Our Woman in Moscow

by Beatriz Williams

  For an instant, she thought they’d been burgled—ransacked. The few framed pictures had fallen off the walls; the floor was strewn with broken glass. An empty bottle of gin rolled helplessly across the parquet. The air stank of vomit and decay.

  Then she thought—Sasha!

  Burgess had said he’d left him in the bedroom. Iris picked her way around the broken glass, the bottle, the shoes left in a tumble. She walked down the darkened hallway, past the kitchen and study and the boys’ bedroom, the family bathroom—didn’t look inside any of them. A stink of spoiled milk turned her stomach. The bedroom door hung wide open. Iris hesitated. She hadn’t seen Sasha in a month, not since the catastrophic expedition to the Isle of Wight. She’d spoken to him on the telephone a few times—he’d called down to Honeysuckle Cottage to ask about the milkman and where do we keep the checkbook, she’d rung up the embassy so he could speak to his sons twice a week—but each conversation was veneered in politeness, an almost excruciating formality. Anyway, both times she’d tried to reach him last week, his secretary informed her that he was out.

  Until now, she hadn’t thought to worry. Not any more than usual, at least.

  Iris gathered herself and stepped into the bedroom.

  Sasha was not, as she expected, on the bed. He lay on the floor next to the bed, fully clothed, on his stomach. For a terrible instant she thought he was dead. She cried out and leapt toward him, and yes, for that single instant, everything was forgiven—she loved him—her Sasha! But when she touched his shoulder, he groaned. She noticed a foul, sharp odor. She turned him over and realized he was wet, he was actually lying in his own urine, soaked through the rug beneath him. His eyes fluttered open. He focused on her—smiled—closed his eyes again.

  “I knew you’d come,” he said.

  “What’s happened, Sasha? What have you done this time?”

  “Can’t remember.”

  She shook him by the shoulder. “Yes, you can! Burgess said you’d wrecked somebody’s flat. Whose, for God’s sake?”

  He started to fall away again, so she gritted her teeth and hauled him upright, propped him against the bed. When she removed her hands, he remained sitting, so she rose and fetched a glass of water from the sink in the bathroom. She turned her face away from the unspeakable mess and set the water glass at his lips for him to sip. The stench made her gag, so she tried to breathe through her mouth. He sipped again.

  “Whose flat, Sasha? You have to tell me. Was it hers?”

  “Whose?”

  “You know who. Miss Fischer.”

  He made a lopsided smile and shook his head. “No, no. Got it all wrong, darling. Always did.”

  “Yes, I realize that. Whose flat, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You just—what? Some stranger, Sasha? I don’t understand. Burgess said—I couldn’t make him out—something about a smashed mirror—Sasha, look at me!”

  Sasha, who’d been staring at the hollow of her neck for most of the conversation, now lifted his unsteady eyes to meet hers. “You look good, Iris. Really good. I guess that Beauchamp guy agrees with you.”

  “Stop it.”

  “No, I’m happy for you. ’Sgood. Take good care of you an’ the boys.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She’s dead, my love.”

  “Who’s dead?”

  “Who d’you think? They got her, Iris.” Sasha made a gun with his thumb and forefinger, squinted one eye, and fired it. “Nedda’s dead.”

  The telephone rang just as Iris reached for the receiver. The sound shocked her, for some reason, and she couldn’t decide whether to pick it up or wait for the caller to go away.

  On the second ring, she lifted the receiver. “Digby.”

  “Iris? Are you all right?”

  “Oh, God. Philip. I was just about to call you. The most terrible news.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m so sorry. I know you were friends.”

  “It’s damned strange. Just shot on the street, point blank, nobody saw a thing. Scotland Yard’s looking into it, of course. I assume that’s what set him off?”

  “Yes. He’s still drunk. I can’t make heads or tails of him.”

  “I can bring the boys up, if you want.”

  “No, no. I don’t want them to see him like this. Have you learned anything on your end? About the flat, I mean, and what happened.”

  Philip sighed, and the noise amplified down the line, so it sounded like a gust of wind. “I’m afraid he’s in a bit of trouble. They’re trying to hush it up, but the girl won’t cooperate, not that I blame her.”

  “Girl? What girl?”

  “Just some young woman. From what I can gather, your husband and Burgess went to some kind of party at her flat—friend of a friend, she didn’t know them—and became excessively drunk, started smashing the place up, police were called. Burgess is connected everywhere and somehow got them both off without charges, but that won’t last, not if the girl keeps making a fuss.”

  “As she should,” Iris said. “The stupid fools.”

  She didn’t hear the footsteps coming up behind her, not until Sasha’s hand reached out and took the receiver from her hand.

  “Beauchamp? That you? Beauchamp, old boy! How are you? Yes, yes, it’s me. Been having a nice time out there by the sea, fucking my wife? Goddamn good lay, isn’t she—”

  Iris lunged for the receiver, but he twisted away easily, used his height to his advantage.

  “Stop! You drunken idiot! Sasha!”

  “What’s that? Pistols at dawn? God, no, old man. You can have her. I’m a goner, anyway, right? Big red bull’s-eye, right smack—”

  At last Iris snatched the receiver away. He stumbled and crashed to the floor.

  “Philip? Philip? No, I’m all right, I’m fine, he won’t hurt me. He’s just drunk.”

  “Iris, I’m jumping in the car this instant, I’m driving up—”

  “No, don’t—”

  “You’re not staying with him. Iris, do you hear me? Iris?”

  “I’m here. Look, I’ve got to take care of him, all right? I’ll sober him up. He’ll be fine, he’ll be very sorry. We’ll get him help. That’s all he needs.” She was crying, for some reason. “All he needs is some help. A hospital or something. Good-bye, Philip.”

  “Iris—”

  She hung up the receiver and dropped on the floor. She lifted Sasha’s sobbing chest and cradled him—smoothed his tarnished hair—they wept together.

  “I’m so sorry, darling,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Iris bathed her husband and settled him into bed in fresh pajamas. Maybe Burgess was smart, leaving him on the floor like that, so he wouldn’t soil the bed. Although the sheets didn’t seem to have been changed in ages, now that Iris examined them. Well, what more harm could it do?

  When he was asleep, she cleaned up the mess. She started with all the empty bottles, then found the broom and swept up everything else on the floor. She threw out the spoiled milk, washed the dishes, wiped everything down with vinegar and hot water. Opened all the windows to let in the fresh September air. She put the soiled clothes to soak in the washing tub and sprinkled baking soda on the bedroom rug. Not spick-and-span, but it was a start.

  Before she left, she checked on Sasha, who seemed to be sleeping peacefully. She put on her hat and gloves and took her pocketbook from the hall table. She made sure to lock the door when she left—she would remember that later. She took the stairs instead of the lift.

  The lobby was cool and empty, except for the porter, who nodded at her with an expression she couldn’t make out. When she stepped outside, she paused to adjust her gloves and hat, and as she did so, she looked carefully around—the other blocks, the sidewalk, the street, the garden in the center of the drive. The few people about were all in motion, hurrying in some direction, except for the man in the dark suit on the bench in the garden, reading a newspaper. He looked up just as she looked
away. For an instant their eyes met, and Iris knew she’d seen him before.

  If only she could remember where.

  Ruth

  July 1952

  Moscow

  The children shout and squeal with delight at the sight of their new brother. Gregory starts to bawl. Fox takes me gently by the arm and leads me to the small, dirty window overlooking the street below.

  I speak softly, because I expect the room is probably bugged. “How was your walk?”

  “Exactly what I needed.”

  I put my arms around his waist and lean against his shoulder, like a wife who’s had a difficult day. I glance at the children, busy creating a convenient cacophony a couple of yards away, and turn my face to speak near his ear.

  “Listen, I took a taxi to Digby’s place.”

  “You did what?”

  “I was worried. Something was off. Sure enough, when I got there, he was dead drunk in his own piss. Kip was taking care of everybody. Said there’d been a break-in.”

  “Anything taken?”

  “Kip said no, but he was only talking about valuables. Digby wouldn’t say. But he was a mess, Fox. An awful mess.”

  “But they didn’t arrest him.”

  “No. They broke in while he was at the hospital and the kids were at school. Fox, I’m not taking them back there to that apartment. I wouldn’t trust Digby with a dog right now, for one thing, and for another—what if the KGB comes back? I mean, God knows what they’re capable of.”

  “No, you’re right.”

  I wait for him to say something more, but he stares out the window and holds me gingerly in his arms, as if I’m a mannequin. He’s warm and taut, and I haven’t slept more than four hours in the past forty-eight, and for a moment there I nearly doze off, even though my brain hums like a live wire. I start to step back but he draws me close again.

  “How soon can she be ready to go, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. She’s just had surgery. Probably lost a lot of blood. I don’t know if they gave her a transfusion or anything or how much pain she’s in.”

  “Find out, all right? I have everything we need. Whenever you give the signal, we can start.”

  My heart thuds against my ribs—so hard, I imagine Fox feels it, too. He holds me snug, so our words stay within the glow of our mutual warmth. I turn my head a few inches, so I can see my sister and her children, who are still making a terrible ruckus, though she tries to shush them. But it’s a merry ruckus. It’s the family kind of ruckus that seems loud and contentious when you’re in the middle of it, but when it’s gone, you miss it like you miss the sun when it slips down the other side of the world.

  Fox somehow maneuvers Jack and Claire to the window to take in the glorious sights of Moscow through a dirt-streaked pane of glass. Iris gives the baby to Kip. I lean over her to adjust a blanket. “Fox wants to leave as soon as possible.”

  “Damn,” she says.

  I sit back down and look at her, and she looks at me, and it seems she understands exactly what’s happened without my having to say a word. Like she’s been expecting this—their cover blown. She nods at me, a soundless Yes.

  “Are you sure?” I murmur.

  “I don’t think we have a choice.”

  I stand up. “All right. Act One, the bossy American woman.”

  Poor Kedrov. He has the soul of a diplomat, not a KGB man. I lay into him with my best hue and cry.

  “I want my sister out of this hospital immediately. It’s barbaric. She needs a natural setting, where she can rest and recover in peace.”

  He answers me soothingly. “With respect, Mrs. Fox, best place for new mother is hospital.”

  “Oh? And by what authority do you—a man—presume to tell me—a woman—what’s best for a new mother? Are you a doctor? Are you a mother?”

  “Mrs. Fox, is impossible. She is too delicate to be moved.”

  “But not too delicate to give birth to a ten-pound baby, which is something I doubt you could have accomplished, Mr. Kedrov, let alone survived.”

  “Mrs. Fox, please—”

  “Don’t Mrs. Fox please me! I will not calm down and stay quiet. I will not back down when it comes to the health and happiness of my sister. I will cause such a stink as you’ve never seen before in your life.”

  “Mrs. Fox, doctors agree that—”

  “I don’t give a damn what your doctors say! Do you know that nurse tried to tell my sister that some kind of milk mixed together in a factory—molecule by molecule—God only knows what’s in it—is better for a brand-new baby than the milk from his mother’s own breasts?”

  The word breasts stings him.

  “I-I—”

  “Do you want my sister to have a nervous collapse? Do you?”

  “Of course n—”

  “I mean, I can just see the headlines now, can’t you? ‘Communist doctors kill American mother and her new baby—’”

  “You’re being unreasonable, Mrs. Fox—”

  “Unreasonable? Oh, believe me, you haven’t seen unreasonable, Kedrov.”

  All the while, Fox stands to the side, arms folded, the way you might watch a boxing match. I don’t spare an instant to glance over and see his expression. I don’t need to do that—I know what he must be thinking. Nobody likes a shrew, do they? A woman who insists on having her way. Oh, a man in my position would be hailed a great leader! Firm, decisive, independent, uncompromising. But a woman who stands up for herself and those she loves—well, that’s plain mean and selfish, isn’t it?

  No doubt Fox watches my display of shrewishness with natural distaste. He understands I’m not just acting, after all. I am mad. I don’t like being eavesdropped on, and followed, and told what I should do or say or think, or what’s best for me. To wait my turn and obey, because it’s all for the common good. To have my every infraction reported on—oh, the delicious thrill of reporting on someone!—like we’re children in a kindergarten class, and the damned Politburo is the teacher. My God, it’s cathartic to take it all out on poor Kedrov, who is—after all—merely the representative of that sprawling Soviet state.

  And what does Kedrov do? He turns and calls in reinforcements—namely, the cobweb-haired doctor who speaks English. They hold a rapid, hush-voiced conference in Russian. Now I glance to Fox, who’s trying to catch their words. We stand in an unoccupied room—this is not, remember, a maternity ward available to the general public—because my angry noise might disturb the peace, while the doctor and Kedrov stand in the hallway, just outside the door. The walls are the same hopeless gray as elsewhere. The bed’s been stripped, the window’s streaked with metropolitan grime. The air smells faintly of antiseptic. I shrug my shoulders to Fox, as if to say Well?

  He shrugs back.

  The doctor turns to stare at me through the doorway. His ferocity barrels through the air to land in the middle of my forehead. His body follows in short, quick strides.

  “There is excellent clinic near Riga, on Baltic Sea. You leave tomorrow by special train.”

  I shoot an astonished glance to Fox, who smiles back.

  The doctor frowns down at me. From the look of him, I can’t tell if he’s onto us. Whether this is an act of subversion or plain coincidence. Does it matter? I throw my arms around his neck and kiss his bristly cheek.

  “Thank you,” I say in Russian.

  And I pray to God to protect him when the truth comes out.

  We spend our last night in Moscow like the first, in a suite at the National Hotel. Dinner’s brought up at eight o’clock by a waiter in a white uniform. Is it unspeakably bourgeois to tip? I’m not sure, but I feel certain I see something pass from Fox’s hand into that of the waiter—a man about forty years old, wiry and stone-eyed—and he doesn’t refuse it.

  I’m too nervy to eat much, or even to speak. What’s there to say? We can’t discuss our plans. I try to make conversation about the baby, to muster the kind of relief and excitement I imagine I would feel about this upcomi
ng stay in a clinic on the Baltic Sea, but every word seems so forced and unnatural that I give up.

  “You must be exhausted,” Fox says at last. “You should get some sleep.”

  “You, too.”

  “Going to be a big day tomorrow.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  We stare at each other helplessly.

  “Some vodka, maybe?” Fox suggests.

  “God, yes.”

  He finds the bottle and a pair of glasses and pours us each a shot. To my surprise, he swallows his drink as swiftly and expertly as I do, and I’m even more surprised when he refills us both and repeats the exercise. I slump back against the sofa cushion and so does he.

  “Everything’s going to be all right, isn’t it?”

  Fox touches my cheek with his thumb. “Yes, darling. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  At some point in the night, I wake with a jerk. From the window comes the murky greenish charcoal of a midsummer’s dusk in the far north—no such thing as true night—so it couldn’t be later than three in the morning.

  “Fox,” I breathe, but he’s already awake. His tension prickles me from the other side of the bed.

  He knows, as I do, that someone else shares the room with us.

  We stumbled to bed just before eleven. He wore his silk pajamas and I wore my silk negligee, but it wasn’t the same as two nights ago, though I wanted him just as badly. For one thing, we were too sober—literally sober, despite two shots each of excellent Russian vodka, but also in spirit—and for another, our journey together had just rounded its final turn. We could not risk further attachment. We could not allow our magnetic poles to lock together, no matter how great the pull of attraction.

  Still, it wasn’t the same as our first night in Moscow, either. I wanted him near, even if I couldn’t touch him, and I felt he wanted the same from me. He lifted the covers for me. I scooted over to give him room. He leaned in to kiss me and said clearly Good night, sweetheart, and I like to think he said it to me, and not to the microphone tucked into the frame of the landscape that hung above the headboard.