by Kiera Zane
THE MAN OF MY DREAMS
Kiera Zane
2013 Copyright by Global Grafx Press, LLC
All Rights Reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author or Global Grafx Press, LLC.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE MAN OF MY DREAMS
Chapter One: Siberia
“The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy.” – Alan Lightman
Chapter Two: The KGB
"The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for." -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Chapter Three: English and Mind Control
"A man is known by the silence he keeps." -- Oliver Herford
Chapter Four: Deployment
"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity". -- Edgar Allan Poe
Chapter Five: The Job
"I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life." -- Jean Giraudoux
Chapter Six: Closer
"The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has more threat than comfort."-- Mason Cooley
Chapter Seven: Connecticut
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.” -- Anaïs Nin
Chapter Eight: Tumult
"Nature, in her most dazzling aspects or stupendous parts, is but the background and theater of the tragedy of man." -- John Morley
Chapter Eight: I Love You?
"Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge." – Scott Adams
Chapter Nine: The Escape
"To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable." -- Erich Fromm
Chapter One: Siberia
“The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy.” – Alan Lightman
March 1961
The winds off the Irtysh are cold and wet, turning the river water into snowflakes that feel like they’re cutting into my reddened cheeks. The fields and the sky are white and endless; only a thin, distant horizon to separate them. My blonde hair fades into the pale surroundings, and even though I’ve finally grown up enough to be seen as a young woman and no longer a child to everyone accept those in my own family, I still feel small against the expanse of the Omskaya oblast.
Papa is waiting for me back at the house, far from the romance and culture of Omsk city, where the Trans-Siberian Railway, the airport and the river port brought all of Siberia together in a frenzy of trade and talk, goods and gossip. It would have been the Siberian capital if it weren’t for Novosibirsk, but Omsk still thrives, the air cradling grey clouds from the natural gas and oil mines.
And a lot of that oil is buried deep in Papa’s face; his fingers, the crags of his wrists and elbows and neck; thin black veins that seem to run just above the skin. I know he never smiles when he’s working the oil mines. In fact, he only ever really smiles at me. His lips break wide across his tired face, the wrinkles gathering at the corners of his eyes as he stretches his arms out to me. “Sandra,” he always calls me. Aleksandra can be turned into so many nicknames, but they all sound basically the same to me; I’ll always be Aleksandra Zolotov, no matter what they call me.
But Papa never smiles at Gregory or Vlad. I know he loves them, of course; they’re his sons and his eldest children. Perhaps it is because he wants to make sure they grow up strong and solid and proud that he treats them so coldly. But that is not what Papa wants for me.
And what I want for myself is a new question that follows me on my long walks through the snowfields. I think about my childhood here, filled with so many hours of dancing and singing and make-believe in these very fields, when my head is filled with visions of princes and adventure.
I thrill to the possibilities of my unknown future. I know that danger will await me no matter where I go; somehow I even want it to. I yearn for the excitement of the outside world, of the pain and pleasure and all that being alive can mean. I am young and desirable, and I will have enemies that will pursue me in any event. But my family will be safe. And whatever danger awaits me, I only hope that I won’t be facing it alone.
And that is all I ever really want.
Mamma always tries to warn me about being lost in such dreams, that I have a duty to find a husband and serve him, give him children and to accept that he is not be a prince, but a hard-working and respectable man. Anything else is foolishness, and she warns me that it could bring me to ruin.
But there is always Papa, protecting his daughter against any opposition, even under our own roof. “Why must you taunt the child?” he’s say to Mamma, more a command than a question. To his sons, he’d say worse.
And I walk through the whip of the cold, vast fields off the river; I look around and know that Mamma had been right. I am still grateful for my Papa’s dedication to me, of course. No matter where I go or what happens to me, I will always be his daughter. But there isn’t any future for me here but a life of service to a man whose own life is spent in the service of some other man, whose life is similarly wasted in service to someone else. Somebody somewhere did not serve another; but that man served the Siberian people. And I’d never meet such a man in the dreary chill of the Omsk.
My mind flashes on a series of images; people I have never met, places I have never been. An ugly man with a pronounced ridge over his eyes, brows thick and tangled, snarling at my mind’s eye; then he grins. Another flash, this one of a young woman, naked and twisting from the end of a chain.
No, not a young woman.
A young man.
Another image bursts in my brain, shivers running down my spine and not from the cold, snowy wind. I see a city, speckled with light against an inky night’s sky.
Moscow? No. Somewhere in America? New York?
I can’t be certain. I have never seen Moscow or New York. I can only dream and conjure what they might look like. We are poor; there are no books. All that I have learned is from my mamma, who has dutifully taught me my letters, words, arithmetic and the domestic arts: cooking, cleaning, knitting and quilting against the cold. Our existence is more pleasant than some of our neighbors. My father and brothers work hard to ensure that my belly is full, our house warm and life congenial. It is safe, secure and to me, utterly boring.
I have always had a gift, my mother has told me. I have seen images, visions that are sometimes proven real. These aren’t the first images of their kind to find a home in my heated imagination. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been receptive to these images, pictures of moments in time that hadn’t yet happened, but were going to; or were happening even then, miles away. Even when I was an infant, they say I cried terribly whenever something bad had happened in the neighborhood even before we’d heard about it. They say I was in hysterics the day the Hawaiian port of Pearl Harbor was bombed, even though I was only one year old and we had no news of the event until sometime later.
When I was a little girl, I had visions of that terrible wall the Germans just built this year in the center of their capital city, Berlin. It looked exactly in my mind as it does now; sections of concrete and barbed wire, towers and guards and dogs and searchlights.
Nobody could ever explain my visions, and often I can’t even understand them until later, when their meaning sometimes becomes clear. Th
ey hit me as abstract images, flashes of nervous energy that spill out in front of my mind’s eye with terrible quickness, like steel blades cutting through my brain and my heart.
But there is no questioning the realness of my visions or their accuracy. Even now I’m haunted by suggestions of things to come which I know I cannot stop even when I am given warning of their terrible approach; like a train cutting through the flat flesh of the Siberian landscape, steadily getting louder and closer.
I see the flash of another face, once again one I don’t recognize. This is often the case with my visions, but not always. I don’t care to remunerate on it because the visions have never brought me anything other than pain and dread. I have never mastered the visions; they have always been my master. So this face, like so many others, comes and goes in an inexplicable moment, a heartbeat of the mind. It is a strong face, angular, drawn and pale. Sad. Scared.
I approach the house, one of several on a quiet road stretching through the endless white. Gregory and Vlad shovel snow from the street. Their tall, broad frames stand out against the white powder around them, heavy wool coats wrapped around them. They glare at me as I approach, then look at each other and shake their heads.
“The snow princess returns,” Gregory says, his blue eyes flashing.
Vlad looks at me and adds, “Did you capture the wolf today, young Peter?”
“Perhaps if you picked up a shovel once or twice yourself,” Gregory says to me, “you’d prove yourself worthy of a husband!”
They laugh, but I am not amused.
I have already had plenty of attention from young men, and some that were not young at all. Shopkeepers, teachers, classmates; all have shown interest in my time, my body. I know my limbs are strong but still lithe, graceful. I know my face has a certain softness that boys have always liked to look at, to touch, to kiss.
But not everybody wanted merely to kiss. And I have wanted more than that myself on many occasions.
It is not always so cold in the Omsk.
Not that I want to share my experiences in the barns and the fields and the shadows while dancers twirled and men drank. These are my private experiences, winsome highlights of a childhood a lot people would mourn, even if my own brothers envy it. But the life of every young woman includes time with young men; their hands clumsy, fingers groping, tongues that lack subtlety, much less mastery.
Or restraint.
There had been that one night, after the celebration of the birthday of Peter the Great, when two of the gas minors found me out in the field, alone, further out than any scream could carry.
But Gregory had arrived before clothes had been stripped away, before my neck had been cut or my belly slit open. And his attack upon them had been vicious, anger roaring out of his mouth as he picked up one and threw him into the other like some mad giant.
After that, my brothers started watching me more and more and the boys came around less and less. Soon, only trusted elders were allowed within reach of me before one or more of my guardians would interfere. As I neared my twenties, and then stepped daintily into them, an aura of inapproachability had cut me off from the men of our neighborhood, and a lot of that had to do with my brothers’ overprotectiveness.
So, to tease me about it is not only hurtful, but misguided. I look at Vlad, my lips small between my cheeks, chin jutted slightly as I look him over. “I had a vision of you, Vlad, last night.”
Vlad’s smile melts away as silence replaces their callous chortles. “What?” Vlad asks. “Tell me, what was it, what did you see?”
I hadn’t seen anything the night before, no visions of Vlad or anyone else. But that doesn’t mean I’m above letting him squirm on the hook of my birthright. I just look him over, my expression solemn, my eyes combing his supposedly doomed frame. Without a word, I turn and walk into the house.
Vlad bolts after me, Gregory pushing against his chest to stop him from falling upon me from behind. “Tell me what you saw, you witch!”
“Vladimir,” Gregory says, “don’t you know when she’s pulling your leg?”
“That’s easy for you to say, Gregory. It wasn’t you she had the vision of.” By then I am in the house, but I can still hear Gregory’s voice, muffled from outside. “Am I to die, Aleksandra?”
In the house, Mamma hovers over the stove, beet soup boiling in a cast-iron pot. She looks at me, her posture stooped from years tending to that pot that stove, those beets and soups, her husband and children.
Is this what I want for myself? I have to wonder, and not for the first time.
Her face is craggy with worry, hair lifeless and limp as it falls down over her forlorn brow. She looks at me and gives me a wordless kiss on the cheek. She turns away, with even more melancholy than usual, the silent tension even heavier around her than it has always been.
“Mamma?” I ask, not needing to say more.
“Aleksandra,” Papa says from the other room as he enters. He is not smiling, but his arms are outstretched.
I fall into his loving grip and let him squeeze me, as always. And yet, it is not as it has always been. Something feels off, it feels somehow wrong. His embrace feels less like it is welcoming me in than bidding me farewell. He squeezes extra tight, as if somehow he knows I am slipping through his fingers.
I’d noticed changes in him over the years, of course, for every father must change as their little children become adults and prepare for lives of their own. Gregory and Vlad were both working the oil mines with Papa, and at twenty-one I am still at a marriageable age.
We aren’t children anymore.
But we are still a family, and always would be, no matter where our travails take us. Like a lot of families, the future lay in togetherness. The further we travelled, the less likely we would ever be to return or to see the others again. Siberia is a big place, Russia even bigger and the whole world bigger still.
It is easy to get lost in such a place.
So families like ours tend to stay together, huddled up against the snow and the cold and the bleak world of danger and solitude, loneliness and despair; a desolate landscape that consumes the hapless and wayward.
I ease back out of Papa’s arms. He lets go slowly, reluctantly, as if he knows he’ll never be able to hold me again. “Papa?” I ask, turning back toward my mother to repeat the question that lingered unanswered from moments before. “Mamma, what is it? What’s happened?”
Papa walks over to the little kitchen table and raises a thin, folded newspaper, our local gazette. Even from across the room, I recognize the initials in the subhead above the article.
KGB.
For people like us, that usually means one thing.
Death.
A wave of nervous terror ripples through my body, shaking me to my core. Even in the warmth of the kitchen, I feel chilled to the bone, despite the air filled with steam from the boiling soup, the acrid smell of cabbage in my skull.
I notice Gregory and Vlad enter from outside. Vlad’s anger has melted away.
He’s already heard the bad news, whatever it is.
They all have.
I let my eye fall to the newspaper, knowing the printed words wouldn’t share my family’s reticence. As the black print seems to hover above the trembling gray sheet in my hand, my brain struggled to wrap itself around their terrible meaning.
Words like official invitation, compulsory, subject to arrest.
Daughter or daughters.
I can scarcely keep my brain going in a single direction, much less control it enough to digest the hideous truth behind the words.
“Papa?”
“It’s another one of their schemes! The KGB won’t make a whore of my daughter!”
“Not a whore, Papa,” Gregory says. “A spy.”
Vlad looks at me, almost smiling. “Perhaps, your visions will do you some good after all.”
Mamma rushes over to me, wrapping her arms around my head. “Tell them nothing of it, Aleksandra, promise me! Promis
e you’ll tell them nothing! Be a good girl, do as you’re told and tell them nothing.”
“She’ll not do as she’s told,” Papa says, “because she’ll not be there.”
“We haven’t got any choice, Papa,” Vlad says. “It’s the gulag for us all if she doesn’t go.”
“You coward,” Papa yells at him. “You’ve always despised her!”
“We are the ones who have been protecting her, looking out for your precious wood nymph as she prances around with the spirits. All the while she’s danced herself over a cliff and you haven’t the eyes to see it. Who is the coward now, Papa?”
Papa lunges at Vlad, the two men clashing in the center of the room. Papa’s fingers crane around Vlad’s neck, their faces red, veins pushing up along their necks as their strength is suddenly pitted against one another.
Mamma pulls at Papa, her tiny hands gripping his wool sweater. Gregory pushes himself between the two men, hands on each of their chests as he struggles to push them apart.
Our family, which has always been so tightly knit and self-reliant, is suddenly tearing itself apart.
And I am the reason for it, even if I am not necessarily to blame.
And only I can stop this conflict.
“Stop,” I shout, “both of you please, stop this fighting! Papa!” My voice finally cuts through the waves of tension breaking between the jagged rocks that are my father and brother. They all look at me, standing by the kitchen table just outside the scramble of their fracas.
Calm returns to the kitchen, their eyes upon me. Gregory manages to push the other two away from each other, Mamma’s hands still clinging to Papa’s back.
I say, “It’s okay, I’ll go.”
“No!” Papa shouted. “You have no idea what you’re talking about! You’ll be disappeared, Sandra, given over to men who -- ”
“I’m not a child anymore, Papa. I know what men are, and what they’re capable of.”
Vlad says, “Child, you have no idea what a man is capable of.”
But I do know. My brothers have been protective, and they’d been attentive. But they haven’t been entirely effective.