Our Woman in Moscow

by Beatriz Williams

  Let’s return, for just a moment, to those sins Orlovsky mentioned.

  As I said, I have some moral advantage over Orlovsky, which I never intended to use. Moral advantage has its own priceless value, after all, a hefty solid weight in the column of your assets, and if you cash it in, you don’t possess this credit any longer. You’re no longer wealthy in the only currency that human beings really care about.

  On the other hand, isn’t it merciful to allow others a chance to pay their debts?

  When I first met Orlovsky, he made no secret of his hatred for the Bolsheviks. Obviously Russia needed to reform, he said, needed to modernize its archaic ways and make way for the lower classes to escape the terrible poverty that was the legacy of serfdom. But the Bolsheviks were no more than brutes, he went on, whose vision of world Communist revolution was a grotesque and indeed opportunistic twisting of an idealistic political movement to achieve both vengeance on their ideological opponents and power—always power—for themselves. He was absolute on this point, that bolshevism was corruption, was a psychological pathology. I remember how he used to pace naked around the studio—pale and compact and somewhat paunchy—still ravishingly masculine inside his field of bristling energy. He waved his arms and told me stories about neighbor informing on neighbor, about a petty party official he knew who delivered an impassioned speech at dinner about Communist principles—From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, that kind of thing—when everyone at the table knew that he sent his wife to obtain goods at the special shops available only to party officials in favor with Comrade Lenin.

  “Well, why shouldn’t he, if he could?” I said, because I loved to bait Orlovsky—if I wound him up enough, he would turn on me like a tiger. “It’s human nature to want more and better things than your neighbor.”

  “Because of the hypocrisy, don’t you see!” he raged.

  “That’s human nature, too.”

  “They turn citizen against citizen in name of solidarity! Is diabolical! They want everyone to be loyal only to state—not to his mother or father, not to his child, not to his neighbor, not to God. Only state!”

  So I told him to come over here and demonstrate his loyalty to his lover, and he turned on me like a tiger. Oh, it was the most passionate affair I’ve ever had, before or since. We were insatiable together, and the businesslike way he treated me during photo shoots and fitting sessions only made us more concupiscent in private. All through the winter and early spring we carried on, dirty as hell, until one day at the end of March, not long before Iris’s accident, when he rolled off me, lit a cigarette, and informed me in a regretful voice—this after making love twice during the course of a rainy morning!—that his wife had put her foot down and said enough with this new mistress of yours, you’re neglecting your family.

  “So what does that mean?” I said.

  “It means we must go separate ways for some period of time, bambina.”

  “For how long? A week or two?”

  “Longer, my love. After baby is born.”

  I sat up. You see, for a peculiar moment I thought he meant our baby, the one I was about to reveal to him, once I worked up the nerve. I had it all planned out. Dinner with a nice Bordeaux, a lively tussle on the couch, and then the news dropped casually, as a compliment to his virility, just look what you’ve done to me, you wanton beast. And then of course I don’t expect you to leave your wife, that kind of thing, but we’ll get a nice cozy place somewhere, she’ll come to accept the arrangement.

  After all, you told me the marriage is only in name. You told me this.

  “What baby?” I said.

  “I did not tell you? Laura is having baby.” He counted on his fingers. “November, I think?”

  I smacked him across his bottom. “I’m having a baby, you son of a bitch!”

  He was surprised and apologetic. He said it was an unfortunate coincidence, but he had promised his wife he would give me up, and he could not go back on his word to Laura—she would tear his balls off—and anyway theirs was a sacred union ordained by God. I asked what was our union, chopped liver? The idiom perplexed him so he didn’t answer right away. But I didn’t wait for him to puzzle it out. I saw at once that I had been an idiot. I put on my clothes and stormed out, which solved Orlovsky’s problem rather neatly, now that I think about it, and after some dithering—naturally he wrote to me and offered money, naturally I ignored him—I consulted one of the other models and found a reputable doctor to perform an abortion. I know you’ll hate me for that, but the situation seemed impossible to me. Aside from being unsuited to motherhood, aside from the practical difficulties, aside from my irrational, outsized fear of the physical travails, in what possible hell could I give birth inside some shabby Italian hospital at the exact same time the Princess Orlovskaya was giving birth inside the grand villa she and Orlovsky shared in the hills outside of Rome? I scheduled the procedure for the beginning of May, when Iris was going away on her dirty weekend with Digby in Tivoli—adorably, she told me she was headed for some kind of artist holiday—and after that I had no wish to remain in Rome at all, war or no war. I simply couldn’t get out of the city fast enough.

  So you see, in addition to the great moral debt Orlovsky owes me for acting like such a skunk, I know he’s disposed to hate the Soviet Union with a passion peculiar to exiles. In former days, I even suspected that he did what he could to undermine the Communist regime from time to time, by passing along whatever interesting tidbits came his way. I don’t know if this might still be the case—the espionage, I mean—but nobody changes his political views once his hair starts to turn gray. If anything, those views harden into obstinacy in the face of any contrary evidence. It’s almost as if that entire painful episode with Orlovsky—which I refused to think about afterward, so that it took on the quality of a dream and I had to remind myself that it really happened—has perhaps found some purpose after all. The sacrifice of young love and nascent life wasn’t for nothing.

  Orlovsky is more skeptical.

  “To Moscow?” he says, incredulous. “Do you know what you are asking?”

  “Obviously there’s some difficulty—”

  “Difficulty? Bambina cara, is suicide. Do you speak Russian?”

  “Nyet a word.”

  He smacks his forehead. “Gran Dio. What do expect me to do?”

  “Please. I know for certain you’ve got contacts in the Soviet embassy.” (This is a bluff—it’s not impossible he might have a friend on the inside, but who can know for certain?) “I need a tourist visa and maybe a name or two, people who might be able to help me.”

  “You are nuts. Who is going to risk his life for strange American woman and her sister?”

  “Then forget the names. I just need a visa. You can do that much for me, I know you can. You hate the Soviet system. And you owe it to me, Orlovsky. You know you do.”

  He gives me a tormented look and rises from the couch. I think about how he used to pace naked across that floor, raging at the Soviet Union and its barbarous occupation of the human spirit, and then make love to me over the arm of the sofa or the drafting table or the rug, or downstairs in the courtyard against the lemon tree, and it occurs to me that the one place we never had intercourse was a bed. Orlovsky walks to the table without speaking and lifts the wine decanter. Even in his torment, he’s a gentleman. He returns to me and refills my wineglass first, and then his own. Instead of resuming his seat, he continues to the window overlooking the courtyard, and I don’t know, maybe he’s thinking of the past, too. Maybe he’s thinking of all the places he loved me, and how brutally he stopped.

  “I might know somebody,” he says softly.

  Iris

  July 1948

  London

  At first, Iris thought the man had mistaken her for someone else. He was bloated and untidy, with handsome features tucked in a pasty face and a shock of waving dark hair. He stared at her from the corner of the room, where he leaned heav
ily against a bookshelf in the company of two other men and sipped at a glass of clear liquid.

  The party was like every other party. Whenever they moved to a new posting—Zurich, then Ankara, and now London—Iris somehow expected, against all experience, some change of pace and company and mood, to go along with the change of climate and national culture, but diplomats were all the same, and diplomatic parties all followed the same unspoken pattern. Protocol, you might call it, but Iris secretly hated words like protocol. Pattern she understood; pattern occurred in nature. Rhythm, rhyme, repeat—those were all appealing, but protocol? Just an ugly, artificial human invention. Like this party.

  The flat was typical of London. It was both grand and shabby and smelled of coal smoke. The ceiling was the color of tea and mysteriously stained. The wallpaper curled from the corners, and the plasterwork was liable to crumble from some noble design above your head and into your hair—or worse, your drink. Speaking of drinks. Those were all right, at least. They flowed abundantly from bottles of wine and champagne, bottles of scotch and gin and brandy and so on, mixed—if they were mixed at all—in straightforward, no-nonsense combinations. As for food, well. You might be offered tinned mackerel on crackers, or a square of rubber masquerading as cheddar cheese. But it was best not to think too much about what you were eating, Iris had learned. Three years after the end of the war, Great Britain was a cramped, bland, ungenerous land of ration cards and making do.

  Iris glanced down at the tidbit between her index finger and her thumb—some kind of colorless, elderly olive stuffed with pink matter. The old Iris would’ve tossed it into a houseplant, but Iris was now a seasoned diplomatic wife, so she knew the trick of chewing and swallowing food without quite passing it over your tongue. Then she drank champagne to chase down the olive—not bad—and when she looked up again, the man was still watching her.

  She found Sasha in the study, between a bookshelf and a fog of cigarette smoke. She heard his laugh first, deep and abundant, about three-fifths of the way to his usual state of drunkenness at these things. He held his whiskey and his cigarette in the same hand. He was chatting earnestly with two other people—a scarred, silver-haired man named Philip Beauchamp, a friend of hers and Sasha’s; and a handsome blond woman in a snug, rust-colored turtleneck sweater over a long tweed skirt, unfamiliar. The woman sucked on her cigarette and examined Iris as she sidled up to Sasha.

  “There’s a man staring at me in the other room,” she told him.

  “Is there? I don’t blame him.”

  “He looks a little unsavory, if you ask me.”

  “Seedy chap, eh?” said Philip. “Must be Burgess. Dark hair, pudgy sort, probably drunk?”

  “I think so.”

  Philip nodded. “Burgess, all right. If he makes a nuisance of himself, swat him with a newspaper.”

  The woman in the turtleneck laughed. “Don’t listen to him. Burgess won’t make a nuisance of himself with you. Perhaps your husband”—more laughter passed among them—“but women only by consent.”

  Iris laughed, too, though she wasn’t quite in on the joke. The other thing about the diplomatic service, everyone knew one another—not just the outward man, but all his foibles, his eccentricities, his past indiscretions, things that among women would be called gossip—all shared without words, like a secret handshake.

  “Mind you, he’s got a first-rate brain,” said Philip.

  “Oh, no doubt of that,” the woman said. “First-rate. And always good for a drunken escapade, whenever one’s in need of those things.”

  “Charming fellow, if you like his particular brand of charm.”

  “What if you don’t?” Iris asked.

  “Then you’ll hate him,” said the woman. “Oh, I say. Speak of the very devil.”

  Iris swiveled her head just in time to see him walking through the doorway, the man named Burgess, holding a cigarette and a highball brimming with gin in his right hand and a champagne coupe in the left hand. He made straight for the slight gap between Sasha and Iris and slid himself inside it.

  “This is for you, Mrs. Digby,” he said solemnly, handing her the champagne.

  “Oh! Thank you.”

  “Guy Burgess. Foreign Office. Now, you mustn’t hold it against me, but I suspect I see more of your husband than you do.”

  “Not true,” Sasha said. “Though not entirely false, either.”

  “All matters of state, I assure you. You do like champagne, Mrs. Digby?”

  “Very much.”

  “Then you won’t mind if I steal away the old man for just a moment? Matters of state, you see.”

  “Not at all,” Iris said, and it wasn’t entirely a lie.

  After a moment or two of trivial conversation, the blond woman—her name was Fischer, Nedda Fischer—invented some excuse and left Iris and Philip to each other. Iris smiled. Philip smiled back. The effect was ever so slightly sinister, because Philip had encountered some terrible calamity during the war—exactly what, nobody could agree, and Philip himself wasn’t going to talk about it—that had left the right side of his face scarred and pitted and not quite as mobile as the left side. Also, most of the ear was missing.

  It was commonly accepted that Philip’s hair turned white after the injury. Iris found the effect somewhat dazzling, next to his dark eyes and surreal face. They’d met at a party like this one, about a month or so after she and Sasha moved here from Turkey. Sasha had become incapably drunk and Philip had driven them home in his Morris Eight, and it was only later that Iris discovered what a sacrifice this was, because of petrol rationing. She wrote him a thank-you note, and they went out to dinner the following week, Iris with Sasha and Philip with some woman they never saw again. Sasha told her that Philip’s wife had left him right after the war, had simply taken the children and moved to Canada, and was now dragging the divorce interminably through the courts because of Philip’s money. Iris spent weeks calling him Mr. Boh-shahm in her best French accent before he took her aside and confessed that his surname was actually pronounced Beecham, English style, and their mutual embarrassment was so severe that they agreed she should simply call him Philip, and just like that, they became the best of friends.

  Which explained why the smile they shared now was one of mutual relief, because the flinty blond woman had finally left them alone.

  “Has this aunt of yours arrived yet?” he asked her.

  “Not until next week. She’s setting herself up in the Dorchester for a week to show the girls the sights, Tower of London and Buckingham Palace and everything, and then we head down to Dorset, thank God.”

  He made a little bow. “Delighted to be of service.”

  “Honestly, we’re awfully grateful for the cottage. I’m so desperate for some country air, I could scream.”

  “Will your husband be staying long?”

  “The first week, and then only on weekends. He says it’s a good time to catch up on work, when everyone’s off in August.”

  “Digby’s got a reputation for hard work.”

  “It’s very nice for his employers. Less so for his boys and his poor neglected wife.”

  “Ah, how are the boys? Relieved to be out of school at last?”

  “They are absolute terrors at the moment. The woman in the downstairs flat came up this morning and very politely requested that they stop running up and down the corridor, because her chandelier was shaking dangerously. I’m at my wit’s end without a garden.”

  “It’s jolly criminal, this business of stuffing young families into these beastly so-called mansion flats. You’ll recall I did recommend you find a nice detached house down in Surrey or even Kent.”

  “You’ll recall I did my best to convince Sasha to take your advice.”

  They exchanged a look of understanding.

  Iris drank her champagne and continued. “Anyway, all will be forgiven in August, if the three of us can survive that long. Will we see much of you?”

  “That’s all up to you, my dea
r. Generally I go down after Ascot and don’t come up to London again until after Boxing Day. But I wouldn’t dream of intruding on your summer holidays.”

  “You wouldn’t be intruding at all. How far away is the main house?”

  “About a mile, I should think. Enough we shouldn’t be on top of each other.”

  “Oh, but I’d be delighted if we were on top of each other!” Iris said, without thinking. Philip turned a little red and started to laugh, and Iris clapped her hand over her mouth. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Of course you didn’t. It’s part of your charm.”

  Iris looked away and said, “What were the three of you talking about when I came up? You were awfully engrossed in each other.”

  “Oh, just business. These hearings in Washington, you know. The—what do you call it?—the Un-American Activities Committee. Such a typically American name. There’s a woman testifying right now who claims to have run a Soviet spy network in the State Department for years.”

  Iris didn’t flinch, though her blood ran cold. “Soviets in the State Department? That’s nonsense.”

  “It’s all these chaps, you know, bright young things who radicalized at university in the thirties, when the capitalist economies went to pieces. They very fashionably joined the Communist Party as students and wound up recruited by the NKVD, or whatever they called themselves back then, the Soviet intelligence service.”

  “But surely they all shed their illusions as they got older?”

  “Most of them, of course. I daresay the Nazi-Soviet pact did for a great many. Stalin’s thuggery, the famines. But it’s like a religion, you know. To the true fanatic, everything and anything can be twisted around to prove what you believe in.”

  Was it her imagination, or did Philip stare at her with particular focus as he said this? Iris forced a smile, a hopeless shake of the head. “Well, I certainly hope it isn’t true. I hate betrayal of any kind.”