The ambassador waved our objections aside. “No one is going to Stalingrad yet. Our directive comes from the Kremlin; we will continue on to Canada and then Great Britain . . .”
I wilted, hearing the details: we were to fly to Montreal, then Halifax, then Glasgow, then London . . . I saw a long line of receptions, dinners, and speeches stretching out in front of me. Would Slavka think I didn’t want to come home to him? At this rate he’d be a man grown by the time I returned. “I serve the Soviet Union,” I replied, sighing, when the ambassador paused for a response.
“Did you manage to say that without cursing?” Kostia asked later. He’d come to my room as discreetly as ever, knocking only after Yuri had trundled off duty. （What did Soviet concrete blocks do, off duty? Perhaps a little light reading: Winning the War Against Capitalism, I. K. Volkov, 9th edition.）
“Barely.” I curled into Kostia’s shoulder. We were lying in a mess of sheets, cold Washington sunlight slanting through the blinds, still damp with sweat from recent exertions. “Then I got a scolding because the ambassador somehow got wind of the marriage proposal I got from that ass Jonson, and feared I meant to accept it and defect!” I pleated the sheet between my fingers, shaking my head. “Imagine thinking I’d jump at the chance to stay in the United States.”
“It’s not so bad here.”
I smiled. “If I have to eat another hot dog, I’ll run shrieking around the Washington Monument. I want white nights, Kostia. I want ponchiki in a paper cone, all dusted with sugar. I want people who know about Bogdan Khmelnitsky and the Pereyaslav Council—”
“Mila, even in Russia no one knows about the Pereyaslav Council.”
“They will once I finish my dissertation. If you can even read my dissertation anymore through the bloodstains and the gunpowder burns.” I shook my head. “All my schooling would mean nothing if I stayed here—I could never be a historian, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. Yet even people like Mrs. Roosevelt seemed to think I’d be grateful to stay.”
“Some people would.” Kostia’s voice sounded odd.
“Not people like us.” I tugged my partner’s head down for a kiss, but he’d gone utterly still. “Kostia . . .”
He reached over suddenly and turned on the radio. The sound of Kay Kyser warbling “Jingle, Jangle, Jingle” filled the hotel room as Kostia cranked up the volume, then rolled over in bed and pulled me beneath him. Laying his cheek against mine and his lips to my ear, he spoke in a voice that was barely more than a thread. “I want to tell you about New York.”
I didn’t know if my room was being listened to by our minders, but Kostia was taking no chances. He told me in the vaguest terms possible, in a nearly soundless whisper right into my eardrum so not even the most sensitive microphone could pick up his words . . . but the picture was clear enough.
He’d summoned up the nerve to knock on the door of his grandmother’s sister in Ridgewood. He’d shown her photographs: his grandmother; his mother. He’d been welcomed, embraced, introduced to others.
It hadn’t been explicitly said . . . but they would welcome him if he stayed.
He fell silent then, his face taut and stony, and I had no idea what I could say. There were too many things to say, all of them impossible. How can you think of walking away from your country?—but I could see why he was tempted. The motherland could be great, I believed that with all my soul, but I wasn’t going to pretend in a moment like this that it wasn’t a hard, unforgiving place to make a life. You’re in danger—but Kostia knew that; he knew he risked a bullet even for revealing he had family here, much less for visiting them. And my final desperate question: How can you be with me and then threaten to leave me?—but that wasn’t important. This was a life to consider, his life—I had flesh and blood in Russia pulling me back there by an invisible steel thread, but he didn’t. His only blood family was here. His tie to Russia was . . . me.