The Russian Affair - By Michael Wallner Page 0,128
he was also wearing his long scarf. A few yards away from him sat a young woman who had, he kept telling himself, his eyes. In addition, she wore steel-rimmed eyeglasses, just as he did. To avoid the fuss of borrowing a book from the reference shelves, Kamarovsky had brought one with him. He sat at one of the long tables. Rows of fluorescent tubes bathed the reading room in a sallow light that made him tired and offered no possibility of hiding in shadow should the student happen to turn her head in his direction.
The book was an advance copy of a volume of poetry, sent to Kamarovsky at his request. It was a slim volume, and the cover showed a flock of red birds flying out of a black sun. Why hadn’t they put a hard cover on the first edition? Kamarovsky wondered; this floppy little book couldn’t be displayed upright. Even though it was outside his authority, he resolved to make a telephone call to the state printing office. Why use half measures when it was a matter of lifting a writer out of obscurity?
Before opening the book, Kamarovsky cast a fleeting glance three tables ahead. How pretty she is, he thought, and he was unable to suppress the joy he felt at the idea that he deserved a lot of credit for that, too. If I were a young man, I’d find it a pleasing prospect to woo this attractive young woman. Even though he regretted that his only possibility of seeing her was to spy on her, there was something thrilling about it. The student had three giant tomes open on the table in front of her. Her pencil flew over her notepad; as she wrote, her glasses would slip down her nose, and with a swift gesture she’d push them back up. She’s inherited my narrow nose, Kamarovsky thought, and so her glasses won’t stay in place. When his daughter grew immersed in a passage in one of her texts, he opened his volume of poetry.
Viktor Ipalyevich Tsazukhin’s legacy comprises thirty years of Soviet lyric poetry and is the expression of an epoch rich in hard-won victories as well as painful losses. Tsazukhin is a man produced by the Revolution …
The Colonel snorted impatiently and flipped the pages to the end of the foreword.
“Where Does Russia Begin?” was the title of the first poem. Kamarovsky was immediately taken with the bright tone, with its direct, emotional appeal. Even though his assessment of the poem was rather blurred, he flattered himself that such verse had been published through his intervention.
What was she working on? He would have been all too happy to take a look at her books. Her decision to major in architecture filled the Colonel with pride. She’s inherited more from me than she’s willing to admit, he thought. My child. My child is growing up. Maybe she’ll marry that fellow from Okhotsk she’s been living with for a year. And even if she doesn’t go back with him to his hometown, her profession will take her away from Moscow. They need good architects out in the provinces. If she’s smart—and it goes without saying that she is—she’ll go to one of the newly founded cities in the Tuvan SSR or Kazakhstan. The Colonel’s eyes skimmed Viktor Ipalyevich’s poem without apprehending its content. So far, there’s nothing out there but a main road, electricity, gas, and water connections, and the CC’s official mandate to build a city. What that city will look like will be up to the architect—namely my daughter. Now, that’s going to require her to be away from Moscow for years, maybe decades. It could even mean that I’ll never see her again in this life. Calm down, he said to himself, shaking his head, she’s barely begun her studies, and you’re already sending her out to raise up cities from the earth. In spite of this insight, he felt a sudden urge to stand up and walk over to her and present himself, a sick, gaunt person, a wearer of eyeglasses, the owner of some not very good teeth, a nervous man in the sixth decade of his life. If nothing in his appearance betrayed the office he discharged, how could she reject him? Didn’t everyone want to have a father? How lovely it would be to discuss architectural topics with her. He was interested to know how she conceived of the building art, what architect or school of