set free.”
The birds had fallen silent; tilting their little heads, they stared at the big human finger that was stroking the bars of their cage.
“His back was completely crooked, he had a broken thigh bone that never healed right, and he couldn’t digest solid food anymore. He died from a rapidly spreading deterioration of his mucous membranes. Soon after his funeral, my mother and sister left Kharkov, never to return.”
Anna removed her hand from his shoulder and leaned against the car door. “Why are you telling me this, Alexey?” She examined the man beside her: bent forward, sweat running down his temples.
“To make it clear to you how much better everything is these days. Up until the end, my father remained a fervent member of the Party, because he believed in its self-healing powers. Today, things like what happened to him don’t happen anymore. Checks on governmental entities are strict and correctly applied. Such an arbitrary power apparatus would be impossible in our Soviet Union.”
Anna nodded, but the situation made her uneasy. She’d wanted to make a confession and unexpectedly found herself listening to his. The shadowy, enclosed space, the frightened birds, and Alexey, divulging incidents that, in current practice, remained unmentioned … Why this sudden openness? What was his purpose in revealing himself to be the son of a convicted enemy of the people? Back at their first appointment, Alexey had suggested that he’d climbed as high in the nomenklatura as a non-Russian could. Didn’t his story throw a different light on his career? Anna sat there, rigid with concentration, while a silhouette approached the car.
The front door opened and Anton climbed in. He was balancing two paper plates of shashlik in one hand.
“No beer?” Bulyagkov asked.
Anton handed them the food and then pulled two bottles out of his overcoat pockets. “There aren’t any glasses.”
The Deputy Minister thanked Anton and told him to drive off; they’d eat on the way, he said.
“Careful, hot,” said Anton, then he closed the door and started the engine.
FIFTEEN
March was uncommonly mild. Now that it was getting dark later and later, Anna found her workdays longer than usual. She caught herself holding a dripping brush in her hand and gazing out of the window openings of her worksite, searching the treetops for signs of the first green fuzz. A long spring lay ahead of her, followed by a difficult summer, and an interminable stretch of time would pass before the leaves would begin to change color again. In the bus on the way back, she enjoyed the last rays of the sun and told herself as persuasively as she could that something had to happen during the coming season, something that would steer her life in a new direction. But didn’t everyone wish for that at the beginning of every spring?
When she got home, she didn’t feel like cooking, so she put some bread and sausage on the table. Petya was having an afternoon nap. As though they were on a picnic, Viktor Ipalyevich took out his clasp knife and started cutting the sausage into thin slices.
“Do you remember the show trials?” Anna asked as she stirred the buttermilk.
“What put that in your head?” He looked at her with red-rimmed eyes; since his volume of poetry had started to take shape, he often worked until dawn.
“What was it like, when they were going on? I really don’t know anything about them.”
He peeled back the sausage casing so that he could cut more slices.
“You were a prominent person. Weren’t you ever called before any of the tribunals?”
“Who would want to question a poet?”
“You were the ‘Voice of Smolensk,’ the ‘Conscience of the Comintern Youth,’ ” Anna said, quoting from the inscriptions on his decorations. “Your testimony carried weight.”
“I’d like to know what kind of significance that still has today,” he said, instinctively lowering his voice.
She poured out the buttermilk. “Who else can I ask, Papa? Nobody talks about those things.”
“What would be the point? That’s all in the past. The Party healed itself from within a long time ago.” The sausage slices were getting thinner and thinner.
“Politicians’ platitudes,” she said, teasing her father with one of his own favorite expressions.
“I never gave testimony at any trial.” Viktor Ipalyevich thought for a moment and then added, “However, my doctor was arrested.”
“What do you mean, your doctor?” Neither of them had yet touched any of the food on the table.
“Doctor Mikhoels. He removed my ganglion.” Viktor Ipalyevich showed Anna his right hand. “It was on my middle