“No, no, that was a nine,” Olga mutters, jamming her finger toward where Andrei’s writing. He scratches it out and rewrites the number.
In the gaps between each sequence of numbers, a Russian orchestra surges forth, blaring “The Internationale.” Subconsciously, I find myself humming along, the chorus bubbling into my head: This is our final and decisive battle—with “The Internationale,” humanity will rise up.
The transmission completes, and “The Internationale” fills the airwave, drumming its catchy beat right into our heads. I spot Olga and Andrei swaying back and forth, humming along, then realize I’m doing it, too. We hum along through the next verse, then stop and shake our heads as the transmission dissolves into scratchy silence.
“Sorry.” Andrei’s pencil glides quickly over the scratch paper as Olga helps him along. “Let’s see what our message is…”
Olga leans over his shoulder. “All agents … report to Berlin. Extraction imminent … 0800 April Five. Fifth. Berlin will fall.”
“April fifth. That’s tomorrow morning, right?” I ask. “So we have a day to get there and … do what we need to do … before Rostov expects to find us there.”
Olga scoots her chair back and twists so she’s facing me. “Antonina Vasilievna.” She scratches at the stump of her leg. “I know your standing at the university. Everyone knows you. The model Party member in training, the tireless researcher for the good of the State.”
My jaw clamps up like I’m bracing for a blow. “It’s really not like that. I’m only doing—”
“What you’re told. Yeah, I know.” Olga rolls her eyes. “Why the change of heart? Why should we trust your newfound wish to leave your cushy Party life behind?”
Progress—isn’t it the guiding tenet of every good Party apparatchik? Onward toward progress, toward advancement, experimentation. It’s time for a new approach. I square my shoulders and look at Olga and Andrei head-on.
“I don’t want to be a part of Rostov’s plans anymore. Of Stalin’s. I’ve done everything they’ve asked, and it’s kept me alive, but the cost—who knows how many lives the psychics I’ve found will endanger? When all I’m doing is giving a new platform to men like Rostov … it’s not worth the scientific advancements I’ve been able to make.”
Andrei’s mouth wavers, as if he’s fighting off something—a smile or a frown, I can’t tell. Olga arches a single eyebrow.
“If you want to find Rostov, I won’t stop you. I don’t expect you to risk your lives to join me. But I’m going to find these Americans who are supposed to meet with Herr Trammel, and I’m going to offer my services to them.”
“What makes you think they’ll be any better?” Olga asks.
I let the vision wash over me, gentle as waves lapping at a beach. Sun trickling through high windows, across a classroom, gilding the walls. The dark-haired girl turns her attention to the professor. She doesn’t see me, but I see her, I know her, I know this place—it is home. A home I’ve never seen before. A home far, far away from everything I’ve done, everything more that Rostov and all the rest might ask me to do. The lack of tightness in my chest, the lightness in my step like I’ve cast off a thousand lies.
“Because I can see it,” I say.
Andrei rears back, like a snake preparing to strike. Then he propels himself to his feet. “All right. I’ll join you. We’ll make our case to these Americans who were supposed to be extracting Trammel. Offer our services, instead.” He taps his temple. “With what we’re capable of, they’d have a real tough time turning us down.”
I glance toward Olga. “Again—I understand completely if you don’t wish to join us, but—”
“I got no allegiance.” She pulls a lighter from her pocket and flicks it to life. “To you, to Rostov, to anyone.”
My throat constricts; I force myself to nod.
“But I think you’re right. Anything’s got to be better than this. The way we live now. Fear, uncertainty, never knowing who’s peering inside your head … and that’s even before the war started up. Don’t worry.” She puffs a cigarette to life. “If I don’t join you, I’ll at least help you on your way.”
The world flickers like a hazy film projector. Again, I see the doorway of flames, Olga standing nearby, pointing, shouting with no noise. But it’s gone before I can examine it, replaced by another image. Andrei, this time. His face looms just in front of mine and the warmth of his skin radiates against my cheek. “Nina,” he whispers—my nickname—with flushed, ripe lips. “Nina. We can find a way.”
The visions fade away, revealing Olga and Andrei watching me, and Doctor Stokowski watching all of us, clueless as to the content of our conversation in Russian. I raise my head high. “Then I think it’s time, Andrei, that you found us our way to Berlin.”
We wait in the tree line for over an hour while Andrei scouts out each approaching vehicle. I don’t know what he’s looking for—they all seem capable of carrying the four of us, as best as I can tell—but he lets two military transit trucks pass and a convoy of motorcycles. Finally, we hear a rumble in the distance, and a slow smile unfurls on Andrei’s face.
Andrei strides slowly, confidently, toward the road with both hands upraised while we wait where he asked us to. He’s wearing the SS uniform again, but the coat is unbuttoned, hanging loose around him like a shawl. A sleek black officer’s car approaches, its lengthy engine casing protruding forward like a sneer. The vehicle decelerates and pulls onto the shoulder. Even idle, the engine purrs, caged, eager to pounce.
“What is the problem, officer?” someone says in German from inside the cab. They’ve rolled down the passenger-side window, but I can’t see inside. Are we dealing with one man? Five? Andrei has the best German of all of us, but he gave us no guidance; my nails dig into the bark of the birch tree and I scan the ground for a heavy stick.
Then static crinkles in my ear and the hairs on my arm lift up, like an impending lightning strike. I glance toward the sky—overcast still, but no thunder, no spring rain. The noise swells and swells, more felt than heard, lacing shut my throat and pounding in my head and—
“Nina? Olya? Friedrich?” Andrei shouts.
I lurch forward, gasping for air. But whatever sickness had overtaken me has passed; the air is cool and ripe with the promise of springtime, and nothing more. I step out of the tree line, head lowered as I search for any signs the Germans have seen through Andrei’s ruse, but Andrei’s lounging against the hood of the car’s engine casing, laughing with another SS officer who’s all sharp angles and rodent teeth.
“Come on, Nina, come, don’t be afraid! This is Rudolph. Can I call you Rudy? Yes, I think I shall. Rudy here—he’s supposed to be headed to Berlin for some big meeting, hush-hush, we’re about to lose the war, you know how it goes. But, mein Gott, who wants to drive for hours just to get yelled at? And I hear that Adolf, he tends to spray it more than say it, right?”
Rudy howls with laughter and slaps his palm against the car’s hood. “Yes! Yes, that’s exactly it! Like standing in front of a fountain when he yells at you!”
Andrei grins, the slippery-wet cat grin of a true believer. It pierces me as quick as a bullet. “So I told Rudy about our little cabin in the woods, and he thinks he’d rather hang out there until all this nonsense passes. Get his story straight, sweet-talk the English whenever they inevitably bulldozer their way over the Buchenwald. And let’s be honest, Rudy. They are coming, in weeks if not days.”
Rudy plucks his black hat and dabs a handkerchief to his brow. “Mein Gott. We really have gotten ourselves into a mess, haven’t we? I’m glad you’ve got a plan out of it.”
I’m watching them banter back and forth like a flawlessly timed comedy routine, and it feels like I’ve swallowed broken glass. This Nazi—this high-ranking SS officer—can’t possibly give up so easily, just because some man in a dirty uniform wants to be his best chum. And Andrei—I barely recognize him, he’s morphed so fully into the sleazy Nazi deserter that if it weren�
��t for those wire-rim glasses and those twinkling eyes of mischief, I wouldn’t ever know it was him.
It makes me sick.
“—so we’ll just take the keys, get this car back to Berlin—that’ll help your story, not having your car with you, don’t you know—and wish you the best of luck, Deutschland über alles, Rudolph, auf Wiedersehn!”
Rudy plops the keys into Andrei’s outstretched palm, wraps him in a one-armed embrace, then stoically makes his way toward the forest, passing a slack-jawed Olga and Stokowski.
I kick off my heels as soon as we’re inside the car and curl up into a tight ball, leaning as far away from Andrei as I can as he steers us back onto the road. For a few minutes, nothing but dire German news broadcasts on the radio fill the black leather interior, twisting the scowls on Olga’s and my faces until my jaw aches.
“What?” Andrei asks finally. He glances at me in short bursts, not wanting to take his eyes from the road too long. “Nina, what’s the matter?”
I squash myself into the far corner of the front passenger seat. Far away from him. “Who are you, really? What are you?”
“I’m a psychic! Same as you. Same as Olga here—”
“But you’re not a remote viewer. You’re not just a remote viewer.”
Andrei puffs his cheeks, then lets his breath out in a slow whistle.
“You—you manipulate people. Like Rostov does. I believed you, at first, when you said you just gave the guard a little push—I assumed that you were only just tapping into that ability for the first time. But no! No, you’ve known you can do this.”
Andrei’s Adam’s apple quavers as he swallows; his jaw is wound up tight like a spindle. “I am nothing like Anton Rostov,” he says, voice thin and low. It sounds like black ice.
“You did it to me when we met with Stalin, too, didn’t you?” I bash the heel of my palm against my forehead. “Bozhe moi, but I’m an idiot. I thought I was having another vision—a strange, vivid one. But you—you tried to erase a moment of time from everyone, so you could answer Stalin correctly. Because you knew he was out of patience with you, that he wouldn’t wait for you to do another test.”
I’m fuming, churning like an overworked furnace, my anger hot and dry and stifling inside of me. Why have I let this man get under my skin so? The way he looked at me last night felt so honest, felt like finding a piece of myself I hadn’t known was missing. But how can I trust my own feelings, my own judgment? I’m too used to being lied to, manipulated, used. It’s part and parcel of working with the Party.
I just thought, perhaps, I’d found one soul who wouldn’t treat me that way. I wanted him to be merely gifted—not also cursed.
I wanted what I feel for him to be genuine.
Andrei tugs at the collar of his jacket as if it’s suddenly too tight, though he’s still wearing it open. “All right, all right, so I have perhaps noticed a slight … addition to my powers, lately, that hadn’t been there before.”
“What do you mean by ‘lately’?” Olga asks, eyeing him from the backseat.
“Less than a year. It makes sense, doesn’t it? That our powers aren’t stagnant, that they evolve and grow alongside us. In any case, it’s not like I have an instruction manual or Comintern edict to work from when dealing with my power. It’s all trial and error. I’d never even met anyone like me until we did that research project together, I swear!”
I seize a fistful of wool skirt. “You knew what I was even then?”
“I—I’d catch glimpses. Like I told you—I wasn’t trying to read your mind, but there were times when I saw past the Firebird surrounding you, not even meaning to, and that’s when I saw … those visions. Those images from the future. Nothing definite, just fragmentary. Washed out. Yes, I suspected, but couldn’t think of how to bring it up.” Andrei’s skin turns from a pleasant shade of olive to a deep, bruised, beet red. Where is his camouflage now? “You understand, don’t you, how crazy it sounds? Asking someone out of the blue if they’re psychic. I didn’t want you thinking I—I mean, I didn’t want you…” He swallows, loud, and glances down. “To think less of me. That I was a bad scientist.”
I catch myself starting to grin, and force a deep scowl back into my expression. “Be that as it may. You are capable of doing what Rostov does.”
“To a much lesser extent, yes. Though today and yesterday, I have felt more … in control of it. Capable.” Andrei lifts one hand from the steering wheel and clenches and unclenches a fist. “I used to press and press against someone’s mind, and if I was lucky they might be ever so slightly swayed in the direction I pressed. Believe me, I’ve tried cultivating it. But with Stalin yesterday … that guard … and the officer whose car we’re borrowing…”
I wince at the reminder. Andrei had seemed so calm, then, so comfortable with the vile thing he was doing. “You didn’t just suggest to them. You outright changed their thoughts. Mine, too,” I add, anger stoking anew. “You made me think I was crazy, that I’d been stuck in a loop of déjà vu—”
“I had to, don’t you see? At first, I didn’t want any part of what Stalin had in mind for us. Become another tool of the State? No, thank you. I’m not a piece of machinery to fit into the factory, for the bright and noble workers to tinker with till it breaks.”
“To work to death,” Olga offers, from the backseat. I look at her through the rearview mirror; she’s slumped back, expression sour, staring out the rain-streaked window. “What’s it matter, Andrei? It’s all we are, and all we’ll ever be. Whether we’re psychic spies or professors or scientists or tools on the factory floor.”
Andrei shakes his head. “No. I think I can do something different. The world is changing, and we can be a part of that change. I don’t have to become like Rostov.”
For just one minute, his confidence, his tone make me believe that I can be a part of it, too.
“Don’t ever alter my thoughts again.” I narrow my eyes. “Ever.”
Andrei nods his chin, swiftly. “I promise you. And you, Olga. Not without your explicit permission.”
My brow furrows. “But why would I ever want that?”
He glances back at Doctor Stokowski. “Maybe some things are better to forget.”
*
We approach the first checkpoint outside Berlin sometime after noon, not that the hour is apparent through the dismal gray stuffing that hangs overhead. Andrei produces no papers to secure our passage; he only does like he’d said, give the guard a little push in the right direction, and we’re ushered past the toothy metal tank traps and concertina wire strewn like confetti across the suburbs. The city feels like a held breath: watching, waiting, not yet ready to let go, though the waiting burns and burns. I’m surprised by how many people still inhabit Berlin, though I suppose at this point, they have nowhere else to go. You dig your heels in for this long and the options to deny what you are grow slimmer and slimmer.
I’m much the same way—I’ve made so many choices that favored the Soviet regime that I don’t know if I can ever take them back. But now, we have a plan. Now, I’m willing to try.
Block after block trawls past the windows, each one looking like a different city, a different era. The squarish, thrusted-chest posture of the Third Reich administrative buildings muscle their way in between filigree Bavarian mainstays and newer mansions whose facades have been reduced to rubble by the Allies’ frequent bombing campaigns. “Looters will be punished by death!” a sign warns, in front of a house that’s been sheared in half, an abandoned grand piano sagging dangerously along the edge of the second floor that’s about to collapse. The red, black, and white bunting from countless photographs still hangs from many walls and arches and balconies, but it’s torn, tattered, charred, or soiled. The brave eagle of the Nazi Party is starting to look askance.
“Bozhe moi,” Olga mutters, as we pass the third bombed-out factory in as many blocks. “How can they possibly think they may still win?”
“It’s that damned survival instinct,”
Andrei says. “Gets us every time.”
I scan the streets around us. “Did you happen to get a glimpse of the American spies’ faces when Rostov was manipulating Trammel?” I ask.
Andrei leans forward to peer up at a towering stone pillar, topped with the Reich eagle. Somehow, it has weathered the bombing campaigns thus far, though probably not for long. “I saw faces but not names. Trammel is supposed to meet them at a café next to the Ministry of Armaments and Weapons, near the Reichstag. I’m thinking I’ll do Rostov’s ‘big important SS officer here to hunt for moles’ act at the Ministry headquarters, see who’s been talking to people they shouldn’t be. Someone’s bound to have a lead for us.”
“What about us?” Olga asks.
We pass the Tiergarten—a lush, column-frocked square at the heart of Berlin, once home to the famous Berlin zoopark. I dreamed of visiting it as a little girl, when my father made business trips to Berlin, before the Revolution. The trees should be in full bloom by now, but everything is dried out, yellow and black and cracked branches. The pond is a muddy hole.
“I’d rather go into the Ministry on my own,” Andrei says, slowly. “I’m nowhere near as strong as Rostov—don’t have as much experience with manipulation. It’s better if I only put myself in danger. And only have to maintain an illusion of one person instead of four.”
I reach for his arm. “Andrei—”
“Go on.” He gives me a hard look, all dark seas and Georgian spring storms. “Look to the future. Tell me it’s a bad idea to go alone.”
I narrow my eyes at him, but he has a point. Gently, I unwind the tension inside me, in my stance, and sink back into the seat as I wait for the vision to come.
We’re seated at a café table, coiled protectively around untouched waters—there’s no lager to be had in all of Berlin—which our neighbors at the café are discussing at great volume. Panic thrums through me like a heartbeat, but then the door flies open—he staggers into the café in his officer’s uniform.
Safe. Unharmed. Unescorted by the Gestapo. He’s returned.
Kursed Page 6
