You Are One of Them (18 page)

I
N THE MORNING
I called Svetlana again. I didn’t reach her, but this time instead of leaving her a voice-mail message I decided to go to her office. I was tired of being strung along. I wanted more than focus groups. I skipped my Russian class and walked all the way to Ulitsa Petrovka. Inside her building, the guard demanded my passport as usual. I told him I was there to see Svetlana Romanova. “I was just here yesterday,” I said in Russian.

He wanted to know if she was expecting me. I was proud that my Russian had improved so much that I could understand him.
“Nyet,”
I said. She wasn’t expecting me, but if he called her, I was sure she would be happy to see me. I smiled at him, as if I were a regular in a restaurant greeting my favorite waiter. But he remained impassive. I watched him dial the red phone, listened to him describe me as an “American girl.” When he hung up, I expected him to wave me past. Instead he said that Svetlana wasn’t there.

“Where is she?” I said.

“You can’t stay here,” he said.

“I’ll wait,” I said. “She’ll come down eventually.”

He told me I’d have to wait outside. I took my passport and returned to the cold. It was nearly eleven. I figured that Svetlana or one of her colleagues would step outside for lunch, that I wouldn’t have to wait long. I was wrong. Two hours later I was still waiting. I jumped up and down to keep warm.

It was Andrei, not Svetlana, who finally came out of the building. He was wearing a suit—dark gray with pinstripes—and a navy blue tie, as if he’d been costumed to play a stockbroker. A camel-colored scarf gave him a dash of European flair.
“Nasha Amerikanka,”
he said. Our American. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to talk to Svetlana,” I said. “She didn’t answer the phone.”

“She isn’t here,” he said.

“Where is she?”

“Yaroslavl.”

“Why Yaroslavl?” I had only a vague idea where the city was. South, I thought, in the provinces somewhere. I imagined a grimy place with a colorless ache of sky.

“Sampling,” he said. “Taste tests, on the street. Unmarked cans, to see what people say.”

“When will she be back?”

He shrugged. “A few days. Why? You have the big idea for us? Sveta says you are helping with the Czar campaign.”

“Not really,” I said.

“You are still looking for your dead friend?” he said with a smirk.

“I’m not sure she’s dead.”

“Either she is dead or she is alive. Are there any other options?”

“That woman at the focus groups . . .” I said.

“Who?”

“Zoya,” I said. “She reminded me of my friend.”

“Zoya is
my
friend.”

“Your friend?”

“Sure, we go way back. Our fathers worked together. I introduced her to Sveta. Now they are thick as burglars.”

“Thieves,” I said. “Thick as thieves.”

“Ah, yes. Sometimes I forget these expressions.”

“If she’s your friend, why was she at the research yesterday?”

“They are paid for the focus groups. We needed people and she needed money.”

“Let me guess: This is information that can’t be shared with Richard.”

He smiled. “You are clever girl. Walk with me. I am going to buy cigarettes.”

I fell into step with him. We turned right onto Ulitsa Kuznetsky Bridge. Passersby carried plastic bags from designer stores—Gucci, Prada, Versace. These empty “packets” were sold on the street to people who could never afford to shop in such places but who wanted to tote designer labels. The bags were wrinkled and worn after being used again and again.

“You don’t ever smoke?” Andrei said.

“I used to,” I said. “Sometimes. In college.” I always felt like I was faking it even during the six-month period when I smoked every day. It was an attempt at cool that never quite fit.

“You have the boyfriend?” He so rarely mixed up his indefinite and definite articles. The boyfriend, I thought, as if there could only be one for a lifetime.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?” he said.

“I guess I’m defective,” I said.

“What is wrong with you? You have an extra toe?”

“No,” I said with a half laugh. “Just ten the last time I checked.”

“You look like a normal girl to me. Absolutely normal American girl.”

“You don’t have much basis for comparison. How many American girls do you know?” I said.

“I lived in USA,” he said. “I saw my share of Americans in Washington. Maybe I was looking through the fence of the embassy compound, watching the girls go by. Maybe I saw you in your school kilt.”

“How did you know I wore a uniform to school?” How grown-up Jenny and I had felt at the start of fourth grade, when we started wearing those itchy tartan skirts.

“Lucky guess,” he said.

“What about Zoya?” I said. “Where in the States did she live?”

“She was also in Washington.”

“At the embassy with you?”

“Not with me,” he said. “Our families were not there at the same time. She was already back in Moscow when I went to Washington.”

“Was her father a spy?” I said.

“Sarushka,” Andrei said. “You are an attractive girl, but this suspicion is not becoming.”

“Doveryay, no proveryay,”
I said.
Trust, but verify. It was Reagan’s philosophy when dealing with the Soviets.

We had reached a kiosk near the Metro. Andrei asked for a pack of Marlboro Reds. The woman behind the counter reluctantly put down her magazine to fulfill his request. She shoved the cigarettes at Andrei.

“My friend Maxim is having a birthday party Friday night,” he said. “You should come with me.”

“I’m not sure I’m in the mood for a party.”

“You cannot spend all your time with foreigners,” he said. “Don’t you want to see real Moscow?”

I did want to see the real Moscow, whatever that meant. But I hesitated. “It’s only Tuesday,” I said. “Give me a few days to think about it.”

“Sveta will be there,” he said. “She’ll be back from Yaroslavl. You can talk to her.”

“Okay,” I said. He promised to pick me up outside Corinne’s building.

•   •   •

I
N RUSSIAN CLASS
THAT WEEK,
we were expressing hopes and desires. “I would like to be a mother,” said the Dutch woman. “I would like to visit Egypt,” said the Chinese diplomat’s wife. Irina waited for me to share my desire with the rest of the class. I hesitated, then said, “I want to find my friend.”

“Kakuyu podrugu?”
Irina asked. Which friend?

“Podrugu myertvoyu,”
I said. The dead friend.

Irina looked frightened. So I pretended to have mixed up my vocabulary words. “I meant
podrugu kotoroyu ya poteryala,
” I said. The friend whom I lost.

I could make a list of all the things I’ve lost over the years. Library books, parking tickets, swim races, my virginity, my temper. My grandmother’s charm bracelet, which told her life story in gold baubles—a San Francisco cable car, a tennis racket, a tiny Eiffel Tower—fell off my wrist one spring afternoon while I was riding my bike around the neighborhood. My favorite jeans disappeared from the laundry room in my dorm sophomore year. And I lost a friend when my first serious boyfriend began sleeping with her—“an unexpected turn of events” he called it, as if he were as surprised as I was to find her in his bed. It was the only time I’ve been angry enough to throw something—an organic-chemistry textbook—at anyone. He ducked, but the book hit the mirror behind him and shattered glass all over his floor. “You fucker!” I said. And he, looking at the discarded condom wrapper on the bedside table said, “Well, yeah.”

But with Jenny I had the nagging sense that she wasn’t really lost, not for good. I thought of the Joneses’ house after the plane crash. The grocery list, the casserole in Tupperware, the rugby shirt folded on Jenny’s desk chair. They had gone away to Maine for one night; everything was ready for their return. Was it possible that they had staged everything to look as if they intended to come back?
You Americans,
Svetlana said,
believe everything you see
. In hindsight Mrs. Jones’s grocery list seemed a little too perfect. Not a single item crossed out, no second thoughts. It was written in one color of ink, as if it had been composed on the spot. Was it a prop? And where was the cat? Had they taken Hexa with them?

I used to lie in bed at night thinking about what I would take with me if our house were on fire. Assuming my mom and Pip made it out on their own, what irreplaceable material object would I rescue from the encroaching flames? My priorities shifted year to year. When I was seven, I wanted to save the film reel of Izzy. When I was ten, it was my journal. Later, of course, I had my Jenny files to worry about. When the Joneses prepared to go to Maine, knowing they were never coming back to Cleveland Park, what did they take with them? I imagined Jenny in her room, ranking her belongings. She left her diary behind, I remembered, which made no sense. She wrote in it almost every night and was absolutely hysterical at the possibility that someone might read it. If they knew they were leaving for good, surely she would have taken the diary with her.

My rational brain told me there was no way she could be alive. Her diary was still there. There was nothing but circumstantial evidence that her father was a spy. And it seemed unlikely that the Joneses could have defected secretly. But I couldn’t assume anything. I had to trust my gut.

•   •   •

O
N
F
RIDAY NIGHT
I found myself in the back of a car with Andrei on our way to the outskirts of the city. “These days only foreigners can afford to live in the center,” he said. “And
novye russkie.
” New Russians were everyone’s favorite scapegoat.

The car was a Lada, ashen and boxy, and there was a hole in the backseat’s leather. I found myself nervously pulling out bits of foam stuffing. I wiggled my finger down far enough to feel the coils of the springs, and I imagined them rusted and tarnished like everything else in Russia. My fidgeting made me think of my mother. She could never keep her hands on the steering wheel. Buckled into the backseat (even when my father was no longer there to claim the passenger side, she insisted I stay in the back where it was safer), I watched her hands flit from radio knobs to her scalp—she’d scratch absentmindedly when stalled at traffic lights—to her lips, which she’d tap with two fingers in a three-quarter rhythm that suggested a waltz. I was used to her nervous energy, and in hindsight I realize that it kept her thin. She maintained a girlish figure without regular exercise. While my classmates’ mothers embraced the 1980s aerobics trend, she worried herself into shape.

Andrei had a bottle of vodka and a bouquet of flowers. I’d forgotten to bring anything. My mother had always warned me never to arrive at a dinner party empty-handed. I was trying to think of some way to compensate for my bad manners when I felt Andrei’s breath on my neck; he had scooted close to me.

“When was the last time you saw your friend?” he said.

“Which friend?”

“Your dead friend,” Andrei said.

“Ten years ago,” I said.

“That is a long time,” Andrei said. “If she is still alive, will she be the same?” He was rummaging around in his pocket, and his arm kept brushing my leg. I shivered at his touch and slid over on the seat. “Sorry,” he said. “I am looking for the lighter.”

“Please don’t smoke in the car,” I said. “I swear I’ll throw up.”

“Ah, the delicate constitution!
Ladno.
For you I will wait.” He removed his hands from his pockets and made a show of folding them in his lap.

“Spasibo,”
I said.

“So you have ten toes and ten fingers,” he said. “Do you have any extra parts I should know about?”

“No. Nothing extra,” I said. “But I might be missing a few.”

“You are a strange girl,” he said.

The car came to a sudden stop in front of a dreary apartment block. Under the weak light of the streetlamps, I could make out a rusted slide in the courtyard, so out of use it looked like it had been abandoned by a civilization that was now extinct.
The land of happy childhood
.

“Ladno,”
Andrei said again. He paid the driver while I got out of the car.

•   •   •

E
VERYTHING IN MAXIM’S APARTMENT
was dingy and brown. Even the walls were papered in a brown floral print. We removed our shoes in a cramped hallway and pushed into the living room, where a long table was piled with plates of cheese and various pickled things. Cucumbers had been sliced into stars that fanned across one plate. There were about fifteen people crowded around the table, and a scruffy man was playing the guitar.

“He is playing the songs of Vladimir Vysotsky,” said Andrei. “You know Vysotsky? He was like our Bob Dylan. Folk music.”

I nodded. Vysotsky’s funeral was during the Moscow Olympics in 1980. Apparently a lot of people left the sporting events to attend the ceremony.

Andrei introduced me as
“moya Amerikanka.”
My American. I blushed, but no one seemed to be laughing at me. Everyone seemed genuinely excited to make my acquaintance. Maxim the birthday boy offered me a clownish bow. I told him my name.

“Yevreyka
?”
he asked. Are you Jewish?

“Nyet,”
I said. “But a lot of my friends are,” I added, afraid to seem like I was endorsing anti-Semitism.

“U menya tost!”
Maxim said. Someone handed me a glass. His speech was too fast and elaborate for me to follow—lots of puns and wordplay, something about a bear, maybe?—but it must have been funny, because everyone was laughing. At the end I understood him when he said, “To America!” Maybe he was joking, but everyone drank. I forced down a large swallow of vodka and then chased it with a pickle.

I pulled off my sweater and tied it around my waist. The room was stifling. The heat in Moscow’s buildings was centralized; it was turned on at the beginning of October, and there was no way for individuals to control it. So outside you were freezing, but inside you were always too hot. It was especially stuffy on the Metro, where you were trapped in layers of clothing. Whenever I emerged from a Metro station, I could feel the sweat on my skin congeal as it cooled.