armor of restraint she had decided to adopt as her modus operandi. But the interlocutor was deaf and devoid of feeling, and she kept getting off track, catching herself in inconsistencies. It was tormenting, all the more because she had no idea how it would all end: whether they would let her go, arrest her, kill her … No, they wouldn’t kill her, of course; but there were moments when she was plunged into fear, a physical, animal fear that exceeded human endurance. And it went on and on.

They questioned her repeatedly about Ilya. About his job. He had a more or less official cover—a document stating that he worked as a research assistant. He was already on his third patron. After his first arrangement with his father-in-law, an academic in the field of agriculture, he had a short stint with a cranky old man, a writer, who broke off relations with him after six months. Now he had an agreement with another writer, a decent sort, who lived in Leningrad. If a ruse became necessary, it was that he was carrying out research for him in the Moscow libraries.

Olga answered all the questions about Ilya with one phrase that was difficult to refute: I don’t know, my husband never spoke to me about it. She gave the impression of an obedient, submissive wife.

“Think hard, Olga Afanasievna. It’s probably best not to cross us. I’m sure your parents would be disappointed, too. Today we were just having a little talk, getting to know each other. Your books will remain here, of course. There are plenty of them—they’ll suffice for five years of prison. Here’s the list of the books. Yes, yes, I know you’ve already signed it. Think about everything we’ve discussed here. We’ll meet again soon, there are still some things we need to talk about. We understand that your husband dragged you into this anti-Soviet activity. Now you must think about it, decide who you … and sign here, too. A nondisclosure clause, about our little conversation.”

Matters seemed to be drawing to a close. The clock on the wall read quarter to eleven.

Alexandrov scribbled something on a piece of paper, and gave it to a woman who had been sitting in the room for a long time. This turned out to be a permit for her to leave. The corridor was a veritable labyrinth, breaking off, turning, then veering off again at strange angles. The length of the journey to the exit didn’t correspond to the rather modest dimensions of the building on the outside.

When she emerged onto the street, she wanted to get a taxi. Not a single car stopped, and she dragged herself, exhausted, through the whole expanse of Dzerzhinsky Square to the metro.

Her parents’ house had been turned inside out, shaken down, violated. How had they managed in such a short time to destroy the propriety and dignity of their well-maintained household? There were footprints all over the parquet floors, books were strewn about everywhere in heaps, a trail of the general’s underwear—piles of long johns and undershirts that had been accumulating on the shelves since the war—fanned out through the spacious hallway. It was a good thing that her mother was already at the dacha for the third night running and didn’t have to witness any of this.

Ilya wasn’t home. Faina Ivanovna, the housekeeper, had left a note on the table: “Olga! I picked up Kostya from school and took him to my house. He’ll spend the night here. I’ll take him to school in the morning. Call me when you get in, Faina.”

If only she had had a mother like Faina—she always did just the right thing, no questions asked. She had raised Olga without a single extra word, and she was helping out with Kostya like no one else in the world knew how. What luck that her mother had gone straight to the dacha after work without stopping off at home!

She called Faina.

“Faina, you’ve been saving me my whole life. I can’t thank you enough.”

Faina grumbled a bit, and cursed under her breath, saying that if Olga kept this up she would leave them.

“If only for the child!” she said, before hanging up the phone. Pure gold. She was pure gold.

After some hesitation, Olga decided to call Maria Fedorovna, Ilya’s mother. She dialed the number, but when no one picked up right away, she hung up. Her exhaustion outstripped her anxiety. She collapsed on the divan and fell asleep immediately. Fifteen minutes later she woke up, choking with fear. It was as though she hadn’t slept at all.

At half past two in the morning, she began to clean up. By morning she had put the house in order.

What could have happened to Ilya? The question gnawed at her and gave her no rest.

She called Galya at work, saying they had to meet right away. An hour later, Galya was sitting in Olga’s kitchen.

“Galya, our house was searched. Do you realize that this all started with the typewriter?” No sooner had Olga begun to talk than Galya broke into tears. “Tell me honestly, did you tell your husband what you were typing? That you had borrowed the typewriter from me?”

Galya swore that her husband knew nothing about the typewriter, nor that she earned extra money as a typist. Moreover, she hadn’t told a single person in the world about it. She swore so vehemently that it was impossible not to believe her. It was a mystery how everything had ended up with the KGB. And why had they waited so long, why hadn’t they come right away?

“Olga, please understand one thing; now I have to tell Gennady everything. Otherwise, it’s as if I set everyone up: you, and Antonina Naumovna, and Gennady, too. He could get into trouble! What else can I do, go out and kill myself? Maybe you think I’m ungrateful—do you think I don’t know how much your family has done for me? But Gennady doesn’t know about that. It has nothing to do with him. He lives a completely different kind of life, his views on everything are different. He has strong ideological principles! Who was the secretary of the Komsomol organization at school, was it me? No, it was you! You were the most Soviet of all of us! Tamara, though she never said it out loud, was anti-Soviet. And I had nothing at all to do with any of that—after I turned twelve all I ever thought about were the uneven bars and the balance beam!”

At that moment, the lock clicked, and Ilya stumbled in. Ilya and Olga embraced as though after a long separation, then clung to each other in exhaustion.

Galya put on her coat and slipped out shrewdly.

“When did they let you go?” Ilya asked, still holding Olga to him.

“At eleven last night. Did they keep you all this time?”

“At first they drove me to my mother’s, and they cleaned everything out. Everything. My darkroom is gone. Then they took me to Malaya Lubyanka. That’s where I’ve been till now.”

After Kostya had started school and they moved to Olga’s Moscow apartment, Ilya had transferred the darkroom to his mother’s, to the broom closet.

“That two-story building? That’s where I was, too.”

“Yes, it’s the Moscow branch. To hell with them. They can all go to hell,” Ilya muttered. And nothing mattered to him just then except his clear-eyed Olga, his wife, his beloved, who was worth more than all the world to him … he’d tried to keep Olga out of it, and to take all the blame upon himself. After all, he was the one who had brought the books into the apartment! He’d tried to extricate Olga from the mess. He could wriggle out of it somehow; if only Olga didn’t have to suffer for it.

Now Olga, with her slightly chapped lips, her pale freckles sprinkled over her white skin, the center of his life, its very heart, stroked his face. He would still have to deal with the branch, but he was determined to keep Olga out of the affair at any cost.

When Antonina Naumovna returned home from work, she received a full account of what had happened from her daughter. Antonina clutched first at her heart, and then at the telephone receiver. She made an appointment the next day with General Ilienko, who was the Writers’ Union liaison with the most vitally significant state organs. They had been on amicable terms since the thirties, when she was just starting her career. They survived the purges, then carried out purges themselves, making short shrift of the formalists, and working together on the Ehrenburg case.

It was hard work, and very unrewarding. Though of the utmost importance. Antonina had no doubts about that.

Ilienko always helped his own people, and now he helped Antonina Naumovna in her hour of need.

The general introduced her to another general, who spoke to her in what she could only feel to be a condescending manner; but in the end, her plea met with success. They returned her typewriters, the old Underwood and the new Optima, the address books, and the manuscripts that had been confiscated during the search. Among the things they gave back to her were some books of Ilya’s—pre-Revolutionary religious texts that Antonina Naumovna was loath even to touch. Most unexpectedly, they even gave back Ilya’s cameras and enlarger. Olga’s Erika was the only thing that wasn’t returned right away. She managed to get it back three months later, by special request. How it had ended up there, who had informed on them, she wasn’t told.

Antonina Naumovna was not given to scandal and emotional upheaval. Moreover, after Olga’s expulsion from the university, she had experienced the bitterness of rupture in the spirit of Fathers and Sons. For this reason she didn’t reproach her daughter. Any hope of a meeting of minds had been uprooted from her heart long before, though she had raised the girl according to her own lights, her own best pedagogical insights. What would Olga say about her grandparents, those misguided religious fanatics?

Antonina’s eyes burned with a dry flame; her lips pursed together once and for all—in her veins ran severe and obdurate Greek blood. When she was young, she had often been mistaken for a Jewess, which caused her a great deal of consternation. Now, later in life, she had acquired a likeness to a Byzantine icon: a fiercely spiritual countenance, devoid of pity or compassion. A Paraskevi of Iconium or St. Irene … though instead of a halo she wore a coarsely crocheted beret or an Astrakhan hat from the Literary Fund store.

Antonina Naumovna’s first thought was to exchange her apartment for two smaller ones. Then she wouldn’t have to see either her daughter or her son-in-law. She reconsidered, however: Would the second apartment go to the state after her death? What about her grandson? He was a good boy, and very attached to his grandfather. Why should he be cheated of his inheritance? No, that wouldn’t do. Besides, someone had to keep an eye on them, the old writer decided. She had long known that the government was watching her lousy son-in-law and Olga at the same time.

After this, Antonina Naumovna changed her schedule. She went to the dacha on weekends and holidays, but not every weekday. Several times a week she visited the young family—always without warning, so that they knew she might drop in at any moment and wouldn’t dare indulge in any anti-Soviet revels and mayhem at home.

Faina continued to work for them. She freed up the careless and irresponsible parents in the evenings, and even allowed them to stay out overnight. Olga and Ilya roamed around from house to house, visiting old friends and meeting interesting new ones.

Life drove a wedge between the old girlfriends. They saw one another now once a year, on Olga’s birthday, June 2. They called one another rarely. This estrangement was natural: each of them had her own life, her own secrets to keep. Their school years were the only thing the girlfriends had left in common, and those memories became ever more faded and insignificant.

In addition to her beloved science, Tamara now had her beloved Marlen. And Galya, besides her husband and her job, had a secret pastime: she was getting treated for infertility, making the rounds of all kinds of medical clinics, homeopaths, herbalists, and even charlatans of every stripe and color.

These were the happiest years in Olga’s life. It was like skating on thin ice: dangerous and exhilarating. The professor who had brought Olga and Ilya together outside the courthouse had served his seven-year prison term, had been released, and had then emigrated.

Neither Olga nor Ilya had been able to see him in the months before his departure, which they both regretted. But he had been inaccessible. Perhaps he didn’t want to see anyone himself; perhaps his wife had erected an iron curtain around him. He left very quietly, almost surreptitiously—the authorities were clearly glad to be rid of him. Moreover, dark rumors about his involvement with the KGB were making the rounds.

During those years, members of the underground, readers and creators of samizdat alike, had quarreled among themselves and broken up into small groups, into sheep and goats. True, it was impossible to distinguish between them, to decide who was a sheep and who was a goat. Even within the small herds and flocks there was no concord. Parallels with the “men of the sixties” of the nineteenth century—“Westernizers” and “Slavophiles”—were too remote to seek. Now everything was much more complicated and splintered. Some were for justice, but against the Motherland; others were against the authorities, but for communism; others wanted true Christianity; still others were nationalists who dreamed of independence for their Lithuania or their western Ukraine; then there were the Jews, who wanted only one thing—to leave the country …

And there was the great truth of literature—Solzhenitsyn wrote book after book. They came out in samizdat, passed from hand to hand in the time-honored pre-Gutenberg manner, on loosely bound, soft, hardly legible pages of onionskin paper. It was impossible to argue with these pages: their truth was so stark and shattering, so naked and terrible—truth about oneself, about one’s own country, about its crimes and sins. And over there, already an emigrant, Olga’s professor, an underground writer with a soiled reputation, but with Western glory, as shrewd, acerbic, and spiteful as a devil, made his damning, ignominious pronouncements, calling Russia a “bitch” and the great writer an “undereducated patriot.”

Tea and vodka poured out in rivers, kitchens basked in the fervent steam of political dispute, so that the dampness crept up the walls to the hidden microphones behind the tiles at the level of the ceiling.

Ilya knew everything and everyone. He was calm and conciliatory in arguments, because he always had his “on the one hand” and “on the other hand” at his disposal … And he told Olga:

“You know, Olga, any position you take limits you, makes you dumber. Even this stool has four legs!”

Olga could only guess at what he was trying to tell her, but she agreed with him in her heart of hearts: the idea of stability appealed to her.

Meanwhile, Tamara, under Marlen’s influence, had temporarily become a Zionist; but endocrinology prevented her from immersing herself completely in the Jewish movement. Her dissertation was almost finished, and the results of her laboratory research were astounding. The hormones had been synthesized, and were working away like good little things in test tubes; all that remained was to test them on a living organism, if only a rabbit.

Vera Samuilovna was thrilled with her former graduate student, who, after graduating from the institute, took a lowly job as a senior lab assistant, with a likewise paltry income, but had nevertheless blossomed into a full-fledged scientist.

Tamara stayed until late in the evenings at the laboratory, then met Marlen by the Molodezhnaya metro station. From eleven to twelve at night they walked together, while Marlen walked his beloved setter, Robik, whom he loved still more for the opportunity he gave him to go out in the evening.

Marlen and Tamara were in the throes of a great and secret love, with all the signs of its exceptional and divinely ordained nature: an abundance of every kind of intimacy, a burning sensation at the slightest touch, an understanding beyond words, the bliss of mutual silence and the thrill of even the most ordinary conversation. Marlen was astonished by Tamara’s magnanimity; she perceived even his failures as merits, never tiring of praising his mind, his erudition, and at the same time his nobility.

She based her judgment about the last quality on his devotion to his children, his family, and the Jewish traditions he had introduced into his home. For some time now his Russian wife had regularly set the table for the Friday night Shabbat ritual and had read the prayer in Hebrew above two candles. Marlen’s Communist ancestors would have rolled over in their graves, but prisoners in Kolyma were not committed to graves. Only his mother, who had by some miracle been spared a fate in the camps, and had gone off her rocker from fear instead, had managed to lie down in a grave in Vostryakovo Cemetery.

The parents of Lida, Marlen’s sweet wife, would have been very surprised about the “kikification” of their daughter. But they knew nothing about her Friday-night family entertainment; and, besides, they loved Marlen for his joviality, his affability, and his eternal readiness to drink moderately, in a non-Russian way, while offering drinks generously to others. They were simple, unpretentious Soviet folk, an engineer and a teacher, who had not yet been informed that Marlen planned to move the whole family to Israel.

After the Shabbat meal, Marlen took Robik out on his leash and walked him to the nearby five-story building where Tamara lived, so that he could spend the Sabbath as the Talmud decreed. Robik lay on the doormat and also had his share of pleasure—he gnawed on a bone specially prepared for this occasion. Raisa Ilinichna sequestered herself in her hundred-square-foot room and didn’t even dare come out to use the bathroom—it was as if she wasn’t there at all.

* * *

Galya was coming up in the world. Her husband found her a suitable position working in the Army Sports Club. She had a job in her own field, and she received a good salary. As a husband, Gennady didn’t disappoint. He was faithful and honest; he always carried out his promises. His own life was not easy. He worked long hours, traveled a great deal, and was enrolled in night courses, which he said were necessary for his professional development. He had been developing for five years already. And this development had already led to an apartment in a brick building in Kuntsevo, and to a good position. The exhortation of the Leader—to learn, learn, and learn—was not lost on him. He attended various courses to expand his qualifications, and he acquired a second higher degree along the way.

The only thing missing was progeny. It was as though fate were mocking them—in a country with the highest number of abortions per capita in the world, Galya happened to be the one whose ovaries backfired and defied the best attempts of all the little seeds, the one who was shunned by this most ordinary of miracles.

* * *

During these years of happiness for Olga, Tamara saw very little of her. The silence got in the way. Tamara’s secret love was already common knowledge, but she never mentioned Marlen in her conversations with Olga. Olga was hurt; this was not the way a friend should behave, not the way women should behave. Female friendship that was not well oiled with exchanges of intimacies about life soon dried up and lost its charm. Even when Marlen and his family were unexpectedly bundled off to Israel, Tamara didn’t say a word to Olga. And there was plenty to say.

After that, hard times began for Olga. Ilya emigrated and everything changed in Olga’s life. All that had once held meaning for her was now meaningless, and nothing emerged to take its place. Ilya’s absence proved to be even stronger than his presence. He became a fixation, and Olga’s thoughts, like the needle on a crazy compass, continually pointed toward him. During these months, before Olga had recovered from the first blow, Tamara came to her side. At first Olga’s illness appeared to be the classic symptoms of an ulcer. But Tamara saw all the signs of depression: Olga lay with her face toward the wall, silent, hardly ever getting out of bed, going without food and almost without water. With her medical acumen, Tamara sensed trouble ahead.

“Olga, it’s like you’ve come to a standstill, you have to make an effort to save yourself. You’ll lose your mind, you’ll get ill! Get rid of it, root it out of your being—you can’t live like this!”

Tamara tried to drag Olga out of her depression. First she took her to a psychologist who received patients in a clinic that was underground, in all senses of the word. Then she took her to a psychiatrist. Olga’s natural resilience, Tamara’s guidance, and antidepressants lifted her out of her doldrums. But soon she started bleeding. Tamara was almost glad, thinking that her bodily ills would save her psyche. But the obsessive thinking and talking about Ilya continued as before. The illness was snuffed out, but the flame of injury, jealousy, and animosity still burned bright. The former Olga, smiling and even-tempered, had nearly disappeared, and had given way to something else—tears, wailing, bouts of hysteria.

The girlfriends absorbed the fallout of these outbursts, taking the burden onto themselves. Galya visited Olga on a regular basis, sympathized with her quietly, and nodded mechanically in agreement. Ilya’s cruel act, his abandonment of Olga, was perfectly in keeping with her view of the world, in which men were bastards, beautiful women were whores, bosses were unfair, and girlfriends were envious of each other. Olga, who was a girlfriend and also beautiful, was an exception. Likewise, Galya’s own story: her husband was a decent man who didn’t run after other women and who turned over his whole salary to his wife. From superstition, she held her tongue about the family happiness she enjoyed—she didn’t want her girlfriends to jinx it inadvertently.

Tamara saw everything in a different light. Galya’s simplistic notions inspired only contempt in her. Tamara didn’t have time for Galya; she was busy rushing around to visit specialists of all kinds with Olga. The doctors had diagnosed cancer, which was progressing rapidly and seemed to be outpacing the medical examinations. The cancer had been caught in its early stages, but it was an aggressive one. It was possible that Olga’s bitterness and hurt fed the illness; science was silent on the matter.

At times, Olga refused treatment. Once she even fled the clinic, the best one of its kind, to which Tamara, using all her own and Vera Samuilovna’s medical connections, had managed to get her admitted. In the end, Olga gave in to Tamara’s importuning and underwent a course of chemotherapy; her health began to improve.

The dynamics of the relationship between the friends changed: Olga lost the upper hand and seemed not to be aware of it. Now Tamara was in charge. Galya ignored this change in relative power and influence. She had perfected the art of keeping silent, observing pauses, not noticing questions, and nodding vaguely. Tamara, who had always considered Galya to be a nonentity, could hardly endure her presence.

Tamara was the only one who still remembered the incident of the typewriter.

* * *

The three girlfriends met for the last time on the occasion of Olga’s birthday, at the general’s dacha, in 1982. They were all thirty-eight. Galya and Tamara arrived at the dacha separately, one by bus, the other by the usual route—the commuter train from Rizhskaya Station. They ran into each other by the gates of the dacha. The gates appeared to be hewn from logs; they were ancient. The grounds were sprawling, and now seemed even more spacious. There was a pond on the property that hadn’t been cleaned for ages and was overgrown with duckweed around the edges. The outlines of a half-rotted boat were visible in the middle of the pond. The two-story house was falling into charming decay. The general had died, Antonina Naumovna had been relieved of her high administrative post, and the dacha looked like a nobleman’s dilapidated estate. Kostya came out to greet the girlfriends. He was already a tall young man with a shock of light hair like Esenin’s, which he kept pushing off his forehead. Physically, he bore a striking resemblance to his father, Vova, but in his mannerisms and his speech he took after Ilya, though without Ilya’s wit. They all exchanged kisses in greeting.

“Mama’s over there,” he said, and led them to the veranda.

Olga was sitting in a wingback chair, her head resting on a tapestry pillow, her little feet in thick knitted slippers, propped up on a low bench. Her hand, which looked more as if it were carved from ivory than like human flesh, lay on a side table that was next to the chair. Everything incidental had drained from Olga’s face; all that was left was a sharp, naked beauty and the illness itself. Her small head was wrapped tightly in a silk kerchief. Then she pulled the kerchief off, revealing the sparse, uneven growth, resembling an auburn hedgehog, underneath. After the chemo, her hair was growing back like a child’s, new and buoyant.

Half a year had passed since Olga had discharged herself from the clinic and had categorically refused any medical treatment. The letter from Ilya had done its work. Now everything was happening not according to science, but according to magic.

Kostya brought sandwiches with caviar and smoked sausage out to the veranda. Antonina Naumovna’s supplies of provisions had not been cut off, Galya observed, accustomed to the government feedbag herself. On this day she had come to say good-bye to Olga, as it had seemed then, forever. But she couldn’t find the words to communicate this: as usual, Tamara’s presence daunted her.

Right before she left, she said she was saying good-bye for a long time, because she and her husband were going abroad. Olga, with seeming indifference, asked her where.

Galya grinned. “Just imagine, we’re going to the Middle East. I can’t say where exactly. Tamara would get too jealous.”

There was no room for doubt about the precise destination. Tamara turned away her head, with its shapely afro. Tamara’s neck was extravagantly long, even disproportionately so; Olga used to joke that she seemed to be able to turn it 360 degrees.

During their school years, Tamara had considered Galya to be a necessary appendage to her beloved Olga, or like a levy placed on her own friendship with her. She merely tolerated her. And she would never have admitted to Olga what she thought of Galya—that she was a lowly plebeian sort, a pest and a nuisance, lacking in wit and talent, and also unkind … not to mention a traitor. Tamara had never forgotten about the typewriter.

Tamara looked in the direction of the pond. So they’re over there, too, those KGB thugs. They’re everywhere, there’s no escaping them … not even in Israel! There’s nowhere to hide from them.

“Oh,” Olga said. “The Middle East. You should learn French.”

“Why French?” Galya said, surprised. “I’m studying English.”

“Will you be gone long?”

“Three years, most likely.”

* * *

Afterward, when she was home on leave, Galya visited Olga—both times during Olga’s fantastical four-year remission, which lasted from the moment Olga received Ilya’s letter until she received the news of his death.

She brought souvenirs with her: Jerusalem crosses, icons, amulets. Olga wasn’t interested in these trinkets for the pious, and all of them migrated gradually into Tamara’s possession. She was thrilled to have them. Olga had become her old self, cheerful and energetic.

The third time Galya came to Moscow, Olga was no longer among the living. Galya already knew about her death. She called Kostya and went to visit their home, which they hadn’t changed or rearranged at all after Olga had died. The only difference was that now it was in complete disarray. Galya brought expensive gifts for Kostya’s children: plastic soldiers with mechanical innards, battery-powered toy cars, and a long-legged doll with clothes that fit her.

When she got home, she cried long and hard over Olga, then called Tamara. It was early evening and they both wept into the telephone. Then Galya asked whether she could come to see her.

“When? Could you come over right now?”

Galya caught a cab and fifteen minutes later she was with Tamara. You couldn’t say they talked—rather, they cried in each other’s arms all evening, their tea growing cold on the table in front of them. They didn’t even bother to turn on the lights. First they cried about Olga, whom they had both loved deeply, then about themselves, and about everything that life had promised and not given, interrupting their tears with silence, and their silence with tears. Then they cried about each other, sympathizing with each other about the things they could never say, and again about Olga. Then Tamara found half a bottle of cognac, and they each drank a glass, and Tamara finally asked the most important question—about the typewriter—for all the betrayal had begun with this machine.

“Didn’t Olga tell you? I told her about it as soon as I found out. My brother, Nikolay, God be with him”—here Galya crossed herself with a sweeping gesture—“took the typewriter and The Gulag Archipelago to the district branch of the KGB. He would never have done anything like that himself. Raika, his wife, God be with her, too”—again she crossed herself, but with less vigor—“she had always hated me, and she talked him into it. They showed Gennady the text of his letter. ‘To intercept an anti-Soviet conspiracy by enemies of the people and to evict my sister Galina Yurievna Polukhina from the apartment,’ Nikolay wrote. The housing authorities were kicking them out of the basement and resettling them in a new apartment, and Raika thought they might end up with a bigger space if I was out of the picture. In the new apartment, they died in a fire that started when they were both drunk.” Again she crossed herself ceremoniously.

Apparently, the mutual shedding of tears softened the invisible crust around Tamara’s heart. She, too, told Galya about what she had kept to herself for so long. After telling her these things, she beseeched, under her breath: “Lord, Lord, forgive me!”

After Marlen’s departure for Israel, and perhaps even before, Tamara had come to love Jesus Christ deeply. This had changed her in many ways.

Why have I hated this unfortunate little fool for so long?

Galya would have liked another drink, but she was too shy to ask. For the first time, Olga’s girlfriend, the clever Tamara, who had hardly paid the slightest bit of attention to her, was opening up to her.

It seems that Olga has brought us together, Galya thought tenderly.

Then Tamara showed her their new, but already aging, apartment. Galya had been to their old room in the communal flat on Sobachaya Square several times, but she had never been invited here. All the furnishings were from their previous life: the piano, an armchair, bookshelves, and photographs. Only the pictures were missing. Galya asked about them, and Tamara laughed.

“You noticed? The paintings are gone.”

“I remember them. There was an angel with an enormous head, blue. Yes, Tamara, I was at your old house a few times. Olga took me with her. I remember the pictures, and I remember your grandmother.”

When it was already after one in the morning Tamara walked Galya out to the taxi. Both of them felt like milk bottles in the hands of a good housewife, ringing with cleanliness after a thorough wash. They didn’t yet know—they still had a great deal to share with each other—what kinds of strange paths had led them to this evening: Tamara, a Jew and former Zionist, who never did leave for Israel, was now a Russian Orthodox Christian; and Galya, the wife of an official at the Russian compound in Jerusalem, occupying what appeared to be a minor post, but which was, in fact, very significant. Over the past few years she had grown to despise everything that had to do with “religious leaders,” priests, rabbis, and all other mullahs, and at the same time, the entire East, with all its stratagems, secrecy, and base insincerity. Still, she was steeped in a warm feeling for the person of Jesus Christ …

“Israel itself is a wonderful country. Too bad you never went there. If only it didn’t have all those religions,” Galya concluded.

Tamara laughed.

“Why do you make the sign of the cross on your forehead, then? You’ve always been a silly girl, Galya, and you still are! How can you acknowledge Christ, but not Christianity?”

Galya composed her poor face into a stern expression, then answered back for the first time in her life:

“You just can, that’s all!”

After so many years of animosity, their relations had become easy and familial.

Galya, in no way offended, said defiantly:

“You’re the silly one, even if you do have a Ph.D. You’ve got your head on backwards!”

Galya and her husband were supposed to be posted to Israel for three more years, but misfortune struck; her husband became very ill, and she returned home for good—wilted, washed out, and covered with tiny wrinkles from the dry sunny heat. Now there were no closer friends in the world than Polushka and Brinchik.

Their story must be told to the end, however. Tamara Grigorievna Brin, a doctor and an esteemed member of the scientific community, managed to talk Galya into getting an endocrinological examination, not in a polyclinic but in a scientific research institute, where they had discovered a substance—a hormone or something of that ilk—that they injected directly into a vein. They did it one more time, and Galya got pregnant. At the age of forty-six, for the first time. If the baby had been a girl, they would have named her Olga. But it was a boy, and they called him Yury.

Tamara had him baptized with the silent consent of the KGB-agent family. Every Sunday Tamara visited Galya to take her godson on an outing. He was a sweet boy, the offspring of two plumbers—fair of hair and blue-eyed. Tamara took him to church and to museums. He called her Godmama.

When they returned from their outings, Tamara would drink tea with Gennady. Just as Ilya had predicted. He had been, of course, the Rodent, and so he would remain. Never mind. God bless him. After his heart attack, he suffered a stroke and emerged from it only half-alive. His healthy side continued to drag his paralyzed side along. Poor Galya. But now Tamara would just murmur: Lord, grant me the ability to see my own errors and not to judge my brother …

And Tamara felt relieved.