not to look Western, a serious offence in Moscow.
‘Did you hurt your mouth?’ she said to him after he kissed her hello.
‘It’s nothing.’ Volodya smelled chicken. ‘Special dinner?’
‘Anya is bringing a boyfriend home.’
‘Ah! A fellow student?’
‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure what he does.’
Volodya was pleased. He was fond of his sister, but he knew she was not beautiful. She was short and stumpy, and wore dull clothes in drab colours. She had not had many boyfriends, and it was good news that one liked her enough to come home with her.
He went to his room, took off his jacket, and washed his face and hands. His lips were almost back to normal: Markus had not hit him very hard. While he was drying his hands he heard voices, and gathered that Anya and her boyfriend had arrived.
He put on a knitted cardigan, for comfort, and left his room. He went into the kitchen. Anya was sitting at the table with a small, rat-faced man Volodya recognized. ‘Oh, no!’ Volodya said. ‘You!’
It was Ilya Dvorkin, the NKVD agent who had arrested Irina. His disguise had gone, and he was dressed in a normal dark suit and decent boots. He stared at Volodya in surprise. ‘Of course – Peshkov!’ he said. ‘I didn’t make the connection.’
Volodya turned to his sister. ‘Don’t tell me this is your boyfriend.’
Anya said in dismay: ‘What’s the matter?’
Volodya said: ‘We met earlier today. He screwed up an important Army operation by sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong.’
‘I was doing my job,’ said Dvorkin. He wiped the end of his nose on his sleeve.
‘Some job!’
Katerina stepped in to rescue the situation. ‘Don’t bring your work home,’ she said. ‘Volodya, please pour a glass of vodka for our guest.’
Volodya said: ‘Really?’
His mother’s eyes flashed anger. ‘Really!’
‘Okay.’ Reluctantly, he took the bottle from the shelf. Anya got glasses from a cupboard and Volodya poured.
Katerina took a glass and said: ‘Now, let’s start again. Ilya, this is my son Vladimir, whom we always call Volodya. Volodya, this is Anya’s friend Ilya, who has come to dinner. Why don’t you shake hands.’
Volodya had no option but to shake the man’s hand.
Katerina put snacks on the table: smoked fish, pickled cucumber, sliced sausage. ‘In summer we have salad that I grow at the dacha, but at this time of year, of course, there is nothing,’ she said apologetically. Volodya realized that she was keen to impress Ilya. Did his mother really want Anya to marry this creep? He supposed she must.
Grigori came in, wearing his army uniform, all smiles, sniffing the chicken and rubbing his hands together. At forty-eight he was red-faced and corpulent: it was hard to imagine him storming the Winter Palace as he had in 1917. He must have been thinner then.
He kissed his wife with relish. Volodya thought his mother was thankful for his father’s unabashed lust without actually returning it. She would smile when he patted her bottom, hug him when he embraced her, and kiss him as often as he wanted, but she was never the initiator. She liked him, respected him, and seemed happy being married to him; but clearly she did not burn with desire. Volodya would want more than that from marriage.
The matter was purely hypothetical: Volodya had had a dozen or so short-term girlfriends but had not yet met a woman he wanted to marry.
Volodya poured his father a shot of vodka, and Grigori tossed it back with relish, then took some smoked fish. ‘So, Ilya, what work do you do?’
‘I’m with the NKVD,’ Ilya said proudly.
‘Ah! A very good organization to belong to!’
Grigori did not really think this, Volodya suspected; he was just trying to be friendly. Volodya thought the family should be unfriendly, in the hope that they could drive Ilya away. He said: ‘I suppose, Father, that when the rest of the world follows the Soviet Union in adopting the Communist system, there will no longer be a need for the secret police, and the NKVD can then be abolished.’
Grigori chose to treat the question lightly. ‘No police at all!’ he said jovially. ‘No criminal trials, no prisons. No counter-espionage department, as there will be no spies. No army either, since we will have no enemies! What will we all do for a living?’ He laughed heartily. ‘This, however, may still be some distance in the future.’
Ilya looked suspicious, as if he felt something subversive was being said but he could not put his finger on it.
Katerina brought to the table a plate of black bread and five bowls of hot borscht, and they all began to eat. ‘When I was a boy in the countryside,’ Grigori said, ‘all winter long my mother would save vegetable peelings, apple cores, the discarded outer leaves of cabbages, the hairy part of the onion, anything like that, in a big old barrel outside the house, where it all froze. Then, in the spring, when the snow melted, she would use it to make borscht. That’s what borscht really
