“Mama,” Marina says, once they’re settled on the sofa—Lyudmila reading a KGB training manual, Marina reading Tolstoy for school tomorrow—“how old were you when you met my father?”
Lyudmila thinks for a moment. “I was twelve years old.”
“Ah. The same as me.”
“A little older.”
“Oh, a few months,” Marina says impatiently.
She returns to her book and Lyudmila returns to her training manual, but thanks to Marina’s strange question she can’t concentrate. She keeps thinking about Dmitri, and how he used to shield her from some of the other children, who teased her because she was so smart and serious and wore clothes even uglier and shabbier than the other girls. She thought he was just being kind, but when she turned seventeen he told her it was because he fell in love with her that first day at school, when they were both twelve years old.
The next day, Lyudmila receives word of an unusual request from the American embassy. Mrs. Alexander Digby, who has a history of difficult childbirth, has apparently invited her sister to stay with her in Moscow, during and after the period of her delivery. The sister wishes to formally apply for two visas to enter the Soviet Union, one for herself and one for her husband, to whom she is newly married.
Lyudmila’s skin prickles as she reads this report. She holds no truck with sentiment, but instinct is a KGB officer’s most valuable asset.
She picks up her telephone and asks to speak to the head of the American section.
Ruth
June 1952
Rome, Italy
I’ll say this for Herbert Hudson. When I told him I needed four hundred dollars to fly to Europe and help my sister with her new baby, he didn’t ask any silly questions, like why couldn’t I sail instead, and when would I return. He wrote me a check and wished me bon voyage, then expressed his hope that the agency would remain a going concern in my absence.
That was Saturday afternoon at his place. By Sunday afternoon at five o’clock, I’m safely belted into my seat on the Pan Am Strato Clipper transatlantic service, scheduled to stop in Boston before continuing across the ocean to Paris and then to Rome. On my lap, the Sunday paper features a photograph of our party at the Palmetto Club on the front of the society page, in which Miss Barbara Kingsley is singled out as “the up-and-coming model in New York these days.” I fed that caption myself to my old pal Joan on the social beat, and it gives me immense satisfaction—it always does—to see my words repeated back to me in sincere black and white.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been inside one of those new double-decker Boeing Stratocruisers, but I can’t recommend them enough. For one thing, they’re fast. We lift off from Idlewild bang on schedule at five p.m., and an hour later we descend from a thin layer of clouds to land in Boston to take on a few more passengers. You hardly even notice the change in altitude because they pressurize the cabin to sea level, and the noise of those four giant Pratt & Whitney propeller engines is no more than a droning annoyance. We land with scarcely a bump and roll to a magnificent stop near the terminal. The seating’s all first class, as it should be, and I paid extra for one of those sleeping berths up front, since we won’t land in Paris until the following afternoon and God knows I need a few decent hours of shut-eye. I settle back in my seat and peer idly out the window at the five passengers preparing to board. There’s a young couple that looks as if they’re headed on their honeymoon, bless them, all pink and bright the way you set off on adventures when you’re just a baby. A couple of dour businessmen in pin-striped suits and fedoras, not entering into the spirit of things at all. A grand dame speaks in an animated way to the head stewardess, telling her exactly how to do her job.
They find their seats—the stewardess bolts the door. The propellers whine, the airplane trundles back to the runway. It’s nearly seven o’clock in the evening and the sun is a molten pool to the west. I light a cigarette and stare out the window at America as it falls away below me. God only knows when I’ll see it again.
I haven’t returned to Rome in twelve years, not since I sailed away on that terrible day in June of 1940. The good ship Antigone was packed with desperate Americans and I had to share my second-class berth with a middle-aged artistic type of woman whose summer tour of Italy’s Renaissance treasures had been cut short almost before it began. I remember she was indignant about it all, as if she’d traveled to Italy that spring with no expectation whatsoever that her travels might be interrupted by a thing so inconvenient as war. In fact, she hadn’t wanted to go home at all—she’d kicked up a real fuss, she claimed proudly—but since the Italians were putting all the great paintings in storage and boarding up the museums, there was no point but to capitulate as rapidly as the French had. I found her complaints strangely soothing. She was one of those people who was happy to talk about herself and her troubles to a complete stranger and expected nothing more of you than the occasional sympathetic noise. She said she would go back just as soon as this awful business was over. Sometimes she asked about me, and what I was doing in Italy, and I made up extravagant lies about a love affair with a Russian émigré, a jealous Italian wife, some extremely valuable jewelry, a discreet apartment decorated in beautifully preserved Carracci frescoes, all of which she drank up like punch. When we docked in New York she insisted on exchanging addresses. I’m afraid I never answered her letter.