Natalya hadn't been able to resist. She'd puttered around her apartment in the morning, watering plants, cleaning dishes, looking through mail… all in an attempt to distract herself from thinking about the strange letter she'd received from Dr. Jeremy Fletcher. All to no avail.
But before she'd left her apartment, Yuri had called to invite her to dinner with some of the embassy staff. They were going to the Russkiy Dom restaurant, over on Connecticut. Was she interested? Under pressure and wishing to stay in Yuri's good graces, she finally said yes, perhaps.
So eventually she found herself at the embassy, almost alone. The white walls and shining stone floors created a sense of cavernous emptiness. Yet once there and with Fletcher's letter before her, she still wanted to postpone her investigation. She decided to check on some of the details for the embassy's reception for the Bolshoi the coming Monday evening.
They were using an American caterer rather than the embassy's own kitchen-money had changed hands there, she was sure-and as soon as she looked at the menu faxed over from the caterer's the day before, she knew there was a problem.
Borsch was on the menu. Which for Americans, she knew, meant a watery beet soup with a mass of sour cream dumped on top.
That wasn't borsch. At least not Russian borsch.
Russian borsch was more of a stew, with beef, onions, potatoes, peppers… How, she wondered, did Americans think Russians had survived on beets in hot water?
And then she saw that caviar was also on the menu-no doubt served with chopped eggs, onions, chives, black olives, and probably half a dozen other garnishes, all of which were another American invention-like chop suey-and there for people who actually didn't like the taste of fish eggs.
But true Russians did, and enjoyed their caviar with nothing more complicated than hard bread and butter. And they probably would serve red caviar as well as black, but unless the red caviar was sevruga, it would be an insult at such an important dinner.
A half hour later she hung up the phone, having tactfully if forcefully explained all this to a Mr. Foy, the manager of the catering service.
"Well, of course," he'd said finally, exasperation evident, "if that's what you want. We strive to be ethnically authentic."
Ethnically authentic? The Soviet Union may have fallen, but she was sure Mr. Foy thought of Russians with the same old Cold War cliches: borsch-slurping, vodka-swilling, caviar-snob savages who just happened to possess nuclear weapons.
Would Americans and Russians ever truly understand one another? Was that even possible between two such vastly different cultures, one formed by Enlightenment logic, the other steeped in centuries of Pagan mysticism?
She realized she was still distracting herself from Fletcher's letter.
She carefully unfolded Fletcher's letter and read it again. Perhaps she was reluctant to dive into it because he had provided so very little to go on: he was doing research on the Cold War period, specifically 1960-1970; he was particularly interested in documents concerning Russian nuclear war strategies-a word, curiously, he'd translated as stzenariy, which meant something more like screenplay, rather than the more literal strategija; she shrugged and read on-and he wondered if Natalya had any knowledge of a particular book about such stzenarii, something called Borba s tenyu… though, he admitted, he wasn't sure if it was a book, a report, a memorandum… or even if that was the title at all.
Well, the subject and period provided her with at least one clue: if whatever Fletcher was after had been published in the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1970, and it was about Soviet nuclear arms strategy, then it couldn't possibly have been an official Soviet publication. So it could only have been samizdat: something produced unofficially by one of the dozens of small illegal presses run from basements by brave, idealistic dissidents-which would only make tracking it down all the more difficult.
The first reference she discovered wasn't a book at all, but rather a film; a silent film at that, titled Borba za Ultimatum, a title translated into English as The Fight for the Ultimatum Factory. But it was much too early, 1923.
Natalya thought for a moment. The word borba was old Russian; in fact, its roots could be traced to the Serbo-Croatian;Борба, which meant simply "struggle." So she tried the search from that angle.
This soon revealed that Borba had been the title of a newspaper in Belgrade, printed by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. Nuclear secrets published in a Party paper in Belgrade? Unlikely. But then perhaps tenyu, shadow or shade, was the pseudonym of a dissident writer for the paper, someone using the Party organ to expose its own secrets?
She wasted a full hour looking through the archives of the newspaper Borba, searching for any mention of tenyu. But most of the archived material was either numbingly routine or the raving paranoid fantasies that passed for commentary during those dark, suspicious years: articles about Americans needing to buy their oxygen from vending machines, being thrown out of the windows of hospitals for not paying their bills… amusing stuff, but hardly Cold War intrigue.
She sensed this was a wild-goose chase, as the Americans put it-though she'd never been able to understand why the goose had to be wild; was there such a thing as a tame goose? Did early Americans keep such geese as pets, teach them tricks, put them in circuses, like Russians with their bears?
There was so much cultural history beneath almost every colloquialism-so much meaning that was simply taken for granted-it sometimes astounded her that people from two different cultures could communicate at all. And then sometimes, too, she wondered if they ever truly did.
She thought back to her one brief affair with an American. He'd been a speechwriter for the White House. She remembered one very early morning in particular, a discussion that had seemed unimportant at the time, but had by now become a symbol for the cultural gulf between them.
They'd been lying in bed after making love, smoking, the ashtray set on the gold satin sheet-she brought them out especially for his visits-when he'd started complaining about his job.
"It's difficult to keep coming up with phrases that say much but mean nothing."
She'd smiled. "Mr. Gorbachev was a master at such speech. We called it sotryasat vozdukh, shaking the air."
"Well, he's much admired in this country," said her lover, exhaling smoke.
"And hated in Russia," said Natalya.
He had suddenly grown serious. "The Soviet Union was rotten to the core. It had to collapse. He was just trying to limit the damage."
"And of course the Americans did not benefit from this 'damage control.' "
He sighed. "There you go again, with those paranoid theories. Did you ever consider that sometimes there is no plot? Sometimes, as we say, shit happens?"
And sometimes, she'd thought, shit very conveniently happens. But she hadn't said anything, not wanting to start another argument.
And eventually it was such arguments that ended the affair.
To her mind, most Americans were naive children, playing at world politics as though the Bad Guys always wore black hats, like in their cowboy fairy tales. Growing up during Soviet times, even in their sunset years, had taught her that enemies were not always so clearly identifiable; that, more often than not, the hats they wore were gray, not black.
"Gray Cardinals" they were called in her culture; the true power that stood always behind the throne, whispering into the ears of those seemingly in charge, all the while remaining invisible.
The faint bluish glow of the computer screen suddenly seemed irritating, her eyes unable to focus on the multicolored symbols.
Natalya leaned back and stretched, trying to work some of the tension out of her back. No one had returned to work in the last hour. Apparently the weekend staff was taking a more traditionally Soviet lunch break. She remembered what a friend had said of those days: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."
She walked out of the small glass-walled office, saw no one, then wandered over to the window and gazed out on Wisconsin Avenue. Even on a Saturday it was filled with taxicabs and heavy traffic. She looked up to the clear blue sky, a crisp early fall day. The row of maple trees across Wisconsin were crowned in fall colors, the distant pinnacle of the Washington Monument a stark intrusion into the cloudless sky.
The scene made her want to give up the search now and leave, perhaps walk over to the Mall, visit the Lincoln Memorial, a diversion she always found refreshing. There was something so comforting, yet so tragic, in that immense statue's face that she always felt both inspired and humbled in its presence.
Of course tragedy was something Russians knew a great deal about. In fact, she'd often thought that was what most mystified Americans about her countrymen: their ability, even their need, to treat sadness as an emotion like any other, as something necessary to life, like joy or determination. She'd voiced that idea once to a counterpart in the American embassy, and he'd replied, "Oh, I see. So Russians aren't happy unless they've got something to be depressed about?"
Perhaps there was something to that. She felt in her own heart the need to know and appreciate both sides of her emotions, both the light of pleasure as well as its shadow.
And at that thought her mind suddenly went back to her search. So far she'd been focusing on the word borba. What if she took tenyu, "shadow" or "shade"-there was really no distinction in Russian-as the key?
With renewed energy she went back to her desk. She sat down and immediately began typing.
And immediately she got a hit: another film, this one titled Боu с mен b ю (Boy s tenyu). But it wasn't the film itself that had caught her attention, it was the English translation of the title.
Shadow Boxing.
"Shadow boxing" made a lot more metaphorical sense than "fighting with shadows" or "warring with shade."
Or did it?
After all, besides fighting and struggle, borba could just as easily be interpreated as "war." Borba s tenyu. Warring with shadows? Or, given that the word "warring" didn't exist in Russian, what about the simpler version?
Shadow war.
It occurred to Natalya she should scour the archives for a Russian book that had been translated into English as Shadow War, regardless of its original name in Russian.
She glanced out the window and saw that the outside light was fading as evening approached. Her second wind of curiosity was wearing off. But she had time for one more attempt.
She tapped at the keyboard until English Title = Shadow War was glowing in green letters on her screen. She hit Return.
Immediately there was a result. At first she was surprised by what she read; but then she realized it confirmed her first intuition.
Досmуn в архuв огранuчен read the screen.
Restricted archives.
In bright red letters. Blinking bright red letters.
"Everything all right, Natalya Nikolayevna?"
The voice startled her. She looked up to see one of the guards standing in the doorway. He looked quite threatening in his gray-and-olive camouflage uniform, a small pistol strapped at his waist.
"Yes. Just working." She smiled, and shifted so her shoulders would cover the computer screen.
"On a beautiful Saturday afternoon?" said the guard. "A pretty woman like you should be out enjoying herself, not cooped up in this mausoleum with an old fossil like me."
"Is there a problem?" she asked somewhat curtly. She didn't want him to linger long enough to become curious.
He looked confused. "No, of course not. I just-"
"I am very busy," she said.
He nodded. "Of course." He decided to counter her frostiness by asserting his authority. "But be certain to sign out when you leave. In these days-"
"I will." Now she smiled, hoping that would satisfy him. "You have my word."
He nodded at her, continued on his rounds.
She turned back to the computer screen. The red "Restricted Archives" message was still blinking. She canceled it out, then began filling out the form on the screen that would submit a request for access to the restricted archives; permission that could only come from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but which would really come from the FSB. Which could take anywhere from a week to forever.
She thought of Yuri. Now she would definitely have to accept that dinner invitation.
And then she thought of one additional source to which she might turn for help.
Her father.
If this book-if it was a book-had something to do with the Cold War, and if it had in fact been somehow leaked to the samizdat press… well, then, it might be something her father had found in his own searching. Not that he would necessarily tell her about it. But she had nothing to lose by asking-other, that is, than suffering another of his inscrutable silences. And she hadn't called him in two weeks. This would give her an excuse.
She logged off and watched the screen go black. She put Fletcher's letter back in her desk drawer and locked it, then reached over and switched off the lamp on her desk.
She had taken her purse and coat and turned to leave when she paused. Taking her keys out again, she unlocked the drawer, took out Fletcher's letter, and put it in her purse.
She had no idea why she did this; it just felt right. Then she shrugged on her coat and walked down the hall to the elevator, her very non-Soviet high-heeled shoes creating echoes as they clicked on the white-and-brown-veined marble floor.