— He was telling the truth. I had you followed. And it had nothing to do with my work. I thought…
— That I was sleeping with someone else?
— There was a time when you wouldn’t talk to me. You wouldn’t touch me. You wouldn’t sleep with me. We were strangers. And I couldn’t understand why.
— You can’t marry an MGB officer and not expect to be followed. But tell me, Leo, how could I be unfaithful? I’d be risking my life. We wouldn’t have argued about it. You’d just have me arrested.
— Is that what you think would happen?
— You remember my friend Zoya, you met her once, I think?
— Perhaps, I don’t know.
— Yes, that’s right — you never remember anyone’s name, do you? I wonder why? Is that how you’re able to sleep at night, by blanking events from your mind?
Raisa spoke quickly, calmly and with an intensity Leo hadn’t heard before. She continued:
— You did meet Zoya. Perhaps she didn’t register, but then she wasn’t very important in Party terms. She was given a twenty-year sentence. They arrested her as she stepped out of a church, accusing her of anti-Stalinist prayers. Prayers, Leo — they convicted her on the basis of prayers they hadn’t even heard. They arrested her on the basis of the thoughts in her head.
— Why didn’t you tell me? I might’ve helped.
Raisa shook her head. Leo asked:
— You think I denounced her?
— Would you even know? You can’t even remember who she is.
Leo was taken aback: he and his wife had never spoken like this before, never spoken about anything other than the household chores, polite conversation — they’d never raised their voices, never had an argument.
— Even if you didn’t denounce her, Leo, how could you have helped? When the men who arrested her were men like you — dedicated, devoted servants of the State? That night you didn’t come home. And I realized you were probably arresting someone else’s best friend, someone else’s parents, someone else’s children. Tell me, exactly how many people have you arrested? Do you have any idea? Say a number — fifty, two hundred, a thousand?
— I refused to give them you.
— They weren’t after me. They were after you. Arresting strangers, you were able to fool yourself that they might just be guilty. You could believe that what you were doing served some purpose. But that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted you to prove that you’d do whatever they asked even if you knew it in your heart to be wrong, even if you knew it to be meaningless. They wanted you to prove your blind obedience. I imagine wives are a useful test for that.
— Maybe you’re right, but we’re free of that now. Do you understand how lucky we are to even get this second chance? I want us to start a new life, as a family.
— Leo, it’s not as simple as that.
Raisa paused, studying her husband carefully, as though they were meeting for the first time.
— The night we ate dinner at your parents’ apartment I heard you talking through the front door. I was in the hallway. I heard the discussion about whether or not you should denounce me as a spy. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to die. So I went back down to the street and walked for a while, trying to collect my thoughts. I wondered — will he do it? Will he give me up? Your father made a convincing case.
— My father was scared.
— Three lives weighed against one? It’s hard to argue with those numbers. But what about three lives against two?
— You’re not pregnant?
— Would you have vouched for me if I wasn’t?
— And you waited until now before telling me?
— I was afraid you might change your mind.
This was their relationship: stripped bare. Leo felt unsteady. The train he was standing on, the people near him, the cases, his clothes, the city outside — none of it felt right now. He could trust none of it, not even the things he could see and touch and feel. Everything he’d believed in was a lie.
— Raisa, have you ever loved me?
A moment passed in silence, the question lingering like a bad smell, the two of them rocking with the motion of the train. Finally, instead of answering, Raisa knelt down and tied her shoelace.
Voualsk
15 March
Varlam Babinich was sitting cross-legged on a filthy concrete floor in the corner of an overcrowded dormitory, his back to the door, using his body to shield from view the objects arranged in front of him. He didn’t want the other boys to interfere as they had a tendency to if something caught their interest. He glanced around. The thirty or so boys in the room weren’t paying him any attention; most of them lay side by side on the eight piss-sodden beds they were forced to share. He watched two of them scratching the bug bites swelling up across each other’s backs. Satisfied that he wasn’t going to be pestered, he returned to the objects arranged in front of him, objects he’d collected over the years, all of them precious to him, including his most recent addition, stolen this morning — a four-month-old baby.
Varlam was dimly aware that by taking the baby he’d done something wrong and that if he was caught he’d be in trouble, more trouble than he’d ever been in before. He was also aware that the baby wasn’t happy. It was crying. He wasn’t particularly worried about the noise since no one was going to notice another screaming child. As it happened he was less interested in the baby itself than in the yellow blanket it was wrapped in. Proud of his new possession, he positioned the baby at the centrepiece of his collection, among a yellow tin, an old yellow shirt, a yellow-painted brick, a ripped portion of a poster with a yellow background, a yellow pencil and a book with a soft yellow paper cover. In the summer he added to this collection wild yellow flowers, which he picked from the forest. The flowers never lasted long and nothing made him sadder than watching their shades of yellow fade, the petals becoming lank and brown. He used to wonder:
Where does the yellow go?
He had no idea. But he hoped he’d go there too some day, maybe when he died. The colour yellow was more important to him than anything or anybody. Yellow was the reason he’d ended up here, in Voualsk’s internat, a State-run facility for children with mental deficiencies.
As a small boy he’d chased after the sun, certain that if he ran far enough he’d eventually catch up with it, snatch it from the sky and carry it home. He’d run for almost five hours before being caught and brought back, screaming in anger at his quest being cut short. His parents, who’d beaten him in the hope that it would straighten out his peculiarities, finally accepted that their methods weren’t working and handed him over to the State, which had adopted more or less the same methods. For his first two years in the internat he’d been chained to a bed frame, like a farm dog chained to a tree. However, he was a strong child, with broad shoulders and a stubborn determination. Over several months he’d managed to break the bed frame, pulling the chain loose and escaping. He’d ended up on the edge of town, chasing a yellow carriage of a moving train. Eventually he’d been returned to the internat suffering from exhaustion and dehydration. This time he’d been locked in a cupboard. But all that was a long time ago — the staff trusted him now he was seventeen years old and smart enough to understand that he couldn’t run far enough to reach the sun or indeed climb high enough to pick it out of the sky. Instead, he concentrated on finding yellow closer to home, such as this baby, which he’d stolen by reaching in through an open window. If he hadn’t been in such a hurry he might have tried to unwrap the blanket and leave the baby behind. But he’d panicked, afraid that he was going to get caught, and so he’d taken them both. Now, staring down at the screaming infant he noticed that the blanket made the baby’s skin appear faintly yellow. And he was glad that he’d stolen them both after all.