Besides, he really didn’t want Matskevich rolling over. It was warmer this way, with Matskevich’s chest against his back, and his arm around Daniel’s stomach, and even the tip of his cold nose tucked into Daniel’s neck.
He couldn’t resist complaining about this last. “Your nose is like ice, Matskevich.”
“It will warm up.” Matskevich’s lips brushed Daniel’s neck as he spoke. Goddammit. And his hand was – was he stroking Daniel’s stomach?
Daniel smacked Matskevich’s hand. “Cut it out.”
Matskevich stopped. He began to withdraw his arm, but Daniel grabbed it and held it in place.
“It’s warmer this way,” Daniel said, excusing his action to himself as much as Matskevich. His face flushed with nerves and the first stirrings of arousal.
He plunged his hand into the icy sheets, which cooled him down. Christ, he needed to get laid. By someone other than Matskevich, who was a Soviet agent, for God’s sake, and probably not interested anyway, no matter how seductive that hand had felt. It was probably just… the Russians were touchy-feely people. He’d seen those photos in Life after World War II, the Soviet soldiers kissing American GIs on the lips. The socialist kiss of brotherhood.
God, he’d loved those photos. He had clipped them out and kept them secretly, guiltily, without really understanding either his compulsion to look at them or his guilt.
Matskevich’s hand remained still now. Possibly he hadn’t been stroking Daniel’s stomach, after all, just wriggling into a comfortable position. And it didn’t mean anything that Daniel had reacted to that touch, just a physiological reaction. Perhaps he felt a certain attraction to Matskevich but, after all, attractions were as common as houseflies. He didn’t fall in love with every attractive waitress who brought them milkshakes and he was not going to fall in love with Matskevich.
The blankets warmed into a soporific cocoon, and Daniel began to relax. Matskevich had forgotten to close the curtains, and the moonlight filled the room with a sweet silvery light. The soft heavy snow clung to the ice-covered spruces, picturesque as a Christmas card.
“This reminds me of when I was a kid,” said Daniel, “sleeping on the sleeping porch at my grandparents’ house at Christmas.”
“The sleeping porch?”
“Yeah. Do you have them in Russia? It’s just a screened-in porch so you can sleep cool in the summertime. But at Christmas Grandma and Grandpa didn’t have enough room for all their guests, and I was the oldest boy, so they put me out on the porch.”
In his mind’s eye, the view out the motel window blurred with the view from the sleeping porch, years ago.
“They’d pile the blankets on till I could hardly move,” Daniel said. “It was warm if you stayed still, but if you so much as twitched your pinkie finger, the sheets were like liquid nitrogen. So I’d lie like a baby in swaddling clothes and look out over the fields. Grandma and Grandpa’s house was at the edge of town, and there was a long view across the fields. You could see the lights of the next town over, miles away, shining against the darkness of the night…”
“That sounds nice.” Matskevich’s Russian accent had grown thick with sleepiness.
“Yeah.”
Silence followed – the perfect silence of a night after a snowstorm. Daniel was drifting drowsily when Matskevich said, “Tell me more about these Christmases.”
“We always had an enormous feast,” Daniel murmured. “There’d be cranberry sauce – real cranberry sauce made with cranberries and orange peel, not that stuff you get out of cans nowadays. And a great big meatloaf. Grandma never liked turkey so we always had meatloaf with her homemade tomato sauce on top. And all the aunts would bring different kinds of pie… cherry and apple and sweet potato…”
“You make a pie out of potatoes?”
“Sweet potatoes. It’s a different plant. You’ve never had sweet potatoes?” Daniel asked, and he almost rolled over to look at Matskevich, except that the first slight movement brought him in contact with the icy sheets.
And it wasn’t a good idea to roll over so they were face-to-face, anyway.
“Are they good?” Matskevich asked.
“What? Oh, sweet potatoes. Delicious. Better than regular potatoes.”
“This I don’t believe.”
“You’ll have to try them and see,” Daniel said.
The moonlight cast blue shadows on the soft white snow. Daniel’s eyelids were drooping again when Matskevich asked, “Did you eat like this at all the holidays?”
“Hmm? No. I mean yes,” Daniel said, his voice confused with sleep. “There was always a lot of food, but not always meatloaf and pies. At Easter we had ham like everybody else. Do you celebrate Easter in Russia?” he asked. His eyelids felt too heavy to hold up. “I guess probably the Communist Party doesn’t approve…”
“Approve, no. But, after all, in Russia you have to have Easter. You’ve waited so long for the spring…”
His breath, still warm against Daniel’s neck, grew slow and even. Daniel’s eyelids drifted shut again, and he fell asleep.
***
“Do you have plans for Christmas?”
It was the next morning. They had hiked into the nearest town (Matskevich looked immensely smug in his thick Russian coat and tall boots) and had the good fortune to stumble on a diner with its own generator, where they were greeted with steaming cups of coffee and an apologetic warning that “The kitchen’s really busy – it may be ages before your food comes out – but after all, it’s not like there’s anywhere else you can go today!”
Which was true, of course, so they settled in at a corner table.
“Plans for Christmas?” Matskevich echoed. “No.”
“Do you want to come to Christmas with my family? Drink some eggnog, sing some carols. Try a sweet potato pie.”
The idea had come to Daniel as they hiked through the snow that morning, past houses bedecked with Christmas wreaths. Why shouldn’t Matskevich experience a real American Christmas? He had been so interested in Daniel’s ramblings the night before, and after all, it would certainly fulfill Mr. Gilman’s instructions to show America in the best possible light. What better light could there be than the glow of a Christmas tree?
But Matskevich looked doubtful. “What will you tell your family about me?”
Of course Daniel couldn’t tell them that Matskevich was a KGB agent. “That you’re my FBI partner. A defector from Russia.”
Matskevich frowned. “I think your family will not want an outsider at Christmas.”
“Oh, they won’t mind. Mom loves to have the house full of guests for Christmas. She’ll be pleased as punch to have you. And so will I.”
A look of surprised, almost shy pleasure crossed Matskevich’s face. “Then yes. Of course I will come.”
Chapter 9
Daniel’s childhood home was a palace.
Actually, it was a two-story house with a wide front porch: a comfortable American professional’s home. Gennady and Daniel had visited a number of such places on the Good Shepherd subscriber list (surprising how many professional men thought the world would be better off if the society that underpinned their wealth disappeared), and if this had been merely another interview Gennady would not have been intimidated.
As it was, however, he sat in the car, clutching the bottle of brandy he had brought as a hostess gift.
His own people were professionals too: his mother and his father and his grandfather had all worked in Soviet intelligence. And what had it gotten them? A single room in a kommunalka apartment where Gennady still lived with his grandfather and intermittently his cousin Oksana, whenever Aunt Lilya got tired of Oksana’s husband Alyosha and kicked the whole family out.
“It’s better here anyway,” Oksana once told Gennady dispiritedly, sitting on the sagging cot that she schlepped from apartment to apartment. “Not so many people in the room. And it gets us away from the shpionka.”
The shpionka was a Young Pioneer who spied on Oksana
and Alyosha when they had sex. This was a hazard in any kommunalka; Gennady and Galya always used to go to the park, because the bushes were more private than any place in the apartment, and talked wistfully of someday, perhaps, if they were lucky and got on the right list, getting one of those apartments Khrushchev was building. Two whole rooms of their very own.
This house had at least eight.
“Gennady?” Daniel said.
Gennady swiftly got out of the car. “I wish I could have brought Sovetskoye Shampanskoye,” he said.
“The brandy will be all right.”
“Anyone could bring brandy.” He wanted something impressive and Soviet, something to smooth his crumpled pride.
Daniel’s mother received the brandy with that rapturous American enthusiasm that Gennady had difficulty believing was real. “Brandy! This will be perfect to fire the Christmas pudding.”
“Haven’t you charred enough holes in the ceiling?” Daniel joked.
“Now Daniel, that was only the one year,” Mrs. Hawthorne scolded. She told Gennady, “I put a little too much brandy on the Christmas pudding the first year I made it and it did leave a mark on the ceiling, but I’ve refined the technique since then… Do come in, do come in. It’s too cold to stand outside on the porch here. Oh! I should have presented this to you first thing, shouldn’t I?”
And as Gennady came in the door, stomping snow off his boots, she fetched a small plate, which held a white bread roll with a sprinkling of salt on top. “I don’t know if people in the Soviet Union still do this,” she said apologetically, “and it’s probably the wrong kind of bread. It’s really impossible to get good black bread here, I’m afraid, or I would have bought some, but…”
Gennady was smitten. “You’re so kind,” he said, and ventured an American exaggeration of his own: “It’s perfect.”
She beamed. “What nice manners you have.”
“He’s a good influence on me,” Daniel announced.
“Yes, well, you probably need it, Danny boy. Now, Gennady – is it all right if I call you Gennady?”
Gennady nodded.
“Oh, good. It will feel much friendlier than calling you Mr. Matskevich all weekend. Now, I’ll give you a quick tour of the house and drop you off in Daniel’s room to get settled. You don’t mind sharing, do you? Anna will be in her old room with her family, and Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Oscar will have the guest room…”
“That will be fine, Mom,” Daniel said. “We’re grateful just to be indoors. I was just telling Gennady how they used to stick me on the sleeping porch at Grandma and Grandpa’s house.”
“Oh, weren’t those Christmases wonderful!” Mrs. Hawthorne paused as she hung Daniel’s coat. “It’s just as well we don’t have quite as many guests, the house wouldn’t hold them – not that Mom and Dad’s house held them then, either! But I do miss having the whole family together… Let me take your coat, Gennady. Do you want a pair of slippers? I remember the Polyakovs always kept slippers for their guests. Tapochki, I think they called them. So much cleaner than tracking slush through the house…”
“All right, all right,” Daniel laughed, “I’ll take my shoes off. You go ahead and show Gennady around, Ma, I’m familiar with the house.”
“Oh, all right. Come on, Gennady. The library’s just to your left, you can borrow any books you like while you’re here…”
The library was a light airy room lined on two sides with crowded bookshelves. Gennady thought of his own home again. This is our library – that stack of books over in the corner. We had a bookshelf once, Czech, you won’t believe how long we stood in line for it, and then Alyosha sold it for beer money, that bastard…
“And here’s the dining room,” Mrs. Hawthorne said. Gennady followed her mechanically. This room held a dark handsome wooden table and a matching sideboard, which contained a set of blue dinner plates.
And here’s the table where we eat, I used to sleep under it when I was a child…
“I don’t use the dining room very much, I’m afraid. Of course we’ll be using it for Christmas dinner, but if you don’t mind we may eat in the kitchen tonight? I’m planning to make blini – oh, Daniel, how do you feel about blini for dinner?”
For Daniel, shoeless now, had caught up with them. “I love blini.”
“Not real blini,” Mrs. Hawthorne said apologetically, “with buckwheat and so on – but just little pancakes, almost like crepes. Oh, I don’t know if they’re really what you eat in Moscow…”
“My mother likes to try cooking new cuisines,” Daniel told Gennady. “Ma, are you still cooking out of How to Cook and Eat in Chinese?”
“Occasionally. It’s difficult when there’s no one to tell you if the dish tastes like it’s supposed to…”
They followed her into the kitchen. Here there was no stink of spoiled cabbage, no burn rings on kitchen table, just a clean cluttered welcoming room with red checked curtains and a shining refrigerator almost as fancy as the ones at the American Exhibition in Moscow.
And here’s our kitchen. We only share it with six other families, really lucky, Oksana’s mother shares with eighteen. And we’ve got a refrigerator! Till just a few years ago we kept things cold in a box outside the window.
“Well, at least the Polyakovs liked these blini. They gave me the recipe, and it’s the only Russian food I ever made to their satisfaction.”
“Who are these Polyakovs?” Gennady asked.
“Oh, they used to be our neighbors – White Russian émigrés, you know. They watched Daniel and Anna when they were little,” Mrs. Hawthorne said.
Gennady flashed a look at Daniel. Daniel avoided his gaze by taking the lid off a china jar shaped like a Dutch girl and peered intently inside. “I suppose Daniel and Anna picked up a little Russian?” Gennady asked Mrs. Hawthorne.
“Oh yes. They used to chatter away like it was their own secret language,” Mrs. Hawthorne said blithely.
“And yet his accent is still so poor,” Gennady murmured, with a meaningful look at Daniel.
Daniel avoided his eyes and turned a beaming smile on his mother. “New fridge, Ma?”
“Oh yes. I thought I had better replace the appliances before I retire from the newspaper. Get the house spic and span while there’s still money coming in. Look at the freezer space!”
They dutifully admired the packets of frozen peas and tub of vanilla ice cream. Then Mrs. Hawthorne led them through the living room (“Daniel, you and Anna will get the tree as usual tomorrow, won’t you? I still like the old custom of trimming it the night before Christmas”) and up the stairs to the second floor. “And here’s Daniel’s old bedroom.”
My childhood bedroom – oops, we already did that part of the tour, didn’t we? Under the table. Now I sleep on a trunk with a chair pulled up at the end to make it long enough. Hope you’re comfortable hanging from the ceiling like a vampire bat, because that’s how you’ll be sleeping!
“I already set up the cot for you, Gennady, I hope you’ll be comfortable.”
The cot was a flat padded plank, you could sleep on it for years in perfect comfort. Much nicer than the collapsible canvas cot that Oksana used, which was already ruining her back.
Maybe he could buy one of these and take it home as a present.
“Oh yes,” said Gennady. “Thank you for all your kindness.”
“Oh, it’s nothing. I’m just glad we could give you a real festive Christmas. Now I’ve got to go finish packing the Christmas cookies. You boys come down and help me taste-test them once you’re settled, all right? Daniel, I hope you’ll make the eggnog again, somehow it always comes out chunky when I do it.”
“Of course, Ma,” Daniel said.
After she left, Gennady prowled the room, peering at the strange triangular felt flags on the walls, the half-finished model RAF fighter on the desk, the bookcase underneath the window seat. The books had fallen at a diagonal, terrible for their spines, and Gennady bent to straighten them. The Boy Scouts in the Blue Rid
ge. The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods. Don Strong of the Wolf Patrol.
“This room is a shrine to your childhood,” Gennady said.
“Those scout books were my dad’s when he was a kid,” Daniel said.
At the end of the scouting books stood a photograph album. Gennady snatched it up and sat on the window seat to leaf through it.
“My dad gave me his old Brownie camera when he left to work in the hospitals during World War II,” Daniel said.
When Gennady’s father left for the war, he just disappeared. Probably he had died in one of the early battles, when the Nazis slaughtered whole Soviet armies, but they never found a body, he was still officially just missing.
“Dad told me to take pictures so he could see what we’d been up to when he came back,” Daniel was saying. “That’s Anna’s seventh birthday,” he added, gesturing at a blurry photograph of a little girl blowing out the candles on a chocolate cake. The date in the top left corner read Sept. 1942, the year badly blotted as if a child had written it. “We saved our sugar rations for weeks to make that cake.”
Halfway through February of 1943, their ration cards had been stolen. They had lived off shchi made of spoiled cabbage leaves stolen from the neighbors’ trash till the ration cards came through for March, and Gennady had taken to haunting the trash cans behind the officers’ club, where they sometimes threw out – actually threw out crusts of bread, which the feral children of Moscow fought over like wild dogs.
That was how he broke his arm. He spent the next month recuperating under the table, and that was when he first read Ilf and Petrov’s One-Storied America, over and over, as if it were a fairy tale.
“Your sister is almost my age,” Gennady said.
Daniel shifted uneasily. “I suppose this all seems extravagant to you.”
Gennady clenched his jaw. He said in clear deliberate Russian, “Thank you, Stalin, for our happy childhoods.”
And yes: Mrs. Hawthorne was right, Daniel understood Russian, he rocked back on his feet as the words landed. Gennady closed the photo album. “Well, so, I should have guessed you’d speak Russian. Were they hoping I’d talk in my sleep?”
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