***
It had been a difficult week at work. The staff had already gone. Olivia had remained behind, doing nothing of any importance. But Maria had made it clear that she would attend to organizing and decorating the new house, and Olivia had agreed to accept her judgment and her tastes once more. No matter, now that she had her things from home.
Home? This is home now.
“Doctor Tolchinskaya?” Just the faintest quiver in the voice.
Startled, she looked at the guard, whose real, legal name really was Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov. When introduced to him, she’d asked him to show her his propiska. She was used to armed security; she had been so back in America. Her .45, by now an extension of her body, was against her belly, beneath her cardigan, but she was glad to see another armed, living human being. “Yes?”
“Doctor.”
She smiled. “I am keeping you from your own weekend, and you a family man.”
“Yes, Doctor.” Said with gratitude. “And you should go home to your own man.”
“Let us put the lab to bed, then.” When they were finished, she handed him some rubles. “Take your family to dinner, with my compliments to your wife and my apologies to her for delaying you.”
Maria Fedorovna met her at the doorway to the first floor of the private rooms, the older woman now more slender and lively than she could ever remember being. Clearly, also, the weight loss had improved her decorating abilities, as had some time spent with Valentina, the widow of Ira’s dead brother Alexander and for many years since then, her partner and lover. Walking into the kitchen was like walking into morning, waves of color shimmering up from the floor into walls of palest, clearest yellow, the ceiling a gentle, calm blue. In the living room, Olivia’s Two Grey Hills rug took pride of place. The walls were painted a soft, mottled blue green of sea glass that echoed the stone terrace outside, and yet Olivia could see the most delicate tracery of greenery and flowers on the wall that would mirror whatever Maria Fedorovna intended to plant.
“Doctor, go up to your bedroom.” Olivia looked at her. “Alone, Doctor.”
Knowing whom she would meet, Olivia climbed the circular staircase of ironwork past the second floor with its studies and library, past the third floor with the spare rooms for guests or the children she wondered if she would ever have, to the octagonal master bedroom, high in a tower that had once dominated Moscow. Had Peter, not yet the Great, who had forced his wife into a convent, tortured their son to death and imprisoned his mistress, slept here? Very likely.
Olivia opened the door to the room, nodded to the woman sitting there, whom she knew to be Valentina, then stood lost in wonder. A chest of drawers, made by a furniture co-op in New Mexico, had taken up residence in the walk-in closet. The only furniture in the room was two nightstands, a long chest at the foot of the bed, and the bed itself. From the floor, the vivid oranges of a sunset shimmered into pink, then rose and violet, finally purple, then a blue that became darker and deeper, while still somehow retaining a translucent clarity, until it reached the vaulted ceiling, where the color was so dense it seemed velvet. Lacey molded fretwork in the Ottoman style extended up the corners of the walls to the high, arched ceiling where all the corners intersected; the fretwork had been left white, but the openings of it were painted in jewel tones. Then she looked at the bed. It was newly covered with Maria Fedorovna’s weaving, long runs of deep, verdant greens and oranges, golds and browns that melted into each other. She had learned to spin and weave as a young girl and Olivia had given her the loom as a belated Christmas gift after her first winter in Chechnya. Finally, she looked down, out of the eight windows, their blinds raised, much of official Moscow at her feet.
Olivia turned to the massive woman sitting cross-legged on the blanket chest, a glass of wine in her hand, a second beside her. Valentina was a big woman, a former nationally ranked swimmer, when her hair had been all golden curls: every Russian girl’s dream when she’d met Ira’s brother Alexander at the swimming pool of the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul one summer day back in 1981. He’d been an Airborne officer, brave, beautiful, and useful; she’d been a combat correspondent and artist with her own good reputation. He had given her that name, now her artistic name, the one everyone knew her by. She still swam, had not gotten fat or even soft, and in her mind’s eye, Olivia could easily see Valentina forcing herself onto that helicopter headed into Chernobyl. The photographs she had taken there had only cemented her reputation. The paintings she had done from them and her memory had created another. After the radiation sickness had passed, her hair had grown back in, in the brindled, marled colors of fossilized mammoth ivory that gave her a weird, rawboned beauty.
Valentina looked back at her out of clear eyes the color of burnt water—grey flecked with brown and gold—and handed her the second glass. They had met before, but barely spoken: taciturn herself, Olivia was shocked by how little need or desire Valentina had to speak. “Home is the sailor from the sea; And the hunter from the hill,” she quoted Byron in a voice rusty with disuse.
“Thank you,” Olivia answered.
“It’s for my brother, too.”
“Why?” Olivia heard herself ask stupidly.
“Because I remember him after his divorce, for three years staggering around like a slaughtered bull, trailing pain behind him like blood. Now you make him happy. Because you spared many, many Russian women my pain and my darling’s pain, and that of both our parents, although few of those women will thank you. Because working for you, Maria Fedorovna has become whom she should have become long ago. Because I could see the colors you missed from the high desert so I found a way to give them to you that was suited to this northern light. In truth, Maria Fedorovna did a great deal of the painting herself. As you gave to people I love, so I give to you.”
More than once, Olivia had been an unwontedly timid guest at the former printing plant that was part home to two women and their four sons, and part studio, part living quarters for Valentina’s apprentices in an increasingly expensive city. “I was terribly afraid you would be jealous,” she said quietly.
One word described Valentina. Varangian, descendant of the original Russian conquerors who may have been Vikings. But the smile she offered Olivia was bemused, not deadly. “You both need women friends; as an artist, it’s somewhat easier for me. In any event, no one who is loved as much as I am has any need of jealousy—”
“But it’s more than that.”
“Of course. And it has nothing to do with the fact that you have no more of a wandering eye than do either my darling or the man who is in fact, if not blood, my brother.”
“Honestly, I have no sexual interest in women.”
“Although your life would have been easier if you were, in fact, like-minded.” The polite Russian term for lesbian.
Startled, Olivia smiled in rueful acknowledgement of that particular fact.
Valentina smiled. “If you consent, I will tell you something about yourself that you may be afraid to hear.”
“I consent.” A little afraid of what she would hear. She’d seen this woman’s work. She had first publicly displayed her paintings from what she had seen at Chernobyl in the spring of 1989, three years after the catastrophe. They had caused a scandal and a sensation and in the years since lost none of their power to hammer the viewer with their sheer power. People had gone into the exhibit with a great many noisy, foolish opinions—dissent, treason, she should be put against a wall and shot, she’s a war widow, she should be ashamed of herself, she’s crazy, the radiation has caused a brain tumor—all of which were silenced by the huge, starkly over-painted photo montages. The near-universal reaction to actually seeing the work was a stunned silence that dissolved into tears: love and grief and loss, shame and sorrow and yearning and a huge pride in the men who had prevented an even greater catastrophe, knowing the deaths they would have to endure. Her later portraits and landscapes showed a perception not only beyond politics—which was why you could not cal
l her a dissident—but beyond most language; pictures that showed what was, without recourse to the categories that most people needed to make sense of life, and yet so hampered their understanding.
“What you do with my Ira, and with Volodya Malinovsky, is about pain. Your friendships with them are about far more than pain, but without that pain, you would not love them. You love them not because they inflict pain on you, but because they show you a way to use your pain. To bring sex into that would be evil and obscene. Which they know and want nothing of.”
“This is why you love Ira. Like her brother, the only people she wants to hurt are Russia’s real enemies.”
Valentina offered her a dazzling smile and Olivia realized that the two women had reached an understanding very different from the old Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies ethos so common among people who lived in the classified world. Rather, at some point, they had reached a decision that Ira would answer any question Valentina asked. For her part, Valentina would ask only the questions she had to, and Ira would tell her—without being asked—all she could that Valentina needed to know.
“You, too, were an only child,” Valentina went on.
“Yes.”
“Our parents, yours and mine and Ira’s, all had dreadful pasts. Love would have vanished from their lives totally, except that they refused to let that happen. It—made them different.”
“How many of your clients are afraid to sit for you?”
“Many. Yet that is why they come. They know I can help them to see and to learn their hopes, their fears, their regrets, their yearning. Sometimes they curse me when I show them their portraits, but I have never yet had one refuse to pay. Often, those who curse me the most bitterly send me clients, or commission a second portrait. Incidentally, you will do well to continue renting out the public spaces of this house. If you allow Maria Fedorovna to handle the event planning and rentals, she will, as I think you have surmised, only blossom further.”
Olivia stood there, drinking her wine, pondering Valentina’s words, realizing that Valentina had not simply married into a typical military family. They had accepted her as daughter and sister and wife for her own obvious value. Olivia did not have to be interested in women to understand why Ira might find Valentina profoundly attractive. This had never been simply a relationship of comfort and convenience between two desperately hurt young women, as Olivia had half-allowed herself to think, while knowing better. “You helped her too,” she said defensively, blushing hard, embarrassed by her idiocy.
“Only when it came to color,” the big woman answered coolly, her eyes glinting with amusement, even high up in the Moscow night. “Shall we go down to your guests?”
“Guests? I’m not expecting anyone.”
“But they’re expecting you.” Firmly, Valentina led her downstairs to her lover, his arms full of roses for her, and his sister. Rebecca Taylor, warned beforehand by Suslov that everything she heard and saw was utterly and completely off the record, smiled her most unjournalistic smile. Then she saw Colonel Marianenko, then her brother, Volodya Malinovsky, grinning impishly.
Maria vanished, then returned with a cart. Champagne and zakuski. Caviar. Blini.
“To our Olivia,” they drank. Maria retreated to prepare to serve dinner.
“My family,” Olivia murmured, her eyes wide with wonder.
“To that also,” Suslov answered.
Olivia sent her guests home a bit before midnight with food and drink. When the last were gone, and Maria Fedorovna had gone off to bed, only Olivia and Suslov remained. And Colonel Marianenko, who shed his genially drunk persona like a snake shedding his skin, becoming, once again, the man Olivia had spent a week with, in a small room, taking her apart without ever laying a finger on her. “If I were a single, male engineer, I would enjoy working in your lab, Doctor Tolchinskaya.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Word gets out. Your staff is now nearly half women.”
“I’ve made it very clear that I won’t tolerate a soap opera.”
“Nor would I provide you with theatrics but I might very well become a happily married male engineer.” He nodded to Suslov, who was sitting so close to Olivia that his shoulder touched hers, his arm very protectively around her waist. “Sadly, word also gets out about other things.”
Olivia stiffened. “Such as?”
“Doctor Tolchinskaya,” Marianenko chided her. “As a security service, the FSB is as compartmentalized as any other. You know what you need to know to do your job, and no more. Officially. Unofficially, there is professional chatter, gossip, even. So there are things I have heard and overheard that I believe you and the general need to know.”
“Go on,” said Olivia, her voice low.
“Your Mister Borodkin doesn’t like the staff you’ve assembled. He doesn’t like General Suslov. He does not like your sixteen-legged friends.”
“What?” Suslov exclaimed.
“An invention of mine that follows me around in the lab from time to time. She makes Borodkin nervous. Go on, Colonel.”
“Mr. Borodkin does not like you.”
“I’ve known that for quite some time.”
“As a personal matter, his dislike is neither here nor there. As a professional matter, it is.”
“What does he want?” Olivia asked.
“At a guess? You. In an interrogation room, with him. Or perhaps with his newly acquired friend, Major Kristinich.”
Simonov…
“I have no authority over Borodkin,” Marianenko went on. “He works for the Science and Engineering Service, as you know: the old Line X. I am in the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System and the Fight Against Terrorism. A mouthful for which I am not responsible. Maj—as of next week, Lieutenant Colonel Suslova is in one of the directorates, for Terrorism and Political Extremism. So, different command lines. I can’t reassign him, but there is no question that he should be.”
“There’s only one problem,” Olivia answered tautly, “and it’s serious. If I pull him out, I have a mess on my hands. He is an able administrator and expediter and has become a vital source of institutional memory. I have to have someone in place who has the technical knowledge and the clearances to run my lab, and the administrative ability to take over without any overlap. Such people are not common and finding the right one will take time. Transition will also be time-consuming and difficult.”
“Can you bear with him for a while longer?”
“Yes. I have no choice.”
“Your decision. I do not presume to second-guess you. But I will tell you this. Watch your back.”
“Thank you, Colonel.”
He smiled a little. “And enjoy this beautiful old home. You have earned it.”