The Red Dove

‘Really?’ Talin refused to look surprised; he was used to Sedov’s dark humour; he searched the face of his friend and mentor, eyebrows charcoal black, shadow of a cleft in the chin. ‘And what does the First Deputy Commander-in-Chief have to say?’

‘He wants you to get. married,’ Sedov said, popping a morsel of crab meat into his mouth.

Talin grinned, waiting for the rest of the joke; when it didn’t come he began to roll a pellet of black bread between his thumb and forefinger; the sparkle that had been with him all morning faded.

‘He wants me to get married?’

‘He’s a romantic,’ Sedov said. ‘But, to be fair, he’s merely conveying a message from the image makers.’

‘Married to anyone in particular?’

‘To Sonya Bragina, of course.’

‘Supposing I don’t want to marry Sonya Bragina?’

‘But you do, don’t you?’ Sedov stared at him over the rim of his glass.

‘I did.’

Sedov ordered another couple of beers from the headscarved woman behind the bar and said: ‘I don’t know why you’re being perverse. Both you and the General want you to marry Sonya.’

‘What the hell’s it got to do with him or anyone else?’

Two men in spaniel-eared fur hats pushed their way into the bar bringing a gust of cold air with them. ‘You know how it is,’ Sedov told him, ‘you and Sonya are featured in every magazine in the Soviet Union. Readers are beginning to think it’s time you made it legal. It’s quite permissible for husbands to be unfaithful to their wives but young people living in sin … that’s a different story.’

‘I thought,’ Talin said, flattening the pellet of black bread, ‘that the Cult of Personality was discouraged.’

‘Ah, if you’re a big wheel in the Kremlin, yes. If you’re a young man and a beautiful girl who personify the spirit of Soviet youth, no.’

‘Some big wheels seem to get their fair share of publicity.’

Sedov held up a warning finger.

The sunlight outside had faded. Or was it the grime on the windows? Talin said: ‘As a matter of fact I was going to ask Sonya to marry me this evening.’

He noticed a fleeting change of expression on Sedov’s face. Pleasure? Regret? It was a difficult face to read; theirs was a difficult – no, unusual – relationship; it had endured since university when Sedov, responsible for indoctrination of young cosmonaut hopefuls, had singled him out for special attention. In appointing Sedov for that job the KGB had chosen well; he hadn’t been too old – mid-thirties – and he had himself been a cosmonaut and therefore a hero. Talin who had lost his father when he was twelve had responded to his advice: Don’t kick the system, it kicks back. And Sedov whose only child had been stillborn had responded to him.

So here we are, Talin thought, father-and-son, adviser-and-pupil, fellow cosmonauts, friends, discussing my marriage. An unusual relationship.

‘She will accept, of course,’ Sedov said.

‘I said I was going to ask her. Before a bureaucratic match-maker interfered.’

A chunky man wearing a blue boiler-suit barged past Talin saying: ‘Sorry, Comrade, we mustn’t spill beer on that fancy coat of yours, must we,’ but when he noticed Sedov he moved away: there was something about Sedov.

Sedov said: ‘In three months’ time, in February 1984 – and let’s not believe everything Comrade Orwell had to say about that year – you and I will be flying together in space again in Dove II. May I suggest that before the flight, in December perhaps, you take a couple of weeks off training and go to the Black Sea for your honeymoon?’

‘I wish,’ said Talin tightly, ‘that you and the Comrade General would stop trying to market my life. Perhaps Orwell wasn’t so wrong …’

‘Our lives have always been arranged, you know that. And let me assure you that it’s not so different in the West. Lives are regulated just as methodically there but the people don’t realise it: they believe they are masters of their own destiny. But they still set their alarms for seven, catch the eight-twenty train, leave the office at five-thirty, switch on television at seven-forty-five and go on vacation every August. Life is a timetable, Shakespeare knew that. All we can do is enjoy the ride in between the stops.’

‘I’ve never heard you talk so much,’ Talin remarked. ‘You must be nervous.’

‘I’m just telling you not to let our version of the timetable interfere with your feelings for Sonya.’ Sedov zipped up his parka. ‘Personally I think I instilled a little humour into the situation. Imagine a general acting as a go-between.’ He stuck out his hand. ‘Well, I must be off.’

‘To report on the success of the mission to the Comrade General?’

‘To buy a bottle of vodka to celebrate your engagement,’ Sedov said.

They shook hands and walked into the street and went their separate ways in the cold bright sunshine.

The swan died. The curtain fell. The audience erupted.

In his box in the great red and gold well of the theatre Talin watched the audience clapping and cheering. Sedov should have been with him: nothing was arranged here.

Beneath him a stout woman dressed in grey was crying; her husband, a balding man in a black suit and open-neck white shirt, put his arm round her.

The Bolshoi, the gold domes of the Kremlin, wooden cathedrals in the countryside, dachas, Tzarist treasures, icons … they were all the scourge of the Party publicist trying to accommodate the decadent past in the present. The publicist’s mistake was in trying; the extremes and contradictions were an entity, part of the exquisite torment of Russia.

In the front stalls they were on their feet, these discriminating judges. If they departed after a mere couple of encores then the ballerina might as well retire to teach dancing in Archangel. Tonight Talin lost count of the encores for Bragina who, according to his companions in the box, was comparable with Pavlova. Her arms were full of flowers.

Talin excused himself from the box; outside he drank a glass of pink champagne in which a glacé cherry bobbed like a cork. Communism! He fetched his coat from the cloakroom and in the street, beneath the Quadriga of Apollo, hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to the Georgian restaurant where he had reserved a table for two.