Even then, Leonid had shown no interest in hearing reasons or learning names; he’d even told her he trusted her! Furious, she’d moved away from him on the sofa and told him to his face that she was having an affair with a member of the Central Committee. “And I’m being required to continue it, too!”
Leonid had been neither wounded nor outraged, but merely alert. Without Anna’s mentioning the KGB again, he’d wanted to know if their conversation was being listened to. She’d laughed, but with a glance at the familiar objects around her, she’d nonetheless admitted that she’d never considered such a thing even as a possibility until that moment. Since the name of her control officer had also been dropped, Anna considered that the moment had come to present Kamarovsky’s proposal. Once again, Leonid’s reaction had been not reproachful but practical. “Ever since I became a commissioned officer, I’ve been allowed to serve in Moscow. But no one who doesn’t belong to the nomenklatura can get out of serving in the provinces at some point.” He stood up. “That means that they would surely transfer me eventually, sooner or later. Why not now?”
“Do you know what that means?” She’d taken his hands and named the place in Siberia. For the first time in a long time, she’d noticed how sinewy his lower arms were. “Nine months of winter.”
“We have a big, glorious country. Why shouldn’t I get to know more of it?” He’d gone over to the bookshelves. “We don’t have a single book about Siberia.”
Not long after that, Leonid had taken matters into his own hands. He’d started bringing home books about the North and cutting out every newspaper article he saw that described the beauty of Siberia. Anna had distrusted his optimism, thinking it was just for show, and she’d read aloud to him reports stating that the ground in Yakutia never thawed out. The houses there, she read, were built on concrete pillars to keep the heated rooms from warming the soil and causing the whole building to sink into the resultant mire. Nevertheless, Leonid’s willingness to make the move remained constant, and one morning after night duty he’d told Anna that he’d decided to try for a transfer to Minusinsk. His application was already being considered.
“Why so far away?” Anna had asked. Strangely enough, she’d felt rejected.
“Does it make a difference?”
It had been a long time since she’d seen him so self-confident. He’d looked up the place in the atlas and determined that there were five time zones between Moscow and the city on the Yenisei River. “After this, I’ll be an expert in coal mining,” Leonid had said with a laugh, reading her a statistic that estimated the coal reserves in the area at 450 billion tons.
At night, Anna had wondered how she’d let things go so far. Wasn’t her situation beyond all reason? In order to maintain an illicit relationship, she was standing idly by and watching while her husband let himself be exiled to the other side of the socialist world. She understood Leonid’s motives less and less. Instead of asserting his rights—hadn’t Anna secretly hoped he would?—he was falling in with Kamarovsky’s perverse proposition, and he was prepared to relocate at a great distance and without resentment. She almost envied him his eager anticipation at the prospect of getting to know some of the Soviet Union’s outlying regions.
In the days after her husband’s decision, Anna’s image of him had changed more and more starkly. How generous and spontaneous Leonid was! In their thoroughly muddled situation, he remained composed and kept his sense of humor. Unexpectedly, he’d become again the person whom Anna had once liked so much. She’d even told him that, had even sought his affection, but Leonid had rejected her advances. She’d tried to give him an idea of the barren wastes he proposed to enter and asked him whether he wouldn’t curse her for having driven him into exile, and he’d responded by chiding her for being such a romantic. It was then that Anna had admitted to herself that her feelings for Alexey were fading.
Simultaneously with Leonid’s promotion to the rank of captain, the news had come that he would be transferred not to southern Siberia but to Sakhalin Island, in the easternmost part of the Soviet Union. He’d reacted calmly even to this change and explained that the pay for duty on Sakhalin, because of its extreme location, would be double