50
His mother again stepped up and said she would stay with Sasha. "You are an angel," he told her. She smiled and shooed him away. They were okay again. Then he left.
The dacha was remote, fenced all around, a forest north of Moscow in the mountains. The country house itself was one of four, set in a glade and backed by a pine forest. The skies were blue, the songbirds filled the grasses and trees, and he felt very welcome there. Inside the house, it was rustic but well-furnished with comfortable couches and beds, a well-stocked kitchen fit for a special guest, all of which made him feel he was receiving special treatment because of his KGB station—not a reward, never that in any sense.
He looked around the six bedrooms, found one with good afternoon light for writing, and moved his duffel in here. He removed what few items of clothing he'd brought and put those into drawers. He laid out his writing tablet and pens and moved a desk lamp from another room onto his desk to write at night. He was determined to reform himself, tell what he'd done, and undo as much damage as possible. His new shame was boundless, and his guilt was overwhelming. He regretted every secret, every word he'd ever given to the British. Lord, he thought, if I can only save lives, even one, it's a beginning.
His first night alone, a dread arose inside of him, unlike anything he'd ever felt. Sasha. Young. Beautiful. Innocent. What he dreaded was how she would be treated after this. She would be an outcast and never get a good job, education, or any semblance of autonomy. Nikolai didn’t believe a word the general had promised about Sasha. She would become dependent on Carolina and Maxim for everything, even as an adult. He had seen it too many times. Nikolai paced the floor all night, wrestling with his devils. When the sun came up, and he was drained, he had moved beyond brokenness. It was a new, slow death he was marching toward. Hereafter, he was serving time.
He made coffee, sat down, rolled up his sleeves, and then put pen to paper on the kitchen table where he had cleared a space to write. They had supplied yellow pads and ballpoint pens, which were a luxury at that time. So he felt amply provided for. Then he began thinking back to his first posting in Britain. He remembered it like yesterday. He remembered their arrival in London, the shock of seeing the West for the first time. Had he crossed a line during that first posting?
He wrote: I was recruited by a British MI5 agent named Jason Donovan. He was assisted by Franklin Bolling, Charles Lightner, Emma Magnuson…
Then he stopped mid-sentence and read what he'd written. He read it a second time.
He couldn't do it. Those people trusted him, and he was going to betray them, maybe get them killed? But on the other hand, what about Sasha? If he didn't divulge, they would kill him and Sasha, too.
He was stuck.
He shut his eyes, and he thought. He'd seen a movie once, a Russian Jew escaping across two-thousand miles of the frozen Siberian tundra. The images flashed in his mind, the running, the pitting oneself against every conceivable odd to escape. Yet, the Russian Jew, dressed only in a light coat and without food and fire, struggled to freedom. How could Nikolai do any less? How could he sentence his baby girl to damnation? Wasn't a run across the tundra with her father the better choice?
He tore the first page from his pad and set it ablaze with matches from the kitchen. Then he opened the front door and sprinkled the ashes into the breeze.
A new page was begun. He was going to find out how creative he was.
The next day, a roommate came to stay with him at the dacha, clearly put there to keep an eye on him. In his mid-sixties, he was a pensioner, very active and orthodox in his ideas, who tried to follow Nikolai everywhere before he tired of that restless occupation. He put in a bad report on Nikolai for sitting on the balcony and listening through headphones to foreign stations on his short-wave radio, but Nikolai was past caring by that stage. Little did the KGB know that the BBC's World Service Programme Outlook nearly made him cry with nostalgia. The good old English tunes they played represented a world he might never see again.
Three days later, he was finished with his testimony. Eleven pages of lies, falsehoods, and fabrications. He had invented an entire world of imaginary people, places, secrets, and meetings. He had created precisely what Barishsky and Masirov and Bucharov wanted to hear—action items that could be addressed. He would turn it into them and feign good faith and fair dealing. He would tell them he hadn't left anything out. The parts about Soviet shipments of soldiers into East Germany, the planting of KGB spies in Poland, France, Germany, and Scandinavia, the strength of the Soviets' nuclear arsenal on the fringes of Eastern Europe, Soviet plans for economic interruption of the West's booming Capitalist take over—all of it was made up, put down on paper and populated with will-o-the-wisps and ghosts. He would solemnly turn it in and go home.
Then he would run.
For the second half of his stay, the pensioner was replaced by a lieutenant colonel of the Border Troops, Mikhail Mashky, a typical Soviet officer whose aim in coming to the dacha was to drink and pick up a woman, at both of which he succeeded. In some ways, he was an attractive character and talked openly about his problems. He also told Nikolai a good deal about borders and frontier defenses, in which Nikolai had a rapidly growing interest.
“Where do the Border Troops get their uniforms?” Nikolai casually asked the lieutenant while the man was knee-walking drunk.
"Where?" The man wrote in the air with one hand, trying to remember. "Ah, yes, Sergey's Uniforms on Lenin Prospekt just off Red Square. We all get our uniforms there."
While the man was off wooing some woman or other at night, Nikolai studied his Border Troops' uniform. He noted insignia, the name tag, the collar, and ribbons. He even took a picture with his tourist camera.
One day, the lieutenant colonel told Nikolai that he found it hard to believe what the Soviet propaganda claimed about spies and infiltrators who were continually trying to violate the country's borders and penetrate the frontiers from outside. "That's not true," he said. "I work there. All the border defenses must be against something else. What do you reckon it is?"
Nikolai said, "Well, it's to stop Soviet people trying to flee to the West."
Then he told Nikolai about the woman he had picked up, and she, too, was an interesting character. She worked in the KGB watching department in Novosibirsk, spying on people through peepholes and hidden television cameras. When he had asked her if that wasn't rather amusing, she replied, "Not at all. I spend my life watching wild, raw sex, violence, drunks beating up their mistresses, and so on. It's all incredibly depressing."
One night, the lieutenant colonel asked Nikolai for money. It turned out he had spent all he arrived with on the woman of his dreams.
“How much do you need?” Nikolai asked.
"Enough to make her crazy with love," the lieutenant colonel replied, for he had started drinking early that afternoon and was feeling no pain when they talked.
"Would that be one-thousand rubles?"
The lieutenant colonel's eyes widened like bottle caps.
"But how would you pay me back?" Nikolai wanted to know. "You can't earn that much in a month."
The lieutenant colonel’s face fell. He didn't have a way to repay.
"I know what," Nikolai said suddenly with a snap of his fingers. "Sell me your Border Troops uniform, ribbon and medals and all of it."