And yet...
He remembered his first view of her, stepping out of the darkness by the metro station, rose in hand, trying desperately to act sophisticated and alluring. He remembered the way she sat on the bed with his poster floating above her, the intensity in her eyes as she recounted the sad little story of her life. He remembered the feel of her body, warm and helpless, as he held her before leaving. But maybe someday.
He had remembered these things many times in the three years since that night.
Valentina turned off the highway finally and drove along a dirt road shaded by fir trees and beeches. After half a mile she veered onto a rutted path and came to a stop in front of a small cottage painted a faded green.
Fulton was vaguely disappointed. He had imagined dachas to be grandiose villas with landscaped grounds and bearskin rugs on the floor. Evidently he was wrong—or perhaps the word was more elastic than he realized. At any rate, they had arrived. They got out of the car and stood for a moment under the soggy sky looking at the place. Across the fence a neighbor was sawing wood while a tinny radio played Prokofiev. "It's really quite comfortable," Valentina said. "There's no plumbing, but it does have electricity."
"It's charming," he murmured, then grinned, remembering that he had said the same thing to her before. "Did they tear down that building where you were living?"
She nodded. "I do not miss it," she said.
"I don't blame you."
They walked across a muddy patch of lawn to the dacha. The porch was pleasant, but the inside was dark and smelled of mildew, and the furniture looked cheap and rickety. The paintings on the wall were of dreary peasant scenes. He could feel Valentina staring anxiously at him, awaiting his opinion, but he couldn't think what to say.
Her bedroom was different. It was bright and clean, with a small wooden bookcase next to the double bed. He glanced at the English titles on the top shelf: The Call of the Wild, An American Tragedy, The Grapes of Wrath. His poster stared down at him from above the bed. Valentina opened a window. "This is a nice room," he said.
She blushed. "Thank you." She looked very nervous. "I brought a luncheon," she said. "I didn't know what—what you were expecting, so I took the liberty—"
"That's marvelous. I'm starving."
She looked outside. "I think the rain is over. We could go into the woods, if you like, and eat it there."
"That sounds wonderful."
They went back out to the car, and Valentina got a picnic basket out of the trunk. They each took a handle and carried it past the dacha and its outhouse. Fulton didn't think he had ever seen an outhouse before. Behind it was a dirt path that led into the woods.
Walking into the dark, silent woods made Fulton feel as if he were entering the heart of Russia. It was as alien to him as the windshield wiper, but in a different way: the windshield wiper was everyday life, and these woods were the mystery that shimmered behind that life. Valentina seemed comfortable with both.
"Do you like mushrooms?" she asked.
"Well, yes, I guess."
She kicked at some growing by the base of a tree. "I don't. People like to gather them this time of year. It is a stupid pastime."
"It certainly sounds boring."
Valentina sighed. They walked on. The leaves were already turning color, Fulton noticed. Summer was very short here. Eventually he and Valentina came out of the woods and into a meadow. They crossed a stream on a wooden footbridge. An old man was fishing nearby; two crows cawed overhead. Fulton couldn't identify the strong, damp odor he was smelling. Wild onions, perhaps? The sun broke through the clouds.
They walked a little farther, then Valentina stopped next to a copse of birch trees. "Is this all right?" she asked.
"Couldn't be better."
They set down the basket. The grass was a little wet, but the sun was drying it fast. Valentina took out a blanket and spread it on the grass, then placed the food and plates on it: black bread, sausage, salted cucumbers, Georgian wine... enough for several luncheons.
"From Food Store Number One?" Fulton asked.
Valentina smiled and did not reply. She opened the wine and poured them each a glass. "To music," she said, holding up her glass.
It was a safe enough toast. "To music," he agreed.
The wine was sweet but pleasant. Valentina served the food, and Fulton ate greedily. He was always hungry the day after a performance. Besides, eating gave him time to think. He knew he would have to start explaining soon, but he didn't know where to begin the explanation—didn't really know if he could explain why he was having a picnic with this strange young woman in this alien land.
Valentina said nothing. She was waiting for him, he assumed. Maybe she figured she had gone about things the wrong way three years ago and didn't want to repeat her mistake. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest. I asked for this date, he thought. It's up to me to begin.
When the meal was just about finished, he poured himself another glass of wine. "You don't know the effect you had on me that night, Valentina," he began, not looking at her. "I doubt that it was exactly the effect you hoped for, though. I had just given the greatest performance of my life. Everything I wanted to do at the piano I was able to do. Then I met you, and suddenly it didn't seem to matter. What you said about me seemed so true. I saw myself in the same way you saw yourself, I think—in the grip of a power that would not let you live."
"But the powers are not exactly the same," she said, shaking her head. "The joy you give—"
"Didn't seem to matter. What mattered was how I felt. You know my life story, Valentina. It's your story, it's the story of every prodigy. I try to blame my parents for the way I grew up, with people forever poking and prodding at me, demanding more from me, but the fact is that I lived exactly the way I wanted to live. I didn't care about friends or baseball or television programs, I just wanted to play the piano."
"Do your parents love you?" Valentina asked, with the curiosity of an orphan.
"I don't know. I suppose so. Maybe they love me because they get to bask in my reflected glory—look at what we produced! Maybe that's unfair. I don't know." Thinking about his parents always confused him. He swallowed some of his wine as memories flashed through his mind: winter in Evanston, his mother driving him to his lesson through a snowstorm—nothing mattered more than his lesson; his father nodding his approval backstage after a performance of the Grieg piano concerto (and that nod meant more to him than the standing ovation on the other side of the footlights); both of them arguing with Hershohn about some clause in the management contract—Hershohn looking mildly amused and infinitely patient, while Fulton wondered where gratitude had to end and embarrassment could begin. But he was getting off the track. "The point is, I decided I couldn't keep it up. I needed to think about my life, to do some of the things I never had the time to do. So I finished my tour and canceled everything else. I didn't play the piano in public again until last night."
"It was I who caused you to stop playing?" Valentina asked. She didn't look happy at the idea.
"If it hadn't been you, it would have been someone—or something—else, I suppose," Fulton replied. But he wondered if that was really true, if in fact she was perhaps the only person who could have made him stop. He remembered what she had said about his gift. It has ruined your life, but you cannot imagine life without it. How did she know that? He noticed the little area of tanned skin visible between the end of her jeans and the top of her sock. Why did that inch of her leg move him so much? "At any rate, it doesn't seem to have been such a good idea. I've spent most of the past three years staring out the window at my bird feeder. The things I thought I should do—learn how to drive a car, for instance, or make a lot of new friends, or learn about sports—well, I just never seemed to get started on them. It was as if I had lost the knack of living a normal life, and it was too late now to find that knack. So I didn't really grow up; I just—stopped."
Her gray eyes stared at him. "Why did you
start again?"
Good question. He was going to answer it. But he had to make sure that, when he did, she understood. Understood that he was more than a stooge for the CIA, and that what he was doing was motivated by more than just blind patriotism. He wanted very much for this woman to understand him. "Can we walk some more?" he asked.
"Of course."
They rose from the blanket and wandered silently across the meadow, leaving their luncheon behind. Eventually they came to the ruins of a church, half-hidden in the tall grass. Fulton supposed there were a lot of churches like it, cupolas caved in, windows broken, silent witnesses to a Power not strong enough to resist the march of history. He wondered if Valentina believed in God. He knew so little about her. They walked up to the church and stopped. Valentina leaned against a crumbling stone wall and smiled at him.
He did not smile back. "A lot of the time while I was staring out at my bird feeder I was thinking about you," he said. "I don't know why. Maybe what you said that night was right—we are soul mates, and I'm too rational or too stubborn to admit it. Maybe it was fate that brought us together that night and made me do what I did afterward. I don't know." He paused. This was going to be hard. It might ruin everything, but he had to do it. "It certainly seemed like fate, Valentina," he said softly, "when the CIA showed me your photograph, and told me you were the most dangerous woman in the world."
Her eyes widened. She shook her head. "No," she whispered.
What could he say to her? "We are what our powers make us, Valentina. My powers happen to give people joy; yours do something very different to people."
She began to cry, and then she turned and walked away from him, hiding her tears. He waited a moment, and then followed. She stopped in an abandoned cemetery just beyond the ruins of the church. A few weathered headstones with barely readable Cyrillic letters on them tilted drunkenly amid the tall grass and the wildflowers. Their lives forgotten, were they carousing in death? He stood and waited for her to turn back to him.
"That night had such a different effect on me, Daniel," she said, still not facing him. "I had dreamed of meeting you for so long—it had taken the place of real life for me. And then it was over, my dream had come true, and life went on. You do not know how gray and horrible and hopeless life is here—or perhaps you do. You saw my apartment, how I lived. What was I to do?
"I decided to let them test me again. Why not see if my curse could help me for once? I went to a place in Moscow called the Popov Institute. There is a group there studying the sort of thing I do. They were familiar with the experiments in Akademgorodok, and they were eager to set up more. But the results were not as impressive as they had been when I was a girl. I don't know why. Perhaps my powers had—what is the word?—atrophied. And then I met a man at the institute."
"Trofimov," Fulton said, remembering the name from his meeting at CIA headquarters.
Valentina turned and stared at him, frightened once again by his knowledge. "Trofimov," she agreed. "He is a brilliant, persuasive man. He had faith in me, and even more faith in the device he had created to amplify and channel psychic powers. I don't understand his theories exactly, but they seem to make sense. And they work. In his machine I was able to relax—the machine was doing the work, not me. I wasn't to blame. And that is when I became dangerous. But perhaps you know all this."
"I know some of it," he admitted. "But I don't know you."
"There is nothing to know," she replied. "I have let them use me. I have traded men's minds for a car and a sunny apartment and a dacha. And it is killing me. But perhaps I don't need to worry about that anymore. Perhaps you will kill me first."
Fulton looked at her standing across the cemetery from him, and then almost laughed when he realized what she must be thinking. He had done it all wrong, of course. He should never have mentioned the CIA without explaining everything. And perhaps she didn't understand him as well as she thought. "I'm not going to kill you, Valentina," he said. "I couldn't."
"Then why are you here? What do you want?"
"I want you to defect."
He whispered the word, suddenly realizing how much power it held in this country. Valentina stared at him, and then she was running toward him over the ancient, forgotten graves, and then she was in his arms, kissing him with a fierceness that almost made him topple over. He felt himself responding, felt himself being drawn into the maelstrom of her emotions; then reluctantly he pushed her away. "I guess that's your answer," he said, and she laughed. "But I want you to think about it some more, because it's too important a decision to make lightly."
"What is there for me to think about?" she asked.
"Well, first of all, you're Russian. You drink tea out of a glass, you keep your windshield wiper in the car. America is just... different."
She shrugged. "It doesn't matter. I'm Russian by accident. Why should that stop me from being happy?"
"But there's no guarantee you'll be happy in America. The CIA may use you the same way the KGB is using you. They say they won't do anything without your consent, but I can't guarantee that they're not lying."
"It doesn't matter," she said. "You will be in America."
And that was the most difficult point. "That isn't enough reason to leave everything behind, Valentina."
"I love you," she said.
More than one woman had said that to him, but the words had never really seemed to matter before. "How do you know?" he asked. "How do you know you aren't in love with a role I'm playing? I go around in disguises back in America, Valentina, partly to keep away fans, but also to give myself an identity—because I'm not sure that beneath all the roles there is an identity. Maybe I'm just an empty vessel through which the music passes—a pipeline from the gods." But even as he said the words, he knew what her response would be, because she did know him, she had proved it that night in Moscow, and he had spent three years trying to understand what she had told him.
The most real you is somewhere else; it looks at your life and it wonders why?
She laid a hand on his arm. "I am not in love with the great romantic pianist, Daniel," she said, "or the sexy fellow who seduces beautiful women, or the spoiled radical who says outrageous things because he can get away with them. I'm in love with you."
Her gray eyes stared at him, willing him to believe. He did believe; he didn't. He couldn't think what to say; he couldn't think. "Let's go back," he murmured.
They silently returned to the remains of their picnic. The sun was low on the horizon. A breeze had sprung up; Fulton suddenly felt cold, and the cold cleared his mind just a little. Mission accomplished. He didn't know whether to feel relieved or frightened, just as he couldn't make up his mind whether to shun this person as the superstitious old women did where she had grown up, or to give himself to her totally. He supposed he shouldn't even be thinking about that at all, he should have been thinking about the Safety of the Free World. But he wasn't. He was obsessed with Valentina Borisova.
They loaded the picnic basket and walked back through the woods to the dacha.
* * *
Valentina set the basket down next to the Zhiguli. She was afraid if she tried to say anything more she would break down; she had already said far more than she would have imagined possible. Perhaps Daniel felt the same way. But more had to be said; something had to be decided. She took a breath. "I will drive you back to the hotel, if you like," she said. "I will stay in Russia, if you like. I will do whatever you want. But please, Daniel—"
That was all Valentina could bear to put into words. She stood there in the gathering darkness and waited for him to decide her fate. She started to shiver. It was cold out; another long winter was coming. She crossed her arms on her chest.
Daniel reached out and touched her cheek. She closed her eyes. He folded her into his arms, as he had so long ago, and she waited for the words of dismissal. But maybe someday. There would never be another someday if he left her again.
And then he was kissing her—n
ot the chaste kisses of farewell, but the kisses of a passion finally allowing itself to be felt. She unfolded her arms and embraced him, trying not to cry the tears of joy pressing against her eyes. This, then, was her dream, and it could not have been better.
* * *
They stood naked in her bedroom. Liebestraum played on her tape recorder; she hoped the KGB listeners would enjoy it. Daniel Fulton was smiling at her beneath his poster. "Soul mates," he whispered.
"You must believe it," she said.
"I think perhaps I do."
He took her hand and led her to the bed.
Chapter 23
The KGB, not unlike the CIA, had built a large, modern building in the woods outside the capital. But the headquarters of the KGB remained where it had been for longer than most people cared to remember: in a mustard-colored building adjoining the Lubyanka Prison, near the Kremlin. It was here that Igor Volnikov's limousine brought him every morning at 7:30. He then took a private elevator to the third floor and entered his mahogany-paneled office overlooking Marx Prospekt. His secretary would have a pot of strong Turkish coffee waiting for him. Also waiting for him would be a stack of reports that had come in overnight from KGB residencies around the world.
Usually Volnikov would leaf through the reports while he drank his coffee, looking for nuggets of information that might somehow be transmuted into power. It was not always clear to him what kind of power he was seeking—power for the motherland, or power for himself. He had come to the conclusion, however, that the two were not so very different.
This morning only one report interested him. When he had read it, he buzzed his secretary. "Get Rylev in here," he demanded.
Rylev was in his office within ten minutes. Volnikov stared at him across his large desk. He liked Rylev. The man was loyal, and he knew what he was doing. Volnikov gestured at the report that had interested him. "Our friend Valentina has been entertaining."
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