Tim Powers - Declare

“Why does he want to uproot any plant, any feeblest seedling, that grows out of the Army’s intelligence efforts?” mourned Moroz more than once. “Is there truly something inherently perilous in an Army intelligence agency, so that it needs to be exterminated to the last man every few years? Beria is Stalin’s man, as the monster Yezhov was before him. The Army was founded by Trotsky-do you suppose that’s why Stalin must at every season sow salt in that scorched earth?” Moroz had already confessed to Elena that he wrote poetry.

Elena knew that Trotsky had been killed more than a year ago in Mexico; but she knew too that Stalin feared the man’s posthumous influences. Trotsky had been the founder of the Red Army, directly after the Revolution, as well as Lenin’s commissar of foreign affairs; and he had been a close confidant of Lenin’s, and was rumored to have helped Lenin organize a number of Soviet agencies so independent and secret that now Stalin himself could only guess at them. Perhaps there was some subterranean agency that Stalin especially feared, one that consistently tended to surface in the GRU, which was the agency founded to deal with threats against Mother Russia from abroad. Had some defensive posture proven more horrifying to Stalin than the foreign threat it was meant to counter?

Elena remembered Andre Marty executing alleged Trotskyites in Spain, and she remembered her suspicion that Marty was actually eliminating agents who had drifted into some transcendent order.

Sometimes Moroz thrust his hand into his pocket as he voiced his worries about Beria and the NKVD, and Elena guessed he was making the gesture known as fig v karmane, the fig in the pocket-the fig was the thumb thrust between the first two fingers in a clenched fist, expressing the universal “fuck you” defiance; but v karmane meant in the pocket -furtive, fearful. For all his frail charm, Moroz lived by the Soviet bureaucrat’s maxim: ugadat, ugodit, utselet, pay attention, ingratiate, survive.

“Nichevo,” Moroz would say, dismissing the subject-she gathered that the word expressed something like a despairing What’s the use, and a fatalistic So be it.

But Elena made a determined effort to love Moscow. She was allowed to supplement the basic diet of black bread and cabbage by buying food at a restricted General Staff shop, and she tried to buy only Russian items such as garlic sausage and eggs and Caucasian tea, and ignore the powdered milk and peanut butter, which were likely to be United States Army rations donated through the Lend-Lease program. But nearly half of the cars on the boulevards were American Lend-Lease Studebakers and Dodges. She never saw refrigerators in the shops and never saw a refrigerator car in the trains at the Kiev station.

She got used to the street loudspeakers that played the “Internationale” every morning at dawn and broadcast incomprehensible speeches all over the city all day long; and she made allowances for railings that came loose under her hand and new brick walls that had no mortar at all in some spots and were lumpy with excess in others; but she couldn’t bear the smell and the crowds at the public baths, and made do with towels and cold water in her room-but a dated chit from a bathhouse was necessary to buy a train ticket, and when heavy snow forced her to take the train to Moroz’s office she would buy a bath-chit on the black market. When the trains broke down, a porter would walk through the cars and take the electric lightbulbs out of the lamps so that they wouldn’t be stolen.

Elena learned to scan the newspapers that were posted in display cases on the street, looking for the Cyrillic symbols for Moroz’s name in the lists of Party officials; she had noticed that the lists weren’t arranged alphabetically, and gathered that the order of the names indicated their current standing with the Politburo.

And she noticed that Moroz’s name had fallen to the bottom of the list on the day after she met the Middle Eastern woman on the Sadovaya ring road by Arbat Street.

Elena had stopped at a sidewalk kiosk to spend a ruble on a scant shot of vodka, when she noticed the metallic glint of jewelry on a woman standing beside her; the popular costume jewelry was stamped out of colored plastic, so Elena assumed the gleam had come from one of the state medals that Muscovites always wore. But when she turned to look, the exotic face of the woman distracted her-it was a dark face, veiled across the nose and mouth so that only the glittering brown eyes could be seen under the black braided hair, and in spite of the intense cold the woman was dressed in a length of dark blue cloth draped over the shoulders and wound around the waist to hang in folds like a skirt. Her feet were bare on the pavement.

And even as Elena told herself that she must help this lost foreigner, must get her indoors somewhere out of the snow and find shoes and a coat for her, she noticed that the woman’s bare feet were in the center of a patch of cleared wet pavement; the woman’s feet had melted the snow on the sidewalk to a distance of nearly a yard; and now Elena could feel the heat that radiated from her, as palpable as radiant energy from a furnace.

The jewelry, Elena noticed finally, was a string of gold rings around the woman’s neck; and interspersed among the rings were holed lumps of steel and gold. Elena had seen many Muscovites with stainless-steel teeth-dental porcelain was scarce.

The woman rocked her head to the south, staring intently into Elena’s eyes-and Elena’s face was suddenly hot, for the gesture and the look had somehow conveyed an urgent sexual invitation, if not an order. One of Elena’s molars was gold, and she could imagine it strung among the lumps and the rings on the woman’s breast.

But Elena turned away and ran down the Arbat Street sidewalk, skidding on the ice and fearful of pursuit but somehow taking comfort in the grid of electrified streetcar wires that made a net overhead. When she stopped under the harsh neo-Gothic pillars of the Foreign Ministry and looked back, the woman had not moved-or only a little, perhaps: surely she seemed a little closer, a little bigger against the background of gray buildings, than she would have if she had not moved.

And the next day, when Elena checked the display copies of Pravda, the Cyrillic symbols for “Moroz” were at the bottom of the list of Moscow council members.

She walked on past the newspaper display and then turned up a side street to the left, away from Moroz’s office.

She felt like a swimmer out far past any thing to cling to, with the bottom leagues away below her flailing legs. If Moroz had been arrested, how could she safely find out? If he had been, she herself would surely share in his ruin. Her faith in the Party was subsumed in her terror of Beria- Each morning the NKVD executioners were given their rifles and their vodka, Cassagnac had said only three months ago, and after they had shot their dozens and bulldozed them into pits dug by convict labor, they went back to the guardrooms and drank themselves insensible. And even more recently Marcel Gruey, Lot, had told her, Cassagnac said that this generation of the Soviet secret services will be killed in their own turn before long, and that the next lot is likely to be more reasonable. But how could she take any evasion measures here? She had no contacts, she didn’t know the city, the nearest border was more than three hundred miles away at Latvia, and she didn’t even speak the language yet beyond a few utilitarian or slangy phrases.

She simply walked, east down the Gertsena street toward the medieval bastions that studded the gray Kremlin wall. She saw several police officers-mostly women in blue skirts and berets, directing traffic-but it wasn’t uniformed figures that would threaten her. And she saw old women bundled up in coats and scarves, shuffling along the sidewalks in heavy felt boots, sweeping the snow into the gutters with crude brooms. Elena envied them their secure identities.