by AnonYMous
“Sergei.” His breath was heavy with vodka. “You look for Sergei Sorokin.”
“Who is that?” Grace said, as she stood up again. She started to write it in her notebook.
Katka’s father pointed at her notebook and shook his finger no, no, no. Then he drew the same finger across his neck.
* * *
—
It was dark now and Grace was thankful for the ride in Katka’s small white Renault Clio, especially as they passed the same ruffians in sweat suits. On the way, she asked Katka what her father had said that was so crazy.
“It’s a myth,” said Katka. “The KGB and the StB apparently recruited talented girls and sent them to the West to do…whatever.”
“To be, what?” said Grace. “Spies? He thinks Ms. Craig was a KGB spy?”
Katka laughed. “All I know is in my time in New York I do not think I met a more American woman than Elena Craig.”
Grace knew what she meant. Elena loved to talk about how she arrived in America with nothing and achieved everything. There was not another country in the world where such a thing was possible. It was the theme of every fifth or sixth Ask Elena column. She was a sentimental patriot.
Katka parked half a block away from the train station and looked around. A few people walked up the sidewalk, pulling small suitcases on wheels. “I make fun of it, but do be careful. My father isn’t entirely senile. He went through a lot in those days.”
Grace wanted to ask about Sergei Sorokin but she knew that if Katka’s father had wanted his daughter to hear the man’s name he would have said it with her in the room. “I’ll be honest with you, Katka. Ms. Craig didn’t drop me off in Mladá Boleslav this morning. She kicked me out.”
“Why?”
“I was asking questions.”
Katka nodded and looked straight ahead. “That’s why she sent me back here. She was like a mother to me, or at least a bossy aunt. I thought, in fact, that I would never leave New York. One night we were sharing a bottle of wine and I asked about the old days, about what had happened between her and my father. There were the stock answers, the ones I knew to be untrue. I thought: who cares, right? The Cold War is over. I told her she was bullshitting me. I asked for the truth. The next day I was not only fired, I was flying back to Prague with an expired visa.”
“And when you tried to speak to her about it?”
“Nothing,” said Katka. “For Elena, I no longer exist.”
8
PRAGUE, 1970
It was a Friday, nearly dark, and snowing heavily on the cobblestones and wind-battered shrubbery of the Square of Red Army Soldiers.
Elena stood at the window of the Great Hall of the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, exhausted from weeks of what passed for examinations in the special program: interviews in Czech, in English, in French, in Russian, scenarios abroad, and the role-playing exercises.
You are at a cocktail party in Paris. You are in the back of a car in New York and they have locked the doors. A child stands between you and the information you need, the exit. A man is holding you down, his hand on your neck. You need to kill someone and make it look like a natural death. The CIA offers you money now and a new identity, a new everything, in ten years. What do you do?
Fewer than half of the girls who had started the program with her had passed the first test: alone in a cell in a nightgown, no sleep, then alcohol and drugs, drowning in a chair. Tell us his name, they had shouted at her. Just his name and all of this ends, sweet girl.
Or maybe they had passed the test and somehow she had failed. Either way, Elena never saw them again. A few others dropped out in the summer; they just disappeared, and the rest of the girls, the ones who remained, knew not to ask about them.
There were real students of Charles University below, men and women her age, regular Czechs from towns and cities like hers, walking arm-in-arm, on their way to their small apartments and the train station. They would become clerks and teachers and stewardesses. In the hall behind her, her new friends celebrated the end of term with beer and bad sausage. If not for this program, her special education, she would not have known how bad it was. Elena had been ruined for bad sausage because she had tasted good sausage, good wine, champagne, truffles, caviar, American hamburgers, French confit de canard, osso buco alla Milanese. She knew how to eat them, what to say about them, how to hold a glass, which fork to use when.
“Join us.” Danika guided her back to the party: nine beautiful young women and their “professors,” a collection of genuine academics and teachers, bureaucrats, soldiers, and secret police. Half were Russian, dispatched from the Kremlin and KGB Center, half were Czech and Slovak. They all had fine apartments and drivers in Prague, access to real food and blue jeans. Their lives were unimaginable to all but a select few in Czechoslovakia.
And their families.
This was her reward and, she now understood, their ultimate power over her: Jana was in her apartment, Petr was on his land.
A fog of cigarette smoke hung over the party, which was in a vast upper-level lecture hall of old leather and wood, a room of books and soft lamps. They listened to “problematic” music no one else was allowed to hear: Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Doors, some genuinely strange new songs by the Beatles. They danced, they smoked, they drank, they kissed.
In every way they were different from the men and women, boys and girls Elena had watched out the window in the snow. For friends and family here in Prague and back home, wherever home might be, each of Elena’s fellow students had constructed an alternative story—or stories—with the help of their professors and mentors.
The music stopped and Sergei Sorokin, the leader of the special program and Elena’s lover, raised his hands until everyone stopped talking and laughing. Sergei’s soft brown hair confounded her: it was perfectly parted on the left and never moved, even in bed. She had never been in his apartment but she often thought there was a closet with twenty suits tailored for him in Italy and London, suits of every color. Her father had a single black suit for weddings and funerals and May Day.
“My gorgeous, intelligent girls,” he began, then paused.
Did everyone know about her affair with Sergei? Surely it was insignificant, next to everything else that was happening to her. Every hour of every day she thought about escaping the special program and becoming a regular, honest student like those on the Square of Red Army Soldiers. How would she do it? What would happen to her parents? What would happen to her?
The night before, Elena had gone for a walk alone. She had stopped for a glass of honey wine, which her father used to let her taste on cold December nights. When she had first entered the special program, it felt like she was going on-stage and learning to act for a small, peculiar audience. Now she understood she was going backstage to engineer a show. Everything was an illusion: her parents’ lives, her neighbors in Mladá Boleslav, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, America and the West, socialism, communism, capitalism, fascism.
Here was a new word for her: nihilism. They were slowly emptying her of everything that had made Elena Klimentová. They had shown her it was irrelevant.
And yet she loved her parents with a ferocity she could never explain in words, and not her parents in their wonderful apartment, the apartment they deserved, in the upper town of Mladá Boleslav, on their land along the Jizera. She loved them in their old house, the color of a dead carp.
Elena wanted to be twelve again. No, nine. Before the first germs of the feelings that now controlled her.
“My girls, you astonish us all with your talent and your determination. I think back two years, more or less, to when I met you. Today you are different people. I hardly recognize you, and I mean this in the most admiring way. We had expectations but we had no idea how strong you would be, how intelligent, how imaginative.” Sergei smiled, and looked around the room for another moment of silence. “This will be our last Christmas together.”
“What’s Christmas?”
one of the teachers said.
And they laughed. She laughed! How preposterous it was that they had removed the central European ritual from European life, how absurd, how sublime. They could make anyone think anything. Elena thought of the women from the program who had disappeared.
They are dead. Their parents are dead. Their brothers and sisters are dead. No one knew, so no one could care.
“I am proud of you, each one of you,” Sergei continued. “I know how hard you have worked. I know what you have sacrificed to be here among us and how it sometimes breaks your hearts.”
Sergei looked at Elena, just long enough.
“You know what people call this program, call you? I don’t like the word. I don’t use the word. I don’t even like to say it.”
“You can say it,” Danika called, the strongest of them, the star of the program. She was leaving for New York City in February.
“We can’t help but long for home this time of year. Love and adore your families, hold them tight. Keep them safe.”
Sergei looked around the room. Keep them safe. How easily he could insert the ultimate threat into an inspirational speech. No one moved or made a joke.
“Do not fret,” Sergei said. “No matter where they go, swallows always come home.”
9
PRAGUE, 2016
Whenever she found cellular coverage on the train between Mladá Boleslav and Prague, Grace Elliott searched for the name Sergei Sorokin. There was a hockey player and a technology worker, but nothing else came up on English-language websites. Grace went through the notes she had taken, and the day’s photographs. Thinking about her conversation with Katka and her father, she enlarged and reread one of the placards from the Museum of Communism.
Violence, intimidation, blackmail, and psychological terror were the basic interrogation methods of the Communist secret police, based on the model of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police….StB investigation methods included physical violence, brutal beatings, electrical torture methods, nighttime interrogations, extended solitary confinement, and sleep, water, and food deprivation. Physical violence was accompanied by psychological terror, humiliation, threats of the arrest of family members, and even faked executions.
Records were kept of all StB operations; an archive so enormous that, if these files had not been burned toward the end of the Communist regime, they would cover several soccer fields piled many meters high.
Grace shared Katka’s cynicism about her father’s paranoia, and his stories of Russian agents stealing Elena from her family. Still, Grace was an investigative reporter, or she wanted to be, and her prospects for investigative reporting did not sound terribly good: if these files had not been burned toward the end of the Communist regime…
The cold rain had returned, and Grace had forgotten to carry the transparent poncho Katka had given her. Wind blew in unpredictable gusts, so the few awnings Grace could find were useless. In a crowd rushing for shelter on the cobblestones of Old Town Square, a man in a black jacket yanked at her purse. Grace screamed, “Thief!” and he ran off before he could wrestle it from her. In a covered arcade a British couple, who had rushed to her aid, ensured Grace was safe and asked if she could describe the man. He was…white and tall and thirty? They walked her to the Airbnb above the spice shop, and by the time they arrived Grace was sceptical about their motivations too.
Jamie and Claire from Leeds. Jamie and Claire sounded like the names two secret agents pretending to be British tourists would choose. When she thanked Jamie and Claire, she kept one hand on the top of her purse, to guard her phone and notebook. In a battle of politeness, she did not allow them to escort her up to the apartment.
When she opened the door, the apartment was much warmer than she had left it, and the lights were on. She was sure she had turned them off.
“Hello?”
Had the landlady come in for some reason? There was no movement inside, but she could feel a presence. She moved through the small kitchen and screamed when she entered the bedroom. Her suitcase was open on the bed. Her clothes were spread about.
Her vibrator was on the pillow.
Grace ran back into the kitchen, grabbed a paring knife from the drawer, and crouched next to the oven.
It took some effort to speak again. “Is anyone here?”
Thirty seconds later, when she heard nothing in the apartment but her heart thumping in her head, Grace stood and crept back into the bedroom. Her computer was where she had left it, on the bedside table, but it was open. She zipped the vibrator into an inside pocket of her suitcase and explored the rest of the apartment.
In the bathroom she turned on the light and retched. The toilet seat was up and the bowl was filled with aromatic piss. She called her landlady, Marie, who lived in the apartment above. Within five minutes Marie was walking through the apartment with Grace.
“Did they steal?” said Marie.
“I don’t think so.” Grace looked through her bag again, to be sure. The only item worth any money was her MacBook, but they had not taken it. If she phoned the police, what would she tell them? “They turned up the heat and used the bathroom.”
Marie managed three suites in the building for her father. Now, she helped Grace collect her things and moved her one floor up, to a two-bedroom apartment. “We will change the locks in the old one. You will give us bad review, I suppose?”
When Marie was gone, Grace turned on her computer. Everything seemed fine. Next she ran the bath and opened a bottle of tall black beer a previous tenant had left in the fridge. She propped one of the heavy wooden chairs up against the door handle, like in the movies, and called her mother.
“Prague! What are you doing in Prague?” Elsie Elliott lived in a retirement complex in Florida. Complications from diabetes had rendered her nearly blind, so she was not much of a texter.
“It’s for work, Mom.”
For the next while, her mother talked about how proud she was to have a daughter who took so many business trips. Five did not seem a lot, to Grace, but neither her mother nor her father had taken a business trip in their whole lives. One of Elsie’s neighbors in the complex took a trip to Europe every year, on a river cruise through Germany and Budapest and who knows where, and lorded it over everyone else. Well, she can have it, said Elsie Elliott. Who needs an airplane ride, going through all that security, not knowing if the person right next to you is from ISIS?
While she could not tell her mother about the break-in, it made Grace feel better to sit in a bath with a black beer and listen to Elsie Elliott’s voice.
After her bath, assuming a man had touched her clothes, she put everything into the apartment’s washing machine. Then she put one knife under her pillow and two on the table next to the bed.
Grace Elliott had lived forty-three years without anyone trying to steal her purse. No one had ever followed her. No one had broken into her apartment. Yet in one day, in Prague, all of this had happened to her.
Her flight was scheduled to leave in a few days and she had not even posted a selfie on Instagram. She had not tasted goulash. She had not walked across the Charles Bridge. Maybe she was pretending to be someone she was not, just because Steadman Coe had humiliated and discouraged her. Maybe this is what a mid-life crisis felt like: the anxiety in her stomach, the confusion, the loneliness. She thought of her mother in the retirement complex in Pompano Beach, of Zip and Manon and her quiet, cheerless life in Montreal. Her mother needed her! Was it so bad, writing advice columns under the name of a rich woman? Was it so bad writing about celebrity love affairs, DUI convictions, and cellulite?
If being ordinary means no one breaks into your apartment to leave a piss, maybe she did not want to be extraordinary. In twenty years, if she saved carefully, she could sell the condo in Montreal and buy a little place in a warm city where everyone speaks English, with a decent farmers’ market. In this imagined future Zip is still alive and Manon is still somehow her neighbor. She goes on a date from time to time with a
man named Dave, Dave from Tucson, who makes dad jokes. She learns to care about sports.
Then she thought of Christiane Amanpour in her hijab, reporting from Faisalabad. She thought of Steadman Coe, telling her what she could never do.
Fuck Steadman Coe, she thought. Fuck him and the men who were trying to scare her. She would show them all.
10
STRASBOURG, 1971
Sergei Sorokin smoked at the dining-room table in Elena’s little apartment and sang the chorus of “Douce France” over and over again. The scent of the lilacs of Strasbourg blew into her modest rooms on Rue des Veaux, above a coin laundry, and competed with Sergei’s cigarettes. He sat with one leg crossed over the other. His socks did not go high enough and a flash of sun warmed his bare ankles. There was a bottle of sweet Gewürztraminer and a bowl of salted pecans on the table.
Cher pays de mon enfance-uh.
Elena had asked him to stop singing it, to stop taunting her, but it only seemed to encourage him. He found it weak and silly, her feeling for this country. Everything she loved about the French, their rituals and songs, their daily commerce, their vegetable and flower markets, their pretty buildings, Sergei loathed.
They had only a few nights together and she did not want to waste any time unpacking, but Sergei insisted. Though he was only twenty-six he pretended to understand the hearts of Western women. No Frenchman would believe her story if her bedroom did not look and feel correct. There had to be a place for perfume, for jewelry, for teddy bears, for her favorite hats and clothes, for pictures of her beloved parents and the city she left behind.