A Hero's Daughter Read online

  Olya went out feeling slightly dizzy. She walked along the gray April streets where the red flags for the May celebrations were already unfurled. On the front of a big department store workmen were putting up an enormous banner with portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The red canvas was not yet stretched taut and the April wind was making it belly out in little ripples. At one moment the prophets of Marxism were gazing out over the roofs of Moscow toward the radiant future, the next they were winking ambiguously at the passersby.

  Olga walked the full length of the Kalininsky Prospekt in a state of blissful giddiness. Now even its hideous concrete skyscrapers seemed to her graceful. She descended toward the Moskva River and climbed up on the bridge. Everything in this part of Moscow is on a gigantic and inhuman scale. The 700-foot pyramid of Moscow State University can be seen silhouetted against the skyline. On the other side of the river, with the same exuberance of Stalinist gothic, the building of the Ukraïna Hotel thrusts upward into the sky. Behind it glitters the COMECON skyscraper’s open book. On the opposite bank, facing the Ukraïna, stands a collection of gray-green buildings with orange windows. It is precisely there that the International Trade Center is located.

  On the bridge a strong and supple wind was blowing. Olya felt as if her short hair were billowing out like a long silken train. She had never felt so young and free. All over again she was thinking, with a smile of admiration; the KGB can do anything!

  During those two years that had followed the Olympic Games Olya had come to understand what Vitaly Ivanovich had referred to as the very “specific” nature of the work. Now she knew what interested him and his colleagues. And she knew how to extract this skillfully from a foreigner. How ridiculous that ruse of Jean-Claude’s seemed to her now, suddenly needing a translation! She used it herself quite often these days, in order to establish contact with “interesting” foreigners. But she had a great many other tricks, too. The names of her foreign acquaintances made up a continual procession: each one might last for a week, or a month, or a year. There was a certain Richard, an Alain … a John, a Jonathan, a Steven…. Indeed, there were even two Jonathans, one English, one American. Their voices jostled one another in her memory in a confused chorus. Snatches of their confidences rose to the surface. One of them bore the title of “Honorable” and was very proud of it. Another was an enthusiastic mountaineer and went rock climbing in New Zealand. Another used to assert that everywhere you go in the USSR you run into people from the KGB. All of this and much more besides was passed on in the reports Olya diligently submitted to Vitaly Ivanovich. And sometimes details no one had any use for resurfaced, even though the people to whom they belonged had become confused in her memory: a shoulder covered in freckles, the glow from a face that resembled a pale mask in the heavy darkness of the bedroom….

  Sometimes, waking in the small hours, the favorite time for suicides, she was almost physically aware of the echoing void entering her eyes. She would prop herself up on one elbow, contemplating with alarmed amazement a head, a somewhat prominent ear, a half-open mouth from which a quiet little whistling sound emerged. Then her glance would turn toward the pile of crumpled clothes on the chair and meet the languid eye of a saxophone player with dark slicked back hair, smiling at her from the wall. “Gianni Caporale,” she read on the poster. Sometimes in this darkness her stare would encounter that of a voluptuous half-naked beauty, or else that of Lenin, stuck above the bed by a facetious Westerner. “Gianni Caporale,” she read silently and took fright at her own internal voice. “What am I doing here?” The question echoed in her head. And each time this “I” reminded her of their apartment in Borissov, the particular smell and light of their rooms. Also of a winter’s day with sparkling sunshine, and a gleaming slope, with skiers and children on toboggans racing down it. That day — it must have been a Sunday — her parents were out for a walk with her. When she became tired of her toboggan Ivan thought it would be fun to invite her mother to have a ride. And, elated by the sun and the sharp, icy air, she laughingly agreed. They plunged down, so huge and so comic on the little toboggan! At the bottom they had turned over and climbed back up the slope hand in hand, reappearing at the summit with rosy cheeks and shining eyes.

  Olya looked again at the person sleeping beside her. She called him silently by his name, remembering what she knew of him in an effort to bring him to life, to bring him closer to herself, but it all remained empty of meaning.

  “I’m nothing but a whore,” she said to herself. But she knew very well this was not true. “What do I get out of all this?” Tights from the Beriozka store. That filthy makeup you can buy from any black market dealer… I should really stop this at once. Vitaly Ivanovich? Well, so what? I could go and see him and tell him point blank: ‘I’ve had enough of this. It’s finished. I’m getting married.’ They wouldn’t put me in prison for that….”

  These nocturnal reflections calmed her somewhat. “I’m complicating my life,” she thought. “I’m filling my head with all this nonsense. As Mayakovsky said, ‘What is good? What is evil?’ And after all, where’s the harm in it? The girls at the Institute hang around in restaurants for months before landing themselves some grubby little Yugoslav. While here there’s something to suit all tastes…. Take Milka Vorontsova, a beautiful girl with real class, a princess. She found herself a husband, an African, without batting an eye!”

  Olya remembered that after the three days of wedding celebrations Milka had gone back to the Institute. In the intervals between classes her fellow students had clustered around her and, with many a mischievous wink, had begun to ask her questions about the initial delights of conjugal life. Without any embarrassment and indeed welcoming this curiosity, Milka instructed them thus: “Listen to me, you future ‘heroic mothers.’ The golden rule with an African husband is never to dream of him at night.”

  “Why not?” the voices asked in amazement.

  “Because he’s so ugly that if you see him in your dreams there’s a good chance you’ll never wake again!”

  There were peals of laughter. When the tinny sound of the bell rang out the students hastily stubbed out their cigarettes and made their way back to the lecture room. Olya asked Milka: “Listen, Milka, are you really going to become African and live in Tamba-Dabatu?” Milka looked at her with her clear blue eyes and said softly: “Olyechka, any town in the world can be a staging post to somewhere else!” Outside the window the day was beginning to break. The head on the pillow murmured something in French and turned over on the other cheek. Olya stretched out as well, unfolding her weary elbow with relief. The suicides’ hour receded, as did the dark shadow of night.

  In her new life at the Center Olya’s first “client” was the representative of an English electronics firm. She made contact with him by telephone and introduced herself, saying that she was going to be his interpreter. The voice on the telephone, was calm, self-confident, even a little authoritarian. She imagined a face in the manner of James Bond, with graying temples and a suit as dark as if it had been carved out of a block of granite glinting with mica. “He’s an old hand,” Sergei Alexeievich, the KGB officer who worked with her at the Center had remarked of this Englishman. “He knows the USSR very well and speaks Russian. But he pretends not to.

  But the imposing tones of the voice on the telephone had misled her. They were simply the tones formed by his profession. When a dumpy bald man clad in a checked jacket detached himself from the wall and came toward her in the lobby with a somewhat embarrassed smile, Olya was dumbfounded. He was already nodding his head and holding out his hand as he introduced himself while she continued to stare at him. At that very moment a metal rooster began leaping up and down on its perch in the middle of the lobby, announcing twelve noon by flapping its wings. “What an odd representative,” thought Olya in the elevator.

  When taking his shower that morning, the Englishman had lost a contact lens. Feeling around in the shower tray for it, he had lost the other one. Once dressed, he had e
xtracted his glasses case from the bottom of his suitcase, taken out his glasses nervously, and dropped them on a marble ashtray. “How can one present oneself in such a state?” thought Olya in amazement. He cast rather confused glances at her: the right lens of his spectacles was missing and his eye peered through the empty circle in a blurred and timid manner.

  “I can understand almost everything in Russian,” he had said in the elevator, “but I’m out of practice and I speak it very badly.” He would say: “I telephone to you,” and, something that particularly amused Olya, “Would you like to close me the door?” He was staying at the Intourist Hotel. On the third evening they had dinner together at the restaurant and she stayed with him.

  And once more she experienced that hollow wakefulness early in the morning at the suicides’ hour. But also on this occasion a calm, desperate serenity. She realized that what tormented her was not futile remorse but the inevitable disappointment of an absurd hope. It was something she had already experienced when she was at the Institute and was now encountering again at the Center.

  She used to meet a new “subject” and, in spite of herself, without being conscious of it, would begin looking forward to some miraculous change, a completely new life that would be quite unlike the old one.

  But nothing would change. Sometimes she would go with her acquaintances to the airport. Sluggishly, as if in an underwater kingdom, the announcements at Sheremetevo would make themselves heard. And already on the far side of customs, her “subject” would be waving good-bye to her and disappearing amid the colorful crowd of passengers. She would walk away slowly toward the bus stop.

  Nothing did change.

  And now, waking up beside this Englishman, fast asleep with his face in the pillow, she finally understood that she should expect nothing. That all this was futile. Futile, this hoping for something. And sometimes there was this feeling of pity for the “subject,” a sentient human being, after all. And a vague sense of shame.

  She had to press on, knowing her place in the long, invisible chain that disappeared into the labyrinth of political games and technological theft and ended up somewhere in the capitals of Europe and the Americas. It was not her business to think about all these machinations. Her business was to assess her “subject” in a swift exchange of words and looks and, within a given time, to act out all the scenes of the stipulated love drama. Her business, when she encountered a representative like this in a checked jacket, was to make him forget that his damp reddish hair barely covered his bald head and that his right eye was peering out hazily and timidly, and that, in unbuttoning his crumpled shirt beneath his belt, he had laid bare his white belly and tried to cover it up and then, having caught her look, been horribly embarrassed.

  In this first role at the Center Olya played her part so well that the Englishman did not dare to give her money. When she went with him to Sheremetevo he awkwardly presented her with an extremely costly perfume with the price ticket from Beriozka scratched off

  She remembered him well, this first client, and could recall some features of the next two. As for the rest, they soon became mixed up in her memory.

  * * *

  With her colleague, Svetka Samoilova, Olya had rented two rooms, not far from the Belayevo area. Svetka had already been working at the Center for two years. She was exceptionally greedy for Western currency and lingerie but at the same time extravagant and generous to a fault, in the Russian manner.

  She had a beautiful and opulent physique. If she had not succeeded in holding herself in check in Moscow, she would long since have turned into an Arkhangelsk matron, a human mountain, robust and warmblooded. In Moscow, on the other hand, and especially at the Center, she had been obliged to go against all the dictates of her nature. She was constantly on a diet, forced herself to drink tea without sugar and, in particular, exercised with a hula hoop at every free moment. The fashion for this had passed years ago, but it was not a question of fashion. Svetka had pierced a hole in her hula hoop, slipped half a pound of lead into it and sealed it up again with adhesive tape. It had become a weighty contraption. She spun it in the kitchen when stirring clear semolina, on the telephone, in her room in front of the television.

  They often spent their free evenings in Svetka’s room, chatting or watching the innumerable episodes of some adventure film. Olya occasionally went in there when Svetka was away, sometimes to borrow the iron, sometimes to leave on the bed a letter bearing the crude postmark of a village to the north of Arkhangelsk.

  At such moments Svetka’s room appeared to her in a completely different, unaccustomed light. Her gaze took in the narrow worktable, the side table piled high with old Western magazines, the arabesques on a thick carpet. And she no longer recognized any of it.

  There was the chipped bottom half of a Russian doll, bristling with pencils, a glass saucer glittering with bracelets and earrings, and, open on a pile of magazines, a little book printed on gray paper, Autumn Cicadas.

  Olya bent over it. A three-line stanza had a mark in the margin against it made with a fingernail.

  Life is afield in which, as darkness falls

  Close to the footpath, there amid the corn,

  A tiger watches, eagerly alert.

  Olya studied everything around her with uneasy curiosity. It was as if the things all took pleasure in the places where they had been put. Among these objects Olya had a presentiment of hope for some alleviation, the possibility of becoming reconciled to all that she lived through each day. To her amazement she seemed to be making a strange excursion into this anticipated future, without knowing if this was encouraging or a cause for despair.

  She found herself picking up the heavy hula hoop behind the dressing table and, for amusement, tried to spin it round, imitating Svetka’s gyrations. She recalled her friend’s joking observation: “Do you remember who coined this gem? Was it Breton? Aragon? ‘I saw a woman-waisted wasp pass by’”

  “Absolutely One with hips like an Arkhangelsk milk delivery woman,” Olya had teased her.

  “You may laugh! But when you’re older you’ll understand that real men always appreciate the poetry of contrast!”

  And Svetka had made her contraption spin so fast that it hissed with the menacing fury of an aggressive insect….

  On Svetka’s dressing table, among the bottles and the jars of makeup, there was a piece of paper covered in figures. Every week she measured herself. Sometimes Olya added a few wild zeros to the figures, or altered centimeters to cubic centimeters. Which sent them both into fits of laughter.

  Amid the disorder of all the objects accumulated on Svetka’s dressing table stood two photos in identical frames. The first showed an elegant sunburned officer with one eyebrow slightly raised. At the bottom of the photo the white lettering stood out clearly: “To my dear Svetka, Volodya. Tashkent 1983.” In the other one a man and a woman, not yet old, pressed awkwardly shoulder to shoulder, were looking straight in front of them, without smiling. Their peasant faces were so simple and so open — almost unfashionable in this simplicity — that Olya always felt embarrassed by their silent gaze….

  “It’s curious,” she thought. “What if Svetka’s foreign clients should one day ever see this hula hoop, this photo, this ‘Tashkent 1983’? And that, too: ‘A tiger watches, eagerly alert’?”

  Nevertheless from time to time Svetka’s diet was put on hold. Noisily, and bringing the smell of snow with them, the guests would start to pile in, the table would be covered with food and wine. There was pale pink meat from the Beriozka store, caviar and fillet of smoked sturgeon brought in from some ministry’s private supply. Svetka pounced on the pastries, and cut herself a slice from a tart with baroque decorations, exclaiming with reckless bravado: “What the hell! you only live once!”

  The guests thronging around this food were colleagues from the Center, people in business and men from the KGB who saw to the alcohol. On mornings after feasts like this they got up late. They went to the kitchen, brewed up very s
trong tea and spent a long time drinking it. Sometimes, unable to restrain herself, Svetka opened the refrigerator and took out some wine: “To hell with them, all these pathetic representatives! What kind of a life is this? We can’t even drink to get rid of a hangover….”And on this pretext they took out the rest of the cake, and the remains of the elegant tart, whose decorations were now in ruins….

  During these vacant Sundays, Hungarian Ninka, a prostitute from the Center, often came to see them. She was called that because her father had been a Hungarian member of the Komintern and it was claimed that he was related to Bela Kun. He had been in prison under Khrushchev and after his release had had time, a year before his death, to marry and have a child, and this was Ninka.

  She passed on all the gossip from her world: the caretaker was becoming a real bastard! To let you into the Center he now took fifteen rubles instead of ten! Broad-hipped Lyudka had managed to get herself married to her Spaniard…. It was rumored they were going to close the Beriozka stores….

  These winter days passed slowly. Outside the windows occasional sleepy flakes fell from a dull sky. Under the window they could hear people from the apartments beating their carpets on the snow. Children shouted on the frozen slide.

  Sometimes, by way of a joke, Ninka and Svetka would start arguing: “You’ve got it made,” the Hungarian would say. “You sit there in the warm. Your paycheck arrives once a month. They bring you a client on a silver platter: ‘Here you are, Madam. Be so kind as to bid him welcome and take care of him.’ While we freeze to death just like those poor wretched whores at railroad stations. The cops take their three rubles from us. And our sisters, the goddamned bitches, are forever ratting on us to cut out the competition….”