“The reports of yesterday’s press conference are really quite favorable,” said the First Lady, pouring hot tea into a delicate china cup. “Elsa Maxwell gave you a lovely write-up in the New York Post. Listen: ‘What Lieutenant Pavlichenko possesses is something more than just beauty. Her imperturbable calm and confidence come from what she has had to endure and experience. She has the face of a Madonna from a Correggio painting and the hands of a child, and her olive-colored tunic with its red markings has been scorched by the fire of fierce combat—’ ”
The florid words made me flush, and the next article—the one that described me as having the icy eyes of a cold-blooded killer—made me burn. One day in Washington, and I already had people who disliked me. No, worse than that—I pushed the newspaper away, feeling the crackle of paper in my pocket: Go home you Communist whore or you’ll die here.
One day in Washington, and I was already watching my back.
“YOU WILL RETURN to the White House for the student conference in a few days,” the Soviet ambassador told us all when we gathered in his office after another press conference at noon. “But from tonight on you will be housed near the embassy—a hotel a few blocks from here. You may have the afternoon today for sightseeing on your own, but this evening there is a performance at the national theater which the entire delegation will attend.” Checking notes. “The opera is Madama Butterfly.”
I hadn’t attended the opera since La Traviata in Odessa on the day war broke out. I’d left at intermission then, not even staying to see Vika dance in the opera ballet. I wondered if Vika was still driving tanks or if she’d returned to her toe shoes and raked stages.
Or if she was dead. So many of the people I knew were now dead. And here I was going to the opera . . .
I felt a sudden violent need for fresh air and decided （once we were dismissed） on a walk through the city. High time I saw some part of America that wasn’t glimpsed through a train window or over a bank of microphones—I couldn’t get over how glossy and prosperous this city was. You’d never know there was a war on, looking at the men in gleaming shoes that had never been patched, the women in smart hats and ready-made frocks, the children with their plump well-fed cheeks. The shining automobiles, the buildings unmarked by bomb craters, the shops with no queues stretching out the doors . . . And I blended in here, passersby moving around me without a glance for my canvas shoes and lace-collared dress. I was just another window shopper, not the icy-eyed cold-blooded killer these people had read about with their morning coffee. Not a Communist whore.
I shook that thought away before it could darken the day. “Are you looking forward to the opera tonight?” I asked my minder gamely as he tramped along at my shoulder. “Do you like Puccini?”
“No, Comrade Pavlichenko. It is Western and therefore decadent.”
I sighed. The delegation members had all been assigned minders, discreet Party men in heavy suits whose job it was to shadow us whenever we left the embassy. I’d made a token protest yesterday—what did they think I was going to do, defect? with my son still back home?—but the minder was mandatory, and mine was named Yuri Yuripov, who looked like a cement block in his gray wool coat, and had all the personality of a cement block, too. Having him trudge along behind me while I wandered a line of shops was like wearing a concrete bangle to the swimming pool. “What about some shopping, Comrade Yuripov? A few little luxuries for your wife in Moscow?”
He just stared at me stolidly. You didn’t really expect a rollicking sense of humor from anyone who’d made a career in the NKVD, but the occasional smile would have been nice. I bet he’s a real thigh-slapper at parties, I imagined Lena saying with a chuckle. I wished desperately that she was here instead. If she had been, she would have had her nose pressed up against the glass of the nearest boutique, ogling the dresses on the mannequins. Look at this beauty, she’d be crowing. I’d look like Hedy Lamarr in that!
“Yes, you would,” I said aloud, lingering to look at the dress in the window: a yellow evening gown, heavy satin the color of buttery sunshine, scooped low at the front, skirt slinking toward the floor from a tight-molded waist. I couldn’t take my eyes off that color—something a sniper would never wear; a color that painted you like a target. I’d spent an entire year trying to camouflage myself, blend in, and now suddenly I was yearning for color.