Red Sparrow

by Jason Matthews

  Anya of the meadow-flower-blue halo. She was struggling, aghast at the most salacious aspects of training, and clung to Dominika for courage and support. “You have to get used to it,” Dominika told her, but Anya cringed during the nightly films, holding Dominika’s hand tightly as the fuck circus raged on the screen in front of them. The little farm girl isn’t going to make it, Dominika thought. Her color is getting weaker, not stronger.

  Then one night, after an impossibly depraved film that had her silently weeping, Anya came to Dominika’s room, eyes red and lips trembling, her cornflower syllables barely visible. She had come to her friend for solace, she was losing her mind. She had told them she was quitting, but they had said something to her—God only knew what—and she could not leave. Dominika pulled her by the hand behind the bathroom curtain. “You have to get through this,” she whispered, shaking Anya gently by the shoulders.

  Anya sobbed and threw her arms around Dominika’s neck. She pressed her lips against Dominika’s mouth. The little idiot was trembling and Dominika did not pull away, did not reject her. They were on the floor of the little bathroom. Dominika cradled Anya in her arms, felt her shake. Anya turned her head up for another kiss, and Dominika almost refused, but then relented and kissed her again.

  The kiss had an effect on Anya and she reached for Dominika’s hand, pulled it to her body, and slid it beneath her bathrobe onto her breast. Oh, for God’s sake, thought Dominika. She herself felt no passion, but rather sadness for the girl in her arms. Was this the bisexuality they had lectured to them about downstairs? Could they be observed behind the curtain? Was there audio in the room? Was this a serious offense?

  Anya held her hand by the wrist and trailed it over her nipple, which swelled under Dominika’s fingertips. The bathrobe fell open and Anya pulled the captured hand lower, between her legs. Perversion? An act of kindness? Something else? Dominika’s unknown ancestral libertine—whoever she was—kept her going, an inexplicable out-of-body state where stopping now was only slightly less possible than going ahead. Dominika’s feather-light fingertips traced minute, perfect circles and Anya melted, her head turned in to Dominika, the line of her neck soft and vulnerable.

  Sitting up against the bathroom tiles, Dominika felt Anya’s breath between her own legs and there was no reason now to stop. Her secret self told her to feel her body, and the sensation of Anya’s breathy exhalations radiated up her stomach. Dominika’s head dropped back against the tile and her arm gripped the side of the sink for support. She felt Prababushka’s tortoiseshell brush in her hand and pulled it down. Her great-grandmother’s hairbrush, her mother had brushed her own hair with it, it was her secret companion during the thunderstorms of her girlhood.

  Dominika trailed the handle down Anya’s stomach, making the soft amber curve infinitely light, infinitely insistent. Anya held her breath and her eyes fluttered behind tight-shut eyes. Looking at Anya’s face, Dominika positioned the handle and flexed her wrist. Anya’s mouth opened partway, and her eyes showed a sliver of white, like the slack face of a corpse on a slab.

  Anya stiffened and began shaking against the slow plunge and drag of tortoiseshell. She turned chin-wet to look up at Dominika and whispered, “Yes baby, just so, you’re cumming me,” and Dominika smiled and watched the little milkmaid thrash about while she put her own secret self back in the hurricane room inside her and closed the door.

  After a few minutes, Anya sighed and turned her face up to be kissed again. Enough. “You have to go, quickly, now,” Dominika said. Red-faced, Anya gathered her bathrobe around her, looked at Dominika, and went silently out. Would there be bellowed accusations tomorrow morning? Was there anyone behind the mirror right now? Too tired to care, Dominika got into bed in the darkened room. The brush lay forgotten on the floor under the sink.

  =====

  The next morning, in a large downstairs salon, wood-paneled and carpeted with a huge blue-and-ivory Kazakh carpet, the women were ordered to sit in chairs set in a circle in the center of the room. The first student, a slight young brunette with the lilting western accent of Novgorod, was ordered to stand up, undress, and walk around the circle to be critiqued by the others. There was shocked silence. She hesitated but then disrobed. The female doctor and her assistant, both in lab coats, acted as moderators, noting strengths and weaknesses. Finished, the student was ordered to sit in her chair, but to remain naked. The next student was called and the process was repeated. Flushed faces, goose bumps, and bitten lips, the room slowly was filled with incongruous, shivering naked bodies, a pitiful pile of clothes and shoes beneath each chair.

  Thank God there were no men present! Anya twisted her hands nervously as her turn inexorably came, and she looked over to Dominika in a panic. Dominika looked away. The doctor snapped at Anya to hurry up when she hesitated to peel off her panties. Now it was her turn, and Dominika ignored her nervousness and stood up when she was called. It was monstrous to be ordered to strip off in the presence of half a dozen strangers, but she forced herself. Anya looked at her intently. Dominika was embarrassed as much by her nudity as by the awed silence in the room when she walked around the circle of chairs. “Best in breed,” whispered the assistant. “Best in show,” corrected the doctor.

  The following day a man stood in the circle of chairs and took off a short bathrobe. He was naked underneath and needed to bathe and clean his toenails. The doctor evaluated the pale body for the students, and close-up assessment followed. The next day the man in the bathrobe was back, this time with a short, stocky woman with iodine-red hair and chapped cheeks and elbows. They disrobed and unconcernedly made love on a mattress in the center of the students’ circle of chairs. The doctor pointed out different lovemaking positions; she would order the couple to stop in mid-act to illustrate a relevant point or to demonstrate a physical refinement. The models showed no emotion, neither for themselves nor for their partners, their colors so washed out as to be invisible. It was soulless.

  “I cannot look at them,” Anya confessed to Dominika. They had grown into the habit of walking together around the shabby garden of the mansion in the few free minutes after breakfast. “I cannot do this, I simply cannot.”

  “Listen, you can become used to anything,” said Dominika. How was this girl ever selected? From what provincial capital had she been picked? Then she wondered to herself, What about you, can you become accustomed to anything after enough time?

  The next week was, as Dominika anticipated, a multiplication of indignity. Again the salon and the familiar circle of chairs, but this time men, brusque men in tight suits and bad haircuts, sat in the circle. The female students were told to undress in front of these men, who then proceeded to critique each of the students, pointing out flaws in her figure or complexion or face. They were never identified; their yeasty yellow bubbles combined to tarnish the atmosphere of the entire room.

  Anya covered her tear-streaked face with her hands until the doctor told her to stop being a silly cow and to take her hands away this instant. Feeling as if she were in a dream, Dominika left her body, closed her mind, and endured the stares of a man with a terribly pocked face. The color coming from inside him made his eyes yellow, like a civet in an alley. She stared back at him without blinking as his eyes wandered over her. “Not enough meat on her,” he said aloud to nobody in particular. “And her nipples are too small.” Two other men nodded in agreement. Dominika stared them all down until they looked away or got busy lighting their cigarettes.

  Dominika was surprised to note that she was beginning to go numb. Numb to nakedness, numb to lewd commentary, numb to strangers’ eyes looking at her breasts or her sex or her buttocks. They can do what they like, she told herself, but I won’t let them look me in the eyes. Other students reacted in their own ways. One silly little idiot from Smolensk with the lilt of southern Russian dialect vamped and hip-shot her way through the sessions. Anya never seemed to get over her shame. The defining smell of disinfectant in the mansion now was overlaid wi
th the pungency of their bodies, musk and sweat and rosewater and brown soap. And after lights out, the sweating staff sat in the cabinets and took notes and made sure the cameras were not blocked.

  Anya knocked softly at her door late one night, and Dominika opened it a crack and told her to go away. “I can’t help you anymore,” she said, and Anya turned and disappeared down the darkened hallway. It isn’t my problem, thought Dominika. It’s enough that I’m fighting for my own sanity.

  Then the bus came with the military cadets, the ones who had scored at the top of their class. The women waited for them in their rooms, and sat on the beds and watched the skinny, bruised bodies as the boys ripped off their tunic shirts and boots and trousers, and held on tight as they rutted like stoats until time was up. The cadets left without looking back at the women, and the bus swayed as it went out through the gate into the pine forest.

  The next morning in the curtained, darkened library the projector began, but instead of the usual film, they saw their classmate in room number five on the single bed with a skinny, shaved-headed cadet from the day before. The women could barely look at the screen. This was shame, this was indignity, seeing yourself with legs hooked around a pimply back, hands formed into claws on bony shoulders. The doctor would freeze-frame the films to add commentary, suggest improvements. Worse, they all now guessed that the films would come in order—rooms five, six, seven, and so on. Anya’s head was down, her face in her hands. She was in room eleven and would have to endure not only the films, but also the wait. She ran from the room weeping as her segment ended. The doctor let her flee. She prattled on about what had been done wrong, how it could be improved.

  Dominika was in room number twelve, at the end of the hall. The filmed segment of the interlude with her cadet therefore was the last. Disembodied, she watched herself, surprised at her slack face, how mechanically she had grasped the young man and guided him, how she had pulled his ear to get him off when he collapsed on top of her. Her head was spinning, yet she felt no shame, no embarrassment. She looked at the images on the screen without feeling and kept telling herself that she was a member of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation.

  The next morning Anya did not come down to breakfast, and two girls found her in her room. They had to push the door open with their shoulders. She had knotted panty hose around her neck, wrapped the end around a coat hook on the back of the door, and simply had drawn her legs up and strangled herself. She had had the strength to keep her feet off the floor until she blacked out. The weight of her lolling body had kept the noose tight. In the garden, Dominika heard the screams. She raced upstairs, pushed the others aside, and lifted Anya off the hook and laid her on the floor. She felt guilt and anger. What did the little twit expect from her anyway? How could she have had the courage to choke to death, she thought, but not to lie with a man for thirty minutes?

  There barely was a reaction. The bear sniffed at the body, then turned its back. Anya was carried out of the mansion on a canvas stretcher, covered by a blanket, her blond hair sticking out from under. Nothing was mentioned, by anybody. The day’s instruction continued as before.

  The course was coming to an end. The six Sparrows watched as the four young men filed back into the dining room. They were fledgling “Ravens” now, trained in a smaller villa down the road, three of them expert in the art of seducing the vulnerable and lonely women targeted by the SVR—the minister’s spinster secretary, the ambassador’s frustrated wife, the underappreciated female aide of a general. The fourth young man had learned another specialty: befriending the sensitive, fearful men—cipher clerks, military attachés, sometimes senior diplomats—who secretly yearned for male friendship, companionship, love, but who were heart-piercingly vulnerable to the threat of exposure. The Ravens loftily declared that they had suffered during their training. Training partners were not readily available, whispered Dmitri; they practiced on unwashed girls from nearby villages, made love to sallow slatterns bused from factories in Kazan. Dominika did not ask about the fourth boy, how and with whom he had practiced. “But now we’re trained to excel in love,” said Dmitri. “We are experts.” He opened his arms and stared at them through his eyelashes.

  The women looked back at him wordlessly. Dominika saw the women’s faces were closed down, saw the skepticism and fatalism and mistrust. These were like the vacant faces of the hookers on Tverskaya Ulitsa in Moscow. The fruits of Sparrow School, thought Dominika. Anya’s empty place at the table was not the only cost.

  They departed for the airport at midnight, carrying their cheap cardboard suitcases, leaving the blacked-out mansion without a look back. Whore School was closed until the next group arrived. The pinewoods were black, silent. The plane circled the smokestacks of Kazan and flew west over the invisible landscape. In another hour they were over the lights of Nizhniy Novgorod, bisected by the black ribbon of the Volga. Then came the gradual descent toward the glow of sleepless Moscow. She would never see any of the other trainees again.

  She was to report to the Center the next morning, to the Fifth Department, to start her career as a junior intelligence officer. She thought about Simyonov, chief of the Fifth, and about the other officers she would meet, how they would look at her, what they would say. Well, she thought, the trained courtesan is back from the steppes, and she intended to inhabit their world.

  The living room was dark when she tiptoed into the apartment in the hours before dawn, but her mother appeared in the hallway, dressed in a bathrobe. “I heard your steps,” she said, and Dominika knew she meant her uneven tread in the stairwell. Dominika hugged her, then took her mother’s hand and kissed it—with lips that had been trained to ruin a man—an act of expiation.

  SPARROW SCHOOL TOKMACH SOUP

  Boil coarsely chopped potato, thinly sliced onions, and carrots in beef broth until soft. Add thin noodles and cook until done. Put boiled beef in bottom of bowl and pour broth and vegetables over.

  9

  Dominika reported to the Fifth the next morning, still exhausted by the flight from Kazan. Walking down the long headquarters corridor with light green walls, she went to Simyonov’s office to report for duty but was told the colonel was out and to come back later. Instead they sent her to Personnel, then to Registry, then to Records.

  She walked around a corner in the hallway and came upon Simyonov himself, talking to a white-haired man in a dark gray suit. She noticed the man’s bushy white eyebrows and kindly smile. His liquid brown eyes narrowed as Simyonov made a brief introduction: General Korchnoi, chief of the Americas Department, Corporal Egorova. She vaguely knew the name, was aware of his seniority. Compared to the pale aura around Simyonov’s head, Korchnoi was bathed in a flaming mantle of color, as bright as Dominika had seen in anyone. Purple velvet, deep and rich.

  “The corporal just returned from the course at Kazan,” said Simyonov with a smirk. Everyone in the Service knew what that meant. Dominika felt the blood rush to her cheeks. “And she is assisting in the approach to the diplomat, the case I was telling you about, General.”

  “More than just assist,” said Dominika, looking at Simyonov, then at Korchnoi. “I graduated from the Forest in the last class.” She ignored Sparrow School, cursing Simyonov under her breath. She knew what Simyonov was doing, but she sensed nothing from the older man. Hard to read.

  “I heard about your record at the Academy, Corporal,” said the general enigmatically. “I am glad to meet you.” Korchnoi shook her hand with a dry, firm grasp. Simyonov looked on, smiling, thinking this would be the first of many senior officers who would try to dive down the front of her blouse. She’d be working in the front office of some general (and on his leather couch) within six months. Surprised and flattered, Dominika shook his hand, thanked the general, and continued down the corridor. The men’s eyes followed her.

  “More steam than a banya in Yakutsk,” whispered Simyonov when Dominika had walked around the corner. “You know she
’s the niece of the deputy?”

  Korchnoi nodded.

  “Niece or not, she’s going to be a pain in the ass,” muttered Simyonov. Korchnoi said nothing. “She wants to be an operator. But look at her, she’s built to be a vorobey. That’s why Egorov sent her to Kazan.”

  “And the Frenchman?” asked Korchnoi.

  Another snort. “Polovaya zapadnya. A straight honey trap. A matter of weeks. He’s a commercial type, we squeeze him dry, and it’s done.” He nodded his head down the hallway. “She wants to read the file, to get involved. The only thing she’s going to get involved in is what’s between the Frenchman’s legs.”

  Korchnoi smiled. “Good luck, Colonel,” he said, shaking hands.

  “Thank you, General,” said Simyonov.

  =====

  They had pointed her to a corner of the French Section of the Fifth Department. She had stared at the windowless angle of the walls as they met at the corner of the chipped desk, which was bare save for a cracked wooden in-tray. Two fat file folders were thrown rudely on her desk. Simyonov had finally released them to her to get her off his back. The dull blue covers with black diagonal stripes were dog-eared, spines fuzzy from sweaty hands. Osobaya papka. Her first operational file. She opened the cover and drank in the words, the colors.

  The target was Simon Delon, forty-eight, first secretary in the Commercial Section of the Embassy of France in Moscow. Delon was married but his wife remained in Paris. He traveled infrequently to France for conjugal visits. As a geographical bachelor in Moscow, Delon had been noticed by the FSB almost immediately. They assigned a single watcher at first, but as time passed and interest in him peaked, he was covered in FSB ticks. They spent a lot of time with their krolik, their rabbit. A twelve-man team took him to work and put him to bed. Photos spilled out of an envelope stuck between the pages of the file. Delon walking alone along the river, alone watching the skaters at the Dynamo rink, alone eating at a restaurant table.