Elliott Holt - You Are One of Them

I had always been quick to assume I was in the wrong. My perpetual sense of wrongness followed me into clothing boutiques, where I apologized to the clerks who maniacally refolded the sweaters I picked up from display tables; to hair salons, where I was uncertain about how much to tip; to shoe stores, where I often bought the first pair I tried on because I couldn’t bear to trouble anyone to bring me another style or size from the back. There are some women—Mrs. Jones was one of them—who are comfortable being waited on. When she took Jenny and me to Saks Fifth Avenue, she thought nothing of monopolizing an hour of a saleswoman’s time. Jenny and I sat on the floor outside the fitting rooms while her mother tried on dress after dress before their trip to the Soviet Union. “What do you think, girls?” she’d say, emerging from her stall. “Do I look like Jackie O?” And Phillipa was equally comfortable being served. On my visit to London, I was amazed to see that she actually summoned the housekeeper with a bell.

The babushkas working in Moscow’s museums were quick to reprimand anyone who tried to take pictures without paying extra for a photography pass. There was a permission slip for everything, I discovered. If you wanted to swim in one of Moscow’s pools, you first needed to visit a doctor—every pool seemed to have its own one-man clinic for this purpose—and pay to be examined as proof that you were not contagious with some kind of disease. Once you had your spravka, you could use the pools for six months, but even in the locker room the babushkas were there with unsolicited advice. On my visit to the Chaika pool—heated for swimming outdoors even in the dead of winter, when steam rose from the water as if from a hot spring—I was shamed in the shower by a babushka who stood uncomfortably close and pointed at my crotch until I had thoroughly scrubbed it.

I dropped off my résumé at the Moscow Times. They invited me back to take the copy-editing test. I began looking at the real estate section, at Western-style apartments. They were expensive, but I’d find a roommate, and if necessary I could dip into the money my father had given me. My mother wouldn’t want me to stay, but I didn’t want to end up like her, always taking the safe route, afraid to get on a plane.

One sunny afternoon after class, I strolled the Arbat, trying to be inconspicuous as I scanned the scene. It was a cobbled pedestrian street. A man in a withered tuxedo played the violin. I recognized the flurry of bright notes as a Mozart concerto and dropped a dollar into the velvet-lined case at his feet. Artists sketched caricatures in charcoal. Many of the drawings were of American celebrities; I saw David Duchovny and Cindy Crawford in the mix. There were some tourists, I noticed, and a lot of Russian teenagers, lurking in smoky packs. I don’t know what I was hoping to find. Even if Edward Lee Howard still lived in an apartment on the Arbat, did I expect him to be milling around in the crowd? I don’t know how I thought I’d identify him. What did defectors look like? Did regret linger on them like scars? Or, like my father, did they plunge into their new lives without looking back?

I saw White Nights a few months after Jenny died. Gregory Hines was an American defector who ended up in Siberia with his beautiful Russian wife, played by Isabella Rossellini. Baryshnikov starred as a Russian ballet dancer who had defected to America but ended up back in Soviet custody after his plane made an emergency landing on an airbase in the USSR. I sat in the dark wishing that Jenny could be there in the theater with me. Is Russia really like that? I would have asked her. It was 1985, and everyone in America loved Baryshnikov: he was gorgeous and talented, and he’d chosen us. He was like a lover who had actually left his wife, and America was his triumphant mistress.

Where the defectors hang out, Svetlana said, as if there were enough of them to form a club. As if they were assembled around a table, playing poker. Chips stacked in red, white, and blue, the colors of the country they left behind but also the ones of the place they now called home. There were two kinds of defectors: those who were running away from something and those who ran toward the Soviet Union for ideological reasons. The seekers of asylum and the true believers. Both were gamblers. Hedging their bets. Risking what they had in hopes of trading up. Reckless because they believed they were entitled to more.

Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the Soviet Union for a few years. When he returned to the United States in 1962, he brought a Russian wife and daughter with him. He assassinated Kennedy the following year. American Morris Cohen and his wife, Lona, were both KGB spies; they defected in 1969 and lived in Moscow on KGB pensions until their deaths in the early 1990s. The Cohens were awarded the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of the Friendship of Nations, and after the Soviet Union splintered, the Russian Federation issued postage stamps with their faces on them.

I considered the facts. Mr. Jones had access to intelligence secrets. He had opportunity: we gave him our letters, so he certainly could have buried messages in them. For the first time, it occurred to me that he might have been the one who hid my letter behind the bulletin board in Jenny’s room. Maybe Jenny didn’t know that it was there. Maybe she wasn’t lying when she said she was sure Andropov would write to me. If Edmund Jones was a spy, then it wasn’t my fault that Jenny abandoned me. There were larger forces at work.

Was it so improbable? Every true story about espionage was full of impossible-to-believe details. Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian playwright who moved to London and denounced his government through his work as a radio broadcaster, was murdered in 1978 by Bulgarian secret agents who stabbed him with an umbrella that had poison hidden in it. KGB colonel Oleg Gordievsky was smuggled over the Finnish border by MI6 when he defected to Britain. Edward Lee Howard escaped by diving out of his wife’s moving car in the desert night; he planted a dummy wearing his clothes in the passenger seat so that when his wife drove back to her house, the FBI men watching her would assume that Howard was still there. What if the Joneses’ plane went down with dummies on board? The more I thought about this scenario, the better I felt. I’d spent all that time on Martha’s Vineyard holding a grudge, but maybe Jenny didn’t do anything wrong. Maybe I was the one who owed her an apology. Maybe our friendship came to an end not because she preferred Kim, not because I was no fun, but because she sensed my pulling away.

ONE NIGHT I asked Jane if the American embassy thought there were any unreported defectors. We were at Cafe Margarita, an arty den across the pond from Corinne’s building. Some kind of jazz band was playing, and we’d all ordered red wine.

“What do you mean by unreported defectors?” Jane said. She pushed her glasses up on her head, and I noticed that she had almost no eyebrows. The absence of the green frames around her eyes transformed her face completely. It’s funny how such a small change can make such a big difference. I thought of Pip. When he was wet, he looked like a completely different dog. With his usually fluffy coat flattened out by water, he was tiny and meek.

“I mean people who defected without ever officially declaring that they defected,” I said. “People who were reported dead but didn’t really die. People who chose to disappear.”

“This is the problem,” Jane said. “It’s hard for us to build diplomacy with Russia when everyone’s still holding on to these Hollywood clichés. Enough about defection and spies. This is a new era!”