Suddenly Benjamin woke up. He was certain someone was standing over him.
Dim moonlight was coming through the open balcony doors. He could see Natalya above him.
She was naked, her pale skin almost shining in the moonlight. Without a word, she lifted the covers from his bed and crawled underneath them. She pressed her lips to his cheek, his mouth, his neck; her hand traced down his chest, across his stomach, lower.
Benjamin rolled so he was facing her, pressed against her, returned her kisses. He felt himself clearly, sharply awake, and yet wondered whether this wasn't all a dream.
A very wonderful dream.
They made love slowly, without speaking. It was as if a reserve of tenderness, held at bay through the anxious maneuvers of the last couple of days, was suddenly released. When they looked into each other's eyes, they both saw trust and compassion there. Benjamin felt he had never experienced an intimacy so consuming, so deep.
Afterward, they lay for a long while in each other's arms, Natalya's head resting on his shoulder. Finally, Benjamin said something that had been on his mind ever since they'd arrived in Nice.
'Natalya,' he said, 'I have something to say.'
She snuggled closer to him. 'You don't have to say anything,' she said.
'No, this I do,' he said. He turned and faced her.
'What if you were simply to stay here? Whatever will happen in Russia… well, it is my adventure, as you called it. I should see it through alone. You could write an introduction for me to your father, and…'
'Benjamin,' she interrupted. 'There is another story about the Russian Revolution and Nice I did not tell you earlier. There was a very famous Bolshevik, Raskolnikov. He was completely loyal to the Party, one of those who put down the sailor's mutiny at Kronstadt. But even he lost faith during the Moscow show trials in the thirties. He fled here to Nice. He lived there seven years, and finally thought he was safe. But Comrade Stalin's agents found Raskolnikov in 1939. Even this paradise was not far enough away from such people.'
'Stalin is long dead,' Benjamin objected.
'But these people, whoever they are,' she said, finally looking up at him, 'they might be just as terrible. Such people do not simply forget, Benjamin. If we truly have something they want, or know something they do not want us to know, they will not leave us alone. Believe me,' she said, looking into his eyes, 'I have known such people. Power is more important to them than anything. Our only hope is to find the truth.'
Benjamin looked at her for a moment, then smiled and pulled her close.
'Ah, Mrs. Levebre,' he said. 'I have a feeling I will not win many arguments with you.'
Natalya held him tighter. After a while, she could hear Benjamin's regular breathing as he lay sleeping, but for a long time she lay wide awake, staring out the window at the brightening dawn sky.
CHAPTER 41
Benjamin looked out of the train window at the passing countryside. As they'd left Moscow, the land had grown flatter and less densely populated, and the monotonous, square, gray rectangles of Soviet-era Moscow architecture had given way to the villages of small, haphazard dachas that studded the land between Moscow and Dubna. The closer they got to Dubna, the thicker grew the forests of pine trees.
On the short flight from Nice, and all during the train ride to Dubna, Natalya had said nothing about what had happened the night before. If anything, she seemed more distant than ever. Benjamin wrote it off to her concerns about her father and, for that matter, concerns about their entire adventure here.
Perhaps because of this, or some other reason Benjamin couldn't fathom, much of their trip to Dubna was spent in silence; watching the passing landscape, making small talk about his impressions of Russia, each of them trying not to appear too anxious for the sake of the other's feelings.
Along the train tracks there were stretches of undeveloped forest and of wild land that he thought probably hadn't changed in hundreds of years. There was also the sense of enormous potential, of great power and pride in the land itself, of immense history and possibility. He said something of this to Natalya.
'Yes,' she agreed. 'That is the Russia no Russian ever truly leaves. My father used to say we inhale Russian history with our every breath, that it is in our blood. It isn't until I return that I remember what that means.'
Finally they pulled into the station in Dubna. It was the last stop on the line and so everyone exited the train. There was a light rain falling, and the air was chill with a premonition of frost and perhaps snow.
As they left their car, Benjamin saw a large monument at the front of the platform: a huge red star with an arc over its top and, and in another arc on the bottom, the English words ATOMIC CITY. He asked her what it meant.
'This is where they created the Russian atomic bomb,' she said. 'For many years, Dubna was like Uzhur, a secret city. Before 1956, it did not even exist on any map. Of course, there was the old Dubna-some say a settlement here dates back thousands of years. But the new Dubna was built by prisoners under the NKVD's control during the war.'
'NKVD?' Benjamin asked.
'I forget, not everyone knows such things,' she said. 'NKVD was what came before KGB. Before that it was GPU, and before that it was Cheka. Now it is FSB. The letters change, the job is the same. Understandable?'
Benjamin nodded, and Natalya continued.
'At first, the prisoners stripped the pine trees of their branches up to about thirty meters and built many small buildings, scattered about. They wanted the pine trees to hide the buildings. I have seen photographs. It looked like a summer camp for students. And then they sent their best scientists here. Sakharov, Kurchatov, Kikoin.'
'Like Los Alamos,' Benjamin said, 'out in the American desert, where they sent the American scientists.'
'Well, not quite,' she said. 'Dubna was a sharashka, a special camp for scientists. The NKVD was in charge of everything. That is how my grandfather came to be here.'
'Your grandfather?'
Natalya looked at him.
'I will explain later. Perhaps.' Then she went to a nearby telephone and called her aunt's number. She spoke for a while, then returned to Benjamin.
'Now, we should go to the hotel.'
'Won't that be dangerous? We'll have to register.'
'Olga said there is a convention of physicists in town, for the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research. It's very famous. They created a new element there, element 105, which they called, of course, dubnium. Anyway, the town is stuffed with scientists from all over the world. Two more foreigners will hardly be noticed.'
So they took a taxi to the Dubna Otel. Along the way, Benjamin saw that parts of Dubna were quite charming: rows of forties-style apartment buildings all painted yellow, and many separate houses, some of them rather large and constructed in a classical style not dissimilar to American turn-of-the-century mansions; these were painted in pastel reds, blues, and of course more pale yellow.
At the Otel, the lobby was filled with men and women, all of them looking very academic, and all of them engaged in intense conversations. No one took any notice of them.
At first, the clerk told Natalya there were no rooms to be had, due to the convention. Then Benjamin thought to bring out their press credentials, and Natalya, following his lead, explained they were there to cover the convention for the international press and that their paper would pay a donation to the hotel for finding them space. Once the 'donation' had changed hands, an empty room was suddenly discovered.
'Guy's friend was right,' Benjamin said, holding up the press credentials. 'These are a bonus.'
As they were walking through the lobby, Benjamin came to an abrupt stop. He was staring at an enormous frieze on one of the walls. It displayed a forest, obviously meant to represent the surrounding forests of pine trees, but there were also numerous figures and geometric shapes, some he guessed were meant to be people, but others he couldn't interpret.
'What on earth…?'
'Part of Soviet iconography,' Natalya said. 'It is a sort of map of Dubna. That large arc is the Ivankovo Dam,
