Moscow Rules

by Robert Moss

  How much time had passed? There was no way of knowing. He lay on his back, breathing with difficulty, looking up at constellations he couldn’t name. The radio. He rolled back to the car, but the transceiver was dead.

  An instinct stronger than the desire to lie still told him that he couldn’t stay there. The guerrillas might return. He started to crawl along the valley, pausing to wash off some of the blood with the chill water of the irrigation ditch. There was a fire somewhere ahead. It became his lighthouse. He swam toward it, hand over hand.

  He collapsed at the door of a house set in the side of a hillside above the canal like a beehive. The blackness swirled up and enveloped him again. Then he was conscious of someone inspecting him, a figure covered in dark cloth from head to foot like an angel of death, peering through a veil with eyes that were blacker than the cloth.

  The voice that croaked, ‘Help — a doctor —’ in Dari seemed unconnected to him.

  The shape disappeared, and he heard voices raised nearby, inside the house.

  Someone — a woman — was screeching, ‘He’s a Soviet! Kill him like a dog!’

  A man’s voice, measured and calm, replied, ‘He has asked for refuge, and we can’t refuse him. Remember ninawati. Remember the code.’

  ‘But Masoud! His people killed your own son! He’s an infidel!’

  ‘He has invoked our law. It is our duty to protect him, even at the expense of our lives. So it is written.’

  *

  For months after Sasha left New York, Elaine drifted like a rudderless boat that had slipped its moorings.

  The personnel manager at X-Tech called her in and fidgeted, seeking the right euphemism to tell her she was fired.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she helped him. ‘I was planning to hand in my notice anyway.’

  She had no doubt what had happened. The FBI had told Charlie Macdonough about her relationship with Sasha.

  The personnel manager looked less embarrassed. ‘You’re entitled to one month’s salary,’ he told her. She left him in mid-sentence as he was explaining about pension rights.

  She stayed in her loft for days at a time. When friends called to invite her out, she gave the same answer. ‘I’m going away.’

  She would wake with a start at four in the morning from a terrible, recurring dream, in which she scaled a great tower, like a broken ziggurat. Sasha was at the top, but when she touched him, he was cold and hard as a mortuary slab, and she found that her hand was powdered with a fine white ash. Then she was falling out of the dream, into the loneliest hollow of the night.

  She would sit at her table, with a blanket over her knees, waiting for the throb of the morning traffic to begin, jotting down random notes. I am a dry husk. I am a field of stubble.

  She felt his absence the way an amputee feels a missing limb and reaches to touch it, despite himself.

  She was two months overdue with her rent when her father flew up from Florida to see her.

  ‘I’ve been worried about you,’ he reproved her mildly. ‘You’ve even stopped answering your phone.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Daddy. I’ve been trying to write.’

  A practical man, he inspected her refrigerator. He found some yogurt, half a lettuce, and a grapefruit.

  ‘First thing, I’m going to take you to lunch,’ he announced. ‘You can’t live on coffee and rabbit food.’

  He guessed far more than she admitted to him. ‘Forgetting is a survival mechanism,’ he told her. ‘You can’t drive through life looking into the rearview mirror. Life is all about starting over.’

  She nodded, and pecked at her swordfish.

  ‘Do you want to tell me about him?’ her father asked.

  ‘Not really.’ It sounded too curt, so she added, ‘I think you’d like each other.’

  ‘So it’s not over.’

  ‘No.’ That much he had left her. Hope. And this hollowness, the aching sensation that I am incomplete.

  Her father had more questions, and she turned them aside as gently as she could.

  ‘There are things that have to be worked out, Daddy. I’m really not ready to talk about it. But thank you.’

  ‘I fixed things with your landlord,’ he said, feeling more secure with tangibles. ‘But I think you ought to get out of the city for a while. Why don’t you come to Israel with me this year?’

  So she spent a week with him at the King Daid Hotel in Jerusalem, and walked the streets of the old city, and met a lively young Sabra called Arnon who squired her around the Armenian quarter and told her he had just completed his annual stint with the commandos. He was alert and attractive, and she knew she was testing herself when she agreed to have dinner with him.

  ‘The Russians are scared of us,’ Arnon said at one point. ‘We know them too well. Take me, for example. I have cousins in Kiev.’

  ‘Are you in contact with them?’

  ‘They’re trying to emigrate. They lost their jobs, of course, when they applied. But sometimes it’s possible to talk to them by phone. It drives the KGB crazy, having to listen in to conversations in Hebrew. I’d like to go over there, but it’s not easy for an Israeli. And it’s forbidden for me because of my military duties. Now you, you’re American. No problem. But if they know you’re Jewish, you have to watch out. They see Zionists under every rock.’

  It wasn’t this that frightened her. She had thought, many times, of following Sasha to Moscow. It was fear for him, fear of putting him in danger if she tried to see him, that held her back. That, and a greater fear: of going to Moscow and not seeing him, of accepting that the loss was irretrievable.

  The wine flowed, and the conversation shifted to lighter topics. But when Arnon took her hand, she shied away so abruptly that she knocked over her glass.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized as he mopped wine from his shirt. ‘You’re not married, are you?’ he said, studying her with a slightly mocking smile.

  She shook her head.

  ‘But there’s someone,’ he suggested.

  ‘There’s someone,’ she agreed.

  ‘I envy him.’

  She was grateful for his gracious withdrawal, and they promised to write, the way people do when they want to dress up a flat goodbye.

  She never heard from him again. But the holiday in Israel, and the talk with Arnon, helped to form a project in Elaine’s mind. It was something that might give her the discipline and the purpose that she needed to cope with Sasha’s absence — and to find him again, at least in spirit.

  She began roughing out a plan for a novel spanning several generations of a Russian Jewish family. She swallowed her pride and accepted financial help from her father — though she insisted the money was a loan — and rented a tumble-down cottage near the water on the Noyack side of Sag Harbor. She arrived on a raw March day, and tried to stick to an eight-hour working schedule each day. Sasha was a hidden presence on every page she wrote. The writing did not dispel the sense of emptiness that still inhabited her, but for those eight hours it kept it at bay. She made new friends, including an editor who commissioned a couple of articles for a glossy magazine that paid well, and a fisherman who took her out to chase bass. She also discovered, after a few months, what she had known to begin with: she would have to go to Sasha’s country.

  While the summer people were still flocking east to the Hamptons, she drove back to the city and enrolled for the fall semester of the Russian course at the New School. This time, she managed to show up for the first lesson.

  *

  The second Wednesday night, a new student attended the Russian class. He was older than the others, and he wore a worsted suit that gave him a vaguely professorial look, reinforced by his pipe, which he sucked on throughout the class but didn’t light.

  The teacher introduced him to the others by his first name, Luke. In keeping with the name, he had a leisurely, euphonious Southern accent. It gave a bourbon flavor to the Russian phrases he tried hard to pronounce.

  ‘If they ever develop a
taste for Old Grandad in Russia,’ one of the students said to him as they were waiting for the elevator, ‘you can do the commercials.’

  He exchanged some pleasantries with her as they went their separate ways, and she didn’t think about Luke until the following week, when he asked her to have a cup of coffee with him after the class.

  She inspected him more closely. He was quite distinguished, with his silver hair and his salt-and-pepper moustache. Fifty, probably, but well preserved. She liked his hands; they were fine and narrow, like a painter’s.

  She said, ‘This wouldn’t be a pick-up, would it? I’ve sort of given up men.’

  ‘That sounds like a New Year’s Resolution.’

  She liked the way his chin dimpled when he smiled. There was something reassuring about that.

  They went into Beefsteak Charlies, down the block, and made proper introductions.

  ‘I’m Luke Gladden.’

  ‘And you’re a Southerner.’

  ‘Well, that’s a large piece of real estate, ma’am,’ he said, parodying the style. ‘I come from Louisiana, and I’m French on my mother’s side.’

  She found herself talking to him readily, maybe because he honed in on things she was ready to share. After prying out of her the fact that she was working on a novel, he didn’t pursue the theme — which, for her, was still taboo. Instead, he asked about how she got the words on paper.

  ‘You know what they say,’ she told him. ‘Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down and open a vein.’

  ‘I’ve heard that,’ he laughed, ‘and I’m ready to believe it. Tell me something. Do you write fast, or slow?’

  ‘Pretty fast, when I manage to chain myself up and actually do it. That way, it’s easier to suspend your own disbelief in what you’re doing, easier not to see the blank spaces between the lines.’

  ‘That’s my experience too. In the riverboat days, on the lower Mississippi, they had some extraordinary races. The captains would rip the timbers from their own decks to keep the furnace stoked up. Don’t you get that feeling sometimes when the creative fires are burning? You consume your own timbers.’

  ‘Are you a writer?’ Elaine asked, astonished by how close this man from Louisiana had come to her own feelings.

  ‘Just an observer,’ he replied, and she felt a sudden chill.

  To exorcise it, she said, ‘You didn’t ask me why I’m studying Russian.’

  The silver hair, the courtly Southern manners, the sensitive hands with the discreet signet ring didn’t redeem his answer. It was the last thing she wanted him to say.

  ‘I think I know why you’re learning Russian.’

  *

  When they threw the stretcher on the ground, Sasha was roused in such pain that he thought they must have broken his back. There were voices all around, harsh and repetitive, like crows’. He was lying in the dust in some open place, with a hot white sun glaring into his eyes. He must have been unconscious for hours. He tried to speak, but his parched tongue wouldn’t respond. A veiled woman bent over him, as if to make out what he wanted to say. But instead, she drew aside a corner of the veil long enough to spit full into his face.

  He clutched at a word, the word the old man who had come to his defense the night before had used. Ninawati, the Afghan code of honor that ordained hospitality for those who sought help. He could only form the syllables with his lips. A white-haired man came near and looked at him with something akin to pity, and he wondered if this was his protector. If so, the man’s power had failed, for younger men in turbans and bandoliers came and dragged him from the stretcher into the center of the field. It was almost like a playing field, he thought through a red haze, mostly stamped earth, and there were sticks poking out of the ground, like makeshift goals.

  There was the crows’ cawing again, and then a new sound, of snorting and stamping, and the profile of a horseman suddenly rose above him, blocking out the sun, as immense as the Hindu Kush from where he lay, helpless and prostrate. The horseman was grinning from ear to ear, and brandishing an unusual weapon. No, more like a hockey stick. The horseman wheeled away, and Sasha felt the hot breath of his mount, and in the thunder of galloping hooves, Sasha recognized a scene he had never hoped to witness firsthand. These Afghans were going to play buzkashi, their grisly version of polo, and he was the ball.

  Not yet, he thought. Not here. I haven’t begun to fight.

  The crows screeched, and he hurled himself onto his side and rolled as far as he could. Something scraped and seared for an instant, and he rolled again to escape a horse’s trampling hooves. He was conscious of a rider bringing his mount around, preparing for a second charge.

  There was a crackling sound, small and insignificant, like the splutter of a string of Tom Thumb fireworks, and the buzkashi players started racing away in all directions, all except one of the riders, who bore down on Sasha swinging his stick in a great arc, like a saber. Sasha writhed, and rolled his body the other way. The movement caused him such exquisite pain that he hardly felt the stab of the horse’s hoof as it tore skin and flesh from his lower neck. The rider was thrown from his saddle, but he took the fall well and was up again in an instant, advancing on Sasha with something in his hand that was shorter and more lethal than any hockey stick.

  From behind Sasha’s head, a man in a black mask came ducking and weaving through the crossfire. Without breaking his run, he pumped a dozen rounds from his kalashnikov into the Afghan’s stomach. He crouched low over Sasha, his broad back between the wounded man and the sniper fire from the retreating Afghan tribesman, and felt for his pulse.

  Zaytsev pulled off his mask to breathe more freely, and called to his men to bring up a stretcher.

  ‘You’ll live, Sasha,’ he murmured. ‘You’ll tell them in Moscow what kind of games they play here.’

  *

  A long time afterward — impossible for him to tell whether it was a week or a month — Sasha swam out of his coma like a half-drowned man emerging from the surf. His eyelids seemed to be glued together. When he got them unstuck, his first reaction was to cover them up again with the back of his hand. Light reflected off the white walls and the metal frame of the bed jabbed at him like needles. There were flowers beside the bed, masses of them, yellow and red.

  He sensed a woman’s shape, bending over him, and tried to shape a name. Elaine.

  It was Petya who saved him. ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ the boy broke loose from his mother’s grip and started kissing Sasha’s hand. Sasha couldn’t speak, but the tears welled up in his eyes. He was in Moscow.

  That evening, Marshal Zotov came to visit. The nurses flustered over the old warrior with his seven rows of ribbons and the big stars on his shoulder straps.

  ‘How are you?’ he greeted Sasha.

  ‘Zinda basham,’ Sasha croaked. ‘I’m still alive.’ It was what you said to an Afghan who posed the same question.

  ‘Speak Russian, will you? Or did they turn you into a black-ass down there?’

  The Marshal had brought a practical gift, a bottle of his Armenian brandy. The nurses frowned when he set it on the table, but didn’t dare to say anything.

  ‘You’d better hurry up and get well,’ he told Sasha. ‘Great things are happening, and I need you at my side. I’ve got plans for you.

  ‘By the way,’ he added as he was leaving, ‘you’re a full colonel now. And they gave you another gong. The Order of the Red Star.’

  Sasha could only groan. For a moment, as consciousness receded, he was flat on his back in the dust, with the hooves drumming across the field toward him.

  He felt stronger the next day, when the Marshal returned.

  ‘You were damn lucky, you know,’ Zotov said. ‘The bullet came that close’ — he held up thumb and forefinger, an inch apart — ‘to your heart.’ He didn’t mention the buzkashi match, except to mutter ‘Savages’ under his breath.

  Seeing that Sasha was more alert, the Marshal launched into his new recipe for Afghanistan, which involved s
trikes into Pakistan. The Indians were being armed to the hilt; if the Pakistanis refused to seal their border, India could be encouraged to invade. Above all, the Soviets needed to act with maximum force.

  ‘You read Annenkov, I hope?’ Zotov had brought his copy along, in case Sasha wanted to refresh his memory. ‘Yes, here we are.’ He thumbed the book open and read out approvingly, “‘Once the enchantment of prestige is broken, once a people accustomed to give way before disciplined troops loses this habit, it becomes indispensable to employ efforts of a very much more powerful character to restore respect.”’ The Marshal slammed the book shut and said, ‘That hits the mark. We need something like Geok-Tepe.’ This was the stronghold of the fierce Tekke tribesmen who inflicted a bloody defeat on a Russian column. When the Russians finally captured the fortress in 1879, they slaughtered everyone inside. ‘Well?’ Zotov demanded. ‘What do you say?’

  ‘I don’t know that it will work with men who believe that death is the gate to paradise.’ Sasha thought of the white-bearded rebel who had gone on chanting the call to prayer after Major Mahmoud chopped off his fingers.

  Zotov looked annoyed that his lesson from history hadn’t been better received. He said, ‘No man confronted with death can feel certain about his chances in the afterlife.’

  ‘These men aren’t like others.’

  The Marshal shifted his weight on the edge of the bed, and for an instant Sasha felt the earth tremble again under the racing hooves, heard the women’s mocking cries, and smelled the rank odor of his own flesh, soiled and damp as if his guts had been laid open. The tang of ammonia that hung about the hospital ward couldn’t erase that.

  Chapter Six – House of Lies

  ‘I spoke the truth, but no one believed me, so I took to deceit.’

  Lermontov

  In his dream, Nikolsky was swimming in a shallow lake, with a slip of a girl who seemed to have gills instead of lungs. He pursued her underwater, but she always eluded him. It was warm in the lake, but the trees in the park were leafless, and the men who were loitering on the pathway wore overcoats and fur hats. He realized that they were going through the clothes he had left jumbled up on the bench. He scrambled out and ran dripping toward them. A man with a loose, putty-colored face — it might have been Topchy — inspected him in a leisurely fashion. ‘You’re wanted right away,’ he said. They bundled him into clothes, but his papers were missing and they wouldn’t allow him time to put on his shoes. A second man, short but very powerfully built, with wiry red hair and a loud checked suit, was jumping up and down in his impatience. He looked like a real psychopath, itching for an excuse to give Nikolsky a good working-over. Then they were hustling him along but somehow he managed to persuade them to let him make a phone call. When he dialed, he heard a plummy English voice saying, ‘Royal Stationery Office.’ It sounded a bit like that girl he had tried to pick up in London.