Sekret Read Free Page A

3
    WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD , I read about an experiment where biologists took silver foxes and bred the friendliest, most docile specimens to determine if domestication could be genetically inherited. In just a few generations, they’d produced playful, calm foxes that wanted to cuddle up to human beings and looked to them for happiness, like pet dogs.
    The experiment was written up in one of Mama’s professional journals, back when she practiced medicine, before we went into hiding. I’d always been enamored of genetics, which had been Mama’s specialty before joining Papa in developmental psychology research, and something in this experiment strummed the right chord in me. I’d ramble about it to anyone unlucky enough to let me corner them. I dreamed of attending the Mendeleev Genetics Institute at Moscow State University, where Mama and Papa met, and researching a cure for the storm of thoughts inside my brother’s head.
    I read every book about genetics and biology that I could find, forever lugging around books that unbalanced my eight-year-old frame. But I was not satisfied; I was desperate to fix my brother and his growing fits of fear. And so, in the meadow behind our dacha, our summer cabin in Kazan, I tried to catch and breed some foxes of my own.
    The only thing I ever caught was a raccoon, and when I lifted up the seething, chattering cardboard box, he flew from it and latched on to me, a ball of claws and desperation. Mama snuck me into the laboratory where she and Papa worked—past the patrolling soldiers with AK-47s—to get a rabies shot immediately, instead of waiting at the state hospital. I didn’t understand why their clinic had armed guards, but I realized, then, that my parents’ work was perhaps not as straightforward as I thought.
    But I kept dreaming of the Mendeleev Institute. I spent months formulating my strategy—everything in the Soviet Union is a system, a game, and you must learn the system’s rules. I devoted myself to earning perfect marks in biology. Papa only offered his constant platitudes; “An empty mind is a safe mind,” he’d say, though I wanted to fill my head with knowledge until it overflowed. After he left, and we went into hiding, Mama swore she’d help me find a way to attend. We would craft another identity for me to slip into, much like unbeknownst to Mama I was now learning to slip into others’ skin.
    There was a second part to the fox experiment that I didn’t like to think about. In addition to breeding the friendliest creatures for domestication, the scientists bred the aggressive foxes together as well. For years those raging monsters, similar to the raccoon I’d caught, invaded my nightmares, striking at the cage wire, ready to attack the moment a person came near. When I joined the program, I told myself, I would do away with that part of the experiment.

 
    CHAPTER 4
    THE TILED INTERROGATION ROOM could double as a grade school sports equipment closet or a changing room for the community pool—there’s that lingering musk of sweat and bleach and the rusty drain in front of the wooden chair that I’ve been bound to. But I know the real reason for the smell, the drain, the walls so easy to hose down. These are the sorts of closets dissenters get lost in, never to be found again. In my cotton-mouthed, sluggish waking, I fight to keep my wrists from settling on the chair’s wooden arms. I’m not in control of myself enough to keep from slipping into past prisoners’ battered skin.
    When the door opens, it’s the red-haired KGB officer, clicking along the floor in black pumps with only a sly wink of a heel. The door shuts behind her and I catch a whiff of her weary body odor. I hope it’s been days since she slept; I hope her daring mission to capture me, a fearsome unarmed, half-starved teenager, has kept her from showering and eating. I don’t want to be the only prisoner here.
    “You know why you are here.” She steps toward me, close