Hot Siberian

by Gerald A. Browne

  She stood, arched her back to stretch it, and removed her soiled suede gardening gloves. She had on an oversized underwear T-shirt that fell off one shoulder or the other, cotton panties, and a pair of therapeutic clogs, the kind with hard red rubber nipples all over their insoles. She’d bought Nikolai a similar pair and he’d tried them, but every step he took in them was torture. She, on the contrary, could go around in them for hours with nary a wince.

  “Want to drive over to Tiverton tonight for a film?” she asked.

  “No.” Nikolai was across the terrace, where she had him shoveling, turning over a sunny part of the garden where she wanted to put in some new lilacs.

  “Neither do I. But if we stay home you know what sort of mischief we’ll get into, and I’m already sore.”

  He was both sorry for her and pleased with himself. “What film are they showing in Tiverton?”

  “I could call,” she said, not even halfheartedly. She flopped down in the hammock and situated herself in it, evidently there to stay awhile. She took up the book she’d been reading, In Search of the Miraculous, by P. D. Ouspensky. A blue jay’s feather marked her place. She read for five or so minutes and then without taking her eyes from the page she said: “I’d like to throw a tantrum.”

  “Go ahead. No one’s around.”

  “That’s just it. It would be a waste.”

  “Don’t I count?”

  “Inestimably, but not when it comes to tantrums. Now that I think of it, I’ve never behaved badly with you, never gotten raving vulgar jealous or anything like that, have I?”

  “Only a couple of times.”

  “I can’t recall even once. Perhaps we’re talking about different degrees of rave. You are exceptionally sensitive to me.”

  The truth of it was she had the accommodating ability to tuck whatever she found mentally uncomfortable way back in a corner of her brain’s forget file. She couldn’t blank things entirely, but she could, through some personal trick she’d learned, dilute them to such vagueness that they weren’t easily summoned.

  Nikolai’s memory was not so obliging. He clearly remembered, for instance, a night when he and Vivian had gone to a play at the Shaftesbury and during intermission at the bar he’d gotten into a conversation with a lovely Russian émigrée, who slipped him her telephone number when she thought Vivian wouldn’t notice. Vivian maimed the lady with a look and accused him of duplicity so loudly every head turned. They didn’t stay for the final act, hurried from the theater, Vivian four steps ahead. She tore her lamé skirt getting into the car, flung her evening purse at the backseat, drove maniacally, screaming hurts and blames so rapidly he couldn’t get in even a sliver of appeal. She became abruptly silent and fixed as a statue when she stopped in front of his flat, which was her way of ordering him out. The keys to his place had been left on the dresser at her place, but he decided not to mention it. With an insolent screech of tires she left him standing there. He went to one of the embassy’s spare rooms, giving the excuse that his plumbing had broken. Weeks later, when it was psychologically less costly, Vivian revealed to him that by the time she’d arrived home alone she had cooled a hundred degrees, and when she’d put herself to bed alone she was shivering inside. She had rung him up and let it ring so long it was a wonder his wires hadn’t shorted and caught fire. She had imagined an entire revue of tragic and lurid things happening to him, most of them involving the lovely émigrée, whose phone number he had probably only pretended to have thrown out the car window. She’d acted ridiculous, she’d said. Nikolai by then saw no exorbitant psychological price in confessing that he hadn’t slept that night and all he could find to read in that embassy room were stale Pravdas. He’d tried to phone her every five minutes for two hours but her line had been constantly busy and he took that to mean she had angrily taken it off the hook.

  They had made up so ardently the next morning that Nikolai had been late for an appointment with Churcher.

  No, Nikolai thought, Vivian hadn’t ever thrown a jealous tantrum—that she recalled.

  She resumed reading Ouspensky. With one bare leg extended to create swing for the hammock. Her knees were grubby from gardening. Nikolai paused from his shoveling to appreciate her. He enjoyed observing her when she was unaware. He especially liked to watch her sleep.

  With her attention only apparently on the page, she grinned her know-it-all grin. “Stop spying,” she told him.

  “I wasn’t spying.”

  “What then?”

  “I was thinking.”

  “About what were you thinking when you were spying?”

  He went back to work, stomped the blade of the shovel into the ground, struck a rock.

  “I’m going to make supper tonight,” she announced as though it were an event. “Escalloped potatoes and something. Does that water your mouth?” Escalloped potatoes deserved italics in her limited culinary repertoire.

  “I’ll peel,” Nikolai gladly volunteered.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I prefer you wild rather than domesticated. In fact, I don’t want to ever find you peeling a potato. A champagne cork but never a potato.”

  “What about dishes? I usually help with the dishes.”

  “Well, that’s not enough to even be considered a concession. Tell me, darling Nickie, are Russian men as a rule really such dreadful husbands?”

  “Where did you get that impression?”

  “From an American journalist who spent six years in Moscow.”

  “He should know,” Nikolai remarked sarcastically.

  “I didn’t hear it firsthand; I read it in his book.”

  “They all spend six years in Moscow and they all write books.”

  “Don’t get miffed about it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You had the beginnings of a miff. Anyway, in his book this fellow went on about how Russian men beat their wives. It’s not a question of whether or not the wives deserve it, mind, it’s just traditional. He even quoted an old Russian saying: “The more you beat a woman the thicker the soup.”

  “Is way to go,” Nikolai mocked, deepening his voice.

  “So are monthly cramps,” Vivian retorted, and then in the same breath: “Have you ever done any sailing?”

  “What kind of sailing?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just something I was told to ask. It popped into my head so I popped it out.”

  Nikolai had come to recognize such metaphysical traps and go silently around them. “As a boy I used to sail now and then with Lev. Neither of us was very good at it. We’d rent a boat at the yacht club on Petrovskaya and go out into the bay.”

  “A yacht club in Leningrad?”

  “Of sorts. Anyway, it’s called a yacht club.”

  “What bay?”

  “The Bay of Finland. When the wind was right we’d go way out, farther than was safe in such a small boat.”

  “Because it was exciting, the danger?”

  “Because it made it easier for us to pretend we were on our way to Tahiti. We’d bring books along to help us decide what we’d do when we got there.”

  “Why Tahiti?”

  “Lev’s choice. He had a fascination for Gauguin. He’d sit for hours in the Hermitage with the Gauguin paintings. Not merely looking but rather staring spellbound at them, as though he’d entered the atmosphere of the canvases, was lost among the tropical colors and Tahitian women.”

  “Perhaps he was Gauguin in a previous life.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Why not?” Defensively.

  “Gauguin wouldn’t choose the Leningrad climate.”

  “Might, for a change. What does Lev do to keep body and soul together?”

  “He works for Soyuzchimexport.”

  “Again, slowly.”

  Nikolai repeated it syllable by syllable and explained that it was the Soviet trade branch responsible for the importing and exporting of chemicals.

  “So Lev’s a c
hemist.”

  “No. He doesn’t have to be. It’s just a job, somewhat similar to mine, a niche that he somehow angled himself into a few years back. He doesn’t talk much about it. I suspect it’s dull. Probably the only reason he sticks with it is that he gets to travel out of the country.”

  “Lev sounds to me like a bit of a hustler.”

  Nikolai agreed but thought she didn’t really understand about Lev, and he didn’t want to get into trying to explain how and why in the Soviet Union ambition was most often better served surreptitiously. He told her: “Lev was a hockey player. One of the best. Fast, tough, and tricky. For quite a while the highest-scoring wingman on the Soviet army team. As such he was a national hero. Practically every influential office and, of course, a great many bedrooms were open to him.”

  “A star,” Vivian categorized.

  “He enjoyed all sorts of advantages. Until the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid when the Soviet team got beat out of a gold medal by a bunch of American kids playing over their heads.”

  “I remember. The Americans were such underdogs. Actually, there was no way they could lose, you know. It was just meant.”

  “Lev said after that loss it was a wonder he and the rest of the team weren’t made to swim home. It was never officially called a disgrace, but the consequences said as much. Lev’s privileges were cut back to practically nil. He was reassigned to a much smaller apartment on the basis that he was exceeding the nine square meters per person which was the legal allotment of space. The new car he had taken for granted would not be forthcoming. His right to buy in the special shops where plenty is available was revoked. I doubt that you can imagine what a comedown it was for him.”

  “Poor Lev,” Vivian commiserated.

  “Normally when a player the caliber of Lev is done with his playing days he’s well provided for all his life, given a coaching assignment at a generous salary with one of the top Soviet teams. Lev was offered the job of coaching a minor factory team in Novosibirsk. Lev turned it down, as they must have known he would. I don’t believe he’s had a hockey stick in his hands since.”

  “What does one who is out of work do in Russia?”

  “It’s against the law to be out of work in Russia.”

  “So, what did Lev do?”

  “He became bitter, drank more than too much, sidestepped and ducked various authorities, falsified entries in his workbook. I’m almost certain he was working the black market, but he didn’t implicate me by letting me know. Anyway, he got along without turning gebeshnik.”

  “Translate.”

  “KGB.”

  “What does KGB stand for? I’ve never thought to ask.”

  Nikolai gave it the full-out, most menacing Russian pronunciation: “Komitet Gosuidarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, Committee of State Security.”

  “Brrrr,” went Vivian.

  Nikolai continued on Lev. “He’s recovered considerably since he’s been with the chemical export branch. He’s not the good-natured Lev he once was, but at least he’s not headed down the pipe.”

  “The drain, darling.” Vivian corrected, and after a moment of introspection, “Wonder what it’s like to have a friend the way you have Lev. I don’t have one friend, not a one. I mean a faithful female chum.”

  “Beautiful women seldom do.”

  “Everything you say is true.” Vivian smiled and made her lips into a kiss and threw it at him.

  From around the front of the house came the sound of gravel crunching under tires on the drive. A car pulled up and stopped. Nikolai and Vivian were on the rear terrace, so they couldn’t see who it was. They assumed it was Archer. Vivian had given the caretaker, Tigley, Saturday off, ostensibly to visit his brother but actually to play Lady Chatterley’s lover to a well-off but simmering married woman in Exeter. So it had to be Archer, not Tigley. Archer, however, wouldn’t be knocking at the front door. Probably someone needing directions. Nikolai slipped on his sweatshirt and went around front.

  Vivian in the hammock scrunched up and closed her eyes. The tantrum cycle had passed. Contentment was left in its place. She would drift off into a nap. But she caught a fragment of greeting by voices she didn’t recognize. Whoever could it be? Surely Nikolai wouldn’t bring them around back. Or might he? She struggled out of the sling of the hammock, dashed into the house, and ran up the stairs.

  Ten minutes later she came down and out, dressed in fresh clothes and with knees scrubbed. Concealing her uncertainty, she welcomed the older man and the young woman who were seated on the terrace with Nikolai. Introductions revealed that the young woman was as French as she appeared. Her name was Valérie de Varignon, which sounded contrived but was a pleasure to pronounce. She had an atypical Gallic disposition, an honest, lively smile. The man was Grigori Savich, and the “Minister” that Nikolai put before his name transmitted respect as would the British “Lord” or “Sir.” Vivian had heard Nikolai speak of this man, so she knew his importance.

  Savich charmed from his first words, even though they were the predictable apology for the intrusion. “We were out for a weekend drive and happened to be nearby,” he explained. “When we phoned earlier no one answered, so we came just on the chance. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” Vivian charmed back. “In fact, we were in the mood for visitors, weren’t we, Nickie?”

  “Yes,” Nikolai replied too quickly. He was still off-balance from Savich’s having shown up like this. No doubt Savich in his high position could easily find out Vivian’s unlisted number and the location of her house in Devon. But why was Savich there? Ministers didn’t just drop in. Had Savich been in his Claridge’s suite and let loneliness get the best of him? That was difficult to imagine. Savich was the sort who would battle such a mood, not give in to it. Even if Savich had craved company, why would he choose them, Nikolai and Vivian? No matter—Nikolai was delighted that Savich was there.

  “Not to entirely impose we brought a little something,” Savich said.

  The little something was a 1.8-kilo container of caviar, Royal Beluga. It was in a blue-and-black disk-shaped tin packed in shaved ice which was kept from melting by dry ice. It had been shipped via Aeroflot just the day before from Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. Savich had also brought a half-dozen bottles of Noskovskaya vodka, as if one or two wouldn’t have been sufficient.

  Vivian put the vodka into the crammed freezer compartment of her refrigerator, sacrificing several packages of frozen entrées to make room. As they waited for the vodka to chill, Vivian maneuvered the attention onto Mademoiselle de Varignon.

  “Please call me Valérie,” the young Frenchwoman said. She had an enviable accent. It gave color to even the most mundane things. Vivian found that Valérie needed little drawing out, was very open about herself, even her personal self. She confided amusingly that she had assumed the “de” of her name in order not to sound like a Victor Hugo character. “I am a dancer and an actress,” she said as though that were evident. Then she admitted that the dancing and acting she did was hardly demanding as such. “I work at Le Crazy Horse,” she said, assuming they would know she meant the Paris nightclub. She related brightly how in one Crazy Horse sketch her pubic hair (she called it her “poos-ie hair”) had to be heart-shaped. “It was très mignon but such a bother to keep clipped just so. I shaved and got a merkin.”

  “A what?”

  “Comprenez ‘merkin’? A perruque, a wig for the pelvis.” As though they were in every shop window.

  Vivian decided she liked Valérie and her candor. Hers was the sort of ingenuous sophistication that especially a young Frenchwoman could get away with. She was very pretty and physical. Slender, slight in the hips but nicely waisted, she had a somewhat boyish figure, except for her rounded bottom and her breasts. All things considered, Valérie gave the impression that she would be unconditionally selfish in bed.

  As for Valérie and bed and Savich, Vivian intuitively gathered that this day of countrying was a respite between sexual encounters�
�the one of last night, which, judging from the languor of Valérie’s eyes, had been very successful, and the one of the night to come, which accounted for the nervous lower torso she also detected in Valérie. This Savich must be quite a well-practiced fellow, Vivian surmised. She turned her appraisal to him. His air said that he believed his years of experience were in his favor. And he wasn’t fooling himself, Vivian felt. He must have been torrid when he was younger, was likely even more so now. Where was it she’d read that certain men naturally gave off extra huge whiffs of an arousing chemical, a kind of inverse estrus? Now what had brought that to mind? Mainly for her own fortification she gave Nikolai a part-kiss, part-bite on the nape of his neck on her way in to check on the vodka.

  The bottle was frosted. The warmth of Savich’s hand melted a print on it as he filled four small glass tumblers. He left the opening of the caviar to Nikolai, who removed the inch-wide rubber band that had acted as a seal for the disk-shaped tin. The large gray caviar grains were revealed, mounded up, packed snugly but not damaged. Shining fresh, not at all watery, this was Royal Beluga at its finest. A clump of grains fell from the edge into the ice, but what matter when there was four pounds?

  “Quelle décadence!” Valérie exclaimed.

  Nikolai assumed the caviar was from the embassy’s supply. The vodka as well. Still, it was thoughtful of Savich.

  They scooped it onto Waterford luncheon plates, huge portions, properly accompanied by just crème fraiche and decrusted, lightly buttered toast. Savich raised his tumbler to Nikolai, but his words were: “To your Vivian.” They all tossed down to that, Vivian too.

  Crunching on a triangle of toast piled with beluga, Savich asked Vivian: “Do you know how to make blinis?”

  “No, but I’ve vowed to learn.”

  That was the first Nikolai had heard of it.

  “Learn to make good blinis and I’ll see that you receive a tin of beluga like this every week,” Savich promised.

  “Only if you’ll come and share,” Vivian told him.

  “But of course.” Savich laughed, pleased. “How else would I be able to judge your blinis?”