Our Woman in Moscow

by Beatriz Williams

  To any ordinary observer, the scene’s perfectly innocent. A tall, gangly man buys ice cream for his family—a wife and three children, two boys and a girl—what is wrong with that? But Lyudmila recognizes this man. It’s HAMPTON, the American defector. HAMPTON now works primarily as an academic, lecturing on foreign relations at Moscow State University, but he’s also frequently employed by the KGB training program. He lives in Moscow with his three children and his wife, who (if Lyudmila’s not mistaken) is shortly to deliver another baby. Lyudmila knows all this not just because it’s her job to know what men like HAMPTON are up to, but because his two older children happen to attend the same school as her own daughter.

  Lyudmila has a daughter, yes. Marina was born at the end of 1940, nine months after Lyudmila discovered her husband in possession of a radio set, with which he regularly listened to broadcasts from the BBC and other Western sources. She was twenty-six years old and deeply in love, but it was her duty to report this subversive activity to the authorities and so she did. She kept the baby, however. She and her mother raised little Marina together, and the three of them were Lyudmila’s whole family until her mother—weakened by wartime deprivation—died five years ago. So now it’s only Lyudmila and Marina.

  When Lyudmila arrives home from work, her head full of the ASCOT case, Marina calls to her from the tiny kitchen, where she’s making dinner. “Coming, pet,” says Lyudmila. She sets down her briefcase and takes off her shoes and her small hat and pads across the living room. Marina looks up from the stove. Her blue eyes are exactly like her father’s, crisp and smiling, surrounded by wet black lashes.

  “How was your day, Mama?” she asks.

  “Good. What are you making?”

  “Solyanka.”

  “Hmm. My favorite soup, is it? Have you been misbehaving at school again?”

  Marina gives her a playful look. “Maybe.”

  They eat the soup together at the little table in the corner of the tiny living room. Marina does her homework and Lyudmila checks it carefully. Of course, there are no mistakes. Dmitri was an electrical engineer when he was sent to the gulag; he had been the smartest boy in school, when they were children. He also had a rebellious streak, which he passed on to his daughter.

  “Mama,” Marina says, once they’re settled on the sofa—Lyudmila reading a KGB training manual, Marina reading Tolstoy for school tomorrow—“how old were you when you met my father?”

  Lyudmila thinks for a moment. “I was twelve years old.”

  “Ah. The same as me.”

  “A little older.”

  “Oh, a few months,” Marina says impatiently.

  She returns to her book and Lyudmila returns to her training manual, but thanks to Marina’s strange question she can’t concentrate. She keeps thinking about Dmitri, and how he used to shield her from some of the other children, who teased her because she was so smart and serious and wore clothes even uglier and shabbier than the other girls. She thought he was just being kind, but when she turned seventeen he told her it was because he fell in love with her that first day at school, when they were both twelve years old.

  The next day, Lyudmila receives word of an unusual request from the American embassy. Mrs. Alexander Digby, who has a history of difficult childbirth, has apparently invited her sister to stay with her in Moscow, during and after the period of her delivery. The sister wishes to formally apply for two visas to enter the Soviet Union, one for herself and one for her husband, to whom she is newly married.

  Lyudmila’s skin prickles as she reads this report. She holds no truck with sentiment, but instinct is a KGB officer’s most valuable asset.

  She picks up her telephone and asks to speak to the head of the American section.

  Ruth

  June 1952

  Rome, Italy

  I’ll say this for Herbert Hudson. When I told him I needed four hundred dollars to fly to Europe and help my sister with her new baby, he didn’t ask any silly questions, like why couldn’t I sail instead, and when would I return. He wrote me a check and wished me bon voyage, then expressed his hope that the agency would remain a going concern in my absence.

  That was Saturday afternoon at his place. By Sunday afternoon at five o’clock, I’m safely belted into my seat on the Pan Am Strato Clipper transatlantic service, scheduled to stop in Boston before continuing across the ocean to Paris and then to Rome. On my lap, the Sunday paper features a photograph of our party at the Palmetto Club on the front of the society page, in which Miss Barbara Kingsley is singled out as “the up-and-coming model in New York these days.” I fed that caption myself to my old pal Joan on the social beat, and it gives me immense satisfaction—it always does—to see my words repeated back to me in sincere black and white.

  Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been inside one of those new double-decker Boeing Stratocruisers, but I can’t recommend them enough. For one thing, they’re fast. We lift off from Idlewild bang on schedule at five p.m., and an hour later we descend from a thin layer of clouds to land in Boston to take on a few more passengers. You hardly even notice the change in altitude because they pressurize the cabin to sea level, and the noise of those four giant Pratt & Whitney propeller engines is no more than a droning annoyance. We land with scarcely a bump and roll to a magnificent stop near the terminal. The seating’s all first class, as it should be, and I paid extra for one of those sleeping berths up front, since we won’t land in Paris until the following afternoon and God knows I need a few decent hours of shut-eye. I settle back in my seat and peer idly out the window at the five passengers preparing to board. There’s a young couple that looks as if they’re headed on their honeymoon, bless them, all pink and bright the way you set off on adventures when you’re just a baby. A couple of dour businessmen in pin-striped suits and fedoras, not entering into the spirit of things at all. A grand dame speaks in an animated way to the head stewardess, telling her exactly how to do her job.

  They find their seats—the stewardess bolts the door. The propellers whine, the airplane trundles back to the runway. It’s nearly seven o’clock in the evening and the sun is a molten pool to the west. I light a cigarette and stare out the window at America as it falls away below me. God only knows when I’ll see it again.

  I haven’t returned to Rome in twelve years, not since I sailed away on that terrible day in June of 1940. The good ship Antigone was packed with desperate Americans and I had to share my second-class berth with a middle-aged artistic type of woman whose summer tour of Italy’s Renaissance treasures had been cut short almost before it began. I remember she was indignant about it all, as if she’d traveled to Italy that spring with no expectation whatsoever that her travels might be interrupted by a thing so inconvenient as war. In fact, she hadn’t wanted to go home at all—she’d kicked up a real fuss, she claimed proudly—but since the Italians were putting all the great paintings in storage and boarding up the museums, there was no point but to capitulate as rapidly as the French had. I found her complaints strangely soothing. She was one of those people who was happy to talk about herself and her troubles to a complete stranger and expected nothing more of you than the occasional sympathetic noise. She said she would go back just as soon as this awful business was over. Sometimes she asked about me, and what I was doing in Italy, and I made up extravagant lies about a love affair with a Russian émigré, a jealous Italian wife, some extremely valuable jewelry, a discreet apartment decorated in beautifully preserved Carracci frescoes, all of which she drank up like punch. When we docked in New York she insisted on exchanging addresses. I’m afraid I never answered her letter.

  Dinner is catered by Maxim’s of Paris and lasts seven courses. I’m able to sleep a good six hours in my berth before being awakened by the happy, muffled cadence of the honeymooners consummating their union in the berth below, the darlings. I put on my robe and grope my way through the dimmed corridor to the ladies’ dressing room. When I return and part the curtains to peer through the litt
le window, the first gray-green streaks of dawn have appeared on the vast dome of sky outside, and I think what a miracle it is that this disappearing sun should reappear so soon, and how clever of man to rush east to meet it. Then I suppose I fall asleep, because I wake to a series of hard bumps, followed by the sensation of falling, like you feel on the downslope of a roller coaster. I sit up in my berth. The heavy drone of the engines continues without interruption. Another hard bump nearly sends me flying. Somebody screams. I hear the stewardesses hurrying down the aisle, hushing everybody with nice calm melodious phrases. One of them attends to us nervous souls in the sleeping area, sticking our little heads out between the curtains, all panicky.

  “Is something the matter?” asks a woman across the aisle with the voice of Brünhilde. I believe it’s the grande dame who boarded in Boston, all bosom and quivering neck—the one who will probably help pass out the life vests and prop up morale with her steadfast refusal to give her heirs the satisfaction of her passing.

  “Just a little bumpy air, ma’am!” chirps the stew. “But I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to return to your seat and fasten the belt.”

  Everybody groans—we’ve paid extra for the berths, damn it, and I imagine those honeymooners were counting on another hour or two before breakfast is served—but we put on our slippers and trudge obediently to our seats.

  The next hour is almost the most harrowing of my life. We pass through a storm, one of those North Atlantic gales, and I imagine the wind will surely rip the engines from the wings—will rip the wings from the fuselage. The man sitting next to me just turns the pages of his newspaper, utterly unconcerned. At one point, when the stews come through to pass out chewing gum and ginger ale—I take both—he asks me if I’m a nervous flier.

  “Not usually, but I’ve never flown through weather like this.”

  “Don’t worry,” he replies. “The pilots are highly trained, and the airplane itself has endured numerous tests in weather far worse than this.”

  He’s what you might call an ordinary man, so very ordinary that you wouldn’t even notice him unless he spoke to you. Five foot eight, dark, neatly trimmed hair, unexceptional suit, unexceptional face—you know the type I mean. He seems to affect a trace of an accent, but I can’t place it and don’t want to be so awkward as to ask. We exchange a few more observations. He asks if I’m flying for business or pleasure, and I tell him pleasure. I say I’m visiting a friend in Rome and turn back to the window. When we land in Paris, he takes his briefcase from the luggage cabinet above our heads, tips his hat, and wishes me a pleasant stay in Italy, and I think no more about him. I don’t think I could even recognize his face if you showed me a picture of it.

  We land in Rome at the most beautiful moment of the evening, just before the sunset. By the time I make my way through immigration and customs and hail a taxi to take me to Orlovsky’s apartment on the Palatine Hill, it’s twilight. He’s expecting me. I sent a telegram on Saturday night, and though I hadn’t received a reply by the time I left for the airport, I didn’t need one. He can’t possibly refuse me.

  All right, so those extravagant lies I told the nice lady on board the Antigone weren’t entirely truthless. I first met Valeri Valierovich Orlovsky only a couple of weeks after arriving in Rome in 1939. He was, in fact, a Russian émigré. He could have styled himself a prince, if he chose to, but in his professional life he was simply Orlovsky. He’d arrived in Rome twenty years earlier, young and penniless, and apprenticed himself to a tailor. Now he was head of one of the great fashion houses in Italy. He had married a beautiful Roman aristocrat who went into rages whenever he got a new mistress and could only be mollified by diamonds of the first water, and his atelier was the most beautiful building I had ever seen. He kept a private studio on the piano nobile, decorated—he said—by those Carracci frescoes I mentioned earlier, although as I knew nothing about frescoes, then or now, I can’t say whether he was telling the truth. They were mesmerizing, however. Whenever we slept together, I would stare for ages at those entwined nude figures that so mimicked our own and thought how erotic Rome was, how you simply couldn’t do this back in New York City—sprawl with your lover on a studio couch in the middle of the afternoon and gaze at some ancient, obscene painting that was part of the wall itself.

  This is the building where I direct the taxi. So far as I know, his wife has neither died nor divorced him (she’s Catholic, and they have seven or eight children together at last count) nor yet murdered him herself, as I would have done. I admit, I feel a little anxious when I ring the bell. Will he meet me? Will he care at all? We parted in such terrible anger, after all.

  But the door opens, and there he stands, a million years old. His hair has turned gray, his jowls now merge seamlessly into his neck. His famous black eyes glitter as he holds out his arms to me. “Bambina!” he says in his curious accent—Italy by way of old St. Petersburg, a residual disdain for definite articles. “I thought you would be married with dozen children by now.”

  I allow myself to be folded into his embrace. “Who says I’m not?”

  “Your figure, bambina. So slim and beautiful still. And your skin, smooth like butter. But come inside. I brought out some good wine for you.”

  It’s like I never left—like the past dozen years never passed. The vestibule is exactly the same, down to the single umbrella and four ivory-handled walking sticks in the wrought-iron stand. The little courtyard holds the same lemon trees—a few feet taller—and the same stone benches I recall. The staircase curves upward in the same spiral, the stone steps are worn down in the same shiny, dark divots. When he opens the familiar thick wooden door to the studio, every stick of furniture sits where I remember it. I stand next to the large, wide couch, which bears the same soft upholstery, and stare yet again at the domed ceiling, where the nymphs still gambol with their satyrs.

  “You haven’t changed a thing.”

  “Why should I? This way I am never old. I am always young man with beautiful young woman. Wine?”

  “Oh, damn,” I murmur.

  “Is that yes or no?”

  “Yes. I was just thinking about old buildings, that’s all. Our fanatical need to keep them exactly as they were. I still live in my parents’ old apartment in New York.”

  “But you have redecorated.”

  “Some of it. Not all.”

  He hands me the wine and nods. “Because if it stays as it was, they are not entirely dead, yes? Your childhood still there in walls.”

  “What I’ve always hated about you, Orlovsky, is that you understood me better than anybody. Next you’ll be telling me you were actually in love with me.” I clink my glass against his. “Cheers.”

  “But I was in love with you. I love each girl I sleep with. I love them with all my heart.” He presses his hand against his chest, where this generous organ resides. “But especially you, bambina.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  “No, is true. You have quality, special quality in your spirit, I cannot find word in English.”

  “Don’t bother. I’m not twenty-two anymore, and I’m not here to be seduced. We can be perfectly honest with each other.”

  “But I am always honest with you, bambina. When did I ever tell lie to you?”

  I make a skeptical noise. “Shall we sit? I don’t imagine we have much time. The princess will want you home.”

  “My wife? No, she is not so particular now.” He half shrugs, half gestures to the couch. “We are both getting old, yes? More kind to each other. Forgiveness. You see, it is relief to let go of passions.”

  I sit not on the couch, but on the armchair next to it—a massive, ancient hulk made of unyielding dark wood upholstered in sumptuous bronze and green tapestry, which contains its own set of memories. I recall a few as I arrange myself, things I haven’t remembered in years, and I wonder at my own youthful abandon. What happened to that gamine blond girl who so gleefully straddled a married man in a chair built for a Medici prince and made
him howl like some kind of Siberian wolf? Does she still exist? Or is age and wisdom a permanent affliction? The wine surprises me. “Oh, you’ve finally gone native, have you?”

  “It seemed patriotic thing to do, in time of war. Then I developed taste for it.” He brushes his hand over the corner of the sofa nearest me and sits like an old man, stiff and deliberate, not altogether confident in his joints. My God, what the war’s done to him. Twelve years, and he’s transformed from a vigorous, distinguished, infinitely charismatic man enjoying a singularly virile middle age to this creaking roué. “You approve? Is some champagne in cellar, I think.”

  “No, I like it.” I fiddle with the stem. I’ve realized it was stupid to come here right off the airplane, so tired and disoriented, not just from the marathon flight but from Rome itself. I lived here less than a year—why did it take such an outsized hold of my imagination? “I saw your fall collection. Marvelous. That tweed dress with the—”

  “Bambina,” he says sadly, “you did not come all the way to Roma to talk to old man about his clothes, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Then tell me what you want. What this besotted old lover can do for you to make amends for his sins.”

  “I need your help.”

  “So I am guessing. What do you need? Some money? Some work for new model?”

  “Nothing so simple, I’m afraid. It’s my sister, Iris. I think she’s in terrible trouble.”

  He frowns. “Your sister? Little brown mouse with luscious tits?”

  “The same.”

  “What kind of trouble? She needs husband? My son Giovanni—”

  “A husband? God, no. The husband’s the trouble.” I set the empty wineglass on the floor and lean toward him, bracing my folded arms on my knees. “I need your help to go to Moscow and rescue her.”