***
The long lines of drab, Soviet-era customers that had greeted the initial opening of the Pushkin Square McDonald’s were a thing of the past. Those customers, mid-level apparatchiks, had yielded their places to those who were now ostentatiously embarked upon the Russian version of Euro-chic or beyond to American tawdry. It seemed that the female clientele either wore high black heels, black tights, miniskirts, big hair and shimmery makeup, or aspired to grow up to wear them. They might as well have been a different species from the two strong women who ambled in like race horses, their track suits steaming in the cold air of an early September morning. They’d had a hard workout.
“Officially, there are four food groups,” Olivia said. “Starches and grains. Meat and fish. Milks and cheeses. Fruits and vegetables. Unofficially, we have what I call the Perfect Foods Group.”
“Which includes our favorite foods, such as curries,” Irina Borisovna said. “And McDonald’s?”
“No, except for their hash browns, which are to die for.” She ordered from the girl behind the counter. “Six, please, and are they hot?”
The girl looked her in the eye and smiled, not Muscovite habits. Not Russian habits, and certainly not Soviet. “Yes, ma’am.”
Olivia paid for the hash browns, Irina Borisovna for the coffee and strawberry milk shakes. “I think,” Irina said as they loaded their trays with napkins and condiments, “that if we’re going to be teenagers, we ought to do it wholeheartedly.” Nevertheless, she found a booth that put her back to a solid wall, and her eyes never stopped scanning the restaurant.
By unspoken agreement, they wolfed down the hot, crispy hash browns without waiting for them to cool, washing them down with cold water and strawberry milkshakes before lingering over coffee.
“What did you do growing up?”
“There are five years between my surviving brother and myself, but our parents always swore my brothers and I were triplets separated at conception. Russian children grow up very segregated—boys do some things, girls do others—much more than America. But my brothers and I were absolutely inseparable until they left for the Airborne Academy. I ran, I learned to ski and shoot, and took up sambo, which is our martial art, a hybrid of boxing and judo, although I later shifted all the way into judo for intellectual reasons. I fished, I hunted, I rode. We all had strong leanings towards the artistic: my oldest brother loves ballet and still takes lessons when he can, although he also loves boxing. I love dressage and have been able to study it a little.”
“Did you date?”
“Date?” Irina Borisovna smiled wryly. “Like all good fathers the world over, mine was very protective of his daughter. Then he found himself having to reassure my suitors because my mother was this very small, very beautiful Tartar woman who looked like she was machined out of tungsten carbide and probably was. Before the war, she had been kidnapped to be ‘married’ by a man she didn’t want. Just another word for rape and slavery, a tradition we’ve only partially crushed. Without saying or doing anything hostile, she would sit across the table from those boys looking like something out of Genghis Khan’s nightmares. She may well have been.” She grinned. “My brothers used to run interference for me with her, and I was eventually allowed, say, to have a boy over to study with so long as one of them chaperoned me.
“But did you date?”
Another smile. “Date? Let’s put it this way. It was actually my father, not my mother, who had that conversation with the doctor, because my mother could not be rational about her daughter and young men. She didn’t want to lock me up, she wanted to kill them. All of them. This she knew was unfair; she was a very loving, very kind woman. By the standards of, how would Americans of our station live, we were poor but it was an outrageously happy childhood. I suppose you would say we didn’t know what we were missing.”
Olivia shook her head. “I would never say that.”
“And how did Olivia, the only child of a widower, behave?”
“I did my share of sneaking out of the house. There was a tree beside my bedroom window. I could get up and down it from the time I was about ten. My father was almost as protective as your mother, not just because he was a widower but also because his younger sister had died in childbirth.”
Irina Borisovna let out her breath in an almost shocked expulsion of air. “Yes, that has been the fear of all fathers who are good fathers since time out of mind.”
“I guess you could say I lived a very sheltered life. No television, no car, which is practically a rite of passage for American teenagers, no heels, no makeup, and my father strongly preferred me to wear jeans or trousers to skirts. A little perfume was OK. I rode at a show barn where people cared more about the results—the prizes and the money and the status—than the horses, and I think you know how unpleasant that can be if you love the animals. I was a cross-country runner and I had my pilot’s license before I got my driver’s license. I had cash, a credit card for emergencies, and a pistol, which I shouldn’t have had because I was a minor. Who could ask for more? My girlfriends, my classmates really, would ask, ‘Do you want to go to the mall and go shopping?’ I could only wonder, why? Wouldn’t you rather fly?”
“Did you ever ask them that question?”
“Once. They didn’t like the question and I sure didn’t like the answer.”
They watched a young woman flounce down into the booth across from them. Her hair was piled high upon her head in golden curls that were, as could be seen from the roots, natural and she wore an extravagant mink, ridiculously high heels, and a vulgar diamond necklace. She was attended by a thuggish young man in a magnificent black suit who appeared, from the way he looked at her, to genuinely adore her. He also studiously avoided the officer’s slanting green eyes. “Don’t envy her,” Irina Borisovna breathed to Olivia over her coffee.
“Is it so obvious that I need to get laid?” she asked, astonished by the sudden, unwelcome sexual hunger that the couple had occasioned.
“There is no need for vulgarity.” Irina Borisovna’s voice was not prim but extraordinarily gentle.
“In other words, this would be handled for me as well, like my housekeeper or my lab administrator?”
A graceful shrug. “You’re a woman, you have needs, you’re not a prisoner, and there are more adult ways to deal with this than you going to some Moscow night club and bringing home God knows what.”
“In other words, you would find someone to play the stallion, with tact and discretion and perhaps even tenderness.”
“It wouldn’t be a matter of giving some poor soul his orders, however welcome he might find them. We are not inhuman.”
“I know that. I do know that. But I also don’t use people. How do you handle your…situation…as a widow?”
Irina Borisovna held up her hands in caution, then answered, “It’s different for me. I have two wonderful sons from my late husband.” Then her tone changed and Olivia realized that their friendship either had not matured to the point where Irina could speak freely…or was about to. “I live with my,” she paused, “with…my brother’s widow…and their two sons.”
Olivia had heard the change in tone and suddenly realized that Ira wore two wedding rings, one on her left hand, one on her right. One—she assumed the left, according to Russian custom—was from her dead husband. Well then, the second would be from her brother’s widow. And while Olivia wasn’t certain if sexual love between women had been a criminal offence under the old Soviet penal code, she knew that women in such relationships had sometimes been forcibly psychiatrically hospitalized, along with dissidents. Olivia pondered the likely sequence of events: two young mothers, newly widowed, helping each other rebuild the wreckage of their lives and plans, choosing to live together with their children for comfort and convenience until they found new mates—and perhaps months or years later, realizing they had found them in each other. Then enduring what they must have endured from those who thought they had a right to an opinion. From
colleagues and superiors.
Olivia nodded respectfully. “Is she also in your profession?”
“No, Valentina photographs and paints and draws and sculpts—other people would call her an artist, except that word has been debased. She and our sons are my hostages to fortune.”
It was an astonishing remark from someone so self-contained. “If I may ask without asking you to violate any restrictions, here in this place…what do you do?”
Irina Borisovna’s voice was so low Olivia felt more than heard her words. “I work against one aspect of organized crime. Our problems with organized crime came about because profit was an illegal concept under Communism. Anyone who did business was de jure and too often de facto a criminal. Many still are, but we have had to make use of them in order to really get our economy going.”
“So now you try to rein them in or bring them in?”
“Nothing so simple or so clean. I work at what you might call the intersection of organized crime and international terrorism. It is a broad intersection. Broad enough to move a lot of things from the former Soviet arsenals that no one should ever be permitted.”
Olivia felt her spine grow cold with fear and began to glimpse the hideous risks that Irina ran, dealing with such persons. “I understand.”
“It would make for a more peaceful life if I spent my time investigating oligarchs.”
“So you never know who wants to get close to you or why.”
“Exactly; the why is always open to question, even when I know the who. When dealing with people who traffic in such items as we fervently do not want them to have, it is even more difficult. I have no normal social life, and little personal life at all, beyond my family.”
Olivia picked her words carefully. “How did your…first marriage come about?”
Suslova’s eyes showed her approval. “My first marriage was arranged, in that my oldest brother, Dmitri, sent me a letter one day. He was a fourth-year kursant, an officer candidate at the Airborne Academy at Ryazan. I was in my second year at the Institute of International Relations. He wrote that he had met a young man my age whom he thought might be very special to me, and our parents and my older brother, who had already met the young man, agreed that he was worth my taking the time to meet. Despite my best intentions, they were right, of course. We married after we graduated and we were extremely happy.”
“A hard and complicated life. Or is it wrong to say that?”
“It is and it is not. I wouldn’t trade my life for anyone’s, for all mistrust is the very air I breathe and death a daily risk. Any more than you would, for all pain is your constant companion.”
Olivia decided a change of tone was in order. “When I was growing up, my father told this joke about how Soviet men impressed the girls at your seaside resorts.”
“Ivan, just put a potato in your swim trunks,” Irina Borisovna said, rolling with her change of tone. “But Miklos, make sure you put it in front this time. We told the same jokes about the Hungarians.”
Giggling alarmingly, they finished their coffee and swaggered past the other patrons, one of them a very muscular, tanned young man who looked at them with a mixture of alarm, dismay, and desire. “Tell me, Comrade,” Olivia could not help but smile suggestively, “Is your potato in front?”
Then she yelped, from surprise rather than pain, as Irina Borisovna quickly and efficiently twisted her arm up between her shoulder blades. “Come along. Soliciting is still against the law here. I beg your pardon, Comrade.”
“Wait, wait,” he called after them, bewildered and aroused, as the two women, whooping with laughter, seemingly as big and strong as racehorses and just as beautiful, burst out of the warm restaurant into the grey Moscow cold, air bracing as a stream on a muggy summer day. Wild with a suddenly joyous exuberance, Olivia looked at Irina Borisovna out of eyes that were full to overflowing with the sun now fully risen to light the morning. “Let’s run.” And then she hurled herself forward, stunned, for the first time since her accident, by the old sensation, sudden, still fragile and perhaps fleeting but utterly real, of the earthbound flight that running had been for her.