Let Me Explain You (28 page)

He smiled. “You wouldn't like it.”

“Why not?”

“It's not really for kids,” he said.

“I'm not a kid. I'm almost thirteen.”

He took her wrist and rubbed it against his stubble. “It's confidential.”

He must have sensed her tensing, because he stopped, began to talk. “It's about spies in the fifties. The Russians have the bomb, the Communists are invading South Korea.”

“Like 007?” Voice shaking. “That's stupid.”

She was pulled onto his lap, which was warmer than the rest of his body. She laughed in surprise, embarrassment, but stopped cold when he wrapped his arm around her waist. He stroked her back, drawing her in so that she could face him. She could feel her heartbeat in her teeth. “What's so exciting about it,” she said from very far away and also up close.

He nuzzled his beard into her neck and said, “Oh, everything. Everything.”

There was surveillance. There was bugging. There were dead-letter drops, arranged so two spies could transfer materials without ever meeting. He kissed her earlobe. He raised her nightgown above her waist. There was wetwork. There were honeypots. He flicked his thumb over her nipple, and Dina realized that no one other than her mother had ever seen her breasts before. The KGB thought that Americans were sex-obsessed. They trained girls to be swallows. Their job was to seduce secrets out of CIA officers.

Angelos's tongue slipped over her collarbone, and Dina was dragged down into the molten core she never suspected in her body. She knew she had to leave, and then a moment later, less than a second, knew she had to stay. She didn't recognize his hands when they grabbed her because they were so rough, and yet at the same time she knew they could not have belonged to anyone else. She was suffocating, she was more afraid than she'd ever been in her life, but she could not be anywhere else. It felt important, what she saw in Angelos's eyes.

His fingers crept under the elastic of her underwear. They found the small tuft of hair and slipped easily inside. Dina gasped, her heart pounding. Then his entire body was inside. In a shock, she saw that he was too much, she was too full of him. It hurt. She tried to pull away, but he clenched the small of her back and pushed deeper. Her eyes teared. She was cold from the pain. Just as she began to sob, terrified that her body was being torn apart, it stopped.

Dina was trembling, unable to move. Angelos sighed. He shifted her weight to his right leg. She could feel his heart beating. He was shaking. She believed he was scared, more afraid than she was, and her own panic receded. She rested her chin on his damp shoulder and pressed her hands against his back. She listened to his heavy breaths, they matched hers. “Tell me more,” she whispered.

He was quiet. Then, “There were the Rosenbergs. They were the most famous of all. They loved each other so much, nothing could come between them. Not even death.”

“What happened to them?”

Angelos fixed her underwear, nightgown. He prodded her to her feet. “They were executed for selling the Russians classified information about the atom bomb. They were scapegoats for the government.”

“They were married?”

He nodded. “They sang to each other through the thick concrete walls of Sing Sing. Ethel and Julius, loyal until the very end.”

Dina smiled.

He pushed a jolt of black hair from her face. “You won't betray me, will you?”

“I would never,” Dina said and she meant it, though she did not know what it meant. She would do anything for him, she wanted to say.

He lay back down and gestured to the door with his chin. “Don't worry about the blood,” he said, voice throaty, tucking a pillow behind his head. “That only happens the first time.”

Dina crept to the bathroom to wash. In the morning, when she was sore, she did not worry. He had prepared her for that, too.

One of the things Angelos taught her was how to evade suspicion. This started with her left eye, which could reveal her at any moment. He showed her exercises: he stood behind her and, with his own palms, cupped each eye. She put her hands over his and interlaced her fingers over her forehead. They stood like this for five minutes, ten minutes. She wanted it to be romantic, but what she felt was self-conscious; she worried he was laughing at her. But she trusted him. When he brought her home an eye patch, she wore it faithfully, even though she would have burned it had her parents been the ones to insist on it. She started to feel proud of the eye. She started to feel like it was why he picked her.

One day, missing Angelos like crazy even as she sat next to him, she took out a pen and wrote a note, slid it across the table. Angelos continued to read his book. She pushed the note again. Mihalis flicked his paper so that the corner bowed low enough for him to see her over it. “Let Angelos work,” he said. “Go play.”

She waited for Angelos to defend her, but he just turned the page.

Late that night, she went to his room. It was locked. At breakfast, she swallowed a pastry that tasted like paste. When Angelos came in, she offered him some just to see how he'd react. She even said, “Try it, it tastes like glue,” in a voice that was stronger than expected. He smiled at her the way the school principal did and said, “Just a coffee.” All was lost. Then her mother said she wasn't feeling well, and could Angelos walk Dina to school today?

“Sure,” he said, but the answer had everything to do with her mother and nothing to do with her.

Dina followed Angelos. He carried her bag over his shoulder. She wasn't sure if that was a good sign or not. It could mean he forgave her for whatever she'd done, that he would carry her and her things with him forever; or it could be a knapsack of pity to let her down easy. Dina couldn't help it. She started crying. She walked ahead so that he wouldn't see.

He caught up, stopped her by the shirt. “Listen,
koukla
,” he said, “you have to be smart about this. You can't just write notes with everyone looking.” Not everyone was as evolved as they were, not everyone would understand. Some people, some parents, were old-country.

“OK,” she said, eyes still wet, “but it's hard.”

He told her about a case—a spy who searched the daily paper for an advertisement that read “Dodge Diplomat, 1971, needs engine work, $1000.” If it was printed, that meant that his contacts overseas needed to reach him. Dina could do something like this—they could have a special sign—if she really needed something. “But you have to promise not to be so obvious,” he said. “You have to get stronger. You have to do your eye exercises. You have to be cunning.” Dina liked that word,
cunning
.

But Dina did make a mistake. A big one.

Sometimes, Dina's mother made Angelos do work that was beneath Angelos. Dina had to watch him scrub garbage cans (garbage!), clean chicken (clean!), wash dishes (dishes! A Greek intellectual doing dishes!). Irene didn't want Dina helping him, just made her sit at the table and wait for him to complete his chores. And the whole time, Dina's mother talked to Angelos as if they were close. As if he didn't think she was a fat, ignorant, backward peasant with peasant manners and peasant hygiene.

“You miss your home, Angelo? You miss your mother?”

“My mother is a saint. I would call her every day if I could.”

Dina kicked the leg of the table. “Ma-ma, we have work to do. Science project.”

Irene turned around. Her hands were in yellow rubber gloves, and she was sponging down the face of the refrigerator. “Angelos is almost finished, and then you can start.”

“Ma-ma, he isn't a slave.”

“What slave? All he's doing is giving his aunt a little help. It doesn't trouble him anything.”

“To tell you the truth,” Angelos said, “it's a nice break from all the thinking.”

“Fine. I can dry.” Dina was already up, pulling a towel out of the drawer. She took a plate from Angelos and let herself touch the wet ridge of his knuckle.

Angelos pulled away and, in an instant, cinched her wrist. His grip was unrecognizable—disciplinary. He looked up at Irene, smiling, and dropped Dina's arm. “Listen to your mother,
koukla
,” he said. “I should have more often listened to mine.”

Irene looked to Angelos's hand, hanging by his side. “My daughter was never so excited for extra chores before you came.”

Dina was quaking. “It's not chores,” casual as she could. “It's helping.”

That night Angelos opened the door, but he wouldn't let her in. He said he barely recognized Dina anymore—she was sloppy, whiny. A double agent. A brat. “I warned you,” he hissed.

Dina cried, apologized. She said it was her mother. Her mother made her crazy. Her mother didn't know when enough was enough. Angelos said Dina was the one who didn't know when enough was enough. Teach me, Dina said.
Teach me
, she begged. Too loud, her parents' room too close. She did not reveal that, between dinner and bed, she overheard her parents talking. Her mother saying,
It's something wrong, a man and a young girl alone in a house so much
, and her father answering,
He's a good boy. He is family.

Angelos pulled her into the room and told her to shut up. Then he said, You won't question me? You won't doubt my methods? Every form of subterfuge? Every expression of concealment? You won't make stupid mistakes? You won't act like a baby?

Yes. I'm ready. I'm ready to learn.

By the time he was done with her, he promised, there would be no mistakes. There would be nothing she couldn't do. “Sometimes spies don't have to speak to one another, even when they're face-to-face,” he instructed, untying the drawstring on his pants. “They talk in code.”

“Morse code?” she asked, letting him draw her to her knees.

He nodded and scooted to the edge of the bed. “That's right. Let me show you.”

He showed her how to transmit information using rhythm. Under his guidance, she listened for the short and long gasps, used her mouth to send out continuous waves of current, honed a message with pulses. She never spoke, but he understood her loud and clear. He could barely suppress the dots and dashes that escaped his lips as “dits” and “dahs.” It was the only time he broke his code of silence, muffling cries into her hair.

It was nearly four in the morning. They lay in the sallow light of his desk lamp, Angelos's arm hanging over his chest. She said she could hear his heart, even though she couldn't. She sat up when Angelos reached over to the night table and slipped a white pill out of a textbook. She had seen the white pills before. He hid them in socks, swab boxes. Angelos maintained that they were medicine to help him study, but then why hide them in such weird places? It hurt that he was keeping part of himself secret, but she knew it would only be a matter of time. Maybe he just wanted to make sure she was ready.

Angelos didn't want her to leave yet. He lit a cigarette and she took a drag, entwining her middle finger in his wiry beard. She didn't want to leave, either. She wanted to tell him how beautiful he made her feel, but she couldn't bring herself to talk like that. Instead, she said, “You should see the girls in my class.”

“Oh yeah?” he said.

“None of them are Greek.”

“What do they look like?”

“They have blond hair.”

“They are probably just skinny crows with bird legs and no tits.”

Dina clapped her hands over her smile. “You wouldn't say that if you saw them.”

Angelos propped himself up on his elbow. He took another puff, and the smoke filled his mouth. “Maybe that is true. When I was your age, I chased after the obvious girls.”

Dina's smile receded. “Tell me about them.”

“There was only one.” And he confessed that, for a while, he had been in love with the Red Spy Queen.

“What happened?” Dina asked, hating this woman already.

“She revealed my true identity.”

“She's a stupid dog bitch.”

Angelos frowned. “Sooner or later, they'll get to you, too.”

“No they won't.”

The frown behind his beard became a grimace. “Your father will. He'll get you to defect.”

Dina scowled and yanked the cigarette out of his mouth. “No he won't.”

“Swear to me.”

“I swear.”

“No,” Angelos said, his voice hard. His Adam's apple rose and fell. He sat up. “Swear to me.”

Dina's annoyance disappeared. She had never seen him so close to crying. Her eyes swept over his face. She twisted the edge of his beard in her fist and yanked him toward her.

Angelos's eyes lit up. He chuckled, kissed her on the mouth, then the eye. Then he took the cigarette back. “My beautiful Ethel,” he said, exhaling a loom of smoke.

It made Dina feel like she was the most important, most-loved person in the world.