You Are One of Them (22 page)

“You were my best friend,” she said. The phrase had the hollow snap of a slogan.

“And now?” I said.

“Now I need help,” she said. “I’m broke.”

“I told you. The foundation is a nonprofit,” I said.

“But your father gives you money.”

“Svetlana told you that?”

“Last April,” she began. “I had an investment opportunity. An oil concern. A chance to protect my savings from inflation. The money my father left—the pension from the KGB—I found a way to make it last.” She drew nervously on her cigarette. “Oil. One thing this country has is oil. And the investment company’s board of directors . . . . There were names I knew on the list. Names I recognized. Former government officials. I told Svetlana we would not have to worry about money anymore. The state is bankrupt, but the market, the free market, it will provide for us.” She took another drag. “The minimum investment was one million rubles.”

“You gave them one million rubles?”

She nodded, sadly.

“In April of this year?” She nodded again. I did the math based on the exchange rate in the spring of 1995. A million rubles was about two hundred thousand dollars. “And it’s gone?”

“You think I’m very stupid, don’t you? You think how very naïve I am, to trust these people. Their board of directors? All those official names? The fancy stationery with the letterhead? I know now it was false. These were common criminals. But you don’t know what it’s like to be here, with the ground shifting all the time under your feet, with the rules changing, with the food disappearing and the opportunities—so many opportunities! I thought I would be an actress!—slipping through your fingers. You see this house? This is all I have. I was going to be a movie star. I thought I was going to live in Hollywood. Now I barely have enough to eat. It’s not fair. Do you know what it’s like to lose everything?”

“You want money?” I said. I thought of the money from my father. Ten thousand dollars was nothing to him. He and Phillipa wrote checks of that size all the time.

“I wanted to see you again,” she said.

It was what I’d longed to hear. But I’d always imagined hearing those words from the Jenny I knew. I’d been holding on to my fossilized idea of Jenny. The woman beside me—who claimed to be the former Jennifer Jones—seemed like a stranger. And it wasn’t just Jenny I’d suspended in amber. I’d turned myself into a fossil, too.

“What about my letter?” I said.

“What letter?”

“My letter to Andropov,” I said.

“
I
wrote the letter to Andropov,” she said.

“You wrote the letter that he received,” I said. How could she not remember? “Mine ended up behind your bulletin board.”

“What do you mean?” she said. She looked genuinely confused. Maybe she never knew that my letter was tucked behind the bulletin board. Her dad could have hidden it and then told her he’d mailed both. Although I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t have destroyed my letter. Weren’t spies in the habit of eliminating evidence?

The woman before me could have been Jenny. Or she could have been an impostor who’d been briefed by Svetlana. Jenny had told Sveta a lot about me in the summer of 1983. She told Svetlana that my parents were divorced, that my sister was dead, that I was sad. But she had obviously neglected to mention that I wrote a letter to Andropov, too. She never told anyone that the letter that made her famous was my idea. She never gave me the credit. I’d never told my story. Why would anyone believe me?

“Do you remember . . . ?” Zoya said. “The magnolia tree in your backyard? The way we used to touch the petals to see how fast they would turn brown?”

I had forgotten it until that moment. “Yes,” I said. My mother had warned us that the oil in our fingers would ruin the flowers.
Don’t touch,
she said.
Don’t touch.
We couldn’t resist.

“How much money do you need?” I said.

“For starters? Twenty thousand dollars,” she said. “I owe the creditors . . . I don’t know who to turn to. You’re the only one who can help me.”

“I don’t have that much,” I said.

“How much do you have?” she said. She dropped her cigarette and crushed it out with her left foot.

I didn’t have to tell her, but I did. “Ten thousand,” I said. “I have ten thousand.”

She said I could deposit the money in a bank account she had set up. “I’ll give you the account information.” Then she hugged me. It was a hungry embrace. The appetite in her limbs—arms that held me for a beat too long, legs locked close to mine—was the strangest aspect of this Jenny. The girl I’d known didn’t need me. I could feel her slide a piece of paper into the pocket of my corduroys. “You are a lifesaver,” she whispered. She released me from the hug and clasped her hands together, the way Jenny’s mother used to do. “You are saving my life. Do you know that?”

“Are you really happy here?” I said.

“I dream in Russian now,” she said. “This is home.”

•   •   •

B
ACK IN THE
HOUSE,
Zoya resumed her cover.

“So?” Svetlana said, expectation cresting in her voice. “It was a good walk?”

“A very good walk,” Zoya said.

Svetlana poured the tea and set a plate of cookies on the coffee table. Andrei claimed the leather recliner. I was next to Zoya on the couch. Our conversation returned to its stilted conventions.

“We wanted to make you a cake,” Zoya said. “A birthday cake. But in Russia it’s bad luck to celebrate a birthday early. You have to wait.” It was November 5. My birthday was in two days.

“Perhaps you will come back,” Svetlana said. She and Zoya exchanged a look.

“When I was a child,” I said slowly to test their reactions, “my friend and I wrote letters to Yuri Andropov. We were worried that he was going to start a nuclear war.”

“The newspapers never said anything about
you
writing a letter,” said Svetlana. She shot Zoya a nervous glance.

“No,” I said. “Newspapers are not necessarily truth.”

“We were all writing letters,” said Andrei. “Post for Peace, we called it. Children here were urged to write to President Reagan. We thought you were going to bomb us.”

“You wrote letters?” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “Everyone did. Children were used for propaganda.” And just like that, my experience was flattened into something generic, off the rack. Nothing about my story was special.

“Spasibo za kompaniyu,”
Zoya said when she showed Andrei and me to the door. Thank you for the company.

“Was it worth defecting for?” I whispered.

“What can you mean?” she said.

•   •   •

A
NDREI AND
I
DIDN’T TALK
on the way back to the city. I was cold, and he handed me a blanket to spread across my lap. We were on a road without streetlamps; the headlights pioneered through the night. It was too dark to see the birch trees, but I could hear the wind in their branches.
“Tikha zoloto,”
he said. Silence is golden. I didn’t answer.

When he finally pulled up in front of Corinne’s building, he said,
“Chto ti dumayesh?”
What do you think?

“I’m still not going to sleep with you,” I said. But I pondered what would happen if I did. Would I rifle through his wallet while he slept? It was hard to know who was in on what. I could seduce him for information, I thought. But I could picture the morning after, the awkward first look at each other in daylight. I’d play it cool while he pulled on his clothes and pretended he wasn’t in a rush to leave. He’d pretend I mattered to him, and I’d pretend to believe it. He would tell me I was beautiful, but it wouldn’t change anything. We’d still be pretending. I was holding out for the real thing.

His finger crawled up my arm. I pulled away. “Don’t,” I said.

“Have you found the friend you were looking for?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Ochen stranno,”
he said. Very strange.

“I’m a strange girl,” I said.

“I like you anyway,” he said.

“You don’t know me.”

“Let me get to know you. Have a drink with me.”

“Not tonight,” I said. “We’ve been drinking all day.” Until I got to Moscow, I didn’t believe the stories about how much Russians drank.

“Another night?” he said.

“We’ll see,” I said. “I’m starting a new job. I’m going to be busy.”

“Americans love to be busy,” he said. “So many to-do lists.”

“You’ve got us all figured out,” I said.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Absolutely nothing.”

•   •   •

I
N MY ROOM
THAT NIGHT,
I pulled out the piece of paper that that Zoya/Jenny had folded into my pocket. It was typed, so there were no handwriting hints.

S,

As soon as I can pay you back, I will. But I need the money by December 1st. Please. I’m desperate. See account number below.

J.

P.S. Burn after reading!

I thought again of Zoya’s hug. Did she feel that fierce need in me when we were kids? Did she feed off it until, like too much sugar, it made her sick?

I didn’t need the money. I could transfer it into Zoya’s account and pretend I’d never had it. It seemed fitting in a way, that the money my dad had given me should go to the friend who’d filled the space he left in my life. It was a relief to know that the money wouldn’t be there, tempting me away from self-sufficiency. But that was assuming that Zoya really was Jenny.

There was only one way to find out.

Z
OYA SAID SHE
SWAM
laps at the Olympic pool in the mornings. So the next day I got up early and took the Metro there. I showed my
spravka
to the desk clerk, paid my admission fee. In the locker room, I soaped my private parts before anyone could yell at me.

I was out on the pool deck by a few minutes after seven. I wondered if Richard had watched the 1980 games. He said that Russians didn’t know anything about marketing, but they were savvy enough to brand their games with Misha the Bear. The mascot was everywhere, even floating over the closing ceremonies as a giant bear-shaped balloon. On the wall of the pool, huge Cyrillic letters proclaimed the Olympic motto:
Faster, Higher, Stronger. I was about to get into the very pool the American swimmers were denied the chance to compete in because of the boycott.

Two old men were crawling down the lane on the far right, and in the center a flabby woman was breaststroking toward me. She wore a rubber cap with flowers on it, like the ones from the 1950s. The room was hot, and the suffocating smell of chlorine put me in a dreamlike state. I half expected to see Jenny emerge from the water in her yellow bathing suit. “Two out of three!” she’d say whenever I beat her to the end of her backyard pool. She couldn’t bear to lose.

If I could see Zoya in a bathing suit, I could check for the birthmark. If the birthmark was there, I decided I’d give her the money, however vague her reasons for wanting it. I crouched at the edge of the pool and splashed water on my latex cap to make it slick enough to put on easily. I can’t go into an indoor pool without thinking of my high-school team. Outdoor pools are for summer frolicking, but indoor pools I associate entirely with hard work. Sprints and drills. Sets on intervals. Only the truly dedicated swim indoors. I was a good swimmer. My old coach called me a stealthy competitor. He said I didn’t look like a threat on the starting blocks, but once I was in the water, I was hard to beat. It was all about will. I snapped my goggles into place and slid into the lane.

I stuck to freestyle and counted the lengths with each flip turn. One hundred meters, then two hundred, then three. Jenny’s book was full of pictures of the Soviet Pioneers competing in swimming races at camp on the Crimea. The sea was partitioned by lane lines. For the championships there was a red banner with the Olympic motto and bleacher seating for the crowd. “The water in the Black Sea is so salty,” Jenny had said. “You float without even trying.” I felt like I was in Jenny’s wake, that with each stroke my fingers might catch her slippery toes. But it was the young Jenny I was thinking of. The person who didn’t exist anymore. After five hundred meters, I could feel a burn in my biceps. My arms felt too heavy to lift, and my strokes became choppy. After one thousand meters, I stopped to rest. I stood panting against the wall of the shallow end, desperate for a drink of water.

That’s when she walked out of the locker room. Unmistakably Zoya. She was wearing a red bathing suit and blue track pants. Her mouth was set in a furious expression, as if her teeth were clenched. I was in lane three. In my cap and goggles, I felt sleek and anonymous. She knelt at the edge of lane seven and stuck a tentative hand into the pool. Checking the temperature, I thought. I waited for her to take off her track pants so I could see her thighs. But she stood up and began stretching. She spread her legs wide, arced sideways, and extended an arm. In that position she looked so much like Jenny.

I pushed off the wall of my lane and stayed underwater so she couldn’t see me. I’d reveal myself after another lap. I made it down half the length of the pool—twenty-five meters—before I needed to come up for air. That’s what I’ve got going for me: strong lungs. The lungs of a nonsmoker.
Trust, but verify
. Is it really trust, though, if you have to fact-check it? Either you make the leap or you don’t. You believe in spite of the doubt. You believe because you want to believe. Or you decide to put your trust in something—or someone—else. In yourself, maybe.

I switched to backstroke on my return to the other end of the pool. It felt good to swim. I felt invincible.
Faster, Higher, Stronger.
Of the Artek races, Jenny said, “Svetlana is a good swimmer, but not as fast as you.” Jenny didn’t watch the 1984 Summer Games with me. That was the year of the retaliatory Soviet boycott; she and I were already estranged.

I overtook a woman in my lane. She turned her head to the side and sucked at the air like a blind puppy trying to find a teat. Too much breathing will slow you down. About fifteen meters from the wall, I picked up speed. I wanted a strong finish. But I misjudged the distance and slammed my head into the wall. I was in the shallow end, so I stood up and pulled off my swim cap. My head was throbbing. When I touched the back of my scalp, my fingers came away warm with blood.

A babushka
was reprimanding me in Russian from the next lane. “Be careful,” she was saying. “You have to watch where you’re going.”

A drop of my blood hit the pool. I watched it separate as it moved through the water and thought,
If I were in the ocean, I’d attract sharks. I’d be prey.

Zoya was thirty yards away, sitting on the deck, folded over her outstretched legs. Loosening up her hamstrings, perhaps. She could have been anyone.

Even now, in my thirties, whenever a romantic relationship ends, I find myself saying,
He’s not the person I thought he was.
From a distance a lover I knew so well becomes a man I do not recognize. I see him with his new girlfriend and even his posture is different. With her his stance is more solid, more aloof. I no longer see the cracks, the vulnerable places where he let me in. He is across the room at a party—with a little effort, an adjusted angle, our eyes would meet—but he might as well be on another continent.
Have you
met X?
someone says to me, and I do not say,
I used to share his bed. I used to
know his passwords and his whims.
Instead I say, in the same vague tone I reserve for elevators,
I think
we met once a long time ago.
Because the person who he is with her is a stranger. A foreigner. Maybe the person he was with me was just a role he was trying on. And maybe the words he fed me were lines. But that doesn’t mean the relationship was any less real. It felt true to me.

I hoisted myself out of the pool and stood there, dripping water and blood, knowing that my teeth would soon start to chatter the way they always did when I was cold. I felt woozy and wondered if I had a concussion. No one was going to sweep in and take care of me if I did. Even Jenny couldn’t be counted on. She’d left me in the woods. If our roles had been reversed, she wouldn’t have spent two hours looking for
me.

When I asked my mother why I was the last to know the truth about Santa Claus, she said, “People believe in things until they don’t need to anymore.”

Suddenly I didn’t want to see Zoya’s bare legs. Even if the birthmark was there, Jenny was dead. My friend was gone. I didn’t need her anymore.

Zoya never saw me. When I left the pool, she was still stretching.

•   •   •

T
HE NEXT NIGHT
I celebrated my twenty-third birthday by going out for Georgian food with Corinne and Leslie and Jane. They sang to me in Russian. Then Corinne said, “I don’t think it’s unfortunate that birthdays only happen once a year. I am in no rush to get older, thank you very much.”

“Amen to that,” said Leslie.

Jane insisted that we order champagne. It wasn’t real champagne, though. Just the sparkling wine that the menu referred to as
shampanskoe.
We raised our glasses. “To your new job!” Jane said. “To your future as an ace reporter.”

•   •   •

T
HE FOLLOWING WEEK
Svetlana would call me for the last time.
“Spasibo bolshoe,”
she said. Thanks a lot.

“For what?” I said.

“You helped us create the idea!” she said.

“What idea?” I said.

“For Czar,” she said. “Now I will go to USA. To New York office. I will go to top of Empire State Building. I will walk on Brooklyn Bridge.” She sounded like she might not come back. I pictured her triumphantly hailing a yellow cab.

“So what’s the campaign idea?” I said.

“‘Czar,’” she said. “‘The cola worth defecting for.’ The campaign will be tongue-in-cheek. We will use the Cold War imagery.”

“That’s good,” I said. I didn’t bother to point out that defectors were anachronistic with czars. “Congratulations. But you didn’t need my help.” When it came to marketing, she was an expert. I told her I was staying in Moscow to work for the newspaper.

“This is funny,” she said. “You will be in Russia, I will be in America. We make a switch.”

“It is funny,” I said.

“When Jennifer Jones came here in 1983, I asked many questions about America. I never thought I would see for myself.”

“I waited a long time to see Russia,” I said.

“And?” she said. “You like what you found here?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m glad you invited me. Thank you.”

“Nichevo.”
It’s nothing. “And our friend?” she said. “You will help her?”

“I can’t,” I said. “I don’t have what she needs.”

“You have everything she needs,” she said. Her voice was drawn tight like a slingshot, ready to fire.

“I don’t,” I said.
“Eto ne pravda.”
It’s not true.

•   •   •

I
TOOK A DIRECT
FLIGHT
to New York. I had a window seat, and as the plane lifted off early that afternoon, I looked out at the morose scene below. It was snowing gently, and as the runway lights streaked and blurred beneath me, I felt as if I were traveling through time. Going to Moscow was like stepping through a magic portal to a very different world. A world of superstition and shadows, of poetry and deadly icicles. Defectors and spies. Secret messages and invisible ink. Svetlana and Zoya and Andrei had served me the Russia of my imagination. It was hard to believe that it would take just ten hours to get back to the place where I began.

The seat next to me was empty, but across the aisle a toddler suddenly burst into hysterical tears. He writhed on his mother’s lap. “I don’t speak Russian,” she said to me. “He’s been crying for two days. I can’t get him to stop.” She rocked back and forth, and it was clear she was trying to soothe herself as much as the child. She told me that she had adopted the baby from an orphanage in Nizhny Novgorod and now she was taking him home to Nashville. She trembled as if the enormity of her decision to adopt this orphan had just hit her. On the flight to Moscow, she had probably been dreaming of nursery paint colors, and now she had the complicated knot of motherhood to face.