Andrei Makine - A Hero's Daughter

The following morning, May 9, the same doctor, reeking of» tobacco, his face hollow from being on night duty, emerged and sat down in silence with Ivan on the wooden benches in the corridor. In some arcane corner of his mind, Ivan had already had time, not to consider what his life would be like without Tatyana, but to have a sharp and desperate presentiment of it. As this feeling welled up, the echoing void terrified him. He sat there without asking the doctor anything, following with an absent gaze the actions of an old cleaning woman as she wiped the dusty windows.

Finally the doctor gave a sigh and said softly: "She should never have risked herself in our crowds. For her even wiping a window was dangerous."

Olya arrived the next day. She was so beautiful it was almost unseemly. She herself felt uneasy with her tight skirt and the sound of her high heels in their now silent flat amid the whispers of people dressed in black whom she hardly knew. One of the women gave her a black head scarf for the funeral. But even with this scarf her beauty was astonishing. She wept a great deal. What devastated her was not so much the grim, emaciated face of her mother as the fragility of everything she had believed to be so natural and solid. Everything was crumbling before her eyes. From being a dashing hero, her father had turned into an old fellow with all the stuffing knocked out of him and red eyes. Now her parents' lives struck her as unbelievably drab. A wretched, starved childhood, the war, more starvation and then right up to old age – no, right up to death itself- that absurd furniture factory, and that truck driver's cab stinking of diesel oil. Olya looked around her in astonishment. The television her parents sat in front of each evening. The sofa bed where they slept. A photo on the bedside table: the two of them, still very young, before she was born, somewhere in the south, during the course of the only vacation trip of their lives. And just this photo, her father's sandals – horrible sandals, reminiscent of dog muzzles-just her mother's gesture, hiding her right hand, all this was enough to break her heart.

Ivan hardly saw anything of his daughter. It was only on the last night, when the weary relatives had left them, that he came face to face with Olya. They were sitting one each side of the coffin, completely exhausted by the ceaseless agitation of the women fussing around, by the day's endless and meaningless whisperings. Ivan looked at his daughter and thought: "She's a woman now. She's of an age to get married. It seems only yesterday that Tatyana was wrapping her in swaddling clothes. How time flies! Nursery school, grade school, and now Moscow, the Institute… She needs to find a good man, one who doesn't drink… a soldier… Although those guys hit the bottle nowadays like nobody's business…! I must speak to her. Now that we're burying her mother…"

It was only at the station, when they were waiting for the Moscow train that Ivan said to her: "You must work hard, Olya. Just…" Olya laughed sweetly.

"But Dad, I've only got a few more weeks of classes. I'm just about to do my final exams."

"Oh, really?" said Ivan, amazed and embarrassed. "So where will you go after that?"

"Wherever my Country calls me to serve," joked Olya.

She kissed Ivan and boarded the train. She waved to her father through the window for a long time, as he stood motionless in his tired dark suit on the platform flooded with sunlight.

Olya already knew where her Country would call her to serve… Some of the students in her year expected to make a painless transfer from lecture room benches to well-upholstered chairs, lined up for them by their relatives in high places. Others resignedly prepared themselves for the drudgery of technical translations in a dusty office. Yet others dreamed of immersing themselves as soon as possible in the whirl of Intourist, anticipating with delight the cavalcade of European faces passing by too rapidly to grow wearisome, thrilled, in advance, to think of all those little gifts and the mirage of Western life.

For Olya it was quite different. Sergei Nikolaievitch of Room 27 had long since been replaced by his equally impressive colleague, Vitaly Ivanovich. It was when she met him in April that Olya learned where her Country would call her to serve.

They were in a hotel room, which was where their meetings often took place. Vitaly Ivanovich was smiling mysteriously and rubbing his hands, like a man who has a pleasant surprise up his sleeve. They were talking about their current business, the foreigner whom Olya was taking care of at the time. Then, as if he had suddenly remembered something, Vitaly Ivanovich exclaimed: "Listen, Olya! You'll soon be finished at your Institute. Then it'll be time for appointments. Have you already had preliminary appointments…? So, what sector have they assigned you to…? Well, obviously! Technical translation relating to patents in a factory. It's not the greatest fun in the world. What are you planning to do…? But no, listen. You shouldn't be such a pessimist. There'll be time enough for you to bury yourself in all that dust. I've talked about this with my superiors. Your services are greatly appreciated. That's why it's been decided to recommend you – not officially, you understand – for work as an interpreter at the International Trade Center… Hold your horses, don't get carried away. Save your thanks for later. I don't think there's any need for me to explain to you that at the Center there are hundreds and thousands of foreigners. And so, our specific work, intelligence and counterespionage, as they call it in the detective stories, takes precedence…"

Olya went out feeling slightly dizzy. She walked along the gray April streets where the red flags for the May celebrations were already unfurled. On the front of a big department store workmen were putting up an enormous banner with portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The red canvas was not yet stretched taut and the April wind was making it belly out in little ripples. At one moment the prophets of Marxism were gazing out over the roofs of Moscow toward the radiant future, the next they were winking ambiguously at the passersby.

Olga walked the full length of the Kalininsky Prospekt in a state of blissful giddiness. Now even its hideous concrete skyscrapers seemed to her graceful. She descended toward the Moskva River and climbed up on the bridge. Everything in this part of Moscow is on a gigantic and inhuman scale. The 700-foot pyramid of Moscow State University can be seen silhouet- ' ted against the skyline. On the other side of the river, with the same exuberance of Stalinist gothic, the huilding of the Ukraiha Hotel thrusts upward into the sky. Behind it glitters the COMECON skyscraper's open book. On the opposite bank, facing the Ukraïna, stands a collection of gray-green buildings with orange windows. It is precisely there that the International Trade Center is located.

On the bridge a strong and supple wind was blowing. Olya felt as if her short hair were billowing out like a long silken train. She had never felt so young and free. All over again she was thinking, with a smile of admiration; the KGB can do anything!

During those two years that had followed the Olympic Games Olya had come to understand what Vitaly Ivanovich had referred to as the very "specific" nature of the work. Now she knew what interested him and his colleagues. And she knew how to extract this skillfully from a foreigner. How ridiculous that ruse of |ean-Claude's seemed to her now, suddenly needing a translation! She used it herself quite often these days, in order to establish contact with "interesting" foreigners. But she had a great many other tricks, too. The names of her foreign acquaintances made up a continual procession: each one might last for a week, or a month, or a year. There was a certain Richard, an Alain… a John, a Jonathan, a Steven… Indeed, there were even two Jonathans, one English, one American. Their voices jostled one another in her memory in a confused chorus. Snatches of their confidences rose to the surface. One of them bore the title of "Honorable" and was very proud of it. Another was an enthusiastic mountaineer and went rock climbing in New Zealand. Another used to assert that everywhere you go in the USSR you run into people from the KGB. All of this and much more besides was passed on in the reports Olya diligently submitted to Vitaly Ivanovich. And sometimes details no one had any use for resurfaced, even though the people to whom they belonged had become confused in her memory: a shoulder covered in freckles, the glow from a face that resembled a pale mask in the heavy darkness of the bedroom…