Our Woman in Moscow(45)
So you see, in addition to the great moral debt Orlovsky owes me for acting like such a skunk, I know he’s disposed to hate the Soviet Union with a passion peculiar to exiles. In former days, I even suspected that he did what he could to undermine the Communist regime from time to time, by passing along whatever interesting tidbits came his way. I don’t know if this might still be the case—the espionage, I mean—but nobody changes his political views once his hair starts to turn gray. If anything, those views harden into obstinacy in the face of any contrary evidence. It’s almost as if that entire painful episode with Orlovsky—which I refused to think about afterward, so that it took on the quality of a dream and I had to remind myself that it really happened—has perhaps found some purpose after all. The sacrifice of young love and nascent life wasn’t for nothing.
Orlovsky is more skeptical.
“To Moscow?” he says, incredulous. “Do you know what you are asking?”
“Obviously there’s some difficulty—”
“Difficulty? Bambina cara, is suicide. Do you speak Russian?”
“Nyet a word.”
He smacks his forehead. “Gran Dio. What do expect me to do?”
“Please. I know for certain you’ve got contacts in the Soviet embassy.” (This is a bluff—it’s not impossible he might have a friend on the inside, but who can know for certain?) “I need a tourist visa and maybe a name or two, people who might be able to help me.”
“You are nuts. Who is going to risk his life for strange American woman and her sister?”
“Then forget the names. I just need a visa. You can do that much for me, I know you can. You hate the Soviet system. And you owe it to me, Orlovsky. You know you do.”
He gives me a tormented look and rises from the couch. I think about how he used to pace naked across that floor, raging at the Soviet Union and its barbarous occupation of the human spirit, and then make love to me over the arm of the sofa or the drafting table or the rug, or downstairs in the courtyard against the lemon tree, and it occurs to me that the one place we never had intercourse was a bed. Orlovsky walks to the table without speaking and lifts the wine decanter. Even in his torment, he’s a gentleman. He returns to me and refills my wineglass first, and then his own. Instead of resuming his seat, he continues to the window overlooking the courtyard, and I don’t know, maybe he’s thinking of the past, too. Maybe he’s thinking of all the places he loved me, and how brutally he stopped.
“I might know somebody,” he says softly.
Iris
July 1948
London
At first, Iris thought the man had mistaken her for someone else. He was bloated and untidy, with handsome features tucked in a pasty face and a shock of waving dark hair. He stared at her from the corner of the room, where he leaned heavily against a bookshelf in the company of two other men and sipped at a glass of clear liquid.
The party was like every other party. Whenever they moved to a new posting—Zurich, then Ankara, and now London—Iris somehow expected, against all experience, some change of pace and company and mood, to go along with the change of climate and national culture, but diplomats were all the same, and diplomatic parties all followed the same unspoken pattern. Protocol, you might call it, but Iris secretly hated words like protocol. Pattern she understood; pattern occurred in nature. Rhythm, rhyme, repeat—those were all appealing, but protocol? Just an ugly, artificial human invention. Like this party.
The flat was typical of London. It was both grand and shabby and smelled of coal smoke. The ceiling was the color of tea and mysteriously stained. The wallpaper curled from the corners, and the plasterwork was liable to crumble from some noble design above your head and into your hair—or worse, your drink. Speaking of drinks. Those were all right, at least. They flowed abundantly from bottles of wine and champagne, bottles of scotch and gin and brandy and so on, mixed—if they were mixed at all—in straightforward, no-nonsense combinations. As for food, well. You might be offered tinned mackerel on crackers, or a square of rubber masquerading as cheddar cheese. But it was best not to think too much about what you were eating, Iris had learned. Three years after the end of the war, Great Britain was a cramped, bland, ungenerous land of ration cards and making do.
Iris glanced down at the tidbit between her index finger and her thumb—some kind of colorless, elderly olive stuffed with pink matter. The old Iris would’ve tossed it into a houseplant, but Iris was now a seasoned diplomatic wife, so she knew the trick of chewing and swallowing food without quite passing it over your tongue. Then she drank champagne to chase down the olive—not bad—and when she looked up again, the man was still watching her.
She found Sasha in the study, between a bookshelf and a fog of cigarette smoke. She heard his laugh first, deep and abundant, about three-fifths of the way to his usual state of drunkenness at these things. He held his whiskey and his cigarette in the same hand. He was chatting earnestly with two other people—a scarred, silver-haired man named Philip Beauchamp, a friend of hers and Sasha’s; and a handsome blond woman in a snug, rust-colored turtleneck sweater over a long tweed skirt, unfamiliar. The woman sucked on her cigarette and examined Iris as she sidled up to Sasha.
“There’s a man staring at me in the other room,” she told him.