“I’ve been too useless for too long,” she’d said.
Last night, instead of huddling in the darkness, she’d made an Iranian pomegranate-walnut stew. Tonight, she cooked a small roast chicken, rice and vegetable plov, and dovga yogurt soup. It had taken her most of the day, given her injuries, but she hadn’t complained or accepted help when Mark had offered.
They ate it all slowly, out on the balcony, with the sounds of Baku drifting up from the streets eight stories below them. The rumble of old Russian trucks mingled with the distant thuds of pile drivers pounding foundation supports for new skyscrapers deep into the ground. They drank a bottle of wine with dinner, then started in on another. As darkness fell, obscuring her scars, she grew cheerier, even elated at times.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, after finishing the last of her plov.
“Of?”
Daria got up from the little dinner table and sat down on a bench near the edge of the balcony.
“Of getting a master’s in international affairs.”
Daria already had a law degree from Georgetown but had joined the CIA before taking the bar.
“Oh?”
“I need to think about a career. With a master’s in international affairs, and a JD, and my language skills, I could get a job practicing international law at, like, the UN, or Amnesty International. I need to do something decent with my life.”
“You’d be good at that.” Those weren’t career options that appealed to Mark — he wasn’t much of a do-gooder — but he could see Daria enjoying that kind of work.
“If I don’t I’ll just go back to…”
Daria didn’t finish her sentence, but she didn’t have to — Mark knew what she meant.
She’d been born in Tehran some thirty years ago, as the Islamic revolution was raging. Her Iranian mother had been slaughtered by revolutionaries. Her American father had refused to care for her. Despite being raised in a wealthy Virginia suburb by well-intentioned adoptive parents, her inauspicious start in life, coupled with her own inclinations, had led her to a backstabbing underworld populated by spies and thieves. That underworld was what she didn’t want to go back to.
“I’d have to finish a master’s program in the States or Europe,” said Daria, “but I was thinking of taking some courses here at Western first. It’d be cheaper and the credits should transfer.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Maybe I could take one of your courses.”
Mark got up and sat next to her on the bench. “You wouldn’t learn much.”
She leaned into him. “Easy A, though.”
“Not necessarily. I am, however, receptive to bribes.”
The Glasnost restaurant was popular with retired Kazakh men who liked to sit at the plastic tables covered with plastic tablecloths, sip Derbes beer, and play toguz kumalaki, a popular board game. It was located on a potholed street lined with shops that sold little more than the bare necessities of life, reminding Mark of the neighborhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he’d grown up.
Daria appeared just after he’d started in on a Derbes. She was still wearing her InterContinental uniform, though she’d removed the name tag. Mark had meant to offer a brief explanation of why he was here, but instead he thought back to the last time he’d seen her naked, on his bed, after sex.
He wondered what the state of affairs was between her and Decker. None of his business, he knew. But he still wondered.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Mark pointed to his beer, and the one he’d bought for her. “Thought we could catch up over dinner.”
“I’m assuming you’re here about Deck?”
“Yeah.”
“Follow me. I don’t want to talk here.”
Daria started walking.
Mark left a twenty-dollar American bill on the table — the smallest he had — to cover what was only four dollars’ worth of beer, and followed her out the back of the restaurant. She led him down an alley that smelled of cat piss, then through the rear door of a two-story apartment building. After turning down a flight of steps, she stopped in front of a metal door and fished an oversized key out of her jacket pocket.
The door opened onto a small room. A streetlamp cast dim light through the basement windows near the ceiling. The dirty white walls were bare, and a single uncovered lightbulb dangled from the ceiling. Daria turned it on. A brown mini-refrigerator with a dented door sat in the corner next to a utility sink. The faded green plastic table in the center of the room looked as though it had spent many years aging in the sunshine. There was one fold-up chair, on which Daria now sat down.
She pointed to a couple of wooden milk crates in the corner. “Grab a few.”
Mark stacked them on top of one another and sat across the table from her. They looked at each other for a while.
“It’s good to see you,” said Mark.
“Stop staring at my face.”
“I wasn’t staring.”
“Yes you were.”
“I was just staring at you, not at—”
“You were staring at the scars.” She put a hand to her temple and turned away from him.
“I can’t even notice them. You look great, Daria.”
Mark had slept around plenty, and had even had some decent long-term relationships over the years, but the only other time he’d woken up in the morning with a woman actually in his arms was when he’d had sex for the first time, back when he’d been a sophomore in high school.
Ordinarily he preferred a certain distance when he slept. He didn’t like people breathing on him, no matter how good they looked or how nice they smelled, and he got hot if he felt crowded in bed. Even a light hand on his chest could lead to insomnia.
So even though he and Daria had started having sex weeks ago, not long after she’d started making good dinners and he’d started buying good wine, he’d always moved over to his side of the bed afterward. Until last night, that is, when they’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms.
Now it was morning, and since he’d woken up before her, he just lay there for a while, thinking. Her breathing was light, and her bare skin was cool where it touched his own. On the end table next to the bed, the wilted stargazer lilies that he’d bought two weeks ago hung limp in a vase. After fifteen minutes of just lying there, he started getting antsy, remembering why he liked his space in bed. He considered getting up. It was already late.
Then the phone on his end table rang.
“What time is it?” Daria stretched her arms up toward the headboard.
“Eight.”
Mark leaned out of bed and checked the caller ID. It just registered as an international number. “Shit,” he said.
“Are you going to answer it?”
Mark picked up the phone and listened silently as Daria curled up into the covers. He said “Yeah” a couple of times, and then, “Is that subject to discussion?” and finally, just before hanging up, “I’ll tell her.”
“Tell me what?”
Mark sat up in bed and ran his hand through his hair. “That was Kaufman.”