Sekret (4 page)

We enter a cavernous, window- and mirror-lined room that must have hosted balls in the Imperial days. Velvet ropes dangle from the ceiling, bereft of their chandeliers like leashes missing their dogs; channels on the walls that once housed gold leaf have been stripped bare. The bank of windows looks onto a desolate stone terrace along the house’s side, full of weedy flowerbeds and dry, leaf-smeared fountains. The same high concrete walls from the front yard block the rest of the view. I curse under my breath as a pair of guards patrol through the yard. Missile silos have less security than this.

At the far end of the ballroom, someone plays a soft Tchaikovsky waltz on a battered baby grand. The piano isn’t as out of tune as I’d expected. Two teens waltz around the piano: a boy and girl, slender without looking starved, with soft brown hair and matching French noses. I suck in my breath—the twins from the market. They’re dressed in far nicer wool and cashmere than the scratchy tweed and cotton on Sergei and me. Little crescents of perspiration lurk under their arms as they twirl, carefree, smug.

“Misha? Masha?” Sergei calls. “Our twins,” he tells me. Of course their names match—I can’t help but grin at their parents’ cruelty. “Though I believe you’ve already met.”

My jaw tenses and I manage a curt nod. I can’t think about anything around them. Nothing is safe.

Misha—or Mikhail, I assume—saunters toward us. “The little trapped rat. Not worth the effort, if you ask me.”

“If you were dumb enough to get caught, you have no place here,” Masha says.

“Then what’s your excuse?” I ask.

Masha eyes me with sudden wolfish dominance. “How long have you known you were a psychic? You’re not a very good one. I mean, you didn’t even see us coming.”

I shrink back from her, which I realize a second too late is about the worst thing I could have done. “It took you five years to find me. What’s that say about you?”

Masha scrutinizes me for a minute more. The piano music has stopped. She breaks the gaze first; relieved, I lower my head and stare at the decades of scuffmarks gouged into the floor. It doesn’t matter, these people don’t matter. As soon as I find out where Mama and Zhenya are, I can leave this all behind, and—

Shit.

Masha’s face lights up, triumphant. “You can scheme all you want. You won’t get far.” She wrinkles her perfect nose, glancing toward the piano. “No one ever does.”

Sergei nudges my shoulder with his own, though he has to stoop down to do it. “Just ignore them. I do.”

Misha jabs his thumb toward Sergei, eyes still on me. “You think this hockey hooligan will protect you? I used to think I couldn’t read Sergei’s thoughts until I realized he didn’t
have
any.” He shares a smirk with Masha and they strut out of the ballroom.

“Can you believe they actually want to do this work? I figure that’s punishment enough.” Sergei’s face is flushed, but he keeps his half grin lacquered to his face. “Come on, tour isn’t over.”

We circle the piano, revealing a dark-featured boy seated at it, hands steady as a surgeon’s above the keys, as if stopping the music has frozen him, too. Sergei sighs and leans against the splintering piano. “And this is Valentin.”

Valentin’s deep cherry-pit eyes watch me from behind thick-framed glasses; he nods once at me and scrubs his black hair. He has a large frame like Sergei’s, but his muscles are lean and withdrawn. Something about him reminds me of the brooding photographs of Russian composers and poets in Aunt Nadia’s encyclopedias.

“You play very well,” I tell him. “Was that Tchaikovsky?”

He looks down like the compliment was too much to bear. “It was supposed to be
Swan Lake
, but … it’s out of tune.”

I shouldn’t act like I care. I don’t need any friends here; I’ll be gone at the first sign of gaps in the security. But something in his musical phrasing reminded me of the old Kondrashin piano recordings Papa and Zhenya and I listened to, Zhenya dutifully transcribing the notes in his private notation. “Have you been playing for long?”

His dark eyes meet mine again. I know that tightness around them well—the look I gave to anyone who noticed me, the slip of a girl darting along Moscow’s streets. I don’t blame him for not trusting me; I’ll use whatever and whoever I can to escape.

“All my life.” He eases his posture; I uncoil in turn. “My mother taught me so I could accompany her when she played violin.”

“She must be very proud of you,” I tell him. But it was the wrong thing to say. He drops his head and the tension returns.

“Valentin here wants to be the next … What’s his name, Valya?” Sergei nudges him in the ribs—none too gently, I suspect. “Dave Barback?”

“Brubeck,” Valentin says to the piano keys.

“Yes! Great American jazz composer, Valya tells me. But no one in the Soviet Union cares about jazz. Colored people music,” Sergei says. I bristle, though I’m not surprised. Most Russians think like Sergei—Africans, Asians, even olive-skinned people like myself from Georgia and the other southern republics are treated suspiciously.

Valentin eyes me with a slight tilt to his head. “My family is Georgian, too.”

“Did I give you permission to read my mind?” I snap. He winces and tucks his hands into his lap.

“Come on, let me show you the view out back,” Sergei says. “Valya won’t follow us out there. He hates the river.”

Sergei pulls me onto the rear balcony of cracked concrete. A long shadow in my periphery marks Boris, moving closer, but Sergei closes the door before he reaches us. My blood races when I realize that this side of the mansion is not hemmed in by the cold concrete wall. But my hope instantly deflates. It’s a sheer drop—the mansion perches on a cliff overlooking the Moskva River. We’re somewhere in the hills of southeastern Moscow. Barges chug through the oily gray water beneath us; the Metro trains clatter across the river bridge. To the north, at the heart of the city, I can make out the peaks of the Seven Sisters—Stalin’s skyscrapers capped in gold and red stars—and the pink turrets of the Novodevichy Monastery jutting defiantly above the river.

“There’s Luzhniki Stadium.” Sergei stands behind me and points around me to the low white pod just opposite the river from us. It looks like an alien craft that could take flight at any moment—sail into the stars like the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin or the
Sputnik
satellite. “I’m going to play for Spartak there someday. I’ll be the greatest hockey player in the world.”

I don’t mean to, but I can feel the sadness sheening his bare arms. They’ve taken something from all of us. For me, it was Mama and Zhenya, and my dreams of studying at Moscow State so I could fix Zhenya someday. What else have they taken from Sergei, besides his hockey career? But when I glance back at him, his face is blank, a frieze of the Worker as He Advances the Motherland, unmoving.

“You want to go to Moscow State?” He swings me around to my left by my shoulders. “Look.”

I stumble back into his dense chest. I can only see the top of the tower over the mansion’s roof, but I know it instantly. It’s the greatest of Stalin’s Seven Sisters; the bright red star and the golden sickle and hammer upon it are perfectly clear. The education I crave is just out of reach.

I scrub at my eyes—they’re moist from the wind, I tell myself—and look away.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he says. “I just thought you’d like…”

“It doesn’t matter.” When I find Mama and Zhenya and run away from this place, I’ll have to leave it behind. I’ll keep teaching myself, as I’ve been doing. We’ll keep running; we’ll watch Moscow shrink to a speck over our shoulders. Always running, forever—

Sergei’s hand touches my shoulder. It burns with conflicting emotions: Sadness? Anger? “Yulia, you have to stop thinking about escape. It’s too dangerous.”

“What do you care?” A barge sounds its horn; I peer over the balcony ledge. If it were straight down, I could survive it, but the embankment slopes just enough …

“Maybe I don’t. You wouldn’t be the first to try.” He shrugs. “But believe me, if there’s one thing I’ve learned here … There are worse things than a bullet in the back, a broken neck. What they can do to your brain, or your family’s…”

Sergei flinches; his gaze roves anxiously, unsettled. I step away from him, not liking the sudden darkness I sense on his skin.

“Death would be a mercy,” he says. “For you and your family both.”

CHAPTER 6

MAJOR KRUZENKO TEARS
open the balcony door, and as she squeezes between Sergei and me, her arm touching mine, I glimpse what Sergei’s talking about. Her head is full of bees. She buzzes with panic—with the sound of a shadow peering over her shoulder.

And then, just as abruptly, the panic dissolves into a soft melody.

“I said a quick tour, Seryozha.” She waggles her finger at Sergei, who rolls his eyes. “I just spoke with Comrade Rostov. They are ready for you to resume your training exercise.” That buzzing sound around her again when she leans in close—and then it’s gone.

“Then I’d better not disappoint.” Sergei sets his mouth in a grim line and slips out the door.

I start to follow him, but Kruzenko catches my shoulder. “A minute, Yulia, if I may.”

I squeeze my escape plans to the back of my mind, with no clue whether it will do me any good. Pay attention, Yulia. You must first learn the rules.

“Masha tells me you are planning to escape,” Kruzenko says.

Adrenaline burns through me. I need a quick excuse. “She has it out for me. She thinks I—”

Kruzenko holds up one finger. “No, no, it is all right. I know this is all new to you; it is very difficult to accept. So I will make you an offer.” Her voice is softer than in the interrogation room, maternal even. It’s too easy to trust her when she’s unintimidating this way. “Follow your studies diligently and work hard for a few months, and I will let you see your family.”

My effort to focus my thoughts is lost in a deluge of rage. Who is she, to act so damned generous when offering me what I should already have? I want to reach out and slap her. She flinches, either because she read it in my thoughts, or in the way my shoulders draw tight and my fists cock. I step back. My skin is boiling in the crisp winter air. I take a deep breath, but nothing fills the ache in my lungs.

“I’m only doing this for them as it is. Don’t turn my family into a reward. A treat for obedience.”

“I am permitted to do whatever the State authorizes me to do, if it means your cooperation. Don’t forget this.” She matches the chill in my voice, but she’s perfectly motionless, eyes as unflinching as a photograph. No rage prickles through her like it does in me. I’m sure it’s standard KGB training. I’ll have to sever emotions if I’m going to outsmart her.

“Now, then. I am not angry at you for having such thoughts, though I am sure I don’t have to tell you how foolish an escape attempt would be, for you and your family both.”

I say nothing and watch the treetops below us ripple in the wind. She won’t make the same offer to see my family again; it will be chiseled away and forgotten like the imperial sigil over the front door.

“But your classmates cannot be blamed for believing you might try. So let me teach you a little technique. It’s how we shield our thoughts from intruders.”

I stand up straighter. “Intruders like you?” I ask.

“Don’t flatter yourself. You aren’t
that
strong.” She smiles, patronizing, and clears her throat. “I am speaking of enemy agents. Your fellow classmates—at least in casual passing. Your thoughts and feelings flow far too freely. You fling them at me when I’m not even trying to peer inside.”

I look away, trying not to think how much I hate her, so of course it’s foremost in my mind.

“Yes, always troublesome, that. Someone tells you not to think about elephants, and you can do nothing but.” She bares her ragged teeth in a grin. They remind me of the metal tank traps along the Moskva River that held back the fascists. “But there’s a simple way to guard them. It’s easy enough to understand, but takes a lot of effort to master. Try peering into my thoughts.” Major Kruzenko steps closer to me and reaches for my wrists. I instinctively yank my hand back. “Come now, I know it’s easiest for you when you’re making physical contact. Tell me what you hear,” she says.

I rest two fingers on her arm, close my eyes, and listen. The river flowing beneath us—fluid, glassy, not raging today. The wind whispering through the birch trees and rustling the occasional sparrow from its roost. Cars sputtering on a faraway road.

Then I hear that melody: catgut balalaika strings and a mournful, keening voice. Notes with hooks in them to yank out your heart and make you bawl. A gypsy song, one that sprouted from the dark Russian earth long before the Communist Party took root.

Not so far away from here, the River Volga flows

Among the ripe and golden wheat, among the pure white snow

The River Volga flows past me, when I am but a child

“I hear an old folk song,” I say. “Is there a radio somewhere?”

“No, no.” She shakes her head with a smile and drops her arm. The music dissipates like steam. “It’s how we guard our thoughts, you see. We can’t redirect them, so we must shield them instead. Straighten up.” She taps my hip. I scowl and stand upright, but fold my arms protectively across my chest. “Now choose a song—one you won’t get sick of.”

I mull over the possibilities. Tchaikovsky’s oeuvre is bursting with loud, ponderous music, perfect for concealing thoughts, and I pause on the dark, heavy opening to his piano concerto. No, it’s too much. What have I heard on the radio? A few snatches of American pop songs—wonderful sunny songs, about girls in California and shining chrome-trimmed cars—but I’d only caught a few bars before the static curtain of the radio jammers closed on the frequency.

The radio triggers another memory—huddled in Aunt Nadia’s kitchen with Mama, Cousin Denis, and Zhenya just a few months back. The new voice of Russia, the poet Yevgenni Yevtushenko, was reading his poem that decried the Nazi slaughter of Jews in the Ukraine. But there was more than just words. Dmitri Shostakovich conducted his Thirteenth Symphony live, set to the reading, in a delirious and dangerous waterfall of violent strings, blunt elbows of brass, slow bleeding drums.