But schooling had come, nevertheless, possibly through some contact of his mother’s, and at Lomosov University Dybrovik distinguished himself in business administration and finance.
From there he had gone to work for the Soviet Economic Council, one of his most important early projects being the turnaround of the department store Glavny Universalny Magazin: GUM. It was only a couple of blocks away from his present office, but seemed a million years ago in time.
Actually, it was only fifteen years ago that he had been assigned to Eportkhleb, the Soviet grain-trading bureau. At first he had languished there. “What does a poor carpenter’s son from Leningrad know about grain trading?” he had cried more than once. He had learned though, and learned well, and had in fact risen spectacularly in the ranks. Now he headed the bureau, much of his rapid rise due to the Soviet reward system. Those who did well, who learned their jobs well, were allowed to travel abroad. At once a simple and stunning idea.
Less than a year after he had started with Exportkhleb, Dybrovik had seen Paris, spending two marvelous weeks there with the trade mission. Then Buenos Aires the next year. New York, London, and Paris all in the third year. And, in the next years, every major Western capital.
He smiled now with fond memories, not really seeing the Polytechnic Museum. He had always loved Mother Russia, he told himself, almost as if he had to tell himself in order to believe it. Yet he loved his country better from afar. While in Paris, he often lunched at Russian restaurants. While in New York, he would extravagantly telephone his wife, Larissa, to tell her how much he missed her and their tidy apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt.
After those little nationalistic indulgences, Dybrovik would invariably dress in his finest Western suit, dine at the finest Western restaurant, and hire an escort for an evening of dancing and then pleasure.
This double life in no way affected his performance for the bureau. On the contrary, he often told himself that he did so well precisely because of this dichotomy in his personality and tastes. He could at once understand the solidity and comfort of collectivism and yet see the obvious merits of capitalism. He understood his peers and loved his wife, while at the same time he felt a certain kinship with Western grainmen such as the McMillans of Cargill, the Louis Dreyfuses, the Fribourgs of Continental, and of course the mavericks like Ned Cook and Kenneth Newman.
He laid his forehead against the cool window glass and closed his eyes for a few seconds. His father, who had lived with his share of strife, had told him once that being a man was nothing more than the willingness to accept responsibility. But what happens when the responsibility is killing you? His father had never been able to answer that question. And his father’s responsibility had eventually killed him.
A truck rumbled distantly up the street and disappeared around the corner. Dybrovik turned back to his desk, bundled up the files he had been studying, and stuffed them in a lower drawer. Then he locked the drawer.
If all went well, if the weather held, the grain harvest in the fall would top 250 million metric tons. The largest in the history of the nation. A glorious achievement of the collective farm system, the posters would proclaim. A triumph of Soviet knowhow, the radios and televisions would blare.
But he would not be here to participate in the sale of the twenty to thirty million tons of surpluses expected. He would no longer be a part of the system. He would no longer even be a Soviet citizen.
They had been watching him over the past year or more. His personal mail had been tampered with, and there always seemed to be new staff members underfoot. And three months ago, in Montreal, he was certain that he had been followed.
Degeneration, they would call it. They always had names for everything. He had succumbed to Western decadence. He smoked American cigarettes, drank Scotch whiskey, preferred steak to borscht, drank coffee instead of tea with lemon from a glass. He understood free enterprise too well. And he had been unfaithful on more than one occasion. In Paris with Marie Genarde. In New York with Marilyn Morgan. In Montreal, just three months ago, with Susanne Armor.
“For those and other crimes against the state, against the sensibilities of good morals, we find you unfit for further travel abroad.”
Dybrovik left his office, walked past the darkened rows of empty desks in the main trading and posting center and down the two flights to the ground floor.
The evening smelled warm and moist, a fog forming from the Moscow River a few blocks away. It was the kind of evening that most people preferred to spend indoors, but it suited Dybrovik’s bleak mood.
Unlike Paris or New York, cities that never slept, Moscow was a dark, forbidding city after nightfall. There were very few cars on the streets, no pedestrians in this section, and only the occasional streetlight to provide any illumination.
Stuffing his hands deep into his pockets, he turned east and headed toward his apartment building half a mile away, the soft slap of his heels on the pavement keeping time with his fears, with the nagging worry that had been with him for months. Had he made the wrong decision?
The buildings here were all old, with baroque exteriors, and stained, it seemed, with the sweat of the city; windows like blank eyes, blind to the tribulations of the people who passed. Doorways locked now, but in the daytime opening to shops and offices and a clinic. Busy people here by day, but by night they were all at home, locked away with their own fears and guilts.
Maybe he was going insane, he thought, stopping momentarily at the corner. Only this morning Larissa had planted that seed in his head.
“What’s wrong with you lately, Pasha?” she had asked from the bed where she lay bundled under the covers.
He had opened the windows in their bedroom last night and had forgotten to close them before he went to bed. Larissa had spent a restless night cuddled next to him. It was chilly in the room.
“What do you mean by that?” he asked, coming from the bathroom.
“Look at you, you’re getting fat, and you don’t care. You eat greasy food and smoke disgusting cigarettes. Who would want you, except for me, I ask?”
Dybrovik stared down at his wife. Her face was plastered with a mudpack he had brought back for her from Montreal; her hair was done up with French curlers and wrapped in a scarf from Finland, blue and green.
He loved her, there was no doubt about that. But he loved the West and personal freedom as well. And he never hated them, as he sometimes hated her.
Across the street and down the block Dybrovik turned onto Kutuzovsky Prospekt, his step slower now that he was nearing his building.
In less than twenty-four hours he would be on an airplane for Geneva, where he would pick up the money he had hoarded there (another of his crimes against the state), and continue west. Paris the day after, and then New York City and finally Washington, D.C., where he would ask for political asylum.
It was time, he told himself again. It was time to leave. Time to expand. Time to change — or more accurately, to shed — his old skin, and become, in the light of day, what he had always been.
“Larissa,” he cried out loud, stopping once again, his own voice startling him. It was too late to go back. There were no simple Leningrad days to return to. No Black Sea vacations to pine for. Only freedom in the Western sense of the word.
Years ago he had been in Gaborone, Botswana, with a trade delegation to the capital city, and he had watched from his hotel balcony as five thousand blacks gathered in the city square shouting the one English word “Freedom!” Only in their chanting it came out as two words: Free Dom! Free Dom! Free Dom!
He could almost hear them now. Shouting, screaming for something they had no earthly conception of. Free enterprise, and voting, and telephones without taps, and butcher shops without lines (supermarkets, they called such places). Free Dom.