A Hero's Daughter Part 3

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

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

"Yes, not bad. But there's no b.u.t.ter."

"There's b.u.t.ter to be had across the road today, at the Gastronom. But there's a line a mile long!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Isn't that just typical! These veterans! Let them buy their b.u.t.ter in their own store!"

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

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

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

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

"Kuzminichna, come in front of me. Maybe we can get some of this b.u.t.ter."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was borne to the front of the building by a closely packed crowd... No one had noticed a thing. It was only on the steps that, as it dispersed, the crowd let her go. Tatyana collapsed gently. The b.u.t.ter and the veteran's pa.s.s fell out of her bag. People stumbled against her body. Some moved away hastily, others bent over her. The merry little bystander roared with laughter: "Well, what do you know? The little mother's taken a drop too many in advance of tomorrow's celebration!" Aunt Valya pushed aside the gaping onlookers, came up to her and called out in piercing tones: "Help! Look! This woman's been taken ill! Quickly, someone call an ambulance!"

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

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

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

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

Ivan hardly saw anything of his daughter. It was only on the last night, when the weary relatives had left them, that he came face to face with Olya. They were sitting one each side of the coffin, completely exhausted by the ceaseless agitation of the women fussing around, by the day's endless and meaningless whisperings. Ivan looked at his daughter and thought: "She's a woman now. She's of an age to get married. It seems only yesterday that Tatyana was wrapping her in swaddling clothes. How time flies! Nursery school, grade school, and now Moscow, the Inst.i.tute... She needs to find a good man, one who doesn't drink... a soldier... Although those guys. .h.i.t the bottle nowadays like n.o.body's business...! I must speak to her. Now that we're burying her mother..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During those two years that had followed the Olympic Games Olya had come to understand what Vitaly Ivanovich had referred to as the very "specific" nature of the work. Now she knew what interested him and his colleagues. And she knew how to extract this skillfully from a foreigner. How ridiculous that ruse of ean-Claude's seemed to her now, suddenly needing a translation! She used it herself quite often these days, in order to establish contact with "interesting" foreigners. But she had a great many other tricks, too. The names of her foreign acquaintances made up a continual procession: each one might last for a week, or a month, or a year. There was a certain Richard, an Alain... a John, a Jonathan, a Steven... Indeed, there were even two Jonathans, one English, one American. Their voices jostled one another in her memory in a confused chorus. s.n.a.t.c.hes of their confidences rose to the surface. One of them bore the t.i.tle of "Honorable" and was very proud of it. Another was an enthusiastic mountaineer and went rock climbing in New Zealand. Another used to a.s.sert that everywhere you go in the USSR you run into people from the KGB. All of this and much more besides was pa.s.sed on in the reports Olya diligently submitted to Vitaly Ivanovich. And sometimes details no one had any use for resurfaced, even though the people to whom they belonged had become confused in her memory: a shoulder covered in freckles, the glow from a face that resembled a pale mask in the heavy darkness of the bedroom...

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

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

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

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

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

"Why not?" the voices asked in amazement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing did change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, by way of a joke, Ninka and Svetka would start arguing: "You've got it made," the Hungarian would say. "You sit there in the warm. Your paycheck arrives once a month. They bring you a client on a silver platter: 'Here you are, Madam. Be so kind as to bid him welcome and take care of him.' While we freeze to death just like those poor wretched wh.o.r.es at railroad stations. The cops take their three rubles from us. And our sisters, the G.o.dd.a.m.ned b.i.t.c.hes, are forever ratting on us to cut out the compet.i.tion..."