‘Now fifteen years have passed and we’re farther behind than ever. And Natalya tells me the East European countries have also fallen behind their neighbours. They’re kept quiet only by massive subsidies from us.’
Tania nodded. ‘It’s a good thing we have huge exports of oil and other raw materials to help us pay the bills.’
‘But it’s not enough. Look at East Germany. We have to have a damn wall to stop people escaping to capitalism.’
Grigori stirred. Tania felt guilty. She had been questioning her grandfather’s fundamental beliefs while sitting at his death bed.
The door opened and a stranger walked in. He was an old man, thin and bent but immaculately dressed. He had on a dark-grey suit that was moulded to his body like something worn by the hero in a movie. His white shirt gleamed and his red tie glowed. Such clothes could only come from the West. Tania had never met him but, all the same, there was something familiar about him. This must be Lev.
He ignored Tania and Dimka and looked at the man in the bed.
Grandfather Grigori gave him a look that said he knew the visitor but could not quite place him.
‘Grigori,’ the newcomer said. ‘My brother. How did we get so old?’ He spoke a queer old-fashioned dialect of Russian with the harsh accent of a Leningrad factory worker.
‘Lev,’ said Grigori. ‘Is it really you? You used to be so handsome!’
Lev leaned over and kissed his brother on both cheeks, then they embraced.
Grigori said: ‘You got here just in time. I’m about done for.’
A woman about eighty years old followed Lev in. She was dressed, Tania thought, like a prostitute, in a stylish black dress and high heels, make-up and jewellery. Tania wondered whether it was normal for old women to dress that way in America.
‘I saw some of your grandchildren in the next room,’ Lev said. ‘They’re a fine bunch.’
Grigori smiled. ‘The joy of my life. How about you?’
‘I have a daughter by Olga, the wife I never much liked, and a son by Marga here, whom I preferred. I wasn’t much of a father to either of my children. I never had your sense of responsibility.’
‘Any grandchildren?’
‘Three,’ Lev said. ‘One’s a movie star, one’s a pop singer, and one’s black.’
‘Black?’ said Grigori. ‘How did that happen?’
‘It happened the usual way, idiot. My son Greg – named for his uncle, by the way – he fucked a black girl.’
‘Well, that’s more than his uncle ever did,’ said Grigori, and the two old men chuckled.
Grigori said: ‘What a life I’ve had, Lev. I stormed the Winter Palace. We destroyed the tsars and built the first Communist country. I defended Moscow against the Nazis. I’m a general and Volodya is a general. I feel so guilty about you.’
‘Guilty about me?’
‘You went to America and missed it all,’ Grigori said.
‘I have no complaints,’ said Lev.
‘I even got Katerina, though she preferred you.’
Lev smiled. ‘And all I got was a hundred million dollars.’
‘Yes,’ said Grigori. ‘You got the worst of the deal. I’m sorry, Lev.’
‘It’s okay,’ said Lev. ‘I forgive you.’ He was being ironic but, Tania thought, Grigori did not seem to realize that.
Uncle Volodya came in. He was on his way to some army ceremony, wearing his general’s uniform. Tania realized with a sudden shock that this was the first time he had seen his real father. Lev stared at the son he had never met. ‘My God,’ Lev said. ‘He looks like you, Grigori.’
‘He’s yours, though,’ said Grigori.
Father and son shook hands.
Volodya said nothing, seeming to be in the grip of an emotion so powerful that he could not speak.
Lev said: ‘When you lost me as a father, Volodya, you didn’t lose much.’ Keeping hold of his son’s hand, he looked him up and down: gleaming boots, Red Army uniform, combat medals, piercing blue eyes, iron-grey hair. ‘I did, though,’ Lev said. ‘I guess I lost a lot.’
* * *
As she left the apartment, Tania found herself wondering where the Bolsheviks had gone wrong, where Grandfather Grigori’s idealism and energy had been perverted into tyranny. She went to the bus stop, heading for a rendezvous with Vasili. On the bus, thinking over the early years of the Russian revolution, she wondered whether Lenin’s decision to close all newspapers except the Bolshevik ones had been the key error. It meant that, right from the start, alternative ideas had had no circulation and the conventional wisdom could never be challenged. Gorbachev in Stavropol was exceptional in having been allowed to try something different. Such people were generally stifled. Tania was a journalist, and suspected herself of egocentrically overrating the importance of a free press, but it seemed to her that the lack of critical newspapers made it much easier for other forms of oppression to flourish.
It was now four years since Vasili had been released. In that time he had shrewdly rehabilitated himself. At the Agriculture Ministry he had devised an educational radio serial set on a collective farm. As well as the dramas about unfaithful wives and disobedient children, the characters discussed agricultural techniques. Naturally, the peasants who ignored advice from Moscow were lazy and shiftless, and the wayward teenagers who questioned the Communist Party’s authority were the ones who were jilted by their boyfriends or failed their exams. The serial was a huge success. Vasili returned to Radio Moscow and was given an apartment in a block occupied by writers approved by the government.
Their meetings were clandestine, but Tania also ran into him occasionally at union events or private parties. He was no longer the walking cadaver that had returned from Siberia in 1972. He had put on weight and regained some of his former presence. Now in his mid-forties, he would never again be movie-star handsome; but the lines of strain on his face somehow added to his allure. And he still had buckets of charm. Each time Tania saw him he was with a different woman. They were not the nubile teenagers who had adored him in his thirties, though perhaps they were the middle-aged women those teenagers had become: smart females in chic clothes and high-heeled shoes, who always seemed able to get hold of scarce nail varnish, hair dye and stockings.
Tania met him secretly once a month.
Each time he would bring her the latest instalment of the book he was working on, written in the small, neat handwriting he had developed in Siberia to save paper. She would type it for him, correcting his spelling and punctuation where necessary. At their next meeting she would hand him the typescript for review and discuss it with him.
Millions of people around the world bought Vasili’s books, but he never met any of them. He could not even read the reviews, which were written in foreign languages and published in Western newspapers. So Tania was the only person with whom he could discuss his work, and he listened hungrily to everything she had to say. She was his editor.
Tania went to Leipzig every March to cover the book fair there, and each time she met with Anna Murray. She always came back with a present for Vasili from Anna – an electric typewriter, a cashmere overcoat – and news of even more money piling up in his London bank account. He would probably never get to spend any of it.
She still took careful precautions when meeting him. Today she got off the bus a mile from the rendezvous, and made sure she was not being followed while she walked to the café, called Josef’s. Vasili was already there, sitting at a table with a vodka glass in front of him. On the chair beside him was a large buff envelope. Tania waved casually, as if they were acquaintances meeting by chance. She got a beer from the bar then sat opposite Vasili.
She was happy to see him looking so well. His face had a dignity he had not possessed fifteen years earlier. He still had soft brown eyes, but nowadays they were keenly perceptive as often as they twinkled with mischief. She realized there was no one, outside her family, whom she knew better. She knew his strengths: imagination, intelligence, charm, and the gritty determination that had enabled him to survive and keep writing for a decade in Siberia. She also knew his weaknesses, the main one of which was an irresistible urge to seduce.
‘Thanks for the tip about Stavropol,’ she said. ‘I’ve done a nice piece.’
‘Good. Let’s just hope the whole experiment doesn’t get stamped on.’
She handed Vasili the last episode, typed out, and nodded at the envelope. ‘Another chapter?’
‘The last.’ He gave it to her.
‘Anna Murray will be happy.’ Vasili’s new novel was called
First Lady.
In it the American President’s wife – as it might be, Pat Nixon – got lost in Moscow for twenty-four hours. Tania marvelled at Vasili’s power of invention. Seeing life in the USSR through the eyes of a well-meaning conservative American was a richly comic way to criticize Soviet society. She slipped the envelope into her shoulder bag.
Vasili said: ‘When can you take the whole thing to the publisher?’
‘As soon as I get a foreign trip. At the latest, next March, in Leipzig.’
‘March?’ Vasili was disappointed. ‘That’s six months away,’ he said in a tone of reproof.
‘I’ll try to get an assignment where I could meet her.’
‘Please do.’
Tania was offended. ‘Vasili, I risk my damn life to do this for you. Get someone else, if you can, or do the job yourself. Hell, I wouldn’t mind.’
‘Of course.’ He was immediately contrite. ‘I’m sorry. I have so much invested in it – three years’ work, all in the evenings after I come home from my job. But I have no right to be impatient with you.’ He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. ‘You’ve been my lifeline, more than once.’
She nodded. It was true.
All the same, she still felt cross with him as she walked away from the café with the ending of his novel in her bag. What was bugging her? It was those women in high-heeled shoes, she decided. She felt that Vasili should have grown out of that phase. Promiscuity was adolescent. He demeaned himself by showing up at every literary party with a different date. By now he should have settled down in a serious relationship with a woman who was his equal. She could be younger, perhaps, but she should be able to match his intelligence and appreciate his work, perhaps even help him with it. He needed a partner, not a series of trophies.
She went to the
TASS
office. Before she reached her desk she was accosted by Pyotr Opotkin, the editor-in-chief for features, the department’s political overseer. As always, a cigarette dangled from his lips. ‘I’ve had a call from the Agriculture Ministry. Your piece on Stavropol can’t go out,’ he said.
‘What? Why not? The bonus system has been passed by the Ministry. And it works.’
‘Wrong.’ Opotkin liked to tell people they were wrong. ‘It’s been scrapped. There’s a new approach, the Ipatovo Method. They send fleets of combine harvesters all over the region.’
‘Central control again, instead of individual responsibility.’
‘Exactly.’ He took the cigarette from his mouth. ‘You’ll have to write a completely new article about the Ipatovo Method.’
‘What does the regional First Secretary say?’
‘Young Gorbachev? He’s implementing the new system.’
Of course he was, Tania reflected. He was an intelligent man. He knew when to shut up and do as he was told. Otherwise, he would not have become First Secretary.
‘All right,’ she said, stifling her anger. ‘I’ll write a new piece.’
Opotkin nodded and walked away.
It had been too good to be true, Tania thought: a new idea, bonuses paid for good results, improved harvests in consequence, no input required from Moscow. It was a miracle the system had been permitted for a few years. In the long run, such a system was totally out of the question.
Of course it was.
52
George Jakes wore a new tuxedo. He looked pretty good in it, he thought. At forty-two he no longer had the wrestler’s physique he had been so proud of in his youth, but he was still slim and straight, and the black-and-white wedding uniform flattered him.
He stood in the Bethel Evangelical Church, which his mother had been attending for decades, in the Washington suburb he now represented as congressman. It was a low brick building, small and plain, and normally it was decorated only with a few framed quotations from the Bible: ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ and ‘In the beginning was the Word’. But today it was decked out for celebration, with streamers and ribbons and masses of white flowers. The choir was belting out ‘Soon Come’ while George waited for his bride.
In the front row, his mother wore a new dark-blue suit and a matching pillbox hat with a little veil. ‘Well, I’m glad,’ Jacky had said when George told her he was getting married. ‘I’m fifty-eight years old, and I’m sorry you waited so gosh-darn long, but I’m happy you got here in the end.’ Her tongue was always sharp, but today she could not keep the proud smile from her face. Her son was getting married in her church, in front of all her friends and neighbours, and on top of that he was a congressman.
Next to her was George’s father, Senator Greg Peshkov. Somehow he was able to make even a tuxedo look like creased pyjamas. He had forgotten to put cufflinks in his shirt, and his bow tie looked like a dead moth. No one minded.
Also in the front row were George’s Russian grandparents, Lev and Marga, now in their eighties. Both looked frail, but they had flown from Buffalo for the wedding of their grandson.
By showing up at the wedding, and sitting in the front row, George’s white father and grandparents were admitting the truth to the world; but no one cared. This was 1978, and what had once been a secret disgrace now hardly mattered.
The choir began to sing ‘You Are So Beautiful’ and everyone turned and looked back towards the church door.
Verena came in on the arm of her father, Percy Marquand. George gasped when he saw her, and so did several people in the congregation. She wore a daring off-the-shoulder white dress that was tight to mid-thigh then flared to a train. The caramel skin of her bare shoulders was as soft and smooth as the satin of her dress. She looked so wonderful it hurt. George felt tears sting his eyes.