A Shadow in Moscow, page 12
I reached up and kissed his cheek.
Even tonight, I can feel the slight scratchiness of his cheek, the warmth of his skin against my lips. I shake my head to banish the moment and the memory. It does no good remembering that gleam in his eyes, the smell of him, or the electricity that raced through me at his touch. The memories still crash into me each and every night as I try to sleep—I can’t let them devastate any more daytime moments as well.
Scott was true to his word. He started a letter campaign within weeks of my departure. Boring letters that brought me to laughing tears at the banality of his days. But through the laughter, there were real tears as well because I felt him in every word.
I went to the grocery store today missing you. They had a new kind of mac ’n’ cheese, but I couldn’t buy it. It cost $1.17! But I think the inflation that’s plagued us is coming to an end. Which is a good thing, as I now pay my own bills and I have seven bills every month. Electricity, rent, telephone—it’s a big number for a simple guy like me.
I got so worked up about all those bills, I walked right out of the grocery store with nothing but apples, Doritos, and Cheez Whiz. So that was dinner.
Afterward, I tried to go running. It ended as badly as you’d expect, and I thought of you then, too, because I had to stop. I almost threw up. I could hear you laughing.
I sat down on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial to let my stomach settle, and as the sun set, I thought about life and love. It was all very poetic.
Life and love. To the KGB readers, it was a throwaway comment. But it meant the world to me—and Scott knew it would.
We once stayed awake all night, sitting on the brightly lit steps of the Jefferson Memorial, debating life, thought, love, and eternity. And in the early hours of the morning, our debate turned confessional and I shared with him dreams I’d never shared with another soul, not even Dmitri. There was never any freedom at home to dream. But sitting on those marble steps facing the Potomac River, I let myself imagine desires rather than duty. Scott did the same.
I fell a little more in love with him that night too.
I dig my hands into my pockets. I wish summer would come. I’m so tired of this cold. My fingers feather the edges of Scott’s last letter. I’ve been carrying it with me for a week now, and its once-crisp edges are soft and fraying. He again mentioned his Rose Beuret with no hints as to her identity.
He thinks it’s endearing, but it’s been almost two years. His letters arrive less frequently now, but they still arrive, and the searing pain and loss they bring haven’t diminished one bit. I feel most saddened for the hope Scott still carries. He needs to let me go. When he does that, maybe I can let him go too. But this open question—this silly Rose Beuret—somehow keeps us together.
I release the letter, pull my hand out of my pocket, and pound the night club’s door.
* * *
Cat Club is located just around the north side of Red Square in the basement of an old office building. If you aren’t aware of it, you’ll never find it.
It’s our new spot. We’ve got one each week, as such clubs are popping up all over Moscow. Crowded basement scenes filled with our generation—dancing, drinking, laughing, yelling, and doing who knows what to whom in dank and dark back corners.
The bouncer lets me in with a grunt, and I work my way through the crowd searching for my friends. Instead I land upon Dmitri, alone and slumped over at the bar. While disappointing, it’s not surprising. Finding him this way, too drunk for this early in the night, happens more frequently these days. I search the dance floor and locate all the others. My heart breaks for Dmitri—he loves to dance.
“Hey.” I drop onto the stool next to him and shoulder-bump him. We were great when I first got back, but Dmitri has put distance between us lately. I sense he’s hiding things, and I’m not sure if it’s that he won’t share or that he can’t. I can’t blame him; I’m hiding things from him too.
He has no clue how deeply I still love Scott. He’d deem such senseless dreams perilous and a weakness. I’m not ready to lift them or myself up to such judgment.
I have no clue as to what Dmitri does at work. I do know, however, that he travels often, and each time he comes back, he’s a little more hollowed out, a darker shadow of himself. He was always thin, but he’s approaching gaunt. And the gold flecks in his eyes have darkened. They don’t gleam any longer.
I also suspect he drinks to forget his present, while I choose sobriety to remember my past.
Although Dmitri told me to meet him at nine o’clock and it’s only three minutes past, the fact that he’s propped on his elbows with an empty shot glass in front of him is a bad sign. I inwardly groan, anticipating his glassy eyes and lips drooped in the telltale lazy smile of lots of drink and little food. It’s worrisome. The stakes are high for him, because if I’ve noticed his drinking, someone else will too—if they haven’t already. His superiors don’t frown on it. Heck, I think it’s a KGB survival tactic. But they do a lot more than frown if drinking compromises an officer.
I lean close and yell into Dmitri’s ear. The music is so loud I can barely hear my own words. “I’m sorry I’m late. Have you been here long?”
“Nah. Just a few minutes.”
I shift to look him straight in the eyes and pull back at what I find. They are clear, focused, and there’s something moving within them that puts me on full alert. “What’s up?”
“I saw your mama.” He uses the affectionate name we used as kids. I melt a little, regretting that moment upon returning when I, so grown up, insisted on calling her Mother.
“You did?” I wave my hand to the barman, needing a distraction, as a quick flash of loss and jealousy surprises me. Working until six each night, six days a week, I haven’t made the bus trip home in months. I haven’t been a good daughter. Mother has called a few times with enticing dinner invitations, but I haven’t been able to accept.
That’s not true. She’s perceptive and she loves me. She’ll see right through me; I’m not sure I want to be so closely examined right now. I’m struggling too much. Dmitri, on the other hand, has always welcomed her insights and care, her guidance and wisdom. He’s more vulnerable with my mother than with anyone in his life, including his own mother and me.
My mother, unlike his, took the dispensation to not work when we were young. So, starting at age six after that knockdown at our Little Octobrist meeting, Dmitri and a few others came to my apartment after school each day. Everyone fell in love with my mother and love her still. Unlike other parents, she laughed with us, played games with us, devised scavenger hunts for us throughout the parks, and designed obstacle courses in our building’s courtyard. She created codes and treasure maps and teased that she was training us to be good comrades and soldiers. She made us feel like we were clever, invincible, and good. We ate it up—Dmitri most of all.
“Did you go to the museum?”
He shakes his head. “I dropped by their apartment on Sunday. We sat in the kitchen while her kozuli baked and talked for a while. Your dad was at his desk, working as usual.”
Now I’m really jealous. My mother baked Dmitri my favorite cookies—and he was with her on a Sunday. For most, that day is like any other. But my mother loves Sunday. She goes to church—even though it’s the State Church where the “sermons” are propaganda and her name gets recorded.
She then spends hours humming in our kitchen, making a multicourse meal. She often invites other families to join us as well. Neighbors crowd into our apartment, spill out of the kitchen and into the living room, and we all stuff ourselves silly. Friends vied for dinner invitations each week when I was growing up. In fact, Dmitri and Sonya kept going even after I left for Georgetown.
I don’t ask, but I wonder if Dmitri accompanied her to church as well. When I was a kid, neither my father nor I went with her, but Dmitri did.
“Guess who I found lurking on the stairs?” she’d say with a laugh upon entering our apartment. It took me a couple years to realize she didn’t find Dmitri on our apartment stairs but on the church stairs an hour earlier.
“What’s she up to these days?” I miss her so much I can almost smell the hint of jasmine her hair holds, and I can definitely feel the tight hug she gives whenever I’m home.
“She’s opening a new show. She says we should go see it. She got permission to display some French artist, Marc Chagall. He’s actually Russian, born in Belarus, but he left long ago. His light, his colors . . . She showed me pictures of some of the works she couldn’t get for the show.” Dmitri scrubs his eyes with both hands. I can’t tell if he’s trying to recall the art or forget it. “They were beautiful. Almost painfully so.”
“Dmitri?”
He shudders, brushing away my concern. “We went for a walk.”
“A walk outside?” My voice arcs in question. My mother only goes for walks when there are things to say she wants no one to overhear—it was usually me doing all the talking. Shostakovich can only cover so much.
I thought she, like my father, was completely paranoid with all her walks, until the year I left for the United States. One night that summer our upstairs neighbor Comrade Sokolov got arrested. His wife screamed so loudly the whole building was up and standing in the hallways, watching as KGB officers pushed Sokolov down the hallway with stiff arms and pistols.
When I asked what he’d done, my father merely replied, “He said things he shouldn’t have. In the Federovs’ apartment.”
A Federov turned him in or the Fedorovs’ apartment was bugged. I never asked which because it doesn’t matter. The end result is the same. Sweet Comrade Sokolov, who used to tell us stories and give us homemade candies, was arrested; his kids got pulled from school; and his family lost their apartment. I never heard about any of them again. Now a hard-eyed little man, his grumpy wife, and their shifty teenage son live there.
“My work has unexpected challenges.” Dmitri’s comment jolts me back to the present. “I wanted her advice.”
I say nothing. Of course his work has challenges. Nothing feels right here. Some people believe we are closer than ever to the utopian and global Marxist-Leninist world dream, but we aren’t. It’s slipping away because it was never attainable—the Afghans are still raging an all-out guerrilla war, a harsh winter decimated Army 40, and the entire world is lining up behind NATO against us. And that’s outside our borders.
Inside it’s worse. Our grain supply can’t feed us, embargoes are crippling our already-stagnated economy, our infrastructure is crumbling—my 1950s Khrushchyovka apartment is a good indicator of that—and people churn with anxiety and hunger.
Despite a good supply of ration coupons and an ample salary by all standards, I can’t find goods in the stores that were available when I got home two years ago. Three or four days a week, lines stretch down the block for the most basic things. And you can only get in those lines fast enough if a friend “inside” tips you off that something decent might be available. With no friend, there’s no chance.
No one understands where all the funds go, but I do.
A lot goes to the KGB. Comrade Captain Mikael Stanslych, the KGB officer who oversees my lab, told me they inducted over one thousand new officers in this year’s class alone. He also told me that Brezhnev had given them “a little more license in and outside our borders.” That’s how he put it. License. I try not to wonder how far that privilege stretches.
Then there’s defense and armaments. My lab is part of a network of five military-development facilities, and there are at least seven networks—that’s potentially thirty-five facilities at or below my security clearance alone. If those other labs get anywhere close to the funding my one lab gets annually, we collectively just about match the country’s GNP. That’s if Georgetown’s Professor Michaels is right about the Soviet Union’s GNP. It isn’t a number readily publicized here or abroad.
Yes, Dmitri’s right. Unexpected challenges are all around us. I lean toward him again. “Did you share your challenges with my mother?” I ask very calmly, but I’m nervous.
It isn’t that my mother can’t keep a secret. I expect she can. But secrets put people in danger. She’s a museum curator, loyal and fearful of misstepping. She believes that by getting along, we can go along. She does her job, takes care of her family, and lets the rest swirl around her. I’ve never seen my mother with a samizdat, a black-market book, or anything else not permitted. She keeps her head down and her mouth shut. That’s one reason I sometimes feel Dmitri understands her better than I do. He has an innate desire to shelter and protect her. Whereas I keep poking her to wake her up.
“A little.” He shrugs to allay my concerns.
“Be careful, Dmitri.” I sigh. We’ve traveled this road a hundred times. “You took that oath. She didn’t. You can’t—”
“Заткнись.” He stares at me, his face inches from mine. Shut up.
I do. Something in his tone tells me to back off, and fast.
I stare at him and notice he’s again missed shaving deep into the cleft in his chin. The stubble there is more pronounced. Then I realize how well I can see it across his jaw. He’s pale, more so than usual. His hair, once long enough to crash into his eyebrows, is cut short, a brush cut that lies close to his scalp. He’s thinner, more severe, even forlorn. We’re together several nights a week when he’s in town, and yet it feels like I’m sensing new and disturbing changes at this very moment.
“I would never bring harm to your mama. She just let me talk. Okay? Give me some credit. You have no idea what it’s like.”
His hand rests on the bar near his drink. I lay mine on top of it. He’s right. I don’t have any idea at all.
Growing up, we knew Dmitri’s father was in the KGB. I’m not sure what he did, but we all thought he was the most dashing and daring of the fathers. Mine, working a boring office job in the CPSU, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, could never compete. But debonair turned to despair by our twelfth birthdays as Dmitri’s dad drank more, grew taciturn, and became super jumpy. The littlest noises made him twitch. It got so bad his mother, always stoic and strict, forbade us to go to their apartment at all if she wasn’t home. We were sixteen when he killed himself. No note. No explanation. Just a bullet beneath his chin in their building’s communal bathroom.
Dmitri squeezes my hand so tight the bones roll over each other. I don’t cry out and I don’t pull away. He’s in more pain than I am.
“I can’t take much more of this, Anya. I can’t.”
I press closer. The music has shifted and, if possible, it’s louder. Part of me hates it, but the better part is thankful for the cover it provides. “What’s going on, Dmitri? Tell me . . . I’m right here.”
He shakes his head. “You don’t see it. It’s all around you and none of you see it.”
“See what?”
He straightens and twists to stare into the club and across the dance floor. I follow his gaze and realize it has grown crowded while we’ve been talking and, lit only by harsh strobe lights, it feels surreal and chaotic. Dystopian. I pull in a breath and, rather than feel better, I shrink back, struck by the pungent smell of alcohol, sweat, and something sour and stale.
Dmitri watches me. “That’s it.” He bumps my shoulder to recapture my attention. “We chase it away at night, but it catches us every morning. Desperation. Hopelessness.”
He didn’t need to explain it to me. I feel it myself. A mania grips the dance floor, everyone gyrating with every ounce of their beings to keep up with the music and the endless race to nowhere and nothing. My energy, maybe my hope, too, oozes away.
Dmitri toggles two fingers toward the barman and a couple shots slide our direction. He picks his up and throws it back in a fluid motion.
I stare at mine, remembering the letter in my pocket and what hope once felt like. Cherry blossoms. Warm sunshine. Blue eyes. Lemons and sandalwood. And while I’ve been carrying this letter around for a week, it’s already two months old. I toss back the shot.
“Thank you,” I say to him. “Now I’m just as depressed as you.”
“I’m sorry.” Dmitri drapes an arm around my shoulder and pulls me close. He kisses my temple in a punctuated motion. It feels like the quick rap he used to give my arm when we were kids. “What’s that phrase you keep telling me?”
“Misery loves company?”
“That’s the one.” He waves to the barman again.
“You’re not sorry,” I grumble as two glasses slide our direction. “Maybe you should slow down a little.”
“Being sober makes this better?” He taps his full glass against mine. “Either keep up or go home.”
“Don’t tempt me,” I tease.
He doesn’t reply and he doesn’t slow down. Instead he downs his shot and mine, then lifts his hand again. Another glass, this time only one, lands in front of him. He tosses that back too.
The barman throws me a challenging glare and turns away. I get the impression he sees something in Dmitri I don’t.
“What’s really going on, Dmitri?”
“You were smart.” He sweeps a hand across his eyes and his nail beds whiten with the pressure. When he drags his hand away, his eyes glisten. The skin around them is red and swollen.
“About what?”
“If you hadn’t gone to America, you wouldn’t have taken that spot at MGIMO. You would’ve sided with your mama and gone to MIFI . . . It’s killing me.”
I peer around us. No one can hear our conversation, but his words are charged. Others must feel their impact. “What’s killing you?” I speak into his ear.
“I got transferred to Directorate K, Anya. Illegals. And to Poland . . . To bring him down.” I straighten. Dmitri slumps. “It’s what we train for.”
I scan the bar once more. No one is near, but that hardly matters. He can’t say these things. I can’t hear these things. I shoot to standing and haul Dmitri to his feet. He stumbles as I drag him through the dancing throng toward the club’s back door, but I don’t stop and he doesn’t resist. He keeps shuffling after me almost as if pleased to be led. I pull him up the short set of stairs to the back alley. My hope is that the bracing cold will shock sense into him.
