Page 284 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

She giggled. "Apart from that . . ."

"What?"

"When you review this trip in your mi

nd, don't you get a feeling . . . ?"

"That we were totally managed and exploited? Yes, from the first day."

"In fact, that Ho Chi Minh deftly manipulated the two most powerful countries in the world, and ended up getting everything he wanted."

"Yes," said Dimka. "That's exactly the feeling I get."

*

Tanya went to the airport with Vasili's subversive typescript in her suitcase. She was scared.

She had done dangerous things before. She had published a seditious newspaper; she had been arrested in Mayakovsky Square and dragged off to the notorious basement of the KGB's Lubyanka building; and she had made contact with a dissident in Siberia. But this was the most frightening.

Communicating with the West was a crime of a higher order. She was taking Vasili's typescript to Leipzig, where she hoped to place it with a Western publisher.

The news sheet that she and Vasili had published had been distributed only in the USSR. The authorities would be much angrier about dissident material that found its way to the West. Those responsible would be considered not just rebels but traitors.

Thinking about the danger, sitting in the back of the taxi, she felt nauseated by fear, and clamped her hand over her mouth in a panic until the sensation faded.

On arrival she almost told the driver to turn around and take her home. Then she remembered Vasili in Siberia, hungry and cold, and she steeled her nerve and carried her case into the terminal.

The Siberia trip had changed her. Before, she had thought of Communism as a well-intentioned experiment that had failed and ought to be scrapped. Now, she saw it as a brutal tyranny whose leaders were evil. Every time she thought of Vasili, her heart was filled with hatred for the people who had done this to him. She even had trouble talking to her twin brother, who still hoped that Communism could be improved rather than abolished. She loved Dimka, but he was closing his eyes to reality. And she had realized that wherever there was cruel oppression--in the Deep South of the USA, in British Northern Ireland, and in East Germany--there had to be many nice ordinary people like her family who looked away from the grisly truth. But Tanya would not be one of them. She was going to fight it to the end.

Whatever the risk.

At the desk she handed over her papers and placed her case on the scale. If she had believed in God, she would have prayed.

Check-in staff were all KGB. This one was a man in his thirties with the blue shadow of a heavy beard. Tanya sometimes assessed people by imagining what they would be like to interview. This one would be assertive to the point of aggression, she thought, answering neutral questions as if they were hostile, constantly on the lookout for hidden implications and veiled accusations.

He looked hard at her face, comparing it with her photograph. She tried not to seem scared. However, she told herself, even innocent Soviet citizens were scared when KGB men looked at them.

He put her passport down on his desk and said: "Open the bag."

There was no knowing why. They might do it because you appeared suspicious or because they had nothing better to do or because they liked pawing through women's underwear. They did not have to give a reason.

Heart pounding, Tanya opened her case.

The clerk knelt down and began to rifle through her things. It took him less than a minute to discover Vasili's typescript. He took it out and read the title page: Stalag: A Novel of the Nazi Concentration Camps by Klaus Holstein.

This was fake, as was the contents list, the preface, and the prologue.

The clerk said: "What is this?"

"A partial translation of an East German work. I'm going to the Leipzig Book Fair."

"Has this been approved?"

"In East Germany, of course, otherwise it would not have been published."

"And in the Soviet Union?"

"Not yet. Works may not be submitted for approval before they are finished, obviously."

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