Honeytrap

by Aster Glenn Gray

  “What will their families think?” Gennady interrupted. “Will they pay for their sons’ education if they know that it will be useless now that they have joined this club? Who will hire the boys now that they have publicly declared themselves to be deviants?”

  “There were girls, too,” Daniel said.

  “Oh, yes! Because parents certainly approve of sexual impropriety in their daughters! I really can’t believe that this man, this professor, encouraged these children in this foolishness,” Gennady said. He rolled over on his stomach. “This is illegal in your country, isn’t it? There are laws against public indecency, against sodomy. Why is he encouraging them to publicly declare themselves as criminals?”

  “Dissidents in your country do practically the same thing,” Daniel objected. “Just for free speech instead of free love.”

  “Yes, and the rest of us know that they’re crazy,” Gennady returned. “Just live your life quietly and try to get as much happiness out of it as you can. If you rock the boat, it will sink.”

  Daniel didn’t answer. He had shared Gennady’s reservations, after all, but he had been so won over by John’s description of the club, and Gennady’s response left him deflated and confused.

  “Perhaps it is different in your country,” Gennady mused. “There is a tradition of ordinary people winning rights for themselves, Civil Rights and women’s liberation. In my country, there is a tradition of people sticking their heads up and getting them cut off.” Daniel winced. “Even if the Party decided to reform, after all, this will only last until the next wave of hardliners take over. Then it will be taken away.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you?”

  Gennady shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  Daniel rolled over on his stomach too. “You could defect,” he said.

  “This again.” Gennady sighed. “No, I couldn’t do this. If one person leaves, the rest of the family suffers for it. They’ve all suffered enough already. And anyway,” he added, “that’s not doing anything about it. Nothing will change for anyone else if I defect. Not for the better, anyway.”

  Chapter 6

  Gennady had no intention of telling Daniel about it, but Daniel was not the first to speak to Gennady of defection this trip.

  A few weeks before, fairly early in the morning, Gennady woke at the sound of a knock on his door. He was still blinking sleep from his eyes when he opened it, and then the sight on his doorstep knocked sleep out of his mind, because there was Maksym Sergeyevich Bondar. Sergeyich.

  “Maksym!” said Gennady, because Sergeyich seemed too informal when they had not seen each other for fifteen years.

  A good Soviet citizen ought to slam the door in a defector’s face, perhaps even inform the embassy of his whereabouts. Gennady had no intention of doing the second, hesitated a moment on the cusp of doing the first, then gave Sergeyich a good Russian bear hug and kissed both his cheeks.

  “Let’s go out for coffee,” Gennady said. He did not think his apartment was bugged, but it was better to be safe. “A good American breakfast. Yes?”

  They ended up at a café a couple of blocks from Gennady’s apartment. Sergeyich ordered a massive meal, of course: bacon, sausage, orange juice, a fruit cup, three blueberry buttermilk pancakes swimming in maple syrup, and a “granola parfait,” although neither of them were sure what that could be. “I’ll have one too,” Gennady decided.

  “Really, is that all you’re having for breakfast, Gosha? The Americans are paying, so you might as well get more.”

  “Do they think they can buy me with breakfast food?”

  “Well, hope springs eternal – ” this phrase Sergeyich said in English, and Gennady laughed, because his accent was nearly as bad as ever. “Yes, I know,” Sergeyich said, with a sigh. “But eat more, Gennady, eat more. You’re too thin.”

  So Gennady ordered bacon and eggs and a cinnamon roll, and teased Sergeyich, “Perhaps this will make me as fat as you.”

  Sergeyich smiled and patted his belly. “My wife feeds me well.”

  “Ah! So you convinced some poor girl to marry you?”

  “Yes, yes! An American girl. Polish heritage,” Sergeyich added, “so she cooks well.”

  There was a slight hesitancy in his voice as he spoke Russian, as if he did not speak it often. Probably the American government had settled him somewhere far away from other Russians. Still, Sergeyich looked happy. His face retained its natural hollowness, but it no longer gave him the look of a saint suffering in an icon, and he smiled easily, just like an American.

  But of course, the Americans must have asked him to look happy when they sent him here.

  The food arrived. The parfaits came in tall glasses, layers of granola and yogurt and those out-of-season American strawberries that had no taste. Gennady tried one and made a face and pushed it aside in favor of the cinnamon roll.

  They did not speak about why Sergeyich had come until they were done eating. Then Gennady said, “You cannot imagine the turmoil on the dock when you did not show up.”

  “Oh, I think I can,” Sergeyich returned, with relish. “Arkady storming up and down, red as a tomato, tearing at his hair? Perhaps in actual fact ripping some of it out of his head? I have seen him do that – before your time, I think.”

  “Yes, yes, all of that,” said Gennady, although with considerably less relish. It might be a pleasant scene to imagine, but it had not been pleasant when Arkady stormed across the dock, his lips flecked with spit, and screamed in Gennady’s face, “Bondar’s your friend! Where is he, that son of a whore?”

  The waitress refilled Gennady’s coffee cup (wonderful American service: he hadn’t even asked). Gennady took a sip of the fresh hot coffee. “He’s dead now,” he told Sergeyich. “Heart attack.”

  “He had a heart?”

  “I know. A surprise for everyone,” Gennady said, and rolled his shoulders and sat back in the booth. “So? Is that why you defected? To make Arkady angry? They demoted him, you know.”

  “Oh, well! I’m glad to hear that. But no, that wasn’t my plan: as usual I was thinking of myself.” Sergeyich spread his hands. “Look around you, Gosha! The cars, the clothes, the girls!”

  “There are girls in Russia.”

  “But do they swoon over a Russian accent? No. Everyone has a Russian accent there. Here, though…” Sergeyich bunched his fingertips and kissed them.

  Gennady couldn’t help laughing. He slung an arm along the back of the booth. “I’m married.”

  “Well, so, she can stay here too,” Sergeyich said. “She probably wants to already. The supermarkets! The children in American schools! Suggest it to her and see if she doesn’t kiss your hands.”

  Gennady’s arm slipped back down to his lap. “No, she stayed in Moscow. She didn’t want to come.”

  “Oh.” Sergeyich paused. “Well, so. If you defect she’ll divorce you, and then you can marry an American girl.”

  “Your Polish-American girl has a sister?” Gennady teased. “I will marry her, live right down the street, in the evenings we will all get together and play Durak?”

  “Wouldn’t that be the life?” For a moment Sergeyich looked wistful. “No, of course, we couldn’t see each other. All defectors have to go into witness protection.” Witness protection he also said in English.

  “And never see my family again? My Alla, little Dasha?” Dasha was his cousin Oksana’s daughter, not Gennady’s, but in his heart she was almost his own. “No, no. Listen, Sergeyich, I’m glad to have seen you, and it seems that this life agrees with you, but it’s not for me. I hope the Americans don’t begrudge you the cost of the cinnamon roll when you tell them that.”

  Sergeyich shrugged and smiled. “Oh well,” he said. “It was worth a try, no?”

  ***

  In mid-December, the winter cold chased Daniel and Gennady out of the dacha. They went one last time to close it up for the winter: close the shutters, check the cupboards, pack the soft furnishings and take them
into town until spring came again.

  “You seem quiet,” Daniel observed. They were upstairs, both of them in their coats because of the cold. They had folded away the two camp cots, and now they were folding up the down comforter on the double bed.

  “It’s toska,” Gennady told him. “Did the Polyakovs teach you this word?”

  “They used it when they talked about Piter,” Daniel said. “Old St. Petersburg, as it was before the Revolution. I thought it meant something like homesickness?”

  “Yes – no. Not exactly. If you can be homesick for a home that doesn’t exist, that has never existed and could not exist… Toska is a little like that.”

  Daniel smiled, one of those funny American smiles that expressed sadness. “Are you going to miss this place?” he asked. “We’ll open it up again in April. March if we’re lucky.”

  “Only three months.” A yawning pit in time. They finished folding the comforter, and began to fold the quilt, and Gennady said, “It’s not only that. Alla had said she might visit this winter, and of course I always knew this was unlikely, but now it is certain that she is not going to come…”

  He hadn’t meant to tell Daniel. It seemed impolite to talk about his wife to his lover, unfair to both of them. But there was no one else to tell, and when Daniel said, “I’m sorry. That must be so disappointing,” his sympathy undid Gennady, and Gennady sat on the edge of the bed and pressed his hands to his face.

  Daniel came and sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulders.

  “We’re going to get divorced,” Gennady said. “Which I already knew, I already told you, but I suppose in my heart I still hoped we would reconcile. I hoped,” Gennady confessed, and then shook his head, “No, I didn’t hope, I knew this wouldn’t happen, but I dreamed that she would come to the United States and find that she liked it and stay, and our marriage would continue the way we both dreamed it would, back in the beginning.”

  Daniel’s face took on that funny smile again. “And how did I fit in this plan?”

  “Well, you didn’t, but then it wasn’t a plan. Even if she had come to visit, she would not have stayed. It was a daydream,” Gennady said, “an impossible daydream…” He felt he had erred in telling Daniel. Naturally it must be unpleasant to Daniel to hear about a vision of Gennady’s life in which he played no part. “I have such daydreams about you too,” he said, and swung his foot sideways to nudge Daniel’s foot.

  Daniel smiled. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes.” Gennady smiled down at his hands. “We come here to this cabin and stay for a week, a month, forever, in endless summer, and the berries are always ripe and the good mushrooms always growing, and the sunsets linger on for hours. But of course,” he added, because he didn’t want Daniel to misunderstand him, “this also is a daydream that wouldn’t be so pleasant if it came true. It would get boring to be a hermit and never go anywhere. You would miss your wife and children. Murderers would roam free without Special Agent Daniel Hawthorne to catch them.”

  The last sentence made Daniel laugh. He leaned back on the bed, propped on his elbows, his eyes dreamy. “It would have been nice, though,” he said. “To have a week.”

  “But impossible,” Gennady reminded him. He stood up. Daniel caught hold of his hand and tried to pull him on the bed, but Gennady won the tug of war and pulled Daniel to his feet, instead. “We should finish packing up the house.”

  They folded up the quilt and the sheets and carried it all downstairs. But they didn’t leave yet: the wood stove had finally warmed the living room, and so they spread the down comforter on the floor and took off their coats and lay on their stomachs in front of the fire.

  Gennady still felt a little uncomfortable, in spirit rather than body. “You understand,” he told Daniel, “what I told you about Alla, this is not a reflection about my feelings about you. I love her, but of course I love you too…”

  A smile lit Daniel’s face. “Do you love me?”

  “Of course,” Gennady said, a little irritably. “Why else would I take such risks to see you?”

  “It’s nice to hear you say it,” Daniel said. He leaned over and kissed the top of Gennady’s head. “I love you too.”

  Gennady blushed like a schoolboy and hid his face in his folded arms.

  The fire crackled. Daniel ran his hand down Gennady’s spine, to the small of his back, and insinuated his hand beneath the layers of sweater, and shirt, and undershirt. A little cold air seeped in with his warm hand, and the contrast made Gennady shiver.

  “What are we going to do until March?” Daniel murmured.

  Gennady did not feel like thinking about that now. He rolled over onto his back, and tugged his layers of shirts back into place, and pulled Daniel’s arm around him. “We’ll still have lunches.”

  “That’s not the same.”

  Well, it wasn’t, but Gennady had no intention of suggesting a sordid motel rendezvous. That might make some spy agency sit up and pay attention. It was too bad Daniel couldn’t come to Gennady’s apartment… Gennady thought with horror of the unwashed sheets on his bed and the mildew on the shower curtain and the dishes piling up in his sink, and mentally cleared them all away… But it didn’t matter anyway. Daniel couldn’t come; Gennady lived too close to his colleagues, someone might notice.

  “You could come to my house,” Daniel said.

  “Daniel,” Gennady scolded.

  “Not for sex, idiot,” Daniel said, and his ears turned red. “Just… I like having you around.”

  Gennady was almost painfully touched. But. “Will your wife like having me around?”

  “Didn’t she like you when you met?”

  “That was different,” Gennady protested. True, she had sent them up to the dacha with a picnic basket, and after all she was an artist, and French too, but – well, it was different to send someone to a dacha than to have that person right under her nose.

  “I wish I could ask you to come to Christmas,” Daniel said, “but we’ll be celebrating with Elizabeth’s family, and it would be hard to explain…”

  “No, no,” Gennady said. He could hardly inflict himself on Elizabeth at Christmas. “We don’t celebrate Christmas anyway.” He snuggled into the comforter. “We had a fine Christmas at your mother’s house,” he mused, “all those years ago. How is she, your mother?”

  Daniel hesitated just a moment. “She died a few years ago. A car accident…”

  Gennady had only met Mrs. Hawthorne the one time, for just a few days, and yet the words struck him as though he had lost a dear old friend. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She was a wonderful woman.”

  “Yes, she was,” Daniel said, and they lay for a minute in sorrow. The fire crackled in the stove.

  At length Gennady asked, “And your sister? Is she well?”

  “Oh, yes. Anna’s great. She and Joseph divorced… Christ, it must be nearly fifteen years ago now. She showed up for Christmas – this was the year after you visited us – and she told us, ‘My Christmas present to myself was a divorce.’”

  Gennady laughed.

  Daniel grinned at him. “She remarried. Anna and Nate – that’s her husband’s name, Nate – they write travel articles together. Anna does the photography and Nate writes the articles to go with her photos.”

  Gennady felt a tiny lance of envy in his heart. This sounded like an ideal life: to make your living traveling with someone you loved. “Lucky them,” he said lightly.

  “Yes,” Daniel said. “It all worked out well in the end.” He glanced over at Gennady. “But it was pretty hard for her for a while. I think the end of a marriage is always hard.”

  Gennady found the compassion in his face painful. He rolled over on his stomach again. “Do you think I did the wrong thing in coming to the United States?” Gennady asked.

  Daniel looked taken aback. “I’m probably the wrong person to ask. I’m too glad that you’re here to think it was wrong for you to come.”

  Gennady sighed. He took up a stick
from the wood box and poked at the fire. A log collapsed in a shower of sparks. “Pretend I was sent somewhere else then, Australia perhaps. I will not say that your presence was not an extra incentive to take this assignment, but it was not the deciding factor, if they had assigned me to go to the land of kangaroos I still would have gone.”

  “What did your family think about it?” Daniel asked. “Your Aunt Lilya and…” He paused. “The others,” he added apologetically, as if he should have remembered their names, although Gennady had not ever talked about them much with Daniel.

  Gennady poked at the fire some more. “Aunt Lilya said that of course I must go where the Soviet Union sends me. But of course she would say that: she flew fighter planes during the war.” Gennady plucked at a bit of fluff on the comforter. “And Oksana said that I have always wanted to travel, ever since I was seven years old and we played Three Musketeers and I said someday I would go to Paris. If I did not go I would resent Alla for keeping me, and Alla would resent that resentment, and it would ruin our marriage more surely than if I went, so I might as well go.”

  “Of course I’m biased,” Daniel said, “but I think that’s wise.” Gennady sighed, and Daniel added, “I think that there are some things you can’t sacrifice for another person, even if you want to, no matter how much you love them. Like Anna trying to set aside her love of art to be the model wife that Joseph wanted.”

  Gennady did not think this was exactly parallel. Alla was unhappy, and felt bad for wanting him to stay just as much as he felt bad for leaving. But in the end it did not matter that they felt bad, they both still wanted what they wanted.

  Suddenly he did not want to talk about it anymore. It was like Tyutchev said, a thought once uttered is untrue. To say anything, to try to reduce this complexity of feelings to words, inevitably simplified it so much that it became almost a lie.

  Daniel kissed the side of Gennady’s head. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said again.

  Which did not really solve anything. But still it was pleasant to hear.