George Bartram - Under the Freeze

At the edge of his vision, Tarp saw another figure approaching along the same route that the two Americans had taken to the beach. He wanted to kick himself for getting into such a stupid situation. Yet, being in it, he had to stay with it. He tried to frown as Repin did, and he tried to make his voice even more like Repin’s as he said, “Comrades, is wrong to question the judgment of the people’s representatives. Who are you, to reject nightclubs when workers all over Cuba dream of nightclubs? Who are you, but children of the bourgeoisie, looking for the titillations of playing at workers? Who are you, but decadent Americans, still hand in hand with Rockefellers and United Fruits, sneering at the nightclubs of the twenty-sixth of July? Who are you” — he said, his voice rising as he heard footsteps crunching over the palm fronds — “but the offspring of the middle class, trying to satisfy corrupted urges by playing at work while you sneer at the pleasures of the workers? Shame, I say. Shame, Comrades! Do not criticize until you have earned the right to criticize!”

“Bravo,” a firm voice said behind him. Tarp turned slowly and tried to look surprised. “Bravo, Comrade.” She was quite sincere. She was also tall, strong, dark, strikingly handsome. She put out a brown hand. “Juana Marino.”

Tarp tried to think. He had already made a Russian of himself; the French identity was no good. Too smart ! “Yegor Solkov,” he said.

“You are Russian?” she said in Russian.

“Most assuredly.”

“Thank you for what you said,” she told him in lightly accented Russian. “These two have done nothing but complain since they landed.” She smiled at the Americans as if she had said something complimentary about them.

“They are children,” he said. “Your guests?”

“I am their guide. From the Bureau of Tourism and Solidarity.”

“Of course. You have a group?”

She nodded. “Thirty. We are here looking at the cement plant. All but these two. It is hard to know what they want. Machine guns and urban revolution, perhaps. They do not seem to understand that Cubans like nightclubs and baseball, and that cement plants and furniture factories are necessary to us.”

“Maybe they want to see spies and counterrevolution and another Bay of Pigs,” Tarp said. He laughed. The woman laughed, too. It was a beautiful laugh, musical and open. She glanced at her watch.

“Time to wipe their noses?” Tarp said in Russian.

“You are a bad man,” she said lightly. She was still laughing. She was very flirtatious, he saw, perhaps habitually so. It would have been flattering to think that she did it only for him.

“You must go back to the bus,” she said to the two Americans in English.

“We just wanted to take a walk!” the girl protested.

“And you made the group lose time.”

“Well, the group has made us lose enough time.”

Juana Marino was very cool. “Individualism is an aberration,” she said. She made it sound like a quotation. “Please go back to the bus now.”

Tarp walked up the beach and squeezed his feet into his damp canvas shoes. He bent down and pushed the .22 into the front of the cotton trousers and buttoned his shirt so that the square-cut tail hung out all around. It was an old short-sleeved shirt with epaulets that looked vaguely military and that had been made in Africa years before. He thought it would pass in Cuba.

“Are you going back to the road, Señor Solkov?” the beautiful guide called to him. She was standing by the path that led away from the beach, just where she might have been able to see what he was doing if she had wanted to.

“I was waiting for a friend,” he said.

“ Here ?” She sounded as severe as a schoolteacher. Tarp thought of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, and of tour guides, and of the intricate systems of surveillance that made everybody a spy on somebody here.

“No,” he said. He gestured vaguely. “Out there.”

“Well, won’t you walk with me, then?” she said. She sounded flirtatious again.

Tarp reached her side in half a dozen running strides. The two Americans were ahead of them, and Tarp and the beautiful Cuban woman came behind like parents herding their children homeward after a day at the beach.

“You are visiting in Cuba, of course,” the woman said in Russian.

“Of course.”

“For the celebration of antinuclear peace?”

“Partly that.”

The path led along a cut through the sandy scarp behind the beach; on each side of them was a head-high bank of sand and a growth of pine trees. Tarp saw an old tire track in the deep sand, as if the cut were used for vehicles that patrolled the beach, perhaps. He sensed the Cuban woman studying him, and as a distraction he said, “Americans are very young for their years, are they not? These two seem like children.”

“You have been to America?” she said.

“I have met Americans before.”

“Yes, they are very young. And very spoiled. They think they are the kings of creation.”

“Many Americans think that,” he said.

She laughed. “All Cuban men think that.”

Up ahead he could see a paved road and a rather pretty circular road with benches and palms in the middle. There were two buses there and a crowd of people. “Are Cuban men different from Cuban women?” he said idly, thinking of how he was going to get to Havana and of whether he could get on one of these buses safely. The gun seemed very big and very visible just then.

She was looking down at the sand. “Cuban men are children, but they think they are very grown-up, and what they want their women to be is even younger children.” She looked at him with a smile and then looked away. “It is called machismo .” She shrugged. “Politically, Cuban men are all Communists now, but sexually they are still tied to the pope’s skirts.”

Tarp was looking at the buses, which were decorated with brightly colored posters celebrating peace and the establishment of nuclear-free zones. “Happily, we Russians do not have that problem,” he said. She laughed. She was laughing at him, no doubt, and even though she was laughing at the stuffy Russian he was only pretending to be, he was piqued. She went right on laughing at him, and the annoyance changed to genuine amusement, then to sexual recognition. “You are very beautiful,” he said.

“You even talk like a Cuban man!” she said.

“Men are men, at a certain level. You are very beautiful!”

“Well.” She stopped. She took off a shoe to empty it of sand, and to hold herself steady she put a hand on his arm. “Well, I am enough of a Cuban woman to like being told I am beautiful.” She blew out her breath in what seemed to be impatience with herself. He thought she would empty the other shoe, and to do so she would hold his arm again, but she started toward the road and the buses. He caught her shoulder. “Will you go out with me?” he said. He was not sure whether he had asked her as himself or as his Russian creation.

“Where?”

His hesitation was very brief. “The Russian ballet.”

“You want to see the ballet?”

“Of course.”

“Tonight is their last performance in Havana.”

“Well, then — tonight.”

She looked him over. He had a sick feeling that she could see the gun, even though the shirt hid it well. She folded her arms, which were brown and leanly muscled, like a swimmer’s arms, and covered with fine brown hairs the color of a seal’s. “I’m not one of the easy Cuban girls, Russki,” she said.

“I can tell that by looking at you.”

“Well… All right.” For the first time she looked unhappy with herself, as if she disliked what she had done. Still, she said stubbornly, “I will meet you in front of the theater at seven-thirty.”