Then she caught a cab to a pub called the Hawk ‘n’ Dove near the Capitol and glowed when she saw the M.G. hunched outside.
But why hasn’t he tried to make love to me? In a way sexual reticence was a form of dishonesty, if you felt the way she did. Because Natasha Zhukova knew now that this was the face and the body she had wondered about in the past. The one that fitted. You didn’t mock his weaknesses: you nursed them: that was love.
He was sitting at a table pouring a beer. ‘Hi,’ he said rising. She saw the happiness on his face before the mask was replaced.
‘Hi,’ she said, very American.
‘Like a beer?’
‘Please. That would be good.’
They sat for a while watching the bubbles spiral. Sharing.
‘What about a drive out into the country?’
‘I don’t think that would be so good.’
‘Why not? They don’t confine you to Foggy Bottom.’
‘Foggy Bottom?’
He explained that it was a part of bureaucratic Washington that collected fog, and added that perhaps they could compromise and drive to Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘But no further.’
Outside, Charlie reverted for a moment to Washington guide, explaining the architectural history of the Capitol. Thornton’s prize winning design; subsequently Latrobe, Bulfinch and Thomas Ustick Walter who raised the great dome and built the two outlying wings. Natasha enjoyed his enthusiasm and his knowledge, but not his facts. ‘Would you like to design a building like that?’ she asked, hoping for more of his sap to flow.
Charlie shook his head. ‘Perhaps a monument one day to our age. Glass and grey stone and shining metal reaching for the stars through the clouds.’ He looked embarrassed. ‘But first of all I’d like to design good houses for people who can’t afford good houses.’
Natasha thought he sounded surprised at discovering his ambitions.
In the car they shared the imprisoned spring warmth like a pillow. It smelled of leather and speed. Stumpy gear-change, wooden wheel. The car a terrier rather than a greyhound. And that was how he drove it, nipping and charging and boasting. A weakness; but all for her benefit.
‘One day,’ she said, as they patrolled the lawns of Mount Vernon, ‘I would like to show you the Kremlin. It is very beautiful.’
He didn’t reply.
They visited the smokehouse, the barn, the coachhouse, the schoolhouse, the museum and the ‘slave’ quarters where sixty of the 200 servants once lived.
‘I guess both our countries went to war because of slavery,’ he said. He took her hand: such intimacy! A courtship fuelled by American history.
They sat on the lawn near the house which looked very composed in the sunlight, as secure as Sunday lunch, white-walled, red-roofed, colonial. Sparrows sprung on the turf and a voyeur squirrel came down from the trees behind them.
Charlie Hardin, casual in striped slacks and blue towelling shirt, rolled on his stomach and examined the grass with concentration. ‘I guess,’ he said after a while, ‘that you might think we overdo the patriotism a bit.’
She shook her head. ‘No, I admire it.’ The flags in suburban gardens and light switches with metal eagles above them. ‘It’s the same with us Russians.’
‘It’s a pity we can’t somehow manufacture a combined patriotism.’
‘Then it wouldn’t be patriotism.’
‘No, I guess you’re right.’ He burrowed in the grass with a twig. ‘You know a lot of the guys that you meet in Washington probably seem ridiculous with their intrigues, their electioneering, their swaggering.’
‘I don’t meet people like that.’
‘I suppose not. But I do. And they’re good people, you know, Natasha. Well, most of them, anyway. They can get a little pompous and they have a lot of complexes, but their motives are good. The hell of it is that so much of their effort is channelled into futility. They don’t understand your country and you don’t understand ours. And no one tells the truth.’
Who, Natasha wondered, were these people. They didn’t sound like an architect’s contacts. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘We only read about the decadence of Capitalism. You only read about the grey colours of Socialism. Neither is accurate. Why does it have to be so?’
‘Because of a few men,’ Hardin said.
‘It is very sad. Both countries, it seems to me, want to have friendship. And yet both work against it. They use up all their energy making bad propaganda about each other when they could be trying to understand each other. I suppose I sound naïve …’
‘Sure you do—-thank God. We could do with a little more naïveté. Too many people dismiss honesty as naïveté. The half-smart guys.’
‘And you, Charlie—are you naïve?’
The mask which had been slipping was adjusted. ‘I try to be.’
‘Is it so hard?’
‘It’s just about the hardest thing in this world. Have you ever tried telling the truth all day? About every little thing? It’s impossible.’
‘You mean you lie to me?’
He resumed his examination of the grass and the sparrows hopped nearer. Behind them in the trees a red cardinal swooped through the branches, a whistle of scarlet. ‘I try not to,’ he said.
She adjusted the pink mini-skirt she’d put on in the lavatory of the Hawk ‘n’ Dove. (Why did they call lavatories rest rooms?) Her legs were still sun-starved. ‘You shouldn’t have to try, Charlie.’ He wanted to explain: she could feel it.
‘I know. It’s like you’re sitting in the Kremlin and I’m in the Pentagon …’
‘An architect in the Pentagon?’
‘Figuratively speaking, I mean.’ He searched the turf for an escape route. ‘That’s a wild skirt you’ve got on. You’re getting downright degenerate, Natasha Zhukova.’
‘Do you like it, Charlie?’
He whistled. ‘Sure I like it. So would any other red-blooded American. But you’re supposed to wear tights or something with it, you know.’
But she didn’t want to wear tights or anything. She wanted the sun on her legs. The freedom. The admiration. She moved closer to him so that she could feel the warmth of his body. In her mind he no longer inhabited cocktail bars with scarlet-taloned women. He was just Charlie. The hair on the top of his scalp was thinner than the rest: at forty he would be balding and that would be nice. She was pleased that he wasn’t too handsome: that there was character there—and toughness, too. She wanted to see his face in passion. His hands on her body.
‘What has impressed you most about us Yanks?’ he asked, still swerving away from intimacy.
‘You’re very polite and you smile a lot. In a shop the other day a sales lady said to me, “You’re welcome.” And I said, “Thank you.” And she said, “You’re welcome.” I wondered how long we could have gone on for.’
He grinned and she noted that his ears moved slightly. ‘Is that all?’
‘No. I’ve never known people say “Right” so often. Right?’
‘Right,’ he said. All right. But what about their character?’
‘It seems to me that they try just a little too hard. Always they try to be clever when there’s no need. Also I think a lot of people don’t know whether they’re more proud of being Italians or Germans or just Americans. Also they seem too interested in sex.’ (Except you, Charlie Hardin.) As if they’ve just discovered it. The permissive society they call it, I believe. With freedom to make love, I suppose. And yet they still treat sex in the films and magazines as if it were something dirty. It’s such a contradiction.’
‘I guess you’re right. Right? But it’ll pass. In many ways we’re a backward nation. What’s the attitude in Russia’—very tentative here—‘to sex?’
‘The natural attitude,’ Natasha replied promptly. ‘They like it.’
Charlie skirted that one, too. ‘But our society. What do you think of that?’
‘You’re in the middle of a revo
lution,’ she said. ‘It seems to me that you’re trying to shake off all the old fixed ideas. Even in war—no one seems to want to have American soldiers in Vietnam and yet they’re still there. I think your politicians find it hard to keep up with the changes. When you first arrive in America it seems as if the young people are a different nationality: they are quite separate from Washington and your government. And the young people themselves—they are divided about what they want. Either to do something which has social value or to do nothing at all. I think,’ she added carefully, ‘that they all seek a new leadership that will guide them away from the tired old ideas—war and meaningless wealth.’
‘Maybe,’ Charlie said. ‘Maybe.’
‘You never commit yourself, Charlie.’
‘I was listening to your views. They’re interesting. How do the young people compare with the kids in Russia?’
‘In Russia they have more sense of purpose. For instance our young people built a whole city. It was called Komsomolsk in the far east of the Soviet Union. In America they would do the same if they thought there was any point. But they don’t think one group, one individual, can achieve anything. They need this new leadership. Something new and exciting, not like the promises of elections. Because from what I read, Charlie, the young people are looking for good causes all the time. So much idealism squandered’—she was speaking in Russian now—‘by your industrialists and politicians. It is shameful. I think perhaps you should have a movement like the Komsomol …’
Hardin lit a cigarette. ‘You’re right, of course,’ he answered in Russian. ‘Up to a point. These kids are missionaries in their own country. When they haven’t got a mission, they turn to drugs.’
‘That,’ Natasha said firmly, ‘is the very worst aspect of your society. It should never have been allowed to happen. And it would never have happened in Russia …’
‘Sure,’ Charlie said, irritation grating his voice a bit. ‘I guess they just get drunk on vodka instead.’
She stopped preaching. ‘I’m sorry. There is so much that is good about America.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like freedom,’ she whispered.
A garden laid out with petal precision. Iris unfurling, tulips drooping, daffodil bugles already crisping, cultivated bluebells sweetening the air. Bees with furry rumps protruding from suckling flowers.
His hand was dry and strong. She wanted emancipated, liberated love that would last forever; finding me the woman, the Sibiryak; deep and carnal and spiritual. Her breasts ached with it. The piston pulse of mating. Eternal and perpetual and forever into the babushka sunset.
With this man. (Poor Georgi.) The man who had reached for a book in a Washington shop. Born six years before her and waiting here in an alien land. What happened if you married and then, by civilized mistake, met him? Natasha Zhukova considered predestination. I was sent here from a town called Alma-Ata in the republic of Kazakhstan to meet a man possessing vulnerable sophistication, a pleasant face and a secret mask. Inevitable? Ridiculous. Imagine all other circumstances that could have arisen, Natasha Zhukova. But they didn’t. This was the one that arose, here in a green corner of the grounds of the late George Washington and his wife, Martha. Ludicrous.
Involuntarily she tightened her grip on his hand; and he turned and faced her; and kissed her as gently as the flowers around them. And then with the intensity that she knew existed behind the mask. So that it was a consummation within the circumstances.
‘Charlie.’
‘Yes?’
‘Nothing. Just Charlie.’
But he didn’t tell her that he loved her, although she knew that he did.
One May day when the heat was swelling in the capital city he met her at the Hawk ‘n’ Dove and told her with un-American hesitancy that he had found a place where they might spend a few hours together.
‘Where, Charlie?’
‘It’ll sound ridiculous, I guess.’
‘Where, Charlie?’
‘Out at the National Airport. You can take a place there for a few hours. While you’re waiting for a plane. Will you come?’
Of course she would come.
They didn’t speak much as they drove in the green M.G. across the Potomac towards the diesel-smelling, jet-roaring runways.
‘It isn’t the most romantic rendezvous in the world,’ he said as they let themselves into the aseptic motel room overlooking the serpent faces trundling along the runway for take-off.
‘It’s the most romantic place in the world,’ she said.
Even then he was shy. Although she knew that the shyness was not natural. It hadn’t been this way with other woman. She was different: a quaint peasant. Or was there some other reason for the anachronism of his courting? To this fearful proposition she blindfolded herself.
In Russia, she thought, we do this on the big white river-steamers. Without the dishonesty of manners.
‘Charlie.’
‘Yes?’
‘I love you.’
He nodded.
She began to take her clothes off, showing him her breasts, a little heavy the way Russian men liked them.
He went into the bathroom and re-emerged, towel around his waist. Slim and better muscled than she had imagined; the athlete’s ripples at the sides of his ribs, skin paling just beneath the navel, hair on his belly growing into a reverse parting.
She climbed into the bed and waited. He joined her, still wearing the towel.
And the eternity, the perpetuity, the seal of indefinable feeling that, with waiting, had advanced way beyond attraction, was achieved with frantic speed.
Afterwards she thought: He didn’t ask. He didn’t wonder. Why?
She said, ‘Charlie, I wish you had been the first.’ Which was a lie, or a half-truth, or something.
He stroked her. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
Immediately she wished that he had wanted to be the first. Such stupidity about sex when hitherto it had been unconnected with love. Now in reverse.
‘Would you have preferred it if I had been a virgin?’ she asked.
‘It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.’ American-like, he reached for his pack of cigarettes on the bedside table.
‘I think it does, Charlie.’ A nerve-gas suspicion poisoned her thoughts. ‘It’s almost as if you knew that I wasn’t.’
He inhaled deeply, making a meal of smoking. ‘I told you—it doesn’t matter.’ The blindfold again.
‘I’m glad, Charlie. Because it never mattered before. And it was only once.’
He turned and regarded her. ‘Only once?’ His words approaching hatred.
Sickness inside her—and she said, Yes, Charlie, only once.’
He crushed the cigarette, breaking it in half. ‘I believe you. But, as I said, it doesn’t matter.’
And he made love again, with an initial cruelty that spent itself in tender pain.
15
CHARLIE HARDIN awoke in his apartment in Georgetown in a state of euphoria born of satisfying dreams. It deflated almost immediately into guilty depression.
He lay for a while in his bachelor bed, occasionally shared, listening to the circulation of the city getting under way after the night. Then he went into the kitchen—more electric machinery than food—and made coffee. And sat at the window watching the traffic, like beads on a thread, being pulled into the capital of the United States.
He smiled without realizing it. Her honesty extended to her love-making. Intuitive responses substituting for experience. Nothing like the textbooks which made sex like a driving lesson.
He poured himself more coffee and remembered their second visit to the National Airport, fancying that he could smell the fumes of burning jet oil in his apartment.
They had the whole day yet within five minutes of arriving they made love. Now they lay beneath a sheet, hands clasped, the taste of passion still lingering. A stem of cigarette smoke from the ashtray swayed and eddied beside them; outside the big nosing jets ch
ased each other into the sky.
‘A whole day together,’ she said.
‘What do you want to do?’
‘Just stay here with you, Charlie. Be close to you. Make love again later.’
‘Twice more, maybe,’ he said, boasting a little.
‘That would be good,’ she said, enfeebling the boast. His hand moved to the moisture at her loins, his moisture, and she held it there. He wanted to talk deeply and tenderly of his love, but the wisecracks of the past strangled him—the wisecracks themselves camouflaging shyness.
After a while he remembered. ‘I bought you a present.’ He reached for his briefcase which contained a copy of the British Architectural Review, a toothbrush and some aftershave, and took out a pocket-chess set, the pieces allegedly ivory, the leather case embossed in gold with her initials. ‘I thought we might have a game. Lying here. East versus West.’
She kissed him. ‘You are very sweet, Charlie. I love you so very much.’
Charlie who considered himself moderately astute at chess pegged in the pieces and let her be white. Pawn to king four, pawn to queen’s bishop four; knight to bishop three; knight takes pawn, bishop to knight two. The Sicilian opening proceeded with orthodoxy; but within his concentration certain promises fidgeted.
On the eighth move he castled and asked, ‘Just what does your father do at the Embassy, Natasha?’ With such theatrical nonchalance; such glaring deceit.
Pawn to knight five. ‘He’s just a diplomat.’
‘I see.’ Knight to king one. ‘I see.’ Staring hard at the little board between them, wondering how plausible he might have been if he hadn’t loved her. ‘Does he do consular work?’ His voice so softly off hand now that the treachery shrieked above it.
Pawn to king’s rook four. ‘Most of the time he reads newspapers I think. He has to find out what America thinks about Soviet actions.’
‘I see.’
She stroked his chest, his belly, his groin. ‘It’s your move, Charlie.’
I can’t do it, he thought. I can’t. But the promises nudged him again. Your family, your country. Oh Christ! Knight to bishop two. Miraculously the right reply. With grotesque levity, ‘And what does America think of Soviet intentions?’
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