The Man of My Dreams (From Russia With Love Story Series) Read online

  I don’t have confidence in any of the three options. But I don’t have a fourth choice.

  The truck rumbles around me and my dying guard, our bodies swaying and bobbing in a final dance of death, a slow waltz into the grave. Soon enough, I notice his chest ceases to heave, his throat goes silent.

  Two hours after the man’s death, the truck finally stops. I wait while the activity buzzes around the truck. I hear the cab doors opening and closing, footsteps of the driver and his guard and those of the others.

  We’re not alone, I realize. I’ll never be able to shoot my way out of this.

  But I don’t have long to think about it, as the driver and his guard call for my guard a third time, increasing worry in their timing and tone.

  Then they throw the canvas flap open at the rear of the truck cab, calling the man’s name one last time. Shock takes their expressions, mouths small, jaws dropping, heads dipping forward.

  I sit with my arms crossed in front of me, meek as I can appear. I know it’s my only chance. And for some reason, men always respond to that coming from me; so it’s a good chance too.

  They look at me, and at my guard. One pulls his handgun on me and my blood runs cold. Nerves twitch, but I try not to move. My blood freezes, but I’m careful not to exhibit any reaction at all. Even the slightest movement can bring death to me, a death that happens so fast it would take me off the Earth before I even realize.

  My heart pounds in my chest, my mouth filled with a foul flavor; the panicky taste of the grave. My lips stick together, suddenly dry. I can’t swallow. Beads of sweat break out along the crevice of my spine, instantly chilling in the late-winter cool.

  One of the guards puts his hand out to lower the other’s gun, muttering and shaking his head. “We knew what he was up to back there,” he says. “Yuri knew his luck wouldn’t last.”

  They both glare at me, smiles stretching across their angular faces as little chuckles bubble up. The one lowers his gun and steps away from the exit of the truck bed.

  One looks at me and says, “Miss?” very politely.

  At first, my legs won’t move.

  Soon enough my reflexes kick in again and my body manages to carry me onward, further from my treasured past and deeper into my mysterious future.

  Novosibirsk’s government center is filled with families, each including a young woman, just as Omsk has hosted.

  More young women for the KGB.

  But why? Surely, this amount of trouble and expense would never be put to the mere task of collecting whores or even sex slaves. Such women disappear from the streets all over Siberia and all of Russia, Europe, the United States, the Latin countries like Mexico and those in Central and South American. Young Russian and Siberian women are lining up to become whores just to escape to the west; the KGB wouldn’t go to such trouble simply to coral and export these women. And we aren’t spies, because the KGB isn’t hunting us like spies.

  I realize that we’re part of a massive effort of some kind. Something big and sophisticated, like the KGB itself.

  And something just as deadly.

  I notice other trucks like the one that brought me. I notice other women like myself; young and strong or at least fit, and all pretty, peering out from the feeble disguise of worn and ugly peasant’s garb.

  We aren’t fooling anyone but ourselves. And we share eye contact in the same fleeting way that prisoners might, or even gladiatorial competitors; with understanding, solidarity.

  And with a cold-blooded willingness to kill or be killed, even while hoping against hope that we wouldn’t have to be killing each other.

  But still knowing that it is more than likely.

  Certainly, the leisure of choosing whom we might kill or whom might kill us will be out of our reach, at least initially.

  But somebody will be killing somebody, which seems clear to everyone.

  One young woman is a redhead, tall and striking, with high cheek bones and glaring blue eyes. She has suffered, I know in an instant. She walks with a tall woman of some mixed descent; she looks to have African and Asian blood, an exotic mix that in this case created a tall, muscular beauty of considerable influence and stamina. Another is a short brunette, powerful and muscular, anger pumping out of every pour, a sneer to match the grizzliest face from my ugliest vision.

  Each woman is escorted by an armed guard.

  Around us, other families mingle and murmur, worrying and wondering and hustling about in a mad dash to remain unseen; hiding in plain sight.

  The clamor of the worried Siberians and the muddled, muffled questions from the specks of uniformed KGB officers rises around us as our guards lead us onto a train platform.

  Agent Dragunov, whose face still resembled the hard mask of an officer and not the melancholy despair of my vision, paces in front of me and the three other women, all of whom are roughly my age.

  “You have been brought here because you stood out,” he says, pausing in front of me. His eyes dig into my soul, but they come up empty. “You have excellence,” he adds, “and that is what Mother Russia needs, now more than ever. I know you have fear, because you are human and, of course, because you are women. But conquer your fear! You are not merely women, but women of Russian Siberia, and you will rise to the task the way a true Russian will always do, even one of your ... reduced gender.”

  The other women and I do not exchange knowing glances, raised brows and half-smiles of our own that say, Who does this idiot think he’s kidding? Does he know where he or any of his fellow men would be without us women? Are men this dense the world over?

  Are they this dangerous?

  Dragunov resumes pacing in front of us, saying, “You will transcend your roles and become tools of the State in ways you could never have imagined. If you mourn for yourselves or your families, I cannot discourage you. Mourn for yourselves, because your old selves are dead, and you are here to be born anew, true sucklings of the Russian Bear.”

  He stops pacing and talking. I hope he’s finished with this lecture. It is beyond depressing; I’m sure they feel it is necessary, but mostly it just makes me wish for home more not less. “Mourn for your families,” Dragunov resumes pacing and lecturing, “because you may not cross their paths again in this life. Instead, your paths will take you elsewhere, to where you never dreamed and from which you may not return. But you will have the honor of service beyond the others, a life beyond your limited foresight and opportunities for you and Mother Russia. It is your honor and your duty to make the most of these opportunities, and to make the most of yourselves and of the State. You will not deny Mother Russia, or yourselves or your destinies.”

  He stops in front of me again, my blood running cold with his icy stare. Something about the hollowness of his glare, the soullessness of it, frightens me to my very core. But I am not afraid of this man, so much as I am afraid of what has reduced him to this echoing shell of once-vital human being.

  For now, he is more machine than man; and what manner of man lies within the machine, I do not want to know.

  But I feel that, once again, that choice will not be mine to make.

  He says, “Your lives are no longer your own, in truth they never were. Our great nation was waiting to reap the harvest of her loins, and now...” He smiles at me before adding, “Now the fruit is ripe. The time for harvest has come.”

  The four of us are piled into a train car, empty but for some straw on the wood-plank floor, wreaking of animal waste. They slam the door shut, heavy and loud, creaking and croaking. We sit in the long, heavy darkness, light streaming in through the slats in the wooden sides of the train car. The silence is nearly deafening, the slightest cough or sneeze seeming to reverberate around the empty train car like a collapsing building.

  There is so much I want to ask these women. Why you? Why me? Why us? Why? And what, and for whom? Well, I know for whom. For Mother Russia. And the other questions, they’d only ask me in return.

  In Russia, one learns tha
t silence is in many ways as telling as any words at any volume. The less one says, the more one can hear and understand and the less another can do the same. Silence heals and protects, it also assaults and thwarts and reduces an enemy into a disappeared memory or another ugly story to be told by the old women in the textile mills.

  After what seems like hours, my legs are stiff and my feet burning but my body unwilling to sink to the filthy, damp floor. The door slides open with a sudden clamor and light spills in, nearly blinding me. I squint through my tightened eyelids, failing to focus on the bodies and faces of another dozen or so young women as they pile into the car.

  The door slides shut again.

  The silence among us gets even louder, the reverberation of unspoken words banging against the wooden planks and against the insides of my skull.

  But there are no answers. Only time will provide them. And we have plenty of that.

  For now.

  After a few more hours, loud hisses surround the car, the slow grinding of the train’s machinery beneath us jostling our tired bodies as the train begins crawling forward.

  Toward Moscow.

  Toward our destinies.

  And there is no turning back.

  Chapter Three: English and Mind Control

  "A man is known by the silence he keeps." -- Oliver Herford

  April 1961

  I drift off to sleep during the train ride to Moscow, my legs having finally given out after almost sixteen hours of standing up. When the train stops, amid the hissing of steam, greasy wheels slowing beneath the calming train car, I wake up not from the sudden movement but from the sudden lack of movement.

  The doors pull open again and I have to squint in the burning sunlight, the glare bouncing off the snowy street and nearly blinding me.

  A bus with metal grating on the windows is waiting to take us into the heart of the city.

  Moscow.

  I’ve never seen the great city before. Here it seems to be as they say, that life is without limits. We roll through modern streets, cars and brick buildings reflecting the modern hustle of our post-war world, everything sleek and slick and fast. We pass the Kremlin building in Red square, huge and ornate, and the Pokrovsky Cathedral, still as colorful and grand as it was when Ivan the Terrible had it built in the 1500s.

  What city ever intermingled the old and the new with such aplomb? I wonder. The Nazi’s recent reign of terror had wiped out a lot of Europe’s medieval cities. But Hitler never got to Moscow, so it remains complete in its historical aspect, protected by the very isolation which may ultimately be its undoing.

  But they do say that the world seems to be getting smaller and smaller, and even as my own world tumbles in an interlocking of contraction and expansion, somewhere between everything out there and nothing at all, I know that the old saying is true. With television becoming so popular, air travel so common, it won’t be long before the iron grip of the Kremlin rusts and rots and dissolves and the Russian people run mad with glee in the streets, free to come and go as they please.

  Free.

  But that isn’t the case yet. There is still so much fear and hatred of the West, especially the United States, Moscow will remain cloistered, secluded, protected.

  Safe.

  But not free.

  The bus pulls up to the KGB headquarters in Lubyanka Square. The huge building is a massive brown box, eight stories or more of tan brick and gold trim, the first level a flat gray. Windows punctuate the facade, bringing light into those lucky enough to inhabit one of the offices above the main floor.

  Because I know instinctively that the basement floors are where the real horrors of this place occur, and that’s where we women will be going.

  Indeed, the bus pulls into a subterranean parking garage and then down several levels. Several uniformed KGB officers usher us out of the bus and into the garage, our footsteps and the metal clanks of the rifles echoing in the cold, dark, concrete cavern.

  I look around and wonder if I’ll ever see sunlight again.

  Double doors are pushed open in front of us, long hallways await, lit by small bulbs affixed to the walls at fifteen-foot intervals.

  Nobody speaks, but not only because we all know it would not be allowed.

  There’s simply nothing more to say.

  We are led into a large room, where several small chairs with attached desks sit lined up in rows, facing front, like a classroom. We are lined up facing the chairs, only ghosts inhabit them now, of children long grown up or dead.

  I stiffen as the two guards do, turning to the door as a familiar man enters. He’s not familiar because I’ve met him before. I haven’t. But I’ve seen his face in my visions.

  He approaches us slowly, his pronounced ridge low over his eyes, his gnarled brows tangled over his lifeless eyes, thick lips slick with his own saliva. The creases on his thick, leathery skin bely his age, at least fifty. His body is bulky, graceless as he paces in front of us.

  “I am Division Commander Alexei Vasilyevich Sobchak,” he says, his voice low and gravelly, filled with phlegm. “From this point forward, everything in your lives, and your lives themselves, are in my hands. You will look upon me as the State itself; undeniable, inescapable, indomitable.”

  He stops to glare at me, in the center of the line.

  “You are here to serve Mother Russia. As you serve me, so shall you be serving her.” He peers into my eyes, but I stare straight ahead, trying my best to look past him, to look through him. He considers as he glares at me, but I can’t be sure what he’s thinking. I half-wonder if he can hear my heart beating faster, or sense the dread that wells up inside me with his nearness. He smiles and moves on down the line.

  Yes, I realize, he can.

  He says, “If you do as you are told, you will have the honor of serving our country for many years, and in strength and good health. If you fail or rebel, your lives will end quickly and without exception. Your families already consider you to be dead.”

  One of the girls brakes out in a gasp at this harsh truth. We all know it and think it in our protracted silence, but the stress and the reality finally cracks her solemn facade with a panicked release.

  Sobchak turns and slaps her hard across the face, her black hair falling forward as her body snaps to the side.

  “Strength is what the Kremlin needs, you simpering fool! Now get a hold of yourself,” he turns to us to add, “all of you! Weakness will not be tolerated.”

  Sobchak turns to one of the guards and nods. The guard nods back and opens the door. Sobchak exits, his gait stiff and strong, and the guards lead us out behind him, into the hallway and down the other direction.

  We are put into rooms, furnished only with bunk beds and dressers already filled with gray wool garments of only two kinds; pants and shirt.

  I am paired with the tall, striking redhead they’d picked up in Novosibirsk. We stand for a minute, looking around the silent sequestration of our new home.

  Told to say nothing to the women we are paired with, I can’t help but extend my hand to her and say, “I’m Aleksandra.”

  “Ivanna,” she says, glaring at my hand and not shaking it. I lower my rejected palm back to my side and sit down on the thin mattress, springs squeaking beneath me. Several hours later we are taken to a mess hall to rejoin the other women, a plate of mashed oats and water and a raw beet presented to each of us. It’s the first meal I’ve had in over twenty-four hours, but it still tastes like wet cardboard and, well, a beet.

  We’re brought back to our rooms and the lights are turned off automatically.

  My sleep is filled with visions; Papa and Mamma sitting quietly; she from exhaustion and he from abject misery, the little house dimly lit around them to match their internal gloom.

  I see the sad-faced KGB officer again, who’d introduced himself as Dragunov, his sorrow still overtaken by his officiousness.

  I see another man’s face, not Dragunov or Sobchak or Papa, not Gregory or Vlad or any of
the men I knew in the Omsk. He’s handsome, smiling casually, hair graying slightly. My knight in shining armor come to rescue me. I feel his warm arms wrapping me in their protection. I love this man; vision of my dreams. I will meet him one day, I hope. If I can survive Mother Russia.

  In my mind’s eye, he gently pulls my chin up so that my lips are angled toward his, and he leans in and kisses me. It sends a chill through me, and I feel a slight wetness between my legs. I have dreamt of this man since my childhood; a combination of my gentle giant of a father and a beautiful fantasy man with pretty green eyes, blondish, brown hair, tall, strong, tanned and muscular. In that moment, I forget where I am, then clanging doors and sudden darkness brings me back to my harsh reality. I will probably never meet my fantasy man. I will, more than likely, die an agonizing death at the hands of some torture mad administrator in the heart of the Kremlin.

  ***

  The next day, our training begins. We sit in the big classroom we’d been brought to before, each in a small chair-and-desk, paper and pencils in front of us. Dragunov himself stands at the head of the class, several words written in chalk on the blackboard: nouns, verbs, adjectives.

  The words are written in English.

  The hours crawl by, turning slowly into days as Dragunov drills the lessons into us. Cat. Dog. May I have a glass of water?

  He approaches my roommate Ivanna, leaning over her. “Where is the restaurant?”

  Ivanna answers, “The restaurant is down the street.”

  After a tense silence, Dragunov nods and turns to another young woman, the brunette who’d gasped in line before. He says, “What is the name of your dog?”

  She sits there, uncertain, looking around as if the answer is written on the walls.

  It isn’t.

  Dragunov repeats, “What is the name of your dog?” even louder.

  Finally, she answers, “The name of my dog, it is... hamburger.”