by Paul Vidich
He surrendered. “It doesn’t matter what my mother’s name was. Let’s call her Yelena, for the purpose of this conversation. There was a woman, and maybe she had a son. Is that satisfactory?”
Natalya nodded.
“She was a Russian translator working in Moscow for the Americans who’d come here during the war to manage the lend-lease logistics for tanks supplied to the Red Army. She was a widow with a five-year-old son. Russian men were all at the front. She worked for an American captain, and they had an affair. When he was sent back to Washington, he took her and her son. The boy grew up there. She spoke Russian to him at home, but he was raised as an American.”
“You speak about yourself as if it weren’t you.”
“I didn’t say it was me, okay?” He paused. “So, this boy spoke Russian at home and English at school. He had a Russian mother who, he discovered years later, happened to be an illegal working for Directorate S, and an American father who traveled, drank, cheated, and never caught on that his wife reported to Moscow. Can you imagine the boy’s surprise when one day his mother sat down her son and said, ‘Now, this is who your mother is, and you will be sent to Moscow to visit your grandparents, and while you’re there, a nice man from the KGB will talk to you about your responsibilities to the Soviet Union’? The boy was twelve. What did he know?”
Garin looked at Natalya. “Say something.”
“You’re KGB?”
“I was. Then I was CIA. Now, I work alone.”
“Who was your real father?”
“I never knew him. He was a doctor in Moscow arrested for something, maybe for practicing medicine. He was taken to Solovetski Detention Center on the White Sea. Two months after his wife’s second conjugal visit, he was among a dozen prisoners selected for punishment in reprisal for a prison escape. They were made to walk outside the walls and stand before five soldiers in a firing squad. They were ordered to kneel, and all except my father did. He kneeled for no man, or so the story goes, and the commander promptly shot his leg, bringing him to his knees. The prisoners were shot, but the soldiers were drunk and their aim was not good. The fallen prisoners were thrown in a mass grave they’d been made to dig. But some were not dead. The next morning, the commander came out and shot his pistol into the moving earth until the ground was still.”
Garin looked at Natalya. “This is the story that the boy’s grandmother told when he visited his father’s village. Is it true? Who knows? The boy believed it. Everyone believes what they want to believe about themselves. And the boy never knew who reported his father to State Security.”
“You told this to my father?”
Garin smiled. “It makes for a good story. Is it possible such a thing could happen to a small boy? It is a dangerous world for children. You aren’t the only one who can cry crocodile tears in bed.”
She slapped his face.
Garin touched his cheek, still hot from the sting. He saw in her anger a kind of empathy. “So we both have dead fathers,” he said. “It happens to everyone.”
Garin set his wineglass on the doily and carefully centered the base, turning it bit by bit until it was perfectly placed. He saw her staring at him.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He tore a piece of bread from the loaf. “I am the man eating with you.”
“Fine. You don’t have to tell me. You are Aleksander Garin. That’s enough.”
She stood and began to clear the table, stacking serving dishes and dinner plates and topping them with cutlery. She started for the kitchen but stopped at the door and turned. “I’m glad we’ve met.”
She did not return immediately from the kitchen, and he thought something was wrong. He found her at the sink, head leaned forward, struggling to breathe, chest heaving.
He startled her. She turned to him. Her face was pale, though her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes were red and tearing.
“Yes, I cry.” She composed herself and wiped a tear with her knuckle. “I don’t mean to be emotional. I should never have met you. This is all wrong.”
“What’s wrong? Have you told them I’m here?”
She grimaced through her tears and laughed. “You don’t know, do you?” She looked at him. She took his head in her hands and pulled him forward, kissing his lips. She relaxed into her sudden, startling passion, and then she pulled away. “No one is coming.”
She stepped back and held herself, suddenly cautious and embarrassed. “Do you remember the night here in the bedroom?” She breathed quickly. “I looked at you, knowing how Posner was there behind the wall watching, and I was scared you would see my fear.”
Garin’s eyes drifted to the walls around.
“There is no one.” She laughed.
Garin’s eyes returned to her, and he felt terrified. He saw that she struggled to keep her distance, and he saw that she too was terrified by what was happening. Neither of them moved. Silence and a brittle formality separated them.
She took his hand and placed it on the smooth skin of her neck and held it there.
Garin saw fierce yearning in her eyes and felt her loneliness, and he was aware of the danger that attached to intimacy. He knew that he had come face-to-face with a person as lonely as he was. A terrible caution held him back. But what was he afraid of?
“You’re quiet,” she said. “Thinking too much.”
She kissed his lips with feeling. Her eyes signaled the bedroom’s open door.
She was under the bed’s comforter when he entered. Her clothes were draped over a chair, and she had pulled the comforter to her neck so only her head poked out. She watched him undress, stepping out of one pant leg and then the other, and he pulled off his shirt, laying it casually over the chair. He removed his socks last.
He slipped under the comforter beside her and felt the pleasant warmth of her body. Her nose was cold, but her legs and arms were warm. He touched the silken smoothness of her skin.
Suddenly, she rose up on her elbow and looked down at him. Her finger traced the raised scar that went ear to throat, investigating the old wound. “How did you get this?”
Their bodies were close, and they looked warily into each other’s eyes, waiting on the question: two people shedding distrust; two people looking to escape loneliness; two souls coveting the pleasure that was theirs to pluck.
She lay down beside him. A finger of moonlight entered the curtain and drew a line across the comforter and hit her dress on the chair and her brassiere, which had fallen to the floor. Two figures lay side by side on the large bed.
“We don’t have to do anything,” she said. “Hug me.”
He did. As he rolled over, her dancer’s body folded on him and she wrapped her arms over his chest to complete their innocent embrace.
* * *
SHE WAS STILL awake. All was quiet, and he was asleep. His dark hair was wild on the cushioning pillow, and his cheek was warmed in the silver moonlight that shone through the window. His restlessness had kept her from sleep. She sat up and looked at him for a long moment, gazing at his face. Even in sleep, he had a determination so strong that the bitter disquiet of pain was visible. Beaded perspiration unmasked his struggle with an unseen adversary in the wild dominion of his dreams. She gently placed a hand on his forehead and said something to comfort him. She wished that she could provide him as much solace as his loneliness deserved. Then she kissed his cheek and lay down beside him, drawing close.
18 INTERLUDE
MORNING LIGHT WOKE GARIN. HE saw that the comforter had been kicked off and she was cuddled against him, her arm affectionately draped over his chest, her face on his shoulder. He lay there vaguely aware of the sounds outside and glad they had not spoiled the evening with hungry sex. He had known that experience, and he knew what came after.
He was on his back looking up at the ceiling with his palms on his chest, feeling the patient rhythms of his beating heart. He remembered their first encounter in the bedroom—her amateurish, staged seduction and her em
barrassed flight, wrapped in a bedsheet. He was glad the new memory replaced the old.
He gazed at her pale body, smooth and porcelain, and her petite breasts. He had been surprised when she suggested they do nothing and pleased because he didn’t want to squander the chaste pleasure of getting to know her. He wasn’t a young man anymore, and there was something pleasant about not doing what was easy and expected.
He knew that she too was awake. Surprise came over him when her fingers engaged his. Warm yearning in her gentle touch traced the contours of his chest. Part of him wanted to ask her everything about her life, just as she had asked about his scar, and another part of him wanted to know nothing, to keep his distance to protect himself from attachment.
They had begun to explore each other—fingertip to fingertip, hand on hand, the warmth of each other’s breath. The patient discovery of a stranger’s body. She rolled over and kissed his eyes, then pressed her lips on his with an ardor that he was returning.
“You talk in your sleep,” she said.
“What did I say?”
“It was a bad dream.”
He went to speak, but she stopped his mouth with a kiss. “No words.” She moved her legs over him and kneaded his chest with her fingers, gazing into his eyes with desire.
Everything they needed to say had been said. Everything they wanted from each other they took.
19 A QUIET WEEKEND
GARIN KNEW THAT EXPERIENCE OFTEN repeated itself—at least it did in his relations with women—and he knew that every intimacy was pleasant at first, and perhaps even intoxicating, and made life appear to be an adventure. But in time, the feelings inevitably grew into something ordinary and perhaps unbearable. Each new beginning with an interesting woman held that sad potential, and he hoped that it wouldn’t happen with Natalya. He wanted to keep everything between them uncomplicated, if only for the weekend while they lived a pleasant moment, trying to ignore the future.
She had left work early Friday afternoon for the start of the last weekend of Lent. They had spent the day apart, and he felt good being away from her. The idea of too much intimacy had begun to wear on him and crowded out what he knew he must do in his final days in Moscow.
That evening, they found themselves on the roof of her apartment house. The dying sun was an orange seam across the horizon, and threatening clouds had moved their conversation to a dark place without any conscious effort on their part. They seemed to know that whatever pleasures they had enjoyed were behind them. What lay ahead was uncertain.
It was warm out in the spring evening, and windows of the building across the street were thrown open for air after having been shut tight all winter. They leaned on the stone parapet looking toward the russet dusk. Now and then they looked at each other and smiled, as if surprised to find themselves in each other’s company. Intimacy between them was still a new thing being tried out.
Natalya ground her cigarette with her heel, extinguishing it, and without turning her head she asked, “How do you know Deputy Chairman Churgin?”
Garin didn’t know what prompted her question. The wine at dinner? The sight of the luminously illuminated Kremlin? The memory of the meeting in Spaso House?
Natalya turned to him. “The head of Directorate S is a man who isn’t photographed. His name isn’t spoken. He is a shadow.”
“He trained me.” Garin addressed the surprise he saw on her face. “He wouldn’t remember. I was twelve. I was in a group at a camp outside Moscow. There were twenty of us receiving training. We were all tan, brown-haired, eager, dressed in the same uniform. The Soviet image of healthy youth. His job was to train illegals to talk, think, and act like regular Americans, even to the point that in our subconscious, we took on a false identity and became a made-up person. It was all very patriotic to be part of the preparation for the day when we’d come out of our holes behind enemy lines and engage rearguard operations against shop clerks, taxi drivers—mothers with strollers.”
Garin laughed at the absurdity of what had been expected of him. Then his face darkened.
“But it wasn’t fun and games back in America. If you were seen as unfit or wavering, the punishment was quick and ruthless. You were recalled to Moscow.” He turned to Natalya. “The woman I spoke of the other night—the one married to the American army captain in Virginia with her son. She was recalled. If you were recalled to Moscow, you didn’t return. The rule was no contact. If a person returned to America and it became known they had been in Moscow, the whole deceit was at risk. So they disappeared. Lost. The woman didn’t exist, except as a name taken from a cemetery marker. Probably she was shot and thrown in an unmarked grave, or it’s possible she died in a labor camp in the gulag.
“It is always harder for the ones left behind. Death comes as a relief to the condemned, but the living suffer the absurdity and grief. Her crime? Even that was a mystery. Too many complaints against her alcoholic, cheating husband? Too much concern for her son? Too much suspicious behavior? Too few reports? Too many care packages of Easter sausage and kulich? Who knows?”
Garin had gone on at length in a quiet voice. The sun had set, and darkness had fallen on them like a shroud. All around, the lights of the city had come on one by one, twinkling. The two of them stood quietly in the deepening gloom of night. Garin had assumed a meditative pose.
“And this too,” he said suddenly, “has been my life. The mother I resented. What bargain did she make with the devil to believe that the life she chose was worth living?”
Garin’s voice was gruff, and he lowered his head, looking at nothing. Then he looked at her. “You asked how I know Churgin? There were three encounters. I told you about the training camp. The summer after that, I saw him parked in front of our home in Virginia.” Garin paused. “My mother was frightened and pulled me from the window. He never came inside the house, but my mother knew he was unhappy. I saw her fear. She never described the threat, but, like any child, I assumed I had done something wrong. I had failed her in some indescribable way. I would wake up in bed trembling and crawl under my desk, a scared kid thinking it was safe there. Then she left—vanished, actually. I put things together as I got older. Somewhere along the way, I swore I would kill him.
“My third encounter was in Spaso House. I was not surprised he didn’t recognize me. But he was a man I would never forget.”
Garin ended the short account of his life. A part of him felt relieved to have a person he could openly talk to about his hoarded emotions and things he’d never shared, and another part of him, the part that managed fear, went along reluctantly. His life too, he said, had been an unforeseen chain of events set in motion a long time ago, and he’d done what he’d needed to carve out a life for himself.
“It sounds terrible,” he said, laughing, “but it’s been fine. I couldn’t imagine a desk job in a bank or a dull nine-to-five existence. And I’ve met you.” He laughed again, but his voice carried a sense of heartbreaking loss. His survival was a peculiar happenstance of luck and skill. He’d fought a Cold War—against the CIA, Langley, the White House; now he was fighting another war against the KGB, Moscow Center, and the Kremlin. They were all the same thing; all the same enemy, he said.
Natalya touched his hand, arranging her palm over his fist. She leaned against him and coddled his shoulder with a gentle embrace. She felt his body tremble, and she pulled away, gazing into his face. “You’re crying.”
“Yes.” He smiled through the tear that had welled in his eye. “Not a crocodile tear. Just a little one.” He wiped the corner of his eye with his finger. “Or maybe a speck of dust.” He turned to look at her. “We’re alike, you know.”
“In what way?”
“There are people who want to silence us. A few I suspect want to kill us. And we both want to cheat them.”
* * *
EVERY MORNING THAT weekend, when the whole of the city beyond the closed shutters of her apartment began to stir, Natalya and Garin were awoken by emergency repairs on
a water main. Workmen dug up the street in a leisurely effort to fix the broken pipe, goaded by angry residents who complained they were dragging out the work and disturbing everyone. The crew talked loudly with cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths, ignoring the pleas. Then they applied themselves more vigorously with a chorus of clanging shovels, pickaxes, and pounding jackhammers that entered Natalya’s darkened bedroom, rising and falling in waves of obscenities that filled the brief silences between the pneumatic pounding.
Garin and Natalya woke reluctantly late that Saturday, and it seemed to them that they awoke at the same time from dreamy sleep, due to the same shrill sound outside. For reasons they could not explain, they were sharing feelings. A mosquito buzzed one and then the other, and they both covered their heads with a pillow.
The next morning, Sunday, it was the urgent siren of a passing ambulance that brought them out of bed. She threw open the shutters, letting in blinding sunlight, and went to the bathroom without shutting the door. Still absorbed in a pleasant dream, he rolled over to hold on to the fleeing thought.
When Garin woke, he knew it was late. He lifted his arm and looked at his wristwatch. Noon! How could that be? Then he realized that the street outside was quiet and Natalya was not in the bathroom. He jumped from the bed and walked barefoot to the kitchen, shoving his arms into his shirt sleeves.
“Natalya?”
No answer. He looked in the bathroom, the other bathroom, and then down the circular stairwell. “Natalya?” He felt an emptiness to the apartment when he was back inside. Her coat was missing. Her purse was not where she usually placed it, and there was an envelope taped to the vestibule door where she knew he would see it. He stared at his name, which she’d written in her precise script. He tore it open.
You were sleeping, the note read. I decided not to wake you. I left the morning paper. Be careful today. Dinner is at 20:00. If the telephone rings, don’t answer it. Two rings followed after a long pause by two more rings means danger. Get out of the flat as fast as possible. Love, Nata.
