Ways to Hide in Winter

by Sarah St. Vincent

  “Clear out?”

  “Leave.” I watched his movements. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes, yes. Let me bring your suitcase in.” He stepped to the doorway and reached down, touching the brittle sides of the case, its rusted handle. “Oh, my. This is an old one.”

  “Yeah. It was my grandfather’s.”

  “It reminds me of the one my father had when he was young and traveled from Moscow to Tashkent. He still has it somewhere, but I never even thought of trying to use it.” He placed the suitcase carefully by the desk and closed the door.

  I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or alarmed by his seeming serenity. “You’re a lot calmer than I expected.”

  “You mean about the police?”

  “Of course I mean about the police.”

  “Well,” he said. He sat down on the edge of the bed, looking away as he gently smoothed the covers with his hand. His thin legs dangled from the towel. “When they first came, it was—of course, I was upset. But it’s a bit like a fire, being frightened in that way. It burns very terribly all at once, and then it’s gone and you’re only rather tired.”

  Water trickled from his hair onto his neck. He looked exposed, vulnerable, like a man dropped into a hostile wilderness.

  Yes, I thought. I knew that kind of fear, the one so sharp it left only exhaustion in its wake, a kind of indifference to fate. It was dangerous, that feeling. It led to a certain kind of decision-making, like a sleepwalker choosing to leave the doors unlocked when she goes to bed.

  “I don’t mean to sound like a broken record,” I told him, picking at a streak of mud on my thigh, “but I’d think the obvious thing to do would be—”

  He raised his hands and then dropped them. “Martin says they will not be back right away. In the meantime, I’ll think about what would be best.”

  For a moment, I felt a shadow of what I suddenly understood Beth must feel whenever she tried to make me see reason. Exasperation mixed with pity.

  “All right,” I said finally. “I’m going to dinner. But I’ll knock when I come back—if you’re still awake, maybe we can talk then.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “What?” I did a double take. “No. No, no, no. That’s not happening.”

  “Why not? I would like to.”

  “No,” I said again, shaking my head. “Absolutely not. I’ve watched you spend all this time trying to make yourself disappear up here. I may not think that was the world’s best idea, but I’m not going to help you fling it away on an impulse. No.”

  He laughed self-consciously. “You’re a good friend. And I’m grateful for your concern. But…well, it seems to me that it makes no difference. If I stay here, I’m a sitting duck, as they say. Besides…” He glanced around the small, square room with the bare floor and gray furniture. “If I sit in here, you know, I just…”

  He didn’t finish, but he didn’t have to. I could picture him sitting there, gazing at the blank white walls, thinking the same thoughts over and over. Jumping at every sound.

  “I understand that,” I said. “I do. But it can’t be a good idea.”

  “I’m not certain anything I do is truly a good idea.”

  “Yeah, well, that may be, but—”

  “Please,” he said softly.

  The word hung in the air, delicate and suspended, like a moth that had flown into a web.

  I let my head fall back and looked up at the ceiling. “All right,” I said at last, trying and failing to quiet my better judgment.

  “Thank you. Just—if you could—maybe somewhere—”

  I understood. “Yeah, I could take us to the twenty-four-hour diner up on the interstate. They get a lot of travelers. They’d probably be less likely to notice us.”

  It had begun to rain, and the drive was a slow one. The stranger sat in the passenger’s seat in silence, watching the road as it unfurled in front of us, turning his face every time we passed a house or a barn even though it was impossible to see anything more than shadows. He smelled like soap.

  As we pulled onto the highway, he looked at me. “You seem troubled,” he said.

  “I’m driving around with a crazy person. How should I seem?”

  “No, I mean it looks like it’s something more than that.”

  “Oh.” I glanced at the headlights in my mirror. “No, it’s nothing.”

  I slipped into the traffic, not that there was much. This stretch of the highway was usually empty at night except for the trucks, eighteen-wheelers that barreled down the interstate on their anonymous way to Allentown, Scranton, New York. Elsewhere.

  “These guests at your house,” the stranger went on cautiously. “You don’t like them?”

  “I can’t believe that’s what you’re worried about right now.”

  “Well, I’m not worried, exactly. You just look a bit—”

  “No.” I gave in. “It’s not that I don’t like them. They’re my family. We’re just different people.”

  “How are they different?”

  “It’s not important—they’ve just done some things I wouldn’t have done. Or that I hope I wouldn’t have done.” I flicked my turn signal to pass a slow pickup.

  “Yes, families can be like that. Believe me, my father—well, that’s another story for another time. And of course it isn’t good to disrespect one’s parents. Not that I’m blaming you,” he added quickly.

  I smiled briefly at his politeness. “It’s fine,” I said.

  “What did they do, if I may ask?”

  “It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter.” We passed a rest stop, its entrance lined with parked trucks, the drivers probably sleeping in their cabs. Several of the rigs had shapes on their grills done in what looked like Christmas lights, mostly crosses. The stranger turned in his seat to look at them, but within moments the trees that lined the highway had cut off the floating apparitions, and we were left in darkness.

  The diner’s neon sign shone down on the parking lot. A strip of bells clanged when we pushed open the door, and the stranger jumped, stumbling into me. I felt him go tense. “Careful,” I murmured, and asked the hostess—a pert, sharp-looking woman with a pen in her mouth—for a table in the smoking section. She nodded and plucked two menus from a pile, pen remaining pressed between her lips.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” the stranger said as we slid into a booth. He curled forward, his hands in his pockets, looking around him.

  “I don’t. Well, not usually. But apparently nobody else does tonight, either.” I lifted my chin at the empty booths and tables around us. “We can talk without worrying about who’s listening.”

  “I see.” He opened the menu, glancing at it doubtfully. “I’m actually not very hungry, I’m afraid.”

  “Pick something anyway,” I advised. “Otherwise they’re more likely to remember you.”

  I watched him think about this. “All right.” He stared at the menu again as if it were written in hieroglyphics. “What should I choose?”

  “Well, none of it’s exactly fine cuisine, but the roast beef’s not bad. In my opinion.”

  “Okay. I’ll get that.” He closed the menu and leaned back against the booth. Whatever it was that had been buoying him up seemed to be draining away now that we were here; I watched him cast his eyes over our surroundings, doing a very poor impression of someone who wasn’t nervous.

  When the waitress came, I ordered for both of us, the beef for him and an omelet for me. Two coffees. A lifetime ago, when Amos and I had been dating, we’d come here often, ordering scrambled eggs and hash browns late at night for no particular reason. Like the teenagers we were, I thought, and then pushed the memory from my mind.

  “So,” I said when the waitress had put our food on the table and left. “What are you going to do?”

  He turned his fork upside down the way British people did on TV, nudging at his meat. “Do?”

  “You can’t stay. Not if you’re worried about
someone finding you. You have to know that.”

  All at once, the skin around his mouth seemed to sag. “As I said, I—there’s nowhere I can go.”

  “But you came here. To the park, I mean.”

  He took a sip of coffee and looked at his plate. “Yes. I was lucky.”

  I found myself looking at his frayed cuffs, the tarnished buttons of his coat, all the small things I had come to know so well and that cried out, in their own way, with an unmistakable desperation. I pushed my plate aside.

  “I’m not going to beg,” I said, “but I really could take you somewhere. Even another rural area, if that’s where you want to be. I don’t care how far we have to drive; I’ll do it.”

  He spread a layer of mashed potatoes onto his fork and examined it without answering. His hair had fallen over his eyes. Maybe it was something about being in a new place, I thought, but I had never seen him look so fragile or so worn.

  I took a deep breath, bracing myself.

  “What exactly did you do that was so bad?” I asked finally.

  His head jerked up swiftly. “That’s not why the police came.”

  “I’m not talking about why the police came.”

  He looked me in the eye for a long moment. We had never exchanged such a look, not in that way. His irises were dark, the darkest I’d ever seen, and I was suddenly, almost dizzyingly reminded that I was talking to a man who was twelve years older than I was, who had traveled the world, whose simple words were probably meant to soften an intelligence that would otherwise be overwhelming; who would, in the ordinary course of life, never have been sitting here, never have ventured anywhere near here, never have found himself in this place having a conversation with someone like me.

  I dropped my gaze, tucking my hands into the front pocket of my sweatshirt. Despite his absurdity, his awkwardness, I was in awe of him. There was no denying it. And even though there was still something unreal about the fact that the two of us were sitting here, facing one another under the slowly revolving ceiling fans and dim lights of a highway diner, I had to admit that he had brought something to my days, something that had been missing. I was fine on my own; I had long ago learned how to make do with my own company. But it was true that his arrival had thrown the previous months, and even years, into a different light. I would never have told him so; I would never have told anyone. And yet when I thought of those days, I now felt as if I stood on the edge of something. They hadn’t been a wasteland, I told myself. They hadn’t been barren. But they had been different, and, if I were being honest, I wasn’t so sure I was ready to go back to them. Not just yet.

  “I betrayed people,” he said softly, breaking into my thoughts.

  I looked back at him with a start. He was gazing at the empty place in the middle of the table.

  “You what?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  He started to speak again and then stopped.

  “You mean you think you let someone down?”

  Clearing his throat, he wrapped his fingers around his mug. “No.” He considered his words. “I mean I betrayed people. That’s what I did.”

  The fan spun overhead.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Of course,” he sighed. “I keep forgetting that you’ve never left this place.”

  I must have winced, because he added quickly, “I mean to say you live in a place where these things don’t happen.”

  He fell silent for a minute, then two. The waitress appeared, refilled our coffee cups while he stared at his plate, and disappeared.

  “I can explain,” he said eventually. “But I need you to understand that these are things I wish I hadn’t done.”

  I reached for my mug and held it.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He coughed, leaning forward.

  “In my city, in Tashkent, about ten years ago—not quite ten years, but nearly—there were bombings. Six car bombs in one day. It was horrible. So many people were injured. I was at my office, and I felt one of them. I came down to look and there was just…” He opened his hands. “Pieces of metal and glass. Blood everywhere. It’s impossible to describe—you see things like that on the news, but when you’re there, you see the people, you hear screaming, you smell—” He shook his head, as if to clear the memory away.

  “Most people in Uzbekistan—I mean the Uzbeks, not Russian people like me—are Muslim. Not the kind who pray a lot; usually more laid-back. When I was younger, during Soviet times, the government kept a close eye on things—not just mosques, but churches and everything else, too. It controlled the kind of religion people could have, more or less, so nobody was very religious. Not really.” Briefly, his face took on an exasperated look. “Things were so much better then, let me tell you.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but let him go on.

  He sank slightly in his seat, focusing on the fake flowers in the middle of the table. “When the bombings happened, the government blamed the Muslims—the religious ones. So, of course, a lot of other people did the same thing.” He made a helpless gesture. “I believed it. Almost everyone believed it. It was only later that people started asking questions. Asking whether the government itself might have…” He drew a breath and let it out. “Well. It doesn’t matter. We’ll never know.”

  For a moment, he paused. Then he said, “I was a lawyer, as I mentioned.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “I had—” He faltered. His hair had fallen in front of his eyes. “I had clients, of course. People told me many things. And I knew a lot of people from my university. I was…always a friendly person.”

  Fingering his coffee spoon, he wiped it on his napkin and began scraping it lightly against the edge of the table.

  “All right,” I said.

  “One day I received a call on my phone, my mobile phone, telling me I was invited.”

  His eyes were fixed on the spoon.

  “Invited?”

  “That’s what they call it. They ‘invite’ you.” A corner of his mouth twitched into a dry, fleeting half-smile. “As if it were a dinner party.”

  “‘They’? The—the secret police, like you said before?”

  “Yes, but a different kind of them. A more serious kind.” He leaned back against the orange vinyl cushion of the booth.

  “Of course, when you’re invited, you can’t refuse. So I went.” He glanced up at the light that hung over our table. “I took the bus, and I still remember everything about it, that ride. The people around me seemed to know where I was going. No one would look at me. It was very strange.

  “When I arrived, there were two of them, just like in the movies. One of them was tall and strong-looking, and the other one was shorter and rather fat. Their faces were similar, though, like they could have been cousins. They were both very light, as if they didn’t spend much time in the sun.

  “I came in, and they poured some glasses of vodka, one for me and one for each of them. They made small talk with me for a while, about my work, my family, a class I was teaching at the university. Then they asked.” He paused. “They asked me what I had heard.”

  Taking a breath, he let it out slowly. “You have to understand,” he said, “that I was frightened, and angry about the bombs. Many of us were. And I believe in a—what would you call it?—a secular society. After independence, many of us were already worried that things would change too much, that everything around us would become unrecognizable. And I…”

  He looked down into his cup.

  “I was persuaded,” he said. “I started…giving names. Not just anybody, but the people I knew, or had heard of, that were activists. Those were the ones I mentioned, at first. In most cases, they were names I was sure the government already had. I thought I couldn’t be doing any harm.”

  His voice grew softer.

  “The thing about that kind of police is that they know more about you th
an you do about yourself. It’s not that they’re especially intelligent. In fact, they’re often the men who didn’t do well in school. But they know what to say.” He glanced at me briefly. “They kept wanting…well, they wanted to know what I’d heard. What people were saying. More names.

  “And I wanted to leave,” he said. “They knew that. They knew I’d studied languages at university, that I wanted something different for myself.” He swallowed. “And of course, there’s always a threat hanging behind what they say, even if they never actually come out with the words. I’d been in prison once before, like I told you—my father was trying to get someone to pay a debt, and he made the wrong kind of people angry. I didn’t want…I couldn’t bear to go through that ever again. When people go into prison in Uzbekistan, things sometimes happen…”

  He left the sentence unfinished. “And so,” he continued instead, “eventually, I agreed to work for them. I knew a lot of people. My clients, my friends. Students I had once taught, when I was a professor’s assistant. They trusted me, they told me everything.” He paused. “And I betrayed them. Every week, I went to that building, to the officers who had invited me. And I betrayed them.”

  He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand, although he wasn’t crying. More than anything, he looked exhausted.

  “There was one young woman, a painter. I remembered her because she used to wear these silk flowers in her hair. She was bold—she was never afraid of saying anything. I used to get so frustrated with her. I thought she was wrong about everything.” He seemed to draw in on himself, his shoulders curving. “They took her. I told myself she must have expected to be taken, since she’d said such bold things in front of other people. I…”

  He trailed off.

  I was too stunned to speak. We sat across from each other, the smoke from the kitchen wafting over us, the fan blades endlessly paddling the air.

  “Let’s go,” I said finally, and he nodded. We slid out of the booth, walking to the register.

  In the darkness of the car, I put my hands on the wheel. The stitching in the leather felt rough under my skin. I stared straight ahead.

  “So what happened to them?” I asked. “Those people you…told the officers about?”