Only now do I think of my father. Why isn’t he here? This indifference, at the moment of triumph he waited thirty years for, is surely the last word on our relationship.
When I was young he occasionally let me listen to Radio Liberty, an elusive buzz, its meaning hovering in and out of reach, corrupted intonation of Russians long abroad. He had assembled the radio, tuned to eccentric frequencies, hotwired it together. My parents’ apartment on the fringe of the Lenin Hills was a receptive zone. He and the government jammers played cat-and-mouse. ‘We just committed a crime,’ he remarked on conclusion of an audible broadcast on Sakharov’s internal exile to Gorky in 1980. On his pardon and release six years later the station was allowed a special broadcast we caught clear and untrammelled, a roundtable of Kremlinologists who concurred that Gorbachev and his allies were serious about reform.
Another time we sat through a diatribe by one Igor Sladkov, hailing from New York. Without pausing for breath, Sladkov got started on cheating East German Olympians, Soviet perfidy in Afghanistan, the shooting down of the Korean airliner off the Siberian coast and the Polish government’s suppression of the Solidarity movement. Igor blasted through the air tubes with sheer vehemence.
‘You know what Igor just told us?’ my father asked when Igor was done. ‘Our life here is one big lie. Walled up behind lots of little lies. His job is to punch holes through. I doubt I’ll be around to see it, but mark my words, one day the whole rotten edifice will topple over. Maybe in your time. Or my grandchildren’s. That’s what keeps me going.’
I haven’t even thought to ring him. Congratulate him on his prescience. Fortitude, considering the repression of that era. Who is to say the son takes bigger, braver risks? For that matter, why hasn’t he rung me? The obvious explanation – telecommunications down in his part of Moscow – is moot. If he wanted to be here, he’d have walked the whole way. Pity trumps filial guilt. In my mind’s eye I imagine an aged, shrunken Sergey bent to a dusty transistor.
Around midnight strangers begin hugging each other, a liberating carnival. Steadfast presence in numbers spells victory, and now we can disperse into the shallow summer darkness. A drunk standing beside us brings his boot down on a cockroach. ‘See?’ he roars. ‘Seventy years of communism snuffed out. Just like that.’ Pent-up fear dissolves in fireworks, rousing refrains of popular anthems. ‘Great Russia… you will resurrect yourself…’
I want to stay till dawn, but Anna reminds me that the trains stop running at one.
‘Now we can tell Nikolai we were there.’
Anna is incredulous. ‘So revolutions fix everything. Including infertility?’
‘If the Soviet Union can fall beneath its own weight, anything’s possible. You have to believe. Look around you, everyone here does.’
‘Anyway, what makes you so sure he’ll be Nikolai? A he for that matter?’ Chiding, humorous. I’d foisted on her a blond heir in my own image. Anna aches for a pole-vaulting Nadia or somersaulting Olga or pirouetting Svetlana. Revisiting shop-worn arguments from our optimistic, pre-women’s clinic times. Which more often than not descended into some variation on…
‘You’re an only daughter. Your family name died the day you married me, right? That leaves mine. Why wouldn’t I want a son?’
‘What a strange mix of Anglophile and unreconstructed Russian male you are. Worse than your father.’
Whack. Ouch. Although nothing we can’t make up in bed later in the evening.
Outside the White House, we link arms. Her teasing forgiveness at last – the best kind…
‘Let’s settle for an it,’ I suggest.
Nikolai – she says it aloud – affirms our future. A kind of preconception, the day’s perfect postscript.
We tune into Vremya the evening after. Spirited back to the capital, Gorbachev walks stiffly over the tarmac as though he has indeed undergone spinal fusion, and presides over a self-pitying press conference. In his lilting southern accent, to snooty Muscovites the mark of a perennial bumpkin, yesterday’s statesman makes a last-ditch plea to keep the USSR intact. He would have us believe that despite his ordeal at the plotters’ hands he remains a convinced communist. His reforms hadn’t worked because they hadn’t really been tried. Blah blah blah. I can hear a hundred million Russians laughing in derision.
‘What do you think?’
Anna snuggles closer in reply. ‘You know my politics. Free love before free speech. French kisses under Gorby’s nose.’ And proceeds to demonstrate.
★
COUNTER COUP
OCTOBER 1993
★
I turn on the television and we watch a civil war going on down the road. Constitutional crisis gone visceral. Yeltsin’s erstwhile allies – ragtag mercenaries, disaffected generals, a goodly contingent from the newly outlawed Russian Communist Party – who stood beside him two years before as he roared his defiance of the coup, are holed up in the White House ringed by his tanks. Pock-pocking Kalashnikovs provide live backbeat to the truncating unreality of the broadcast. Cameras, monitors, CNN equipment mass at strategic points around the siege. Every so often tanks scuttle across the screen like electronic pawns in a gambit manoeuvre. Interviews with bystanders splice together sporadic action. ‘At least in 1991 there was something worth looking at,’ complains a woman whose balcony overlooks the White House. Cut to the British Prime Minister’s press conference, his prim tones. ‘I believe President Yeltsin had no alternative but to take the action he did.’ All but erased by an unsynchronized Russian voiceover. Cameras chase stretchers bearing the injured along hospital corridors.
Then a tank belches somewhere behind the schoolyard, cracking the picture open.
The top part of the White House turns burnt toast the instant Anna’s dropped tea glass hits the floor in response to a soft, sharp tap on the door by an instrument or one knuckle. Not our neighbour Zhenya, who borrows our bottle-opener every other evening and knowing he is on a good thing, always gives it back the next morning. His code knock is rat-tat-a-tat-tat, rat-tat.
I press an eye against the peephole. Two people swim into focus, their faces hidden behind scarves, one holding a swaddled baby. One steps closer to the door. I jump sideways. Anna stifles a moan of fear.
‘Please – we are refugees, and our baby is sick.’ The woman’s frail voice, a Chechen accent, muffles through the doorframe.
Anna pulls me backwards. ‘Don’t fall for it. The baby’s a ploy. They’re bandits.’
‘Why? Because they’re Chechen? Show compassion.’
Retrieving my German handgun and tube of mace from the desk drawer, I stuff them inside each coat sleeve. I’d bought the gun, a bronze Magnum of uncertain vintage, through the trade magazine From Hand to Hand. It fires eight rounds of soft-nosed bullets, lethal to two metres. Supposedly. The clip is empty. Mace is my real weapon. Aiming a gun straight at assailants takes steadier nerves than mine.
When I open the door the woman staggers through, balancing against the coat rack. Trembling and feverish, she squats beside the wall heater. Her hair is dyed blonde in a crude attempt to pass herself off as ethnic Russian. The man lowers himself and gives her the baby. Stocky, he too has emaciated cheeks from a long ordeal. Anna fetches a blanket from the bedroom. The woman wraps it around herself and nods in feeble gratitude.