A Shadow in Moscow, page 9
“Leo? Leo, are you awake?”
“No. You’ve exhausted me.” Leo’s voice was tender and he squeezed her tight.
“No. Really.”
“I’m awake . . . Is something wrong?”
“I’ve been wondering . . .” Ingrid twisted to face him and noted, in the faint starlight peeking through the crack in the window’s drapes, how his eyes, rounded and relaxed, narrowed with his habitual alertness. Did her new husband feel safe with her, and could he be unguarded and vulnerable with her? She was about to find out.
“When I asked about your father, you said war took him, but you never told me more. What happened to him?”
Leo stiffened. The muscles in his arms pressed against her ribs rather than provide the soft covering they had an instant before. “When did I say that?”
“When you first met me in the park.”
His voice dropped to the softest whisper. “What made you think of this now?”
“Vienna . . . I’ve left my home and you said I need to leave it all behind. But my parents will always be there, my childhood, my . . .” She stopped herself, afraid to feel too much and consequently reveal too much.
“You shouldn’t be awake with such thoughts, dorogaya. Not on our wedding night. I’m sorry . . . I handled it poorly.” He slid his arm from around her and brushed her hair from her face. He kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth.
Dorogaya. Darling. She pressed closer, savoring the warmth of the endearment and his passion. When he broke his last kiss, she whispered into the curve of his neck. “Please tell me.”
Leo sighed and rolled onto his back, pulling her closer with the motion. A quarter atop him, she snuggled within his embrace.
He spoke into the inch between their lips. “He was denounced and executed when I was seventeen.”
“Leo.” Ingrid gasped and pushed up and off his chest. Her head tapped the train car’s ceiling.
He pulled her down and nestled her securely once again. “We never learned what happened or why. He came home from the Revolution a hero, a medal recipient, but he was different. Quiet. He didn’t talk much, but he wasn’t a dissenter. He simply wanted to return to his woodworking. Maybe quiet wasn’t enough. Maybe it was simple jealousy. A neighbor denounced him in ’33 and he was shipped to a gulag. There was no trial. Then we received a letter in ’36 stating that he was ‘sentenced to ten years without the right to correspondence.’”
“You couldn’t write to him?”
“No . . . That particular sentence was used to convey that your family member had been executed.” Leo nudged Ingrid closer. “That is why I asked it of you. I’m sorry, but so many were taken then, and it’s hard to forget. Everyone regarded their neighbor with suspicion, and thousands, maybe millions, died . . . Lives were destroyed.”
“You poor thing. I understand.”
“You don’t. You can’t . . . My brother and I were pulled from school. We lost everything. He died in a work camp, but I was lucky. The factory foreman saw I was smart and snuck me books.” Leo shifted his focus back to the low ceiling, as if talking to his past rather than to her. “There was no recovery from denunciation until now. Comrade General Secretary Khrushchev issued a proclamation of rehabilitation last year. It was one of his first acts and I applied.”
“‘Rehabilitation’? What does that mean?” Ingrid pushed up on her elbows.
Leo’s voice grew bright and focused like a sunbeam. “He wiped my slate clean. I was let back into society. I could join the Party. And because I kept up with my studies, I could test into the officer class. I could receive promotions.”
He grinned at her. “It’s how I received my post in Vienna and met you. It’s how I got my new promotion and am now called back to Moscow. It’s how we will be assigned our own apartment in one of the newest sections of Moscow. We are on the brink of great things . . . Stalin was father and I must respect the hard choices he made to put us on the right path and honor the Revolution. But Comrade General Secretary Khrushchev will take us higher. He is building housing, offices, theaters, shops, and factories all over the city. He is funding advancements no one has ever dreamed before. Moscow is now powered by the world’s first nuclear power plant at Obninsk. Do you see? Our city, Moscow, is the first in the world to do this.”
His arms tightened more. In the moonlight Ingrid couldn’t see where she ended and her husband began.
“You will be so happy there. Khrushchev and his reforms give us everything—our own apartment, good food, and good work, and we will help achieve the ideals Marx and Lenin set before us, the great new tomorrow. I can be part of that now. We are part of it.”
“But the cost . . .”
“Shh . . . You don’t understand.” Leo ran a hand down her arm. “This is a good story. A happy story.”
Ingrid rested her cheek against his chest as puzzle pieces clicked into place. “That’s why my mother’s nationality upset you. You think someone will doubt your commitment because of me, that I’ll put you at risk again.”
“I wish it wasn’t so, but yes, I do fear that. I considered not marrying you—” He halted as she pulled away. “Not for me, for you. To protect you. But Comrade Lebedev is right. Your accent is flawless and no one needs to know more. I’m sorry to cause you pain. I couldn’t walk away . . . It’s not too much to ask, is it?”
Ingrid’s gaze followed a beam of light to the crack in the train car’s curtains and out to the night sky. She could see moonlight striking out between passing clouds as the train charged toward Moscow. While part of her wanted to balk and declare it was too much to ask, she recognized she had made the same calculation that very morning. Peeking from behind the pillar, she had asked herself what Leo’s love meant to her and what she was willing to sacrifice to keep it. Her past? Her memories? Then, as the notes of the music reached her, she took her first step toward him on her own. No one had forced her to do it. And in that step, she had chosen Leo and all that came with him. She had chosen to love and to believe in him. She would not withdraw her love and support now.
“No. It’s not too much to ask.”
Eight
Anya
Moscow
October 17, 1981
In a society where all is regulated and provided for, I was homeless for a month.
In reality, my housing assignment got lost within the vast bureaucracy that makes up everything here and I was not assigned a place to live. Dmitri offered to let me crash with him, but he didn’t get an apartment of his own and cramming into a one-bedroom place with three other guys sounded less than appealing. Sonya also offered, but she was assigned communal housing as well. So I asked my parents if I could move back into my old bedroom.
My job, however, started the day after I landed at Sheremetyevo International Airport. I reported, with all the appropriate paperwork, at 8:00 a.m. that morning to research lab NIIR3 in the Kapotnya District.
My facility specializes in radar and electronic technology—it’s all very hush-hush, cutting edge, and well-funded. There are about thirty scientists and another fifteen of us who support them. My job, at its most basic level, is to translate science-speak into Kremlin-speak so the lab gets more funding and the Politburo gets technological advances. It’s “the best of the best,” my father declared, puffing his cigar, as we discussed it my first night back, while my mother served up my favorite dish of oven-braised veal stew with sour cherries and parsley-roasted potatoes. It was a fantastic supper, and most days I really enjoy my job too.
For that first month, however, I complained about it and everything else each night out with my friends. I droned on about the boring work, the confinement of living with my parents, and my beastly long commute. It shocked me how quickly I fell back into the habit. But that’s what we do. We pride ourselves on our discontent and cynicism—we complain, we grumble, we rail.
Only Dmitri saw through me. His amber eyes had danced with challenge. “You’re such a liar. Your work excites you, I can tell. You’re having fun.”
I smiled at him. It was small and still filled with longing for all I’d left at Georgetown, but it was real.
Several inches taller than me, he swung an arm around my shoulders, ruffled my hair, and led me to a back booth at Drey Bar. “Spill it all. Tell me about everything. About him. What you saw. What you did. And you’d better stop teasing me about Pavlina.”
I laughed. Pavlina was the strawberry-haired girl in Class Ten who stole Dmitri’s heart. He wrote her some horrible poetry and fed me the line that he couldn’t help it, the “love spilled out” of him. I’ve never let him forget that embarrassment. But I understand it now too. So, with our voices drowned out by the club’s pulsating beat, I told him everything, starting that night and continuing each night for about a week. Dmitri let me pour out every detail, every day, and every drama. Every laugh, longing, and loss, too, and I began to feel better.
Living at home also soothed my soul. Mom cooked my favorite dishes, and I didn’t need to speak, think, pretend, or project. While I had loved America, I was always “on,” always hiding to a degree, and didn’t realize how it drained every aspect of my being until I closed my bedroom door my first night back and I was suddenly “off.”
I cried like a baby. I cried because Mr. Olivers was right—I found what I needed in the Soviet Union. I reveled in the comfort and safety. I was home. I could be nothing more nor less than me, and that was enough. It both surprised me and disheartened me how quickly and instinctively I felt it, as if I hadn’t grown at all in my four years away.
That was my first night.
After a couple weeks I discovered something startling and unexpected, even unwelcome. Once I was no longer exhausted, I became restless. I had changed. I felt like I did when I was a kid and had stayed up all night reading an amazing story. My mind would expand and grow within the pages. I’d see things in new ways. I’d become new. Then I’d peek out of the book as the sun rose outside my window and discover nothing in my reality had changed with me.
All those philosophies, books, readings, discussions, trips, friendships—every minute of every day at Georgetown had seared an indelible mark deep within me. And looking around my small room, I began to wonder if I could tuck back within my reality tight enough to survive.
My commute became the only time I felt truly free. In my “beastly long” combination of bus rides and stretches of walking to the Kapotnya District, I was outside the system. I was anonymous. I wasn’t where I was supposed to be—making me nowhere at all.
I left my parents’ apartment early each morning and caught the bus right outside the building. I then hopped off at a bakery in the Arbat District if I saw a line stretching outside the shop’s door, because that meant they still had fresh vatrushki. Those buns are the best, filled with cheese in the winter and often with fresh berries during the summer. I would then jump on another bus and savor my treat for the next stretch of the journey. Book in one hand, warm bun in the other, I was in heaven.
Even deep in a story, I would lift my head with uncanny accuracy at just the right moment to relish the bright reds of St. Basil’s Cathedral, the Kremlin, and the Lenin Library, all facing off across Krasnaya Ploshchad. Then on to Gorky Park, the famed park of the Revolution, before the bus crossed over to Pirogovskaya Street and traveled onward past the embassies across the Moskva River.
So while I complained to my friends, there was much I truly enjoyed and savored that first month. The only hiccup was when my mother found my smuggled copy of To Kill a Mockingbird under my mattress. She probably found it changing my sheets. She never said a word and neither did I. It simply disappeared—and she was silent and stiff for two days.
That’s wrong. We had two hiccups. My first morning home, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about Pravda.
“Mother, why do you bother to read that?” I used the Russian word for Mother rather than Mama. It surprised her.
“‘Mother’?” She wrapped her tongue around the word.
“Yes . . . I’ve grown up.” I sounded so smug, so sure of myself. I expected her to chide me and remind me of my roots and my place within our family.
Instead, she tucked a strand of dark hair behind my ear and pulled me into a tight hug. “Yes, I suppose you have.”
Once she let go, I pushed the paper across our kitchen table. “You can’t swallow all this. You can’t believe—”
I stopped as a flash of panic filled her eyes. They darted to the light fixture above us, then back to me. I followed her eyes’ path to the white ceramic bowl and bulb that hung above our kitchen table as a flood of discussions returned to me, along with the realization of what was missing for this one.
Mother shook her head and crossed to the radio sitting on the shelf right below the window. She flipped it on and turned up the volume. Shostakovich filled the kitchen.
She then perched on the chair across from me and spread her hands across the table, wiggling her fingers to invite me to place mine within hers. I obeyed. That’s how she communicates and passes on wisdom and discipline. We have to be connected.
I watched her lips, as any words I didn’t catch, I could read. It’s a skill I perfected long ago—we all have to some degree. Conversations drowning in Shostakovich happen all the time.
“Your father hasn’t swept in years . . .”
I blinked. When I was a teenager, he “swept” for listening devices all the time. He never talked about it, but Mother said he did it to keep us safe. A friend, she said, lent him the device, then moved away, forgetting my father still had it. It’s one of his prized possessions.
I always suspected he was overreacting and that no one cared about my teenage rebellion and snide comments. All my friends ranted and no one else’s parents took us seriously. Only my father. My poking and pestering used to really anger him. But rather than argue with me or even tell me to stop, he’d grow still and stern—and “sweep” for bugs.
“Anya, you have changed, but here has not.” Mother held my hands tightly. “Tensions are high and you must be careful. You will be watched closely for some time. We all will.” She bit her lip. “They need to make sure you are still loyal.”
“Mother.” I groaned, not because she was overreacting or wrong but because she was right.
I expected her usual soft sigh of resignation as she got up to circle the table and hug me again, with a consoling “This can be hard.”
It didn’t come.
Instead her eyes hardened to ice and her grip tightened. “I see you. I see your eyes narrow in annoyance. You walk differently. You talk differently. You think differently. They will see too . . . We have been lucky. No one has turned on us, but people can think we reach too high, that you reach too high, and that you are now autsayder. Anyone can talk.”
She used an antiquated term for outsider, employed more commonly during the purges of the 1930s than today. It made her point. I nodded. “I’ll be careful.”
She stood to make her morning coffee. I watched in silence. For all my mother’s calm conformity—the woman never makes a ripple much less a wave—she has this one tiny cultural rebellion. She adores coffee.
We are a tea nation. Not only was coffee rare until several years ago, it wasn’t even coffee at first. She tried to introduce it to Sonya, Dmitri, and me when we were fourteen. We had just joined the Komsomol, that next step in Party membership from the Young Pioneers, and she wanted to celebrate our great honor. She glowed with pride as she marveled at our new pins, ironed our neckerchiefs, and set the mugs before us. She thought the honor was worthy of her extravagance, but we didn’t find it much of a celebration at all, considering her “coffee” was a dreadful drink of chicory, oats, and spices that we choked down with grimaces.
It wasn’t until a couple years after that, when my father surprised her with real beans, a grinder, and a coffeepot, that I learned what the drink was supposed to be. Mother cried happy tears that day, and it became my first lesson in “reaching too high.”
Every neighbor took note of our new luxury and stopped in for a cup. Mother served each and every one with grace, even opening our door at 5:00 a.m. for Comrade Chernov who had just gotten off working a night shift. She was afraid to disappoint, fearing someone might get envious and talk out of turn. She used a whole month’s ration of beans that first day, caffeinating anyone who knocked on our door.
I moved out ten months ago and I still miss her coffee. I miss her hugs, meals, and daily care too. I also miss my commute. I now live in my assigned building filled with engineers and administrators, all working here in Kapotnya. We flood the sidewalks and streets at the same time each and every day as we walk the same direction to and from the several labs and facilities situated on the district’s south border. I am exactly where I am expected to be now, at the times I am expected to be there.
I also miss my parents’ larger allotment of ration cards and their access to the State’s better shops and services.
Coming home, that was a shock for me. During my time at Georgetown, the ration-card system grew far beyond ancillary items, like a television, dress shoes, or a new appliance. Coupons now extend deeply into foods and personal products—things I call daily necessities like sausages, grains, butter, deodorant, and soap. Far more of our daily meals come from canned goods, and oftentimes that’s all I can find on the store shelves.
While it’s true we’ve always run lean on consumer goods, the West’s economic sanctions, protesting Brezhnev’s ongoing war in Afghanistan, have cut deep. I miss America’s full grocery store shelves. I miss fresh produce—green lettuces, bunches of celery and carrots, broccoli, yellow squash, spinach. Yes, I miss my vegetables. I miss the snap when biting into them and the color they gave to my plate. I’m so tired of opening cans.
A knock on the edge of my desk startles me from my daydreams. “Anya. I have the final circuitry requirements and component list for the RP-23 radar.”
