Elliott Holt - You Are One of Them

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I wouldn’t marry a foreigner,” Zoya said.

“That’s because you are still in love with Dima,” said Sveta.

“I thought we weren’t going to bring up Dima,” said Andrei.

“Who’s Dima?” I said.

“Dmitri is an asshole,” Zoya said.

“Dmitri is her ex-husband,” Sveta said.

“Does everyone have an ex-husband?” I said.

“I have an ex-wife,” said Andrei. He laughed.

Maybe it was hard to commit to people when everything else was changing so fast. People seemed ambivalent about marriage and children. Russia had zero population growth. Women weren’t having babies; they were having abortions. They used them as birth control. How could this woman—a divorcée, contemptuous of foreigners—be my former best friend?

“I don’t regret my divorce,” Zoya said. “I don’t regret anything. I have a good life. I have friends. I have a vegetable garden. I swim every morning at the Olympic pool ...” She ran out of items on her list. She raked her left hand through her hair, lifting the curtain off her face and exposing—for just a moment—a forehead that could have been Jenny’s. “A toast,” she said.

We all raised our glasses and awaited her speech. She looked directly at me and said, “To international correspondence.”

We drank. We ate. We drank some more. By the end of the meal, I was quite drunk.

AFTER LUNCH I HELPED Zoya and Sveta clear the table. True to stereotypes about Russian men, Andrei remained in his chair and let the women do the work.

“How about a game of cards?” Zoya said. “We can wash the dishes later.”

We all followed her into the living room and returned to our seats around the coffee table. She pulled a deck out of a drawer in the sideboard. The cards had pictures of Gorbachev on the back, but his famous birthmark had been airbrushed out.

“I saw Gorbachev once,” I said. “When his motorcade was outside the Russian embassy. My mother and I were in the crowd. He waved to us.”

The three of them looked at me as if I were a child whom they’d been forced to baby-sit. Clearly no one wanted to discuss Mikhail Sergeyevich.

“Ladno,” Zoya said. “We will play a Russian game called durak. ”

Durak means “fool.” Zoya explained the rules as she shuffled. The objective, she said, was to get rid of all your cards. The last player with cards in his hand was the fool. “There is no winner,” she said. “Only a loser. The starting player is the attacker. The player to the attacker’s left is the defender. Then we go clockwise.”

Andrei continued. “The attacker turns over a card. If you can’t defend, you must pick up the attacking card and add it to your hand, okay?”

“Aces are high. Trump always beats non-trump, so a trump six beats a non-trump king, ponimayesh? ” Zoya said.

I didn’t really understand, but I nodded. My motor skills were definitely impaired.

“Each player gets six cards to start,” Zoya said. She distributed the cards with the stoicism of a professional dealer. She put the rest of the deck on the table and then removed the top card. It was a nine of spades.

“So,” said Andrei. “Spades is trump.”

Zoya attacked with a seven of hearts.

“You can beat that with any heart higher than six. Or with any spade. Ponimayesh? ” Andrei said.

“Da,” I said. I was the defender. I looked at my hand, a blur of red and black. I was having trouble separating my diamonds from my hearts. I shook my head to restore focus. I had a five of spades. I slapped it down.

“Molodets,” said Svetlana. Good job.

“Now you are the attacker,” Zoya said. I saw a glimmer of Jenny’s competitive streak in her eyes.

I wanted to rise to the occasion, but my game was downhill from there. The vodka seemed to have had no effect on the others, but I felt like I was moving in slow motion. The fan I’d made of my cards kept slipping through my fingers, and I was struggling to keep the others from seeing my hand. Andrei, Svetlana, and Zoya easily defended my plays. I was the last one holding any cards.

“You are the fool,” Svetlana said.

“The fool deals next,” Zoya said. She pushed the cards at me. Then she lit a cigarette and passed the pack to her friends. Once again I was surrounded by smoke. I’ve never enjoyed feeling like a fool.

“Are we just going to keep playing cards and pretending we’ve never met?” I said.

The room grew very quiet. Svetlana and Andrei turned to look at Zoya. But Zoya kept her eyes on me. “We should take a walk before it gets dark,” she said. “You must see our Russian forest.”

“Poshli,” Andrei said. We’re off.

“Andryushka,” Zoya said. “Stay here and get the fire going, will you? I will walk with our American friend. Sveta can prepare our tea.”

Zoya and I put on our coats and went outside into the winter afternoon. It must have been about half past three. I remember the silver light across her face; it made her skin look solid as stone. I walked with her into the woods, along a path that was nothing more than a dent in the snow. There were only a few inches on the ground, but it was perfectly white. I was right next to her, yet the distance between us still felt immense. Through the naked trees, I could see the roofs of other dachas.

“Lots of people are out here in the summer,” Zoya said. Her breath hung in the air like an omen.

But on that early-November day, there was not a living soul around. The only sound was the crunch of snow beneath our feet. I was wearing the same L.L. Bean duck boots I’d had since I was fourteen. Zoya wore boots covered with fur and a heavy lambskin coat. Her head was bare, and her nose turned red and shiny in the cold. When we were about a quarter of a mile into the forest, she stopped.

“We couldn’t talk inside,” she said as she lit a cigarette. “It’s always been bugged.”

THAT AFTERNOON ZOYA told me the story I wanted to hear.

“My father didn’t start working for the KGB until we came to Washington,” she said. “The CIA tried to recruit him at Yale in the 1960s—he was studying Russian—but he didn’t want to be a spy. He was a scholarship kid. He just wanted to make money. But then he ended up as an intelligence analyst. In Dayton he worked on military-intelligence projects, but in D.C. he was working directly with the NSA and the DOD. He had access to all this information the Soviets wanted. And he was greedy. He wanted to pay off our mortgage, join the Chevy Chase Club. He needed cash for private school. He and my mom were living beyond their means. He thought he was smarter than everyone else; it never occurred to him that he’d get caught. It was supposed to be a onetime deal. And then when I wrote the letter to Andropov, it was like I handed him this grand plan. He didn’t mail it—he took it to the Soviet consulate. It was on Phelps Place then, remember? He had contacts that made sure my letter reached the Kremlin and got it published. He knew we’d be invited to the USSR, because the invitation was his idea. The trip was good cover. We were sanctioned to travel there. We had all kinds of diplomatic protection. The press corps was traveling with us, so our every movement was documented. It wasn’t like he could sneak off to meet with some KGB agent somewhere in Moscow. So I don’t know when he handed off the information or how, but it was supposed to be the last time, you know, just one more big fat deposit for his Swiss bank account. Enough money for my college tuition. My mom didn’t know. I didn’t know—not then anyway. And he said he never passed any information to them after that, but in 1985 all these American assets in Moscow were discovered, and the CIA and FBI were hunting for moles, and everyone was getting suspicious. There was no evidence that my dad was even under surveillance, but he was really nervous, and the Soviets put all this money in escrow for him here and told him that they could give us a good life in Moscow. He defected on the condition that our family and friends would never know he was a traitor. He wanted to sneak away. He wanted to leave without looking like the bad guy. He was a coward.”