Our Woman in Moscow

by Beatriz Williams

  Iris loved the street where Sasha lived. It was one of those quiet, ancient side streets you sometimes found in Rome, tucked around the corner from some grand boulevard packed with shops and achingly fashionable shoppers. She loved the damp, sleepy air and the trees and especially the buildings, tall and pale and curiously austere, so that you couldn’t help but imagine what rich woods and frescoed walls existed inside. The first time Sasha unlocked the heavy, iron-barred door and ushered Iris into the vestibule and the courtyard beyond it, she thought she had never been so enchanted. She told Sasha it was like a secret garden, a fairy palace. In the late evening when they returned from Tivoli, she and Sasha had tangled together in the shadows beneath an orange tree. Iris had fallen asleep and Sasha woke her sometime during the night to carry her upstairs. The memory hurt her ribs. She actually pressed her hand there, at the intersection of bone, as she pressed the button next to his name on the brass plate. She waited for a minute before she pressed it again, although she knew he wasn’t there. Of course not. He’d be working at the embassy, working through the night, sleeping on the sofa. Nobody in the entire consulate worked harder than Sasha Digby, Harry told them. This used to make her so proud.

  She rang the bell a third time and looked up and down the street. Night had arrived, everything was dark. A streetlamp gleamed against the wet cobblestones. Iris opened her pocketbook and pulled out one of the pages she’d rescued yesterday, a sketch of the façade of the Pantheon, ripped at a careless diagonal across the top. She turned it over and wrote a note to Sasha, which she folded twice into a small square and slipped into the letterbox.

  When she returned home, Harry had gone, and Ruth was cleaning the dishes in her kimono. Iris stood in the kitchen doorway and said, “So what did you tell Harry?”

  A cigarette dangled from the corner of Ruth’s mouth. She didn’t trouble to remove it, or even to turn in Iris’s direction. “I’m not a snitch, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said, and those were the last words either of them spoke to each other for three whole days.

  The next day, Ruth started packing up the apartment.

  She dragged the steamer trunks from their duty as sofa tables and opened them up. She sorted through clothes and books—discarded the unwanted into a pile she took to the convent around the corner. Everything that didn’t belong exclusively to Iris got packed or given away. Harry took all the wine and gin and mixers; the Sisters of the Sacred Heart took all the rest. Ruth was ruthless. She was a virago of organization. While Iris reclined on the sofa—which, like the rest of the furniture, came with the apartment—and leafed through a magazine, Ruth marched from cupboard to drawer, kitchen to bathroom, and emptied every sign of their habitation.

  The day after that, she cleaned.

  Binding her head in a matronly scarf, Ruth put on her oldest dress and set to work with mop and brush and buckets full of soapy water. Iris watched her in amazement. Because they weren’t talking to each other, she couldn’t ask what had brought on this fit of domesticity. Was Ruth trying to scour the floorboards or something more elusive? All this ferocious hygiene, what did it mean? Ruth scrubbed silently on. The apartment took on the smell of lemons and vinegar. The radio scratched away on its shelf. At some point, Ruth stopped midstroke and lifted her head to listen. Iris folded up the magazine and walked to the radio, where she turned up the volume dial. A familiar Italian voice shouted into the bare, acidic stillness of the living room. Every time it paused for breath, some crowd roared to fill the void. To Iris’s ears, it was a joyless roar. You’d have thought those Fascists would be ecstatic to go to war against the plutocrats, but they weren’t. Something was missing. It was the roar of patriotic duty, not fervor. Iris thought of the two men in black shirts the other day and wondered if their voices made up some tiny part of that noise. She turned to the window and shut it, even though they couldn’t actually hear the crowd from here. Mussolini would be speaking from a balcony in the Palazzo Venezia, which was over a mile away and thankfully out of earshot.

  The next day, Iris woke to the sound of Ruth rattling around the kitchen cabinets. She opened the shutters to the gray, warm sky, but the morning air didn’t revive her. The same sick despair clung to the organs in her middle. The same ache inside her chest.

  Iris put on her dressing gown and wandered into the living room. She checked the front door—no folded note, no envelope pushed under the crack. Of course not. She turned her head to hear the noise from the open doorway to the kitchen, where Ruth seemed to be making coffee, by the clink of the percolator lid.

  All around her, the apartment was bare. Ruth’s steamer trunk sat in the middle of the floor. Iris’s trunk sat against the wall next to her room, waiting to be filled. Today was the eleventh of June, and the SS Antigone departed from the pier in Civitavecchia at noon tomorrow.

  Iris walked to the kitchen and stopped in the doorway. Ruth was slicing bread for toast and didn’t turn. The percolator made comforting noises nearby.

  “Well?” said Ruth. “Out with it.”

  “I was wondering if anyone’s called for me. Any letters or notes or anything.”

  Ruth laid down the knife and turned her head. Her face was unexpectedly soft and full of sympathy.

  “I’m sorry, pumpkin. Not that I know of.”

  Iris nodded and walked toward her bedroom. She took hold of the handle of the steamer trunk and dragged it inside. She made her bed neatly and didn’t think about the April day when she slept with a man for the first time on this bed and decided she was in love. She figured it was best not to think about these things as you packed your clothes and shoes and your dear little objects, preparing to leave that man a few thousand miles behind you. There would be other men. Ruth seemed to flit from beau to beau without any travails of the heart. Iris folded her underthings into a bundle and imagined having sexual intercourse with a man who was not Sasha Digby. But this man continued stubbornly to be long and lanky, and his gold hair kept falling in his face as he made love to her. At least that face was blank. No eyes, no nose or mouth or chin—just a peculiar, blurred void that no amount of determined imagination could sketch in.

  Harry took them out for a farewell dinner at their favorite restaurant. Ruth had insisted; Iris said she would rather not, but since she couldn’t come up with a plausible excuse, other than fatigue—the truth was, they had eaten here with Sasha once—off they went in their best dresses.

  Harry wasn’t the most observant of men, and to be fair he’d been deeply distracted those past weeks, so it wasn’t until dessert that he noticed Iris hadn’t been saying much.

  “Oh, our pumpkin’s got the blues, that’s all,” Ruth said.

  “Aw, poor Iris. You’ll forget all about the bastard when you get home, believe me.”

  Iris looked at Ruth. Ruth shrugged her shoulders.

  “Don’t be silly,” Iris said. “I’m just tired, that’s all. I’ve been packing all day. I’ve forgotten about him already.”

  Harry raised his glass. “Good for you. Take my advice, go home and find a nice American kid to fall in love with. You can’t trust these Italians anyway. Right, Ruthie?”

  Ruth clinked her class against Harry’s. “Don’t I know it.”

  “Too bad neither of you hit it off with Digby,” said Harry, lighting a cigarette. “I tried to lure him along tonight. No use.”

  “Oh? What did he say?” Iris asked.

  “Too busy, he said. Poor bastard’s been working night and day. Catches a few winks on the sofa and he’s back at his desk. I don’t know what they’ve got him doing, but it’s just about killing him.”

  On the way home, Iris said to Ruth, “So you told Harry I was seeing some Italian fellow?”

  “I didn’t say one way or another. I just let him reach his own conclusions. I’m no snitch, but I’m not a liar, either.”

  Iris walked silently. Ruth rummaged in her pocketbook and lit a cigarette.

  “Pumpkin, you’re taking this too hard. He’s a louse
, all right? A dog in a manger. Do like Harry says. Find some nice, simple American kid when we get home. Some fellow who really appreciates you. I’ll help you. I’ve got a good eye.”

  “Sure you do. A good eye for husbands, maybe.”

  “So what if I do? Let the other woman do all the work of breaking him to saddle, that’s what I say. Picking his socks up off the floor. We’ll go back to New York, we’ll set up a household of our own, just you and me, and take our men on the side with a spoonful of whipped cream. What do you say to that?”

  “Sounds like a swell idea,” said Iris.

  Their heels went clickety-clack on the sidewalk, and the old buildings slid by, smeared by centuries of soot and dirt. A clear, bright moon rose above the city. Iris tried to paste it all in her memory, her last night in Rome, but nothing stuck. The magic was gone. Like Iris, the streets were quiet with foreboding.

  Ruth ordered a taxi for nine o’clock in the morning to take them to Civitavecchia, twenty miles up the coast where the ferries and steamships docked. Iris remembered going to see Tosca at the Teatro Reale dell’Opera last winter, and how the chief of police, when he writes out the safe passage for Tosca and her lover, asks if she plans to leave Rome from Civitavecchia, and Tosca replies hopelessly, Sì, and you can tell by the uneasy music that something’s wrong—they’ll never reach Civitavecchia. That was how Iris felt right now. Except Ruth wasn’t some wicked police chief. Ruth was her sister and confidante, the person she trusted most in the world, especially now. Ruth would take her to safety. Together with Ruth, she’d find a way forward.

  By ten minutes after nine, the taxi hadn’t come. Ruth thought he might be outside and hadn’t troubled to ring the bell. “You telephone the taxi company,” she said to Iris, exasperated, “I’ll go downstairs and see if I can flag him down.”

  Iris picked up the telephone and called the taxi company. In her broken Italian, she tried to explain the problem, and what she understood was that they dispatched the taxi, signorina, and it wasn’t their fault if he hadn’t arrived yet. Maybe she should look outside?

  Iris hung up the telephone and stared at the bare walls, the empty apartment, the closed shutters, the steamer trunks by the door. How was it possible that she was leaving, that these walls that had rung with joy and merriment were now like a tomb? Ah, well. That was life. You won some, you lost some. You caught some glimpse of the sublime just before you fell into the mire.

  The telephone rang.

  Iris jumped.

  The taxi company, she thought. She picked up the receiver and said, Pronto.

  “Iris? Is that you?”

  “Sasha?”

  “Thank God. Thank God.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “What’s the matter? Christ. I just came home to bathe and change, and there’s this note from you. My God, why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I did.”

  “Don’t you know I’ve been going crazy, wondering what happened with us? Why you never answered me or telephoned back or anything?”

  “Answered what?”

  “My letters! My notes! I called twice a day. I left message after message. Just ask Ruth. And now this? The day you’re leaving? By the way, Sasha, I’m going to have your baby? Why not just rip my heart out of my chest and finish the job?”

  Iris whispered, “I don’t understand. I never received anything. I never knew.”

  The telephone line crackled static in her ear. She swiveled around to face the door, which Ruth had left ajar.

  “Goddamn,” Sasha said slowly. “The bitch.”

  “No. No. It’s some mistake.”

  “Iris, don’t go. Please. Just stay where you are.”

  “I can’t. The steamship—twelve o’clock—”

  “Stay where you are! For God’s sake! Just trust me, won’t you? I’ll be there in twenty minutes!”

  “Sasha—”

  The line clicked and went dead. Iris held the receiver to her ear anyway. Maybe it would come back to life again—maybe some wise, impartial operator’s voice would explain everything, like in the movies.

  She heard the quick thump of footsteps climbing the stairs. The door flung open. Ruth said, “Thank God, he’s here at last. Iris, could you . . .”

  From the dead receiver came a buzzing noise. Iris set it carefully in the cradle. Ruth stood in the doorway, flexing her fingers against her crisp linen trousers. A couple of lines appeared across her forehead.

  “I just want to know whether you saved the letters,” Iris said. “Did you save his letters or did you throw them away?”

  “Look, it was for your own good. You’re a bunny, Iris, a baby bunny. You don’t know from anything. No idea how it is with men like that. He’s too complicated for you. He’ll take over your life, if he doesn’t break your heart first. He’ll run around on you, believe me, you can’t trust him, he’ll—”

  “Just tell me whether you saved the goddamn letters.”

  Ruth whistled the air out of her lungs and threw up her hands. She kicked the steamer trunk next to her—it happened to be hers—and crouched down to open it with the little key from her pocket. Iris watched her rummage around. It was like watching an actress in a film, or someone in a dream. Her heart smacked against her ribs. She couldn’t even feel her fingers, they were so cold.

  Ruth rose at last. Her right hand clutched a packet of envelopes. “He’s a narcissist,” she said.

  “Takes one to know one.”

  “Not true. I’ve slept with one or two, that’s how I recognize it.”

  “Give me the letters.”

  “Iris, you’re such a sweetheart. You’re so sweet and gentle. He’s going to crush you. He’s going to gobble up all that sweetness to try and make himself whole, and it’s not going to work, and he’ll blame you for it and make you miserable. I couldn’t let him do it.”

  “Give me the letters.”

  Ruth held out her hand. “You’ll note they’re still sealed.”

  “How honorable of you.”

  “I was going to give them to you later. Once you were cured.”

  Iris put the letters in her pocket. “I should have known. I should have figured it out. I should’ve had the nerve to call him up myself. I should’ve had the guts to march right up to him and ask him what was going on. But I didn’t. You know why?”

  “Because you trusted me. You never imagined in a million years I would play such a mean, dirty trick on you.”

  “So I ask you, Ruth. Who’s worse, you or him? Who’s really using me to fill some hole inside?”

  Ruth blinked and turned around to close and lock the lid of the steamer trunk. She wore a white linen shirt tucked into the beige linen trousers. A silk scarf secured her hair in a ponytail. She looked like she’d just stepped out of a fashion shoot for a travel magazine. When she straightened and turned bravely back to Iris, only her pink eyes gave her away.

  “So are you coming with me, or not?”

  “I’m going to have a baby,” Iris told her.

  “You don’t say.”

  Iris folded her arms across her chest. Ruth glanced to the shuttered window and back to Iris, and it reminded her of the time Sasha stood in her bedroom, not quite certain of her, and the same confidence she felt then returned to her now.

  “You’re making a mistake,” Ruth said. “You can still come home with me. We’ll find a way. You and me, Iris. You still have a chance.”

  “Actually, I like my chances here.”

  “Then you really are an idiot.” Ruth picked up her pocketbook and slung it over her shoulder. “So long, then.”

  “So long.”

  Ruth dragged her steamer trunk into the hallway and shut the door. Iris heard her call for the taxi driver—bark instructions—bang bang bang as the poor trunk made its way to the courtyard. Then nothing, not even the roar of an engine. Just the smell of vinegar and wood, the smell of an empty apartment.

  Iris sat down on th
e lid of her trunk and waited for Sasha to arrive.

  Two

  I am really two people. I am a private person and a political person.

  Of course, if there is a conflict, the political person comes first.

  —Kim Philby

  Lyudmila

  June 1952

  Moscow

  Sometimes it seems to Lyudmila that her work is futile. No matter how many traitors she unmasks, no matter how many acts of subversion, no matter how many instances of heresy to the great faith, a hundred more spring to life before her eyes. There’s always some note out of tune in this Soviet chorus, some person who puts his own self-interest ahead of the interest of the state. Sometimes it’s the very person who sings the best and the loudest.

  Trust no one.

  Early on in her work—the beginning, really—she learned to strip away all sentiment from her judgment. When is it possible to feel and to think at the same time? Never. So as Lyudmila pursued all possible candidates for the ASCOT leak over the past year, she didn’t regard past service to the Soviet Union, faithful or not; nor did she consult her opinion of the man’s character. There are only facts—did he have access to the information suspected to have been leaked? Did he have the opportunity and the means to communicate it? But until recently, there were not enough facts to guide her. No further ASCOT communications were intercepted. The agent seemed to have gone quiet.

  Now she sits in her small, windowless office in Moscow Centre and contemplates a photograph. It was taken a year ago in Gorky Park, where a local team had intercepted a bundle of photographs and coded messages during a random search of an ice cream vendor. Under interrogation, the vendor admitted to operating a postbox for an agent whose name and identity he didn’t know. So the KGB sent a surveillance team. They had taken hundreds of photographs that yielded nothing useful, so the photographs had been filed away. Lyudmila had discovered their existence almost by accident, a conversation in the corridor with a secretary in the Moscow counterintelligence section.