Angel Eyes (55 page)

Ripples, black in the starless darkness that immersed them, held them fast, protected them from everyone and everything, purled outward from the engine of their bodies, filling the water's surface with purpose.

At the other end of the pool, Arbat floated, still, silent, feeling the ripples wash endlessly against her, happy because the Hero was happy, content because the ???? was content.

After a very long time Odysseus slipped from Irina's warmth, but, strangely, she did not feel the emptiness, the sting of sadness she usually did at that moment. She was left with the image of what she had been exposed to, what she had become. She reached out, touched him, wondering if, instead of calcium, there was fluid running in the conduits of his bones.

Odysseus laughed. "Not yet," he said, reading her mind. "Though maybe one day."

Irina was still trembling. Waves of emotion rippled through her, but it could not dissolve the dark undercurrent that left a bitter taste in her mouth. And she thought, I've lied to Valeri, to Mars, even to Natasha. I cannot lie to him. She clamped down on her dread of the repercussions, said, "Actually, Mars did want me to find out something.''

The Hero was silent. Arbat moved closer, watched Irina with a peculiar, disconcerting intensity.

Irina swallowed hard. In sudden panic, she wanted to turn back time, but instead she pressed on. "He wanted to know where you got some papers you showed him, a top-secret file." Watching Odysseus, she held her breath. She could feel the blood pounding in her temples. "Are you angry with me?"

"On the contrary," Odysseus said, "I'm grateful you told me."

Irina put her hands on him. "It was wicked of me not to tell you right away."

"Was it?"

''I don't want to ever lie to you.''

He smiled. "That's a wonderful ambition." He said it as if he meant "impossible," instead of "wonderful."

"I want-" She stopped abruptly, marshalling her thoughts. "I need someone I can trust, someone I can confide in.".

"You mean Comrade Volkov isn't the one?"

This is it, Irina thought. I want to-I must tell him. I know he will understand. And, taking a deep breath, she stepped off the edge of her world.

"I have spent some time in America, Boston," she said. "The Cambridge area is filled with students from many wonderful universities. I got drunk on the atmosphere and the variety of opinions. At least I thought I was drunk. But when I came home, and sobered up, I realized that I had left a piece of myself in Cambridge. I had fallen hopelessly in love. Can one fall in love with a place? Why not? But ever since, that love has been like a stone in my heart." Drifting. Arbat close, listening it seemed, too. "Now I know just how Shakespeare's Juliet must have felt. Love and pain are sometimes inseparable."

"Yes," Odysseus said. "It is true that sometimes memories hurt. Memories of paths not taken, memories of what might have been.''

Irina watched the play of light across his face, tiny crescent reflections off the surface of the water. She could not decide whether she saw the sadness in his face or felt it emanating from him. After a time she said, "Are you here of your own free will?"

"That sounds like a metaphysical question," he said. "I don't know if I 'm qualified to answer it."

She cocked her head inquisitively; she was getting the knack of manipulating silences.

"The question of free will is an important one," Odysseus said carefully. "We all may believe that there is free will, but I doubt now that it's the case. We are-have become-what we have been made into, what has been implanted in us in an unconscious, a subliminal sense at a very early age. And, as adults, the way in which we respond to people and to situations is determined by the nature of that subliminal information we may not even know is there.''

As he spoke, Irina felt a tiny shiver race down her, and she sought to be closer to him, as if so near his presence she could beat back the unpleasant truth that seemed so uncomfortably near now. She had seemed so close to freedom when he was inside her, but now the old sad Irina was trying to reassert herself. Don't think about it, she told herself.

"I wonder," Odysseus said, "whether you hold me as you hold all your men?''

"Are you jealous of Mars already?" Irina said. She had meant it humorously, a light touch to a conversation pulling her ever deeper into the heart of her own darkness.

"Jealousy has nothing to do with it," Odysseus said.

"Of course. One of my men is KGB.''

"Yes."

"You know?" Irina was startled.

''The KGB knows many things,'' Odysseus said. ''But I know more.'' His eyes were light; she could see pinpoints dancing in their depths. ''I know how we are joined. There can be no deceit in such openness, just as there can be no duplication of it with another. No, Irina, I am not threatened. But I am concerned by your dependence on men."

''What are you talking about?'' But her heartbeat, out of sync with his, accelerated painfully, as if she already knew what he would say.

"Nothing." There was so much sadness in his voice that Irina's heart broke.

"Won't you talk to me about it?"

"No," Odysseus said. "I'll talk to you about space. The final frontier, isn't it?" He laughed, but there was an unease to him that Irina found unnerving. Arbat splashed nervously near them.

"But what have I said to offend you?"

"Not a thing."

''Then why do I suddenly feel cut off from you?''

"You are cut off from yourself," Odysseus said.

"You can help me, then."

"If I try, I'll only succeed in plunging you deeper into the woods in which you are lost.''

Irina, on the verge of tears, said, "I don't understand."

Arbat, swimming fast beneath the water, surfaced at Irina's side, pushed her head against Irina's hand, as if she could feel Irina's distress.

"Arbat," Irina whispered. "What am I to do?" But she was staring into Odysseus's dark eyes.

Arbat chattered in her high dolphin voice, and Irina said sadly, ''If only I could understand what you're saying.''

"I'll translate," Odysseus said. "She says life is short but lessons are not quickly learned.''

"Is that true of dolphins as well, I wonder?"

Odysseus looked at her. ''Dolphins have no lessons to learn,'' he said, "except when it comes to dealing with man."

"I believe, Mr. Yasuwara, that we are finished with you," Big Ezoe said.

"Just like that?"

"Just like that," Big Ezoe said.

"You're going to let me go?"

"Oh, no," Big Ezoe said. "How can I? You've lied to me from the beginning.''

"But-"

"You would have me believe that Hitasura, Kunio Michita, and Fumida Ten-all of whose profit motives are highly honed-are putting together an organization to make some kind of nuclear reactors, and then they are shipping them into Russia, a country so poor it has to buy wheat from the Americans to feed its own people? What do you take me for? It simply isn't logical."

"But it's the truth. I swear it!" Yen Yasuwara's eyes were bulging, his hands vibrating with his terror.

"For a start, why would Hitasura sink capital into such an insane venture?"

"Ask Hitasura or Michita. I don't know."

"Of course you don't," Big Ezoe said, then to Koi, "Kill him."

"Wait!" Yen Yasuwara closed his eyes. His face was completely devoid of color, and he was whispering "Dear God" over and over. His eyes opened, his tongue brushed his dry, cracked lips. "There's a way to prove I've been telling you the truth."

"Oh, Mr. Yasuwara," Big Ezoe said, "how can you expect me to trust anything you tell me?" He watched Koi edge closer to the lawyer.

"Please!" It was a croak. There was a wild look in Yen Yasuwara's eyes, more telling than if he had been hooked up to a lie detector.

Big Ezoe waited, turning the emotional screws, before nodding. "You have one chance, Mr. Yasuwara. I do hope you'll make the most of it."

*

The old wooden slats were drawn across the windows, and the acrid smell of iodine and sickness filled the room like dead flowers. Irina stood on the threshold of the one-room apartment in an unlovely, massive post-World War ? building in Sadovo-Chemogryazskaya, and for a moment her mind was blank. She could not even remember what time it was or how she had come here.

Then she stepped into the room. She could see the form, sitting upright in the ladder-backed rocker that for years had belonged to Babushka. Wan light fell across the silhouette in thin, damaged strips, illuminating a scrawny shoulder here, a gnarled finger there.

Irina took a deep breath, said, "Hello, Mother."

"Is that you, Yvgeny?"

"It's me, Irina," Irina said, coming to kneel beside her mother.

"Yvgeny, you've been away so long," the old woman said. "You bad boy, why have you stayed away?"

"Mother, it's Irina. Your daughter."

''My daughter?'' The narrow head moved, and light lit up its features, ravaged, wasted by time and memories that would not fade. "Have I a daughter?" The head moved slowly back and forth. "I cannot remember."

Irina reached across to the windowsill, took down the tin of dusting powder her mother loved so much. Softly, gently, she applied the duster to the translucent skin of her mother's shoulders.

"That smells nice, Yvgeny. I am reminded of my mother. She used to smell of boiled potatoes and cabbage. Even after she bathed, she smelled of boiled potatoes and cabbage. I wanted never to smell that way. No, never." Her eyes fluttered closed. "So nice."

Then her eyes flew open and her false teeth clacked together. "Mother of God, Yvgeny, what have they done to you! There is blood on the snow!" Her voice was rising in pitch. "Oh, Yvgeny, don't leave me! Don't leave me!"

"I'm here. Mother," Irina said. Her palm stroked her mother's brow. ''Nothing can take me away from you.''

"Yes." The old woman was calmer now. "Yes, that's the way it should be, of course. A boy needs his mother beside him, to take care of him, to protect him from the harm others might do to him. My Yvgeny." Her eyes closed again, and in a moment she was asleep, her head nodding, soft and warm, against the palm of Irina's hand.

Irina stared at her sleeping mother for a long time. In slumber she was so peaceful, her face suffused with the carefree peace of a child. How much like a child she was now, in her old age, the circle closing.

For an instant Irina allowed herself to come back from behind the mirror, from the blackness of her other reality, into the all too familiar horror of this reality, and she saw in the curve of her mother's lips, the line of her nose and brow, the qualities she liked in her own face. But she did not see her own destiny there, the ending of her life. Instead she became acutely aware of the branching of her fate. She saw how she had stumbled off the path that had been set for her, and then, less clumsily, had begun her journey to the other side of the mirror. The flesh may be the same, she thought, but the desires that animate us are so disparate.

She thought, then, of what Natasha had said: Where did I come from? My mother, my father. My grandparents. Most people know. I know, Irina thought, but it makes no difference. I am, like Natasha, an orphan now. My mother no longer knows who I am. I am dead to her-even worse, I have never existed.

Irina could remember her grandmother, splashed with thick lemon light, bustling about a kitchen warm with heat and good smells. There was always a bit of food on the tip of Babushka's finger for Irina to taste, and when Irina begged for more-as she invariably did-Babushka would laugh, scoop up some more, blow on it to cool it sufficiently, before offering it to her granddaughter.

Irina remembered her grandmother as a strong woman in the way Soviet peasant women are strong: stolid, beefy-cheeked, hands as hard as concrete, with all the life sparkling in her eyes.

Irina did not remember her as smelling of boiled potatoes and cabbage, even when she was rocked against her grandmother's ample bosom, when, her belly full of Babushka's delicious cooking, she fell asleep to songs from Babushka's youth.

In the summer there was an emerald-green grasshopper who lived by the hearth. Irina's father was forever trying to kill it, but Babushka kept it safe, or so she told Irina.

"Grasshoppers are good luck, especially in the kitchen," Babushka had said. "They talk to you; yes, it's true, little one. Grasshoppers tell you when it's time to sow, and when it's time to reap your crops. Grasshoppers are very valuable."

When Babushka died, everything changed. Irina's father was transferred to a more modern nuclear plant, so the family moved to Moscow. Irina, who had made something of a pet of the grasshopper who lived by the hearth, had tried to take it with her, but it had not survived the trip. But then again, in Moscow there were no crops to sow or reap.

The afternoon sunlight was red as it squeezed through the slats in her mother's one-room apartment. The young student whom Irina had hired to take care of her mother came in from shopping.

"The lines are so long, one might as well camp out in the streets," she said, piling her meager packages beside the sink. ''And then the shops are out of anything one wants to buy.'' She shook her head. "There's really little point in shopping anymore."

"She's worse," Irina said.

"Don't blame me," the student said, stowing what food she had bought in the tiny refrigerator and cupboards. "Her medicine is in short supply." She began to boil water for tea. "But, to be truthful, I can't see that the pills are doing her any good. It's clear she has no idea where she is or what's happening around her. If you ask me, she'd be better off dead.''

"No one's asking you," Irina snapped.

''I only meant that this is no way for a human being to live,'' the student said hastily. She poured boiling water over loose black Russian Caravan tea, waited for the cut leaves to settle to the bottom.

"Have you ever eaten a pizza?" Irina asked impulsively.

"What?"

She looked into the student's dull face, trying to see any hint of the spark she had seen in so many of the young faces lining the streets of Cambridge. "Nothing," she said. "Drink your tea. It's all right, I don't blame you. She's just worse, that's all."