The Unwitting (16 page)

A member of the cast spotted Vera’s West Berlin journalist, who had insisted he could not risk entering East Berlin, outside the hotel one afternoon, but when she stopped to say hello, he pretended not to know her.

One evening I came back to my room to find that my drawers had been rifled. The underwear, stockings, and sweaters were a mess, but nothing was missing. The Soviets were honest, in their way.

They were also, on occasion, inefficient. On another night Woody and I came home late from the Mariinsky Theatre, which had been rechristened the Kirov. Just about everything in the Soviet Union, including the country, had been renamed, though the translators, desk clerks, and everyone else we spoke to kept forgetting and used the old designations, except for Leningrad. For some reason that had caught on. The Russians had taken some of the troupe to an interminable production of
Sleeping Beauty
, and it was after one by the time we got back to the hotel. When Woody and I got off the elevator on our floor, we found the matron slumped over her tiny desk, asleep.

“Do you think she’ll get shot for that?” I whispered as we took our keys off the hooks.

“Just packed off to Siberia.”

We started down the hall.

“But while the watchdog is asleep, the tourists can play. I have a bottle of very good Russian vodka in my room.”

I told him I was too tired and kept walking past his door to my own. He followed me.

“I said good night, Woody.”

“Just give me a minute.”

The old Woody could turn a minute into an hour. It had been hard to tear myself away. I put the key in the lock and started to turn it. He put his hand on top of mine.

“Woody!”

“I just want to say something.”

I took a step back from him and folded my arms across my chest. “All right, say whatever it is you suddenly have to say, and let me go to bed.”

We stood for a moment in the silent hall. The only sound was the occasional snore of the matron at the far end. Suddenly the light went out. We had turned on the timer when we’d stepped off the elevator, but we had lingered too long. Now he was nothing more than a shadow in the darkness.

“I just want to say I’m sorry.”

I could have asked him for what, but that would have been coy. I could have told him he had not acted badly. He had not offered to marry me—thank heavens—but he had agreed to stand by me while I did whatever I decided to do. I could remind him that I was the one who said the moment had passed. I could have absolved him. But standing there, careful to keep a foot of darkness between us, I did not want to absolve him. Not now, in a strange ominous country, with him next door and Charlie halfway around the world. My disillusion with him was my armor.

Ten

W
E WERE FOLLOWED
and bugged and spied on, but as we grew more accustomed to Leningrad, and I suppose Leningrad grew more accustomed to us, the surveillance took on the aura of an opera buffa. My shadow behaved more like a bodyguard. When two girls in the chorus got lost, their tail helped them find their way back to the hotel. Little by little, the fear slipped away. The two Bobs got roaring drunk with the real proletariat at a place no tourist had ever set foot, or so they insisted. A man, who had struck up a conversation with us in the bar at the Kirov the night we went to the ballet, developed a fearsome crush on Faith and would not give up until she agreed to go with him to the glaringly lit restaurant off the hotel lobby for viscous Georgian champagne and lugubrious Russian jazz. The next morning, she reported that he loved her, but he also loved his wife.

“I thought the Soviets were supposed to be puritanical.”

“He didn’t lay a hand on me. At least I don’t think he did. Georgian champagne packs a mean wallop.”

We were seeing, we told ourselves, the real Russia, and if it wasn’t harmless, it did not seem to intend any harm to a group of singing and dancing goodwill ambassadors and their hangers-on. True, there were occasional overtures to dirtier work. Woody got one. So did some members of the cast. The Soviets could not understand,
Woody explained when he told me about the incident, how a negro could feel any loyalty to a country that treated him so badly.

“They have a point,” I said.

We were walking side by side down Nevsky Prospekt, and his eyes slid to me. “You think the Soviets would treat me any better?” He grinned, but there was a terrible fury behind his bared teeth. It wasn’t directed at me, but it encompassed me, and I suddenly saw what I had been too naïve to see years before. I was the enemy too. His mind saw shades of gray, but his heart knew only black and white. Nothing I could do would change that, not principles, not good intentions, not sex. Or maybe the sex had been part of it, his way of evening the score. I should have been angry or hurt, but I felt a sudden wave of sorrow for this man who spent his life banking his rage.

AT FIRST IT
didn’t occur to me that I might be a likely candidate for recruitment too, but the more I thought about it, the more logical it seemed. When Charlie had been called down to Washington for questioning, he’d said the two Kafkas knew all about me. The Soviets had to be at least as good. They’d know about my past sympathies, and my current position as Charlie’s wife could make me useful. That was why I couldn’t get over the feeling that the meeting in the commission store was not a coincidence. It was the other side of the coin of the package of pamphlets delivered to my hotel room in Berlin.

I had wandered into the place, which was more a state-run pawnshop than a store, out of curiosity. It turned out to be a dispiriting jumble of tattered clothing, worn shoes, chipped china, broken toys, and cheap jewelry. As I prowled among the objects, wondering who had owned them and, more to the point, who would buy them, the door opened and a woman entered. She was well dressed, for a Russian, in a fox-collared cloth coat that was not too shabby, though it was a good two sizes too big for her and made her look like a fragile
child. Her skin, pulled tightly over fine bones, was parchment white, and her large dark eyes reminded me of the martyred saints in the old master paintings in the Hermitage, only hers were not cast heavenward. I couldn’t tell whether the crimson spots on her cheeks were fever or hard-to-get rouge, and I didn’t want to stare.

We moved around the small area, tracked by the salesman’s gaze, deferential to each other as we stepped back or squeezed past. I came upon a box of wedding bands. As I rifled through them, I wondered if they had been sold for survival or taken off the fingers of corpses. Some of them had inscriptions etched around the inside. I couldn’t read the words, but I knew what they said. Hope is the same in any alphabet.

I looked up. The woman was standing across the table from me.

“Sad,” she said.

“You speak English?”

“A little.”

I had a feeling it was more than a little.

“You are with the Americans,” she said. “The
Porgy and Bess
of Mr. Gershwin.”

“How did you know?” As soon as the words were out, I realized the stupidity of the question. I had American written all over me, and how many of us were wandering Leningrad these days?

“But I think you are not an actress.”

“You’re right. I’m a journalist.”

“A journalist. An American journalist.”

She sighed the words, and I wanted to tell her it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, though from her side of the Curtain, I suppose it was.

She glanced over her shoulder at the salesman, and when she spoke again, her voice was softer. “I would like to know about America. I would be most grateful if you would tell me.”

“What would you like to know?”

“Not here,” she said and turned to look at the man behind the
counter again. “There is a café around the corner. I will leave now. You follow in a few minutes. Will you do that?”

“I’ll do it, but are you sure you want to? A man follows me. Officially, I mean.”

Her smile revealed a missing tooth on the upper right side. “Of course, you have a follower. But since we are not leaving here together and not arriving there together, and since he will not come inside, he will not know that we talk.”

Now I was sure I was being recruited. No ordinary Russian would take such a chance just to hear about America.

She left the shop, and I followed a few minutes later. It took me a while to find the café. No sign gave it away.

She was sitting in a corner, still bundled up in her oversize coat, her face a pale cameo nestled in the mangy fox collar. I sat across from her at the small table and kept my coat on too. There was no heat. She said her name was Darya Etinger. I told her mine was Cornelia Benjamin.

As we shook gloved hands across the table, a sullen-looking waitress in a stained apron approached. Darya spoke in Russian, then explained to me that she had ordered tea and cakes for us.

“Benjamin,” Darya repeated when the waitress was out of earshot. “You are a Jew?”

“My husband is.”

She seemed to think about that for a moment, but surely the information could not be a surprise to her. Or had they not bothered to brief her? Was she merely a conduit? Whichever it was, I found myself waiting for a reaction. Charlie’s watchfulness had rubbed off on me, and my old roommate Natalie’s warning had turned out to be apt. Since my marriage I had discovered what a large portion of the world thought of Jews.

“You do not recognize my name?” she asked.

“Should I?”

“I am a Jew too.”

I was surprised that she was working in intelligence. Many of the old Bolsheviks had been Jews, but since then, the communist government had done a good job fanning the embers of the old imperial anti-Semitism. The tsars had had their pogroms; the Soviets had their Night of the Murdered Poets and their Doctors’ Plot. I suddenly remembered that one of the men murdered in the Doctors’ Plot, which many of us had sent letters and wires to protest, was named Etinger, though, for all I knew, the name was as common in Russia as Smith and Jones were in America, or as Cohen and Schwartz in this case.

Our tea and cakes came, and she poured for both of us before she went on.

“You were not afraid to marry a Jew? Or perhaps there is no prejudice in America?”

“Oh, there’s prejudice.” I started to tell her about it, but she had other questions on her mind.

Where in America did I live? Did I have children? How many people did we share our flat with? Did I have to know somebody high up in government to get my job? What kinds of things did I write? Could I publish anything I wanted or was there censorship?

I thought of my piece on how the CIA managed to keep a reporter from covering the coup in Guatemala, but that was too complicated and too controversial to try to explain.

“No censorship, only editorial judgment. That means that the person in charge may think something is not good enough to publish, or that too many other pieces on the subject have already run, or that readers have no interest in the topic. There are all sorts of reasons an editor might decide not to publish a story.”

“This happens often?”

“Sometimes.”

“But you, if you wrote about Russia, your editor would publish it?”

“I’m here to write about Russia.”

“So if I told you stories, they would appear in America?”

Woody said they had approached him not for intelligence work but for a different kind of infiltration. He was supposed to rise in the ranks of the NAACP and bring it into line with communist policy.

“It depends on the stories. I won’t write propaganda.”

She put her hand over her mouth. Her fingers were long and tapering and would have been lovely if two of them on her right hand were not badly misshapen. They looked as if they’d been broken and never properly set. The fingers and the missing tooth spoke of mean times, and I wondered if she was a true believer or merely trying to survive.

She took her hand away from her mouth. “I do not speak propaganda. I speak truth.”

I still had the feeling I was being softened up. She had started by asking about America, but she seemed on the way to peddling the Soviet Union. Even the sales pitch, however, would be worth writing about. I debated taking out my notebook, but I didn’t want to scare her into silence. Before I could, she stood.

“You will meet me again tomorrow?” she asked. “Then I will tell you the truth about life in the Soviet Union.”

I started to tell her that I was at the Hotel Astoria, though I was fairly sure she knew that too.

She cut me off. “I will meet you outside the Hermitage. At two o’clock.”

“Where outside the Hermitage?”

“If you are there, I will find you.”

It sounded a little too hugger-mugger for my taste, but I promised her I would be there.

THE NEXT DAY
, Sunday, I opened the curtains to a Leningrad I had never seen. It was not snowing. An expanse of cobalt sky stretched over the city. Winter sunlight glinted off the snow and hurled blue shadows from the buildings.

I spent the morning at a desk in the lobby, writing up the previous day’s meeting with Darya. Ordinarily, I would have stayed in my room to type the notes, but I wanted to soak up as much ambience as possible. The cheerless gazes of the Intourist representatives as they kept track of people coming and going, the hard-faced wariness of the Russian and Chinese businessmen as they tried to outsmart one another, and the feeling that watchers were everywhere were part of the story. My notes weren’t exactly in cipher, merely a kind of shorthand. Perhaps I was overreacting, but I remembered my rifled drawers.