A Shadow in Moscow, page 11
As she set the table, he opened a large corner cabinet and retrieved the special bottle of wine his boss had given him to celebrate the very promotion, to captain, that Vada had referenced.
Halfway through the pie and the wine, Leo laid down his fork. “It’s truly a night to celebrate. I have a surprise for you . . . I have hired help for you here at home.”
Ingrid felt her eyes prick with tears. “Is my housekeeping that bad or my cooking that horrible?”
“Not at all.” Leo laughed. “Since you began your job last month, you haven’t had as much time, and I was given permission for this. It’s a rare honor.”
Her job. That was another of Leo’s surprises for which he’d received “permission.” He returned home one day with papers outlining her job assignment and instructions to report to an office building just off Krasnaya Ploshchad the following morning. “The Bureau of Historical Archives needs people with language skills to file old documents. See? You use those skills, which some might frown upon, to benefit the State and no one complains.” Now she worked in a dark, windowless room, filing papers, wondering if warmth or spring could ever reach that dank space.
Stunned, Ingrid sat silent. Leo didn’t notice and continued talking. “It’s not that I don’t enjoy my piroshkis crisp, even burned and served like pie, but this . . .” He reached over and pressed a finger between her brows. “This frown I cannot have. I promised to take care of you. Part of that is helping you as best I can.”
He continued. “Her name is Dolores Galecki. Originally from Poland, she worked for Comrade Bortsov before his transfer to London last week, and she has passed all the security clearances to work with people in our office. Bortsov highly recommends her.”
An incongruence focused Ingrid’s attention. “You worked with Comrade Bortsov?”
She had met the man a couple months earlier. He was watchful, secretive, and sharp, and she had heard rumors as to his occupation.
“We crossed paths.” Leo reached for her hand. “Are you not pleased?”
“I am.” Ingrid slid her hand back across the table, cut into her pie, and lied. “I was thinking how nice it will be to have someone around.”
Leo smiled and returned to his dinner. After a few bites, in what he may have felt to be congenial silence but Ingrid found cool and prickling, he spoke again. His voice was full of its initial jubilance. “She will arrive at eight tomorrow morning and work six days a week. You may choose her day off.”
“Tomorrow? So soon?” Ingrid noted Leo’s lips turn downward. She waved her fork airily. “I need time to prepare for her.”
“Not at all. She is coming to relieve you from that.”
“Sundays.” Ingrid forced a tone of light enthusiasm. “That will be her day off. It’s the only afternoon you are home from work. I don’t want someone in our apartment then.”
Leo brightened again. “Very wise. I agree. No Sundays.”
As the evening progressed Ingrid found her attention captured by small inconsistencies revealed over the months. She parsed through each of her husband’s comments, wondering what was true, what was false, and what she was imagining.
She thought of Leo’s intelligence, intensity, eagerness to please, and love for rules and structure. She thought of how he had taken her books off their shelves days after she’d arranged them, with a “No one has these books,” and tucked them away in their bedroom closet. She thought of how many of his friends, including Bortsov, worked within the KGB, and how he pulled the sheets over their heads at night when they whispered their most intimate secrets or made love. She thought of his slow, thoughtful answers and slight pauses only to be followed by overbright smiles and conversational changes. She wondered what he was hiding.
And now, with someone in the house to keep watch over her, she wondered if she’d ever find out.
* * *
The woman hired was not at all what Ingrid expected. She determined Dolores would be old, thin, sour, and grumpy—a wizened Russian babushka-type woman, with sharp eyes and a critical tongue.
Instead, Dolores was not much older than Ingrid herself, perhaps in her late thirties, heavyset in a healthy way, with light brown hair twisted and pinned carefully at the nape of her neck. Her grey-blue eyes, though wary and assessing, were not cruel.
She stood inside the front door that first morning and examined the apartment in silent consternation. Finally, she turned to Ingrid. “I am Dolores.” She said her three words in slow, clear Russian and offered nothing more.
“Hello, I am Inga,” Ingrid replied in Polish. While “Inga” rather than “Ingrid” rolled off her tongue smoothly after almost a year, it still scraped within her. “It’s nice to meet you.”
The woman blinked. “You speak Polish.”
“Not well.” Ingrid gestured into the living room. Dolores followed her. “Would German work better?”
“I speak German,” Dolores replied in Russian. “Comrade Bortsov insisted on Russian, but—” Dolores stopped herself. She stared at Ingrid, then blinked at something she found within her. “I do not enjoy it.”
Ingrid felt something shift between them but was unsure if she had stepped closer or farther from danger. After all, Leo had chosen this woman for reasons of his own. She pressed her lips together, nodded, and made a decision. “When we are alone, we will speak German then.”
“Danke dir.” Thank you.
Ingrid sat and motioned for Dolores to do the same. Dolores took the room’s only other chair, leaving the love seat empty between them.
Unsure what to say, Ingrid scanned the apartment. Almost its entirety was visible from her vantage point. Identical to every other unit within the building, the front door opened into the living room with the door to the galley kitchen off the back. One bedroom flanked this central room on the right, with their bathroom next to it. Next to the kitchen was one last door—a thimble-sized coat closet that held Leo’s coat, Ingrid’s two coats, and a pair of boots for each. While it was a luxury to live alone rather than in a communal apartment, it was still only a few hundred square feet in total. Dolores would soon uncover everything within it and everything about her. When not at work, Ingrid conceded there would be no escaping Leo’s latest “gift.”
Ingrid stopped her racing thoughts and focused on Dolores once more. “Where are you from?”
“Kraków.”
“Do you like it here in Moscow?”
“What I like is irrelevant. I have been here since I was fourteen.” Dolores stood. “I will see your kitchen now.”
Ingrid stood as well and gestured to the door only a few feet away. As Dolores stepped into her kitchen, Ingrid reached into the hall closet for her light coat. Staying was futile. There was nothing Dolores could not see or find within seconds.
Ingrid had asked permission to be late to work, but she wanted out. Her one place of sanctuary no longer existed. “I will be home from work at six tonight.”
“That is fine.”
Standing just outside the kitchen’s open doorway, Ingrid could hear their few cupboards opening and closing.
“I will have dinner ready.”
“Wha—? What will you make?” Ingrid swallowed, embarrassed her voice cracked within her own home.
“I haven’t taken stock of your pantry yet.” Ingrid stepped forward to assist, but Dolores shooed her away. “I will handle it.”
With that Ingrid left.
She paused outside her neighbor’s door. Vada had once been the one she could talk to. She raised her hand to knock, then lowered it just as fast. Vada was no longer her friend. She no longer spoke to Ingrid. She never even glimpsed at her.
Ingrid continued down the hallway to the stairwell. Two flights below, she knocked on another apartment door. Helka had just given birth and would be home. She was forthright and bold, and Ingrid believed they might be friends. And Ingrid would not make the mistake she and Vada had possibly made weeks before.
She gave the door a soft double tap and Helka answered immediately. “Inga? . . . You’re lucky I was passing to the kitchen. I might not have heard you.”
Ingrid almost laughed. Helka’s apartment was the same size as her own, and she could hear everything, even noises from the apartment two units away. “I didn’t want to wake you if you were sleeping.”
Helka gestured to the bassinet standing in the center of their living room only feet away. “He’s the one who sleeps all the time. Not me.”
“Is Boris home?”
Helka nodded toward the bedroom. “He’s on the hospital’s night shift this month. He’s sleeping too.”
Ingrid gestured into the hallway. The questions she wanted to ask could not be posed in Helka’s apartment.
“I had planned to be late for work today, but . . .” Ingrid swallowed. “Leo’s new maid doesn’t need my interference. Would you like to take a walk?”
“Yes. Please.” The younger woman grinned. “He just ate, so he’ll sleep for a while now.”
Within moments Helka grabbed her shoes and her sweater and they were down several flights of stairs, out the building’s front door, and headed to Vorontsovsky Park.
While they chatted nonsense for the few blocks along Bolshaya Gruzinskaya, Helka turned to Ingrid as they reached the park’s green expanse. “What’s this about?”
Ingrid opened her mouth to dissimulate, wanting to approach her friend with subtlety and not commit herself to the embarrassment of not knowing or to the risk of probing. But one look at her friend’s perceptive eyes told her she could not.
“Leo hired a maid for me, as I said . . . ,” she began. “She previously worked for Comrade Bortsov.”
“Who was promoted to rezident in London.” Helka’s statement lifted in wonder. Ingrid had caught those tones before. In a society that proclaimed all equal, she found this particular note of awe, for those rising in power and influence, fascinating.
They walked a few steps before Helka said, “Is there a question there?”
“Perhaps . . . You work for the KGB.”
“I manage meeting logistics, Inga. I have no idea about the First Directorate. But they are a tight group, aren’t they? Speaking of Bortsov, he was there last weekend.”
“Your brother’s wedding. I completely forgot to ask. How was it?”
“It was fine.” Helka sighed. “Pretty good. They both got what they wanted.” She sniggered at Ingrid’s blank expression. “Promotions.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The KGB doesn’t promote single men beyond the first levels. They must marry.” Helka’s mouth twisted in a sardonic smile. “Leverage is a powerful motivator, and there’s very little with a single man. So Anton married to secure his promotion, and Nikita got one too . . . Let’s just hope they don’t mess it up. No divorces in the KGB either.”
Helka stopped. “I should get back. Stop by later this week. I want to hear all about this new maid.” She gave Ingrid a quick hug and dashed off to her newborn son.
Ingrid dropped onto the nearest bench. While she had learned little about her maid, she had learned much about her marriage. Snippets long floating free fell into place.
Questions churned all day, and by dinnertime there was no holding them back. “Do you work for the KGB?”
Leo glanced to the radio, then back to his wife, as if now understanding why she had turned it on the moment he entered the apartment. “What would make you ask that?”
“Dolores. You mentioned she worked for Comrade Bortsov, who is now rezident in London. That’s a top KGB title, right? And . . .” She clasped her courage tight. “You asked me to marry you right after your trip here, right before you took your promotion. Was it a requirement? Did you have to marry to accept?”
“Who have you been talking to?”
It wasn’t a denial.
“No one.” Ingrid’s courage, built all day in the silence of her mind, faltered.
“Vada?”
“No. Please.” Ingrid reached for her husband’s arm, but he stepped away. “She is so frightened she talks to no one.” She shook her head. “I’ve simply paid attention.”
“I see.” Leo stared at her, and Ingrid felt she was absorbing someone new, a stranger. Gone was his vulnerability, his mild gentleness. There was no trace of any softness in the plane of his cheeks, the cut of his jaw, and especially none in his dark eyes. Had she imagined it all along?
Leo stepped toward her and Ingrid forced herself to stand still and not step back. “Stop paying attention. Do you understand? We will not talk about my work. Ever.” He gestured to the stove. “Now, please, let’s get Dolores’s dinner on the table.”
Ten
Anya
Moscow
April 5, 1982
I burrow deeper into my coat. Spring hasn’t come to Moscow yet, and a vicious wind kicks up off the river. I pause to stare at the brightly lit Krasnaya Ploshchad, Red Square, standing in stark contrast to the black sky above. Without a single cloud a curtain of stars drapes over the buildings like a canopy of glittering jewels. I miss this in summertime. Somehow the stars aren’t quite so bright. They need a chill to bring out their glory.
The power and majesty of St. Basil’s and Spasskaya Tower take my breath away, and I’m reminded of my first Victory Day parade. I was about four years old and that May morning was unusually warm. I remember that I wore my new red sweater. My father stood right where I’m standing now, lifted me on his shoulders high above the crowd, and explained each of the glories passing by. He was so proud of our country and so excited to share in my first parade. His excitement made me proud too.
Like tonight’s stars, the day was mesmerizing. Red was draped everywhere—symbolizing the blood of the workers, of the Red Army, of the Revolution, and of the Union’s new dawn. The bands, the marching, the music—I can still feel it pounding through me, my blood surging in syncopated beat with its tempo. The missiles.
A guffaw escapes.
A couple walking by stops and stares at me. I raise a hand in apology. The missiles. Every time I think I’ve let him go, something draws me back.
Scott was shocked when I let that detail slip. I think I was describing a parade for the Great Patriotic War, but it hardly matters. We pull out our missiles for both. Why is that odd?
“You have missiles in your parades?” His eyes rounded to nearly twice their normal size. “Arms? Real missiles? The kind countries shoot at each other?”
“They’re stunning. Huge trailers carry them between the military divisions. They’re as big as grain silos. You can’t help but gasp in awe at the size and power of them.” I blinked. Scott wasn’t nodding or smiling. His lips had parted in an odd slack-jawed gape. “Don’t you like them?”
When he didn’t reply, a new thought occurred to me. “Wait . . . Haven’t you seen yours? Don’t you have missiles in your parades?”
“No, Anya!” Scott exclaimed. “We have never, I promise you, had a single missile rolling down any American street to celebrate the Fourth of July or any other holiday.” Then he winked at me and lowered his voice. “And I doubt the West Germans do either.”
Scott privately teased me for weeks after that. And I accepted it—until he started picking on Krasnaya Ploshchad. “Everything about you people is aimed at war and destruction,” he claimed one day after a particularly offensive Government Relations lecture.
“You people? Have you serious? You speak that about me?” I was so upset and furious I failed to construct my English verbs correctly, which added humiliation to the mix.
He shoulder-bumped me. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
I sidestepped him and picked up my pace.
“Anya! Anya, wait.” He caught up with me within a few strides and slid an arm around me. I wanted to push him away, but I couldn’t. Even in those few seconds of walking away, I understood why he said it. It was what he’d been taught to believe—what all Americans believed. They don’t know us—the real people living, working, and trying to survive day by day in my country. And until coming to Georgetown, I didn’t know them. When I was growing up, America represented everything base and wrong. Americans were “you people” to me as well.
Tucked under Scott’s arm, I tried to explain Red Square to him, because, unlike the missiles, Krasnaya Ploshchad is defining for us in all the best ways.
“Yes, we are a fighting culture, but not like Professor Michaels said today. He was right about the military structure behind our government, which came about after the October Revolution. But he’s wrong about Red Square. It wasn’t named for the Revolution, blood, or the Red Army. St. Basil’s is six hundred years old. Most of the towers within the Kremlin are even older. Red, krasni in the past and now krasivi in modern Russian, means ‘beautiful.’ It signifies something lovely and right and good. Red doesn’t always mean fighting, war, fear, and anger.”
“You’re right . . . It’s also the color of passion, love, and really good wine.” He winked again. “Am I forgiven?”
“Yes.” I tried not to laugh. I fell in love with him that afternoon.
“Why didn’t you raise your hand and correct Professor Michaels today?”
I bit my lip. That was part of why I was upset, furious, and humiliated too. I didn’t speak up. I didn’t defend my homeland. If anyone who mattered—Igor, for one—ever found out, it wouldn’t be good. We Foreign Studies students are to be poster children for a superior way of life. Yet I didn’t rise to the occasion. I sat like a silent coward while an American professor berated my homeland.
“I can’t fight all that alone. I only almost fit in here because people think I’m from the GFR—” I closed my eyes. I’d messed up again. “West Germany. I can’t risk it . . . And just because your Senator McCarthy’s Red Scare ended, doesn’t mean Americans trust us. This ongoing Cold War shows you don’t. And we don’t trust you. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that we trust you less and fear you more.”
“I trust you.” Scott slid his hand down my arm and captured my hand within his. “And I’m sorry about all that.”
