“It’s despicable,” Sigmund had said. He read aloud from the paper. “‘This description of the atom bomb, destined for delivery to the Soviet Union, was typed up by the defendant Ethel Rosenberg that afternoon at her apartment at Ten Monroe Street. Just so had she, on countless other occasions, sat at that typewriter and struck the keys, blow by blow, against her own country in the interests of the Soviets.’” He shook his head and the paper rustled. “So they say Ethel Rosenberg does the typing, but maybe it was the brother’s wife who did the typing, no? She was a trained typist, you know,” he said. “A man protects his wife over his sister? Well, it’s not right.”
His mother had looked terrified. “You don’t have a sister,” she said, and Sigmund had laughed.
“And you don’t type,” he said.
“But how could this happen, Sigmund? How could this happen here?”
“How long have you been living here, Tatiana?” Sigmund snorted. “Where else? This country rubs your face in its own manure. It makes you eat your heart out.”
Dennis had pictured his father pulling his chair up to the table, a fork in one hand, a knife in the other, leaning in to eat his own beating, bloody heart.
The CIA, the FBI, what was the goddamned difference? Only that now Dennis worked with folks at the CIA, he had cocktails on the Hill with several contacts there. Not three years ago when his parents had been visiting around Thanksgiving, he’d stopped on the way home from the office at Common Ground, a leftist bookstore he liked to browse in, just below Dupont, and an agent had followed him out. An agent! He’d known instantly—he would always be able to recognize them. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, he’d thought when he heard the footsteps. He wished he’d bought something incredibly communistic that he could have flashed, not some shit copy of Rolling Stone with Linda Ronstadt on the cover. He had wanted to turn around and scream, I am one of you, you morons. I too am a government tool. See? He could have flashed his laminated ID.
But was he? Was Len? He managed to think of his old roommate as someone outside the Agency. Len was family, for God’s sake. He was Skatesville and road trips and college and Annie and good fucking weed and Sissy Ford. He knew all about Gary’s life, but what did Gary Jensen have on him? Because there very well might have been a file on Dennis. Any number of people had files now, open or not, and with his father’s connections to the Communist Party, however broken, they had to have something open on him. Gary had asked gentle questions about his past—Where are you from? Where did you meet your wife? Len says your mother is Russian—normal, everyday questions that men might ask one another while eating steamers on the bay or at a Hill happy hour, but those questions cast in the buzzing fluorescence of government light could most certainly take on a different glow. Everything Dennis knew about Gary—his infidelities, his weakness for beer, his daughter’s battle for her sanity—he knew only as it was happening, as if Gary lived merely in the present.
It was strange that his initial response was to rebel. Because in the next moment, he felt an electric surge of fear. Though Dennis knew this agent could very well have come from Gary, he also knew that a file of any kind would have come from his own set of mistakes, such as that first state dinner in January of 1964. He had been an idiot that night, at the Hotel Moskva in Moscow, and while one wouldn’t call it a mistake per se, he certainly could have handled himself better, as he’d learned since.
The myth was that the hotel was built not on cement and steel, but on fear; it was said that Stalin approved two architectural plans and no one dared correct him. That cold night Dennis had tried to feel the fear travel through him, but he had felt nothing. Despite the rather grim facade, something was charming about the mismatched towers, the tilted windows, and the view of the Kremlin from the fifteenth-floor café. It being one of the few Russian buildings outside of the Kremlin that did not utterly depress Dennis; he was taken in by the rich history of artists and writers and politicians who had stayed there. He was still so easily taken in by bohemia! Sometimes, as if to harken back to the man he almost once was, he grew a mustache and let his hair go below his ears. Just to prove it.
Leonid Orlov, the mission’s deputy chief, was hosting a dinner during a round of negotiations. The deals were done in cash, and so much was at stake for both parties that Dennis sometimes found it mind-boggling. Though Viktor was buying for the state and Dennis was selling, a fairly simple transaction, it often felt as if they were no longer acting as men, but as countries. But during these talks the effect of such gravity was often levity. It was all a game of Risk, the present juxtaposed over the past: the ghosts of Stalin and Truman, their hands hovering above a single button, dividing nations up like black cake. The buttons were still there; would Brezhnev and Carter use them? What is loyalty? Dennis often thought. Which is more yours—your mother’s country or your children’s?
This question, had he ever asked it aloud, would explain why someone might revoke his security clearance, or why he was being followed leaving that lefty bookstore. He was shaking as he’d unlocked the car door. But even then he’d known he had most certainly never uttered aloud anything against something as sacrosanct as nationhood, and so he wondered, Would that agent have come after anyone in that store? Or had he followed him from the office? Dennis had tried to relax. Perhaps Len had sent him as a joke, though this was unlikely; Dennis didn’t think a lot of practical gags were happening down at CIA headquarters. Or had Gary sent this agent as a warning? Yes, my mother is from St. Petersburg, Dennis had answered him. The Chesapeake sky was that clear blue of early June, before it faded into summer-white. Would this be enough to call out the dogs? But my uncle is still there, in Moscow. He’s a musician, Dennis had said, tightening the lanyard. The sun was so perfect on his face. I don’t remember what he plays, Dennis had answered. The drawbridge was up and a huge yacht was passing through. How unusual, Gary had said. How interesting that you never played music then, what with it being in your family, I mean. Dennis had shaken his head. My mother did make me play the clarinet, he had said, laughing. But it’s true, I was absolutely no good. I did not get the musician gene, this is the truth.
In his car on the way home from the bookstore, Dennis had looked in the rearview and seen that the agent was now following him in a car. He drove along Connecticut, under the speed limit, and in trying to quell his nerves he thought of his mother and her fear when the FBI came to their neighborhood, when the Rosenberg boys were there. She locked the doors and closed the curtains. FBI, she said, her front teeth biting her lower lip. It was so village, Dennis thought as he drove toward home, this peasant fear of authority he always despised about his mother. As they walked down the street, it was always, say hello to the post office clerk, Dennis! Now shake the banker’s hand, Dennis. She did this when he was sixteen! Her deference to bureaucracy drove him mad.
Was someone trying to terrify his mother, the foreigner? I will not be my mother, Dennis thought. Had someone known his parents were visiting then? He thought of his father—talking in that angry circle with his friends. Someone always banged a fist on the kitchen table, covered in oilcloth, and Dennis remembered the teapot jumping on the stove. They argued and railed long after he’d gone to sleep, and the sounds of those deep, enraged voices was somehow more comfortable than his parents’ silence after dark, the apartment closed, quiet but for the tick of his mother’s knitting needles or the swish of his father’s newspapers as he aggressively turned the large pages. The sound of argument might have been curious comfort, but as he was being followed, Dennis wondered, What had those men been talking about anyway? Had those heated debates been political quarrels or some sort of schemes? Who was this agent here to frighten?
Tatiana had stepped out of the front door to meet Dennis as he pulled into the drive. The black government car had idled on the street, but no one got out, and Dennis saw her note the car, and he knew it was coming: the Russianness! His mother and her Russian fears.
But this time the fe
ar—that foreboding housed even in those Russian buildings—did not seem to come. Tatiana had raised her head unafraid, and her eyes had met Dennis’s. After just an instant she turned, guiding the storm door gently closed behind her. Dennis carried his briefcase, his Common Ground book bag, logo turned outward for anyone to observe, up the stairs and into the house. He looked out the squares of warped glass and breathed out as he watched the car drive away.
At that first dinner in Moscow, the men had insisted on Dennis’s joining them in some heavy drinking. This too was not unusual; he had been warned, but he’d already known the importance of drinking if only from the nights his mother’s boss, Boris, had come back from a trip to St. Petersburg, where they were always trying to get their music played by Soviet orchestras. Boris had come with a hard, gray suitcase filled with vodka and little jars of caviar, and those nights the whole family ate blini topped with sour cream and caviar, and Boris would scream, Do dna, bottoms up, before each of the many shots he knocked back at the wobbly kitchen table, Leopold Stokowski’s Fantasia recordings playing on the record player. Boris always drank until he was red with rage or until he melted into a puddle of his own tears. Dennis’s father never joined in; his idea of drinking was only celebration—two short glasses of peppermint schnapps—and so it wasn’t until college that Dennis had learned to drink at all, with considerable help from Len, whose childhood in Savannah and summers at Kitty Hawk and Hilton Head with Sissy did nothing if not teach the essentiality of five o’clock cocktails. Dennis learned to drink claret until dawn, and he also acquired a taste for—as well as the hows and whens and whys of—scotch to begin the night, and whiskey to end it. Gin and tonics flowed freely each spring, but somehow he had escaped a necessary lesson in the flavorless, all-too-easy-to-consume vodka.
Dennis knew he would have to drink with these men to gain their trust, and he knew that, as he did so, the Soviets would try to extract information. So he had tried to prepare before the dinner by eating several large hunks of the black bread he’d picked up from a bakery in the Garden Ring and taking a salt pill he’d brought from home. Despite these efforts, however, he had one or two, perhaps three or four, even six, too many that night. Who could count? The bottle kept tipping and tipping; everyone drank. To respect the culture, as a sensitive representative of the U.S. government, Dennis stupidly, very stupidly, drank far too much. And his stupidity sang.
While the night unfolded, it all seemed as innocent as those first few months of freshman year, evenings that began with Lenny mixing cocktails in their room at Hartley, looking out onto Amsterdam Avenue, that continued at the West End until closing, then ended in a blur of the crooked walk back across campus at dawn. Dennis remembered the ease between him and his roommate those nights that could only have come from life before it was divided by politics. In Moscow, backs were slapped; glasses were tilted back, then slammed on the wooden table. Who actually brought up business, and who in particular wanted to discuss the Landsats, Dennis would never remember, but someone referred to them in passing.
“They’re entirely legal,” Dennis pointed out. He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “What’s to say?”
“But who,” Viktor Uspensky said, “likes to be watched?” In addition to his work for the state-owned Exportkhleb, he also oversaw the state-owned flour mills, so he had a special interest in grain.
The whole country is watching itself, Dennis thought, thinking of those police stationed everywhere in Red Square.
The other men, also with Exportkhleb, and several ministers from the Ag department, including Leonid Orlov (it was rumored he was a KGB man, but what could they do? There was no getting out of doing business with Leonid), nodded in tandem as they tore off bits of bread and sopped them in the warm beef borscht.
“Of course,” Dennis said in Russian, “it happens to all of us.” Speaking Russian always made him feel as if he were a child talking to his mother as they made their way around the fountain at Seward Park.
“Besides,” Viktor responded in English, “what do these images really tell you? They reveal nothing, of course. You know this, yes, Dennis?”
Dennis nodded sternly, an effort to override Viktor’s implication that the Americans were fools who not only couldn’t tell how large the Soviet stockpiles were, but who didn’t even know the stock existed. What annoyed him most, however, was Viktor’s shift to English. Dennis had excellent Russian, though his vocabulary was sometimes as limited as that of a twelve-year-old holding his mother’s hand while shopping on Hester Street. Viktor’s insult was yet another way of pointing to the stupidity of Americans.
“Yes, I know this,” Dennis answered in Russian.
“Unless,” Viktor continued, “unless you know a way to measure the reserves?”
English again! It enraged Dennis. Despite the drunkenness that had come over him slowly and rather sweetly, increasing in waves until he felt soaked in a clean, pure sea, Dennis could see the challenge laid before him, as if Viktor had unsheathed some kind of sword. And just as soon as the pure state of his drunkenness had come, it began to recede. In its place lay his unwashed anger, dry as sand, and he turned it to address the table of men, revealing a weapon of his own.
“What do you think the CIA is for?” he said in Russian, raising his eyebrows. He leaned back and wished that he were an enormous man who could place his large hands across his massive belly and sit back in a big chair with gravitas.
There was silence. Aleksandr Vishnevsky paused, his tiny glass at his enormous mouth, and Leonid Orlov stopped chewing his potatoes. Dennis wondered what exactly Leonid Orlov did in the KGB. Dennis turned to the door, for a brief moment expecting it to be stormed, by the Russians or the Americans, he couldn’t determine. How had Orlov gotten the information he’d needed? How often? And how had he made it back home?
Dennis continued, the sack of butterflies inside his belly wild to be set free. “They’re everywhere, crawling over your whole fucking country, over farmland, under bridges.” They wanted English? He’d give them English. “Perhaps they are here right now.” He placed both hands on the table, imagining that if he could not truly overturn it, he could at least turn the tables, as it were, so that the conversation was in his control. “Under this very building.”
“Of course.” Viktor brushed off this conceit with one flick of his pudgy hand. He made a most imperceptible move with his neck that Dennis thought might have been a tic, until out of the corner of his eye he saw Egor Demidov slowly get up to leave, his large body silhouetted over the Historical Museum, lit up behind him.
“Wait!” Those butterflies raged now, wings batting against Dennis’s stomach. He could see the snow was falling, illuminated by the ruby lights winking to one another in Red Square. He thought of Ivan the Terrible’s chopping block. They looked at their Snow Maiden and were amazed at what they saw. The eyes of the Snow Maiden twinkled, he heard his mother in the next room, whispering the winter fairy tale to his sister, the radiator blasting intermittently with steam. “I kid with you,” Dennis said. “Come back, Egor. Have a drink with us.” He swept his arm around the table, an imitation of Viktor’s grandeur. “The CIA. What do I know from the CIA?” he said in English.
The men all looked to Viktor, who paused for a moment. He stared at Dennis. Then he lifted his massive hand and clapped Dennis hard on the shoulder. “A joker!” he said in Russian.
Egor Demidov sat back down. Aleksandr Vishnevsky tipped his head back and downed his shot, crashing the glass on the table. Leonid Orlov, whose party this was after all, resumed his chewing. “Greetings from Fanny!” he said to Dennis, smiling, a mouth of black teeth, and Dennis looked away, then suddenly the music played again, though Dennis wasn’t sure it had ever stopped, or if all sound had merely been cut off by the ringing in his ears.
Everyone laughed heartily, including Dennis.
“What fun it will be doing business together. With such a comedian,” Viktor said.
Dennis nodded and looked to
his plate, still filled with borscht, the oil slick on the surface of the soup and on the suspended chunks of meat. This was the most famous dish of the restaurant. They had all said he must have it. “The people come here and beg for this dish,” Viktor had told him. “They beg,” he’d said, his hands heavy on the table.
That night in his apartment far outside the center, Dennis’s high began to dissipate. All that was left of the alcohol now was the sugar. Before the hangover he knew was coming arrived in earnest, Dennis felt only panic. It was common knowledge about the CIA looking for stockpiles, was it not? People talked of it freely in the office, after all. It could hardly be considered confidential intelligence. But of course talk of the CIA at the Department of Agriculture was not the same as a conversation at a famous Soviet hotel—where Stalin was said to have celebrated his fiftieth birthday—right smack in the middle of Red Square. Red for color, Dennis reminded himself, red for beauty.
He closed his eyes and saw the Hungarian tailor from around the corner of his old block on Rivington Street being taken in by two FBI agents. The tailor’s head was bowed and they walked closely behind. Kids got up from pitching pennies and shooting marbles to watch him go by. What had the man done? None of it was clear, but the Rosenberg children had just been taken from their grandmother; surely there was some kind of connection, the women leaning on their brooms said, and so did the men with the scratched-up briefcases at their sides. The old man’s shop was boarded up as soon as he was gone. Dennis could see the agent who walked close to the buildings, so clearly, his mustache twisting up at the sides, his large ears protruding from the sides of his head like handles on a water jug. Dennis’s mother had run out onto the street, his sister holding a meringue cookie and bouncing on Tatiana’s hip. What is it, what is it? she had asked, then seeing the agent, she’d run back inside. The fear! The Russian fear. Even the buildings hold it.
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