Part 13 (2/2)
His sober tone unsettled her, as did the way he suddenly started scrutinizing her.
”It takes strength to keep quiet, Anna.” He drew her to him; her head sank against his shoulder. ”Maybe keeping your mouth shut is a stupid male virtue, but it's a virtue all the same.”
She was tempted to leave it at that. Why did she want to ease her conscience? Because she was hoping for Alexey's forgiveness. Would she actually be telling him anything new? Of what use would it be to him to know that Anna reported their conversations to the KGB? And yet, it didn't make very much sense to keep up a lie just because the truth was unattractive.
She tried another tack: ”The only person I ever see around you is Anton,” she observed. ”Don't you have any protection besides your driver?”
”How do you mean?” He smiled, but she could sense the alertness in his gaze.
”I never see any security people around you.”
”Do you have the impression that I'm in danger?”
In the long silence that followed this question, Anna realized that the time for innocent chatter had pa.s.sed, and that she couldn't go back. ”After all, you're ... you're an official of the Soviet Union, a bearer of state secrets.”
”I was in danger once upon a time, many years ago now. And ever since then, everything that's come afterward has seemed harmless.” He undid the top b.u.t.ton of his s.h.i.+rt. ”I've never told you about my family.”
His offer to talk about himself was so unexpected and direct that Anna could muster only a mute nod.
”My father was a civil servant in Kharkov, in Ukraine. He carried out the land surveying for the kolkhozes in an enormous area between the Donets and the Don. His frequent travels and his influence as a survey official made him a prominent person. He was a veteran member of the Party and presided over the provincial government.” Alexey looked outside, where a group of young people was strolling toward the limousine. Not imagining that they were being observed through the window, the youths stopped right in front of Bulyagkov.
”Then came the time when Vradiyev's show trial was being prepared. He'd been relieved of his positions as premier of the Ukrainian SSR and chairman of the Economic Affairs Council, accused of nationalistic deviation and factional activity, and called upon to perform unsparing self-criticism. Our family had the bad luck to be related to Vradiyev on my mother's side. At every show trial, care was taken to produce a series of subordinate accomplices who were prepared to testify against the main defendant. My father was a.s.sured that the Party was aware of his achievements and that the court would declare a verdict in appearance only; as soon as the dust settled, he would be granted a pardon. When my father declined to take part in the deception, he was arrested.”
Alexey kept his eyes fixed on the window, so that he seemed to be telling his story to the young people outside.
”My father was chained hand and foot and put in an underground cell. His jailers pumped in cold water through the ventilation flaps and threatened to drown him. There were other tortures, and he held out against them all for three months before he signed the first confession. In the meantime, we had no news of him. My mother asked all his old Party friends for help; they either remained silent or pretended they were out. She received a single letter from the prison. The handwriting was my father's, and the letter stated that he wasn't afraid. He was a true communist, he wrote, and as such had nothing to fear from the state security agency, which was the iron fist of the people's democracy and struck only its enemies. When she read that letter, my mother knew he was lost. She sent my sister and me to an uncle who lived outside Ukraine. Because my uncle forbade me to show myself in public until everything was over, I had to break off my pursuit of a degree in physics.” Alexey turned to Anna. ”For a whole year, I did nothing but wait.”
”What happened to your father?”
”He had to go through the whole procedure. Right on cue, before the trial began, the state security headquarters turned into a convalescent home; the accused were given medical care and nursed back to health. In the meantime, a committee of experts had underpinned the vague accusations against Vradiyev with technical details. He was now accused of economic sabotage. The defendants who'd been selected for the show trial were a.s.signed teachers, with whose help they learned question-and-answer texts and-above all-their confessions, verbatim and by heart. The same scripts were distributed to the judges. The trial took place in the Great Hall of the People's Army Retirement Home in Kharkov. The only spectators allowed in were dependable factory delegates, people from the kolkhozes, and some selected journalists. The proceedings were broadcast on the radio.”
Outside, one of the young people inadvertently b.u.mped against the window. His friends suggested that he should watch what he was doing and pulled him away in the direction of the market. Meanwhile the impact had awakened the birds, which ventured a duet of tentative peeping.
”First, Vradiyev's prestige was dragged through the mud,” Bulyagkov went on. ”He was 'convicted' of being a separatist of long standing who'd collaborated with fascist stool pigeons in the early forties. But before he admitted his guilt and requested the severest penalty, the squad of co-defendants had to perform. My father spluttered during his confession and lost his power of speech. The court was obliged to have the confession that had been tortured out of him read aloud.”
The two birds were now merrily chirping away; inside the automobile, their singing sounded unusually loud.
”Vradiyev was sentenced to death by hanging. Many of the others received a sentence of life imprisonment. My father got twenty years of forced labor.” Bulyagkov leaned toward the cage and tapped its bars with one finger.
”And then?” Anna gazed at the white nape of his neck.
”It was a good year, nineteen hundred and fifty-three,” he said, smiling and turning around. She didn't grasp his meaning right away. ”On the fifth of March, nineteen hundred and fifty-three, Stalin died. The following December, my father was rehabilitated. Not long after that, in an antishow trial, the Ukrainian chief prosecutor, as well as the head of the secret police, was condemned and executed.”
”And how about you?” she asked, touching his shoulder. ”Did you go back to Kharkov?”
”I went to Moscow with my uncle.”
”Why? I don't understand ... When did you see your father again?”
”We buried him a month after he was set free.”
The birds had fallen silent; tilting their little heads, they stared at the big human finger that was stroking the bars of their cage.
”His back was completely crooked, he had a broken thigh bone that never healed right, and he couldn't digest solid food anymore. He died from a rapidly spreading deterioration of his mucous membranes. Soon after his funeral, my mother and sister left Kharkov, never to return.”
Anna removed her hand from his shoulder and leaned against the car door. ”Why are you telling me this, Alexey?” She examined the man beside her: bent forward, sweat running down his temples.
”To make it clear to you how much better everything is these days. Up until the end, my father remained a fervent member of the Party, because he believed in its self-healing powers. Today, things like what happened to him don't happen anymore. Checks on governmental ent.i.ties are strict and correctly applied. Such an arbitrary power apparatus would be impossible in our Soviet Union.”
Anna nodded, but the situation made her uneasy. She'd wanted to make a confession and unexpectedly found herself listening to his. The shadowy, enclosed s.p.a.ce, the frightened birds, and Alexey, divulging incidents that, in current practice, remained unmentioned ... Why this sudden openness? What was his purpose in revealing himself to be the son of a convicted enemy of the people? Back at their first appointment, Alexey had suggested that he'd climbed as high in the nomenklatura as a non-Russian could. Didn't his story throw a different light on his career? Anna sat there, rigid with concentration, while a silhouette approached the car.
The front door opened and Anton climbed in. He was balancing two paper plates of shashlik in one hand.
”No beer?” Bulyagkov asked.
Anton handed them the food and then pulled two bottles out of his overcoat pockets. ”There aren't any gla.s.ses.”
The Deputy Minister thanked Anton and told him to drive off; they'd eat on the way, he said.
”Careful, hot,” said Anton, then he closed the door and started the engine.
FIFTEEN.
March was uncommonly mild. Now that it was getting dark later and later, Anna found her workdays longer than usual. She caught herself holding a dripping brush in her hand and gazing out of the window openings of her worksite, searching the treetops for signs of the first green fuzz. A long spring lay ahead of her, followed by a difficult summer, and an interminable stretch of time would pa.s.s before the leaves would begin to change color again. In the bus on the way back, she enjoyed the last rays of the sun and told herself as persuasively as she could that something had to happen during the coming season, something that would steer her life in a new direction. But didn't everyone wish for that at the beginning of every spring?
When she got home, she didn't feel like cooking, so she put some bread and sausage on the table. Petya was having an afternoon nap. As though they were on a picnic, Viktor Ipalyevich took out his clasp knife and started cutting the sausage into thin slices.
”Do you remember the show trials?” Anna asked as she stirred the b.u.t.termilk.
”What put that in your head?” He looked at her with red-rimmed eyes; since his volume of poetry had started to take shape, he often worked until dawn.
”What was it like, when they were going on? I really don't know anything about them.”
He peeled back the sausage casing so that he could cut more slices.
”You were a prominent person. Weren't you ever called before any of the tribunals?”
”Who would want to question a poet?”
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