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deciding that it wasn't worth a reply. Doctor Chukova stared at him with hatred for the same amount of time, then hurried after her patient.

 
     
     
    Chapter 2

     
    Doctor Olga Chukova was a stout woman in her mid-thirties, divorced, childless, and perpetually tired. Her life was not easy, and there was no hope of it improving. But still she kept doing what she had to do, because if she didn't, everything would get unimaginably worse.
    When she was satisfied that her patient would be all right, she left the clinic. She took the metro to the Lenin Library, wandered along Marx Prospekt for a while, and then went to sit in the Alexandrovsky Gardens in the shadow of the Kremlin.
    It was twilight, and the air was turning chilly. But that was all right; it was so nice to go outside without feeling the weight of an astrakhan coat on her back that she would put up with a little more cold weather. She sat on a yellow bench near the Obelisk to Revolutionary Thinkers. The trees were just beginning to bud, and the flowers were peeping cautiously out of the ground. The gardens were not crowded. The news kiosks were closing; the last babushki were hurrying their overdressed little charges home for supper before they caught pneumonia; a lone gray-coated militiaman strolled along the path, whistling a Beatles song. The air still held the rancid smell of Russian cigarettes. She closed her eyes and tried to relax. It was impossible.
    After a while she heard footsteps approaching, then someone sitting down next to her on the bench. "Olga, my little butterfly, what a pleasant coincidence!" a cheery man's voice said.
    "Hello, Volodya," she replied. They both knew that it was not a coincidence. She opened her eyes.
    He was a rather handsome man, with dark hair and flashing eyes topped by bushy, Brezhnev-like eyebrows. But in a way, she thought, his physical appearance was the last thing you noticed about him. You were too blinded by the brightness of his personality; you were too busy trying to resist his joyful laughter.
    "You look tired, my pet. Did you have a tough day?"
    Doctor Chukova didn't answer.
    Volodya smiled and changed the subject. "Do you see the obelisk there?"
    She nodded.
    "Did you know that it was built to celebrate three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty? No? Of course not. These little historical oddities were not brought up in our Komsomol lectures. The Bolsheviks erased the names of the tsars and replaced them with Marx and Engels and the rest. It makes one wonder, doesn't it?"
    "About what?"
    "About when these names will be erased and the next set inscribed, of course. In another three hundred years? Or is the pace of history accelerating-—will we not have to wait quite so long this time?"
    "That is not an appropriate remark, citizen," she murmured.
    Volodya grinned and squeezed her arm. "Don't worry, my loyal little comrade, the state cannot watch all of us—at least, not all the time. Thank God for incompetence. So tell me: How was your day?"
    She closed her eyes. The western wall of the Kremlin loomed behind her; in the Arsenal building behind that wall the Politburo met and made decisions that determined the future of her nation, perhaps of the world. Volodya had not let go of her arm.
    He had come into her life soon after she started work at the Popov Institute. Valentina had been performing her miracles for several months, and the KGB was beginning to realize that she needed constant medical attention. Doctor Chukova quickly found out that taking the job had been a mistake, but like many people she couldn't turn her back on the benefits that came to one who worked for the security organs. And she couldn't turn her back on Valentina.
    And so Doctor Chukova had needed laughter and excitement. She was lonely and she was depressed by her job, and every time she looked into a mirror she was staring at middle age, every time she tried to plan for the future she thought of the dissolution of her dreams, the long