“Anything interesting today?” she asked. It was almost their daily joke.
“There is never anything interesting at the office,” he joked in reply. No, just the usual messages to and from field officers, which he forwarded to the appropriate pigeonholes for in-house couriers to hand-carry upstairs to the offices of the control officers who really ran things at KGB. A very senior colonel had come down to see the operation the previous week, which he’d done without a smile, a friendly word, or a question for twenty minutes, before disappearing off to the elevator banks. Oleg knew the man’s seniority only from the identity of his escort: the colonel who ran his own operation. Whatever words had been exchanged had been too distant for him to overhear—people tended to talk in whispers, if at all, in his department—and he was trained not to show much interest.
But training could only go so far. Captain Oleg Ivanovich Zaitzev was too bright to turn his mind all the way off. Indeed, his job required something approaching judgment for its proper execution, but that was something to be exercised as gingerly as a mouse’s stroll through a roomful of cats. He always went to his immediate superior and always started off with the most humble of questions before getting approval. In fact, his judgmental questions were always approved. Oleg was gifted in that, and he was beginning to get recognized as such. His majority wasn’t all that far off. More money, more access to the closed stores, and, gradually, more independence—no, that wasn’t quite right. A little less circumscription on what he would be able to do. Someday he might even ask if a message going out made good sense. Do we really want to do this, comrade? he’d wanted to ask every so often. Operational decisions were not his to make, of course, but he could—or would be able to in the future—question the wording of a directive in the most oblique terms. Every so often he’d see something going out to Officer 457 in Rome, for example, and wonder if his country really wanted to risk the consequences of having the mission order go bad. And sometimes they did go bad. Just two months before, he’d seen a dispatch from Bonn warning that something had gone wrong with the West German counterintelligence service, and the field officer had urgently requested instructions—and the instructions had been to continue his mission without questioning the intelligence of his superiors. And that field officer had disappeared right off the network. Arrested and shot? Oleg wondered. He knew some of the field officers’ names, virtually all of the operations’ names, and a lot of the operational targets and objectives. Most of all, he knew the code names of hundreds of foreign nationals who were agents of the KGB. At its best, it could be like reading a spy novel. Some of the field officers had a literary streak. Their dispatches were not the terse communiqués of military officers. No, they liked to communicate the state of mind of their agents, the feel of the information and the mission assigned. They could be like travelogue writers describing things for a paying audience. Zaitzev wasn’t really supposed to digest such information, but he was a man with a mind, and besides, there were telltale codes built into every dispatch. The third word misspelled, for example, could be a warning that the officer had been compromised. Every officer had a different such key system, and Zaitzev had a list of them all. Only twice had he caught such irregularities, and on one of those occasions his supervisors had told him to ignore it as a clerical error—a fact that still astounded him. But the mistake had never been repeated, and so, maybe it really had just been an enciphering error by the officer in question. After all, his superior had told him, men trained at The Centre didn’t often get caught in the field. They were the best in the world, and the Western enemies were not that clever, were they? Then Captain Zaitzev had nodded submission to the moment, written down his warning notation, and made sure it was in the permanent files, covering his ass like any good bureaucrat.
What if his immediate superior were under the control of some Western spy agency, he’d wondered at the time and later on, usually after a few drinks in front of his TV set. Such a compromise would be perfection itself. Nowhere in KGB was there a single written list of their officers and agents. No, “compartmentalization” was a concept invented here back in the 1920s, or perhaps earlier still. Even Chairman Andropov was not allowed to have such a thing within his reach, lest he defect to the West and take it with him. KGB trusted no one, least of all its own Chairman. And so, oddly, only people in his own department had access to such broad information, but they were not operations personnel. They were just communicators.
But wasn’t the one person KGB always tried to compromise the cipher clerk in a foreign embassy? Because he or she was the one functionary, the one not bright enough to be entrusted with anything of importance—wasn’t she the one person who was so entrusted? It was so often a woman, after all, and KGB officers were trained to seduce them. He’d seen dispatches along those lines, some of them describing the seduction in graphic detail, perhaps to impress the men upstairs with their manly prowess and the extent of their devotion to the State. Being paid to fuck women didn’t strike Zaitzev as conspicuously heroic, but then, perhaps the women were surpassingly ugly, and performing a man’s duty under such circumstances might have been difficult.
What it came down to, Oleg Ivanovich reflected, was that functionaries were so often entrusted with cosmic secrets, and he was one of them, and wasn’t that amusing? More amusing than his cabbage soup, certainly, nutritious though it might be. So even the Soviet state trusted some people, despite the fact that “trust” was a concept as divorced from its way of collective thinking as a man is from Mars. And he was such a man. Well, one result of that irony was the cute green shirt his little daughter wore. He set a few books on the kitchen chair and hoisted Svetlana there so that she could eat her dinner. Svetlana’s hands were a little small for the zinc-aluminum tableware, but at least it wasn’t too heavy for her to use. He still had to butter her bread for her. It was good to be able to afford real butter.
“I saw something nice at the special store on the way home,” Irina observed as women do over dinner, to catch their husbands in a good mood. The cabbage was especially good today, and the ham was Polish. So she’d shopped today at the “closed” store, all right. She’d gotten into the habit only nine months before, and now she wondered aloud how she’d ever lived without it.
“What’s that?” Oleg asked, sipping his Georgian tea.
“Brassieres, Swedish ones.”
Oleg smiled. Those of Soviet manufacture always seemed to be designed for peasant girls who suckled calves instead of children—far too big for a woman of his wife’s more human proportions. “How much?” he asked without looking up.
“Only seventeen rubles each.”
Seventeen certificate rubles, he didn’t correct her. A certificate ruble had actual value. You could, theoretically, even exchange it for a foreign “hard” currency, as opposed to the valueless paper that they used to pay the average factory worker, whose value was entirely theoretical… like everything else in his country, when you got down to it.
“What color?”
“White.” Perhaps the special store had black or red ones, but it was a rare Soviet woman who would wear such things. People were very conservative in their habits here.
With dinner finished, Oleg left the kitchen to his wife and took his little girl into the living room and the TV set. The TV news announced that the harvest was under way, as it was every year, with the heroic laborers on the collective farms bringing in the first crop of summer wheat in the northern areas, where they had to grow and harvest it quickly. A fine crop, the TV said. Good, Oleg thought, no bread shortages this winter…probably. You could never really be sure about what was said on the TV. Next, some complaining coverage of the American nuclear weapons being deployed in the NATO countries, despite the reasonable Soviet requests that the West forgo such unnecessary, destabilizing, and provocative actions. Zaitzev knew that the Soviet SS-20s were going into place elsewhere, and they, of course, were in no way destabilizing. The big show on TV tonight was We Serve the Soviet Union, about military operations, fine young Soviet men serving their country. Today would be rare coverage of men doing their “international duty” in Afghanistan. The Soviet media didn’t often cover that, and Oleg was curious as to what they’d show. There were occasional discussions over lunch at work about the war in Afghanistan. He tended to listen rather than talk, because he’d been excused from military service, something he didn’t regret one little bit. He’d heard too many stories about the casual brutality in the infantry units, and besides, the uniforms were not attractive to wear. His rarely worn KGB uniform was bad enough. Still, pictures told stories that mere words did not, and he had the keen eye for detail that his job required.