“I don’t understand, Victor. I don’t understand any of this. If you don’t want to be with me, if you don’t want to see me any longer, you could just say so. There’s no need for this, for this elaborate . . .” She paused, bile rising in her throat. She felt like she was going to retch.
“This is not my doing, Talia. I’m just helping you get on that plane.”
Something snapped inside her, hard, like a brittle branch. “This is insane!” she screamed. “I am not going to hear another word of this!”
The door handle stuck, and she jerked it forcefully to get it to open. Then she was out of the car. If her legs were not shaking so badly, she would have run. But all she managed to do was stumble a few feet, reel against the direction of traffic. She knew he would come after her; it seemed the only constant. She was always running, and he was always catching her, bending her to his will.
“Talia, stop.”
“Let go of me!” she spat, trying to free herself from his grasp. “Let go of me now, you bastard! Go back to your Russian wife and your despicable job! I should have never looked in your direction! I despise myself for spending one moment with you!”
On his face, as he began pulling her back toward the car, she saw no emotion, only a trace of something hard, unyielding. Somewhere along the highway, he had become someone else, someone cold, detached, vacant. He had become a machine, a robot executing a task. It was more out of terror than anger that she raised her free hand and slapped him. It was enough to make him halt, but he did not release her. She slapped him again, harder this time. This time, he did not flinch, for he was ready for it.
“Talia, look at me!”
There was nothing left in her. There was no trace of strength or anger, there wasn’t anything in her at all, as he shook her shoulders, forcing her to look in his eyes—those beautiful eyes that she had adored for almost her entire life, which now felt like daggers in her heart.
“You are getting on that plane today,” he said sternly as if he was issuing a command. “Do you know how many people would risk their lives for this chance? Have you not told me how you were tired of hating, you were tired of living this life? This is it, Talia. This is your only chance to have a different life, one that is worthy of you.”
“What about my parents, Victor?” she cried, unable to stop shaking. “How can you think that I would ever leave them? How could I leave my father when he is so weak and lost these days, my mother who needs me now more than ever? How could you think I would ever abandon them?”
He let go of her. His hands fell to his sides. Gently now, evenly, he said, “They know, Talia. Your parents know. Your mother made me promise that I would get you on that plane.”
It felt like a blow to her stomach. The bones in her legs seemed to have melted, and she had to grab on to the edge of the car door so she wouldn’t sink to the ground. When had Victor had a chance to speak to them? Before this morning, he did not even know where they lived. He had not seen them in a decade. They had known nothing of her relationship with him. No, it didn’t make sense. He was lying to her.
Raising her cold, hard eyes to him, she said, “So what about us? You came after me with such determination, and this is how you want to finish it?”
“There is no us, Talia. There can never be us. We’ve already had the best that we could hope for.”
There it was at last, the truth unvarnished and brutal, the truth she’d always sought in his eyes and never seemed to find. So she had been right after all. Her instinct had been right. He had never loved her, and he didn’t care how much he was hurting her now. He had played with her like a toy, a trinket, and she had let him. It was too much to absorb, and she dissolved in a torrent of sobs. Not bothering to cover her face, not caring how she looked in his eyes, she sank to the ground and wept openly while he watched. After a while, he came and crouched down next to her, leaned his head against the car door.
“Think about it, Talia,” he said when there were no tears left, when all that remained of her despair were dry, quivering gasps. “Think about the possibilities. This is the only way that you could help your parents, truly help them. You can send them money when you get a job. Perhaps they can join you later. I could try to help with that, you know. They are old now, they are no threat to the state. Either way, you can have a life, a future in which you don’t have to hide and look over your shoulder at every turn. That’s all they ever wanted for you. Do not disappoint them.”
He was right, of course. Whatever Victor had done to get her the passport, however he had paid for the ticket, he was right about that much. There was no future for her here. Other than with him. And he did not belong to her, never had. He had made that very clear.
“Will you go? Talia?” It was odd, the way his voice fractured when he said her name. It sounded like he was saying it for the last time. “Will you let me take you to the airport? There isn’t much time left.”
She wiped her eyes and straightened up, gazing off into the distance. She felt void, tampered with, hollowed from the inside out. This was all too much; it was happening too fast. Her senses were disabled, and she knew that she couldn’t trust them.
“There will be the next plane. I need more time. To think.”
“This is the only plane, my love. This is the only plane if a hundred were to follow.”
45
VICTOR’S HANDS WERE GRIPPING THE steering wheel, and he was looking ahead, straight ahead, as they sped down the side road that intersected the main highway. Next to him, she sat with her knees drawn up, her forehead resting against them. She was no longer crying, she just sat there shivering despite the heat and humidity, which even at this early hour were unbearable.
There was an awful smell coming from outside, something like fertilizer and gasoline intermingled. It was the only thing on which she could pin a sense of reality. It was persistent enough to let her know she was not trapped inside a dream. Still, she had not given up hope that any moment she might awaken and breathe out with relief, realizing that she was in her bed. That her parents were in the next room, still asleep. Her thoughts would drift to Victor then, as they did every morning while her lids still fluttered with sleep. She would see a different face from the one before her. A different set of eyes from the ones looking at her now.
As he spoke, his voice calm but austere, she became aware that it was the last time they would be like this, sitting together side by side. He was saying something about what she should do once she got to New York City, where she needed to go. There was someone she needed to see the moment she landed. He pronounced a name, an English-sounding name that she had never heard before.
“How do you do it?” she said, interrupting him. “How do you turn yourself off like this, like a light switch?” It wasn’t meant as an insult; she really wanted to know. She wanted to know so that she might attempt it herself.
“Talia, let’s not say anything. I beg you, let’s not spoil our last moments together.”
She laughed, a hollow, bitter laugh. “Our last moments together? What do they mean to you, Victor? Why should they matter at all?”
“You’re wrong,” he said softly. “Soon you will understand that.”
They rode without saying another word the rest of the way. A few kilometers later, they pulled up along a narrow strip of asphalt that lined the length of a domed building with rows of vertical windows. In front of the massive glass doors, a dozen or so policemen with patrol dogs marched up and down. Victor turned off the engine and got out of the car. He came around to her side and flung the door open wide, then stood there holding his hand out to her.
“You cannot park here!” a guard with a rifle slung over his shoulder shouted, waving his arms as he marched menacingly toward them. Victor took a badge out of his shirt pocket and flashed it impatiently, not looking in his direction.
“Oh, I am so sorry, sir,” the soldier muttered in a very different tone, coming to a halt. “Please, let me escort you inside.”
“It’s not necessary,” Victor growled. “I know exactly where I am going.”
Natalia thought this might be her last chance to escape, to run back to her old life, her old home, which already seemed so far away that she might have already crossed over continents. I can still reach out and touch his face, she thought. I can drop to my knees and beg him to let me go. I can scream in front of the airport employees, in front of the guards. But it would do no good, she knew. Victor was going to put her on that plane the same way he had put people on trains to the Gulag camps. No pitiful pleas would break him down or get him to change his mind. There was nowhere to run anyway, and her body would not move. Somewhere along the road, she had lost her resolve. She took his hand and let him help her out of the car.
Extracting her valise from the trunk, not letting go of her elbow, Victor ushered her into the building. They moved along at a clipped pace, crossing through a maze of interminable corridors, stopping only at checkpoints along the way where her passport was checked, her valise ransacked. Several times, guards rushed toward them with hands held up, shouting for them to stop. Each time, Victor flashed his badge, and instantly the guards stood aside, practically bowing as they passed through. One of them clicked his heels and saluted him, a military salute that looked out of place as a disheveled, glum-looking Victor in civilian clothing waved him off.
At the end of the last hallway, he led her down a flight of concrete steps that opened into a large carpeted area. When they reached the bottom, he released her arm, and she wandered away from him a little, her gaze scanning the airless space, taking in the dozen or so people who sat scattered among the rows of chairs. An elderly white-haired man was reading a book. A young woman with bleached hair was bouncing a crying baby on her lap. Sitting underneath the row of windows that spanned the length of the room, a young couple who looked distinctly Western in their clothing were whispering, absorbed in conversation. But it was what stretched beyond them that she couldn’t look away from. Although she’d never seen a runway before, she knew from magazine pictures that that’s what it was.
She stood there without moving, thinking that this strip of land would be the very last thing she would see of her home, of the city of her birth. How was it possible that her parents had known all along? That they had not only known but helped Victor arrange this? It was astounding that the three of them had been accomplices, that they had planned everything without her knowledge, without the slightest regard for what she wanted.
But if that was what they truly wished for her, she would do it. She would do it for them, for her mother and father. If it made them happy, if it made it possible for them to live the rest of their days in peace, she would not hesitate. Deep down, she knew that what Victor had said was true. He never would have acted without their approval and blessing. For Victor, there would always be that invisible thread that connected him to her father, despite the passage of time, despite class differences, despite even death itself.
It was with this last thought in mind that she turned to him and said, “You don’t have to stand guard to make sure I get on the plane. I’ll go.”
Wearily, he came to her and stopped a few feet away, far enough so that she could not touch him. After fishing inside the pocket of his trench coat, he took out the envelope containing her ticket and passport. It quivered slightly in his hand as he held it out to her. She thought his lips quivered, too, or perhaps he mouthed something wordlessly. When she took it from him, his hand dropped limply to his side. So this was it. Well, she would not make it that easy for him.
“What am I supposed to do for money, Victor, once I get to New York? Sleep under a bridge? Eat out of garbage cans? Have you thought about that?”
“There is the letter,” he answered with a start, as if he had just remembered it. “There is the letter I was telling you about earlier, in the car.” His hand disappeared once more inside the trench coat and extracted a smaller envelope, this one of thick, creamy stock.
“Remember what we talked about? Wait to open it on the plane. When you are in the air.”
She stared at him, then at the letter. When had he mentioned a letter? She had no recollection. Then again, the entire morning had been a blur. She slipped it inside her skirt pocket alongside her passport and ticket.
“Any more surprises, Victor? Anything else you have in store for me before I vanish off into the sunset?”
He exhaled deeply, closing his eyes. A strand of hair fell across his face, and he brushed it away. Beyond the window, an airplane was rolling on the tarmac toward them.
“You think that you are being just?” she went on, her voice low but fierce. “You think that what you are doing is out of loyalty to my father? Is that how you justify to yourself that you simply wanted to get rid of me, to dispose of an unnecessary complication? Well, you found the perfect way. To break free while still looking noble in my father’s eyes. Congratulations, Victor. You’re very smooth.”
He stared at her then with eyes so dark they looked bruised. She could no longer stand to look at them, so she turned back toward the window and watched the plane as it taxied.
“Forgive me, Talia,” he said then, a little too loudly, for every one of the passengers who had lined up in front of the oval metal door turned to look.
It threw her off kilter. She expected a more discreet reply or the concrete, impenetrable wall that she had been pounding against since early this morning. When he reached out to take her hand in both of his, she flinched and wanted to pull it away, but then she saw the muscles of his chest rising and falling, rising and falling under his shirt, and she could not. As he had done before, in another life, in another time, he brought her palm up to his chest and rested it against his heart. It thrashed wildly underneath her cold, damp fingers. He held it there still as tears welled in her eyes, as her other hand came up to trace his cheek unhurriedly from his silver-threaded temple to his square jaw, as if to imprint the contours of his features beneath her fingers.
He seized her hand then and pressed it hard to his lips. For a brief moment, her pulse leaped, spurred on by a glimmer of hope that there was a part of them she could still salvage, that this was not the end, this was not the last time she would see his beautiful, stoic, unflinching face. She lifted her wet eyes to him and smiled, despite herself and all that she was feeling. And then the moment passed.
He let go of her. He looked smaller, diminished, suddenly a middle-aged man for whom the best years of his life lay behind him, as he turned and walked away. Deliberately, as if it took great effort, he made his way up the stairway to the corridor above, the corridor that would lead him out of the airport and back to his old life.
Natalia listened to the echo of his shoes on the concrete steps even after she could no longer see him. And there it was again, that image of a younger Victor fading from view, disappearing in a crowd of pedestrians as she stood watching in the doorway of her childhood home, thinking she would never see him again.
46
SHE WAS GLIDING. A FEATHER caught in the breeze, floating through space. Not flesh and bone but the vibrations of sound, Duke Ellington’s notes from a decade long gone spilling all around her in a mad swirl, cascading, and she with them. She was one with the music, everything perfect in the capsule of this moment, everything serene. If only she could stay like this, nestled in the echo of those sounds emanating from within. If only.
The plane dropped again, jolting her, and she sat upright. For nearly two hours, she had been on this flight to Munich, but she had yet to get used to this motion, this vertical jarring that sent swells of fear right through her core. She still did not know how she was able to board at all, how she found the nerve to walk down the tarmac and climb the unsteady metal steps, how she sat idly and watched as the jet pulled away from the gate and rolled down the concrete strip, slowly at first, then with dizzying speed, before ascending into the somber late-morning sky. The entire time, she watched the whole thing unfold passively
, with no emotion, as she would watch a movie, as if it was someone else’s life that would change irrevocably when the wheels lifted off the ground.
Yet somewhere in mid-flight between the city of her birth and Munich, her senses began firing again, like bolts of electricity spouting through the severed end of a telephone wire in the dead calm after a storm. Little by little, she became aware of the shadows playing on the white ceiling of the cabin, the blinking red lights, the backdrop of white and blue and perfect symmetry surrounding her. She became aware of her own hands, white and lifeless in her lap, the dull ache in her ears. The pulsing of her heart, the heaviness lodged in its beats. Victor. Her parents. The three of them had made up her entire world, and she had lost them. She did not know what awaited her at the end of this flight or the one that would take her across the Atlantic. She did not know what her life would resemble tomorrow or an even an hour from now. All she knew was that it would go on without the people she loved.
Sometime later, when she looked up with eyes raw and veiled with dried tears, the striking blue outside her window made her gasp. Clouds in the shape of animals, cotton-candy pink and translucent, moved past her, some close enough that she thought she might touch them if she reached out. A shard of light slashed across the horizon, like the edge of a sword glinting at high noon, and the plane tilted toward it, flooding the cabin with a light so bright that she had to shield her eyes. By now, her parents would know that she was in flight somewhere above the Alps, above a range of mountains that did not belong to her homeland. She’s free, Victor might tell them, sitting across the table or perhaps standing in their doorway, loosening the collar of his shirt, raking a hand through his hair.
Would the three of them shed a tear together? Would it be a tear of loss or one of relief? Your parents know. Your mother made me promise that I would get you on that plane, Victor had told her in those final moments, while he stood before her in flesh and blood, not yet a chimera, not yet a haunting presence that would become distant and faded with time. She had looked into his eyes, solemn and detached, already looking ahead to a life without her, and she had believed him. This was what her parents had wanted for her, and no matter what Victor had said or done to convince them, it was the one thing that gave her solace. You have made my life truly beautiful, her mother had said, and Natalia realized now that it had been her good-bye.
The Girl They Left Behind Page 25
