“Is that her?” Garin said, pointing to a photograph.
“No, my father removed her pictures. He didn’t want to be reminded.” She drank her wine and was quiet. “She was a typical Russian Jew. She decided the best thing for me was to become a ballerina, and I thought, well, that’s a good idea, but then I realized that she wanted me to accomplish what she had dreamed for herself as a child. All her frustrated ambitions landed on me. And then she died.”
She shrugged. “My father saw her suffer, and the needless inefficiency of the clinic made him angry. She died from their carelessness. It was the turning point in a series of difficult transitions, if you can think of tragedy as transition.”
“What happened?”
“Enough! I don’t want to talk about myself.”
His silence undermined her resolve, and then slowly she was telling the whole story of her parents, as if she had been waiting a long time for an audience. “My father was not the same man after her death,” she said. “Moody, angry, blaming her doctors, and he drank. He began to resent the Party. I never knew a man could love a woman so much. All I remembered was their shouting, but in death she became a saint. Who knows what goes through a man’s mind. He put all his attention on me after her death. She had encouraged me to dance, and he took up that cause. It was like I had two parents pushing me. He knew men who put in a good word for me at the Bolshoi School. I was good enough to get in, but you only discover how bad you are when you compete against talented girls—and all the time I was thinking I should dance for my mother. I was fourteen years old. What did I know?
“I never would have had a long career. My injury was a godsend. It protected me from public failure.” She refilled her wineglass and his. “You drink a lot. I know about heavy drinkers.” She stared at him. “My father was executed when I was twenty. That was the second transition. I am now on my third tragedy. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
She laughed sadly. “They said no child should bear the sins of her father. Dmitry Posner took responsibility for me, giving me the privileges I would have had if my father had lived. He helped my career at the Bolshoi, and he protected this flat from a bureaucracy that wanted to evict me. And when I was injured, he helped me find employment in State Security. My brother and I took a new last name after Father was executed. We were told that if we had the surname Zyuganov, we’d be connected to the traitor Zyuganov—and we would suffer.”
She pointed to the photograph of her brother on the T-62 tank. “Luca was the talented one. Three years younger. Stupidly patriotic, but a clever boy. So eager to erase his father’s stigma with his own heroics. He volunteered for the front. And do you know the worst part? They used him against me.”
Garin had been picking at the duck when she made her claim, and he lifted his eyes.
“Posner. Talinov. All my father’s colleagues said, ‘Don’t dig up the past, Nastia. Don’t ask questions.’ They made it clear that Luca would suffer if I tried to find out why my father was executed so quickly.” She put a pistol finger to the nape of her neck. “I know how he died. I know where he died, and I know why. What I don’t know is who. Talinov pulled the trigger, but I don’t know who betrayed him.”
Natalya carefully placed her knife on the table, aligning the blade vertically, and she raised her fierce eyes to Garin. “Was it you?”
Garin didn’t respond.
“Or maybe you just failed him,” she said. “Guilt doesn’t become you. For a quiet man, you have a hard face.” Her voice had turned angry.
“He was compromised,” Garin said calmly, his eyes on hers. “Compromised from the inside. Someone knew he would be crossing that night. Yes, I visited his grave. Yes, I regret the failure. Could I have done more? Probably. I often ask myself what we did wrong. But in time, I have come to understand the problem was inside the KGB.”
Natalya leaned back and pondered Garin. She tapped her palm with the knife. “They made it clear. ‘Don’t ask questions. Don’t do anything stupid, Natasha. Luca has a good career. You will hurt him if you are too curious.’ ” Natalya slowly leaned forward again and took her wineglass, coddling it. “I was quiet for years. Then Luca was killed. My third transition.” Her expression became a sad, careless smile. “Now, I am free to ask questions, free to leave, free to avenge him.” She patiently tapped the knife on the table. “A prisoner of all my freedoms.”
She was silent for a long moment, then said, “We have a joke. We like jokes. There is a billboard near Red Square that proclaims capitalism is rotting away. A diplomat returns from his two years in London and a friend asks, ‘Well, is it true? Is it rotting?’ The diplomat says, ‘Yes, of course, but the smell of decay is quite pleasant.’ ”
Natalya smiled. “A stupid joke, but soon I will again smell the bouquet of decay.” She noticed that Garin had been looking at her pearls. “Maybe you’re a thief,” she said, laughing, her fingers at her neck as she touched her pearls. “I don’t dress like this often. I want to feel better about myself. Does that happen to you? Do you dress up to feel better about your life?”
Natalya suddenly looked at him. “There is a woman’s photo in your wallet. Of course I looked. Who is she?”
“My wife.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
She was skeptical.
“Ex-wife,” he said.
“You left her?”
“She left me.”
“Did you love her?”
“I don’t know.”
Natalya scoffed. “If you say you don’t know, then you don’t admit it. Men don’t know what they feel for women. They get confused by affection.” She paused. “I never wanted that responsibility—marriage. It was easy for me, as a Bolshoi dancer. Everyone wanted to sleep with me.” She shrugged. “Some men were nice, most were clumsy. I was with Bogdan a year ago. He still thinks I owe him some emotional privileges because I once took him into my life and read his shitty novels.”
Garin listened to her casual insults tossed out like discarded cigarettes. He heard a hint of regret in her easy toughness.
“Were you ever happy?” she asked.
“A stupid question. Only an unhappy person would ask that question.”
“Maybe not. What do you know?”
“I know what you’ve told me. This apartment. Your childhood memories. Your brother, father, mother. So much pain for one life.”
“I’m Russian,” she snapped.
“So am I.”
She laughed her answer. “A strange Russian with an odd accent who thinks you can be happy. Where is your suffering? You, a Russian American mongrel.”
Garin felt the first stirrings of anger. The wine, which had begun to pleasantly numb him, and her rudeness combined to irritate him. He was glad neither of them was good at flirting. It was a kind of game, a deception, but at that moment he knew that they were not acting.
“Speak,” she said. “Tell me your suffering.”
“Your father knew.”
“Well, perhaps you should tell me, since he never shared it. Where were you born? Who was your mother?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he grunted. “I don’t talk about myself. It’s not safe.”
She laughed. “As if everything else you do keeps you from an early grave.”
He surrendered. “It doesn’t matter what my mother’s name was. Let’s call her Yelena, for the purpose of this conversation. There was a woman, and maybe she had a son. Is that satisfactory?”
Natalya nodded.
“She was a Russian translator working in Moscow for the Americans who’d come here during the war to manage the lend-lease logistics for tanks supplied to the Red Army. She was a widow with a five-year-old son. Russian men were all at the front. She worked for an American captain, and they had an affair. When he was sent back to Washington, he took her and her son. The boy grew up there. She spoke Russian to him at home, but he was raised as an American.”