Read Online The Sisters by Robert Littell - Free Book Online Page A

of store windows on the Arbat and looked in them to see who else might be lingering in front of other store windows. He ducked into an underground tunnel that pedestrians used to cross October Square, hurried halfway down it and then suddenly doubled back on his tracks-and watched to see who else might double back on his tracks. He entered GUM, the archaic bazaarlike department store across Red Square from the Kremlin, through one door, allowed himself to become caught up in a mob stampeding for a counter that had just put East German umbrellas on sale, and then made his way out of another door. He ducked into a prewar apartment building near Pushkin Square, climbed to the sixth floor, where the corridor connected with an adjoining building, and emerged from an entrance of a different building on a different street. It was midafternoon before he decided his wake was clean. He caught a taxi to the Central Depot and boarded a bus for Peredelkino, a village about forty kilometers from Moscow.
    In the half year since his last trip to Peredelkino, Moscow had sprawled, like a lazy lady, farther into the countryside. Prefabricated concrete apartment buildings had sprouted on either side of the road; to the Potter's eye they had the aesthetic appeal of pillboxes. Streets that had been bulldozed into existence, but not yet paved, ran off like rivulets in every direction. Beyond the last building, in still-unleveled fields covered with corn stumps, the skeletons of giant cranes, some on their sides, some upright already, hinted at the further expansion of the city limits. "There are no limits to cities," Piotr Borisovich had once remarked as he and the Potter drove through what was then the suburb into the countryside. He had thought a moment and then revised his sentence: There are no limits, he had said, though at the time the Potter hadn't been sure what he was getting at.
    Now he thought he understood. And he wondered, not for the first time, whether he had been Piotr Borisovich's teacher, or Piotr Borisovich had been his.
    Outside of Moscow, the first peasant cottages, looking distinctly one-dimensional through the dirty window of the bus, appeared on either side of the Minsk highway. With their painted, carved wooden shutters and carefully tended vegetable gardens-in Russia, something like half the fresh vegetables came from these tiny peasant plots-they provided quite a contrast to those pillboxes that would eventually rise in their places.
    In the old days, before the revolution, the peasants going off to the fields used to leave their doors unlocked and food set out on the table in case anyone happened by. But then the Bolshevik grain-confiscating squads had happened by, and the peasants had started locking their doors. Probably because of his peasant roots, Piotr Borisovich had talked a great deal about the subject during his stay at the Potter's school. The trouble, he would say, his voice reduced to the soft purr he used when he felt deeply about something, was that the Bolsheviks, being city-bred and city-oriented, never quite knew what to do with the eighty percent of the population that lived outside the cities. The peasants were the enemy, the Potter would explode. In their heart of hearts, they were all capitalists-they wanted to own the land they worked. What they wanted-Piotr Borisovich would shake his head in disagreement-was to own the crop they harvested, and not have it carted off without compensation to feed the workers in the cities.
    They hadn't seen eye to eye on everything, the Potter and Piotr Borisovich, but their differences only seemed to bind them closer together-to reinforce the notion, foreign to Soviet Russia, that holding different opinions was perfectly normal.
    Arriving at Peredelkino, the Potter walked the four kilometers along a rutted road from the depot to the peasant's cottage the old man had moved into. "I always wanted to water, and be watered," he had said then, but he had been exhibiting