Sekret by Lindsay Smith
For Gwen, who put the Russian enigma in my heart
CHAPTER 1
MOSCOW, SEPTEMBER 1963
MY RULES FOR THE BLACK MARKET are simple. Don’t make eye contact—especially with men. Their faces are sharp, but their eyes sharper, and you never want to draw that blade. Always act as though you could walk away from a trade at any moment. Desperation only leaves you exposed. Both hands on the neck of your bag, but don’t be obvious about it. Never reveal your sources. And always, always trust the heat on your spine that haunts you when someone is watching.
I pass through the iron gates to the alley off New Arbat Street. A mosaic of Josef Stalin smiles down on the ramshackle market he never would have permitted. If he were still our leader, the man wearing strings of glass beads, snipping them off for customers, would vanish overnight. The little girl with jars of bacon fat would emerge years later in a shallow ditch, her skull half eaten by lye.
Comrade Secretary Nikita Khruschev, the USSR’s current leader, is content to ignore us. The Soviet Union provides everything you need, as long as you don’t mind the wait: a day in line for butter and bread rations, another day for meat, seven years for automobiles, fifteen for a concrete-walled apartment where you can rest between factory shifts. Khruschev understands the stale-cracker taste of envy in every worker’s mouth when a well-dressed, well-lived Communist Party official, more equal than the rest of us, strolls to the front of the ration line. If we quench our own thirst for excess in the black market, then that’s less burden on the State. His KGB thugs only disrupt the market when we do something he cannot ignore—such as trading with known political dissidents and fugitives.
And I happen to be one.
A tooth-bare man lunges at me with an armful of fur coats. I don’t want to know what creatures wore that patchwork bristly fur. “Not today, comrade,” I tell him, straightening out my skirt. Today I must restock Mama’s clinic supplies. (Average wait for a doctor’s visit: four months. Average wait for a visit with Mama: three minutes, as she wrestles my brother Zhenya into another room.) The sour, metallic tang of fish just pulled from the Moskva River hits me and my stomach churns covetously, but I can only buy food with whatever’s left over. We’ve lived off two food rations split five ways for some time now. We can live with it for some time more.
I spot the older woman I came for. Raisa, everyone calls her—we never use real names here. In this pedestrian alley, wedged between two disintegrating mansions from the Imperial days, we are all dissidents and defiants. We do not inform on each other for illegal bartering—not out of loyalty, but because doing so would expose our own illegal deeds.
Raisa’s whorled face lifts when she sees me. “More Party goods for Raisa?” She beckons me into her “stall:” a bend in the concrete wall, shielded by a tattered curtain. “You always bring quality goods.”
My chest tightens. I shouldn’t be so predictable, but it’s all I have to trade. The finer goods reserved for high-ranking Party members are worth their weight in depleted uranium here. I glance over my shoulder, hoping no one heard her. A boy and a girl—they look one and the same, with only a mirage-shimmer of gender to distinguish them—turn our way, but the rest of the market continues its haggling, lying, squawking. I let their faces sink into my thoughts in case I need to remember them later.
“Maybe you brought a nice filtered vodka? My boy, he wants a pair of blue jeans.” Raisa ferrets through her trash bags. She still reeks of sweat from the summer months—not that I can criticize. I have to boil water on Aunt Nadia’s stove to wash myself. “I have ointment for you, peroxide, gauze,” she says. “You need aspirin? You always want aspirin. You get a lot of headaches?”
I don’t like her making these connections, though for clinic supplies, I have little choice. If she knows about Mama’s headaches, that’s a weakness exposed. If she suspects we were Party members before we fled our home and became ghosts—
No. This is paranoia, gnawing at my thoughts like a starved rat. The KGB—the country’s secret police and spying force—can only dream of training drills as thorough as my daily life, with all the ridiculous precautions I take. My fears are outweighed by one simple truth: I need something and Raisa needs something, and that will keep us safe.