A Very Private Plot Read Online Free PDF Page B

stopped herself. Not yet.…
    Now, seven years later, she still had not told him. Titka was prudent, because she had been under regular surveillance by the local KGB ever since … Grigori and The Episode, as the farmers in the village continued to refer to it.
    It had all begun when Nikolai’s father had taken the lead in organizing a protest. With twenty dirt farmers grouped about him, he approached the Chief of Section to request slightly higher hourly pay and shorter hours—a work week of sixty hours instead of sixty-six. The Chief of Section said he would refer the request to a higher authority. At the end of the day, four uniformed officials came to the small cabin—the same cabin in which Titka and Nikolai now lived—and informed Grigori that he was under arrest. He was taken off to spend the night at the collective’s little detention center. The following day, after a half-hour trial before the Chief of Section and two magistrates brought in from the neighboring collective, Grigori was sentenced. He was taken off to ten years of hard labor for counterrevolutionary activity, under Article 70 of the criminal code.
    The following day, Lidya went with her month-old baby to her sister Titka at the collective center and asked her to look after him.
    â€œI will be back before the end of the day” were her last words as she bent over and lingeringly kissed her baby.
    Lidya then went to the detention center, her husband’s army rifle in her arms, cocked. She walked to the desk, pointed the gun at the startled sergeant, and demanded the release of her husband. The sergeant, wide-eyed, rose and told Lidya to follow him to the cell. While pretending to cope with the key to open the cell, he brushed his holster, pulled out a pistol and shot Lidya, whose finger closed simultaneously on the trigger of the rifle, firing a shot that killed her husband.
    There was wide resentment over the treatment of Grigori and much grief over the fate of Lidya and her husband. The Chief of Section felt a near-mutinous resentment and made a public gesture designed to appease: Instead of sending Nikolai off to an orphanage, he turned the little family cabin over to Titka and the baby. But even now, ten years later, The Episode was memorialized. Every year, on September 11, the 112 farmers in the collective departed after lunch to their living quarters. A half holiday, so to speak.
    Titka knew it was inevitable that the details of The Episode would reach Nikolai before too long. But it would be better coming from one of his schoolmates than from her, because Titka could not trust herself to keep her emotions under control. It wasn’t only Lidya and Grigori, but the memory of her father, Nikolai’s grandfather.
    Titka remembered it all vividly. She had been seven, after all, and many details of her life at that age stayed in the memory. But as she grew older she learned from her reading, and from a cousin who studied psychology, that ugly memories of youth tend to fade away, and sometimes at night she would dream that this memory would fade away, but it never did.
    Central to it was the Red Army’s long log building, squatting a mere thirty meters from where she, her sister, and her mother and father lived, or rather tried to live, through the famine. What was special about the building in which the Soviet officers met when completing their rounds was the smells that came from it. She spent many hours, along with Lidya, just staring at it, and watching officers drive in in their cars and little trucks. It seemed to serve them (there were about sixty, she counted) as a recreation building, a meeting room for staff planning, but above all as a place in which they had their meals, special meals she had supposed, though now she knew that from the perspective of the famine, any meal was special. The smells of soup and chicken and cabbage and pork and turnips seemed to aim at the little cabin in which she and