‘What about?’
‘Us,’ she said. ‘I told you a long time ago that I loved you. Don’t you think I’ve been very patient?’
‘Yes,’ he agreed.
‘So?’
‘I think I love you too.’
‘What are we going to do about it?’
Did she love him enough to be told the truth? Absurd thought, more absurd than considering defection before he’d known what had happened to Kazin. He said: ‘What do you want to do about it?’
‘Just because one marriage didn’t work doesn’t mean I’m not willing to give it another try.’
What sort of conversation was this! He said: ‘There are problems.’
‘Like the marriage you said didn’t exist? These absences are pretty damned odd, you know.’
‘I didn’t lie: I’m not married.’
‘What’s the problem, then?’
Could there be a way fully of adopting the William Bell identity? He said: ‘Let me try to work something out.’
‘How long?’
‘Soon,’ he promised. ‘I’ll try to make something work soon.’ What? he demanded of himself. What the hell could he do? Did he love Caroline as much as his forgiving father had loved his unfaithful mother? A pointless question, leading nowhere. The letters were still unread, in the safe-deposit box, he remembered suddenly.
40
Yuri ran, literally and from the decision because it was a decision he couldn’t make. He told himself the obvious way to end the affair with Caroline was belatedly to agree to Granov’s suggestion about closing down the apartment, and just disappear. Then he told himself that Caroline might cause difficulty with the Amsterdam publication, trying to find him, and eventually confronted the fact that he was putting his own barriers in the way of his own problem. That he had, simply and brutally, to say he didn’t love her and wanted it over. And couldn’t do that because he did love her and didn’t want it over. The one situation for which there had been no training and no preparation because it was inconceivable to anyone in Dzerzhinsky Square that a Russian intelligence officer would fall in love with anyone but another Russian, preferably another KGB officer.
He lied about an assignment in South America and the night before he left 53rd Street they had their first real argument. At its height she actually asked him if he wanted to call it quits – giving him his opportunity – and Yuri said no, just a little more time, and she said how much and he said until he returned, just pushing back his self-imposed and impossible deadline.
Yuri hated Riverdale and the claustrophobia of the Soviet compound, refusing to mix or become part of their limited social environment, finding it easy to make comparisons with long-forgotten Kabul.
It was his third evening there, his mind constantly upon Caroline, that he recalled again the unread letters between his parents still in the safe-deposit box in the Second Avenue bank. He went there the following day, early, wanting to give himself enough time and when he explained it would not be a short visit the bank official allocated a study room just off the main, box-lined vault.
Yuri gazed first at the fading photographs, trying for an emotion he had not been able to find in the cramped loft in the Lenin Hills dacha. The soft-featured woman, hair caught high and full on top of her head, did look too demure and innocent to have done what she did, cheat and cuckold. Had she loved them both? Or just turned to Kazin in the terror of war, frightened and confused as people were frightened and confused in war, doing things which at any other time would be unthinkable? His father had been a handsome man, reflected Yuri. And before the deforming injury he would have been impressive, too, with his broadness and his height: it would have been easy to be proud of someone like his father. Had his mother felt pride, as well as love? She had loved, Yuri knew: his father had told him during that stumbled, inadequate account. And it was inadequate: still so many unanswered questions.
The last photograph was of the three of them together, at the wedding. Yuri concentrated upon Kazin. My supporter, his father had said. He’d also said he did not know how long the affair had been going on. Not then, surely? Surely she hadn’t married one while she was sleeping with the other? Yuri tried to remember his impression when he’d first seen the picture. Proprietorial, he recalled. Kazin appeared to be looking at his mother as if there was already something between them, an understanding. Yuri shook his head in the empty, metalled room, refusing the impression. It was a trick of the camera, a half-caught expression. How could it be anything else?
Now that the personal danger was over – now that Kazin was dead – Yuri felt differently about the imagery of the man. Later, during their confrontation, he had been over-indulged and bloated but that man actually wasn’t there in the photo, and it had been wrong to think him so. Heavy, certainly – a hint of how he became – but no more than well built. Still impossible to understand…
Yuri stopped the pointless drift, laying the photographs aside to turn to the frail, brittle correspondence, lifting the bundles completely from the box to set them out on the greater space of the table.
Initially he did not attempt to read the contents. Determined upon a chronology, Yuri went through the letters establishing by date that they were consecutive, his mother’s to his father, his response to hers. And then he began to read.
It appeared to have been a stilted courtship in the beginning – the strange formality he had recognized in the loft – with some indication that her family had disapproved: there was an early letter, a copy Yuri guessed, of a plea not to his mother but to her family in which his father had stressed his prospects. A secure and rewarding career, the man had promised. And he had written something else: ‘I will always honour your daughter.’ A pity, thought Yuri, that she had not been able to return that honour.
The change, to Stalingrad, was abrupt and obvious, his father’s letters on scraps of paper, the writing scrawled and almost illegible, in pencil. Yuri strained to make sense, suddenly aware of Kazin’s name. Our courier, the man had been called. And by his mother, not his father. And then another reference. This time ‘Our beloved courier’. Yuri swallowed against the hypocrisy, reading on. There was no description of the horror of the siege, of course, because that would not have been permitted, but his father had hinted at the awfulness. There was a reference to noise above which it was impossible to speak, and that there were no longer in the city any animals, a clue to how they’d stayed alive eating the cats and the dogs and finally the rats. Where, wondered Yuri, had the beloved courier been then?
And then another abrupt change, which Yuri could not immediately understand until he realized it was the period of his father’s hospitalization. Still in Stalingrad, at first – the Stalingrad from which he knew Kazin had by now been evacuated – and from the dates a long gap between their writing. In that first letter his father had written ‘I am not dead, as you thought’, and Yuri wondered if there were an explanation for everything in those seven words. And maybe in the next line: ‘I will be ugly.’ Yuri blinked against the blur making it difficult for him to focus, which came again when he coordinated his mother’s reply, reminiscent of the stiffness of the courtship letters. There was an official communication, telling me you had been killed.’ And then: ‘How are you hurt? What does ugly mean?’
From his father’s reply – ‘my arm has gone’ – Yuri accepted it would have been impossible for his mother to imagine the true extent of the untreated injury: that it would have been a shock when she first saw him.
Which from another letter he saw had been in February 1943, when he’d been airlifted from the relieved city to Moscow: ‘I existed in the thought of seeing you again,’ his father had written. The jar came to Yuri from a sentence in his mother’s reply. ‘I will care for you, until you are better…’ What had ‘until’ meant? Had she been setting a time limit upon a relationship she had resigned herself to be over, having already established another? He went back to the Stalingrad letters, calculating the gap. A full three months, he saw. Three months when she believed her husband to be dead, with their best friend always there, to comfort her. Could she be criticized for falling in love again? Shouldn’t the feeling instead be pity, for the dilemma she faced when the man reappeared from the dead?