Upsetting the Balance

“That’s true,” he said, and laughed in some embarrassment “But it’s your country, after all, so I think you should know these things. Easy to forget you could drop England anywhere in the Soviet Union and it would disappear.”

Ludmila nodded. “After the Lizards came, I flew once into Sweden and Denmark and Germany.” She didnot say she’d taken Molotov to Berchtesgaden. “Everything seemed so small and so… so-used. Here we have more land than we know what to do with. I have seen it is not like that all over the world.”

“No, hardly,” Bagnall said. “With us, the trouble is finding the land to do all the things we want to do with it.” He hesitated, then laughed. He had a good laugh; even when he was laughing at himself, he sounded genuinely amused. He went on, “Here I am with a pretty girl, and I’m talking about churches and land. I must be getting old.”

Ludmila looked up at him. He was a few years older than she, but-“I do not think you are ready for the dustbin yet,” she said. She didn’t know how to saydustbin in German, and getting it across in Russian took almost as much work as his trying to makeinitiative comprehensible.

When he finally understood, he laughed again and said, “Then it must be my young, fiery blood that makes me do this.” He slipped an arm around her shoulder.

When Georg Schultz tried putting his hands on her, she’d always got the feeling she had to shake him off right away, that if she didn’t, he would tear off whatever she happened to be wearing and drag her to the ground. Bagnall didn’t give the same impression. If she said no, she thought he’d listen.Yes, I do like kulturnymen.

Because she thought she could say no any time she wanted to, she didn’t say it right away. That emboldened Bagnall to bend down and try to kiss her. She let his lips meet hers but, after a moment’s hesitation, she didn’t kiss back.

Schultz wouldn’t have noticed, or cared if by some chance he had noticed. Bagnall did. He said, “What’s wrong?” When Ludmila didn’t answer right away, his brow furrowed in thought. Then he smote his forehead with the heel of his hand, a gesture she’d seen him use before. “I’m an idiot!” he exclaimed. “You have someone else.”

“Da,”she said, and in an odd sort of way it was true, though all she and Heinrich Jager had together was time best measured in hours and a couple of letters. Then, to her amazement and dismay, she burst into tears.

When Bagnall patted her shoulder this time, it was in pure animal comfort. No, perhaps not quite pure; anyone who finds someone else attractive will always have mixed motives in touching that person. But he was doing the best he could. “What’s wrong?” he asked again. “You don’t know if he’s all right?”

“No, I don’t know that,” she said. “I don’t know very much at all.” She looked up at his long face, set now in lines of concern. She would never have told her story to a countryman. Speaking to a foreigner somehow felt safer. And so, in a torrent where Russian soon swamped her German, she poured out what she’d hidden from everyone for so long. By the time she was done, she felt as if she’d been flattened by a train.

Bagnall rubbed his chin. Bristles rasped under his fingers; both razors and hot water for shaving were in short supply in Pskov. The RAF man uttered something in English. That meant nothing to Ludmila. Seeing as much, Bagnall dropped back into his mix of German and Russian: “You don’t do anything the easy way, do you?”

“Nyet.”She scanned his face, trying to figure out what he was thinking. It wasn’t easy. What they said about Englishmen was true: whatever went on inside their heads, they kept it to themselves. At least he hadn’t called her a traitor and a whore for ending up in the German’s bed when they found each other in Berchtesgaden. That was something.

Slowly, Bagnall said, “You must know something of what the fair Tatiana”-die schone Tatiana,he called her; which made Ludmila smile in spite of herself-“feels because she is carrying on with Georg Schultz.”

“Yes, perhaps so, though I don’t think she’d give me much sympathy.” Ludmila didn’t think Tatiana gave anyone much sympathy. She looked Bagnall in the eye. “Now you know why I cannot, do not want to-how did you say it? — carry on with you. And so?”What areyou thinking? Your face is as quiet as Molotov’s.

“Yes, I see that,” Bagnall answered. He didn’t sound happy about it, either. Ludmila felt obscurely good about that, even though she’d just told him she didn’t want to have an affair with him. Picking his words with care, he went on, “Your German had best be a good man, if he is to be good enough to deserve you.”