The night felt surreal and dark, and the frigid wind spiked past his face and whipped at his coat. Lev had trained him to think in English—it helped with his English conversation, and to do away with his natural accent—but now he had to put that away and think in Russian. It would be fatal for him if he slipped up and gave anyone an indication that he spoke English at all, much less perfectly. Like a switch being flipped in his mind, he made the change to Russian, and he purposefully put on his Russian attitude and demeanor, even changing his walk. He became, step-by-step as he walked toward the gym, just stupid, harmless Vasily, the town idiot from Warwick, who nobody suspected because no one had ever bothered to walk in his shoes.
It is odd the way a major event, some birth or death or loss or change, can make one see the world through brand new eyes. It is as if the world is a snow globe, and occasionally it gets shaken up so that, while the pieces all remain in the same environment, the whole somehow fits together differently.
As Vasily walked through Warwick toward the gymnasium to face what could be his death, he noticed the intricately carved latticework on the eaves and rakes of the small wooden houses along his route. He felt the gravel crunch in the hard-packed snow under his boots as he listened to the moon’s stillness.
In the distance, he could hear shouting and fluttering of action, and through a window he heard a chair scoot. He had walked through this town so many times at night, and the sounds and sights had always washed over him like rainwater on the windshield of a fast moving train, merely forming impressions, without announcing themselves and demanding that he stop and pay attention. Now, as he walked, he felt everything new, as if waking from a dream and realizing that the material world mattered.
Here was the place that he and Arkady, a young boy who’d lived two houses down from him since the time of his birth, threw stones at a goat and the ricochet of their misses landed them in trouble with old man Kovalenko. Down Bunin Street, he saw the jutting façade of the home of the beautiful woman he knew only as Lyudmila, who paid him to gather stones in the forest, and to build a low-rising step for her door. Here was Irinna’s house, and there was the place he had first seen her, walking home from the bakery along a little side street toward her door, her arms full of bread that he could smell from across the street.
This town was the only place on earth that he had ever truly known, and as he walked through the snow toward the gymnasium, he was struck by the thought that he barely knew it at all.
Vasily was born to be a spy. Like some others of his age, this reality had always been clouded by the fact that he was born in a time when his personal value was questioned, not only by the people of his town who, as has been mentioned, saw him as having less than average intelligence, but also by the shadowy authorities who designed Warwick for the purpose of waging war with the Soviet Union. When that union dissolved, those authorities simply left the machinery of the charm school in place without giving it a discernible direction. Vasily, therefore, had grown up with a lack of direction, as if his existence mirrored the existence of the town. Not only was he a young man in a country that didn’t recognize him, and in a town that didn’t know him, but he was also a dreamer whose highest dream was almost certainly unattainable. He’d been, like all those who eventually did become spies and were caught out for one reason or another, abandoned to his fate and disavowed.
So he’d thrown himself into his studies, but quietly, behaving as a child does who is bullied by his peers. He received threats and intimidation on a daily basis from his classmates, and was ridiculed for his small size, and the delicate features he had inherited from his mother. Of those who’d bullied him, none had done so as prominently as the youths in the gang who had just seized power in Warwick.
Mikail Mikailivitch Brekhunov, Vladimir Nikitich Samyonov, and Sergei Dimitrivich Tupolev had, like him, been born to be spies, and like him, they had failed to achieve their ultimate goal of being picked by the Americans to spy in Russia. Though they had all been subjected to the machinery of the charm school’s training, they each were found unworthy of further commissioning into service—the latter two and Vasily because their performance on testing had resulted in less than optimal results, and Mikail because he was found too unstable to be acceptable.
They all had learned, in their turn, that they were destined to stay, live, and die in Warwick, and each had reacted in different ways. Mikail and his gang became more aggressive among their peers, lashing out at anyone weaker than themselves. Vasily became a watcher of windows, a dreamer who decided that his only hope in life was to bide his time and wait for something better to come along. While he waited, he’d read books.
Mikail, Vladimir, and Sergei had noticed their younger cohort’s reticence to action from the earliest days in school and in the streets of their town. They saw weakness and timidity where there had been only Vasily’s hopes, and they saw stupidity where there was his tendency toward silent and internal contemplation. At some point they had decided that he was an easy mark, and they’d treated him as such. He was, they thought, a fool, but they had read the cover of his book all wrong.
Vasily never understood the gang’s need for aggression. He’d simply never felt the desire to belittle, or to rage, or even to be noticed. Well, that is not entirely true. He’d acted once before, and that action was the reason he’d been in prison when the coup erupted.
As he rounded the final corner along Tsentralnaya Street and looked up the hill toward the prison where only a few hours ago he’d plotted with the men he was assigned to oversee, he passed the Orthodox Church and looked beyond it to the cemetery. It was in that cemetery—the only one in Warwick—that he’d been sitting and drinking one night, not long ago in the big scheme of things. On that night, a group of younger boys had passed him on their way to somewhere, and one of them had sneered at him and called him stupid, and he’d simply had enough of ridicule to take it from those who were younger. He fought with the boy and had been arrested for drunkenness and brawling, and the arrest had landed him in jail. That series of events had set him upon his present course. His current situation had begun in that one moment of his life in which he’d stood up for himself, and, having had a moment of doing what had been neglected for far too long, he had taken his first step toward what might now be his undoing… or his freedom.
The Spetznaz troops were stationed around the gym, securing the perimeter as Vasily came over the sloping walkway. He felt his feet slide gently across the ice and snow, and the sounds seemed to be amplified in the chilly night. One of the soldiers raised a rifle and pointed it in his direction, and he held up his hands and stopped in his tracks for a moment, intending to show them that he was unarmed. From a commotion near the right of a little group of soldiers, he heard a familiar voice rise up, and as the soldiers parted slightly, he saw the images of Mikail and Vladimir appear and begin to walk toward him.
“You there. Vasily Romanovich! Get over here!”
There are moments one sees not from the perspective of an individual, but as if it were a movie, from a distance. If, from that perspective, one had watched and studied Vasily’s situation, one might’ve seen the two figures of the new bosses, Mikail and Vladimir, walk angrily toward the smaller youth in the distance. Their tones were insulting and angry.
“Where have you been?” was not a question but an insinuation.
“What have you done?” was not an inquiry but an invective.