Our Woman in Moscow

by Beatriz Williams

  “Better.”

  The doctor left some aspirin behind. Iris swallows a couple of pills and carefully stands, so she can walk back and forth with the baby. His diaper’s soaking wet, poor thing. When they bring food, she’ll beg for some cloths. Anything will do.

  The day passes, inch by inch, in a strange, nightmarish haze. The guards bring bread and water, and then—grudgingly, a little horrified—cloths for Gregory and also for Iris, whose womb still bleeds heavily. She tries to rest as much as she can. Not to think too much.

  Ruth tells her that a guard came earlier with another prisoner, some school friend of Kip’s. Iris doesn’t catch the name—she doesn’t have the strength—but she hears them talking. It’s a girl. She tries to remember Kip’s friends. She knows there was a girl among them, very pretty in a solemn, fierce way—dark hair, energetic eyes that seemed to catch every movement. What was her name? Possibilities float in and out of Iris’s mind, but she can’t catch one. Her world has shrunk to the tiny dimensions of her cell—to the minutes ticking by—the baby who needs all her attention. The air is damp and stale, but every so often a clean fresh salt draft whooshes in from the sea with one of the guards, and she breathes this wind like a tonic that will restore her to health.

  Iris has some idea that Ruth is keeping up the children’s spirits. There are songs and word games, the same songs and word games that she and Ruth used to sing and play when they were little, so Iris keeps having these half dreams—hallucinations, almost—that she’s ten or eleven years old, she’s on the beach with Ruth, some hot and eternal summer’s day on the shore of Long Island Sound. She hears the word marina, over and over, and in her mind they’re rigging the sailboat for a long day on the water, and Iris feels the old, familiar unease that comes to her when she’s out sailing, and the old, familiar envy of Ruth, drenched in sunshine as she scampers around the boat while Iris clings to her seat and tries not to be seasick.

  The cell door clanks open. Ruth rushes inside. Iris, she says.

  Ruth, Iris whispers back.

  You have to get up. They’re moving us.

  Where?

  I don’t know. Maybe a hospital for you.

  Iris almost laughs, this is so impossible. Ruth hasn’t lived inside the Soviet Union for four years—she still has hope.

  But she summons herself and stands, with Ruth’s help. Ruth swaddles up Gregory and carries him with her right arm; with her left arm, she supports Iris.

  “Don’t forget Gregory’s bag,” Iris says.

  Ruth finds the valise and wrinkles her nose. “Why don’t you just throw out the soiled ones? I’m sure you can get fresh cloths where we’re going.”

  “You never know,” Iris replies. “Where are the children?”

  “They’re already in the truck.”

  Truck?

  It’s one of those military convoy vehicles, noisy and hard. One of the guards hoists her inside. The children clamor her name—Mama! She closes her eyes and savors the feel of their young legs and arms, of Claire’s soft cheek against hers. The truck smells of dirt and sweat and mildewed canvas and vomit but she doesn’t care. This is all that matters, her babies, for whose sake she has done what she has done, so that they can live in a better world. Of course, that’s what Sasha told himself, isn’t it? You start out wanting to make the world better, and you end up destroying everything that was good.

  The truck lurches forward and everyone falls silent. Through the cracks in the truck’s canvas covering they glimpse the twilit world outside. It might be any hour from eleven until three in the morning—twilight never quite sinks into the absolute dark of night during these midsummer weeks—just this purpling sky, the faint stars, the hush, now broken by the roar and rumble of the truck and some other vehicle ahead of them.

  Wherever they’re going, it’s not along some road. The truck sways and dives. In her mind, Iris returns to Long Island Sound and a sailboat under the hot sun. The terror of a vessel she can’t control, obeying natural laws she can’t predict. She hears an unfamiliar voice speaking Russian, a girl’s voice, and she remembers the other prisoner, the school friend of Kip’s—what was her name? How did she get here? It’s all part of the dream, maybe.

  The truck stops with a jerk. A pair of guards appear at the back and shout at them to get down, file out, line up. The Russian girl shouts back at them. But they don’t have any choice—the guards carry fearsome rifles, which they point to the girl, then Kip, then Ruth. They have the decency not to point at Iris. One by one, everyone crawls across the bed of the truck and jumps to the ground below. Ruth goes before Iris. She hands the baby to somebody, leaps down, and holds up her arms to help Iris. Ruth is so strong, she catches Iris without a stagger.

  Iris gives her the bag with the soiled diapers. Because what does she have to lose? If something happens to them, the bag will be thrown away. Nobody will look inside a baby’s soiled diaper. And maybe the bag will survive even if she does not. Maybe someone will come looking for her, and find this bag, forgotten in the mud. You never know.

  The guards shout some more.

  “What are they saying?” Ruth asks.

  “They want us to follow them.”

  Ruth puts her arm around Iris’s waist and walks with her at the end of the line. They’re walking on hard sand, by the feel of it. Iris can almost hear the rushing of the sea in her ears, unless it’s her imagination again. The voices bark in Russian to hurry along. They travel some hundred yards or so, then a guard orders them to stop and line up. They stop and line up. Iris turns to face the guards. There are two of them, holding their rifles, and a woman who stands a few feet away. The KGB woman. She stares at them coldly, one by one, ending with the girl.

  “Where’s Fox?” Ruth shouts at her. “Where’s Digby?”

  “This is not your concern,” the woman says, in perfect English. “After a thorough investigation, you have been found to have committed treason against the Soviet people. The penalty for this crime is death—”

  “I hate you!” the girl screams.

  The woman turns her head and stares at the girl. Not long, a few seconds only, during which not a murmur interrupts the cool, dark silence of twilight.

  The woman makes a signal to the guards, who shoulder their rifles and aim them at the line of prisoners, women and children, newborn baby in the arms of his big brother.

  Nobody moves. Nobody makes a sound, not even Claire. The shock is too great, the knowledge of instant death paralyzes them all. Iris feels the universe shrink and expand around her. Her flesh anticipates the thud of bullets and the spray of blood. She sees—no, not her life passing before her, but everything all at once—Sasha and Philip, the children, Ruth, Harry, her parents, all gathered into a single soul, like a star. She croaks out a soundless NO.

  The woman opens her mouth and says, “—or exile.”

  From the beach behind them comes another sound—a voice.

  Ruth turns first, then the children, then Iris. A pair of men brace themselves in the sand, about a hundred yards away, illuminated by a sliver of moon. Behind them, a large rowboat rests on the ebbing tide.

  “Go,” the woman says, in English.

  Ruth

  July 1952

  Baltic Sea

  The sun is just beginning to rise when we reach the fishing trawler.

  Trawlers are the most unlovely things afloat, in my opinion—dirty white and clumsy as a gravid rhinoceros. But this one is perhaps the most beautiful craft I have seen in my life, all bathed in the fine pink otherworldly glow of a breaking dawn.

  Everyone in the rowboat is stupefied, except the girl Marina. She sits in the stern and silently weeps. I only know this because I turned around once, during the journey across the fidgety, chopping waves, and saw the trails of tears along her cheeks. At one point, Kip tried to climb back and console her, but she shook her head and he stopped in his tracks. Sat back down and faced forward. I guess they understand each other, those two—like me and Fox.<
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  The trawler is well out to sea, and it requires almost three hours of hard pulling on the part of those two sailors before we meet. All this time I’ve been pushing back any thought of Fox—or of Digby, for that matter—but especially Fox. It helps that my hands are full, keeping Claire from climbing over the side of the rowboat, trading off Gregory with Kip, checking anxiously on Iris, who curls at my feet, propped against the curving side of the boat, burning hot and restless, while Fox’s image clamors painfully at the back of my head. Three such hours can make anything look beautiful.

  As we approach, one of the sailors hails the trawler. I don’t think it’s necessary. A rope ladder already hangs down the side, and a man stands there as though he’s prepared to dive in at the slightest signal. For an instant I imagine it’s Sumner Fox, by some extraordinary miracle on a night of miracles. I can almost see his big shoulders—his rough face soaked in sunrise. But as we draw nearer, my imagination dies away. These shoulders are no more than sturdy; the face is not as broad or as coarse; one side is marked with terrible scars, where he hasn’t got much of an ear left. He leans forward to catch the rope tossed up by the sailor, and his hair catches the light—pink and gold as the dawn itself.

  One by one, the children go up the ladder and into the man’s arms. The boys seem to recognize him—Jack makes a squeal. Marina climbs carefully and doesn’t say a word of thanks. Then Claire goes up. He catches her tenderly and says something to her that makes her laugh. Her feet hit the deck and she scampers out of sight.

  Now it’s my turn. I clamber forward on the rocking boat and hand up the baby to this man. He scoops Gregory like a man who’s held a newborn in his time—one hand supporting the head, the other under the bottom—and comforts him while I climb the rope ladder and stagger to the deck.

  “You must be Ruth,” the scarred man says.

  Without the scars, he might be handsome—you can’t tell. Without the white hair, he might be a young man—again, there’s no telling. He has the eyes of someone who has lived too much and too long, but the trim, taut figure of someone who lives ferociously in the present. The sunlight makes a nimbus around him and the baby in his arms. All this I gather in an instant, because there is not an instant to lose. I hold out my hands for Gregory. “I am.”

  You know, I don’t think he even sees me, really. He puts the baby in my arms and says hastily, “Philip Beauchamp. You’ll excuse me.”

  I step away from the opening on the rail. From below, one sailor supports Iris around the waist while she puts her hands and feet on the rungs of rope. The man named Beauchamp goes down on his knees and then his belly and reaches down to take my sister in his arms. He hauls her carefully to the deck and cradles her as you might cradle a child. The new sunshine coats them both. He pushes away some hair from her forehead and shouts out for the medical kit.

  Iris looks for me. “The bag!” she gasps out. “Gregory’s bag.”

  I look back at the rowboat, where the valise sits, forlorn and forgotten, in the very peak of the bow, because nobody wanted to sit near it—reeking as it does. Gregory stirs in my arms and lets out a lusty cry.

  Because I am numb with sorrow, revelation steals over me quietly, like a thief.

  Lord Almighty. The football.

  And I laugh—giggles at first, then giant, hysterical whoops that shock Gregory into silence and cause everyone in the trawler to stare at me as if I’m crazy. Maybe I am. Are we not still surrounded by misery and death? Does my heart not groan in anguish for what we left behind? Still, I laugh. I can’t seem to help myself.

  Sumner Fox’s final handoff, across the goal at last.

  Before I fit the baby into the crook of my elbow and reach down with one hand to take the bag from the sailor, I kiss my sister on the cheek. She’s the only one left in the world who understands.

  Four

  Every man is hung upon the cross of himself.

  —Whittaker Chambers

  Iris

  August 1952

  Dorset, England

  After breakfast every morning, Iris settles Gregory into the enormous Silver Cross perambulator and heads out across the lawn and the meadow until the Channel breeze comes out of nowhere to tumble her hair and wash her cheeks and fill her lungs. Then she sits in the grass with her sketchbook and fills the crisp, new pages with drawings.

  The perambulator was a gift from Philip, along with the nurse who tends Gregory during the middle of the night so Iris can rest. To say nothing of Honeysuckle Cottage itself—dear, crumbling bricks and climbing vines, like coming home! Philip—reading her mind as always—said it would be easier for the boys if they stay in the cottage, in their old familiar bedrooms, instead of Highcliffe. Even Mrs. Betts has returned to their lives. Philip hired her to look after Honeysuckle Cottage when the Digbys disappeared, and between Mrs. Betts and Ruth and the nurse, everything runs to the beat of some invisible clock, so Iris hardly has to lift a finger. Even if she wants to.

  “When you’re strong again . . .” Ruth says, from the grass beside her.

  “I am strong. I’m all better.”

  “Thanks to good capitalist penicillin. Anyway, you’ve earned a holiday. Who would’ve thought my little pumpkin could break up an international spy ring?”

  The sea air is good for everyone, even Gregory. Iris peers over the edge of the pram to check on him. He slumbers on, motionless—two small, perfect hands on either side of his small, perfect head. Iris gazes in rapture at the tufts of pale hair, the apple curve of his cheek, the outline of his long, bowed legs under the blanket. A part of her wants to answer Ruth’s argument—to explain that she was never really the little pumpkin of Ruth’s imagination, that the sisterhood is not divided neatly into adventuresome Ruths and retiring Irises, that bravery is woven from all kinds of different fabric and maybe hers is actually the more tough, the more durable. But this story is so important to Ruth—the story of Ruth forever coming to the rescue of a delicate Iris—so she returns to her drawing and doesn’t say a word.

  “What are you sketching this morning?” Ruth asks.

  “Oh, nothing much.”

  “May I see?”

  Iris turns the sketchbook so Ruth can see the page.

  “Nifty. It’s Beauchamp’s sailboat, isn’t it?”

  Iris fills in a shadow with tiny crosshatches. “Not bad, for a Philistine.”

  “You used to hate sailing.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind so much as I used to.”

  “I guess it depends on who’s sailing the boat, then.”

  Iris makes a small smile. The morning is cool and so extraordinarily clear, she can almost see the coast of France. But she hasn’t stopped here to see France. She’s stopped because this is her favorite spot, where the cliffs jut out a bit and the soft turf invites you to sit, and where she kissed Philip Beauchamp for the first time. Of course, Ruth doesn’t know that. Ruth doesn’t know a lot of things. In the pram, Gregory starts to stir. Ruth climbs to her feet and adjusts his blanket. She’s transformed into this obsessively attentive auntie—making up for lost time, Iris supposes.

  “It’s a pickle, isn’t it?” Ruth asks.

  “What’s a pickle?”

  “Your husband. Beauchamp. And don’t play dumb on me or anything. I’m not an idiot. You and Beauchamp—the two of you—I know he’s Claire’s father.”

  Iris lays her charcoal back in the tin. “Ruthie,” she says.

  Ruth turns to face her sister. Hands on hips. “It’s just like you, not to think things through. Everything’s done by the heart, with you.”

  “And you, everything by the head.”

  “So maybe we’re perfect for each other.”

  Iris tries to smile back.

  “The kids will be fine,” Ruth says. “You know that, don’t you? They have each other. Even that Marina kid, she’ll come around.”

  “And now you’re an expert on children?”

  “Well, they have you for a mother, the lucky tramps.” Ruth
shades her eyes and nods to the cottage. “And that terrific Beauchamp of yours. Arriving any minute to start up a round of cricket or something, I’ll bet. They’ll be fine. The question is you. Will you be fine, Iris Macallister?”

  Iris studies the sketchbook in her lap. The sailboat is not quite right. It’s supposed to be a surprise for Philip, and also a little joke between them—how he loves that schooner more than he loves her. But Iris isn’t a born sailor. She hates the sea. How can you draw a sailboat if you don’t have some intuitive grasp of the physics of sailing? Anyway, sailboats remind her of that disastrous expedition to the Isle of Wight. Sasha, drunk and angry. She had almost forgotten how terrible he used to be, because he became a different man in Moscow. He became this sober, loving husband and father, and all along Iris had betrayed him—coldly, without mercy—photographing his papers and harvesting his memory and taking his children out for walks in the park, during which she would drop her bundles of photographs and coded reports into a hollow tree, say, or that ice cream vendor in Gorky Park. Then, after Burgess tipped her off—never realizing he was tipping her off, poor old thing—the most coldhearted manipulation of all.

  Even now, when she thinks of that terrifying year—boxed in, trapped, exposure possible any minute—that final cache of vital information lying hidden in the apartment, month after month—unable to communicate to Fox and Philip except by their old, prearranged signals—her audacious plan, Sasha’s unknowing cooperation—Gregory growing at last in her womb, thank God, praying she wouldn’t miscarry, praying they wouldn’t catch her first—guilt, worry, desperation—she has to shake herself to understand she’s still alive. The children are alive. She has won her terrible gamble. She has this beautiful new baby, and she has Philip, and Ruth.

  And Sasha has nothing.

  “We have to assume he’s alive,” Iris says. “One of the labor camps, maybe.”