“Who is it?” I asked.
“Irene? There is no Irene here. Why are you calling here?”
I grabbed the phone. “Hello?” Mama shrugged and went back to the Ping-Pong table.
“Miss Irina Droz-do-vah?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Yes, this is she. I’m sorry about that. My mother doesn’t—”
“Please hold for Walter Anderson.”
“What?”
Classical music switched on, and my stomach muscles clenched. After a moment, the music stopped, cut off by Mr. Anderson’s voice. “We want you to come back in.”
“I thought I scored second to last?” I asked, then gritted my teeth. Did I really have to remind him of my mediocrity?
“That’s correct.”
“And I thought there was only one position open?” Was I trying to self-sabotage?
“We liked what we saw.”
“I got the job?”
“Not yet, Speedy,” he said. “Or should I come up with a better nickname for you, given your typing skills? Can you come in at two?”
“Today?” I was supposed to go to a fabric store in Friendship Heights to help Mama pick out some silver sequins for the Quinceañera dress. Mama never liked to go to the fabric store alone because she thought the woman who owned it was prejudiced against Russians. “She charges me twice, no, three times as much!” she’d told me the last time she went by herself. “She looks at me like I’m about to drop the bomb on the store. Every time!”
“Yes. Today,” he said.
“At two?”
“Two.”
“Two?” Mama appeared in the entryway. “We have to go to the Friendship Heights at two.”
I waved her away. “I’ll be there,” I said, but was met with silence. Anderson had already hung up. I had one hour to get dressed and get downtown.
“So?” Mama asked.
“I have another interview. Today.”
“You already did the typing examination. What else do they want you to do? Perform gymnastics? Bake a cake? What else do they need to know?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked up and down at the flowered housedress I was wearing. “Whatever it is, you can’t go looking like that.”
* * *
—
This time, I wore the linen.
I was early again, but was escorted into Walter Anderson’s office as soon as I arrived. What he asked first was not a question I’d anticipated. He didn’t ask where I saw myself in five years, what I thought my biggest weakness was, or why I wanted the job. And he didn’t ask if I was a Communist, or if I had any allegiance to the place of my birth. “Tell me about your father,” he began as soon as I sat down. He opened a thick folder with my name on it. “Mikhail Abramovich Drozdov.” My chest tightened. I hadn’t heard his name spoken in years. Despite the linen, I could feel beads of sweat collect at the nape of my neck.
“I never knew my father.”
“One moment,” he said, and pulled back from his desk. He removed a tape recorder from the bottom drawer. “I’m always forgetting to turn this thing on. Do you mind?” Without waiting for me to answer, he clicked the button. “Says here he was sentenced to hard labor for illegally procuring travel documents.”
So that was it: that was why they’d taken him at the docks. But why had they let my mother go? I asked Anderson the question as soon as I thought it.
“Punishment,” he said.
I stared at the coffee stains on his desk, overlapping like Olympic rings. A flush of heat ran down my arms and legs and I felt unsteady. “I was eight when I found out,” I managed to say. For eight years, we knew nothing. As a child, I’d imagined the moment I’d be reunited with my father—what he’d look like and how he’d scoop me up into his arms and whether he’d have a certain smell to him, like tobacco or aftershave, as I’d imagined.
I scanned Anderson’s face for sympathy, but all I got was slight annoyance, as if I should’ve known what the Big Red Monster was capable of. “I’m sorry, what does this have to do with the typing position?”
“It has everything to do with your working here. If you’d like to stop now, if you find it too uncomfortable, that’s fine with me.”
“No, I…” I wanted to scream that it was all my fault, that it was I who’d caused his death, that if I hadn’t been conceived, they wouldn’t have risked so much. But I composed myself.
“Do you know how he died?” Anderson asked.
“We were told he had a heart attack in the tin mines at Berlag.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No. I don’t.” I’d always felt the answer buried deep inside but had never said it aloud, not even to Mama.
“He never made it to the camps. He died in Moscow.” He paused. “During interrogations.”
I wondered what Mama knew, and what she didn’t. Had she believed what was in the telegram from her sister about my father’s death? Or had she known better? Had she pretended all this time for my sake?
“How does that make you feel?” Anderson asked.
This was not a question I’d prepared for. I fixed my gaze on the coffee rings. “Confused.”
“Anything else?”
“Angry.”
“Angry?”
“Yes.”
“Look.” He closed the folder with my name on it. “We see something in you.”
“What is this about?”
“We’re good at spotting hidden talents.”
CHAPTER 3
THE TYPISTS
Fall had come to Washington. It was dark when we woke and dark when we left the office. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees and during our commute we’d walk with our heads down to avoid the wind whipping through the spaces between buildings, careful not to slip on wet leaves or roll our heels on the slick sidewalks. On mornings like that—when the thought of getting out of a warm bed to go stand on a crowded streetcar under some man’s armpit just to spend the day in a drafty office under harsh fluorescent lights almost made us call in sick—we’d meet at Ralph’s for coffee and doughnuts before work. We needed those twenty minutes, that dose of sugar—not to mention a better cup of coffee. The Agency’s own brew, though brown and hot, tasted more like the Styrofoam cups we drank it from.