Angel Eyes (44 page)

One might think of this as a rather traditional curriculum, and it was: for a young boy studying the martial arts. It was totally unconventional for a female. In addition, the Man of One Tree added to Honno's studies the somewhat more esoteric philosophies and physical disciplines he had acquired during his years crisscrossing the Indonesian archipelago.

"You will never be a woman in the traditional sense," the Man of One Tree said to Honno one night. It was six years since she had come to live with him. She had breasts now, and the place between her thighs was covered with fine black hair. She had bled for the first time that evening, just as the sun was sinking with the colors of a peacock into the turbulent ocean.

She had known what the blood flow was, and what it meant. But some other part of her, the hinoeuma child hanging on, had remembered the horror of her mother's dream, how she had squatted in the snow and, under the baleful gaze of the starving stoat, had squirted blood.

"I am still hinoeuma," she had said in despair to the Man of One Tree. She was trembling, and her callused hands were rough and red from scrubbing herself. "I am still unclean."

To which he had replied, "You will never be a woman in the traditional sense.'' He took her to the center of the One Tree, where its trunk was as large as a house, where even the stars could not be seen, and sat her down with her back to the rough bark. ''But that is all to the good. I have done my best to cleanse your spirit. Never mind your body; it will only betray you.''

"It will never betray me," Honno had said naively.

He spread his arms wide. ''When you return to the mainland, all this will fade in time."

"No, no!"

"It will come to seem as a dream," the Man of One Tree persisted. "That is only natural; it is the way of life. You will continue to mature until you become a woman. Then will your body betray you, and you will want what every woman wants: a husband, a family, a home.

"But your path leads in other directions. For you, normality will bring to the fore your hinoeuma, and only evil can ensue. Therefore, I counsel you to be strong within yourself. When you feel the urge to fall in love, to marry, return to that place in your spirit I have taught you to find, for only this will nurture you, and protect you from the fate of the hinoeuma, the husband killer."

Honno, opening her eyes in the present, stared out into pale sunlight, except she was still seeing the body of the young man whose larynx she had crushed. Had it been only hours ago? It felt like years.

But, yes, it must be only hours. In her mind's eye she could still see his blood fresh on her hands, and behind her Big Ezoe saying, almost gently, "Mrs. Kansei, I have the Sakata ledgers and their decoded pages. It's time to go."

Now Irina and Natasha Mayakova went to dinner almost every night. Even on those days when she wasn't attending Natasha's acting classes in the back of the new Moscow Arts Theater, Irina met Natasha after her performance of Three Sisters.

Often, in fact, they did not have a proper dinner, they preferred to stroll through the streets and parks, talking, endlessly talking. They would stop, eventually, for a bowl of cabbage soup in some tiny neighborhood shop filled with steam and gossip, then move on, drifting through their city, a part of it yet somehow apart, creating their own world.

Now more than ever Irina was burning with curiosity about Natasha's relationship with Valeri. She could not be seeing him at night, unless they met very late, and as Irina was coming to understand, an actor could allow neither drunken days nor sleepless nights while she was working.

At the same time, Irina found herself feeling guilty at having lied to Natasha about her name. It was no longer exciting to hear Natasha call her by the name of Katya Boroskaya; instead she longed to be called by her real name. Yet she could think of no way to tell Natasha that her name was Irina Ponomareva. What excuse could she give for her falsehood? Besides, despite her growing friendship with Natasha, she was loath to give up her reason for contacting her in the first place: to find the link with Valeri.

It was so incredibly wearying to be a spy and to be feeling close to the person on whom you were spying. Often, on their walks, Irina forgot why she was there and, for a brief time, would luxuriate in her newfound friendship. Then reality would intrude and in some subtle way that disturbed and depressed her, she would withdraw from the shared intimacy with Natasha.

At night in bed, alone, Irina would think of her relationship with Natasha. It seemed terribly unfair that her one chance at true friendship should be tainted, so distorted by lies and deceit.

Her nights with Valeri became more fevered, fueled by a kind of desperation pulled from Irina's very core. Their lovemaking was increasingly wild, animalistic, exhausting, so that afterward Irina would plunge into the most absolute slumber, from which Valeri was obliged to shake her awake in the morning.

Then, over his protestations, she would climb upon his naked body, spread her legs across his loins, moving until she felt his response, then engulf him with her mouth until he arched off the bed, exploding.

In an orgy of self-destruction, she could no longer tell the difference between lust and love. And Valeri's groans of sexual arousal and release would haunt her all day, echoing in her ears while she watched him talking intimately with Natasha Mayakova, until tears of hatred and self-pity clouded her eyes.

Irina, Irina, Irina. She would recite her name silently as if it were a prayer or an enchantment that would ensure she remembered who she really was. The trouble was, she no longer knew who Irina Ponomareva was. Somewhere along the line her identity, her self, had been misplaced or covered over so thoroughly that she had forgotten where to look for it.

At Mars's apartment, after he fell asleep after their tepid lovemaking, she would stare at the ceiling and, before she herself fell into a shallow, troubled sleep, she would promise herself that tomorrow would be the day when she would confess everything to Natasha, so that they would have an opportunity to start all over.

But she awoke each morning knowing that she could never go through with it. What was done was done. She could never go back, sanitize the emotions that were sure to be raised by the truth. Would Natasha forgive her for using her, or would she never want to see her again? With a profound sense of foreboding, Irina knew that she could not take the chance to find out. Her relationship with Natasha was already too precious for her to jeopardize it in any way.

And yet she knew that she was jeopardizing it every time she and Natasha were together, when there was a possibility that she might slip or that someone she knew would recognize her and use her real name. Worse, she suspected that she hated Natasha as much as she cared for her; despised her for her relationship with Valeri, the unknown nature of which Irina found increasingly maddening.

Irina had begun to experience an odd sense of fragmentation, as if her life had been an eggshell that had abruptly been struck against a stone, turned into jagged bits, all with their own structure, but each with far less than the whole. Some essential truth was missing, and had been, she realized, for some time, even before she had met Valeri.

Irina knew that she had been given a glimpse of that truth-that heart of things that, when she understood it, would come to mean more to her than anything else-in America.

In Boston she had watched the kids pouring out of the universities. She had walked the tree-lined Cambridge streets with them, had eaten pizza and Coke alongside them, had bought clothes where they did, had listened to their music, first in snatches from passing cars, then in jukeboxes in the pizzerias, then in the dance clubs late at night.

One evening she had been invited to a party along with everyone else-including the chef-of the local pizzeria. She had, of course, declined, but moments later thought, Why not?

It was as close to all-out chaos as Irina had ever been. The noise level was tremendous. Her glass shook in her hand and her teeth ached from the vibrations. It was wonderful, as liberating, in its way, as sitting in the darkened movie theater, watching Elizabeth Taylor being Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But different. So different.

Everything was spontaneous, from the laughter to the comings and goings of people, from the informality to the wide range of conversation topics: Kierkegaard on the meaning of death; Woody Allen on the meaning of life; Tom Cruise on the meaning of sex. It was dizzying, wild, captivating. Irina had not wanted to leave.

There was a young man there, with hair the color of a bear's pelt. He wore it short on the sides, long and flowing on top, so that he was continually brushing it back from his forehead. He had watched her drifting slowly from group to group in the party with a shyness that made Irina's heart ache.

At one point, when she was standing on the edge of the crowd and he was dancing with a thin, sandy-haired woman, he had accidentally brushed against her, spilling the contents of the glass over her.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry."

"It's all right," Irina said. "It's only club soda." And then, because he obviously could not take his eyes off her, "Shouldn't you get back to your dance partner?"

She ran into him again in the kitchen. It was late, and the crowd had begun to thin out. Irina was putting a slice of cold pizza in the microwave, and he had stopped her.

"Don't you know anything?" he said. "You can't use foil in there, it'll pop all over the place." He put the pizza on a paper plate, shoved it in, turned on the microwave.

They shared the slice.

"You're the Russian, aren't you?" the young man said.

"Yes."

"Your English is excellent. I wish my Russian was as good.''

"How good is it?" Irina asked him in Russian.

"Only so-so, I'm afraid," he said in the same language.

"You need to speak more, that's all," Irina said, switching back to English. She found that she wasn't in the least nostalgic for anything Russian.

All of a sudden the young man leaned forward, kissed her on the lips. "I've been wanting to do that all night," he said in a rush.

"Did you think I'd be offended?"

''I had no way of knowing.''

And in that one sentence he had summed up for her the disquiet she had been feeling there. Why was she so comfortable, so free in Boston? Why did she not feel homesick for Moscow? / had no way of knowing. Tacked away in Russia, she had had no way of knowing what America would be like, let alone Boston, or this wondrous Cambridge area, delightfully old-fashioned, yet at the same time, so excitingly avant-garde. A world within a world within a world. All scrupulously hidden from her by her government.

Oh, how she had wept that night when at last she had crawled into her bed, because she would never feel the same about her home anymore. Doubts so fundamental that they questioned her entire way of life had crept into her consciousness. And, once there, they could never be dispelled.

The very worst of it was that as soon as she got back to Moscow, it all seemed like a dream: the silk Charmeuse teddy she had swooned over, the magnificent Martha brought to life by Elizabeth Taylor, the endless pizza and Cokes, the equally endless curious minds, the shocking music and even more shocking clothes, the young man at the Cambridge party who had loved her from afar, who had dared to kiss her, who had said to her, / had no way of knowing, all were swept away on the gray tide of minutiae that was her daily life.

A dream, that's what it had become. She would dream-when she was released from the recurring prison nightmare-of Cambridge, and would awake weeping, as if it were as lost as Camelot or as mythic as Avalon.

So painful had this sense of loss become that even Irina's feelings for Mars could not quench them, sex with Valeri was an inadequate opiate, and, more and more often, she would seek the only solace she had ever known, kneeling before the altar at the Church of the Archangel Gabriel. There she prayed for guidance, and for some measure of peace which she now suspected was beyond her.

And then, one evening in the midst of a sleety rain that had driven them off the slick Moscow streets, the miraculous occurred. Natasha said, "Do you know that my greatest moment on the stage came not in Moscow, not in Russia at all, in fact, but in the United States. I was asked to perform at Lincoln Center in New York City. Do you know it?"

"I've never been to New York City,'' Irina said with her heart in her mouth. She knew this was the time to mention Boston, but she could not.

They were in Praga, a restaurant on Arbat Square. It was a touristy place, so the food was good, and because the owners knew Natasha, the service was, too. Irina stared out the windows at the people hunched over, hurrying along the rainswept street. She found, to her utter amazement, that she felt no connection with those people. It was as if she were now separated from them all the time by this plate-glass window, as if she were here, safe and dry, while they were there, cold and wet.

But if they were here in Moscow, she asked herself, then where was she? hi some kind of terrible limbo or purgatory, serving out her sentence in the prison that barred even the moon.

"Katya?" Natasha put a hand over hers. "What's the matter? You look as white as winter."

Irina's depression was so intense that she completely forgot who Katya was and, for an interminable moment, stared blankly into Natasha's concerned face.

"Katya?"

"Yes, yes," Irina said, breathing again, in out, in out, everything quite normal now, and yet not normal at all. "I'm fine. I . . . don't know what came over me. For a moment I was so dizzy. It's passed now."

"Nevertheless," Natasha said firmly, "it's a glass of starka for you, my girl. And, for God's sake, eat. You haven't touched a thing."

Later, after the plates were cleared and the strong, dark tea had been served, Natasha said, "America is such an unusual place. How I wish you could see it! So filled with delicious sights, sounds, tastes. Quite naughty, really." She chuckled. "There was, for instance, the divinely decadent French bustier I wore the night that Texas financier and I-" She stopped abruptly, waved a delicate hand. "But, no, I think I've already shocked you quite enough for one evening."