“I’ll get off with you at Irkutsk,” he had pleaded.
She had put a finger on his lips to silence him, and he had brushed it away, holding it in his fist.
“What harm would it be?” He felt his own foolishness.
“It wouldn’t be the same,” she said, after a long pause.
“Nothing will ever be the same,” he said. “My life has taken on a whole new dimension.”
He wanted to probe, to force her to admit that she felt the same. But he could not bring himself to press her, afraid that the truth would be other than he would wish. How will it be after Irkutsk? he wondered, looking about the compartment, imagining how it would be when she was gone for good.
Already, his other life—Janice, his daughter, his work, the bland suburban life of Washington—seemed pale and insipid. In twenty years, he and Janice had not experienced what Anna Petrovna and he had found in just a few days. How can I go back, he thought, even if they let me?
He remembered the terror he had felt, searching for Anna Petrovna. Once he had imagined that she had simply fallen off the train, doomed forever to roam the frozen paths of the taiga like some of the escaped prisoners his grandfather had told him about. He had pictured Anna Petrovna as one of the spring flowers of Siberia, perfectly preserved in ice.
Finding her alive, lying on the lower bunk in the darkness, he had wrapped her in his arms.
“I looked everywhere,” he had said, holding her tightly.
“I took a walk,” she said, returning his caresses. “We must have missed each other.”
“I was worried.”
“That is silly.” She reached up and playfully traced his nose with a forefinger.
“You can’t imagine what I was thinking.”
“Was I kidnaped by a Russian bear?”
“Worse.”
“Brutally abused, raped, garrotted and tossed off the train?”
“Given the history of your countrymen, it is quite possible.” He leaned over and kissed her deeply on the mouth, grateful that she was safe.
“See how propaganda in your country creates stereotypes.”
“The rape part was quite plausible,” he said, reaching between her legs with his hand, kissing the breast that had slipped from her opened robe.
“I can’t get enough of you,” he whispered, lying down beside her. “I can’t envision living a single second away from you.”
“Please,” she responded, then closed his mouth with her own in a long, deep, lingering kiss.
“I love you, Anna Petrovna,” he said, pulling away.
“You mustn’t say that.” But she drew him to her, caressing him, as he unzipped his trousers and kicked them off to the floor.
“Do you love me?” he blurted, his passion rising, the words exploding in the darkness.
She gripped him tighter, drawing his body into hers. Was the fury of her response meant as an answer, he wondered.
“Do you love me?” he asked again, his urgency increasing as he felt her body rise, writhing in the throes of a powerful force within her. He felt his own blood pound as the pleasure surged upward from his legs to the tight focus of his nerve ends. Words lost their meaning, and he accepted her body, joined to his, as the answer he had to have.
Then he lay still in her embrace, her body slack beneath him, her eyes closed, her breath even, her heartbeat caught in the same rhythm as his own. He watched her eyes open languorously, and was surprised to see two giant tears roll down each cheek.
“Are you crying?”
She shook her head. She stirred, insinuated herself away from him and sat up, leaning against the wall of the compartment. He pulled himself up, slumped beside her, and covered them both with a blanket.
“Why are you here?” she asked suddenly, her directness startling.
“On the train?”
“No. In Russia?”
“I was asked.” He paused, searching her face, the old caution surfacing, then quickly dissolving. “Must you know?” he asked gently, wanting to tell her, but holding back.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The perspective is important.”
“The historian again.”
“It is a habit of mind. Perhaps the circumstances might help explain the result.” She looked at him. “Please explain.”
“It is official business.”
“That explains nothing.”
“Confidential business.”
“You’re teasing me.”
“The knowledge has risks.”
“Everything has risks. Perhaps the risks are greater if the knowledge remains in the shadows.”
He wanted to tell her, felt the need to share everything with her. Perhaps that was part of the mystery of attraction, the hunger to be, not alone, but part of someone else. Yet she was a stranger, at least in a conventional sense, although he believed that he had always known her. It was inconceivable that she would betray him.
“Perhaps I am prying beyond my province,” she said softly.
Then he knew he would tell. It is a test of my trueness, he told himself. She was suddenly his whole world; the idea of boundaries between them was unbearable.
“I have been treating Dimitrov.”
“Dimitrov? The General Secretary Dimitrov?”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
“Leukemia.”
“I don’t understand. Why you?”
“I was ordered here by the American President. He wants to keep Dimitrov alive. It has been a rather odd assignment, one in which I had little choice.”
She seemed puzzled. He hesitated now, the full weight of his knowledge an impossible burden. Could he tell her that, by successfully treating Dimitrov, he had doomed Eastern Siberia, her home?
“And will Dimitrov live?”
“Not forever,” he whispered, barely audible.
“For how long?”
He felt himself slipping into his doctor’s role again, the old mantle comfortable and reassuring. He cleared his throat.
“It’s hard to tell. He is being treated with chemotherapy, and the results have been good. He has responded. But one can never be sure. He lives almost from day to day.”
“How long does he have?”
“He could die at any time. Or he could live for five years.”
“Well, which is more likely?”
“You sound like him,” Alex said, feeling somehow unburdened. “I can’t make a prediction. I’m not God.” He heard the echo of his own words in the dacha. Any prediction was pure speculation.
She frowned, closed her eyes, became pensive. But the door had been opened. Should he tell her more? he pondered.
“That is the principal difficulty about this whole business. Everybody asks me the same question, as if it were a death watch. Zeldovich—Dimitrov’s right-hand man. He was always asking, always obliquely, the same question: How long? How long can Dimitrov live?”
“Perhaps he had good reason,” Anna Petrovna whispered.
He brooded over her words, turning them over in his mind. Shall I tell her? Can she help? He wanted to share everything with Anna Petrovna, to smash all the barriers that had been constructed between himself and everything. He watched her, his hand moving over the wonder of her body as he searched for more and more of her. They had no right to take this from him.
“It cannot end,” he whispered.
“It will never end in the mind, the memory.”
“That’s not enough, not now.”
“It is sometimes far more potent. Look at you, carrying the memories of your grandfather’s Siberia with you. The intensity is there, the flame is still hot.”
“That’s different. This passion is more complete.” He kissed her deeply, feeling the cycle begin again in both of them.
“Our lives are totally different.”
“Tributaries of the same river.”
“For a scientist you are an impossible romantic.”
“Is that what it is?”
“What?”
“This desire to spend every moment with you, to capture you, to surrender to you. For the first time in my life I am a ship without a rudder, drifting in your wind. It is a terrible responsibility.”
“I don’t want it,” she said quickly.
“It’s too late.”
“Then it’s gone too far,” she said, stroking him tenderly.
“I’ll never let you go, ever.” At the same time that he was drifting, he felt his strength, a new power over himself.
“I will get off at Irkutsk and that will be the end of it.” Her breath quickened as she kissed his eyes, his nose, his lips, while he smoothed her hair.
“There will never be an end to it.”
Then the words had stopped and he felt his life begin again as they embraced.
Sitting now in the gray light, in the circumscribed world of their compartment, he marveled at the energy that had passed between them, the waves of sexuality that had sent them thrashing about the compartment, from upper bunk to lower bunk, in a whole range of classic configurations, as if they had tried to create new ways of reconstructing the primary act of procreation.
Now, as he sat in the chair watching Anna Petrovna sleep, the sun was rising. It was the face of his watch that told him how much the rhythm of his life had changed. By every ordinary measure, his energy should have been spent, his mind clouded with fatigue. But he felt alive as he had never felt alive before, and for the first time he began to share Dimitrov’s appreciation of the finiteness of time.
Finally the light broke through the grayness and the sun bathed the compartment’s interior. Anna Petrovna turned over onto her stomach, blinking into the sun, squinting and rubbing her eyes.
“Morning?” she asked
“Theoretically.”
“Was I dreaming?”
“If you were, I would have liked to be in it.”
“If I were, you would be.” She reached out and touched his thigh.
Then she lifted her head and looked out of the window. “I love this,” she sighed. The sky had turned deep blue and each white birch seemed etched in the landscape. “It must stay like this forever,” she said.
“It’s done pretty well for itself up to now.”
“It could disappear in a single poof.”
He stiffened.
“Damn your Russian sense of guilt,” he said cautiously. “Isn’t it possible to feel joy without balancing it with gloom? Where do you get the idea that the taiga is in danger?”
“It is,” she said emphatically.
“From what?” he asked. Were they crossing another Rubicon?
“Splitting atoms.”
She knows, he thought. By God, she knows.
“Would you save it if you could?” she asked suddenly.
She watched him, the light shining into her blue eyes, the pupils little pinpoints of fire.
“If Dimitrov were planning to unleash a holocaust, would you destroy him?”
He continued to watch her, unable to respond.
“If you knew in advance that he was going to order the first shot of a nuclear war, and if you had the power to destroy him, would you?”
She is one of them, he thought. It was an instant judgment, but even as he made it, he could not bring himself to believe it. Then guilt nudged at his throat. He had had the power to destroy Dimitrov. Perhaps he still had. But he had not acted. Was it because he lacked the courage? The logic seemed crystal clear—one life exchanged for tens of thousands, perhaps millions.
“Would you, if you knew?” she pressed.
“I am a healer, not a killer,” he stammered, his thoughts cloudy.
“You would let millions die?”
The question was delivered with such wide-eyed innocence that he became cautious again. They are trying me, he thought.
“It is beyond my frame of reference,” he told her.
“Then you would destroy Dimitrov?”
“I didn’t say that.” He felt calm again, cerebral, under control.
“If you knew in advance, for sure, that he was to be the instrument for killing millions?”
“I would have to be very sure.” It was his place of refuge.
“And if you were?”
“Then I would ponder the alternatives.”
“Does that mean you would kill him?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“If you had known in advance that Truman was going to deliberately kill millions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would you have destroyed him?”
“There the choices were different,” he said angrily. “Truman thought that by illustrating the horror of the ultimate weapon he would save tens of millions. He wanted to show the futility of war as an instrument of change.”
“And do you think the lesson was learned?”
He almost smiled, delighted at the way she was parrying his attempts at logic.
“Probably not.”
“And if you had the power to destroy Hitler in 1938?”
“How could I know what was being contemplated?”
“He had told everyone.”
But how could I be sure?”
She fell silent. He watched her grope for words, her lips trembling.
“I would destroy him,” she said. “The possibility would be enough.”
“Then you would be God.”
“I don’t believe in God,” she said. Her decision had been made; she was sure of what she said.
“I couldn’t,” he said with equal finality. He had come to the core of it. Not cowardice, but a respect for life.
“A single life is nothing, including mine. Especially mine,” he had added. Alex had thought it mere bravado in the face of death. “You must read your Marx, Kuznetzov.”
“I have, but I can’t remember the reference.”
“It underlies everything he tells us. We are one family with a single objective, the organization of our resources for the cumulative good of the whole family.”
“You had better take your pills and go to sleep.”
“You are a nonbeliever, Kuznetzov,” Dimitrov had said with weary humor.
“Cousins.”
“Kuznetzov.”
“All right, have it your way.”
“It is the only way. The blood is the blood.”
Alex watched Anna Petrovna, her skin pink in the brilliant sunlight now filtering through the compartment. “I am not God,” he whispered, reasserting his passivity in the face of everything. Besides, he thought, his hand reaching out to touch hers, what do others matter? He would not ask for the source of her knowledge.
LIKE
a magnifying glass focusing a single sunbeam to white heat, Godorov’s mind focused on the dominant obsession of his journey, the ultimate act of retribution, his impending murder of Shmiot. Planning it offered a counterbalance to his pain, as an act of imagination so compelling in its intensity that it could act as an opiate on his nerves. It suggested that the act itself would remove, by a magic that defied logic, the burden of his physical hardship. He dared not dwell on this thought, although he had begun believing in his heart that even before Shmiot’s body grew cold, his own back would miraculously straighten, his legs would quiver with sudden strength and the whole direction of his life would change. The possibility of such a metamorphosis seemed to increase in his mind as the train moved toward Krasnoyarsk.