On Green Dolphin Street (44 page)

She easily found the Metropol hotel, with its art nouveau façade and lobby full of KGB prostitutes, and, close by, the start of Petrovka Street. She felt vindicated, as though this proved her plan was sound. But she was
very cold and, as the large blocks of Petrovka went slowly past, she became convinced that the footsteps were coming closer.

Thoughts of Frank, and of Charlie, began to fade from her mind; she had no energy left for anything but her own survival. Periodically she took her hands from her coat pockets and blew on them, but the warming effect of her breath was lost to the cold of the air. Sad Sam was more than ten minutes up Petrovka; it was much more, she discovered, when at last she came to a junction, but discovered it was only the inner, not the outer, ring road.

Mary’s courage began to fail. She saw no taxis and would in any case have been too frightened to get into one. The cold had frozen her ability to think; even her mental energy was now required to keep her warm, as she pushed on blindly, increasingly fearful of the tap on the shoulder, the strong arm around her waist as the black Volga drew up alongside, leaking fumes from its exhaust, its doors held open from inside.

At the junction of the outer ring, she faltered. Was it left or right? This she could not afford to get wrong. She needed one last effort, and she prayed for the energy to make it. Then, on the other side of the road, and to her right, she saw the drab but familiar view they had had from the front window of their apartment. She hurried on and turned up the narrow street to Sadova Samotechnaya, shivering with relief. She stopped at the guard post and gave the uniformed policeman the name of the paper and its correspondent. After two telephone calls, he gestured her through, watching her back with heavy eyes as he reached again for the receiver.

Mary pushed open the door at the corner of the block and found herself in a small wooden entrance box; another door led into a dingy hall with a stone floor and a caged elevator. A woman of about her age was coming down the stairs; she turned out to be English and, in response to Mary’s request, directed her to the fourth floor.

She knew better by now than to wait for the lift and ran up the tenement steps instead, arriving breathless and close to collapse. The door was opened by a plump American in spectacles with a cigarette between his fingers and a pen clenched between his teeth.

“Mr. Sheppard?”

“Yep.”

“My name’s Mary van der Linden. I’m a friend of a colleague of yours, Frank Renzo.” She paused. “It’s a bit of a long story.”

“Come on in,” said Deke Sheppard. “Take your boots off. Here are some slippers.”

He left her in a small, untidy sitting room with piles of books and newspapers on the floor; Mary found a radiator and put her frozen hands against its ribs.

“Right,” said Sheppard, coming back into the room. “I’ve told my secretary to hold any calls—not that anyone gets through much on the Moscow phone system. It’s good to have a visitor. You from London?”

Mary explained her situation, and Sheppard nodded sympathetically. She did not explain the nature of Charlie’s illness, but stressed that he must be made to eat and wondered if perhaps she could buy some food from him.

Sheppard smiled. “Keep your dollars. You’re a friend of Frank’s, that’s good enough for me. Come and take a look in the kitchen, see if there’s anything that takes your fancy.”

In a primitive square room, he opened various store cupboards. “I get all this stuff from the Embassy, but I eat out most days. Tell me about that son of a bitch Renzo. What trouble’s he in now? I heard they’re sending him to Washington.” Sheppard had a big, phlegmy laugh.

Frank was coming to live in her hometown at the moment she was leaving: the reminder came at a bad moment for Mary, and she struggled for a moment to compose herself among the cans of beans and jars of American preserves.

“He’s doing fine. Now I suppose what I’d really like is some soup, but the trouble is, it’ll be cold by the time I get it back.”

“Listen, lady, this is the twentieth century. Even here in Moscow. Ever hear of a vacuum flask? What’s he like? Campbell’s cream of chicken?”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Now where’s that can opener?”

They chatted about Frank while Sheppard made up what he called a Marshall Aid package: a flask of hot chicken soup, some sesame-seed bagels with Skippy peanut butter, a small box of Oreo cookies, two cans of tuna in oil with a spare can opener thrown in, some butter wrapped in greaseproof paper, a half loaf of whole wheat bread, a tub of imported coleslaw, some Stolichnaya vodka, a packet of Fritos corn chips, some local cherry jam, half a dozen tangerines and a large glass jar of beluga caviar.

“Some guy gave it to me. They’re always giving it to me, hoping I’ll write something nice about them, I guess. I hate the goddamn stuff. Brings me out in hives. Now if you don’t mind my saying so, you need some gloves. I have a couple of ladies’ pairs I keep spare.”

Mary calculated that she had been gone more than two hours and that she needed to get back. As Sheppard burrowed into a drawer in a chest in the small entrance hall, she explained, while trying to minimize how foolish she sounded, her fear of getting into a taxi.

“Don’t worry, I understand. Kind of unsettles you having these big goons following you around. I’ll take you back myself. It’s ten minutes around the ring and I need some air anyway.”

He overcame Mary’s protests and forced a large rabbit-skin hat over his thin hair. “This is my minus ten hat. I have a minus twenty as well. But we Muscovites don’t get to put the flaps down till minus fifteen.” He gave her a big smile, full of America. “We consider it what you Britishers would call ‘unsporting.’ ”

He took her out to the courtyard and opened the doors of a muddy blue Volvo. With what seemed to Mary like miraculous speed after the rigors of her walk, they drove round the northwestern rim of the city, past the zoo and the American Embassy, and crossed the river at the Borodinsky Bridge.

Mary thanked her savior warmly, but her spirits fell as she found herself once more on the wide steps leading up to the Ukraina; she turned at the heavy doors, clasping her bag of supplies, and saw Deke Sheppard waving to her as he prepared to depart.

Back inside the murk, she crossed the expanse of the lobby and braced
herself for the elevator wait. After a mere ten minutes she was clanking skyward, then making her way once more down the passageway beneath the sour gaze of the beshawled crone at her desk.

It seemed to Mary that she had already made this short walk an infinite number of times; its details had acquired the power of the eternal: Hell might be this reeking gray corridor, with its straight lines that converged to a never-realized vanishing point.

Once more as she fitted the key to the lock and opened the door she feared for what she would find inside. It was dark. When she had located the light switch, she placed the bag of food on the table and went into the bedroom. Charlie was lying down, curled up beneath the blankets, though something in his attitude made Mary think he was not asleep. She touched him on the shoulder and he slowly raised himself onto an elbow.

He smiled. It was the first time she had seen him smile since she had been in Moscow. She kissed him and told him she had brought some food. The smile left his face, but she said that after all the trouble she had been to, she expected him to try. She left him to get dressed while she laid out some plates and cutlery from the glass-fronted cabinet on the thick pile cloth with its curious dangling bobbles.

Charlie reached for the vodka bottle when he came into the sitting room, but Mary put her hand on his. “You must eat first. You can have one drink afterwards if you’ve eaten.”

Meekly he spooned some of the soup to his lips. He grimaced at the taste, but managed to swallow it. Mary also began to eat; she had had nothing since arriving twenty-four hours earlier and found Deke Sheppard’s picnic a feast of urgent flavors.

She watched Charlie spoon some caviar uncertainly onto a slice of bread.

What does it mean to love a man? she thought. Does it mean you take his weaknesses, his shaking hands, transparent failings, and subsume them in yourself, where you can heal, and make them strong, and give them back to him restored? It means that at some point you give up the idea of yourself as a person capable of infinite expansion. It means that if
an impossible choice is to be made between his life and yours, you choose his. And it means that you cannot repine for this hard moment, because he is grafted onto you; that what you do for him you do also for yourself and for some separate entity that is greater than the sum of both, because the dangerous enterprise of your joined life is more dramatic, more arresting and more exciting than any alternative could ever be.

She could no more abandon him than she could turn away from the crying of her child. “I love you,” she said.

Charlie’s eyes filled with tears above the food he was struggling for her sake to eat. He swallowed and coughed. He said, “You’re more than I deserve.”

She said, “I don’t know what all this means. ‘Breakdown.’ What’s that? But you will be well again. I’ll make sure of that.”

“Will you stay with me?”

“Now?”

“No. Always.”

Mary looked round the room, at its sticky floor, botched carpentry and Soviet-approved paintings. She saw the wooden radiator cage, half detached from the wall, and she thought of the wires that ran back into the plaster of the monstrous building, up to a listening station on the twenty-somethingth floor, where two bored men with nicotine fingers and raw faces watched the slowly turning spools and listened like recording angels to the answer she must give.

Her voice was very quiet in her throat. “Yes,” she said. “Of course I will.”

Charlie lowered his head to the table and began to weep in huge convulsions.

“Of course I will,” said Mary. “And in return, you must promise me to live. I lost my fiancé in that war and I’ve never looked back, I’ve never compared you to one another. I loved you for yourself, because with your laughter and your stories you made life glorious. My darling, you invented it—a way of living it at least.”

She stood up, flushed with the daring of the moment. “I won’t let you
join him among the dead. You owe it to him and to me and to all those thousands of young men not to give in.”

Charlie ceased his sobbing long enough to say, “I know.”

Mary walked round the table and knelt by him. She laid her head on his shoulder as she had done so many times when first they were together; and he, remembering, stroked back the thick, almost-black hair from her forehead with his faltering hand.

Chapter 20  

T
he next day, Dr. Keslake called and certified Charlie fit to travel.

“Thank you,” said Mary. “I think I’m supposed to let the Ambassador …”

“Dont worry,” said Keslake. “I’ll fix all that.”

After lunch on the remains of Deke Sheppard’s largesse, Mary packed their cases and at two o’clock Michael Winterburn called to take them to the airport. Mary looked up one final time at the slabbed mass of the Ukraina behind them, the slave monument of one totalitarian order to another, its spiral point lost in graying snow; she closed her eyes as they climbed into the car and turned toward the West.

Winterburn could barely contain his relief as he sped them to the airport, chattering about Embassy matters, hoping insincerely that they would come back soon. Charlie made a weary grimace at Mary from the backseat, suggesting an imminent return was unlikely, and she stifled a laugh; it was their first moment of pleasure together since she had been in Moscow and she thought it was a good augury for what lay ahead.

At the airport, Winterburn helped them with their cases and watched through a glass screen until they had negotiated the line at passport control;
it was as though he feared some last-minute hitch would throw Charlie back into his orbit, another Cold War bomb waiting to explode. When they walked across the runway to the plane and climbed the steps, Mary looked back into the terminal building where she thought she saw Winterburn’s anxious face pressed against the glass. He would not relax until he saw them airborne, she thought: he would not uncork his celebratory bottle until the aircraft was fifty miles west of Berlin.

With the hours winding back in their favor, they were home in Regent’s Park in time to see Richard and Louisa before bed. In front of the fire in the sitting room, Mary hugged them to her and did not doubt for a moment the justice of what she had decided in that distant hotel room. This was her life, these backs and ribs that she crushed in her embrace, the bloom of their cheeks against hers, the smell of Richard’s fragrant neck and Louisa’s just-washed hair.

In the morning she took Charlie to see a former colleague of her mother’s, who read the letter from Dr. Keslake and referred him to a hospital in Edgware that he recommended for its sensitive handling of such matters. Charlie was allowed to go home and pack his bag before being admitted the next day.

After a week he was allowed home on condition that he attend as an outpatient three times a week for half a day; they prescribed a regime of sedatives and psychotherapy while they awaited definitive analysis of the liver. Charlie went into Whitehall to speak to the people in Personnel, who said he should take as long as he needed to recover; Charlie’s accumulated reputation was worth something and he drew heavily on its credit. They would wait for the medical situation to clarify, but if necessary they would not ask him to return to Washington; they would deem that posting complete and would bring forward his next due spell at home, to be commenced when he was fit.