He hadn’t. Another thing he’d kept from me.
“Boris has created the abyss he stands at now,” Fedin continued. “And if he kills himself, it will be a terrible thing for the country, an even deeper wound than the ones he’s already inflicted.”
“Nothing can be done?”
He told me he’d arrange for Boris and me to meet with Polikarpov—the same official from the Culture Department with whom I’d pleaded after Borya had sent his manuscript away with the Italians. We could make our case in person to him, with the understanding that Borya would apologize for his actions.
I agreed, and I was prepared to do everything in my power to convince Borya to agree to it. I’d tell him he was selfish. I’d bring up my time in Potma. I’d tell him they’d go after me again. I’d tell him he had never given me what I’d wanted most: to be his wife, to have his child.
But in the end, there was no need.
Before I could ask, Borya informed me he’d already settled the matter. He’d sent two telegrams: one to Stockholm, declining the Prize, and one to the Kremlin, letting them know. The Nobel would not be his.
“They’re coming for me, Olga. I can feel it. Even when I’m writing in my study, I can feel them watching. It won’t be long now. One day, you’ll wait for me and I’ll never come.”
WEST
December 1958
CHAPTER 25
The Swallow
The Informant
THE DEFECTOR
According to my former employer, one can sum up the entire spectrum of human motivations with a formula called MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego. I wondered how the other side would assess me. Did they have their own formula? Did they think through these things with more nuance?
The woman who’d told me about Henry hadn’t yet appeared again, but I knew she would in time. Meanwhile, I sold off two of my favorite Hermès scarves and my remaining copies of Zhivago. I did keep one, though, the English edition I failed to return at Le Mistral—which I placed in the nightstand next to my bed, where one might find a Bible in an American hotel.
I no longer spent my days in my room; I no longer mourned the person I used to be. Mornings, I went to the Jardin des Tuileries—walking the gravel corridors of perfectly manicured trees, feeding the ducks and swans at the pond, pulling a green chair into a spot of sun to read. In the afternoons, as the days got shorter, I sat at every terrace on rue de la Huchette, sampling each café’s selection of mulled wine. I made friends with the barman at Le Caveau just so I could sit on one of the plush red couches and listen to Sacha Distel croon night after night.
Wherever I was, she was never far from my mind. I kept waiting for the day when I’d wake up and my first thought wouldn’t be of her. The worst was when I dreamed of her. How one moment we were together, only to wake and feel the loss all over again. Sometimes I’d feel a spark run across my body, convinced Irina must’ve been thinking of me at that exact moment. Silly.
On her birthday, I wanted to call—even just to hear her answer—but didn’t. Instead, I opened the nightstand drawer, removed the book, and, for the first time, began to read.
On they went, singing “Rest Eternal,” and whenever they stopped, their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing.
His words grabbed hold of my wrist. I knew the way a feeling can linger after a song ends. I shut the book and went out onto my balcony, which was only big enough for a single chair. I sat and opened the book again.
When I read the part where Yuri reunites with Lara, in the battlefield hospital, and realized that this book—this novel they deemed a weapon—was really a love story, I wanted to close it once more. But I didn’t. I read until the sun had faded into a purple halo over the tops of the buildings. I read until the streetlights turned on and I had to squint to make out the sentences. When it became too dark, I went back inside. Wrapping myself in my robe, I lay down and continued to read—until I fell asleep, my hand an accidental bookmark.
When I awoke, it was nearly midnight and I was hungry. I dressed and put the book into my purse.
As I crossed the hotel lobby, I saw the woman from the bookshop seated on a chaise longue, beneath a portrait of Flaubert. Impeccably dressed in Chanel tweed, her hair was still perfectly finger-waved, albeit two shades lighter than it was when she told me about Henry. When she saw me, she got up without making eye contact and left.
We walked for what must have been twenty minutes, the woman never looking back. Eventually, we came to a stop at the Café de Flore, on the boulevard Saint-Germain. The café’s awning dripped with white Christmas lights. Its terrace was empty, and its snow-laden wicker chairs looked as if they were wearing white fur coats. A torn red, white, and blue Vive de Gaulle banner hung from the wrought iron balcony on the second floor.
Inside, the woman kissed both my cheeks again and left, but not before pointing to a table in the back, where a man I recognized was waiting.
I knew they’d come, but I wasn’t expecting it to be him.
He stood to greet me, the too-small tortoiseshell glasses he’d worn to Feltrinelli’s party gone. “Ciao, bella,” he said, his Italian accent also gone, replaced with a Russian one. He reached for my hand and kissed it. “Pleasure seeing you again. I suppose you’ve come to have your dresses cleaned?”
“Possibly.”
We sat and he handed me a menu. “Order whatever you’d like.” He raised a finger. “One cannot subsist on pain au chocolat alone.” He already had an open bottle of white wine and a silver tray of untouched snails in front of him, so I ordered a croque monsieur from the crisp-collared waiter and waited for him to speak.
He drank the last of the wine and signaled the waiter for another bottle. “I prefer women to men and wine to both,” he joked. Communist or capitalist, men are still men. “We wanted to thank you in person,” he continued. “For your generosity.”
“Did you find it useful?”
“Oh, yes. A talker, that one. Very…how do you say…”
“Social?”
“Yes! Exactly. Social.”
I didn’t ask for details about what happened to Henry Rennet, and I didn’t want to know. For a year, I’d wanted revenge more than I’d ever wanted anything. And after he’d gotten me fired, I not only wanted to destroy him, I wanted to burn the whole thing to the ground. But I felt only a minor relief at the confirmation of Henry’s fate. Anger is a poor replacement for sadness; like cotton candy, the sweetness of revenge disintegrates immediately. And now that it was gone, what did I have left to keep me going?