Pushing open the door of his compartment, Alex found Mrs. Valentinova lying across the bottom bunk. She had changed into a long dressing gown and hung her dress next to one of his suits. She had also pinned her hair in an upsweep, revealing a long stretch of soft pink neck. She lay on her side, supporting her head in her palm. The pose had disarranged the top of her robe, revealing the upper portion of her breasts.
Beside her on the table was an open bottle of vodka and an empty tea glass. The scene had a calming effect on him, a sense of coming home. She had taken off her makeup and when she looked up at him, her eyes had an innocent girlish look.
"Satisfy the human clock?" she asked, flashing a wide smile.
"Satisfy is hardly the correct word," he said. He threw the medical journal onto the top bunk and sat down heavily on the chair.
"I should have warned you." She laughed and he felt their tension ease.
"Where are we?" He looked at his watch. It was seven thirty Moscow time.
"You sound like Pyotr," she said.
"Who's that?"
"My son. Whenever we take him on the train, he asks every five minutes where we are." Then, pointing to the vodka bottle, she asked, "Can I offer you a drink? What good is it being Russian if one has to drink by oneself?"
He nodded, wondering if her friendliness was sincere. What does it matter? he asked himself. He got up and opened the washroom door. Inside was a tiny sink with a gleaming shower attachment hooked on the wall. He found a glass on a shelf above. Reaching for it he glanced at himself in the mirror, noting the flush along his cheeks and nose. His eyes were bloodshot and under them dark hollows had deepened. He was exhausted. He went back to his chair and poured himself a drink.
"To answer your question, I'd say we were an hour or so from Yaroslav; we cross the Volga during the night. And late tomorrow we will be in Asia."
He sipped the vodka, feeling the spreading inner heat. "I've never been there," he said, lifting his glass. "To Asia."
"We make that vodka in Irkutsk," Mrs. Valentinova said, rolling over so that she lay on her stomach facing him, her breasts flattened under her.
Irkutsk! He hesitated for a moment, feeling the urge to explain his own vision of that city, the dream that sprang from his grandfather's recollections. He rolled the vodka on his tongue, feeling in its warmth the compelling link of the generations, Russian to Russian, grandfather to father to son. The very name of Irkutsk sent shivers up his spine and straightened the hairs on his neck. He envisioned a jumble of wooden houses, log cabins, and stretches of plank sidewalks. His grandfather had told him tales of lurking thieves, who had escaped from the penal colony outside the village. The strong ones had lived off the villagers, pillaging, robbing to survive. The weaker ones, miscalculating the brutality of the Siberian wastes, had attempted to make it back to European Russia. They rarely, if ever, succeeded, their corpses found the following spring, perfectly preserved in the ice. "Spring flowers" his grandfather had said they were called. It is remarkable, Alex thought, the power of the old man's recollections and the effect on my own sense of reality. Even now!
But he did not speak of this to Mrs. Valentinova, inhibited, perhaps by Dimitrov's strange admonitions: "Tell them nothing. Give them no information."
"What is it like in Irkutsk now?" he asked, wondering if his use of the word "now" might provoke her curiosity. But, he reasoned, if she was one of them, she would know all that.
"It is beautiful," she whispered. He strained to hear. "We are more than three hundred years old, but we are a young city. Young people are everywhere. That is the way you must think of our city-young, fresh, strong. Like the Angarra itself."
"Angarra?" he repeated, remembering the mention of it somewhere in his own past.
"The beautiful daughter of Lake Baikal. You know Lake Baikal?" It was the first question she had put to him.
He nodded. "One of the most ancient lakes on earth. Deepest fresh water body in the world-" He checked himself.
"It is fed by more than three hundred rivers, but only one, the Angarra, flows from it." She had the same force, the same yearning as his grandfather. It is an aberration, he thought, this passionate territoriality that afflicts the Russian psyche.
"We are a city of half a million souls living on the edge of death," she went on. Could she know? But she was referring to the rock tremors that could unleash the waters of Lake Baikal.
"Your family has a long history in Irkutsk?" It was half statement, half question. Am I taking some bait? he thought. But it was tantalizing, irresistible.
"We have found evidence of five generations in the cemeteries on my mother's side. My father was a soldier who arrived in the thirties. He was a Russian." Alex thought he detected a slight curl of contempt on her full lips. "On my mother's side we are mixed up-Yakut, Evenkis, Buryat blood."
She pointed to her eyes, the high cheekbones, the almond shape. "Can you see the hint of Genghis Khan?"
Her glass was empty and he refilled it as well as his own. Lulled by the vodka, the voice of the woman, and the rhythm of the train, Alex felt a strong need to tell the story of his grandfather and to explain the reasons for this pilgrimage across Siberia. Certainly the tales were harmless, his caution and suspicion irrational. But still he hesitated to speak.
"People from Irkutsk were explorers and fur traders," she continued. "Did you know that it was men from Irkutsk that crossed the Aleutians, claimed Alaska and put a Russian flag in California?" She had been watching him. Am I being overly cautious? he asked himself. Am I expected to stay alone and keep my mouth shut for eight days? Despite his suspicions he felt drawn to Mrs. Valentinova. She lay on her stomach, her body deliciously relaxed, languid. He was surprised at his own awkwardness as he turned his eyes from hers, assailed by a youthful shyness he hadn't felt in years.
"You're not going to eat?" he asked, feeling the banality of the question.
She reached for her glass of vodka and lifted it to her lips.
"Quite enough caloric content in this," she said with a smile, her eyes glistening as she sipped.
"Very bad for the brain cells," he said. "The alcohol destroys them."
He felt increasingly silly, bantering with her, wondering if she would respond to his cautious overtures. His comparative celibacy and the tension of the last six weeks was reawakening his desire. Seduction had always been difficult for him and now his old fear of rejection was bubbling upward, eroding his self-assurance. The episode at Dimitrov's dacha with the nurse had been furtive, a quick groping in the dark. His disappointing performance had made the woman irritable, bitchy, and he had finally arranged her transfer, though not without guilt.
Yet, he had been strong and authoritative in his medical dealings with Dimitrov. Imperious, in fact, and Dimitrov had allowed it, believing that Alex held his life in his hands. Did Mrs. Valentinova understand her effect on him, the intimacy, the privacy of their surroundings as the train chugged its way into the mysterious land mass of Siberia? Of course, he thought. It is all orchestrated. But why? To what end?
He stood up suddenly, balancing himself against the edge of the upper berth, feeling a bit dizzy. He sensed her eyes on him, following his face. The vodka had made him looser, unguarded. He wondered if she could detect the bulge in his pants as he returned the medical journal to his book bag that lay on his bunk.
But as he reached into the book bag, alertness suddenly returned. His head cleared. The bag had been tampered with, he was certain, the journals removed and thumbed through. Again he remembered Dimitrov's warning. "The jackals are everywhere." Or was his imagination playing tricks with him? Had the vodka turned his head?
"How much time?" Dimitrov had asked again and again.
"I'm not God," he would reply.
"That is the point," Dimitrov had chuckled. "They will want to know, and no one can answer."
He had slapped Alex on the back. "They will try everything to find out. It is precisely the bit of information they will require. We will fool them, Kuznetsov." From the beginning he had insisted on using the old family name. Alex had long since stopped correcting him.
"Who is 'they'?" he had asked innocently, but by then it was a pose. Alex had already begun to piece things together. At first, he had tried to characterize it as merely an intellectual exercise, a scientific pursuit of truth. Then it all came together, and the information had cascaded into his consciousness like molten lava, covering all doubts. He knew! The old bastard was going to die, but he was going to take along with him a few million Chinese. This was not the dream of a wild visionary. It was the will of Viktor Moiseyevich Dimitrov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Mrs. Valentinova had closed her eyes, perhaps on the verge of sleep. Alex shivered as he opened a medical book. But he couldn't concentrate, so he watched her. She looked so innocent, virginal. But the image of Dimitrov kept returning, keeping him from pleasanter thoughts.
"It must be settled once and for all," Dimitrov had said. And the President of the United States and that self-proclaimed genius of a Secretary of State. Did they actually believe he had meant to achieve a nonviolent solution? How little they knew of Dimitrov.
