ALEXstraightened his tie, feeling Anna Petrovna’s eyes on him as she lay in the lower bunk, propped against the pillows, the blankets drawn to her chin. He had shaved, patted cologne on his cheeks and carefully combed his hair. He could not remember when he had taken so much care with his grooming.
“There,” he said, turning to face her, reminded of a time long ago when he had primped for the approval of his mother.
“You look lovely,” Anna Petrovna said, a touch of wistfulness in her tone.
The words were a caress. His love for her had taken away his fear and, with it, his caution. Otherwise, he might have reacted quite differently to her strange interrogation. As it was, he put Dimitrov out of his mind. She is an innocent, he told himself—not a neutral, merely an innocent—and that was enough for him. If I am to live only two more days, I would spend it with her, just like this.
“Come with me to Nahodka,” he said.
“It is impossible. You’re being an adolescent schoolboy. I have another life, children, a husband.” She paused, turned away from him. “You don’t know about me.”
“I know enough to love you.”
“That’s not enough.”
“It is for me. I also know that you love me.”
“How do you know that?”
“I feel it.”
“Sentimentality.” She sighed, patted his head, reached for his hand.
“You must control your emotions.”
“Why?”
“It is not scientific.” She was teasing now, playful.
“You are making a joke of it.”
“It is a joke.”
He decided then not to think about her leaving, hoping that the train would somehow hurtle endlessly through the snow.
“We will have the best feast the Russian railway can devise. Champagne. Caviar. Extravagant delicacies.” She giggled like a young girl, and he wished that he had known her sooner, had grown up with her, had loved her since the moment of her birth. He was jealous of every lost moment. The thought of her conceiving children with another man was unbearable.
“Get dressed,” he ordered. “I’m taking my best girl out for dinner.”
“You go,” she said, a shadow falling across her face. “I’ll have to put myself together.” She put out her cigarette and watched him for a moment. He imagined that they both felt the same sadness. Tomorrow they would be in Irkutsk.
“I’ll meet you in the restaurant car.” She lifted her head from the pillows and smiled at her reflection in the window. “I have a lot of work to do before I can be seen in public.”
He bent and kissed her forehead.
“You are the most beautiful woman in Siberia.”
She pushed him away. “What do you know of Siberia?” she said.
“Only all the lies my grandfather told me.”
“Lies?”
“It was all a figment of his imagination. As you are a figment of mine.”
With that, he reached for the blankets and yanked them down to the foot of the bunk. He marveled at the whiteness of her skin in the light, the soft, youthful curve of her belly, the thatch of pubic hair, shades darker than the hair on her head. She relaxed under his gaze and stood up.
“You’re magnificent,” he said with unabashed admiration, feeling the glorious sense of possession.
“And you’re crazy.”
She reached for her flowered dressing gown, hanging on a hook, and slid gracefully into it.
“You go,” she said again. “I’ll fix myself as quickly as humanly possible.”
He enveloped her in his arms, kissed her face, and buried his lips in her hair. She caressed the back of his neck.
“We’ll go later.”
“The restaurant will close.”
“You’re right. I’ll get the best table in the house. I’ll bribe the maitre d’.”
“It’s against the rules.”
“You Russians and your rules.” He kissed her hair again. “Fuck the rules,” he said in English.
“What?”
“It’s an English obscenity.”
“Say it again?”
“Fuck.”
“Fuck,” she repeated, pausing. “It is beautiful. I must remember it.”
He laughed, and started to unbolt the compartment door. “I’m off.”
“Yes, go,” she said, and pushed him firmly out into the passageway.
The restaurant car, glistening with light, was a cozy oasis in the thick blizzard. Alex took a seat at an empty table, directly behind the British diplomat and the Australian.
“Two bottles of your best champagne and double orders of caviar for starters,” he told the waitress.
“A celebration, is it?” Farmer said, his bow tie bobbing on his Adam’s apple.
“Of sorts. Are you enjoying the journey?”
“It’s driving me round the bend,” the Australian said. “Never again.”
“You should have flown,” the diplomat said. They had obviously reached the outer edge of tolerance as roommates. The red-haired man appeared at one end of the car and was watching them carefully.
“Someone said it would be exotic,” the Australian said bitterly. “They’re full of bull. This is one boring experience.”
“It’s isolating for anyone who can’t speak the language,” Farmer said, with exaggerated superiority.
“These Russkys have nothing to say anyway. They’re a morbid lot. We should have kicked their asses in when we had the chance.”
“He doesn’t think much of them,” Farmer explained to Alex.
“Can’t understand why the British keep an Embassy at Ulan Bator. It’s the middle of the end of the world,” the Australian said.
“Precisely the reason,” the diplomat said. He was getting off the next day, to transfer at Ulan-Ude. “It could very well be the place where the world ends.” He looked up quickly to see if anyone else had heard. Then he pointed to his eyes and ears. “We watch and listen. It is like being between the devil and the deep blue sea.” He took a deep breath, then leaned toward Alex. “We are trapped there, of course. They know everything. Not a word. Not a letter. Not a telephone call escapes their surveillance.” He looked at Alex to see if he understood. Alex nodded. Even if he could have brought himself to trust Farmer, this avenue was obviously closed.
“The Mongols who live out here are in the middle,” the diplomat said. “They’ve survived wars, disease, famines. They’re tough, beyond feeling. Even if the whole country becomes one big Gobi desert, they’ll be the first to dig themselves out of the ashes.”
“Descendants of Genghis Khan,” Alex observed.
“They once controlled most of the civilized world,” the British diplomat said.
“Yesterday’s dishwater,” the Australian retorted.
“He has no sense of history,” the diplomat said.
“They’re nothing more than savages.” The Australian threw his spoon into the bowl of borscht. Little red flecks spilled over the tablecloth.
“No more than we are,” the diplomat said, looking with disgust at the mess the Australian had made.
Alex listened to their chatter, losing the thread as his mind turned inward. In its way, his life in Washington had been a simplification of himself. His time with Janice and Sonia was merely a rote exercise. His only real life was lived deeply in the mind, and his work consumed him even more because of the emptiness of his other life. And now he had found Anna Petrovna, the perfect balance between the life of the mind and the heart. Just a few days ago he would hardly have understood what the heart meant. It would have been far from any familiar frame of reference. The fantasy of romantic love that blared out in popular songs, movies and books, all that sentimentality that he had detached himself from was suddenly a burning relevancy. And that it should happen in Siberia, on the Trans-Siberian Express, compounded the mysterious joy of it. In the very conception of Anna Petrovna, Alex thought, he had acted out the idea his grandfather had planted in his head so many years ago. He had come home.
The Alex Cousins who had stood in Yaroslav station only a few days before had been a different man, detached and indifferent. What had Dimitrov mattered to him, except as an extension of his work? Now Anna Petrovna had split open his mind as well as his heart and he was beginning to piece together what it all meant.
“If Dimitrov was on the verge of unleashing a holocaust, would you destroy him? Would you save him?”
For Alex, the question had created a new set of possibilities.
Suddenly the waitress plunked two plates down on the table, bringing him back to his surroundings. It was the caviar, surrounded by little piles of neatly trimmed toast. Then she returned with the two bottles of champagne, placing them on the table in a stainless-steel bucket. Instead of ice, the bucket was packed with snow.
“How practical,” Alex said.
“As you can see, we have plenty.” For the first time, the waitress smiled, showing a flash of gold tooth.
Alex slid his knife into the caviar and spread some on a square of toast. I should have let him die, he thought. Knowing what I know, how could I have possibly let him live?