A Shadow in Moscow, page 5
“I shouldn’t have said that about your parents. I—”
“Don’t talk about them. Don’t talk about any of them.”
“Ingrid . . . I want to stay, but I can’t. I have orders . . .” Adam’s hand dropped from her shoulder. “Don’t do this, Ingrid. Don’t shut me out. Please don’t turn away. I don’t want to leave you. Not like this. I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry for everything that’s happened. I would take it all back if I could. I would—”
“Stop,” she whispered. “Stop saying you’re sorry, because it’s meaningless. Nothing was worth their sacrifices, your sacrifice . . . This game of yours . . . I can’t do it anymore.” Her ribs hurt. Her head hurt. Her shoulder hurt. Her heart hurt.
“I’ll come back. I promise. I’ll come back and we can leave together.”
Ingrid closed her eyes again. In the darkness she saw loved ones gone—countless friends, her mother, her father, Martin. “Don’t make me promises. I’m not your charge anymore. It’s not your job to keep me safe.”
“I wasn’t saying that. I meant—”
“Go, Adam.” She cut him off. “You have orders. Just go.”
Ingrid heard a scratching noise, then felt gentle pressure as he laid a kiss on her head and pushed a note between her fingers.
“Keep that number, Ingrid. It connects to London and it’s always monitored. Do you hear me? Always. No matter when you call or where I go, they’ll find me. If you ever need me, they’ll find me and I’ll be here for you. Do you understand?”
Ingrid did not open her eyes, nor did she answer him. Adam left the hospital room without another word.
But he did come back.
Returning to Vienna a month later, he found Ingrid a shell of her former self and unwilling to listen or leave.
Three months later, Adam returned again and found Ingrid still working at the Third Reich’s Economic and Administrative Office. She no longer arrived early nor did she stay late. She did just enough not to get reported or arrested as the Nazis scrambled and fled around her.
Adam tried one last time, arriving in Vienna on April 4, 1945, the day the Soviets liberated the city.
He couldn’t find Ingrid at all.
Five
Anya
Washington, DC
June 11, 1980
“What about you? Would you try? Do you want to stay?” Three months and Scott’s questions still plague me. Every waking moment I scrape at them, keeping the wound and the desire fresh and painful.
Some days my heart screams DA—an all-caps declarative YES. I want to stay in America. I want to dance to disco music, wear clothes more colorful than the brightest rainbow, be a schoolteacher, and drive my own green VW Bug. I want to grow in America’s sunny optimism, can-do spirit, and innate generosity. I want to marry Scott—maybe ask him if he doesn’t ask me again—and live in a place that veers to heat nine months of the year rather than frost. Scott promises Georgia—the US state, not the Soviet republic—boasts such a climate.
Does that mean I think America is better or that I’d betray my country? Nyet. And if I’m honest, I’m a little terrified Mr. Olivers floated the idea. To show anything but absolute loyalty is dangerous. Beyond dangerous. Is that what Sasha sees in me? Have I grown too comfortable, too familiar, and, as he would say, too soft? Have I truly forgotten my roots and my family? no. It may be a sad and lowercase whisper, but a whisper can be as firm, real, and devastating as a shout.
Mr. Olivers was right. I miss home.
Besides, this was never to be more than it has been. A gift. An honor. A test. One that came with so many strings, it scared both my parents. Mother had tempted me by coming to my room late one night to share with me all the art I might see—but she had only been dreaming, musing aloud. She never expected me to act upon it, and her tight expression signaled she was chastising herself for talking to me at all. My father’s expression vacillated between pride and terror. After all, the Foreign Studies Initiative was an honor, one of the highest bestowed, but it was a risk. At a base level we Soviets distrust those who soar too high, and such an honor was sure to get our family noticed, by everyone.
A groan from my roommate, Tracy, returns me to the present and brings my head up and out of the book I have not been studying.
“What is it?” I ask. Her guttural moan means she wants to talk.
“Since you asked.” She bounces up from her chair and topples onto my bed. I scoot over to give her more room. “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”
I laugh, as she’s asked this question a hundred different ways. I give her the same answer I always do. “It’s the right call. You’ve got free rent, the job is exactly what you want, and it’s a reputable newspaper. Pay some dues, live for free at home, then make your next move.”
Tracy wants to be a journalist. A good one. The kind that changes the world. Satisfied, she hugs me and moves back to her desk to study for whatever final she’s got next.
I do not return to my engineering.
Instead I sit stunned in another of those weightless moments that lifts me up, shakes me about, and drops me again. It happens more frequently now, and its force takes my breath away. I came to the US ready to assimilate. I wanted to conduct my own social experiment simply because I could. I was curious, despite being raised to hate Americans, how much of America a Soviet could absorb in four short years.
The answer rocks me to my core: a lot.
But now, with two days to graduation, I feel a fissure opening inside me. I carry both cultures within me and I understand both. And to be frank—not that I can truly admit it to myself, nor would I to anyone else—some aspects of America feel more comfortable to me now.
My advice to Tracy illustrates this beautifully.
“It’s the right call.” I agree, deep in my heart, that Tracy should choose her career. Because if she loves it, she’ll bring her best to it and that will benefit everyone. I was assigned my job a couple months ago.
“Live for free at home, then make your next move.” Tracy gets to choose where to live by what she can afford. Someday she also might buy a house, and it’ll have a red front door and reasonable home-mortgage loan. She loves both red and math. I haven’t been allocated housing yet, but I will be soon.
“It’s a reputable newspaper.” Until I landed in America, I had no idea that papers could publish differing opinions—and so many of them. At home Pravda gets delivered daily, and within it, the Party tells us the facts and what our opinion regarding those facts should be. Sure, we have the samizdats—the “self-published”—but, well, they’re underground newspapers.
A shout from outside our open window draws me from my mental gymnastics. Someone has probably just finished his last exam because he’s yelling for the entire campus to come out to play. How I want to. It’s a gorgeous day and I’m going to miss these. The cherry blossoms, fully bloomed and gone, have been replaced by bright green leaves, blue skies, and chirping birds. Flowers cover the campus in neat, colorful rows.
The sunshine and warmth last so deliciously long here. The world awakes in early March, according to my thinking, and returns to rest sometime in November. About as long as Moscow’s cold darkness, starting in October and lifting in June. The light and colors are hopeful and bright. They remind me of my mother’s work at the State Museum in Moscow. She tries hard to bring the hope and color of the world’s art within our borders. Most of the time the minister of culture denies her requests. Here, she would love to openly discuss art, music, and culture and reach new conclusions and even disagree over interpretations. Back home, she hangs State-approved paintings alongside the State-approved copy explaining them.
Yet it’s still home, and I miss our traditions and the familiar things that signal comfort and belonging. I miss the smell of Comrade Rudinov’s peppermint ointment that wafts through the air vent into our apartment. I miss kozuli, the cookies my mother always keeps in the ceramic jar on our kitchen counter for all my friends. I miss the fall colors along the Moskva River that make the bright red of St. Basil’s and the Kremlin pop, exuding a history and a power the White House and the Washington Monument can never touch. I miss the smell of burning leaves in the parks during the first days of September and the scent of snow come the last.
Sure, life is hard and confined in many ways, but there is also freedom within the strictures. We know who we are and what we are about—it’s a straight-line mentality, a tough mentality, with very few distractions to veer us off course. Our conformity gives an illusion of power and peace as we are raised to believe our way of life is superior and virtuous. Illusions are powerful things. If you believe them hard enough, they can become one’s reality.
It’s reality that we are raised to believe Americans are weak. They don’t have the stamina, the gumption, the drive, or the fortitude for the long fight. Their shiny capitalism lulls them into complacency. They won’t or can’t truly sacrifice for the common good.
That is an illusion too.
I’ve learned that Americans are hard in ways I couldn’t have imagined and find absolutely exhausting. To have all these constitutionally protected freedoms is enviable, but it also means you have to respect them, uphold them, and fight for them. Americans have to watch out for the weak, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised—it’s an average citizen’s responsibility and vocation. Sacrifice and commitment and the common good are woven into their democracy, their ideology, and their DNA. And within all that, there is a whole world to manage moment by moment on a multidimensional level—with visible consequences and, if you believe in any religion, as most Americans do, eternal consequences too.
The whole thing takes strength—the illusory peace that conformity brings has no place here. Here peace and freedom rest on Americans’ ability to live in tension and to discuss, debate, and refine. To live like that takes constant commitment and energy—every opinion, every decision, every day.
Mr. Olivers was right. I miss home.
* * *
“Dinner.” I launch from the bed. “I forgot. I’m supposed to be at Scott’s apartment in ten minutes.”
“That poor boy.” Tracy twists in her chair again. Her auburn ponytail swirls across her face.
I try to ignore her and search for my new sundress. She is about to give me an opinion I don’t want to hear. I find the dress and focus on that. It’s so lovely it makes me almost believe in hope. When I saw the dress on discount at a local boutique, I spent the last of my money on it. I may never wear it again—but it was still worth it. A cotton sundress with a sweetheart neckline and thick shoulder straps, it’s the happiest yellow sunburst of a color I’ve ever seen, with little red roses scattered across the fabric and puddling along the hemline.
I slip off my Nike shorts and Georgetown T-shirt. Tracy hasn’t continued. She’s waiting for me to bite. I give in. “Say it. Why is he a ‘poor boy’?”
She smirks, knowing I’d give in and ask. “You could marry him and stay. He wants that and so do you. You’re just too stubborn or stupid to admit it.”
“You think this is all on me?”
“If you appeal to them, you might convince them. What about that man you meet with every—?”
“Stop.” I glare at her through my mirror as I apply lip gloss. “We’re not going over this again.”
For a year Scott harangued me, even throwing out the M word occasionally. Each and every time, our conversation started sweet and ended in a fight. Though logically he got it, he couldn’t emotionally understand that none of his ideas or dreams were possible.
Oddly, when he finally stopped pestering me a few months ago—around the time he started his job and got super busy—I began to miss those fights. If nothing else, I felt wanted. How warped is that?
Then Tracy picked up the baton. But fights with her aren’t any fun. We don’t kiss and make up. And despite endless rounds, she refuses to accept that the Iron Curtain isn’t mere metaphor or that it keeps people in as much if not more than it keeps people out.
“That boy has loved you from the day he met you, and even when the night’s long, we Americans believe grit and determination can get us what we want . . . For Scott, that’s you. He’ll pine over you forever.”
Tracy is clearly on Scott’s side and, again, this is somehow my fault.
“Cut him a little slack,” she continues. “Marry him or set him free. Maybe a little more Casablanca than Romeo and Juliet, if you don’t mind.”
That’s new. I part my lips to reply but can’t. I have always been clear about the plan—I would leave and that would be that. I’d be devastated, but wouldn’t Scott move on?
Without another word I gather my hair into a scrunchie and dash out of our room, down the corridor and stairs, and into the first golds of a beautiful early-summer evening. Upon hitting the sidewalk, I slow and take a deep breath. The DC heat and humidity wilt me instantly—as does Tracy’s admonition. She’s right. On all levels.
Scott O’Neill sat next to me in Introduction to Comparative Politics our first quarter on campus. He forgot a pen and I had two. I got lost exiting the building and he pulled out a map. I could barely grasp a word he said, and my accent made his jaw drop. Try putting a Muscovite accent with a Georgian one (again, the US state, not the Soviet one), and trust me, you couldn’t tell the two of us were speaking the same language.
As he not only didn’t run away upon learning my true nationality but actually was interested in my home and stories, our first walk turned into lunch, and I started to maneuver through his southern twang. Right away he agreed to keep my secret and help spread my West German origin story to all his friends. He also introduced me to all those friends, including me in anything exciting he was doing around campus. It was like he saw something radiant and fascinating within me, and that alone called it into existence. I felt radiant and fascinating, and now I always want to be that person.
With regard to him, well, I was lost handing over that first pen. My attraction to him defied logic, science, or any other metric by which I tried to understand it. It was simply there and I knew I’d never be the same again. So, yes, he has creeped into that corner of my heart I’ve tried to keep locked safe, but if asked, I’ll deny it.
For almost two years, I thought the depth of my feelings was mine alone. And I was good with that. Better than good. Igor and now Sasha have drilled the cautionary tales into my brain. Stories of Soviet girls and boys who slept around during their Foreign Studies assignments and forgot the rules. No pregnancies. No marriages. No exceptions.
It was only after a drunken night early last year I discovered my love wasn’t so unrequited after all.
“Why not? It’s not impossible.” Scott threw the words at me as fast as he was tossing back shots at an off-campus party.
I matched him shot for shot, but fantasy didn’t eclipse reality. I wasn’t that drunk.
“It is.” I leaned close in an effort to be heard and believed. “After next year I go home. It’s not a quick commute, Scott. It’s a whole world from you and I can’t come back.”
“If you married me you could stay.”
“Marry—” I barked the word so loudly heads turned despite Pink Floyd adding another brick in the wall at a deafening volume. I pressed my lips together in both embarrassment and confusion. Scott’s face told me, thick consonants and flippant delivery aside, he was serious.
“What are you thinking?” I hovered my lips near his ear. I meant it rhetorically, more along the lines of “Have you lost your mind?” but he didn’t hear it that way. He heard what he wanted to hear.
He held his hand to the back of my head. “I’m thinking we marry and you stay because I love you. You have to feel that.”
“I do—” My words shocked me and I pulled away. I was too close to the flame and was about to get burned beyond my ability to heal. I did that once when I was a kid. I touched the hot plate on which my mother was making tea, and I still have the scar across my palm.
Pain has a memory all its own.
Scott stared at me for a few heartbeats before chaos broke out and a brawl pulled our attention away. We lost each other as the police cleared the party. And after searching for him for fifteen minutes, I gave up and headed back to my dorm. It wasn’t kind, but I couldn’t reason with him like that. He was drunk, irrational, and dreaming clearly silly things, and the agony of trying to make him understand and talk him out of the very thing I imagined in those cocoon-like moments before sleep was beyond my strength.
So I left him.
He didn’t call the next day or the day after that. I figured he was angry and maybe that was best. But then he showed up at my study carrel in the library a few days later, dragged a chair next to mine, and shut the book I was reading.
Pressing his hand down on the front cover, he began. “No commitment. Certainly no marriage. Though I might mention it occasionally.” He cracked his adorable half smile. “But we’ve got over a year and a half, and I say let’s not waste a minute. You with me, Kadinova?” He turned his hand over, palm up, eyes wide with expectation.
I placed my hand within his and, beaming like an idiot, believed I had found home. There’s no other way to describe it. We’ve been together every possible moment since. Then this spring things started to change, and are changing still.
After an incredible spring break with his friends and mine, he began his job with a DC consulting firm working as an analyst in international emerging markets. The company insisted his training begin before graduation so he could get up to speed for some conference later this month on Middle East development funds. Between school and work, he’s swamped. He’s too busy to hang out most evenings, and he’s stopped peppering me to stay. I’m struggling with that. Even if staying is impossible, I want him to yearn for it as much as I do.
I bite my lip and tuck my disappointment and the memories of our last year and a half away. I can’t tarnish them with what-ifs. They need to stay safe for the Someday Soon when I’ve nothing but their warmth left.
