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Grigori came in, wearing his army uniform, all smiles, sniffing the chicken and rubbing his hands together. At forty-eight he was red-faced and corpulent: it was hard to imagine him storming the Winter Palace as he had in 1917. He must have been thinner then.
He kissed his wife with relish. Volodya thought his mother was thankful for his father's unabashed lust without actually returning it. She would smile when he patted her bottom, hug him when he embraced her, and kiss him as often as he wanted, but she was never the initiator. She liked him, respected him, and seemed happy being married to him; but clearly she did not burn with desire. Volodya would want more than that from marriage.
The matter was purely hypothetical: Volodya had had a dozen or so short-term girlfriends but had not yet met a woman he wanted to marry.
Volodya poured his father a shot of vodka, and Grigori tossed it back with relish, then took some smoked fish. "So, Ilya, what work do you do?"
"I'm with the NKVD," Ilya said proudly.
"Ah! A very good organization to belong to!"
Grigori did not really think this, Volodya suspected; he was just trying to be friendly. Volodya thought the family should be unfriendly, in the hope that they could drive Ilya away. He said: "I suppose, Father, that when the rest of the world follows the Soviet Union in adopting the Communist system, there will no longer be a need for the secret police, and the NKVD can then be abolished."
Grigori chose to treat the question lightly. "No police at all!" he said jovially. "No criminal trials, no prisons. No counterespionage department, as there will be no spies. No army either, since we will have no enemies! What will we all do for a living?" He laughed heartily. "This, however, may still be some distance in the future."
Ilya looked suspicious, as if he felt something subversive was being said but could not put his finger on it.
Katerina brought to the table a plate of black bread and five bowls of hot borscht, and they all began to eat. "When I was a boy in the countryside," Grigori said, "all winter long my mother would save vegetable peelings, apple cores, the discarded outer leaves of cabbages, the hairy part of the onion, anything like that, in a big old barrel outside the house, where it all froze. Then, in the spring, when the snow melted, she would use it to make borscht. That's what borscht really is, you know--soup made from peelings. You youngsters have no idea how well off you are."
There was a knock at the door. Grigori frowned, not expecting anyone, but Katerina said: "Oh, I forgot! Konstantin's daughter is coming."
Grigori said: "You mean Zoya Vorotsyntsev? The daughter of Magda the midwife?"
"I remember Zoya," said Volodya. "Skinny kid with blond ringlets."
"She's not a kid anymore," Katerina said. "She's twenty-four and a scientist." She stood up to go to the door.
Grigori frowned. "We haven't seen her since her mother died. Why has she suddenly made contact?"
"She wants to talk to you," Katerina replied.
"To me? About what?"
"Physics." Katerina went out.
Grigori said proudly: "Her father, Konstantin
, and I were delegates to the Petrograd Soviet in 1917. We issued the famous Order Number One." His face darkened. "He died, sadly, after the Civil War."
Volodya said: "He must have been young--what did he die of?"
Grigori glanced at Ilya and quickly looked away. "Pneumonia," he said, and Volodya knew he was lying.
Katerina returned, followed by a woman who took Volodya's breath away.
She was a classic Russian beauty, tall and slim, with light blond hair, blue eyes so pale they were almost colorless, and perfect white skin. She wore a simple Nile-green dress whose plainness only drew attention to her slender figure.
She was introduced all around, then she sat at the table and accepted a bowl of borscht. Grigori said: "So, Zoya, you're a scientist."
"I'm a graduate student, doing my doctorate, and I teach undergraduate classes," she said.
"Volodya here works in Red Army Intelligence," Grigori said proudly.
"How interesting," she said, obviously meaning the opposite.
Volodya realized that Grigori saw Zoya as a potential daughter-in-law. He hoped his father would not hint at this too heavily. He had already made up his mind to ask her for a date before the end of the evening. But he could manage that by himself. He did not need his father's help. On the contrary: unsubtle parental boasting might put her off.
"How is the soup?" Katerina asked Zoya.
