Red Sparrow: A Novel

by Jason Matthews

  After the usual righteous letter of reprimand in Forsyth’s file, the Seventh Floor quietly offered Forsyth the COS Helsinki job. The offer was made to demonstrate to Congress that Headquarters sympathized with Forsyth’s reaction to fatuous oversight inflicted on hardworking field operators during Codel shopping junkets camouflaged as fact-finding trips. Offering Forsyth Helsinki was, in addition, an insincere and calculated offer because no one thought Forsyth would accept. The Station was one-sixth the size of Rome’s, in arguably the least important of four somewhat sleepy Scandinavian countries, a post for a junior COS. They expected Forsyth to decline, find a place to park himself, and leave in two years when he became eligible to retire.

  “By accepting the assignment he basically told the Seventh Floor to go fuck themselves,” said Gable. “A half year later he got me as his deputy, and yesterday you arrive. Not that you’re a fuckup.” Gable laughed. “You’re just known as one.”

  Gable saw Nate’s face, the faraway stare. Okay, he told himself, this kid has a worm in his guts. He’d seen it before, the talented case officer too fucking afeared for his rep and future to be able to relax and let it flow. That whey-faced Gondorf had rattled the kid, should be ashamed of himself, and now he and Forsyth had to get Nash thinking straight. He made a mental note to talk to the COS. The last thing Station needed was a c/o who didn’t know the right time to pull the recruitment trigger.

  TARIK’S ADANA KEBAB

  Purée red bell and hot peppers with salt and olive oil. Add purée to ground lamb, chopped onion, garlic and parsley, finely cubed butter, coriander, cumin, paprika, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Knead and shape into flat kebabs; grill until almost charred. Serve with grilled pide bread and thinly sliced purple onions sprinkled with lemon and sumac.

  8

  The white-and-blue Voskhod hydrofoil settled into the water and approached the dock in a trailing cloud of blue diesel smoke. Carrying a small suitcase, Dominika stepped onto the steep pontoon ramp on the edge of the tarry mudflats and walked up to a bus waiting on the gravel road above the river. Eleven young people—seven women and four men—trudged up the pier behind her. They were all silent and tired and put their bags down in front of the open baggage compartment of the bus. No one spoke, they didn’t glance at one another. Dominika turned and looked out over the wide Volga River, pine trees lining both sides down to the shoreline. The air was humid and the river smelled of diesel fuel. Three kilometers north, around a bend in the river, the steeples and minarets around the Kazan Kremlin could just be seen in the morning haze.

  Dominika knew it was Kazan because they had driven through the city from the airfield, past all the highway signs. That meant they were in Tatarstan, still in European Russia. At midnight, they had flown seven hundred kilometers from Moscow to a darkened military airfield. Unlit signs had read BORISOGLEBSKOYE AERODROME and KAZAN STATE AIRCRAFT PLANT. They had silently boarded a bus, the star-cracked windows covered by stained gray curtains. They drove through quiet predawn streets to a waterfront pier, where they boarded the wallowing hydrofoil as the sun was coming up over the city.

  They waited wordlessly for an hour in the aircraft-style seats of the hydrofoil in stifling air. The arrhythmic rocking of the hull, the slopping water against the pier, and the creaking of the frayed nylon lines straining against the bollards made her queasy, then sleepy. Apart from the driver of the bus and a man on the bridge of the vessel, they had seen no one. Dominika watched the sunlight spread on the water and counted the seabirds.

  Eventually a gray Lada pulled up to the gangplank and a man and woman got out, carrying two flat cardboard boxes. They boarded the boat, placed the boxes on the counter at the front of the cabin, and opened the flaps. “Come and help yourselves,” said the woman, and sat down in a front-row seat with her back to the passengers. They rose slowly and made their way to the front. They had not eaten since breakfast the day before. One box was full of fresh-baked bulochki, sweet buns with raisins, the other filled with waxed containers of warm orangeade. The man watched the passengers return to their seats, then went out and spoke to the man on the bridge. The vessel’s engines started with a rumble, and a shudder went through the seats. The aluminum gangway banged onto the pier and the lines were cast off.

  The hydrofoil was on plane, up on its foils, and the whole ship trembled as it sped downriver. The seat in front of her vibrated, the cabin headliner grommets buzzed, the metal ashtray inserts chattered in the armrests. Fighting down nausea, Dominika focused on the fabric of the grimy headrest in front of her. Courtesan College. She was flying down the Volga toward a colossal indignity.

  Now they were on the bus, the nameless woman sitting in the front seat. They swayed through a sun-dappled pine forest, finally stopping at a concrete slab wall. The sun caught the broken glass mortared along the top. The bus sounded its horn, then squeezed through the gate and up a sweeping drive and stopped in front of a two-story neoclassical mansion with a mansard roof of spalling slate. It was absolutely quiet in the woods, without a breath of a breeze, and there was no movement from within the mansion.

  Deep breath. Come on, snap out of it. This disgusting school was another obstacle, more sacrifice, another test of her loyalty. She stood in the piney woods in front of the mustard-colored mansion and waited. She had arrived at Sparrow School.

  After talking with her uncle, Dominika had thought hard about telling them all to go to hell. She contemplated taking her mother back to Strelna on the shores of the Nevskaya Guba, near Petersburg. She could find work as a teacher or a gym coach. With luck and time she might find employment at the Vaganova Academy, back into ballet. But no, she decided she was not going to run away. She would do this, whatever it took. They were not going to shoot her. This was about physical love, it would not matter what they made her do, they could not defeat her spirit.

  And even as she revolted against the thought, Dominika’s secret self, the humming servo of her body, wondered whether the grimy catechisms resident in the ocher building before her would in any small way fulfill her. She hated the thought of Sparrow School and was abashed at having been sent here, but she privately was expectant, watchful.

  “Leave your bags in the hallway and follow me,” said the woman, who had preceded them up the front steps and through the towering front doors of weathered wood. They gathered in an auditorium. Judging by the bookshelves, it had formerly been a library that had been converted to a lecture hall with a raised wooden platform and dais and several rows of creaking wooden seats at one end of the room. The woman, dressed in a shapeless black suit, walked among them and passed out envelopes by hand. “Inside you will find your room assignments,” she said, “and the names you will use during your training. Use only these names. You will not relate any personal information about yourselves to other students. Any infraction will result in immediate dismissal.” In her early fifties, the administrator had upswept gray hair, a square face, and a straight nose. She looked like the woman on the stamps, Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Her words came out in gouts of yellow.

  “You have been chosen for specialized training,” said the matron. “It is a great honor. The nature of the training may seem alien and strange to some of you. Concentrate on the lessons and the exercises. Nothing else is important.” Her voice echoed in the high-ceilinged hall. “Now go upstairs and find your rooms. Dinner is at six in the dining room across the hall. Instruction will begin here this evening at seven o’clock. Go now. Dismiss.”

  In the upper hallway Dominika counted twelve rooms, six either side, numbers in cracked-enamel lozenges screwed into the wood. Between the bedroom doors along the hallway were other plain doors without knobs or handles. These could be opened only by use of a key. Her room was painted light green and was spare but comfortable, with a single bed, standing closet, table, and chair. There was a faint but constant odor of disinfectant, on the bedspread, in the closet, in the stack of sheets on the shelf. The room had a curtained-off toilet (above which h
ung a hand shower) and a rust-stained sink. Above the writing table was a large mirror, too large, incongruous in the barracks-style room. Dominika put her cheek flat against the mirror and looked at the surface in glancing light, like in training. The silver smokiness of a two-way mirror. Welcome to Sparrow School.

  Dusk, and the night sky not visible through the pine tops. The house was dimly lit; there were no clocks in the mansion, anywhere. No telephone rang. The hallways and staircases and ground-floor rooms were silent; the night invaded the house. The walls were bare, held none of the daguerreotype official portraits of Lenin or Marx, though moldy outlines where portraits once hung were still visible on the panels. What Tatar noble family had lived here before the Revolution? Did resplendent parties ride and hunt in these pines? Did they hear the whistle of the Moscow steam packet from the river? What Soviet instinct had put the school this far away from Moscow?

  She looked around the dining table at the eleven other “students” silently spooning tokmach, a thick noodle soup that had been ladled into their bowls from a colossal blue-and-white porcelain tureen by a wordless waiter. A plate of boiled meat followed. The women and three of the men were all in their twenties; the fourth man seemed even younger, in his teens, thin and pale. Were any of them also SVR-trained? Dominika turned to the woman on her left and smiled. “My name is Katia,” she said, using her training alias.

  The woman smiled back. “I am Anya.” She was slight and blond, with a wide mouth and high cheekbones lightly dusted by freckles. She looked like an elegant milkmaid with pale blue eyes. Her halting words were cornflower-blue, innocence and artlessness. Others shyly recited their aliases. After dinner they filed quietly into the library.

  It was absolutely quiet in the room, then the lights dimmed. Welcome to Sparrow School instruction. A film started, stark black-and-white images, brutal, feral, sawtoothed, it burst onto a screen at the front of the room with straining faces, clasping bodies, organs shafting endlessly, everywhere, now in such close focus to become gynecological, unrecognizable, unworldly. The sound started at full volume and Dominika saw the heads of her classmates jerk back at the sudden assault of sound and sight. The air was filled with spinning color for her; she knew the signs of overload when the bleeding sequence red-violet-blue-green-yellow began. She had no control and closed her eyes to escape the onslaught. Then a speaker popped and the sound suddenly went down to barely audible, so that the woman on the screen seemed as if she were whispering, even as her hair stuck to the side of her face and her body was jolted endlessly by an off-screen partner.

  The light flickered on the ceiling beams twenty feet above her head. Could she last here for the duration? What would they expect her to do? What would they do if she got up and walked out of the room? Would she be dismissed from the Service? The hell with them. They wanted a Sparrow, they would get a Sparrow. No one knew she could see the colors. Mikhail had said she was the best student he ever had in seeing people. She would stay. She would learn.

  She told herself this wasn’t love. This school, this mansion secluded behind walls topped with broken glass, was an engine of the State that institutionalized and dehumanized love. It didn’t count, it was physical sex, it was training, like ballet school. In the flickering light in the musty library Dominika told herself she was going to go through with this, to spite these vnebrachnyi rebyonoki, these bastards.

  The lights came on and the students sat red-faced and embarrassed. Anya sniffled and wiped her eyes with the back of her fist. The matron addressed the students in a flat, hard voice. “You have had a long journey. Return to your rooms and get some rest. Instruction resumes tomorrow morning at oh-seven-hundred. Dismiss.” Nothing in her manner would have even remotely indicated that they had been watching a film of people engaged in coitus for the last ninety minutes. They filed out and up the grand staircase with the massive wooden banisters. Anya nodded good night before closing her door. Dominika wondered whether Anya or the others knew that tonight the as-yet-unseen staff of the Kon Institute, stuffed into the cabinets de voyeur between rooms, would be watching them undressing, bathing, and sleeping.

  Dominika stood in front of the mirror, ran the long-handled brush through her hair, the only familiar token she had brought from home, and she looked at it in her hand, as if it could mock her. She stood and unbuttoned her blouse. She slipped the blouse on a bent wire hanger and nonchalantly hooked it on the frame of the mirror, covering one end of it. She set her little suitcase on the table and opened the lid against the mirror, blocking a further third. She stepped out of her skirt and pirouetted unconsciously to look at the curve of her back and the swell of her bottom in the nylon panties before casually flipping the skirt over the frame of the mirror, covering the last third. They would clear the mirror in the morning, perhaps speak sharply to her about it, but it was worth it tonight. Then she brushed her teeth, got under sheets in a disinfectant bloom of camphor and rose oil, and flipped off the light. She left the hairbrush on the dresser.

  The men were separated from the women and the days spilled into one another and they lost a sense of time. Soporific mornings were devoted to endless lectures on anatomy, physiology, the psychology of the human sexual response. A few new staff appeared. A female doctor droned endlessly about sexual practices in different cultures. Then came the classes on male anatomy, knowing how a man’s body works, how to excite a male. The techniques, positions, movements numbered in the hundreds. They were studied, repeated, memorized, an Upper Volga Kama Sutra. Dominika marveled at this monstrous encyclopedia, at the sticky epiphanies that ruined normality, that forever would rob Dominika of her innocence. Could she ever make love again?

  Afternoons were reserved for “practical subjects,” as if they were training to be ice-skaters. They practiced walking, they practiced conversation, they practiced pulling the cork out of a champagne bottle. There were rooms of used clothes, scuffed shoes, sweat-stained lingerie. They dressed up and practiced talking to one another, learned to listen, to show interest, to make compliments and to flatter and, most important, to elicit information during conversation.

  A rare afternoon of camaraderie, five of them sitting on the floor of the library in a circle, knees almost touching, laughing, chattering, practicing what they called “sex talk” from what they had heard in the nightly films.

  “It’s like this,” said a dark-haired girl with the heavy accent of the Black Sea, and she closed her eyes and murmured in cast-iron English, “Yah, lovers, you are making me to come.” Gales of laughter, and Dominika looked at the blushing faces and wondered how soon some of them would find themselves in their underwear in the Intourist Hotel in Volgograd watching skinny Vietnamese trade reps shuck off their shoes.

  “Katia, you try,” said the girl to Dominika. From the first night they had all sensed she was somehow different, somehow special. Beside her, Anya looked at her expectantly.

  Without knowing why, perhaps to show them, perhaps to show herself, Dominika half closed her eyes and whispered, “Yes, honey . . . just like that . . . Oh, God,” and pushing the sound up from her belly: “UNNGGGHHH.” Shocked silence, and then the circle of girls roared their approval and applauded. Anya stared, flaxen-haired and wide-eyed and wordless, mindless of the general hilarity of the moment.

  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.