A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  Years later, at her country home in Pitsunda in Caucasus, on the banks of the Black Sea, surrounded by the large family that she spent her thirties siring, she one day tried to write her memoirs, and she realized the shortcomings of her memory with a good degree of bemusement. With a start, she wondered whether, in fact, it had been Emmett – remember Emmett? – who had taken her to the restaurant, and then taken her back to the apartment. For some reason, she could not remember. When did she first meet Emmett? That, too, she did not know. In the bliss of her retirement, sitting under the sun, her feet nestled in the last remnants of the sand that had once been shipped in each season for the entertainment of the Communist officials, she could not remember even which one was Emmett and which one was Linus. Well, she decided at last, pen in hand, I will just have to skip that part of my life. And so she went directly to a rather lengthy description of her termination by Ivan, and her discovery, and ultimate fame, thanks to the foresight of the studio executives who cast her in her first American motion picture.

  When Ivan came back to the store, he was a little drunk, not too bad. The door blew open. A storm was coming, and the wind outside howled furiously. “Gorbachev’s coming to America,” he said, as the bells on the front door jingled. “He’s going to give a speech at the University of Virginia.”

  “I hope someone kills him,” she replied.

  “I hate the bastard, the hypocritical bastard.”

  “I hate him more,” Irina said. “I am the one he oppressed, so I hate him more than you do.”

  (A strange irony: they managed to get along only by talking about how much they each hated Gorbachev, though for different reasons; she hated Gorbachev because he was a Communist, and Ivan hated Gorbachev because he was not a Communist, which of course remained carefully unstated.)

  “I’d like to castrate the bastard,” Ivan said, and Irina replied, “I’d like to feed him to wolves, or to the hungry people he has starved.”

  “How was business today?”

  “We made practically no money at all. I was horribly bored. I cleaned the store. Not so well. Not so perfectly clean.”

  Ivan nodded, thinking. He stared out the front window, at the trash-lined street, now darkened from the impending storm. “Do you smile at the customers?” he asked. “Do you talk to them?”

  She didn’t budge, didn’t even look at him. “I don’t know. I think so. I smile if they make me happy. If I am not happy, I don’t smile.”

  “You’re not smiling now.”

  “No,” she said.

  “I hired you because I thought you’d add a little interest to the store. I’ve always tried to make this like a home. People can come and talk about the things in the store, or politics, or drink a cup of tea.”

  “What should I do?” Irina was becoming angry, not frightened. “You say that you don’t run a dictatorship, but you insist that I be like you.”

  “Irina, if I lose money – ”

  “Money!” she exclaimed. “I can tell you all about money, Ivan! In Moscow I knew all the rich men! I knew all the rich men in their big cars and their Italian suits, Ivan, and they must have thought I was worth a million dollars, because everything they owned was worth a million dollars, I think. You can’t tell me about money, Ivan! In Moscow, I made a movie!” Now she was shouting. “I made a movie that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars! In Moscow, with all the capitalists, they put me in a nice apartment, and they fed me, and they put me up on whatever it’s called, the Golden Screen! Now, here I am in America, working for a Communist and exploited, exploited much worse than I ever was by the mafia capitalists! Growing up, I always thought that the difference between the Soviet Union and the United States was that in America, the Communists were supposed to know what the word ‘Communism’ means! Does it mean profit, Ivan? Does it mean bring in the most profit, and make the worker earn enough only to eat bread? Is that what being Communist means to you, Ivan?”

  Ivan’s face darkened. He stood very quietly for a few moments. Irina didn’t speak any more. She’d given her performance. And she knew where she would go now.

  “Your simplistic attitude,” Ivan grunted, “shows why the Russian people betrayed the revolution.”

  Irina threw her carpet bag into the middle of the living room floor underneath his big TV. She sat down on the floor, and she lit a cigarette.

  “I will never feel guilty about this,” she said. “Smoking. I will never apologize.” The room filled with smoke. “Just so you know.” The room looked better filled with smoke.

  “I wonder,” said Linus. “I wonder whether you’re coming to stay here just because I’m the only person that you know in the entire country now. Except for Ivan, of course, who hates you.”

  “That’s silly,” Irina said. “Where else can I go? Would you throw me out on the street, the way Ivan did?”

  Linus sat down on the couch, tossed his feet up on the coffee table. “Were you a movie star in Russia, really?” he asked.

  “You saw movie. I was star.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. Listen: Would ordinary people out for a Sunday stroll with their kids in Gorky Park know your name? Do I have a real movie star here in my apartment? A star?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and her voice was gentle and bewildered. “It was just hard for me to know, at the time.”

  “Why can’t you just call back home, have some money sent over?”

  She sat down next to him on the couch, slung an arm around him. She leaned in very close. “I cannot,” she whispered in his ear. “A man named Anatoli Rostislavsky wants me to be dead. Some mobsters broke his fingers over me, but he knows other mobsters. I am refugee from the mob.” She paused, letting her quiet, trembling breath tickle his ear. “I have read about all of this, when I was back in Moscow. The average man, he leaves Moscow somehow, jumping at every shadow, knowing the mafia wants to kill him because he thought he could avoid paying protection money, because he declined an offer of business, something like that. And so he comes over here. And he gets job, maybe night watchman somewhere, maybe he mops up somewhere. Maybe he learns English good enough to become taxi driver, and so he lives in New Jersey or Queens and studies electrical engineering during day and drives Wall Street lawyers to their Upper East Side homes at midnight. But even in New York, every night he thinks that he will be found the next morning, sitting bloody behind his steering wheel by the side of the FDR highway, riddled with bullet holes, his eyes open and empty.”

  Linus was silent, his mouth slightly agape. “Whenever I talk to you, Irina,” he said finally, “I feel like I’m in a movie.”

  Irina’s face was grim.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  How much of this do I mean? Irina wondered, thinking of her friend Tatiana, all those years ago, Tatiana with her shadow flickering on the wall like a scene from a movie, a few hours before Viktor’s life was snuffed out. Despite all that had happened to Irina in the last few years, she did not know how much of her anger or her sadness or her fear she actually felt, or how much she imagined she should feel, and insisted she must feel, as though she were a film director giving instructions to a complete stranger, bellowing insistently across a crowded set. She was so much like Tatiana now, she carried so much of Tatiana’s artifice with her. Across the New York night, Irina would have found a soul-mate in Natalie, who had once insisted to Daniel, at a gallery opening, We are all actors when he’d asked her whether her burning buildings represented some crushed hopes that, perhaps, she should tell her husband about. You should paint what you feel, and only what you feel, he’d argued, and Natalie had shook her head. I paint what I wish I were strong enough to feel, she’d said. Tonight, a few long blocks to the west of the apartment in which Irina sat ruminating, Natalie now wandered the street through a light drizzle of snow and hail. She was disoriented, dizzy. She felt a fever coming on, but she couldn’t return to their empty apartment; nor could she return to her studio and paint. Her angry canvases,
tonight, were screaming.

  She crossed the street. On the sidewalk, a little bird with a mangled leg and a crushed wing flopped about. Natalie wondered what a good citizen was supposed to do about a thing like that. One block to the north, a dirty bow-legged woman was following a middle-aged man who sported a furry cap. “That’s a god dammed ugly hat!” the woman shouted, sounding genuinely offended. “How the hell can you walk around with that ugly god dammed hat!”

  Natalie felt like crying, but she didn’t, and she also felt like drinking until she would fall down on the floor of her studio, but she also didn’t do that, just because it wasn’t the sort of thing that she ever did. She composed herself and went to a pay phone and called Daniel, who said he had a moment to talk.

  “How late are you working tonight?” she asked.

  She could hear his sigh, loud and dispirited. He’d been working even harder since setting his sights on the partnership, trying to win enough allies to his cause, hoping to swing a number of votes and also convince the billing partner that his contribution to the firm’s finances was indispensable. “We’re filing this reply memorandum tomorrow,” Daniel said. “Thought we’d send it FedEx, but we missed the deadline so it looks like it will go out World Courier. Carter’s in his office, pacing around. Since we missed the FedEx deadline, he feels no pressure to approve my draft any time soon. He’s just pacing. He’s started throwing things around and cursing. I don’t know what that means, but I’m not about to interrupt.”

  Natalie had only barely listened to his story. For readily apparent reasons, an average day at Daniel’s office yielded very few stories that interested her; she just liked hearing his voice, letting it echo in her mind. “When did we last make love, baby?” she asked.

  The line crackled briefly. “I’m so sorry, Natalie. Things have just been so busy lately ....”

  “It never ends over there,” she said. “It just never ends. They just don’t think you have a right to be human.”

  Daniel agreed. “They don’t.”

  “Do people lead empty, lonely lives? Does everyone?”

  “Oh, who knows? I don’t know what these people think, how they think ....”

  “I hear that it’s not uncommon for a lawyer at a big firm to take a temp secretary into his office in the middle of the night and do it on the desk.”

  Daniel laughed. “Believe me, there’s nothing sexual about Johnson & Tierney. Nothing at all. I think most of our lawyers were born without genitalia, as a matter of fact. Maybe that’s just my view of Protestants in general, but there you have it. That’s an idea for a hell of painting, by the way, Natalie, and feel free to use it.”

  “I love you, Daniel,” Natalie said, laughing.

  “Oh shit!” he exclaimed – not the reaction she’d been expecting. Under his breath, in a panicked whisper, Daniel said, “He’s going crazy. He’s cursing and screaming and coming my way. He knocked over a filing cabinet! I didn’t know that was even possible! Shit – I have to go.” Daniel hung up without saying goodbye, and Natalie was left alone on the sidewalk, declarations of love caught awkwardly in her throat.

  The next day, of course, a writer with a fat jolly face but secret inner demons sped in a taxicab straight from the airport to Ivan’s store, The Equinox. His heart thumped with excitement at the very prospect of Irina’s continued existence on the planet. The cab spun through the slush and mud left over from the previous night’s rainstorm. For a moment he pondered his wife’s half-teasing admonitions and felt a pang of guilt. He had always been faithful, had never even considered an affair. Was this pang of guilt deserved? Should he feel ashamed to careen wildly through the city streets, driven to an uncertain destination by the specter of a beautiful girl who once stood naked in a swirl of radioactive rain?

  But at the Equinox, Emmett found only a middle-aged, pony-tailed man, dark circles beneath his eyes. Emmett offered a casual greeting. The man said Hello sadly, more than a touch of alcohol on his breath. Emmett asked if Irina worked there, and the man looked even sadder.

  “Never heard of her,” he said.

  “I know you have,” Emmett said. “Look, I know she was illegal. I know you employed her. I don’t care about that. I just want to find her.”

  “She’s dead,” he said, as though he’d just thought of it. “Dead.”

  “When?” Emmett asked skeptically.

  “Don’t know,” the man said. “I found out about it yesterday.”

  Emmett hung around for a while, trying to dig more details out of the man, who became, ultimately, unforthcoming.

  “How did Irina die?” he asked.

  The man paused, thought, then said, “Bullet in the head,” as though it were the first time he’d heard the news.

  “Who did it?”

  The man shrugged, as though it were pointless to continue. They both knew he’d made the whole thing up, and making up more served no purpose at all.

  “I’m from the New York Times,” Emmett said. “I’m doing a story on Irina. I’ll have to go to the police to check out your story.”

  “Do whatever you feel you have to do.”

  “No,” said Irina. “Over on 14th street and First Avenue.”

  “That was luxury to you?” Linus said.

  “Look at what I had just left.” They walked on for a moment along 11th street, heading west toward the park. On a front stoop, a toothless woman who looked about sixty drank from a paper bag. “It’s all so deserted here, nothing to buy, nothing to eat, nothing to see. All these people, so bored, all day long. I don’t know what my mother is doing right now, but I hope she’s not sitting on someone’s stoop, getting drunk. And so when I wandered away in the middle of the night and came upon this market, this bustling place, I felt happy all of a sudden, like I was back in Moscow.”

  Linus seemed not to be even listening.

  “Do we have a future at all?” he asked.

  “No.” She didn’t look at him.

  “How can you just rule it out like that?”

  “Just because I have to,” Irina said. “Anatoli says he will have me killed ... and if not, I will return to Russia as soon as it is safe. And you will not belong in Russia, you cannot return with me. Linus, you are so stupid – ”

  She stopped herself.

  “I know, I don’t mean ‘stupid.’ That’s not the word I want.”

  She stopped walking, bit her lower lip, acting as though her almost-perfect English had suddenly failed her. In fact, stupid was exactly what she meant, it just hadn’t sounded fair, coming out of her mouth, hanging in the damp, humid air.

  “What word am I thinking of? Идиот. Or, maybe, дурак дураком. That’s it. дурак дураком.”

  She stared off into the distance and cursed under her breath, something in Russian.

  “Let’s turn around,” she whispered, nervously.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I think that taxi is circling us.”

  “Huh?”

  The cab vanished behind a building on the corner of Avenue A.

  “It passed us once on the street,” she explained slowly, as though speaking to an imbecile. “Then it passed us on the Avenue, then again on the street. Now it waits behind that building.”

  “What are you – ”

  “What I’m talking about,” Irina said, “is that you can hire a Russian hit man for Moscow to New York plane fare plus one hundred dollars.” She squinted into the distance, saw the taxi backing up into view. It skidded backwards across the avenue, then began heading east on 11th Street, straight towards the two of them, accelerating. A fat face popped out of the window. “Irina!” the face shouted. Irina turned to Linus, but discovered that her new lover had already turned and fled. She felt a sudden anger, then realized that unlike the very brave men with whom she had slept in the past, Linus would likely outlive her, and she could not begrudge him that. She turned and began to run. The taxi sped up again. She turned left down a side alley, heard
the sound of a car door opening, then slamming shut. Irina, cursing herself to the heavens, ran up against a dead end, a brick wall covered with mold. She turned and faced her murderer, gasping for breath.

  “I am defenseless,” she said in Russian, then added in English: “I hate you. Do with me as you please.”

  The man with the fat face had a phony-endearing grin, which he now beamed at Irina as radiantly as he could. But if it failed to reassure, it was because the fat-faced man seemed like a wolf baring its teeth for the kill, or, at second glance, like a laughing murderer, grinning at the pleasure of the hunt; or finally, perhaps he was just a poor boy from the streets of Moscow, or some sad city like Yaroslavl, now trying to calm himself, to reassure himself with this unsteady, mirthless grin.

  Across the street, Christmas lights flickered in the windows of some Indian restaurant, though Christmas was six months in the future, or the past, depending on one’s point of view. The killer’s bloodless lips parted, here in this side alley. His voice was surprisingly tinny. He said he loved Chernyy Glaz.

  Emmett was surprised at how quickly Irina overcame her fears. She led him out of the alley, now entirely composed. Out on the street, she stepped lightly over the puddles and remarked with only slight bemusement: “I see Linus didn’t think to call the police. A coward and an idiot. Quite a combination.”

  “Who is he, Linus?” Emmett asked, quickening his pace and drawing up beside her.

  “You’re from the New York Times,” Irina said, ignoring the question. “I read the New York Times in Moscow, sometimes. I listened to tapes – studying elocution, so I could talk like movie star when my patrons sent me here to make their fortune. But I wanted also to argue politics like the Americans. At first, New York Times was forbidden to Russians; it was sold only in hotels for foreigners, and we could not even go into the lobbies. Finally, I found man who would sell me Times in Yaroslavl. Then when I moved to Moscow, I could read anything I wanted. Times was the least of it. So I know all of American politics.” Mostly, she took to heart the American scandals, though she didn’t mention this to Emmett, trying to impress him with her sophistication. She had been particularly touched by George Bush’s affair with his long-time employee, Jennifer Fitzgerald. She was so ugly, Irina mused, that the president must really have loved her. One rich powerful man screwing two ugly women for decades. There was something lovely and sincere about that. It wasn’t lust, anyway. As for the rest of the American news scene, she read the film reviews and stories about terrible murders in the Bronx.