The auctioneer, in a popinjay’s glitter jacket, took bids starting from twenty thousand roubles, at five thousand intervals. Just as he was about to bring the hammer down, someone upped their bid. It went on until a riot threatened.
‘Five thousand bucks,’ called a male voice off-screen.
‘Five thousand it is. Going. Going. Gone.’
Anna tried to translate five thousand American dollars into edible equivalents. How many tonnes of potatoes? Warehouses of rice? Apples? Her imagination boggled.
‘Well, that’s one lucky winner,’ Sergey commented. ‘He gets a life. Too bad for the ten thousand also-rans. Take note, young people.’
The next Wednesday was Scrabble with a difference.
‘You two against me.’ With his customary linguistic machismo Sergey bogged Vassili down in double-jointed matrices, meeting even less resistance than usual. Anna suspected Vassili was running dead. Or his mind wasn’t on the game.
Sergey scooped up all seven letters, skewered Vassili’s woeful three-point E-A-T to form M-A-R-R-Y. He counted out the value of each letter.
‘M on the triple word square makes twelve. Double word score for Y, comes to thirty-eight. Puts me in the lead by fifty-three. Might as well concede son, you won’t claw that back. Now you two can fight it out for second.’
With that he adjourned triumphant to the balcony. Passing Vassili he tipped an ostentatious wink. Vassili swallowed. He picked up a handful of tiles, checked which letter was on each, awarded himself eleven instead of the requisite seven and passed an E and S to Anna.
‘Hey!’ she protested. ‘That’s cheating on three counts. I’m handicapped as it is.’
‘Tonight isn’t your standard game. We’re playing for bigger stakes. So I’m bending the rules.’ He marshalled his letters and tacked them down from the top row. W-I-L-L-Y-O-U-M-A-R-R-Y.
She could make out the constituent parts but the meaning eluded her. Somehow ungrammatical, a subject or object omitted?
‘Vyidesh za menya zamuzh,’ Vassili translated. ‘I’m Levin, you’re Kitty.’
Levin quits sulking on his farm, musters the gumption for a second marriage proposal, via chalk scribbles on a table. The previous week Vassili had asked – ever so casually – to borrow Anna Karenina. ‘Bit hard to explain,’ he had mumbled when she asked why. ‘Need to check something in English for next week’s class.’ She handed it over, thinking little of it at the time. Nor when he returned it yesterday, Kitty’s consent bookmarked.
He was staring at her.
‘Get it?’
‘Oh. Do I have time to think?’
‘Of course. Two minutes. Or you forfeit. Playing by the rules.’ He grinned.
Anna studied her letters, top heavy with junk consonants. Did she love him? Yes and no, was the honest answer. Was that the right question? Should one even marry for love? In life or in art or in Scrabble? She liked him. So did Kitty at a comparable stage in her courtship with Levin, which roughly speaking moved through three phases – like, dislike, love. Would that do?
The five-thousand-dollar question – was Vassili a patch on Levin?
She could always console herself that she rose to the romantic occasion. But baser considerations carried the day. His was the right proposal – in the wrong setting. As a forest romantic and a capital hardhead, they should have been sitting on a picnic rug in a glade. Brave – in a way that only someone as shy as Vassili could be. They hadn’t spent more than two hours at a time alone, his parents hovering within earshot. However unqualified to judge, (did her broken-off portion even constitute a family?), Anna, a country girl who had never been kissed, knew only that, even at the Kurguzikovs’ fractious worst, she would not do better.
There was no getting round it – marriage would secure her propiska. As the television report affirmed, newlyweds vaulted the queue. But for how much longer?
Anna pondered her situation well past two minutes. A proposal precipitate and, going by television, not a day too soon. This was her Kitty moment. Let slip the opportunity and… next stop Kaluga.
What Kaluga represented, hit her. The full horror of her mother’s death. Or enough of it. Tatiana, alone in her saintly torment, excreting a live being. Knowing, or sensing neither was likely to survive. No loved ones to bear witness, hold her hand, mop up.
Anna remembered too, as though it was yesterday, finding her father.
She blinked at Vassili, who remained silent. Having browsed her conscience, she tacked on ES at right angles to the last letter of her opponent’s neologism.
★
COUP AUGUST 1991
★
Dum dum dum-dum-dum dum da-da-da dum dum dum dum dum dum da-da-da dum dum dum dum dum dum da-da-da-da-dum dum dum dum dum…
Swan Lake blares from the television instead of scheduled current affairs. I like Vremya (Time) burbling in the background while I prepare evening classes. Four cygnets strive and fail to take wing. After eight or nine hearings the ballet’s perfection registers. What do the English call it? Acquired taste. I scrawl the phrase in today’s vocabulary handout list.
Pity Anna isn’t here. She would leap from the couch, a fifth Little Swan, feet en pointe, arms pressed to sides. Her favourite movement, which ballet companies reserve for unknown or up-and-coming dancers. An unlikely chance, given the conformity it demands, to be plucked out and assigned bigger roles. My contribution to Anna’s performance is applause on behalf of Bolshoi Theatre’s imaginary packed stalls.
As I sit down to catch the rest, the music stops. I turn the television off, try the radio. First, Echo of Moscow, the independent station. Dead air. So too Radio Russia. Enough is enough, citizens. The joke’s on you. I flick the television back on. A still of a May Day parade in Red Square, Tunguska tank smack bang centre screen. How tactful not to show the military parades themselves. Sumptuous medley of Tchaikovsky waltzes concluding with an airy concerto – by coincidence or eerie design, they all belong in Anna’s collection. Back to the ballerinas – identical quadruplets – right feet poised on left knees. The sequencing is brilliant, I have to give them that – aural tranquillizers. Go back to sleep, it murmurs to restive children. You see? Everything’s under control, nothing to worry about. It was funeral music for Brezhnev, who held on for two years past his Olympic swansong, followed by Andropov in ’84, Chernenko in ’85. Once synonymous with passing eras, now it serves a more sinister purpose.
I dial Anna’s work number to cancel this evening’s plan. The phone rings out. Nothing alarming in that, a regular occurrence in fact, but she might already be on her way to meet me. Little of the outside world penetrates her institute. Such as yesterday’s neutral – deceptively so as it transpired – announcement in Pravda of a planned demonstration in Lubyanka Square followed by a rally outside the White House. These days this kind of event meets an equivocal official response. Civil unrest has ceased to be remarkable or provoke bloody reprisals.
I had proposed we meet at seven, under Dzerzhinsky’s statue. Anna’s unexpected yes lent the idea the thrill of a tryst. If Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky can divide us, he can also reconcile. Anna has always shied away from political involvement, refusing to accompany me to semi-secret meetings of Democratic Russia. In this, as in so many things, she shows good sense. Apart from the obvious risk to her job she would have ended up sewing banners while I and the other men debate strategy. She maintains that mounting disorder presages mass arrests. My stock reply, that the security apparatus is disintegrating along with the rest of the country, only strengthens her conviction that whoever wins will instigate a new terror, in which case it’s better to be arrested at home than mown down at a demonstration. If our future is other peoples’ theatre, I retort, at the very least we are entitled to a seat in the audience.