The Nightingale

By Kelley Dupuis

Set in the mid-1990s, The Nightingale tells the story of Tony Braden, a man with a rare talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Assigned as an information management worker at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Braden hires a Russian-language tutor, Nadya Kovalova, only to find himself falling in love with her. But it’s early times in post-Soviet Russia, and the embassy has not yet changed its policy against employees fraternizing with Russians.Tony is reported and sent back to Washington, where he kicks up a public fuss about the outdated policy, even taking time to write a novel, The Nightingale, “an exercise in anger management” in his words. When the contact policy is changed and the two lovers are free to be together, they make plans to meet for a summer holiday on Spain’s Costa Brava. Tony thinks his troubles are over; actually they’re just beginning.

Part love story, part spy story and part satire on the slow, byzantine ways of bureaucracy, The Nightingale takes a look back at a time when the world was changing so rapidly that people –and governments – were having trouble keeping up.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665537537

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© 2021 Kelley Dupuis. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 09/27/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3751-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3752-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3753-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021918521

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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For Elena Aschepkova Watt

Спасибо за вашу помощь, ваше понимание

и ваше доброе сердце.

"I never sought anything in you except yourself; I wanted simply

you, nothing of yours." – Letters of Abelard and Heloise

"God is a humorist." – Lawrence Durrell

A ll you did was jump the gun.

Al Friedbauer’s words. A long time ago.

Friedbauer was right, but a lot of things happened after that portentious gun-jumping that Friedbauer never heard about, and his jaw may well have dropped had he known. More farce than skulduggery, the whole business could easily have been the basis for some dark comedy starring…who? Michael Caine, maybe? He was still alive back then, and always did well with characters who were in over their heads. For the female lead…maybe Anjelica Huston. She played opposite Robert Duvall in Lonesome Dove back in 1989 and still looked pretty good then. She had the dark hair and the eyes, and she certainly had the range.

As he stepped aboard the Metro on a June day around eight O’clock in the afternoon, (he had never ceased to find it delightful that at this time of year in this part of the world, there was such a thing as eight O’clock in the afternoon) he reminded himself once again that youth was already long over even back in the days when he rode this subway for the first time, trying to puzzle out the advertising in the cars (despite a month spent learning the local alphabet and a few phrases.) He was already in his late thirties then. It would be ridiculous to expect things to be the same now.

They were not of course, and he hadn’t expected otherwise. Past sixty, one of your first discoveries is that nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

Given the choice he would not have come back here at all.

But they had asked him to make the trip. Indeed he was selected precisely because they knew that he had been here before, in another life or not. The company asks you to go somewhere, you go. Besides, he did have a certain curiosity, not only about the city but also about whatever had become of her.

There was much in the city that remained familiar: the American embassy building was right where he had left it two decades before. Moscow had been on this spot for 800 years; some things had to stay the same. But new construction was going on nearly everywhere he looked. The new business center rising in the Presnenski district was going to be something spectacular when it was finished, Manhattan in Moscow: tall buildings just a walkable distance from the statue of Mayakovski across the square from the great Tchaikovsky Hall where they had strolled hand-in-hand late at night after a concert there and he had read some of his poems to her.

She had always hated all of this new development and made no secret of it. Look at what they are doing to my city, she lamented.

But the new business center would be a fine place for Cyserve’s new Moscow office if they ever finished building downtown Moscow or whatever they were planning to call the Presnenski business district. That was what his report would say when he got back to Baltimore, and the board of directors could take it from there. He was thinking about retiring, looking at real estate in Coeur d’Alene. What difference did it make to him where they put the Moscow branch office? He’d done what he’d been asked to do.

She had never been good about writing letters and she refused to use email. Facebook and other social media were out of the question. She wouldn’t go near them. That was the way she was. In the old days when people still wrote letters, his own took two weeks to reach Moscow, and she seldom wrote back, so most of their contact had been by phone, with him doing most of the calling. She always sounded as if she enjoyed their transoceanic conversations, her voice usually cheerful, interested and punctuated with laughter as they talked, and she almost always said I kiss you before hanging up, but she never encouraged his calls. Gradually he called less and less often, then the calls ceased altogether.

But he had seen her again during this visit. She looked older, of course, a few gray hairs, dewlaps, her face a bit lined – he had all of those features himself now. Their reunion was cordial; they went for a walk along the Moscow River past the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (blown up by Stalin in 1931 and replaced with a swimming pool; rebuilt in the 1990s when Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov went on a building binge.) They had had lunch at a café on Pushkin Square that they both remembered liking (they were lucky it was still there, he thought.) They revisited some art museums and parks they had enjoyed together in earlier days.

Tonight they would meet for one last time. He couldn’t think of anything that might ever bring him back here again, although he could remember a time, and it didn’t seem so very long ago, when he would have been willing give up everything and settle here if she had only said the words. But she never said them. She only came close a few times.

His hotel and her flat were both on the purple Metro line, Ryazanski Prospekt on her end and The Year 1905 Street on his. Kuznetski Most station was roughly halfway between the two, so they agreed to meet there. Neither would have to change trains.

The Metro trains were newer and cleaner now, better-lit and quieter – they didn’t make as much noise as the smelly subway cars of the old days that were still clankety-clanking down the line when he first arrived here years ago. And you didn’t have to step over drunks on the train floor now as you occasionally had to do in those early post-Soviet times that he remembered so well.

What struck him right away, (and gave him a fleeting pang of longing) were the ubiquitous and familiar young lovers on the Metro. He had once been told that kissing on the Metro escalators was an acquired skill among Russian youngsters. Stations, particularly along the Ring line, which circumscribed the city with Red Square at its center, were dug extra-deep (they served as bomb shelters from let’s-pretend American missiles in the nuclear-attack drills to which Soviet children were subjected in school, or so he had been told) and the long escalators moved much faster than the average tourist was accustomed to. There had been incidents of visitors missing a step as they got on, with resulting minor injuries from falls. But the Moscow kids were used to it. Teens were often seen kissing and groping as they disappeared rapidly into the ground or re-emerged into the air.

The kissing, and sometimes the groping, continued on the trains of course. He looked around inside the car at several young Russian couples holding hands, smooching, ignoring everyone around them. Nothing new there. One young man had his arm around his girlfriend as she rested her head on his shoulder.

Then it occurred to him that when he first came here most of these kids had not been born yet. At best they had been babies. Now they were all grown up and engaged in the mating rituals. Where had more than twenty years gone in such a hurry?

It is best not to think about it, Nadya said.

They sat outdoors at a café across the wide boulevard from the TSUM department store. In the late, long twilight the street was crowded with shoppers, the cafés with diners and loafers, some reading newspapers and some staring out at the street; lovers speaking in low tones tète-a-tète; people sipping drinks; squat old ladies shuffling along the cobblestoned street, their heads under scarves; kids in T-shirts and jackets sporting the logos of Guinness Stout, Harley-Davidson, the Chicago Bulls…

I suppose you’re right, he said. Then he smiled, remembering. You used to say that a lot, ‘I suppose this’ and ‘I suppose that.’ ‘I suppose…I would like to go to Paris.’ ‘I suppose I would like to see the Grand Canyon one day…’

She laughed, then he added, And I clearly I remember you saying ‘I suppose, maybe, I’m in love with you’ that New Year’s Eve down on Red Square. Do you remember that?

Yes, I remember. That was when your troubles started.

Troubles usually start with someone saying ’I love you.’

She looked down at her hands on the table and smiled. I remember how cold it was! A glass of iced tea stood in front of her, the condensation making a pool on the plastic tablecloth. He had a Carlsberg beer in front of him doing the same thing.

So long ago, she said.

He sighed. Yes. And snowing hard.

Her words two days earlier in front of the Tretyakov Gallery kept going through his head like a tune stuck in what used to be called tape-loop: I am not alone. He was surprised that those four words could produce a scintilla of pain after all these years. By now he should have been far past giving a damn one way or the other whether she were alone or not. But hearing her actually say it caused a tiny, reflexive sinking in his heart, even now. Well, he had never heard those words from her before. But surely there had been others before now. Why not? There had been others for him, why not for her? And she was right; what had passed between them was long ago.

Still, not alone were the words she used. To be so vague was typical of her. That side of Nadya’s personality had not changed. So she was now living with a boyfriend in the flat on the outskirts of Moscow that she had once shared with her now-dead mother. A guitar player in a rock band, more than a decade her junior. Now that was not like her, or at least not as he remembered her. A guitar player in a rock band? Jesus.

I never had you figured for a cougar, he muttered.

What is it, a ‘cougar?’

Never mind. I always pictured you differently. In a long, old-fashioned dress, somewhere deep in the 19th century Russian countryside, picking mushrooms or flowers. Maybe in a wide, matching hat with pink roses. A volume of Lermontov under your arm.

You are still a romantic.

I certainly never pictured you as a woman in her fifties shacked up with some guitar-whanging punk. Does he have tattoos? Maybe a black T-shirt with ‘Party ‘til you Puke’ on it?

He is not a ‘punk!’ He is 37 years old! she said sharply. And you couldn’t very well expect me to wait for you all these years like a nun, could you?

"If you recall, I asked you to marry me three times. And never got anything in the way of a reply but unfinished sentences. Oh, what the hell, since I’m here anyway, why don’t we go ahead and make it four proposals? He took another pull on his beer. I like nice, even numbers. So... Will you marry me?"

She smiled. Oh, Tony, stop! Then, turning serious again, she reminded him, You yourself have been married and divorced since then.

I only got married because I gave up on you. That wasn’t entirely true, but he felt entitled to say it in the circumstances.

She reached across the table and took his hand. You’re very dear to me, Tony, she said. You always will be.

Yes, it’s a late day for regrets. Hey, that’s Eugene O’Neill.

What is?

"What I just said, ‘It’s a late day for regrets.’ That’s from Long Day’s Journey Into Night."

How do you remember these things?

I saw the movie on cable last week. Katherine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards.

You still have a remarkable memory.

He sipped his beer and sighed again.

Well, now that we’ve gotten the proposal business out of the way for another twenty years… he trailed off, then blurted out suddenly, You’re never going to admit it, are you?

Admit what?

That you were in on it.

Are you going to start that again?

Come on, it was a long time ago. I’m past being bitter. I wound up with a better job didn’t I? I wanted to get away from that government rat-race anyhow. It all worked out for the best. I should have thanked you.

I told you years ago that I was never ‘mixed up’ in anything, as you put it. But you would...never believe me, she said. You still don’t.

I wanted to. But what about that guy in Spain? And what about your bursting into tears in our hotel room that day for no apparent reason? You never would tell me why you were crying, and I still wonder about that guy. Why he turned up when he did. It was too much of a coincidence. And what about Mitya?

Will you forget about Mitya? I haven’t seen him in years. I heard he has a son and a daughter. They would be teenagers now. And as for that man in Spain, I’ve told you over and over, I never saw him before. Tony, we’ve been over this so many times. This is probably the last time we shall ever see each other. Do you want to spoil it with what you yourself would call...ancient history?

You’re right. I’ll drop it. This isn’t getting us anywhere. There’s nowhere left for us to get. Well, he said as he drained off the last of his beer, I still say that Malevich canvas at the Tretyakov is a con job.

Happy to have the subject changed, she smiled. It is a history-making painting, she said.

"Come on. A black square? It’s a con job. Chagall is one thing, but I could have done that with a ruler, a pencil and a can of spray paint."

No one had ever done anything like it before.

And if no one ever had, I can’t see where the world would have been any the worse off.

Many attempts have been made to copy it, all unsuccessful.

That’s what you said when you had me standing in front of it. If I believed that, you could sell me the Kuznetski bridge if it were still here. He paused, then smiled in spite of himself. This is just like us, isn’t it? Like old times. In Spain all we did was argue.

Well...We didn’t only argue. We did finally make love, remember?

That was a surprise. In earlier times she never alluded to their lovemaking.

He ordered another Carlsberg.

I remember thinking at the time that it was one of the great moments of my life, he said. That alone was worth the trip. He continued to hold her hand across the table. And the money. God, what an odyssey that was, getting myself to the portals of your body. More than a thousand bucks, followed by one delayed flight, then another flight, then a train ride, then a taxi ride that brought me to the wrong hotel where I went so far as to get into the wrong room. Worst trip I ever took, but it was worth it.

She squeezed his hand again. I know you went through a lot for us, Tony.

Yeah, I’d say a career-change at forty is going through a lot, he shrugged. Oh, well. You know, I can’t stand people who say everything happens for a reason. That’s so ... Pollyanna. But I have to admit that some good came out of it, at least on that level. Cyserve has been a hell of an improvement over working for the damn government.

I’m sorry. Who is…Pollyanna?

He explained about the old Disney film, Hayley Mills and her Glad game. He was seven when he saw it, which would have made her two, over here on the other side of the planet, which was indeed another planet back then.

I remember what you were wearing the night we met, that first night, here in Moscow, he said. A black coat, a white knit cap and under your coat, a dark blue dress with matching shoes. There were tiny ribbons on your shoes. I don’t suppose you remember what I was wearing.

I remember your bow tie! she laughed. I don’t often see men wearing bow ties. I thought you were...quite handsome.

I wore a bow tie so I’d be easier to spot. Neither of us had ever seen the other one before. Do you remember the music we heard?

Schubert.

That’s right. Schubert’s Fifth. You do remember. Thank you.

Thank me for what?

Just...thank you for remembering. You know I still love you.

I know. And I have never understood why. Do you think I was ever worthy of your love?

No. I don’t. But I loved you anyway, that’s the hell of it. Did you ever love me?

A pause. Of course I did. She looked away toward the street. It had taken him twenty years to get that much out of her.

It rankled that he had never been able to get her to actually pronounce either the English phrase I love you or its Russian equivalent, the same three words: Я тебя люблю. (ya teb’ya lyublu.) I. (Я. First-person pronoun.) You. (Тебя –second person singular pronoun.) Love. (Люблю – first person verb.) In Russian the word order is different: literally it’s I you love," but in Russian it makes perfect sense. Russian is a heavily-inflected language in which word order is less important than in English.

He had said it to her many times, in both English and Russian, hoping to hear it echoed, but she would never say it back. She just wouldn’t say it. She always talked around it. She was still talking around it insofar as she would not say the words.

He paid the check and they walked back to the Metro station where they stood together for a few minutes on the platform awaiting whichever of their trains should come first.

She looked up at him and said, Forgive me.

His first thought was that she was finally admitting her guilt. But then he remembered. In Russian, as in English, there are plenty of ways to say goodbye. The most common are До свидания, (do svi’danye") or Pok’a, which are roughly the equivalent of See you later and Bye, But there was also Прощай, (pros’chai) the form used when two people do not expect to see each other again. It literally means Forgive me.

Прощай was what she meant. Only this time she said it in English.

Instead of answering, he gently took her by the arm, led her behind one of white arches that lined the subway platform and put both of them out of sight of the escalators.

He pulled her into a long, deep kiss. The boyfriend with the electric guitar wasn’t around anywhere, and anyway, after all these years he felt that she owed him at least this much.

Apparently she felt the same way. Nadya not only allowed the kiss but participated in it, giving as good as she got. It was a sincere, wholehearted, protracted, this-is-it, Pros’chai kind of kiss.

No one in the small crowd on the platform paid them the slightest attention. There was not a raised eyebrow or a side-glance anywhere to be seen as they kissed their brief, endless and final goodbye.

1

T hat spring I was on my way to Moscow as a State Department communications specialist, a sort of high-tech clerk whose workplaces were U.S. embassies and consulates overseas.

Now that I’ve said that, all of the knowing looks, elbows to the ribs and muffled guffaws will begin. "Oh, ‘State Department,’ sure." I’ve seen and heard it a thousand times. Tell somebody you used to work for State and right away they think you were CIA. Remember The Falcon and The Snowman starring Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton? It was about two guys doing the same kind of work I did in those days. But I’m here to tell you that things as exciting as The Falcon and the Snowman rarely happen in the real world, and not all State employees are working under cover. That’s only in the movies.

I could have worked for the agency if I had wanted to. State and CIA both employed people in the job I did. I would surely have made more money and gotten promoted quicker if I had signed on with the spooks. But I also would have had to live with even more schizo-paranoid bullshit than I encountered on the State side, and what I had to put up with was bad enough. Take a routine polygraph test every year? No thanks. In 1985 Secretary of State George Schultz said he would resign before he would take a polygraph test. The rest of us piled on with the Boss – if he didn’t have to, neither did we.

I never did, either, not even when asked to do so by the FBI.

But that was much later.

The job I did in those days is now obsolete on both sides of the house. The old story: people have been replaced by devices. If I had stayed in that job I would be long retired by now, which is why I can shoot off my mouth about all of this. Nadya can’t sue me and there isn’t much the government can do to me either. (Well, I suppose they could have me bumped off, but why bother? I’m an old man who quit the State Department more than two decades ago. Any classified information I might even remember would date from the Clinton years.)

Like I said, everything we did by hand is done electronically now– the days of the HW-28 teletype machine up on the fourth floor, (which predated even me) chuck-chuck-chucking softly away as it once did behind Walter Cronkite on The CBS Evening News, are long gone. Today it’s just apps, email and mobile devices. It must drive the Bureau of Diplomatic Security crazy, all these dimwit Foreign Service officers conducting official business on cellphones and tablets. We all saw the hubbub on the news when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was caught storing classified documents on a private server. I’ll bet DS had a collective seizure over that.

Well, I never liked DS anyway. Let them have seizures. The wannabe 007s deserve it.

I joined the Foreign Service at twenty-nine because I wanted to see the world but didn’t want to join the Navy to do it (and also because Catherine, my girlfriend of three years, had just dumped me and gotten engaged to someone else.) I gave up small-time radio journalism for a dull, repetitive techno/clerical job with the government because I wanted to get far away from the central valley of California, where I grew up and went to college and where, before joining State and going overseas, I had been a newscaster on a 12,000-watt FM station about thirty miles from Sacramento. (KVGA 102.5 FM – Rockin’ The Delta!) Before working in radio I’d been a newspaper reporter and freelance writer for a few years.

Along with six other new-hires, I was sworn in at the State Department that fall. I had no telecommunications background. (Radio news didn’t count.) But they needed bodies that year. Badly. The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings bill had just passed and the government was frantic to fill positions before that bill’s federal spending constraints went into effect. Uncle Sam was on a hiring spree.

And he wasn’t being too choosy. I was hired simply because I had a Bachelor’s degree. My degree was in journalism, but that didn’t matter. According to government logic, if you had a four-year degree in anything you must be teachable. They put me through twelve weeks of slap-dash training in Warrenton, VA and then I was off to Frankfurt, Germany where I was put to work slinging diplomatic telegrams at the U.S. consulate.

I was in Africa, specifically Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) seven years later, serving at the U.S. embassy in Abidjan, when I volunteered to go to Moscow. I’d been transferred to Abidjan after three years in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia.

I wanted a change. After close to five years in backwaters like Brasilia and Abidjan, I had a hankering to be in one of the world’s great cities, and ever since I was a kid I’d been fascinated by Russia. I grew up during the Cold War, when Russia was a big mystery to most of us. I had read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol. I had taken a Russian-language course in college (although I just barely passed.)

So, when a cable came out of Washington requesting a communications volunteer for embassy Moscow, I jumped on it.

My boss in Abidjan wasn’t too happy about one of his minions wanting to suddenly jump ship like that, but I had the right to do so under house rules.

And things happened quickly. Hardly had I stood up and waved my hand before the TM-1 came in announcing my reassignment. (TM means travel message.) The TM-4 authorizing my moving, airfare and per diem expenses came in later the same day, unbelievably fast for Washington. Oh, they needed a body in Moscow all right.

Although the job I did in the embassies and consulates did not require the language proficiency a diplomat’s would, someone in Personnel back in Foggy Bottom decided that I should be run through a six-week Russian-language course in Washington prior to my departure for Moscow. It was called F.A.S.T. Russian – Familiarization And Short-Term. (Don’t you just love those cutesy government acronyms?)

Anyway, I flew back