When they were seated in the rear of the car, Rostnikov said, “My father believed that kvass was like medicine, the mixture of black bread and yeast stimulated the body fluids.”
“It’s possible,” said Karpo.
“There are fewer and fewer carts in the city,” said Rostnikov with a sigh. “Do you remember the apartment in which you were a small boy?”
“Yes,” said Karpo.
“In detail? Where the chairs, beds, tables, windows were?”
“Yes.”
“About the joke. You don’t have to learn one. I was joking.”
“I see,” said Karpo, looking straight ahead and making it quite clear that he saw nothing.
There were only two people Emil Karpo trusted, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov and Mathilde Verson. He did not always understand either of them, but he had come to the conclusion that not only could they be relied upon but that they had strong feelings for him. Since he was well aware that there was no humor or warmth within him, he found their feelings inexplicable and meaningful.
For more than forty years of his life all meaning had been contained in the Soviet state and the revolution. The function of Emil Karpo had been to obey his superiors and to locate and bring to justice all criminals, all enemies of the revolution.
The union was gone. The Soviet Socialist Republics were now a commonwealth of sovereign states. Leningrad was once again St. Petersburg. They had even gotten rid of the hammer and sickle and designed a flag that seemed no flag. Next, he thought, there would be a return to the two-headed eagle of the czars. The party was underground, crying in pain, dying. The revolution was gone and there was nothing ahead but a gray imitation of the Western democracies.
Meaning was disappearing, but what little there was he clung to. His faith and loyalty had lost their certainty and there were moments when panic threatened to break through, moments that were longer each time they came. And each time the moment was accompanied by the headaches, the headaches that he still welcomed, that still tested him as they had since he was a boy. There were still the headaches and he could still welcome them. There were still criminals and they could be identified. He wondered if Porfiry Petrovich was aware of these moments of doubt.
Rostnikov was looking out the window making a sound that might have been humming and might simply have been a sound. “Were your grandparents religious, Emil Karpo? Did they believe in a god?”
“They were members of the Orthodox Church,” said Karpo. “They died long before I was born.”
They drove the rest of the way to the train station in silence.
Through a curtained window slightly parted so that he could look out onto what had recently been Dzerzhinsky Square, Colonel Vladimir Lunacharski looked down at the group of tourists gathering for a guided tour of Lubyanka, the former headquarters of the Committee for State Security, the KGB. The tour guide was pointing to the empty pedestal in the center of the square where the statue of Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet Secret Police, had stood until the rabble had torn it down. There were rumors that Lubyanka, too, would either be torn down or turned into a government office building.
The tourists would pass by his office door sometime later that morning, whispering such rumors in foreign languages, looking at everything as if they were in some Byzantine church.
Cars circled the square, headed toward the heart of Moscow. A small group of people gathered in front of the toy store beyond the square.
The colonel suppressed a sigh. He had no great love for these changes, for this new Russia that brought Americans and jabbering Germans galloping past his office. Independence had resulted in a demotion for him. Well, they had not called it a demotion.
The fifth directorate, the directorate responsible for monitoring the activities of dissidents, the directorate in which Vladimir Ivanovich Lunacharski had served for thirty years, had been reorganized even before the collapse of the union. Its name had been changed first to Directorate Z, but now, for almost a year, it had been called the directorate for safeguarding the constitution. This reorganization, the tours of Lubyanka, had all come about after the KGB’s power had been transferred from the Politburo to the Supreme Soviet, implying greater scrutiny over the KGB’s activities. But that, too, had changed, and now every day there were new laws and new restrictions. Lunacharski did not even know with certainty from day to day what organization, if any, he worked for.
The KGB had, since its inception, been at the service of the Communist party. Now all security forces within the Russian borders were under the direct control of the egomaniac Yeltsin and his young idealists.
But General Karsnikov had assured him that the collegium, the highest decision-making body of the KGB, would remain strong, that the nation needed the confidence and control of the security apparatus, whatever they chose to call it. Of this, General Karsnikov had no doubts. General Karsnikov had called Colonel Lunacharski into his office on the first floor less than a month ago to tell him all of this. The office, with large, modern furnishings, sturdy chairs, and a circular conference table for six, had not changed in twenty years, and the large photograph of Lenin still hung on the wall near the door.
Others had removed their Lenin photos and paintings and replaced them with nothing, but General Karsnikov had left his where it had always been, a sign that for him the change would not come simply, that too many lives had been invested in the institution to give it up with a whimper.
“Changes will have to be made,” the general had said.
He was a heavy man who liked to wear uniforms but had ceased doing so a week before Russia declared its independence. Colonel Lunacharski had done the same.
Colonel Lunacharski was fifty-one years old. His weight, maintained by vigorous exercise and diet, was the same as it had been when he had entered the service at the age of twenty-one, the son of a hero of the revolution and the war against the Nazis. Lunacharski always stood erect and kept his still-dark hair cut military style. Lunacharski’s one regret was that he was not quite five and a half feet tall. He was determined that this lack of height would not keep him from rising in the ranks, that no one would ever say that this man with the face of a peasant and size of a large Alsatian dog could not represent state security at its highest levels.
“So, there will be some cosmetic changes, little things, temporary things,” the general had said, sitting across from him at the round conference table. “A few big ones.
“The truth,” he had continued, lowering his voice in confidence, though no one else was with them, “is that me KGB grew stronger, not weaker, with this perestroika. We withstood the attacks within our ranks, the attempts to cut our financial resources. We maintained more than two hundred and twenty thousand border guards, a volunteer militia of eighty thousand. Some of the army’s best units, including two paratroop divisions, were transferred to the KGB. We had our own planes and ships, our own army, and do you know what we provided?”
“Stability,” Colonel Lunacharski had answered, knowing that he was being prepared for some sacrifice.
“Stability,” the general had agreed. “It is we who will hold this confederacy of fighting chickens together, we who will provide hope, we to whom they will turn when they fear their Ukrainian and Georgian neighbors, we to whom they will turn when the world treats them like hulking trash. Lunacharski, these new leaders are no different from the old leaders, but they do not have the mask of communism to hold in front of them. They will change the face on that mask. They will call it democracy. And they will need us. But some surface changes are needed, temporary. There will be battles for control, power. Civilian idiots will think they are giving us orders and we will make them think we are obeying. There are those of us who will not allow the Russians to slip back into the nineteenth century.”