Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

Dominika trailed the handle down Anya’s stomach, making the soft amber curve infinitely light, infinitely insistent. Anya held her breath and her eyes fluttered behind tight-shut eyes. Looking at Anya’s face, Dominika positioned the handle and flexed her wrist. Anya’s mouth opened partway, and her eyes showed a sliver of white, like the slack face of a corpse on a slab.

Anya stiffened and began shaking against the slow plunge and drag of tortoiseshell. She turned chin-wet to look up at Dominika and whispered, “Yes baby, just so, you’re cumming me,” and Dominika smiled and watched the little milkmaid thrash about while she put her own secret self back in the hurricane room inside her and closed the door.

After a few minutes, Anya sighed and turned her face up to be kissed again. Enough. “You have to go, quickly, now,” Dominika said. Red-faced, Anya gathered her bathrobe around her, looked at Dominika, and went silently out. Would there be bellowed accusations tomorrow morning? Was there anyone behind the mirror right now? Too tired to care, Dominika got into bed in the darkened room. The brush lay forgotten on the floor under the sink.

The next morning, in a large downstairs salon, wood-paneled and carpeted with a huge blue-and-ivory Kazakh carpet, the women were ordered to sit in chairs set in a circle in the center of the room. The first student, a slight young brunette with the lilting western accent of Novgorod, was ordered to stand up, undress, and walk around the circle to be critiqued by the others. There was shocked silence. She hesitated but then disrobed. The female doctor and her assistant, both in lab coats, acted as moderators, noting strengths and weaknesses. Finished, the student was ordered to sit in her chair, but to remain naked. The next student was called and the process was repeated. Flushed faces, goose bumps, and bitten lips, the room slowly was filled with incongruous, shivering naked bodies, a pitiful pile of clothes and shoes beneath each chair.

Thank God there were no men present! Anya twisted her hands nervously as her turn inexorably came, and she looked over to Dominika in a panic. Dominika looked away. The doctor snapped at Anya to hurry up when she hesitated to peel off her panties. Now it was her turn, and Dominika ignored her nervousness and stood up when she was called. It was monstrous to be ordered to strip off in the presence of half a dozen strangers, but she forced herself. Anya looked at her intently. Dominika was embarrassed as much by her nudity as by the awed silence in the room when she walked around the circle of chairs. “Best in breed,” whispered the assistant. “Best in show,” corrected the doctor.

The following day a man stood in the circle of chairs and took off a short bathrobe. He was naked underneath and needed to bathe and clean his toenails. The doctor evaluated the pale body for the students, and close-up assessment followed. The next day the man in the bathrobe was back, this time with a short, stocky woman with iodine-red hair and chapped cheeks and elbows. They disrobed and unconcernedly made love on a mattress in the center of the students’ circle of chairs. The doctor pointed out different lovemaking positions; she would order the couple to stop in mid-act to illustrate a relevant point or to demonstrate a physical refinement. The models showed no emotion, neither for themselves nor for their partners, their colors so washed out as to be invisible. It was soulless.

“I cannot look at them,” Anya confessed to Dominika. They had grown into the habit of walking together around the shabby garden of the mansion in the few free minutes after breakfast. “I cannot do this, I simply cannot.”

“Listen, you can become used to anything,” said Dominika. How was this girl ever selected? From what provincial capital had she been picked? Then she wondered to herself, What about you, can you become accustomed to anything after enough time?

The next week was, as Dominika anticipated, a multiplication of indignity. Again the salon and the familiar circle of chairs, but this time men, brusque men in tight suits and bad haircuts, sat in the circle. The female students were told to undress in front of these men, who then proceeded to critique each of the students, pointing out flaws in her figure or complexion or face. They were never identified; their yeasty yellow bubbles combined to tarnish the atmosphere of the entire room.

Anya covered her tear-streaked face with her hands until the doctor told her to stop being a silly cow and to take her hands away this instant. Feeling as if she were in a dream, Dominika left her body, closed her mind, and endured the stares of a man with a terribly pocked face. The color coming from inside him made his eyes yellow, like a civet in an alley. She stared back at him without blinking as his eyes wandered over her. “Not enough meat on her,” he said aloud to nobody in particular. “And her nipples are too small.” Two other men nodded in agreement. Dominika stared them all down until they looked away or got busy lighting their cigarettes.

Dominika was surprised to note that she was beginning to go numb. Numb to nakedness, numb to lewd commentary, numb to strangers’ eyes looking at her breasts or her sex or her buttocks. They can do what they like, she told herself, but I won’t let them look me in the eyes. Other students reacted in their own ways. One silly little idiot from Smolensk with the lilt of southern Russian dialect vamped and hip-shot her way through the sessions. Anya never seemed to get over her shame. The defining smell of disinfectant in the mansion now was overlaid with the pungency of their bodies, musk and sweat and rosewater and brown soap. And after lights out, the sweating staff sat in the cabinets and took notes and made sure the cameras were not blocked.

Anya knocked softly at her door late one night, and Dominika opened it a crack and told her to go away. “I can’t help you anymore,” she said, and Anya turned and disappeared down the darkened hallway. It isn’t my problem, thought Dominika. It’s enough that I’m fighting for my own sanity.

Then the bus came with the military cadets, the ones who had scored at the top of their class. The women waited for them in their rooms, and sat on the beds and watched the skinny, bruised bodies as the boys ripped off their tunic shirts and boots and trousers, and held on tight as they rutted like stoats until time was up. The cadets left without looking back at the women, and the bus swayed as it went out through the gate into the pine forest.

The next morning in the curtained, darkened library the projector began, but instead of the usual film, they saw their classmate in room number five on the single bed with a skinny, shaved-headed cadet from the day before. The women could barely look at the screen. This was shame, this was indignity, seeing yourself with legs hooked around a pimply back, hands formed into claws on bony shoulders. The doctor would freeze-frame the films to add commentary, suggest improvements. Worse, they all now guessed that the films would come in order—rooms five, six, seven, and so on. Anya’s head was down, her face in her hands. She was in room eleven and would have to endure not only the films, but also the wait. She ran from the room weeping as her segment ended. The doctor let her flee. She prattled on about what had been done wrong, how it could be improved.

Dominika was in room number twelve, at the end of the hall. The filmed segment of the interlude with her cadet therefore was the last. Disembodied, she watched herself, surprised at her slack face, how mechanically she had grasped the young man and guided him, how she had pulled his ear to get him off when he collapsed on top of her. Her head was spinning, yet she felt no shame, no embarrassment. She looked at the images on the screen without feeling and kept telling herself that she was a member of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation.