Chapter 18: Galya’s Kremlin
Rudy heard Galya screaming, then Nina. Someone grabbed him, dragged him. He tried to fight, but he couldn’t open his eyes. HIs nerves wouldn’t connect to his muscles. More screaming, dropped, dragged, shaken… Rudy could lock onto nothing, with his mind or his hands.
The first thing that made sense was the wallpaper. Galya’s office wallpaper, that god-awful dark, baroque mess. He saw Africa in the pattern, and a lanky sheriff with a horse’s head looming over it, watching for bad guys. Sure, that made sense.
The next thing that made sense was the awful burning in his throat. Someone was pouring vodka into him. He gagged and spat.
“Vitaly!” Galya screamed, “I told you, that’s the last thing he needs!”
“Rudy!” Now Nina was screaming, jostling close, her mouth inches from his eyes. “Rudy! Who did this?”
The most urgent matter in his clouded mind at that moment was to get Nina, Galya, and whoever else was in the room to stop screaming. Stop screaming, stop screaming—the noise was worse than the vodka. His soured mouth moved in some fashion around an insistence on quiet. The voices around him screamed that they weren’t screaming. He mumble-rebutted them futilely until he realized no one was screaming. But his body was screaming, pierced with pain as he shivered uncontrollably against someone’s firm embrace.
Another pair of feet pounded across the floor toward him. He saw Marina, a first-aid kit in her hand. Galya opened it beside her desk on the floor, took out gauze, and seized the flask from Vitaly’s hands. Suddenly his forehead stung. “Hold him,” Galya barked through gritted teeth, and hands tightened around him. He was waking up enough now to appreciate those hands.
His mouth slopped around something like the questions he wanted to ask.
“You have to tell us,” Nina said. Her face was still the closest to his. “Who?”
“We know who,” Galya spat, now pressing a stinging bandage to the flesh on Rudy’s pounding head. Still well short of his fullest faculties, he only knew that Galya’s tone and her blue eyes, flashing like an arc welder, filled him with dread. “We know why. You hit them. They hit back. Now what will we do?”
Galya, Marina, Nina, Vitaly… Rudy wasn’t quite thinking yet, but the people around him triggered memories of closeness dancing between consciousness and dream. He remembered Ksenia holding him as Galya held him now—but all wrong, Galina Filipovna is my director, and she isn’t centered, the bike will tip and we won’t make it to Galich—and Ken offering water as Vitaly offered vodka—or is it tea, or Fanta, and why did Galya rub it on my head?—and river bathers huddled around him in Suzdal, in sunshine, as these people now crowded his mental haze—but that can’t be, because they’re all gone, and my head hurts, everything hurts, everyone around me hurts—and remarkably here his logic re-engaged to ask what have I gotten myself into?
* * *
Galina Filipovna was the smartest woman in Siberia. She held a doctorate in nuclear physics and degrees in electrical engineering and materials science. She had designed the electrical system for the Soviet space shuttle before the shuttle and the Soviet Union were canceled. She developed ceramic-composite components that improved MiG fuel efficiency and saved the air force several thousand liters of jet fuel each day.
Most importantly (for Rudy, for Galya, and for everyone else gathered in her office around their dazed and injured American friend), Galina Filipovna led a team that designed a particle collider bigger than anything the Americans had proposed to that day. She was in Moscow on August 18, 1991, to present the plans to a Politburo science subcommittee that would tell Gorbachev whether or not to approve the first twelve billion rubles to start digging the giant ring, 50 kilometers across, 157 kilometers around, east of Novosibirsk. The size and power of the Great Novosibirsk Ring would crack open the Big Bang and deliver the majority of 21st-century Nobel prizes in physics to Soviet scientists. She waited two hours in a reception room in the Kremlin for a white-haired woman wearing not one speck of color to tell her the subcommittee had postponed the meeting to tomorrow. Galina Filipovna carried her valise, stuffed with sixteen light-blue-bound copies of her presentation of schematics, timelines, and cost projections for the Ring, around the Kremlin, past St. Basil’s, and back to the Hotel Rossiya, where she locked herself in her room, pulled the drapes, and worked out physics problems for nine straight hours, until sunset. With the fading light, she realized she had forgotten to eat. She absently nibbled some bread and dates she’d acquired the night before, worked out two more particle interactions, then brushed her teeth, threw her clothes over the chair, and went to bed.
The next day, everything at the Kremlin was postponed. Galya woke to the announcement on state radio of the putsch (state radio did not call it that, but like every Soviet citizen listening, she knew exactly what it was). She saw the tanks appear at the Spassky Gate. She saw Muscovites and reporters roaming the streets uncertainly. She knew before the chanting began, before Yeltsin grandstood on that tank, before Gorbachev reappeared in his daze, that her presentation was canceled for good. The Soviet Union would not live long enough to build her Ring, and whatever replaced the Union would have more immediate concerns than explaining the creation of the universe. As she walked along the river, all the way to the university, then up to the Arbat, she could see in the cracked pavement, the haphazardly stocked shops, and the anxious faces of her countrymen that Soviet entropy had reached a critical mass; it would now swiftly collapse into God-knew what.
She wanted to be far from that collapse. She bought another package of dates—no bread in the stores this day on her route through the capital—and marched straight through the growing and anxious crowds back to the Rossiya, where she dropped the 16 blue booklets into the hotel incinerator and stayed up until midnight nibbling dates and writing a new plan for her giant particle collider. The next morning, she called the airport and learned her return flight had been canceled. She took a long, tepid shower, dressed, and carried her lightened valise to the metro. From there to the train station, where she found two loaves of bread and a block of cheese, and onto the train with her government travel voucher (accepted and stamped without question, even as the government lay headless around them), Galina Filipovna continued to sketch her plan. A flight straight back to Novosibirsk, less than a day in the air, would have been too brief. Seven days on the train was a perfect mini-sabbatical, a transition from the ill-fated project that had consumed the last several months to a bigger project that could consume years.
She stopped in Novosibirsk long enough to call Nina, the rector of faculty at the Irkutsk Science and Technology Institute, and ask if the Institute’s invitation remained open. Nina was as ready as Yeltsin to seize the moment to her advantage. In her first official action as ISTI’s new director, Galina Filipovna called two collaborators from the Ring team in Novosibirsk and posted quick letters to two others inviting them all to join her in Irkutsk. Then she was on the train again, and three days later she was teaching in Irkutsk, organizing site and funding studies for a relocated Ring, and working physics problems late into the night.
* * *
Galina Filipovna was the second person Rudy met at the Institute, after Vitaly. Rudy had come down from the cabin at the beginning of March, while the dirt roads were still frozen solid, before they turned to mud. He did not come down straight away to Irkutsk. He went first to the east, over the mountains, picking his way along barely passable roads down to Lake Baikal. He spent the spring working with fishermen on the eastern shore, living on fresh-caught omul, cabbage, bread, and tea. One day in June the boss and the boat weren’t at the dock, so Rudy and three other men went their separate ways. Rudy had enough cash in his pocket to feed himself and the Captain’s bike and survive devaluation for at least a month. He rode to Irkutsk, city of exiles, and on his first day in the city, as he paused along the edge of the botanical garden, a whistle from up the street—more of a dirt alley here, with little traffic—caught his attention. A man stood by truck at a loading dock, beckoning. Rudy rode up to the loading dock and shut off his engine.
“Hey, fella! You need work?” The Russian was wiry, hawk-nosed, tough, with big hands. He spoke in Russian, as Rudy had, without interruption, all spring with the fishermen.
“What work?”
“Damned drunks here leave our shipment outside and don’t stick around to help load or keep the bandits away. I can’t move these crates myself, and I can’t haul them all in one trip. Help me load, stay and guard what I can’t take on the first trip, help me load the rest. I’ll pay.”
Rudy looked at the crates, some blank, some stamped “Irkutsk Scientific and Technological Institute.” The truck cab doors bore the institute’s initials in white paint. Watching Rudy’s eyes, the Russian pulled a card from his pocket, a laminated ID showing an ISTI logo (INTI in Russian) and his own hard eyes. “I’m not the bandits. Want to work or not?”
Rudy dropped his pack beside the bike. “Which box first?”
The Russian gestured to the nearest wooden crate, a long box on top of the others. They hefted it and five others into the back of the truck. That was all that would fit.
“You stay, guard these crates. Anyone but me comes for them, tell them to leave this stuff alone.”
“What if the bandits get tough?”
The Russian looked Rudy over. “You look tough. Bandits won’t mess with you.” The Russian opened the driver’s door, pulled out a crowbar, and tossed it to Rudy. “There. Now you look tougher. Thirty minutes.” The truck belched smoke and growled away down the rutted alley, leaving Rudy alone with his bike, five big crates, and the crowbar. Rudy sat down on the crate nearest the edge of the dock, rested his hands and chin on the crowbar like a cane in front of him, and meditated on the strangeness of sitting alone between this warehouse and a garden, drafted now as security guard for who-knew-what bandit-prone gear.
Rudy must have done his job well. No bandits appeared. A few children could be heard off in the trails winding through the trees. Two lanky, sullen boys in ratty denim jackets skulked by on the opposite side of the alley, sharing a cigarette. Five minutes later, two lanky, sullen girls, also in ratty denim jackets, also sharing a cigarette, went by, elbows linked, chatting grimly… but maybe fifty meters away erupted in girlish giggles. They glanced back at Rudy and his motorcycle and crowbar and hushed themselves immediately.
The Russian returned in his growling truck. Rudy stood and guided him back, bringing his hands together to show the distance between the truck and the dock, then clapping and holding them out to bring the truck to a halt just an inch from the concrete ledge. The Russian hopped out of the truck. Rudy extended a hand and hauled him up to the dock. The Russian eyed the crates. “I am called Vitaly,” he said, still gripping Rudy’s hand. “No bandits?”
“Rudy. No bandits.”
They loaded the remaining crates. Vitaly handed Rudy a thousand-ruble note—a day’s wage back at the lake, but comparisons even week to week were dubious amidst the ruble’s endless collapse. “Another 500 if you come with, help me unload.”
Rudy had nowhere else to be, and no excuse to turn down pay that would cover a room and another tank of benzin. “I’ll follow you.”
Vitaly eyed the motorcycle. Like Rudy’s boots, the machine was caked with mud from lake roads. “Can your bike keep up?”
“Yeah, but let’s go gently. Surely that’s valuable equipment we’re hauling.”
Smiles were hard to get from long-surveilled and suspicious Russians. But Vitaly smiled and got in the truck. “Irkutsk Scientific and Technological Institute. Across the river, ten minutes. I’ll signal.”
Rudy had learned quickly, in Kostroma and Ekaterinburg on the open road, to ride with confidence and with the assumption that every driver around him was drunk. He didn’t sightsee through Irkutsk: he kept his head on a swivel and his bike centered in Vitaly’s mirror, close enough to keep other drivers from nosing in. He watched for bumps and holes and threats all around, but nothing threw him off, not even Vitaly’s crossing of three lanes to reach the river bridge. (To Vitaly’s credit, there was little room to merge gently right, but he managed to accelerate and leave room for Rudy to safely follow.) Over the river, through a rough commercial district (what urbanscape had Rudy seen east of Moscow that wasn’t rough, wasn’t crumbling like the empire?), and then pulled through a guarded gate into the Institute’s main alley.
The core of the Irkutsk Scientific and Technological Institute was its own little Kremlin, a five-sided fortress of brick and brains, with new offices, laboratories, and dormitories built across old streets since the Great Patriotic War. Three gates allowed vehicles to access separate zones of campus, but nowhere could a vehicle pass through campus from one gate to another; the alleys from each gate ended at small cul-de-sac parking lots, loading docks, or the edge of the small central courtyard. If Genghis Khan returned (and east of the Urals and particularly here, 300 kilometers from the Mongolian frontier, with the Chinese outnumbering Siberians 30 or 40 to 1, Russians commonly fretted over the possibility of a Chinese invasion), Rudy mused that a few trucks and concrete barricades could make this central campus defensible position.
Vitaly waved Rudy back so he could pull into a parking spot and wheel around to back down the remainder of the alley. Vitaly pointed to a platform by a locked metal door. Rudy guided Vitaly in, and they stopped and unloaded the truck. “My men were here to take the first load,” Vitaly explained. “They’ve already hauled those crates to their work sites. Since you’re here, we can unload now and get this truck out of the way. Ho—leave that big crate. We’ll deliver that ourselves.” They locked the other crates inside the warehouse. “Park your bike around the side, there, out of sight. No one will mess with it.”
Rudy went with Vitaly in the truck, out the west gate they’d come in, and around to the north gate, into a garage where another delivery truck was parked. They lugged the remaining crate, the size of a big couch and twice the weight, onto a cart that Vitaly pulled and Rudy pushed to a plain concrete building with stark letters cut from steel 30 years ago imagining 60 years into the future, bolted above the front doors: FIZIKA. The building had a large service elevator, designed apparently for physics equipment larger than this crate. They took cart and crate up to the second floor and rolled down a dim, empty hall. Rudy heard furious tapping and scratching. When Vitaly eased the cart to a stop at the single open door in the hall, Rudy saw the tapping was chalk on a slate-covered wall. The chalker was a black-haired woman in grey pants and a white blouse with sleeves cuffed above her elbows, stooping to mark the last available corner at the far end of a wall-spanning board otherwise covered with dusty equations and diagrams.
Rudy watched over Vitaly’s shoulder as the woman finished what looked like an equation, rose to her full height—equal to Rudy’s own, he guessed, maybe an inch more in her black heels—and backed up to survey the board. Spheres, vectors, variables, deltas and double and triple integrals—Rudy recognized a few symbols but no meanings. He did, however, get the impression from the energetic nature of the chalk marks and Vitaly’s silent posture outside the door that the markings on the board and the woman making them were proper objects of respect and maybe awe.
“Vitaly,” the woman called, still facing the board, her back to them. “What do you bring me?”
“Taipei Fabric and Fashion,” Vitaly said.
The woman turned abruptly. She wore a sky-blue scarf that complemented her excited eyes. “My computers—” in an instant her eyes bounced from the big crate to the stranger behind Vitaly “—and an American?”
Vitaly looked at Rudy, a bit surprised. Rudy was surprised, too: he hadn’t spoken yet for her to hear what might be left of his accent. Months of the highway and the lake and work had worn away the alien glow of the American tourist and allowed him to pass as a local among most of the fishermen and the villagers at the lake.
The woman brought her chalk and blue scarf to the door. Her scarf was a deeper blue than the scarf knotted around Rudy’s neck. “What, buy 21 computers, they send an American to plug them in?”
“He’s my help for the day,” Vitaly said. “Computers—where would you like them?”
The woman studied Rudy with brief intensity. “Hello, help,” she said to Rudy. Then to Vitaly, “Roll them in. Let’s take a look.”
Rudy heaved the back end of the cart around, and they brought the cart into the room. The wall behind them was all glass cabinets filled with physics equipment and three tall black worktables. To his right—west, he guessed looking out the windows that spanned that wall, seeing the direction of the shadows outside—a flippable chalkboard stood on wheels, with more equations and notes. The rest of the floor was empty, allowing free access to any part of the main board.
Vitaly pulled a screwdriver from his back pocket and started prying loose the crate lid. Rudy worked his fingers under and helped pull it free. Inside were 21 slim rectangular boxes, arrayed three by seven, and four fat cardboard cubes, all swaddled in foam rubber sheets. Vitaly pulled out one of the slim boxes and laid it on the nearest table. Rudy tore a large white envelope from its tape inside the lid—”Manifest and Shipping Information”—and handed it to the woman. She took it, opened it, and scanned the papers. “Twenty-one processors,” she said, “twenty-one power units… four monitors, remaining seventeen to be delivered separately—fine, we won’t be using all twenty-one machines until fall classes begin.”
The woman then huddled with Vitaly at the table over the slim box and its contents. They fell into a hushed chatter that suggested to Rudy his work was done… but he also had the odd sense that he wasn’t to leave until dismissed by the woman in charge. Getting the rest of his pay from Vitaly would be nice, too, but—
“Amerikanyets!” The woman’s voice was not harsh, but she surprised him nonetheless. It was the first time she addressed him. She switched to English. “Just passing through?”
“I…” he switched into Russian, “…yeshcho ne znayu. Kuda, kogda—ne reshilos”—don’t know yet. Where to, when—hasn’t been decided.
The director—the word came to him before Vitaly mentioned it, before Rudy knew it really was her title—raised an eyebrow and switched back to Russian for the rest of their conversation, testing him. “An American who says he does not know where he is going? How novel. Do you know computers?”
“I’ve used them, and I’ve installed network cable.”
The woman’s eyes widened. “Are you sure Taipei did not send you as a bonus package with my purchase?” She looked over the contents of the big crate. “By August 27, I want all twenty-one of these machines, with the monitors that will come, set up in this building. Six in this lab, ten in a lab at the other end of the hall, one in my office, and four in offices upstairs. I want all machines to communicate with each other and the four upstairs and with the ‘World Wide Web’.” She switched to English for the last term, stretching out with difficulty the -rld- and -wi- sounds. “I could do this myself, but as you can see—” an arm swept toward the chalkboard “—I have bigger problems to solve. Besides—” and now she reached back, retrieved a thick paperback book from the computer box, and handed it to Rudy “—the manuals and the software are all in English, which you may read a few percentage points more efficiently than I. Can you do this work?”
Rudy’s mind whirled. The cable job he’d mentioned, back at the bank—that wasn’t his project; he just did what the foreman told him, picked up a few things along the way. Now the director—of the department? the entire institute? all of Irkutsk? Rudy didn’t know yet—was asking him to install a network on his own. He knew nothing about prices and availability of cables, conduits, new electrical… and World Wide Web? He assumed that meant connections to the Russian phone system, which struck him as inadequate for simple voice connection, never mind computers somehow talking to each other.
But this woman was looking at him with eyes that said, I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t think you were capable. Long afterward, Rudy remembered that expression well, because the director would favor/challenge/doom him with that same confident/persuasive/commanding expression again and again.
Under the director’s curious and formidable scrutiny, Rudy flipped through the manual, glancing at the diagrams and technical specifications. He stepped toward the table and picked up the microprocessor. It was remarkably small, maybe the size of a desk dictionary, less than a quarter the size of the suitcase-shaped processors he’d used at the bank. He looked over the ports on the back, the various cables in the box. Computers were more opaque than motorcycles, but they were still machines. They could be taken apart, put together, and made to work, all according to rules that one could read or figure out.
“If I read this manual, if I can get some direction—” Rudy nodded to Vitaly “—on where to get materials… yes, I can do this.”
“Then you will do this. I am Galina Filipovna.” She reached for Rudy’s hand and shook it briefly and firmly.
“Rudy,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Rudy, where are you staying in Irkutsk?”
Rudy hadn’t gotten that far in his day yet. When he’d headed up the highway to Irkutsk, he’d figured he might ride back out to the forest and sleep under the stars again, right next to the Captain’s bike. He’d slept in the open most nights while fishing, and he didn’t particularly ache for four walls. He stammered, “I… I just arrived this morning.”
“Vitaly, the water and power are on in the east dormitory, yes?”
“On the first floor, yes. Several rooms are empty.”
“Please assign our new technician a suitable room.”
On the way out, Vitaly tucked the promised 500-ruble note into Rudy’s hand. “And I thought I was the luckiest man in Irkutsk. Welcome to Galya’s Kremlin.”