The Russian Affair - By Michael Wallner Page 0,110

was sure he’d managed to get all the medication down his gullet. Now there was nothing to do but wait. He could smell a faint scent of varnish, with which the floor had been sealed years before. He even thought he could smell his own sweat, the odor left in this spot by his feet.

By the time the doorbell rang, Kamarovsky was already capable of standing again. Groaning, though feeling steadily stronger, he rose to his feet and dropped into the chair. After the second ring, he stretched out his hand, just a little, and pressed the buzzer. Shortly thereafter, he heard the staccato sound of steps coming upstairs and entering the apartment. The Colonel made an effort to straighten his crooked spine. Rosa was wearing black; he nodded to her and motioned toward the chair across from him. She thanked him and took a seat, opening her portfolio on the way down.

TWENTY-FIVE

The most sensible thing she could do would be to hang the curtain. Avdotya had finally finished the job, and now Anna spread the blue fabric over the table to attach the hooks. The tape had been stitched across the top part of the curtain in an impeccably straight line, and the border, too, had been neatly executed. While she busied herself with the hooks, Anna became aware of an interior stillness; she wouldn’t have called it calm. It wasn’t the inner harmony that the performance of simple tasks sometimes produces, nor was it the peace of mind she longed for, but a void, like the grayness of the days that lay before her. Anna could do nothing but wait in anxious expectation for Leonid’s decision, nothing but hang up the curtain.

She laid the fabric aside and sat on the sofa in her small apartment. Viktor Ipalyevich had gone off in search of cheap potatoes, Petya was in school, Alexey was probably being driven to some meeting, and Leonid was back on duty in the East. Suddenly, Anna couldn’t help envisioning the whole country, like an enormous map, where people worked, argued, grew stronger, suffered pain. In many regions of the Soviet Union, spring had already arrived; in others, one couldn’t yet begin to hope for it. The mental image of her dynamic homeland left Anna feeling empty and alone. She’d made the beds, and tomorrow she’d do so again. She was cooking something for Petya to eat, and she’d be cooking again that evening. She’d do the shopping and cleaning, as she did every day; she’d board the combine’s special bus and start her shift. She did all this to feed her family, to go on living, to keep the whole thing running.

Leonid had gone back a day early. Forced to depart in advance because of weather conditions, he’d declared; spring cyclones were moving from the Sea of Okhotsk toward Sakhalin, and there was a good chance that landing an airplane there would soon be impossible. Strangely enough, Anna was convinced that he’d welcomed his early departure. He’d promised to give more consideration to his notion of getting a transfer to Siberia, but she had the impression he’d said that just to placate her so he wouldn’t have to talk about it anymore. Five years, she’d thought in despair as she watched her husband going down the stairs with his bag slung over his shoulder. They hadn’t told Petya that his father was leaving a day sooner than planned; Leonid had put him to bed with particular tenderness and held him in his arms during the night. Still half asleep, the boy had gone off to school in the belief that his father would be there to greet him when he came back home.

Now Anna was sitting there, on an afternoon like many others, and she didn’t know how much time would pass before she’d see her husband again. Until very recently, she’d believed her life was safeguarded by a solid structure, which was now volatizing into an atmosphere of wan pointlessness. Hanging a curtain was the only thing to do. She adjusted the hooks and lifted up one corner of the fabric in front of the sleeping niche.

While Anna Viktorovna Nechayevna was inserting the hooks, one after another, into the rings on the curtain rod, the majority of those present at a meeting of the Central Committee’s Department of Research were voting to accept the invitation of the Swedish Science Council. Even though the invitation came from a Western nation, the department was of the opinion