He recited the facts mechanically. Hadn’t he given this summary a hundred times?
“Could this condition change suddenly?” Zeldovich asked.
“Yes.”
“Or could the change be gradual?”
“That, too.”
“It is unpredictable?”
“I have been trying to explain that to anybody who would listen. Including Dimitrov.” He had blurted out Dimitrov’s name without thinking.
“Then he also knows?”
“Yes.”
“That he could topple over quickly?”
“Or go gradually.”
“It is positively exasperating,” Zeldovich cried.
“I have tried to explain that to you,” Anna Petrovna pleaded. “You cannot find specifics where there are no specifics.”
Alex looked at Zeldovich, could feel the man’s cruelty.
“You, Zeldovich,” he began, feeling his voice faltering. “A man obviously without the conscience of an ant.”
“Alex, please—” Anna Petrovna said.
“You think his motives are the same as yours?” He was furious with her for unwittingly sharing a moral position with Zeldovich.
“Does it matter?” she asked softly.
“You needn’t be so self-righteous, Dr. Cousins,” Zeldovich sneered. He stuck a thumb in her direction. “She saw me kill a man who would have carried out Dimitrov’s orders without blinking an eye. On the other hand, you preserved a life that will soon be responsible for the death of millions. We should compare acts, not motives, Dr. Cousins.”
So they were putting him on the defensive now, he thought, feeling the guilt begin again.
There was a knock at the door. Tania set down the tea and departed. Zeldovich looked at his watch.
“It is midnight at the dacha,” he said, lifting the tea and blowing on it.
“There is bread and sausages,” Anna Petrovna said, opening a newspaper and spreading it on the table.
Their actions seemed so banal. The sausages tasted delicious, but Alex felt uncomfortable, as if he had no right to this enjoyment. It was not the simple act of eating that disturbed him, but rather the camaraderie that it implied, as if he and Zeldovich were old friends. Did Zeldovich think they had captured him now, that he was part of their joint action?
Wiping his fingers on his pants, Zeldovich pulled out a piece of paper from his coat pocket and handed it over to Alex.
“What does this mean?” he asked.
Alex read Dimitrov’s message, then looked back at Zeldovich. He could not deny his doctor’s instincts. What Zeldovich had only suspected, he felt with certainty. Something was wrong with Dimitrov, or going wrong, despite the casual tone of the request.
“When did this arrive?”
“I picked it up in Irkutsk hours ago.”
“You waited this long to tell me?”
“You were not conscious, remember?” Zeldovich burped and patted his stomach. “Besides, we will not be near communications until we reach Ulan-Ude.” He looked at his watch. “At nearly four in the morning. We will decide what to do later,” he said, standing up and looking toward Anna Petrovna.
Had they communicated something in that exchange of glances? Alex wondered.
“There will be a guard posted at the door,” Zeldovich said, letting himself out.
When he had gone, Anna Petrovna busied herself rewrapping the leftovers in the newspaper. Alex watched her movements, graceful yet efficient. He knew she was acting out of nervousness. The window was a black mirror in which her white sweater and blonde hair appeared almost translucent.
“Ulan-Ude,” he said stupidly. “What an odd name.”
“It is the point where the Trans-Mongolian Railroad intersects. It is the road to Peking.”
She sat down on the chair and faced him. He loved her. He was sure of that, no matter how many doubts about her assailed him.
“It was heralded twenty years ago as the great railway to friendship. The Chinese built a connecting link direct to Peking in the same gauge as ours. Then they tore it up again and rebuilt it in the standard narrower gauge. That is what happened to friendship.”
They were silent for a long time.
“So you have complied with their request that you stay,” he said at last.
“Yes.”
“You had no choice.”
“I am aware of that.”
“You would not have stayed if you hadn’t been forced?”
“No.” She looked away. “I saw my sons at the Irkutsk station, and my husband. It was a cruel moment.”
“I’m sure it was.” He waited a moment. “If you had gone, would you have given me a moment’s thought?”
“Of course.”
“With longing?”
She looked uncomfortable. Her eyes would not meet his eyes.
“This sentimentality disturbs you?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “It is—” She could not find words.
“Incongruous.”
“Certainly that.” She found her poise again. “Alex, with the world on the brink of destruction, it seems so pointless.”
“And selfish.”
“That, too.”
“I’m sorry, Anna Petrovna,” he said, reaching out, taking both her hands in his. “I love you more than my own life, more than the dead millions. Beside what I feel for you, everything else is trivial.”
“This is absurd,” she said.
He drew her up from the chair, his arms enveloping her, feeling the heat of her skin, the perfume of her body. A shiver ran through her. He felt his loneliness vanish, felt a sense of purpose that had never seemed to exist before.
“I would never have breathed without a thought of you,” he whispered, feeling the joy of her response as she pressed closer to him. He put his hands under her sweater and ran his fingers down her back to her hips. Then he drew her downward to the lower bunk and pressed his lips onto hers, feeling her breath in his mouth.
Is there more than this? he wondered.
“You are everything,” he said.
They sat up. Silently, they removed their clothing and he held her. She began to shiver again and he drew the blankets over them.
“I’m frightened,” she whispered.
He was full to bursting with the joy of her nearness. It was the sweetness of reunion, which he had never experienced before. His emotions were like fireworks in a dark sky.
“Yes,” she said suddenly, a dam within her breaking, the fury of her yearning seeking an escape as she reached out for his hard manhood and plunged it into herself, her body sinking under his. She cried out, and he heard that cry as a confession, her admission that she understood life’s meaning now, beyond the fear of death and nothingness. For an endless moment they were together in their understanding. Then the tidal wave seized them and crashed them to the ocean floor, and they lay in each other’s arms, time suspended. He had been outside of himself, he was certain, for the first time in his life. And not alone. He lay in a haze, hardly knowing whether he was asleep or awake.
The train began to slow down. Artificial light poured through the windows. Then the train halted. He turned his head, saw a tiny building and against it a dark figure huddling in a coat, holding a red railroad flag stiffly in the air. Then the train began to move, the metal shivering forward, beginning again the interminable invasion of the Siberian wasteland.
“Misavaya,” she whispered. “The other side of Lake Baikal. I was here once with my mother, one summertime.”
“It is a lonely place,” he said. “It is hard to believe that people live here.”
“I have never been lonely,” she said.
It was the answer he had expected, but not wished for. She was revealing the essential difference between them, the cultural anomaly. It made his romanticizing seem pathetic.
“Never?” He was immediately sorry he had pressed the point. He half-expected her to say: It was not allowed.
“It is an indulgence,” she said.
“You have never felt cut off from other people?” He slid his hand between her legs, fingers probing gently.
“Only as an individual,” she said, her words precisely spoken. “I never feel cut off from the group.”
“Why must everything be objective?” He removed his hand.
She raised herself on her elbow. “Poor Alex,” she said, rubbing the hairs on his chest.
Her pragmatism was maddening.
“You think I’m a child,” he said.
“In a way. Mostly ignorant.”
“Ignorant of what?”
“Of social values, of the practical considerations necessary in providing for people’s needs. Sooner or later all society must be structured along those lines.”
My God, she is propagandizing me! he thought.
“And Dimitrov’s intentions,” he said, moving his head away. “How do you explain that?”
“An aberration.”
“And Stalin?”
“Another aberration. We self-corrected that.”
“Only after millions died.”
“He was impatient, indulgent of his own sense of power.”
“He was a paranoid, like the bunch of you.”
He was trying to insult her. He found her glibness offensive. Why should I love her? he asked himself. He was certain she felt the same dichotomy.
“Dimitrov is impatient, too,” she said, ignoring his remark. “He is impatient with the historical process. He is trying to force evolution. If he were twenty years younger and healthy, he would be reacting quite differently.”
“Are you really against his intentions?” Alex asked.
She looked up at him. He could see her confusion.
“Not in the abstract,” she answered.
He was coming to the nub of her anxiety now, and knew it.
“A nuclear strike is not an abstraction. Ask the Japanese.”
He understood now how her naiveté had been manipulated, her convictions played upon. At that moment he forgave her the part she played for the KGB. Who is the child here? he asked himself.
“What you fear is the destruction of Siberia,” he said. “Your Siberia. You know it will mean nothing for him to sacrifice it.”
“Siberia must be protected.” Her body began to shiver again.
“It is all that matters to you,” he said. “Beyond everything. Beyond me? Beyond yourself?”
He lowered his body onto hers again, feeling her drawing him into her again.
“We must destroy Dimitrov,” she whispered between short gasping breaths.
“We?”
“I will do anything you ask of me, Alex. I will go wherever you wish me to go. I will never leave your side.”
He felt her body compelling him, pleading with every nerve end. When he looked up again, the train was still moving through the darkness and he could see his reflection in the window.
A
freezing mist hung over the station at Ulan-Ude. Zeldovich burrowed deep into his fur collar as he walked toward the gloomy stone station that straddled the border between the Soviet Union and Outer Mongolia. Here at Ulan-Ude a charade of customs and visa surveillance took place, since the Mongolian People’s Republic was little more than a vassal of the Soviets. The railroad was heavily trafficked by the Soviet military who manned the network of missile bases and military camps along the line. Many of the soldiers who had traveled in the hard-class sections of the “Russiya” were lined up at the exchange point. Zeldovich was disgusted by their lack of military bearing.
He watched them now, their tunics unbuttoned, their hats awry. He spat onto the hard ground. The American doctor walked at his side, looking ashen in the pale afternoon light. KGB soldiers marched in front and behind the two of them, their machine guns strapped to their shoulders, trigger fingers at the ready, conscious of the smartness of their military demeanor.
Zeldovich looked at his watch. The Ulan-Ude layover was seventeen minutes and he hoped to do his business in that time. The KGB troops would block the path of the engine, so there was no chance that the train would leave without him. But unless it was absolutely necessary, he preferred not to interfere with the railroad’s timetable. To do so seemed an affront to Russian pride.
As they walked briskly toward the station, a tall, thin man suddenly came toward them. The soldiers moved to intercept him, but Zeldovich motioned them away. The tall thin man never even noticed. He stood before the American doctor and put out his hand.
“I’ll be leaving you here,” he said in English. “Too bad we couldn’t spend more time together.”
“Quickly,” Zeldovich hissed impatiently at Alex.
“Mr. Farmer is quite fluent in Russian,” the doctor said, smiling at Zeldovich.
“No tricks,” Zeldovich mumbled.
“Are you in trouble?” the thin man asked in English. He kept his face from showing alarm or concern.
“In a manner of speaking,” Alex said.
“Who is this man?” Zeldovich asked.
“I am with the British Embassy in Ulan Bator,” the thin man said in Russian. Zeldovich had only the vaguest notion of where Ulan Bator might be. But he was prepared to be cautious. He motioned to a soldier, who quickly stepped between Dr. Cousins and the British diplomat. The tall man started to protest, but the soldier stood his ground and Zeldovich hurried Alex away, holding him by the arm.
“I was only saying good-bye,” the doctor said. He waved toward the tall man, who responded in kind.
“It is pointless to be difficult,” Zeldovich said, walking faster.
It was warmer in the station. An old-fashioned potbellied stove glowed in the center, with a group of slovenly old men drowsing around it. Zeldovich saw a door marked “Station Master” and strode in without knocking, startling the bald man who was sitting with his feet on his desk. Ignoring the man completely, Zeldovich looked around for the telephone, which stood on a table behind the bald man.
The bald man was so frightened by Zeldovich and the KGB troops that he moved quickly out of the way, obviously assuming the invaders were on official party business. Zeldovich nodded to an unarmed soldier carrying a metal suitcase. The soldier opened it and drew out wires, tools and earphones. Working quickly, he began to fiddle with the telephone connection in the wall.
“We will only be a few moments,” Zeldovich said to the bald man, finally acknowledging his presence. “Please wait outside.”
Apparently relieved, the bald man quickly left the office. As the soldier worked, Dr. Cousins leaned against the desk, wiping his nose with his handkerchief.
“How much more company will we have on the line?” Dr. Cousins asked.