The Snowfly (27 page)

“Will I always be me?” I asked, half joking.

“It's too early to tell,” Anjali said ponderously.

When I left Heathrow for Moscow, I was alone. Anjali and I had said our final farewells without actually saying the words and I was sad, but also excited to be moving forward. The manuscript was in the Soviet Union and I was determined to find it.

9

The UPI office in Moscow was not a one-man show. There were three correspondents. Our chief was Susanna Ovett, the daughter of ­Russian parents who had fled the Soviet Union before the war. She was a graduate of NYU and Columbia and fluent in the language. She was a colorless woman, hardworking, deliberate, and calculating, her Russian blood giving her the perfect temperament for dealing with the obfuscatory Soviets. She was also single, but we never socialized. The other member of our triumvirate was Charles “Beany” Anderson, a redhead from Boise, Idaho, who had a Ph.D. in Russian studies from Stanford. Beany was our main bird dog at the defense ministry. Susanna covered the political events at the Kremlin. My beat was what we called Soviet life, the everyday life of simple comrades.

I met my Russian tutor the morning after I reached Moscow. Lydia Yonirovna was sixtyish, trim, well dressed, and all business. She gave me a copy of
Izvestia
to read out loud and after a while proclaimed that my comprehension was adequate but my pronunciation and accent were “atrocious and unlikely to be corrected in a lifetime.” She then set about to correct my deficiencies. Her standards and goals were somewhat higher than mine, but I worked hard and was satisfied with my own progress. The more I used the language, the easier it became. It had been a hindrance not to know the language in Vietnam. I was determined not to have to operate with this disadvantage again and in the Soviet Union I knew I needed to know what people were saying, even if I never let on that I could understand.

It was difficult making contact with the sort of people I was most interested in. There were plenty of allegedly rebellious young people eager to talk, but I didn't trust their motives and wanted to meet and understand people who lived simple lives and had no visions of grandeur. I learned to troll: the farmers' market, sporting events, museums, trolleys, and buses. Day after day I returned to write stories about cab drivers and bus jockeys and grave diggers and street sweepers. I did not compare their lives to counterparts in the West and I did not use last names. I simply told their stories, the facts of how they lived, their hopes and dreams. It was the approach I'd learned in Vietnam and refined in Britain.

I had been in the Soviet capital less than a month when I made a formal request for an interview with the officials in the Kremlin responsible for purchasing antiquities in the West. My request was ignored, which was pretty standard. A few weeks later I requested an audience with Brezhnev and this was refused before being processed. He was far too busy for journalists. All during this time I refrained from making inquiries specifically about Mikhail Peshkov. As driven as I was to solve the mystery of the snowfly, it was apparent to me, even before I arrived, that I needed to tread lightly in the USSR, at least until I understood how things worked and figured out how much leeway I really had.

In summer the Moscow River was a magnet for people. I had arrived in November and struggled through the slashing winter. By May, with the barest hint of sunshine, the grassy banks filled with the fish-belly white bodies of Muscovites in scanty bathing garb. Fishermen, swimmers, picnickers, bird-watchers, strollers, and sunbathers all shared space, a practice in peaceful coexistence. The kiosks along the river sold inexpensive
kvas
and ice cream and loaves of sweet black bread.

In a nation as spacious as the Soviet Union, it was hard to comprehend its overcrowding, but people could not move freely and were constrained by laws overlapping, interconnected, and almost always conflicting. Moscow was crammed beyond its holding capacity with five or six people shoehorned into space designed for two. When the weather warmed, people spilled into the city's parks and green areas. When the sun began to sink, the wooded areas filled with lovers and, though the uniformed militia were ubiquitous, there seemed to be an unspoken rule that summer belonged to the people and the police left them alone. Summer gave people the chance to depressurize from the frustrations of a seemingly endless winter. Those in power or with connections escaped to their dacha communities in the birch forests outside the city, but most citizens had to find their retreats within the city limits.

It had been a particularly long winter and a dismal, rainy, and muddy spring. With spring came a lengthening of days and I felt the familiar urge to find moving water and fish. I was partially successful. There were fishermen all along the banks of the river in the city; where they got their equipment remained a mystery. There weren't many stores in the city and none had sporting goods. Most of the gear I saw looked homemade.

During my first forays along the Moscow River I was given the cold shoulder, a default for Russians with outsiders. My clothes, especially my shoes, immediately marked me as a foreigner, and contact with foreigners was risky business. After the war, Stalin had sent tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers into the gulags simply because they had seen the West and were therefore assumed to be contaminated. Stalin was dead, but his lessons and far-reaching paranoia lived on.

Once summer turned serious, I visited the river regularly and began to observe a group of five fishermen. I had no idea what they did for a living, but they seemed to have time to come to the river every day. Eventually mutual curiosity took hold and we struck up a dialogue in mixed pidgin English-Russian. There was no ideology on the river and interest in catching fish transcended cultures. They were bait-and-bobber fishermen and we talked of fish caught and to be caught, of food and drink, of weather, and of women. We came to call ourselves the Anglo-Soviet Piscatorial Society. Nicolai, Pavel, Ivan, Georgi, Misha, and me. They were all veterans of the Great Patriotic War, men who had proven themselves against terrible odds and, having done so, felt no need to relive the doing. We fished for lethargic mirror carp, which were greenish brown in the Moscow River. I got hold of canned corn, marshmallows, and Vienna sausages and showed them American baits and ways. I never talked about fly fishing, which seemed light-years beyond what they were interested in. Somewhere in the Soviet vastness I knew there had to be trout, but I was pretty much stuck in Moscow and there were no trout there.

Then one day we fished just outside the city at Sabrony Bar, made a fire, and cooked the fish we caught. Two militiamen came to sternly lecture us on the rule against open fires. We offered them food and vodka, they accepted, shed their gray tunics, and joined us. We all got so drunk that we had to sleep it off on the side of the river that night.

Though Russians tended to be standoffish with strangers, once their suspicious natures were satisfied they embraced friends as few people I had known.

I wrote about many things in those early months after I forged friendships with my fellow anglers by the river, but I never wrote about the Anglo-Soviet Piscatorial Society. My fishing friends were mine alone.

In August we were fishing off a barge on the southern fringe of the city. I had no idea how this had been arranged, but it had. Russians learned the art of personal networking before it became a buzzword in American business schools. It was a hot and humid night and my Russian friends had small torches burning along the gunwales. The captain of a river tug joined us, as did several Russian women. I had a small Japanese-made, portable eight-track player that we used to listen to the Beatles and Fats Domino as we drank and fished off the vessel. Georgi brought a balalaika and strummed and picked while we danced the
gopak.
One of the Russian women and I went skinny-dipping, then crawled onto a platform at the rear of the barge and made love frantically while the Piscatores jounced boisterously above us. I did not even know her name. She had bleached hair and brown eyes and a come-hither smile. When it suddenly went silent on the barge, I had a sense of foreboding. I climbed up to see what was going on and a powerful set of hands clamped onto my shoulders and hoisted me aboard, scraping me over the railing and dumping me unceremoniously onto the filthy wooden deck. The woman was nowhere to be seen.

A heavy, rough blanket was pulled over my head and I was handcuffed and taken stumbling to an automobile and driven away. I could see nothing. I did not want to think about what lay ahead, but I had heard legions of stories about Westerners grabbed without warning by the security services; usually such events were intended only to harass or show official displeasure, but some such events ended badly with a foreigner's expulsion or worse, an untimely and lethal accident, complete with witnesses and corroborating evidence.

The car came to an abrupt halt. I was dragged from it into a building, shoved into a room, and left in the dark. I managed to get the blanket off. I felt the splinters from my slide along the deck of the barge. Pitch black. My heart pounded. Still naked. Jesus. It was common knowledge among Westerners that the KGB often stripped prisoners for interrogations. Why was this happening to me?

Eventually the door opened. I was given trousers. The cuffs made it nearly impossible for me to use my hands. I stumbled around trying to put the pants on, then lay down. I was hauled into another room and shoved unceremoniously onto a chair.

The man before me was immense. Most Russians I had met were short, but this man was tall and powerfully built. His hair was blond and cut close; a thick reddish brown mustache drooped over the corners of his mouth. He had gray eyes and dense eyebrows.

“You have committed a crime against the Soviet people,” he said. His voice was deep and menacing, his English flawless, hinting of England rather than America.

I thought of the willing flesh of the Russian woman and went cold. Had I been set up? The Soviet security services were famous for entrapments using women—enticements that spooks called honey traps.

“I have nothing to say,” I told him. “I've done nothing illegal. I want to talk to my embassy.”

He leaned close to my face. “You have violated a Soviet woman. This is not allowed.”

“I didn't violate anyone!”

His voice modulated. “It will be to your advantage to cooperate.”

“I
am
cooperating. I
am
telling the truth.”

“Truth is determined by the state.”

I countered. “Truth is determined by facts.”

My interrogator said, “Facts, like numbers, can be assembled to support many conclusions.”

I had just enough vodka lingering in my bloodstream to be combative. “I have nothing more to say, asshole.”

“In our system silence is an admission of guilt,” my interrogator replied, glaring at me and holding up a beefy fist. His knuckles were streaked with scars, some of them looking very recent. I tried not to flinch.

“Do you deny congress with a Soviet citizen?”

“I've only slept with Brezhnev's wife,” I said, lashing out. “I think he watched.”

The giant looked appalled and stepped back. “That is a
truly
disgusting image,” he said, allowing a smile to creep onto his wide face.

The doors to the room burst open and the members of the Anglo-Soviet Piscatorial Society tumbled in, smiling and jabbering, carrying bottles of vodka. The women were with them, including my swimming partner. A setup indeed.

My interrogator poked me in the center of the chest with a finger as thick as a broomstick. “You are not afraid,” he bellowed. “You have
balls!
” He turned and said something to the others about courage. They nodded drunkenly and began to applaud in the peculiar rhythmic way Russians clapped.

“What the hell is going on?” I was no longer afraid; I was embarrassed and more than a little infuriated by their practical joke.

Misha unlocked my handcuffs. Ivan gave me a tumbler of vodka.

The big man cocked his head to the side, crossed his arms, then grabbed my arms. “I am Viktor Andreyevich Valoretev.” He kissed me on both cheeks and gave me a playful shove that knocked me backward.

“Our comrade,” Misha said happily.

“A joke? You think this is a fucking joke?” I felt my temper flaring but before it could gain real intensity, I found myself laughing with the others. “You are all assholes,” I told them in Russian, which only made them laugh all the harder.

We stayed at the cabin for two days. There was a lily-pad-choked lake a hundred yards away, but we were having too good a time to bother with fishing.

My female companion was named Talia and she was a pediatrician. In fact, my colleagues were not simple working folk, but professionals and academics, and the dacha belonged to Misha's family.

The mysterious Valoretev and I talked nonstop about fishing. He said he wanted only to catch trout and that carp were the serfs of the fish world, bottom feeders like politicians and beneath his dignity.

When I asked him if there were trout near Moscow, he shook his head and said, “Not close.” Then he asked, “Do you use a fly rod?”

“Yes. Do you?”

He did not answer and I had no chance to follow up because Misha appeared and pulled me away.

“Only here are we truly free,” Misha confided. “The forest has no ears and Viktor Andreyevich is our sword and shield.”

It would be some time before I came to understand that Viktor, who was in his midthirties, was in the KGB and that our lives would be inexorably linked. The KGB called itself the “sword and shield” of Mother Russia. The only thing it shielded was the truth and that from the Russian people more than from the outside world.

 

•••

 

There was no official Christmas in Russia, but the Russian people sidestepped this technicality and put up trees and decorated them for New Year's. The happy days of fishing on the river had given way to crushing cold and blowing snow. The expatriate community felt isolated in the Soviet capital and tended to pounce on the slightest excuse to throw a party. These were not elegant affairs, but more like impromptu college dorm bashes with guests bringing whatever they had hoarded or brought back from the outside world during their most recent trip. I did not like such gatherings and avoided them to the extent I could. Ignoring them completely would have been unwise because there was always information and speculations to be had off the record. In the figurative sense Westerners in Moscow were all fishing for one thing or another and, like good anglers everywhere, we would trade and share some of our recent finds.