ANNA
She was nervous-he sensed it the moment he entered the apartment. She was practicing, in a pair of white shorts and a sleeveless white jersey, and when she pulled her bow she looked as though she were trying to saw through the cello's strings.
He moved toward her. Her forehead was dripping. When he raised her hair and felt the back of her neck he found it slick.
She stopped.
'What's the matter?'
''Something Yosef said this afternoon. I got upset.'
David sat down. 'What did he say?'
'Nothing. He had the right to say it. We criticize each other all the time. It's just that we've been working on the Mendelssohn and he said the way I was doing this passage was 'gypsyish.' ' She picked up her cello, played a portion of the D Major Sonata with exaggerated sentimentality. 'Later he took it back, said what he meant was I was playing like I was trying too hard to please. I wanted to kill him.' She paused. 'I think maybe he was right.'
He watched as she carefully placed the cello back on the floor, stood up, and walked into the kitchen. When she came back out she was smoking a long black silver-tipped Russian cigarette.
'Smoking again?'
'Just since this afternoon. I got so nervous I walked over to the King David and bought myself a pack.' She exhaled. 'No wonder Israelis are such smokestacks. Everyone's nervous here. I'd be too if I weren't so damned disciplined.'
He studied her. 'What's the matter, Anna?'
She started to pace the room. 'Every day now you ask me that.'
'Someone's turned up, hasn't he?'
She stopped pacing. 'David, how did you know?'
'It's Targov, isn't it? There's an interview with him in the Post.'
She nodded. 'But how do you know his name? I'm sure I never mentioned him, unless I talk in my sleep.'
'I'm a detective, remember.'
The Russian in her accepted that: in the USSR detectives knew everything, so why not in Israel too?
She took another long puff. 'Damn him for coming. Damn!'
'Sit with me.' She came to the couch. 'What's the matter? Have you seen him? Did he come here to track you down?'
'No. His secretary phoned. A very strange, very thin man named Anatole Rokovsky. He said Sasha was here and asked me to please come and see him. I told him I'd think about it. I was doing that when you walked in.'
Then, suddenly, she began to speak. David was amazed. It was as if she had stored up her feelings for a year, and now, releasing them, was so caught up she couldn't stop.
'…we were lovers. Did you know that? We had some wonderful moments too. But in the end it was impossible. He flaunted our affair in front of his wife. I was just one in a long string of younger women brought into the house to make her feel like shit.'
She was up now, pacing the room again, puffing on another cigarette, waving her arms as she described the agony of the months she'd spent with the Targovs in Big Sur.
'…not, you understand, that Irina was some poor abused creature. She engineered a lot of it. He told me once that if it weren't for her contempt, he thought she'd probably die. He's a brilliant man, David. Knows everybody. Quotes great hunks of poetry. Pushkin, Pasternak, Tvardovsky. Huge gnarled hands. 'Sculptor's hands,' he'd say, 'but useless now.' Then he'd start in, his litany: Artistic paralysis. Old injustices. Bureaucrats who'd hated him and detested his style. How they cut him off from state commissions, demanded he sculpt more 'realistically,' and finally how they drove him into exile -or, at least, so he said. Complaints, complaints…all the time, too, making sure Irina knew about us. He'd steal pieces of my underwear and hide them in his bed where he knew she'd search them out. Awful scenes at dinner. The two of them screaming at one another standing inches apart. Sasha was good to me, helped me, but he used me too. I was his sounding board. He made me pay a thousand ways.'
'How did you meet?'
She shook her head.
'What's the matter?'
'You don't want me to tell you that.'
'I love you, Anna. We can't have secrets.' He paused. 'Listen-I'll tell you one of mine.'
She stopped pacing, grinned. 'I didn't know you had secrets.'
'How do you think I found out about you and Targov?'
'How did you?' She gazed at him.
'An old girl friend of mine. An American. You see-you're not the only one around here with a past.'
'She knew?'
'She's some kind of American agent. Jealous, and a liar too. She told me Titanov was seen recently in the West. I checked and of course it wasn't true.'
She nestled beside him, hung her head. He stroked the back of her neck.
'I know your defection was legitimate, Anna. But there's something you're holding back. Tell me what it is. You'll feel better if you do.'
Tears sprang to her eyes. 'I don't think I can.'
'Guilt is stupid.'
'Do they teach you to say that at detective school?'
He nodded.? They have a name for it. 'The tell-your-story method.' So come on, Anna, tell me your story. A detective who loves you-what better listener could you have?'
She began finally to tell it, starting back even before her defection in Milan. He had heard details of these incidents many times but he didn't interrupt her; he knew she had to work herself up before she got to the part that made her feel so ashamed.
'…it was a couple of months later, after I got to the States. I was temporarily settled in New York. A cold winter day. The wind was biting. I was hurrying along West Fifty-seventh Street near Carnegie Hall when a man approached. He matched his stride to mine and started speaking to me in Russian. He was friendly, polite, open about who he was and what he wanted me to do. He was with the Soviet Embassy. He proposed a mission, and said that if I didn't perform it my brother would be expelled from Moscow University. He didn't put it to me like a threat. Just stated it sadly as a fact. And when I told him that whatever happened to my brother I wasn't going to be a spy, he said this wasn't like that, that spying was for professionals, that all he wanted me to do was report to him on the thinking of some emigres. He invited me into a coffee shop to talk. I was a little hesitant. But it was a public place, he didn't seem dangerous, and I was worried about my brother's future. There he revealed that he knew I was going out to California to give a concert the following week. While I was there he wanted me to telephone the sculptor, Targov, whose name I recognized but about whom I knew nothing at all. I was to introduce myself to Targov, arrange a meeting, then sound him out on his activities and plans. That was it. Stupidly I agreed. Now I'm so ashamed. But you see, at the time it seemed like such a harmless thing. Those people, old emigres-all they ever do is talk.'
When she met Targov she was surprised. She didn't discover a militant anti-Soviet activist. Instead she found a tormented artist, flawed on the scale of a character from a Russian novel. There was a party that first weekend in Big Sur-refugees, defectors, other emigres. Tables set high with Russian food, meat pies and cakes, flasks too of spicy vodka endlessly refilled. Targov was attentive. Within hours she found herself in thrall. Grizzled, seductive, he swept her up in passionate talk, flinging out poetry, ideas, raucous jokes. Later, when the balalaika players sang, they stood and clapped together and then they danced.
Tears filled her eyes as she told David all of this, and then of how Irina had invited her to move in. It somehow fed Irina's fury, she thought, to provide a young woman for her husband to seduce. Irina's anger, Anna soon realized, was reserved solely for Sasha; the field of energy in the house was between the Targovs, not Sasha
