Captive of Desire

by Alexandra Sellers

  But not tonight. Laddy unlocked her door and moved down the hallway to the kitchen at the back.

  Laddy’s kitchen was the prettiest room in the house, its soft yellow wallpaper with the tiny flowers giving it a warm glow all year round. But tonight it was too full of memories: she could not look at the unstained pine table without seeing her father sitting there, talking, listening, understanding.

  Laddy dropped her bag and the paper onto the table and turned to the stove. Well, she had planned a simple menu, melon and beef Stroganoff and salad, and luckily she had prepared the beef last night. Now she turned it into a saucepan and pulled mushrooms from the refrigerator and began chopping them. Suddenly she put down her knife and crossed over to the table, staring down at the copy of the Herald that she had dropped there. Mischa Busnetsky’s face filled half the front page under the blazing headline. She studied the picture intently.

  A broad forehead, close-cropped hair, dark eyes full of a dedicated fire that were riveting in their intelligence. He would look older now; the photo had been taken almost eight years ago. Laddy had seen it countless times. It had been shot during one of his early trials, after he had already spent a year in Lefortovo prison. He wouldn’t look like that now, she reflected grimly. Not after all those years of....

  And tonight he was flying to freedom. What was he thinking now, she wondered, leaving the homeland he might never see again?

  The oil in the saucepan spat loudly, and with an exclamation Laddy hurried to the stove to continue her preparations for the meal. Damn it! He was a job of work, a story assignment, that was all! She would think about him tomorrow.

  After a moment she returned to the table and collected the paper, taking it back to set beside her on the counter. She gazed at Mischa Busnetsky from time to time as she worked.

  Her father had first shown her the picture when she was seventeen and the man in the picture twenty-three. She had been mesmerised by him then and she was now, but now between her and those eyes was a barrier of pain. Personal pain, which, added to the long years of hatred she felt for Mischa Busnetsky’s oppressors, became an intolerable knot in the pit of her stomach. A knot of anger and hatred for all the oppressors of the world, who sought out that intelligence and burning dedication in order to destroy it.

  Laddy gazed at the picture. He had a wide and well-defined mouth that seemed to be almost smiling at the photographer, at his accusers, and in his eyes was the knowledge, the contemptuous acceptance, that the outcome of the trial was a foregone conclusion.

  What had happened to that intelligence now? What would he look like now, after the long series of prisons and labour camps and, finally, confinement in psychiatric hospitals? What had happened to that burning intelligence under the onslaught of modern medical and psychiatric knowledge?

  Laddy put the salad in the refrigerator, leaving the rice and the beef simmering, and went into the bedroom. John would be here in fifteen minutes; she would have time for a shower if she were quick.

  But it was not the way she had intended it, she thought as she dried herself quickly and pulled over her head the beautiful wine-coloured caftan embroidered in gold thread that her father had brought back from one of his last trips. She had meant to laze in the bath, and dress and make up carefully.

  She put on more makeup than usual, mechanically outlining her dark eyes and using mascara and a lipstick in a shade called raisin, which matched the caftan. Her black hair needed no special care. A quick brushing restored the natural fall of curls that clustered around her head and over her shoulders.

  In the kitchen Laddy laid the table quickly, foregoing the flowers she had meant to cut from the garden for a centrepiece. She was ready, but it looked as though John would be late. Laddy sank into a chair and almost involuntarily picked up the paper again....

  “Another Soviet dissident on the ICF’s list,” her father had said, passing the picture to her across the desk in his study upstairs, now Margaret and Ben Smiley’s sitting room. “I’ll be traveling to Moscow soon, with a fair chance of meeting him.”

  Laddy had not been able to tear her eyes away from the face in the photo. “I wish I could go with you this time,” she said. She had just entered university to study journalism, and it was the first time in seven years that her own interests would prevent her traveling with her father.

  As one of the founders of the International Council on Freedom, Dr. Lewis Penreith had put his massive dedication behind the cause of dissident thinkers under totalitarian regimes the world over. His small publishing house in Covent Garden had published the works of these dissident thinkers, which Lewis Penreith had obtained on his travels and smuggled out of various countries. The publication of such works in the West sometimes contributed to the release of the author from prison or internal exile, or to his expulsion to the West.

  From the age of nine, ever since her mother died, Laddy had travelled with him. Lewis Penreith had believed that travel was the best education she could have, and her warmest childhood memories were of lying on his study floor, poring over an atlas while her father described the people, culture, language and history of the country they were about to visit.

  Although they had travelled as far afield as Hong Kong and Argentina, Lewis Penreith had been a Russian scholar, and the Soviet dissidents had been closest to his heart. Their cause he had made his personal one.

  He had taken up Mikhail Busnetsky’s cause after publishing a powerful expose of the Soviet treatment of political dissidents that Busnetsky had written in Lefortovo Prison. Lewis Penreith had decided to go to Moscow to try to meet him.

  “I wish I could go with you this time,” Laddy said again, looking into the searching eyes in the photograph and feeling somewhere inside her that she knew the man as deeply as though he were herself. But Laddy was seventeen then and starting on her own career, and her years of traveling with her father were over. She was excited by the future work she had chosen—her goal even then had been to work as a newspaper reporter—but now she was seeing the price of it for the first time, and it caught her a deep blow somewhere in behind her ribs: because of her choice, because of the timing, this was a man she was destined never to meet. She looked at her father sadly.

  “Well, it’s only a five-day trip,” Lewis Penreith said easily. “Why don’t you come? Make it our last jaunt together. It’ll be worthwhile.”

  Laddy read Busnetsky’s Details of Oppression that night, and she knew that if there was the faintest chance of meeting the author, she had to go with her father. The next morning she told him she would make one last trip with him—to Moscow.

  It was an end for her, she thought, and somehow also a beginning.

  Chapter 2

  Moscow was stark, cold, grey, dirty and impressive, as always, and although she had been here several times with her father, still it took her breath away.

  But there was little time for tourist pursuits. They had contacts to make, people to seek out—in secret. Pushkin Square, Red Square, the Kremlin; all were seen with craned neck through the dirty window of a taxi.

  The rules she had learned on past visits came quickly back to Laddy: never talk about anything but the weather in your hotel room; ignore the fact that you are being followed; never carry the address of any Russian contact with you; and don’t bother to get upset over mild inefficiencies like a lack of toilet paper in the hotel.

  Mischa Busnetsky, who had been out of prison only three months, had organised a showing of the works of an underground artist—a showing that had no official sanction. It was at this exhibition that Lewis Penreith hoped to meet him. In those days in Moscow there was another “thaw,” and foreign correspondents were allowed almost unrestricted access to certain dissident intellectuals who had been published in the West. These men and women, holding court in small overcrowded apartments, were taking all the advantage they could of their sudden immunity from the secret police, for they were felt to be too well known in the West to be sent to internal exile or
prison.

  It was in one of those apartments that Mischa Busnetsky had organised the art showing, and as they approached the large stark apartment building, Laddy’s heart leapt in a kind of fear she had never felt before on such trips. No meeting with a dissident, famous or obscure, had ever caused such turmoil in her.

  The building was large enough that no secret follower could be certain of which apartment was being visited, and as she and her father climbed the stairs to the fourth floor they heard no step on the stairs behind them; but still a tight band had formed itself around Laddy’s ribs so that it was almost impossible to breathe.

  The apartment was stuffed to bursting. The exhibition had been running for six days, and people knew that it would not be allowed to run much longer.

  The forbidden paintings were all nudes. Sensuous, erotic, compelling, and the glow from the skin tones seemed to suffuse that small, over-furnished, overcrowded apartment with a wave of sexual warmth that touched her, washed her from the moment Laddy walked through the door.

  At seventeen, Laddy had never even had a boyfriend. Her father’s work and her life of travel had somehow cut her off from a teenager’s usual social life. But she had never missed it, her life was so full.

  The paintings—some softly, some harshly seductive—made Laddy suddenly, and for the first time, truly aware that she was a woman. She stood motionless, gazing at the nudes, scarcely able to breathe, until her father softly called her name.

  And she turned, and her father was standing beside the man in the photograph.

  Laddy had seen her body’s changes over the past few years, had watched herself becoming a woman, with an air almost of detachment: her breasts had filled out, her legs had suddenly been long and well shaped: well, she was of the female of the species. But she was too used to living in her head. It hadn’t really touched her.

  Now, in the moment that she and Mischa Busnetsky looked at each other for the first time, what she felt was--oh God, what it is to be a woman! And it was a prayer of the deepest, the most delighted gratitude, and the most profound discovery suffused her, earth-shaking, as significant to her as “I think, therefore I am.”

  He was tall, taller than her father, taller than anyone in the vicinity, and he was thin and his hair was jet black. And those eyes that even in the photograph had seemed to see so much, saw everything there was to see about Laddy Penreith—heart and body and soul. Over Mischa Busnetsky’s shoulder, the painting of a naked woman on her knees, her back arched and her hair dangling down her back, cast its golden glow over her mood, and she had a light-headed, drunken feeling that she knew the entire meaning of life.

  He took her hand and said her name, and his warm hard strength seemed to issue equally from his deep voice and from the touch of that roughened palm. From him directly she recovered the strength to speak, and what she said, softly, gently, was, “Don’t go to prison again.”

  An indecipherable look, like a mixture of regret, resignation and sacrifice crossed his face, and his eyes were momentarily darker. He smiled down at her, a slow, understanding smile, and that, too, touched her physically, in a way she had never before experienced and only instinctively now understood. “I do not want to go to prison again,” he said, “but this is a choice that is not mine to make.”

  She understood that he intended to continue his battle, whatever the result might be, and something deep within her cried out for her to tell him to give it up, to give in, to tell him that nothing was as important as what she felt in that moment—not freedom or right or truth. But she held back the cry as a betrayal, and she smiled at him in her turn. In that moment she knew all the agony of a woman who sees her man off to battle knowing that nothing in life is as important as what they have together—nothing—but letting him go to make the world right, knowing that the world can never be right for her if he does not come back.

  Mischa Busnetsky and her father talked quietly for a long time about important things—of which Laddy heard not a word. Afterward she could not even remember whether they had spoken in Russian or English. She was learning a whole new language—the song her body sang. She understood that the red velvet of her dress over the soft fullness of her breast was an unmatchable eroticism, that the brush of red velvet on her thigh was also the touch of black denim on Mischa Busnetsky’s; that she and this dark man were, at one and the same time, one complete being and its two composite, opposite halves.

  When her father’s attention was claimed by someone else and he moved away from them, Laddy and Mischa Busnetsky stared at each other in the crowded room, buffeted by the milling crowd, but untouched by anything except what they saw in each other’s eyes.

  “Have you looked at my friend Vaclav’s paintings?” he asked her at last. When Laddy shook her head, he said, “Come. I will show you.” What flowed between them was so compelling that she knew that his putting an arm round her waist, light as the touch was, was an involuntary movement; she knew with a direct, certain knowledge that he could not stop himself touching her in that moment, any more than she could stop her own body moving into him so that her hip and leg brushed his as they walked.

  He paused in front of the painting of a woman who stood in a simple pose, facing the viewer, waiting. That was all, except somehow one sensed the woman was watching the approach of her lover. Her eyes and part of her golden body were in shadow, but Laddy knew that the woman was looking at a man she loved passionately, and in every line of that naked body was evidence of a battle she was fighting with herself to wait, to wait and make him come to her.

  Laddy drew in her breath through opened lips and felt Mischa Busnetsky glance down at her. They said nothing, and he guided her gently but firmly to the next painting.

  A woman on her knees, her arms up and her lips parted, but this time the shadow falling on her was in the shape of a man’s leg and hip, and when she realised the significance of it, Laddy felt her insides turn over. For a moment she closed her eyes.

  “You are young,” his deep voice came from over her head. “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen,” she breathed, her whole body aware of the contact between them at leg and hip, and his hand, burningly strong at her waist.

  “In the West that is old enough to have learned about love,” he said softly. Laddy caught her breath.

  “Have you learned about love?” he asked, quietly, gently, and she breathed,

  “No.”

  “It will not be long before someone will wish to teach you,” he said. “You are so beautiful, so alive.” There was quiet regret, resignation in his tone. “I would like to teach you about love,” he said, and Laddy felt as though she had been struck in the stomach. She looked up at him; he was looking down at her, the same quiet regret in his eyes as she heard in his voice.

  “But these things are not to be,” he continued, his voice now causing a warmth to flow through her body, his voice caressing her and her body responding.

  Her eyes, wide, gazed into his, and she felt that he must kiss her. “Look at the picture,” he commanded quietly, doing so himself, and she looked at the picture of the enraptured woman with parted lips.

  “This is a look I will never see on your face,” he said. “But this is how you would look for me if I taught you about love.”

  No one around them in the crowded apartment was taking the least notice of them, and Laddy realised, with a kind of drunken joy, that what he was saying to her, in English, could not be understood by anyone in the room except her father, who stood by another wall engrossed in conversation.

  “Here I can make love to you only with words,” Mischa said. “Shall I do this? Shall I tell you how my mouth would touch your hair, your soft lips, your full young breasts? Shall I tell you what we would have together if the world were not what it is at this moment?”

  She said breathlessly, “Mischa—”

  “Look at the painting of my friend Vaclav,” he commanded again. “This is a woman who is in love with a man body and soul,
as you will someday be, but not for me. But if it were I, if you looked at me like this, how would I keep from touching your lips?” And he reached out and his fingers lightly touched the oil-on-canvas lips of the woman kneeling in the golden glow and the shadow.

  Laddy’s mouth burned as if it were her lips that he touched. His hand dropped to his side.

  “When I am next in prison,” he said, “I will remember this as though it were your own flesh I had touched, and I will remember you looking at me with a face such as this, and then I will wish that life had been different.” He looked down at her again.

  “You do not yet know about love, but I know how you have looked when my hand is on your breast, I know what you have said to me when I touch your thighs, your long legs. Everything I know about you, even how you have made me tremble.”

  Laddy already could hardly speak, could hardly stand, but the thought of what it would do to her to know she had made this man tremble, made her head reel. She swallowed, licking her lips.

  “I would like to make you tremble,” she whispered, hardly knowing what she said.

  She saw that she had reached him by the sudden breath that he took, the involuntary tightening of his hand on her hip.

  “I trembled the first moment I saw you,” he said roughly. “These other things will never be, but—you have made me tremble.”

  Suddenly she felt tears in her eyes. “Tell me,” she said, fighting back the tears, for in that moment it was as though all the years stretched out ahead of her, desolate, empty and loveless, while she waited for this man, the man who could never come to her. And instinctively she wanted all the memories that he could give her, to store up against the future emptiness that she saw so clearly. “Tell me how it would have been,” she repeated, and in her voice was a plea against the loneliness, and she knew that he heard and understood.

  They walked around the whole room then, looking at the paintings, and all the time his deep quiet voice, rough with passion, was making love to her, slow, incredible, passionate love to her, and her body responded fanatically, drunkenly, to every word until, when he said that she would moan his name aloud, she did so.