Polostan
March 1934
It was a matter of drainage. In the spring, half a year’s precipitation suddenly became liquid and the world became mud and you couldn’t play polo on mud. But it turned out that there was a place south of Moscow where a river made a big, lazy bend. It had been depositing sand on its floodplain since time immemorial. The sand couldn’t hold water, which made it useless for agriculture. But in the spring thaw it became a decent enough riding surface as soon as the snow had melted away. Slower than turf, of course, but they weren’t trying to hold the world polo championship here, just getting some exercise for the mounts and the men.
And now women. Aurora came down a week in advance, dragging a massive trunk containing Owen’s entire literary output, the three different English dictionaries needed to fully decipher it, several Red Army uniforms (men’s and women’s), a sewing machine, leatherworking tools, boots, jodhpurs, and red hair dye. The cavalry, which of course consisted entirely of men, was already pitching camp on the site, and trailering ponies to makeshift stables. It was clear from the manner in which they received her that they’d been given a stiff talking-to from someone of whom they were terrified. The fact that the Red Army women’s polo team was utterly factitious (an Owen word, there) was neither here nor there. Separate tents and sanitary facilities had been set up for them. Like so much else in the Soviet Union these looked to have been thrown together in a day by men with guns to their heads. But it wasn’t much worse than where the men were going to stay. Aurora told the men where to put her enormous trunk. She got the stove lit and then sat down to ponder as the place warmed up.
More than once she’d replayed in her head that exchange in Beria’s office. Like a censor airbrushing a disgraced commissar from a photograph of Stalin, she had simply edited Zhirkin out of the recollection.
Is there a Red Army women’s polo team?
Would you like there to be?
It was both a simple ask and a way of Beria saying, What would you do if I allowed you to have that much power? Part of her shrank from that, but after a couple of sleepless nights (they’d given her a new flat, the bowls of kerosene were no longer necessary) she understood that from here on there would be no steady state, no day-to-day job into which she could settle. She was going to have to keep advancing.
She remembered her father taking her to a seafood market in Seattle, close enough to the waterfront that you could hear the waves pounding the piers, where they had a big aquarium full of live Dungeness crabs. They never stopped climbing over one another. Occasionally one would get high enough to thrust one claw up out of the water and hook it over the rim of the tank. It seemed plausible for a few moments that it might heave itself over the edge, fall to the floor, and scuttle out the door, making a break for the cold, murky waters of Elliott Bay. But any crab that ascended to that height was immediately grabbed onto by others below and dragged back down. Young Dawn had always sympathized with those aspirant crabs—the climber-outers, she called them—and instinctively loathed the grabber-onners. The ones who just sat motionless on the floor of the aquarium, waiting to die—the giver-uppers—she scarcely noticed. She wondered if any of the climber-outers had ever made good their escape. She wondered, too, how much craft the builders of the aquarium had put into making it seem escapable, but in reality an Alcatraz for crustaceans. In sight of freedom. But if you attempted it you’d learn the physics were against you. You were no different from Proton, bolted into a metal sphere, experiencing zero gravity and knowing what it meant.
Anyway, she was a crab in a tank. Beria had already figured out that she was no giver-upper. By posing that question he was trying to find if she was a climber-outer or a mere grabber-onner. After some consideration she’d said yes, she wanted such a polo team to exist.
It helped that the idea wasn’t purely ridiculous. The Soviet Union had an army—the largest in the world, at the moment. Like all armies, this included cavalry. Like every other cavalry, they played polo. As could be attested by the likes of Veronika—a minor celebrity in her own right—the Red Army was second to none in incorporating women into its ranks. This team only needed to be willed into existence. The men here already had the physical apparatus: the ponies, the stables, the grooms, the tack, mallets (Brits called them “sticks”), balls, and goals. All that was really needed was three women, in addition to Aurora, who were good riders. In some inscrutable way these had been extracted from the Soviet military. One of them, a Tatar from Bashkortostan, had arrived a couple of days ago. Two more—a Zaporizhian Cossack and a Belarussian—showed up the next day. The only thing they had in common, other than absolute bewilderment, was that they were experienced riders. None of them had played polo, of course. The Tatar had never even heard of it. But having arrived early, with no orders, she’d watched the men play and got the general idea.
But they weren’t claiming that this was a crack polo team. Just that it was a new one—which was no lie. Some of the girls were better than others with needle and thread, but over the course of a few evenings they were able to pull together what passed for uniforms. Secondhand gear from the men’s team was adequate—anything nicer would have looked suspicious. Ponies, of course, were abundant. The men didn’t mind letting the women borrow some of the smaller ones. Aurora rode full-sized mounts. This was resented by some of the grooms and lower ranks, but those were overruled by obviously terrified officers. When it came down to it, the only thing that really mattered to these men was the horses. They didn’t want these carefully trained mounts spoiled by bad riders. Once they saw that the girls were good riders, they settled down.
So it only remained to teach the girls enough basics to make it look like they’d done this before. A tall order in the few days they had. But if you knew how to ride, and you were on a mount accustomed to the swing of the stick and the crack of the ball, this boiled down to smacking a thing with a hammer. The camp already had a polo pit—a wooden horse surrounded by an embankment. It was the usual way to teach the basic strokes to beginners. From there they moved on to practice on an old, very calm mount, legs protected from errant strokes by leather boots. They watched the men practice and rode with them to get a sense of how the game flowed, where you did and didn’t want to be on the ground. They learned some basic tactics—the fact that even if you never struck the ball you could assist your team by interfering with the opposing back. And as twilight fell on the evening of Owen’s arrival, they all rode out in their uniforms and played a chukker against some of the men.
“Polostan!” Owen dubbed it, a few moments after he’d climbed out of the car that had brought him and a couple of other Brits down from Moscow. He kept turning his head from side to side trying to estimate the distance separating the goals, which seemed almost to sink beneath the curvature of the Earth.
The witticism went untranslated by his interpreter. But the joke was the same in any language. His hosts, mostly high-ranking cavalry officers, didn’t get it. Oh, they understood that he’d slapped the Central Asian suffix “-stan” onto “polo”—that much was obvious—but the whole concept of clever wordplay for its own sake just didn’t belong to their world. Banterers they were not.
Aurora was ready for it though. By now she’d read everything Owen had ever published. She’d even learned a new word, “persiflage,” which accurately described ninety percent of the man’s literary output. His capacity for it was why important—which was to say, educated—Brits read his stuff. His wit was now therefore a strategic asset. His only rival—for there was always a rival—was Christian Audsley, Viscount Rocksborough, who’d gone to the same posh school as Owen and was even more disgustingly young and precocious. But the rivalry was like a wheel spur digging into Owen’s flank. It was the only thing saving him from his own indolence. It was why he had bothered to drag himself out of bed this morning, shave, dress, and endure a three-hour drive south to the windswept and chilly floodplain that was now and forever Polostan.
And it made for good watching, as far as Aurora was concerned. Notwithstanding the Bonnie Parkers and Amelia Earharts of the world, it was just the case that men did and women watched. Some watching was more fun than others. Watching a delectable young man like Owen trying to outdo his rival by going out into the world and doing rash, stupid things made for some of the best watching ever. It was why they had cheerleaders at football games. Not just there as entertainment, but to be entertained.
And that was just from reading his words on the page. He wrote in an arch, flagrantly clever style that made his sentences impenetrable to more academically trained Russians. Even for Aurora, a native English-speaker, it took some getting used to and some looking up of words in dictionaries. She’d been looking forward to seeing him in the flesh, in more ways than one. The only thing that had troubled her about the Owen assignment at first was Proton: the only boy she’d met in the Soviet Union she might actually like to date. But she couldn’t cheat on a dead boy.
Owen’s companions were a diplomat from the British embassy and a journalist from Edinburgh. Both were old and podgy and wearing trousers. Owen had worn jodhpurs, meaning that he intended to ride. The junket had been billed as an opportunity for him to have a bit of fun, seeing how his favorite sport was played in the unique circumstances of the Soviet Army. The article practically wrote itself. Aurora could easily imagine high-and-mighty men of the British Empire chortling over their milky tea and runny eggs as Owen described the sandy immensity of Polostan and the primitive ways of Communist equitation. And yet beneath the funny surface layer they’d be learning a few things about the state of the Red Army in general and its cavalry in particular.
His minders had been instructed not to mention the existence of a women’s team. It had to be something that Owen discovered. He had to spy it, to be intrigued by it, maybe to push through some minor show of resistance to learn more—making it an achievement for which he could congratulate himself. Accordingly, Aurora and her team began to conduct a visible but unobtrusive practice off to one side of the main polo grounds during the sixth chukker of a match between two of the men’s teams. The vast size of Polostan left plenty of room for that. There were no fences, no demarcations. Owen had been provided with a good pony. He’d watched the army teams play from the vantage point of the saddle, restlessly riding up and down the edge of the grounds to follow the action or help chase down stray balls.
When the whistle sounded terminating the sixth chukker, Owen cantered directly across the field toward the women, pursued by a minder who, if he was doing as he’d been told, was insisting the whole way that there was nothing to see there. But Owen, like a stallion who’d caught a whiff of a mare, came straight on. More men began to approach in his wake.
Aurora’s experience with the girls’ polo team in Virginia provided her with a template for how she knew this was going to go. The men would be amused by the novelty—the cheek, really—of women trying to play their sport. They would tolerate it at first, if for no other reason than that they enjoyed looking at the shapely bottoms of healthy girls in tight-fitting breeches. Most would not advance much beyond that. But a few, as Patton had done, would begin to take it seriously once they understood that the women took it seriously. This was surprising. A separation would occur. Men who did not like being surprised—stupid men—would turn away and mutter rude things. Men who rather liked being surprised—and she was pretty sure Owen was one of those—would find in it something to take them out of their ennui.
He’d outridden his interpreter. Aurora turned her mount with her knees and a gentle shift of her weight, a detail she knew he’d savor, and rode toward him. She had red hair now. The transformation had startled her teammates, who had been told only that they were here to form a polo team and couldn’t make out what hair color had to do with that. But as with so many other inexplicable happenings in the Soviet Union, they knew better than to ask questions. She knew from Owen’s dossier that he’d now be suspicious if she presented with a radiant waterfall of red hair and so she’d put it up and tucked it under her helmet, except for one stray lock that had “worked loose” during her exertions. Demurely she tucked it back as she drew closer. “Katya,” she said, placing her hand on her sternum. “I speak some little English. Not them.” She waved her stick in the direction of the other girls. “You are Angliskii? Americanskii?”
“The former,” he said, “but fear not, I’m not here to invade you. Unless you want to be invaded.” He muttered the last bit under his breath, looking around for some other chap who might appreciate the double entendre, but no one was there.
“You like to play? It seems you do,” she said, turning her mount so that she was facing in the same direction as Owen, a length ahead. He was obliged to catch up. “Is new sport for us. We try to learn. Good riders. Bad polo players.”
“Well, there’s only one thing for it then,” Owen said, “and that is to play more! From what I’ve observed, all you ladies lack is experience.”
“So give us experience, former.”
It took him a moment to get it. Then his head snapped sideways to look at her.
She had him.
He led the women onto the main ground and galloped about, hand-picking three other men to form a scratch team. They went at it. Not hard, at first. But Owen had chosen his side well, picking men who’d play seriously but with restraint. He shouted at them in English, of which they spoke not a word, but he did it with a combination of zeal and humor that they understood well. If “Katya” was nearby, she attempted to translate. Once they had all got used to one another and the horses and the humans had come to a shared understanding of how it was going to be, they just played. They played with the joy of children and the intensity of warriors.
The only really competitive play was between Owen and “Katya,” whom Aurora already knew was going to be written up in Owen’s next dispatch as the tall, mysterious redhead whose riding skills were a match for any Englishwoman’s and who bantered with him in an effective but hilariously crude approximation of English. She played back, meaning that she was the last defender, and he played number one, providing many excuses for contact. If his number two was mounting an attack, he might come galloping down the field to ride her off. If he was the sole attacker, she would head him off and get in his way. So there was a lot of body-to-body contact between horses and players. For the final chukker she selected a big mount that could handle it. He understood the challenge and came at her hard, and frequently. The incredible size of Polostan sometimes led to the two of them finding themselves virtually alone.
She had not planned on what she did next. Had not even imagined it. But she saw that this was her moment to climb out of the aquarium. She spun her mount round to face him and said, in American English, “Owen. This whole thing was a setup.”
Owen was having so much fun—he was so ridiculously infatuated, with both her and the game—that this took him as much by surprise as if she’d smacked him in the gob with her stick.
“The OGPU wants me to sleep with you.”
He got a thoughtful look on his face, clearly seeing this as more of a good than a bad outcome. Yet understanding the gravity of the situation.
“I need your help getting out of here,” she said. “Sure, I’ll sleep with you if you want. I’d enjoy it, and I can’t get pregnant. But you have to know what this really is.”
There was now a slow but unmistakable transformation that came over him, beginning with his mouth and propagating through his face and body to a degree that even his horse noticed it. She found it fascinating to watch, precisely because she had no idea where it was going at first. At its beginning he was just a fop trying to have a good time. He could have gone on as such without end, and probably would have found that a lot easier. She’d ruined that plan. How, then, was he going to respond? A damsel in distress had thrown herself across his path. He could easily have hurdled this obstacle and galloped on without a look back. But at some level even the most selfish and degenerate man knew what was expected of him. You never knew when you were going to be tested. It was what you did in such a moment that told what kind of man you were. He did not make his choice easily or without misgivings. But after those first few moments of uneasy consideration, an alteration came over him that reminded her in some way of the balloon being slowly filled with hydrogen. At first just a flaccid sack, supine on the field, but by the time it was over, inflated and shapely with power.
“How may I be of assistance, young lady?”
“Fall in love with me.”
“Done. Will there be anything else? Is there some acceptable pretense under which I might see you again? I should like that more than practically anything else my feeble mind is capable of imagining.”
“Someone will make that happen if you continue to show interest.”
“That much, Katya, will be quite easy for me. But you must know I’ve been called away. I’ll be leaving the country very soon.”
“Write me letters.”
“Which . . . will be read by OGPU.”
“Of course. Go around the world and do what you do. Eventually they’ll send me out after you.”
“Then I’ll see you out in the world.” He wheeled his mount and rode back into the fray. She galloped after him.