Maria was careful not to write about the background. She detailed the ceremony and included some pointed quotes from the eulogy. She indicated with skilfully selected words that the death was not from natural causes but, otherwise, she kept to the ritual itself and let the readers draw their own inferences.
The editor held up the piece. He accused her of expressing anti-Soviet sentiment, of encouraging dissent. She had her rebuttals prepared. How could this be anti-Soviet subject matter when the authorities themselves had made publicly known that the perpetrators were SB police? She was reporting on a funeral; it had nothing to do with politics. Maria had no doubt she was on steady ground. She could defend every sentence against accusations.
Her editor listened and nodded, and then produced several pages of pink carbon paper, covered in her familiar scrawl. Pages she’d written for a samizdat, which had been typed and copied and typed and copied until her words had been thumbed through by several hundred pairs of hands.
The editor displayed each set of pages and read the headlines:
Maria couldn’t believe it. The samizdat went to incredible lengths to make sure authors would be untraceable.
“I’ve never seen these before.”
“Fine. In that case, I can hand them to the KGB to conduct some handwriting analyses.”
She placed her face in her hands.
“Writing inflammatory articles for a ragged underground paper is one thing. But now you are trying to bring us into disrepute. I’m obliged by law to report you.”
There was nothing to do but wait for it all to unfold.
Maria spent the day pacing the apartment, waiting for the knock on her door, thinking about the interrogation room she would soon find herself in, the sleep deprivation and starvation, the days of endlessly repetitive questioning.
She couldn’t even bring herself to let Grigory know what had happened, telling herself there was no point in burdening him with the same sense of dread. So when she received the call to return to work that evening, she was swept away with relief. She grabbed her coat, made her way to the Metro stop, taking the same route she’s just walked. When she reached the viewing platform, Mr. Kuznetsov was standing there, looking at the traffic below.
Mr. Kuznetsov, her editor. A stale man, desiccated skin, flat, unresponsive eyes.
She stopped, recognizing him straight away; it was clear to her that his being here, intercepting her journey, was no coincidence. Immediately, all that would transpire unfolded in her mind. It was all set up to play out beautifully for him. He would remind her that, due to his discretion, she still had a job. He would remind her that the KGB would be very interested in her dissenting view. She even predicted that he would use the word “implications,” use it to promise the destruction of her husband’s career.
“And there are other implications,” he proceeded to say.
The words still ring out to her, even now, with a terrible clarity. Her life imploding with that single sentence.
If she had had more time, if the conversation had taken place in his office, perhaps she would have fled, found Grigory, told him everything. He would, of course, have confronted Kuznetsov, paying no attention to how well connected the man was. It would have meant the destruction of a fine career, another skilled doctor disregarded. Grigory would have been deprived of the very thing that defined him.
But of course, Kuznetsov knew that too. His standing there, so close to her apartment, meant that she couldn’t defer the decision. And once that determination was made, she couldn’t turn back. As she lay with Grigory later that night, afterwards, her deception expanded into the millimetres that separated their bodies. Lying there on the freshly changed sheets, another man’s body heat still contained in the core of their mattress.
The only influence she could bring to bear was her lack of willingness. When Kuznetsov prised her apart, her body proved itself resistant to his touch. The lips of her opening as stiff and dry as cardboard, causing them both to burn as he propelled himself into his rhythm.
She looks away from the spot where Kuznetsov once stood, his presence still palpable, and gazes down into the cold heart of the city. Leninsky Prospekt is straddled by neon-lit billboards, all of them proclaiming the superstitions of her leaders. Their weaknesses, the tensions, the conflicts, the secrets that give the Party a reason to exist, the fears that make their hearts flurry in the quiet of the night:
Sentences swathed in vanity. This rhetoric surging through their institutions and overflowing into the minds and actions of individuals. Surging through Kuznetsov as he surged into her: creating, eventually, her unwanted child, her unwanted life.
And when she rid herself of the child, it compounded her guilt. All she wanted then was to turn away from the world, from Grigory. Not revealing it all to him then—now that she can reflect upon that time—was a wilful act of self-destruction. When it was all over with Kuznetsov and he reported her anyway, she was glad. She welcomed the punishment, she told herself she deserved to toil away at a job she hated. To lose herself in menial tasks, to shut down her mind, close off her personality.
She makes a pact with herself, a promise, as she walks down the broad avenue, traffic whipping past as she disappears into the pavement underneath Gagarin’s steel monument, as she descends on the narrow escalator: she will no longer be just another shadowed form in this city built on whispers.
Chapter 18
The snow is coming in force now, these past two weeks, dropping its full weight from the sky. Huge, feathery flakes clump on Artyom’s lashes, small drifts gather in the nape of his hood. All around, the resettlement camp is silent, not much moving other than the trucks that come and go.
The snow sits evenly both on the ground and on the flat roofs of all the prefabricated huts, so they look as if they’ve been driven upwards from the earth, their yellow walls the only color for kilometres around, a colour that was probably intended to elicit cheer but instead serves only to emphasize the cheap, inhospitable nature of the constructions. They would look cartoonish but for their dilapidated state. Already, in many, windows have fallen from their frames and the residents have taped up cardboard or nailed up the doors ripped from their kitchen presses to keep the wind out.
In every hut there’s a fuel-burning stove. So much of the day spent poking and prodding. They get their fuel allowance from the supply store: a wheelbarrow of logs for each home, delivered by a young soldier with red-raw features and a permanently runny nose.
Batyr is improving. After three weeks, Artyom can see how his coat is beginning to regain its lustre; he’s starting to put on weight. Artyom visits him at mealtimes and, more recently, takes him for walks. He’s built a small cart for the dog, big enough to rest his haunches on but small enough so that he can put his front legs on the ground. There’s a handle on the back of the cart that Artyom uses to push the dog forward, and Artyom is aware that it must look strange, but there are many stranger sights here.