Authors: Lindsay Smith
If I’d peered into the future, would I have chosen this version of Papa—jaunty and reckless and unwilling to discuss Mama? Why didn’t he warn me they were hunting her? When I first embraced him again, after crossing over to West Berlin, it felt like we’d never been apart. I knew him like I knew the hollow at the base of his ribcage where I used to rest my forehead. But the Papa who told me bedtime stories and used to be inseparable from Mama feels lost to me. He’s an unknown Papa-shaped quantity, unbalancing all my equations.
Yulia.
Unlike me, Valentin can press a thought into my head without contact. He stands under a blooming cherry tree behind me with a dusting of pink across his shoulders.
I’m sorry. I should have warned you.
I step back onto the granite edge of the basin.
Please don’t keep secrets from me,
I think, concealing the thought in our shared song, but placing it outside of my shield where Valentin, unconstrained by physical touch like I am, can read it.
I want those days to be over.
The little dimple on Valentin’s chin shows as he tilts his head, the one that’s a touchstone for my thumb when I stroke his cheeks.
I’m sorry, Yul. I never meant to hurt you. We haven’t talked about your mother in so long, and I was afraid of how you’d handle hearing their suspicions …
Poorly, as it turns out.
I squeeze my eyes shut. We haven’t talked about a lot of things. Whatever haunting thoughts were knocked free in Valya’s mind …
You think she has a plan, don’t you?
He takes a tentative step toward me, stopping shy of the basin.
I raise my head and step toward him.
I’m on your side, Yul. Always. If you want my help …
Valya …
I lace my fingers through his hair. Of course I want to believe him; I want to think he’d do whatever it took to keep my mother safe. But he’s right: now is the time to play by the rules. We are the guests, the outsiders, the ones with something to prove. Once I understand her plan, then we can find some way to clear her name from these deeds.
Valentin kisses my eyelids where I’ve clenched them shut. The tension drains out of me, replaced by that dangerous mix of hope and peacefulness. I cup his face in my hands and kiss him back. Of course he’ll help me with this, too. His soft lips linger against mine for a moment, the world completely silent around us.
“Okay, kids, you can neck later. I’m starving,” Papa calls.
Valya squeezes my hand and steers me back toward the car.
I’ll do everything I can to help you make your family whole.
* * *
Winnie is already waiting for us on the sidewalk outside the brasserie. She’s a perfectly motionless figure in her pleated monochrome blouse and skirt, silent among the Technicolor waves of Georgetown pedestrians in frothy spring frocks, puckered cardigans, seersucker suits. “Did they not teach you how to tell time in the Soviet Union?” she asks Papa, reining in a smile.
He fires off a sloppy salute. “Sorry, ma’am. It won’t happen again.” He extends his elbow to Winnie; she rolls her eyes and shoves past him, but her smile’s gaining ground.
Valentin takes my arm in his as we duck into the dark wooden brasserie. “You’re right, as always,” he murmurs, lips right at my ear. His voice thrums in my veins. Particles vibrating, heating up, melting away my earlier heartache. “I should’ve told you about their suspicions. But no more secrets. Whatever you need to do, I’m here to help you.”
I know Valya still has secrets of his own, but I smile and squeeze his hand.
A bell over the door jangles to announce us. “Welcome to Brasserie Bonaparte.” The maître d’ looks up from his stand with a smile that quickly dissolves. “Ah. Um. I’m sorry, sir.” His gaze darts to Winnie before pinging back to Papa. “I’m afraid we can’t…” His jaw muscles work a nervous jig beneath his jowls. “Our other customers wouldn’t like—You see, it’s standard for all businesses in Georgetown—” He leans toward Papa. “I’m afraid we don’t serve her kind.”
Winnie straightens to her full height. “And what kind might that be?” Her voice frays into the upper register. “Servicewomen? Or colored girls?”
The maître d’ staggers back as the room shudders and shifts. A jolt of electricity stands my arm hairs on end and turns the screws in my brain. The dark wood paneling warps around me, drinking up my thoughts until I’m left with a dull, fuzzy hunger in my gut. I stumble forward, tethered only by Valentin’s grip.
The room settles like a ship righting itself; the lights dim, then return. Winnie blinks, hand raised, index finger extended, then carefully lowers her hand as if she’s forgotten whatever she was about to say.
The maître d’ stares through me, trying to place my face, then forces a smile to his rubbery lips. “Welcome to the Brasserie Bonaparte! May I offer you a table for four?”
“A private dining room,” Papa says, still smiling. “Bring up a bottle of your best cognac—extra old.”
The maître d’ grabs four menus and leads us through the restaurant. Columns of smoke and the scent of dark wines rise from each table we pass; the diners’ heads whip around to chase us as we progress through the honeycomb dining nooks. Specifically, to chase Winnie. But as soon as Papa strides past, a blanket of calm settles over them, and they turn back to their confit and coq au vin, chattering about North Vietnam or the new Elvis film.
The maître d’ leads us into a glassed-in dining room, burgundy velvet curtains covering all the windows. “I’ll be right back with that cognac.” His nose nearly scrapes the floor as he bows.
“Papa?” I narrow my eyes as the door clicks shut. “Was that really necessary?”
“You’d rather Winnie not be able to eat with us? No harm done.” He settles onto the low wooden bench.
“You’d rather I what?” Winnie asks, one eyebrow cocked. But the air ripples again and her expression wanes. “I … I’m so sorry. I forgot what I was saying.”
“You were telling me all about your day, Sergeant.” Papa props his chin in his hands.
I glare at him for a few moments longer, but he’s forgotten me already. I study him while he listens to Winnie—his stylish jazz club frames and sloppy crew cut and twitchy grin. The Papa I knew in Russia took no risks. He kept his mind empty and his record spotless. I remember walking through Moscow with him once and my hand, clutched in his, slipped from its too-big glove and instantly he was lost to me. I couldn’t divine his face from any of the hunkering Russian men around me, their eyes dulled and deferent, their stock boiled-wool coats upturned to guard against wind and wayward stares. He was factory-stamped, assembled on a conveyor belt; only at home with Mama and Zhenya did he expose any personality at all, and even then only after a few drinks. Is this the real Papa exposed before me, or is it another camouflage he wears?
Rostov said Papa was a remote viewer when he was younger—like Sergei, General Rostov’s son, he could summon up a place from photographs and then move around it like a ghost. One remote viewer on our old team learned to manipulate objects like a ghastly hand reaching from the other side of the world to shuffle papers, move rocks, close doors. Sergei learned to push his thoughts into others’ heads through his viewings. I can force emotions out, now, in addition to drawing them in. And Papa—
What chain of events turned him into a scrubber? Was it always there, and he hid it from the KGB? But Papa doesn’t merely change thoughts like other scrubbers; Papa has mastered the art of suppressing memories, and when I was younger, he erased all knowledge of my powers from my mind. Even now, there are soft patches on my brain that mask memories from our old life. Maybe Papa was always the reckless man I found in East Berlin, tossing a Molotov cocktail through a café window.
“A toast,” Papa says, smiling at me. “The family that spies together…” He trails off and clinks his glass against mine.
Lies together? Dies together? Convenient of him to leave out that we’re spying on our
own
family. I gulp down the cognac and let its fiery trail match my mood. I feel Mama’s and Zhenya’s absence around our table like phantom limbs; how can we celebrate now, when we have so far to go until we’re whole once more?
“Cheer up, buttercup.” Papa ruffles my hair. “We need you in tip-top shape to stop whatever Rostov’s up to now.”
And Mama
, I think.
Whatever Mama’s up to now.
But her name never passes his lips; whether he thinks she’s on our side or not, he never seems to think of her at all.
After several rounds of roasted game hens and foie gras and truffled snails, my Soviet ration-sized stomach and bladder have reached their upper limits and I excuse myself to the restroom. Only one room, for men and women both. I jiggle the handle—locked. I slouch against the wall like an American teenager while I wait. Black-and-white photographs line the wall opposite me: Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart and dozens more faces of politicians, movie stars, artists I recognize from Winnie’s tutoring, all posing with the brass Josephine Bonaparte statue at the bar. Immortalized by an impassive camera lens. If only my power were so simple—snapshots frozen in time, nothing more. No messy emotions and secrets and pain piling up without release.
I shove my hands into my armpits and wait.
The door swings open; the bathroom’s occupant stops himself just short of crashing into me. He reeks of wine and mothballs. His tweed jacket swallows him like a crumpled wrapper, and his shirt hangs loose from his waistband. He backs up with a grunt, then stares hard right at me.
Sallow skin, the color of bile. Blisters at the corners of his lips and red rimming his eyes. Hair standing up every which way, except for a greasy mustache that droops down. He looks mere hours from ending up in the general’s stack of crime scene photos.
A warning shot fires through my mind. I have to touch him—no matter how afraid I am of him, of myself, of whatever I might find. I take a step forward, reaching for the door with one hand but the other grasping for him—
A shockwave rips through me, all my threads of thought fraying apart in the blast. The picture frames rattle against the wall and the door shakes loose from my hand. I double over as steel wool scours through my brain and creamed potatoes attempt to reach back up my throat.
And then it’s gone—the sensation, and the man with it. In the distance, the bell over the front door tinkles.
I charge back to our room and throw the door open. “Papa, I think one of the—”
But the maître d’ is hovering over the table, smiling vacantly as he collects a folio stuffed with cash. “And a good evening to you as well, mademoiselle,” he says to me before backing out of the room.
That burst just now.
I close my hand over Valentin’s.
Was that Papa? You?
A muscle twitches along Valentin’s jaw.
Your father was adjusting our bill.
Whatever tension had been inflating in my chest empties. I sink onto the bench beside Valentin. This is my old paranoia, wriggling under my skin like shards from broken glass.
We are not being followed. We are not being targeted.
The most dangerous man in the restaurant is the one who brought me here.
DURING THE DAY,
my mind is working in sixth gear: spinning and spinning on thousands of English words and phrases and nuances; soaking up and sorting through countless cultural detrita. Elvis Presley and Pepsodent and
The Sword in the Stone
. Elizabeth Taylor. Things go better with Coke. The genetic research journals Winnie forces me to painstakingly translate. During the day, my brain is cluttered up with so much information that it can’t discern what’s important; it can’t clear out a space to pick at those raw-wound memories Papa tried to suppress, recently torn open, lying in wait beneath it all.
But at night, when sleep clears it away, the four-note symphony Zhenya used to hum threads through my mind and ushers those memories out of the wings.
Mama and Zhenya and I are walking through Gorky Park, a delicate layer of ice crackling under our soles. We take each step with purpose and watch our feet, as if by keeping a close eye on them, we can shame them into not slipping. It is much too cold for this; were it not for Zhenya, we’d be bundled up by the furnace, sipping the ultra-strong
zavarka
tea from the samovar and reading Chukovsky’s children’s poems. Instead, we are shivering, swaddled up like eggs packed for shipping, all alone in the park.
“Look,” Mama says, gesturing to the snow bank on the left of the path. “Look at the beautiful feather!”
It’s half-crusted in ice as she pulls it from the snow, and as long as her forearm. Dark gray striations interrupt the drab brown shade. “It’s ugly,” I say. Zhenya tugs at my hand, momentum pulling him forward along the path. He does not care one bit about the feather, or anything that interrupts him from his walk. He whistles four notes, steel-sharp in the winter air.
Mama kneels down in front of us and watches us with crystalline eyes. Wind rattles through the bare birch trees of the park; in the distance, we hear the low toll of the Novodevichy Monastery bells.
“Do you know the story of the firebird?” Mama asks, her breath white and dazzling as it leaves her mouth.
I burrow my chin into my scarf. “Yes.” I’m sure I’ve heard it before, and I want to finish our walk and go home. I want to throw my arms around Papa’s shoulders and warm up in our posh Party home near Rubleyka.
“I don’t think I’ve told it to you before.” She holds the feather out in front of me. “Pay attention—this is important.”
I groan; Zhenya tugs back toward the sidewalk, but Mama holds firm.
“Once upon a time, a hunter stumbled into the realm of Koschei the Undying while chasing a beautiful bird covered in all the hues of flame. He caught the firebird, but she begged and pleaded for her life. The hunter hated to lose such a prize, but he had a kind heart, so he relented, and the firebird left him a single feather as thanks. ‘What use do I have for a single feather?’ the hunter grumbled, and tucked it into his belt. But it was too late for the hunter; Koschei the Undying, evil sorcerer that he was, already knew the hunter was on his land.”