Our Woman in Moscow

by Beatriz Williams

  But Sasha insisted.

  “Are you nuts?” she said. “You must’ve drunk half the gin in London last night, you and your pals. You look like death.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean you’re hungover, that’s all. You need aspirin and coffee, not God. Anyway, it’s almost nine thirty, and you haven’t even shaved yet.”

  He threw down his napkin and rose from the table. “I’ll shave now. Have the boys ready in twenty minutes.”

  “Oh, but Sasha—”

  “We’re going, all right? That’s all there is to it.”

  She watched him storm out of the kitchen and turned to Jack, who sat awestruck in his chair, nibbling a toast soldier while his brother studiously flipped the page of his magazine and dragged his cocoa cup to his mouth.

  “And for this I married an atheist,” she said.

  While Sasha banged around in the bathroom, Iris put on her lilac Sunday dress and forced Kip and Jack into their navy sailor suits, neatly pressed. They left the building at nine fifty-four, leaving just enough time to hurry around the corner under the shelter of an umbrella for the ten o’clock rites at St. Barnabas, the second and longer service of the morning. Privately she thought Sasha was more suited to St. Mary Abbots up Kensington High Street, which was larger and grander and more High Church than low, lots of ceremony and incantation and that kind of thing, but he seemed to prefer the convenience of a smaller neighborhood church.

  The bell tolled gloomily, calling the faithful, or whatever they were. Sasha lengthened his stride and Kip, holding his father’s hand, stepped up his pace—her small determined boy. Iris held tight to Jack’s hand so he didn’t fall behind. When she glanced at Sasha, she saw he’d nicked himself shaving, and the cut was beginning to bleed again. She reached into the pocket of her raincoat for a handkerchief and fished it out just in time to catch the trickle before it landed on Sasha’s shirt collar.

  At the touch of the handkerchief, Sasha flew around, throwing out his elbow. Kip stumbled and nearly fell—Iris cried out and stepped back. She clutched the handkerchief with his blood on it.

  “Mama, what’s wrong?” said Jack.

  Sasha looked at the red stain, then at her. His eyes were bloodshot. Probably he wasn’t even hungover, just still drunk from the night before.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she exclaimed.

  “Nothing. Nervy, I guess. I didn’t hit you, did I?”

  “No.”

  He took the handkerchief and shoved it in his pocket. “I’m sorry,” he said. He picked up the umbrella, which he’d dropped on the pavement, and took her arm with his other hand. St. Barnabas loomed nearby, soot-stained and Gothic. In another minute they reached the steps. They trudged up and through the open door just as the organ prepared to lurch into the processional. Sasha folded the umbrella and turned left, as usual, to walk up the side aisle to the pew where they always sat, without fail. The church only filled at Christmas and Easter, and their seats were still empty. Iris filed in silently behind Sasha—settled the boys—picked up her hymnal.

  The first time they went inside this church, Iris was pleasantly surprised. Instead of the usual gloomy Gothic nave, obscured by pillars and arches, the space was wide open and full of light. Sasha said this was because the weight of the roof was supported entirely by the external buttressing. Well, whatever. Iris loved this openness because it allowed her to glance around as the hymn droned on and observe her fellow worshippers. She recognized some families from Oakwood Court, although she didn’t actually know any of them, except for the woman who lived on the second floor of their own block and had two small children—a boy named Peter, slightly older than Jack, and tiny, dainty Gladys, who was about a year younger. Their last name was Peabody. Mrs. Peabody caught Iris’s glance and smiled back, a little sternly because they were in church and supposed to be singing a hymn.

  Or so Iris thought. But Mrs. Peabody might have looked stern because Jack, at that very second of connection, was slithering under the pew. Iris caught him just in time and discreetly dragged him back upward.

  As she straightened, she saw Sasha take a piece of paper from his hymnal and tuck it into his jacket pocket, singing lustily as he did so—Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire.

  The nick was bleeding again, but this time Iris didn’t try to stop it.

  Since the long-ago day in Tivoli, when Iris confronted Sasha about the envelope in his suitcase and the woman he used to meet in the Borghese gardens, they’d only once discussed the subject. That was in December of 1941, after Pearl Harbor, when the US embassy in Rome was hastily closed on account of war, and they’d moved back to the United States in an almighty hustle. On the promenade deck of the steamship bound for New York one stormy afternoon, staring nervously out to sea for the possibility of German submarines, Iris had looked around to make sure nobody could hear them and said to Sasha, “I suppose this makes your work a little easier, doesn’t it? Now that we’re all fighting on the same side?”

  He’d looked down at her incredulously. “What work?”

  “I mean what you were doing with the envelopes and the . . . the woman you used to meet.”

  He hadn’t answered at once. They were leaning on the railing and little Kip, only a year old, lay snug in his perambulator, bundled up in blankets and fast asleep. Iris remembered how taut Sasha’s face looked. He’d worked without sleep for days, rolling up all the affairs at the embassy, and now he seemed to have fallen out of the habit of sleeping. He would go to bed long after Iris and wake up earlier, and during the night, if Kip stirred, he told Iris to go back to sleep, he would take care of the boy. So he was tired, but he wasn’t exhausted; it was the insomnia of the newly awakened, of somebody too thrilled with the possibilities of life to waste valuable minutes unconscious.

  “Listen,” he’d said at last, “I was wrong to tell you about that. You should just forget we ever had that conversation.”

  Iris was devastated. “I don’t understand. Don’t you trust me anymore?”

  Sasha had turned and gathered her up against his thick, damp overcoat. “Darling, I trust you more than ever. You mean more to me than ever, a thousand times more. It’s why I can’t say a word to you. Not even if it kills me to hold back.”

  “You need to talk to somebody,” she said. “You can’t do this all alone.”

  “Just forget I ever said anything. Forget you ever knew anything. That’s all.”

  Iris had stared at the perambulator, which they’d set next to the rivet-studded steel wall, sheltered from the wind, brakes on. She remembered thinking she should try harder. She remembered thinking this was one of those moments in a marriage, a crossroads, and she was taking the cowardly fork. If she were brave and clever—if she were Ruth, for example—she would insist he spill the beans and then become some kind of partner to him in all this. She would show him that she believed in what he believed—that she would do all she could to help him bring about an end to war and injustice.

  Instead, she’d just said, “What if something goes wrong?”

  Sasha had brushed back her hair and kissed her forehead. “Then you’ll tell Kip his father was trying to make the world a better place, that’s all.”

  And from that day to this one, Iris had put the whole matter out of her head, as something beyond her control. Soon after arriving in Washington, they were dispatched to Zurich, then Turkey, and now London, and Iris had never seen the slightest clue that Sasha was, or was not, anything more than an ambitious member of the US diplomatic corps, working his way up the service through hard work and brilliance.

  Until now.

  The service lasted over an hour, and it seemed even longer. Sasha kept fidgeting and looking at his wristwatch. When at last the congregation was dismissed, Sasha hustled them out of the pew and through the door. Iris heard someone call her name as they descended the steps to the wet pavement outside. Sasha tugged her arm, but she turned aroun
d anyway to see Mrs. Peabody waving at her, little Peter on one side and Gladys the other.

  But Sasha was already hurrying them up Addison Road. His hand still gripped the sleeve of her raincoat. As soon as they turned the corner into Oakwood Court, she shrugged it off.

  “What on earth was that about? Why couldn’t we stop?”

  “For God’s sake, I don’t have time to dither about after church.” He didn’t pause; if anything, he lengthened his stride as they approached number 10 on the right. Despite the drizzle, he hadn’t put up the umbrella. It poked out from under his elbow as he struggled to light a cigarette.

  She tagged along behind, Kip on one hand and Jack on the other, calling over his shoulder, “But they’re our neighbors!”

  “We’ve got friends enough already.”

  “You’ve got friends! I haven’t got anybody. Just women you know. Women like that blond number last night.”

  Sasha spun around. He wore a trench coat, dark with rain, and his wet fedora. He was terribly pale and thin, she realized, as gaunt as a cadaver. “What the devil do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing. I just—nothing, of course.”

  He tried again to light the cigarette, covering the match with his hand. From the corner of his mouth, he said, “You have no idea, Iris. No idea.”

  “Of course I don’t. You don’t tell me a thing. You come and go and sneak notes out of hymnals—”

  “What’s that?”

  “I saw you. I saw you take that note out of the—” She glanced down at Jack, who dangled from her hand and jumped in an adjacent puddle. Kip had already wandered away to stand against the wall of the building, affecting an air of utter boredom, hands stuffed in the pockets of his suit like a sailor on leave whose trousers had been sliced off at the knee.

  Sasha lit the cigarette at last and blew out a large cloud of smoke into the damp air. He stared at the treetops over the walls of the nearby park. “Iris, go inside. Take the boys and go inside out of the rain, all right? I’ll be home in a bit.”

  “Home in a bit? Where are you going?”

  He handed her the umbrella. “Out.”

  Iris opened her mouth to demand where, but he’d already turned to hurry up the pavement toward Abbotsbury Road, leaving her standing by the entrance to the building with an umbrella in one hand and Jack in the other.

  With Mrs. Betts gone, their footsteps made lonely, clattering sounds on the parquet floor of the apartment. Iris made the boys take off their shoes and raincoats. Jack ran off down the long hallway to his room, shouting something about an airplane, while Kip wandered into the living room and slumped on the sofa, where he picked up a battered paperback from between the cushions. The light was dim and gray, not July at all. Iris wandered to the window overlooking the entrance to the block, where the Peabodys were coming up the sidewalk. (The pavement, she reminded herself.) Mrs. Peabody’s arm linked through Mr. Peabody’s elbow, and a child skipped from each of their outside hands. Mr. Peabody’s damp, pink face turned toward his wife; he seemed to be laughing at something she’d said.

  Well, Sasha had warned her, hadn’t he? He’d told her at the beginning that the life of a diplomat wasn’t an easy one, that you would move to one city and make a certain set of friends, and then a few years later you moved a few hundred or a few thousand miles away and had to start all over again, and how could anybody form a real friendship that way?

  It doesn’t matter, she’d told him. I’ll have you. You’re all I need.

  Sasha returned just before dinner came out of the oven, a beef roast that would be made into soup, into hash, into sandwiches as the week went on, because meat was still rationed here in England, almost three years after the war had ended. His face was weary and he smelled of whiskey. After dinner he helped Iris bathe the boys and put them to bed. He read one of the railway stories, the one where Henry stops in a tunnel, speaking in all his funny voices.

  Once the boys were tucked in, he took a long bath and then disappeared into his study until almost midnight. Iris was still awake in bed, reading a book. She didn’t say anything when he passed by, into the dressing room and the bathroom, brushing his teeth and so on. When he climbed into bed, one leg and then the other, she set the book on the nightstand and said, “Is it about these hearings? In Washington?”

  “Following the news from America, are you?”

  “Somebody mentioned it at the party last night.”

  He was holding something in his hand, which he gave to her. “This fellow, maybe?”

  It was a handkerchief, crumpled, bloodied in one corner—the one Iris gave him to stop the blood on his neck. Iris stared at it, bemused, until she noticed the monogram in the corner, plain black letters, pBh.

  “Oh, it’s Philip’s! How funny. I must have put it in my coat pocket last night.”

  “And what were you weeping about with Philip?”

  Iris set the handkerchief on top of the book on her nightstand. “I don’t remember. Some silly thing. I might have had something in my eye.”

  “You don’t need to lie to me, Iris. I’m not going to play the jealous husband, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Oh, Sasha. You can’t be—Philip? He’s very dear, he’s awfully kind to me—”

  “I’m sure he is. He’s giving you a cottage, isn’t he?”

  “And you just said you weren’t going to play the jealous husband. Anyway, the cottage is for us—the entire family, you included. And Aunt Vivian and the girls.”

  He made a little groan. “I’d forgotten about Vivian.”

  “You’ll love her. You need to get away from London, Sasha, you really do. All of this—the war’s over, you should be settled now, you should be happy in your work. Put all the past behind you.”

  He started to say something and changed his mind. He lay on his back, staring straight up at the ceiling—a little like Kip. Iris turned on her side and put her hand on his chest.

  “You didn’t answer my questions about the hearings.”

  “Don’t worry yourself about that.”

  “But you’re worried—”

  “Just shut up about it, all right? There’s nothing you can do.”

  “Do about what? Sasha, you have to tell me. If something happens to you—”

  “If something happens to me, you clam up. Do you hear me? You don’t know a thing. Nothing ever happened, you never noticed anything, saw anything, you’re just the nice dumb housewife they think you are.”

  Iris sat up. “How dare you. How dare you. If I am—if I am just a housewife—it’s because of you, because I’ve given up everything I dreamed of doing, all for your sake. Ruth was right—”

  Sasha sat up too and clamped his hand over her mouth. “Christ, shut up! The neighbors!”

  “I don’t care!” She snatched his palm away, but when she spoke again, she whispered. “I haven’t drawn a single thing since Jack was born. Not a sketch or a painting. When was the last time I spent the afternoon in a museum? By myself, I mean, actually looking at what’s on the walls instead of chasing after children? I’ve given it all up for you and the boys.”

  “You’re the one who wanted another baby.”

  Iris felt as if he’d struck her between the ribs. For a moment, she couldn’t even breathe.

  “Iris, I’m sorry—”

  “Never mind. You know what? Never mind. Go ahead and—and do your cloak-and-dagger act, if it makes you happy. Go ruin yourself for a lost cause.” She fell back on the pillow and rolled on her side, away from her husband. “I’ll just be home raising our sons.”

  “It’s not a lost cause. It’s the most important cause in the world.”

  Iris closed her eyes.

  “Someone’s got to do this. You don’t understand—I’m working to end war, end all this terrible injustice; look what capitalism’s bought us, the means to destroy the whole world! I want to bring about a revolution that—”

  “You want to feel important, that’s all. It doe
sn’t matter how. Communism is just what fell in your lap at the right moment. It might just as easily have been—I don’t know, Hinduism.”

  “If you really think that, you’re an idiot.”

  Iris sat up again and pointed to the door. “Go. Go sleep on the sofa.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake—”

  “Go.”

  Sasha stared at her in the light from the lamp on her nightstand. For an instant, she wavered. His blue eyes were wide and hurt, his hair askew. He looked more like a wounded animal than an angry husband. For once, he smelled of nothing but soap and toothpaste and warm, scrubbed skin. He was clean and perfect—uncorrupted. She heard the words again in her head—You’re an idiot—yet even in the full vortex of fury, she saw his beautiful face and the small, beloved fragments of his beautiful soul—her Sasha—and thought, Just apologize, just say you’re sorry, God knows I’ll take you back, I’ll always take you back.

  But Sasha couldn’t hear Iris’s thoughts, or he didn’t care. He climbed out of bed, took his pillow and the spare blanket folded at the end, and walked out of the bedroom.

  Sasha always locked his study door when he was out, but Iris knew where he kept the key—behind the frame of the mirror above the mantel in the dining room.

  The next morning, after Sasha left for work, Iris unlocked the study door and slipped inside. Her husband was not an immaculate man. There was always something slightly askew about his dress, even if you couldn’t quite pinpoint what was out of order, and his study was no different. Except, perhaps, that you could pinpoint the mess, because it lay all around you—the stacks of unfiled papers, the books shoved in odd corners of the bookshelves, the broken lampshade sitting upside-down next to the lamp. The morning sunshine speared through the window and struck a framed map that hung off-kilter on the opposite wall. Mrs. Betts was only allowed to clean the room while Sasha was inside it. He liked his privacy, he always said, and until now, Iris was happy to let him enjoy it. Wasn’t it better not to know?