The Russian Affair - By Michael Wallner Page 0,108

he’d cleared off his desk so meticulously that he didn’t know what to do during the rest of his wait. He sat down at the piano, played the five bars he’d mastered, and came to grief with the sixth. He improvised a little, letting his thoughts drift, remembering how smoothly his female trolley conductor had taken in the passengers’ fares and returned their tickets and change, in spite of the lurching car. The mute Kremlin Bell, the biggest in the world, crossed his mind, and that sixteenth-century bronze cannon no one had ever dared to fire, for fear that it might explode. Kamarovsky strung together some melancholy chords, reducing the melody to the span of an octave. He wanted to play something more cheerful, something he could jiggle his knee to, but nothing of the sort occurred to him. At night, when everybody in the building was asleep, he’d sometimes sit at the keyboard and start banging away; he found it amusing that his neighbors in the adjacent apartments, who’d lived next door to him for decades and in that time had figured out what he was, didn’t dare call the police. You’re a fossil, Kamarovsky thought, born out of the fratricidal struggle between the Whites and the Reds; you think in terms of the old, long-outdated hierarchies. Look at the young people, how easily they move among our great accomplishments, how they take them for granted. They display no reverence for the privations that were the cost of every victory; they take the whole and shape it for themselves.

“The big Kremlin Bell,” the Colonel murmured, lifting his fingers from the keyboard. The silence did him good. He knew what the true meaning of his words was, but instead of occupying himself with that, he returned to Comrade Bulyagkova’s divorce. It was a private matter, so what was there to fathom?

Bulyagkov’s career was the kind of success story you read about in books. After breaking off his physics studies, Alexey, a talented Ukrainian with dubious relatives, had met the pretty daughter of a good Moscow family. Through the girl, he’d gained admittance to the right circles; since her family recognized that she was going to marry Alexey in spite of all opposition, they decided not to exclude him, but to appropriate him. Medea’s grandfather, the senior serving member of the Central Committee, had Alexey Bulyagkov’s biography rewritten and his father recast as a staunch fighter against counterrevolution. After the wedding, important doors had opened to Medea’s young husband, who wasn’t shy about striding through them. His preparation in the natural sciences had predestined him for assignment to the research sphere. He’d climbed up the hierarchical ladder, step by step, until he’d reached the second rung, from which there was no further ascent. In addition to being an alcoholic, the Minister was lazy and erratic, and it had cost Kamarovsky a great deal of effort to suppress the evidence of his weakness for minors. Nonetheless, the Minister had the best connections; from now until his retirement, nobody would ever contest his position. Since the opening of the Bulyagkov dossier, the Colonel had sought to prove that Alexey Maximovich found his lot as Deputy Minister intolerable and would therefore engage in some maneuver to unseat the Minister. So far, Kamarovsky’s efforts had failed.

And now, this unexpected divorce. What advantage would Medea gain from altering her status? She wasn’t seeking to liberate herself so that she could be with some “other man”; culture had always been her only passion. In the course of the decades, Alexey had never eschewed cheating on Medea, but he’d always arranged matters so tastefully that she wasn’t compromised. Bulyagkov was fifty-one, his wife marginally younger; what could either of them, at their age, do with their new freedom?

The big Kremlin Bell, the Tsar Bell, weighs two hundred tons, the Colonel thought. It had barely been hung when it developed an inner crack and had never sounded, not even once. Kamarovsky had had his daughter’s graduation thesis, an essay on the Kremlin Bell, sent to his office and had read the document as though it were one of the many that constantly passed over his desk. The text, at once precise and patriotic, was written in a flowing style; with such a thesis, obtaining her diploma would be a mere formality. And so his daughter would complete her studies at the Polytechnic Institute a year early and begin working toward a degree in architecture at the university in the