Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

They waited wordlessly for an hour in the aircraft-style seats of the hydrofoil in stifling air. The arrhythmic rocking of the hull, the slopping water against the pier, and the creaking of the frayed nylon lines straining against the bollards made her queasy, then sleepy. Apart from the driver of the bus and a man on the bridge of the vessel, they had seen no one. Dominika watched the sunlight spread on the water and counted the seabirds.

Eventually a gray Lada pulled up to the gangplank and a man and woman got out, carrying two flat cardboard boxes. They boarded the boat, placed the boxes on the counter at the front of the cabin, and opened the flaps. “Come and help yourselves,” said the woman, and sat down in a front-row seat with her back to the passengers. They rose slowly and made their way to the front. They had not eaten since breakfast the day before. One box was full of fresh-baked bulochki, sweet buns with raisins, the other filled with waxed containers of warm orangeade. The man watched the passengers return to their seats, then went out and spoke to the man on the bridge. The vessel’s engines started with a rumble, and a shudder went through the seats. The aluminum gangway banged onto the pier and the lines were cast off.

The hydrofoil was on plane, up on its foils, and the whole ship trembled as it sped downriver. The seat in front of her vibrated, the cabin headliner grommets buzzed, the metal ashtray inserts chattered in the armrests. Fighting down nausea, Dominika focused on the fabric of the grimy headrest in front of her. Courtesan College. She was flying down the Volga toward a colossal indignity.

Now they were on the bus, the nameless woman sitting in the front seat. They swayed through a sun-dappled pine forest, finally stopping at a concrete slab wall. The sun caught the broken glass mortared along the top. The bus sounded its horn, then squeezed through the gate and up a sweeping drive and stopped in front of a two-story neoclassical mansion with a mansard roof of spalling slate. It was absolutely quiet in the woods, without a breath of a breeze, and there was no movement from within the mansion.

Deep breath. Come on, snap out of it. This disgusting school was another obstacle, more sacrifice, another test of her loyalty. She stood in the piney woods in front of the mustard-colored mansion and waited. She had arrived at Sparrow School.

After talking with her uncle, Dominika had thought hard about telling them all to go to hell. She contemplated taking her mother back to Strelna on the shores of the Nevskaya Guba, near Petersburg. She could find work as a teacher or a gym coach. With luck and time she might find employment at the Vaganova Academy, back into ballet. But no, she decided she was not going to run away. She would do this, whatever it took. They were not going to shoot her. This was about physical love, it would not matter what they made her do, they could not defeat her spirit.

And even as she revolted against the thought, Dominika’s secret self, the humming servo of her body, wondered whether the grimy catechisms resident in the ocher building before her would in any small way fulfill her. She hated the thought of Sparrow School and was abashed at having been sent here, but she privately was expectant, watchful.

“Leave your bags in the hallway and follow me,” said the woman, who had preceded them up the front steps and through the towering front doors of weathered wood. They gathered in an auditorium. Judging by the bookshelves, it had formerly been a library that had been converted to a lecture hall with a raised wooden platform and dais and several rows of creaking wooden seats at one end of the room. The woman, dressed in a shapeless black suit, walked among them and passed out envelopes by hand. “Inside you will find your room assignments,” she said, “and the names you will use during your training. Use only these names. You will not relate any personal information about yourselves to other students. Any infraction will result in immediate dismissal.” In her early fifties, the administrator had upswept gray hair, a square face, and a straight nose. She looked like the woman on the stamps, Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Her words came out in gouts of yellow.

“You have been chosen for specialized training,” said the matron. “It is a great honor. The nature of the training may seem alien and strange to some of you. Concentrate on the lessons and the exercises. Nothing else is important.” Her voice echoed in the high-ceilinged hall. “Now go upstairs and find your rooms. Dinner is at six in the dining room across the hall. Instruction will begin here this evening at seven o’clock. Go now. Dismiss.”

In the upper hallway Dominika counted twelve rooms, six either side, numbers in cracked-enamel lozenges screwed into the wood. Between the bedroom doors along the hallway were other plain doors without knobs or handles. These could be opened only by use of a key. Her room was painted light green and was spare but comfortable, with a single bed, standing closet, table, and chair. There was a faint but constant odor of disinfectant, on the bedspread, in the closet, in the stack of sheets on the shelf. The room had a curtained-off toilet (above which hung a hand shower) and a rust-stained sink. Above the writing table was a large mirror, too large, incongruous in the barracks-style room. Dominika put her cheek flat against the mirror and looked at the surface in glancing light, like in training. The silver smokiness of a two-way mirror. Welcome to Sparrow School.

Dusk, and the night sky not visible through the pine tops. The house was dimly lit; there were no clocks in the mansion, anywhere. No telephone rang. The hallways and staircases and ground-floor rooms were silent; the night invaded the house. The walls were bare, held none of the daguerreotype official portraits of Lenin or Marx, though moldy outlines where portraits once hung were still visible on the panels. What Tatar noble family had lived here before the Revolution? Did resplendent parties ride and hunt in these pines? Did they hear the whistle of the Moscow steam packet from the river? What Soviet instinct had put the school this far away from Moscow?

She looked around the dining table at the eleven other “students” silently spooning tokmach, a thick noodle soup that had been ladled into their bowls from a colossal blue-and-white porcelain tureen by a wordless waiter. A plate of boiled meat followed. The women and three of the men were all in their twenties; the fourth man seemed even younger, in his teens, thin and pale. Were any of them also SVR-trained? Dominika turned to the woman on her left and smiled. “My name is Katia,” she said, using her training alias.

The woman smiled back. “I am Anya.” She was slight and blond, with a wide mouth and high cheekbones lightly dusted by freckles. She looked like an elegant milkmaid with pale blue eyes. Her halting words were cornflower-blue, innocence and artlessness. Others shyly recited their aliases. After dinner they filed quietly into the library.

It was absolutely quiet in the room, then the lights dimmed. Welcome to Sparrow School instruction. A film started, stark black-and-white images, brutal, feral, sawtoothed, it burst onto a screen at the front of the room with straining faces, clasping bodies, organs shafting endlessly, everywhere, now in such close focus to become gynecological, unrecognizable, unworldly. The sound started at full volume and Dominika saw the heads of her classmates jerk back at the sudden assault of sound and sight. The air was filled with spinning color for her; she knew the signs of overload when the bleeding sequence red-violet-blue-green-yellow began. She had no control and closed her eyes to escape the onslaught. Then a speaker popped and the sound suddenly went down to barely audible, so that the woman on the screen seemed as if she were whispering, even as her hair stuck to the side of her face and her body was jolted endlessly by an off-screen partner.