The Secrets We Kept(3)

CHAPTER 1





THE MUSE


When the men in black suits came, my daughter offered them tea. The men accepted, polite as invited guests. But when they began emptying my desk drawers onto the floor, pulling books off the shelf by the armful, flipping mattresses, rifling through closets, Ira took the whistling kettle off the stove and put the teacups and saucers back in the cupboard.

When one man carrying a large crate ordered the other men to box up anything useful, my youngest, Mitya, went onto the balcony, where he kept his hedgehog. He swaddled her inside his sweater, as if the men would box up his pet too. One of the men—the one who would later let his hand slide down my backside while putting me into their black car—put his hand atop Mitya’s head and called him a good boy. Mitya, gentle Mitya, pushed the man’s hand off in one violent movement and retreated into the bedroom he shared with his sister.

My mother, who’d been in the bath when the men arrived, emerged wearing just a robe—her hair still wet, her face flushed. “I told you this would happen. I told you they would come.” The men ransacked my letters from Boris, my notes, food lists, newspaper clippings, magazines, books. “I told you he would bring us nothing but pain, Olga.”

Before I could respond, one of the men took hold of my arm—more like a lover than someone sent to arrest me—and, with his breath hot against my neck, said it was time to go. I froze. It took the howls of my children to snap me back into the moment. The door shut behind us, but their howls grew louder still.

The car made two left turns, then a right. Then another right. I didn’t have to look out the window to know where the men in black suits were taking me. I felt sick, and told the man next to me, who smelled like fried onions and cabbage. He opened the window—a small kindness. But the nausea persisted, and when the big yellow brick building came into view, I gagged.

As a child, I was taught to hold my breath and clear my thoughts when walking past Lubyanka—it was said the Ministry for State Security could tell if you harbored anti-Soviet thoughts. At the time, I had no idea what anti-Soviet thoughts were.

The car went through a roundabout and then the gate into Lubyanka’s inner courtyard. My mouth filled with bile, which I quickly swallowed. The men seated next to me moved away as far as they could.

The car stopped. “What’s the tallest building in Moscow?” the man who smelled like onions and cabbage asked, opening the door. I felt another wave of nausea and bent forward, emptying my breakfast of fried eggs onto the cobblestones, just missing the man’s dull black shoes. “Lubyanka, of course. They say you can see all the way to Siberia from the basement.”

The second man laughed and put out his cigarette on the bottom of his shoe.

I spat twice and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.



* * *



—

Once inside their big yellow brick building, the men in black suits handed me off to two female guards, but not before giving me a look that said I should be grateful they weren’t the ones taking me all the way to my cell. The larger woman, with a faint mustache, sat in a blue plastic chair in the corner while the smaller woman asked me, in a voice so soft it was as if coaxing a toddler onto the toilet, to remove my clothing. I removed my jacket, dress, and shoes and stood in my flesh-colored underwear while the smaller woman took off my wristwatch and rings. She dropped them into a metal container with a clank that echoed against the concrete walls and motioned for me to undo my brassiere. I balked, crossing my arms.

“We need it,” the woman in the blue chair said—her first words to me. “You might hang yourself.” I unclasped my bra and removed it, the cold air hitting my chest. I felt their eyes scan my body. Even in such circumstances, women appraise each other.

“Are you pregnant?” the larger woman asked.

“Yes,” I answered. It was the first time I’d acknowledged this aloud.

The last time Boris and I had made love was a week after he’d broken things off with me for the third time. “It’s over,” he’d told me. “It has to end.” I was destroying his family. I was the cause of his pain. He’d told me all this as we walked down an alley off the Arbat, and I fell into a bakery’s doorway. He went to pick me up, and I screamed for him to leave me be. People stopped and stared.

The next week, he was at my front door. He’d brought a gift: a luxurious Japanese dressing gown his sisters had procured for him in London. “Try it on for me,” he implored. I ducked behind my dressing screen and slipped it on. The fabric was stiff and unflattering, billowing out at my stomach. It was too big—maybe he’d told his sisters the gift was for his wife. I hated it and told him so. He laughed. “Take it off, then,” he pleaded. And I did.

A month later, my skin began tingling, as if submerging into a hot bath after coming in from the cold. I’d felt that tingle before, with Ira and Mitya, and knew I was carrying his child.

“A doctor will visit you soon, then,” the smaller guard said.

They searched me, took everything, gave me a big gray smock and slippers two sizes too big, and escorted me to a cement box containing only a mat and a bucket.

I was kept in the cement box for three days and given kasha and sour milk twice daily. A doctor came to check on me, though only to confirm what I already knew. I owed the baby growing inside me for preventing the more terrible things I’d heard happened to women in that box.