Now that Jack was nearly four years old, he slept in a real bed like his brother, all tangled up in sheets and blankets. Iris straightened them around his warm little body. He wore a soft, blue-striped union suit, his favorite. Mrs. Betts must have fished it out of the clothes hamper for him because Mummy and Daddy were away at a party. Iris smoothed his damp hair from his temple and imagined him sipping his warm milk, swinging his legs on the chair at the kitchen table next to Kip, while she and Sasha sat in their taxi and edged through the drizzle and the traffic toward the Desboroughs’ flat in Eaton Square.
Kip, on the other hand. Kip lay like a vampire in a coffin, perfectly straight, nose pointed to the ceiling, blankets tucked around him. Kip was the sweeter one, the sensitive one, who shared Iris’s artistic spirit but liked everything just so—soldiers lined up on the chest of drawers, clothes folded and ready for the next day—that kind of thing. Iris didn’t understand, but she went along with it. Last year he’d decided warm milk before bedtime was for babies, so he drank cocoa instead and instructed Jack on the finer points of the milk mustache.
Sometimes, when the boys lay asleep like this, tranquil as they never were when awake, Iris would stare at them and not quite believe they were hers. Eight years! How could eight years pass so quickly, and yet seem like forever? Iris felt like a different person now. She’d lived an entire lifetime in those eight years. That sense of holy purpose she’d felt in Rome—that determination to belong to Sasha, whatever the cost, and his determination to belong to her—where had it gone?
Jack stirred under Iris’s hand. She stepped back and held her breath, waiting for him to settle. In the shadows, she couldn’t see his shape, let alone the colors of him—his pale hair, his round, rosy cheeks. But she knew they were there. She knew the essence of both boys in her marrow. Her second child, her baby born in Ankara as the Allies marched through Normandy. She had suffered two miscarriages between Kip and Jack, and Jack’s birth had been even more harrowing than Kip’s. Nearly thirty-six hours before they wrestled him out into the world, and all that time Sasha was away on some special mission, she didn’t know where, because she’d gone into labor two weeks early.
No more babies, Sasha had said, when he stood by her bedside a week later—home at last—pale and disheveled—and Iris had agreed.
But that was history. The fear and agony had faded, as they’d faded after Kip, and now Iris stared down at Jack, so small and yet such a little boy now, all traces of babyhood slipped right through her fingers, she felt the familiar stir in her belly—the clutch of longing.
She turned and slipped out the door and down the hall to the bedroom she shared with Sasha. The door was closed—she pushed it open and turned her head away from the empty bed.
The dressing room connected the bedroom to the bathroom. Iris laid her pocketbook on the dresser—wriggled out of her dress—hung it in the wardrobe. She sat on the stool and removed her stockings and slip, found a nightgown to slip over her underthings. Before heading into the bathroom, she emptied out her pocketbook, so she could put away her lipstick and compact.
But the lipstick and compact wouldn’t fall free. Something else lay on top of them at a particular angle, trapping the objects within. Iris stuck her fingers between the lips to dislodge this thing, which turned out to be a calling card. She pulled it out and held it to the light.
On the face of the card, the name c. sumner fox appeared in raised black letters. Underneath, in smaller type, was an American telephone number with a Washington exchange. On the back, in sharp, masculine handwriting, someone had written In case of need, followed by a telephone number in Mayfair.
Ruth
June 1952
Rome, Italy
I wake the next morning to a noise both obnoxious and distantly familiar. I take in the plaster walls and wooden beams of a small, white room, and for a moment I have no idea where I am, or even who I am. Then I remember I’m in Rome, in the attic of Orlovsky’s old atelier, and that noise is the particular noise of an Italian telephone ringing its head off.
The bedroom is tiny and hot, designed for servants, and the telephone’s on the floor below. I experience a moment of crisis when I stagger into the hall and lose my way to the staircase. The telephone keeps ringing. At last I stumble through the doorway of the studio and find it. “Hello?” I mumble.
“Good morning, bambina. Have I wake you?”
“What time is it?”
“Half past ten o’clock.”
“Half past ten?”
“Never mind,” Orlovsky says soothingly. “Is good to sleep. And I am working on your behalf this morning.”
“Oh? What have you done?”
“First put on your dress and have coffee. You remember café, end of street?”
“Yes, but—”
“Meet me for lunch. I explain everything there.”
“Why can’t you just come here?”
“Because I have loose ends, bambina. Lunch at half past noon, is okay?”
“I don’t have time for lunch!”
“You must eat, however. So we meet and have lunch and discuss things in rational manner. Good-bye.”
He hangs up, and the once-familiar noise of an Italian dial tone buzzes in my ear. I set the receiver in the cradle and attempt to collect my thoughts, which are still mired in the confusion of deep sleep. I had no right to sleep like that, just as I have no right to eat a leisurely lunch in an Italian café with a man who was once my lover. I need to get to Moscow—I need to find Iris with an urgency that’s only grown stronger during the night, as if some part of my brain has turned into a ticking clock.
But Orlovsky’s right. I must eat—I must sleep—and anyway I can’t do anything until we find a way inside the Soviet Union.
I head upstairs and open my suitcase.
“You look much better,” Orlovsky tells me, when the waiter’s opened the first bottle of wine and poured our glasses.
“You, on the other hand, look worse. What’s happened to you?”
He shrugs. “Life. War. You know we lost two sons—”
“Oh, damn. I hadn’t heard. I’m so sorry.”
“War kills the young, this is fact of life. Laura prayed to God, but I am not believer. I believe in fate, that is all.” He sips his wine and offers me a cigarette. We spend some time lighting up, enjoying the first drag. He waves away the smoke that gathers between us and says, “Enrico died in Albania. Mario at Palermo. So Giovanni is now our only son. Five girls and one boy. His mother spoils him.”
“Of course she does.” I’m now filled only with pity for Orlovsky’s wife. Still, I can’t resist adding, “But at least she had the new baby to comfort her.”
He looks at me in surprise. “But you did not know this? Baby died two days after he was born. His heart, doctors said to us. He had weak heart.”
“Oh, God. What a heel I am.”
“No, it is I who am heel, bambina. It is I who am brought to learn humility before will of fate. I thought I was tremendous man. I have wife and children and beautiful mistress, all because I am great fellow, I am like God. Whole world moves in magnificent circle around me. I am immortal!” He pulls on the cigarette. “So fate strikes me down. One by one, my children die. Is greatest agony man can endure. Why not kill me instead? No, fate tortures me first, because I am proud, because I play with hearts of women like you play with cards.”
“That’s not true. That has nothing to do with it. Your children didn’t deserve to die because of you. You didn’t deserve for them to die.”
“Ah, you are generous with me, bambina cara. Always you are generous.”
The conversation’s become morbid, and the wine turns sour in my mouth. “What about your daughters? Are any of them married?”
“Yes, Elvira and Renata, they marry nice Italian boys. I have two grandchildren, girl and boy.”
I lift my glass. “Cheers to that, anyway.”
“And my little Donna, she is spending summer in Russia with my parents, near Sochi. You know Sochi?”
“It’s by the Black Sea, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Is beautiful there, like resort. She will come home tanned and happy, with Russian boyfriend.” He shakes his head. “Is terrible burden, children. Always they take your heart with them, wherever they go.”
“I wouldn’t know. But my sister has a fourth on the way, I hear.”