Wracked with guilt, Louise walked back to her flat in the gathering dark, shaken and defeated. Even though she hadn’t taken the press release to the papers, she was the one who wrote it. She was responsible and she needed to do something to right her wrong. She nearly bumped into a woman coming her way on the sidewalk. Mumbling an apology she stumbled away. A cold gust of wind hit her, and she crossed her arms, trying to hold in some heat. She became aware that she was angry. At the shallow State Department briefings for assuming all she needed to know was how to manage a cocktail party. At the Oklahoma education system for isolating her from any history beyond her own country. At America, for sheltering her from the stark and grim reality that Natalya faced every day. The horror of living in the Soviet system was no longer some textbook description. The reality now filled her with dread.
She nearly walked in front of a car as she crossed the street. How had she missed the subtext that everyone else seemed to be able to read? Her mind kept replaying the many conversations of the past few days that had an implicit meaning that she’d missed.
You didn’t get it, Louise, she said to herself. You ignorant naïve American, welcome to the world outside of Oklahoma.
Her first thought was to tell Arnie. No matter how crazy the situation or what emotional state she was in, Arnie could somehow put all that aside and think and act. He could always figure out what to do. He was always there to help. But Arnie was gone. Gone where? Somewhere between Rovaniemi and Kuopio. Somewhere nobody knew. She wanted to pound her forehead with her fists, but her forehead was covered with a wool stocking cap and her hands with wool mittens. She tried to talk herself down from the panic, but some inner finger-waving demon wouldn’t let her escape her feelings of guilt and shame. How could she have missed the signals? Kaarina’s shifts in tone of voice and volume, the occasional quick, almost furtive look. Had Natalya herself hinted at the problems with making the race public? Then she realized that she’d heard and seen everything as if she was still in Oklahoma, that the rest of the world was like home. Now she knew a grim truth: naiveté was not an excuse; it was a flaw. And it was a flaw that hurt people.
She saw an empty bench at a bus stop and sat down, feeling the cold through her wool skirt and stockings. Bringing her head down and her mittens up to her face, feeling them scratch her cheeks, she started shaking with sobs.
Feeling frozen snot beneath her nose brought her back to the present. The crying had calmed her.
She remembered the time she’d lost a considerable number of lumber orders by carelessly failing to file them properly. She suspected that she’d somehow mixed them with scrap papers that she’d thrown into the office’s potbelly stove. The orders represented a serious amount of income. After several hours of frantic searching, she’d gone to her father in tears and confessed. He was angry but calm. He’d made it clear just how much money was at stake and what that meant. After he’d let that sink in, he said, “There’s an old expression: you’ve made your bed, now lie in it. I never liked that expression. It should be you’ve made your bed badly, now get the hell up and remake it.” Then, he pointed to the telephone and walked out of the office, leaving her trembling. Three days of telephone calls, and several months thereafter to pay for the long-distance charges from her allowance, she’d remade the bed.
She rose from the bench and drew her coat in tightly, comforting herself. This bed could be remade. It had to be remade.
Mentally throwing her shoulders back, she began to think. The story was out. There was no putting that genie back in the bottle. She briefly thought of writing another release saying that the race had been canceled. That, however, would quickly be seen as a lie, making things worse.
Finally reaching home, Louise collapsed crying on her bed, kicking and pounding at the bedding in frustration and impotence. Then, the storm over, she carefully brewed a pot of tea and sat down to think. The papers weren’t going to back off. Since the race would be well publicized, it made no sense to try to call off the raffle. Be practical. It was sure to bring in a good deal of money.
She kept at the kitchen table, scratching out various alternative plans to fix the problem, drinking cup after cup of tea.
Her first rejected plan involved Sokolov. He’d seemed so friendly; then she found that he’d bugged their apartment. Sokolov also seemed friendly toward Natalya and Mikhail. However, she also now knew that nothing about Sokolov—or most of the Russians she’d met—was necessarily aligned with what appeared on the surface. She still didn’t know if Natalya knew about the bugging. She no longer cared. If Natalya knew, it meant nothing about who she was or their friendship. Who knew what pressure Sokolov could apply to both Natalya and Mikhail.
Plan two was to get asylum for the Bobrovs. The American legation in Helsinki, however, wasn’t internationally recognized as a full-on official embassy, which by international law would make the building and grounds the sovereign territory of the United States, not Finland. The nearest true American embassy was in Stockholm, nearly impossible to reach. It was 250 miles away and would require getting on a boat or ferry. They would be unlikely to escape without being seen by one of the many Communist sympathizers who would happily inform the Russians. Besides, she had no reason to think that either Natalya or Mikhail would want to defect, even if uncertain about their own lives.
Plan three was to try to stop the America-versus-Russia, freedom-versus-totalitarianism emphasis the newspapers were giving the race. Given Kari’s reaction to that, plan three was probably a non-starter. Besides, not all the papers were published in Helsinki, and she couldn’t reach them in time. The strongly pro-Communist Kansan Lehti was published in Tampere. News of the race could soon be all over Finland.
Then a cold chill enveloped her. Why not other papers in other countries? The story was out, sure to be carried by all the newswires. It was as if she’d released a virulent virus, and there was no stopping it until it ran its course. She grew desperate with the thought.
Of course, she could just do nothing, hoping Mikhail would win. Doing nothing kept the raffle money coming in. That would help the orphans and keep Kaarina happy. She, however, knew how good Arnie was at his sport. In most sports, the odds start to work against anyone over thirty. In endurance sports, however, like mountain climbing, something else kicks in besides sheer physicality: mental toughness. This grew throughout a man’s life. The combination of slowly declining strength and increasing grit peaked around the mid-thirties.
Only she and Arnie really knew how good he’d been even before all the training with the Tenth Mountain. Had it not been for the war, Arnie would have been a serious contender for a spot on the US Olympic team. Of course, Mikhail had skied the entire war. Just looking at him, she could see he carried himself the way good athletes do. His fluidity and strength were apparent even in the way he drank and talked with Arnie. They were peas in a pod.
Both men were in their thirties, and both had been in office jobs since the war, so neither was going to be as good as they were during the war. Arnie, however, exercised hard every morning before work. Risking a family’s life on hope that Mikhail would win didn’t seem like a good idea. She also knew of what stern stuff Arnie was made. He’d had something he called sisu driven into him since he was a toddler. Arnie would put in one of the best performances of his life. The only physical failing that would stop him from giving it everything he had was death.
After far too many cups of tea—thinking, rejecting, thinking again—she realized that she had only one workable option. She had to find Arnie and get him to throw the race. But how?