***
Five hours later, Olivia found herself sitting at a garden table on the terrace of a dacha somewhere north of Moscow, watching the sun set over the vast openness of the land. She would judge about a hundred miles north and a touch east, based on the driving time and the position of the sun. She was, in fact, outside of Tver, a city on the Moscow-St. Petersburg road that had once contested with Moscow to be the first city of Russia, and then, between 1931 and 1990, was known as Kalinin. After it had been ravaged by fire in 1763, Catherine the Great had rebuilt Tver in the neoclassical style. German occupation for only two months in 1941 had reduced the city to ashes again and cost the Germans 30,000 lives. She was calm.
The guards were very polite to her, addressing her as Doctor, and using the formal form of address with her, as she did with them. They told her that the next morning, a Lieutenant Colonel Marianenko of the FSB and his assistant would be there to talk with her. Talk. Olivia was not deceived. They were armed. She was not. They had their papers, money, transportation. She had nothing. Her luggage had been delivered with her, but not her laptop, which had apparently been taken away for examination. Also missing were a few other things, such as her pocket knife and even some embroidery snips. So after unpacking and consuming a solitary dinner left for her in the dacha’s kitchen, she poured herself a single stiff brandy from the utterly astonishing amount of alcohol in the pantry, laid out her knitting, and began to work. She went to bed just after ten, annoyed but not surprised that the bedroom door could not be locked from within. She slept soundly until 6:30 AM.
The first thing Olivia did the next morning was to search her bedroom and bathroom thoroughly for observation devices. She found a small camera mounted just above a highboy dresser, trained on the bed. Oink, she muttered. After she showered and dressed, she went down and discovered another person in the dacha, an old woman, jolly and warm and kind on the surface, watchful and cold and scarred beneath. She was the housekeeper, she explained as they introduced themselves. Everybody called her Aunt Maria. Olivia did, too. They ate breakfast together, talking quietly about the running of the dacha, which turned out to be a nearly self-contained compound, and then, just before 9:00 AM, Olivia took up her knitting and held herself in readiness for Lieutenant Colonel Marianenko.
He did not arrive at nine. Or ten. Or eleven. By noon, Olivia had made measurable progress on the cardigan and permitted herself a smile. OK. Lieutenant Colonel Marianenko and his assistant would show up when they did, whether it was that afternoon or a week thereafter. She might not like the game that was being played, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t volunteered to play it.
She had a modest lunch and then explored the dacha. For an American, Olivia had led an extremely austere life at her Los Alamos home, the first she’d ever owned. It had been a beautiful house, open to the high, silent desert that she loved, but she had not even had a TV. By her previous standards, the dacha was luxurious. Provincial but luxurious: not a bad combination, she decided. There was a beautiful old Bechstein grand piano in the drawing room and plenty of music, both in sheets and on discs for the new CD player. Lace curtains on the windows spread the sun in wide patterns across the smoothly polished floor boards, and the richly colored oriental carpets were so beautiful she hesitated to walk on them, even barefoot. She wondered if the carpets and the Bechstein were war booty from some splendid German or Austrian estate. She hoped so.
There was a sizable kitchen garden with an herb bed, asparagus, and sour cherry trees, like those her father had planted on the day of her birth, as well as flower gardens surrounding a rear terrace overlooking a birch-lined creek. An enormous pile of cut logs had been delivered recently, fuel for the masonry stove. They needed splitting and stacking. Would they mind if she split? Her guard, a hard-faced, burly man, stared at her for a second, perhaps wondering if she planned to take the axe back to her room, then granted permission. She could not possibly hide anything as large as an axe, so he was safe from accusation of dereliction in that regard. The thought that she might use it on him, did not occur.
Olivia changed into a pair of boots that the guard had borrowed from the housekeeper and got a glass of lemonade from the kitchen. Then she settled into a pleasant, easy rhythm with the axe and the wood. She set piece after piece of wood up on the chopping block, then split them, her feet spread so that if she missed she would probably not chop off a foot. After each swing, she kicked the pieces aside. Soon her tee shirt was soaked with sweat and she’d visibly reduced the pile of logs. While her sweat was drying in the late afternoon sun, she found a file and sharpened the edge.
“I am done for the day,” she told the guard. “Stack if you would, please, and I’ll split more tomorrow.” He glared. Prisoners did not give orders to guards. Not even high-status American prisoners. Olivia looked at him quizzically for a moment, then realized what she’d done. “I’m sorry.” The man made no response, except a small wave of his hand that indicated he considered her apology as misguided as her command. Olivia thought for a moment to ask him if his union forbade him stacking wood, then decided against it. She needed no problems with guards.
So she went into the kitchen. “Aunt Maria, do you have plans for that asparagus in the garden?”
“I don’t. Unless we eat it all in the next few days, it will go to waste. I preserve and pickle, but I haven’t found a recipe that I like for asparagus.”
“Well then,” Olivia racked her memory. “If you have the canning jars and some white vinegar, there’s tarragon in the garden. Do you have garlic?”
“Of course, child. Also vinegars, many kinds, and canning jars. Juniper berries, too.”
“An embarrassment of riches. I have a thought about what we might do with that asparagus.”
Later in the kitchen, surrounded by canning jars full of asparagus, spiked with tarragon, garlic, juniper berries and shallots, filled with a blend of white vinegar and white wine vinegar, a recipe that Aunt Maria hadn’t thought of, the two women snacked on cold zakuski, Russian appetizers, and colder vodka. After they were done, Olivia helped her stack the dishes in the sink, clumsily dropping the glasses. She cursed under her breath, soft and mild. “I beg your pardon. I don’t normally drink so much.” Swiftly and competently, she gathered up the large shards for the garbage with her bare hands, leaving the housekeeper nothing to do but get the broom and dustpan for the smaller fragments.
Later that night, in her bathroom, she slipped a shard of glass out of her pocket. It was not large, but it would do what she might need it to do, in case only one way out remained to her. Carefully, she wrapped it in tissue, then put it inside her wallet.
The next morning there was still no Lieutenant Colonel Marianenko. Not at nine, not at ten, not at all. Olivia knit until noon, then went out and split more wood. This time, the burly, hard-faced guard joined her in stacking. Olivia said nothing until he spoke. “Splitting is man’s work.”
“When I lived in the high desert, it was all my work—including hunting.”
“You have no man, Doctor?”
As a pick-up line, it wasn’t even remotely amusing. But it wasn’t a pick-up line. Prison guards do not have sex with prisoners unless… Olivia stared at the guard until he had the decency to blush. After several long seconds, she tossed the axe to him. She took her lemonade down the hill to the creek that was one of the few terrain features she could see, down to the birches with their slender white limbs and trembling green leaves. If anyone wanted her, they would know where to find her. She wondered what kind of perimeter security the place might have. She contemplated the problem presented by a prison without walls. Perhaps she could just walk off. But where would she go? And how far would she get, an American in Russia with nothing but the clothes on her body and a shard of sharpened glass for some final act of submission or defiance, should it come to that? Russia had offered her freedom to create. It might still keep that promise. But she began to realize, it was a promise Russians could break at their
leisure, forever or as often as they wanted, for any reason or for none, and she had absolutely no say in the matter. Physical freedom had never been an overt part of the bargain. Hello, Russia.
She came back at dinner time, ate, knit until dark, then took a single glass of wine out onto the terrace and drank it beneath the ripening moon. She watched the tall grasses waving gently in the night breeze, listened to the small sounds of scurrying animals and the beat of the wings of hunting birds in the night air. Then she went to bed, allowing herself a momentary pleasant thought. She knew how to keep busy. She knew how to do things. She knew how to live.