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.
They met at a party in her friend’s dormitory room. Polina was sitting and talking to one of her friend’s roommates when she turned her head and saw Maxim standing beside her. Maybe she smiled at him; maybe she didn’t. As if reading from the pages of a courtship manual, Maxim asked if she would care for a drink of any kind. Polina couldn’t think of a reason to decline, so he returned with a glass of lemon soda and installed himself at her side for the rest of the evening. He inquired after her name, where she lived, what she was studying, her opinion of her program, her career aspirations. Having established these fundamentals, he proceeded to cultural and recreational interests: movies, books, ballet, music, figure skating, volleyball, rhythmic gymnastics. To be polite, Polina answered his questions. She had no interest in him but did wonder if his robotic approach was a consequence of nervousness or if it was simply the way he was. She was still unsure when Maxim asked to see her again. Because she didn’t want to say no, she said yes. She then forgot all about him until he appeared one evening at her door. Her mother told her that she had a gentleman caller, and she couldn’t imagine who it might be until she saw him waiting there. Worse still, she felt panicked because she couldn’t remember his name. But she experienced her first affectionate feeling for him when he rescued her by reintroducing himself. He appeared to do this not because he inferred that she had forgotten his name but because he believed that a person was well advised to repeat his name upon meeting someone for only the second time.
That night, he took her to see a figure-skating competition at the Palace of Sports. He recalled, he said, that she had expressed an interest in figure skating. She recalled having expressed only the same generic interest in figure skating as in volleyball and rhythmic gymnastics. But she was aware that tickets to the figure-skating competition were scarce, and even though the seats Maxim had got were among the worst in the building, she suspected that he had paid for them dearly in one way or another. After the competition, he took her to a café. He opened the door for her and held her chair. He did everything with precision and earnestness. At some point in his life, someone had taken him aside and informed him that, in the civilized precincts of planet Earth, there existed certain protocols. At some point in life, everyone heard a variation of this speech, but not everyone took it to heart. Maxim had. In Polina he seemed to recognize that he had found someone with an equal respect for protocols.
Polina didn’t encourage him but he didn’t require encouragement. He courted her with the measured discipline of a person climbing a long flight of stairs. There was something endearing about Maxim’s doggedness, as, step by step, he insinuated himself into her life. He asked to be introduced to her parents. He brought flowers and a bottle of cognac. He also brought a gift for her younger sister, Nadja, and subsequently invited her along on outings. She was then only twelve or thirteen. They went to the zoo. He hired a boat and rowed them on the Lielupe River. Nadja teased him in a playful way. In the boat, she hopped up and down in the bow, leaned over the edge and made a theatrical speech about the cruel, cruel world and the weedy river’s irresistible call.
“I’m going to do it, Maxim,” she said. “Are you going to jump in and save me?”
“Don’t be silly,” Maxim said.
“I’m going to do it,” Nadja said.
“Polina,” Maxim appealed.
“Nadja,” Polina cautioned.
“Oh, it’s all just too much for a delicate girl to bear,” Nadja said, and flopped over the side.
The green water closed over her like a curtain. Polina looked back at Maxim with apology and exasperation. They watched the water and waited for Nadja to part the curtain again. Polina stole glimpses at Maxim. Just when he seemed on the brink of plunging in, Nadja thrashed to the surface, gasped for help, and then disappeared again. Maxim waited a few moments longer and then, stalwartly, as if complying with an order, removed his shoes and jumped in after her. A lesser man, Polina thought, would have let Nadja flounder until she grew bored. Another kind of man, however, would have embraced the game.
After some requisite diving and searching, Maxim found Nadja peeking out from under the keel. When they floated back into view, Nadja had her head tipped back and one arm around Maxim’s neck. Her free arm swayed dramatically above her. “My hero,” she said, sighing, her eyes half closed. Maxim endured the performance with the consummate face of the adult: distaste subjugated to obligation.
Reason, or its pale ambassador convention, ruled Polina and Maxim’s time together. It extended to everything, including sex. Before Maxim, Polina had had three encounters that had approached but not crossed the line. On two of those occasions she had halted things before they went too far. The other time, at a Komsomol retreat, she had been willing but, at the critical moment, another couple had entered the barn and started climbing to the hayloft.
Polina couldn’t say that she was eager to take this next and inevitable step with Maxim, but she did wonder when he would grant himself the license to do it. During their gropings and fumblings she felt like a spectator, watching Maxim as he denied himself for the sake of her honor. These preliminary bouts always ended with Maxim apologizing for the liberties he had taken. Polina either pardoned his liberties or said nothing at all. Afterward they would sit or lie together on a bench in the public gardens, or on the embankment of the river in Riga’s industrial quarter, or in the cold, shadowy entrances to public buildings, and share momentous and ostensibly soulful silences. Eventually, Maxim interrupted a bout of groping to ask Polina for her opinion and her permission. She consented with a simple “All right,” and waited as Maxim scrupulously tore the edge from the yellow paper wrapper she had heard about but never actually seen. Inexpertly, he put the rubber on himself and then spat on his hand and pawed Polina clumsily in preparation. Polina shifted her weight from one hip to the other so as to help him and then put her hands on his chest to resist his weight. She said, “Careful,” because she wasn’t quite ready and she didn’t know how to explain that to him. It was the only word that passed between them. When it was over, Maxim acted as if something significant had transpired, and Polina didn’t contradict him.
From then on, they repeated the act with some regularity. Polina saw that Maxim liked it and wanted it, so she obliged him. What they did they did with no variation. For Polina, intercourse began when Maxim tore the edge from the yellow paper wrapper. She assumed that it was the same for everyone until she overheard other girls speaking about their experiences with their mainly drunken boyfriends. That was when she learned that most men went to great lengths to avoid having to deal with the contents of the yellow wrapper, and that, despite the risks, most women relented. They rationalized their actions by maligning the quality of Soviet condoms, which were known to rupture or slide off. It made little sense, they said, to put your faith in something so unreliable. In Polina’s experience, the condoms had never ruptured or slid off. She also thought that the alternative measures the women cited—hot water, wine vinegar, urine—sounded dubious, but several weeks later, when Polina and Maxim were alone in Polina’s apartment, her parents having gone with Nadja to attend a choral recital, and Maxim found that he did not have any condoms, Polina insisted that they do it anyway.
It was not something she had planned in advance, but neither was it entirely spontaneous. It was the first time she had ever challenged Maxim’s authority, and she was as aroused by the prospect of luring him into temptation as by the recklessness of what they were doing. Maxim was sitting up on his knees when she told him what she wanted, and he wavered for a few seconds, a look of fear and doubt on his face, before Polina reached out and took him into her. After that, the fear and doubt were replaced by something insular and fierce. Shortly before it ended, Polina hissed in Maxim’s ear that she wanted him to do it inside her. It was a sentence that had been circling malevolently in her head from the moment she had insisted that they have sex. As she said it, she knew it couldn’t have had less to do with a desire for children. And as soon as Maxim finished, Polina slid out from under him and went to the kitchen for a basin and a purple, thin-necked vase. She returned to the bedroom, set the basin in the middle of the floor, and urinated. Carefully, under Maxim’s silent gaze, she transferred the urine from the basin into the vase, spilling several drops onto the floorboards. She then lay down, arched her pelvis, and instructed Maxim to pour the urine into her. What they were doing was disgusting and sordid, and Maxim avoided Polina’s eyes as he carried out her instructions. He was pliable then in a way that he had never been before and would never be again. She had made him complicit in something depraved, and she expected, in some inchoate way, that she would eventually be punished for this. Later, when her punishment was meted out, Maxim never once blamed her for what she knew was entirely her fault.
The punishment was administered by a taciturn doctor in a green-walled hospital clinic. The doctor, a woman, walked into the surgery and parted Polina’s knees without quite looking at her. She offered no explanation of what she intended to do or when she intended to do it. She said nothing at all until a nurse came in, at which point she berated her for not having already prepared and sterilized the patient.
Like a magician’s assistant, Polina felt as if she had been split in two. The doctor and the nurse pretended that her top half didn’t exist and dealt only with her bottom half. Polina relinquished it to them. She concentrated on her top half, and tried to retain this focus in spite of the pain, refusing to cry out, as though what was happening below were incidental and remote. She imagined that the pain was coming at her from a vast distance, from the unseen bottom of a gorge.
When they were finished, Polina was transferred onto a gurney. She was rolled out into the hallway and left there, once again, without explanation. Polina thought that she could still feel blood seeping. The loss of blood, the pain, and the cold metal of the gurney chilled her and she started to shiver. She was exhausted and drained, too weak to call out, and yet the tremors became so violent that her gurney creaked from side to side on its rubber wheels. Time and again, people rushed by and ignored her. When she saw her doctor hurrying past, she reached out and caught her by the arm. Through chattering teeth, she told her that she was cold, that she wanted a sheet for her gurney.
“How old are you?” the doctor asked.
“Twenty-one,” Polina said.
“You’re not a child. Pull yourself together,” the doctor said.
“Please, is there a sheet?” Polina asked.
“Who are you to make demands? You don’t like it here, don’t fuck so much next time.”
When they released her that evening, Maxim was waiting for her outside. She wasn’t really in any condition to take the bus by herself, so, in a way, she was grateful to have someone to help her. She only wished it were someone else. Who, exactly, she couldn’t have said, even a stranger, anyone but Maxim. She saw him through the square, wire-reinforced windows of the hospital doors. He was at the bottom of the stone steps, bent slightly at the waist, listening to another young man, who was smoking and talking. When Polina opened the door, Maxim looked up and mounted the steps as if to help her with it. But by the time he reached the top the door was already swinging shut behind her. He looked lost for a moment. Polina expected him to offer her his arm. She looked forward to refusing him. Only he didn’t offer his arm. He also didn’t do or say any of the unwelcome things she expected him to do or say, which, curiously, irritated her even more. She looked at him and saw penitence and relief vying for dominion in his face.
“Did you happen to see a kind of chubby girl in a blue cloud-patterned dress in there?” the young man with the cigarette asked when Polina and Maxim reached the bottom of the steps.
“I don’t think so,” Polina said.
“Raisa is her name. She has shortish brown hair and sort of a dimple in her chin.”
“I really don’t know,” Polina said.
“Her girlfriend brought her in this morning. That’s a long time. Let me ask you, and please be honest: What do you think, should I keep waiting?” he said.
Polina allowed Maxim to escort her home on the bus. They walked the two blocks from the bus stop to her building without speaking. It was only when he stopped to say goodbye that Maxim delivered his line. He had employed it many times in the discussions that had led to the abortion.
“It’s better for our future,” Maxim said.
The following day, Maxim brought her carnations and inquired after her well-being. Several days later, he brought carnations again. After a week, he returned with more carnations, this time on account of the fact that he had, before the abortion, established a habit of bringing her flowers once a week. He presented these to Polina in such a way as to communicate that he believed things had returned to normal. Though she had an indefinable urge to protest, she admitted that things had indeed returned to normal. She couldn’t justify her lingering resentment. Her experience at the clinic had been horrid, but she’d had no reason to suppose that it would be otherwise. Almost everyone she knew had had at least one abortion. Some had gone to the hospital; others, hoping to conceal the pregnancy from their parents, had had their boyfriends pay twenty-five rubles and submitted to the procedure at the apartment of a nurse or a doctor. Not a few of them had ended up in the hospital anyway, with infections and complications. Compared with these, her ordeal hardly ranked.
In their own way, Polina and Maxim had kept the abortion to themselves. Maxim had given a tin of caviar to the doctor at the regional polyclinic who had referred Polina to the hospital. It was understood that the doctor wouldn’t say anything to Polina’s parents. Polina also didn’t share the information with her sister. Which was why, since they knew nothing, both her mother and her sister made a point of commenting on Maxim’s extraordinary romantic display.
“Three bouquets in one week. It’s a very refined and thoughtful gesture,” Polina’s mother said.
“He’s probably going to propose,” Nadja said.
Maxim had already talked seriously about marriage. But he’d refrained from making a formal proposal, because they were at a crucial point in their lives. They would both have to pass their exams and, ideally, finish near the top of their respective classes. After that, Maxim would have to perform his military service. He would be gone for two months and would then be obliged to write another exam. If he passed the exam, he would get his shoulder bars, become a reserve lieutenant, and be free to pursue a normal civilian life. If he failed, he would be conscripted into the Army for two years. It was rare for people to fail, but to make a significant life decision with this question unresolved would be rash. Finally, neither of them yet knew where they would be posted for work. There were no guarantees that they would both secure positions in Riga or, failing Riga, that they would secure positions in close proximity to each other. So they agreed to wait.
On the day of her graduation ceremony, Polina sat with her parents and Nadja under the glass roof of the university’s great hall. According to custom, her father held a bouquet of flowers—white, fragrant calla lilies. Polina’s hair, freshly shampooed and styled by her mother, shone brilliantly, as if radiating intellectual light. She wore a new dress of luminous green cloth—the material purchased by her mother and then sewn by a seamstress after a French pattern. Polina was the first person in the family to receive a university degree. Anything her father had learned after eight years of primary school had come courtesy of the Soviet Navy. Her mother had grown up in a small Byelorussian town where the pursuit of higher education was rare for anyone, and particularly for women. So when Polina heard her name called, she rose from her chair and felt herself propelled to the stage as if by the cumulative force of her parents’ dreams.
In the evening, Polina joined her classmates for a party at the Café Riga in the old city. All over town, graduates were dancing and toasting the end of their student days. A number of Polina’s classmates had brought their instruments and played the songs of the Beatles, Raymond Pauls, and Domenico Modugno. Glasses of champagne were circulated, and they all dropped the diamond-shaped lapel pins they’d been awarded into them, then downed the contents in one swallow, leaving the shiny blue enamel glinting between their teeth. At around ten o’clock, Maxim left his class’s party and joined Polina at the Café Riga. When she spotted him in the crowd, she was surprised by how glad she was to see him. A warm, proprietary feeling bloomed inside her. This man, blinking through the haze of cigarette smoke, intently searching the room for her, rubbing absently at the scar above his eyebrow where, when he was a boy, a schoolmate had hit him with a badminton racquet—this was her man. Out of the many, he was hers, and this simple recognition was enough to endear him to her. Flushed with optimism, alcohol, and affection, Polina fell into his arms and swept him onto the dance floor. Her classmates offered them a steady flow of champagne, vodka, and wine. Before long, Maxim forgot his usual reserve, loosened his tie, and danced with uninhibited, clumsy exuberance to the band’s rendition of the Beatles’ “Get Back.”
At dawn, as they weaved together along the cobblestones of the old city, Maxim proposed and Polina accepted. Their future seemed as assured as a future could be. Like Polina, Maxim had scored well on his exams and had his choice of prestigious factories. She had a job waiting for her at V.E.F., and he would take a position at the highly regarded Popov Radiotechnika. They would marry, move in with his parents, file a request with the municipal housing authority for a separate apartment, and start a family. They would embark upon productive and satisfying adult lives.
For Alec, Polina had been like the still point at the center of a gyre. He’d seen her, day after day, at her desk in the technology department, poised and delicate as a china figurine. Beside her was a stern old matron. Every time Alec thought to approach Polina, the matron was there, discouraging him with castrating looks. For at least a month he contemplated ways to breach this system of defense. At first, he wanted only a few words with Polina, just to see if he could elicit a smile. That was all. Nothing more. Just for a start.
Finally, one afternoon, as Polina prepared to leave work, her sentinel vacated her post and Alec approached, accompanied by his brother, Karl.
“My brother and I are going out to seek adventure. We require the company of a responsible person to make sure that we do not go to excesses.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“You have a kind and responsible face.”
“So does Lenin.”
“True. But Lenin is unavailable. And, at the risk of sounding unpatriotic, I am sure we would prefer your company.”
She said little that evening; she let him entertain her. After she finished her drink, she discreetly checked her watch and rose to say goodbye.
“You can’t leave yet,” Alec said.
“I can’t?” Polina asked, pausing, as if allowing that there might be substance to Alec’s words.
She stood a moment and regarded him, waiting for him to give birth to the reason. Alec looked up at her from his place at the round café table, hardly big enough to accommodate their glasses and ashtray.
“You see,” Karl said, “my brother can’t bear to have a woman leave until she’s confessed that she thinks he’s the sexiest, most desirable man on earth.”
“Do many women say that?” Polina asked.
“Surprisingly,” Karl said.
“Or not,” Alec offered.
“So this is the reason I can’t leave?”
“Only if you think it’s a good reason,” Alec said.
“Honestly speaking, I don’t,” Polina said.
“Then it isn’t.”
“So what is?”
“There are many. Very important ones. To list them all would take some time. Please sit and I’ll buy you another drink.”
“Your reason to stay is to hear the reasons to stay?” Polina asked.
“Not good enough?”
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.
“Who are you? Zaitsev?” Volodya said. “This isn’t the Battle of Stalingrad. Just aim in the general direction of the target.”
“Do you have one with an adjusted sight or not?” Alec persisted.
“What’s with you?” Volodya asked. “Have you been drinking? It’s not even lunch.”
Without much elaboration, Alec told Volodya what he’d arranged. Volodya glanced quickly at Polina, raised an approving eyebrow, and sorted through the stack of rifles for something suitable. He handed a rifle to Alec and then offered to find another, grossly inferior one, for Polina.
“There’s one here that practically shoots sideways,” Volodya said.
But that wasn’t the kind of contest Alec wanted, largely because he sensed that it wasn’t the kind of contest Polina would accept. She seemed like the type who respected rules, including rules that dictated the breaking of other rules.
Alec shot first. For all his pride at having placed eighth, he had to admit that he couldn’t compare the effort required to achieve mediocrity with that required to achieve excellence. Everything naturally flowed toward mediocrity; for this, the world needed little in the way of your coöperation. Whereas total incompetence or extreme proficiency demanded some application.
To his credit and mild surprise, Alec shot well. Volodya called for ceasefire and presented Alec with his perforated target—a cluster of holes grouped reasonably close together, reasonably close to the bull’s-eye. Even if Polina shot better, Alec felt that he’d performed well enough to warrant the date.
“Is this how you shot in the Army?” Polina asked.
“I’ve never shot so well in my life,” Alec said. “But then I’ve never had such motivation. As my teachers used to write in my school reports, ‘Alec is personable and shows signs of intelligence, but is lazy, inattentive, and lacks all motivation.’ ”
For the sake of equity, Polina shot with the same rifle that Alec had used. Alec watched her assume the prone position and take careful aim, the rifle’s stock pressed correctly against her cheek, its butt in the crook of her shoulder. As she shot, Alec stood behind and slightly to the side and used the opportunity to admire her in a way he hadn’t been able to before. Unchallenged, he let his eyes linger on her small lobeless ear, the creases at the corner of her squeezed-shut eye, the strong, sculptured tendons of her neck, and the fine symmetry of her profile. He watched her shoot with steady regularity, squeezing off a shot and then sliding the bolt to chamber the next round. It looked to Alec as if she were shooting to win, which he couldn’t but construe as a bad sign.
Later, when things between them were better defined, Polina explained that she had shot the way she did not because she wanted to avoid seeing him again but because she couldn’t perform otherwise.
“The graveyards and songbooks are full of people like you,” Alec had commented, a fact she had not disputed.
After Polina had finished shooting, Volodya collected her target and compared it with Alec’s. Polina had shot well, but there was no doubt that Alec had shot better.
“Imagine that,” Alec said, feigning bashfulness.
“Maybe it’s not too late,” Polina said. “You could still make general.”
“There’s a disturbing thought,” Alec said.
After this, they ran, jumped, hurled the shot put, and killed time until the exercises were finished. As Alec was leaving the stadium, Volodya caught up with him and congratulated him again on his great triumph. He wanted to inform Alec that his shooting performance had earned him more than the date with Polina. It had earned him first place over all. As the top shooter, Volodya explained, Alec would be in line for a commendation as a Stakhanovite marksman, and this would include official recognition at the Young Communists meeting and special mention in the factory newspaper.
“Come on, Vovka,” Alec said. “Don’t spoil the day for me. Write that I came in eighth and give the honor to some other schmuck.”
“Next in line is your girl,” Volodya said.
“Perfect,” Alec said. “Her husband likes to paste articles from the factory newspaper.”
The following week, when Polina’s name was printed, an acquaintance spotted it and told Maxim. As before, he asked for a copy. Polina described to Alec how she’d had to watch Maxim paste the silly article into his album. If only he weren’t so foolish, Polina had said, which Alec took as no ringing endorsement of his own appeal as a lover. But Polina always spoke plainly. If only Maxim weren’t so foolish, she’d said, she would have remained faithful to him, would never have taken up with Alec, and would have lived a regular, quiet life.
Through the summer and fall they carried on the affair. At times they saw each other quite regularly; other times weeks might pass between their meetings. Polina had her marriage to Maxim, and when she wasn’t available Alec tried to take what life cast his way. All this time, unbeknownst to them, the train of their departure was approaching, at first distant and barely audible, but gaining momentum with every passing week.
Then, on a blustery afternoon in March, after Karl had announced his intention to seek his fortune in the West and had begun a campaign to persuade Alec to go with him, Polina came to see Alec at his tiny bachelor apartment. Cold, and drenched from the rain, she sat down at the kitchen table and let the water drip from her hair and the hem of her coat.
They exchanged all the questions and answers: Was she sure? Yes. How could she be sure? She was sure. And then the more delicate, unpleasant questions that he couldn’t restrain himself from asking: And she was sure? Almost certain. But not certain? As certain as she could be. Did he want her to go into details? To provide a tally? She could do it. It wouldn’t take long. No, he didn’t want that. They could wait until it was born, then they could run the tests. Was that what he wanted? No, he didn’t want that, either. So what did he want?
As gently as he could phrase it, he told her what he wanted.
“I did that once,” she said. “I swore I’d never do it again. Not that I believed I’d ever be faced with the choice.”
He was unable to think clearly. His mind raced, seeking a way out. It didn’t help that in her condition, soaked and chilled, her lips nearly drained of color, Polina cast an image of injured, poignant beauty.
Afterward, he consulted with Karl and there was the agonizing enumeration of options: Did he want to marry her and raise the child? Did he not want to marry her but let her raise the child? Alone or with her husband? Did he want to join Karl and leave Riga? And what then? Marry her? Bring a pregnant woman along? Or an infant? Emigrating was hard enough without that added burden. Karl knew of happily married women who’d aborted their pregnancies when they received their exit visas. And what were her designs? What did she want? What could be done about her?
Even if men did it all the time, Alec said, he didn’t want to leave his child behind. He didn’t think he could simply forget. It would always trouble him.
But what alternative did he have if she wouldn’t agree to an abortion?
Three days after she’d delivered the news, Polina returned for Alec’s answer. The day was cold but clear, and she arrived this time in a very different state. Instead of martyred, clinical. Under her coat she wore a heavy gray woollen turtleneck, whose collar rose to the line of her chin. She matched this with a long navy skirt and high black boots. Except for her face and hands, she was somberly, thickly covered. The clothes seemed chosen to negate her body, to discourage any sensual thoughts, in him or in anyone else. What other reason could there have been for such a shapeless outfit? Not to conceal the pregnancy. The tiny being that had latched on inside her was less than three months old. Alec imagined it having the size and vascular translucence of a gooseberry. He pictured it in the red convection of the womb, growing, thriving, and encroaching on his life. He’d tried to think of it in other, more positive terms, to envision it as a source of happiness. Why not? Many people were very glad to have children. And he wasn’t categorically opposed to one day having a child. At some future time, he could see himself surrounded by children, horsing around with them, walking them to school, putting them to bed. But not like this. Like this, he foresaw only a tangle of complications.
And, of all the tangled complications, Alec’s mind seized upon the most perplexing. By the third day, he’d seized upon it to the exclusion of everything else. The more he thought about the worst possible scenario—emigrating and leaving a child behind—the more imperative emigration began to feel. He pictured himself conscience-stricken somewhere in the generic West, or, conversely, stranded by his conscience in Riga, unwilling to deny his paternity.
“Screw conscience,” Karl had scoffed. “Conscience is the least of your problems. You could get stuck here regardless of your conscience.”
By this he meant that if Polina had the child and he was proven to be the father he’d need her written permission to leave the country. She’d have to sign an affidavit stating that she had no material claims on him.
“It goes without saying,” Alec declared, “that if I left a child behind I’d send money. Polina would know that.”
“She might or she might not,” Karl countered.
“She’s not vindictive. She’d never cause problems.”
“Have you ever stiffed her with a kid before?”
“She’s not the type. Of this I’m sure.”
“You don’t know, and you can’t know. There’s no telling how a person will react from one day to the next. There’s only one way to avoid a problem, and that’s not to create it in the first place.”
“Well, the problem exists.”
“It does and it doesn’t,” Karl said. “But wait much longer and it will be finita la commedia.”
“She won’t agree to it.”
“Is this the first time you’ve got a woman pregnant?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You charmed your way in—charm your way out.”
“Charming in is a lot easier.”
“Yeah, well, write that on your forehead so you’ll remember for next time.”
“Anything else?”
“What else? You have to take care of it. I can’t do it for you. But, if you haven’t got one yourself, I know of a good doctor. Quiet, expert, and clean.”
“Rosner?”
“You’ve used him?”
“Never needed to. Have you?”
“I know him strictly by reputation.”
Apart from recommending a doctor, Karl was no help. Alec was left to his own devices. And, with Polina sitting in his kitchen, it occurred to him that life, which he’d treated as a pastime, and which he’d thought he could yet outdistance, had finally caught up with him. And he discovered, much as he’d suspected, that once life caught up with you, you could never quite shake it again. It endeavored to hobble you with greater and greater frequency. How you managed to remain upright became your style, who you were.
Style was the difference between him and Polina. On that March afternoon, he wanted to approach the problem from the side, circle it a few times, until, sidling over with such roundabout movements, the two of them would discover themselves at the destination as though by happenstance.
Polina, meanwhile, wanted to get there directly.
“It was an accident,” Alec began. “You wouldn’t have planned it this way.”
“How could I plan something I thought impossible?”
“But, if you could, would you have planned it like this?”
“No. But what does that matter? It happened. I’m not sorry that it happened. Even if you want me to be,” Polina said with controlled defiance.
“I don’t want you to be sorry,” Alec said. “I want you to be happy. Will having the baby make you happy?”
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 dénouement 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. ♦
