***
The two women were settled in a day room for senior officers with large, soft leather armchairs. Lyudmila Trofimovna took a good look at Olivia. “Poor lamb. I was told they were feeding you.”
Olivia shrugged. “They tried, I just couldn’t manage to eat most of it.”
Lyudmila Trofimovna spoke to the matron who had accompanied them, unarmed although there were armed male guards in the corridor. “Could you get us some food, please? Is there any shashlik available?”
“Spicy food would be nice,” Olivia agreed, swimming through the haze of vodka.
“Doctor,” the matron asked, “do you promise…”
“I give you my word of honor that I will do no harm to Madame Getmanova, nor to myself. I won’t even damage the furniture. Nor will I try to jump out the window and fly away.”
“Then I will get us all food. Doctor, you do understand that I’m under orders to keep an eye on you.”
“I do. And since you have accepted my word, I shall not violate it or in any way embarrass you.”
With a last, worried look, the matron left them.
“I found it curious that I was actually permitted pain medications. They made the prolonged sitting reasonably bearable, if not exactly pleasant.”
“They wanted you rational and not going through withdrawal. The point of this, initially, was, What, if anything, did you actually do? You came up clean. But there was concern that if the investigation widened, people might use it for their own purposes and things would get out of hand. Fortunately, these—” she reached into her capacious handbag and brought out Taylor’s articles— “have generated sufficient publicity to create the beginnings of an affair that no one wants. This has impacted upon the Kremlin. The video that General Schwartz is sending will provide an additional inducement to avoid going back to the former ways. Our belief is that you will be set free tomorrow. At worst, you may be charged with some minor infraction of something, pardoned, and then the whole thing quietly dropped. One never knows for certain until it happens, but I do believe this is over.”
Olivia read the articles, then handed them back. “She writes well.”
“Indeed.”
“How soon do you think I can get back to work?”
Madame Getmanova peered over her reading glasses at Olivia. “My dear, would you desire my honest assessment?”
“Please.”
“That may not be possible. You are far too well known and even if you are proclaimed totally innocent, too many people will still have their knives ready for you.”
“So what are my options, do you think?”
Madame Getmanova sighed. “You may have, I think, four. One, if all goes well, would be to return to your life of a week ago, properly chastened by the experience and now far more cautious.”
“I would like that.”
“I must tell you again, my dear, that may not be possible. Your second option would be to return to America.”
“And imprisonment?”
“Perhaps. Your third option might be to go to Israel. As a Jewess, you are automatically a citizen of Israel and the Jewish Agency has some experience in moving Jews out of Russia quickly. I would actually expect the Mossad to be well aware of your technical achievements. You would certainly be welcomed for those.”
“I have never considered that. My mother was a convert. Perhaps I’m not Jewish enough for them?”
“My dear, Israel is taking every Russian Jew who wants to leave, plus a lot who aren’t but claim they are. All kinds. They would take you in a minute.”
Olivia thought a moment, then shook her head. “And my fourth option?”
“To stay in Russia in some other capacity.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, some other kind of engineer. Or perhaps just as a general’s wife. Being a general’s wife does have its rewards. Now,” she reached down into her bag and brought out some yarn. “The dyer calls it mother-of-pearl,” Lyudmila said. White kid mohair plied with silk, it had been hand-painted in short, gentle washes of color: pale pinks, blues, greens, purples, shot through with the sheen of silk. It demanded a high degree of technical skill to handle the colors so carefully, refining them down to their essence, let alone working on mohair, with its desire to felt. “The last thing I did before I got on the airplane was to buy several skeins. My husband thought I had lost my mind, and perhaps I had. But it was also an act of faith.”
“So you have opinions about my wedding dress,” Olivia said warily, looking at the fine yarn, achingly soft, with more than a little suspicion. “You do know I have never had the slightest desire to find myself wearing something looking like it is made of spun sugar.”
“I can imagine no one less amenable to spun sugar.” Instead, she handed Olivia a written pattern for a very simple, elegant pullover sweater, so light that the extra-large size that Olivia required because of the depth of her chest and breadth of her shoulders, would weigh only a hundred and fifty grams. It would be easy enough to turn it into a dress, and almost as easy to add some lace edging to the collar and cuffs for interest.
“So many words for such a simple pattern!”
“Every engineer and scientist I know who knits, prefers Japanese patterns,” Lyudmila observed. “The schematics really do appeal to us.”
“The question is, I think, whether or not to double this yarn, because knitting a dress takes some time.”
“True, but not every stitch need be yours. And it can be knit in pieces. Summer is the time for weddings.”
The matron returned with shashlik and lemonade. Olivia began to eat, slowly, steadily, not greedily, savoring the taste of the food, while casting on her estimate of the number of stitches required for a swatch. After a while, Olivia sat back and contemplated the pattern and thought about yardage for the kidsilk. “Five hundred grams for the dress itself, and that should give us a good margin.”
“Yes,” Lyudmila said. “A dressmaker can sew it to a silk lining to support the fabric, as well as provide for modesty.” She thought about colors. “Two layers of silk chiffon beneath the knitting, next to your skin, in different but very pale iridescent colors, perhaps gold and rose, but we will have to lay swatches underneath to see how the colors interact. The entire weight will be less than a kilogram.”
“What an awful lot of work to go through for something to be worn once.”
“I do not think you’ll be wearing it just once. I think it should come out on anniversaries.”
“And perhaps this will all be for nothing.”
“Let us be optimists, Olivia. And if we’re wrong, then this has been quite a pleasant way to spend these hours.”
“I agree. You are very kind to see me through them.”
Madame Getmanova smiled back at her. “It is the least I could do. After all, I’m the one who got you into this in the first place.”
Not entirely surprised, Olivia gave her a hard, appraising look. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” said Lyudmila, “that it was I who first pointed you out to my husband.”
“Do I understand you correctly?”
“Yes. Although I have not been a practicing engineer for many, many years, part of my work at the embassy involved reading American technical publications that might not be available to our people in Russia for one reason or another. I read a paper you had written. I admired your work greatly. I was, if I may use the word, jealous. Admiringly jealous because I knew that you had seen the future. I showed it to my husband, who agreed. And the rest, as they say, is history.”
“Might I ask something?”
“Of course, dear.”
“Why did you wait until now to tell me?”
“Because,” said Madame Getmanova, returning to her knitting, “as they say in America, a girl has to have some secrets.”