"Oh, they'll take care of that. They really are friendly. Just like in the old Western movies. All scrubbed and clean and smiling all the time. And they don't act like stupid little bullies. Really, they're just the opposite of Russian men."
"But… I've heard they're very uncultured."
Tanya closed her eyes in an expression of disgust. "Well, if you want to go to an art museum, you can always go by yourself. I think the Americans are wonderful." To emphasize her point, she squeezed out a few words of her best English, far weaker than Valya's drilled speech. "To have fun," Tanya said. "Always to have fun. Darling, it is very nice. "
"I don't think I'd like them," Valya said, already imagining dull-witted American smiles, solid shoes, and lives of unforgivable material well-being.
"That's silly. First meet them, then make up your mind. I've already told Jim about you. He and his friends would love to meet you."
"Jeem," Valya said disdainfully. "It sounds like a name from a film. It's a foolish name."
Tanya shrugged in sudden weariness, as though Valya's slovenly malaise had grown contagious. Then she looked at her watch.
"It's getting late," she said. "I promised Jim I'd meet him."
Valya felt a rush of fear. Fear of being left behind, in these sour rooms, in her soured life. Who knew what possibilities might exist with the Americans? And a drink or two would do no harm. Perhaps there would even be something good to eat at the hotel. She felt herself blossoming back to life, after the long dead weeks. Surely, there would be marvelous food, gathered up just for the foreigners. Seductive, not-quite-focused visions began to crowd her mind.
"You're right," Valya said suddenly. "I need to get out. For some fresh air. I'll sleep better."
Tanya brightened again, and Valya wondered whether her old schoolmate had begged her to go along out of antique devotion, out of the need for further help in communicating with these rich men from abroad, or as some sort of procuress. But it did not matter.
"How long are they staying in Moscow?" Valya asked, letting the coverlet slip from her shoulders. In the background. the television displayed a map of far-off battles.
"A long time, I think," Tanya said. "Jim says he doesn't know for sure. They're on business. It's some kind of trade delegation. But don't worry. They're not boring, not at all the way you'd picture American businessmen. They're all friends, and they're always telling stories about when they were in the Army together."
It suddenly struck Valya as odd that a trade delegation would be in Moscow for an extended stay while the country was desperately at war. But she quickly shrugged it off. A thousand articles, programs, lectures had assured her that the Americans even made money off of plagues and famines, while Naritsky had already demonstrated to her how easily money could be made off of war. Perhaps that was why they were here now, to sell the tools of death. Valya found it no cause for serious concern.
"I'll have to wash up. And fix my hair."
"That's right," Tanya said happily. "And make sure you wash really well. They're very particular about it." She wrinkled her nose. "While you're getting dressed, I'll just clean up some of this mess."
Valya hastened into her tiny bedroom and began rummaging through a pile of neglected clothing. What was clean enough to wear? She had to be cautious with colors— she had been looking very pale.
China clacked in the next room, and she just heard Tanya's musing voice:
"You're such a bad girl, Valya."
Ryder sat at the bar. Alone. Drinking bottled beer that tasted as though it had gone stale in a can. He had not intended to stay so long. There was plenty of work waiting for him up in his room. Yet, it had been a very difficult day, troubling in ways that refused to be neatly labeled and put away. Machines don't feel pain. And a world of new possibilities. He had explained it all as clearly as he could to his superiors, and they, too, had grown excited. Opportunities like this, the detachment commander had said, only come once. Yet, Ryder worried that they did not really understand. He longed for them to come up with a plan instantly, to exploit this new dimension of the battlefield without hesitation.
He laughed to himself, playing with his half empty glass. So that this machine will not have suffered in vain. He had carefully played that aspect of the business down, stressing instead the enemy's near-miraculous vulnerabilities. And now it was up to them to make it all go, to forge the plan that sent the men to realize the possibilities. He knew he could not do that himself. But neither could he let go of the project. He sensed that his role had not yet been played.
He sipped the warming beer. Never much of a drinker. Absurd, he told himself. The entire thing. Absurd. But the word he felt and could not bring to bear was "haunting."
The entire world was haunted now. The hotel bar. Constructed in some bygone fit of hope, it was intended to be elegant but managed to achieve only a worn biliousness. Velvet seats with their contact surfaces rubbed white by countless rumps; brass plating crazed and chipped. Only the mirror had a genuinely antique feel, thanks to the years of cigarette smoke that had given it a deep gray tint. It was in that mirror, just above the palisade of bottles, that he first met the woman's stare, and now it was the memory of that stare, held a moment too long, that kept him fixed to the barstool.
He had been ready to leave, despite the passing admonishments of his fellow officers to join the party Ready to accept the loneliness that was not really all that bad when you made yourself think about it logically. Ready to go back to the small overheated room with its grumping noises of too much liquid in an old man's throat. There was always work, and work could justify any sacrifice.
Then her eyes caught him. Almost too strong for so delicate a face, he knew they were brown even though he could not begin to see their color through the smoky twilight of the bar. She had been watching him in the mirror, and the first thought that struck him was how bluntly out of place she was. Squeezed into a booth between two loud officers in ill-fitting sport jackets. It was finally the big sweep of a forearm that broke the reflected stare between them.
She seemed to be with a paunchy lieutenant colonel, whom Ryder knew as professionally incapable, politically adept, and delighted to be in a foreign country with a pocket full of money and without his wife. Ryder knew everyone at the table: officers for whom he had little respect. He even knew the other Russian woman by sight, even though he rarely strayed into the bar. Tallish, with a helmet of metallic-looking black hair. Charter member of the Bar-girl's International.
He knew everyone — except this fine-featured girl with honey colors strained down through the tangles of her hair. She sat silently, her face almost somber, while the increasingly drunken party spun its web around her. Neither the laughter nor the strangers with whom she sat seemed to touch her. She looked like a princess who had too little to eat, and he remembered a fellow warrant officer's snicker that "Most of them would do anything you could dream up for a good meal." Ryder felt a proprietary sense of loss that such a woman should be wasted on her present company.
Her face dropped back into the shadows, and Ryder could see only that she was smiling now, speaking words he could not hear.
He looked down at his beer. But he could see even more of her now, in his memory. Below the snapshot of face and hair a long white neck led down to bared collarbones and lace trim on a dress cut in a style that had been popular in the States some years before. A red dress, as if she were making a broad joke out of it all. He shook his head, telling himself that this one was genuinely beautiful, even though he knew it was not true. Somehow, her features fell just short of legitimate beauty. But, alone of the women in the crowded bar, this one had the power to jar him, to shake the hell out of his tenuous grip on the night.