I knew I needed to formulate a plan before my bank account dwindled to Code Red level. There was no running to Mommy or Daddy, as some of my friends had the luxury of doing when times got tough. That evening, I’d flipped through my little black book and set up a stream of dates with the D.C. lobbyist and lawyer set, an occasional diplomat, and one or two congressmen. The dates were tedious and exhausting, but at the end of the day, the rent was paid on my Georgetown apartment, I’d gotten some nice dinners out of them, and the men whose company I’d pretended to enjoy kept me in couture that rivaled Bev’s. I was not attracted to them, and yet how easy it had been to convince them that I was.
That line of work suited me fine. But after a while, I grew bored with the taxi, dinner, hotel, taxi, dinner, hotel rotation. That and the high level of personal upkeep were wearing me out. The brushing, tweezing, plucking, dyeing, waxing, bleaching, squeezing—even the endless shopping—were beginning to take their toll.
I thought of becoming a stewardess. For one, I’d look great in Pan Am’s signature blue. Plus, I loved to travel. It’s what I liked most during the war—the possibility of being uprooted to a new place every few months. But they’d take one look at my age—thirty-two if I was being honest or thirty-six if I was actually honest—and say I was “overqualified” for the position.
The truth was, I missed intelligence work, missed being in the know. So when Bev rang one last time to beg me to go to the party, I said yes.
“So many familiar faces,” Bev said, scanning the crowd. The music had started up again and people were dancing and spilling their gin fizzes on one another. I spotted Jim Roberts across the deck, breathing down some poor girl’s neck. Jim had once cornered me at an embassy party in Shanghai, putting his hands around my waist and saying he wasn’t going to let me go until I gave him a smile. I did smile, then I kneed him in the groin.
“Maybe a few too many familiar faces.”
“I’ll toast to that,” she said. Bev leaned over the rail and brushed a piece of her dark brown hair out of her face. Bev was the kind of woman whose beauty came late, passing over her high school years, college years, and early twenties entirely, only to arrive in her late twenties and not reach its full glory until her thirties. Bev had had many Jim Roberts experiences herself. “But still,” she continued. “I wish all the girls could’ve been here.”
“Me too.” Bev and I were the only two of our old crew still living in Washington. Julia was in France with her new husband, Jane was in Jakarta with someone else’s husband, and Anna was in either Venice or Madrid, depending on what mood she was in that month. Our group had first met on the Mariposa, a former luxury liner recommissioned to shuttle GIs to the front line. The only women on board, we shared a cramped cabin outfitted with metal bunks, one toilet, and a tub that sputtered cold salt water. Despite the camp-like conditions and the seasickness, we all got along famously. We were in our early twenties and ready to take on the world. We were the kind of girls who’d grown up reading Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, then graduated to H. Rider Haggard’s She in high school. We bonded over the belief that a life of adventure wasn’t reserved for men, and we set out to claim our piece of it.
Most important, we shared a similar sense of humor, which went a long way when sharing one toilet with questionable flushing abilities—especially when the ship hit rougher seas. Julia loved to play pranks and once started a rumor that we were a group of Catholic nuns headed to Calcutta. The men, who’d been catcalling us any chance they could get, became reverent when passing us in the corridors. One soldier had even asked if we’d pray for his sick dog. I made the sign of the cross and Bev burst out laughing.
By the time the Mariposa made landfall in Ceylon, we were inseparable, and held tight to each other in the back of a thick-wheeled truck that jettisoned us through the jungle to the port at Kandy. Surrounded by tea plantations and electric-green terraced rice paddies that spilled down from the hills, Kandy, though just across the bay from the terror unfolding in Burma, felt as far away from the war as one could get.
Many of us would remember our time in Kandy fondly. And when we’d write each other—or, if we were lucky, catch up in person—we’d reminisce about the many nights spent under a sky so large and so dark the stars would reveal themselves in layers. We’d recount slicing papayas off the trees surrounding the thatch-roofed OSS offices with a rusty machete, or the time an elephant got into our compound and had to be enticed out with a jar of peanut butter. We’d recall the all-night parties at the Officers’ Club, dangling our legs in blue-green Kandy Lake and yanking them back out when we disturbed some bubbling creature lurking beneath. There were the throngs of monks making their way to and from the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, the sweaty weekends in Colombo, the leaf monkey we’d named Matilda who’d given birth in our food hut.
I’d started out as MO support staff—filing papers, typing, that sort of thing. But my career trajectory changed when I received an invitation to attend a dinner at Earl Louis Mountbatten’s lavish residence up on the hill, overlooking the OSS compound. It was the first of many parties I’d attend and the first time I’d discover that powerful men would willingly give information to me, whether I asked for it or not.
That’s how it started. That first party, I’d squeezed myself into a low-cut black evening gown Bev had packed “just in case,” and by the end of the night, a Brazilian arms dealer who’d been chatting me up let slip that he believed there was a mole within Mountbatten’s staff. I reported the tip to Anderson the next day. What the OSS did with that information, I have no idea. But I was soon inundated with more dinner invitations, set up with visiting people of import, and given questions to ask loose-lipped men.
I got good at my new job—so good I was given a stipend to purchase gowns we’d have shipped in with our toilet paper, Spam, and mosquito repellent. The funny thing was, I never thought of myself as a spy. Surely the craft took more than smiling and laughing at stupid jokes and pretending to be interested in everything these men said. There wasn’t a name for it back then, but it was at that first party that I became a Swallow: a woman who uses her God-given talents to gain information—talents I’d been accumulating since puberty, had refined in my twenties, and then perfected in my thirties. These men thought they were using me, but it was always the reverse; my power was making them think it wasn’t.
* * *
—
“Wanna dance?” Bev asked.
I wrinkled my nose as Bev shimmied her hips. “To this?” I yelled over the Perry Como. Bev didn’t care. She took hold of my arms and moved them back and forth until I gave in. Just as I was getting into the swing of things, someone shut off the record player with a scratch. From the back of the crowd, someone clinked his fork against a glass, and the rest of the crowd joined in until the entire boat sounded like a chandelier in a windstorm.
“Oh boy,” Bev said. “Here we go.”
The men began with the toasts: To Frank! To Wild Bill! To the Old Standby Stooges! To the Otherwise Sad Sacks! Then came the songs we used to close out the night with back in Kandy: “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “Lili Marlene,” followed by their not-so-secret clubs’ songs from Harvard and Princeton and Yale. Bev and I always snickered at the drunken musicale that rounded out every party—but that night, we couldn’t help but link arms and join in.
The toot of an approaching tugboat come to tow us back to the marina interrupted the third round of Yale’s “ ’Neath the Elms.” We yelled for the tug captain to come join us for a nightcap. Not very happy to be dragged out of bed to come and rescue the drunken lot of us, he and another man went to work tethering the Miss Christin.
* * *
—
Back on dry ground, the men debated whether to head to the Social Club on Sixteenth or the twenty-four-hour diner on U Street. Bev and I said our goodbyes in front of the black sedan her husband had sent,
promising not to let so much time pass before seeing each other again. “Are you sure you don’t need a ride?” she asked.
“I could use the air.”
“Suit yourself!” She blew me a kiss from the open window as the car pulled away.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. “Can I walk with you?” asked Frank. “I could use some air too,” he said, his breath minty with a hint of tobacco. He seemed perfectly sober. I wondered if he’d been sipping Coca-Cola the whole night. “We’re going in the same direction, right?”
Frank lived down the street from me, but in terms of real estate, his Georgetown town house was light-years away from my small apartment above a French bakery. “Indeed we are,” I said. Frank wasn’t the kind of man who’d ask to walk a girl home with ill intentions; he’d never made a pass at me as long as I’d known him. If Frank said he wanted to talk, he usually wanted to talk business. He signaled to his driver, who was standing by the open door of his black sedan. “I’ll be walking tonight,” he called out. The driver tipped his hat and closed the door.
We walked away from the Potomac, through downtown Washington’s sleeping streets. “I’m happy you came,” he said. “I hoped Beverly could talk you into coming.”
“She was in on it?”
“Is she ever not in on it?”
I laughed. “No, I suppose not.”
He was silent again, as if he’d forgotten why he’d asked me to walk with him.
“You could’ve told your driver to go home earlier, before making him wait all night.”
“Didn’t know I was gonna want to walk,” he said. “Not until I made up my mind.”
“Made up your mind?”
“Do you miss it?”
“All the time,” I said.
“I envy that. I really do.”
“Do you wish you’d stopped? After the war?”
“I never used to think about the what ifs,” said Frank. “But now…I’m not so sure. Things aren’t as black-and-white as they used to be.”
We arrived at the bakery. The lights were on, the morning baker already loading baguettes into the oven. I’d chosen to live there not only because it was in my price range when I started at State, but also because I love the smell of fresh-baked bread even more than I like eating it.
“I hear you’re looking for a new line of work.”
“Can’t keep a secret from you, Frank.”
He laughed. “No, you really can’t.”
“Why? Have you heard of something?”
He gave a tight-lipped smile. “Well, I’ve got something that may be of interest.”
I tilted my ear toward him.
“It’s about a book.”
EAST
1950–1955
CHAPTER 5
The Muse
THE REHABILITATED WOMAN
Respected Anatoli Sergeyevich Semionov,
This is not the letter you’ve long sought. This is not about the book. This is not the confession that would prove the crimes you’ve assigned to me. Nor is it a plea for my innocence. I am innocent of what I’ve been accused of, but not of everything. I’ve taken a man for my own, knowing he had a wife. I’ve failed at being a good daughter, a good mother—my own mother left to pick up the pieces I’ve left behind. All that is over now, and yet still I feel the need to write.
You may believe every word I write with this pencil I traded two sugar rations for, or you may take it for a work of fiction. No matter. I’m not writing for you; you are only a name at the top of my letter. And I will never send this letter. Each page will be burned as I finish. Your name is a mere salutation to me now.
You said I didn’t tell you everything during our nightly talks, that I left great holes in my “stories.” As an interrogator, you must know how unreliable memory can be. One’s mind can never get the entire story straight. But I will try.
I have this one sharpened pencil. It is smaller than my thumb, and my wrist already aches. But I will write until it wears down and turns to dust.
But where to start? Should I begin with this moment? How I spent my day, my eighty-sixth of the 1,825 days it will take to make me a rehabilitated woman? Or should I start with what has already transpired? Do you want to know about my six-hundred-kilometer journey to this place? Have you been on the trains that go to nowhere? Have you visited the windowless wooden boxes they kept us shivering in while we waited to be shuttled to the next location? Do you know what it’s like to live on the edge of the world, Anatoli? So far from Moscow, from your family, from every warm thing and every kindness?
Do you want to know that during the final stage of our journey, the guards forced us to walk? How it was so cold that when the woman walking next to me collapsed and they pried her boot from her foot, she left her smallest toe inside? Or how I shared a train compartment with a woman with two skinny braids that ran the length of her long back who claimed to have drowned her two small children in the bath? How when someone asked her why she did it, she replied that a voice that still won’t shut up had told her to? Should I tell you how she woke up screaming?
No, Anatoli, I won’t write to you of these worries. Really, for what you must know, these details would likely bore you, and I do not wish to bore you. What I wish is for you to keep reading.
Let me go back.
After Moscow, we arrived first to a transit camp, run by female guards—a slight improvement over the conditions where you and I met. The cells were clean and cement-floored, and they smelled of ammonia. Each woman in our cell, Cell No. 142, had her own mattress, and the guards turned the lights off at night and let us finally sleep.
But not for long.
Days after arriving, they came at night and emptied out Cell No. 142. They boarded us onto the trains and told us the next stop, the only stop, was Potma. The train was dark and smelled like rotting wood. Iron bars separated each compartment from the corridor, so the guards could see us at all times. There were two metal buckets in the corner—one our toilet, the other full of lye with which to cover our mess. I claimed a spot on an upper berth, where I could lie down and stretch my legs. And if I tilted my head just so, I could see a sliver of sky through the cracks in the ceiling. If it wasn’t for that tiny sky, I wouldn’t have known when it was day or night, or how many days and nights had passed since we boarded.
It was night when the train came to a stop.
It looked more like a manger than a train station. But instead of sheep or donkeys, men in worn army uniforms with dogs that resembled stout lions awaited us on the platform. The guards yelled for us to get out, and we looked at each other wildly. When no one got up, a guard grabbed a young woman with short red hair by the arm and told her to get in line. We followed in silence.
The guard at the front held up a hand and the march commenced. As we left the platform, we realized there would be no other train or truck to take us the rest of the way. I pulled the sleeves of my coat to cover my balled-up hands. They were warm then, but they wouldn’t be for long.
We cut a path through the virgin snow, following the train tracks until they stopped and disappeared into white. No one asked how long the march would be, but that’s all we could think about. Would it be two hours or two days? Or two weeks? Instead, I attempted to focus on the footsteps of the woman in front of me, whose name I never knew. I tried to fit my own footprints neatly inside the ones she’d left behind. I tried not to think of the way my toes and fingers had begun to tingle, how the snot in my nose dripped and froze in the dimple above my upper lip—the same dimple Borya often touched with a fingertip when teasing me.
It was something out of Doctor Zhivago. Yes, Anatoli, something out of the book you long to read. Our march felt as if it had sprung from Borya’s mind. The moon was full and illuminated the snow-covered road, casting a silvery glow on our footprints. It was a deathly beauty, and
maybe if I’d had any sense left in me, I would’ve run out into the woods that lined the road, running and running until my body gave out, or until someone stopped me. I think I would’ve liked to die there, in that place that felt as if it were conjured from Borya’s dreams.
* * *
—
First, the guard towers—each capped with a dull red star—peeked out from the tops of the tall pines in the distance. Then, as we got closer: the barbed wire fence, the barren yard, the lines of barracks, a thin plume of smoke connecting the gray sky to each building’s chimney. A malnourished rooster walked the fence’s perimeter, its beak cracked, its red comb mangled.
We’d arrived.
I cannot speak for all of us, but I’d spent every second, every minute, every hour, every day of our four-day march dreaming of warmth. And yet, when they herded us through the barbed wire fence and we were allowed to warm ourselves by the fires burning in tin drums in the courtyard, I’d never felt colder.
On the far side of the yard, forty or fifty women stood in a line, holding metal plates and mugs, awaiting dinner. They turned when we approached and appraised our pale faces, our full heads of hair, our hands: frostbitten, yes, but uncalloused. We looked at their jaundiced faces, their kerchiefed or shaved heads, their broad, hunched shoulders. Soon it would be like looking into a mirror. Soon it would be us standing in line for dinner while a new group of women began their rehabilitation.
A dozen female guards appeared and the men who’d marched us there turned and silently walked back into the snow. We were led into a long building with a cement floor and stove. There, the guards instructed us to strip. We stood naked, shivering while they ran their fingers through our hair, then across our bodies, lifting our arms and checking under our breasts. They made us spread our fingers, our toes, our legs. They stuck their fingers in our mouths. I began to warm up, but not from the wood stove. I burned with an anger I still have not yet begun to process. Have you felt such an anger, Anatoli? An anger burning somewhere inside you that you can’t pinpoint but that can overtake you like a match to petrol? Does it come for you at night, as it comes for me? Is that why you’re in the position you are in now? Is power, no matter the cost, the only cure?
The Secrets We Kept Page 7