When her son was absorbed in his homework at the kitchen table of her small but extremely clean apartment, they talked in the living room. She was defensive and on guard.
But Monk was unlike the abrupt, unsmiling officials she had met before during her struggle to be accepted into the United States eight years earlier. He had charm and a winning smile and she began to relax.
“You know how it is with us civil servants, Ms. Rozina. Files, files, always files. If they are complete, the boss is happy. Then what happens? Nothing. They gather dust in some archive. But when they’re not, the boss gets fretful. So some small cog like me is sent out to complete the details.”
“What do you want to know?” she asked. “My papers are in order. I work as an economist and translator. I pay my way, I pay my taxes. I cost nothing to the U.S.A.”
“We know that, ma’am. There’s no question of any irregular
ity in your papers. You are a citizen, naturalized. Everything in order. It’s just that you registered little Ivan there under a different name. Why did you do that?”
“I gave him his father’s name.”
“Of course. Look, this is 1988. The son of a couple who did not marry is no problem to us. But files are files. Could you just give me his father’s name? Please.”
“Ivan Yevdokimovich Blinov,” she said.
Bingo. The name on the list. There could hardly be two such names in all Russia.
“You loved him very much, didn’t you?”
A faraway look came into her eyes, as of someone gazing at a memory of long ago.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Please tell me about Ivan.”
Among his several talents Jason Monk had a peculiar ability to persuade people to talk to him. Over two hours, until the boy came out with his arithmetic homework in perfect order, she told him about her son’s father.
Born in Leningrad in 1938, he was the son of a university teacher of physics, his mother a schoolteacher in mathematics. By a miracle the father survived waves of Stalinist purges before the war, but died during the German blockade in 1942. The mother, with five-year-old Vanya in her arms, was rescued, escaping the starving city in a convoy of trucks across the ice of Lake Ladoga in the winter of 1942. They were resettled in a small town in the Urals, where the boy grew up, his mother devoted to the idea that he would one day be as brilliant as his father.
At eighteen he went to Moscow to seek entry into the most prestigious technical establishment of higher education in the USSR, the Physics/Technological Institute. To his surprise he was accepted. Despite his humble circumstances, the father’s fame, the mother’s dedication, maybe the genes, and certainly his personal efforts had tipped the balance. Behind its modest name, the institute was the forge of the most sophisticated designers of nuclear weapons.
Six years later, still a young man, Blinov was offered a job in a scientific city so secret that it was years before the West even heard of it. Arzamas-16 became for the young prodigy at once a privileged home and a prison.
By Soviet standards, conditions were luxurious. A small apartment but all his own, better shops than anywhere in the country, a higher salary, and limitless research facilities—all were his. What he did not have was the right to leave.
Once a year there was the chance for a vacation in an approved resort, at a fraction of the usual price. Then it was back inside the barbed wire, intercepted mail, tapped phones, and monitored friendships.
Before he was thirty he met and married Valya, a young librarian and teacher of English in Arzamas-16. She taught him the language, so that he could read the harvest of technical publications pouring in from the West in the original. They were happy at first, but slowly the marriage became blighted by one flaw; they desperately wanted a child but could not have one.
In the autumn of 1977 Ivan Blinov was staying in the spa resort of Kislovodsk in the northern Caucasus when he met Zhenya Rozina. As was often the case in the gilded cage, his wife had had to take her vacation at a different time.
Zhenya was twenty-nine, ten years his junior, a divorcée from Minsk, also childless; lively, irreverent, a constant listener to the “voices”—the Voice of America and the BBC—and a reader of daring magazines like Poland, printed in Warsaw and much more liberal and versatile than the dreary, dogmatic Soviet publications. The shuttered scientist was entranced by her.
They agreed to correspond, but as Blinov knew his mail would be intercepted (he was a holder of secrets) he asked her to write to a friend in Arzamas-16 whose mail would not be looked at.
In 1978 they met again, by agreement, this time at the resort of Sochi on the Black Sea. Blinov’s marriage was- at an end in all but name. Their friendship became a torrid affair. They met again for the third and last time in 1979 at Yalta and realized they were still in love, but that it was a hopeless love.
He felt he could not divorce his wife. If there had been another man after her, that would have been different. But there was not; she was not beautiful. But she had been loyal to him for fifteen years and if love had died, that was the way of things. They were still friends and he would not shame her by divorce, not in the tiny community in which they lived.
Zhenya did not disagree, but for another reason. She told him something she had not told him before. If they married it would mar his career. She was Jewish; that was enough. She had already applied to OVIR, the Department of Visas and Permissions, to emigrate to Israel. Under Brezhnev there was a new dispensation. They kissed and made love and parted, and never saw each other again.
“The rest you know,” she said.
“The transit camp in Austria, the approach to our embassy?”
‘‘Yes.”