The Russian Affair - By Michael Wallner Page 0,112

difficult ordeal on Alexey’s chosen path. Respect and admiration had bound them to each other for half a lifetime. Everything he had been able to attain, he owed to her. The divorce hearing would take place in a week; Alexey wished it were over now. When the big guns started firing, Medea would already be a safe distance away.

Deep in thought, he reached the little street with the illegible sign. Entering the apartment house as the owner of a clandestine hideaway adjusted to suit the wishes of a succession of female visitors was different from entering it as a simple resident, walking up the washed-concrete stairs, and opening the heavily scratched door in order to spend the night here alone. In the foyer, Bulyagkov threw off his sports jacket. After his long walk, the apartment seemed overheated. Only then did he realize that he’d had scarcely anything to eat in the cafeteria at lunch and nothing since, and suddenly he was starving. He pivoted around toward the door, but the thought of the dismal neighborhood, where there was hardly a restaurant, made him change his mind. He’d eat at home.

During the moving-in process, Anton had seen to it that the refrigerator was filled with the bare essentials; a glance inside revealed to Alexey that he’d already eaten most of them. He found eggs, a moldy onion, and half a jar of sour cream. He disliked cooking and wasn’t good at it, but he surrendered to necessity, grabbed the skillet, poured in some oil, and lit the stove. Then he cut the onion into thin slices. Alexey hated the life he was leading. His profession had turned out to be the opposite of what he’d had in mind many years previously, when he’d seized the opportunity to become an administrator of scientific research. He accomplished nothing more meaningful than the paperweight on his desk did. His contempt for the pencil pushers in his department struck him as increasingly pathetic with each passing day; he’d long since become one of them. The tool of his trade wasn’t the microscope or the scalpel or the slide rule, but the rubber stamp.

Bulyagkov focused his mind’s eye on the Minister, whose tactical shrewdness was exceeded only by his incompetence. He obediently distributed the funds in his budget in exact accordance with the capricious wishes of the Central Committee. Nobody thought in wide-ranging terms or made allowances for the decades-long continuity that was a necessity in complicated research work. Today the pharmacologists got the biggest chunks; tomorrow it would be the biochemists. Had the Minister not had Bulyagkov at his side, the cases of unwarranted favoritism, haphazardness, and corruption would have been past counting. At the same time, Alexey was aware of being merely tolerated: He was the troubleshooter for his clueless boss, the fixer for the Minister’s mistakes. Despite his advancement, Bulyagkov had remained the fellow who did the dirty work, a second-class person, a man whose background barred him from ever really entering the nomenklatura. He’d always be the Deputy, surrounded by envy for his abilities and condescension regarding his past.

A crackling sound came from the frying pan, and the smell of hot oil rose to his nostrils. He quickly dumped in the onion slices and jumped away from the sputtering grease. Without Medea, I would never have come even this far, he thought, rolling up his shirt sleeves. The determining factor wasn’t my qualifications, it was her contacts. If I hadn’t let myself be blinded in my youth, if I’d gone ahead and finished my degree after all, maybe I would have been able to make the transition back into science. I could have returned to Kharkov and worked as a biophysicist; I would have had a real position in life. But for a young guy in Moscow, the allure of making a career there, Medea’s charms, and the open-mindedness of her family were too tempting. In those days, Alexey had severed his roots; instead of the son of a Ukrainian renegade, he preferred being an up-and-coming nobody in the capital.

Bulyagkov stirred the sizzling onions, removed the skillet from the fire, added paprika and sour cream, and then broke a couple of eggs into the mixture. As he placed the pan in the oven, he tried to remember the last time Anna had fixed this for him. He’d explained that it was a dish from his homeland, and then she’d wanted to know what he’d been like as a boy. Happy, he’d told