Sekret (2 page)

What I am? I climb down the escalator slowly enough that I don’t raise suspicion. My ratty clothes are lost in the sea of gray-brown-blue. Just another half-starved waif with empty eyes and empty hands. I know just what I am.

I am Yulia Andreevna Chernina, seventeen years old, daughter of former high-ranking Communist Party members. I am a fugitive in my own country. And sometimes I see things that can’t be seen.

CHAPTER 2

OUR SHELL-SHOCKED TANK
of a neighbor lumbers toward me on the walkway, stinking of potato vodka and sleeplessness. I don’t like the way his eyes pull from mine, like a magnetic repulsion. It’s a guilty act, one I can’t afford to ignore right now. Like the market, I need every advantage. As he brushes past me, I tighten up my mind—tuning that imaginary radio—and am thrown into his skin.

We are no longer standing in front of 22 Novaya Rodina, where the all-new apartment towers already look beaten and cowed. We are outside Lubyanka Square earlier this morning, standing in the bronze-cast shadow of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the father of the KGB, the secret police who tell us how to act, who to be. I peer out of the neighbor’s eyes at a KGB officer in a mud-green coat who is smiling just enough to show the edge of his teeth. The officer scribbles in his notebook and says
How long have the Chernins been hiding there?

This is the traitor, this neighbor who has reported us to the secret police, sentencing what’s left of my family to death—for what? A bit of spending money? The twins at the market were no accident, though they didn’t look like the usual KaGeBeznik thugs.

The officer lowers his notepad and jams his fist into a pocketful of worn-out rubles.
We have been looking for them for some time, you know.
The wad of notes dangles below my neighbor’s nose.
The Chernins are dangerous people. You were right to come to us.

I should have known, but there’s no time to berate myself—or even this scum—so I fall back into the present and rush past him on the walk, thoughts of Mama pulling me toward the building.

Our building hangs over me as I rush up the too-long walk. It’s made of giant concrete slabs cantilevered into place as if by magic—a Stonehenge for the people, the worker, the State. When Khruschev first built them, the workers were thrilled to leave the old roach-rotted, subdivided mansions that housed three families to a room. But to me, the building is our prison—I only leave it for the market or for a breath without four other bodies pressed against me. The rest of the time, my caged-animal stare could peel the lead paint from the walls. That girl dared to ask me what I am? I am the weed growing through the sidewalk’s cracks, resilient, but knowing I’ll someday be ripped out by the root.

I have to warn Mama. I don’t know how long I’ve lost the twins for, if I’ve lost them at all. I don’t know how many are with them. As I fumble with my key, I strain for the soft fall of boots on cement of a team sneaking around me, guns trained. But there is only me, with every instinct coiled in my genes screaming to save my family.

The elevator button clicks; an electrical current travels lazily down its wire, gears whirl, and the car yawns as it descends, as if it can’t believe it must haul yet another person to the tenth floor. My nerves play a scale up and down my spine as the car jerks upward, rattling my teeth, the light of each floor drifting too slowly past the door’s crack.

Can I trust this strange sight of mine, or is hunger and a five-year weariness in my bones confusing me? Maybe my head is just finding images it likes and stitching them together into patchwork paranoia. My parents are scientists—I don’t believe anything that can’t be proved. But it’s been right too many times for me to doubt.

I reach the door to Aunt Nadia’s apartment. Like the others in the antiseptic hall, it is black and densely padded, like we’re in an asylum and can’t be trusted with sharp, bright things. Unlike them, however, ours stands ajar. That little crack of air that should not be. My heart hides in my throat.

Sunlight dapples the front room, but it looks false, like someone’s shaken an old, stale bottle of springtime and let it loose. No one sits on the bench, reading Gogol or trying to quiet the hunger that follows us as surely as our shadows. Only my gaunt reflection fills the foyer mirror, frazzled black hair escaping from its braids. Mama’s coat hangs from the high hook with Zhenya’s miniature one beside it; Aunt Nadia’s and Cousin Denis’s are gone.

It’s four in the afternoon, the time I always walk Zhenya through the neighborhood, though I hate how predictable it makes us. It’s hard to avoid routine with a brother who requires order the way some plants require a wall to anchor them. He’d have a fit if we didn’t go, or worse, crumple up inside of himself and refuse to unfurl for the rest of the night. I open my mouth to call for him but can’t force the words out into the open.

I turn to the kitchen on my left, just past the washroom and the water closet. A cup of tea steams, abandoned, on the table. An issue of
Pravda
lies open beside it: “Khruschev Promises Moon Landing by 1965.” Vladimir Vysotsky croons one of his safe, tepid folk ballads through the AM radio, Aunt Nadia’s prized possession that cost her more rations than she’ll ever admit. She can’t be so impulsive with us around. Each ration must stretch until it snaps to feed Mama and Zhenya and me.

Maybe, I think desperately, Mama went to lie down with another of her headaches. Perhaps a patient showed up, and they’re all crammed into Nadia’s old bedroom that we share. Perhaps she stepped across the hall to chat with neighbors, safe neighbors, neighbors who would never surrender us to the KGB—

I stop with my hand resting on the bedroom doorknob, my extra sense wiping memories from it like a layer of dust. The scream that I cannot unleash burns back into my lungs, ripping through me in search of escape.

In my mind, I see the other side of the door. Two men hold Mama and Zhenya as if they are dolls. Hands clamped over their mouths, they are motionless, waiting. A third man flattens against the wall beside the door, wedged in that narrow pass between our fold-out bed and the cabinet full of molding Tolstoy and medical journals. He will grab me as soon as I walk in.

I nudge the door with my shoe and jump back.

Silence, dusty and dense. I barge into the room, but it’s empty and still. I’m too late. The memory is just that—come and gone, and with it, my family. Tears burn in the corners of my eyes. I trusted my sense, and it failed them. I’ve failed.

Something flutters against the smoke-stained curtains.

A woman—she wears the same mud-green uniform as the KGB officer on Lubyanka Square—steps down from the balcony. Her hair is dyed the riot-red that every Russian woman over forty sports these days; it’s styled in an overgrown bob that does no favors to her sagging shape.

“Yulia Andreevna Chernina.”

My name hangs between us as we study each other. She might have been beautiful ten years ago, she might have had the endless lashes and silver screen lips of Tatiana Samoilova for all I know, but the weight of her deep frown appears to have recast her face. She folds her hands behind her back. She’s physically unimposing, but the spark in her eye betrays a mind that never stops churning. I’ve seen that spark before. The superior spark of informers, spies, politicians—anyone smart enough to use you for all you’re worth.

“Daughter of Andrei and Antonina Chernin.” Her eyes narrow. “Sister to Yevgenni—”

Yevgenni—Zhenya. My brother, whose own thoughts turn against him if his supper’s five minutes late. “Where is he?” I ask. “And Mama? What have you done with them?”

She smiles, though her face fights to hold the frown in place. An old gypsy song floats through the room like a breeze. Something about lost love, crying-in-your-vodka folk music; it must be Nadia’s radio still, but the music sounds watery, like it’s soaking into my skin.

“Your mother and brother will be safe, but I require your cooperation, Yulia.” She smiles—the confident smile the twins in the market wore. The smile of someone who holds all the cards, when their opponent doesn’t even know the game’s rules. She takes a step toward me, lamplight slithering off the edges of her brass military emblem. “It’s time to show you what you really are.”

I step back, but two men have appeared behind me. Their leather gloves are cold on my skin. I buck against them as they wrangle my arms behind my back. “Mama!” I scream. “What have you done with them?”

They yank me from the doorway. If I were stronger, perhaps I could break free, but I’m weak from too few rations and too many years of unfocused fear. They press a rag against my mouth, and the last thing I see is our old family photo with Mama and Papa smiling right at me before I’m lost in endless black.

CHAPTER 3

WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD
, I read about an experiment where biologists took silver foxes and bred the friendliest, most docile specimens to determine if domestication could be genetically inherited. In just a few generations, they’d produced playful, calm foxes that wanted to cuddle up to human beings and looked to them for happiness, like pet dogs.

The experiment was written up in one of Mama’s professional journals, back when she practiced medicine, before we went into hiding. I’d always been enamored of genetics, which had been Mama’s specialty before joining Papa in developmental psychology research, and something in this experiment strummed the right chord in me. I’d ramble about it to anyone unlucky enough to let me corner them. I dreamed of attending the Mendeleev Genetics Institute at Moscow State University, where Mama and Papa met, and researching a cure for the storm of thoughts inside my brother’s head.

I read every book about genetics and biology that I could find, forever lugging around books that unbalanced my eight-year-old frame. But I was not satisfied; I was desperate to fix my brother and his growing fits of fear. And so, in the meadow behind our dacha, our summer cabin in Kazan, I tried to catch and breed some foxes of my own.

The only thing I ever caught was a raccoon, and when I lifted up the seething, chattering cardboard box, he flew from it and latched on to me, a ball of claws and desperation. Mama snuck me into the laboratory where she and Papa worked—past the patrolling soldiers with AK-47s—to get a rabies shot immediately, instead of waiting at the state hospital. I didn’t understand why their clinic had armed guards, but I realized, then, that my parents’ work was perhaps not as straightforward as I thought.

But I kept dreaming of the Mendeleev Institute. I spent months formulating my strategy—everything in the Soviet Union is a system, a game, and you must learn the system’s rules. I devoted myself to earning perfect marks in biology. Papa only offered his constant platitudes; “An empty mind is a safe mind,” he’d say, though I wanted to fill my head with knowledge until it overflowed. After he left, and we went into hiding, Mama swore she’d help me find a way to attend. We would craft another identity for me to slip into, much like unbeknownst to Mama I was now learning to slip into others’ skin.

There was a second part to the fox experiment that I didn’t like to think about. In addition to breeding the friendliest creatures for domestication, the scientists bred the aggressive foxes together as well. For years those raging monsters, similar to the raccoon I’d caught, invaded my nightmares, striking at the cage wire, ready to attack the moment a person came near. When I joined the program, I told myself, I would do away with that part of the experiment.

CHAPTER 4

THE TILED INTERROGATION ROOM
could double as a grade school sports equipment closet or a changing room for the community pool—there’s that lingering musk of sweat and bleach and the rusty drain in front of the wooden chair that I’ve been bound to. But I know the real reason for the smell, the drain, the walls so easy to hose down. These are the sorts of closets dissenters get lost in, never to be found again. In my cotton-mouthed, sluggish waking, I fight to keep my wrists from settling on the chair’s wooden arms. I’m not in control of myself enough to keep from slipping into past prisoners’ battered skin.

When the door opens, it’s the red-haired KGB officer, clicking along the floor in black pumps with only a sly wink of a heel. The door shuts behind her and I catch a whiff of her weary body odor. I hope it’s been days since she slept; I hope her daring mission to capture me, a fearsome unarmed, half-starved teenager, has kept her from showering and eating. I don’t want to be the only prisoner here.

“You know why you are here.” She steps toward me, close enough that I could punch her if my hands weren’t tied.

I hold her gaze and don’t answer. Anything I might say could be used as an admission of guilt. I’m better off saying nothing and thinking even less. Whatever happens, I must play this like the market game: carefully, controlled.

“Your parents are Andrei and Antonina Chernin.” Air whistles through her front teeth, which I notice are bent inward, when she says our last name. “Both are wanted for political subversion and theft of state property.”

The theft part is news to me, but I don’t let it show. She lifts one eyebrow. Icy fingers of panic worm into my lungs. Why is she looking at me that way? A wisp of weepy gypsy music runs through my mind. In my foggy logic, I suppose she wears that music like others wear perfume.

“You are not troubled by these crimes? Perhaps you do not understand their seriousness.”

“I understand what you do to people who commit them,” I say.

She tightens her lips and
hmm
s. “Your family is already in my custody. It would be so easy, very easy, for you to help them out of this unfortunate situation. I only need for you to cooperate.”

“You don’t have
all
my family.”

I clamp my teeth down on my tongue. I shouldn’t have revealed that. But Papa is safe, Mama swears it; she just won’t tell me where.
An empty mind is a safe mind
, he would say. I can’t help thinking of the last time I saw him. Scarf wrapped tight at his throat; steel-rimmed glasses fogging as he steps into the cold.