Voyagers I Read Free Page B

felt cold to his bare skin.
    “She is my wife, dear child, and this is her apartment even more than it is mine. Do you think a mere university professor of languages would be given such an elegant apartment, in such a fine part of town?”
    The girl got up out of the bed and padded naked to the bathroom without another word. Watching her, Markov saw that she was heavy in the thighs and rump. He hadn’t noticed that before they had gone to bed together.
    Sighing, he pulled himself out of the bed and stripped off the sheets. He kept two sets of bedclothing: one for the marriage and one for fun. His wife had a keen sense of smell and was fastidious about certain things.
    Nadia re-entered the bedroom, tugging on her quilted slacks and stuffing her blouse into the waistband.
    “What does she do, this wife of yours, to rate such a fancy apartment? A private bathroom, just for the two of you!” It was almost a reproach.
    “She works in the Kremlin,” said Markov. “She is a secretary to a commissar.”
    The girl’s eyes widened. “Oh, I see. No wonder she is treated so well.”
    Markov nodded and reached for his robe. “Yes. In our progressive society, the commissars work so hard and give so much of their lives for the good of the people that even their secretaries live like…like we shall all live, once true communism is established throughout the world.”
    She nodded without acknowledging the irony in his words. He walked her through the little sitting room to the hallway door.
    “This is a wonderful way to learn English,” she said, “but I’m afraid I’ll need many lessons.”
    Markov patted her shoulder. “We’ll see. We’ll see. In the meantime it might be a good idea for you to study the regular lessons and spend more time with the tapes in the language lab.”
    “Oh, I will,” she said earnestly. “Thank you, Professor.”
    He leaned down to kiss her lips, then swiftly ushered her through the door and out into the dimly lit hallway.
    Closing the door behind her, Markov leaned against it for a moment. Hopeless, he told himself. Forty-five years old and you still play childish games.
    But then a grin broke out on his bearded face. “Why not?” he mused. “It’s fun.”
    He was an inch over six feet in height, lanky in build with long legs and arms that swung loosely at his sides when he walked. His reddish hair was starting to fade and his scraggly beard was almost entirely gray. But his face was still unlined and almost boyish. The ice-blue eyes twinkled. The full lips often smiled.
    When he lectured at the university his voice was strong and clear; he needed no microphone to reach the farthest rows of the auditorium. When he sang—usually at small parties where the vodka flowed generously—his baritone was remarkable for its fine timbre and lack of pitch.
    He pulled himself away from the front door abruptly, hurried into the bedroom and finished changing the sheets. The soiled ones he stuffed into the special suitcase he kept behind his writing desk. Once a week he laundered them in the machine in the basement of the student lounge at the university. It was a good place to meet girls who didn’t attend his classes.
    Finally, he scrubbed himself down, pulled the heavy robe around his tingling skin and sat in his favorite chair in the front room, before the electric heater. He was just picking up a heavy tome and sliding his reading glasses up the bridge of his nose when he heard Maria’s key scratching at the door.
    Maria Kirtchatovska Markova was slightly older than her husband. Her family came from peasant stock, a fact that she was proud of. And she looked it: short, heavyset, narrow untrusting eyes of muddy brown, hair the color of a field mouse, cut short and flat. She was no beauty and never had been. Nor was she a secretary to a commissar.
    When Markov had first met her, a quarter century earlier, he had been a student of linguistics at the university and she a uniformed guard recently