“I bet.” In Ryan’s case, it helped a whole lot that his wife was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins. He didn’t talk to anyone in a lab coat without “professor” on his nametag, and he’d learned that in the field of medicine, the really smart ones were the teachers, unlike the rest of society.
THE DREAMS CAME after midnight, though he had no way of knowing that. It was a clear Moscow summer day, and a man in white was walking across the Red Square. St. Basil’s Cathedral was behind him, and he was walking against the traffic past Lenin’s mausoleum. Some children were with him, and he was talking to them in a kindly way, as a favored uncle might… or perhaps a parish priest. Then Oleg knew that’s what he was, a parish priest. But why in white? With gold brocade, even. The children, four or five each of boys and girls, were holding his hands and looking up at him with innocent smiles. Then Oleg turned his head. Up at the top of the tomb, where they stood for the May Day parades, were the Politburo members: Brezhnev, Suslov, Ustinov, and Andropov. Andropov was holding a rifle and pointing at the little procession. There were other people around—faceless people walking aimlessly, going about their business. Then Oleg was standing with Andropov, listening to his words. He was arguing for the right to shoot the man. Be careful of the children, Yuriy Vladimirovich, Suslov warned. Yes, be careful, Brezhnev agreed. Ustinov reached over to adjust the sights on the rifle. They all ignored Zaitzev, who moved among them, trying to get their attention.
But why? Zaitzev asked. Why are you doing this?
Who is this? Brezhnev asked Andropov.
Never mind him, Suslov snarled. Just shoot the bastard!
Very well, Andropov said. He took his aim carefully, and Zaitzev was unable to intervene, despite being right there. Then the Chairman squeezed the trigger.
Zaitzev was back on the street now. The first bullet struck a child, a boy on the priest’s right, who fell without a sound.
Not him, you idiot—the priest! Mikhail Suslov screamed like a rabid dog.
Andropov shot again, this time hitting a little blonde girl standing at the priest’s left. Her head exploded in red. Zaitzev bent down to help her, but she said it was all right, and so he left her and returned to the priest.
Look out, why don’t you?
Look out for what, my young comrade? The priest asked pleasantly, then he turned. Come, children, we’re off to see God.
Andropov fired again. This time the bullet struck the priest square in the chest. There was a splash of blood, about the size and color of a rose. The priest grimaced, but kept going, with the smiling children in tow.
Another shot, another rose on the chest, to the left of the first. But still he kept going, walking slowly.
Are you hurt? Zaitzev asked.
It is nothing, the priest replied. But why didn’t you stop him?
But I tried! Zaitzev insisted.
The priest stopped walking, turning to look him square in the face. Did you?
That’s when the third bullet struck him right in the heart.
Did you? the priest asked again. Now the children were looking at him and not the priest.
Zaitzev found himself sitting up in the bed. It was just before four in the morning, the clock said. He was sweating profusely. There was only one thing to do. He rose from the bed and walked to the bathroom. There he urinated, then had himself a glass of water, and padded off to the kitchen. Sitting down by the sink, he lit a cigarette. Before he went back to sleep, he wanted to be fully awake. He didn’t want to walk back into that dream.
Out the window, Moscow was quiet, the streets completely empty—not even a drunk staggering home. A good thing, too. No apartment house elevators would be working at this hour. There was not a car in view, which was a little odd, but not so much as in a Western city.
The cigarette achieved its goal. He was now awake enough to go back to sleep afresh. But even now he knew that the vision wouldn’t leave him. Most dreams faded away, just like cigarette smoke, but this one would not. Zaitzev was sure of that.
CHAPTER 10:
BOLT FROM THE BLUE
HE HAD A LOT of thinking to do. It was as if the decision had made itself, as if some alien force had overtaken his mind and, through it, his body, and he had been transformed into a mere spectator. Like most Russians, he didn’t shower, but washed his face and shaved with a blade razor, nicking himself three times in the process. Toilet paper took care of that—the symptoms, anyway, if not the cause. The images from the dream still paraded before his eyes like that war film on television. They continued to do so during breakfast, causing a distant look in his eyes that his wife noticed but decided not to comment on. Soon enough it was time to go to work. He went along the way like an automaton, taking the right path to the metro station by rote memory, his brain both quiescent and furiously active, as though he’d suddenly split into two separate but distantly connected people, moving along parallel paths to a destination he couldn’t see and didn’t understand. He was being carried there, though, like a chip of wood down mountain rapids, the rock walls passing so rapidly by his left and right that he couldn’t even see them. It came almost as a surprise when he found himself aboard the metro carriage, traveling down the darkened tunnels dug by political prisoners of Stalin’s under the direction of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, surrounded by the quiet, almost faceless bodies of other Soviet citizens also making their way to workplaces for which they had little love and little sense of duty. But they went to them because it was how they earned the money with which they bought food for their families, minuscule cogs in the gigantic machine that was the Soviet state, which they all purported to serve and which purported to serve them and their families…
But it was all a lie, wasn’t it? Zaitzev asked himself. Was it? How did the murder of a priest serve the Soviet State? How did it serve all these people? How did it serve him and his wife and his little daughter? By feeding them? By giving him the ability to shop in the “closed” shops and buy things that the other workers could not even think about getting for themselves?
But he was better off than nearly everyone else on the subway car, Oleg Ivan’ch reminded himself. Ought he not be grateful for that? Didn’t he eat better food, drink better coffee, watch a better TV set, sleep on better sheets? Didn’t he have all the creature comforts that these people would like to have? Why am I suddenly so badly troubled? the communicator asked himself. The answer was so obvious that it took nearly a minute for him to grasp the answer. It was because his position, the one that gave him the comforts he enjoyed, also gave him knowledge, and in this case, for the first time in his life, knowledge was a curse. He knew the thoughts of the men who determined the course his country was taking, and in that knowledge he saw that the course was a false one… an evil one, and inside his mind was an agency that looked at the knowledge and judged it wrong. And in that judgment came the need to do something to change it. He could not object and expect to keep what passed for freedom in his country. There was no agency open to him through which he could make his judgment known to others, though others might well concur with his judgment, might ask the men who governed their country for a redress of their grievances. No, there was no way for him to act within such a system as it existed. To do that, you had to be so very senior that before you voiced doubts you had to think carefully, lest you lose your privilege, and so whatever consciences you had were tempered by the cowardice that came with having so much to lose. He’d never heard of any senior political figure in his country standing up that way, standing on a matter of principle and telling his peers that they were doing something wrong. No, the system precluded that by the sort of people it selected. Corrupted men only selected other corrupted men to be their peers, lest they have to question the things that gave them their own vast privileges. Just as the princes under the czars rarely if ever considered the effect their rule had on the serfs, so the new princes of Marxism never questioned the system that gave them their place in the world. Why? Because the world hadn’t changed its shape—just its color, from czarist white to socialist red—and in keeping the shape, it kept its method of working, and in a red world, a little extra spilled blood was difficult to notice.