Khrushchev picked up his pen and resumed signing. “A script editor,” he muttered. “My arse.”

• • •

Tanya typed out Vasili’s short story, “Frostbite,” with two carbon copies.

But it was too good merely for samizdat publication. Vasili evoked the world of the prison camps with brutal vividness—but he did more. Copying it, she had realized, with an ache in her heart, that the camp stood for the Soviet Union, and the story was a savage critique of Soviet society. Vasili was telling the truth in a way that Tanya could not, and she burned with remorse. Every day she wrote articles that were published in newspapers and magazines all over the USSR; every day she carefully avoided reality. She did not tell outright lies, but she always skirted around the poverty, injustice, repression, and waste that were the actual characteristics of her country. Vasili’s writing showed her that her life was a fraud.

She took the typescript to her editor, Daniil Antonov. “This came to me in the mail, anonymously,” she said. He might well guess that she was lying, but he would not betray her. “It’s a short story set in a prison camp.”

“We can’t publish it,” he said quickly.

“I know. But it’s very good—the work of a great writer, I think.”

“Why are you showing it to me?”

“You know the editor of New World magazine.”

Daniil looked thoughtful. “He occasionally publishes something unorthodox.”

Tanya lowered her voice. “I don’t know how far Khrushchev’s liberalization is intended to go.”

“The policy has vacillated, but the overall instruction is that the excesses of the past should be discussed and condemned.”

“Would you read it and, if you like it, show it to the editor?”

“Sure.” Daniil read a few lines. “Why do you think it was sent to you?”

“It’s probably written by someone I met when I went to Siberia two years ago.”

“Ah.” He nodded. “That would explain it.” He meant Not a bad cover.

“The author will probably reveal his identity if the story is accepted for publication.”

“Okay,” said Daniil. “I’ll do my best.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The University of Alabama was the last all-white state university in the USA. On Tuesday, June 11, two young Negroes arrived at the campus in Tuscaloosa to register as students. George Wallace, the diminutive governor of Alabama, stood at the doors of the university with his arms folded and his legs astride, and vowed to keep them out.

At the Department of Justice in Washington, George Jakes sat with Bobby Kennedy and others listening to telephone reports from people at the university. The television was on, but for the moment none of the networks was showing the scene live.

Less than a year ago, two people had been shot dead during riots at the University of Mississippi after its first colored student enrolled. The Kennedy brothers were determined to prevent a repeat.

George had been to Tuscaloosa, and had seen the university’s leafy campus. He had been frowned at as he walked across the green lawns, the only dark face among the pretty girls in bobby socks and the smart young men in blazers. He had drawn for Bobby a sketch of the grand portico of the Foster Auditorium, with its three doors, in front of which Governor Wallace now stood, at a portable lectern, surrounded by highway patrolmen. The June temperature in Tuscaloosa was rising toward a hundred degrees. George could visualize the reporters and photographers crowded in front of Wallace, sweating in the sun, waiting for violence to break out.