Someone Else's War: A Novel of Russia and America Read online

Someone Else’s War:

  A Novel of Russia and America

  Copyright 2013 by Erin Solaro

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  You may quote from this novel for fair use purposes, but please provide the author a copy of the review or paper or anything else you have quoted it in, along with a link to the site, if applicable.

  The cover photo was taken by Mikhail Estafiev and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, which allows users to copy, distribute and transmit the work with attribution, provided the author does not imply that Mr. Estafiev approves of the work. (She has not contacted him.)

  Although the author has had to work from memory for the following issue, she attributes all quotations by Anna Akhmatova to her greatest English-language translator, Judith Hemschemeyer. Any flaws in the quotes are the failure of the author’s memory.

  DEDICATION

  For good friends in a dark time. And once again and always, for Philip, without whom this book would not exist at all.

  And to you also, dear reader.

  For this is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed are purely imaginary. Any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental and unintended.

  Yet the Russia of this book is real enough. So is the America. If this Russia seems less abhorrent than usual in American eyes, that was my intent. And if this America seems a bit too real for comfort, again in American eyes, that was my intent, also.

  Erin Solaro

  28 February 2014

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  DEDICATION

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  PROLOGUE, MOSCOW, JANUARY 1997: COVENANT

  CHAPTER ONE, WASHINGTON, DC, DECEMBER 1993: GETMANOV

  CHAPTER TWO, WASHINGTON, DC, DECEMBER 1993: A NIGHT WALK

  CHAPTER THREE, LOS ALAMOS, EARLY SPRING 1994: AMERICA

  CHAPTER FOUR, MOSCOW, HOLY WEEK 1994: SUSLOV and REBECCA

  CHAPTER FIVE, FOX CHAPEL, PA, SPRING 1994: OSCAR

  CHAPTER SIX, MANHATTAN, LATE SPRING 1994: SHOPPING

  CHAPTER SEVEN, VIENNA, LATE SPRING 1994: JAY LYONS

  CHAPTER EIGHT, MOSCOW AND TVER, EARLY JUNE 1994: PROOF OF CONCEPT

  CHAPTER NINE, MOSCOW, JUNE AND SEPTEMBER 1994: BORODKIN, SUSLOVA

  CHAPTER TEN, MOSCOW, DECEMBER 1994: MARIA FEDOROVNA

  CHAPTER ELEVEN, GROZNY, EARLY 1995: MALINOVSKY

  CHAPTER TWELVE, MOSCOW AND GUDERMES, SUMMER 1995: KRISTINICH

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN, MOSCOW, EARLY WINTER 1995: TRIMENKO

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN, VEDENO GORGE, EARLY WINTER 1996: SIMONOV

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN, MOSCOW and GROZNY, SPRING 1996: COMBAT

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN, MAY-JUNE 1996, OLD RUSSIA: IN RUSSIA, ALL TRACK IS ROUGH

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN, CARLISLE BARRACKS, PA and MOSCOW, SUMMER 1996: CC COOPER

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN, MOSCOW, FALL 1996: VOROSHILOV

  CHAPTER NINETEEN, MOSCOW, CHRISTMAS 1996: AN AMERICAN GUEST

  CHAPTER TWENTY, MOSCOW, JANUARY 1997: SMART COUNTRIES, FOOLISH CHOICES

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE, MOSCOW, JANUARY 1997: THE DACHA

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO, MOSCOW, JANUARY 1997: THE LUBYANKA

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE, MOSCOW, JANUARY 1997: THE MASTER PLANS OF THE MOMENT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR, MOSCOW, JANUARY 1997: THE FORMER WAYS

  EPILOGUE: MOSCOW, JANUARY 1997: REDEMPTION

  AN AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE READER

  My American Vacation: A Novel of Russia and America

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  The Major Characters Are:

  AMERICANS

  Doctor Olivia Lathrop Tolchin (Tolchinskaya), expatriate engineer.

  Lavinia Lathrop Tolchin, her mother, deceased, by profession an architect.

  Doctor Oscar Tolchin, her father, Hungarian immigrant, retired engineer, now part-time consultant and adjunct professor of engineering.

  Colonel CC Cooper, US Army, retired, visiting professor at Voroshilov General Staff Academy.

  Maxwell Fajans, CIA Chief of Station, US Embassy, Moscow.

  Howie, Chief of the Washington Post Moscow Bureau.

  Jay Lyons, CIA Deputy Assistant Chief of Station, US Embassy, Vienna.

  Rebecca Taylor, Foreign Service Officer, US Department of State, later Moscow/Chechnya correspondent for the Washington Post.

  RUSSIANS

  There are several categories of Russians.

  RUSSIAN ARMY

  Colonel (later Major General) Dmitri Borisovich Suslov, Spetsnaz (Special Forces) and Airborne officer. Olivia’s lover.

  Yuri Mikhailovich Getmanov, cultural attaché, Russian Embassy in Washington, DC, under-cover Major General, Russian Military Intelligence (GRU).

  Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Vladimir Alexandrovich Malinovsky, Suslov’s chief of reconnaissance in Chechnya. Olivia’s boxing partner and friend: the brother she never had, the sister he always wanted.

  Warrant Officer Konstantin Eduardovich Simonov, head of Olivia's personal security detail in Chechnya.

  Lieutenant General Anatoly Petrovich Trimenko, Chief of Airborne Forces, Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.

  THE FEDERAL SECURITY SERVICE or FSB

  Leonid Pavlovich Borodkin, Olivia's lab administrator and an FSB “minder.”

  Major Mikhail Yegorevich Kristinich, FSB interrogator assigned to Suslov’s Spetsnaz brigade in Chechnya.

  Lieutenant Colonel Vladislav Stepanovich Marianenko, Olivia’s intake interrogator.

  Maria Fedorovna Philipova, Olivia’s housekeeper, FSB minder, and a former zek, or political prisoner in the Gulag (the Soviet penal camp system).

  Colonel Sergei Lazarevich Raduyev, Olivia’s chief interrogator in the Lubyanka.

  Lieutenant General Georgii Genrikhovich Schwartz, Director, FSB Counter-Intelligence.

  Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Irina Borisovna Suslova, Dmitri’s sister and Olivia’s friend.

  Colonel Avrum Vissarionovich Zhuralev, personal aide to General Schwartz and Olivia’s arresting officer.

  Four junior interrogators in the Lubyanka, also known as the Borises.

  OTHER RUSSIANS

  Lyudmila Trofimovna Getmanova, wife of General Getmanov.

  Alexander Suslov, brother of Dmitri and Irina, killed in action in Afghanistan.

  Valentina Suslova, widow of Alexander, now a successful artist, living with Suslova and their four sons by their dead husbands.

  FRONTISPIECE

  To live—as if in freedom.

  To die—as if at home…

  Day of the Declaration of War

  21 June 1941

  Anna Akhmatova

  PROLOGUE, MOSCOW, JANUARY 1997: COVENANT

  Dmitri Borisovich Suslov, Major General of Russian Airborne Forces and Spetsnaz, veteran of Afghanistan and Chechnya, drew back the ancient eiderdown comforter and cotton sheets and stared down at his American lover. He saw first, always, muscle from flat, strong shoulders to long, curving calves. Then the scars, where her pelvis and spine had been put back together with steel and titanium. He remembered the first time he had seen those scars and kissed them as if he could take away the memory of the pain. Those fractures had been very bad.

  Seeking warmth in the cold morning, Olivia turned over, moved towards him.

  He saw a strong, clean neck, hard nipples, small breasts, a deep, sculpted rib cage, and more scars. A body of pain in a world of pain.

  He could have wept. He did not.

  Doctor Olivia Lathrop Tolchin, or Tolchinskaya, as she’d come to be known in Russia, felt something, perhaps his racing heart, perhaps the t
remor in his breathing, because she woke, calmly and completely in the way she had learned in Chechnya, to his stare. His slanting Tartar eyes were dark green holes in a face so pale that his fine, weather-worn skin seemed translucent over the high, proud bones. She saw, again and always, the pain in his soul, as real as the physical torment she lived with.

  Suslov opened his mouth to speak. No sound came out as he struggled to form words. Finally, he managed three. “Da ili nyet?”

  Yes or no? Once more, yes or no, to confirm their decisions of the night before. Decisions regarding the treachery that she had never committed, for which she must now be imprisoned, perhaps tortured and killed. Decisions regarding the treachery he must now commit to try to save her. They had chosen freely. They had chosen to embark on the only honorable course of action now open to them, other than death, and they would not die merely to spare the evil the inconvenience of killing them. Only the final confirmation was required.

  “Da.”

  “Then we shall proceed as we have planned.”

  The words of a heart breaking. Two hearts.

  Olivia knew that somewhere in the room, very close to Dmitri Borisovich’s hand, was his loaded pistol. She knew how completely, how terribly, he had fought, perhaps still fought, to keep himself from wanting to use it. Last night, there were moments when she had wanted him to use his pistol. On her, for never telling him the one thing, the one supremely idiotic thing, she feared might someday be found out about her. Then on himself, in expiation for trusting her. But he would not do that, either. She trembled a little, then a little more, at how utterly ashamed she was of her longing for such an end. It was only another burden to lay upon him.

  She rose, showered in the simple dacha’s little cubicle. She dressed under his silent gaze. He pulled on jeans and a sweater, taking his pistol from his nightstand beside the bed and placing it in a pocket of his coat hanging by the bed. He never spoke a word, not even when she picked up her pistol, the .45 she’d sometimes carried in America. She put it in a pocket of her coat and took up the small valise she’d been instructed the day before to pack for prison. He did not lay a hand upon her, to touch her in kindness or to hurt.

  Alone, she stepped out of the shelter of his family’s haunted dacha. She felt his eyes upon her from the dacha’s window. She nodded to the fate waiting for her in the form of an FSB colonel standing by his car, his driver and guard attentive within, the armed detail that had ringed the dacha since last night invisible. She walked toward him alone.

  “Good morning, Colonel Zhuralev. I trust none of your men have frostbite.”

  “No, Dr. Tolchinskaya. They are fine, but you are kind to ask.” And then, “How do you wish to proceed?”

  “I will now reach into the pocket of my coat and surrender my pistol.”

  Zhuralev nodded. In as pure an act of defiance as he had ever seen, she drew out her pistol and handed it over, a weapon that was as much a part of her as her perfume or her knitting. She’d kept all three on the little lamp table on her side of the bed. The perfume was in her valise. The pistol, she knew, ought not to be left with Dmitri Borisovich. Not for him. She wondered briefly if knitting—her work was also in her valise—was permitted in the Lubyanka, at least for prisoners of a certain status. But this was not the time to ask.

  She moved to the car door and never looked back. They had made their plans, made them honorably, calmly. Whatever else, they would not submit. Perhaps, she thought, her lover’s life was over, as hers might soon also be. And all because, and only because of the last stupid, ludicrous, pointless thing she’d done before coming to Russia. The last part of herself that she’d offered America.

  Colonel Zhuralev nodded to his guard, who emerged with handcuffs. Dmitri Borisovich could not bear to watch any longer. He turned away from the window, undressed, and washed himself with frigid water, coarse soap, and a harsh cloth, until his skin was raw. Then he dressed in his uniform and prepared for his day.

  They would come for him, but at their leisure. Or maybe not. This was no longer Stalin’s time. Or even Brezhnev’s. Perhaps Russia was headed in that direction again. Or maybe not. He did not know. Nor did he know whether the two of them would make some sort of difference for the better. All he knew was, whether they came for him or not, he would go on, as before. He would also remain available.