And sure, in summer, Washington’s humidity was thick as a wet blanket, the mosquitoes tiger-striped and fierce. In the morning, our curls, done up the night before, would deflate as soon as we’d step outside. And the streetcars and buses felt like saunas but smelled like rotten sponges. Apart from a cold shower, there was never a moment when one felt less than sweaty and disheveled.
Winter didn’t offer much reprieve. We’d bundle up and rush from our bus stop with our head down to avoid the winds that blew off the icy Potomac.
But in the fall, the city came alive. The trees along Connecticut Avenue looked like falling orange and red fireworks. And the temperature was lovely, no need to worry about our blouses being soaked through at the armpits. The hot dog vendors would serve fire-roasted chestnuts in small paper bags—the perfect amount for an evening walk home.
And each spring brought cherry blossoms and busloads of tourists who would walk the monuments and, not heeding the many signs, pluck the pink-and-white flowers and tuck them behind an ear or into a suit pocket.
Fall and spring in the District were times to linger, and in those moments we’d stop and sit on a bench or take a detour around the Reflecting Pool. Sure, inside the Agency’s E Street complex the fluorescent lights cast everything in a harsh glow, exaggerating the shine on our forehead and the pores on our nose. But when we’d leave for the day and the cool air would hit our bare arms, when we’d choose to take the long walk home through the Mall, it was in those moments that the city on a swamp became a postcard.
But we also remember the sore fingers and the aching wrists and the endless memos and reports and dictations. We typed so much, some of us even dreamed of typing. Even years later, men we shared our beds with would remark that our fingers would sometimes twitch in our sleep. We remember looking at the clock every five minutes on Friday afternoons. We remember the paper cuts, the scratchy toilet paper, the way the lobby’s hardwood floors smelled of Murphy Oil Soap on Monday mornings and how our heels would skid across them for days after they were waxed.
We remember the one strip of windows lining the far end of SR—how they were too high to see out of, how all we could see anyway was the gray State Department building across the street, which looked exactly like our gray building. We’d speculate about their typing pool. What did they look like? What were their lives like? Did they ever look out their windows at our gray building and wonder about us?
At the time, those days felt so long and specific; but thinking back, they all blend. We can’t tell you whether the Christmas party when Walter Anderson spilled red wine all over the front of his shirt and passed out at reception with a note pinned to his lapel that read DO NOT RESUSCITATE happened in ’51 or ’55. Nor do we remember if Holly Falcon was fired because she let a visiting officer take nude photos of her in the second-floor conference room, or if she was promoted because of those very photos and fired shortly after for some other reason.
But there are other things we do remember.
If you were to come to Headquarters and see a woman in a smart green tweed suit following a man into his office or a woman wearing red heels and a matching angora sweater at reception, you might’ve assumed these women were typists or secretaries; and you would’ve been right. But you would have also been wrong. Secretary: a person entrusted with a secret. From the Latin secretus, secretum. We all typed, but some of us did more. We spoke no word of the work we did after we covered our typewriters each day. Unlike some of the men, we could keep our secrets.
EAST
1949–1950
CHAPTER 1
THE MUSE
When the men in black suits came, my daughter offered them tea. The men accepted, polite as invited guests. But when they began emptying my desk drawers onto the floor, pulling books off the shelf by the armful, flipping mattresses, rifling through closets, Ira took the whistling kettle off the stove and put the teacups and saucers back in the cupboard.
When one man carrying a large crate ordered the other men to box up anything useful, my youngest, Mitya, went onto the balcony, where he kept his hedgehog. He swaddled her inside his sweater, as if the men would box up his pet too. One of the men—the one who would later let his hand slide down my backside while putting me into their black car—put his hand atop Mitya’s head and called him a good boy. Mitya, gentle Mitya, pushed the man’s hand off in one violent movement and retreated into the bedroom he shared with his sister.
My mother, who’d been in the bath when the men arrived, emerged wearing just a robe—her hair still wet, her face flushed. “I told you this would happen. I told you they would come.” The men ransacked my letters from Boris, my notes, food lists, newspaper clippings, magazines, books. “I told you he would bring us nothing but pain, Olga.”
Before I could respond, one of the men took hold of my arm—more like a lover than someone sent to arrest me—and, with his breath hot against my neck, said it was time to go. I froze. It took the howls of my children to snap me back into the moment. The door shut behind us, but their howls grew louder still.
The car made two left turns, then a right. Then another right. I didn’t have to look out the window to know where the men in black suits were taking me. I felt sick, and told the man next to me, who smelled like fried onions and cabbage. He opened the window—a small kindness. But the nausea persisted, and when the big yellow brick building came into view, I gagged.
As a child, I was taught to hold my breath and clear my thoughts when walking past Lubyanka—it was said the Ministry for State Security could tell if you harbored anti-Soviet thoughts. At the time, I had no idea what anti-Soviet thoughts were.
The car went through a roundabout and then the gate into Lubyanka’s inner courtyard. My mouth filled with bile, which I quickly swallowed. The men seated next to me moved away as far as they could.
The car stopped. “What’s the tallest building in Moscow?” the man who smelled like onions and cabbage asked, opening the door. I felt another wave of nausea and bent forward, emptying my breakfast of fried eggs onto the cobblestones, just missing the man’s dull black shoes. “Lubyanka, of course. They say you can see all the way to Siberia from the basement.”
The second man laughed and put out his cigarette on the bottom of his shoe.
I spat twice and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
* * *
—
Once inside their big yellow brick building, the men in black suits handed me off to two female guards, but not before giving me a look that said I should be grateful they weren’t the ones taking me all the way to my cell. The larger woman, with a faint mustache, sat in a blue plastic chair in the corner while the smaller woman asked me, in a voice so soft it was as if coaxing a toddler onto the toilet, to remove my clothing. I removed my jacket, dress, and shoes and stood in my flesh-colored underwear while the smaller woman took off my wristwatch and rings. She dropped them into a metal container with a clank that echoed against the concrete walls and motioned for me to undo my brassiere. I balked, crossing my arms.