MANHATTAN Chapter 2

MANHATTAN

Steven Overholt

Chapter 2: Goodbye to Anna

"No, not Gouzenko! That can mean only one thing." Anna Mirov sank onto a kitchen chair. She pressed her fingertips against her lips and shook her head, a look of terror welling up with her tears.

Sergey could trust Anna, his partner of 21 years, with the most top-secret information, even though they had never participated in the bourgeoisie institution of marriage, and even though they could get the firing squad. But there were so many ways to die an untimely death in the Soviet Union. A few of them flitted through his mind in a parade of doom: the hangman's noose; a stab in the back; blown to bits; cholera; starvation. It's pointless trying to avoid it. It would even be better that way, if not for the children. "He said Gouzenko, but he didn't say which Gouzenko." Sergey pointed out with a strained smile. "Igor..."

"Yes... Igor Gouzenko!" Anna jumped up and raised both hands toward the ceiling, cutting him off as if desperately waiting to hear him say the name.

"Shhhh. You'll wake the babies," Sergey gently chastised as he heard a couple of them babble in the dining room.

Since there was no door between the kitchen and dining room, the Mirovs kept the youngest of their group in the dining room. It was their only way to have private conversations. The older ones slept behind closed doors and filled the rest of the Mirov's humble abode.

"How many do we have now?" Sergey wondered aloud.

"Just the babies, or all of them? Anna replied.

"All of them, I guess, though I'm almost afraid to ask."

"Well, there's the six infants, plus four more under ten years old, and four between ten and sixteen."

"I don't know how you do it, even with the older ones helping," Sergey sympathized, shaking his head as he opened one cupboard, then the others, searching. "Isn't the food situation getting any better? Even a bit?" He closed the last door having counted only three loaves of black bread, one kilo of dried beans, and two cabbages. "You'd better be eating, Anna. You'll be no use to the children starved to death, now will you?" he reasoned. He knew, though, the futility of appealing to her self-preservation, or even of appealing to his need for her preservation, when compared to the needs of the kids.

For the past several years, the Mirovs had judged the number of children that they were able to keep by the starkness of the kids' ribs and the degree to which their bellies distended. Anna reasoned that as long as they were kept alive, they would get to eat after the war was over, as it had now been for a few weeks. If she ever noticed that her charges were gaining much weight, she would bring in another mouth to share the "bounty" provided by her husband's meager and erratic Red Army salary.

During four nightmarish years of writhing in a slaughterhouse, Russia had lost over 20 million dead. Countless children had been orphaned, and food had been more a dream than a reality. But the Mirovs had not figured on the shortages lasting this long after Germany's defeat, though it now seemed so obvious. It was also clear that months or even years would pass before things returned to normal, if there ever was such a thing as normal in long-suffering Russia.

But at least we've turned the corner, Sergey considered. His often-battered optimism rose up and caught him by surprise. Germany was destroyed and the Americans had so badly degraded the Japanese forces that Japan posed no real threat to the Motherland. For a long time everything had seemed so hopeless as the Nazis had raged across the Soviet Union. Especially grim was October 1941, when Anna had toiled with hundreds of thousands of other women and children, desperately heaping up dirt and building fortifications. Their hands, unprotected and bloodied, were quite literally worked to the bone. Thinking about those times, Sergey stared in a daze, his eyes fixed on Anna's face. It was tender as the day he met her, but as gaunt as he'd ever seen. His mind blurred away the present, instead harvesting the feasts and famines of 21 years. Back when she filled out that slender dress, she was a glory, a goddess, and a temptress bursting those seams.

"You said Igor Gouzenko's still with our embassy in Canada," Anna offered, bringing Sergey back to the business at hand. "He could get you into the U.S. But what about Fyodor Gouzenko? Won't Stalin find out he's not with you?"

"I've got that taken care of." Sergey assured her, allaying her concern and nearly assuaging his own as well. He turned and quickly opened the door to the living room, poking his head in to see if the younger teenagers were asleep. He closed it without a peep from the well-oiled hinges.

"I will need an assistant in America, though." His eyebrows raised and his head tilted just a bit. "Do you know that the Americans have put their Japanese citizens in concentration camps? Well they have. Some of those camps are near Los Alamos, where the atom bomb is being built. There's even one in Santa Fe, only 40 kilometers away from there. And can you believe this?" His excitement skittered off his tongue: "That camp holds Japanese that have renounced their U.S. citizenship and are considered loyal to the Emperor. I'm sure I can recruit someone from there to help, once they learn what is going on right under their noses. Those Americans amaze me. So smart but so stupid! We have spies in the U.S. Department of Justice that runs the camps. I'll be getting some names and dossiers tomorrow before I leave."

Sergey again opened and closed the living room door. "Igor's here in Moscow. He's returning to Canada tomorrow, but he said security is too tight over there and he can't get me on a flight. Well, I can get on a flight, it's getting off that would be the problem," Sergey joked to a flat response from Anna--a reminder that now was not the time for levity. He straightened up and continued: "I've made arrangements to put ashore from one of our submarines that patrols the North Atlantic. Igor will be waiting for me at an arranged location. It may be a bit risky, but..."

Sergey stopped speaking without closing his mouth, his attention grabbed by a vase of flowers he had picked while striding up the walk to surprise Anna at the front door earlier that day. He half-leaned, half-fell back against the counter beside the sink. Turning around slowly, his gaze was drawn down the sink's drain hole. That's my future, he recognized with a sigh. The support of his arms against the counter hunched his shoulders, while his head hung so low that Anna could no longer see it from behind.

"What?" Anna asked in a low, serious tone.

Sergey spun around, then leaned back again, his hands resting behind him on the lip of the sink. He gently pushed off as he pulled his gaze up from the floor and straight into her sapphire allure, taking two stumbling steps to reach her and catching her just as she began turning away. Anna had never before seen such an ominous look in Sergey's eyes; and never, in fact, in anyone's eyes.

"What?" Anna pulled back hard as Sergey's arms swept around her chest. "No!"

"Anna, listen to me now: You must have a bag always packed and be ready to leave on a moment's notice. Go to my brother Vasily's dacha on the Black Sea. He will take care of you. Make sure you have someone to watch the children until they can be put into an orphanage."

"What? Why?" Anna blustered, burying her face against him and pounding her palms against his shoulders, tearing at the shoulder-boards of his green uniform.

"Anna, my greatest danger in the U.S. will not be the Americans, but Stalin's agents. Our dear 'Papa Joe' is planning to have me eliminated. My trip is just a ruse to divert the Americans from the actual team." He placed his hands on both sides of her head and began to turn it up and toward him, urging against her straining neck muscles. Then, with a sharp twist that surprised him, she met his gaze like a deer in the headlights.

He couldn't kiss her now; if he started, he could never stop. And so he just continued--no secrets; that was their agreement. "Soviet agents will either expose me to the Americans as a spy or kill me and make a show of how they prevented a 'rogue' Soviet from disrupting the atomic bomb project. Anna, settle down. Anna, the children! Yes, it's a crazy idea. The Americans will never fall for it, but by then it will be too late for me."

As Sergey poured out the grim news, Anna became increasingly distraught and agitated, until he had to spin her around and clench her rail-thin form--draped in that loose tattered dress--tightly from behind. He scuffled against her thrashing, pinning her arms with his left arm, and cupping his right hand over her mouth to keep her from waking the children. As she calmed down, Sergey relaxed his grip. A few seconds later, she went limp and crumpled toward the floor. With a startled grunt, Sergey threw his left arm around her back, scooped his right forearm under her knees, and lifted, turning her upper body toward him. Anna's head rolled against his shoulder. Her eyes stared up at him, streaming.

Gently touching his lips to her reddened forehead, tasting the salt of his own tears, he fell back with her, slumping against a cabinet. A pointed knob raked up his back as he slid down. He pressed back hard against it after he banged against the floor. "Anna... Anna... This may be the last I'll ever see you. I don't want to remember you crying. Be strong. Strong my little lily... stronger than me."

Her sobs softened and melted into the rhythmic breaths of slumber. He shifted off of the cabinet knob and sat back with her head on his lap. He stared across the kitchen to the window, up at the clock, and down at Anna. Then it was back to the clock. I really need to get some sleep before I leave at 4:00 AM. He shut his eyes for a few minutes, opened them, stared at the clock, rolled his head side-to-side. Each time he closed his eyes, they sprang wide again ten minutes later.

As he watched the clock pass 3:30, though, Anna's voice startled him: "Don't go."

Sergey sat silently for a moment, then slapped his hands to his head and contorted his face as if wood slivers were being shoved under his fingernails. Staring up at the ceiling and then scrunching his eyes, he said the awful words: "I have to go."

"Don't come back."

It was no surprise. He recalled the many times this issue had been discussed, argued, and fought over--sometimes physically. Anna seemed to lose her sanity every time he came home and then had to leave. It doesn't matter to her that I'm a colonel in the military and took an oath of obedience. She had even suggested that they run off somewhere together. It's crazy, he thought. She's so giving to the children, but so possessive of me.

Anna's voice rose: "Stalin's trying to have you killed, for God's sake! Yet still you do anything he tells you. I can't take this anymore."

At 4:00 AM Sergey slowly closed the door behind himself, leaning back against it for a moment. This time she really means it, he knew. The stress is just too much. I can't keep doing this to her. He would never be back, he realized. Arriving at his car, he took a long last look at his home as a pale orange glow silhouetted it from the east.