“I’m not uncomfortable,” Gennady objected.
“No, you’re certainly not,” Daniel said, so ruefully that Gennady knew that he was referring to Gennady crawling into his lap the night before.
Gennady shifted the ice to shield his furious flush, and insisted, “You’re the one who’s uncomfortable.”
“Yes.” Daniel admitted it with a sigh. “I’m just not used to… well, to anyone knowing.”
“Paul must have known.”
“Paul!” Daniel sounded startled, as if he had forgotten that he told Gennady about Paul.
But of course he had forgotten, he had been very drunk that night, and had not recognized Arkady’s name when Gennady said it again.
Then Daniel blushed, as if realizing when he must have told Gennady about Paul. He said stiffly, “But that was different, Paul knowing. We were… well, he was in love with me.”
Gennady mulled this over in silence. Of course men had sex with each other sometimes, but that was quite different than love, drunken and impulsive, not a matter of kisses and flowers… And then it struck him that Daniel might really be in love with him, and the idea took him aback. He felt like a cad, who had led Daniel on and then dropped him flat, and he wanted to apologize.
But it seemed presumptuous to say, Sorry for making you fall in love with me – when probably Daniel was not in love with him at all. Instead Gennady asked, awkwardly, “Did you love Paul?”
Daniel’s mouth twisted. “I thought so. For a while, at least. But maybe I never did. ‘Love is not love which alters if it alteration finds…’”
“Oh, how silly,” Gennady said impatiently. “Everything in this world alters. If love is not love if it changes, then love can’t exist.”
“You can take that one up with Shakespeare, Gennady.”
Gennady turned the cup of water around in his hands. “Was he good to you? Paul?”
“Yes,” Daniel said, so definitely as to quash any other questions.
Gennady finished the water. He handed the glass to Daniel, who put it on the side table, and finally sat down beside Gennady, after all. Gennady leaned the unbruised side of his face against Daniel’s shoulder.
“Do you feel better?” Daniel asked.
“I feel terrible.”
“But do you feel less terrible than you did before?”
“Yes,” Gennady conceded, although he wished Daniel would put an arm around him instead of sitting there with his hands clasped primly in his lap. “A little bit.”
“Maybe we ought to take tomorrow off,” Daniel said. “Let you rest.”
“It’s better to keep going. That’s what they found in Leningrad, when the people were starving during the war, the ones who kept going lived longer…”
“I don’t think that’s exactly a parallel situation.”
“Still.” Gennady yawned. It was nice, it was warm and peaceful, leaning against Daniel. He would have liked to fall asleep like this. “It’s better to keep going.”
“Fine.” Daniel pushed Gennady off his shoulder, very gently, and Gennady rolled on his side and curled up like a gray flannel pill bug. “If we’re starting the investigation tomorrow, then I’m going to get a shower.”
***
That conversation knocked a few things off their shelves in Gennady’s head, and for the next few weeks he was picking them up and turning them over gingerly. The idea that a man could be in love with a man was new to him, but he could see how his own behavior fit this pattern: the giddy playfulness, the desire to pester Daniel and bask in his attention, that snowball fight that almost ended in a kiss. Hadn’t he compared it in his own mind to his first kiss with Galya?
It felt like the world had expanded, like this was a new country that he could visit. In his mind he stood at the gates and looked in, and in imagination it was good.
And perhaps, probably, very likely it would have been good in reality, if he could have let Daniel kiss him that night by the roadside. But now, after that last meeting with Arkady, the thought of someone’s hands on his skin, of someone looking at him – not just Daniel, anyone, even a pretty girl – it all made Gennady feel uneasy.
So he tried to think about other things. The case didn’t strike him as particularly interesting: let the Americans have their Baltic amber if they wanted it, why not? But he began to like Boston, with the Old World tangle of its streets, and sites from American history as thick as plums in a pudding. Daniel got as giddy as a schoolboy when they stood at these historical places, and told Gennady their stories with a patriotic fervor that Gennady found funny and oddly touching.
Here was Boston Harbor where the colonists threw the tea overboard; here the Old North Church, where the patriots hung the lanterns that sent Paul Revere on his ride. Here, the site of the Boston Massacre, marked with a star in the pavement.
Gennady listened solemnly enough as Daniel told him the story, although privately he felt the five deaths wasn’t much of a massacre. But he held his peace until a week later, in late April, when they took a Saturday off to walk on the Boston Common and found another memorial of the Massacre: a statue of Lady Liberty with an eagle preparing for flight at her side.
It seemed a pompous memorial for such a little event, and Gennady couldn’t help scoffing. “What kind of massacre kills only five people? Thousands died in the massacres under the tsars, thousands.”
“Only under the tsars?” Daniel said.
Dammit. Gennady had opened himself up to that one. He shrugged and turned away. “She loves blood, the Russian earth.”
“You’re going to blame the earth and not Stalin?”
“Well, so. Stalin too then.” Gennady shrugged angrily. “I’m a Soviet citizen. What else can I say?”
“Have you ever thought of defecting?” Daniel asked.
Gennady felt like he’d fallen into a bucket of ice water. “No,” he said.
“But you said when the tanks rolled into Hungary…”
“I expected things to change too fast. But when does anything ever change overnight? Just look at your newspapers. All these sit-ins, these marches, to fight this racial caste system that persists even though your Civil War ended nearly a hundred years ago.”
“And how,” Daniel muttered. “All right. All right.”
They stood a while looking at the bronze lady trampling a crown beneath her foot. At last Gennady shook his head and walked on. “I wish I could take you to see our statues. There’s no variety in yours, they’re all Lady Libertys and men on horseback. If we could see the fountains at Petrodvorets…”
“Petrodvorets?”
“Your Polyakovs probably called it Peterhof. It was Peter the Great’s show palace, his answer to Versailles.”
Daniel’s eyes brightened. “Where else would we go? If you were showing me around the Soviet Union?”
“Leningrad: our Boston, the place where our Revolution began. We would see the Finland Station, and the Smolny Institute, and Kronstadt…” Were Americans allowed to visit Kronstadt? Probably not, but then none of this could ever happen anyway, they would never let an FBI agent into the USSR. “And we would go to Moscow,” Gennady continued, “to the Red Square and the Kremlin, and Lenin’s Mausoleum and the Bolshoi…”
“St. Basil’s Cathedral?”
Gennady had noticed this American obsession with St. Basil’s cathedral before. Perhaps it was the onion domes. “Yes, if you wanted. I would take you all over Russia if I could, the way you have shown me America.”
“And the Crimea?” Daniel said. “The Polyakovs always said that the Black Sea was so beautiful.”
“Yes, of course. It’s wonderful there, a paradise. And we would ride the Transiberian Railway to see the beauty of Siberia – our great steppe, like your Great Plains – and get off in Vladivostok, and dip our hands in the Pacific Ocean. And when we returned to Moscow, I would take you to our dacha,” Gennady added, carried away by his imaginings, “and teach you how to find good mushrooms. Can it be true that Ame
ricans never go mushroom hunting?”
Daniel confirmed this sad fact with a nod.
“We will sit in the garden under the sun and eat the tomatoes still warm from the vine, just sprinkled with salt, and make strong black tea in the old charcoal samovar. And in the night we will drink vodka and sing all the old songs around a fire.”
“I wouldn’t know any of your songs.”
“Well, so, I’d teach you. Everyone has to learn sometime. Grandfather will play for us on the ukulele.”
“The ukulele!”
“Yes! Did you think only Americans had ukuleles? They were very popular with us too, in the twenties. He stopped playing when my mother died, she was his oldest daughter, but, after all, perhaps after more time has passed…”
They walked on for a while. Small early leaves dotted the trees like a green mist.
“I didn’t know your mother was dead,” Daniel said.
“It wasn’t in my dossier?” Gennady asked dryly.
“Well, no.” Daniel glanced over at him. “I’m sorry.”
Gennady shrugged. “It was two years ago.”
They had reached a lake now. On the water floated a ferryboat with two sculptural swans at its stern. Gennady shoved his hands in his pockets. “She would have been interested in all of this,” he said. “This trip. America. She kept all the old copies of Ogonek with Ilf and Petrov’s photographs.”
“Ogonek?”
“A magazine. It runs, how do you say, articles with many photographs.”
“Photo essays. Like Life.”
“Yes. She was always interested in that sort of thing, in faraway places.” His throat hurt. He shrugged and moved on, and Daniel kept pace with him, mercifully silent.
The path was busy but not crowded: not so full that it was difficult to find a place to walk. A few cherry trees grew near the shore, their blossoms like pink clouds.
“I thought,” Gennady said, “that it was Washington DC that had the cherry blossoms.”
“Oh, there are cherry trees there too. They were a gift from Japan to celebrate friendship between nations.”
“Was this after you dropped an atomic bomb on them?”
“Two atomic bombs,” Daniel corrected, with a wince. “No. They gave us the cherry trees long before the war. And we only dropped the bombs after we had been at war with them for years,” he added. “It wasn’t a sneak-attack, like when they bombed Pearl Harbor.”
“Behold friendship between nations.”
“You’re a cynic, you know that?” Daniel said. “You’re probably right. But damn, you’re depressing.”
“Yes, perhaps.”
They were walking more slowly now. A swirl of petals fluttered off the cherry tree, landing on the path and the water and their shoulders.
“Do you think that could ever really happen?” Daniel asked. “That I could visit you in the Soviet Union?”
Gennady burst into laughter. “Of course not,” he said, and laughed some more. The idea was so ludicrous he just couldn’t stop. “No, they would never let you in: a real American agent. Don’t try to visit.” He grew serious suddenly. “I suppose we’ll never see each other again after I leave.”
A stronger breeze blew a shower of petals from the trees. They landed like pink polka dots on Daniel’s suit and his dark hair, and it struck Gennady as almost unbearably beautiful. He wanted to brush the petals off Daniel’s shoulders and his hair, to kiss him perhaps, as if that would make this moment last forever, a reverse of Sleeping Beauty, a kiss that would freeze them both in time.
Only real life was not a fairy tale, and a kiss would not freeze time, and it would be inviting arrest to kiss Daniel out in public where anyone could see.
Gennady walked out of the shadow of the cherry tree into the warm sun.
Daniel fell in alongside him. “Well, that won’t happen for a while,” Daniel said, his voice light and false. “You’ll be stuck in the US till we solve this case.”
“Maybe.” If relations between their countries remained good. Behold friendship between nations, Gennady thought, and felt cold despite the sunlight. “What else should I see in Boston?”
“Bunker Hill,” Daniel said promptly. “And we ought to drive out to Lexington and Concord, too. And if you’d like to see Emily Dickinson’s house…”
“Yes!” Gennady was delighted. “Her poems – I have been reading them in the book you gave me. Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me… She is a little morbid, but it is a pleasant change from ordinary American optimism. Only sometimes I do not understand what her poems are about.”
“Sometimes,” Daniel said, “I’m not sure Emily herself knew what she was getting at. But the poems are beautiful anyway, aren’t they? She lived in western Massachusetts. We could drive over some weekend.”
“Yes,” said Gennady. “Let’s do that.”
Chapter 23
RUSSIA REPORTS DOWNED U.S. PLANE.
PILOT REMAINS ALIVE, TO BE TRIED AS SPY
That headline smacked Gennady in the face on Saturday, May 7th. They had driven out to Amherst and spent the day at Emily Dickinson’s house, so he didn’t see the papers until he stepped out to buy cigarettes in the evening.
He allowed himself three minutes to pretend that nothing had changed. He could buy his cigarettes and eat his dinner with Daniel and their partnership would go on forever.
Then he bought the newspaper, and chain-smoked as he read the article.
An American U-2 spy plane had been shot down over the Soviet Union. The Americans, thinking that the pilot had died, pretended it was just a weather research plane – but then Khrushchev gave a long speech in which he revealed that the pilot was still alive, then railed against American duplicity and spy craft.
Even the American newspaper cringed over being caught in such a lie. Gennady could well imagine how it was playing in Pravda.
He stopped at a pay phone and put through a call to Stepan Pavlovich’s office.
***
Daniel was still sipping his coffee when Gennady slid into the booth. “Where’ve you been?” Daniel asked.
Gennady tossed the newspaper on the table, folded so the headline was prominent. “It’s over,” he said. “I’ll be heading back to Moscow tomorrow.”
“What? But – ”
Gennady jammed his finger at the newspaper. Daniel picked it up. He winced as he read the article. “Are you sure?” he said. “We’re so close to cracking the case! This could all blow over…”
Gennady shook his head. “I’ve already called in,” he said. “They wanted me to take the train back tonight. I only put them off because there is nothing leaving until the morning.”
“I could drive you back to DC,” Daniel offered.
“No, no. Your boss wouldn’t want you to abandon your case. And, anyway, they want me to take the train. My people never liked this partnership. It only happened at all because Chairman Khrushchev supported the idea.”
“And what Khrushchev giveth, Khrushchev can taketh away. Damn it,” Daniel said, and slapped the newspaper down. Then he looked embarrassed, and glanced over the back of the booth to see if any ladies had overheard his language. “I’ll drive you to the train station tomorrow morning, at least. What time does the train leave?”
“At 6:15.”
Daniel grimaced. “Well, that can’t be helped. I’ll drop you off and then head over to the Boston field office. They’ll want me to call in too.”
They lingered over their coffee, barely speaking. Gennady lit a cigarette, then tossed it half-smoked into the dregs of his coffee. “Let’s go back to the motel.”
“We could hit the town,” Daniel offered. “I noticed a bar a couple blocks over.”
“No, no. We will need to be up very early,” Gennady said.
When they got to the motel, Daniel took over the bathroom to shave while Gennady collapsed in the armchair. It seemed a sad waste to spend his last evening in America staring at the paisley drapes
. (Of course he would probably still be on American soil for a few days, but once he left Daniel behind it wouldn’t count.) There was still so much he wanted to see, to do, to experience – all of it now out of his reach.
The Rocky Mountains. The California redwoods. New York City. The deserts of the southwest, which Ilf and Petrov said were so beautiful.
Really it was a miracle that Gennady and Daniel had been on the road so long. Ilf and Petrov only got ten weeks. It was silly to think, oh, if only I had two more months, I could have seen the Fourth of July…
He would have liked to watch the fireworks with Daniel, and tell him that Soviet May Day parades were better. And visit a county fair. And go to a drive-in movie theater…
Daniel came out of the bathroom, clean-shaven and tired-eyed. “It’s all yours,” he said, and flashed a smile.
He would have liked to kiss Daniel again.
Gennady fled into the bathroom to splash his burning cheeks. Of course he had thought about this before, but there had always been something theoretical about the idea: it was easy to put it off for later.
But now there was no later.
Do everything; try everything. Grab happiness when you find it. And he would never get another such good chance to try this. Daniel would almost certainly say yes, and he was good-looking and kind, and with him it wouldn’t hurt any more than was unavoidable. If it went well, it would be a happy memory to take back.
And if it turned out not to be pleasant, after all, it wouldn’t matter. He would never see Daniel again after tomorrow.
This thought hurt, and Gennady shook his head to rid himself of it. Then he smacked his cheeks lightly, trying to draw some color in them. Maybe this was why Arkady was always patting his cheeks. He bit his lips to redden them, and attempted a smile at the mirror. Daniel liked it when he smiled.
Gennady propelled himself back into the motel room. Daniel was reading in the armchair by the window, and Gennady walked over and drew the curtain and leaned against the wingback. His heartbeat pounded in his ears.
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