He stared at her a moment, then laughed. —Nurse, pedant, and polyglot, the girl of my dreams.
Jolly him along, she thought, and she gave a half-smile. —I had tutors before I left for school, and then again when I came back.
— What do you mean, left?
— Boarding school.
— Your father sent you away?
— It’s not like that. And I didn’t stay. I was a bit of a troublemaker. So I came home, and my father hired tutors. French, Spanish, Italian, German, and some Old High German. I can read some Danish, too, but it’s very difficult for me, some rock in the fog, just out of my reach. I suppose you really want to know about the Russian?
This time, he did kiss her forehead. Then he said yes in every language he knew.
Sweat broke out on her neck, and she forced herself to smile. —My maternal grandparents emigrated to England in 1891. Part of the Russian flu, some people said. They were academics, he a linguist and she a chemist. They only had the one child, my mother.
He drew his lips over her hair.
Temerity struggled to concentrate. —In the end, I learned Russian from a lovely old count who emigrated in 1917. Very aristocratic. You’d shoot him on sight.
His lips touched her cheek, and he hesitated, giving her a chance to pull away.
She kept still.
He kissed her, just below the cheekbone.
Soft.
Then she got up, strode to the front room, turned up the radio.
Eyes shut, face red, Kostya let out a long breath. He tugged on civilian clothes, and, still buttoning his shirt, followed her.
She sat in the soft chair, body turned to the wall. Under the racket of a loud female voice rapping out arrest statistics, Temerity spoke in quiet accusation. —You’ve not got my papers.
— Look, I had a bad night.
Rubbing her cheek with the heel of her left hand, she gestured to the radio with her right. —Is that it, then? I’ll disappear?
— I’ll get them.
— Why couldn’t you get them last night? What in hell were you doing?
Surname, first name, patronymic. —Paperwork.
A recognition hit her. This menacing NKVD agent, her one link to freedom, didn’t know where to look.
He knelt beside her. —Please, don’t cry. I’ll find them, Nadia, just give me time.
— I’ve not got time! God’s sake, why have you done this? Why did you bring me here?
— Spain.
— Spain. I see. What was it, then? The sunny skies?
— No.
— The warm breezes, the shortage of clean water?
— No. Listen—
— The beautiful music of bombardment?
— Shut up!
She flinched.
Still on his knees, he’d tensed and now seemed ready to leap at her. —Is this some competition for you, woman? Which of us had the worse time in Spain? You want bombardment? Try Madrid, over and over, and fucking Gerrikaitz!
She said nothing.
The radio report on arrest statistics finished, and another announcer introduced a short musical selection: the ‘Garland Waltz’ from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty.
Kostya stood up, grabbed Temerity’s arms, and hauled her to her feet. —Shall we dance?
— No. Let me go.
Kostya led with vigour and grace; he murmured near her ear. —Ah, sunny Spain, Nadia: espionage, bombardment, and gonorrhea. I know you share the first two. You can travel. I can’t. Another country? Strange dirt and foreign water can only poison me, infect me with Trotskyism or worse, imperialist Western decadence. One soaks up treason from the very air. But I got to see Spain. Another country. I got to see it. I love Russia, and I got to leave Russia. My orders to go to Spain were a gift. You dance well for someone wearing no shoes, my sweet angel of Comintern. I saw another country. In a civil war. I knew something about that, the confusion, and the fucking hunger, always hunger, everyone. And I added to it. I hurt people. I called it interrogation. Then I killed them.
He made a misstep, corrected it.
I lost Misha.
He took in a sharp breath. —And then I fell in love with you.
Her body slackened in his grip. —What?
He tugged her along in the waltz. —I told myself love at first sight, true love, whatever one calls it, is just decoration for fairy stories. I did believe in it once. Wandering Ivan meets Marya Morevna, they fall in love, and he joins her on some difficult quest. Perhaps they even defeat Koshchei the Deathless, and then they live happily ever after. I believed it when I was a boy, and then, as a man, I forgot it. NKVD work knocks sense into you. Humans are flawed, we learned, and NKVD must root out and destroy those flaws for the good of everyone else. It’s a kind of love. Like when Arkady Dmitrievich would beat me. For my own good. He saved me, so I have to listen to him. How do I ever pay him back for saving me, hey? Or Vadym Minenkov, how can I repay him? I decide to serve them by serving my country. I do well, just as Arkady Dmitrievich predicted. Languages, he always said, your gift for languages. When he first tugged me up from the ground, I cursed him out in four different languages. Later he said he could see the future of the country in me. Why was Chekist Arkady Dmitrievich Balakirev, the Muscovite’s Muscovite, fourteen generations on his mother’s side, ten on his father’s, even in Odessa in January of 1918? Why did Arkady Dmitrievich happen to find me on the ground and think to help me up, just so I could curse him out like the bezprizornik I pretended to be? Great forces we don’t understand, Nadia, can’t understand. I surrender to that idea. I do. I submit. Arkady Dmitrievich was meant to find me, and I was meant to find you, first in Spain, then in a Lubyanka cell, and finally at Arkady Dmitrievich’s house. I love you. I am meant to love you. I submit.
The waltz ended.
He let go of her waist, took a step back, kissed her hand, and bowed.
She kept still. His voice at the clinic, so cold as he ordered her to kneel. Down. Now! Yet he’d fired wide. —You’re in love with me?
Kostya gave her an exasperated look.
The radio announcer urged all good Soviet children to get ready for a special treat today, a recording of Comrade Prokofiev’s Petya and the Wolf.
Temerity’s hand tingled where Kostya had kissed it, near the injection site. —And if you’d left me at this Arkady Dmitrievich’s house?
— Let me fix up some food, yes? Then I want to tell you a story.
As Kostya worked in the kitchen, Temerity stared at the radio.
I never tried to charm him. God’s sake, his beautiful face…
Prokofiev’s songbird asked the duck: What sort of bird are you that can’t fly?
Help me.
And the duck asked the songbird: What sort of bird are you that can’t swim?
Kostya and Temerity ate eggs and potato in silence until Kostya pushed his plate away, and the scrape of heavy glass across the wooden table seemed too loud. —I don’t know how Arkady Dmitrievich found me. I don’t even know how Odessa fell, and I was there. Early 1918. I was twelve. First the Reds took Odessa, then the Whites, then the Reds again, and any moment the Germans might roll in. I lost track. The Germans did take Odessa, after I got out, and years later Arkady Dmitrievich showed me a photograph of how the Germans cleaned the streets of bezprizorniki. Hanged them. I knew some of those boys. The one facing the camera as he tried to keep his balance on the gallows was called Timofei, Timofei Boykov. We sat next to each other in school. One day, I had the desk all to myself, and the teacher asked us all if we knew why Timofei had not come to school. None of us knew, yet all of us knew, even the teacher, because we all saw Timofei standing in queues for hire or huddled on the corner begging for coins and cigarettes. I heard him say that the next time a man offered to pay him for a blow job he’d cut the bastard’s Achilles tendon. When I saw him again, he was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and when he saw me, he looked so angry, like the whole mess was my fault. When I became a bezprizornik myself, Timofei got his revenge, and I took a beating. Down in the catacombs. ‘You pretended not to see me,’ he said. ‘Your grandfather gave me cigarettes and kopeks, but you pretended not to see me!’ I hated him, and I was afraid of him, yet when Arkady showed me that photograph years later, I wanted to be sick. He was just twelve. Fucked in the mouth.