Moscow
February 1934
If Scott Gronsky hadn’t been such a straight-arrow all-American, Aurora would have looked askance at his handwritten order—delivered to her flat by a messenger at 9 p.m.—telling her to meet him the next morning at 10:30 at a bathtub. But she now had two weeks under her belt in this job: pretending to be a translator for foreign press correspondents in Moscow while actually spying on them for the OGPU. She’d come to know the bar they frequented, the special stores where they bought bread, butter, and sausage in exchange for valuta—hard currency—the rooms in the Soviet Press Office where they submitted their dispatches to the censors, and the back room in the Central Post Office on Tverskaya Street where they sent cables to London or New York or Chicago in advance of their newspapers’ deadlines.
And the bathtub. For most of the foreign press corps lived in flats lacking any such convenience. Russians generally bathed in communal banyas, where the wait could be long and the conditions rugged. Rumors flew of high-rent apartment buildings where superintendents had installed showerheads in secret basement rooms and would let tenants use them in exchange for bread or sausage. But one of the New York papers had actually managed to rent a flat that included a functioning bathtub. And as a professional courtesy they were willing to let reporters from other papers use it. You had to schedule a thirty-minute slot weeks in advance. Thanks to a last-minute cancellation, Scott Gronsky had secured the 10:30–11:00 berth tomorrow. It was his first opportunity for a proper bath since he’d come to Moscow two months ago, and he wasn’t going to let it go to waste.
So first thing in the morning Aurora dressed and coiffed herself in a manner consistent with her cover story: a tall but mousy ex–Moscow University student named Svetlana. She’d dyed her hair dark brown and framed her eyes in heavy-rimmed glasses. No cosmetics. That was a game there was no winning. You’d be looked down on if you didn’t make the effort. But store shelves were bare of makeup, perfume, and silk stockings, so women who craved such things had to resort to elaborate schemes to procure them. The job of “Svetlana” was to translate for valuta-bearing Western expats like Scott Gronsky. If she showed up looking fancy it would be assumed that he had traded luxury items to her for “favors.” Better, and more consistent with her cover story, was to be as frumpy as possible. So in her frumpy, bootlike shoes she walked down five flights of stairs from the flat she shared with four other OGPU informants likewise pretending to be translators. She took a clanging and careening tram to Theater Square, walked round back of the Metropol Hotel, and ascended five flights of stairs to the Soviet Press Office, where she gathered the morning’s batch of official press releases plus fresh copies of Pravda and Izvestia. Another tram ride took her to the flat with the bathtub. This was on the ground floor of a nice apartment building with a courtyard and a lobby. It no longer looked like, nor functioned as, a residence. It had been emptied out and converted into a newspaper bureau with a stenographer, filing clerk, and an office manager who appeared to devote about fifty percent of her working hours to juggling bathtub appointments. There was also a steady traffic of messengers and attendants coming and going on various errands, and a custodian who just sat in the lobby smoking and waiting for the bathtub to malfunction. All of the employees except the correspondent himself were Soviets, though from a wider than average range of backgrounds: a Jew, a Lett, a Ukrainian of German extraction, and an Englishwoman who had perhaps somewhat rashly torn up her British passport and gone full-blown Soviet. Any or all of these might be filing reports with OGPU, so Aurora was always careful to maintain her cover as Svetlana and to affect a Russian accent when speaking English. As far as Scott Gronsky or anyone else knew, Svetlana was from Rostov-on-Don, orphaned during the Civil War, raised in a state school, sent up to Moscow in recognition of her academic prowess, opted out of an otherwise promising academic career to put her weird proficiency with languages to work helping foreign journalists spread the good news about the completion of the Five-Year Plan.
Her tram had been delayed. In what she’d come to recognize as typically Soviet, the reason for the delay was as prosaic as it could be (a fender bender in an intersection down the line) but was treated as a state secret of the highest order, not to be spoken of or even noticed. Consequently Scott was already five minutes into his bath by the time Aurora walked in. Probably just as well. Like half the other rooms in this country, this one was partitioned into smaller ones by blankets suspended from the ceiling, making it possible for non-bathers to enter and use the toilet without awkwardness.
“Svetlana” perched on the toilet’s rim. The seat had been removed for “safekeeping” and could be rented from the custodian for cigarettes. She greeted Scott in her fake Russian accent and he bid her good morning in the flat vowels of an upstate Bears fan. His voice always made her wish she’d never left Chicago—until, that is, she reminded herself why she’d had to. He smelled like good Western soap, which was hardly surprising. Svetlana and the other girls in her flat, when not masking it with perfume, always smelled faintly of kerosene. They all had beds. But the building was infested, and the only way to prevent bedbugs, cockroaches, and lice from crawling up the legs of the beds during the night was to plant each leg in a bowl and fill the bowl with kerosene. The scent of kerosene, slowly evaporating from all those bowls, permeated clothes, hair, and even flesh. Aurora wondered if half an hour in that bathtub would be enough to get rid of it, or whether it had penetrated so deeply that it would well up to the surface again, like crude oil coming out of the soil in Azerbaijan?
She had to vacate the room once to allow a correspondent from Manchester to use the toilet (he was next in line for the bathtub, in the 11 a.m. slot) but otherwise spent the time reading the news to Scott, translating the Russian on the fly. She was aware of many infelicities or downright mistakes in her own work but trudged ahead anyway, like a kulak behind the plow, dodging rocks and tree roots in marginal soil. She had listened to the work of some of the other girls. They got away with howlers. Beyond a certain point she began to summarize, or skip over, sentences. Then paragraphs.
Even with a blanket hanging between them, she could sense Scott’s boredom slowly rising to exasperation. These articles were the same shit every day. Everyone knew it: the shills who wrote them, the party bosses who told the shills what to write, the translators like “Svetlana” and the foreign visitors like Scott. To a point, a worldly man like him could amuse himself and flaunt his cleverness by pretending to winkle out hints as to what was going on inside the Kremlin, but that was a parlor game that for him was already wearing thin. Aurora could hear the hydraulic sound effects as he heaved in the tub. Or nothing at all as he just lay still in the lukewarm water letting the will to live drain out of him.
Speaking of drains, the knock on the door came, letting him know that his time was nearing its end and he needed to make room for the man from Manchester. Aurora briefly thrilled to a skin-crawling possibility, namely that they re-used the bathwater. But the rattle of a chain and the gurgle of a drain told her that Scott had pulled the plug. She rose, gathered up her newspapers, and left the room so that Scott could get dressed.
“Let’s walk,” he said. He was a big man, a former left tackle with the facial damage to prove it. But after college he’d gone to Princeton and got some kind of advanced degree. He shrugged on his gigantic camel overcoat and helped “Svetlana” on with hers: a well-worn but still substantial garment that had been issued to her by the OGPU, still smelling faintly of cigarettes and imported cologne.
“To where?” she inquired, but Scott shook his head and rolled his eyes to say it didn’t matter. So it was one of those walks, common in Moscow, the purpose of which was to have a conversation that would not be overheard.
But. Scott was no dummy. He knew perfectly well that “Svetlana” was reporting to the OGPU. So what was the point of privacy?
He wanted to keep a secret from the other reporters.
He pulled on an astrakhan hat so that his wet hair would not instantly freeze to his scalp. They stepped out into a formerly prosperous boulevard.
“The Trib is gonna send me home,” he announced, “so I figure I might as well go out in a blaze of glory. I have three weeks, give or take.”
If she’d really been Svetlana, orphan girl of Rostov, she’d have had difficulty with these idioms. But Aurora understood almost too easily.
“Why are you being sent home?” She would actually be sorry to see him go. Some of the other girls had to work with men much less agreeable.
“I keep on writing the wrong shit.”
“What is wrong precisely?”
“I write think pieces. Abstract. Inside baseball. Doesn’t sell papers.”
“What would sell papers?”
“Oh, you know. Human interest. Man on the street. Interesting characters, personal adventure.”
“Blaze of glory?”
“Yeah. So, most of the others”—he turned to look back—“they’re coloring inside the lines because their press pass is their meal ticket. They don’t want the commissars to yank it and send ’em packing.” He turned sideways to appraise her. She got the nervous sense that he was onto her. Or at least that he had suspicions. Could she follow all of his Americanisms? “Coloring inside the lines.” “Meal ticket.” If so, it cast doubt on her cover story.
Was he a spy?
Or had she spent too much time around people like Shpak and Beria? Paranoid. Overthinking everything.
“Anyway,” he continued, “my point is, my days are numbered. So I’m going to Ukraine.”
“Ukraine? Why?” But she knew perfectly well. Everyone knew.
“To see what’s actually happened there. The censors will never let me cable that story out of the country, but I can take it home up here.” He tapped his giant furry hat.
They walked a few more paces through enormous clouds of their own condensed breath.
“You know your way around,” he said. “You’re from Rostov.”
“That is not in Ukraine,” she pointed out.
“But close.”
“Close,” she agreed, trying to remember the map the OGPU had showed her. She had not imagined her geographical knowledge would be tested so soon.
“I need a translator.”
“I could get in trouble.”
“With OGPU.”
She didn’t respond. He took that, correctly, as agreement. “I’m going to do it anyway,” he said. “I can get on a train anytime I want. Unless they arrest me. For what? Thinking about getting on a train? They’re not gonna do that. So, I get on the train. If you’re with me, then it’s okay.”
“How is it okay?”
“‘The naïve, overconfident Westerner thought he was pulling a fast one on us,’” said Scott, adopting a hilariously bad Russian accent, “‘but we were onto him from the beginning. He was shadowed every step of the way by our girl Svetlana, who provided a full report.’”
Aurora found herself nodding.
“I’ll spring for soft class,” he offered. It was a reference to the quality of the seats.
She shook her head. “You want hard.”
He nodded. “So I can see how ordinary people live?”
The real answer was that the soft seats had lice in the cushions. But she nodded. “Yes.”
They were on the train, sitting on hard seats, less than twenty-four hours later. Aurora had explained matters to her nominal boss at OGPU, a woman named Katerina, who reported to one Zhirkin, who reported to Beria. Katerina was not happy. But Aurora knew that there was nothing Katerina could do about it. As Scott had pointed out, they couldn’t prevent him from boarding a train short of preemptively arresting him—an act that would be seen as a major provocation and an admission that they had something to hide. And since he was being sent home anyway, the threat of expulsion had no force.
As for “Svetlana,” her conduct was above reproach. She’d reported the conversation to Katerina immediately. The most they might have done was to forbid her to get on the train with Scott. But better to have a faithful OGPU informant shadowing him every step of the way than to have him go alone.
And there was another thing somehow factoring into all of this, difficult for Aurora to see beyond its blurry penumbra, which was that she had some kind of special status in the mind of Lavrentiy Beria. She was his prize catch, his protégée. Or at least one of them; for all she knew, he might have a hundred. This stint as “Svetlana” was just a way of breaking her in. Showing her the ropes. He had bigger plans for her. Katerina somehow knew it.
During their brief working relationship, “Svetlana” had personally subjected Scott to hours of press statements from the People’s Commissariat of Railways extolling the pace at which new roadbeds were being laid across steppe and tundra. If he’d paid any attention whatsoever, he was probably expecting new lines stretching across vast distances, stations few and far between.
The journey south and west from Moscow was anything but that. Railway lines, most of them decades old, covered the landscape like a finely drawn web of steel. In the thousand-mile expanse between Moscow and Odessa there were few places more than twenty miles from a railway line. Getting from Moscow to—where, exactly? Somewhere in Ukraine that Scott would accept as typical?—entailed making a lot of decisions. It was evident from the worn-out, yellowed maps and inscrutable timetables spread out on their laps that every station they pulled into was going to present them with choices. Seven lines radiated from Bryansk, six from Gryazi. Eight converged on Kharkov. “Shit,” Scott exclaimed after they’d been on the train to Bryansk for an hour, “there’d be a million ways to get where I want to go—if I even knew where that was.”
He had heard tell, from more seasoned correspondents, of a big hydroelectric project in Ukraine that had been the site of a massive press junket last summer. Until he came up with a better idea, that seemed a good place to aim for. He could go there and follow up on the story, explain how his colleagues had been duped. But it was just a pencil smudge on a map that was too out of date to show the new line that the Soviets had constructed to haul steel and cement to the site.
As it turned out, almost all of the choices implied by the maps and the timetables were ruled out by circumstances and so they just opted for whichever trains seemed to be headed in the right direction reasonably soon. The farther they went, the emptier the carriages became. Few people, it seemed, wanted to go toward Ukraine. At the same time there was a marked upward trend in the rank of the railway personnel pacing up and down the aisle, pretending to do things. The Soviet Union as a whole seemed to divert a lot of its productive capacity into uniforms, badges, and medals. The foreign correspondents hanging around the bar at the Metropol made fun of them for it, then went back to their fleabag hotel rooms to write think pieces about what it all meant. If you couldn’t pay, feed, or house the masses you could at least make them feel like they were part of something by giving them uniforms and awarding them ranks. Anyway the sleeves and collars of even the lowliest railway workers all bore the hammer and sickle as a matter of course, but pretty soon they began to collect little red chevrons, and when there was no room left for those they switched to red dots. When the collar became crowded with those they were replaced with red stars. There was room for maybe four of those, raising the obvious question of just how many four-stars dwelt in the most exalted ranks of the responsible Commissariat. On this journey, they observed no stars at all, but chevrons and then, increasingly, dots were more and more in evidence the farther south they went.
Guessing from the map, they were now very near, perhaps actually in, Ukraine. The carriage was otherwise empty except for one middle-aged man in a suit who had been pretending to read the same copy of Pravda for seven and a half hours. When they approached stations, railway workers with lots of dots appeared at either end of their car and—as could be inferred easily enough—discouraged new passengers from entering.
It was at one such stop that a woman approached the train holding up a bundle. This was little more than a whistle-stop, consisting of a single platform between the southbound and northbound tracks. A snatch of roof on stilts sheltered the platform from direct assault by the elements. Built into that structure was a stairway-and-bridge contraption giving access to the platform from the road side, which happened to face east. The west side, on their right as they pulled into the station, gave way immediately to open fields. These, of course, were covered with snow. No matter how assiduously Scott stared at them, he could glean no hints as to the true current state of Ukrainian agriculture.
It was from that side that the woman approached. Some attempt had been made to fence the station off, but you couldn’t fence off an entire railway line. The woman was picking her way over the ballast—the linear heap of crushed stone in which the railroad ties were embedded. All she could see from that low vantage point would be steel wheels and undercarriage. When she tilted her head back, exposing her yellowed face to the overcast sky, she’d be looking at the windows of the passenger carriages above her head. But Aurora got the idea that she couldn’t see inside. The panes of glass were reflecting too much light from the sky. Clearly she wanted to get the attention of passengers inside the carriage, to show them what she was carrying. She was making her way down Scott and Aurora’s side of the carriage, gazing up toward each window in turn—windows that had no people on the other side of them.
Their Pravda-reading minder, down at the other end of the carriage, was seated on the platform side, oblivious. Scott and Aurora exchanged a look, but no words. The woman was approaching, faltering on the frozen ballast and the protruding ends of the ties, but indefatigable in the true peasant way.
“Selling produce?” Scott guessed. “Onions? Turnips? What grows here?” The guess was reasonable. He’d been in Moscow long enough to know of the unsanctioned street markets where people from the countryside sold vegetables to city-dwellers.
Aurora shrugged. “Jars of honey?”
Faint thumping could be heard through the shell of the carriage. The train might be completely empty for all this woman knew. Pausing beneath each window she pounded on the wall with her mittened hand, trying to get someone’s attention.
Scott glanced sidelong at their minder. The whistles and gesticulations of the railway workers with the chevrons and the dots told that the train was getting ready to pull out of the station. Their minder hadn’t yet twigged to the existence of the woman trying to sell her turnips or whatever, but pretty soon the thumping was going to give her away. This was Scott’s first, and might be his only, chance for a face-to-face encounter with an actual Ukrainian—a bit of personal experience that would satisfy his editor in Chicago.
He stood up, excused himself past Aurora, stepped into the aisle, and sauntered—he didn’t want to tip off their minder by moving too decisively—two rows up to the place where the woman was thumping on the side of the carriage. Entering the row he got a knee on the hard seat closest to the window and began fumbling with the latch. Their minder looked up from Pravda and stared at him, then threw “Svetlana” a hard look.
She rose and stepped quickly up the aisle to where Scott was just now getting the window open.
As she sidestepped into the row, she caught a glimpse of the woman outside thrusting her bundle up toward them.
Scott recoiled from the window and, like an offensive lineman putting a spin move on a defender, almost flattened Aurora. She saw him coming just in time to dodge out of his path but tripped over his foot and sprawled toward the window. Not wanting to smash her hands through the glass she reached for the frame instead and caught herself, arms high and wide, face so close to the window that it fogged instantly from her breath. But in that moment she saw what Scott had seen. Then she was glad the pane was misted over. The train shrieked and began to move.
Railway workers with many red dots, supervised by a one-star, moved down the length of the carriage pulling all the blinds down over the windows and securing them with twists of wire. Their efficiency was proof that they did it all the time. The next time Aurora got up to use the toilet, she saw that the same thing had been done in adjoining carriages as well.
Passengers were not allowed to look out windows of trains passing through Ukraine.
Scott and Aurora were both silent for half an hour, avoiding each other’s gaze. Her purpose in going to the toilet had been to throw up. She wondered if he could smell it on her.
“Do you think it was dead?” Scott finally asked.
Aurora’s gaze swam in his direction.
“She didn’t unwrap it—expose it—until she saw me in the window.” His eyes focused. “Him. It was a boy.”
In this picking over of words Aurora saw him beginning to write the story that he would carry into the West in his head. She envied him that ability to step back from it. To file the story and move on.
It seemed important to him that she be a part of this conversation. She nodded. “I was wondering why it was exposed.”
“He.”
“That shocked me. Would she have exposed a living baby to the cold?”
“Well, maybe. As a way to show how emaciated he was. But he wasn’t moving.” How was he going to write it up for his three million readers in Chicago? He could say that the baby was alive or that it was dead. He could change any detail he wanted. Nobody would gainsay him. It wasn’t like the Trib’s fact-checkers were going to track “Svetlana” down before they ran the story.
“If the kid’s dead, then the lady’s just crazy,” Scott said.
“Maybe not crazy. Maybe she’s just trying to communicate.”
“If the kid’s alive, then she’s just a beggar.” It was clear from Scott’s tone that a mere beggar was a less potent story than a lady trying to say something to the world about what was going on here.
For her, though, there was a layer to this that she could never explain to Scott. Never talk about to anyone.
Scott went silent. He crossed his arms over his barrel chest and stared straight ahead, unfocused, for a while. Composing the story in his head. From time to time, though, she caught him looking at her curiously. She had been second-guessing herself since that last exchange. She was almost certain that in her shock she had forgotten to use the fake Russian accent. She’d blurted out at least a few words in mid-American English. Had he noticed?
The train eased into another stop. Conductors blew their whistles and shouted up and down the platform, unseen on the other side of those window shades. No one got on or off. Aurora practically jumped out of her seat as a muffled thump-thump sounded through the wall of the carriage. A moment later it had moved on to the next window.
The thumps were sounding from more than one place now.
The baby, with its tiny, wrinkled body and its huge, swollen head, had looked like an embryo floating in a jar.
The train’s whistle sounded in a way that did nothing to steady her nerves. It came to a stop, more harshly than when it was gliding into a station. The staff were surprised. Even Scott could have guessed as much from the tone of their voices. One of them opened the door at the end of their carriage and climbed down to the ground. Dry snow was squeaking under boots outside the windows.
If there was anything to the map, they were in the middle of nowhere, still on flat land but headed into some hills that, Scott speculated, wrapped around the artificial lake behind that big hydroelectric project. At such a juncture it would be normal to pause while additional pulling power was added to the train to help with the uphill grade, but nothing seemed to be happening.
Half an hour went by. The conductors were showing no urgency at all about getting back on the train. Indeed, more and more passengers were getting off. Aurora leaned forward and strained to listen. “They’re actually asking people to detrain,” she said.
“Well, that’s all I need. Shall we?” Scott stood up and heaved his overcoat off the hook, then helped “Svetlana” on with hers. Both of them were tracking their minder in the corners of their eyes but he made no move to interfere. It was a delay. Delays happened. Whether the foreign visitor experienced it from inside the sealed carriage or outside would make little difference in how he wrote it up.
Aurora was, to be honest, terrified that the train would be swarmed with people holding up dead or dying babies. But the map didn’t lie. They were well and truly out in the middle of nowhere. No one was around. Just here the two tracks were running straight across level ground between snow-covered fields. Half a mile ahead, though, the ground began to rise. Not so steeply that the railway couldn’t manage the grade, but the twin lines did curve to the right seeking a more gradual ascent. Something had gone wrong up ahead, near the beginning of that curve. Other passengers were issuing in ones and twos from carriages. Train staff were exhorting them, with sweeping arm movements, to move up the line.
Aurora was beginning to wonder if they should go back and fetch their baggage, but none of the other passengers seemed to be doing so. Scott’s attention was fixed on the ground. The snow was deep in the ditch beside the line and so they, like all the other detrained passengers, were moving in single file along the strip of exposed ballast next to the rails, trailing one hand along the flank of the train for balance.
“New ties,” Scott observed. “Maybe a couple of years old. But the ballast.”
“What of the ballast?”
“It’s mostly sand.” Scott used the toe of his boot to scuff at it. Sharp fragments of crushed stone skittered into the snow, exposing loose sand.
Aurora, despite all the time she’d spent on trains, was a little unclear on the significance of this. But it meant something to Scott. Ballast was the heavy, loose stuff that they poured over the ties once the rails had been spiked down. Once the ties were so embedded, they couldn’t move. Seemed like any heavy stuff would do the job, but Scott didn’t think so.
She might have asked for a more complete explanation of why it was bad to use sand, but this soon turned out to be one of those cases where words weren’t needed. Ahead of them, only a few yards ahead of where their locomotive had screeched to a halt, another locomotive, facing the other way on the other line, rested askew. It was listing to one side at a forty-five-degree angle and pitched nose-down into the earth, as if it had been driven into a pit of quicksand. Its weight and momentum had simply driven the rails and the ties to which they were spiked down into the earth. Behind it, half a dozen boxcars had derailed and flopped over onto their sides. The rising terrain made it possible to see the whole length of the stopped train. Scott paused to count the cars.
A repair crew had preceded them in a little train equipped with a crane, spare rails, ties, and tools. They hadn’t been here for long. They were still looking at things and arguing. But it was possible to guess at their strategy. Those boxcars had toppled to the other side—away from the uphill-bound track. So they weren’t blocking Scott and Aurora’s train. The only thing that stood in their way was the locomotive, and the mess it had made of both tracks when it had foundered in the morass of bad ballast. The affected section of track was no more than a hundred feet long. The southbound line was intact. The rails themselves hadn’t been damaged. Those rails were simply in the wrong place—passing too near the marooned locomotive, which wasn’t going to move for a long time.
So they moved the track. The workers from the repair train, bolstered by volunteers from Scott and Aurora’s train, drove prybars into the ground next to the rails and heaved, dragging and bending the whole line sideways away from the downed locomotive. This effort, which seemed almost Pharaonic in its scope and ambition, took surprisingly little time once the ties were free of the sandy ballast. They didn’t have to move it that far. It was just a matter of getting enough volunteers heave-hoeing in unison. And they had plenty of volunteers once a grizzled one-star conductor had made it plain in the most stark and profane language that they were all going to be stuck here until this got done. Scott was the most enthusiastic heave-hoer of them all, his ruddy face showing actual joy. Only Aurora knew why: his editor in Chicago was going to eat this up.
The ineluctable laws of geometry dictated that this sideways diversion of the line created a gap. The rails weren’t long enough—the unbolted ends didn’t quite meet. Fortunately, there were extra rails on the train, fresh from the rolling mills of Magnitogorsk. They only needed to be cut to the right length to fill the gap. Unfortunately, there was only one hacksaw blade. So the rapid and glorious victory of the sideways-rail-bending operation gave way to a manual hacksawing project that was obviously going to take hours. Perhaps longer as the blade got duller.
So Scott began to wander around, if for no other reason than to stay warm. Aurora followed him. All semblance of order had dissolved. No one was keeping an eye on them. Lavrentiy Beria could not be everywhere. Scott had spied a farmhouse on the opposite edge of a field. It was perhaps a quarter of a mile away. He had got the idea—which in Illinois would have made sense—that a farmhouse had to have a basic complement of tools; that among these were hacksaws; and that if a hacksaw could be borrowed, or rented, the rate of rail-sawing might be doubled.
So he trudged across the field, followed by Aurora. They got to the house. No smoke came from the chimney, no chickens or livestock were in evidence. They pushed at the door, which was ajar, and found a family of dead people. There were no signs of struggle or violence.
They walked back toward the derailed train. Scott had forgotten about the hacksaw.
Up to this point they’d seen very little police or military presence, however there were half a dozen men in Red Army greatcoats and ushankas standing around the toppled boxcars, pacing desultorily back and forth, rifles slung over their shoulders. Apparently the cargo in those things was valuable, and they’d been posted there to discourage pilfering.
Yet none of them seemed to mind when Scott Gronsky, with that air of self-assured entitlement that both awed and annoyed Aurora, strode between them and walked right up to a boxcar. Aurora hung back. But when no one leveled a rifle at Scott, she hurried to catch up.
The boxcars were literally just boxes, made of planks bolted to a steel frame. Upon impact many of the planks had splintered, and the frames had bent, but they all still retained their boxy shape and performed the function of boxes—namely to contain things.
What they contained was people. Some of them were still moving.
“When we assigned you to that job,” Beria said, “our only objective was to acquaint you with the procedures for managing foreign press correspondents. That was accomplished in a matter of days. It is simply not that complicated.” He paused and looked up at her through those round, heavy-framed lenses. “We could not have anticipated that you would go into Ukraine and see the things that you did.”
He paused to rearrange a few papers on his desk. Nikolai Zhirkin—Aurora’s boss’s boss—the OGPU official who seemed to be in overall charge of the program of which Beria spoke—sat as still as it was possible for a living, presumably breathing human to sit. During the first ten minutes of this meeting he had unlimbered a few preliminary gambits, feinting in the direction of scolding, denouncing, praising, or merely educating Aurora whilst keeping his gaze fixed on Beria’s face. Beria, though, had given no hints as to which way the wind was blowing. Aurora guessed that Zhirkin was now replaying those ten minutes in his head imagining all the ways he had gone wrong.
It all hinged on what Beria was going to say next. Beria knew as much, and was enjoying the moment. Here was a man who really liked what he did for a living. Aurora ought to have been anxious to the point of hysteria, but after all she’d seen and lived through in the past year she could not bring herself to feel very much. She knew that as long as she lived in this country, within reach of men like these, she’d be dangling above that hole in the ice, the knife on the rope. With a word Beria could kill her. The only point was that he wanted her to know that.
“However,” he went on, “it is actually a good thing that you went to Ukraine. Fortuitous.”
“May I ask—did Gronsky write the story?” She had parted ways with Scott in Kyiv, and he had got out of the country by way of Odessa.
“Yes. He filed it from Zagreb.” Beria glanced at a document.
“Did the Chicago Tribune print it?” Zhirkin asked. Not his job to know that, apparently.
“No,” Beria said. “Nor will they. We have a friend in that company who can recognize vile anti-Soviet propaganda when he sees it.”
“Fortunate,” Zhirkin said, with a none-too-friendly glance at Aurora. “I will see to it that in future—”
“I am not here to talk about Gronsky or any of that,” Beria said. And it was clear that a lot of time would pass before they heard Zhirkin’s voice again. Beria’s attention was on Aurora. “Now that you have seen what you saw in Ukraine, a young woman of your intelligence will immediately understand the importance of the task I have entrusted to Comrade Zhirkin here. Namely, the shaping and molding of how our story is told beyond our borders, in a way that best supports our national strategy. It is every bit as important as tanks and airplanes.”
Aurora nodded. “Especially now. Because of . . . Ukraine.”
“I of course do not believe in miracles,” Beria said, “yet it is a kind of miracle that no one knows. Do you have questions about what you saw? It would be natural to have questions.”
If she said no, she’d be lying and he’d know it. “Well, it’s obvious that there have been food shortages. And . . .”
Beria nodded, looking serenely and pleasantly sad. “Some increase in mortality from diseases related to poor nutrition.”
Starving to death. But she made a note of that phrase.
“My only other question, then, Comrade, would be about the people in the boxcars.”
“Kulaks,” Beria said. Then, perhaps seeing some trace of skepticism on her face, he shook his head and lifted his hands slightly from the desktop. “Why else would they have been put in boxcars?”
Aurora nodded. “On their way to . . .”
“Being relocated to parts of the Soviet Union where they can do some good. It is regrettable that the train derailed, but such mishaps are a known hazard of rail transportation. Just ask yourself, if they had not been on that train, what then would have been their fate?”
“I suppose they would have been at very grave risk of diseases related to poor nutrition,” Aurora said.
Beria’s face took on a bit of the proud-uncle aspect it had worn when he’d watched her tommy-gun Shpak. He glanced at Zhirkin as if to say, You see?
Aurora wondered if Zhirkin knew about Shpak. If Zhirkin was afraid of her. Because that was how it worked. Beria was at the center of a web of people who were all afraid, for good reason, of being killed by the others.
“Now that you have a perfect understanding of these things, we must put you to work without further delay on a more challenging and consequential task,” Beria said. He nodded to Zhirkin. Zhirkin nodded back, reached into the briefcase next to his chair, and drew out a fat manila envelope sealed with string. This he handed to Aurora. She tried to ignore the block-letter imprecations stamped on its front, promising death to any who opened it, as she unwound the string. She drew out a folder. This was stuffed with loose documents—photos, newspaper clippings, typed reports—to a thickness of about half an inch. A name had been written on it in Cyrillic, which didn’t quite scan, but once she opened it and glanced at a few of the documents—which were mostly in English—she saw that the subject matter was one Owen Crisp-Upjohn, a British journalist. Or perhaps “writer” was a better descriptor.
“This man is coming to the Soviet Union?”
“He’s been here for ten days,” Zhirkin said.
Ten days. Long enough to have overlapped for a bit with Scott Gronsky. Aurora found a loose photo of Owen Crisp-Upjohn standing next to a polo pony. She’d seen him before, probably on the day he’d arrived in Moscow, in the bar at the Metropol, downing gin with a vengeance and saying hilarious things to a circle of admirers. Foreign journalists could be a jealous and back-biting lot, but they seemed to see in him a refreshing novelty, not a competitor.
“You would like me to serve as his translator?” she asked.
“He’s already gone through two of those. Number three seems to be holding her own,” Zhirkin said.
Beria added, “You may consider yourself as having been awarded a promotion to a higher grade than mere translator.”
“Are you asking me to fuck him?” It was a risk saying that. But Comrade Stalin himself had recently stated that the act of sex was a routine natural function, no different really from taking a shower. Zhirkin, an older gentleman, stiffened in a way that suggested he might not yet have come round to Stalin’s point of view. Beria seemed to appreciate the simple candor. But he deferred to Zhirkin, who, after taking a moment to compose himself, said: “Based on the man’s reputation, we had assumed, going in, that the strategy you are alluding to would be simple, quick, and effective. But life is full of surprises and it has not worked out that way. One thing that is now certain is that, in the wake of failed attempts by some of your, er . . .”
“Sisters in revolutionary struggle,” Beria cracked.
“Yes, Mr. Crisp-Upjohn will now be very much on the alert for any such direct approach—anything obvious, heavy-handed.”
“However,” Beria added, “should the opportunity present itself, by all means take advantage of it.”
Her eye fell to another photograph of Owen, an eight-by-ten glossy, shot through a long lens at the Metropol, still redolent of darkroom chemicals. Compared to most of the Metropol crowd he was young, fit, and well put together. The idea was not inconceivably disgusting.
“If that was all we wanted,” Beria went on, “we’d have given the job to someone else.”
“Someone prettier?”
Anyone else would have blanched. Not Beria. “Someone more his type.”
“What is his type?”
“Going in, we were told redheads,” Zhirkin said. “Based on copious empirical evidence. But at this point it’s anyone’s guess.”
“Does he like boys?”
“No!”
Zhirkin spoke this one word with a finality indicating they’d tried it. Combined with an exasperation and world-weariness that caused a whole story to appear in Aurora’s mind about an expensive, madcap, ham-handed effort to put a likely boy in Owen’s way, culminating in failure.
“Do we know—does he have any fixed plans here?” she asked. But the thing about the boy was stuck in her head and now she was getting the giggles. At the end of this question her voice rose to a squeak as she tried to suppress it. Had anyone ever got the giggles in Beria’s office? It seemed unlikely. Beria’s deadpan face made it impossible to tell whether he had noticed, but he didn’t seem to mind. Was that a wry twist to his mouth? It was. The fact that he could find humor in such things only made him seem more deadly. What did it say about her?
“Other than drinking at the bar at the Metropol, he has no plans that we know of,” Beria said, then glanced at Zhirkin for confirmation.
She was about to ask why this man was so important to them. But newspaper clippings kept falling out of the dossier, skating to the carpet of Beria’s office like leaves, and this was enough to give her a general idea. This man Owen wrote for British newspapers. Of late he wrote exclusively for the British newspaper, the one that would be read, every day, by everyone who mattered in London. And a glance at some of his ledes was enough to tell her that he was no Scott Gronsky. Owen Crisp-Upjohn was never going to be upbraided by his editor for writing abstract think pieces. He was a personal-adventure man all the way. The anti-Gronsky.
A thought occurred. She gazed, unfocused, at a clipping that had ended up between her feet. Owen with the polo pony.
She looked up and discovered that Beria and Zhirkin had both been staring at her. Partly, of course, because they were men and she was a woman and that was how it was. But she’d learned from Shpak and others that this was even more likely to happen when she was thinking, and they didn’t know what she was going to say next. “Polo,” she said. “But at this time of year—we’ll have to wait.” She considered it some more. “Is there such a thing as a Red Army women’s polo team?”
Zhirkin was saying “Don’t be ridiculous!” but Beria spoke over him: “Would you like there to be?”
An awkward silence then as Zhirkin had been elbowed out of the way by this remark of Beria’s that might have been a joke.
“Does he know about the balloon launch?”
Aurora knew about it because sometimes she had tea with Proton and Elektron, who were working on it. It was the day after tomorrow.
“He ought to,” Zhirkin said. “We circulate a daily briefing to make all foreign correspondents aware of such opportunities. But it seems unlikely that a man of his tastes and interests would—”
“He’ll go,” she predicted, “if other correspondents are going, and if it seems . . . sporting.” She said the last word in English, with an English accent, but they knew what it meant.
Zhirkin had been a bit ruffled by her confident prediction. What would a girl like Aurora know of the mentality of a man such as Owen Crisp-Upjohn? A fair question, but what he didn’t know, or had perhaps forgotten, was that Aurora had once been Dawn, and Dawn had spent her adolescence on a polo-pony ranch in Wyoming. Men like Owen went there all the time. During their stay, which was rarely less than a week, they inevitably posed for photos in cowboy hats. They took potshots with six-shooters at bean cans on fence posts. They gawked at buttes and teepees.
Owen was the second of three brothers. A remittance man, living off payments from his late father’s estate. Very little about the thoughtways of such men made any sense at all to the kinds of people who worked on ranches in Wyoming, but one thing they’d all learned was that they could be talked into anything if it were couched as a sporting proposition. That, sex, and drinking were what got them out of bed in the morning.
The balloon was to be launched from a military base in the suburbs of Moscow, lately expanded to include an aerodrome. Weeks ago the balloon project had taken over a hangar. Days ago the Soviet propaganda machine had, in turn, taken over the balloon project. Zhirkin’s operation was only a small cog in that apparatus.
“Svetlana” was too new to the job to have witnessed it in action, but she’d heard stories from some of the other girls about the spectacle that they’d staged a few months ago to celebrate the completion of the Five-Year Plan. It sounded as though every singer, dancer, musician, and lighting technician still alive within the borders of the Soviet Union had been pulled away from their duties digging canals and chopping down forests, and mobilized. The result had been to stage productions that were to Broadway extravaganzas what Magnitogorsk was to steel mills. What the other girls ended up saying, after repeated, failed efforts to put its scale and magnificence into words, was that you just had to have seen it to believe it. “Svetlana” nodded and wished she could have been there. But Aurora cast her mind back to the Century of Progress in Chicago and knew she’d seen its like. And according to Scott Gronsky, who had spent some time in Germany, the National Socialists there were throwing their own spectacles to match.
The balloon launch was, of course, a different sort of affair. Turning it into a staged spectacle would have undercut the message: the Soviet Union was neck and neck with the United States in the race to send aeronauts to the threshold of outer space. In fact, they were going to succeed where the Americans had fallen flat on their faces. Proton Fizmatov and his comrades were going to return from the edge of the void with scientific data that would crack the code of the universe. They were going to settle questions that had bedeviled the world’s greatest scientific minds. No amount of peripheral singing and dancing could improve on that. On the contrary. The infamously cynical and jaded foreign press corps would find in it reasons to cast doubt on, even to lampoon, its pretensions. So, though busloads of fresh-faced Komsomol youths had been brought in, and the Soviet Union’s strategic reserves of lipstick and pomade had been broken open, it was all in the service of the science to be done and the feats of engineering needed to do it.
Owen was there. She caught sight of him climbing out of a big car in company with three other Metropol regulars. A smaller car behind them disgorged its bevy of translators. Unseasonably cold weather was outstaying its welcome, and a balloon launch by its nature was an outdoor event, so everyone was bundled up. Someone had procured the requisite ushanka and thick boots for Owen. He and his colleagues, already blowing into their hands, were greeted by a highly presentable Komsomol tour guide who waved in the direction of the athletic field where the balloon was being unrolled and spread out, then got them into the hangar—which was a few degrees warmer than outdoors—before frostbite could set in.
Aurora shadowed him at a distance. She was still in the Svetlana getup. She wanted to observe him before he noticed her. The density of the throng made it easy enough for her to hide in plain sight. For the first fifteen minutes or so he dutifully looked where he was told. Aurora could have stood directly behind him and never crossed his eye line. But after that he became restless, even irritable, as he grew tired of being led around. Aurora put a little more distance and a few more bodies between herself and Owen and watched from a distance as he climbed down into the spherical gondola that was going to take Proton and his comrades into space. She saw him peering out through one of its tiny, thick portholes, made of special glass that wouldn’t burst from internal pressure.
She was thinking about Dick. Seeing it all through his eyes. She had no formal education in physics but she’d learned from talking to him, and to Bob Overstreet, and more recently Elektron, that certain things were physics incarnate. Bridges, blast furnaces, aeroplanes, and balloons all looked the same in every country. If you had an eye for it you could make them more stylish, like the Golden Gate Bridge, but the form had to be the same. She knew everything about this Soviet balloon before she saw it, because she’d learned about the American one they’d launched from the fifty-yard line at Soldier Field. And they had to obey the same physics. Two spheres, a huge one of rubberized fabric to hold the hydrogen and a tiny one of thin-walled metal to hold the air that would keep the people alive. A cone of shroud lines connecting them. Compressed gas and ballast to make it go up and down, controls and contraptions for actuating those from inside the capsule. Some of the English-speaking reporters were already muttering that this was just a copy of the American one, but Aurora doubted that Dick would have agreed.
She felt that she was more than halfway to being Proton’s girlfriend. Close enough that she ought to have been entitled to wish him well, maybe even give him a kiss on the cheek for good luck. But that was ruled out by circumstances. Things happened fast. The days were still all too brief and the launch was behind schedule. Abruptly the hangar doors were hauled open, letting in a fanfare of bleak sunlight and a fist of cold air. A truck towed the gondola, which was mounted on a trailer, out to the field where the balloon was beginning to mound up. It moved at no more than a walking pace, so the crowd went with it. But everyone who wasn’t a scientist, engineer, or aeronaut was diverted onto a wedge of bleachers rising from the edge of the field. During the walk she had almost come close enough to Proton to call out his name, but she wasn’t sure he’d even recognize her in the full Svetlana disguise, surmounted by winter clothes. What ought to have been hers—the wishing him well, the kiss on the cheek—was taken care of by some fake girlfriend issued from the ranks of the Komsomol. Then he saluted to some important people who’d come out from the Kremlin and crawled through the capsule’s tiny circular hatch. This was bolted into place. Various pre-flight checks and tests happened, making sure that the aeronauts could breathe. The whole time the balloon just kept getting bigger, peeling itself off the ground and growing to a size that would have astonished her if she hadn’t seen one like it before.
And then at some point physics took precedence over story and the thing just sprang into the air. What had seemed so huge became tiny over the space of a few minutes. For a while it was a white star in the northeastern sky. Then it rose up through a veil of high, icy clouds and disappeared. By that point Owen and a few other handpicked journalists had long since piled into their cars and roared off in pursuit.
The fact that Proton and all the other aeronauts were dead was never announced, but they did get an excellent funeral. Aurora had now been in the Soviet Union long enough to understand. A big, splashy balloon launch made for excellent, upbeat propaganda. A big funeral made for sad, but still excellent, propaganda. The in-between part—the actual announcement that the balloon had crashed and killed everyone aboard—did not make for such great propaganda and so it was simply omitted. Beyond a certain point you were just expected to know that all of those aeronauts were dead. Naïve persons—foreign visitors, say, who had only just arrived—might think, I must have missed the announcement, and flip back through the last couple of weeks’ back issues of Pravda looking for an article—perhaps squirreled away on a back page, but at least still there, somewhere—stating that the balloon had crashed with the loss of the entire crew. But people in the know wouldn’t even bother. They would just know. And the sooner they knew, the more well-connected they seemed.
His captors in Magnitogorsk gave Dr. Fizmatov a week’s pass to travel to Moscow for the funeral. Aurora was able to have tea with him in the lobby of the Metropol. Elektron arranged it and sat there with them. It was all complicated because the parents were divorced, and not in a very friendly way, and poor Lek wasn’t good at navigating such situations—he’d always relied on Proton for that kind of thing.
After all the trouble it took Lek to arrange the get-together, they didn’t have a lot to talk about. But Aurora had already seen enough of death and funerals to understand that it was always thus. You didn’t go to a funeral to break new ground in a friendship. You just showed up, made small talk, nibbled on things, and went home. It was really just a way of taking a census, a head count of who was still alive.
Dr. Oleksandr Fizmatov, Ukrainian metallurgist and political prisoner, normally wouldn’t have been welcome in the Metropol, but he was still dressed in the getup that had been provided him for the funeral—a massive procession across Red Square, complete with warplanes flying overhead. So, just this once, they let him sit there and take tea. He had apparently got updates from his sons as to what Aurora was up to, so he didn’t have a lot of questions. For her part, she could have asked him how things were going in Magnitogorsk, but the answer would have been forgotten as soon as heard.
She got up to use the toilet. When she emerged, she noticed, from across the lobby, that a man had come over to chat with the Fizmatovs. He was standing with his back to Aurora. Young, upright, well-dressed. As she came closer she realized that it was Owen Crisp-Upjohn. She turned away and found a place to sit at the other end of the lobby, in a high-backed chair around which she could peek from time to time to see if Owen was still there. He stayed longer than she expected—fifteen minutes or so—then went on his way. Only then did Aurora go back and reclaim her place.
“What did he want?” she asked.
She recalled, now, that prior to the launch, in the hangar, Owen had spent time talking to both Proton and Elektron. He’d have recognized Lek in the lobby. Perhaps even made the reasonable guess that the older gentleman next to him was the bereaved father.
“That is a very courteous and well-spoken young man,” said Dr. Fizmatov.
“What language were you speaking?”
“French.”
Lek shrugged. Not a French speaker himself.
“There are a lot of ways to say you’re sorry in French. He knows some of the better ones,” Dr. Fizmatov continued.
“You talked to him for a while,” Aurora observed.
“He was there. At the site of the crash. He wanted us to understand that death was instantaneous.” Dr. Fizmatov was strangely impassive, clinical, as he said this. But then tears filled his eyes faster than he could blink them away. “Of course in a sense that’s true when you hit the ground at very high velocity. Then death comes before you can feel it. But before then . . .”
“They were falling for a long time,” Lek said. “Minutes.” His eyes rolled up and to one side. Aurora realized, fascinated, that he was performing the calculation in his head. How long, to the decimal point, had his brother known he was about to die?
“This Owen chap is a sophisticated man, and he knows it’s all just words at this point. But he also knew that it would mean something to me to talk to one who was there.” Dr. Fizmatov wiped his face with a white linen napkin and threw it down. “Aurora. Walk with me.”
One of those walks. They left Elektron Fizmatov in the lobby to calculate.
It was as if the crash of the balloon had precipitated a change in the weather. Winter was over. Tires were hissing on streets that were wet for the first time in six months. The conversation wasn’t long, and didn’t need to be. They just made a quick turn around Revolution Square.
“I can guess well enough what they have you doing,” Fizmatov said. “I saw it all taking shape around that dinner table in Magnitogorsk. I won’t say the obvious things. You can’t possibly have any illusions in your head as to what kind of man Beria is—what he’s capable of.”
“Certainly not.”
“You must do what is necessary to survive. I understand this. We all do it.”
“Thank you.” She meant it. Though she hadn’t really dwelled on it, there’d been this voice in her head recently. The voice of Dr. Fizmatov. Approving or not.
“This business that we talked about at that dinner . . .”
It took her a moment. “You mean neutrons? Alchemy?”
“Yes.”
“What of it?”
“It’s important, Aurora. It’s very important.”