The Sisters

by Robert Littell

The Potter nodded.

  Oskar took a step in the Potter's direction. "You are familiar with the signal that can awaken this sleeper of yours, yes?"

  "Yes."

  "So: my clients will want to know how you came into possession of this information," Oskar said.

  "His cover name is part of the legend we worked out together at the sleeper school," the Potter explained. "The location I know because, for personal reasons that had to do with an affinity we shared for a certain poet, he sent me, in violation of standing rules, a picture postcard of the house he lives in."

  "And the awakening signal?"

  "When we selected an awakening signal, I always made it a point to choose a phrase that was already embedded in a sleeper's memory-a familiar motto, a line of a song or a poem he had known since childhood.

  There was a line of poetry that we both knew . . ." The Potter's voice choked for an instant. Did one betrayal inevitably lead to another? What level of Dante's hell was he sentencing himself to? He drew a deep breath. ". . . knew and appreciated. I wrote out the awakening signal in my own hand in his dossier."

  "If my potential clients accept and you don't have the information you claim to have..." Oskar left the sentence hanging.

  The Potter said softly, "I am not an idiot. I know the rules of the game." Against his will, a brittle laugh seeped from the back of his throat. "I helped write them."

  The younger Cousin helped the blind man off with his coat. Tapping his white baton before his feet, the blind man made his way into the hotel room. "Well, Oskar," he called out, uncertain where in the room Oskar was, "in the end pushing him didn't do any harm, did it?"

  Oskar said, "So: it is my opinion he would have come around eventually."

  The younger man waved Oskar off. He had once seen the blind man lash out with his baton at the legs of someone who crossed him.

  Oskar shrugged. "The important thing," he told the blind man, "is that he has come through with what you wanted. It is true what he said about the awakening signal, yes?"

  The blind man found the seat with his baton and settled into it. The younger man extracted a red file from a briefcase and opened it on the table. The blind man ran his fingertips over several pages as if they were written in braille. "Of course the awakening signal is in his handwriting," he said. "That's how we first discovered that he knew it."

  "If he had typed in the signal," said the younger man, "it might never have occurred to us to use him. He'd still be bringing home American mascara to that bitch of a wife of his."

  "What about the postcard?" Oskar asked. "It is conceivable that the Americans will administer truth drugs to him. Every detail must check out if they are to swallow the whole story."

  "There was a postcard/' the younger man confirmed. Only the sleeper in question never sent it."

  "We arranged for it to be sent,” the blind man confessed smugly, "to fill in the single gap in the novator's knowledge. Since he and this sleeper of his aren't going to meet again, he will never find that out."

  "So: alt that remains to be done now is to convince my clients to accept the deal, and then ship the novator and that whore of his out of the country, yes?"

  "Your clients will agree to the deal' the blind man announced in a tone that left no room for doubt. And with a laugh that contained no trace of humor, he added, "I was never more sure of anything in my life."

  Francis had come down with a head cold. It was serious enough to make him skip his Tuesday-night film. Wednesday morning he telephoned Mrs.

  Cresswell to say he had a fever and would not be coming in. She put him on hold for a moment, which irritated Francis because it conveyed the impression that he required permission to stay away from the office.

  Then Carroll came on the line. "Mrs. Cresswell tells me you are under the weather," he said. Something in Carroll s voice made Francis suspect that his cheek muscle was atwitch.

  "I have a hundred and one," Francis informed him as if it were an accomplishment.

  "A hundred and one what?" Carroll's mind was on other things.

  "A hundred and one degrees of fever!" Francis cried into the mouthpiece.

  "I can't see to drive."

  "It's not enough," Carroll retorted. "Grab a cab." And lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper, he confided, "We are starting to haul in our fish."

  Francis swallowed. We are starting to haul in our fish! It was the most original operation he had ever been involved in in his career. If it succeeded, history would be diverted as if it were nothing more than an inconvenient stream!

  "Did you hear what I said?" Carroll hissed into the phone.

  "I shall be right in," Francis said with great dignity. "I only need to put on an appropriate tie."

  For eighteen excruciating days, the Potter didn't hear a word from Oskar. After the first week went by in sinister silence he broke down and dialled B one-forty-one, twenty-one, but almost had his eardrum shattered by the peculiar whining sound that in Moscow indicates the number is out of order. Had it all been a hoax? Someone's idea of indoor sport? Or even worse, a trap designed to test his loyalty? But ii it were a trap, why would they wait to spring it?

  In the state he was in, throwing pots was out of the question. They spiralled off into lopsided shapes that had nothing in common with the conception in his head. So the Potter paced: the attic, the bedroom, the corridor, the streets around the apartment building in which he lived.

  Nine days after his last session with Oskar, the Potter was prowling around the attic when he heard the phone ringing underfoot. He raced downstairs, but Svetochka beat him to it. "I understand," she was saying into the mouthpiece. Her posture was rigid, her face frozen in an expression of a sullen child. "We will both be there. You will be able to set your watch by our arrival."

  The call turned out to be a summons from the Deputy Assistant Procurator's office for a groundbreaking session. Svetochka astonished the Potter by scrubbing every trace of makeup off her face, wearing her lowest heels and her drabbest clothes-until it dawned on him that it was her idea of how to impress Deputy Assistant Procurators with one's innocence. At the interview, Svetochka rose to the occasion and denied everything, starting with her age. "I happen, Comrade Procurator." she announced, baring teeth that looked as ii they had been sharpened, "to be twenty-nine years of age, and not thirty-one."

  The Deputy Assistant Procurator peered at a photocopy of her internal passport through a magnifying glass. "It says here in black and white that you were born in . . ."He read off a month and a year. "Subtract that from today"-he began counting on his fingers- "and you are left with thirty-one.'

  Svetochka's jaw angled up in displeasure. "The woman who issued me the passport wore thick eyeglasses. She made an error when she copied the date off my birth certificate."

  "And where, if I may make so bold as to pose the question"-the Potter recognized this as a standard bureaucratic effort at irony-"is this, eh, birth certificate?"

  "My mother had it."

  "And where"-bureaucratic exasperation now-"is your mother?"

  "In a coffin, underground, in row seven, aisle D of the municipal cemetery of Smolensk."

  "I see," moaned the Deputy Assistant Procurator, though of course he didn't see at all. For thanks to Svetochka, he got so bogged down with inconsequential matters (height, weight, color of eyes, Party background, education, date of marriage, et cetera, et cetera) that he had to schedule a second session to attack the question of pilfering from the warehouse of a state institution. And by that time, Oskar had gotten back to them.

  He called from a public phone one midnight. So: if the Potter would go down to the corner, a taxi would pick him up. Do you know what time it is? the Potter asked, relieved to have finally heard from Oskar but anxious, for tactical reasons, not to let him know it. Ignoring the question, Oskar said only that the Potter was to bring his wife with him, yes? Why bring my wife? the Potter was on the verge of demanding, but Oskar had clicked oft the line.

  S
vetochka relished the envious stares of the others in the taxi queue when the first cab that came along refused even-one except them. The little man with shirred skin, the one who had popped up near Nadezhda Alliluyeva's tomb in the Novodevichy Cemetery, was planted behind the wheel. "Still going anywhere?" he asked, and he laughed a madman's laugh. He eventually deposited his passengers before a drab prefabricated apartment house on Krasnaya Street, a stones throw from the planetarium.

  Did every site in Moscow hold memories for the Potter? When Piotr Borisovich discovered that the Potter had never been to a planetarium, he had immediately arranged a visit. Revolutions had been the theme of the day. They had served up on the overhead dome, as if it were a meal, the sky as it looked over Petrograd the night the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in I9I7. Then they projected the sky as it looked over Philadelphia after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, I776, Walking back to the hotel afterward, Piotr Borisovich had started rambling on about American history. Did the Potter know, he had asked, that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of each other, on July 4, I826, fifty years to the day after they signed the Declaration? James Monroe, another signer and the last President to have been forged by the American Revolution, died five years to the day later. In the decades before the Civil War, the veterans of Bunker Hill, Lexington, Valley Forge, gradually died off. In the end, Piotr Borisovich had said, the Americans and the Russians were confronted by the same problem: how to transmit the idealism of the founding revolutionists to the generations that came after them. The Americans, according to Piotr Borisovich, had never solved the problem. And we Russians, the Potter had asked, have we solved it?

  Piotr Borisovich had glanced sideways at the Potter, calculating how frank he dared get with the novator who controlled his life as surely as a puppeteer controls his marionette. It is my opinion, Piotr Borisovich had finally said-he appeared to be avoiding the question, but of course he wasn't-that revolutions don't so much change things as rearrange them. The Potter had accepted the statement for what it was: in the Soviet context, people consecrated friendships by uttering things which, if reported to the authorities, could get them fired or jailed or, occasionally, shot. And the Potter had responded in the same currency. I agree with you completely, he had said in a formal voice he normally reserved for oaths or rites. The people who made our revolution, theirs too. dreamed bigger dreams than we dare dream today.

  The moment had contained something of the aura of an exchange of rings at a marriage ceremony. But then Piotr Borisovich, who had become the son the Potter could never father, had betrayed him. And now he, in turn, would betray Piotr Borisovich. It would end, the Potter could hear Piotr Borisovich saying with that bitter laugh of his that sounded like steam escaping from a partly open valve, in night, in death. And he remembered the line of Walter Whitman's that he had started to quote in reply and Piotr Borisovich, his head cocked quizzically, had completed.

  " '. . . the hands of the sisters Death and Night,' " the Potter had recited.

  Piotr Borisovich had picked up where he left off: " '. . . incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world.' "

  "So," Oskar was saying-he had been waiting in the shadows of the first-floor landing-"we meet again." He reached for Svetochka's hand and bent his lips to the back of it, which made the Potter think that Oskar's accent was Polish after all. "Your husband, dear lady, calls me Oskar, and there is no reason under the sun why you should not do likewise, yes? Meeting you makes my day."

  No one had ever kissed Svetochka's hand before, and it went to her head.

  "The pleasure," she chirped, adopting airs the Potter never knew she was equipped with, "is mutual."

  Using a latchkey attached to a thin gold chain, Oskar let himself into an apartment on the fifth floor. The three of them groped their way along a darkened hallway toward a door. Light seeped from under it. A soft whirring sound came from beyond it. "Let me do the talking," Oskar cautioned as he ushered them into the room.

  A jew wearing an embroidered skullcap and peering through incredibly thick eyeglasses sat bent over a pedal-operated prewar Singer sewing machine. Oskar muttered something in Yiddish, and the young man nodded shyly at the Potter and Svetochka. "You are the fortunate ones," he said in Russian. He stood up and came around in front of his Singer and squinting professionally through his thick lenses, sized them up. "They will look perfectly American when I am through with them," he promised.

  "American!" Svetochka's eyes cocked open.

  The Jew, who was in his early twenties, handed Oskar a pad and a pencil, then produced a measuring tape. "Arms up, if you please," he instructed the Potter, and he began calling out measurements-neck, shoulders, chest, waist, inseam, sleeve. "You wear your skirt too low on your hips," he commented to Svetochka as he moved around her taking measurements. To Oskar the jew said, "What will you do for shoes?"

  "Only give me the sizes, I will provide them."

  Later, outside the building, the Potter took Oskar aside. "What was all that about?" he demanded.

  "So; you will be leaving the country in five days' time under valid American passports, Oskar explained. "It is a crucial part of the operation that you pass in every detail for Americans, yes?" And he went on to explain when, and how, they would get out of Russia.

  "It is that simple?" the Potter asked in amazement.

  "You would he happier crossing the border in the Arctic Circle on snowshoes, with dogs harking in the distance, yes?" Oskar emitted the only laugh the Potter was ever to hear from him. "So: it is my opinion that you have read too many cheap spy novels."

  The next afternoon Svetochka withdrew two hundred rubles from her bank account and spent every last kopeck of it at the ornately decorated Gastronomi No. I on Gorky Street, popularly known as Yeliseyevsky's after the owner of the delicatessen before the revolution. Rubbing elbows with the Gastronomi's regular clients, the wives and daughters of Central Committee members, leaving large tips on every counter that she came to, Svetochka managed to get out of the store with a supply of blinis, a package of salted crackers, a container of thick cream, a tin of Beluga caviar, several fresh Norwegian herrings and two bottles of Polish Bison vodka.

  "What have you done?" the Potter groaned when he saw her purchases set out on the small table in their bedroom.

  "We won't need rubles in Paris," Svetochka announced innocently, "so Svetochka decided to spend as much as she could here before we leave."

  "You idiot! The last thing we want to do is attract attention to ourselves." He collapsed into a wooden chair and stared at the display of luxury that any other time would have set his mouth to watering.

  Crestfallen, Svetochka spread some caviar on a salted cracker, poured some vodka (which she had put outside a window to chill) into a glass and offered them to the Potter.

  "I am not hungry," he grumbled.

  Svetochka planted herself in a chair facing him. "What if we stimulate your appetite?" she asked suggestively, and she slowly, deliberately crossed, and then recrossed, her legs.

  They made love with the light on, something they hadn't done in months.

  Working the Potter's dwarfish body as if she were preparing a field for planting, faking an orgasm (and when she finally had one, exaggerating its intensity), Svetochka caused him to forget, if only for a moment, Piotr Borisovich and Oskar and the pier of old age to which he felt moored. Later, munching on biscuits coated with caviar, washing them down with chilled vodka, Svetochka blew lightly into his ear and whispered, "That is only a sample of what Svetochka will do to her Feliks when we get to Paris."

  Two days before they were scheduled to leave Russia, the Potter decided the time had come to pay a last visit to Piotr Borisovich's father. Not only did he want to see the old man before he left; there was also the practical matter of recovering the package he had carefully stashed away in a secret compartment under the floorboards of his house.

  The day of the visit the Potter sp
ent several hours doing some elementary street work to make sure he wasn't being followed. It had been quite a while since he had practiced tradecraft, but the gestures he had learned as a young man, and had perfected during his four years as rezident in New York, came back fairly easily. He used reflecting surfaces-doors of polished cars, buses-as mirrors to observe what was going on around him in the street without appearing to. He made it a point to be the last one to board a trolley, and the last to leap off before it started again. He lingered in front 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.