128: the systems man Ivan Atchmianov, well fed and clean shaven, and the other, Eva Rye, her grey hair cut short and her face burnt red from the summer sun. Despite being there for nearly five years, Russian life still excited her with its novelty. She had risen early that morning and breakfasted on doughnuts and sour cream, and then allowed Ivan to persuade her to drink a little vodka for the road.
“What are you smiling about?” she teased her companion, who was looking through a pair of half-moon glasses at the humming line that ran from the dashboard down into the floor of the vehicle.
“I was admiring clever workmanship,” said Ivan. “And I was thinking about how it alienates us from nature. When this journey used to take days, people would get a feel for the size of this land. Spend your days bumping along under the hot sun, looking for a place to shelter from the storms at night, and you’d understand what Russia is.”
Eva laughed. “What do you know about Russian life? You live in Sao Paolo!”
The words were out before she could stop them. She felt herself blushing and fumbled for something else to say. “You know, when we get back I’m going to get ahold of your toolboxes and I’m going to find a wrench and take this thing apart. Maybe when you’ve been forced to take that walk with the rest of us you’ll feel happier.”
“There are too many people in Russia,” said Ivan morosely. “I wonder if the bourgeois who flock to the Narkomfins would be so eager if they had to face up to the cold blast of winter without their passive suits and their heated transport.”
He caught Eva’s smile. “Anyway, a wrench would do you no good. These panels have been sealed using induction screws.”
“Whatever,” said Eva waving her hand. “I’ll look through that big red box of yours, where you keep all those weird new tools, and I’ll find out what an induction screwdriver is and how to use it. I’ll strip apart your bike and your rain belt, and maybe then you’ll be happy.” She released an extravagant sigh.
“You’re such a man! You spend all your time fixing machines but you never want to use them. Six months you’ve been here now. You’ve had that lovely old Zil limousine sitting outside the apartment block, and you’ve polished it and you’ve had your head under the hood practically every day, but you’ve never actually taken me anywhere. You could have driven me to the lake and we could have sat outside the dukhan there, and I could have bought you fish soup and stuffed zucchini.”
Ivan reddened with embarrassment.
“You should have said you wanted to go to the lake. I did not realize! I would have taken you there in the britzka.”
The awkwardness between them had passed. Now Eva felt it was safe to laugh gently at him. She laughed with a confidence she had had to wait nearly seventy years to acquire.
“That’s not what I meant…” she began but, on seeing the confusion in his face, continued, “though yes, I would have liked to have gone to the lake.”
He gave a happy smile, and Eva tried to look cheerful. Ivan folded his glasses into his breast pocket and sternly took her hand.
“Maybe when we had finished our soup, and if you had promised to leave my britzka alone, I would show you how to use an induction screwdriver.”
Eva smiled at him. She wanted to say something funny and sarcastic in reply, but she knew that he would misunderstand.
“I used one in the Pekarsky block to open the hatch to the heating system,” he continued. “A black handle, about this long?”
He held his palms apart, his soft hands pale and smelling of soap. Eva shivered at the memory. The people of the Pekarsky block were unintelligent and superstitious: they had walked out from under the constant surveillance of the world outside but, lacking the vision to find something to replace the Watcher’s protection, they had instead handed control of their lives over to some imagined malign fate or nature. When machinery failed, they blamed bad luck or sabotage, then they waited in sullen bad temper for someone like Ivan to come and sort out their problems.
And they hated him for it—Ivan came from the outside world. Social Care arranged for people like him to do their six months’ public service in the Russian Free States, and Ivan had dutifully turned up, bringing along Katya, his handicapped daughter. And still they resented him for it. They saw his work as an intrusion on their lives, and yet they expected it as their due.
Eva had followed the big man through peeling concrete corridors of the Pekarsky Narkomfin, past smashed plasterwork and half-open doors, to a metal duct where Ivan had put down his traveling toolbox and set to work. Unlike Eva, he hadn’t seemed to notice or care about the people who shuffled up to gaze at them. Doughy people with greasy hair, who smelled of fried food and cheap leather, who stared at them with hard eyes, resenting their presence, making Eva wish she had stayed at home in her own Narkomfin, looking after the handicapped.
Ivan had not been oblivious to how she had felt, though. Quite the opposite. When the metal panel swung open, he had sensed her revulsion and had pushed the door closed again to give her time to calm down. He knew that Eva
