CHAPTER FOURTEEN, VEDENO GORGE, EARLY WINTER 1996: SIMONOV
Borodkin had never before deployed with Olivia, nor had he discussed her field style with the lab people who’d already gone. The subject was taboo to him and anyone who volunteered information was cut off harshly. But now they were going, and this woman who was pacing the lab one final time, terrified him anew. Her hair was shorn down nearly to her scalp for cleanliness and comfort. She wore jeans and a cotton sweatshirt under a battered black leather jacket and boots. Her eyes were brilliant with anticipation. Borodkin, who had learned to know her moods from her perfumes, was shocked that she wasn’t wearing scent. Then there was the lip balm, liberally applied. It seemed salacious. And the fact that he’d forgotten to bring his own made him feel endlessly inadequate. He briefly wished that he hadn’t ignored the detailed lists that Olivia provided.
He did not speak to this strange creature. He only feared. Resentfully.
As always at the start of a deployment, she felt very focused and peaceful. She anticipated pain during the flight. Sitting for so long was very unpleasant, but those hours of transition were precious to her. It was during them that she prepared herself for what it really meant to take what they had designed in the lab and made in the factory out into the world.
She was hard, Borodkin realized as she checked everything one last final, twentieth time, in preparation for the 4:00 AM ride to the military airport. Hard and sharp. He was very unprepared for how remote she was during the flight down, knitting silently on a pair of fingerless gloves from deep, weathered blue-grey wool, cabled across the backs, very large, far too large for her.
Gloves for a man, he thought.
Far too large for him.
A very large man.
He was not prepared for Mozdok, either. Particularly unsettling was a delegation of soldiers’ mothers, looking for their sons. Or their sons’ remains. Olivia went absolutely white when she saw them. “Thank you, once again and always and forever, for getting people panorexed and tagged and storing DNA samples,” she murmured.
“It’s this bad?”
“Worse. It is unforgivable.”
Their lab team was met by delegations of officers and conscripts from several units. Borodkin was surprised to discover that Olivia knew all the officers and most of the conscripts as well, and that they knew her. Quietly, she assigned her people and equipment to their escorts, making introductions, until she and Borodkin were left alone with a raffish-looking collection of about a dozen heavily-armed men and a warrant officer who looked like a boy at once thuggish and angelic, pug-nosed and freckled like a trout. Again, Olivia made introductions.
“We’ll load this stuff, Doctor. We brought your kit and some for Doctor...?”
“Mister.” Borodkin resented having to say it.
“Mister Borodkin. We’re in a convoy for most of the way and then after that, we’re on our own. As you can see, Doctor, we’re augmented for this trip.”
Borodkin was startled when Olivia climbed up in the back of their assigned truck, stuck her hand down, and pulled him up. “Get in, Borodkin. Here, put these on.”
He stared at her, slack-jawed. She was already changing out of her civilian clothes, shedding her leather jacket. “Praise wool,” she muttered.
“Doctor, those men…”
“Aren’t looking. Believe me, even Russian boys don’t find long wool underwear sexy.” She pulled on a dense grey wool sweater he realized was not uniform, then a uniform tunic.
“I’m not a soldier,” he muttered.
“Neither am I. Standing out in any way is a good way to get your head blown off, Leonid Pavlovich. Well, so is wearing Russian uniform, but in a Russian convoy, not wearing it is like painting a big red target on yourself for Chechen gunners.” She wriggled out of her civilian boots and jeans. Praise wool indeed, she thought, shivering, and put on a trouser liner and then uniform trousers, wrapped her feet quickly and expertly in cloths before pulling on boots. Borodkin watched, fascinated and horrified, as an armored vest, uniform jacket, and fighting harness completed her transformation. Almost. Her wallet and a small white plastic pouch went into her left cargo pocket. She removed her pistol from her bellyband, chambered a round, and slid it into the holster on her right leg, then slapped a magazine into her assault rifle, one of two magazines taped end to end. She neatly folded her civilian clothes and placed them into the duffle bag along with her boots and handbag.
“Leonid Pavlovich.”
He looked at her. He had worked for her for nearly a year and a half and realized that he might as well have known her not at all. He felt cheated. In the lab, he had taken pride in handling little annoyances that he never brought to her attention. Here, such shielding was neither required nor desirable. His skills were now useless.
“Waiting will not make this truck warmer, Leonid Pavlovich. Change quickly.”
“Decent, Doctor?” Simonov called.
“Always, Warrant Officer.”
Simonov swung neatly up, took in Olivia ready to go and Borodkin slowly changing, and gave her a long look that said harshly, We are burning daylight. “Threat assessment, Doctor. The Chechens are operating in three-man teams: machine gunner, rifleman, and grenadier. They’re wrecking our armor with our own RPG’s. Most units are still relearning tank-infantry cooperation on the job and they’re paying for it.”
“Mines?”
“Several. Last week Lieutenant Aushan’s BMD hit something very large. Total loss of life and nothing left. I’m sorry. I know you liked him very much.”
For a moment, Olivia thought she might faint, she was so lightheaded with rage. “He was very sweet,” she said in a flat tone.
“He was,” Simonov agreed. “Never thought I would call an officer sweet, and say it as a compliment. But he was and so were his lads. So we’ve added more sandbags to the vehicles, not if you hit something that big, it does any good.”
“How are you doing, Leonid Pavlovich?”
“Foot cloths, Doctor?” He asked, having none and wondering why he was asking. Perhaps to put a temporary stop to a dialogue that made him tremble.
“Yes.”
“Not socks? Footcloths are primitive.” He was being inane and he knew it.
“They also keep your feet warmer and drier and if you wrap them right, cause fewer blisters. Wrap them wrong and they make your life hell.” Olivia spoke from both experiences, then reached into her kit and gave him a pair. Borodkin wrapped his feet. Not well, but not badly, either. He knew the knack would come back to him. “I assume you fired a weapon during your military training as a student,” she said.
“Uh, yes, Doctor.”
Both of them heard the hesitation in his voice. “Don’t worry. You’ll fire for familiarization for sure and probably also for qualification, so you’re confident in your weapon. Don’t worry if you’re no good at first. Everyone here is very reasonable and professional.”
The rifle in his hands felt profoundly alien to him.
Simonov’s security team and the men who met them at brigade headquarters were also alien. Borodkin felt himself surrounded by a different species. Over the past few weeks, he’d made some efforts to prepare himself physically. He’d lost a good ten kilos and, at Olivia’s urging, had started lifting. He’d gotten a little muscle in his upper body, but he was not like them. In fact, from what he’d seen of Olivia even in her wool long johns, he was not like her. The additional intimidation was not appreciated, and he felt quite inadequate when Olivia introduced him as, “Mister Borodkin, my administrator, who makes everything I do possible.” The compliment, though true, seemed to cheapen him.
He had the first of several more shocks later than evening. He had expected Olivia to be sequestered somewhere under guard, not sleeping in the same large room as the rest of the senior staff, her sleeping bag and pad thrown down on a cot, tucked in a bit of a corner so that she could hang a blanket when she needed privacy, but that was it. The second shock was when he was sh
own to the brigade visitor’s room. Sequestered, he thought bitterly, as if I am the woman. He did not know that he’d been given the room as a courtesy to ease his initial transition, and that he could join the others whenever he wanted. He did not know because he asked no questions and made no protests, only accepted with a sullen weariness that annoyed and estranged his hosts.
The third shock completed the wreckage of his mood. A balding, swarthy bull with a massive shelf of a brow overshadowing brilliant black eyes joined them for a dinner of dark bread with butter and shchi, cabbage soup rich with beef shin and marrow. Olivia, who rarely kissed people or permitted them to kiss her, rose up, embraced and kissed the bull, who responded with a great, warm gentleness. “Major Malinovsky, the chief of reconnaissance. Leonid Pavlovich Borodkin, my administrator.”
“Be welcome, comrade. Good to have you here before dark. Russian vehicles are very vulnerable at night.” He turned back to Olivia, leaving Borodkin feeling first perfunctory, then nonexistent. “So, how was the flight down?”
“The usual.”
“Morphine or knitting,” he responded. “And sometimes morphine and knitting, but not tonight, I think.” He could usually tell when it was the latter, because he could find Olivia in a corner, swearing as she ripped out her work. Morphine only meant she had been able to drowse during the flight. The two together meant she had been utterly restless with pain.
“Knitting only, so a very good flight. Which reminds me…” She reached into the cargo pocket of her trousers and handed him the gloves. “For Hanukkah.” Another Yid, Borodkin thought, utterly amazed, so much so that he failed to process the next phrase. “And for teaching me to box.”
“Thank you. Although you know I’ll wear them to rags here.”
“That is what they’re for.”
“Spar tonight?”
“Yes. I need to. You know I always need to after even a good flight so I don’t know why you bother asking.”
“Good manners. My mother would beat me, if I hit a woman without asking her permission. In fact, I’m quite sure that if I told her about this, she’d beat me anyway.”
“Doctor Tolchinskaya, what did he mean by that?” Borodkin whispered after Malinovsky left.
“We…” She hesitated. “He teaches me to box.”
“He hits you? You mean that’s what happened to your nose? He broke it?”
“No, just adjusted it a bit. It was a mistake. We try not to hit each other in the head, but I’ve blacked his eyes as well. It happens. Things occasionally get out of hand.”
“You’re a woman and he’s huge. And he hits you—”
For the sake of privacy, she spoke to him in English. “A year ago, I gave Major Malinovsky twenty kilos in weight and probably thirty in muscle. We calculate now that while I still give him fifteen kilos, I give him no more than twenty in muscle, and probably closer to fifteen. We think there has been some bone development as well. I am not only stronger, I am more flexible and taller. My accident took five centimeters off my height; I have regained them all due to increased flexibility. Those gains are cheap at a recalibrated nose and a few bruises, not to speak of my ability to defend myself in close quarters.” She paused. “I am in pain, no matter what. There is no choice. The choice is, does it become suffering or not? I find that if I incur pain towards my ends, towards my purposes, it does not become suffering. This thought may help you or it may not.” Her blue gaze, as cold and hard as it was, was also kind; he would have preferred it not be so. “So long as you do not think this a place to indulge base pleasures, you can in this unit exercise those parts of yourself that have no ready home in peacetime society.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” he said stiffly.
“Mister Borodkin.” The gentleness of her voice struck him. “You told me that we would do with each other as we would. And so we have and I find you only praiseworthy. But we also do with ourselves as we will. No one in this brigade cares about your past, any more than they do mine, only about what we may do now, and its implications for the future.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” he repeated stiffly.
Olivia started to lay her hand on his shoulder, but did not touch him when he froze in anticipation. “As you will. I know how hard certain changes can be.”
“Thank. You. Doctor.”
She inclined her head to him. “As you will,” she repeated and walked away.
Drawn against his desires, Borodkin found himself watching as she and Malinovsky wrapped their hands, quietly talking about what they hoped to accomplish, watched as a very lean and elegant chestnut-haired man laced their gloves on for them. Later, that man joined him to observe. “I am Colonel Suslov, the brigade commander. And you, of course, are Mister Borodkin.”
“Is it so obvious?”
“I know every man in this brigade, by face and from behind, by helmet and boot size, so I should hope I know a guest in my own headquarters.”
“This is difficult to watch.”
They were sparring fairly hard. Olivia needed the release from all those hours confined in a small, hard seat. The ligaments in her back and hips snapped audibly each time she moved, each time she landed a blow or took one. The hardness came from the intent and the speed with which they were moving, not from the absolute force behind their blows. Still, they were both hitting hard enough to get each other’s attention. When their blows landed.
“Men beat women,” Suslov said, more to himself than to Borodkin. “The world over, men think women less than human.”
“He is beating Doctor Tolchinskaya now.”
“Not even close.” Suslov was amused. “She’s giving very much as good as she gets.”
“But she’s much smaller than he is!”
“So are most Russian men. Major Malinovsky is our bull. What hurts her is not her size, it’s that she was so badly injured. You can see how awkward and stiff she is in her lower back and pelvis, blocking the power from her legs. But she moves so much better than she did, she is so much more through than she was. Also, she has been doing this for less than a year. He began boxing as a boy.”
“She can’t win. She’s a woman.”
“Agreed, although winning has no meaning here. Training does. As reluctant as I am to admit it, with all of us at this level, it is a matter less of innate talent than of training. Boxing is about the skilled delivery of punishment even when in pain, not brutality. Limitations and all, Doctor Tolchinskaya when sparring is not an object of tenderness.” Suslov watched Olivia do something with her feet that Borodkin perceived only as intricate, smoothly slipping out of Malinovsky’s way and pivoting to sink one blow with her nasty left under his ribs, making the big man grunt as he moved out of range. The sound was of an axe striking wood.
What Malinovsky said through his mouth guard was, “Well done.”
“Good, she can do that now.” Suslov looked down at his watch. “One minute, my friends.”
“That’s all?” Borodkin asked, amazed, as they began to back down and then disengaged when Suslov called time again.
“Three minutes, working like that, is a long time. Three rounds of three minutes each, which they have done, is a very long time,” he said, his low, quiet voice amused. He took their mouth guards from them, squirted water into their mouths and unlaced their gloves for them.
Borodkin sensed he would have things to say to her later about this, then realized that he would never say them. He was silent, letting Olivia and Malinovsky talk through what they had achieved together. “Colonel, do you do that with her?”
“No.” His tone cut off any further conversation.
Watching them all from the shadows was Major Kristinich. When Olivia and Malinovsky noticed him, he smiled politely, raised an arm halfway in greeting, then turned away. His thoughts were not on them.
Kristinich did not approach Borodkin that night, nor all the next day, but the evening after. Olivia and Malinovsky were sparring again, leisurely, more thoughtfully, her back and legs not
making quite so many hideous noises. Borodkin, immersed in his own blankness, did not become aware of Kristinich until he spoke.
“As a cultured man, Mister Borodkin, surely you do not find boxing that interesting? Unless, of course, you wish to hit a woman. Or be hit by her.”
Borodkin turned to the man behind him. “I…”
“We have not met. But we do have the same employer. Perhaps also a common interest or two. You are Mister Borodkin, the man in the background who makes Doctor Tolchinskaya’s glory possible. I am Major Kristinich. I also work in the background, making the successes of others possible. I would find this exhibition shameful. However, I choose not to. For now.”
Borodkin panicked. He looked at Olivia and Malinovsky and could not bring himself to admit that what he was seeing was utterly beautiful. Then he looked over his shoulder at Kristinich, standing behind him, awaiting his response. And he could not admit that he found Kristinich hideous. Then a single, unbearable thought took him completely. He was not like anyone here, or anywhere. I am nothing. I am…void.
Major Kristinich waited calmly. He tortured people because it was a way to be certain of what they were really feeling, of where their minds really were. Pleasure could be faked, thoughts could be concealed. But not responses to pain. Yet he also enjoyed twisting people mentally and emotionally, to the point where they themselves did not know what they were thinking or feeling. Torture was for enemies of the State. Manipulation was for whomever came along.
Borodkin turned to face him. “I do find it shameful, Major.”
“They do not think it so. Neither, apparently, does their commander.”
“I hold to my opinion.”
“I can think of other things that are shameful.”
“Such as?”
“Some of the circumstances of your present position. As Russian patriots, we do what is required of us. Our duty takes us down many roads. But honestly, did you ever expect to find yourself working for an American woman? Did you ever expect to find yourself here, watching this vulgar display?”
“No. This was really not what I had in mind when I came to work for Line X.”
“Still, in some ways it must be a fascinating experience.”
“In some ways, yes.” Borodkin was not a naïve man. He knew there were no innocent conversations with FSB officers. He also knew that he now had, he had been given, the opportunity to betray Olivia in a way that writing routine reports had never allowed. He also knew that he wanted the capacity. He wanted it because it was…something. “She doesn’t think like anyone else I’ve ever met. Other people have bits and pieces. They’re specialists. She knows so much. When it comes to knowledge and ideas, she has no regard for discipline. She steals what she wants and moves on.”
“That is possibly why she is here, lacking intellectual rigor. Perhaps that’s what made her a failure in her own country, to be shunned.” Kristinich’s voice went smooth. “We do live in amazing times. Amazing. I thought we were finally getting rid of our Jews, shipping them to Israel. Then the Americans start sending us their own. They seem to be everywhere in Moscow these days, all those advisers they bestow upon us like we were some primitive colony with no past of our own, no accomplishments of our own, no future except in imitating them. Well, we have no control, you and I, over the Jews they send to teach us how to do business or run our government. We have just our single Zhid to contend with.”
“I do not know why she did not go to Israel.”
Kristinich looked thoughtfully toward the ring and said only, “Indeed. We must continue this conversation at your convenience.”
He walked back into the shadows. And Borodkin felt alive. He had been…noticed.
Then he realized that he had taken Kristinich’s bait. He had said something against his boss to an officer of Federal Security and he realized that was exactly what Kristinich had wanted. An initial opening. To be continued. There was only one way to end the process. That was to go to Doctor Tolchinskaya and confess what he had said and its possible implications for her. He had not defended her; he had wronged her. But to grovel before a Jew, an American, a woman. No. It was intolerable. And now there was another factor. Major Kristinich. His FSB colleague, who might now become his comrade, his only comrade in this awful place amongst these awful people. Kristinich had observed Olivia through all her time in Chechnya. He doubtless knew things about her that Borodkin did not know. Things Borodkin now wanted to know. Things that might be of importance later.
The sparring match ended. Borodkin decided to return to his room. As he turned, he noticed Simonov watching him intently and he had the momentary sense that there were emotions on his face that Simonov should not see. Then he dismissed the thought. Simonov was scum. Kristinich was an officer of the FSB, no doubt destined for promotion and assignment back to Moscow.
He was a good man to know.