Despite the Falling Snow

by Shamim Sarif

  When she had realised the reason for her nausea and her bloated stomach she had wished silently, in the late night darkness of their bedroom, for a miscarriage. But that was before the hope of escape. Before the vision of a life with Sasha in another place, where it would be just them, and their baby – no bugs, no cameras, nobody watching them, nobody for her to spy on. A place where she could fight communism openly. She can hardly believe what is happening. She hates herself for ever wishing the baby dead, and now she is angry with herself, for she feels that she has brought this fate upon herself. It is irrational, but she feels it. Here, in this soiled, cold alley, she has been given the means for her tiny baby to die, and she has to die with it. She turns her head to the side and whispers.

  “Misha, please, don’t do it. You can help me. I don’t want the baby to die. Come away with me. Let’s make a run for it, right now, you and I. We’ll go away together. You don’t want to stay here working for the KGB for the rest of your life. Come with me. We’ll live happily together. We can do it.”

  She pauses, and he is still behind her. She can feel him wavering, she is sure of it. Something has touched a nerve. Perhaps, like her, he feels that, even if the odds are against them, he has nothing to lose by trying. Perhaps one more round of persuasion will clinch it.

  “You and me?” he says, softly, and she hesitates. Something strikes her as being wrong here, but before she can think about what it is, she speaks again, desperate to secure the advantage.

  “Yes. You and me and Sasha, together. Think of it.”

  He kicks her hard. This one is between her shoulder blades and now she cannot breathe. She knows at once where she has made her mistake… ‘and Sasha’. Now she sees with such clarity, as though a spotlight has suddenly been trained on her. He is in love with her. She sees it now, understands finally the desperate need she has sensed, but dismissed, in certain of his looks and touches. And by reminding him that she is going to Alexander, that she loves his best friend, that she is pregnant by him, she understands at once that she has just lost her last chance of evading death.

  She rocks forward on her knees so that her forehead touches the dirty ground, and she waits for the spasm to pass. The kick has thoroughly winded her. Perhaps it is better if I pass out now, she thinks, before he shoots me, but her lungs instinctively fight for breath. She sobs slightly. She wants to go home. She is scared of dying like this, like her parents, with a bullet that will explode through her brain, erasing her and her baby from the earth, leaving Sasha alone with the horror of it. It seems too hard that this black destiny should descend on her now, when they have come so very close to the happiness they imagined together.

  “Sasha,” she whispers. She pictures him in her head, which is pounding with fear. “I love you, Sasha.”

  Misha closes his finger around the trigger of the gun. This is taking too long. He is tempted, briefly, to pull her up and kiss her, to know at last how it would feel to have her lips on his, to taste her warm mouth and tongue with his own, to savour what Alexander has enjoyed for all this time without even thinking about it. But that will only make it harder than it is already. He closes his eyes and concentrates on the blackness that is revealed to him. He is blocking out sight, blocking thought, blocking all sense; but from somewhere, he can hear a buzzing. His right ear is buzzing – from where Katya has hit him, probably. Misha keeps his eyes tightly shut a little longer, and pretends that the buzzing he hears is the distant sound of an aeroplane. He pictures it flying a straight course across an imaginary horizon. How he loved aeroplanes when he was a little boy. Little Misha. Keeping old newspaper cuttings of the first, heroic, Soviet pilots. Pictures of them in their beautiful planes, pictures of them meeting Comrade Stalin. With his classmates, he had watched them flying over Red Square on national holidays, had watched them being saluted by their leader, amid cheers. That was all he had ever wanted to do when he was young. Get into a cockpit, cheered by admiring crowds and fly up into the grey sky, away from the city, and up high above the clouds where, his father had assured him, the sky was always blue.

  He opens his eyes and glances down at the top of her head. His gaze is steady now, and cool, and he knows he has crossed the line in his mind, so that now she will give him no more trouble. Without another moment’s thought, he pulls the trigger, twice, and stands back, dispassionate, as she slumps forward.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Boston

  NEITHER OF THEM SPEAKS MUCH during the drive home from the airport. During the long flight back they have been depressed and agitated by turns. They have talked about Misha’s confession, examined his words from every angle, pieced together not only the facts of the case, but the emotions of it too. Now, during the final leg of the journey home, it is as though all of that artificial, nervous energy has drained from them. Lauren in particular is tense, deeply upset. Each mile along the highway is only bringing her closer to Alexander, and she does not quite know how to tell him what they have learned.

  “I feel like we’ve been away for months,” Melissa says.

  “Missing the office?” Lauren asks, smiling.

  “Sure, but that’s not what I meant. I kind of got used to Moscow. Felt immersed in it, and in Katya. I think I’m still in shock.”

  Lauren nods. “I know.”

  They turn off the highway and into the warren of back streets that leads directly to their neighbourhood.

  “Do you want to have some dinner with us? I can pretty much guarantee that Uncle Alex will have an amazing meal waiting.”

  “I’m sure he will. But I think you’d better do this alone, don’t you? This is going to be incredibly hard for him.”

  “I know.”

  Melissa swings the car into Alexander’s street, and slows before the house. She gets out and helps Lauren up the front steps with her bags. As she hands her the last one, their hands touch. Melissa entwines her fingers with Lauren’s and squeezes. Then kisses her on the cheek.

  “Good luck,” she says. “Call me later and let me know how it went.”

  Before she has even driven away, Alexander has opened the door, and is embracing his niece. He waves to Melissa, and then helps Lauren into the house.

  “So good to have you back. I have dinner all ready.”

  “Smells great.”

  She follows him into the kitchen, where he is all movement and energy. When he looks at her, she is watching him with compassion, or is it pity? Something about her look causes a vague sensation of coldness to invade his chest, and when she asks him if she can have a quick shower before dinner, he is almost grateful for the idea of a few extra minutes to collect himself now that the excitement of her return is beginning to give way to a nervous tension – curiosity about what she might have found out.

  “Go ahead,” he tells her. “I need a few minutes to finish dinner anyway. And then, I want to know about Moscow.”

  She smiles, sensing the effort that he is making to take a distanced interest in her trip. He wipes his hands on a cloth and looks at her.

  “Go on. Then you can come back and tell me everything.”

  “Moscow’s looking more and more like downtown in any big US city,” Lauren says as they eat. “The ads, the coffee places, you know. At least, part of it seems that way.”

  “And the rest?”

  “The rest of it still looks like the place of my imagination. The place I always visualised you living. Dramatic buildings, the churches you walk past where suddenly a group of people are chanting prayers, the old babushkas on the street corners, those solid grey Soviet buildings. The spires of the Kremlin. It’s a strange combination.”

  “You romanticise it too much.”

  “Maybe. I can’t help it.”

  Alexander pushes away his plate. He has eaten less than half of the food on it, she notices.

  “How are you, Uncle Alex?”

  “Fine.”

  “How’s Estelle?”

  Now his eyes avoid hers, and he stands u
p to load more salad into her bowl.

  “I don’t know. I saw her the day after you left. A week ago, nearly. We saw My Fair Lady. You should see it by the way.”

  “Tell me. Something happened.”

  He sits down, pinned there by her insight.

  “Nothing, really. Without actually talking about it as such, she made it clear that she wasn’t interested in pursuing any relationship with me. Not one that might trouble her husband.”

  “Were you surprised?”

  “No…” He pauses, hoping he will be excused from saying more, but she only waits. “I guess I was somehow hoping for more from her. So, I thought it best that we stop seeing each other altogether.”

  “How does she feel about that?”

  “I don’t know. I got a note about a week ago. She said she was going out of town on her own for a few weeks. To get her bearings, think about things.”

  “What things?”

  “I have no idea. She wants to write, you know,” he adds suddenly, with warmth. “But she seems somehow afraid of that man and his opinions.”

  “The professor?”

  Alexander nods. “I don’t think she even likes him. Maybe she loves him, from habit, or duty, but there’s no passion there.”

  “Isn’t passion a lot to expect after thirty years?”

  Alexander fixes her with a look that holds in it a weight of anger and sadness. “I don’t think so.”

  She is silent, sorry for his distress, unsure of what to say.

  “Without passion, what is the point of living?” he tells her, his tone still bristling with emotion. She nods, wanting to placate, wanting to understand.

  “And Misha,” he says, suddenly. “Tell me, did you find him?”

  “Yes,” she says, looking down. “We did.”

  Lauren begins to recount the details of her journey over a dessert of chocolate cake, beginning with how the detective found Misha, and then moving onto their first visit to Misha’s apartment. She does not hurry her words, for she wants time to carry her uncle slowly along with her, before the real story is thrust on him. She has no trouble managing this – despite all Alexander’s previous protestations that he does not care about Russia and the details of what happened, he is in fact hungry for facts, and descriptions, and sights and every one of her impressions is of interest to him. He wants to know what Misha looks like, how he behaves, does he have the same sense of humour, what is his apartment like? All these Lauren answers, obliging her uncle with her painter’s eye for detail and nuance.

  “So you learned nothing from him?”

  Lauren catches an undertone of disappointment in his voice, and she feels slightly sick. Of course, deep down, he was really hoping that we would find something out; of course he has always secretly wanted every fragment of Katya that he can grasp hold of. The fact that Lauren now has plenty to tell him does not make her feel any better. In all of her imagined outcomes, she never dreamed that the story she discovered would be so very difficult to recount.

  “We learned nothing from him at first. He was very hostile to us, actually. Melissa noticed it more than me – she knew instinctively that he was hiding something under all that anger. I mean, I waltzed in there expecting to be received like a long-lost princess. His good friends’ niece and all that. But instead, he cut us dead. Threw us out of his apartment, practically.”

  “How strange,” Alexander comments. Lauren nods but moves quickly on, relating how she left Misha the letter and a brush and ink portrait of Katya – one that she had used as a study for the main portrait. Alexander stands up at this.

  “Come, let’s continue this in the living room. I have something to show you.”

  She follows his neat, padding steps out of the kitchen – he has not bothered to begin clearing their plates, an unusual oversight.

  In the living room the curtains are still open to the blackness of the night beyond. And Katya’s portrait is hanging there, on the large wall to their left. Although the size of the canvas is perfect for the space, she dominates the room, thinks Lauren. Not the picture, but Katya herself.

  “What do you think?”

  She smiles. “It’s a good place to put it. But it isn’t too much for you?”

  He shakes his head. He had worried about that at first – that was why it has taken him so many weeks to hang it.

  “She was the most important person in my life for such a long time,” he says. “I didn’t want to be afraid of that any more.”

  His simple sentence brings the threat of tears to Lauren’s eyes, and quickly, she goes and closes the curtains, a task that gives her a few seconds to compose herself. She has a lot more to get through tonight.

  They sit together before the empty fireplace, and she watches her uncle bend down to light the neatly built pile of kindling and logs. He is lean and economical in all his movements.

  “So you went back to see him?” Alexander asks her over his shoulder.

  “No. I wasn’t expecting to see him again. And then, on the day we left – this morning in fact – a funny thing happened.”

  Was it only this morning, she wonders? Her fatigue from a long day’s travelling has been subsumed by the emotion and shock at the outcome of the morning’s meeting with Misha. Alexander is watching her, patient, calm. He feels carried along in this whole current of events, but the feeling is not unpleasant. Not if he can keep balanced and sanguine, the way he feels now. Perhaps his relaxed air is only superficial, or perhaps it indicates a deeper peace with what Lauren has chosen to do – in any event, he is calm as he waits for her to continue. She smiles slightly and puts her hand over his. Then she leans back and begins to tell how Melissa had caught Misha leaving something at the hotel for her, and how she had kept him there.

  “What did he bring you?” Alexander asks.

  “I’ll get to that,” Lauren says.

  She talks on, paying particular attention to Misha’s reaction to her own resemblance to Katya. Melissa had told her that he had not wanted to see Lauren again, that he could not bear it, and that her arrival in the restaurant had been the beginning of his confession.

  “Confession?” Alexander sits up slightly, and now his surface calm has fragmented; without putting up the slightest fight, it has shattered like a barely frozen crust of ice on a puddle.

  “He told us that he knew all along that Katya was working for the Americans. Because he worked with her.”

  There is a pause while Alexander digests this. He is clearly stunned.

  “Misha worked for the Americans?”

  She nods. “He was Katya’s main contact for years. He recruited her in fact. They worked closely together. For the most part, he used her to smuggle out research he was involved in at the Aviation Institute.”

  “I can’t believe this. It can’t be true.”

  “It is. They recruited him out of college, apparently.”

  She waits, allowing time for this to settle in Alexander’s mind. Her uncle is frowning, thinking, shaping ideas.

  “So did he know her plans to escape? Did he try and help her?”

  Lauren becomes aware that her lips are pursed, as though she is trying to avoid having to let out the next words that she has to say.

  “She told him. After you had left. In fact, she timed it as well as she could in the circumstances, just minutes after you had defected.”

  “She knew I’d got out?”

  “Not for sure. She hoped. Anyway, she didn’t breathe a word to anyone until then, he says. Even him. She wanted to be as sure as she could that you were safe. But then she needed his help. And she told him that the government, or the KGB, had caught someone, and that she was worried that that person would talk and compromise Misha and herself.”

  Alexander nods. “That’s why I left so quickly. The opportunity was there, and we had to take it. Otherwise they would have found her.”

  “Yes, they would have. They would have found out both of you, Uncle Alex. You do know that, don’
t you?”

  Her concern to reassure him, and reinforce the point acts as an instant alert to his senses. His stomach sinks slightly with misgiving at what she might be about to say. But try as he might, he cannot weave a path through his thoughts and conjectures to prepare himself by imagining possible outcomes. He sits slightly forwards in his chair, cradling his wine glass, waiting anxiously.

  “Uncle Alex, it was him.”

  “What?”

  “It was Misha that they’d caught.”

  Now distant possibilities begin, vaguely, to jostle for position in his mind, but he cannot make sense of them. He has a sense of dread, like a small patch of acridity in his throat, but he cannot reason out why.

  “But Misha was with us the night before I left. We had dinner with my parents, I’m sure of that. How could they have caught him?”

  “They let him go.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you see, Uncle Alex? He switched sides. To protect himself. He became a double agent.”

  He says nothing, but his mouth is slightly open as he thinks over this revelation. “Of course,” he says, softly. “Of course.”

  She nods. She goes over to his chair and perches on the arm of it. Takes his wine out of his hand and places it alongside hers on the table. Her hand is on his back, and with bitterness she recalls touching Misha’s bony shoulders, reassuring him, in much the same way not so long ago.

  Alexander can hardly speak, but he must articulate what he is thinking.

  “Misha betrayed Katya?” is all he can get out, in a hoarse whisper.

  She holds her uncle close, and pulls his head to her shoulder, as though trying to cocoon him, insulate him from her next words.

  “Uncle Alex, he pulled the trigger.”

  He is unresponsive – it is as though she has spoken in Chinese, and he cannot fathom her meaning. He looks at her, his eyes wide, trusting, as if willing her to explain again, to explain that what he just heard is a mistake.