Ben Bova: Voyagers

Still frowning, she said slowly in English, “Are you able to fork me another time?” Her accent was atrocious.

Suppressing a laugh, Markov said, “Fuck…not fork.”

She nodded. “Are you able to fuck me another time?”

“That word is considered to be in bad taste by the English and the Americans. Not so by the Australians.”

“Fork?”

“No. Fuck. They usually employ a euphemism for the word.”

“Euphemism?”

Markov’s eyes rolled heavenward. She’ll never pass the exams, no matter whose bed she flops into. As he explained in Russian the meaning of the word, he mentally added, Unless she can fuck the computer.

“Now I understand,” Nadia said in English.

“Good,” he said.

“Well, can you?”

“Can I what?”

“You know…”

“Ah!” Realizing that her mind had not deviated from its carnal goal, he replied, “Make love to you once again? Gladly! With white-hot passion. But not now. It is time for you to get back to your dormitory.”

In Russian she bleated, “Must I? It’s so cozy and warm here.” Her fingers traced lines down his shoulder and back.

“It won’t be cozy much longer. My wife will be returning very soon.”

“Oh, her!”

Markov sat up on the bed. The room felt cold to his bare skin.

“She is my wife, dear child, and this is her apartment even more than it is mine. Do you think a mere university professor of languages would be given such an elegant apartment, in such a fine part of town?”

The girl got up out of the bed and padded naked to the bathroom without another word. Watching her, Markov saw that she was heavy in the thighs and rump. He hadn’t noticed that before they had gone to bed together.

Sighing, he pulled himself out of the bed and stripped off the sheets. He kept two sets of bedclothing: one for the marriage and one for fun. His wife had a keen sense of smell and was fastidious about certain things.

Nadia re-entered the bedroom, tugging on her quilted slacks and stuffing her blouse into the waistband.

“What does she do, this wife of yours, to rate such a fancy apartment? A private bathroom, just for the two of you!” It was almost a reproach.

“She works in the Kremlin,” said Markov. “She is a secretary to a commissar.”

The girl’s eyes widened. “Oh, I see. No wonder she is treated so well.”

Markov nodded and reached for his robe. “Yes. In our progressive society, the commissars work so hard and give so much of their lives for the good of the people that even their secretaries live like…like we shall all live, once true communism is established throughout the world.”

She nodded without acknowledging the irony in his words. He walked her through the little sitting room to the hallway door.

“This is a wonderful way to learn English,” she said, “but I’m afraid I’ll need many lessons.”

Markov patted her shoulder. “We’ll see. We’ll see. In the meantime it might be a good idea for you to study the regular lessons and spend more time with the tapes in the language lab.”

“Oh, I will,” she said earnestly. “Thank you, Professor.”

He leaned down to kiss her lips, then swiftly ushered her through the door and out into the dimly lit hallway.

Closing the door behind her, Markov leaned against it for a moment. Hopeless, he told himself. Forty-five years old and you still play childish games.

But then a grin broke out on his bearded face. “Why not?” he mused. “It’s fun.”

He was an inch over six feet in height, lanky in build with long legs and arms that swung loosely at his sides when he walked. His reddish hair was starting to fade and his scraggly beard was almost entirely gray. But his face was still unlined and almost boyish. The ice-blue eyes twinkled. The full lips often smiled.

When he lectured at the university his voice was strong and clear; he needed no microphone to reach the farthest rows of the auditorium. When he sang—usually at small parties where the vodka flowed generously—his baritone was remarkable for its fine timbre and lack of pitch.

He pulled himself away from the front door abruptly, hurried into the bedroom and finished changing the sheets. The soiled ones he stuffed into the special suitcase he kept behind his writing desk. Once a week he laundered them in the machine in the basement of the student lounge at the university. It was a good place to meet girls who didn’t attend his classes.

Finally, he scrubbed himself down, pulled the heavy robe around his tingling skin and sat in his favorite chair in the front room, before the electric heater. He was just picking up a heavy tome and sliding his reading glasses up the bridge of his nose when he heard Maria’s key scratching at the door.

Maria Kirtchatovska Markova was slightly older than her husband. Her family came from peasant stock, a fact that she was proud of. And she looked it: short, heavyset, narrow untrusting eyes of muddy brown, hair the color of a field mouse, cut short and flat. She was no beauty and never had been. Nor was she a secretary to a commissar.

When Markov had first met her, a quarter century earlier, he had been a student of linguistics at the university and she a uniformed guard recently discharged from the Red Army. She was ambitious, he was brilliant.

Their union was one of mutual advantage. He had thought that marriage would make love blossom, and was shocked to find that it did not. She quickly agreed to let him pursue “his own interests,” as he euphemistically referred to his affairs. Maria wanted only his intelligence to help further her own career in the government.

Their arrangement worked well. Maria was recruited by the KGB and rose, over the years, to the rank of major. She was now assigned to an elite unit concerned with cryptanalysis—decoding other people’s secret messages. To the best of Markov’s knowledge, his wife had never arrested anyone, never interrogated a prisoner, never been involved in the tortures and killings that were always darkly rumored whenever anyone dared to whisper of the security police.

Markov was now a professor of linguistics at the same university where he had been a student. His career was unremarkable, except for one thing: his fascination with codes, cryptology and exotic languages. He occasionally wrote magazine articles about languages that alien creatures might use to make contact with the human race. He had even written a slim book about possible extraterrestrial languages, and the government had even printed it. He never bothered to wonder if he would have risen so far without Maria, except now and then in the dead of night, when she was busy at her office and he had no one else to sleep with.

“Aren’t you cold, with nothing on but that robe?” Maria asked as she closed the door and let her heavy shoulder bag thump to the floor.

“No,” Markov said, peering over the rims of his glasses. “Not now, with you here.”

She made a sour face. “Been tutoring your students again?” She knew how to use euphemisms, too.

He shrugged. It was none of her business. Besides, even though she knew all about it, she always got angry when he spoke of it openly. Strange woman, he thought. You’d think she would have become accustomed to the situation. After all, she did agree to the arrangement.

“Why do you have to work so late?” he asked her without getting up from his easy chair. He knew that she would not answer. Could not. Most of her work was so sensitive that she could not discuss it with her husband. But once in a great while, when she was really stumped on a code or a translation, she would let him take a stab at it. Often he failed, but there had been a few times when he’d made a Hero of the Soviet Union out of her.