The Unwitting (17 page)

I took my notes in to lunch and was still working on them when Woody sat down across the table from me and asked what I was up to. I told him about my encounter with the Russian recruiter the previous afternoon.

“I’m meeting her today at the Hermitage.”

“Are you crazy?”

“What do you mean?”

“The first time they’re just sounding you out. If you say no, they’ll leave you alone. But if you show any interest at all, they won’t give up.”

“Maybe she isn’t even after me. Maybe she just likes talking to an
Amerikansky
.”

“And maybe I’m Nikita Khrushchev. If you’re going, I’m going with you.”

“Sorry, buster, but this is my party, and you’re not invited.”

I gathered up my notes and left him sitting there watching me go. It was not an unpleasant sensation.

The man with the amber eyes was waiting for me on the street. He pretended to be looking in a shop window while I got into one of the Intourist cars that were always parked in front of the hotel. The driver gave me a jovial hello and commented on the fine weather. I was surprised. All the drivers I’d had so far had scowled at me in silence. When I said I wanted to go to the Hermitage, he launched into
a patriotic listing of the wonders I would see there. The capitalist world, he assured me, had nothing to rival it.

Beyond the windows, the city sparkled in the crystalline air, the buildings glowing like pastel candles on a child’s birthday cake, the gold onion domes pulsating in the hard light. The frozen Neva was a silver ribbon flung across the landscape.

The car stopped at the embankment in front of the Winter Palace, and I climbed out. Across an expanse of blinding white snow, the buildings loomed like gargantuan cream-frosted cakes. As I stood there, a line of children marched past, two by two, giddy and giggling, their regulation red Pioneer scarves flaming in the brittle air.

I started to stroll, stopping periodically to take in the details of the buildings and consult my guidebook. I wanted to give her a chance to find me. Whatever she was after would lend a nice personal touch to the story. Every once in a while, I glanced around at the crowd. It must have been the weather, because everywhere I looked Russians were smiling. Even their clothes looked less drab. A young couple walked by, her yellow hair flying free from a crimson babushka, his body curved over hers in a question mark of desire.

Two girls, about eight or nine, began following me. Little by little, they grew braver and drew closer. They pointed at me, and giggled behind their hands, and pointed again.

“Amerikansky?”
one asked.

“Amerikansky,”
I said, and they giggled some more.

I took a handful of hard candies from my handbag and held them out. Wrapped in cellophane, they glowed in the sunshine like rubies and emeralds. The girls looked at the candies warily. I inched my hand closer to them. The girl who had asked if I was
Amerikansky
took a red and a green, stared at them for a moment, then handed the green to the other girl. They unwrapped them, popped them in their mouths, and grinned at me.

“Goodbye,” I said,
“do svidaniya.”

“Do svidaniya,”
they responded still giggling, as I started back along the embankment toward the Winter Palace.

A ZiL limo, the regulation Soviet car, modeled, ironically, on the 1954 Cadillac, and always black, like Henry Ford’s Model Ts, whizzed past. Another sped by a moment later. A third was coming slowly toward me from the other direction. The leisurely pace was odd. There was so little traffic that most of the automobiles raced down the streets and burned rubber on the turns as if beneath the shiny black suits of the party bureaucrats, which matched the shiny black cars, throbbed the hearts of teenage hot-rodders.

The sun beat down on the creeping car as it inched along, turning the hood to patent leather and the windows to mirrors. The sight was so eye-aching that I had to look away from it. That was when I saw her coming toward me, her oversize coat flapping around her ankles as she hurried, her face even whiter and her flushed cheeks brighter in the unforgiving light. She was walking so quickly that she was keeping pace with the car. It didn’t occur to me that it might be keeping pace with her.

She looked up. I waved.

The speed of what happened next made it even more unreal. If I hadn’t had another witness, I would not have been sure that any of it actually occurred.

The doors of the car flew open, and three men leapt out. Two sprinted around to the sidewalk. The third was already there. They were on her like a pack of dogs on a piece of raw meat. Arms lifted into the air and came down with sickening force. Legs swung back and forth like brutal metronomes. A spurt of red exploded into the icy air. Then it was over as suddenly as it had begun. They were gone. The black car was pulling away.

I started to run after it. It was not courage, merely instinct. A hand on my arm tugged me away from the car and began steering me toward the Winter Palace.

“Keep walking,” Woody said. “Keep moving with the crowd.”

All around us, people were picking up their pace and averting their eyes, but they were careful not to run, cautious not to see.

“Don’t look back.”

But I could not help myself. I turned to glance over my shoulder. The car was gone. There was no sign of Darya. The occurrence might have been a dream.

People were beginning to slow their pace again. A woman was herding the two girls I had given candy to across the square. The blonde in the red babushka was hanging on to her boyfriend’s arm. The crowd strolled, enjoying the gift of the afternoon, basking in the slanting rays of a sun that was already inching down the western sky, pinning shadows to their heels. Only one thing betrayed the carefree holiday mood. The crowd was still giving the spot where they had taken Darya down a wide berth. I lifted my hand to shade my eyes to get a better look. A stain, red as the Soviet flag, lay on the snow.

Woody found an Intourist car and pushed me into it.

“You followed me,” I said.

“You’re damn lucky I did.”

We were silent the rest of the way back to the hotel. When we got there, he said he still had that bottle of good Russian vodka in his room. It wasn’t a come-on. We were both too shaken for that.

I thanked him but said I was going up to my room. I had made arrangements for a call to Charlie for six, Leningrad time. It was only a little after four, but this was the Soviet Union, and there was no telling when it might come through. I needed to talk to him. I knew I couldn’t tell him what had happened. The connection would be cut. But I wanted to hear his voice. I was desperate to feel his presence, even attenuated through a telephone line.

I turned on a single lamp and lay down on the bed to wait. The hands of my travel clock carved a wedge out of the gloom. I willed them to move faster, but they refused. The big hand crept from ten to eleven to twelve, then continued on to one and two. At five twenty, I picked the clock up and wound it. At quarter to six, I started to
repeat the gesture, then thought better of it and put the clock back on the night table. I did not want to break it.

I closed my eyes. On the backs of my lids, the doors of the car kept springing open, and the men kept jumping out, and Darya kept disappearing into the maw of flailing arms and legs.

At ten of six, the phone rang. I lunged for it. The woman on the other end had such a thick accent that I could barely make out what she was saying. Then miraculously, my mother-in-law’s voice was coming over the wire, though the connection was bad, and I had almost as much trouble understanding her as I’d had the woman at the switchboard. I asked her to put Charlie on.

“He’s not here.” The words crackled over the wire.

“What?”

“He’s not here.” Now she was shouting.

“But I wired him I was going to call.”

I couldn’t make out the next sentence, but then the word
weekend
came through.

“Where did he go?” I shouted back.

I made out Elliot’s name and Connecticut.

“Why didn’t he wire me he wouldn’t be home?” But even as I shouted the words into the phone, I knew my mother-in-law was not the one to ask.

We talked about Abby for a moment, then she put Abby on to say hello, and, as I listened to the static, I pictured my daughter sitting silent and recalcitrant as Sarah held the phone to her ear and begged her to say hello to Mommy. The operator came on and told me the call was terminated.

I hung up the receiver and lay down on the bed again. Charlie could not have forgotten the call. Only I could think of half a dozen reasons he might have. Another crisis had arisen at the magazine. One of Elliot’s other weekend guests was a writer Charlie was cultivating or someone high up in the arts or government he wanted to interview.

I got up, paced the room a few times, went to the window, and stood looking out. A lone man hurried across the square, his shadow on the snow getting longer as he grew distant from one streetlight, shorter as he neared another. The only other sign of life was a skeletal dog limping along behind him, dragging his own mangy shadow in his wake.

Perhaps Charlie had wired me that he wouldn’t be home, and I hadn’t gotten the telegram. Perhaps he had never received my wire in the first place. I thought of going down to the lobby and trying to place another call, but the arrangements took hours to make, the actual connection days to happen. And I was in no condition to deal with Soviet bureaucracy.

I went back to the bed and stretched out again. The ceiling was cracked and peeling. In the maze of yellow lights that was the chandelier, a dull red pinprick glowed, the malevolent eye of the all-seeing camera I was sure they had trained on me. I was still shivering, despite the overheated room.

I sat up, slipped into my shoes again, and went out into the hall. The matron watched me coming. She was frowning, but then she was always frowning. Her expression did not change when I stopped in front of Woody’s door and knocked. He didn’t look surprised when he opened the door and found me there.

“I have to talk about it,” I said. “I have to talk about her.”

He poured me a drink and topped off his own. We had no ice. We omitted the
na zdorovjes
too. Then I started to talk. I didn’t care if his room was bugged. The worst they could do was throw me out of the country, and at this point I would have welcomed that. I was like a shell-shocked victim trapped in a nightmare of repetition. The men exploding from the car. Darya going down. The black arms swinging, the black legs kicking. The entire scene suddenly disappearing as if it had never happened. “Did you see the blood on the snow?” I kept asking. “Did you see the blood on the snow?”

There was something else I kept asking him. “What do you think
she wanted to tell me? What was so important they would go to that length to stop her?”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t have to have been important. Her crime was talking to you in the first place.”

But I needed more. If there was something concrete, perhaps I could make sense of what had happened. Only I knew I couldn’t.

The travel clock on his night table went from eight to eleven to midnight. The level of vodka in the bottle inched down. I kept repeating myself. So did he. Then suddenly we stopped talking.

Perhaps what happened was inevitable. I have read that the prospect of death is a spur to sex. A woman still shaking from the echoes of the terrifying word
positive
on her biopsy report seeks solace in the arms of a husband or lover. A formerly faithful man leaves his wife’s hospital room and hires a prostitute. The response may be pathetic or heartbreaking or immoral, depending on your point of view. It is certainly futile. But it is human.

He was shorter than Charlie and broader through the chest. My mind registered the difference dimly. My body adjusted itself to it automatically.

I cannot say we made love. We committed sex. Desperate sex. Lonely sex. Frightened sex. Solace-seeking sex. And afterward I was still wondering why Charlie hadn’t been there when I needed him.

Eleven

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I was sick to my stomach. I tried to throw up, but couldn’t. I limped back to bed and pulled the covers over my head, but I could not hide from my self-disgust. If only Charlie had picked up the phone. If only I hadn’t gone down the hall to Woody’s room. If only when we found ourselves standing inches apart, I had turned and left the room. But the if-onlys of life are a childish conceit. The universe does not permit redos.

I got up, went to the window, and stood staring out, as I had the night before. Before. The word was charged.

In the east, the sky was going from black to soot-streaked gray. The snow was coming down again. Big wet flakes, driven by the wind, fell and rose and swirled in the arcs of illumination cast by the streetlights. I stood with my forehead against the cold glass trying to figure out how I would get through the day ahead, the four days in Moscow, the regret-tinged days that would pile up after my return home. The thought of the last made the nausea surge in my chest again. Charlie’s face loomed out of the darkness. Abby’s wide trusting eyes reproached me.