Andrei Makine - A Hero's Daughter

After this tirade he removed the stopper from a carafe with a dry creak, poured out a glassful of tepid, yellowish water and drank it with a grimace of disgust. He went over to the window and drummed on the grayish windowsill, waiting for Olya to stop crying. The heat in the office was stifling. A red butter-fly with tattered, tarnished wings struggled inside the double glazing. Nauseated, he studied the dusty glass, the dark poplars outside the window. He turned back to Olya, who was screwing up a little damp handkerchief. "That's ah. You can go. I have nothing else to say to you. What happens to you is up to the competent authorities. Report to the third floor, Room Twenty-seven. They'll deal with you there."

Olya stumbled out and climbed up to the third Hoor, where, blinded by tears, she could scarcely find the door he had indicated. Before going in she took a quick look in her little pocket mirror, fanned her swollen eyes with her hand and knocked.

Behind the desk a handsome man in his forties was talking on the telephone. He looked up at her, greeted her with a nod, and, smiling, indicated the armchair. Olya sat down timidly on the edge of the seat. While continuing to give laconic replies, the man took out a bottle of water from under the desk and deftly opened it with one hand. He poured some into a glass and slid it gently across toward Olya, blinked, and smiled at her again. "He doesn't know why I'm here yet," she thought, swallowing a little sparkling mouthful. "When he discovers he'll yell at me and throw me out."

The man put down the receiver, extracted a sheet of paper from a drawer and scanned it quickly. He studied his visitor and said: "Good. Olya Ivanovna Demidova, if I'm not mistaken? Well, Olya, let's get to know one another." And he introduced himself: "Sergei Nikolaievich." Then he paused, sighed, rubbed his temples and went on, as if regretfully: "You see, Olya, what took place is without any doubt unfortunate and, I fear, heavy with consequences for you. As a man, I can understand you: youth's the season made for joy, of course. You yearn for new sensations… Essenin, you remember, calls it 'the flood tide of feelings' – that's his phrase, isn't it? But that's the poet speaking. And you and I are living in the world of political and ideological realities. Today your Frenchman is throwing the javelin or doing the high jump. Tomorrow he's being trained for some kind of intelligence work and comes back here as a spy. Well, I'm not going to make a speech. You've already had an earful. I'm just going to say one thing to you. We, for our part, will do everything possible to get you out of trouble. You understand, no one wants to cast a shadow over your father; and you yourself, we don't want to ruin your future. But for your part you must help us. I shall have to talk about this whole business to my superiors. And so, to make sure that I don't give them a cock-and-bull story, we're going to put it all down in black and white. Right, here's some paper. As to the form of words, I'll help you."

When Olya emerged from Room 27 an hour later, she felt as if, with a kick of her heels, she could have taken flight. How ridiculous he seemed to her now, chat Komsomol official with his glistening pate!

She had just had fleeting contact with the mechanism of real power in the country. Filled with wonder, she found a way to spell out to herself in naive but accurate enough terms all that had happened: "The KGB can do anything."

That evening, however, she was seized by an impression quite different from that of the morning. She recalled a sentence she had written in Room 27. Describing that first evening with Jean-Claude she had written: "Finding myself in the bedroom of the French athlete, Berthet, Jean-Claude… I engaged in intimate relations with him." It was that sentence that jarred. "Intimate relations," she thought. "What an odd turn of phrase! And yet, basically, why odd? That's all it was. Certainly not love, in any event…"

She only saw Jean-Claude one more time and, as the polite man in Room 27 had advised, said a few friendly words to him and slipped away.

On the day before the athletes left she came across him in the company of a friend. The two men passed quite close by without noticing her. The friend was patting Jean-Claude on the shoulder and he was smiling with a contented air. Olya heard Jean-Claude remarking somewhat languidly, drawing out the syllables:

"You know, I think I'm going ahead with that property in the Vendée. They simply hand the house over to you, with the keys: no problem."

"Is Fabienne happy with that?" asked the other.

"Absolutely! She adores sailing!"

In the spring of 1982 no one in the country yet knew that it was going to be a quite extraordinary year. In November Brezhnev would die and Andropov would accede to the throne. The liberal intelligentsia, gathered in their kitchens, would begin to be tormented by the worst forebodings. Everyone knew he was once the head of the KGB. He's bound to crack down hard. Under Brezhnev you could still risk opening your mouth frqm time to time. Now there's going to be a reaction, that's for sure. They say he's already ordering police raids in the streets. You step out of your office for five minutes and the militia pounce on you. Let's hope it's not going to be another 1937…

But History, as likely as not, had had enough of the dreary monolithic solemnity of those long decades of socialism and decided to have a bit of fun. The man whose character the alarmed intellectuals identified as that of another "Father of all the Peoples," or even another "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky, turned out to be a mortally weary and sick monarch. He knew that the majority of the members of the Politburo ought to be put up against a wall and shot. He knew that the Minister of the Interior, with whom he chatted amiably on the telephone, was a criminal against the state. He knew how much each of his colleagues in the Politburo had in Western bank accounts. He even knew the names of the banks. He knew that a feudal system had long since been reinstated in Central Asia and that the right place for all those responsible was prison. He knew that in Afghanistan the American scenario in Vietnam was being replicated. He knew that in the villages in the whole of the northwest, there was a shortage of bread. He knew that for a long time now the country had been run by a small family mafia who detested him personally, and who despised the people. He knew that if the ruble had been convertible half the country's rulers would have decamped to Miami or elsewhere long ago. He knew that the dissidents in prison or in exile did not know the hundredth part of what he knew and that the things they commented on were small potatoes. He knew so many things about this society that one day at the Party Plenum he let slip: "We have no cognizance of the society in which we live."

History had its little joke. The terror this man inspired in some and the hope he inspired in others, both arose, as it were, from beyond the grave. He was dying of nephritis and in his moments of lucidity used to derive amusement from a story he had been told by the Kremlin doctor. It tickled him greatly. It happens during a meeting of the Politburo. They are all discussing who is to succeed Brezhnev. Suddenly the door is flung open and Andropov bursts in, accompanied by Aliev. Brandishing a revolver, Andropov shouts: "Hands up!" All the old men raise their trembling hands. "Lower the left hand!" commands Andropov. Turning to Aliev, he says: "Make a note! A unanimous vote for Andropov!"

History delighted in making a mockery of those who thought they could determine its course with impunity. Andropov died. Chernenko followed him. With the indecent haste of a comic strip, all of Brezhnev's entourage were dying off. They celebrated funeral rites to the tune of Chopin's funeral march on Red Square so often that the people of Moscow found themselves whistling the tune as if it were a current popular song.