They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
—Ernest Hemingway, Notes on the Next War
Mark Mitchell was not a happy man.
On the surface, there was no real reason for his discontent. An assignment to Moscow would have been a plum for anybody, but especially for a Midwestern journalist still in his mid-thirties, this kind of assignment was a vindication of all the years spent chasing fire engines and police sirens, all the years of covering mayoralty races that led up to coverage of contests for House seats, then competitions for Senatorial and gubernatorial positions and just last year, the opportunity to run an in-depth series on the effects on foreign policy of the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan. Which had led to this pinnacle of his career.
Except for one, really minor, matter: A Russian hospital was no place for an American woman to have a baby.
It wasn't as if they hadn't known that Donna was expecting. And they had been assured that that was all right, that when her time came they could count on being expedited through Customs or Immigration or whatever in blazes got you out of this godforsaken garden spot and back to civilization, or at least to an American GI hospital in Germany or England. Whoever had spun them this fairy tale had obviously never dealt with Customs or Immigration or whatever it was that had refused to let them out of the country without having "their affairs," whatever that meant, settled.
So here he was, an exile among exiles, consigned to a waiting room with all the charm of the Lubyanka and a scenic view of a yellow brick wall opposite. This was Maternity Hospital No. 3, and Donna was somewhere inaccessible, enduring the birth of their second child in a room full of screaming, wailing women, for all he knew, while he alternately sat and paced and wished Russian cigarettes weren't so infernally potent, not with all these sweaty, smelly characters smoking them all at once.
The only other non-smoker in the room was someone he had been told to stay far, far away from: the blue collar tabs and shoulder boards on his olive-drab uniform marked him as a member of the KGB. It was almost amusing to think that anyone in the KGB could have indulged in so prosaic an activity as fathering a child, and he allowed himself a humorous flight of fancy, picturing this young fellow in bed with his wife, who probably looked like a tank, like all these Russian women—
The young man jumped to his feet, knuckles pressed to his mouth, murmured, "Zvinite," as his shoulder board brushed Mark's shoulder, and slouched against the window, staring down at the snow that had begun to dust Moscow. Mark stared at him for a minute, noted the pale face, the gnawing at the knuckles, the surreptitious brushing at tears, and stood.
You idiot, he's KGB, leave him alone!
He's a new father who's worried about his wife.
He placed a hand on the young man's arm.
"She'll be all right," he said with a reassuring smile that froze at the look on the KGB man's face.
"She was—four months with child," he whispered, then, oblivious to the shocked stares in the waiting room, he broke down and sobbed on a sympathetic shoulder.
"Sergei, I lost our baby."
She looked so small, in these clinical surroundings. The white iron bed, the fluffed-up feather pillows and the feather tick seemed to swallow her so that all he saw was her little white face consumed by green, grieving eyes and framed by a disheveled mop of brown curls, her matchstick white arm stretched out to him, already turning black and blue from the prodding of the nurse who had had trouble starting an intravenous. He tried to smile as he took her hand.
"It's all right. You had nothing to do with it, I know."
"Oh, Sergei...I lost our baby...they said it was a girl..."
Anne's Nina, now only a memory. Named for his mother. He held her hand to his lips.
"Time to go, Comrade Senior Lieutenant."
"But Sister, I've only been here five minutes!"
"You shouldn't be here at all. What do you think this is, the KGB Clinic?"
He had already decided to ignore her, and he turned back to Anne, to find her waving her other hand at him.
"It's all right, Serge, you go. I'll be out of here in a few days. Probably even before New Year's—I imagine everyone will want as little work and as much holiday as possible." From heaven knew where she dredged up a wry smile, and he tried to smile back.
"You sure?"
"Comrade Senior Lieutenant—"
"Go now, before you get me into trouble!"
He bent to kiss her, marvelling at a sense of humor that could indulge in raillery even in these grimmest of circumstances; then, throwing the nurse the blackest look he could muster, he departed to his parents' flat on the Mira Prospekt, where he and Anne would be staying until she had recovered, at least physically, from the birth and loss of their first child.
* * * * *
It had been over a year, and he still thought of it every day. Her sudden clutching at her abdomen, the look of unadulterated terror on her face, the frantic call to the ambulance service that had taken her to the nearest maternity hospital and no time for niceties like KGB clinics. He still thought of the awful silence that had pervaded the flat until spring, until the day he had come home in the state of dread he was no longer even aware of feeling, to find all the windows open and freshly polished, a Rachmaninov symphony blaring so loudly that he could hear it on the street below, and his wife, still pale, still far too thin, with a fresh ribbon in her hair and a determined look on her face. Their lovemaking that night had been nothing less than a shout of defiance at the vagaries of Fate, and he had loved her more than he could have thought possible, loved her spirit and her refusal to cave in to this latest in a series of body blows Life had dealt her.
When the second miscarriage had come, in the autumn, in the season they both loved best, he had been told flatly, "No more children. Her system simply can't handle it. If you'd rather be a widower, that's your affair; but for her sake, understand, there can be no more children. When she becomes pregnant, we'll simply set up her appointment for an abortion when she comes in to have her pregnancy confirmed."
Her doctors had reckoned without two things: her determination to give him a son, and her religious faith. He was too aware of her importance in his life to allow her to risk it giving him children. But that religious faith of hers, that was something else.
"Forget it," she had told him. "I don't have abortions."
"Come on, Annochka. Even the Orthodox Church will allow a mother to abort if her life is in danger." And to his astonishment and almost annoyance, she had actually grinned.
"You gotta believe," she had said, maddeningly. "That was the Mets’ motto back in ’69. If the Mets could win the World Series, anything can happen."
"All right," he had tried another tack, "how can your God expect you to put your life in danger by bearing children? I can't believe that any Supreme Being, or whatever you think He is, would have so little regard for your life. For that matter," he had sailed on, ignoring her attempt to answer him, "how can you still believe in your God when He allowed such terrible things to happen to you in the first place? Letting you get shot, depriving you of children, that's no God to worship."
"If He hadn't let me get shot," she had retorted, "I would never have met you. And as for the babies..." Just for an instant, a profound grief had shown on her face. "I refuse to accept that the death of a child is the will of God. There's a reason for it, Serge. There has to be." And that's all there is to it, she might just as well have added.
He thought about his unborn children, both daughters, every day. Nina and Yelena, named for both their mothers. He did so now, looking out the window of his office towards the gleaming modern buildings on Kalinin Prospekt. Just at the moment, death seemed very close.
His intercom buzzed, and he sighed and got to his feet, not even bothering to answer it. He knew what it signalled.
For the fifth time in fifteen minutes, Anne peeked out the curtains into the wet April evening. Still no Sergei.
He had telephoned around 3:30 that afternoon to tell her that he would be "late," and not to keep supper for him. Anne, recalling "latenesses" in her own career, had drawn the immediate inference that he would be occupied in interrogation, and had made her own plans for the evening.
But it was now 10:30, she had returned half an hour ago from her evening out with her mother-in-law, and there was still no Sergei.
Should she worry?
She shook herself and laughed. After all, she told herself, that's law enforcement. Her own unpredictable hours were what had occasioned her move from her parents' home; they had been as uncomfortable with the idea of a twenty-five-year-old woman's being out "until all hours of the night," as they had been with the idea of any young unmarried woman's having her own apartment. There had been some stormy sessions before she had packed up her books and clothes and gone to live in Greenwich Village. Her stepfather's ultimatum—"If you move out, you're not moving back"—still rang in her ears, after all this time.
Her eyes filled with tears, and she hunched her shoulder, imagining herself enveloped in Sergei's strong, loving arms. If she were honest with herself, nothing had ever gone right between herself and her parents. Sergei knew it and helped her to live with the knowledge. There was a family mold to conform to, and you either crammed yourself into it or you lived in a state of exile, surrounded by an alien culture and mockery and scorn—
Then she remembered something, blinked away her tears, and smiled as she turned from the window towards the ornate baroque escritoire that she still associated so strongly with Aunt Zinaïda. She sat down, picked up a letter and scanned through it one more time, marvelling as she did so at the force of her brother's personality that projected itself some ten thousand miles. It almost seemed as though Kevin himself stood in front of her asking his penetrating questions, making his irreverent cracks about the world at large, filling the minuscule flat with his boisterous Irish humor and shouting the house down with an Irish tenor to rival Joe Feeney’s.
At length she opened a drawer, took out sheets of writing paper and her fountain pen, and wrote.
Dear Kevin,
I was surprised, and very pleased, to hear from you. I'm not sure if you know that I haven't heard from anybody at home since at least last May, so you can imagine what a feeling it was to see familiar handwriting, in English, yet! Where you been keeping yourself?!
I seem to recall that you had the same Ethics professor I did at John Jay—Teddy Behr? (of East Overshoe fame!). Remember what he always said: Believe half of what you see, and nothing of what you hear. Which means:
1. I do not share a communal apartment with seven other families;
2. we do have hot and cold running water;
3. we also have indoor "facilities" (no outhouse!);
4. the whole place is most efficiently centrally heated; and
5. I do not need hot coals to pile into my flatiron every time I iron Sergei's shirts!
We are currently living in a three-room apartment not unlike my old place in the Village (Greenwich, not Middle), and our street, which in English is called the Street of the Pastrycooks, bears a strong resemblance to Waverly Place, in atmosphere, at least. It's not exactly a stone's throw from Sergei's office, but it is walkable—if you love hiking!
You asked, in your letter, about “modern conveniences.” I assume you mean things like dishwashers and clothes dryers, which I don't recall our own mother ever owning, who could have put them to a lot better use than I ever could. But we do have a washing machine, which is a godsend no matter where you live. What would go unsaid was the fact that she never used it; Soviet detergent gummed up the works so hopelessly that it was easier to scrub her clothes clean with a scrub brush and a cake of soap.
And we have a television, radio, and stereo, all of which get ample use. We watch soccer and KGB spy shows on TV, listen to March-Around-the-Breakfast-Table music on our morning radio program and play records when we want decent music. Lord, she hoped Kevin would never take it in mind to visit them.
We have a modern kitchen—Modern thirty years ago, but what the hey, it had a gas stove, a sink with water taps (when they worked), and a counter-sized refrigerator.—which is on the small side. With the kitchen table and two chairs added to the available work space, it's downright cramped. But our living room is large enough for me to have dining-room furniture in it—an arrangement which seems to be fairly common, from what I've seen. In KGB circles, anyway. And no one she knew, including themselves, even owned a dining-room suite. The space was usually occupied by a baby grand piano or some equally ostentatious display of wealth, and when they let their hair down, even the elite entertained around their kitchen tables, even if it meant packing people into the room like caviar in a tin. "Kitchens are more honest," explained Sergei.
My parents-in-law gave us a Berber rug for a wedding present, and I have that at the balcony end of my living room, with the sofa, chairs and TV grouped around it. The other end of the room is lined with bookshelves, complete with library (in Russian, of course). All leather-bound and very high-brow. Sergei's Aunt Zinaïda, whom we cared for in her last illness, left us everything we own, and as she inherited all her belongings from her parents, you can imagine that the sofa and chairs are horsehair-stuffed brocade, and some of the books are original editions. How this stuff ever survived both the Revolution and World War II, I'll never know.
Then there's our bedroom, equally Victorian. We have a dresser with a mirror that hangs from the wall from a silk cord, a double bed that's almost as big as a king-sized bed, and a chifferobe that's big enough to hold all our clothes, both Sergei's and mine. I couldn't tell you what kind of wood—I'm assuming oak—but it looks like that stuff Grandma Flaherty used to have in her house, with the ornate carving around the edges and little curved legs, and the doors of the chifferobe have a forest scene carved into them. Takes forever to dust, as you can imagine! but I feel like a princess when I snuggle into that bed at night. All it needs is a canopy, and yes, the posters are tall enough for one!
So in terms of the “special KGB perks” you were asking about in your letter—yes, if you were to visit us, you would think that we had all kinds of special privileges, to judge by our living circumstances. And you would be dead wrong. Everything we own came to us from an inheritance. Otherwise, we live in much the same conditions you and I grew up in, minus, of course, all the kids. What she would never tell Kevin, or anyone else, was that stringent as her childhood had been by American standards, it was prodigally luxurious by the standards of the ordinary Russian worker, who would never even have considered it possible to own his own home, as her parents had done, who worked two jobs and waited ten years to be able to purchase a car with no frills whatever, to whom a summer vacation was a blessing granted by the Party for superior work, not something to be planned for and saved for and relived on snow-bound days while browsing through the photo album. She consoled herself with the thought that thanks to the ethics and morals that had been bred into both her and Sergei, their life-style was actually rather Spartan by KGB standards, and kept on writing.
KGB officers are about as short of money as FBI agents, despite what you've heard all these years. On the other hand, the American taxpayer has always been convinced that civil slaves are making money hand over fist. Don't we wish! I made less than the average car mechanic when I was at the Bureau.
Answer to unspoken question: Not yet, but we're having a lot of fun trying. My mother-in-law has scrounged up an old cradle that matches the style of our furniture – I have no idea where she got it. I haven't the heart to tell my in-laws not to hold their breath, but after that shoot-out in New York, the doctors told me that my chances of having children in the future were extremely slim. And the doctors here concur.
She paused for a moment, unable to go on. She wondered if even Sergei guessed how it grieved her not to have given him a child by now. She couldn't even look at other people's babies in the street without that stabbing pain in her heart, the awareness, not of what might have been, but what ought to have been, what every other couple planned for and looked forward to even before they were married. Sometimes, when she thought of the two daughters she had buried, she thought of her father, too, the father she had never known, and a horrific dread consumed her that Sergei, too, would be taken from her.
As she felt that dread coming on her now, she took a deep breath, gripped the pen, and continued:
In the meantime, we keep busy. This Sunday we're going to a performance at the Bolshoi Ballet: Sylvia, if I'm not mistaken. The one with the Willies in it, she would have liked to add, but culture to Kevin meant hitting the Irish bars in Far Rockaway on Saturday nights, and anything else was "long-hair" stuff. I grew up with that?! she thought, took a deep breath, and ground on. And Sergei is teaching me to ice-skate. Did you ever think you'd see the day, with my collapsible ankles? But darling Sergei has the patience of—I guess I can't say “a saint,” can I? Not in Soviet Russia, anyway!
I guess that's about everything. Oh, not quite: When's the wedding? And don't say, What wedding. Susan sounds like your other half, and you're crazy if you don't pop The Question. Love to you and all the rest of the Thick Micks, and keep in touch okay? Love, Annie.
She smiled with affection as she wrote out the envelope, tucked the letter into it and left it unsealed on the desk. When Sergei came home, she'd have him read it. He'd probably want to add a couple of lines of his own. He'd be so pleased to know that at last, she'd heard from home. It had puzzled him, she knew, that her family had written only once since their marriage.
She stretched and yawned, and looked at the clock. It was—no, that couldn't be right. Quarter to twelve! And still no Sergei. That was no interrogation. Something big had to be going down. The FBI agent in her itched to know what it was. The KGB wife told her to mind her own business and go to bed.
By one a.m. she gave it up as a lost cause. It was the first time in more than a year that they had been separated at night. She missed him more than she would have believed possible, missed his physical presence, the way he wrapped an arm or a leg around her as they slept, the sweet smell of his body washed with birch soap or fresh from the steam baths, even his warm, moist breath on the back of her neck. This is ridiculous, she groused to herself as she gathered up her pillow and feather comforter and padded out to the living room. I'm a grown woman, slept by myself for two whole years in the middle of downtown Manhattan—
—without Sergei. Life without him was so utterly unimaginable that she had only to think of it to dispel any doubts she might have entertained about her defection. She grinned as she made up an encampment for herself on the sofa, crawled into it and opened up the latest issue of Soviet Woman.
So much for Liberated Female FBI agents.
"You funny little girl."
Anne blinked her eyes open in response to the kiss that accompanied the admonition. Sunlight streamed in through the window, and Sergei sat beside her on the sofa, looking exhausted. At sight of his wife's sleep-heavy eyes and flushed face, he smiled and said, "What had you in mind, to sleep here instead of in bed where you belong?"
She wriggled to a sitting position. "You need to ask? Never mind that. You look like something the cat dragged in."
His eyebrows shot up. "I feel like something the cat dragged back out. For now I need—" He yawned. "—a hot breakfast and a warm bed. With you in it." He got up, rubbed his hand over a chin that was too clean-shaven, and headed for the bedroom, shedding pieces of rumpled uniform as he went. Anne watched him with a sense of foreboding: It was unlike him to be so careless of his clothes. She shook her head, kicked off her feather comforter, and went into the kitchen to start the samovar.
Some thirty minutes later, "Thanks, I needed that," Sergei said as he wiped his mouth with his napkin and held out his tea glass for a refill. Anne obliged.
"I've never seen anyone chug-a-lug tea before," she said. "Can you tell me what's going down?"
He cocked a surprised grin at her use of the law-enforcement slang for a case about to break. Every once in so often, a glimpse of her former profession slipped out, reminded him of the circumstances of their meeting, and the miracle that was their life together enveloped him yet again.
"I love you so much," he whispered, and she laced her fingers through his.
"I love you too," she said softly. "What's going down?"
He let his eyes rove over her face as he searched for the right words. But there were no right words.
"In a week, I must leave for Afghanistan."
Afghanistan.
The Russian Vietnam.
Anne found herself listening from somewhere beyond herself as Sergei told her about the missing caches of arms, the stolen ammunition, the Russians lured into deadly traps by—whom?
"It's been going on ever since we first went into the place," he told her. "GRU—military intelligence—has been doing its best to find out who's responsible. We know it's not the CIA, they've been running M16s and small arms out of Pakistan anyway, and the trouble is that the rebels have too many Kalashnikovs and Makarovs—even some Graz-Buryas—for them to have been taken off captured or dead Soviets. That leaves" —He rubbed a hand across his eyes. He looked so tired. —"either GRU itself or Gebezhniki. Either way, it's an Inspectorate affair. I'm going in with five others." His lips had become thin slits, and his fists were white knuckles, and Anne knew that he had used the derogatory slang term Gebezhniki deliberately, to show what he thought of a KGB officer low enough to betray the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who, after all, were only following the orders of an army they'd been conscripted into. "And we're going to find out who's been killing off Soviet kids!" The sudden outburst was accompanied by the slam of his hand on the table, a slam that set tea glasses and samovar rattling. Anne jumped.
"Oh, dushinka." He bit his lip. "I'm sorry."
She shook her head. "Doesn't matter. Need a shower?"
"No. The intelligence meeting ended around midnight, and I went to the steam bath at the Club. Left there about four this morning, went back to the Center for some breakfast and landed in another briefing." He looked over at her and stretched out his hand. "Dushinka, come with me."
They lay together in the great oak bed, each with his own thoughts. Sergei did not make love to her, nor had she expected it. She allowed him to hold her close, to wrap her in his arms and legs that still smelled of the birch branches he had whisked over his body in the steam bath. Eventually his body covered hers, and his lips and nose blew moist, warm air into the side of her neck. When she was sure he was in a deep sleep, she gently disengaged herself.
Her letter to Kevin had made no mention of the doctor's appointment she had made for today, an appointment she alternately hoped and dreaded would confirm...
A miracle?
* * * * *
Anne toyed nervously with the clasp on her handbag and swung her legs, crossed at the ankles, under the straight-backed chair she was sitting on. The door opened suddenly, and she hopped off the chair to her feet. A tall, dark-haired man in the uniform of a KGB major gestured her through into his office, closed the door behind him and took her hand. "Gospozha Makarova?" he said as he bowed over her hand, an action so completely at odds with his pleasant, square-jawed appearance that Anne wondered if Sergei could have been more accurate than he knew: Could Major Kuryagin be descended from aristocracy? She found herself dropping a small curtsy as she replied, "Yes, Sir."
A smile tugged at his lips. "Viktor Andreyevich Kuryagin," he introduced himself, and gestured for her to take a seat on a sofa against the wall. Seating himself beside her, he continued, "What can I do for you?"
"It's about my husband. Lieutenant Makarov?"
"Yes?"
"He told me, um, he's being posted to Afghanistan."
"That's so."
She bit her lip, and he covered her hand with one of his and steeled himself to refuse the request he was certain was coming. But:
"Something has happened that he ought to know about." At last she looked up at him. "But I know if I tell him, he'll worry about me when he ought to be thinking of his job." Tears welled up in her eyes. "I want him to come back to me."
"Yes of course we all want that," said the major quickly, "he's one of the best officers we have. I don't really understand what the problem is."
She studied the floor again. "I've been told—well, ordered, is more like it—not to have children. I was shot some years ago, and..." Her voice trailed off as, with horror, she felt her cheeks burn. What a thing to be discussing with a man she'd never met until three minutes ago. But she was desperate for advice. "Yesterday I learned that I'm to have a child."
"Are you asking me if you should tell your husband about the child?"
"I thought you would have a better idea of what he's going into. If it's very dangerous, if he needs to give all his attention to the mission, then I don't want him to be distracted worrying about me. Which he would, because of my having been shot, and ordered not to have children, and all."
"Well, surely, that closes the issue, if you've been ordered not to bear children."
"Sir." The look on her face gave him his first clue as to the type of person he was dealing with. "I can't do that. I did my best to prevent it, but now that it's here, I can't destroy it. I couldn't."
Before she knew what he was about, he reached over, slipped his index finger under her collar and caught at the thin gold chain he had glimpsed as she seated herself. The small gold cross dangling from it only confirmed his suspicions.
"Hasn't your husband told you?" he admonished, frowning. "This is illegal."
"It doesn't come off. I've had it since I was christened as a baby. I'd have to break the chain to get it off, and it's all I have," her eyes filled with tears, "of my father or his family."
He realized, from her scarlet cheeks, that she understood perfectly well the indefensibility of her position. Sergei had doubtless explained it to her many times. She knew that she was defying not only her husband, but also the social mores of an entire Communist nation. He nodded and dropped the chain back inside her blouse.
"I'll have a word with your husband, Anna Andreyevna. We don't leave the families of our officers to fend for themselves, and I can reassure him that while he's gone, the Service will keep an eye on you." He smiled at her.
"About your child," he continued, "why don't you wait to tell him? He's an intelligent young man, perhaps he can wrap up this whole case in a few weeks or months and come back to you before you've progressed too far. Then he won't have been fretting about you while he's supposed to have been working." He paused. "And if he's down there longer than we hope, we'll get word to him.
"But the main thing for you," he patted her hand, "is to take very good care of yourself and our future Chekist. Don't take any risks you oughtn't, and above all," he wagged a finger at her, "above all, don't worry about your husband. He's very good at his job. You of all people should know that."
By this time she had grown somewhat accustomed to the blatant sexism of Russian men in general and KGB officers in particular, and she smiled her prettiest smile with only an inner wince. "Yes, Sir," she said, "I'll try."
"Don't just try. Do it. It isn't wise to disagree with the KGB, you know." At that her head jerked up. But the twinkle in his narrow grey eyes was unmistakable, and she found herself smiling back as she said her goodbyes.
"Come in," called Sergei in answer to the knock on his door, and hastily shuffled papers into a file folder. The door opened, a head appeared. "I came to offer some advice."
"Major Pop—I mean, Comrade Colonel, Sir, come in!" Sergei stood with alacrity to greet his former chief. Popov strolled in, knocked his elbow against the door to close it and helped himself to a seat. "What can I do for you, Sir?" asked Sergei as he resumed his own seat.
Popov raised his eyebrows. "You could," he drawled, "put in for a transfer to my division."
Sergei frowned. "But I was just transferred here." Then he grinned. "Don't tell me my replacement is giving you problems already."
Popov glowered at his crossed arms. "Frankly, he stinks. What in the name of goodness do they graduate from the Academy nowadays? You may have been naïve, but naïveté is curable. And you at least had something remotely resembling brains. However." He sighed. "I won't waste your time, I know you'll be wanting to get home. I, ah, heard about your latest assignment. Came by to offer my good wishes for success."
"Thank you, Sir." Sergei wondered if he would ever be able to gauge Popov with any degree of accuracy.
"Also, as I said, to offer some advice. Namely, don't trust anyone. Including anyone on the team you're taking with you. The only person you can trust absolutely is an absolutely dead one."
Taken aback as he was, it took Sergei a minute to reply. "Do you know something about my team that I should know?"
"No, no." Popov held up a hand and got to his feet. "I know the men you've picked, and they all have excellent records. No, I suppose I've been thinking a whole lot of nonsense about the British and the Khyber Pass and Jezail bullets and Gunga Din. Afghanistan is...well...just watch yourself out there, Makarov, that's all."
"I plan to, Sir."
Popov rubbed his nose. "I'll look in on your wife, if you like."
"I appreciate that, Sir. I'll worry about her a lot less if you do, Sir."
And that, thought Popov, aghast, is because you'd tell the wolf in the forest where your own grandmother lived. Yet, curiously enough, Sergei's misplaced trust in him had conferred upon him a responsibility he knew he would fulfill. To cover his confusion, he flared his nostrils and said, "Still stuck on her?"
"Yes, Sir." Sergei blushed. Popov shook his head.
"I want you to know you never had me fooled for an instant while you and she were playing house in the Arbat." Then he relented. "You're still living in that neighborhood, aren't you?"
"Yes, Sir, Pastrycook Lane. We were living with my old aunt after our marriage, and when she died, we were sitting tenants, so we were allowed to stay on. I think the Government was just as glad not to have to move out all that antique furniture."
Popov burst out laughing. "Likely enough! Well, anyway, good luck. Remember what I've said."
"Thank you, Sir, I shall."
Popov nodded twice, turned on his heel and walked to the door. With his hand on the latch, he turned back. "Just to cover all the bases," he said softly, crossed the room again and put his hands on Sergei's shoulders. Their eyes locked. After a few minutes, Popov squeezed both shoulders hard, nodded abruptly and left. With a tightness in his throat, Sergei recognized the gesture that over sixty years of communism had never yet eradicated: the silent blessing conferred upon one about to embark on a long journey. Some said the blessing of God was being prayed for in that silent time; Sergei couldn't believe that of Popov, confirmed atheist and devout believer in the Office of Crude Bandits that he was.
But like everyone else in the KGB, he was above all else Russian. It was the only explanation for his out-of-character observance of that old custom.
"Sergei?"
After a moment, Anne looked at her husband. "Sergei?" she said again.
Still no answer.
"Ser-gei."
He started. "Dushinka?"
"What's the matter?"
He smiled and shook his head. "Nichevo."
"Come on, Sergei. When you start answering me in Russian, I know something's cooking with you. Now tell me what it is, and don't answer 'nothing'."
Sergei closed his eyes and a long spasm shook him. For the first time, Anne allowed her fears to surface. She crossed the room and knelt at his feet. "Hey," she said softly, and looked up at him.
At that he smiled, quirked his eyebrows up and cupped her chin in his hand. "Dushinka. Tell me something."
"Besides how much I love you?"
He smiled. "Besides how much you love me. Tell me. I know you not only as my wife, but as a woman of great intelligence and a—well, if not a colleague," he smiled wryly, "at least as a fellow professional law-enforcement whose abilities are worthy of the highest respect. But one thing I do not understand. How, with all of your intelligence, can you believe in the existence of a God? There is no rational explanation for the existence of any Supreme Being. You can't prove He exists, any more than I can prove He doesn't. So how is it that you still believe?"
He saw by the look on her face that he had stumped her, and his stomach sank. In his most secret self, he had been hoping with all his soul that she would be able to send him into battle with something more than Lenin, more than Marx, more even than the faith that had sustained his fathers: What was in the past wasn't good enough for the future that awaited him.
Then her face cleared. "How can you believe in the existence of Love?"
"That," he said, and disappointment made his voice sharp, "is a refusal to answer my question."
"No, it isn't," she said calmly. "It's true. There's nothing so unscientific as love. They've been trying to define it for years. You can pin it down in terms of hormones, in terms of chemistry, in terms of neurological pathways or sociological similarities or differences, but when it comes down to brass tacks, how can you actually say what brings two people together? You and me, for instance? The closest I can come to defining what I see in you is that you make Me possible. And I'm blessed if I can figure out what you see in me. But what we're talking about is—soul chemistry. Whatever it is that draws our two souls together. And when you're talking about Soul, something you can't define in any purely material terms, you're talking about God. As I said to you once before," and Sergei caught his breath, knowing what she was about to say, "you can't prove He doesn't exist any more than I can prove He does. But I think I have more proof on my side. Because I have you."
The question still haunted Sergei as, three days later, he turned and stared out of the window of the Aeroflot jet for a last look at his familiar world.
His father was in a high-level briefing, his mother was teaching, Zoya was parading around Moscow like a good Intourist guide, causing who knew what mischief with her part-time spying activities. Popov and Kuryagin were both deep in their respective investigations. He hadn't really expected a send-off committee. Nevertheless, he felt unaccountably lonely. He sighed, and blinked—then blinked again, and stared hard out of the window.
No, he hadn't been mistaken. There she stood, in a white long-sleeved blouse and a navy-blue wool skirt that his mother had just made for her, waving as though no other were on that plane, as though there were no terminal filled with travellers staring at her as they hurried past.
She can't possibly see me, he thought. She shouldn't have come. "Annie, my Annochka," he whispered, unaware that he was grinning from ear to ear. "I promise you, dushinka. I'll be back."
With that, the plane's engines roared as the machine picked up speed. In seconds, he was airborne. He swallowed the fear in his stomach, and concentrated instead on the face whose image he carried in his most secret heart, the face of his wife.
I'll be back, my Annochka, he said to himself. I promise you, I'll be back.
Oh nooooooooo !
More , Meg, please !
You can`t leave me in suspense like this !
Poor Anne and Sergei. First the babies and then Afghanistan ?
Dear Lord.
One of our relatives was in the British armed forces and he served two tours of duty in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. We were worried sick about him, so this strikes very close to home. And I have had a miscarriage too, but at least that was between DD1 and Dd2, so I did still have a living child as well as one waiting for me in the afterlife...