* * *
—
“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?