pompous we students can be, he reflected.
Through the birch trees he could see a glint of water and, faintly, he could hear the babble from the beach and the tattoo of ping-pong balls on the tables beside the sand.
‘I wonder,’ Anna said, ‘just what it would take to convince you.’ She kicked a heap of old brown leaves and her red skirt swirled. ‘Blood?’
‘Why do you talk treason all the time? Why can’t you enjoy the benefits the system has brought us?’
‘It has certainly brought you benefits, Viktor Golovin.’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
But he knew. For an orphan he had enjoyed a protected upbringing; and for no apparent reason his foster parents seemed to have rather more than their share of communal benefits. An apartment near the University on the crest of the Lenin Hills, a small dacha in the village of Peredelkino where the writers lived. Not bad for a librarian and his wife.
‘Your privileges are your cross.’
Would she always be like this after making love? ‘I’ve been lucky, I admit.’
‘It must be difficult to hold forth about equality when you’ve had such luck.’
‘Luck! Everyone has a share of it. The trick is knowing what to do with it when you get it.’
‘Nonsense. Not everyone has luck. It isn’t lucky to be an army officer these days.’
‘Ah, the purges again.’
‘Purges, a euphemism. Massacres is a better word.’
They emerged from the green depths of the forest into bright light. Beyond the table-tennis players and the fretted-wood restaurant where you could buy beer, kvas and fizzy cherryade, pies and cold meats, the beach was packed with Muscovites unfolding in the sun. They shed their clothes, they shed the moods of winter. Flesh burned bright pink but no one seemed to care. Rounding a curve in the river came a white steamboat nosing aside the calm water.
The doubts that had reached Viktor in the forest dissolved. Ordinary people wouldn’t have been able to enjoy themselves like this before 1917. Possessively, Viktor, lover and philosopher, took Anna’s arm.
‘But do you?’ She must have been talking while he savoured the fruits of socialism. Impatiently, she said: ‘You haven’t been listening, have you?’
‘I don’t want to hear anything more about purges.’
She pulled her arm away. ‘Of course you don’t. You don’t want anything to interfere with your beautiful, cossetted life. Least of all truth.’
‘I don’t believe it is the truth.’ Her attitude nettled him. ‘Let’s go and have a beer.’
They sat at a scrubbed wooden table and drank beer from fluted brown bottles. Around them families ate picnic lunches and guzzled; in one corner a plump mother was feeding a baby at the breast.
‘I was asking,’ she said, ‘when you weren’t listening, that is, whether you would like to see proof of what I’ve been saying.’
‘If it will please you.’
‘Please me!’ She leaned fiercely across the table. ‘It certainly won’t please me. But it will give me a certain satisfaction to see that smug expression wiped off your face.’
‘Not so long ago my eyes were always searching for the truth …’
‘In everything except politics.’
‘What you’re alleging is more than political.’
‘I can’t understand how you’re so blind. Everyone knows that Stalin is killing off all his enemies, real and imagined. They say the army is powerless now because he’s murdered all the generals.’
Some of the men and women sharing the long table were looking curiously at them. ‘Keep your voice down,’ Viktor whispered, covering her hand with his to soften the words, knowing that any moment now she would accuse him of cowardice.
‘I will for your sake,’ which was the same thing. ‘We don’t want you thrown into Lubyanka, do we?’
A man with a walrus moustache who was peeling an orange pointed his knife at them and said: ‘Cell 28. I spent three years there. Give my love to the rats.’
Viktor said: ‘You see, everyone can hear you even when you lower your voice.’ He felt faintly ashamed of his caution; but really there was no need to: if she had been speaking the truth then, yes, he would have sided with her.
‘Am I to speak in whispers all my life?’
He thought: Yes, if I’m to share my life with you. But the possibility was becoming less attractive by the minute; he seemed to have expended a lot of ideals with his sexual passion.
The man with the walrus moustache bit into his orange and, with juice dribbling down his chin, sat listening. The woman in the corner transferred the baby to her other plump breast.
Viktor said: ‘There are a lot of informers about. Even I admit that.’
‘I suppose you think they’re a necessary evil.’
He thought about it and said: ‘Frankly, yes I do,’ waiting for her voice to rise another octave.
Instead she spoke softly. ‘I meant what I said, Viktor. I will show you the proof of what I say. Or rather I will arrange for you to see it.’
The man with the walrus moustache frowned and edged closer, evidently believing that he had qualified to take part in the conversation.
Viktor tilted the bottle, drained it and wiped the froth from his lips. ‘Make the arrangements,’ he said.
‘What arrangements?’ asked the man with the walrus moustache. He spat out an orange pip. ‘I remember there was one rat who got quite tame. I called him Boris.’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said.
Without speaking, they made their way along the dusty path beside the river. The bushes to their right were the changing quarters and from behind them came shrieks and giggles, the smack of a hand on bare flesh.
As they neared the bus terminal she said: ‘You know Nikolai Vasilyev?’
‘Your private tutor? I know of him. Isn’t he supposed to be a great admirer of Trotsky?’
‘He believes Stalin cheated him. He also believes that one day Stalin will murder him.’
‘Another of your psychopaths by the sound of it.’
‘He’s a very fine man,’ Anna said and from the tone of her voice Viktor guessed that he was, or had been, her lover.
‘Does he teach you Trotsky’s theories?’
‘Sometimes
