When I returned home, there was a note tacked to my door, scrawled in crayon and in Oktyabrina’s unmistakable, childish script. ‘Mind your own business about my country. YANKEE GO HOME!’
I waited until Wednesday to pass Domolinart. Two black Volgas with ‘MOS’ plates were parked near the entrance, and I decided not to drop off the note I’d written. On Thursday morning, she telephoned.
‘Good morning, it’s Tanya/
‘Good girl. Would you care to meet me today? At one o’clock - please ?’ c No. Now/
‘Now it is. How late will you be?’
‘That’s not amusing. This is no time for banter. Now or not at all.’
When I arrived at Sverdlov Square, she was pacing around the fountain, clearly agitated. Having seen me, she turned away and made for Petrovka, indicating I should follow. Before I’d quite caught up with her, I suggested lunch at Maxim’s with a bottle of their best champagne. I felt it would be quite Russian to seal our reconciliation in extravagance. Oktyabrina said nothing, but maintained her rigid march until we were beyond everyone’s earshot.
‘I didn’t meet you/ she sputtered nervously, To discuss
your personal debts to me. This is serious. You must help*
‘What’s wrong now?’
‘Something awful. Leonid is about to be destroyed/
This sounded like her usual hyperbole, but I was glad of any excuse to patch things up. Then she began a shaky narration, and it was soon clear that Leonid was in fact in desperate trouble.
Last year, she explained, he had signed ‘a pronouncement’. It was a letter of protest against the persecution of Alexander Ginsburg, the young intellectual who had compiled a record of the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. This was what had brought about his dismissal from the physics institute. Last month, he signed a second petition condemning the persecution of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Against everyone’s advice, he had included his address. This second offense, regarded as insolence, incensed the KGB.
Four angry officers had raided Domolinart the evening before. They tore through Leonid’s things and removed all the written material, together with Leonid himself. Oktyabrina saw them manhandling him into a car as she was returning home from an errand. He just had time to call a goodbye to her before he was slapped and the two cars drove away. Oktyabrina ran off and, too terrified to go home, spent the entire night walking.
That day came to be called ‘Black Thursday’. We both knew that something had to be done - and also, at bottom, that we would do nothing. Because nothing could be done except to implicate ourselves. When Kostya patiently expounded this to us, we reproached him for his cynicism, but knew he was right - and he knew we had to hear it from someone else.
‘Believe me, I know the score. If the KGB has him, he’s finished and you haven’t got a chance. A bit of sausage and cheese will help him a hell of a lot more than getting yourselves arrested.’
Nevertheless, Kostya did go to KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square -- the dreaded Lubyanka - to inquire 126
what would happen to Leonid. It was an act of considerable bravery. Oktyabrina and I waited a block away. Kostya was told - rather politely, to his surprise - that Leonid would be exiled from Moscow for five years. He would probably be sent to a construction settlement in central Siberia and assigned to hard labor - mixing cement and handling blocks - for a new dam on the Angara river. 'It’s the largest in the world/ said the neatly-groomed KGB officer blandly to Kostya. 'Now, are there any other questions? Or do you want me to ask you one - I mean your name?’
When Kostya returned he took me aside and gripped my arm. 'Leonid’s finished, Zhoechik. As we say, they’ve slipped the sickle around his balls. The solution for us lies in some Egyptian rum.’
In the evening, Oktyabrina and I sat on the bench in Gogol Boulevard and tried to think. ‘But it’s not fair,’ she said. 'Leonid’s a beautiful boy, a living martyr. He’s suffering for his purity and his ideals' She dropped the little-girl whine. 'Can fives really be crushed like this? I always thought it was dramatic accentuation.’
Later she was troubled by her own role. 'I always suspected he was involved in those things. Was it my deep moral obligation to stop him?’
'I don’t know,’ I said. ‘When a friend wants to make a sacrifice for public good - I honestly don’t know.’
‘At least you can do something about it.’
'I wish I could.’
‘What’s written with a pen . . . can’t be expunged by evil men. You can write an absolutely sizzling article about it. Stir up the Western world.’
‘I’ve been thinking about it. It’s probably better to write nothing.’
‘Why?’
'Anything I write about Leonid, can only stir the wrong people in the wrong way. They’ll investigate how I got the information, and eventually narrow it down to you. Then you’ll be in trouble - and probably Kostya. With no hope of
changing anything. Is it worth it?”
When she answered, her tone was more weary than challenging. ‘This is a crucial article. What about your dedication to the truth?’
‘I sometimes make compromises. Which makes me scream all the louder about honesty now and then, and sound self-righteous/
She waved away my offer of a cigarette and I lit one for myself. ‘What about your scorn for journalism? Exploiting people’s misery?’
T sometimes make generalizations. About journalism, for example. The silver lining is what I’ve learned about you.’ She reached for my hand and pressed her palm to mine, as she’d never done before. Her hand was tired and unaffected - as womanly as her voice at that moment.
‘It’s been a terrible day. I didn’t sleep last night. I’d rather not go back to Domolinart just yet . . . Zhoe, let’s go to the apartment - I can snooze a bit on the davenport/
Again I felt the kind of stirring that had disappeared since the final acid months with my wife. I knew that Oktyabrina was less frightened now. Had it been another evening, were I not so wary myself, I would have taken her to sleep with me. ‘You’d better have the bedroom Oktyabrina -after what you’ve been through. I’m used to the davenport/
‘I’d love clean sheets. And a bath!
Inertia kept us on the bench for another half-hour, soothed by the mild May evening and the neighborhood’s sights
and sounds. A mother called to her daughter from an open window of an apartment house: ‘Natasha, Natashinka, come home this minute. It’s terribly late, you should be in bed/ ‘Please mamachka, just five minutes more, please! On the next bench, a girl pleaded to her cloth-capped swain from under his embrace. ‘Oi, Andrusha, Andrushka mine, not here, I beg you. What are you doing to me?’ A peasant woman passed, flopping in the remains of her slippers. She was carrying a heavy bundle on her back, and stank of herring and onions. A young man helped his sleepy son to 128
urinate on a tree stump.
‘But you don't want life to continue/ Oktyabrina said, ‘when something like this happens to your friend. How can we treasure spring with Leonid in a dungeon? Or is that being synthetically dramatic?'
‘Have you ever really been in love?'
‘I might have been. I can be.'
‘Because life goes on afterwards. Even though you feel like a traitor for taking part in it again.’
‘That's it exactly, Zhoe dearest. Life's so indefinite . All these lack-luster compromises instead of something shining and solid so you know what to build.' But before we got home, she was experimenting with a story about how her love for Leonid would have made his exile bearable, if only the tragic arrest hadn't cut the bud before it bloomed.