“Sasha,” Maya said softly, taking the baby from his arms.
“Not tonight,” he whispered back.
“‘What?” asked Lydia, reaching over to touch the baby.
“Sasha, she wants to know,” said Maya.
“All right,” he said with a deep sigh as Maya moved to the corner of the room to change the baby and get her ready for bed.
“What?” Lydia repeated.
“I … we,” Sasha began. What remained of the evening, Sasha was sure, would not be pleasant.
SIX
The uniformed man was standing at the window, looking across at a blank wall of stone. The wall, while not fascinating, did appear to hold his attention as the other man in the room gave his report. When the report was completed, the uniformed man spoke.
“Good. I want no mistakes, Vadim.”
“No mistakes,” Vadim said.
“The consequences of a mistake will be-”
“No mistakes,” Vadim repeated. “We have him. As Lenin said, a single claw ensnared and the bird is lost. We have that claw ensnared.”
The uniformed man at the window said nothing for perhaps half a minute and then turned and spoke.
“We have him when it is done. Understand that. And no one will be involved, have any specific knowledge but you, me, and Nikolai.”
“I understand, Comrade,” Vadim said.
The uniformed man now faced Vadim and looked into his eyes.
“The times are perilous,” he said. “The romantics are taking over all across the Soviet Union. Weasels who cheered us yesterday, today call for rebellion, chaos, all in the name of freedom. Religion is no longer the opiate of the people. Glasnost, openness, an invitation to mindless mimicry of a decaying West, is worse than an opiate. Revolutionary goals have been abandoned. Soviet identity is endangered. You go down the street, turn on the radio, read a newspaper, and you’d think you were in New York or Rome. It cannot last. It cannot be allowed to continue. My father and his rather lived, fought, died for the revolution. We cannot let it go to the god of Pepsi-Cola, Big McDonald’s, and Bruce Joels. We cannot have our history, our commitment demeaned by the triumph of materialism.”
Vadim was attentive. Basically he agreed with his superior, though he thought the game they were playing was less philosophical and more pragmatic than the uniformed man had stated it. He was also uneasy about his superior’s sharing of his thoughts about the project in which they were engaged. It was generally best simply to act and not to carry information that might later be an embarrassment, an embarrassment that his superior might decide to remove.
“Report again tomorrow,” the uniformed man said abruptly, perhaps sensing that he had said too much. He moved to his desk and Vadim turned smartly and left the room. The corridors of the KGB building echoed with the clap of his shoes. It was late, but he still had work to do, things to check. There could be no mistake. His superior was certainly right. A mistake and they could both be facing something far more fearsome than the presence of the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company.
Boris Trush rubbed the top of his head where he had just been hit with a stalk of celery. The stalk had exploded from the unexpected, at least to Boris, collision with his head, and pieces of vegetable had sprayed around the room.
“The man is dense,” the young man said, looking back at the older man.
In the past few hours, Boris Trush had discovered the names of his captors. The older man was Peotor Kotsis, the younger his son Vasily. The other four people at the crumbling farmhouse had gone unnamed and, essentially, unseen since Boris had pulled the bus into the barn where he had been directed. Three men had climbed into the bus and had begun to move the body of the laborer as Vasily and Peotor had led Boris to the main house and the small room in which he now found himself nursing the emotional if not physical bruise of having been hit on the head with a stalk of celery.
“Look what I did,” Vasily said.
Boris was seated on a bed in the corner.
“Look what I did,” Vasily repeated, and Boris looked at the various pieces of celery he could see from where he sat. He also looked at the older man, who stood against the wall near the door, arms folded.
“Look what you made me do,” Vasily amended. “You are stubborn and stupid, Boris. I’m not trying to offend you here. Are you offended?”
“I’m not offended,” said Boris.
“Good,” said Vasily on his hands and knees, looking for a missing piece of stalk. “But you are stupid. You understand your situation here. If you weren’t stupid, you’d be agreeing with me.”
“But-” Boris said.
“No!” shouted Vasily, getting to his feet and throwing celery pieces on the table. “If you’re not going to make sense, don’t speak!”
“You wish to live, Boris,” said the older man against the wall.
“Yes,” said Boris.
“It wasn’t a question,” said Vasily with a sigh. “He was telling you. My father was telling you, reminding you.”
“But we will be killed,” Boris said in anguish.
Vasily removed his gun from his pocket and moved toward Boris on the bed.
“And what will happen if you don’t?” he asked.
“This isn’t right,” Boris appealed to the elder Kotsis. “I’m just a bus driver.”
“And that is precisely what we need,” Peotor Kotsis said gently.
“You want me to drive all of you into Red Square so you can blow up Lenin’s Tomb,” Boris said. “We’ll all be killed.”
“Not necessarily, Boris,” Peotor continued. “We do not wish to die, though we are willing to do so if necessary. We, Vasily, you, I, will all die eventually. This day, a year from now, ten years from now. There are causes bigger than ourselves, Boris.”
“I’d like to choose my own causes,” said Boris, cautiously keeping an eye on Vasily.
“But you do not have that luxury in this case,” Peotor said. “You waited too long. Would you rather die with a bullet in your head here or die having changed history?”
“I don’t want to make the choice,” said Boris. “This is a nightmare.”
“Life is a nightmare, Boris,” Vasily whispered into his ear. “If you could enter my head for five minutes, you would know it.”
“You have another ten seconds to think about it, Boris,” Peotor said.
“No,” Boris whimpered. “There are no bus routes near the square. You take the Metro or a trolley. We’ll be stopped before we-”
“Eight seconds,” said Peotor. “You’re not even looking at your watch!” Boris cried. “Six seconds.”
“I need a toilet!” Boris pleaded. “Three seconds.”
Vasily raised his pistol and aimed it at Boris’s right eye. “I’ll do it!” Boris shouted.
Vasily put the gun at his side and said, “Welcome to our cause.”
“He’s just a man, a man at sunset,” the apparently male voice shrieked from the phonograph.
Elena Vostoyavek looked at her son across the room and considered telling him, asking him to turn down the screaming man or woman, but Yuri seemed lost in thought, on a distant planet. He sat slouched in the worn sofa in the corner, the sofa Elena’s husband had died on five years earlier. Yuri resembled him, was even sitting in the same position in which she had discovered Igor early that March morning. Elena wanted to tell Yuri that if he wouldn’t turn the music down or off maybe he could move to a different position, unfold his hands, take that look from his face.
The man on the record shrieked more words about someone going to a meeting. Drums beat, horns blared.
“Come and eat before you go to work!” she called, waiting for something that resembled a lull in the sound her son thought was music.
“I’m not hungry,” Yuri replied, closing his eyes as if any question she asked him, any comment she made, was a burden he could no longer bear.
Their apartment, two rooms, was in a block of 1960s ten-story white concrete squares near Vostochnaya Street. If an identical building did not block their view they would have been able to see the Palace of Culture of the Likhachev Auto Works.