Page 285 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

She tried to breathe normally as the clerk flicked through the pages.

"These people have Russian names," he said.

"There were many Russians in the Nazi camps, as you know," Tanya said.

If her story were to be checked it would fall flat in no time, she knew. If the clerk took the time to read more than the first few pages he would see that the stories were not about the Nazis but about the Gulag; and then it would take the KGB only a few hours to learn that there was no East German book nor a publisher, at which point Tanya would be taken back to that cellar in the Lubyanka.

He riffled the pages idly, as if wondering whether to make a fuss about this or not. Then there was a commotion at the next desk: a passenger was objecting to the confiscation of an icon. Tanya's clerk returned her papers with her boarding card and waved her away, then went to assist his colleague.

Her legs felt so weak she feared she might not be able to walk away.

She recovered her strength and made it through the rest of the formalities. The plane was the familiar Tupolev Tu-104, this one configured for civilian passengers, a bit cramped with six seats abreast. The flight to Leipzig was a thousand miles, and took a little over three hours.

When Tanya picked up her suitcase at the other end she looked carefully at it but saw no signs that it had been opened. But she was not yet in the clear. She carried it into the customs and immigration zone, feeling as if she were holding something radioactive. She recalled that the East German government was said to be harsher than the Soviet regime. The Stasi were even more omnipresent than the KGB.

She showed her papers. An official studied them carefully, then dismissed her with a discourteous gesture.

She headed for the exit, not looking at the faces of the uniformed officials, all men, who stood scrutinizing passengers.

Then one of them stepped in front of her. "Tanya Dvorkin?"

She almost burst into guilty tears. "Y-yes."

He addressed her in German. "Please come with me."

This is it, she thought; my life is over.

She followed him through a side door. To her surprise, it led to a parking area. "The director of the book fair has sent a car for you," the official said.

A driver was waiting. He introduced himself and put the incriminating suitcase into the trunk of a two-tone green-and-white Wartburg 311 limousine.

Tanya fell into the backseat and slumped, as helpless as if she were drunk.

She began to recover as the car took her into the city center. Leipzig was an ancient crossroads that had hosted trade fairs since the Middle Ages. Its railway station was the biggest in Europe. In her article Tanya would mention the city's strong Communist tradition, and its resistance to Nazism, which continued into the 1940s. She would not include the thought that occurred to her now, that Leipzig's grand nineteenth-century buildings looked even more gracious beside the brutalist Soviet-era architecture.

The taxi took her to the fair. In a large hall like a warehouse, publishers from Germany and abroad had erected stalls where they displayed their books. Tanya was shown around by the director. He explained to her that the main business of the fair was the buying and selling, not of physical books, but of licenses to translate them and publish them in other countries.

Toward the end of the afternoon she managed to get away from him and look around on her own.

She was astonished by the enormous number and bewildering variety of books: car manuals, scientific journals, almanacs, children's stories, Bibles, art books, atlases, dictionaries, school textbooks, and the complete works of Marx and Lenin in every major European language.

She was looking for someone who might want to translate Russian literature and publish it in the West.

She began to scan the stalls for Russian novels in other languages.

The Western alphabet was different from the Russian, but Tanya had learned German and English at school, and had studied German at university, so she could read the names of the authors and generally guess at the titles.

She spoke to several publisher

s, telling them she was a journalist for TASS and asking them how they were benefiting from the fair. She got some quotes useful for her article. She did not even hint that she had a Russian book to offer them.

At the stall of a London publisher called Rowley she picked up an English translation of The Young Guard, a popular Soviet novel by Alexander Fadeyev. She knew it well, and amused herself by deciphering the English of the first page until she was interrupted. An attractive woman of about her own age addressed her in German. "Please let me know if I can answer any questions."

Tanya introduced herself and interviewed the woman about the fair. They quickly discovered that the editor spoke Russian better than Tanya spoke German, so they switched. Tanya asked about English translations of Russian novels. "I'd like to publish more of them," said the editor. "But many contemporary Soviet novels--including the one you're holding in your hand--are too slavishly pro-Communist."

Tanya pretended to be prickly. "You wish to publish anti-Soviet propaganda?"

"Not at all," the editor said with a tolerant smile. "Writers are permitted to like their governments. My company publishes many books that celebrate the British Empire and its triumphs. But an author who sees nothing at all wrong in the society around him may not be taken seriously. It's wiser to throw in a soupcon of criticism, if only for the sake of credibility."

---