by Shamim Sarif
“I brought bread and some fish,” he tells her. He holds up his prized packages with a flourish. She cannot help but notice that his briefcase, perhaps full of papers from work, is still lying on the floor, behind him. Perhaps he sees her glance at it, for he smiles and reaches to pick it up. Should she offer to take it, to put it in the bedroom with his jacket or will that be too obvious? In fact she is saved from the decision, because he himself passes her the food parcels and turns and strides into her bedroom, depositing the rest of his things there.
“Where did you get fish, Sasha?” she asks as he walks past her again, into the tiny area of the living room that passes for her kitchen.
He smiles. “Never mind.”
She feels a quick burn of anger in her stomach. He will not say, but she knows he has ready access to special shops, to the types of food that most people could never have access to or afford. He senses her feelings, and regrets that he dismissed her question.
“I know I have privileges,” he tells her. “But I just wanted you to have it. The fish, I mean. I wanted you to enjoy it.”
He is caught between repentance and the wish to give her everything in the world, and she sees his uncertainty, this dilemma.
“Is there any dessert?” he asks.
She pushes away the remnants of her anger, and stops at the entrance to the kitchen. She holds out her arms, offering herself. Her eyes are teasing, but her movement is slightly awkward, for she does not quite know how to be so relaxed and affectionate with another person; she is still learning to open out her natural insularity. He smiles and puts his arms around her, pulling her close to him, willing her uncertainty to crumble away. Then he kisses her hair, loosens his tie, and rolls up his shirt sleeves, for he has no intention of letting her cook for him.
First, he reaches into the kitchen drawer, feeling for a match, which he applies with caution to the back of the oven. She feels the slow heat rising at once, and can sense just a tiny bit of escaped gas.
He tosses the parcel of fish up behind his back and it drops onto the small plywood counter in front of him. Katya is laughing suddenly – at the fish, at his playfulness, at the fact of him being here. She gives him a knife and watches him slit open the layers of paper.
She shrieks.
“What?” he asks.
“It looks alive!”
“I promise you it’s not,” he replies.
He slams the handle of the knife smartly down on the chipped counter-top and stamps his foot. A flourish to start the cutting of the fish. He picks up the blade, and holds it up to his face, so that he is looking down it’s silvery length at Katya’s expectant eyes.
“Ready?” he asks, voice solemn.
She nods. “Ready.”
“And so.” He grabs it by the tail and turns it over with a slap, merely for effect, and then, in a flash of strokes with the blade, he has decapitated it, and removed it’s tail. These parts are deftly and swiftly wrapped up in the old, oily paper, and pushed to one side.
“Better?” he asks her and she nods.
“What’s next?”
“Gutting,” he says.
“Let me watch, then.”
He begins work with the knife, and she moves closer, near to his moving arm. He is concentrating now, enjoying the attention to detail required of him, and she sees the tip of the knife caressing the soft belly of the fish, watches the gentle strokes with which he cleans away the scales. He handles the knife with respect, as though it were an ally of his, working with him to subdue and prepare this clear-eyed creature.
Again, his wrists and fingers move so quickly once the fish is cut, that she barely sees a glimpse of the soft, red, spilling insides before they are also gone.
He turns his head to look sideways at her, and she enquiringly meets his glance. “Does the smell trouble you?” he wants to know.
“No. It is a fresh fish.”
“Yes, but still.”
She is mesmerised by his hands. The long bones of the fingers, visibly lined with gentle muscles. Their lithe, light touches, the patient, repetitive movement, the firm strokes of his fingertips, the careful caress of his palms. In a matter of moments, in too short a time, he is finished with his task and wiping his hands, and she sighs slightly that it is over.
“What is it, my Katyushka?” he says, turning to her. His mouth is near to hers, his warm breath on her nose. She stands very still, not yet able to lift her lips to his, but not wanting the sensations of this moment to end – there are times when his easy intimacy seems wondrous to her.
“I could watch you cook all day,” she tells him finally, and he laughs, his mouth still close to hers, but not touching. He does not know why, but he feels he must leap across a chasm that lies hidden within her to reach their next kiss.
“Is that what you want me for? To cook for you all day?”
“Yes,” she tells him. “That is exactly it.”
“How was your work today?” he asks.
“It went well. Are you going to bake this thing?”
Their flavourings are few; some salt, dried herbs and some vinegar. He wraps the fish and puts it in the oven.
“What did you do?”
“At work?” she asks.
“Yes. Why did you have to work late?”
“It’s time for the school reports – again,” she adds wryly. “So much typing. It gets boring.” She shakes her head at the memory of her afternoon’s overtime work, trapped in the office of the school administrator, a fictional two hours which is completely real in her mind at that moment. In fact, with Svetlana’s help, she had finished typing the reports by lunchtime.
“I can imagine. Aren’t you tempted to rewrite the bad reports as you go along?” Alexander laughs, but she is serious as she replies.
“Sometimes. Sometimes I have…re-phrased them. So they are less harsh. They are so uncaring, Sasha. They call the children stupid and dull and useless.”
He looks at her. “I am glad that you re-write them then.”
“I don’t change them completely, just…”
“I know. But I’m glad.”
“And yours, how was your work today?” she asks. They walk together to the small sofa and sit down. She likes the warmth of his leg touching hers, feels a stir of desire, but will not, or cannot show it.
“I don’t know.” His eyes are troubled. “It’s not the same since…”
“Since what?”
“You make me look at things in a different way, Katya.”
“But I’m proud of you. And your work. Why am I ruining it for you? Because I told you it was your father’s path?”
He looks at her for a long time, thinking about the answer. His eyes are still considering when he leans over gently and kisses her throat. She closes her eyes slightly against the pleasurable touch of his lips on her skin, and looking up at her, he catches that moment of release.
“No. Not just that,” he continues. “I don’t know how to explain. Everything looks new since I met you. It’s as though I was sleepwalking through the world up until now. You have sharpened all the blurred pictures that I had in my mind, and now I feel that I see things – or begin to see things – more clearly. I’m not really helping people, Katya. All I can do…”
“All they let you do,” she says, fiercely, and he shrugs.
“All I can do is push paper from one side of my desk to the other, and try and argue a small point or two in meetings, or watch and wait and hope that things will improve. I begin to see it in a different way. A very different way.” His voice is low, and she moves even closer to him, allowing his arm to press her to him, so that when they speak they can whisper. Just in case.
“How did you see it before?”
“You know. I like Khrushchev.”
“You know he followed Stalin around like a little puppy,” she says, with an ironic smile. “His little liubimchik.”
“Look. Everyone believed in Stalin unless they figured out what he really was
about. And if you figured that out, you were trapped anyway. Khrushchev did what he needed to in order to survive. I think some of these new ideas of his are good. Not all of them will work, but he has begun sweeping away that hero-worship that people had for Stalin, and that fear, that terrible, terrible fear. I think he’s really trying to help now. It’s just…there are no controls. He overrides Bulganin, Malenkov, all of them. And they’re all watching their own backs, trying to keep their positions. Sometimes at the expense of doing good work. But it is changing,” he says, almost to himself. “At least now they’re trying to control people by giving them something, not by threatening them.”
“But they are still trying to control people?”
“I don’t know. I think so. Possibly.” He gives a wry, desperate smile. “You see, with one question you open up a new way of looking at things for me. I begin to see things differently now. And once you do that, you cannot go back to the old way of thinking can you? Can you, Katya?”
His last question is softly spoken, almost a plea. She hears it, but her eyes are focused on some faraway point, somewhere that he cannot see.
“No,” she tells him. “You can never go back.”
He looks at her a moment, and swallows a sigh. “Come on,” he says, pointing at the stove. “It must be ready. Let’s eat.”
While he is filleting the fish and slicing bread, she has excused herself and disappeared into her bedroom. She quickly applies a little lipstick, for that is what she has ostensibly come here to do. In the mirror she eyes the briefcase. There is no time to consider, she must simply do it. She walks over to the bed in her bare feet, as silently as she can, and flips open the catch. It makes a sound and she glances at the door to see if he may have heard, but he is busy outside, and the background throb of the cooling oven is probably all he can hear. Inside is a notebook, full of clean paper, and one folder containing five sheets of paper. She scans them. They seems to be minutes of a meeting, something to do with defence research. They are in his handwriting; probably he was appointed to take the minutes. She reads two of the pages within a minute, memorising what she thinks are the key names and points. She will write them down later, when he is gone.
“Katya,” he calls.
She slips the folder back into his bag – she can hear him coming to find her. Quickly she twists the catch closed again, and she is up and at the door of the bedroom, kissing him as he crosses the threshold. She stays in the kiss for a long time, to his surprise and pleasure, for she needs a few moments to recover herself, to slow the adrenalin that is coursing through her and making her hands tingle. Unexpectedly, she is also wracked by guilt, immediately. She is completely consumed by it, without any warning, without her even having to think through what she has just done. She leans her head against Alexander’s shoulder, positioning herself so that her face is hidden from his gaze. You’ve done what you were told to do, she reminds herself, as he holds her. You’ve done what you’ve always wanted to do, and it will be all right when you get used to it.
Later, she lies back on her bed with one arm crossed protectively over her stomach and chest. Often these days she misses him when he leaves, but tonight she is grateful to be alone. With her other hand she rubs her temples, as though soothing a headache. There is no pain there, but there is confusion, and she does not like it. She has been unhappy since the moment she opened his briefcase. It is the kind of thing she has had to do many times before, but today’s assignment, with Alexander, was the most difficult to execute. Partly because he knows her so well and is sensitive enough to read her every look and expression; and partly because for the first time in her experience, she simply did not want to do what had been asked of her. She knows this move was made too early, and that Misha only wanted to put her to the test, but she knows also that there is something more at play here. She is worried that stealing secrets from Alexander and abusing his trust and love will not become any easier as time goes by.
All her life has been a struggle against confusion, a wish to keep things clear. Ambivalence and uncertainty are of no help to someone who has chosen the path she has taken. You must believe in what you do and why you do it, even more so than any communist leader who sentences millions of kulaks to death with the stroke of a pen must be certain that he is acting for the greater good, or at least for his own good.
“I do believe in it,” she says, in a whisper. That is not the problem. She will fight the system that made her an orphan, that killed her parents and everyone else’s with such brutality, until she dies. But now she is falling in love – she can barely allow herself to even think the phrase in her head, much less admit it aloud – with a man who represents that system and is deeply involved in it. What does that make her? A traitor to everything she has lived for, probably. A traitor to the cause of making amends for what happened to her parents. A traitor to the anti-communists, to the Americans whom she indirectly works for.
She thinks about Alexander, running through her conversations with him in her mind. She is sure that he is a good man, and this makes her think of the others that she works against, steals secrets from, lies to. Are they good and just working in a system that she considers bad? She rarely knows these adversaries well enough to judge, but it is possible, probable even, that the majority are good, but unthinking. Unquestioning. And in a state where questioning and thinking can cost you your life, or your freedom, can they be blamed?
But Alexander has told her that she has made him think. Or start to think. His boss is not Stalin, it is Khrushchev. Would his questioning cost him his life now? Perhaps not, but his career certainly. He would be left with nothing if anyone found out the thoughts that are winding their way into his head. Or that he was falling in love with Katya. No, that would not cost him anything, not yet, because nobody knows what she really is. What she really does. But they might find out – she lives with that awareness at all times. And then what would happen to him?
She laughs slightly, a laugh of sarcasm at her own thoughts running in that direction, imagining this life with Alexander, and the potential consequences for him. As if his future should be of any concern to her. She should only want to know him to access his information. Khrushchev may not be the same breed of monster as Stalin, but the system is the same, and it still stinks. His crazy agricultural ‘reforms’ are still leaving people starving. And Misha has just told the latest disaster for his father and grandmother out in the country. Their cooperative farm, their small kolkhoz, is being forced to buy all their old tractors and equipment from the government outright and at inflated prices, leaving them with huge debts that they can never hope to pay off. And here in the city, who you are and whom you know are still the only certain way to progress. Alexander himself is where he is today because of his father. These, Katya, are the kinds of things you must keep in your mind.
But for the first time, she is discovering that the head and the heart can have two different wishes, different motives, different objectives. Her heart is a frightening organ, to Katya. She neither trusts nor understands it. When she was twelve, and she watched her mother and father being hustled out of their apartment with guns pressed to their heads, leaving half-finished plates of food behind them, her heart broke. Where it had been, there remained only a hollow, into which she swallowed her tears of terror at what they might do to her parents, and the desperate fear that she could not speak, the crude fear of a child being left all alone. Those roughly hurt emotions left raw, open wounds that no-one but she could slowly try and soothe. And since then, her heart has been sitting quietly within her, untroubled by much more than the effort of pumping her blood through her veins. There is nothing more that she wants of it, for she knows that it is a fearsome, ruthless animal that can rise up and rip out the rest of her organs in a second.
“Katya? You awake?”
She jumps. She has been so absorbed in her thoughts that she has not even heard Maya return.
“Yes. How was your dinner?”
; “Good.” Maya stumbles to her bed, a few feet across from Katya’s and Katya can smell the slightly acrid, smoky smell of a bar on her friend. “I drank too much, of course. I’ll have a hell of a headache in the morning. How was your date?”
Katya gives a half-smile in the dark. My date. “Fine. He’s nice.”
“About time you showed some interest in someone. Men are not all pigs you know.” Maya is unbuttoning her clothes, pulling on a nightdress. She wanders slowly to the dressing table they both share, where brushes, towels and soap are all kept so that they will not be taken from the bathroom out in the hallway that they share with the two daughters from the apartment upstairs.
“I didn’t think they were,” replies Katya. “I’m just…”
“Picky,” finishes Maya.
Katya laughs. “Perhaps.”
Maya disappears to the bathroom, and Katya lies looking at the pattern that the moonlight makes on the corner of the ceiling as it plays through the small, high window of their room. When she returns, Katya whispers to her.
“I like him, Maya.”
But the drink, or exhaustion, or both have made Maya deaf to her roommate’s half-whisper. Katya listens as the girl clambers into her bed, giving a slight moan of relief or pleasure at lying down between cool sheets after a warm, tiring evening.
“Goodnight,” Katya calls.
But Maya is already asleep.
Chapter Nine
Boston
ALEXANDER CANNOT WALK HOME FAST ENOUGH, and Lauren is having to work hard to keep up with him, to enclose him fully beneath the capacious umbrella that she carries.
Courteously, he tries to slow down, and smiles at her briefly, but his face reflects a series of indefinite, discomforting emotions – irritation, nervousness, depression. His thoughts are black-edged with melancholy. Around them the settling evening darkness is being made weightier by the relentless drizzle, and they are both grateful for the lights of home that come into sight when they turn into their own street at last. The two hours at Estelle’s apartment have unsettled him fully, have left him unmoored and feeling exposed. He tries to pin down which aspects of the afternoon have led to his present mood, but he senses that there is something insidious at work here, something that has crept into his mind and now lies curled up and threatening inside his head. He glances sideways at his niece. He had seen pained surprise and yet such clarity of vision in her face earlier, when Estelle’s comment about her portraits had stung her. The idea of such unexpected awareness, such sudden and complete illumination is strangely attractive to him. If he could have felt that clear about certain things in his life – in his younger life especially – would he have taken a different path?
