“Your sentence will end in a pit.”
I tried to sit erect. I tried to show that he had not defeated me. I found that I stooped, as if I was being physically beaten.
“It is scarcely a choice,” Beria continued. “Either you will disappear, you and your whole world, swallowed up in smoke … or else you will serve your country, serve it brilliantly, a weapon in the Soviet’s hand, and you will live. Perhaps you will win a Stalin Prize. You will be released, you will live, you will be celebrated for all you have contributed to our mighty and unbreakable union.”
Beria said it all with that even cadence, that wicked voice. He leaned back, crossing his legs.
“Are you lying or are you telling the truth?” I said, as if I was brave. My voice was as thin as notepaper.
“Oh I am telling the truth,” Beria murmured.
For an instant I imagined leaping from my chair, throwing myself out the open window, a long free leap. I closed my eyes.
It would not really be so different, would it, colluding with Lavrentiy Beria? My life already felt like a remnant of itself. Like a thin dream. Like a habit.
What would change?
Just a new set of orders.
Danny Finch’s blood, moving across the floor.
Perhaps this is what Lenin would have wanted: his scientist, listening for the state.
His scientist, going on.
Perhaps I was not giving anything away. A lossless exchange, a chance for redemption. Trading scraps of my present for what we all would require tomorrow, in this war.
I looked at the faded lights behind my closed lids.
I wondered how much a man can make up for the parts he has wasted.
In a small voice, I said: “I want my family.”
“What?”
I cleared my throat. “My wife. Lavinia.” I straightened in my chair, blinked bloodshot eyes. “They told me they would bring her from America.”
Beria looked at me with a frozen expression, lips barely parted.
“I love her,” I said, in a tarry voice.
Then his lashes fluttered behind his spectacles and he laughed, hard and flat, key ring jingling in his pocket, because he knew it was not true.
EIGHT. THE MORNING FOG
LET ME DESCRIBE MY LAST DAYS in America.
In Moscow today it is balmy, like summer, a lying summer, and the melting snows rush through the streets like rivers. At my window it is as if I am in the midst of rapids, with the sound of laughing children, and sunlight, dazzling sunlight. Eight years later, let me tell you about my last days in America.
It was like this.
I used to meet with men at a diner called L’Aujourd’hui. The Today. These meetings were gruelling: the tedium of idiots, the brute force of an invisible hand. I hated the appointments, hated the operatives who met me, hated the bland reports they drew from me, like steam from a kettle. And yet in the waning heat of 1938, the early autumn, I spent days and nights alone at that same corner dive, waiting for today to turn into tomorrow.
I have never told anyone this.
I did not want to go home. I didn’t want to face the carousel of students, the visits from friends, the expectant eyes of Lavinia Williams, Lavinia Termen, who loved me as if we were young lovers, everything within reach. Instead of facing life and marriage, I hunched in a booth at L’Aujourd’hui, ordering cups of black tea, lemon squares, bowls of potato chips. I sketched plans on paper placemats. I pretended to myself that I was hard at work, waved excuses to Lavinia as I hurried out the door every morning, but there were no revelations on that glossy tabletop. My ideas were desperations. I let them blot salt crumbs and spilled tea.
When the restaurant closed, around midnight, I packed up my things, plinked pencils into my briefcase. I meandered home through the blue streets. Usually Lavinia would be waiting. On the final block I would ask and ask the air for my wife to be asleep, dreaming, folded in sheets. Sometimes I would pass the house and double back, to approach again. Let her be sleeping. Let her be sleeping. On many of those nights I would come in and climb the stairs, turn off the lamps, stand at her feet. She always slept on her belly, like something brought in from the shore.
“Hard day?” she’d ask, the other times. She would crouch beside me as I removed my shoes. “You need to take it easier, Lyova.”
I was deeply in debt. Even living rent-free in my friends’ house, I was drowning in everyday expenses, equipment rentals, interest payments. With money she thought we had, Lavinia bought houseplants, rambling gardenias. Every day our rooms looked more alive, blooming, budding. Every week I searched for someone else to borrow money from, laughing about IOUs, lying about overdue commissions. I owed tens of thousands in taxes. My handlers at L’Aujourd’hui told me I should leave the United States, return to Russia. I refused. I always refused. At Lavinia’s ballet performances I sat with her friends, hands on thighs, watching the dancers twist in the air, watching Lavinia turn from the back of the stage to stare into the dark, the crowd’s dark, where we could not be seen.
BERIA GAVE ME A special office in Marenko’s secret wing. I had an orange pass with my name and Yukachev’s signature. The other engineers asked what I was working on now and I just shrugged, lifted and lowered my shoulders. They let the matter drop. I was not the only zek with a mysterious new commission: Rubin had been transferred to a facility across town, for something to do with hydrogen isotopes.
My work was not with atoms. Every day I showed an attendant my little orange card and entered an almost empty laboratory — four rows of desks, shelves of equipment, an incongruous crystal chandelier. Stalin glowered from a wide, dark painting. I shared the lab with one other engineer, a radar man, and a lanky free worker whose job it was to watch us. We spent our days in separate, silent labour. It never felt like the room had enough air. I ate lunch in the same kitchen where I had sat with Beria, chewing softly beside the stoves. The windows had been closed and locked. If I needed new components, new machines, I submitted a written request. Every requisition was granted.
My task was simple, but then it was not so simple: a bug that required no power source. That required no wires leading in or out. That required no tapes, and scarcely any metal. An invisible, imperceptible, inert device that remembers any secrets that are told to it.
I think it is probably the best thing I ever made.
ONE MORNING IN NEW YORK the owner of L’Aujourd’hui came up to my table, drying a plate, like a character in a play.
“Hello,” he said, in Russian.
“Hello,” I said, in English.
He dried his plate.
“Gotta ask,” he said. “You okay, bud?”
I did not lift my head from my work. I was drawing a semicircle. “Yes.”
Mud Tony shrugged. “All right,” he said. He began to move away.
I raised my face and squinted at him. “Can I ask you a question?”
“What’s that?”
“Should I go back to Russia?”
He laughed. “How should I know?”
“I’m just asking,” I said.
“Huh.” Mud Tony tugged at the ends of his lips. “Is there anything keeping you here?”
“Yes,” I said.
I felt my face was very sad. I tried to smile.
The radio was singing a stupid love song.
I saw him see my wedding ring. “Well,” he said. He cleared his throat. “No. You should stay.”
I looked at the placemat, covered in fragile marks. “Of course,” I said.
“At least until things are worked out.”