“Find out, all right? I have everything we need. Whenever you give the signal, we can start.”
My heart thuds against my ribs—so hard, I imagine Fox feels it, too. He holds me snug, so our words stay within the glow of our mutual warmth. I turn my head a few inches, so I can see my sister and her children, who are still making a terrible ruckus, though she tries to shush them. But it’s a merry ruckus. It’s the family kind of ruckus that seems loud and contentious when you’re in the middle of it, but when it’s gone, you miss it like you miss the sun when it slips down the other side of the world.
Fox somehow maneuvers Jack and Claire to the window to take in the glorious sights of Moscow through a dirt-streaked pane of glass. Iris gives the baby to Kip. I lean over her to adjust a blanket. “Fox wants to leave as soon as possible.”
“Damn,” she says.
I sit back down and look at her, and she looks at me, and it seems she understands exactly what’s happened without my having to say a word. Like she’s been expecting this—their cover blown. She nods at me, a soundless Yes.
“Are you sure?” I murmur.
“I don’t think we have a choice.”
I stand up. “All right. Act One, the bossy American woman.”
Poor Kedrov. He has the soul of a diplomat, not a KGB man. I lay into him with my best hue and cry.
“I want my sister out of this hospital immediately. It’s barbaric. She needs a natural setting, where she can rest and recover in peace.”
He answers me soothingly. “With respect, Mrs. Fox, best place for new mother is hospital.”
“Oh? And by what authority do you—a man—presume to tell me—a woman—what’s best for a new mother? Are you a doctor? Are you a mother?”
“Mrs. Fox, is impossible. She is too delicate to be moved.”
“But not too delicate to give birth to a ten-pound baby, which is something I doubt you could have accomplished, Mr. Kedrov, let alone survived.”
“Mrs. Fox, please—”
“Don’t Mrs. Fox please me! I will not calm down and stay quiet. I will not back down when it comes to the health and happiness of my sister. I will cause such a stink as you’ve never seen before in your life.”
“Mrs. Fox, doctors agree that—”
“I don’t give a damn what your doctors say! Do you know that nurse tried to tell my sister that some kind of milk mixed together in a factory—molecule by molecule—God only knows what’s in it—is better for a brand-new baby than the milk from his mother’s own breasts?”
The word breasts stings him.
“I-I—”
“Do you want my sister to have a nervous collapse? Do you?”
“Of course n—”
“I mean, I can just see the headlines now, can’t you? ‘Communist doctors kill American mother and her new baby—’”
“You’re being unreasonable, Mrs. Fox—”
“Unreasonable? Oh, believe me, you haven’t seen unreasonable, Kedrov.”
All the while, Fox stands to the side, arms folded, the way you might watch a boxing match. I don’t spare an instant to glance over and see his expression. I don’t need to do that—I know what he must be thinking. Nobody likes a shrew, do they? A woman who insists on having her way. Oh, a man in my position would be hailed a great leader! Firm, decisive, independent, uncompromising. But a woman who stands up for herself and those she loves—well, that’s plain mean and selfish, isn’t it?
No doubt Fox watches my display of shrewishness with natural distaste. He understands I’m not just acting, after all. I am mad. I don’t like being eavesdropped on, and followed, and told what I should do or say or think, or what’s best for me. To wait my turn and obey, because it’s all for the common good. To have my every infraction reported on—oh, the delicious thrill of reporting on someone!—like we’re children in a kindergarten class, and the damned Politburo is the teacher. My God, it’s cathartic to take it all out on poor Kedrov, who is—after all—merely the representative of that sprawling Soviet state.
And what does Kedrov do? He turns and calls in reinforcements—namely, the cobweb-haired doctor who speaks English. They hold a rapid, hush-voiced conference in Russian. Now I glance to Fox, who’s trying to catch their words. We stand in an unoccupied room—this is not, remember, a maternity ward available to the general public—because my angry noise might disturb the peace, while the doctor and Kedrov stand in the hallway, just outside the door. The walls are the same hopeless gray as elsewhere. The bed’s been stripped, the window’s streaked with metropolitan grime. The air smells faintly of antiseptic. I shrug my shoulders to Fox, as if to say Well?