Beautiful Assassin Read online

  As I mentioned, my father, the former soldier, got me interested in shooting. He said that in this new world women too would need to take up arms to defend the revolution. But I think it was as much that he’d secretly wanted to fashion me into the son he’d lost; and I suppose I took to it for the very same reasons, to give him back that son, or perhaps, become one. When we lived in Odessa, he would take me to an abandoned quarry not far from the Black Sea where he taught me to shoot a heavy old Cossack rifle he’d used in the war. He would set up cans and have me shoot them from progressively longer distances. When I would miss, he would shake his head in disappointment, and I would feel the sting of having failed him and work all the more diligently. Then he would wrap his arms around me, about the only physical contact I’d ever had from him, and adjust my elbow and my head. “You must make your rifle an extension of your will, Tanyusha.” That’s what he called me, Tanyusha, his attempt at tenderness. I practiced hard, hoping to please him, to be what he wanted me to be. Later he had me join the Osoviakhim, the paramilitary shooting club that all Soviet youth were encouraged to participate in. I soon realized that I had a natural aptitude for shooting a gun. I wasn’t afraid of the kick of the rifle or the noise. Instead, I found in it a wonderful symmetry, a synthesis of mind and eye and target, of a will made manifest.

  When I was fourteen we finally settled for good in Kiev. It was both strange and comforting to have a place I could finally think of as home. In school I was but an average student, bright but undisciplined, lazy except in those subjects that struck my fancy. I could excel when it came to something like literature or athletics, but in class, I would often daydream, staring out the window onto the playing fields, thinking of how I would perform at an upcoming track meet or scribbling in the margins of my notebook some lines of poetry. From an early age I had become an inveterate scribbler of verse. I fashioned myself something of a modern-day Pushkin. One time in my mathematics class, I was working on a poem instead of doing the assignment. The teacher, a shrill-voiced, stolid woman named Comrade Borovechenko, crept up behind me and caught me in the act.

  “What is this, Comrade Levchenko?” she said, snatching the paper I was writing on out of my hands. “Aha. It seems we have a poetess in our midst,” she said sarcastically. Then, to my utter mortification, she proceeded to read the poem aloud to the entire class. It was on a favorite topic of mine at the time—love. The class tittered and taunted me.

  At school I kept to myself, an introverted girl who hadn’t many friends. I didn’t seem to fit in anywhere, except on the athletic fields. A good athlete and one who enjoyed a challenge, I loved competing, enjoyed outdoor pursuits. I took great satisfaction in pushing myself, the feel of my body in motion. I ran track, competing in the hurdles and the javelin. I also loved to ski and hike, to swim in the Black Sea when we went on holiday. Growing up, I’d never had a boyfriend. I suppose all the moving around hadn’t helped, but mostly I wasn’t particularly interested in boys, at least not the ones that I found myself surrounded by at school. They were immature or coarse, strutting vainly around like roosters. The good-looking ones were usually brainless and conceited, the bookish ones too dull or homely or passive to strike my fancy. Or at least, so I told myself—the lies every insecure young girl learns to tell herself. For they weren’t particularly interested in me either. Until I was thirteen, I was this awkward, ungainly creature, with skinny legs and big feet, a flat chest, a mouth too broad. And with my dark hair and serious dark eyes, which tended to look directly upon the world with a kind of challenge, some even took to calling me “Tsygan”—Gypsy. Others called me Jew, though I wasn’t. (My father, for all of his many flaws, harbored no anti-Semitic views; when he heard this, he told me, “Go ahead and tell them you are a Jew. That I’m a Jew. That we’re all Jews in this country.”)

  Despite being so physical, I also loved to read history and books on travel, anything I could find about the rest of the world, which seemed a fascinating and forbidden mystery to me. I loved to read about Paris and London and New York, the Andes and the Great Wall of China. I also enjoyed reading novels and poetry. The classics like Pushkin and Lermontov and Turgenev, as well as more modern writers like Tsvetaeva and Yesenin. I read whatever I could get my hands on, which, given the state’s censorship, was often quite limited. As I said, I’d always written poetry, something to take up the long hours of a lonely young girl whose parents moved from town to town. I wrote in a journal, though I was too shy to show it to anyone, not even my parents. While most of my teachers thought me lazy or simply not particularly clever, a few saw beneath the sometimes prickly, disinterested surface I presented to the world.

  One was Madame Rudneva, my literature teacher. Middle-aged, with a head of wild reddish hair sprinkled with gray, she had large brown eyes, sharp features, an inviting smile. Not so much pretty as striking. She smoked Gauloises and dressed differently from the frumpy way the other teachers did, in bright flowing dresses and exotic jewelry and a beret. She spoke half a dozen languages fluently, including English. It was rumored she had family money she had somehow managed to retain even after the revolution. It was also rumored that she was part Jewish, which made her suspect in the eyes of many and formed a bond for us. (“We’re a couple of Gypsies, we two,” she used to joke with me.) While the other teachers insisted they be called “Comrade,” she preferred “Madame,” in the European tradition. In class she would sometimes make satirical comments about an article in Pravda or Izvestiya, or some new policy of the government’s she thought idiotic. She believed that women were the equal of men, that the revolution had preached that, and yet in practice, the role of women in the country was limited to teaching or working in a factory or on a collective farm driving a tractor, or worse, relegated to being merely someone’s wife. Though we were supposed to read only the Russian masters and those tedious contemporary works by “approved” writers, which meant plodding stories about factory workers overjoyed about reaching their quotas, often she’d bring in something by Shakespeare or Keats and read it to us in class, translating as she went. Occasionally she even slipped in some banned book by a contemporary Soviet. At the front of our classroom was the mandatory picture of Stalin that every classroom had. His cold, snake black eyes seemed to stare down upon us students like the fearsome gaze of some slightly annoyed god. Right beside his picture, though, Madame Rudneva had put up that of Shakespeare, at least until the headmaster removed it.

  I was just emerging from that awkward period of youth, when a girl magnifies her every flaw into some tragedy. Madame Rudneva, though, must have seen some spark in me, one I didn’t even know existed myself. She found some excuse to have me stay after school once. At first I thought I was in trouble, as I sometimes was with other teachers. But instead we just chatted, about poetry, about life, about my life.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up, Tat’yana?” she asked me. It was the first time anyone had ever asked me such a question. The other teachers, my parents, I guess even I, all assumed I would be like any other girl, no better or worse. Work in a factory, get married, make meals, produce healthy children, in short, silently accept what life had selected for me.

  I shrugged. “I like to read,” I told her.

  “Reading is an avocation. It’s not a vocation,” she said to me. “What do you want to do with your life.”

  I paused, then blurted out, “I would like to write poetry.”

  “Poetry?” she said. I feared she’d said this with irony, but I couldn’t detect the slightest trace of sarcasm, as other teachers would have responded to such a bold statement. My own mother, for instance, viewed my poetry writing as just a silly childhood hobby, like playing with dolls. Something that I would eventually grow out of.

  I nodded to Madame Rudneva.

  “May I see some of it sometime, Tat’yana?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied shyly.

  After school the next day the woman handed me a tattered copy of a poet I had never
heard of.

  “You have not read Akhmatova?” asked Madame Rudneva.

  “No.”

  “She’s our greatest living poet. Though her works have been banned by Old Whiskers,” she said, tossing her head toward Stalin’s portrait.

  “Why do you call him that?” I asked.

  “It’s what they call him in the camps.” She paused, then whispered cautiously, “I spent some years in one of his camps.”

  “My God!” I cried, startled. “What did you do, Madame Rudneva?”

  She let out with a sardonic sigh. “I wrote a letter in support of my fifteen-year-old cousin who had been arrested for making a joke about the Party. For this, I received five years’ hard labor.” She glanced again at the picture of Stalin, then said, “‘Old Whiskers’ is too nice a name for that filthy swine.” Madame Rudneva stared at me suspiciously, as if she only then realized she’d spoken out of turn and now didn’t know if she could trust me. In those days, one had to be cautious of what one said. Fear and treachery were everywhere. The walls themselves seemed to have ears.

  “Don’t worry,” I reassured her. Looking over my own shoulder, I whispered, “My mother calls him a mongrel dog.”

  We shared a conspiratorial smile at this, knowing then it was safe to talk openly.

  “Listen,” said Madame Rudneva as she opened the slender volume and began to read:

  “He told me, ‘We’re the best of friends!’

  And gently touched my gown’s laces.

  Oh, how differs from embraces

  The easy touching of these hands.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Here,” she said, handing me the book. “Just don’t let anybody see you carrying it about.”

  I promised that I would be careful.

  After that she would bring me other volumes to read, sometimes a frayed edition of a banned poet or a book smuggled into the country by an exiled writer living in Europe. I didn’t let anyone see them. Especially not my father who, though he appreciated poetry, liked only the older poets, not the subversive modern ones who wrote “decadent bourgeois drivel,” as he put it. Madame Rudneva encouraged me to show her some of my own poems, and while I had previously shared them with no one, I found myself letting her read them.

  “These are very good, Tat’yana,” she told me.

  “Just some scribblings,” I replied defensively.

  “Nonsense. They need polish, of course. Nothing of beauty comes except with hard work. But they are good. They show real promise.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Yes, indeed. You have the seeds of poetry in your soul, Tat’yana.” Then she leaned close, as if the portrait of Old Whiskers might overhear her. “Yet I fear they will never bear fruit in this soulless country of ours.”

  Never before had anyone spoken to me like this, so frankly about our country and its failings, or about my passion for writing. Until then, my poetry had appeared to me as little more than a youthful romantic notion I felt compelled to keep to myself, an oddity I would, as my mother maintained, grow out of. As I came to trust Madame Rudneva, I found myself opening up to her, staying after school to talk about all sorts of things—poetry and philosophy, politics and history. The revolution. The Party. The rights of women. Even about love. Unlike most of my other teachers, Madame Rudneva was not closed-minded, not provincial or dogmatic in her thinking, and unlike the rest of my teachers, she was not afraid to express herself, despite the very real danger such things might bring to one who was so outspoken. She had traveled widely, to Europe, studying in England, at Cambridge. She’d even been to the United States, back in the twenties, before such travel was forbidden. She read Donne and Blake and Keats to me in English. She would spend afternoons teaching me to recite the words in English and then translating them for me. Once, she brought me a volume she’d purchased years before when she was in England, by the American poet Emily Dickinson.

  “‘There is no frigate like a book,’” she would read from Dickinson, and have me recite it after her. “‘To take us lands away.’”

  Slowly I began to pick up a little English, and with it a curiosity about America.

  “What was it like?” I asked her once.

  “In New York, the buildings are so tall the tops reach the clouds. And automobiles everywhere. Going this way and that. Zoom, zoom,” the woman said, waving her hands rapidly about, as if shooing away flies. “And there is more food lying in the gutters than is on the tables of the wealthy here.”

  “No,” I replied in astonishment.

  “It’s true.”

  “What sort of clothing do the women wear?”

  “They dress in very bad taste. Flappers, they are called. They dance like this.” At which point Madame Rudneva got up from behind her desk and demonstrated how the American women danced, kicking her legs up and moving her body wildly around the front of the classroom. “Come,” she said, inviting me to dance. I shook my head, never having danced before. But she insisted. “I shall show you.”

  Madame Rudneva held my hand and spun me about in dizzying circles. After a while we both stopped and began laughing uncontrollably.

  “Are they all as decadent as they say?” I asked.

  “They are spoiled from such soft living,” she replied. “But the Americans are not so very different from us.”

  “But they are capitalists.”

  At this time I still believed in some of the things my father had taught me, and he said the Americans were the epitome of capitalist greed and corruption, a society doomed to the “garbage heap of history.”

  “You mustn’t believe everything those fools tell you, Tat’yana. The Party tries to fill everyone’s head with lies and deceptions. Because the truth would make everyone angry. And when some brave few try to tell the truth, the government uses fear to shut them up.”

  “My father says the Party exists only to carry out the will of the people.”

  “Huh.” She laughed. “I once believed heart and soul in the revolution. I was young when we overthrew the czar, just a little older than you. I thought we could change the world. But those in charge wanted to change things only for their own betterment.”

  “Did you like America?” I asked.

  “In some ways very much. There you are free to do many things we could not even imagine here. You can read whatever you want and write what’s in your heart. People aren’t afraid to say what they think. And American women aren’t pigeonholed into this or that category. They can be anything. Do anything.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. You would like it there, I think.”

  “If you liked it so much in America, did you ever think of…” I asked, my voice trailing warily off, as we’d been trained when speaking of forbidden topics.

  “Defecting?” replied Madame Rudneva. “I did actually. I gave it serious consideration. But this is my home. It’s my country as much as it is those fools’ who run things. Besides, there was the small matter of a man back here.” She smiled at this, her thoughts drifting off for a moment. “I was young and in love. He lived here and I thought I would die if we were not together.”

  “May I ask what happened?”

  “Like you he was a writer. A journalist. He wrote the truth, and when they told him to stop and he refused, they came and took him away. I never heard from him again. It broke my heart. I have had many lovers, but he was the only man I ever truly loved.”

  She let her gaze fall to the floor. I didn’t know what to say. Here was a teacher sharing her intimate personal life with me, as if I were a friend, an equal.

  “I’m sorry,” I offered finally.

  “I consider myself fortunate to have been in love with someone of such courage,” she explained. “Have you ever been in love, Tat’yana?”

  “Me?” I said, shaking my head.

  “A pretty girl like you must have many admirers.”

  “Hardly,” I replied. “I don’t
think boys are much interested in me, Madame Rudneva. They call me Gypsy because of my dark hair.”

  “You have lovely hair.”

  I shrugged.

  “They are imbeciles!” she said, laughing. “But that will soon change. You are a beautiful young woman, Tat’yana. Someday you will have lots of men interested in you. And you will meet a handsome young man and you will fall in love just as I did.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Believe me, you will. Do you know what Tsvetaeva wrote about love?” Of course, at the time I had never even heard of such a poet. “‘Ah! is the heart that bursts with rapture.’”

  Secretly, I hoped someday my own heart would burst with such rapture. You see, despite my competitive nature, my seeming disdain for boys and for matters of the heart, I hoped that I would someday fall in love, that I would meet a man who would stir the sort of passion in me that only my poetry or my shooting did now. I pictured someone tall with broad shoulders and an easy smile, a man who would not begrudge my wanting to write poetry, to think independently, who would accept me as I was and not want to make me into some coarse and dull babushka. As I began to devour Akhmatova as one would an exotic and heady fruit whose sweet nectar made the throat clutch with passion, I would see in her poems my own imagined lover. Someone whose touch was gentle and tender, who wasn’t afraid to love fully and completely, even dangerously. Of course, life never works out as one imagines. Sometimes I think our dreams are there only to make us taste the bitter regret of how far short we fall from them.