Page 193 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

The fictional camp was located in a forest of Siberian larch, and its work was chopping down the trees. There were no safety rules and no protective clothing or equipment, so accidents were frequent. Tanya particularly noted an episode in which the gangster severed an artery in his arm with a saw and was saved by the intellectual, who tied a tourniquet around his arm. Was that how Vasili had saved the life of the messenger who had brought his manuscript to Moscow from Siberia?

Tanya read the story twice. It was almost like talking to Vasili: the phrasing was familiar from a hundred discussions and arguments, and she recognized the kinds of things he found funny or dramatic or ironic. It made her heart ache with missing him.

Now that she knew Vasili was alive, she had to find out why he had not returned to Moscow. The story contained no clue to that. But Tanya knew someone who could find out almost anything: her brother.

She put the manuscript in the drawer of her bedside table. She left the bedroom and said to her mother: "I have to go and see Dimka--I won't be long." She went down in the elevator to the floor on which her brother lived.

The door was opened by his wife, Nina, nine months pregnant. "You look well!" Tanya said.

It was not true. Nina was long past the stage when people said a pregnant woman looked "blooming." She was huge, her breasts pendulous, her belly stretched taut. Her fair skin was pale under the freckles, and her red-brown hair was greasy. She looked older than twenty-nine. "Come in," she said in a tired voice.

Dimka was watching the news. He turned off the television, kissed Tanya, and offered her a beer.

Nina's mother, Masha, was there, having come from Perm by train to help her daughter with the baby. Masha was a small, prematurely wrinkled peasant woman dressed in black, visibly proud of her citified daughter in her swanky apartment. Tanya had been surprised when she first met Masha, having previously got the impression that Nina's mother was a schoolteacher; but it turned out that she merely worked in the village school, cleaning it in fact. Nina had pretended that her parents were somewhat higher in status--a practice so common as to be almost universal, Tanya supposed.

They talked about Nina's pregnancy. Tanya wondered how to get Dimka alone. There was no way she was going to talk about Vasili in front of Nina or her mother. Instinctively she mistrusted her brother's wife.

Why did she feel that so strongly, she wondered guiltily? It was because of the pregnancy, she decided. Nina was not intellectual, but she was clever: not the type to suffer an accidental pregnancy. Tanya had a suspicion, never voiced, that Nina had manipulated Dimka into the marriage. Tanya knew that her brother was sophisticated and savvy about almost everything: he was naive and romantic only about women. Why would Nina have wanted to entrap him? Because the Dvorkins were an elite family, and Nina was ambitious?

Don't be such a bitch, Tanya told herself.

She made small talk for half an hour, then got up to go.

There was nothing supernatural about the twins' relationship, but they knew each other so well that each could usually guess what the other was thinking, and Dimka intuited that Tanya had not come to talk about Nina's pregnancy. Now he stood up too. "I've got to take out the garbage," he said. "Give me a hand, would you, Tanya?"

They went down in the elevator, each carrying a bucket of rubbish. When they were outside, at the back of the building, with no one else around, Dimka said: "What is it?"

"Vasili Yenkov's sentence is up, but he hasn't come back to Moscow."

Dimka's face hardened. He loved Tanya, she knew, but he disagreed with her politics. "Yenkov did his best to undermine the government I work for. Why would I care what happens to him?"

"He believes in freedom and justice, as you do."

"That kind of subversive activity just gives the hard-liners an excuse to resist reform."

Tanya knew she was defending herself, as well as Vasili. "If it were not for people like Vasili, the hard-liners would say everything was all right, and there would be no pressure for change. How would anyone know that they killed Ustin Bodian, for example?"

"Bodian died of pneumonia."

"Dimka, that's not worthy of you. He died of neglect, and you know it."

"True." Dimka looked chastened. In a softer voice he said: "Are you in love with Vasili Yenkov?"

"No. I like him. He's funny and smart and brave. But he's the kind of man that needs a succession of young girls."

"Or he was. There are no nymphets in a prison camp."

"Anyway, he is a friend, and he's served his sentence."

"The world is full of injustice."

"I want to know what has happened to him, and you can find out for me. If you will."

Dimka sighed. "What about my career? In the Kremlin, compassion for dissidents unjustly treated is not considered admirable."

Tanya's hopes rose. He was weakening. "Please. It means a lot to me."

"I can't make any promises."

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