“Well, it was, sort of. I mean, if the FBI wouldn’t have fired him for being gay, no one could have blackmailed him about it. But really I quit because… I felt guilty, I guess. I never should have told you about Paul, and even if that’s not how the KGB found out about him – well, I guess it couldn’t have led the KGB to him, unless the KGB and the GRU get along a lot better than the FBI and the CIA…”
Gennady snorted.
“I figured,” Daniel said. “Nations come and go, but interagency squabbles are eternal. But even so…” He twisted the comforter in his hand. “I guess I felt like I shouldn’t be working for the FBI if I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I mean, sure, I told you by accident, but accidents get people killed. And if Paul…” Daniel closed his eyes. “If Paul had known that I told a Soviet agent about him, he would have broken my jaw. And that would have been better than I deserved, given how that worked out for him.”
The mattress dipped. Gennady sat down on the bed beside him. “Daniel,” he said.
“Sorry. If you’ll pass me those tissues…”
Gennady passed Daniel the tissue box. Daniel blew his nose.
“Sorry,” Daniel said again.
“No, I’m sorry. Maybe I should not have come here. Perhaps I have only made you feel bad again.”
Daniel shook his head. “No, no. I’m glad you’re here. I’ve wanted to see you again for a long time. I’ll probably always feel guilty about Paul, but throwing away my last chance with you wouldn’t bring him back. And with everything that’s happened, the Soviet Union falling, for the first time we really do have a chance to build a life together…” He folded over the tissue in his hands. “If you have any interest in doing that.”
There was a long pause. Daniel bit his lip. He wanted so badly to make a joke, to say anything to undercut the seriousness of the moment, because he felt like more of an idiot with every second that Gennady didn’t answer. Probably thinking of a gentle way to let Daniel down. Undoubtedly Gennady had moved on.
At last Gennady said, “I don’t know. It’s not that I’m angry about anything that happened,” he added. “Of course you were appalled by Paul’s death, naturally the only course was to break things off, what else could you do? But still it was painful, and once you have been burned it is hard to put your hand on the stove again. Do you understand?”
Daniel nodded.
“I hoped when I visited you that perhaps you would be old and ugly and covered in warts,” Gennady told him. “Or old and boring and talking about nothing but golf. Then I could dust my hands of you, and that would be the end of it. But of course you’re an American, you’ve barely aged at all.” He sighed, and rubbed his face, and then perked up and added hopefully, “I have, though. I don’t even have all my teeth anymore. You see?” He hooked a finger in the left corner of his lips to display a gap of three or four missing teeth in the side of his mouth. Daniel leaned in to peer at it.
“What happened?”
“Bar fight.”
“Of course,” Daniel said. He fell back against the pillows. “I like your face,” he told Gennady, and Gennady sighed again. “C’mon. You don’t have to sound sad about it,” Daniel told him.
“It would have been easier if it had just died naturally. I could have eaten your lasagna and left and that would have been the end of it.”
“Do you really want that?”
Another sigh. “Well, I’m here, so no, clearly I don’t.”
A long silence followed. Daniel wanted very much to put his hand on Gennady’s, or put an arm around him and pull him close. But when he moved as if to do it, Gennady drew back, and Daniel fell still again.
When Gennady spoke again, he didn’t look at Daniel. “I thought I would visit Paul’s grave.”
For a long moment Daniel couldn’t speak. Then he said, “You don’t have to.”
“No, of course not. But I think it would be a good thing to do.” There was another silence, and then Gennady said, “I went to DC first when I came to the United States. To your old house, to ask Elizabeth where he was buried. But of course she didn’t know, why should she?”
“She could have called me and asked.”
“She offered. I asked her not to.” Another pause. “I don’t know, I wasn’t ready to see you yet.” He glanced at Daniel. His eyes looked liquid in the refracted gleam of the streetlights. “I was so in love with you in 1976,” he told Daniel. “Everything else in my life was so terrible and there you were. A refuge. Safe harbor.”
A lump rose in Daniel’s throat. “I didn’t realize…”
“No, of course you didn’t know. I didn’t want you to know, it would have been very painful for me if you did, and after all everything would have been just the same, in the end. I’m only telling you now because…” He looked down at his hands. “Well, so you will understand how it hurt me the way that things ended. More painful because, after all, I could not even comfort myself that it was unfair, or that you were cruel, because what else could you have done? And so it’s hard to say, oh yes, let’s try again.”
“You don’t have to decide right away,” Daniel told him. “I know you’re headed out on a trip, anyway, I don’t want to get in the way of your travel plans. I just… I wanted you to know it was an option. Just to let you know that you can always come back here to me if you want to.”
Gennady smoothed one hand over the coverlet. “I think that would be hard on you,” he said. “To leave things so uncertain.”
“Well, I’m hoping eventually you’ll make up your mind,” Daniel admitted. “But now that I’m old and boring and warty, I’m a little more patient, too.”
Gennady laughed at him. “You know very well you’re not boring or warty.”
“Patient, though. More patient than I used to be.”
He smiled at Gennady, and at last Gennady smiled back.
“If you’ll make room,” Gennady said suddenly, “perhaps I could sleep here? The bed is very wide, plenty of room for two, and the couch, you understand…”
“God, of course.” Daniel was already scooting over, his heart beating with happiness. “That couch must be hell on your back.”
***
Gennady stayed three more days. Daniel took the time off work. “My boss is delighted,” he explained to Gennady. “She thinks I work too much.”
“Your boss is a woman?”
“The world is always changing,” Daniel told him. “She’s nice when she’s not trying to set me up with her friends.”
“She’s wise,” Gennady said. “It’s not good for you to be alone.”
“I’m fine,” Daniel protested.
“You’re not fine. You’re one of those people who always needs to be in love with someone,” Gennady told him.
“I got a crush on my boss for a while,” Daniel admitted, which made Gennady crow with laughter. “Oh, shut up,” Daniel said, and Gennady grinned and leaned against the boat rail, the salt spray spitting on his face as they crossed the water to the Statue of Liberty.
“What is it that you do now, anyway?” Gennady asked.
“Oh,” said Daniel. “I’m a counselor. After I left the FBI, I got a master’s degree and… yeah.”
“Really?” Gennady turned away from the sea to look at him. Then he nodded. “Yes, I can see that. You always listened well.”
They hit all the major tourist sights: the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, Times Square and Broadway. They stood in the cold under the marquee lights and discussed seeing a show, until Gennady admitted, “I’ve never cared for musicals. It was always Alla who liked them.”
“Alla,” Daniel echoed. “Did you end up getting divorced?”
He thought they probably had, but he had never known for sure.
“Oh yes. She met another man while I was in America.” Gennady shrugged. “A guitar player. He lived on the floor below us, and the sound of the guitar carried up through the floor… and one day she went down to see who played so beautifully. An
d so.”
“I’m sorry.”
Another shrug. “It was a long time ago.”
They walked on under the garish glaring lights. “What have you been up to since then?” Daniel asked.
“Do you mean, am I married again? No. Two relationships fell apart in a row,” Gennady said, and waved a hand, “no, maybe I am just not meant for romance.”
“Oh,” said Daniel, and felt terrible, although it wasn’t like he’d dated much since his divorce, either. He’d only really felt ready to try again within the last few months. And then Gennady’s letter had arrived, saying that he was coming to New York, and Daniel had decided to wait for that. To see.
“Oh, you sound so sad, it’s not that important. There are other things in life,” Gennady said.
“Black marketeering?”
Gennady laughed. “No, no. Well, yes, but not only that. I bought a car, have I told you that? And on summer days we all pile in, Aunt Lilya and my cousin Oksana and her daughter Dasha, and we drive out to the dacha, where we eat tomatoes from the vine and raspberries off their canes, and Dasha tries to find Voice of America on the radio and complains that they play too much news and not enough music…” He sighed. “Well, of course, no longer. Dasha lives in Berlin now – Berlin! She got herself stranded there when the wall fell, with her rock band, and we were so worried… But of course with everything that has happened, probably she is safer there than if she stayed in Moscow.”
Daniel had gotten stuck earlier in the sentence. “Rock band?”
“Yes! You think we have no rock? You haven’t heard of Aquarium, Kino, Viktor Tsoi…? Dasha went into mourning when he died. Of course her band is not so famous,” Gennady said, “perhaps they are not very good, what do I know about music, after all? But still they are playing in Berlin.”
His words might be deprecatory, but his tone was full of pride. Daniel was touched, not only because it was clear that Dasha was like a daughter to Gennady, but because Gennady had never spoken so openly or at such length about his family before.
“It’s asking a lot to ask you to stay here, isn’t it?” Daniel said.
“Not as much as it was when you kept saying defect, defect,” Gennady said.
Daniel winced. “You must have thought I was such an asshole.”
“No, no. The FBI wanted you to say this, didn’t they? They sent Sergeyich too, my old friend who had defected. I suppose they liked to win defectors; it was a…” He paused, searching for a phrase.
“A feather in their cap.”
“Yes. A feather in their cap. But pointless for me: it is not like they would have let me live near you, you know. But now the borders are open, I can stay here, go back, back and forth, whatever.”
Gennady fell into a thoughtful silence. Daniel didn’t speak either, for fear of bursting the soap bubble of hope that had risen in his heart.
It wasn’t till they were back on the subway car, rattling through the dark tunnels toward home, that Gennady spoke again. “I should start looking for a car,” he said.
“Oh,” Daniel said, and slouched in his seat, and tried to sound cheerful. “Of course. You want to be getting on with your trip. Where will you go first?”
“South,” Gennady reminded him. “Where it’s warm. I will drive to Florida and drink fresh orange juice from a stand by the side of the road. Are there still oranges in Florida in February?”
“I’ve got no idea.” The conversation depressed Daniel. “You don’t need to look for a car. You can borrow mine.”
Gennady looked startled. “I can’t take your car, Daniil.”
“Why not? I never use it. It’s faster to take public transport than try to find parking in the city.”
Gennady was silent. Then a smile quirked his lips. “You want me to have to come back at the end of the trip,” he said. “To return the car.”
Daniel had thought that at sixty he was beyond blushing, but his face reddened. “I guess so.”
Gennady’s smile had turned playful. “Yes, all right,” he said, and he slapped Daniel’s shoulder. “I’ll take your car. I’ll look forward to seeing you again,” he said, “at the end of the trip.”
Chapter 2
Gennady drove to Washington D.C. first, to the cemetery where Paul was buried. It took him some time to find the grave, and when he found it he stopped a while and looked at the clean neat headstone and the manicured grass, and found that he was not sure why he had come here after all.
It was strange to see Paul’s full name carved in the granite: Paul Everard Preston. Strange to realize that he had no face to match to the name. Strange that he had destroyed this stranger’s life, almost by accident, a sentence that he dropped while half-drunk on champagne and fear.
The Communist Party line was that there was no afterlife, just as there was no God. But sometimes Gennady doubted this, and thought they would all be called to account some day for the evil they had done on earth, and then he would meet Paul face to face.
Gennady took off his glove and put one bare hand on the cold granite headstone. “Until then,” he said, and stopped, embarrassed. His materialism reasserted itself. What was he doing, talking to a rock in a field full of rocks? The dead were dead. Paul couldn’t hear anything, and there was no way to make amends.
Gennady patted the rock. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Then he walked back through the graveyard, his breath making white puffs in the air and his hands in the pockets of his heavy coat. He got back in his car and continued southward on 1-95.
He intended to drive to Florida: all the way to Key West, perhaps, to see Ernest Hemingway’s six-toed cats.
***
The American interstate system, still in its infancy when Daniel and Gennady crossed the US in the winter of 1959 and 1960, now covered the country like a cobweb. It made travel fast, you had to give it that, but boring, boring, with the same restaurants at every exit: McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell.
Of course in 1959, all the drugstores and diners had sold essentially the same food, with perhaps some regional difference in pie fillings. But they were at least not five thousand carbon copies of the very same restaurant.
That earlier trip was much on his mind as he drove – or rather, Daniel in general was much on his mind. When Gennady had gone to New York, he had almost hoped to find that their former connection was now only a ghost of the past, and they had nothing in common anymore. Then the thing would be over and he could lay it to rest.
For a long time, the abrupt terrible ending of his relationship with Daniel had overshadowed everything else about it. He had put the whole thing in a box, not a fine lacquer box this time but battered cardboard tied viciously with twine, and tossed it to the back of his mind. And there it was quickly buried, because it turned out to be only the first in a series of calamities that swallowed up the next two years.
First Gennady and Alla divorced, an event no less devastating for being expected. Then Grandfather died, and Aunt Lilya had a heart attack, and for some time they thought she would die too. Gennady sat at her bedside in the hospital, more sober than he had been for some time, and cursed himself for taking that assignment in America. Perhaps if he had stayed, he and Alla would not have divorced. Certainly he would have had more time with Grandfather and Aunt Lilya.
And just when Aunt Lilya began to mend, and it seemed things might get better, Oksana’s husband Alyosha stumbled, dead drunk, into the path of a truck.
This, too, was almost expected. Drunks often died like that. But Oksana collapsed, and barely got out of bed for a month, and Gennady had to stop drinking quite so much, because someone needed to look after Dasha.
Someday perhaps Gennady would tell Daniel about it all, but he saw no point in doing it now. And anyway, things had gotten better after that. By 1980 Aunt Lilya and Oksana were both back on their feet, and Gennady got the green Zhiguli, which Dasha named the Frog. In the summertime they drove out to the dacha and drank raspberry-infused vodka in the eveni
ngs as Dasha taught herself to play her great-grandfather's ukulele.
“I'll be a female Vysotsky,” she said, with all the confidence of her fourteen years. “I'll write songs that speak to the soul of the people.” She stopped to write something in the notebook that she carried with her everywhere that year. “The real people as they actually are. Not like in anything official.” And she wrinkled her nose.
“You're going to sing about vodka?” Aunt Lilya scoffed.
“On a ukulele?” Gennady teased.
He got Dasha a guitar, and Alla’s new husband agreed to give Dasha lessons for cheap. They all still lived in the same apartment building, and Alla often came up to drink tea with Oksana and Gennady, and oddly they were all great friends again.
A few years later Gennady bailed Dasha out when she got arrested playing in an illegal rock club. He scolded her all the way home: “Don't you have exams? Don't you have Komsomol meetings? Do you want to get expelled, do you want to lose your future? Did they at least let you play one of your songs, Dasha, you didn't get arrested playing nothing but other people's music, did you?”
She blinked, startled, and then said shyly, “Yes. We played ‘Fossils.’”
“Ah. So you were singing about the Politburo.” Gennady considered the matter. “So if I knew a source of blank cassette tapes,” he said, “and, oh, let's say tape recorders...”
“Uncle Gennady, are you kidding?”
“Not at all. Unless you object to becoming a black marketeer? Such a good Komsomolka you are, with such great respect for the Soviet law…”
"Uncle Gennady!"
And then Gorbachev swept into power, and the rock clubs were allowed to reopen, and if Dasha didn't become a female Vysotsky, well, at least she and Gennady made a killing selling blank cassettes and tape recorders, because the official Soviet manufacturers couldn't come close to meeting the demand.
It was about this time that Daniel's letter arrived. The sight of his handwriting opened up the box Gennady had tossed to the back of his mind, and he found to his surprise that time had taken most of the sting from the memories. He was no longer sorry he had gone to America in 1975. Alla was happier with her new husband, who shared her dream of a quiet life, and Aunt Lilya had not died, after all. And Paul…
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