***
You couldn’t call what they did fucking, or having sex, or making love, although what they did partook of all those activities. It was Suslov who found the words. “We pleasure each other,” he’d told her on the night train from Petersburg down to Moscow, the last leg of their long wandering.
“Yes,” Olivia had murmured, satiated and languid.
This night, he’d bent her over the bed to find an extraordinarily interesting cluster of nerves high in the front of her vagina, and taken a deliciously long time learning what touches she liked best, how much pressure for how long, at what angle. Quite some time, too, touching her cervix. Olivia was quite certain that people underestimated the role the cervix played in female orgasm. Suslov agreed.
She liked her orgasms first, to burn off tension, then to be able to float on the sensations of prolonged penetration and whatever else they could think up. It tended to be a great deal of physical work for him, but very satisfying, both to see her floating and to enjoy his own orgasms when she was satiated. They lasted a long time, and she knew enough to be still for him then.
Now they were home in her flat. After the confines of the train, the bedroom seemed luxurious, but had taken a bit of getting used to. The real bed, especially. This time, he’d managed to float her straight into calm sleep. He ran his hand down her back, relaxed, and let it rest on her muscular ass. Even in sleep, snoring gently, she pressed against him. He smiled and drifted off again until a noise startled him awake. He had his robe on and was out the door before he remembered that someone else lived here, except she was usually not up this late.
There was a light in the kitchen. Maria Fedorovna was brewing tea.
“Good morning, Aunt.” She jumped. “Forgive me for startling you. But it is after midnight. Are you unwell?”
“Did I wake you, General?”
He shrugged. “I sleep very lightly. Please, let us use the informal address with each other, and call me Mitya, if you would.”
“Even Doctor Tolchinskaya uses your patronymic with you.”
“She likes the sound.” Olivia made the formality an intimacy. “I admit, it is quite strange to be called by my patronymic…at certain times but I’ve come to like it. And I can’t imagine calling her Olya.”
She poured tea for them both, and set out slices of the cobbler she had made according to Olivia’s half-remembered recipe, from the berries they had picked. “Thank you.”
“I see the way you look at each other. Do you think you will marry her?”
He looked at her calmly, taking heed of but speaking beyond the FSB minder to the deep pain in her old brown eyes. “I have had several conversations about her. First, of course, with my sister, and also with my superior general. There are no strong feelings against it. If anything, the feeling is that I help bind her to this country. It is always possible that she will someday run afoul of something here and I would certainly be drawn into that, since she is a foreigner. But it is a chance we all take, one way or another. I have seen the way you two look at each other. There is friendship between you.”
“Do they do such marriages in America without consequences?”
“In situations such as this, there are always consequences. I am not, after all, simply having relations with her. If she were an American general, yes the Americans do have women Generals in their Army, not many, but a few, and I were a Russian engineer and scientist? Their security services would be very interested. Ours, I fear, always will be.”
“Knowing all this, why?” Maria Fedorovna nearly whispered.
“I’ve never known a woman remotely like her and I never will again.” And would consider myself living an utterly wasted life if I did not offer all I have to give, and accept all she has to offer. He drank his tea. “Tell me, why do you care? My sister told me how you came to be here. But this is beyond that.”
“You know,” she said cautiously, “I was a zek. I was in the camps.” He nodded. Of course, his sister would have told him, Maria Fedorovna thought. After all, it made sense: like so many released from the camps, she had little choice but to work in some capacity for those who had imprisoned her, because people didn’t want to associate with zeks. “My sweetheart came home to me from the war. A neighbor…hers didn’t. She wanted mine. She denounced me for telling jokes about Stalin. I got a child’s sentence, ten years. When I had been in the camps for three, I’d lived that long thanks to older women helping me survive, I told a new girl not to work so hard or she’d die. Someone overheard me and I spent ten days in solitary, in an unheated cell in winter. I got three hundred grams of bread, that was all. I didn’t want to die. I’d seen frost-bitten bodies, and I was still young enough and pretty enough that I didn’t want to look like that. So I struggled to live. And I never did a kind thing for another human being again. After I’d watched Olivia…I wanted to do kind things again. For her.”
Suslov embraced her. For a moment, she went rigid. Then, when his embrace did not change, but remained very strong and very gentle, Maria Fedorovna realized he was like his sister, Irina, in more than looks. She allowed herself to put her head down against his chest and then, at last, weep quietly for a long time. When she stopped, he wiped her face with a cold cloth and held her while he poured enough brandy into her to permit her to sleep.
Olivia woke, found herself alone, and made her silent way to the kitchen where her housekeeper was drowsing in her lover’s arms, held carefully and tenderly. “Will you help me?”
“Of course, dear,” she murmured. “Let us not wake her.” They put Maria Fedorovna, half-drunk, half-asleep, and mercifully beyond pain, back in her bed. Olivia covered her with a light blanket against the morning chill before kissing her forehead.
“Should I ask?” she asked in her own bed.
“No. It was something between Russians.” The camps, she knew from the sorrow she could see in his eyes even in the dark, could hear in the timbre of his voice even if she were deaf. “I didn’t ask. Do you know what happened to her husband?”
“He slept with the woman who wanted him long enough to give her a child. And then he got very drunk one winter night and took a walk in the forest, in the snow. No remains were ever recovered. Perhaps the wolves took him after he froze. Perhaps before.”
“You never speak of your mother,” Suslov went on cautiously, “and yet you treat Maria Fedorovna as a mother. Why? Was your mother unkind to you?”
“No, dear. She died when I was thirteen. I have only good memories of her. My father has some of the mercurial Hungarian temperament. My mother was old Pennsylvania, hard and calm and strong as a stone wall. We were a happy family.”