she thought. How were she and Leonid supposed to get back together when everything happened before the eyes of that bad-tempered old man, when Petya was constantly dancing around them? All her attempts to be alone with Leonid had fallen through; she hadn’t been able to give their reunion the excitement and romance of a new love. When the kettle began to whistle, Anna could successfully ignore the sounds coming from the next room. She had a few days left. She had to find a way to bring Leonid back to her side.
TWENTY-FOUR
Two things perplexed A. I. Kamarovsky. The first was that the reports concerning Alexey Maximovich Bulyagkov had become so innocuous. Apparent normalcy was, in the Colonel’s view, a sign that something extraordinary lay ahead. The commotion over the Lyushin project had died down. The Minister for Research had succeeded in embellishing the disappointing results in his report by correcting the date of Lyushin’s expected breakthrough. After this cosmetic application, it seemed only logical that the Ministry should place additional funds at the disposal of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Dubna. The Minister had signed the authorization, and Lyushin had returned satisfied to his backwater north of Moscow.
After the successful adoption of the Five-Year Plan, the hectic pace of bureaucracy had slowed down, and Bulyagkov once again applied himself to his usual work, shuttling between the Ministry and the Central Committee, receiving the representatives of the various oblasts, and giving them the opportunity to present their assessment of the technological progress achieved in their region. He commended the improved performance in pesticide development and labored in vain on promoting the field of petrochemistry. The newly opened oil fields along the lower course of the Ob River were ready for exploitation, but the physicists in Murmansk were still unable to deliver the desired capacities by means of bigger power blocks. The refining of crude oil remained the problem child of the Soviet economy, and even though research funding had increased enormously, there was still no breakthrough in sight.
In his private life, Bulyagkov moved between his residence in Arbat, where he and his wife, Medea, customarily stayed out of each other’s way, and the scene of his erotic adventures on Drezhnevskaya Street. Although formerly the women booked to appear there had changed every few months, in the past two years Kamarovsky had learned of Bulyagkov’s involvement in no amorous affair other than the one he was conducting with Anna Viktorovna Nechayevna, the daughter of the poet Tsazukhin. Anna’s reports were unspectacular; however, Kamarovsky appreciated her collaboration. Unlike others, when she had no suspicious moments to describe, she didn’t make up any. He often had to deal with reports turned in by ambitious agents who invented anti-Soviet activities for the persons they had under observation in order to further their own careers. During all their time together, Alexey and Anna’s affair had remained an unruffled relationship.
Kamarovsky found all the more interesting, therefore, the fact that Bulyagkov’s wife, Medea, who was Moscow’s cultural secretary and above all suspicion, had now sued for divorce. For years, she and her husband had lived such loosely connected lives that the Colonel couldn’t imagine any disruption that would explain such a step. The petition had been filed only a short time ago, but given the influence of both parties, it seemed likely that the case would be quickly settled. Yesterday, the practical first step had followed the official one. While Medea remained in the main residence, Bulyagkov had had some of his things brought to the Drezhnevskaya Street apartment, which was currently serving as his home. Kamarovsky found it difficult to believe in the so-called insurmountable antipathy that was supposed to have sprung up between the couple, but what he chiefly wondered about was why this was happening precisely now. As he saw no possibility of directly questioning Medea Bulyagkova, he awaited all the more eagerly a visit from Rosa Khleb. She’d asked the cultural secretary for an interview. There was no reason to doubt the journalistic motives behind the request; after all, Mrs. Bulyagkova was a person of public interest, she coordinated every guest performance that came to Moscow from the Soviet provinces, and her picture was often in the newspapers. Rosa had announced that she was doing a feature for the Moscow Times and called on Medea in her office in the Cultural Center.
Kamarovsky was expecting the Khleb woman to arrive in ten minutes. It seemed improper to spend the intervening time idly, but