The Train of Their Departure
In the spring of 1976, before the start of their affair, before he became her husband, before she knew anything about him, Polina had noticed Alec in one or another of the V.E.F. buildings, always looking vaguely, childishly amused.
"If my Papatchka ran the factory, maybe I'd also go around grinning like a defective," Marina Kirilovna had said to Polina when Alec appeared in the technology department.
Marina Kirilovna occupied the desk beside Polina's at the radio factory. In her mid-forties and a widow twice over, Marina Kirilovna treated men only with varying degrees of contempt. They were sluggards, buffoons, dimwits, liars, brutes, and -- without exception -- drunks. The tragedy was that women were saddled with them and, for the most part, accepted this state of affairs. It was as though they had ingested the Russian saying "If he doesn't beat you, he doesn't love you" with their mothers' milk. As for her own departed husbands, Marina Kirilovna liked to say that the only joy she'd got out of living with them had been outliving them.
Later, when Marina Kirilovna began to suspect Polina's involvement with Alec, she admonished her.
"Not that it's my business, but even if your husband is no prize at least he's a man."
"It isn't your business," Polina said.
"Just know that no good can come of it. Believe me, I'm not blind. I see him skipping around like a boy with a butterfly net. And if you think that this business will lead to a promotion, then half the women at the factory are eligible for it."
At the word "promotion," Polina almost laughed. The suggestion of some ulterior motive for the affair, particularly ambition, was risible in a way that the widow could not have imagined. First, the mere idea of ambition in the factory was ludicrous. Thousands of people worked there, and -- with the exception of the Party members -- none of them had a salary worth envying. But, beyond that, if anything had led her to consider Alec's overtures it was her husband's ambition -- insistent, petty, and bureaucratic. In the evenings she was oppressed by his plots and machinations for advancement, and on the weekends she was bored and embarrassed by his behavior at dinners with those whom he described as "men of influence." By comparison, Alec was the least ambitious man she had ever met.
Much later, when Polina looked back on her younger self, the girl who at twenty-one had allowed Maxim to dictate the terms of her life, she understood that she had made a mistake. But she also understood that, at the time, she had been incapable of acting differently. In her life she had never had a great love. Her friends had descended into infatuations; she never did. Some people's conceptions of what was available to them coincided with what was actually available to them; other people's conceptions did not. There were men whom she found more engaging than Maxim, but they tended not to pursue her. They found her too serious. She knew that she was pretty enough to attract them, but she also knew that there were many pretty girls who fawned and laughed more easily. What put those men off drew Maxim to her.
She went home that night, but Alec perceived an opening. Weathering the glares of Marina Kirilovna, he made a habit of stopping in at the technology department to say hello. And not long after the evening with Karl, on the day of the annual Readiness for Labor and Defense Exercises, Alec finagled his way into Polina's group. The testing was done according to department, but Alec, in part because of his father's position but mainly on account of his own gregariousness, moved fluidly throughout the plant. It raised no eyebrows when his name was included with those of the technology department. Broadly speaking, nobody cared about any of the official and procedural events. At meetings, people sat, stood, and spoke at the requisite times, for the requisite lengths, employing the requisite phrases. Celebrate the Workers on the anniversary of the Revolution? Why not? Honor the Red Army on Red Army Day? Who could object? Either was a good excuse to avoid work. Lenin's birthday? Stalin's first tooth? Brezhnev's colonoscopy? Each merited a drink, a few snacks, and maybe a slice of cake. So, too, the Labor and Defense Exercises -- only with less drinking and without the cake.
The morning of the exercises, Alec took his place among the young workers of the technology and transistor-radio-engineering departments. Dressed in tracksuits and running shoes, they crossed the street from the plant proper to the site of the V.E.F. sports stadium and target range. At the range, .22-calibre rifles awaited them, having been retrieved from the armory. In the stadium, members of V.E.F.'s athletic department -- the trainers and coaches of the factory's various sports teams -- had already prepared the field for the shot put, the long jump, the high jump, and the short-distance footraces. The trainers and coaches roamed about with their stopwatches, measuring tapes, and lists of the norms that had to be met. Somewhere, presumably in the Kremlin, a physical-culture expert had determined the basal fitness level young Soviet workers needed to possess in order to establish their superiority over the Americans and the Red Chinese. Should these foes come spilling across the borders, they would encounter a daunting column, ready to repulse them with heroic displays of running, jumping, shot-putting, and small-arms fire.
Before the start of the events, Alec sought Polina out and tried to strike a bargain with her. He told her that he wanted to see her again.
"You're seeing me now," Polina said.
"One more evening," Alec said. "All I ask. In the scheme of a life, what's one evening?"
"Depends who you spend it with."
"A valid point," Alec said.
To reach the decision, Alec proposed a contest. If he scored better at the rifle range, Polina would grant him another evening; if she scored better, he would leave her in peace.
"I should warn you in advance," Alec said. "Last summer, in the officers'-training rotation, I placed eighth in marksmanship."
"Out of how many?" Polina asked.
"Sixteen," Alec said.
"That doesn't sound very good," Polina said.
"No, it doesn't," Alec said. "That's the idea."
"I don't understand," Polina said.
"Well, I was specifically trying for eighth place."
"Why is that?"
"In the Army, it's best to be somewhere in the middle. Trouble usually finds those at the bottom or at the top."
"So you mean to say that you're a good shot?"
"Eighth place," Alec said.
"In that case, I should tell you that two years ago at Readiness for Labor and Defense I finished second in my department. They awarded me a ribbon and printed my name in the factory newspaper. My husband pasted a copy of it into an album."
Alec noticed that Polina didn't brandish the word "husband" like a cudgel. She seemed to place the same emphasis on "husband" as she did on "ribbon" and "album." But Alec wasn't fool enough to believe that she'd included the word innocently. In a sense, since she hadn't unequivocally rebuffed him, anything she said about her husband bordered on betrayal. Any information Alec had about him was information that he could use against him. For instance, the fact that he was the kind of man who would save something printed in the factory's idiotic newspaper. Then again it was possible that Polina found such a gesture endearing. She might have been implying that this was precisely the kind of man she wanted. A man unlike Alec, who, in his ironical sophistication, couldn't hope to access or appreciate such pure, sentimental feeling.
But, whatever she meant, she had tacitly agreed to the contest.
Refereeing the shooting range was Volodya Zobodkin, one of the circle of young Jews with whom Alec and Karl played soccer on the beach at Majori. When Volodya distributed the rifles, Alec asked if he could have one with a reliable sight.
She didn't answer immediately, but seemed to carefully consider.
"It might."
Gently, Alec tried to enumerate the options he'd hashed out with Karl.
"Would you be happy having the child with Maxim?"
"If this is where you begin," Polina said, "you don't need to say anything else. I have my answer."
"I think you're wrong."
"Do you want me to have the child?"
"No," Alec said.
"So I'm not wrong."
"If that's the only question, then, no, you're not wrong."
"It's the only question that matters," Polina said.
"And about what happens to the child and to you?"
"We'll find our way somehow. We won't be the first."
"Here in Riga?"
"I imagine. Where else?"
"Living with Maxim or on your own?"
"Or, in time, with someone else."
"Yes, there's that, too. Raising my child."
"Biologically."
"That isn't insignificant."
"To whom?"
"To me."
"I'm afraid you can't have it both ways."
"It may also not be insignificant to the child."
"Alec, that is also having it both ways. You can't claim to care for the feelings of the child you want to abort."
There was logic in what she'd said, but it didn't change the fact that Alec felt quite certain that he could care for the feelings of the child he wanted to abort. That is, once the child was born.
"Polina, I understand what the child means to you," he said. "I understand how you feel about giving it up. Do you believe me?"
"Does it matter?"
"It matters to me. If I could agree to having the child, I would. If I could be a father to it, I would."
"I never asked you to be a father to it."
"So what did you hope I would say?"
"I don't know. Or, rather, I do," Polina said, and laughed dryly. "It wasn't what I hoped you'd say but what I hoped you wouldn't say. That's all."
A stillness of denouement settled upon her, or she summoned it from within. It looked to Alec as if she'd composed her parting face. Somehow the conversation he'd planned had escaped his control. It wasn't that he'd misled himself by thinking it would be easy. He'd imagined a thorny path that led, in the end, to a favorable resolution. He'd pictured Polina's happiness -- gratitude, even -- at his proposal. But now, in actuality, he feared that she would leave before he could even make his big redemptive offer. The offer that would recast him radically and heroically, not only in her eyes but in his own.
Sensing that his time was short, he rushed ahead and told her that he was leaving Riga.
He then unfurled his grand plan, like a carpet to a bountiful future. Polina would divorce Maxim. The two of them would marry. An expert doctor would perform the operation with incomparable care in an atmosphere of total privacy. It would be nothing at all like the savagery of the public abortion clinic. No harm would come to her. She would still be able to conceive. Once they settled somewhere, they could try again properly. This was their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to slip the shackles of the Soviet Union.
"It's all very rosy," Polina said.
"It could be. I think we could make a good life together over there. I truly believe it."
"Don't try so hard, Alec," Polina said. "Next you'll tell me you love me."
With that warning she bracketed a great length of silence, long enough to accommodate everything that had happened or would happen: the abortion clinic, Maxim, Alec's parents, the private doctor, her parents, their spiteful co-workers, the dreadful sunny day when she would sit on a park bench waiting to say goodbye to her sister, and the gauntlet of stifling, overcrowded train compartments that would ultimately deliver them from Riga to the West.