“Of course we must go to church,” Gennady said, with a reproving look at Hawthorne, who made a face at him over the toast.
Secretly, Gennady was delighted. His apartment in DC had been across from a church, and every Sunday he had seen the churchgoers arriving: women in big hats that looked like flowers from above, small children twisting in uncomfortable shoes. It fascinated him that so many showed up, when no one was making them go – or at least not the government; it occurred to him now that perhaps the Mrs. Wrights of the world had a hand in it.
He would have liked to attend a service in DC, just to see what it was like, but that would have suggested an interest in religion unbecoming in a Soviet citizen. But now he had an excuse: the Good Shepherd magazine suggested a religious component to the shooting, an important clue in the case…
Perhaps his glee was not so secret. When Mrs. Wright left to fetch her hat, Hawthorne told Gennady, “Don’t look so thrilled. It’s church, not the stripper’s tent at the county fair.”
“You and your strippers,” Gennady said, and cast upon Hawthorne a sorrowful look that made Hawthorne snort.
Gennady had expected that they would slip quietly into church, that he could observe without being observed. Of course he should have known better: in a small town outsiders can do nothing unobserved.
A greeter caught them at the door and pumped their hands effusively, and in moments they were surrounded on all sides by manically beaming Americans. “I guess you don’t have much opportunity to go to church in Poland, do you?” one woman said, her voice simultaneously sympathetic and avid, as if she hoped to hear that this lack of church-going had blighted his childhood.
Fortunately, Hawthorne somehow managed to extricate them, and steered them to safe harbor in a pew near the back. Gennady glanced around to assure himself that others were sitting, and sat with relief once he had ascertained this would not mark him as an outsider.
He continued this surreptitious surveillance of the congregation as the service progressed, to ensure that he stood when they stood, knelt when they knelt, took out a book when they retrieved their books from the pockets built into the back of the pews. He had to glance over at Hawthorne’s book to make sure of the page, and caught Hawthorne looking at him, a smile flickering at the corner of his mouth, as if it amused him to see a godless Communist so earnestly aping these Methodist ways.
“Glad I entertain you,” Gennady said, very softly, under cover of the rustle as everyone flipped to the right page. Hawthorne’s grin broadened, and he looked like he might reply, but the church was quieting down, and he bent over his book instead.
The only difficult moment came near the end of the service. Everyone rose, so Gennady rose too – after all, he had followed the congregation in everything else – but Hawthorne pushed him back down.
“Communion is only for members,” Hawthorne explained softly.
Gennady felt brutally conspicuous: caught out somewhere that he had no business to be. “So? And we want everyone to know I am not a member?”
“Are you kidding? You heard Milly Douglas. They’ll be thrilled to have a potential convert in the house.”
But Gennady’s heartbeat did not even out until they were on the road out of town. He wanted a cigarette; he cursed himself for agreeing to Hawthorne’s promise to drive if Gennady did not smoke in the car. So what if he barely knew how to drive, the only way to get better was practice.
“We shouldn’t have gone,” he told Hawthorne.
“I didn’t want to go,” Hawthorne protested. “You’re the one who insisted.”
That was true, which only annoyed Gennady more. “It could be important for the case! If the shooter is motivated by religion…” He drew in a deep breath. “I don’t see why you couldn’t let me go up with everyone else.”
“It’s disrespectful. Would you let me pretend to be a Komsomol member?”
“That’s not the same. It’s difficult to become a Komsomol member.”
“It is? I thought everyone had to join. Like Hitler Youth.”
“Komsomol is not like Hitler Youth!” Gennady shouted. Hawthorne fell silent, abashed, and Gennady continued, more quietly, “You are thinking of the Young Pioneers, maybe. Everyone joins that in school. But it’s not like Hitler Youth. We camp, we sing songs, we learn skills – like your Boy Scouts. Only for girls, too.”
“It’s not mandatory to join Scouts.”
“Well, so. I’m sure many people are left out because of the expense. Capitalism,” Gennady scoffed.
Hawthorne did not reply. Gennady cranked down the window, then cranked it back up, mostly to keep his hand occupied so it did not stray to his cigarettes.
At last Gennady said, “Do you really think we are like Nazis?”
Hawthorne glanced over at him. He looked troubled. “No,” he said, but Gennady felt he said it only to keep the peace. Hawthorne would not have compared Young Pioneers to Hitler Youth if he didn’t see a similarity in his mind.
But, after all, it was probably not his fault: American newspapers and magazines painted such a misleading picture of the Soviet Union, always obsessing about nuclear war, as if the USSR was just salivating for a chance to destroy all life on earth, when it was the United States that had death cults who wanted nothing more than an apocalypse. And Hawthorne talked about these cults so casually, as if this was a normal thing to exist in the life of any country.
“Hawthorne,” Gennady said.
Hawthorne winced. “Please,” he said. “Call me Daniel.”
Gennady was silent. “I am saying your name incorrectly,” he said, after a long pause.
“It’s pretty well tailor-made to be hard for a Russian-speaker to pronounce.”
Gennady did not really want to call Hawthorne by his first name. Of course it was good that they had a friendly working relationship, but still, with their countries at loggerheads (even if temporarily they were pretending not to hate each other), they could not really be friends, no matter how much they liked each other.
“Daniel,” Gennady said. He looked out the window when Hawthorne grinned. “Stop at the next town. I want to have a cigarette.”
***
They drove to Omaha that day. Hawthorne wanted to stop at the FBI field office before they hit the road. “Of course it won’t be open on a Sunday,” he said. “I’m sorry for the delay, but I need to send in a report before we head on.”
“Yes, all right.” Gennady ought to write a report, too. Stepan Pavlovich had engaged a secret PO Box for this purpose, although even so he cautioned Gennady not to write anything too juicy, because of course the Americans would start reading all his reports as soon as they found the PO Box.
And of course for this reason it was impossible to report to Arkady on the progress of the honeytrap, which was just as well, because on this topic Gennady had nothing to say except, “Have you considered insinuating Soviet spies into strip clubs? These are very popular with American agents.”
And he didn’t feel like writing this. It was not just that he did not want to honeytrap Hawthorne himself, although he ought to make some attempt, or else what would he say to Arkady when at last the case was closed?
No. He did not really want to see Hawthorne honeytrapped at all.
But fortunately he was not writing to Arkady, but to Stepan Pavlovich, and to him Gennady could write about the alibis of the people of Honeygold, and the church supper (now that was something Ilf and Petrov had missed!), the Boy Scout camp (“Not as well maintained as a Pioneer camp”), the layout of the terrain around the shooter’s blind.
He must try to make it sound like they had made good progress, although in his heart Gennady did not think they would ever catch their shooter, barring a great stroke of luck. Too much time had been allowed to elapse while the American and Soviet agencies squabbled, too much evidence lost to wind and weather and the lapse of memory, and anyway even in the best of circumstances a lone shooter was a difficult creature to find.
&nb
sp; The thing to do now, therefore, was to stretch out the trip and experience as much of America as possible. Although it had to be admitted that Omaha was not an exciting place on a Sunday. When they stopped for a late lunch, even the diner seemed sleepy.
“We could find a bookshop,” Hawthorne suggested. “See if they have The Brothers Karamazov?”
He really meant to read it? Gennady was startled, then pleased. “Yes, all right,” he said, and added amiably, “And I will read an American book. If there is one you would like to recommend?”
“Maybe one of Steinbeck’s other books? If you’re looking to avoid capitalist propaganda,” Daniel said, with a smile. “Have you read East of Eden?”
“No.” In truth, Gennady had not really cared for Steinbeck: his anti-capitalism felt too familiar, not as deliciously foreign as other American books. But it did not seem quite right to say that really he didn’t care if Daniel gave him capitalist propaganda, as long as it was new and interesting.
Daniel chatted up the waitress, who gave them directions to a small bookstore nearby: a narrow storefront, its front window cluttered with books and globes and an old chess set. It reminded Gennady of Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop.
A little bell rang above the door as they entered. The shop smelled of dust and coffee and old paper, a good comforting smell, and the tall shelves flanking the door created almost a tunnel as they entered, as if they were walking into another world.
A black cat appeared at the end of the tunnel, claws clicking daintily on the scarred hardwood floor. “Koshka,” Gennady said, and bent hopefully with his hand outstretched. The cat meowed and rubbed her soft head against his hand.
“You like cats?” There was a hint of laughter in Daniel’s voice. Gennady ignored him and stroked the cat’s back with one hand as he scratched her behind the ear with the other.
“She’ll let you pick her up,” a gravelly disembodied voice said.
Indeed, the cat snuggled in against Gennady’s chest, and gazed up at him with winning golden eyes. Gennady rounded the bookshelf to discover a woman of – perhaps sixty? Hard to tell; Americans did not seem to age like normal people – sitting behind a cash register.
One side of her mouth curved up; the other corner remained turned down, that whole side of her face immobile, remnant of a stroke, perhaps. “That cat loves everybody,” she said, with the raspy voice of a lifelong smoker. “We have a kid who comes in to shoplift every week and all she ever does is make love to him with her eyes.”
Gennady stroked the cat. She purred. “You let him steal from you every week?”
“Ah, well. Usually he brings back the book from the week before, so he’s borrowing, really. If he’d just ask…” she said, and let out a husky laugh. “You boys lookin’ for anything in particular?”
“Eden…” Damn. He had forgotten the title.
“East of Eden,” Daniel supplied. “And The Brothers Karamazov.”
“Fiction’s thataway.”
Thataway was the far back corner. They passed the rest of the aisles in the store as they went, and Gennady glimpsed other browsers there: an elderly man dabbing his nose with a handkerchief, a child building a book city while her mother browsed, a pretty girl in a black turtleneck sitting on the floor of the poetry section.
The bell above the door chimed again, and the cat leapt out of Gennady’s arms and streaked toward the sound. “Fickle creature,” Daniel said, and Gennady laughed, although he felt a trifle bereft.
“Fickle,” he repeated, cheering himself with the new word.
Daniel moved with confidence along the crowded aisle. “Here we go,” he said, after an impossibly short time, and pried East of Eden from a packed shelf.
It was a hefty tome, and Gennady sighed inwardly. It was only fair, after all, The Brothers Karamazov was even longer; but he would have preferred something shorter, something that was not about the misery of capitalism, because he could read about that in translation back home.
“You don’t have to read it.” Daniel sounded almost apologetic. “It was just the first book that came to mind.”
“Yes,” Gennady said, and added, apologetic himself, “I read English slowly.”
“I can find you a shorter book,” Daniel said, cheerful again. “What kind of books do you like, anyway?”
Gennady considered. “Mysteries, ghost stories, adventures. Creepy books,” he said, and paused. He could not think of the English word he wanted. “Books with dark houses and bloody knives,” he said, after some thought.
“Well, I’ll see what I can find.”
While Daniel searched the shelves, Gennady looked at the crowded aisle rather helplessly, East of Eden still in his hands. He had thought he knew American literature well, albeit in translation. He read all the authors he could find in Moscow: not only Steinbeck but Twain, Hemingway, Jack London, Poe. But of course there were a thousand other American authors, thousands upon thousands he had never even heard of, so many books that they overspilled the shelves to stand in precarious stacks in the aisles.
But of course, English editions of Twain and Hemingway would be wonderful presents, even for friends who did not speak English. And like lightning the thought struck him that this bookstore might have that Holy Grail, For Whom the Bell Tolls, pined for by Soviet readers but not yet published in the Soviet Union.
Gennady found three copies, and nearly sat down in the aisle to read it at once. But no: he could read later. Now, he must search the shelves for more treasures.
He took all three copies, and six other books of Hemingway. Then Dumas’ The Three Musketeers for his cousin Oksana: they used to play at being musketeers together when they were children. For his girlfriend Galya – who was probably not his girlfriend anymore, but was not her fault he had not answered her letters, after all, and only a monster could fail to buy her an American copy of her very favorite book, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped!, especially when this copy had such wonderfully dramatic illustrations. For Grandfather, who was old-fashioned in his tastes, a selection of Mark Twain…
He was debating the Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe when Daniel returned. “What about – my God, what do you need all those books for?”
“Presents,” Gennady explained indignantly.
“Are they all going to fit in your suitcase?”
Gennady looked sorrowfully at his beautiful stack, and then began the bitter task of dividing it into two piles: one that he absolutely must buy now, and another of books that could be left behind in deference to that limited suitcase space. America had other bookstores. He could buy A Farewell to Arms later.
“Is Moscow full of Hemingway fiends?” Daniel asked.
“Oh, yes. We all love Hemingway. I will be greeted as a conquering hero when I bring this home,” Gennady said, hefting For Whom the Bell Tolls. “It has not been published in Moscow yet.”
“All these others have?” Daniel sounded surprised, like he thought the USSR was a floating island where they read nothing but Marx.
“Yes! Do you think we are philistines? Hemingway is one of us, almost Russian, so brave and stoic and sad: even under Stalin, we read him.” Only then did Gennady notice the book in Daniel’s hand, and remembered that he had asked Daniel to pick out a book for him. He set aside his sorting. “Ah! What have you chosen for me?”
Daniel held it up. “The Haunting of Hill House.”
The cover looked promising: the gable of a house peeking out from behind a tangle of plants in unnatural colors, violent gold and turquoise. “A ghost story?”
“Not exactly,” Daniel said. “There isn’t a ghost, I mean, the house itself is evil. But it’s not really about the house. It’s like Dostoevsky,” he added. “It’s about the darkness of the human heart, the little deadly ways that people are unkind to each other.”
Gennady doubted an American author was capable of writing a book the least bit like Dostoevsky, but he nodded indulgently. “Yes, all right,” he said, and added the book to his dep
leted stack. He had kept all three copies of For Whom the Bell Tolls (he had visions already of the wonderful trades he would make with these books: the latest issues of Foreign Literature, tickets to French movies at the Moscow House of Cinema), but otherwise he had set aside everything but the Dumas, the Stevenson, a single illustrated Adventures of Tom Sawyer for Grandfather, who after all did not read English. “I will read For Whom the Bell Tolls first, I am sorry, but then I will read The Haunting of Hill House.”
“No, of course. You’ve been waiting for this Hemingway for years, after all.”
Gennady’s heart warmed at this evidence of understanding. “Yes,” he said, and added impulsively, “I will buy your Bratya Karamozovy too.”
“You don’t have to,” Daniel protested.
“No, no. I will put it on my expense account. After all, it is spreading Russian culture,” Gennady said. He scanned the shelves until he found Dostoevsky, and added, “But I can exchange for a shorter book if you like. Notes from Underground?”
“No, I read that in college. And I’ve always meant to read The Brothers Karamazov, anyway.”
Gennady plucked the book from the shelf and added it to his pile. He paid for the books, an absurdly small sum it seemed to him, and returned to the sleepy streets of Omaha with a swagger in his step.
“Want to hit a bar?” Daniel asked.
“No!” Gennady said, and realized only after he said it that Daniel was only teasing: he knew very well that Gennady wanted nothing more than to sit down and read.
“Let’s get takeout,” Daniel suggested. “That way you won’t even have to stop reading for dinner.”
“Yes,” Gennady agreed. He added, with an attempt at American overstatement, “That sounds perfect.”
Chapter 6
“So what we’ve found,” Daniel said, slumping in the vinyl diner booth, “is diddlysquat.”
He had spent the day writing his report in the FBI field office, which made him painfully aware of how little they had discovered in Honeygold. Even Matskevich’s spirited story about escaping Poland seemed stupid when Daniel wrote it down: of course a KGB agent would be able to lie with gusto. It meant nothing about his deeper feelings about the USSR.
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