The Fourth Courier Read online

  While he was recovering, she turned aside and spat him out.

  There was no afterplay or cuddling. After seventeen years they had grown too accustomed to each other. They were useful to each other. Their sex had hardened as their lives had.

  “You like this part the best,” she said.

  “What part?”

  “When the sex is over.”

  “I enjoy the sex with you.”

  “You enjoy sex with yourself. And worry how you’ll do.”

  “Don’t all men?”

  “Most men assume they’re very good or the best.”

  Basia buttoned her sweater.

  “Can you imagine what I am feeling?” he asked.

  “I can never imagine what a man is feeling.”

  “For so many years, I have known what will happen, and how it will be. It’s like a film I’ve rewound and played so many times. I see it that clearly and it always ends the same. I can not change my future.”

  “I confess, Dravko, I have dreamed of being your queen. I know, foolishly.”

  “Next to me on a chariot?” He smiled at the caricature of himself.

  “Oh Dravko, if you only knew my dreams.”

  “I think I do.”

  “I dream of days in the sun, having servants—”

  “Slaves.”

  “—rub oil on me. And the boys—”

  “Men.”

  “—massage me. And you, Dravko?”

  “We have the same dreams.”

  He helped Basia into her fur.

  “A gentleman to the end.”

  “It’s not the end.”

  “Of certain dreams, it is. We go too far back to have another beginning, but it’s only the beginning for you.” Basia finished the last bit of champagne. “How does your film end, Dravko? Am I in it to the last scene? Because if I’m not, rewind it and watch it again. I’m there until it says The End. I’ve already memorized my lines.”

  She left his room.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  DR. USTINOV FELT A LITTLE woozy after three days of sipping vodka and no sleep other than catnaps. He shared his last flask with the bus driver, who had turned talkative under its influence. How hard life had become, he complained, a dog-eat-dog world where only one thing mattered: money. Now he worked double shifts just to feed his family, and yes, he agreed seven children was excessive, but there they were. He was a man, wasn’t he? And his wife, God bless her, had never denied him his conjugal rights. Who were they to deny the Pope his? Birth control was a sacrilege or worse, and what man could synchronize his desire to the few days in a month when it was safe? He couldn’t. Not when desire rose every morning as sure as the sun. Ach! It was a hard life, bread cost double what it had only a month ago, and he had eight hungry stomachs to fill, not counting his own. Was there any more vodka in the flask?

  The driver tooted his horn after dropping him at Białystok’s train station, and Sergej waved goodbye. He felt a momentary pang of sadness, as if bidding farewell to a friend, and entered the train station lugging his twin steamer suitcases. He had not expected the sallow faces or gritty floors or scratchy speakers announcing arrivals and departures. Freedom had always sounded cheerful to him, clean and bright, not this sullenness he recognized from Kosmonovo.

  Inside the station, he sought out the left luggage counter. The attendant, dangling a cigarette from his mouth, squinted from the smoke. “Short-term or long?”

  Sergej’s limited Polish wasn’t adequate for the question. “Do you speak Russian?”

  The man squashed his cigarette on the floor. “We all learned Russian. They fed it to us like we were geese: by ramming it down our throats. How long you want to check them for?”

  “It could be a while.”

  The man shrugged. “That’s more money for me. I’ll warn you, rates go up almost every day, and I don’t take rubles. You checking both bags?”

  Sergej pushed a suitcase forward. “Only one.”

  The attendant handed him a ticket. “You’ll need that to claim it.”

  Sergej reached into his pocket. He had the money ready, and slipped the man a hundred-dollar bill. “Like I said, it could be a long time. Make sure it doesn’t get lost.”

  The attendant quickly put the money out of sight. “Don’t worry about that. And give me back that ticket.” The man scribbled on it. “I marked it ‘paid in advance.’”

  Glad to be rid of one suitcase, Sergej wandered over to the kiosks selling newspapers and snack foods. Attracted to the sex magazines, he reached for one when the vendor stopped him. “You buy it, then you can touch her all you want. You old Russkis. It’s like you’ve never seen dirty pictures before. What, you don’t have naked women in Russia?”

  “It’s a cold country,” Sergej said, trying to make a joke of it. “Do you sell vodka?”

  The man pointed to a shelf. “That’s not bottled water. Fifth, half, or full?”

  “Three fifths.”

  “It’s the same price if you buy one liter.”

  “It’s not all for me.”

  The man wrapped the bottles in newspaper, leaving their necks exposed. “You have a long trip tonight?”

  “To Warsaw.”

  “You just missed the evening train. Russkis!”

  Sergej traded money for the bottles and slipped them into his coat pockets. “Do you sell stamps?”

  “Do I look like a post office?”

  “I want to send a letter to my wife. I’m traveling for the first time away from home. I want to let her know that I arrived.”

  The man handed back his change. “They got stamps in Warsaw.”

  Sergej went outside and found a sheltered bench where he’d be easily seen. He sat and massaged his sprained ankle. A bitter wind blew on his neck through a gap in the boards and he pulled his scarf tighter. He took a moment to let it sink in where he was, where he had arrived, and how all his meticulous planning had paid off. Ultimately he had crossed for vodka, which he knew he would, but Sergej Ustinov a border guard? He chuckled at his own guile. For years he hadn’t been permitted near a border! All had gone like clockwork, the information he had gleaned at conferences or in Moscow’s libraries, surprisingly precise on locations, distances, and timetables. There had been unplanned moments, of course, Emma among them, and he felt his loins stir at her memory. For so long, his love life had exhausted itself between the covers of girlie magazines, forced to donate his sperm—his genius sperm—to upgrade the Soviet Man’s eugenic pool. They left him literally too drained to have much enthusiasm for his wife; so much so that eventually they stopped making love altogether. Sergej began to think a woman’s naked flesh felt like the magazine pages he touched while making his weekly donation to troubling science.

  Natalya was probably in the kitchen when the authorities arrived, the coffee cup in her hand trembling slightly from old age, not fear, but almost dropping it when they knocked—loud, sharp, invasive—on the door. To protect her, he had told her nothing, so she had nothing to tell them and her tears would be real. What had she felt when she realized he was gone? Of course he’d always been honest about how caged he felt, a national treasure rarely let out, almost always to weapons bazaars described as science conferences in the Soviet sphere, and never to the West, where he would likely be kidnapped if he didn’t defect first. On rare occasions he bared his anguish to Natalya, dismayed that his sperm was used to bring a sheaf of babies into a world that he was designing weapons to destroy, a world that further anguished him by being off limits. Without his saying so, she sensed he was justifying suicide, and begged him not to do it, preferring he find a way to defect, even if it meant abandoning her, rather than knowing he killed himself because he had stayed.

  He rummaged in his satchel for a pen, paper, and envelope. He had always known this moment would come. What to tell Natalya? He had thought of her on his journey, though not in Kosmonovo until the train had left the station, and not in Emma’s abundant arms. When his escape was c
omplete, he had imagined her in their woeful kitchen. Words—he didn’t know where they came from—now bombarded him: love, and life mates, and thankfulness. He had predicted this moment to be happy, deliriously happy, and instead he felt emptied, as drained as when he left the clinic, his seed carried away in a test tube. He had wanted to chase after the clinician to reclaim himself, but now he didn’t know what to chase after, he felt that empty. Sergej bent over the paper and started to write.

  A white van came up the road and slowed. The driver peered at him through the windshield. Sergej, preoccupied with his letter, didn’t notice him. Jacek circled back and pulled over as Sergej was sealing his envelope. “Are you the guy I’m taking to Warsaw?”

  “If you know General Mladic, I am,” Sergej replied.

  Jacek jumped out of the van to open the rear compartment. “We don’t use names,” he told the physicist, grabbing his suitcase.

  “Don’t knock the latches!” Sergej cautioned.

  “Why, is it going to explode?”

  “It’s possible. Ha!”

  Jacek cautiously swung the bag into the back.

  Sergej told him, “I want to mail a letter.”

  “We have post offices in Warsaw. Get in, we got a long drive.”

  Sergej slipped into the front seat. “You speak Russian?”

  “What, am I speaking French?” Jacek spat out the window. “If you Russkis had your way, Russian is all we’d be talking.” He shifted into gear and pulled away. Soon they were out of town and he sped up.

  Sergej said, “You drive fast.”

  “You got a problem with it?”

  He didn’t, and pulled a flask from his pocket, “You want a slug of this?”

  “Does the Pope pray?”

  Sergej unscrewed the top, and Jacek took the bottle and drank from it. When he tried to hand it back, Sergej refused it, saying, “I have my own.” They rode a distance in silence, tipping from their bottles, until the physicist finally asked, “Did you pick up my sons? Three of them. The last crossed six weeks ago.”

  “Yeah, I picked them up. I thought I was going crazy thinking they all looked like the same fucking scarecrow, and you’re the fucking scarecrow!”

  “I’m tall,” Sergej admitted.

  Jacek snorted. “You’re more than tall.”

  A two-way radio suddenly had a burst of static. Through the noise they heard a woman ask, “Are you there?”

  Jacek picked up the handset. “Yeah, I’m here. We’re about an hour out.”

  “There’s been a change in plans. Bring him to Centralna,” she said, referring to Warsaw’s central train station.

  “What the fuck do I care?” He hung up.

  Sergej asked, “Is there a problem?”

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  “I don’t like it when plans change.”

  “They only changed for me, not you.”

  Suddenly Jacek pulled off the road.

  Alarmed, Sergej asked, “What are you doing?”

  Jacek opened the van’s door. “Taking care of nature. I gotta piss.”

  Sergej joined him on the side of the road. They both looked up at the thin stringy clouds crossing the moon as they splattered the bushes. “I can’t do this at home,” he told Jacek. “People are always watching.”

  “No wonder you Russkis are full of shit!”

  Jacek laughed at his lame joke all the way back to the van.

  Sergej said, “You don’t know what it’s like, always having someone watching you. It can make you crazy. Ha!”

  “It did you, that’s for sure.”

  Soon a dirty orange glow appeared on the horizon. Warsaw. Sergej watched it approaching with awe. How many times had he studied his map of Russia, tracing its borders as a prisoner paces his jail cell, until he had worn the borders away? To be in Warsaw meant he had escaped and was on his way to America.

  “So you really got a bomb back there?” Jacek asked.

  “It’s my passport to a new life!” Sergej replied, giddy with anticipation.

  “Or a heavenly one if it explodes. So where are you planning this new life?”

  “New York! Ha!”

  “It takes money to go to New York.”

  “One million dollars! Ha!”

  Jacek glanced at the physicist, curious if he was sincere. “A million dollars? What the fuck is it, an atomic bomb?”

  “Ha!”

  Jacek drained his vodka and tossed the bottle out the window.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  LILKA CAME AROUND THE CORNER illuminated by spotlights on the theater’s ivory columns. She had a self-conscious walk, like a child wearing high heels and worried about embarrassing herself. Jay kissed her and told her she was beautiful.

  She started to weep.

  “Is something wrong?”

  She sniffed. “I am sorry. I am so stupid.”

  “You can tell me.”

  “It’s only, Jacek is so mean and you are so nice.”

  New boyfriends were always at a loss how far to go in reviling an ex-husband, and Jay’s task was complicated by the fact that he didn’t know anything about hers. Not to mention that they still lived together in some torturous arrangement. “Did something happen?” he asked.

  “Let me tell you later when I’m not going to cry.”

  “Okay.”

  They joined the opera-goers streaming through the wide doors. Chandeliers sprinkled them with light. While the theater had retained its original neoclassical façade, inside contemporary design had invaded, bringing lots of glass and mirrors.

  “We have time for a glass of wine,” Jay suggested.

  They found the bar and he ordered, “Wino biały.”

  “Your Polish is improving.”

  “You wait. I’ll graduate to ‘red wine’ next.”

  “I prefer white.”

  They clinked glasses. Around them, the crowd chattered in a buzz of anticipation. Here and there, an ostentatious gown or gaudy jewelry shouted nouveaux riches, but for the most part the crowd was a common lot, dressed up in their best and having a good time. Lapel pins had become the fashion for men, displaying tiny flags or the logos of goodwill groups. Solidarity’s wavy signature, once a lonely standard-bearer for the resistance, now competed for lapel space with the emblems of aid organizations which handed out souvenir pins like gimme caps.

  “I realize that I never really asked if you like opera,” Jay said.

  “Oh yes, very much, and Madame Butterfly is my favorite. It’s a sad story, especially for their son, but still, it is my favorite. Sometimes I come alone.”

  “Your husband didn’t like it?”

  “So much changed in Jacek. Jay—” she said, and stopped herself.

  “What is it?”

  “I am scared for my son.”

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  “Jacek makes me afraid to tell you because you are a policeman.”

  “I’m not a policeman in Poland.”

  “Aleks is using heroin. Jacek told me this morning. He gives it to him, I am sure. His own son!” Lilka’s eyes welled up with tears. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Jay touched her arm. “There’s got to be help available. Do you go to church?”

  “My mother does.”

  “Ask her priest if the church has a program to help. Or knows of one. I’ll ask at the embassy, too.”

  The lights flashed and a bell sounded. “Are you okay to go in?”

  Dabbing her eyes with a tissue, Lilka nodded that she was.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  JACEK DROVE THEM THROUGH A congestion of high-rises that were dreary even at night. The yellow streetlights cast sinister shadows. Closer to the center, it was livelier but no cheerier. Staring up at the Stalinist-era Palace of Culture, Sergej’s heart sank. “It looks like Moscow,” he muttered in disbelief.

  “Same flies, too,” Jacek said.

  They pulled into the central station’s parking lot. Dr. Ustinov retrieved
his suitcase and followed Jacek into the building. Trains moving through its bowels rumbled beneath their feet. Everything smelled vaguely of soot and piss. Sober, bundled-up people and drunks with lolling tongues scraped past him, lost in private worlds as grim as the world Sergej thought he had escaped. Freedom, he was learning, had many faces, and hopelessness was among them.

  Jacek left him in a corner of the vast station. “You don’t move,” he said firmly. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  Sergej set down his suitcase. “Where is General Mladic?”

  “Just don’t move.”

  “What about my letter?”

  Jacek was already walking off to disappear down an escalator.

  Dr. Ustinov looked around him, gawking. He had seen very little in his life, which had largely been confined to laboratories in secret concrete towns that epitomized monotony. Occasionally he had traveled to Moscow but had been confined to conference hotels. At that moment, what truly startled him was how many people were traveling, especially how many people had suitcases they pulled on wheels. In Mother Russia, where traveling was so restricted as to be forbidden, it would be tantamount to a public confession of sedition to announce you were such a savvy traveler. Of course, not everyone in that vast station was a traveler. Closer to earth—indeed, sleeping on it—the new economy’s detritus competed for space on flattened cardboard boxes.

  Sergej’s stomach growled, reminding him that he’d eaten a tuna sandwich Jacek grudgingly offered, and before that, almost zilch for three days. He glanced around to see what he might find to eat. A row of kiosks held the only promise of food and he carried his suitcase over to them. He settled on cream pastries and scarfed them down, leaving a film of frosted sugar on his lips. “Do you know who sells stamps?” he asked the vendor.

  The man pointed to a newsstand. “He does.”

  When he asked at the newsstand, the vendor, rummaging in a drawer, said, “To Moscow, huh? I wish we could send all you Russkis back to Moscow for a postage stamp. I only have stamps for postcards.”