Nuryev saw him struggling to open it with one hand and came over on his crutches and sat on the bed. “Let me help, Colonel,” he offered.
Kovpak, still in a kind of daze but enthused about finding something he remembered in the bag, used one hand and lifted it onto the bed where Nuryev loosened the binding cord and pulled it open. Kovpak pulled out his uniform, wincing somewhat at the smell from it being packed for so long, then came his flying boots and the thin flight helmet, followed by the survival kit. Finally the large wadded up silk parachute spilled onto the bed and floor.
At the bottom of the bag was a harness that had been cut up. I did that, he suddenly remembered then pointed at the parachute. “I cut off the rigging,” he said slowly as he rapidly moved handfuls of the silk around to the point where an edge with several short remains of cord appeared.
“So you did use the parachute! And after you collected it you cut the rigging. You made a shelter?”
Kovpak was staring numbly at the large pile of fabric. “It was cold.” He looked at the pieces of the harness and another memory came to him. “My arm ... it was broken by the control stick ... the impact ... the elevator struck something and I should not have held on to it so tightly.” He pulled the odd pieces of the harness closer to him. “I ... I ... yes, I made this ... a sling for my arm. I think I was in the cockpit ... I was on the ground.”
The emergency kit was the next thing he had fleeting recollections of and he picked it up from the floor. “And ... and ... there were medicines in this – look, this is in English – these were for pain.”
Nuryev surprised him by being able to read the label, albeit haltingly, then saying, “I see the chocolate is gone ... and the broth.”
With that Kovpak seemed to freeze in place as he struggled with another fuzzy recollection where the strings of a barely remembered dream seemed to bind him between being asleep and awake. After staring across the crowded hospital barracks for several moments he decided it would be better if he did not reveal anything more – speculation about the ultra-secret mission could do no one any good, especially him. The mission had been a success; three of the four lead elements had landed in Tehran and despite not being able to recall where his plane was, no less than General Krylov had assured him Stalin’s plan apparently didn’t involve recovering it.
At least now he knew he had probably crashed and been found somewhere in the Urals and taken to a medical facility. I’m alive and will fly again soon, he thought.
“It doesn’t matter, Anton,” Kovpak said as if talking to a life-long friend. The military formality ebbed as he went on. “It’s not important any more ... I may never remember the details.” He scanned his damaged body with no small amount of frustration and looked at the younger officer. “I had a skull fracture. The doctors say this is why I can’t remember. But this is nothing we need to be concerned with. We have a war to win – men to train. They will drive the Nazis from the Motherland. That is our fate, my friend,” he said, then poured more vodka into their cups. “Death to Hitler!” he toasted.
CHAPTER 14
Calder Ranch, Texas, Thursday, May 22, 1997
Kirkland sat with Alex and Margaret Calder in her seemingly timeless, southwestern-style living room, surrounded with a lifetime of family memorabilia and Texiana, awaiting the arrival of Elanore and the lunch she was bringing. Over iced tea the casual talk ranged back and forth between a confirmed northeasterner and resolute Texans and he tried to put the older woman at ease by focusing on his work as an appraiser, sprinkled with some of the odd but less exciting facets of his work.
Based on Alex Calder’s suggestion, Kirkland avoided asking questions about the family history unless his mother raised the subject, but it proved difficult to not try and satisfy his curiosity. Instead of trying to uncover more about mystery of the couple’s prior life in Russia, he learned their house had been built on the property by Cecil Calder in order to have a place to get out of the hustle of Houston. Having lived most of the time in a high-rise condo not far from the company’s offices, the family’s part-time “weekend ranch” offered a diversion out in the country, first with horses and eventually even a small herd of cattle. As the primary business evolved, Alex had stepped into the executive office and soon built a much larger home a half-mile further up the private road. The in-town condo was now only rarely lived in unless business meetings or social events necessitated avoiding the long trip back and forth.
Hearing a car door close, Alex said, “That’s her,” and rose out of an over-stuffed leather chair. As the click of a woman’s shoes on the stonework porch became clearer he opened the door for his wife
Elanore juggled one of the large, white paper sacks into her husband’s hands without turning to see who might be in the room. “Whose is that?” she asked casually, tipping her head toward the black SUV in front of the house. “Somebody call the Secret Service?” she joked as she set her handbag down on a side table in the entry and dropped her keys into it.
“It’s mine,” Kirkland said casually as he stood up.
She turned and saw him then froze with her mouth opened. After a few seconds she glanced at her husband then her mother-in-law before looking back at Kirkland. For one of the few times in her life she was at a loss for words but after glaring at Alex she strode to the kitchen with the lunch as she said emphatically, “I can’t wait to hear this!”
- # -
“This is my doing,” Margaret said as they began setting out their lunch at her kitchen table. She touched Elanore’s hand and their eyes met. “It hasn’t been the right time for anyone to know until now ... even Alex didn’t know.”
“Until a few weeks ago,” Alex pointed out.
“Know what?”
Kirkland gestured toward Margaret as he said, “Your in-laws have been protecting an important state secret for half a century.”
Okay ... who the hell is this guy? Elanore thought, almost unable to keep her eyes off the man that she was now certain had lied to everyone. He’s a Fed ... that’s what it is, he’s no insurance appraiser, he’s a Federal Agent! “State secret?” she asked incredulously. “Who are you—”
Before Kirkland could respond Margaret interrupted. “Hon, we had no choice ... we were disconnected from that life for damn good reasons.”
What the hell does ‘that life’ mean? At that moment Elanore felt utterly lost and her gaze stayed on her mother-in-law. “You ... you were ... disconnected?” she asked. “From what life ... what life are you talking about?”
“It was before I was born,” Alex said then picked up a pickle spear with his fingers and took a large bite.
Elanore eyed Kirkland suspiciously. “So you’re what ... you’re with the CIA, you aren’t—”
Kirkland shook his head as Alex corrected her by saying, “No, El, he’s not—”
“Not what?” she asked quickly.
“Not an agent of any kind,” Kirkland suggested.
On top of her fear that she had helped this man become close to Catherine, the fact that her husband was unfazed enough to eat – even though it was from their favorite barbecue joint – was disconcerting. She sighed and using one of Catherine Cruz’s useful Spanish phrases she had learned over the years she muttered, “Más vale que sea bueno,” (this better be good).
“Oh, it is,” Alex said quickly. “Mom and Dad seem to have followed Shakespeare’s advice ... to ‘speak less than thou knowest’.”
Margaret grinned at her son then unhurriedly put some potato salad on her plate as she enhanced the explanation. “I guess, I guess the best way to say this is my real name is ... no, my real name was is better ... I was Helena Ulanova Nuryev.” She looked up from the plate at her dumfounded daughter-in-law and added, “Cecil was Anton Nuryev. Lt. Colonel Anton Nuryev – of the Soviet Air Force.” Tapping the spoon against the plastic container she added, “We escaped from East Germany ... from Berlin in 1947.”
After several moments of stunned silence Elan
ore turned and flashed a look of disbelief at her husband and saw him nod slightly in resigned acceptance. Her face attempted to ask her husband what her mind was thinking: She’s not crazy, is she?
Alex swallowed and gestured back and forth between himself and his mother with his fork. “Like I said, I didn’t know until about three weeks ago.”
How the hell can they even think of food? Elanore thought. It took several seconds to bring herself to ask something and she pointed at her husband. The tone of accusation was unmistakable, but tempered by years of trust it was more sarcastic than angry. “And you decided not to tell me.”
“I couldn’t ... I couldn’t ... not until now. I had to verify something for Mom first.”
Margaret’s tone was serious as she said, “Hon, you’ve gotta realize there are risks ... well, that ... or hell, maybe after all these years, there were ... I finally had to talk to someone.”
Looking at her husband again Elanore asked point blank, “Your dad was a Russian officer?”
Alex nodded. “Yep.”
Her next question sounded even more incredulous. “Ceece was a spy?”
Margaret answered for her son with a bemused laugh. “Oh, no ... oh, Lord no ... he was a pilot, not a spy ... we were there in Berlin the year after Germany surrendered.”
Elanore shook her head as she tried to comprehend the fact that the couple she had known and loved for so many years had been able to conceal such a thing. “Okay ... after the war ... that means you were there, in Germany ... when?”
“Uh huh. We were. Until nineteen forty-seven we were in Berlin,” Margaret answered.
“So ... so ... all those things ... everything about you before what ... what was ... that was—”
“Made up for us,” Margaret interrupted. “Everything. Even the family pictures,” she added, pointing to the hallway.
Elanore’s gaze turned again to her husband and there was a sense of worry in her question. “But, but you were born here – you were born in the U.S.?”
“That much is real,” Alex replied. “But everything before about – what, Mom? Forty-seven?”
Margaret nodded. “More or less.”
“That’s a figment of somebody’s clever imagination,” Alex finished.
Still almost stupefied and with the enormity of what she was learning, Elanore’s mind seemed to focus on odd little details. “Then ... all those people ... all those people in the pictures?” she asked without completing the question, pointing to the hallway that paralleled the large dining room where dozens of photographs had hung for over two decades. “Who are they?”
As she poured a small ladle of sauce onto the food on her plate Margaret answered with an almost embarrassed, confiding tone in her voice, “We never knew, Hon. We just memorized everything. To fit in we had to know lots of names and places. And dates, we had to know dates, of course. Dates were so important ... history especially. We were in a little classroom. We had to have all of it committed to memory. It was a long time before we could be moved into our first neighborhood off the base.”
Elanore tried to comprehend what it might be like to have to learn to perform an entire life as some kind of role in a play. The idea of being able to point to something and relate a completely fabricated story about it as if it were coming from a genuine memory was unimaginable. The realization of how automatic it had become for both of the Calders was setting in, and intuitively she measured it against her own real-life experience.
Her own memories of growing up with a huge family in and around Victoria, Texas were founded on real things – tangible things, including good and bad events. But now she knew her in-laws had been hiding their real experiences successfully for decades; she found the dichotomy somehow disturbing.
Now she knew the couple couldn’t have met at school in California; neither one of them attended, let alone graduated with a degree from USC – including the framed one on the wall in Cecil’s den. Cecil’s father and mother weren’t buried in a small town in Iowa and Margaret’s parents and grandparents weren’t the people interred in that beautiful graveyard she and Alex had once visited in Kentucky. Were those real? Was there even anyone in those graves?
After hearing only a few sentences from the people surrounding the table, her fragments of imagination and assumptions about the Calders in years past had just been rendered utterly meaningless. Living a lie; the trite phrase wouldn’t stop rattling around in her consciousness. Did it get easier as they got older?
The sepia-toned picture in the hall of a man and woman standing with a group of children on the steps of a porch could never again trigger a brief daydream of what it might have been like for a very young Cecil Calder to live on a farm in the Midwest in the ‘20’s. She resisted the urge to go down the hall and look at the little boy again and see if she still thought it looked like a very young version of her father in-law.
Suddenly the story of Margaret’s being raised as an only child by her domineering grandparents after her father and mother were killed in a car accident no longer made her wonder how the woman had become a self-assured, insightful and wise-cracking matriarch.
The little girl in the picture with pigtails and her eyes squinting from the sun, seated between the elderly couple on the tailgate of a truck wasn’t seven-year-old ‘Maggie’ Babbage; Cecil Calder hadn’t driven Margaret all the way from California to Kentucky in his 1939 Chevrolet to ask the elderly Morton Babbage’s permission to marry his granddaughter; they hadn’t been wed by a preacher on the back porch of a general store before retracing their trip back to California.
Elanore was wrestling with the fact that a significant facet of her married life had just been chipped away; the almost perfect gemstone that was her marriage now had a huge but deeply-hidden secret flaw they would always have to hide. God, no one would believe this was one of the repeating thoughts that seemingly wouldn’t go away. How do we explain this one? We’re not who we said we are, were others.
She decided the emotions were too complex to explore at the moment and her mind turned toward thoughts of what had really happened to her husband’s parents in the Soviet Union. That period of time was incomprehensible; all she could vaguely recall of that era was that the East Germans were an oppressed people who lived behind the “Iron Curtain” and longed for a better life somewhere else. Questions arose and faded as she concluded it was yet another subject best left to some later time.
Her heart sank as she thought of similar feelings Alex must have had in the past weeks without being able to talk to her. At least they were his biological parents, she thought.
Her insides quickly turned to knots with the realization that the fiction that served as their family history would probably still have to be maintained – the whole family now had a secret to hide. But for how long? Good God ... Cecil Calder ... Al’s dad ... fifty years of a family secret ... this I don’t want to read about in the papers. She looked at her husband but didn’t verbalize any of her thoughts.
Kirkland’s question to Margaret managed to raise Elanore from her reverie. “Do you know if any of his or your family survived the war?”
Margaret took a sip of iced tea and seemed to think for a few moments with her eyes fixed on something on the table before saying, “I had only one living relative ... a cousin.” She then raised an index finger briefly as a recollection surfaced. “She was six years older than me and she had one child ... I lived with them for a time ... it was in Moscow before we got married.” Her face took on a look of pained dismay and she avoided making eye contact with anyone at the table as her voice weakened. “I was told ... when I was in school ... my parents told me I had two younger brothers but they died while I was very young. I was too young to remember. And of course, after Berlin ... we didn’t exist in the Soviet Union.”
After several moments Alex reminded her, “You said Dad had a sister.”
His mother nodded and looked off to the side for a moment as she swallowed. “He did,” sh
e said then sighed. “I never met her. About all I knew about Anton was what he told me ... he was a young man when he went into the army. He knew horses and became a cavalry officer. Somehow he got into an aviation school ... but that was before I met him. After that, he was a pilot. That was where I met him, in Moscow.”
With a voice somewhat strained with emotion Elanore asked sympathetically, “You never met his parents?”
Margaret shook her head slightly. “No ... no, but that wasn’t all that unusual. I know they passed on years before. Come to think of it, Anton told me he found out somehow his family succumbed to an epidemic ... typhus, typhus, that’s what it was. But hell, there were always official denials about things like that.” She looked at the faces of the people surrounding the table and added, “We came to accept what we were told ... whether we believed it or not didn’t matter.”
Kirkland added grimly, “Few in the West understand how many millions of people died before and after the war – and famine was far more widespread than disease.”
Margaret looked even more distressed as she added grimly, “Those deaths marched side-by-side, Professor. I was a nurse.”
Alex watched his wife’s face sympathetically. The pained expression he saw coupled with years of marriage to the only woman he ever really loved gave him more than just a hint into what was going on in her mind. “A million questions, huh?”
It took Elanore several seconds to fashion a reply and even then it didn’t come out easily. “I ... I ... it’s just I ...” and at that she stalled out, unable to formulate a coherent question.
“We’ve got time, Hon,” Margaret said soothingly. “You want to know, just ask.”
After another moment of thought Elanore’s mind led her toward an odd realization: “You said cavalry officer,” she began, ruminating over the years of the Calders on horseback before Ceece’s diagnosis with lung cancer had started the slow and distressing process of getting out of the family’s sort-of hobby cattle business.
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