“Yes, of course I call her Vera. We’re on excellent terms. She was the one who initially contacted me and said they were interested in bringing Lev’s books to American audiences. Of course I was excited as soon as I saw the first translated manuscript for Knife, Knave. His French editor’s a friend of mine, so I’d been hearing good things, but you see, gossip is no substitute for the feeling of holding a bit of genius in your hands, and responding to it in your own individual way. That’s something people don’t understand about the editorial process, I think: how much of it’s intuitive, almost mystical. Sometimes you can tell, intellectually, that you’re reading a great piece of writing, and still not want to come near it with a ten-foot pole.
“Anyway, no, I haven’t spoken to her in several months. Lev had a big plan that he’d sworn me to secrecy on—exciting, but really hush-hush, you know writers. They always think someone’s going to steal their ideas. It’s not uncommon for the pair of them to go dark when he’s working on something. When she has something to say, she’ll say it. And of course, I’ll let you know, if that would be helpful.”
[Notes indicate Mr. Horne was polite overall, but spoke in a rather tart manner and hurried the officers out after making his statement, claiming business obligations. Officers were then stopped by an associate of Mr. Horne’s down the hall, one James Tipton.]
“I’m not supposed to say this, but I really despise her. Nothing is ever good enough for that woman. And my god, can she not take a compliment.”
“She tried to up-sell me on the price for a story in my own magazine. [chuckles] Called me up and said, ‘I know you pay twenty-five dollars for an ordinary piece of fiction, but wouldn’t you pay more if someone could guarantee you were buying an early work of brilliance?’ Gave her husband forty, just on moxie. Can’t say she was wrong, either—we still get notices about that story. It has shades of Felice in it, like an artist’s sketch before they make a painting, see? That’s really the only time I ever talked to her, though. What exactly are you looking for?”
Zoya
John came into the greenhouse one morning in spring, holding a coffee for me.
“Knock, knock.” He rapped his knuckles on my head and handed me the cup.
“Well, look at you,” I said. “Almost polite. So close.”
He shrugged, but couldn’t mask his pleasure at the compliment. We’d seen less of one another lately, and I knew John worried he’d done something wrong. But what could I say to ease his mind? Every afternoon I raced home and waited for Lev in the kitchen with a pot of tea, shedding clothes on the way to the table. Or else found a note in my satchel that named just a time and a place—the town library, the local park, by the rhododendrons—where I was to arrive alone, and wait. Sometimes I waited for close to an hour, until the loneliness was overwhelming, the quiet screaming in my ears and telling me to Get out, get out. But before I could, I’d feel a hand on my shoulder, pressing me gently to some half-secret place and then reaching up under my skirt, pulling aside my underwear. The rule being, I must never look around.
For years, John had been bothering me to make more friends, saying there were better things for a young lady to do than spend her Friday nights playing board games with a middle-aged man and his wife. A fine sentiment, certainly. But now that I was occupied, he didn’t seem to like it. I suppose he thought I’d meet some girls in town, or bother Nadine into the occasional movie. Something we could talk about after. (Dear John, I realize I’ve been out of touch, but a man’s been investigating my hip bones with his teeth.)
“There’s a flower show happening, you know.” He was examining the banana tree, pinching a still-green fruit between thumb and forefinger. “Couple of towns over. We should go and see if there’s anything worth picking up.”
“Alright,” I said. “That sounds fun.”
“Really?”
“Sure. I’ll make a thermos of hot chocolate.”
John laughed. “It’s seventy degrees outside.”
“At home, my grandmother always said you should drink hot things when it’s hot and cold things when it’s cold, so your inside temperature doesn’t get confused and conflict with the air.”
“Really?”
I nodded, and knocked his hand away from the tree. I wasn’t thinking, really. It was a nice day, the warm air after the final cold snap that turns people cheerful and goofy. Anyway, she did say that.
“That might be the first time you ever mentioned your family to me,” John said. I froze for a moment, but managed to make it look like I was just inspecting the bruise he’d left on the banana leaf.
“Well, I only knew her when I was really young.”
“What about your parents? I mean, I know the story: orphan boat.” He winced. “But you must’ve had some time together with them.”
My parents, who protected me and ferried me between country and town. They were poor, but hard workers. Isn’t that what people said? Papa, with his dark beard, mamochka with her hair tied back. The last time I saw my mother, she was begging me to stay with her, even though we could hear the boots of agents walking door to door, looking for dissidents. She held me back by the arm, by my dress, by my hair, telling me to be quiet and save us. But I still believed in the revolution, then.
“Maybe,” I said, “there’s a reason I don’t talk about it.”
John held up his hands in surrender.
“I’ll pull around the truck,” he said.
My mother used to take me to the market to pretend we were looking for dressmaking cloth, though in fact we got all of my clothes second-hand, and she wasn’t adept enough to take in sewing work; her fingers, thick and callused from digging, made it hard for her to stitch with any precision. Still, for some reason we both enjoyed walking past the stands of pickled cabbage and the large cages full of watermelon, ending up among the rolls of fabric that hung from wagons and got propped up in stalls. Many old babushki lay out crocheting there, which I was not allowed to touch. Lacework, wool work. My mother was on a perpetual hunt for cloth the deepest shade of blue.
“Probably have to look at silks,” she’d say. “Because of the way the cloth takes the color. Looks too black on cotton. What we want is the night sky before it’s really night, see?” Together we stretched out bolt after bolt, sometimes asking for a tiny swatch to take home and “think about,” which we usually received, even though the shopkeepers knew we’d never buy. My mother kept these swatches sewn together in a tiny booklet, and if you flipped through you could start to see the blue she was imagining, with elements of darkness and elements of flash and glow.
The market, chaotic and jumbled as the best of them are, was also a good place to find back-alley action if you knew where to look. You might see, for instance, people trading secrets, people handing off illegal goods or evading tariffs, a whispered conversation followed by a man reaching into a pile of potatoes and pulling out a bottle of scotch. Illicit texts sewn into the spines of Party histories, photographic proof of murders tucked into the pocket of a tailored coat. American cigarettes and chocolate bars hidden beneath piles of beads. Often, old women stood on top of their quarry and spread their skirts out to protect it from prying eyes. The secret police knew about this, of course, but mostly let things be. They had to get candy for their sweethearts too, after all.