The Sisters Read online

  She had been violated once, the Sleeper knew; violated again when the man she loved at the time refused to have anything to do with a violated woman. More than once the Sleeper had seen her wince at what he took to be the memory of pain. The thing she valued most in lovers these days-she made no bones about it-was kindness.

  It was the thing the Sleeper gave her the least of.

  The letter was where Kaat had tossed it. The address on the envelope had been typed out on a typewriter with a red ribbon. Peter Raven, I45 Love Apple Lane, Brooklyn, New York. The postmark indicated it had been mailed in New York two days before. There was no return address. The Sleeper held the envelope up to the light filtering through the kitchen window. He could see the outline of a folded piece of paper inside.

  He didn't like the look of it. At all.

  It flashed through his mind that maybe they had gotten wind of his living arrangements, that they were furious with him for drawing attention to himself when he should have been melting into the foliage of what people considered a more conventional sexual arrangement. Yet the Sleeper's menage a trois provided the ultimate cover, in the sense that it went against preconceived notions. Who would ever believe that a man living with two women was in reality a Soviet agent?

  The Sleeper laughed out loud. He was jumping at shadows. It was ridiculous to think they could have learned about his roommates. Or that having learned of the situation they would risk communicating with him about it. The letter was probably nothing more than the announcement of the opening, on Pierrepont Street, of a new coffee shop where the local talent could read aloud poetry at night. Or another reminder from the Keep Brooklyn Heights Clean Committee to curb the dog he didn't own.

  The Sleeper slit open the envelope with a kitchen knife, extracted the folded piece of paper and opened it. And the words, typed on the same red ribbon, leapt off the page at him.

  . . . the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world

  So it had finally come! It was only now, reading and rereading the words, that he realized that in some distant reach of his brain he had nursed the faint hope that they might have forgotten about him; misplaced his file; restaffed the appropriate department with technocrats who preferred electronic gadgets to flesh-and-blood sleepers. Yet he was too rational a creature not to know that what had happened was inevitable. They hadn't brought him in from Frunze in Central Asia, educated him at Moscow University, trained him for nineteen solid months at the Potter's school, and then gone to all the expense and trouble of inserting him in America to forget about him.

  Dazed to the point of dizziness, feeling as if he were groping his way across the vaguely familiar terrain of an unpleasant dream, the Sleeper took the letter upstairs to his attic workshop. He thought of the Potter kicking away at his Finnish wheel in his attic workshop. He wondered if he still used the piano wire the Sleeper had fashioned for him to cut his pots off the wheel. He wondered too if the Potter had managed to hold on to Svetochka; during the week they had made love together, she had told the Sleeper that she didn't plan to hang around forever with

  "the Jewish dwarf," as she called him.

  Someone-probably Kaat, because she made a fetish of breathing fresh air-had left an attic window open, and the dozen or so mobiles that the Sleeper had in stock were all spinning wildly. It was strange, he was the first to admit, how he had been drawn to the business of finding fulcrums. The Potter had suggested it as one of many possible professions that would give him the independence he needed to function as a sleeper. The Potter had even offered to teach him how to throw pots, but from the moment the wild-eyed Uzbek had shown him what a fulcrum was, and taught him to weld, he had been hooked. Aside from its other advantages, being an artisan of some sort meant he wasn't on any payroll and attracted little attention from the government agencies that thrived on Social Security numbers, tax forms and the like.

  He retrieved the flamethrower cigarette lighter from the cigar box full of old lighters, unscrewed the back and pulled out the thin cylindrical microdot reader. Working with an Xacto blade and a tweezers, he carefully pried the microdot away from the dot over the i in the word

  "Night" and deposited it on the lens of the reader. Then he angled the cylinder up to the desk lamp. What emerged was a negative in which the printing appeared in white. "Piotr Borisovich," it said. (Had some sixth sense caused him to start pronouncing his Russian name out loud so that when he came across it in print he would know instantly that it referred to him?) The microdot went on to describe the location of a dead-letter drop in an alleyway around the corner from the old Brooklyn Eagle Building in Brooklyn Heights. (Whoever was getting in touch with the Sleeper obviously preferred country drops to city drops, a detail that the Sleeper took as a sign of high professionalism.) The message wound up with the words "much luck" and a postscript that read, "The Potter sends you his personal wishes for the success of your assignment."

  So the Potter had a ringer in the pie! It was a reassuring thought to the Sleeper, whose comfortable world of fulcrums had just been shattered. It meant that his father was still alive in Peredelkino. And it guaranteed that whatever it was they wanted him to do would be doable; the Potter would not have put his seal on the letter if it weren't. Spying, the Potter had drummed into the head of his last, best sleeper, was an exploration of the art of the possible.

  The Sleeper went over to close the attic window, but instead found himself gazing out moodily over the carriage-house roofs on Love Apple Lane. He remembered staring out over Moscow from the open hotel window his last night in Russia. He had gotten roaring drunk on French champagne, and surprised himself by dredging up from some corner of his memory snatches of Moussorgsky's Khovanshchina. The opera had made him think of the three hundred streltsy lynched by Peter the Great on the monastery wall, and he had turned to the Potter and (suddenly emotional, though the Potter never sensed it, he was sure) had said: Violence is in our blood, violence and a passion for plotting. You and I, the Potter had agreed, are the last practitioners of a dying art. Funny how the dwarfish novator had gotten under his skin; funny also how he had made the filthy business of spying seem like a holy crusade.

  It was curious he should think of the Potter now. Curious, too, that it should occur to him for the first time that the Potter had never held out the promise of a holy grail at the end of the holy crusade.

  For Piotr Borisovich Revkin, life had more or less begun with a holy crusade (the Great Patriotic War) and a holy grail at the end of it (to find himself, amid incredible slaughter, still alive). Revkin had been a strapping curly-haired fifteen-year-old who already shaved with his father's pearl-handled straight-edge when the local Party recruiters in Frunze, scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel, called up youngsters who looked seventeen. When the one-armed sergeant major who filled in the forms found out that Revkin spoke fluent English, there had been some talk of sending him to Moscow to translate the operating manuals that came with American Lend-Lease equipment. But then the sergeant major discovered why Revkin spoke English. His mother, it turned out, had been an American feminist in the mould of Emma Goldman who had emigrated to Russia in the early thirties to construct the future. She had been arrested and tried as a Trotskyite "wrecker" during one of the mid-thirties purges. Convicted of the specific charge of throwing sand into the gears of some factory equipment in order to sabotage Stalin's five-year plan, she had been dispatched to a Gulag camp, from which she had never returned. (Her last words to her son as she was being led from the courtroom had been an old Russian proverb: 'To dine with the devil,"

  she called in English over the heads of the guards, "use a long spoon!") Eventually a package of thick socks and lard that her Russian husband, Piotr Borisovich's father, sent her came back with "VMN," the Cyrillic letters for "Highest Degree of Punishment," stamped on it, indicating that the idealistic feminist had finished up in front of a firing squad.

  To make sure that the same
fate didn't befall the rest of the family-in those days, simply being related to a condemned person was prima facie evidence of anti-Soviet intentions-Piotr Borisovich's father had abandoned his job as a journalist, his apartment, his stamp collection, his hand-carved chess set (the last two were sold to raise cash), and had gone into hiding with his son on a cotton collective, where the work of harvesting was so backbreaking that the manager didn't ask too many questions of those willing to do it. In the course of four harvests the spine of the father took on a permanent curve. When Piotr Borisovich watched his father, bathed in sweat, bending under the weight of the bales of cotton, he swore to himself that one day he would make it all up to him.

  In the end it was the war that "saved" them from the long arm of the vengeful Bolsheviks. The elder Revkin, making use of his journalistic credentials, went off to serve as a propagandist with a newly formed division. And the younger Revkin wound up as a frontline combat soldier.

  About the war, Piotr Borisovich never said a word. Not one. To anybody.

  After the fall of Germany, Piotr Borisovich, by then a war-weary veteran of seventeen, returned to Frunze, a sprawling city of low buildings and wide streets with narrow canals through which icy mountain water was circulated to bring temperatures down during the hot summer months. He was something of a local hero, which qualified him for a place in the reviewing stand during the May Day parade. On the breast of his worn Army tunic he wore the Order of the Red Banner, which made him, according to the Frunze Party newspaper, one of the youngest soldiers in the Red Army to possess the medal. He had earned it, the story explained, because of his exploits as a sniper; he had been officially credited with the deaths of one hundred and forty-four fascists, which didn't take into account the twenty-two for which he had no corroboration. The newspaper added the enticing detail that the young fascist-slayer always sighted on the jugular-and rarely missed.

  For the next several years the Army sent Piotr Borisovich, by then a teenager with a ready, if somewhat sardonic, smile, around Central Asia giving marksmanship demonstrations to new recruits. He might have ended his days as a rifle instructor if it hadn't been for a sharp-eyed State Security talent scout who, one fine day, saw Piotr Borisovich place twenty-five bullets into a bull's-eye at a hundred meters and decided to take a look at the boy's dossier. When he discovered that Piotr Borisovich spoke fluent English, his interest turned to enthusiasm.

  But in those days State Security did not simply approach a potential recruit and make a pitch. For reasons that had to do with the deep sense of insecurity of all successful revolutionaries (what would prevent others from following in their footsteps and toppling them?), the elders in the organization preferred to get a hook into a candidate first. The obvious hook in Piotr Borisovich's case was his father, who by that time was working for a well-known theoretical journal as its resident expert on left deviationism. The senior Revkin was suddenly arrested on the charge that he had failed to include in his dossier the pertinent detail that the enemy of the people to whom he had been married was American.

  It was at this point, with his father cooling his heels in Moscow's Lubyanka prison, that the younger Revkin was summoned to the local State Security headquarters for what he later laughingly referred to as a

  "friendly chat."

  The three men and one woman who faced Piotr Borisovich across the table didn't mince words. With his war record, above all with his knowledge of English, the interviewers pointed out, Piotr Borisovich could eventually render considerable service to the Motherland. And the rewards, they made it very clear, would be generous: he would never have to worry about material things for the rest of his days. The young Revkin, anxious not to fall into the same trap as his father, said that there was no way he could accept an appointment with State Security, because he was the son of a convicted enemy of the people who had suffered the highest degree of punishment. One of the interviewers waved a hand. "We know all about that," he said. "Did you know that my mother was American?" Piotr Borisovich asked. "That too, that too," he was assured.

  "Did you know that my father is at this very moment in prison?" The interviewers exchanged looks. During the period of collectivization of agriculture in the early thirties, one of them said, his eyebrows arched to indicate he was conveying important information, all relatively well-off peasants were rounded up and shipped off to Siberia- their land, their animals, their houses, their equipment confiscated. The only exceptions were kulaks who had sons serving in the Red Army. The principle was established then: a son s service to the Motherland can mitigate a father's sin.

  Piotr Borisovich signed on the dotted line, then raised his right hand and swore an oath of allegiance to the Motherland and the father figure who presided over it. Two days later he received a telephone call from his father. He had been released from jail, welcomed back to work at the theoretical journal, even given a small raise. And mystery of mysteries, a brand-new refrigerator that he had neither ordered nor paid for had been delivered to his tiny apartment. Was he going crazy? Or had Communism, in the form of a refrigerator for everyone, finally come to Russia?

  Without even applying for one of the coveted places in the school, Piotr Borisovich received written notice that he had been accepted in Moscow University. He was assigned his own room in an apartment on Lenin Hills within walking distance of the university. Each month he found in his mailbox an envelope with one hundred rubles in it, an enormous sum by student standards. On the eve of school vacations, the amount was always doubled. Little was asked of Piotr Borisovich in return except to educate himself in the ways of the world. Every six months or so he was summoned to appear before a review board which met in an apartment in downtown Moscow (Piotr Borisovich never again set foot in a State Security building) to give an account of what he was doing. Why had this trimester's grade in the origins of Marxism-Leninism fallen below the previous trimester's grade? he was politely asked, as if his tutors had nothing more in mind than the sharpening of his intellect. What did he think of the three African students in his advanced English class? he was asked, as if his tutors were simply checking on the company he kept.

  Only once did Piotr Borisovich have reason to believe that the State Security organs were watching him more closely than he imagined. Did he ever hear anyone criticize the Soviet leadership? he was asked. No, he replied. Did the words "Russia is an intellectual wasteland" strike him as being familiar? He may have heard words to that effect, he admitted.

  Where? He didn t remember. Who uttered them? He didn't remember that either. Wasn't it the young professor of American poetry, the one who read Whitman aloud to his class all the time, who the previous week had said this to several students during a coffee break in the cafeteria?

  Now that they mentioned it, admitted Piotr Borisovich, it may have been.

  Then why hadn't he reported this anti-Soviet remark to the authorities?

  Because, Piotr Borisovich explained lamely, it had seemed inconsequential at the time. Don t let a lapse like that happen a second time, one of the tutors warned.

  That night Piotr Borisovich got a phone call from his father. An odd thing had happened that day, he said. Two burly men had turned up at his door, flashed a paper he never got a chance to read, and removed his refrigerator. With all his food still in it!

  Several days later, mumbling vaguely about how they had mistaken the number on the apartment door, the two moving men returned Revkin's refrigerator. The next time Piotr Borisovich heard an anti-Soviet remark, he reported it immediately to the authorities.

  What with his hundred-ruble stipend and his apartment on Lenin Hills, Piotr Borisovich had no problem attracting a steady stream of women to his bed. No sooner had one affair ended than another was under way. At times, affairs overlapped; at times all three shared the same bed.

  During his last year at the university, Piotr Borisovich fell in love with an older woman whose husband, a doctor, had been arrested in what would turn out to be Stalin's last purge. Pio
tr Borisovich managed to talk her into going to bed with him, but when he phoned her to arrange a sequel, she refused. Furious, Piotr Borisovich began calling her up while he was making love with other girls and describing in precise detail what they were doing. He even passed the phone to his bed partners and had them describe events from their point of view. The doctor's wife wasn't turned on-but Piotr Borisovich was. Phoning up one lover while he was making love to another became his fetish, If the tutors knew about it-and it was unthinkable that they didn't-they never brought up the subject at the semiannual review.

  Why they had turned a blind eye to his fetish became clear after Piotr Borisovich was graduated from Moscow University. The Moscow Merchant who became his control obviously considered his sexual prowess to be a major part of his qualifications. Coached by his Merchant, Piotr Borisovich assumed the role of a young dissident writer living illegally (without a resident's permit) in a garret off Gorky Street in downtown Moscow. He would hang around the restaurants and hotel bars frequented by Western tourists, coming on as a frustrated literatus famished for any contact with the West, whether in the form of books, records, blue jeans or warm female bodies doused with French perfume. More often than not, within three days of meeting a single woman, Piotr Borisovich had an intense love affair going. The inevitable partings, with Piotr Borisovich vowing to smuggle love poems out of the country and the women promising to smuggle Western novels back to him, were arranged to give the female tourist the sense that she was running risks for love, not to mention puncturing holes in the infamous Iron Curtain. Weeks or months later, the unsuspecting women would receive a note, smuggled out of Russia by a

  "friend" of Piotr Borisovich's, saying that he had been arrested by the authorities because of his clandestine contact with the recipient of the letter; that they were now demanding that she cooperate with the Russians by providing relatively inconsequential scraps of information that she might stumble across at work; that he, Piotr Borisovich, preferred to suffer in a damp prison cell than have her run any risk for him; that his love for her would not be affected in the slightest when, as he thoroughly expected, she told the Russians to go to hell.