You Are One of Them (15 page)

“She’s not
my
Jennifer Jones.”

“No? You act like it. She is your obsession.”

“I’m not obsessed with her,” I said. “She was my friend.”

“Obsession,” she whispered theatrically. “Like Calvin Klein, yes?”

“If she’s really alive, tell me where she is.”

“I can tell you where the defectors—how do you say?—gang it out.”

“Hang out.”

“
Da,
gang out.”

“She’s a defector?” I said. My shrink was going to have a field day.

Svetlana lit a cigarette and gave me a coy smile. “This would be very interesting truth. Front-page truth for sure. Is possible she lives in dacha outside Moscow, near Edward Lee Howard. KGB gave him apartment on Arbatskaya, dacha
in country. Sure, maybe Jennifer Jones also has
kvartira
on the Arbat.”

“Everything is maybe!” I said.

Svetlana smiled. “Exactly,” she said.
“Babushka na dvoye skazala.”
Literally, Grandmother said two things. Meaning no one can know for sure.

“I’m sick of maybe.”

“Good thing come to those who wait.”

“I can tell that you work in advertising,” I said. “Everything you say sounds like a slogan.”

“Richard gave to us the presentation of slogans.”

“What presentation?”

“It was history of famous advertisements, from UK and USA. I know your Energizer Bunny. Your
‘Ring Around the Collar
.
’ I know your ‘Good to the Last Drop
.
’
Your ‘Ultimate Driving Machine.’ Your ‘Breakfast of Champions.’ Your ‘Snap Crackle Pop.’ ‘Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hands.’ ‘Takes a Licking and Keeps On Ticking.’ ‘Just Do It.’ ‘The Real Thing.’ ‘Where’s the Beef?’—”

I interrupted her. “Did Richard give you a test?”

“Kakoy?”
Which?

“You just memorized all those ads for fun?”

“I am learning to climb corporate ladder.”

I studied her face for signs that she was joking.

“Capitalism,” she said with a shrug. “You swim or you drown.”

“Sink or swim.”

“Sink or swim,
da,
” she said. She pondered the slice of bread in her hand and sighed. “It is not only the maps.”

“What maps?”

“The maps are always changing. Petersburg became Leningrad, then Petersburg again. And Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, even Ukraine break away from Soviet Union. And the cathedral? The Cathedral of Christ the Savior? Right here in center of Moscow? Stalin tore it down, then Khrushchev built the swimming pool there, but now they have torn down pool to build again the church. Perhaps someday it will be another swimming pool.” She waved her hand as if sweeping away cobwebs. “Everything is different. It is not the world we grew up in. Even our flag is new.
Ponimayesh?
”

“Da,”
I said. “I understand.”

“Everything we were taught to believe in does not exist anymore. We cannot go back. So we must to find the new things to believe.”

I admired her flexibility. She was too resourceful to sink. I looked at my watch and realized we’d been away from her office for two hours. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“This is what you call working lunch,” she said. Then she lifted a finger to silence me and held it in the air, as if it were a radio tower waiting for a signal. I listened. Finally she leaned in and whispered, “The truth is that Jennifer is not ready to see you. When she is, I will contact you.”

“Does she know I’m here?” I said.

She sliced a finger across her neck to kill the discussion. Then she raised her glass and nodded at my glass of Czar.

I lifted it in a reluctant toast. Russians are fond of toasts.
“U menya tost,”
they say. I have a toast. I waited for Svetlana’s contribution.

“Up your bottom,” she said.

I did not correct her.

The Moscow Rules, designed by CIA operatives in the 1970s to outsmart the KGB:

1. Assume nothing.
   
2. Never go against your gut.
   
3. Everyone is potentially under opposition control.
   
4. Don’t look back; you are never completely alone.
   
5. Go with the flow, blend in.
   
6. Vary your pattern and stay within your cover.
   
7. Lull them into a sense of complacency.
   
8. Don’t harass the opposition.
   
9. Pick the time and place for action.
   
10. Keep your options open.
    

I
CALLED MY MOTHER
that afternoon. It was early in the morning in Washington, and the phone woke her up. I knew she was sitting up in bed, fingering the telephone cord like a rosary. Her bedside table was always littered with apple cores—she ate fruit while reading at night—and the half of the bed that had once belonged to my father was a dumping ground for nuclear-safety reports.

“Sarah?” she said. I could hear the panic frothing in her voice. “Is everything okay?” [ . . . ]

Our conversation was fractured by a delay after each of us spoke. The tenuous international connection turned the smallest pause for breath into something craven. I pushed my words into the first space I could find.

“I’m not in danger,” I said. [ . . . ]

“This must be [ . . . ] costing a fortune. [ . . . ] Charge it to your dad.” [ . . . ]

“I have a question,” I said. [ . . . ]

“He can afford it.” [ . . . ]

“My question” [ . . . ]

“Are you taking photos? [ . . . ] Going where Jenny went?” [ . . . ]

“I just want to ask you,” I said. [ . . . ]

“Re-creating Jenny” [ . . . ]

Our conversation kept hitting speed bumps. “About Mr. Jones,” I said. [ . . . ]

“Ed Jones?” [ . . . ]

“Yes. [ . . . ] What kind of [ . . . ] consulting” [ . . . ]

“Intelligence,” she said. [ . . . ] “Intelligence operations. [ . . . ] They consulted for the NSA [ . . . ] the CIA.” [ . . . ]

“The CIA?” I said. [ . . . ]

“The Defense Department.” [ . . . ]

“CIA?” I said again. [ . . . ]

“Yes, the CIA.” [ . . . ]

“Did he have access [ . . . ] to classified information?” [ . . . ]

“Classified?” [ . . . ]

“To secrets?” [ . . . ]

“Yes, all those guys do [ . . . ] at that level. [ . . . ] Not just government employees but the private sector [ . . . ] contractors and consultants [ . . . ] also. [ . . . ] Sarah? [ . . . ] Sar?” [ . . . ]

“I’m here.” [ . . . ]

“Are you taking [ . . . ] the pictures? [ . . . ] The places Jenny” [ . . . ]

“Yes [ . . . ] but” [ . . . ]

“Be [ . . . ] careful.” [ . . . ]

“Mom?” [ . . . ]

“Send me e-mail [ . . . ] so I know [ . . . ] you’re” [ . . . ]

“Can you hear me?” [ . . . ]

But she was gone. There was a click.

•   •   •

I
COULDN’T SLEEP THAT
NIGHT.
At two in the morning, while Corinne slumbered, I locked myself in the bathroom and filled the tub. The medicine cabinet was stocked with various vials and creams. (“I always get free beauty products at work,” Corinne had told me. “Right now I’m totally obsessed with Clarins. It’s the best.”) Among the moisturizers and perfumes, I found a jar of bath balls. They were the translucent gold of amber and looked as if they were capable of suspending insects in their cores. Amber was big in Russia. Corinne said you could find beautiful amber jewelry at Izmailovo for almost nothing. I dumped two of the balls under the running water, watched them first dissolve into a viscous fluid like honey and then float into bubbles. The bubbles multiplied like cells, and the room filled with a strange, sweet smell. It wasn’t lavender. It wasn’t gardenia. And then as I sank into the water—so hot, so deliciously hot—it hit me: honeysuckle. “Honeysuckle,” I said aloud, just to savor the tickle of the word. And then I turned on the Jacuzzi—such a 1980s luxury, I thought—and opened my legs around a jet. It had been seven months since I’d had sex. My last boyfriend was a philosophy major named Peter who announced one day, with the precision of a surgeon, that he was not in love with me. “I’m not sure I ever was,” he said. “Though at one point I wanted to be.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” I said to him.

“I deserve more,” he said.

“More of what?” I said.

We had been together for eighteen months, and he’d declared his love for me many times, though in hindsight I realize he was really falling in love with himself. “You make me feel hot, and you make me feel loved,” he said once.

Early in our relationship, he had called me a miracle. “I’m not a miracle,” I told him. “I’m a human being with all kinds of flaws.” He made fun of me for being so literal, but I had to set the record straight. If he thought I was perfect, he would be disappointed. The way my father was disappointed by my mother. The way Jenny was disappointed by me. I pressed myself closer to the water’s source because I wanted to feel the rush, and I did, trembling in that hot, sweet bath until I was spent enough to sleep.

E
VEN BEFORE THE
SNOW FELL,
the color drained out of the sky. Everything was desaturated and gray. The horizon line vanished into the monotone. I could see how weather might calcify a person, how enough days without sun could make you hard. How your humor might get bleaker, how cynicism might take root. The air was glassy and sharp, and being outside made me feel ready to break.

I didn’t hear from Svetlana for a few weeks. I called her office every day. The first few times, the man who answered just said
“Nyet”
when I asked for her and slammed the receiver down. I thought I had the wrong number and called back, only to be hung up on again. A few times I got her office voice-mail. I e-mailed her twice. Maybe she didn’t get my messages. In those days e-mails sometimes took days—even weeks—to go through. So I fell in with Corinne and her expats. She spent most of her time with two other American women: Leslie the NPR reporter and a pale, willowy woman named Jane who worked at the embassy. Jane arranged to have mail from the States delivered to Corinne via diplomatic pouch. “It helps to have friends in high places,” she said.

I joined them on their trips to the CD market to buy pirated music. We went to see American movies at the Radisson. One night we went to the American Bar & Grill for burgers (
gamburgery
in Russian) and beer.

“Is it true,” I asked Jane, “that half the people in the embassy are spies?”

“All I know is I’m not a spy,” she said. “I’m from Minnesota. We don’t know how to keep secrets.” Her hair was fair and fine as a duckling’s; downy pieces stuck up around her temples, suspended by static. She wore glasses with frames the color of jade.

“And at the Russian embassy in D.C.?” I said. “Aren’t most of the so-called diplomats spies?”

Jane swiped a french fry through the puddle of ketchup on her plate. “Are you one of those James Bond junkies who turns every coincidence into a conspiracy?” she said. And then, before I could answer, she said, “God, I love ketchup. It’s embarrassing how much I love it. I’m such a stereotype. The midwesterner who loves ketchup. But I do. I put it on everything. Eggs, mac ’n’ cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches. I can’t help it. Sometimes I think I just eat fries as a ketchup-delivery system.” She laughed at herself.

“And what’s really annoying is you never get fat,” said Corinne. “If I ate the way you do, I’d gain like twenty pounds.”

“You’d never let that happen,” Leslie said.

Silence fell over the group like a blanket extinguishing a fire. It was the awkward quiet of people who don’t know each other that well, who still feel obligated to fill the spaces between them. Corinne, Leslie, and Jane were held together by the flimsiest of threads: they had nothing in common beyond nationality. In New York they might never have met. As a group they manufactured fun, but there was a sense that they were all settling for one another’s company. All expat relationships are glazed with transience. You never get too attached because you know you’re going to leave.

“Do you think that Dad always knew he’d go back to England?” I asked my mother once. I must have been nineteen, home for winter break. Our holidays were stunted and bare; some years we didn’t bother to decorate our tree. We ordered Chinese food, as if we were actually Jewish. But it was Christmas Eve, and the public radio station was playing carols and my mother was singing along. She liked the old English ones: “The Holly and the Ivy” and “Lo, How a Rose Ere Blooming.” She had a lovely voice.

“He didn’t plan to fall in love with an American,” my mother said. “But he didn’t plan to fall out of love either. If things had worked out differently, we could have ended up in London with him.”

Such a possibility had never occurred to me. It could have been me and my mom, not Sebby and Phillipa, in the house in Holland Park. Phillipa’s Christmas card—a picture of Sebby on a horse—had arrived the day before. Over the years fewer and fewer people sent us cards. When my father was around, we received hundreds. My parents had friends all over the world. But after my mother stopped accepting invitations and going to parties, our names were crossed off correspondence lists. By the time I was in high school, the only card that arrived every year was the one from Phillipa and my dad. It was always addressed to me, as if my mom didn’t exist.

“You would have had to take a plane to get to London,” I said, and instantly regretted being so mean.

“I used to fly,” she said.

My parents met when my father was in graduate school. My mother was an undergraduate—“a Cliffie,” my father said—and he spotted her reading in Harvard Square and immediately asked her to lunch. “I was besotted,” he said.

“What was she reading
?”
I wanted to know the first time I heard the story.

“I don’t remember,” he said.

“Emily Dickinson,” my mother told me later. “I was reading Emily Dickinson. ‘I felt a funeral in my brain.’” She let out a short, bitter laugh. “There was no false advertising, you know. I never pretended to be someone I wasn’t. Your father just refused to see me for who I was.”

•   •   •

I
CONTINUED TO VISIT
the places Jenny had been, not just because my mother wanted me to but because I hoped to find some residue of Jenny’s presence. I went to the Old Circus one night; it was full of children, and I realized that they were the first kids I’d seen in Moscow. I hadn’t noticed a single playground. If children are the future, their absence suggested a lack of faith. But now I was surrounded by children—where did they all come from? They packed the sticky seats of the amphitheater, squirming and sniffling, their noses running with seasonal colds. Their giddy pink faces turned up to watch the acrobats. The costumes were tattered, with patches of fabric bereft of sequins, but if you squinted, the illusion was intact.
Jennifer Jones has taught us that children everywhere are the same,
said the opinion pages.
Innocence has no borders.
Jennifer Jones taught us that everyone, all over the world, loves a good show.

Meanwhile the
Moscow Times
ran a story about a traveling Russian circus that had been stranded, without money, in the Philippines for seven months. Despite charity donations, much of the troupe died of starvation. Just thirteen of the original thirty-seven performers and nine of the original animals survived the ordeal. “I’m sorry to laugh,” Corinne said when we read the article, “but you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.”

Another night Corinne and I went to the Bolshoi for a performance of
Swan Lake.
The theater had seen finer days: it was a diva past her prime. The applause at the end of the ballet was the most remarkable thing about the performance. The dancers were summoned for curtain call after curtain call, and dozens of people in the audience approached the stage with bouquets. The clapping went on for half an hour, and by the end my hands were raw and the prima ballerina was holding so many flowers that we could no longer see her face.

I grew bolder about exploring on my own. I’d begun to make sense of Moscow’s circular design, the concentric rings of its streets. The city had no grid; it rippled out from the Kremlin, vibrant in reds and yellows, but seemed duller the farther you moved from the center.

On the day I’d first met Svetlana, she said, “How do you like Moscow? Is it like Washington?”

“It’s nothing like Washington,” I said.

But I soon realized that wasn’t true. Both cities loved monuments. Both had tombs dedicated to unknown soldiers and imposing statues of their founding fathers. In both cities there were too many one-way streets. You couldn’t turn left anywhere in Moscow, so driving was infuriatingly inefficient. But the Metro was fast and cheap.

I went back to Lenin’s tomb. Inside, the mausoleum was lit like a church, with a halo of light over the body. Americans told me that it wasn’t really Lenin, that it was a wax surrogate entombed in glass. It did resemble a figure at Madame Tussaud’s, I thought, but the guard whisked me and the other visitors through the room too quickly for us to get a closer look.

I visited the Tretyakov Gallery and the Pushkin Museum. I learned the drill at museums: you had to trade your shoes for felt
tapochki
that kept sliding off your feet as you moved through the galleries. At the Pushkin I savored paintings by Matisse; at the Tretyakov I stood in awe of the Kandinskys and Chagalls. I walked past the White House—so different from the one in Washington—and the headquarters of the Soviet “news” agency, TASS. I strolled along the river by the beloved Red October factory, where the scent of chocolate in the air was cloyingly sweet. I ventured to Tolstoy’s winter house, where everything had been preserved exactly as he’d left it. On the floor beside his desk were two tiny barbells. They must have weighed about one pound each. I wondered if he used them during writing breaks, if he was doing biceps curls right before he threw Anna Karenina onto the tracks.

I signed up for a Russian conversation class and started taking the Metro to Moscow State University every morning. There were ten people in the class, and all of us were women. Most were wives whose husbands’ jobs had brought them to Moscow. There was a Chinese diplomat’s wife, fine-boned and delicate; a freckled, middle-aged Brit married to someone at the BBC; a no-nonsense Dutch woman, whose elongated face reminded me of a Modigliani painting. Our teacher was Irina, whose pedagogy was inspired by the way children learn. She never spoke a word of English, but she repeated Russian phrases over and over again, trusting that meaning would be revealed by context. She stood in the center of the room, playing with props and exaggerating her expressions like a clown. The class was two hours long. It was baffling at first, but within three days I saw dramatic improvement in my language skills. I no longer constructed phrases in my head before I said them. Words were spilling out. I was picking up the speech patterns of the Muscovites around me. My vocabulary grew without flash cards.

I got used to the arbitrary scheduling of the
pereryv
—the break when shops, offices, and restaurants would close in the middle of the day, sometimes for an hour, sometimes longer. I got used to checking my coat everywhere (you had to check it, whether you wanted to or not). I learned that the main ingredient in “salads” was mayonnaise. I learned that Russians loved ice cream so much that they ate it on the street even when it was freezing outside. I got used to being bossed around by babushkas. Old Russian women didn’t hesitate to scold people on the street.
Devushka!
they’d say.
Girl!
You’re not dressed warmly enough,
they’d say. Or,
Tie your shoe.
They always found something to wag their fingers at. Part of me resented the intrusion; part of me was sure I deserved the criticism.

I had always been quick to assume I was in the wrong. My perpetual sense of wrongness followed me into clothing boutiques, where I apologized to the clerks who maniacally refolded the sweaters I picked up from display tables; to hair salons, where I was uncertain about how much to tip; to shoe stores, where I often bought the first pair I tried on because I couldn’t bear to trouble anyone to bring me another style or size from the back. There are some women—Mrs. Jones was one of them—who are comfortable being waited on. When she took Jenny and me to Saks Fifth Avenue, she thought nothing of monopolizing an hour of a saleswoman’s time. Jenny and I sat on the floor outside the fitting rooms while her mother tried on dress after dress before their trip to the Soviet Union. “What do you think, girls?” she’d say, emerging from her stall. “Do I look like Jackie O?” And Phillipa was equally comfortable being served. On my visit to London, I was amazed to see that she actually summoned the housekeeper with a bell.

The babushkas working in Moscow’s museums were quick to reprimand anyone who tried to take pictures without paying extra for a photography pass. There was a permission slip for everything, I discovered. If you wanted to swim in one of Moscow’s pools, you first needed to visit a doctor—every pool seemed to have its own one-man clinic for this purpose—and pay to be examined as proof that you were not contagious with some kind of disease. Once you had your
spravka,
you could use the pools for six months, but even in the locker room the babushkas were there with unsolicited advice. On my visit to the Chaika pool—heated for swimming outdoors even in the dead of winter, when steam rose from the water as if from a hot spring—I was shamed in the shower by a babushka who stood uncomfortably close and pointed at my crotch until I had thoroughly scrubbed it.

I dropped off my résumé at the
Moscow Times.
They invited me back to take the copy-editing test. I began looking at the real estate section, at Western-style apartments. They were expensive, but I’d find a roommate, and if necessary I could dip into the money my father had given me. My mother wouldn’t want me to stay, but I didn’t want to end up like her, always taking the safe route, afraid to get on a plane.

One sunny afternoon after class, I strolled the Arbat, trying to be inconspicuous as I scanned the scene. It was a cobbled pedestrian street. A man in a withered tuxedo played the violin. I recognized the flurry of bright notes as a Mozart concerto and dropped a dollar into the velvet-lined case at his feet. Artists sketched caricatures in charcoal. Many of the drawings were of American celebrities; I saw David Duchovny and Cindy Crawford in the mix. There were some tourists, I noticed, and a lot of Russian teenagers, lurking in smoky packs. I don’t know what I was hoping to find. Even if Edward Lee Howard still lived in an apartment on the Arbat, did I expect him to be milling around in the crowd? I don’t know how I thought I’d identify him. What did defectors look like? Did regret linger on them like scars? Or, like my father, did they plunge into their new lives without looking back?

I saw
White Nights
a few months after Jenny died. Gregory Hines was an American defector who ended up in Siberia with his beautiful Russian wife, played by Isabella Rossellini. Baryshnikov starred as a Russian ballet dancer who had defected to America but ended up back in Soviet custody after his plane made an emergency landing on an airbase in the USSR. I sat in the dark wishing that Jenny could be there in the theater with me.
Is Russia really like that?
I would have asked her. It was 1985, and everyone in America loved Baryshnikov: he was gorgeous and talented, and he’d chosen
us.
He was like a lover who had actually left his wife, and America was his triumphant mistress.