The Secrets We Kept(12)

The applicants parted outside the Agency’s gates with a wave. The older woman who’d bested us all called out, “Good luck!”

“I’ll need it,” said the woman who’d sat next to me during the test, as she lit a cigarette.

I needed it too, although I didn’t believe in luck.



* * *





Two weeks passed and I found myself back at the kitchen table circling want ads while drinking tea. Mama was at the Ping-Pong table working on a dress for our landlord’s daughter’s Quincea?era in hopes of buttering him up not to raise our rent. She was telling me for the second time that day a story she’d read in the Post about a woman who’d given birth to a baby girl on the Key Bridge. “They couldn’t make it to the hospital in time, so they stopped the car and delivered the baby right there! Can you believe this?” she called out from the next room. When I didn’t answer, she repeated the story, but two decibels louder.

“I heard you the first time!”

“Can you believe this?”

“I can’t.”

“What?”

“I said, I can’t!”

I needed to get out of the house—to go for a walk, to go anywhere. Mama had me running errands for her, but besides that I didn’t have much to do. I’d responded to a dozen ads but secured only one interview for the following week. As I put on my coat, the phone rang. I ran into the living room just in time to see Mama pick up the receiver. “What do you say?” she said in the extra-loud voice she reserved for telephone calls.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Irene? There is no Irene here. Why are you calling here?”

I grabbed the phone. “Hello?” Mama shrugged and went back to the Ping-Pong table.

“Miss Irina Droz-do-vah?” a woman’s voice asked.

“Yes, this is she. I’m sorry about that. My mother doesn’t—”

“Please hold for Walter Anderson.”

“What?”

Classical music switched on, and my stomach muscles clenched. After a moment, the music stopped, cut off by Mr. Anderson’s voice. “We want you to come back in.”

“I thought I scored second to last?” I asked, then gritted my teeth. Did I really have to remind him of my mediocrity?

“That’s correct.”

“And I thought there was only one position open?” Was I trying to self-sabotage?

“We liked what we saw.”

“I got the job?”

“Not yet, Speedy,” he said. “Or should I come up with a better nickname for you, given your typing skills? Can you come in at two?”

“Today?” I was supposed to go to a fabric store in Friendship Heights to help Mama pick out some silver sequins for the Quincea?era dress. Mama never liked to go to the fabric store alone because she thought the woman who owned it was prejudiced against Russians. “She charges me twice, no, three times as much!” she’d told me the last time she went by herself. “She looks at me like I’m about to drop the bomb on the store. Every time!”

“Yes. Today,” he said.

“At two?”

“Two.”

“Two?” Mama appeared in the entryway. “We have to go to the Friendship Heights at two.”

I waved her away. “I’ll be there,” I said, but was met with silence. Anderson had already hung up. I had one hour to get dressed and get downtown.

“So?” Mama asked.

“I have another interview. Today.”

“You already did the typing examination. What else do they want you to do? Perform gymnastics? Bake a cake? What else do they need to know?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked up and down at the flowered housedress I was wearing. “Whatever it is, you can’t go looking like that.”



* * *



—

This time, I wore the linen.

I was early again, but was escorted into Walter Anderson’s office as soon as I arrived. What he asked first was not a question I’d anticipated. He didn’t ask where I saw myself in five years, what I thought my biggest weakness was, or why I wanted the job. And he didn’t ask if I was a Communist, or if I had any allegiance to the place of my birth. “Tell me about your father,” he began as soon as I sat down. He opened a thick folder with my name on it. “Mikhail Abramovich Drozdov.” My chest tightened. I hadn’t heard his name spoken in years. Despite the linen, I could feel beads of sweat collect at the nape of my neck.

“I never knew my father.”

“One moment,” he said, and pulled back from his desk. He removed a tape recorder from the bottom drawer. “I’m always forgetting to turn this thing on. Do you mind?” Without waiting for me to answer, he clicked the button. “Says here he was sentenced to hard labor for illegally procuring travel documents.”

So that was it: that was why they’d taken him at the docks. But why had they let my mother go? I asked Anderson the question as soon as I thought it.

“Punishment,” he said.

I stared at the coffee stains on his desk, overlapping like Olympic rings. A flush of heat ran down my arms and legs and I felt unsteady. “I was eight when I found out,” I managed to say. For eight years, we knew nothing. As a child, I’d imagined the moment I’d be reunited with my father—what he’d look like and how he’d scoop me up into his arms and whether he’d have a certain smell to him, like tobacco or aftershave, as I’d imagined.