• • •

At the age of forty, Tanya became dissatisfied with her life.

She asked herself what she wanted to do with her next forty years, and found that she did not want to spend them as an acolyte to Vasili Yenkov. She had risked her freedom to share his genius with the world, but that had done nothing for her. It was time she focused on her own needs, she decided. What that meant, she did not know.

Her discontent came to a head at a party to celebrate the award of the Lenin Prize in literature to Leonid Brezhnev’s memoirs. The award was risible: the three volumes of the Soviet leader’s autobiography were not well written, not true, and not even by Brezhnev, having been ghostwritten. But the writers’ union saw the prize as a useful pretext for a shindig.

Getting ready for the party, Tanya put her hair in a ponytail like Olivia Newton-John in the movie Grease, which she had seen on an illicit videotape. The new hairstyle did not cheer her up as much as she had hoped.

As she was leaving the building, she ran into her brother in the lobby, and told him where she was going. “I see that your protégé, Gorbachev, made a fulsome speech in praise of Comrade Brezhnev’s literary genius,” she said.

“Mikhail knows when to kiss ass,” Dimka said.

“You did well to get him onto the Central Committee.”

“He already had the support of Andropov, who likes him,” Dimka explained. “All I had to do was persuade Kosygin that Gorbachev is a genuine reformer.” Andropov, the KGB chief, was increasingly the leader of the conservative faction in the Kremlin; Kosygin the champion of the reformers.

Tanya said: “Gaining the approval of both sides is unusual.”

“He’s an unusual man. Enjoy your party.”

The do was held in the utilitarian offices of the writers’ union, but they had managed to get hold of several cases of Bagrationi, the Georgian champagne. Under its influence, Tanya got into an argument with Pyotr Opotkin, from TASS. No one liked Opotkin, who was not a journalist but a political supervisor, but he had to be invited to social events because he was too powerful to offend. He buttonholed Tanya and said accusingly: “The Pope’s visit to Warsaw is a catastrophe!”

Opotkin was right about that. No one had imagined how it would be. Pope John Paul II turned out to be a talented propagandist. When he got off the plane at Okecie military airport he fell to his knees and kissed the Polish ground. The picture was on the front pages of the Western press next morning, and Tanya knew—as the Pope must have known—that the image would find its way back into Poland by underground routes. Tanya secretly rejoiced.

Daniil, Tanya’s boss, was listening, and he interjected: “Driving into Warsaw in an open car, the Pope was cheered by two million people.”

Tanya said: “Two million?” She had not seen this statistic. “Is that possible? It must be something like five percent of the entire population—one in every twenty Poles!”