Edge of Eternity

  The Americans were pretending that South Vietnam was a separate country, just as the Soviet Union pretended that East Germany was a country. Vietnam was a mirror image of Germany, though Dimka would never dare say that aloud.

  While the ministers attended a banquet with North Vietnamese leaders, the Soviet aides ate a less formal dinner with their Vietnamese opposite numbers--all of whom spoke Russian, some having visited Moscow. The food was mostly vegetables and rice, with small amounts of fish and meat, but it was tasty. There were no female Vietnamese staffers, and the men seemed surprised to see Natalya and the two other Soviet women.

  Dimka sat next to a dour middle-aged apparatchik called Pham An. Natalya, sitting opposite, asked the man what he hoped to get from the talks.

  An replied with a shopping list. "We need aircraft, artillery, radar, air defense systems, small arms, ammunition, and medical supplies," he said.

  This was exactly what the Soviets were hoping to avoid. Natalya said: "But you won't need those things if the war comes to an end."

  "When we have defeated the American imperialists our needs will be different."

  "We would all like to see a smashing victory for the Vietcong," said Natalya. "But there might be other possible outcomes." She was trying to broach the idea of peaceful coexistence.

  "Victory is the only possibility," said Pham An dismissively.

  Dimka was dismayed. An was stubbornly refusing to engage in the discussion for which the Soviets had come here. Perhaps he felt it was beneath his dignity to argue with a woman. Dimka hoped that was the only reason for his obstinacy. If the Vietnamese would not talk about alternatives to war, the Soviet mission would fail.

  Natalya was not easily deflected from her purpose. She now said: "Military victory most certainly is not the only possible outcome." Dimka found himself feeling proud of her gutsy persistence.

  "You speak of defeat?" said An, bristling--or at least pretending to bristle.

  "No," she said calmly. "But war is not the only road to victory. Negotiations are an alternative."

  "We negotiated with the French many times," An said angrily. "Every agreement was designed only to gain time while they prepared further aggression. This was a lesson to our people, a lesson on dealing with imperialists, a lesson we will never forget."

  Dimka had read the history of Vietnam and knew that An's anger was justified. The French had been as dishonest and perfidious as any other colonialists. But that was not the end of the story.

  Natalya persisted--quite rightly, since this was the message Kosygin was undoubtedly giving Ho Chi Minh. "Imperialists are treacherous, we all know that. But negotiations can also be used by revolutionaries. Lenin negotiated at Brest-Litovsk. He made concessions, stayed in power, and reversed all those concessions when he was stronger."

  An parroted Ho Chi Minh's line. "We will not consider negotiations until there is a neutral coalition government in Saigon that includes Vietcong representatives."

  "Be reasonable," Natalya said mildly. "To make major demands as preconditions is just a way of avoiding negotiations. You must consider compromise."

  An said angrily: "When the Germans invaded Russia and marched all the way to the gates of Moscow, did you compromise?" He banged the table with his fist, a gesture that surprised Dimka coming from a supposedly subtle Oriental. "No! No negotiations, no compromise--and no Americans!"

  Soon after that the banquet ended.

  Dimka and Natalya returned to their hotel. He walked with her to her room. At the door, she said simply: "Come in."

  It would be only their third night together. The first two they had spent on a four-poster bed in a dusty storeroom full of old furniture at the Kremlin. But somehow being together in a bedroom seemed as natural as if they had been lovers for years.

  They kissed and took off their shoes, and kissed again and brushed their teeth, and kissed again. They were not crazed with uncontrollable lust: rather, they were relaxed and playful. "We've got all night to do anything we like," Natalya said, and Dimka thought those were the sexiest words he had ever heard.

  They made love, then had some caviar and vodka she had brought with her, then made love again.

  Afterward, lying on the twisted sheets, looking up at the slow-moving ceiling fan, Natalya said: "I assume someone is eavesdropping on us."

  "I hope so," Dimka said. "We sent a KGB team over here at great expense to teach them how to bug hotel rooms."

  "Perhaps it's Pham An listening," Natalya said, and giggled.

  "If so, I hope he enjoyed it more than the dinner."

  "Hmm. That was kind of a disaster."

  "They'll have to change their attitude to get weapons from us. Even Brezhnev doesn't want us involved in a massive war in Southeast Asia."

  "But if we refuse to arm them, they could go to the Chinese."

  "They hate the Chinese."

  "I know. Still . . ."

  "Yes."

  They drifted off to sleep and were awakened by the phone. Natalya picked it up and gave her name. She listened for a while, then said: "Hell." Another minute went by and she hung up. "News from South Vietnam," she said. "The Vietcong attacked an American base last night."

  "Last night? Only hours after Kosygin arrived in Hanoi? That's no coincidence. Where?"

  "A place called Pleiku. Eight Americans were killed and a hundred or so wounded. And they destroyed ten U.S. aircraft on the ground."

  "How many Vietcong casualties?"

  "Only one body was left behind in the compound."

  Dimka shook his head in amazement. "You've got to give it to the Vietnamese, they're terrific fighters."

  "The Vietcong are. The South Vietnamese army is hopeless. That's why they need the Americans to fight for them."

  Dimka frowned. "Isn't there some American big shot in South Vietnam right now?"

  "McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser, one of the worst of the capitalist-imperialist warmongers."

  "He'll be on the phone to President Johnson right now."

  "Yes," said Natalya. "I wonder what he's saying."

  She had her answer later the same day.

  American planes from the aircraft carrier USS Ranger bombed an army camp called Dong Hoi on the coast of North Vietnam. It was the first time the Americans had bombed the north, and began a new phase in the conflict.

  Dimka watched in despair as Kosygin's position crumbled, bit by bit, during the course of the day.

  After the bombing, American aggression was condemned by Communist and nonaligned countries around the world.

  Third World leaders now expected Moscow to come to the aid of Vietnam, a Communist country being directly attacked by American imperialism.

  Kosygin did not want to escalate the Vietnam War, and the Kremlin could not afford to give massive military aid to Ho Chi Minh, but that was exactly what they now did.

  They had no choice. If they drew back the Chinese would step in, eager to supplant the USSR as the mighty friend of small Communist countries. The position of the Soviet Union as defender of world Communism was now at stake, and everyone knew it.

  All talk of peaceful coexistence was forgotten.

  Dimka and Natalya were thrown into gloom, as was the entire Soviet delegation. Their negotiating position with the Vietnamese was fatally undermined. Kosygin had no cards to play: he had to grant everything Ho Chi Minh asked for.

  They remained in Hanoi three more days. Dimka and Natalya made love all night, but during the daytime all they did was make detailed notes of Pham An's shopping list. Even before they left, a consignment of Soviet surface-to-air missiles was on its way.

  Dimka and Natalya sat together on the plane home. Dimka dozed, delightfully recalling four humid nights of love under a lazy ceiling fan.

  "What are you smiling about?" Natalya said.

  He opened his eyes. "You know."

  She giggled. "Apart from that . . ."

  "What?"

  "When you review this trip in your mi
nd, don't you get a feeling . . . ?"

  "That we were totally managed and exploited? Yes, from the first day."

  "In fact, that Ho Chi Minh deftly manipulated the two most powerful countries in the world, and ended up getting everything he wanted."

  "Yes," said Dimka. "That's exactly the feeling I get."

  *

  Tanya went to the airport with Vasili's subversive typescript in her suitcase. She was scared.

  She had done dangerous things before. She had published a seditious newspaper; she had been arrested in Mayakovsky Square and dragged off to the notorious basement of the KGB's Lubyanka building; and she had made contact with a dissident in Siberia. But this was the most frightening.

  Communicating with the West was a crime of a higher order. She was taking Vasili's typescript to Leipzig, where she hoped to place it with a Western publisher.

  The news sheet that she and Vasili had published had been distributed only in the USSR. The authorities would be much angrier about dissident material that found its way to the West. Those responsible would be considered not just rebels but traitors.

  Thinking about the danger, sitting in the back of the taxi, she felt nauseated by fear, and clamped her hand over her mouth in a panic until the sensation faded.

  On arrival she almost told the driver to turn around and take her home. Then she remembered Vasili in Siberia, hungry and cold, and she steeled her nerve and carried her case into the terminal.

  The Siberia trip had changed her. Before, she had thought of Communism as a well-intentioned experiment that had failed and ought to be scrapped. Now, she saw it as a brutal tyranny whose leaders were evil. Every time she thought of Vasili, her heart was filled with hatred for the people who had done this to him. She even had trouble talking to her twin brother, who still hoped that Communism could be improved rather than abolished. She loved Dimka, but he was closing his eyes to reality. And she had realized that wherever there was cruel oppression--in the Deep South of the USA, in British Northern Ireland, and in East Germany--there had to be many nice ordinary people like her family who looked away from the grisly truth. But Tanya would not be one of them. She was going to fight it to the end.

  Whatever the risk.

  At the desk she handed over her papers and placed her case on the scale. If she had believed in God, she would have prayed.

  Check-in staff were all KGB. This one was a man in his thirties with the blue shadow of a heavy beard. Tanya sometimes assessed people by imagining what they would be like to interview. This one would be assertive to the point of aggression, she thought, answering neutral questions as if they were hostile, constantly on the lookout for hidden implications and veiled accusations.

  He looked hard at her face, comparing it with her photograph. She tried not to seem scared. However, she told herself, even innocent Soviet citizens were scared when KGB men looked at them.

  He put her passport down on his desk and said: "Open the bag."

  There was no knowing why. They might do it because you appeared suspicious or because they had nothing better to do or because they liked pawing through women's underwear. They did not have to give a reason.

  Heart pounding, Tanya opened her case.

  The clerk knelt down and began to rifle through her things. It took him less than a minute to discover Vasili's typescript. He took it out and read the title page: Stalag: A Novel of the Nazi Concentration Camps by Klaus Holstein.

  This was fake, as was the contents list, the preface, and the prologue.

  The clerk said: "What is this?"

  "A partial translation of an East German work. I'm going to the Leipzig Book Fair."

  "Has this been approved?"

  "In East Germany, of course, otherwise it would not have been published."

  "And in the Soviet Union?"

  "Not yet. Works may not be submitted for approval before they are finished, obviously."

  She tried to breathe normally as the clerk flicked through the pages.

  "These people have Russian names," he said.

  "There were many Russians in the Nazi camps, as you know," Tanya said.

  If her story were to be checked it would fall flat in no time, she knew. If the clerk took the time to read more than the first few pages he would see that the stories were not about the Nazis but about the Gulag; and then it would take the KGB only a few hours to learn that there was no East German book nor a publisher, at which point Tanya would be taken back to that cellar in the Lubyanka.

  He riffled the pages idly, as if wondering whether to make a fuss about this or not. Then there was a commotion at the next desk: a passenger was objecting to the confiscation of an icon. Tanya's clerk returned her papers with her boarding card and waved her away, then went to assist his colleague.

  Her legs felt so weak she feared she might not be able to walk away.

  She recovered her strength and made it through the rest of the formalities. The plane was the familiar Tupolev Tu-104, this one configured for civilian passengers, a bit cramped with six seats abreast. The flight to Leipzig was a thousand miles, and took a little over three hours.

  When Tanya picked up her suitcase at the other end she looked carefully at it but saw no signs that it had been opened. But she was not yet in the clear. She carried it into the customs and immigration zone, feeling as if she were holding something radioactive. She recalled that the East German government was said to be harsher than the Soviet regime. The Stasi were even more omnipresent than the KGB.

  She showed her papers. An official studied them carefully, then dismissed her with a discourteous gesture.

  She headed for the exit, not looking at the faces of the uniformed officials, all men, who stood scrutinizing passengers.

  Then one of them stepped in front of her. "Tanya Dvorkin?"

  She almost burst into guilty tears. "Y-yes."

  He addressed her in German. "Please come with me."

  This is it, she thought; my life is over.

  She followed him through a side door. To her surprise, it led to a parking area. "The director of the book fair has sent a car for you," the official said.

  A driver was waiting. He introduced himself and put the incriminating suitcase into the trunk of a two-tone green-and-white Wartburg 311 limousine.

  Tanya fell into the backseat and slumped, as helpless as if she were drunk.

  She began to recover as the car took her into the city center. Leipzig was an ancient crossroads that had hosted trade fairs since the Middle Ages. Its railway station was the biggest in Europe. In her article Tanya would mention the city's strong Communist tradition, and its resistance to Nazism, which continued into the 1940s. She would not include the thought that occurred to her now, that Leipzig's grand nineteenth-century buildings looked even more gracious beside the brutalist Soviet-era architecture.

  The taxi took her to the fair. In a large hall like a warehouse, publishers from Germany and abroad had erected stalls where they displayed their books. Tanya was shown around by the director. He explained to her that the main business of the fair was the buying and selling, not of physical books, but of licenses to translate them and publish them in other countries.

  Toward the end of the afternoon she managed to get away from him and look around on her own.

  She was astonished by the enormous number and bewildering variety of books: car manuals, scientific journals, almanacs, children's stories, Bibles, art books, atlases, dictionaries, school textbooks, and the complete works of Marx and Lenin in every major European language.

  She was looking for someone who might want to translate Russian literature and publish it in the West.

  She began to scan the stalls for Russian novels in other languages.

  The Western alphabet was different from the Russian, but Tanya had learned German and English at school, and had studied German at university, so she could read the names of the authors and generally guess at the titles.

  She spoke to several publisher
s, telling them she was a journalist for TASS and asking them how they were benefiting from the fair. She got some quotes useful for her article. She did not even hint that she had a Russian book to offer them.

  At the stall of a London publisher called Rowley she picked up an English translation of The Young Guard, a popular Soviet novel by Alexander Fadeyev. She knew it well, and amused herself by deciphering the English of the first page until she was interrupted. An attractive woman of about her own age addressed her in German. "Please let me know if I can answer any questions."

  Tanya introduced herself and interviewed the woman about the fair. They quickly discovered that the editor spoke Russian better than Tanya spoke German, so they switched. Tanya asked about English translations of Russian novels. "I'd like to publish more of them," said the editor. "But many contemporary Soviet novels--including the one you're holding in your hand--are too slavishly pro-Communist."

  Tanya pretended to be prickly. "You wish to publish anti-Soviet propaganda?"

  "Not at all," the editor said with a tolerant smile. "Writers are permitted to like their governments. My company publishes many books that celebrate the British Empire and its triumphs. But an author who sees nothing at all wrong in the society around him may not be taken seriously. It's wiser to throw in a soupcon of criticism, if only for the sake of credibility."

  Tanya liked this woman. "Can we meet again?"

  The editor hesitated. "Do you have something for me?"

  Tanya did not answer the question. "Where are you staying?"

  "The Europa."

  Tanya had a room reserved at the same hotel. That was convenient. "What's your name?"

  "Anna Murray. What's yours?"

  "We'll talk again," said Tanya, and she walked away.

  She felt drawn to Anna Murray on instinct, an instinct refined by a quarter of a century of life in the Soviet Union; but her feeling was supported by evidence. First, Anna was clearly British, not a Russian or East German posing as British. Second, she was neither Communist nor strenuously pretending to be the opposite. Her relaxed neutrality was impossible for a KGB spy to fake. Third, she used no jargon. People brought up in Soviet orthodoxy could not help talking about party, class, cadres, and ideology. Anna used none of the key words.

  The green-and-white Wartburg was waiting outside. The driver took her to the Europa, where she checked in. Almost immediately she left her room and returned to the lobby.