‘Did you know that her first husband brought her to Moscow from Perm and got her the job with the steel union?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Then she left him.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Her mother told me.’
‘All Nina got from me was a baby.’
‘And an apartment in Government House.’
‘You think she’s some kind of gold-digger?’
‘I worry about you. You’re so smart about everything – except women.’
‘Nina is a little materialistic. It’s not the worst of sins.’
‘So you don’t mind.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Okay. But if she hurts my brother, I’ll scratch her eyes out.’
* * *
Daniil came and sat opposite Tania in the canteen at the
TASS
building. He put down his tray and tucked a handkerchief into his shirt collar to protect his tie. Then he said: ‘The people at
New World
like
Frostbite
.’
Tania was thrilled. ‘Good!’ she said. ‘It took them long enough – it must be at least six months. But that’s great news!’
Daniil poured water into a plastic tumbler. ‘It will be one of the most daring things they’ve ever printed.’
‘So they’re going to publish?’
‘Yes.’
She wished she could tell Vasili. But he would have to find out on his own. She wondered if he was able to get the magazine. It must be available at libraries in Siberia. ‘When?’
‘They haven’t decided. But they don’t do anything in a hurry.’
‘I’ll be patient.’
* * *
Dimka was awakened by the phone. A woman’s voice said: ‘You don’t know me, but I have information for you.’
Dimka was confused. The voice belonged to Natalya. He threw a guilty look at his wife, Nina, lying beside him. Her eyes were still closed. He looked at the clock: it was five-thirty in the morning.
Natalya said: ‘Don’t ask questions.’
Dimka’s brain started to work. Why was Natalya pretending to be a stranger? She wanted him to do the same, obviously. Was it for fear that his tone of voice would betray his fondness for her to the wife beside him in bed?
He played along. ‘Who are you?’
‘They’re plotting against your boss,’ she said.
Dimka realized that his first interpretation had been wrong. What Natalya feared was that the phone might be tapped. She wanted to be sure Dimka did not say anything to reveal her identity to the listening KGB.
He felt the chill of fear. True or false, this meant trouble for him. He said: ‘Who is plotting?’
Beside him, Nina opened her eyes.
Dimka shrugged helplessly, miming: ‘I have no idea what is going on.’
‘Leonid Brezhnev is approaching other Presidium members about a coup.’
‘Shit.’ Brezhnev was one of the half-dozen most powerful men under Khrushchev. He was also conservative and unimaginative.
‘He has Podgorny and Shelepin on his side already.’
‘When?’ said Dimka, disobeying the instruction not to ask questions. ‘When will they strike?’
‘They will arrest Comrade Khrushchev when he returns from Sweden.’ Khrushchev was planning a trip to Scandinavia in June.
‘But why?’
‘They think he’s losing his mind,’ said Natalya, and then the connection was broken.
Dimka hung up and said ‘Shit’ again.
‘What is it?’ Nina said sleepily.
‘Just work problems,’ Dimka said. ‘Go back to sleep.’
Khrushchev was not losing his mind, though he was depressed, see-sawing between manic cheerfulness and deep gloom. At the root of his disquiet was the agricultural crisis. Unfortunately, he was easily seduced by quick-fix solutions: miracle fertilizers, special pollination, new strains. The one proposal he would not consider was relaxing central control. All the same, he was the Soviet Union’s best hope. Brezhnev was no reformer. If he became leader, the country would go backwards.
It was not just Khrushchev’s future that worried Dimka now: it was his own. He had to reveal this phone call to Khrushchev: on balance that was less dangerous than concealing it. But Khrushchev was still enough of a peasant to punish the bringer of bad news.
Dimka asked himself whether this was the moment to jump ship, and leave Khrushchev’s service. It would not be easy: apparatchiks generally went where they were told. But there were ways. Another senior figure could be persuaded to request that a young aide be transferred to his office, perhaps because the aide’s special skills were needed. It could be arranged. Dimka could try for a job with one of the conspirators, Brezhnev perhaps. But what was the point of that? It might save his career, but to no purpose. Dimka was not going to spend his life helping Brezhnev hold back progress.
However, if he was to survive, he and Khrushchev needed to be ahead of this conspiracy. The worst thing they could do would be to wait and see what happened.
Today was 17 April 1964, Khrushchev’s seventieth birthday. Dimka would be the first to congratulate him.
In the next room, Grigor began to cry.
Dimka said: ‘The phone woke him.’
Nina sighed and got up.
Dimka washed and dressed quickly, then wheeled his motorcycle out of the garage and rode fast to Khrushchev’s residence in the suburb called Lenin Hills.
He arrived at the same time as a van bringing a birthday present. He watched as security men carried into the living room a huge new radio-television console with a metal plaque inscribed: F
ROM YOUR COMRADES AT WORK IN THE
C
ENTRAL
C
OMMITTEE AND THE
C
OUNCIL OF
M
INISTERS
.
Khrushchev often grumpily told people not to waste public money buying him presents, but everyone knew he was secretly happy to receive them.
Ivan Tepper, the butler, showed Dimka upstairs to Khrushchev’s dressing room. A new dark suit hung ready to be put on for the day of congratulatory ceremonies. Khrushchev’s three Hero of Socialist Labour stars were already pinned to the breast of the jacket. Khrushchev sat in a robe drinking tea and looking at the newspapers.
Dimka told him about the phone call while Ivan helped Khrushchev on with his shirt and tie. The KGB wiretap on Dimka’s phone, if there was one, would confirm his story that the call was anonymous, supposing that Khrushchev checked. Natalya had been clever, as always.
‘I don’t know whether it’s important or not, and I didn’t think it was for me to decide,’ Dimka said cautiously.
Khrushchev was dismissive. ‘Aleksandr Shelepin isn’t ready to be leader,’ he said. Shelepin was a deputy prime minister and former head of the KGB. ‘Nikolai Podgorny is narrow. And Brezhnev isn’t suited either. Do you know they used to call him the Ballerina?’
‘No,’ said Dimka. It was hard to imagine anyone less like a dancer than the stocky, graceless Brezhnev.
‘Before the war, when he was secretary of Dnepropetrovsk province.’
Dimka saw that he was supposed to ask the obvious question. ‘Why?’
‘Because anyone could turn him round!’ said Khrushchev. He laughed heartily and put his jacket on.
So the threatened coup was dismissed with a joke. Dimka was relieved that he was not being condemned for crediting stupid reports. But one worry was replaced by another. Was Khrushchev’s intuition right? His instincts had proved reliable in the past. But Natalya always got news first, and Dimka had never known her to be wrong.
Then Khrushchev picked up another thread. His sly peasant eyes narrowed and he said: ‘Do these petty plotters have a reason for their discontent? The anonymous caller must have told you.’
This was an embarrassing question. Dimka did not dare tell Khrushchev that people thought he was mad. Desperately improvising, he said: ‘The harvest. They blame you for last year’s drought.’ He hoped this was so implausible it would be inoffensive.
Khrushchev was not offended, but irritated. ‘We need new methods!’ he said angrily. ‘They must listen to Lysenko!’ He fumbled his jacket buttons then let Tepper do them up.
Dimka kept his face expressionless. Trofim Lysenko was a scientific charlatan, a clever self-promoter who had won Khrushchev’s favour even though his research was worthless. He promised improved yields that never materialized, but he managed to persuade political leaders that his opponents were ‘anti-progress’, an accusation that was as fatal in the USSR as ‘Communist’ was in the US.
‘Lysenko performs experiments on cows,’ Khrushchev went on. ‘His rivals use fruit flies! Who gives a shit about fruit flies?’
Dimka recalled his Aunt Zoya talking about scientific research. ‘I believe the genes evolve faster in fruit flies—’
‘Genes?’ said Khrushchev. ‘Rubbish! No one has ever seen a gene.’
‘No one has ever seen an atom, but that bomb destroyed Hiroshima.’ Dimka regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth.
‘What do you know about it?’ Khrushchev roared. ‘You’re just repeating what you’ve heard, parrot-fashion! Unscrupulous people use innocents like you to spread their lies.’ He shook his fist. ‘We will get improved yields. You’ll see! Get out of my way.’
Khrushchev pushed past Dimka and left the room.
Ivan Tepper gave Dimka an apologetic shrug.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Dimka. ‘He’s got mad at me before. He won’t remember this tomorrow.’ He hoped it was true.
Khrushchev’s rage was not as worrying as his misapprehensions. He was wrong about agriculture. Andrei Kosygin, who was the best economist in the Presidium, had plans for reform that involved loosening the grip that ministries held on agriculture and other industries. That was the way to go, in Dimka’s opinion; not miracle cures.
Was Khrushchev just as wrong about the plotters? Dimka did not know. He had done his best to warn his boss. He could not start a counter-coup on his own.
Going down the stairs, he heard applause from the open door of the dining room. Khrushchev was receiving congratulations from the Presidium. Dimka paused in the hall. When the applause died down, he heard the slow bass voice of Brezhnev. ‘Dear Nikita Sergeyevitch! We, your close comrades in arms, members and candidate members of the Presidium and secretaries of the Central Committee, extend special greetings and fervently congratulate you, our closest personal friend and comrade, on your seventieth birthday.’
It was fulsome even by Soviet standards.
Which was a bad sign.
* * *
A few days later, Dimka was given a dacha.
He had to pay, but the rent was nominal. As with most luxuries in the Soviet Union, the difficulty was not the price but getting to the head of the queue.
A dacha – a weekend home or holiday villa – was the first ambition of upwardly mobile Soviet couples. (The second was a car.) Dachas were normally granted only to Communist party members, naturally.
‘I wonder how we got it?’ Dimka mused after opening the letter.
Nina thought there was no mystery. ‘You work for Khrushchev,’ she said. ‘You should have been given one long ago.’
‘Not necessarily. It generally takes a few more years of service. I can’t think of anything I’ve done recently that has been especially pleasing to him.’ He recalled the argument about genes. ‘In fact, just the opposite.’
‘He likes you. Someone handed him a list of vacant dachas and he put your name next to one. He didn’t think about it for longer than five seconds.’
‘You’re probably right.’
A dacha could be anything from a palace by the sea to a hut in a field. The following Sunday, Dimka and Nina went to find out what theirs was like. They packed a picnic lunch then, with baby Grigor, took the train to a village thirty miles outside Moscow. They were full of eager curiosity. A station attendant gave them directions to their place, which was called The Lodge. It took them fifteen minutes to walk there.
The house was a one-storey timber cabin. It had a large kitchen-cum-living-room and two bedrooms. It was set in a small garden that ran down to a stream. Dimka thought it was paradise. He wondered again what he had done to get so lucky.
Nina liked it, too. She was excited, moving through the rooms and opening cupboards. Dimka had not seen her so happy for months.
Grigor, who was not so much walking as staggering, seemed delighted to have a new place in which to stumble and fall.
Dimka was imbued with optimism. He envisioned a future in which he and Nina came here on summer weekends year after year. Every season they would marvel over how different Grigor was from last year. Their son’s growth would be measured in summers: he would talk next season, count the summer after, then catch a ball, then read, then swim. He would be a toddler here at the dacha, then a boy climbing a tree in the garden, then an adolescent with spots, then a young man charming the girls in the village.
The place had not been used for a year or more, and they threw open all the windows, then set about dusting surfaces and sweeping floors. It was partly furnished, and they started a list of things they would bring next time: a radio, a samovar, a bucket.
‘I could come here with Grigor on Friday mornings in the summer,’ Nina said. She was washing pottery bowls in the sink. ‘You could join me on Friday night, or Saturday morning, if you have to work late.’
‘You wouldn’t mind being here on your own at night?’ said Dimka as he scrubbed ancient grease off the kitchen range. ‘It’s a bit lonely.’
‘I’m not nervous, you know that.’
Grigor cried for his lunch, and Nina sat down to feed him. Dimka took a look around outside. He would have to erect a fence at the bottom of the garden, he saw, to prevent Grigor falling into the stream. It was not deep, but Dimka had read somewhere that a child could drown in three inches of water.
A gate in a wall led to a larger garden beyond. Dimka wondered who his neighbours were. The gate was not locked, so he opened it and went through. He found himself in a small wood. Exploring, he came within sight of a larger house. He speculated that his dacha might once have been the home of the gardener at the big house.
Not wanting to intrude on someone’s privacy, he turned back – and came face to face with a soldier in uniform.
‘Who are you?’ said the man.