With a quick glance at the open doorway to ascertain she was still alone, she lifted out the frame and turned it faceup. She stared at the photo for either seconds or hours, her buzzing mind had lost all sense of time and space. Without realizing it, she found herself seated in Reveshvili’s chair. Despite her best efforts, her heart kept skipping beats. She could scarcely believe what she was seeing.
The photo showed a family of four, standing in dappled sunshine. The parents were on either side of their children—two prepubescent girls of extraordinary beauty. Already at this young age they both possessed the kind of faces the camera loved, faces that drew you in mesmerically. In this sense, she was already seeing preternatural adults. She looked from one face to the other and could not tell them apart. Identical twins, and there could be no doubt whatsoever. Both had the face of Fraulein Doktor Ana Helm.
Evan put a hand to her head, thinking of the two photos they had found. The one with William Onders was surely Ana, but the one they had found as part of Jon Pine’s possessions could very well be of the twin. Turning on the desk’s task light, she took out the photos, placed them just below the framed photo. She looked from one to the other—the two faces she and Ben had assumed were the same woman. But now she looked closer, she could see a tiny scar running through the left eyebrow of the woman in Pine’s photo. Ana’s twin. She took a couple of deep breaths while she put her photos away because the 8x10 held other revelations for her.
Of the parents standing on either side of their two girls, one was recognizable as Herr Doktor Reveshvili—younger, his face not as lined, but just as stern, dignified, the expression defined by gravitas even, as here, at rest. So Ana was Reveshvili’s daughter. No wonder he was so cagey when talking about her. Neither had he said a word about the twin when Evan had shown him Jon Pine’s photo of her, but she clearly recalled the expression on his face, the ever so brief hesitation before he spoke. Now, both took on an importance she could not have dreamed of earlier. This family portrait changed everything.
And now, at last, her attention was drawn to the fourth figure—Reveshvili’s wife, the mother of Ana and her twin. She was tall—as tall as Reveshvili, which was saying something. Slim and fit, she had dark, wavy hair down to her shoulders, wide-apart eyes, and a generous mouth. She reminded Evan of someone, but she couldn’t think of who it might be. A movie star in Hollywood’s heyday? Hedy Lamarr, maybe? In any event, she could see where Ana and her sister got their looks. In all, this was one striking family, something out of fable or legend. And yet they were real.
At that moment, she heard a noise. Her head snapped up, her eyes locked on the figure standing in the doorway—slim and fit, wavy hair down to her shoulders, but no longer dark: a startling silver, lent an almost feral glow from the office’s warm lamplight.
She was looking at Reveshvili’s wife, mother of Ana and her twin sister.
40
SCHNELLER PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC,
BERGISCH GLADBACH
“I see you found what you were looking for.”
“Frau Reveshvili.” Evan, standing the portrait of the family up on the desk where it had been when she had first walked into the office earlier in the day, rose and came around the desk toward the laden café table. “Finally, we meet.”
The Herr Doktor’s wife did not move from the open doorway. Rather, she leaned against the frame. She was enrobed in a silk dressing gown embroidered with cranes in the Japanese style. Her feet were bare. She was riveted on Evan’s face as if her eyes were magnetized.
“Please feel free to ransack my husband’s personal papers.”
She said this with such a lack of emotion, it was like receiving a text. On curiously stiff legs Evan made it to the table, stood with her hands gripping the back of one of the chairs. “The table has been laid,” she said. “Won’t you join me?”
Ana’s mother said not a word in response. Instead, she drew out a pack of cigarettes, plucked one out, placed it between her lips. It was at that moment that Evan realized she wasn’t wearing a speck of makeup, not even a scrim of foundation. From the pocket of her gown, she produced a gold lighter, flicked it open. But her hand trembled so badly, she had difficulty bringing the flame to the end of the cigarette.
Without a second thought, Evan crossed the space between them, took the woman’s hand in her own, moved the flame so she could draw smoke into her lungs. This she did, but to Evan’s surprise she let go of the lighter so that it fell into Evan’s hand. Surprise turned into astonishment to see Reveshvili’s wife silently weeping as she smoked.
Alarmed, Evan said, “Frau Reveshvili.”
“My name is Frau Doktor Rebecca Reveshvili.”
She never took her eyes off Evan. She never stopped crying, tears overflowing her eyes, running down her cheeks, plip-plopping in the space between them. The cigarette, forgotten, hung awkwardly from her fingers.
“I don’t—” Evan felt a constriction, like a tightened metal band, around her heart. “I don’t understand.”
“Of course not.” Rebecca’s voice was unsteady. “Why would you?”
Again her hand dug in her pocket, and this time she handed something to Evan: a snapshot.
Evan was looking at much younger versions of Reveshvili—Konstantin—and Rebecca. They cut a dashing couple, but there was something in both their eyes—the same emotions: sorrow, resignation, and something more, something darker, deeper: a discordant eddy of incompatible sensibilities. The faint heartbeat of impending judgment, of a future clouded by their own questionable actions. How she could discern all of this from the photo she would not, even in retrospect, fully understand. For the moment, though, she was taken over by these observations as if they had been made part of herself.
The charismatic pair were bookended by two children—both girls. Not twins, though. One girl looked to be about five or six, the other a toddler—maybe two, three? But what struck her dumb was the background. It was as familiar to her as the lines in her palm, as her own reflection gazing back at her from a long-ago mirror. Reveshvili and his wife were standing in front of the Black Hills of South Dakota, in front of the very house where Evan and Bobbi grew up.
“You were five years old then.” Rebecca’s emotion-clotted voice came to her as if from a distant past.
Five. The number of fingers on her hand. The number of years she was alive.
Evan’s knees turned to jelly, her heart felt ripped asunder, and she collapsed onto the floor, into Rebecca’s tears.
41
COAST OF ROMANIA
The sea slapped against the side of the boat, the black water rising and falling in the rhythm of a living thing. The sea was, in fact, an organism alive with a multitude of life, some stranger than others. Just like people, Kobalt thought. She lay in her berth, but even the gentle rocking motion failed to lull her to sleep. There was too much to think about, too many forks in the road that, when she began had seemed so straight and uncluttered.
She heard the lines slap against metal, felt the boat rock more forcefully as the wind began to pick up. No matter: she had a cast-iron stomach. She raised her head, saw a figure in the doorway. She sat up as the figure entered, turned on a lamp.
Lyudmila. She was wearing a rubberized waterproof jacket. Silently, she held out a second one. Kobalt slid out of her bunk, slipped on her boots, and took the jacket. Taking a cue from Lyudmila, she did all this silently. Then she followed, as the other woman turned on her heel and went out.
Seen from the deck, to Kobalt’s eyes the coast was dark and brooding, nothing more than a pencil sketch against a blasted charcoal sky, as if she was looking at the remnants of an enormous celestial burn. Turbulent clouds thickened on the horizon, coming their way. She saw no lights out on the water and was reassured.
When she gave Lyudmila a querying look, the Russian pointed over the port side. Craning her neck, she could make out a small launch with an outboard motor. One of the crew was in the stern, swinging the outboard out of the wa
ter. As the women climbed down a rope ladder that had been unfurled over the side, the crew member took up a pair of oars. No noise tonight, she thought.
The moment they clambered in, the two tie lines holding the launch to the yacht were loosed. They sat, facing each other, while the crewman began to row with powerful strokes through the rising chop toward the shore.
The two women looked at each other. Not a word was spoken. Kobalt had given up trying to winkle out Lyudmila’s mood, let alone her thought processes, by her facial expressions. It was like trying to read tea leaves or the thrown bones of foxes.
Kobalt glanced back over her shoulder at the receding yacht, where others lay sleeping, oblivious to whatever Lyudmila had planned. Looking over the Russian’s shoulder at the oncoming shore, she could now make out the beachfront glimmering in the ghostly glow of the port of Constanta, just to the south.
Because the outboard was raised, the launch was able to slide all the way up the shingle until the bow was grounded in sand. The women stepped out, and into Romania. It was a cool and desolate shore, rocky and somehow foreboding. Kobalt, thinking of Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, who was shipwrecked on a foreign shore, moved swiftly up the sand, boots sinking in bit by bit, up toward the jagged rocks, and beyond, the wall of the corniche. The hiss and suck of the water, the instability of the wet sand, grainy as couscous. The wind scouring the shingle. A shiver of apprehension chased through her.
As they crested the rise upon which the corniche was built, they could see off to their left the baroque cupolas of the grand casino rising from a promontory reaching out into the water, ugly as a boil on a fat man’s behind.
There was a dark-colored Opel Erebus sedan waiting for them, its engine running. It was only then that the full extent of Lyudmila’s meticulous planning came fully home to Kobalt.
“What is this all about?” she asked Lyudmila after they slid into the backseat and the sedan started off, heading south, toward Constanta.
“We’re going to see your parents,” Lyudmila said. “That’s what this is all about.” She turned to Kobalt. “This is why I came to meet you in Odessa, to take you here, where they are.”
Kobalt’s pulse should have quickened, her heart skipping a beat, her stomach contracting. Something. “Here in Romania? In Copenhagen I was told they were Russian agents.”
“True enough.” Lyudmila nodded. “Their parents were Romanian. They emigrated to Russia when they were in their teens. By all accounts, your parents were precocious in every way.”
That should have been Kobalt’s first clue, but she was too busy wondering whether she actually wanted to meet her birth parents.
“At the tender age of seventeen, they were taken in by the FSB, specially trained. As a couple, they were sent to the United States as part of a long-range program to create agents-in-place from, shall we say, the ground up.”
“Russians in American clothing.”
“Exactly.” Lyudmila frowned. “The program was an experiment. As such, it failed. The majority of the children growing up in America became addicted to the American capitalist way of life. They rejected recruitment outright when approached.”
“Except for me.”
Lyudmila nodded. “Except for you.”
“When? The letter wasn’t dated.”
“They left when you were three.”
As the Opel slid through the empty nighttime streets, Kobalt lapsed into a deep silence. Ever since she had found the goodbye letter from her birth parents to the American couple who, for ten years, had been the only parents she knew, she had felt that she was walking on eggshells around them, and especially Evan, lest she somehow give away the vital information she had stolen. She felt split in two: an outer layer concealing the new one birthed inside her. She couldn’t help feeling a distance between her and the Americans, seeing them in a different light. The mooring ropes that connect a child to her parents had been severed for Bobbi, and she felt herself drifting away toward a breach that had appeared in her world. And on the other side of that breach stood the woman in whose womb she had grown, absorbing the hushed Russian conversations the woman would have had with her husband—Kobalt’s father—as they echoed through the amniotic fluid in which she floated.
From the outset, she knew that Evan wouldn’t share her feelings, that Evan was bonded to their American parents with a weld that could not be broken. Evan was nothing if not fiercely loyal. She should have felt loyal to Kobalt as well, but she didn’t. For some reason she didn’t. She would never drift toward the breach in the world that had so drawn Kobalt the moment she had read the letter, felt that it had been written to her, not to the Americans. From that stunned time on she had thought of the people who reared her as “the Americans.” Now she had crossed over that breach, entered an entirely new world, a place she belonged. And of course she wanted to see her real parents, there was no doubt in her mind. None at all.
She turned to Lyudmila. “Have you seen them? Have you spoken to them? Do they know I’m coming?”
Lyudmila smiled and seemed to nod. But there was something lurking in the corners of that smile Kobalt recognized only in retrospect. That should have been her second clue. But she was too excited now. She had worked herself up, thinking of all the things she would say to them and, above all, what she would say first. “Mama, Papa, hello!” “Mama, Papa, I never thought this day would come!” “Mama, Papa, I’m so happy …”
And then the Opel drew up to the gates of Cimitirul Anadalchioi—the Anadalchioi Cemetery.
*
The graves of Galina and Maxim Chernyshevsky occupied one-half of a square plot shared with the Cherniceanus, clearly Maxim’s parents before their names were Russianized by the FSB. A waist-high iron fence that had seen better days marked off the plot, with a little gate that squealed like a stuck pig when Kobalt opened it. Out of respect, Lyudmila stood several paces behind her, hands clasped in front of her, quiet and still.
At this ungodly hour no one else was in the cemetery. Even the crows were asleep. The wind sweeping in off the sea whistled tunelessly through the aisles between the gravestones and polished granite monuments. Not a flower was in sight, not even a dead one. Those six feet under wouldn’t mind, Kobalt thought as she stood in front of her birth parents’ graves. Flowers, like funerals, were for the living, the gateway for grief, for respect, for remembrance. She had none of those gifts to present to Galina and Maxim. How could she? She had never known them. She’d been handed off to the Americans without her consent, which was an absurd thought. How could a three-year-old give her consent to anything?
And yet, she felt resentment; had she been consulted she surely would have opted to go with them back to Russia. Why would she want to be left behind, like yesterday’s papers? Who would want that? But she already had her answer to that: Evan, clearly. Evan, who was on the other side of the breach in the world and would forever remain so.
She felt wetness on her face. Not tears, no. Rain—or, more accurately—a chill drizzle. She buttoned the top snap of her slicker, felt her hair begin to mat down. She thought she ought to say something, a greeting—privet kak dela segodnya, Hello, how are you doing today?—a farewell. An acknowledgment. Nothing came to mind. A prayer, maybe, a eulogy for the dead. Nope, not those either. She felt dry, hollowed out. The place where her Russian parents had been was a well without water—the water to nourish her. It had run dry when they had left her in America, returning across the breach. She could bow her head—at least she could do that, but not for long, she was too restless. She did not like being in Romania. The energy was all wrong, something tearing at her skin, a sleet of biting insects.
At length, she stepped back, seemed pushed, as if some kind of force pressured her chest.
“Are you all right?” Lyudmila asked.
She nodded. She was having trouble breathing. Shallow breaths were no good, and yet these were piling up inside her like waves beating against the shore.
“I thought
you deserved to know.”
A surge of anger flushed through Kobalt. “This intimacy. You and me here with my parents, you the agent of this—what would you call it?—not a reunion, surely!”
Lyudmila did not react as she had expected to the verbal slap in the face. Instead, she said in a perfectly level voice, “I don’t think ‘reunion’ is the wrong word.”
Kobalt’s eyes flashed as she threw Lyudmila a murderous look. Turning on her heel, she strode quickly away, down the avenue of the dead. Feeling dead herself. All this time she had thought she had crossed the breach, when she now realized she had fallen into it. She was nowhere, a rolling stone, pushed back and forth inside the abyss.
“You’re wrong,” she spat as Lyudmila came up beside her. “There’s nothing here for me, not even a single, solitary memory.”
“You think I shouldn’t have brought you here.”
She rounded on the Russian. “I think you’re manipulating me. I think this was a stunt to bring me into your fold, to make me beholden to you.” Her eyes blazed; they felt hot and swollen, as if something had rubbed them raw. “Wrong a second time. Dead wrong.”
They had exited the cemetery now and were heading back toward the waiting Opel. They had plunged into those hours before dawn when night loses its hold, when it reluctantly begins to retreat into the west. The wind had all but disappeared, leaving the drizzle behind like a footprint soon lost to light.
“It was a mistake to bring you here,” Lyudmila said, “to think it would give you some solace.”
Those words rooted Kobalt to the spot. Her anger lifted color into the points of her cheeks. Not an apology, never an apology from this one. “Why are we here? Really.”
The Kobalt Dossier Page 28