CHAPTER SIXTEEN, MAY-JUNE 1996, OLD RUSSIA: IN RUSSIA, ALL TRACK IS ROUGH
“I would have liked to show you Sevastopol,” Suslov told Olivia the next morning at Rostov station, “but because Ukraine is an independent state now and we are arguing over access to the Crimea and ownership of the Black Sea Fleet, things could be a little unpleasant. Especially with personal weapons. So I booked a two-person compartment for us from Rostov up to Moscow. Not direct, you understand.”
“I do, indeed,” Olivia answered happily. “The less direct, the better. I haven’t spent much time on trains in ages.”
“You never toured your country by train?”
“Not really. I rode Amtrak a bit between DC and Boston many years ago. Never overnight or anything this elaborate.”
“Wonderful. Then you don’t know the great secret of long-distance trains with sleeping compartments.”
“Which is?”
“Such trains constitute a separate moral universe.”
“I favor that. Greatly.”
Their itinerary gave them a month riding the rails and visiting cities. They would arrive in Moscow by way of Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad and before that Tsaritsyn, then Voronezh, Vladimir, Kostroma, Yaroslavl, all the way west to Pskov before turning north again to ancient Novgorod itself, once capital of Kievan Rus, and finally Petersburg of the white nights. As Suslov had promised, Old Russia. There would be nights during that long wandering when neither of them slept, simply left their minimal luggage in an austere hotel room and prowled the cities when everyone was sleeping, and the militia seemed scandalized by two peaceful but legally armed citizens, one of them a major general of the Airborne Forces, the other an American woman, walking out well past midnight. They had wordlessly arrived at an agreement that the train was for sleeping and sex, cities for eating and exploring.
But first, they would have to ratify that agreement.
Suslov had closed out his command with a brief indoor ceremony. His men were too scattered and weary to justify anything more elaborate, and he hadn’t wanted to stand before them in the stars their blood had bought. He signed a few papers, told his successor a few things that he hadn’t wanted to write down, made him promise to see that Mashka the cat remained on the staff, then left quickly. The brigade belonged to another man now and it was improper to linger. He met Olivia at the Rostov train station, where they claimed their tickets for the trip.
“A two person-compartment, for Major General Suslov and his wife, Doctor Tolchinskaya, please.”
While most Russian women took their husbands’ names upon marriage, it was far from uncommon for them to keep their own, so the little lie was credible. Or would have been, except that Russian train tickets were sold by time and date, name and propiska number, and propiski specified marital status. The ticket master examined their passports. “Of course,” he said, looking Olivia up and down, leering at her. He didn’t say it, he didn’t have to: PPZh, his face said clearly enough. Field wife.
Had Suslov seen the look the ticket master gave Olivia, he would have wiped it off the man’s face with his eyes alone, but he didn’t notice. He was checking the tickets for accuracy. Olivia was not used to dealing with unearned contempt from underlings. Simonov had taken care of that problem for her, until, first within 22 Brigade, then increasingly outside it, he hadn’t had to say a word. Her accomplishments had more than sufficed. Kristinich, she’d handled deftly and with no small pleasure. Now, she found herself consumed by a silent, incoherent fury that numbed her, almost, to the other emotion she was enduring. Panic.
Neither the fury nor the incoherence were like her. She knew that, but it didn’t prevent her, as she trailed Suslov to their compartment, from getting angrier and angrier. He could feel her radiating hostility at his back and it made him very nervous. He had never known her like this. He found himself wondering if a long train trip through old Russia in the early summer, locked up with an angry foreign woman, was the best way to spend his leave. He didn’t understand why she was so furious. What had he done? Their customs differed but even so, he didn’t think he’d been offensive.
They boarded the train and found their compartment. He closed the door and turned to her.
Suslov watched her look around the small compartment with its two sleeping couches. From her glare and the pulse pounding in the arteries at her throat, he guessed that her status as a mere woman in the company of a general had gotten to her, swiftly and nastily. He decided that it might be best to let her calm down a bit, give her some space, and endure her panic with genial devotion. Angry, frightened, suddenly claustrophobic women had to be taken on their own terms, especially since they would abide no others. So he physically backed away from her, into the opposite corner so she wouldn’t feel trapped. He was beginning to feel so himself. Her panic would be extremely unpleasant and his own was becoming vexatious.
Very well, he thought. Jewish women have a habit of making you work. What was that Yiddish proverb Malinovsky had told him? No Chuppie, No Stuppie. The chuppah, Malinovsky had explained, was the flower-covered canopy under which observant Jews wed. Stuppe had a more universal significance. The meaning of the proverb was totally clear to Suslov. No sex before marriage. He just hadn’t thought it applied to Olivia, but now he was wondering if it might help to buy some flowers and tape them to the roof of the compartment. He promised himself to increase his situational awareness to include flower-vendors.
“We can go to the dining car and have a drink and some food.”
“I don’t want to,” Olivia said, peering at herself from somewhere outside her own head, aghast at the situation before her. How on earth had she managed to find herself in a spalny vagon, a first-class train compartment, with a Major General of the Airborne Forces who might be expected to marry her? This she did not know, except that none of it could possibly have been her fault. She decided to take a close look at this stranger. Even with his scarred face, Suslov was a beautiful man, with his slanting emerald eyes, ivory skin stretched over sharp, broad Tartar cheekbones, and that stunning chestnut hair. There were Russian men—most, it seemed—who thought that to attract women, a man need only be marginally better looking than an ape. Some appeared to strive for just such a condition. Not him.
“Then perhaps we can have a drink and food here.” Many people brought their own food and drink. He had. More could be purchased at every stop, from fresh fruit to bread to shashlik to vodka. Always and endlessly, vodka.
“I don’t want to.”
Suslov decided that it might be wise to take a close look at this stranger. For only the second time since he had met her, she was not wearing a uniform and boots and carrying a visible weapon. Instead, she wore ballet flats of soft black leather, slate grey leggings that ended at muscular mid-calf and a mid-thigh-length tunic of charcoal grey, loose in the upper body and arms, snug below the elbow and hips, with a deep cowl neckline that exposed a white tee shirt. He had never seen a woman dress like that and it struck him that she looked very modern, elegant and comfortable, sensuous and dignified at once. She was also clean. Deliciously, miraculously clean. Unfortunately, her pulse was hammering hard in her throat and she was red down past her collarbones.
He knew he was seeing panic, pure and simple, and he didn’t understand why. She knew he did not rape and would not pressure her. But he simply could not find anything in his repertoire of behaviors appropriate to this situation. Usually, he could deal with panic by kicking people in the ass and cursing them. Their training would then take over and they would do their duty. With others, dark humor might work. But this was not combat. This was…women. This was worse, he thought with irony.
He knew Olivia’s quality, and he was quite prepared to hope that her own desires would quickly overwhelm her misgivings. Just now, though she was terrified and upon reflection, he realized he did know why. She was terrified because of how much she wanted and that he would use it against her. What mattered was to get her past it. If humor could work in
combat, maybe it might avail here. The only problem: Suslov hadn’t the faintest idea of how to be funny in such a situation. One more miscue and she might throw him from the train. It was, he realized with some amazement, far from impossible. Very well. Major General Suslov gathered himself, girded himself, steeled himself, inhaled, exhaled, wondered if there were any Jewish prayers or importunings that a Gentile Communist atheist might employ upon this occasion, and began his attempt to be funny.
“Major, that is to say now Lieutenant Colonel, Malinovsky told me there is a phrase for American Jewish women of your class,” he said, shifting from Russian to his stiff, formal, accented English, the better to relax her. “That is, Jewish American Princess. You are not now such an item. But tell me, as a teenage girl, were you a JAP?”
Olivia flushed even more brightly red, down, he guessed, well past her nipples to somewhere around her knees. “Goddamn you,” she said, struggling for composure, laughing, angry, wanting to bolt out the door, all at once. “I was never a JAP but I do know some JAP jokes.”
Suslov experienced a flash of absolute gratitude to the divine. Olivia knew jokes. Now to ask her to tell one.
“Please tell me one.”
“Very well. What’s a JAP’s dream house?”
“I do not know.”
“Five hundred square meters. No kitchen. No bedroom.”
Suslov laughed dutifully, then inquired, “But where do they sleep? And do they eat out all the time?”
Olivia looked at him skeptically. “I don’t think you understand.”
“What have I missed?”
“JAPs don’t like to cook or fuck.”
Suslov started at her use of the word. “Perhaps if they called it something else.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. What are other English words for cooking?”
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“Yes. And failing miserably.”
“Me, too.”
Then they looked into each other’s eyes and started laughing. They laughed until all things of any degree of absurdity had left them, except for the absurdity they could now share.
He moved towards her slowly and smoothly, his hands held low and open, away from his body, until they stood centimeters apart. Her perfume, the roses and irises blooming among the ruins of a fortress, proud and beautiful and haunting, that he remembered from their dinner with General Trimenko, made it very difficult for him to breathe. She was breathing hard and he could see she was shaking. “I told you, I would have…tended to you, even in hospital. Your lover left you because of your scars. I would kiss them.”
He gently gathered her into his arms and held her very lightly against his chest, feeling her heart hammering, smelling her perfume, feeling the soft skin of her cheek against his, her hard, dense bones and muscles, her weapon and spare magazines beneath her tunic, slowing his heart rate and respiration, letting his calm seep into her. “Just as perhaps you might kiss my own.”
She turned so she could look directly at him, her vivid blue eyes on his in a way they had never been before. No challenge; instead, a slow welcoming. “I place myself in your hands, Comrade General.”
One could do something with that idea, he thought, and then the train lurched into motion, throwing her against him and he found it necessary to remember how to breathe. He could feel her breasts, even her nipples, against his chest, her pelvis against his groin, smell her perfume and her desire.
“Perhaps,” he managed at last, “we might begin by addressing each other less formally.”
It occurred to Olivia that as long as they had known each other and all that they had shared, they had never called each other by their first names. Doctor Tolchinskaya. Comrade Colonel. My friend. And always Vy, the formal address. “I should like that very much.”
“My friends call me Mitya. You may do so too, if you like.”
She tried it on her tongue. “Mitya.” Then his full first name and patronymic, “Dmitri Borisovich. I like that better, actually. May I call you that, instead?”
He thought about it. The formality made him feel dignified, graceful, elegant, desired, and it had been a very long time since he had felt any of these things. “Please do.”
“You may call me Olivia.”
“I would be honored to do so.” He drew her down to one of the couches, his touch the lightest invitation. They were not much wider than Army cots, but they were soft and clean. They would do, especially with sheets and blankets. She was still very tense, but no longer terrified. “I have brought us something for now,” he said. An insulated container: in it were cold Georgian champagne and caviar, blini and sour cream. “A most decadent capitalist breakfast.” The truth was, for more than two years, he had spent almost none of his pay. Even with inflation, it was a tidy sum of money.
“Goodness,” Olivia said, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. “My father told me this is what my mother ordered…” She caught herself just in time. When they agreed to marry, Suslov suspected was the ending. Too early for that, perhaps by years. The smile he offered her, wary and generous at once, acknowledged all his thoughts.
“It was also my last supper with my father before I left America,” she confessed.
“So you were a Jewish American Princess.”
“I was. Not as most people mean that term. I had a lot of grease and dirt under my fingernails from making things, or fixing them, or tinkering. But, yes, I was daddy’s little girl.”
He smiled and started to offer her a blini with caviar on it, then thought better. “Open,” he said.
“Oh my.” At first, she took food from his hand with great delicacy, careful not to touch him with her lips or her tongue.
He poured her some champagne, tilted the glass to her mouth.
As some of the extreme tension left her body, she started licking his fingers when she took food from his hand. Lovers’ games, of a kind he had not played in years, not since he had been married, and infinitely sweet. For the first time since he’d known her, he had enough life left in him to want her in any way other than the most abstract. And there was a depth to his desire that he had not felt in many, many years, since before the divorce, when he had seen how the moral demands of their different professions were pulling him and his wife apart, but had not yet succeeded in sundering them.
He gave her another swallow of champagne, then slipped his fingers deeply into her mouth. Her eyes were on his, her pupils dilated so that there was only a thin rim of blue around the iris, a black lake of desire in which he felt himself capable of drowning. She was breathing hard again, but deeply and slowly; for himself, he thought he might faint. He drew her to him, took her head in his hands, and kissed her. Her mouth tasted of wine and the sea: of salt and minerals, of the sea itself, and of fruit and flowers, of pleasantly soured milk, and faintly of wheat. She drank more champagne and kissed him back. Deliberately, he licked her throat, feeling her strong pulse beneath his tongue, moved close to her. “What do you like?”
“To feel something other than pain.”
He kissed her again. “So much trust.” There was awe in his voice.
“Is it undeserved?”
“Do you remember when you reported to me, and I said that if you betrayed my troops, I would deal with you as an enemy soldier?”
“Yes. And I said you were generous beyond fairness.”
“That was when I knew I would love you. Then you went into fire to bring out Warrant Officer Simonov. When you told me how you felt about what you had done, I thought, She is a woman to whom I would give my last breath. I want to tend to your needs. All of them. I am offering that. For now.”
“And later?”
“I want to tend to your needs until…I become your need.”
Olivia was still in his arms, resting against his deep chest, held closely and lightly, breathing in and out in rhythm with him, smelling the warm, clean, fresh-bread scent of his body. He could feel the desire in his bl
ood like a flood tide; he knew he could smell her desire.
In time, he discovered that he was kissing the back of her neck, where her short hair tapered into her skin, down to her shoulders; after some time of that, she turned her face towards his, seeking his mouth. At first, she was smooth and yielding as silk, then she alternated between being a little forceful with him herself and resisting him for the sheer pleasure of exciting him, of provoking his desire. She was absolutely soaking when he realized he had been so interested in her mouth and neck, and the delicate lines and fine scars that framed her eyes from where she must have been nearly blinded, that he had not so much as touched her nipples yet. A scandalous neglect. He removed her tunic and undershirt, along with her bra and then, somewhat later, helped her out of her bellyband that held her weapon and spare magazines.
She had small breasts, their shallow, perfect curve reminded him of ripe pears, a stunning contrast to her muscular torso. He took her nipples between his thumb and forefinger; her eyes rolled back. She told him, very specifically, how to touch them: a little friction and careful, delicate, almost fierce pressure with his nails. Surely, Olivia thought, riding the waves of sensation, there was a major nerve running straight down from her nipples to somewhere deep inside her. A wonderful nerve.
She had her hands inside his trousers and he had the sense of her feeling him with her palms, and once again the sense of knowing what she was thinking. “You don’t have to worry about that,” he said very gently.
“But I want,” she said in an almost diffident voice, not looking at him, “to enjoy you…everywhere.”
He understood the mixture of hesitation and desire in her voice, and how completely she had to trust him to be so honest. Little worse in the world, he thought, for a woman to offer herself to her lover and find herself not …received with gratitude, but taken, and used. “You do me great honor.” His voice shaking a little with the intensity of his feeling.
He eased himself into her mouth with the smooth authority of a rifle bolt closing, Olivia thought, reaching for cynicism as if a shield and finding only sensations. The scent of his body, the softness of his skin. His hands on her face and neck, very strong and very gentle. His midnight voice that of a beckoning saint. “Bite if I’m too much for you. Hard.” His laughter a rustle of pure desire. “I like teeth. If you’re gentle, I’ll think you want more.” She was shocked by how aroused she was when he slowly sheathed himself deep in her throat, demanding and careful, absolutely stunned by the intimacy. By his slow withdrawal to kiss her deeply and play intensely with her nipples while he gave her a chance to catch her breath, the pupils of his own eyes huge with desire, before sheathing himself again. Quite deliberately teasing her, understanding what it could be like for a woman, knowledge given to a man only by a woman who trusts him with it. After some time of that, when it seemed all the nerves in her body were concentrated in her mouth and her throat, in her nipples and, perhaps, her cervix, his taste, mild and rich and salty, and his mouth on hers, intimate and grateful.
He was surprised to find himself making love to her like that. This intimacy with a woman was something he had accepted from no one, ever, but his ex-wife, and certainly never sought it from, much less imposed it upon, any woman. He liked to enjoy his partner’s pleasure, and be enjoyed in his turn. But he also liked to maintain his distance and his self-control.
Olivia was heartbreakingly different. Sex was an easy start; he was quite certain the end would not be so easy. But he had meant what he said, about what he would give her. While still maintaining his distance. He had been aware, enjoying her mouth, that those two desires could not continue on together, not if he ever wanted to see her again after this month. For now, he had found it impossible to remain distant from Olivia when he was doing something so intimate with her. Indeed, feeling Olivia—her thick, soft hair, the hard bones of her skull and jaw, the slow pulse of her carotid arteries against his sex, the muscling of her neck and shoulders—he was simply unable to stop touching her—smelling her perfume and desire, remembering when she had so reeked of sweat and filth, blood and dirt that the scents of hot metal and gun oil were a pleasant counterpoint—feeling her brows and lashes beneath his fingertips and her hair and skin beneath his hands, remembering when she had worn her fatigues until they were practically rotting off her—a woman who had been exalted by killing, who enjoyed the sweet, brutal science of boxing, offering her sharp teeth as a piquant pleasure—he wondered why on earth he would want any distance from her.
Olivia would remember, after, how he would not let her hide beneath a sheet, but flung the curtains of the coach open wide to the light of the day before laying her down on the couch to finish removing her clothing. She would remember, too, the stark respect on his face when he saw the scars girdling her pelvis like a rusty skein of razor wire before he began to kiss them in an attempt to replace the memory and the reality of pain with pleasure.
A little later, Suslov was making love to her with his hands as well as his mouth, exploring what touches and kisses she liked, when he realized she was resisting what he was very obviously giving her. She was liquid with need, and starved, bracing up hard under pain, afraid to let herself enjoy her body for fear she would be unable to bear her chosen hardships. It was a problem he understood very well, from the first times as a young man he’d learned to manage that fear himself. Keenly aware of her pistol on the table beside them, he laid a hand on her throat. No pressure at all, just the warmth of his skin, both startling her and calming her. “I want this for you,” he said quietly.
“I don’t want to—”
“My love.” He could see his words shocked her; he realized he had not meant to say them so soon. “I mean that. And I mean this. I want this for you. You need not be frantic with me. I will give you everything I can.”
She heard herself sigh, heard herself say, “Thank You” over and over again.
Later, she lay back on the couch, for the moment satiated, vulnerable in her nakedness and at the same time splendid in her scars and the powerful muscling that was tangible proof of her triumph over her body’s pain and her fear of more. He was embarrassed, almost ashamed, to realize he was still in his uniform; he had not even removed his tunic. He stripped then, revealing skin like thick cream and sparse, very fine body hair, almost a glimmer in the light, beneath which heavy muscle rippled like cable. He was flawless except for his scars—his chest looked like it had been sewn up with a zipper—and proud as a stallion. “You please me far better nude than you do in uniform, Dmitri Borisovich.”
Scars and all, he realized. “I have lived in that hope, Olivia.” He entered her slowly, not so much out of gentleness even though she was still very tight, as he wanted her to feel, watching her eyes start to lose their focus as he pressed against her cervix. She gasped a bit. “Too deep?”
“No. I made myself forget what this can be like...”
He was holding her hands to steady himself; tremoring against him, then moving, she kissed his hands in gratitude. “And I, what I can give…”
She stretched out under him, his wise mouth and knowing hands, his size and weight and warmth, the exquisite softness of his skin on her and in her the most incredible luxuries, luxuries she was slowly allowing herself to believe might be hers. The sun was high in the summer sky over the steppe when he allowed her to rest, for she had asked him to be very vigorous and intense and he’d been pleased to oblige. He poured them both some champagne and offered her a glass. “You look happy.”
“I am. I’m thinking. If you time my orgasms to coincide with rough track…”
“My dear, in Russia, all track is rough. You know that, by your leave, I am not nearly done with you.”
She permitted herself a tentative smile. “I am yours for this time at least.”
For a lifetime, I hope, he wanted to say but did not. Every instinct told him it was too soon to make that kind of offer: not because she didn’t want it, but because she did. And she was sti
ll too used to living within herself.
She watched his face change as he required himself to gain a slight distance from her, the same look she had seen while he was making love to her with his hands and his mouth, and moved the subject to safer ground. “How did you come to be circumcised?”
“My wife insisted.”
“So she made you go to a mohel?”
“A mohel?”
“A Jew who does ritual circumcisions for Jewish babies and older converts.”
“No. It was not a matter of religion. It was a matter of hygiene. Also of considerable pain and discomfort when healing.”
“So it was a medical procedure only?”
“Somewhat more than that. She did the procedure herself. She had already had her hands in my chest so I thought it couldn’t possibly hurt that much more or that long.” He laughed. “I was wrong, of course.” He laughed again.
“There’s a JAP joke in there somewhere,” Olivia muttered.
“Please?”
“Never mind. I presume she used anesthesia.”
“Of course. We are not uncivilized.” And then, quietly, decisively, he closed the door on those memories. “Turn over, please, Olivia: there is something I have wanted to do for you for a long time.”
Hesitantly, she obliged him. More scars. He began stroking her back, gently working almond oil into her skin. She was at first absolutely rigid, but under the warmth of his hands, she gradually relaxed, allowing him to work deep into the ligaments so that he could ease the knotting, her back making sounds that were quite hideous: he had the sense of her hips actually opening up to him in a way they had not earlier. Another way to make love, he thought as he heard her long sigh of relief. He was surprised that she had even been able to tolerate the weight of fighting harness and body armor, much less been so constantly capable. And then he realized, her capability was her weapon against the pain. And that the intensity of pleasure might be a counterweight to that pain.
After some time of that, he became aware that she was looking at him over her shoulder; not since his marriage could he remember even wanting to be so intimate with a woman. “I have only ever done this for my ex-wife,” he said in that midnight, beckoning voice. “I am doing things for you and saying things to you that I have not for anyone since her.”
“You know,” she quietly, “that I have to have the intensity.”
“I do. My ex-wife needed intensity too. Her pleasure delighted me.”
“My old lover thought it was about pain. After a time or two, I did not ask again.”
A brute and a coward who left you because of tangible proof of your womanhood. But he said nothing; she deserved better of him than that. Instead, he quietly stroked her for a long time from her shoulders down past her hips, before carefully easing himself, slick with oil, into her tight muscles, listening to her breathing, feeling her body respond to his movements, giving her the time to slowly melt around him. No lover’s games now, however sweet, only the greatest gentleness and most extreme body control on his part, just letting the motion of the train rock him into and out of her as she deliberately pressed slowly back against him. She had expected the intensity of sensation; what she had not expected was the utter, intimate luxury of opening herself so completely to the warmth and gentleness and sensuousness of another human being. His turn to stretch her out beneath him, his reward, as he sank deep within her, was to feel her arch up hard against him, seeking and maintaining as much contact as possible, offering herself up to him for his pleasure while thanking him quite sincerely and incoherently for that which he was giving her.
Then, unbidden and unwanted, the memory of Vienna and her own stupidity crowded in—a stupidity that could someday place this man, her lover, in grave danger by association with her. In a small part of her mind, she knew that if she told him what she had done in Vienna, that he might not be ignorant if it ever came to light, he would keep that secret for her. To ask him to bear that burden, however, was not only to endanger him, it was to ask him to break faith. And since she had taken up that burden to avoid breaking faith, she had no right to ask him to break faith by sharing it. It would become her deepest fear that in moments like this, when they were so very close, she would weaken and tell him.
He felt, as she was thinking of these things, once again, her resistance to the culmination of her pleasure. This time, he did not insist she permit herself to feel more than she wanted. To do so would have been to betray her in a way that he had not earlier. The older he grew, the more he understood sex as a ritual, even art; now he’d found someone who felt that way, too. As it was, it was enough to be allowed to give more than he had received, and quite wonderful that at least for a while, the hideous tension was gone from her back.
After, she lay with her head pillowed on his scarred chest, listening to the beating of his heart while he stroked her hair, satiated, so calm and relaxed that she felt uninjured, even boneless. “Olivia, my love. I should like you, after all your necessary embrace of pain, to embrace pleasure. I should like to give you that. The body is not just an expression of our will, it is also something quite splendid and beautiful. Yours, most especially.”
“Where do you get your kindness?”
“It’s more than a personal quality. Between our wars and our Purges, there was a horrible shortage of men, and women would do a great deal to sleep with a man and get pregnant by him so they could at least have a child. Much less marry him and keep him married. Those men became used to thinking of themselves as the lords of creation. The sons and even the grandsons of most of those men today aren’t worth a damn. They drink, they smoke, they don’t work, they can barely be bothered to bathe unless it’s a special occasion, they expect their wives to give them their paltry earnings, cook and clean and wash for them, and defer to them constantly. Some expect to be able to curse and beat them with impunity. A man who is not so piggish these days—Russian women are grateful for any kindness they receive. Those who have not become totally embittered, at least. And the bosses wonder why Russian women don’t have more children.
“You know my father was a tank officer who fought from Khalkhin Gol to Berlin. My mother was a master sniper. I have no idea how they survived, but I have never heard anything against their honor. They met in Berlin in ‘45 at a dance, although they had actually worked together during the taking of the city. My father wanted the two of them to have a chance to get cleaned up before he told my mother he hoped to marry her. My mother told him that having been a slave before the war, she wasn’t going to be my father’s serf after. My father, whose wife had killed their two daughters and herself before the Germans could burn them alive in ’42, laughed and said that having on principle abstained from raping the conquered, he wanted a wife, not a serf. There was more to it than that, of course, and in their own ways, my parents were made to suffer for the peace they found with each other. I also knew we were far happier and more content and loving with each other than most families. My father had a few things to say about manhood to his sons and differently, to his daughter. Those were his words I spoke.”
He kissed Olivia’s head, burying his nose in her pale, short hair, inhaling her scent: warm, clean skin, the musk of sex, and roses and irises growing and blossoming on stony ground. Very gently, he lifted her off him and lay her on the couch before leaving their compartment to wash himself thoroughly, returning with a little more champagne. Olivia drew him to her.
A new sensation, he realized, letting himself relax into her arms. He had never been with such a physically strong woman. He realized he had been looking for such strength for a long time and counted himself blessed by his father’s memory to have found it at last. Blessed, like his father, after one great loss, if far less terrible than his father’s, to have a second chance. If he had found it in an American woman who had left her country, that was his fate. Perhaps they would survive it.
They were both drifting, swaying peacefully on the narrow couch to the rhythm o
f the train, when a thought occurred to him. “As an officer, I want Russia to become a nation that kills only our real enemies—and nothing worse than simple killing. Everything I do as a soldier is to that end.”
“Dmitri Borisovich—”
He deliberately covered her mouth with a very hard hand. “Olivia, it is too early yet and may be by years. But the world is changing around us as we speak. Once this would have been unthinkable for us both. But I would belong to you, as my father did my mother. That means that as you are a foreigner, I am hostage to the State for your actions.” She lay quiescent under his hand. When he was certain she would not speak, when he was certain that she had heard what he had said and understood him, he uncovered her mouth. Her profound silence rewarded him. “I am your man.” Very carefully, he eased her back onto his chest and simply held her, cherishing the rhythm of her breathing and heartbeat against his. “Remember, whatever happens, that I am your man who would belong to you, Olivia.”