Archive of Our Own

i. MOSCOW

All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class—herself alone—had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.
ANNA KARENINA; Lev Tolstoy

I am very glad you got married, because when a person marries the one he wanted to marry, that means he has got what he wanted.
LETTER TO NIKANDR ANDREEVICH; Daniil Kharms

Flowers make Katya think of Stalin. That is to say, of being a child. Strange, then, to hold them at her wedding, this day when she is most and first a woman.

Or perhaps it is the boy, now man, coming toward her that puts her in mind of her first and foremost Comrade, and of being young. She was eight, nine, ten, she remembers, holding a red banner and a red floret of the same cloth when he came to take the flower from her the first time: not Comrade Stalin himself, great and ever-distant, comrade to all though he may have been, but the boy nearer his side, wearing his smile like a medal even then. Fyodor the diplomat’s son, never far from the top, never far from her sight.

He has always had enough charm and money to squander, and his smile has not dimmed since he was ten. It has only grown slyer around the edges since then.

Fifteen years ago, a boy took a flower from a girl at a parade and paid her for the theft, unasked, with a kiss on her unmarked cheek. Now he shifts the kiss to her lips and for a dizzy moment Katya sees nothing but red behind her eyes.

Things have happened in the years between. Fifteen years is enough time for a mother to disgrace herself, leaving behind a closetful of Western dresses like soft bright badges of shame, still perfumed, still waiting for a body to fill them. For a husband to prosper without them, palms greased, face serious. Men do not like Katya’s father; she knows this. He works hard, double the time and effort with half the shame, and they keep him—he carries no echo of his wife’s charms, her smiles, her sins. Keep him in good company, in a house he can live in alone, which she knows is a luxury above all. (How the thinness of Mels’ walls had startled her, how much moreso when he turned on the music. How little fear he had.) But he is not liked.

This does not surprise Katya: nor is she. But fear will do. Fear and a sharp pair of shears.

She had been leading raids against stilyagi nightclubs for three months before she met Fyodor face-to-face again. He’d grown into a face better than his father’s, a handsomeness he had always been destined for, while for her part she could not speak to the same—beauty was not important, not in orlon, not in the Komsomol, not for leading. Better to be faceless, that way. More equal. All the same, he’d looked her in the eye, said, “Well, if it’s not little Ekaterina—”

Before her patronymic could slip through his lips, she had cut his tie at the throat. The silk—in gaudy green, yellow-checked—had slid through metal and through her fingers, tauntingly wastefully luxurious, and he had swallowed with the blades so close to his lips and she had gone home doubly satisfied: she had put the leader in his place and she had reminded young Fyodor of what a proficient politician he was meant to be. He’d be good for the party, someday, she was sure. A good head of state was friend to all. Of course he’d remember everyone’s names.

She had tried not to think of how he’d said it, the rough tenor of his voice in such particular constraint. How he’d kept his smile on even as the knot of his tie drew up that much tighter. She hadn’t struck fear, so her success was limited, but there would be other strikes to come.

There were. Enough that she has seen him in every costume and once, in reprehensible memory, without. A girl had been on his lap and another behind, and the undergarment shorts he’d worn like a form of bragging had been bright violet, surely silk, she thought with fury French. The girls, more of the same. Lace. Prey to the shears. Nothing is sacred. Without the frippery, they were nothing but plucked fowl, cowering in the hen-house unwilling to look at the stars. There’s nothing special about any of them with their clothes off.

This she has itemized on herself as well. The clothes do not matter; nor does the body. The soul, the mind, the will, these are what the State asks for. These are the only currency that count—besides, of course, currency.

Her father, tied to innumerable Party men with both soul and wallet, had been the one to tell her she was getting married. “A truly important man wants a respectable Party wife for his son,” he had said, “and who more respectable than my daughter?”

Her presence in the Komsomol had been all to her credit, so little of his. Yet he had been the broker, hadn’t so much as asked her to sign a check. So: a final currency, though she supposes in its rudimentary form she might count it as a form of cashing in on the soul.

Marriage is meant to be a transfiguration, she thinks—if not of the soul then of the utility of the individual, which she supposes is soul-encoded. It is a force that might change a working girl to a productive wife. It is, if nothing else, a force, and one that she was never meant to avoid. Nor has she taken pains to avoid it. Why should she, why would she, when she is not special, when it is a kind of treason to expect that she would be. The wife might find her way back to the podium, after a while, and the podium might be set higher up.

So, philosophical background noise, like mortality, like the fact that her black hair will go grey someday. She thought, when she thought of it, only of who or what her husband might be, what kind of work he might do, and what kind of worker beneath the work itself. (Had let her thoughts wear, lightly: blond hair, long limbs. Had promised herself: he would listen to her but he would never be, she would not let him be, weak.) 

Over dinner, her father had named the boy she’d marry and the bite of tushonka in her mouth had turned cold at once as she stared at him, scrying for humor and deception in a face that had never once made a joke.

That had been her mother’s purview, one Katya did not inherit, and what a fine joke her mother might have made of this: the diplomat’s son in American costume. Handsome son, she might have embellished. Katya could not call up her voice for the words that mattered: not luxury, not treason.

Her mother loved her. Katya tries to forget this.

Her wedding dress is chosen by Fyodor’s mother, in absence of her own and of her own desires. Pale green and stiff, and stitched for her in very little time. Her soon-to-be mother-in-law swears up and down it comes from their own countrywomen’s work, not an imported inch of it, and by the way it scratches, Katya believes her.

Fyodor’s own sleeve when he takes her arm is dark and dense and soft and good, too good, and as he walks her into the reception she digs her nails into the imported cloth like a kind of reflex.

He hides it in plain sight, and the room lets him. Her father is here, and a scanty handful of her Komsomol peers, though she would not call them friends. The one she might have—Fyodor’s friend, as it turns out, not hers—is nowhere to be found, not for either of them. The cafeteria is packed with embassy peers, with diplomats and businessmen and their wives, but she sees no one he might call friend. His parents and their friends keep glancing at the door, as if hoping the Chairman himself might walk in. (He doesn’t.)

She lets Fyodor pour her a glass of champagne, sovietskoye shampanskaya in proud letters on the bottle, falseness bubbling in her mouth. They keep labels on while it suits them, these people. But her new husband’s suit is deceptively beautiful, his mother in a mistrustfully smart hat, his father mopping his broad hairline with a handkerchief that is plainly silk. Diplomats travel. They have an excuse. Excuses, excuses.

Fyodor, light-handed as a thief, peels her nails out of his sleeve and keeps her hand in his. “Would you like to dance?” he asks, light and easy and hard as ever to get a grip on. She squints, wondering if he’s joking. There has to be a joke buried in it. His smile offers one, just out of reach. “They’re playing for us, not these fogeys.”

With his hair clipped tidy and neat, in his dark suit, he looks unassailable as a submarine, but she can hear the echo of his life, his inclinations, in his lazy drawl. “Are you going to get up there and sing?” she hisses, and his smile doesn’t falter for a second.

“Don’t you worry. I’m not going to embarrass the wife.” His eyes flick toward his parents. “Or them,” he says, tone darkening, and perhaps that’s what keeps her hand in his, what lets him pull her out onto the floor. His hands grip her hips, practiced and sure, and she lets her own slide around the back of his neck, not thinking much of what her feet are doing. She’s danced at plenty of state-approved functions, and state-approved practice guides her from the hips down. She doesn’t think of music spinning on a picture of a rib-cage, of the shallow blue of Mels’s eyes. At least Fyodor has the sense to spin his lies into a career.

And he’s handsome, and she will not deny, the hand bunched into the stiff fabric at the small of her back only makes him handsomer.

They have a room to themselves back in his parents’ house. Not the house, no, but the rooms are far enough apart that they could be alone—in the house or in Moscow.

“Congratulations, Katyusha,” her father had said, shaking her hand in his twin clammy ones, before leaving her for good. Now here she is in the diplomat’s tremendous home, large as castles, large enough that it makes her vaguely nauseous, makes her think of the parasitic grandeur the state has taken such pains to root out. The wretched history that predates her. The Romanovs would have found these halls roomy enough to run up and down, though they would not have appreciated the practicality of the carpet. She had feared the communalka when she had visited Mels; she thinks now that there are worse things than thin walls and too many friends.

But she distracts herself from the purpose of the evening. Abstraction is easier than watching Fyodor discard his jacket and loosen his collar, but it does not compete in the long run. It does not awaken her senses, not her eyes, nor the rest of her.

He turns to her slowly, even showily, and offers her his wrists with his cuffs still linked. “Would you like to help me with this?” he asks. “As I recall, undressing is your specialty.”

A little zing of recognition goes through her, under her stiff dress, under her skin beneath. She wonders how extensive his memory is. Instead of asking, she keeps her face straight as she stands, as her stockings rasp apart and against her dress. Her hands go to his cuffs and she is proud of how they do not shake.

“I left my shears in the office,” she says. “But I suppose you have everything here.”

She hands his cuff links back to him and he takes them in one palm and her wrist in the other, faster than she might have expected. Now she wears him. He is the most ostentatious garment she has ever put on.

“I don’t want you to cut off my shirt,” he says, shrugging, easy in his skin, though his eyes on hers are wary. “It cost money. Not mine, either.”

She snorts and he makes a small clicking sound with his tongue, designed to get her attention. To her great irritation, she snaps to, her eyes sharp on his, called like a dog. This, he’s practiced in: both because of that absurd blocky creature he likes to dye to match his ties, and because of his loyal hound-pack of friends. Hounds and bitches, yapping up and down the roads.

She does not step back. A dog learns his master by the one that looks him in the eye.

“If this marriage is designed to tame me, there’s no reason that shouldn’t go both ways.” He grins and tips up his chin, the buttons lining patiently all the way up to his throat. Like a kind of rolling over, though she feels caught off guard by it—the long line of his throat, the way she can see it move as he talks. Now he lets her wrist go, and he waits, palms out and fearless. Not vulnerable, not at all. And yet, hers. By law. She considers him, lifting her fingers toward the button at the base of his throat. “You don’t have a state dispensation to cut your problems to pieces, Komsomolka Nefedova. Not anymore.”

This is a problem, he’s right, but it will not undo her. Even as she can feel the warmth of his skin through the fabric, and his voice thrumming under her fingertips. 

“My father’s taunting me with you,” he says. “Picked a girl to keep me in line—all right. Fine. He picked someone upright as a post, fine, and if I told him, that girl clipped a tie worth half a hundred and more in the pains it took to buy it, clipped it right in half and tossed it in the dirt, he’d say that was on me for making poor investments. There’s nothing you could do that’d be wrong in his eyes, except put on a flowered skirt and dance the jitterbug. Though I think you might be good at that. You’ve got loose hips on the dance floor. That’s the ticket.”

“I didn’t think you talked this much,” she says flatly, feeling nothing from the hips downward. No pulse of warmth radiating under her skin. No pulse of fury, nor anything else, under her skin. She is cold and immobile and her hands have nothing left to do.

“I’m hurt,” he says, sliding his shirt off and folding it over the back of his chair. “You’ve come to cut me off in the middle of plenty of songs.”

“Singing isn’t speaking.” 

“That’s where you’re wrong, Katya.” He clicks his tongue again. “Katy.”

She hisses. “Don’t.” 

“Dance with me in private, Katy,” he says. “I’ll teach you how. Mel always said you weren’t quite as frosty as you seemed.”

“Mels said—”

She cuts off, speechless, full up once more with the memory of the music, of her mother’s flowered dress and the ribbon in her hair and how terribly weak she had felt by the end. Alone. Her hand grabs for something, anything, to throw or break, but Fyodor catches her midair. 

“Now, don’t get mad at Mel, you know as well as I he’s kind to the bone. He only ever spoke well of you. The lad puts us both to shame, eh, Katy, Katydid?”

“Use my name,” she says, her voice hardly recognizable, so low, so angry, and he grins. Leans in.

“I won’t do anything you don’t want me to,” he says. Then his mouth is on hers, his smile curling in over hers, his hand in her hair threading heedlessly through the pins in it. Her lips part beneath his, and for a scant preposterous moment it seems right, only right, that they are married; for a moment they are married at Stalin’s parade, and at his funeral too, and on Brod-vey with a knife for their wedding-clerk, a crackling American quick-step their wedding waltz.

Then they are in his room once more, and once more in silence, except for how she is breathing.

“Oh, yeah,” he says, back in that false American voice, thick in his throat, and she reaches out and snags his undershirt with her nails, pulling him in tight and heedless of tearing. She’d like to tear it. Men in undershirts have always been ugly to her, but then again, all the men in undershirts she’s seen have been fathers and grandfathers, slovenly and companionable. She knows nothing of men, less now than ever when pitted against him, who knows everything. Everything of girls and everything of her, whether or not he realizes it.

But it is enough, now, that she can learn Fyodor, fine and handsome and infuriating and a liar in everything but his good looks. And hers, in public and in private.

To do what she says, now.

“Don’t speak that shit,” she says, fierce and rude and true to her mother tongue. It’s tongues she’s after—shared fluency—when she leans back in, thinking for a brief giddy angry second that she might kiss him all the way back to the parade, kiss him back into the state, kiss him into reverence.

She has his mouth for all of a second before he skirts her, nose to nose, half-laughing. “You want a great deal, don’t you?” he asks, lips still brushing hers as he speaks. “I’d love to know what it is you want under all that. You know, Katydid,” he says, and his hand finds its way back to where it landed on the dance floor, flat on the small of her back, “the one absurd thing my father said to me, when he told me to take a good Party wife, he said—”

His fingers bunch hard into the stiff pale-green fabric on take, in a way she leans into, in a way that draws her tight and shivering along the lines of his hand and the presence of his body. In such a way that makes her think of him holding his microphone onstage, fingers stroking and legs straddling just before she’d blow the whistle and the screams would go up.

“Said,” he says to her throat, “he knew one of his comrades had a daughter that always liked me.”

A thin river of hot and cold runs through her, and her nails score into his undershirt so hard she feels him wince. “I know,” he says, though his lips don’t leave her neck. “Might’ve believed him, until he said who.” His lips are practiced, tracing down to the neckline of her dress. Even as she’s freezing, even as her extremities go hot at the tips, she stays still, listening. “Shows what he knows, huh? About either of us.”

And what—she wonders, she really does—do you?

So much of her thoughts are left in reserve, even with her body acting on its own accord. What does he gain from it, this willful ignorance? All right, so he can’t see what she used to be, so he isn’t counting the exact number of shivers produced by every deliberative touch, and that’s a relief and can be nothing more than that—still, she wonders what he gains from this. Perhaps it’s just easier, being handsome and charming, no more no less, sleeping with a wife he doesn’t want. Let him not remember her. Let his lips wander. He takes the path of least resistance every time. Primroses, rather than pins.

It took just a click of higher-up fingers to get him out of his ridiculous treasonous clothes for good. Now it is easier for him to get on with tugging his wife’s dress and veil and lace and underthings off, whomever she is inside of it all. Marriage is, it would seem, mainly dressing and undressing.

“Foolish,” she agrees, voice steadily cold, her chin sharp against the crown of his head.

She lets her nails scratch harder into the fabric, until its weave starts to thin and bend, until she can pull him no closer. All it is is a boundary, well-crafted or no. If he won’t count the shivers, she will.

“I would’ve made peace with any other girl he’d brought up.” He hums into her throat, and she can feel his tongue do something secret and profane against the surface of her skin. At least three new nerves awaken. And counting. “Peace doesn’t seem the order, here. But this is more interesting, maybe.”

His hand pulls out of her hair, spilling pins, and back to her skirt, bunching it up from the centre. The dress is noncompliant; it fights his hand. Beneath it, her petticoat scratches her thighs above her stockings, where her slip has already hiked up near to her hips, static-twisted and ready, ready. “Where in the state did my mother find this dress,” he murmurs, kissing her throat again, but his fingers make their way all the way up to the bare flesh between slip and petticoat and stocking this time and beneath all the fabric she is unlikely silk in his hands.

“Very interesting,” he says, and she blinks the giddy haze out of her eyes and slaps him right along the square jaw, the smug resting grin.

Not as hard as she might have. Enough to shock him, not enough to hurt. She might want to hurt him, but she can’t tell. Her body’s singing four songs, and none of them harmonious.

“All right,” he says, pulling his hand back with such speed she feels the air between her thighs and wants to cry out. Doesn’t, though. “What do you want?”

“I want you to have done with things already,” she says, “stop making such a show of it,” and he rubs his jaw thoughtfully with the hand that’s just been under her skirt. Absent with it. His fingers shine, and she shivers all the way down under her dress. He notices. The grin comes back.

“No,” he says. “No, this isn't a show. This is for you, Katya, zhena. I’m not going to be perfunctory, not on the wedding night—even with you, it’s important to make an impression.”

Her husband turns her in his arms, unzips her, pulls the back of her slip lower to kiss a divot in her spine—an impression, indeed. Then, when her dress falls at her feet, she is not naked, her stockings and slip and a few ragged hairpins dangling around her face still stand guard, but she shivers and her shoulders feel naked and mobile as wings. Zelyonaya kuznechka, he murmurs, stroking between them through the slip and then beneath it, and she arches her back into the feeling and the words, translation as a taunt or a compromise. She can’t decide which.

“You don’t have to be afraid, kuznechka,” he says, and she stiffens against him, even with her hips against his, her slip crumpling in his hands.

“I’ve never been afraid.”

“Then why would you do what you do?” he asks, mouth at her ear, voice almost like he’s interested in the answer. “Why were you always so determined to shut off the music?”

Wouldn’t it be easy for him to think of her as fearful? But he’s only ever seen her fearless, in the heart of her state, in the heart of her duty. Belief banishes fear, she wants to tell him. It doesn’t leave room. But for all that she has married for the state, when his hand slips back between her legs, it is not duty that fills her mouth, it is not duty that sears under her skin. There’s the music, vulgar as ever, and for once she’s going to let him sing.

Marriage is—she knows what it is to the state, a compromise, a meeting between two separate spaces, an allegiance. She understands the reformulated model, designed to elevate the female partner to a peer and the bedroom to a handshake in a factory frame. But it isn’t so, not for her. She has never compromised; she has only ever done one thing or another. Been one thing at a time.

Fearless, not fearful. She will teach it to him in practice, make him see that it takes her whole heart’s commitment to be this selfless, this sure, without anything to call her own.

So she does what she’s asked and what she anticipates she will be. The wiving, the diplomat-wiving, the large house and the tactful shopping trips with his mother and the gifts, the gifts—yes, and more, the dinners with his family, so far removed from her own.

Good. By her second day as an official’s official wife, she has forgotten her mother’s perfume.

Her father had threatened to send her the dresses, or perhaps he had thought it was a gift. For a mercy, she can always count on his weakness, the slack backward-glancing feeling he’d had for the absent woman, the traitor. With the perfume, and the flowers, and the skirts that had swished too nicely, fit Katya too well.

She is glad to be out of the house. Even if she is here, baffled by legal luxury. It has to be legal. It’s in the government’s name.

So that doesn’t matter.  What matters most happens behind closed doors. Fyodor’s interesting expertise with the female body—that she’d come in prepared for, that she’d come to expect as her due. Running in on him time and again with this Lizaveta or that Alina at his knees.

“Betsy,” he corrects her, amusement only broken by a brief tightness around his mouth. He is an unbearable witness at the only time she has to put him to trial: rumpled and bare in their shared sheets. “And I think you mean my good pal Ally—”

“I know what I mean.” She traces her nails down his hard bare chest and he takes her fingers, studies them. The bareness of their nails, perhaps.

“You don’t. They don’t fly in your circles, Katydid.”

“No,” she says, pressing the point of her chin into the tracks her nails left behind, the space between the flat plains of his chest. His heart’s somewhere down below, audible beneath unassailable ledges of bone and flesh. She doesn’t press further. Only cuts to hurt. “I didn’t see your Betsy in the wedding party. Nor any of your friends.”

Quick as a flash he has her turned over, on her back. And her not even out of her slip. There is time after time, night after night, for him to undress her piece by piece. Often as not she catches him watching her at the dressing-table, with equal parts desire—she’ll admit, flattering—and curiosity—less. Itemizing what he sees: plain white underthings and orlon skirts and his mother’s tactful accessories. A pure picture. She knows his tastes don’t run to purity. Now, though, now he slips a hand up under the slip, and his fingers do what they will, and she’s the woman he’s married. And she wouldn’t call her own tastes pure.

There’s sanctions for that now. One on her left hand, ring finger. The other on his face, the look when he pulls the slip all the way up and off.

“What would your friends do?” he asks, “if they could see you like this?”

“I don’t need friends,” she demurs. “I’m different now.”

“What’s changed?” he asks, and she wraps her legs around his hips, slides against him.

“I’m different,” she says again. “I have a new name, now, don’t I? Keep up.”

“Whatever you say, zhena,” he says, which she likes; then, against her lips, “Katy,” which she hates.

Even so. She is what she is.

The diplomat’s wife. And she knows what she’s doing—when she’s on motherland soil, at least. The one condition. Easily met.

ii. NEW YORK

“Who's that?” a Polish girl asks softly, pointing in amazement at the Statue of Liberty. Someone answers, “The American God.”
CITY OF THE YELLOW DEVIL; Maksim Gorky

You,
troubled by only one thought:
“Is my dancing smooth enough?”
A CLOUD IN TROUSERS; Vladimir Mayakovsky

All right, sure, it took him by surprise. So what? There’s no condition he wouldn’t have met, no blank check he wouldn’t have signed. A suitable bride, big shock—the old generation, they pretend they’re so progressive when they’re all old Tolstoyans on the inside. The arranged marriage, tickety-boo. Last hurrah, boy oh boy. Before marrying the Woman of Steel herself.

The passport to America hot in his father’s pocket all the while. That, at least, planned.

Katya—he’d seen Dryn’s and Bob’s dicks just about shrivel up when he’d said her name and if that didn’t just make him all the more eager to promenade down the aisle at her side. It was Mel he wasn’t overeager to talk to, little Marx-Engels-Lenin let’s-leave-out-the-Stalin. Respect for the cool and the dead in equal measure. Mel, in love, and wasn’t that a kick?

Mel had drawn up tight as a silk purse made of a sow’s ass and told him to be nice to the girl that’d shattered their crystal and broken up their parties. Chyort, the amount of damages he’d had to pay nightclubs out-of-pocket just to clean up after the path kicked in by her skinny ankles—skinny but shapely, turns out they’re good in heels. He’s honest enough to admit that she’d have been a bigger problem otherwise. If she’d been one hair different than what she is. Nefedov’s a slime, a ragman with a ghost wife, but she shines. From the hair on down, the burnished gloss of high ideals and good skin. Even wrapped up in point-proving hideous factory orlon, the worth of the package shines through.

Easy, therefore, for his father to think, hope, he was brokering a good deal. Easy for him to think she’d like Fyodor, precisely because she’s pretty, his father with the ironclad belief that the pretty ones always will. Inherited from him, he believes, the old man casting an eye around even with his wife fast at his side. Pathetic: Fyodor swears he’ll grow up, if he has to grow up, with better things to do.

In the meantime, hard to hold a grudge against a pretty girl.

Eye on America instead, better than any alley-purchased jacket and tie, any spun record, any sung song. The genuine article. Some genuineness, on the other side of this crazy country—and it is crazy, every inch of it. He’s got a special view of the craziness, the kind you can only see at the top. Where he can even admire how it spins. Or how it dresses itself up nice, sometimes, in dark hair and fidelity.

Ekaterinas that might be Katys. He can’t decide which captures the imagination more, the way she is or the way she might be. Mel had hinted, under the gentlemanly candor, at possibilities so vague and tantalizing they grabbed the imagination all the more for their lack of precision, almost avant-garde in the way he stuttered them out then took them back. 

“You can’t listen to Mels,” she’d snapped, when he’d teased her with them, with words and a fingertip too. And—get this—those long scissoring fingers of hers, they’d wound themselves in his hair and pulled so hard he’d thought he’d snap. Only she didn’t have her little scythes right then. Just herself, and her fingers, and her mouth, and her surprising snake hips.

But talk about ungentlemanly. Even if his wife does shed her ladylike skin behind the doors the minute the questions turn sour.

The point is: her real name’s on her passport, but how’s it going to sound in an American mouth?  She is stone quiet when he hands her the visa. Trick of marriage and money and the right words, getting it that quick, like the click of a finger, like pulling a bird out of a hat or a scarf from the air, and she’s got nothing to say about it? No surprised grin she’ll try to bite back, no rude comment about the rich grasping beyond the borders? (You’re a leech, she’d said one night, and hadn’t he shown her a place or two he was willing to place his sucking mouth.)  No, no giddy little cruelties, no high ideals. She just turns and leaves, doesn’t even shut the door behind.

“Damn feat of magic,” he says to an empty room, not minding if it echoes, “and she’s not even looking.” Echoing his father’s voice, as much as his own—it’ll take a miracle to polish you back up, but what else’s new? Expect to see you shining by week’s end. That brand of magic runs in the family, smoothed by money, yes, but talent, too. Enough to bring America here in the shadows, enough to bring a Soviet ribbon to American shores. 

Kharms the dog flops down at his feet as he packs. One dark suit after another. “Boring, huh?” he says. “Eh, it’ll get exciting once I get there. Even you’ve lost your color these days, comrade.” He rubs the dog’s belly, enjoys in spite of himself the novelty of his palm coming away unmarked, not pink, not green, not matching. Clean hands, fresh start.

The ink of his ticket stains them almost immediately. Katya’s wearing gloves on the day of travel, so he does not take her hand. Tucks it into his elbow instead in a stance somewhere between wedding march and frog-march, from train to plane to the plane after that.

It’s just them on the plane: his father flies out in three days, in a government plane, not a public one. Careful trust, this. A sign of how much his father trusts Katya’s anchoring properties, as much as anything—that he can say, now, go on ahead, my man’ll be waiting to set you up in New York, and you, take care of the wife. A new thing, having something to look after with no eyes on his own back.

Not that she’ll allow much care. Eventually even he, wired hot as a fast car off Westward travel, ends up falling asleep in his seat on the plane, but when he wakes up, she’s staring straight ahead, shoulders just as square as they were when they first sat down. Hours’ worth of exhaustion settles over her like fine dust, on the surface but not quite sinking in. Beneath it, her eyes are bright and terrible, red-edged but straight-staring. She has said nothing but the answers to very particular questions—would she like a drink, prefer chicken to fish, has she got her bag locked and her visa in her purse. This for days. He doesn’t know where to start. For all the interesting exchange of bodies and barbs, and with those, ideas, he doesn’t know how to open her up, this wife he did not choose that does not like him. He has no practice in this. Everybody likes him.

What does she like, he’s not sure—shears, sheets, certainty. He can pick exactly one lock, with the most particular of touches, and this out of reach in public. Not worth thinking about. Too tired to be stirred, mostly, and too purposeful.

Purpose, that’s the ticket. He knows what they teach in the Komsomol, probably better than half the grey uniforms in the old room with her. “Hey,” he says, a little loud, but he can’t help showing it off, how the Americanism sits so tantalizing on his tongue. Then lower, in the mother tongue, once she’s blinked into listening: “You were trained for this.”

“You’re fucking right I am,” she spits, the curse so hard between her lips that passengers in the vicinity stare whether or not they know the word. A Russian grenade thrown on an American plane. Fine way to start making friends. Though he thinks they can afford to lose this fat businessman, that German frau keeping her child quiet with a sucked knuckle and a hard glare. Them, they will never see again: only Katya matters, Katya volatile but encrypted. He inches his hand around her back, smooths his knuckles up and down the bony knobs of her spine. Soothing, as best he can—he’s an affinity for the hard unyielding places on her body, so uniquely hers. Only Katya is meant to be stroked bone-to-bone. “Baby,” he says, English again and it carries through the stale-packed air even as he shushes its echoes quietly into her hair.

“Stop putting on a show,” she says, but quieter. And talking, at least.

His father’s man from the embassy meets them, carrying a sign in two languages—“Would you look at that!” he exclaims, false joviality failing to pull up the edges of her mouth from how they drag down. “That’s you. Your American reflection.”

It isn’t, precisely. And wife fails, somehow, to thrill her, even written po-anglisky. Even so. He shakes the man’s hand—a Peter, transfigured fluently into a Petrusha before they’ve left the building—and follows him out to the car waiting for them. The vehicle Peter tells him is nothing special, but he’s a damn liar, this Petrusha Johnson, Fyodor can feel it purring beneath them even as he can hardly hear it at all. A fine and silent beast, pantherish. Not unlike Katya, if she’d get back round to purring. But not for him, not now.

Exhaustion keeps America from getting him hard, if with great effort. Already he can feel it in the car between them, an arm around each of them, affable, fixing his collar. His heart’s new comrade Petrusha Johnson sits up by the driver with his head turned back, pointing at the geometric grey lines of the skyline against the queasy dawn-peach of the sky. And huge, just massive, swimming in Kandinsky angles the nearer they pull in. Until the skyline turns into buildings and, shit, the world is so goddamn clear. Signs everywhere. Willing to call things by name—Coca-Cola, Waldorf-Astoria, Broadway the genuine article. Bathed in color and lettering he knows, doesn’t even have to pick apart the letters. This tell-tale swirl, that shameless golden arch. Rude with identity. And then they’re in the centre of it all, cars packed tight, communalka-tight, carnally tight, on these snake-thin streets until he can’t see a thing beyond the race of people and the press of metal almost skin-near.

The car drops them off at a hotel flagged like an embassy all down the front of it, and Petrusha, Comrade Johnson, shuffles them in the door before they can gawk. Not that Fyodor would ever admit to such a rube move, but Katya, she’s a simple Party girl, after all—but she’s behaving all too well, tightened to pure mechanics and silence by the rigors of the plane.

In the lobby, then, beneath the delirious twinkle of the chandelier. “The old man shells out,” says Petrusha with a fraction of that twinkle in his own eyes. Yes, with Fyodor standing in for him, compliant to the strings Papa pulls, the old man makes a very loving father indeed. Gift of a whole country, from the heart out.

Soon. Now to their room, Petrusha’s promise to handle their luggage—their trunks on a separate plane. Only Katya’s little bag for the time being, and his briefcase, and the rumple of his suit, which the moment he ceases to move becomes unbearable. He peels his jacket off himself like the skin off a fruit. Katya sits carefully on the edge of the bed, coat and hat still on and still smart.

“Lively,” he says, “don’t you find? Eh, Katya? Katy—”

“Not now,” she snaps and lies back, turns her back, still fully clothed.

Whatever she likes.

When he lies down, the bed is large enough to leave a handspan or two between them even without him taking particular pains to shy away. For all that, he can still feel her, her tight-coiled energy, her body poised to strike even as sleep inevitably takes her at last. He closes his eyes, resigned to the same fate, wondering if he’ll find her among the shaky geometric echoes already dancing behind his eyes.

Hours later—too many hours—the phone wakes him.

“There’s been a problem with the luggage,” says Peter Johnson, demoted for the moment by bad luck and the wheedling apology in his tone.

Not a sign. A traveller’s dice-roll, a hand that didn’t play out in his favor. Already, he’s thinking of ways this might turn out good for him, of seeing the real Brod-vey and its attendant shops. Or no, he’s thinking of Fifth Avenue, Madizon, so many, all lit and waiting. But Katya rolls over, watches him as he speaks, and her gaze reins his thoughts back into the present. For a moment he’s tempted to switch into English, but his tongue feels sluggish, sleep-rusty. Russian will take over the hard work for him. The mother tongue.

“What’s this?” she asks, danger-soft, when he hangs up.

Her hat hangs from her hair by a few loose pins, the chignon beneath knocked loose by sleep. A few strands soft around her face. He reaches out, neatly plucks the hat off. This too, as fruit.

“Perils of travel,” he says. “And you say I don’t dress well. The airline’s made off with our finery. But I’ll show them a neat trick—”

“Show me,” she says, wearily angry, “my belongings.”

“Your clothes?” He makes a noise of rolling disdain through his lips. “We’re in America, we may as well dress the part.”

“Oh, of course,” she says. “The costumes again.”

He’s affronted. “It’s not costuming.” Really, it never was, not when the bright colors sank into his blood, when the tight trousers forced him to dance and keep dancing. Green trousers, red shoes, wouldn’t Andersen have died all over again for the stories his Russian youths were dancing into creation every night. Wouldn’t the rest of the world have turned their heads to catch a glimpse of such a splendid stage. He catches his wife’s hands, wanting to tell her: Oh, Katya, don’t you understand, we think the same thoughts, we want the same thing. All the world staring in our direction, listening to the song we sing.

But she’s just a simple Party girl, the sex notwithstanding. Nothing could be simpler than a Party girl striped with purity and cruelty. And at present he’s a simple man. He just wants praise for due restraint: there’s not an inch of pattern on him, not a color to be glimpsed. Navy and cream and camel hair, all for the eye to slide over. “They’re what people wear.”

“Of course they’re costumes,” she says, that mouth of hers—that mouth of hers he thinks with new and possessive affinity these days—creasing round the edges with bitterness. “Can’t you hear them breaking the set, setting the stage?”

It’s true: for all the niceness of the room, and what niceness, what oyster-pearl sheets, what careful scrolling on the mahogany desk and gilt paint on the vanity frame, what crystalline facets of the light and plush dusty magnetism of the curtains, for all that he can still hear the city outside, endlessly banging on. Endlessly reconstructing itself. And its audience and players, their chorus of screams and honks. A miracle they could sleep through it all, that anyone could. The city chides him back to waking, and he stretches.

“This stupid country,” she mutters, and he doesn’t know whether he wants to laugh or snipe or kiss the bitter edges of that mouth when he hears a knock on the door.

He greets Peter Johnson with a slap around the shoulders, a little too hard, ushering him in in Russian—Come on, tell the wife what happened—and four or five apologies and six or seven promises later, they’re back in the car. Katya hasn’t taken her coat off since she stepped onto the plane.

And doesn’t, not until they step over the threshold of the shop. Lights turned up, no less fine, but dazzling, platinum to the gold of the hotel. Bright enough to leach the color out of the world, to say nothing of the fabric that wilts under their scrutiny. Not the stuff of stilyagi dreams, but his head’s so shot from the plane and the lights that the world’s this close to being filmed in black and white. And poorly, at that. Its colors and shots and angles will fine-tune when he’s got his head on straight, and he doesn’t need to think too hard to shop: his father will spare nothing. No expense for Russia, no inch of their bodies. Katya blinks, her very squint an act of war, hunching unprettily in her coat. He wants to tug at the edges of her but there’s nowhere to slip in his hand.

“Your father sent your measurements,” says Johnson, “but for the lady’s, we weren’t sure.”

Three suits, stitched for him, a blue and a grey and a black with the thinnest of stripes. He is shocked to find them no less dour than his own clothes; sure, he thinks for a split second, his father’d shown him his own clothes from England—Savile, unforgettable in its forgetfulness—in the same colorless scheme, but that’s not what they were knocking off, him and his friends on Brod-vey. England, they skipped, headed straight over the ocean. A pang, now, to be met with exactly what he avoided.

But he is a diplomat’s son and around him the world is tasteful, the greens forest and the blues navy, everything toned down to a low and courteous hum. The sales assistant hums pleasantly as he runs one suit between finger and thumb, feeling the good make. Asks him—something.

“What?” he asks, and it comes out blocky and contorted in his mouth. The first English he’s spoken aloud here. Under the lights, he almost flushes, a scowling grilled salmon in need of a shave and a shower. He’ll do better. He’ll be better. Doesn’t have to be yet, though, not here.

“They’ve got clothes for her to try on,” supplies Johnson in translation, which makes the heat creep all the way under his collar.

“Good,” he says, English, not right, too loud. Katya, ever attuned to heat and discomfort, turns her sharp eyes on him, watches his throat where it swallows. “Very good.”

But she doesn’t speak at all. It is between Johnson and him to direct her—the dressing room, the rack, clothes off, behind the curtain, make decisions. Come out, show them off. That’s for her.

She says, “The skirts, the little suit—” and he can taste her disgust through all the cloth between them— “They’re fine, the sizes match. We can go.”

“The dresses, for parties,” Johnson begins, and Fyodor speaks over him.

“A diplomat’s wife wears clothes that fit, kuznechka.”

Then the curtain shudders back, yanked so hard the rings rattle, and she comes striding out—in her stockinged feet, sensible brown flats left on the floor behind her, not fitting with the picture—in unlikely cream. The skirt bells around her hips, the waist boned in, the neckline wide, wide enough that her brassiere was wrong beneath it. Was, past tense. She’s always been ruthless with the pieces that don’t match the picture.

So: naked beneath the cocktail dress, from the waist up at least. The faint outline of her nipples under the thick-layered satin. He looks at her and his mouth, word-poor, goes all the way dry. He thinks of standing next to her at this occasion or that, of looking down into the shadowed valley between her breasts from that practiced wedding vantage. Of his hand on the bared upper portion of neck meeting spine. Gifts for the room. Let them be the Russia they look at, beautiful and young and malleable, wearing America’s clothes. Able to compromise, that’s the ticket.

But her eyes are cold as Siberia. Take me home, wife. “As you plainly see,” she says, “it doesn’t fit.”

“There are others,” the shop assistant says, shooing her back behind the curtain, and his hand clenches.

Johnson clears his throat, and Fyodor anticipates the problem. Leans in and whispers a direction or two, and Johnson’s cheeks go slightly pink.

“I’m not a personal shopper, sir, but I’ll do my best.”

“Comrade.” A heavy hand on his shoulder. And English again, his tongue more fluent now that he’s speaking to someone who knows who he is: “Spare no expense.”

The sidewalk after the dazzle of the shops is crowded (disproportionately with plain black coats, he thinks) and his steps are lurching, delirious, still.  Katya at his side hardly reassuring; since stepping off the plane she’s walked like the world underfoot is ice or glass, made for the breaking. Still and all, time’s passing and the embassy’s throwing a party tonight. If not for him, for them, he can still pretend. “Happy honeymoon,” he says to Katya, who winces away from his effusion. “We’ll be drowning in champagne.”

Already, when they return to the hotel, it’s halfway to dark, the sun oranging the sky to match the streetlamps and, drunk off color, he can’t help but pluck a tie up from a passing vendor’s table. That same orange, its fabric comfortingly oily between his fingers. Sure, his father’d said to purge the wardrobe—all the more space he has now. Grinning, he flicks the vendor a few dollars more than he’s asking, doesn’t have to speak a word. Money, this more universal language. Money and charm.

Out to win him everything but Katya, charm-proof, whose compliance—unfaltering, he admits, so perfect it makes him a little uneasy—comes with a sharp set of bristles. He wants to see her naked under satin again, but even as the evening edges all-the-way blue, she does not touch the bags of clothes. It takes three tries for him to ask her—Katya, hey-you, Katy finally does the trick, gets her stalking off into the bathroom. She wasn’t half so sour in Russia, he thinks. Honeymoon indeed. Party marriage indeed, shit!

She doesn’t wear the white. A tamer black, broader-strapped, straighter-necked, crinolines crunching beneath. “Hello, Odile,” he intones, spreading his arms wide, for she is irresistibly balletic with her hair up, in her rustling skirt.

“So you admit you can’t tell the difference between one thing and the next,” she says. “Well, fine. Let’s have done with it, Fedya,” she says, and she turns to him, and for a moment, she has forgotten to be hard, for there is a real plea in her eyes.

“Are you brokering a surrender?” he asks. “Is that why you’ve come out in Swan Lake, to distract us from the war?”

“You’ve remembered the war,” she says flatly, the joke sliding off her like water off a—swan or a damn duck, he’ll see on the dance floor. “That’s something.”

He takes her elbow and says: “Follow me, Katydid, and lock those lips. I don’t trust you on a peace mission.” He should give up; can’t. She’s so still at her side, so imperturbable. Even with his elbow, nudging ticklish against the nipped-in curve of her waist. “Are you happy with your handsome husband?”

She looks away, voice full of resignation. “My lips are locked.”

The hotel ballroom: blinding under the diamanté chandelier. His new suit: itching beyond its expense. Johnson quick to find him, to catch him up in swift translation—this minister, that secretary, here as there.

Here as there indeed, he thinks, plucking a glass of champagne off the table near the door and casing the room with his eyes over the rim.

In his hotel room, he had fashioned himself. Chose the black, and the sun-orange tie, and spent half an hour with a comb in his hair, figuring it out—up and back it went, waving as handsomely as it can against its severe cut. Everything he saw in the mirror called back to what he knew. Would say to them, I know your language, your moves, men. His father knows politicians, sure, but he knew America.

America, or in any case its politicians, stare blankly at him. A sea of semiformal charcoals and greys, grey hair and greying. Their wives like a distant backdrop, wallpaper-flowered between lamp and table, all while he can feel Katya’s nails through his jacket sleeve. Incongruously sleek in her black as a chess piece thrown onto pink parquet.

He watches. Watches all of it, the women most of all. One woman rises, and he turns to her with a last swallow of champagne. “Get me another glass, eh, Katinka?”

“You must be joking,” she says.

He gestures to the table, then to the sky like a prayer, quite helpless—can’t she see to play along? “They’re looking at us,” he says in her ear, and he feels an ugly warmth between them, their faces, how close they are. One’s blushing, one’s foolish. Surely not both. “Stay cool while I make the rounds, that’s all you have to do.”

At length, he watches her stalk off, and even now, damn if he doesn’t admire the view.

Johnson steers him into the thicket, ticks them off like rolling credits: Secretary of State’s here, and the secretary’s secretary, and all on down. Fyodor grins, feeling his own handsomeness, his practice pulling him together, opens his mouth to say hello on the first handshake. Shit, didn’t match name to title; well, he’s tired, next time round he’ll get it right. “Hey fella,” he says, and the man whose hand’s in his—glasses, grease in mostly-black hair—blinks. Smiles politely and pulls back his hand as though he’s touched a pile of, of, shit on this guy of his own grease. Grin through it, Fyodor tells himself, and on to the next guy. “And you, guy.”

Silence all around him, even though he can hear himself, so damn affable, so damn slick. His tongue’s furry with travel, plane dry, and the English is rolling off it and catching, like off a New-York-crushing sidewalk as opposed to a big Moscow boulevard.

Johnson at his side, amending: “This is the Russian diplomat’s son. Just arrived today.”

Then a set of nods, got-it sighs, and the greaseball’s looking at him—hair to tie to shoes, what the fuck could be wrong with his shoes?—with, damn him for an enemy of every important state, with pity. Fyodor’s head swims with reflexive fury, and with champagne, and with the stale air of plane and asphalt gas still filling his lungs. His mouth is a desert, and, worse, one sanded with an accent he can hear.

“With wife,” he says, “pretty wife, damn pretty wife.” Every word like a stone. “She’s got champagne—where is she?”

Johnson opens his mouth, then seems to think better of it. He merely points.

And—there she is, the odd-duck black swan by the punch table, staring right at him. Like she’s seen it all. “Got to go help,” he says with a grin. Some things are worth saving: the grin still hangs right on his face, even if the clothes hang wrong on his body. He’ll burn this tie. He’ll see this underling in something unimpeachable next time.

Now Katya’s his freedom, his oasis, and he makes his uneasy way across the ballroom. Such a stretch of marble between them, and all too well-lit. It’s merely a function of important people, he thinks, irked, not an important function, and Johnson’s translation wasn’t equipped to tell him the difference.

At the table, no wife is present to pale beside Katya’s beauty—for a mercy, as these visual slights go, who’s to say husband-of-the-wife Minister Secretary What’s-This might not hold a grudge. Instead, she’s got a Minister Secretary Who’s-That himself taking up the space at her side.

“Little Russian doll,” Fyodor hears as he steps up. The man’s voice all friendly oil. “Who let you in, huh?”

Katya’s eyes, wide, staring up at him; Katya’s face, impassive as a doll’s indeed.

“Did they frisk you?” the man says. “For wires, I mean. Hear they’re getting pretty ballsy on that side of the Curtain these days. A lady can hide one, all those secret bits and buckles she’s got on under her clothes. In the garter, or—”

“Hey,” Fyodor says, clapping his voice between them, clenching his fists to keep from following up with his hands. “Get your balls away from my wife.”

That was pretty damn fluent, he has time to think. The man blinks, then chuckles. “So she’s just obedient,” he says, “not stupid. Lucky you. Or maybe you’re smart enough for the both of you.”

The compliment crawls under Fyodor’s suit, twists his cheap tie. Once the man leaves—only when he’s gone—Katya looks at him, cool and steady, two glasses in her hands.

“I got more champagne.”

“Don’t ask what he was saying,” Fyodor starts, and she snaps, “I know what he was saying.”

Her knuckles are white around the damp glass stems. “I don’t have to speak English to know that.”

He is silent. She puts the glasses down hard on the table behind her.

“Get me out of here,” she says, “or do you want to humiliate yourself more?”

The only audience that matters, the only audience that understands the performance, stalks out of the ballroom just ahead of him on new and clicking heels. It’s all he can do to keep up with her, to make it look like they’re leaving together. A marriage, one flesh—and flesh of the motherland at that. End scene, curtain at their backs, no more champagne, no more promises. They didn’t even get to dance.

In the elevator, she looks at him mockingly. “So, Freddie-baby, is it everything you dreamed?”

“Shut it,” he says, stinging. Might as well have stitched the suit from wasps for all the good it’s doing him, or from factory fucking orlon. “I’m here on invitation. You didn’t have to come.” 

“I wish,” she starts, her mouth twisting. “But what pains it would take to get back home—”

The word wrenches itself out of her, visibly painful in her chest and her mouth. When the elevator door pings open, he expects her to turn her back and run. Underestimates her composure again, he thinks, her ability to hang together and do as she’s meant—and her self-regard in her own pain, he hasn’t missed that.

He expects her to sink her pain into him, to do what they’ve both learned they love, that puzzle-piece fit of pain and pleasure that made him think maybe he’d won a good hand after all. Instead, she sighs one last angry sigh and sits on the edge of the bed to take off her shoes as if he’s not there at all.

She undresses alone in the bathroom. Sleeps with her back turned to him, enough space in their bed for a whole other soul. Shit, why compromise: build a country between them.

When he leaves the next morning, he doesn’t wake her. Leaves Johnson’s number and a quick-scribbled translation of the menu, and shrugs it off. Her doing! Hers. He can only do his own job.

Still, he kisses her on the cheek on the way out, his wife that he hopes forgives him. After he shaves, say: one kiss of a razor after another.

So it’s cursory greetings in the embassy, Johnson off plastering niceties over the Americans, Fyodor, hungover, grateful for the company of cigar-smoking Russians. Who know his name going in. Friends of his fathers and men that look like they could be—these, he’s met before, or can pretend. America casting reflections. Again and again. He tries not to be disappointed.

He tries not to expect more, not from the business side, at least.

When he comes back, Katya’s dressed for dinner, the cloth of peace a green taffeta rather than a white flag. Let’s try again, he thinks, fluent with her. He kisses her cheek, fluent with that, and slides two fingers beneath the edge of the neck, pulls it back to reveal firm white strapping beneath—no surprises yet, fine. She takes it, his breath on her neck, her eyes guarded. Fine. That’s how it’ll be. Thin ice, but not unfamiliar.

They eat in the hotel dining room, and he can’t help but order her caviar. On toast points, shriveled and salty, so recognizably inferior it makes him laugh. An arch of her eyebrow invites him to break the long taut silence: “Can you believe we came all this way for this?”

A glancing smile around the edges, though she swallows her wine by the full glass before she lets herself speak. “Some American progress. They want what we have.”

He doesn’t argue. He thinks, they do.

He knows something of the American dream, has sung enough songs about it. The knowledge still helps to have in his back pocket—know thine enemy, know thy friend. The American dream isn’t freedom, despite what someone like Mels might have wanted to get out of it. Not even democracy. The American dream is two kids in store-fresh clothes with their heads bent over dinner inside a building where the sign glows overhead. That’s what he likes. The jumpy pulse of it, the sexual frenzy: make, keep making. Make money, make beautiful, rich children, make art if you can’t do that. New buildings. Make something new.

He nudges a foot between hers. She clamps her feet tight around it, not moving all meal. Warning and keeping, all in one.

She orders something Italian, he French, the menu’s an atlas. Wine, not vodka, don’t want to push your luck. He doesn’t toast to the journey, only to health, happiness, life and life again, but he knows she can hear it in his voice. What happiness means.

“Let’s see some sights,” he says after, holding her coat for her and feeling her tense inside it. Never mind that. It’s firmly dark outside, but cities are best like this. New York, no exception. It glitters.

“What’s to see?” she huffs in his ear. Still holding her grudges, he sees, but—with no business forcing him into propriety tonight, no language barrier, nothing but the clothes on his back and the money in his pocket and the wife on his arm—he grins. What isn’t?

But not to get carried away. He flags one of the taxis ever-idling outside the hotel, slips inside beside her. This he knows fluently, like it’s part of him, and it comes out just right: “Take us down Broadway.”

They draw down the street, the streets the only slow part of this rushed, heavy-breathed city, and outside the car the glitter intensifies to a near-unbearable starriness. Colored, too, with scalding neon reds and searing blues. He exhales.

This is why they, New Yorkers, Americans, might stand to be drab. The world beyond them radiates life, sloppily painted and vibrant and individual, there for pleasure, there for taking—take this, take that, come here, come buy, come live. This is the good life, when it goes beyond you, when it carries on all by itself. He thinks of his stilyagi, bright spots in the vast unmarked greys of Moscow, and understands how far they and their world have to go.

“You see anything you like?” he asks, turning to her, wanting to see the lights reflecting in her eyes. “See anything you’d like to take home?”

She blinks those lights right out. Presses a bare finger on the damp glass of the window until it streaks. “I see plenty,” she says. “I’m not sure you do.”

Beneath her fingertip, the clear spot in the window haloes a man on the sidewalk, ragged, seated on the damp street. A paper cup in his hand, his cheeks hollow enough to catch shadows by the cupful. He blinks, unable to look away as the car purrs its slow ride on by. “Do you know,” she says quietly, “how many of him we’ve stepped over on the way?” 

A laugh barks its way out of him, cruel, jostling her somber silence out of the way. “You can drop the Komsomol training,” he says, hearing his own nastiness and unable to pull it back. Discomfort like a fingertip, like hers on the windshill, smearing up the back of his neck. He looks away. “It’s not altruism that gets you hot. I know better.”

“Equality,” she says, “is the point. Universal luxury or none at all. Joy and happiness for all or it doesn’t count. Everyone’s meant to eat from the same feast.”

“Which is why no one ever goes hungry back home,” he says, mocking. “Is that why you were so fixed on the raids, you wanted to confiscate all unequal and illicit rations of joy? You’re skewing the balance just as much, Katinka, when you abstain. Listen to the Comrade, let life be more joyous.”

“I’d find joy,” she says, low in his ear, “by tearing down every sign on this street, and the next, and the next. By letting this world start fresh and clean. What kind of truth can you find in a place like this?”

“Who’s to say you couldn’t teach them?” He opens his palms. “They’ll take from us if we take from them. Quid pro quo. That’s their whole system. If you want to pay in truths and ideals, play it as a currency and they’ll fill their wallets with it—and pop, bang, Katy wins the pot. Because she gets what she put in.”

Her jaw juts. “We don’t need their glitter,” she says, eyes flicking up over him. Theirs, his. “We don’t need them. We can do better.”

Naïve, he thinks. All hot air under those taffeta crinkles. His suit, its dark grey, itches at him, and he wonders what is sacrificed when the world stops depending on you to make it bright. But that’s the nature of politics, isn’t it—sacrifice. Or, what is it, compromise. That’s it.

Still, the words won’t come. Not without numbers, names, economics. Not hers to file away. Here in America, his marriage pulls him back away from his work so far it almost feels like a form of treason. Fidelity to one state at a time.

She has to join him here, on the other side of the shore. Or—he doesn’t know what he’ll do, who he’ll be, fighting his way forward without direction. When Katya, damn her, has so much.

“No one’s listening here, you know,” he says. “The good-girl routine’s not scoring you any points from on high.”

The taffeta rustles, all of it, and her hand raises in the air, whip-quick. He catches it—ah, there she is. How he’d worried she’d left him, his endlessly creative, endlessly vengeful Party girl.  He slips his hand down against her own, leaning forward and not looking back at her. Her narrow hand, hot in the palm, cold in the fingers, curls tight against his and sinks in its nails just hard enough to leave crescent marks as he sticks his head next to the cabbie’s. “Central Park,” he says, narrowly avoiding tsentralny.

The look the cabbie gives him could peel paint. Good thing he’s unvarnished. He leans back, feeling practiced and sure. Slides his cheek near enough to hers that he can feel her breath, the collective rise and fall of her. The fabric crunches up against his hip. 

“We’ll do all right while we’re here,” he says as the car slides beneath the park underpass, into the low-slung shadows of false nature. “You’ll see.”

Still, it throws him afterward when the car’s stopped and the fare’s paid and Katya’s heels are clicking up the sidewalk again, when the cabbie opens his door to spit at their feet. “Fuckin’ Russkies,” Fyodor can parse out, and before he can open his mouth, the car’s off skidding down the road as fast as it can manage in the clogged traffic. So indistinguishable among the lined-up sleek black metal casings that it might be one of their own products.

Katya raises an eyebrow. “No translation needed,” she says coolly. “I might guess.”

Cool, he reminds himself. The most familiar Americanism of them all. Rattles around in him like this-close to a prayer: cool, cool, stay cool.

So it’s not rolling out the red carpet. All the more reason to stay cool, the more wrong things go: he’s learned that time and again, in his own house and in his reprieves from it. With a certain pretty somebody storming through his parties night after night. He offers her his arm now, murmurs near to her hair, “It’ll take more than that to kill the party.”

He wakes up to Katya, huddled and chilly, still with her back to his. Another night like that, so be it. When he slides a hand over her waist, she sits straight up, sharply alert as though summoned by a Red Army trumpet. “At ease, comrade,” he says, laughing, and she turns that cold-fixed look on him.

“What today?” she asks, hard as iron to mask—what’s that he can see behind it, glimmering in the bottom of the well?—a kind of helplessness.

One thing at a time, Katya, Katy, kuznechka. No work today, the weekend. He orders breakfast sent to the room, to the bed, even. The hotel has given him a robe of dense uncolored silk that he wears like a king when he opens the door. “Feed,” he says imperiously, “my wife.”

The scullery scuttles back, leaving him with a series of incoherently French breakfast plates, coffee and chocolate in silvered pitchers, eggs in sauce he could stand a spoon in, jewel-box cuts of fruit. She eats it all indiscriminately, suffering all this luxury in due course. It’s all right, he wants to say, impatient, you’re not from nowhere any more. You’ve made it. You’ve got everything everyone back home wants and more—what desire is more native to their homeland, to their friends, than wanting to come here? “Who in the Komsomol wouldn’t trade places with you now?” he asks, bragging, yes, but bragging for her. To teach her: she doesn’t seem to know how.

She drops her spoon next to the fruit-plate, stares flat at him. “I’m full up,” she says flatly. “What’s next?”

A smile, he hopes, though he’d never say it. A concession, though he’d never admit it. “Eat another bite and then I’ll make things happen.”

He puts in a call to Johnson, who picks up on the first ring—even here, his father making the world dance, even here, him not quite minding. Let Katya think it’s him, he thinks with some hope, and then for all she’d appreciate it. Johnson’s got ideas. “Really?” he asks, and “You think?” But even interrogated, Johnson persists in having them. There’s that defiant American individualism he’s been told to look out for, even in this scraping little man.

When he turns back round, Katya is already half dressed and he vividly regrets the passage of time. The plain perfect white of her slip disappearing under a tidy checked suit, white and off-white, pleasant contrasts of bone. Understatement that turns luxurious, the bone sobriety turning into cream-puff promises on her. A matching hat, glacéed with a veil. The wife of someone with so much money he feels at once a terrible need to kiss the importance and fashion back out of her and into him. To prove it.

Anyway, bless the French for coming to Fifth Avenue first, and all that. Even if she hides it at once under her coat. Katya in camel-hair and immaculate in her rage, herself. And him at her side. The other half of the picture. He checks and checks again that he’s not got a hair out of place, that everything’s just so—and finds, yes, just-so, no more, no less. The same navy, box-hair, the same understatement his father cut him into, indistinguishable from every other man on the street. That’s a good thing. A transcontinental good thing. 

Back in the car with Johnson, tracing another skinny road up along the water. New York a little island, so little, for all that the West turns around it, for all that the world churns within it. And its narrow roads with the cars lined like grandmothers waiting for bread, mainly in black. 

The harbor is crowded, milling, smelling of salt and a hundred perfumes and processed meat. There’s a trick! A muttered instruction to Johnson and, bam-pow, they’ve got two hot dogs, artistically rendered in mustard and ketchup. The taste is nothing to the pleasurable convenience, the passed-down promise from Khrushchev himself. “Eat up,” he says to Katya, “this is the most Russian thing you’ll find anywhere.” Johnson frowning behind her; hell with him, it’s not for him. This, Americans take for granted, misunderstand the potential of: swift eating, scant prices, the everyman’s food painted into bright color, bright paintings. Images of that same dream. He leans into Katya’s ear. “Mikoyan’s own favorite sort of thing,” he says, and she smiles at him, sudden and bright and awful.

“There he is,” she says, staring into his face with a familiarity that makes him damn near shake.

“There’s who?”

“My husband,” she says, “the diplomat’s son. Who else?”

Who else but hers. He rolls his shoulders, shouldering the weight of what she sees: the reflection in her eyes is a little mirror, but in her thoughts, he’s bigger than his body, bigger than his life. Bigger even than his clothes. 

Their mouths rich with salt and grease and compromise, they mount the ferry and he can see the statue in the fogged distance. As it pulls in nearer, it overwhelms the horizon, copper green and calm-faced. The whole crowd aboard the ferry deck presses so hard to one side he wonders if the boat might tip, might punish him for his very-good idea. Even though they don’t move with the rest, he can hear them cooing like sparrows at the sight. Spectacle always wins the day. Katya is very still at his side.

“Why have you brought me here?” she asks, and he opens his mouth to speak—to unspool its history in facts and ironies, he knows who wrote the verse at its base and thinks he might do it rather well in or out of translation—but he gets as far as Lazarus before she shakes her head hard, leaves his words frozen in his open mouth.

“No,” she says. “Why have you brought me?”

The answer is simple. He’d thought it might please her. The part that’s altruistic or pretends to be, the speaker of the good-girl mandates, the idealist. The one that keeps finding New York’s ragged and weary and pointing them out as the great American failing. Fine, fine, he’d figured, think of the weary in your new clothes, don’t worry a second for your beautiful self. Take practice out of it for a day, indulge in pure theory—doesn’t she want to soak up the rhetoric of liberty? Perhaps that, not breakfast in bed, was the way into that factory-lock heart of hers. 

Faced with this, which doesn’t exactly present him with a clever answer, he ends up silent. Until she turns viciously away from him, pulling her coat in tighter. Something’s been lost in translation, he thinks, feeling the tension. Leaning in, he says low in her ear: “Made of Russian copper, you know.”

He feels the recoil move through her, her shoulder blades hard against his chest. 

“Take me home,” she says, and the wave of tension keeps shuddering through her body, wave after wave, soundless. She does not turn, but he sees her press a handkerchief to her face, indiscriminate of where it lands. Cheek, nose, mouth, eyes. She’s crying. He doesn’t know whether she means the hotel, or. Or further back.

Johnson, tactful enough to remain in the distance on the ship and off, promises in Fyodor’s ear that things will be better back at the hotel; Fyodor refrains from remarking, they’ve not got far to go. Back, then. Home, hey, look at how easy it is to make one when the world’s compliant to your desires. He gestures, in the foyer, in the elevator, to Katya: all this, yours.

She shakes her head, her cheeks still red from the harsh harbor winds. Only that, only that. The most unwilling of rulers, the most uncompromising.

Back in the room, Johnson is true to his word, and there’s a large flat box on the bed. The door closed behind him, Fyodor drops to his knees, gestures grand. He can’t help it, he’s a spectacle within the spectacle, it’s his easiest way into the country. And here she is, sharing the scene. “Take off your coat and hat,” he says, alive with new promises, so easy to forget that anything’s gone wrong all day, “and take a look. All this,” he says again, “is yours.”

There’s still ice in her bones, the way she moves like she’s never heard music—the little liar—but she does take her coat off, her gloves, sheds all exterior skins before she opens the box.

She peels aside a sheet of thin tissue and pinches the thin lace inside.

“What,” she says slowly, “is this?”

Too late is what it is—too late for either of them, to shape them into the American figure, the right form under the costumes. But they’re still here, and he grins, slow, wicked in spite of himself. “You won’t feel strange in the dresses now. Not if you’re dressed right all the way down.”

Amazing, the armor under women’s clothes. Brassieres designed to hone the breasts to a point, lace-and-satin that pinches and swallows belly and hips, the delicacy of the slip. He’s undone all these objects in his time, peeled them away to reveal what was waiting all aquiver underneath—but then again, no. Katya picks up the items of her makeshift trousseau with a look of revolted curiosity, one after the other, and he realizes he’s only touched simulacrums. Betsy in green and violet under violet and green, with a run in her stockings even before they were cut off her legs, is not this. Polly and Ally dancing in flowered dresses with nothing on underneath, for all that he’d loved to watch the movement of it all, is not this.

The clothes will make the woman.  If he can’t fashion himself, if he has to work for it, he can save her, at least. And while he’s at it he’ll get to touch the real thing.

Then the pièce de resistance, a full body confection of lace and bone designed to wrap her parcel-pretty from breast to hip, is flying at his head and Katya’s in the en-suite. The door slams, the sound of her breath sharp and disgusted and catching in the slam, and then all’s silent before he can so much as stand. Already, confusedly hard. He flips what he’s holding, stretches it, examines it with a jeweler’s intensity in search of flaws and facets. The tag slides between his fingers; he flips it, ignoring the numbers. Its label, in English, takes a moment, to read and then to reconcile the meaning. He laughs, then, out loud—the sound must annoy her a great deal, he can only imagine.

“Katya,” he calls. “Hey!”

On the other side of the door, he hears the water running. Her voice, over it, she’s never had a problem making herself heard: “Why didn’t you just marry an American and leave me and mine alone?”

By hers he senses at once she means the entire federation at their backs. No small thinker, his little wife.

Marry an American—well, his father never would’ve let it happen, he’s still got a home and a homeland to come back to once the jig’s up. He dreamed once of screwing American girls, sure, but here he finds his thoughts too preoccupied to go chasing, even with a door between him and the lady-wife. He twists the merry-widow (really now) up in his hands, thinking, no American woman would wear it half so interestingly as his resentful bride. Not Marilyn Monroe, not Doris Day. It’s not meant to be worn like second skin, not really. He wants to see her in the costumes of the spectacle.

Most of all because he knows she’s got it in her. The performance, the release.

“Hey,” he says, “if you’re sick of me, I’ve got just the thing.”

The door opens. She emerges with her face wet, her collar wet, the hair at her temples dripping. One hand clasped behind her back.

“Know what this is?” he asks.

“A getup for an American whore.” 

He lets that one slide. In his mind’s eye, Marilyn and Doris blush and pull on robes. “Called a merry-widow,” he says with a laugh, tossing it back to the hands in which it belongs. “Vesyolaya vdova.”

She raises her eyebrows. “You think I’ll outlive you?”

“I hope we die in each other’s arms,” he says with a sly grin. “Isn’t that the point of a marriage?”

“I hope you die in America,” she replies, and her lip curls as at the vilest imaginable thing: “I hope you die a citizen here.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“More and more by the second.”

He rises, takes her lightly—for even now she is calm and cold—by the wrists, one palm open, one still clenched in a fist. She has never hated him. Not once. Not even in the old days, when she was clipping his hard-won finery into handkerchiefs and scraps, and not here in America. She hates what she sees: the spectacle, the costume. “Diplomacy, Katya,” he says, “that’s all,” and he slides his fingers over her warm, unguarded skin, feels her hiss through her teeth.

“You unholy liar,” she mutters, mouth hardly opening. That pretty, relentless mouth. “What did you mean, reciting English poems about liberty to me? I know better. I’ve learned better. Someone’s always listening, and you keep spitting out the wrong language. I won’t put myself in the ground for your treasonous little heart, Fyodor Anatolich.”

“Somber widow, then,” he says, laughing, and she pulls her hand back once more and slaps him cleanly across the mouth. His lips buzz. The first time she did this to him was like an electric shock. He licks his lips, not yet tired of it. The prim Party wife, the Russian misfit, the cold critic, is nothing to this—and how he has missed her. “You do remember that I’m here on Party business? There’s no greater sanction in the world.”

“I know better,” she says again, eyes too bright, damp-bright as opposed to zeal-bright, and he remembers for the first time in a long time, the mother.

“You wear them well,” he says softly. “It’s business. Just business.”

“It can’t be.”

She makes a decision, he sees it in her: steadying the shoulders, something sinuous and startling in the hips. “Here, then,” she says. “I’ll put on the costume. For the visa, for the Party, for the dress to fit—you, sit down and shut your eyes.”

He sits, shuts them, feels something cool and sleek slide over his eyes—

“Hey!”

“A moment.”

A moment imprisoned, then, for what crime he does not know. Treason, he supposes, against—the fabric rustles, the zipper unzipped, beneath his trousers he is almost painfully stiff with anticipation—if not the state, then, then.

Slim fingers underneath the blindfold. A minute later. An hour. A week.

If not the state, then against her. 

The band of the satin robe, untied from his eyes, slides into his lap. And after it, his wife. 

“Hello, Fred,” she says, the English ugly in her mouth but carrying all the heated promise of a kiss.

Hello to Katya in cream-colored lace, dense and expensive and molded to her skin. Her long body, her hair still up in its decorous bun, her metre-long neck. A swan, not a sparrow. He kisses her neck, pulls her by the shoulders. “Shit,” he says, even as her hips push against his and speaking in any language becomes twice the trial. Never mind that. The long-awaited payoff’s all visual. “Let me look at you.”

Her mouth grazes his own. “No.”

Her knees brace at his hips, thighs sliding long and sleek against his own, bare over his trousers, under his hands. Not permitted, those hands. She takes one prisoner, turns the palm up, presses her fist into it. Uncurls it. 

The nail scissors, from the bathroom. Small but sharp. He runs a fingertip over the red mark they have left in her palm, how tightly she has gripped them, so intent and so patient in her pain. Katya leaves him behind her again. But she winds her free arm around his neck and brings him along.

“Cut it off me,” she whispers.

At first, he does not understand. Then he does, though he does not want to. But her hips cant against his and she guides the blades against the fabric valley between her breasts, and the first minute he sees the skin beneath reveal itself, desire shocks through him so deeply he groans aloud. 

He understands. Lace, and his father’s money, falls in ugly shreds around their feet, and he feels heroic and flush, patriotic even. He could hurt her, but doesn’t, his hands impossibly steady. They cut and he thinks of cut stockings, screeching records, and he understands. He understands her, for the very first time.

“Why Katya,” he says, and he smiles, slow. The merry-widow falls in shreds, its last clinging desperately around her hips like a flipped-up and fraying skirt. “Did you want me all this while?”

“Shut up,” she murmurs desperately as he lets the scissors drop and lets his hand skate slickly between her legs. “Shut up and work.”

Do you know, Katya, he thinks, with you here for the long run, he just might.

iii. HOME

“All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy families are more or less alike,” says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English)
ADA, OR ARDOR; Vladimir Nabokov

A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. 
DEATHLESS; Catherynne M. Valente

All Russia’s finest adults had grown up as fine-honed youth in the Komsomol; it stands to reason, then, that all Russia’s finest knew Katya. Accordingly, the day Fyodor’s own position in the government was legitimated, people were looking as much at his wife as at him. What a little terror she had been, ever since she was marching in Red Parades! And how different she looked now. Grown, and the strange little sparrow had turned pretty after all. Well, a good marriage is kind to its constituents. See the strange alchemy of it: the light in her eyes watching the stage, the odd malleable softness that passed over her features when he stepped off and whispered in her ear. 

What a charming and polished boy, born to walk in the footsteps of the greatest men, and what a gift of a wife she makes. How quiet and humble she is, really, a good girl and a credit to her country. Proof that anyone who works for it can earn a position, she certainly had no help from the family—

But let’s not speak of that now, with her too far up to hear, too far away to be heard through the walls. Nothing much to hear, though. The lovely ones never have secrets anyhow.

And at the gala after, as a brass band played songs they all knew, all the room whispered: 

How beautiful they are and how joyful, the diplomat and his wife, and how splendidly they dance together!