He lost his virginity with surprising ease. None of the fumbling and misdirected endeavour that he had feared. And, at the time, such was his need that it didn’t occur to him that his accomplishment owed not a little to her expertise.
She helped him with his clothes. She lay back, skirt hitched to her hips, legs spread, breasts free. She touched him, stroked him, guided him. And when he was inside her, marvelling that at last it had happened, wondering at the oiled ease of it all, she regulated their movements. ‘Gently … stop a moment … harder, faster … now, now …’
For a while they didn’t speak. Then, when he had taken a bottle of Narzan mineral water from his knapsack and they were sipping it from cardboard cups, she said: ‘It was the first time for you, wasn’t it?’
As though it implied retarded development. But he had refused to conform with the sexual boasting of the students obsessed with masculinity. If they were to be believed they coupled every night, fuelled on lethal quantities of vodka. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was. Should I be ashamed?’
‘Ashamed? Why should you be ashamed? You’re young.’
So was she and for a moment the obvious question about her experience hovered between them; but he knew the answer and then, in her way, she answered it: ‘At our age a girl is much older than a boy.’ She stroked his hair. ‘You’re very attractive, Viktor, you’re not … not so obvious as the others.’
‘You mean I’m insignificant?’
‘Far from it. You’re tall and you’re slim and your eyes always seem to be searching for the truth. I think you’re going to have terrible trouble with your conscience in the future.’
He grinned at her. ‘I didn’t just now.’
‘It’s a pity that politically you’re such a conformist.’
Here we go, he thought and said: ‘What’s so wrong with that? I’m only conforming to communism, the beliefs that have rescued our country from tyranny.’
‘Rescued it? Twenty years ago perhaps. But now we’ve got a tyranny far worse than anything the Tsars ever dreamed up.’
‘Watch that tongue of yours, Anna, or it will lead you to Siberia.’
Triumphantly she exclaimed: ‘You see, you’re proving my point. What sort of a country is it when you can’t say what you believe?’
‘A better country than Germany,’ Viktor said quickly, annoyed with himself for having given her ammunition. ‘At least it’s not a crime here for a Jew to observe the Sabbath.’
‘Anyone with a weak argument always resorts to comparisons.’ She stood up and smoothed her skirt. ‘You must have heard about the purges …’
Of course he’d heard the stories. But he didn’t believe them. Iconoclasm was a permanent resident of student society. He preferred to believe the evidence around him that Lenin, and now Stalin, had helped Mother Russia to rise from her knees and given her self-respect. Not that he believed that the Revolution had been quite as heroic as the historians would have you believe – that was for children and none the worse because of it; but he did believe in equality. He knew older people who had once lived on potato skins, black bread and tea.
‘They say he’s quite mad you know.’ She began to walk back towards the beach.
‘Who’s mad?’ picking up his knapsack and following her.
‘Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, better known as Stalin.’
‘They also say that genius is akin to madness.’
‘A psychopath.’
‘One of those words created to disguise our ignorance of the human condition.’
How pompous we students can be, he reflected.
Through the birch trees he could see a glint of water and, faintly, he could hear the babble from the beach and the tattoo of ping-pong balls on the tables beside the sand.
‘I wonder,’ Anna said, ‘just what it would take to convince you.’ She kicked a heap of old brown leaves and her red skirt swirled. ‘Blood?’
‘Why do you talk treason all the time? Why can’t you enjoy the benefits the system has brought us?’
‘It has certainly brought you benefits, Viktor Golovin.’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
But he knew. For an orphan he had enjoyed a protected upbringing; and for no apparent reason his foster parents seemed to have rather more than their share of communal benefits. An apartment near the University on the crest of the Lenin Hills, a small dacha in the village of Peredelkino where the writers lived. Not bad for a librarian and his wife.
‘Your privileges are your cross.’
Would she always be like this after making love? ‘I’ve been lucky, I admit.’
‘It must be difficult to hold forth about equality when you’ve had such luck.’
‘Luck! Everyone has a share of it. The trick is knowing what to do with it when you get it.’
‘Nonsense. Not everyone has luck. It isn’t lucky to be an army officer these days.’
‘Ah, the purges again.’
‘Purges, a euphemism. Massacres is a better word.’
They emerged from the green depths of the forest into bright light. Beyond the table-tennis players and the fretted-wood restaurant where you could buy beer, kvas and fizzy cherryade, pies and cold meats, the beach was packed with Muscovites unfolding in the sun. They shed their clothes, they shed the moods of winter. Flesh burned bright pink but no one seemed to care. Rounding a curve in the river came a white steamboat nosing aside the calm water.
The doubts that had reached Viktor in the forest dissolved. Ordinary people wouldn’t have been able to enjoy themselves like this before 1917. Possessively, Viktor, lover and philosopher, took Anna’s arm.
‘But do you?’ She must have been talking while he savoured the fruits of socialism. Impatiently, she said: ‘You haven’t been listening, have you?’
‘I don’t want to hear anything more about purges.’
She pulled her arm away. ‘Of course you don’t. You don’t want anything to interfere with your beautiful, cossetted life. Least of all truth.’
‘I don’t believe it is the truth.’ Her attitude nettled him. ‘Let’s go and have a beer.’
They sat at a scrubbed wooden table and drank beer from fluted brown bottles. Around them families ate picnic lunches and guzzled; in one corner a plump mother was feeding a baby at the breast.
‘I was asking,’ she said, ‘when you weren’t listening, that is, whether you would like to see proof of what I’ve been saying.’
‘If it will please you.’
‘Please me!’ She leaned fiercely across the table. ‘It certainly won’t please me. But it will give me a certain satisfaction to see that smug expression wiped off your face.’
‘Not so long ago my eyes were always searching for the truth …’
‘In everything except politics.’
‘What you’re alleging is more than political.’
‘I can’t understand how you’re so blind. Everyone knows that Stalin is killing off all his enemies, real and imagined. They say the army is powerless now because he’s murdered all the generals.’
Some of the men and women sharing the long table were looking curiously at them. ‘Keep your voice down,’ Viktor whispered, covering her hand with his to soften the words, knowing that any moment