The Sisters Read Free Page A

buried between her legs, he still managed to forget the unlaundered years (Piotr Borisovich s phrase; from the moment they met, the Potter had been struck by his way with words): the rats scurrying around the labyrinth in the late thirties, when he first joined what was then called the NKVD; the seventeen months spent behind German lines in the early forties; "sanitation" expeditions in the wake of the advancing Red Army in the middle forties; then the endless death watch of the late forties and early fifties as everyone wordlessly waited for the old buzzard in the Kremlin to give up the ghost.
    The Potter could hear the telephone ringing under his feet. He could make out the sound of Svetochka's stiletto heels as she raced to answer it before the people who shared the flat could. In ten minutes the woman whom everyone invariably mistook for his daughter would slip into her imitation fur "soul warmer" and leave. Another rendezvous with another hairdresser, she would say. Another store selling imitation leather gloves that you can't tell from the real thing, she would say. Only when she came back later-much later-her hair wouldn't look any different, and there would be no imitation leather gloves in her pockets. They had run out just before her turn came, she would say
    It occurred to the Potter, not for the first time, that illusions don't die, they rot like fish in the sun. They torture you with ifs: what might have been if one of his sleepers hadn't refused to obey his
    "awakening" signal and disappeared; if a second, happier in America than in Russia, hadn't gone over to the other side; if a third, inside the CIA, hadn't been ferreted out by someone with an astonishing capacity to think the problem through from the Russian point of view. All within a six-month period. The Potter had trained the sleepers in question. He was accordingly rated on how well they performed. When the axe finally fell, there had been talk of exile in Central Asia, talk even of a prison sentence. But his record had been impeccable up to then. So they had put him out to what they thought of, all things considered, as generous pasture: a smaller apartment, a monthly stipend large enough to keep him in clay and vodka, even a self-winding Czechoslovak wristwatch delivered, without ceremony-with a certain amount of embarrassment-on his last day in harness. "For Feliks Arkantevich," the inscription read,
    "for twenty-seven years of service to the state." Service to the state!
    He might have been a street cleaner for all anyone could tell from the inscription.
    Surprisingly, Svetochka had taken his fall in stride. Not to worry, she had said, Svetochka likes her Feliks even without access to the school's warehouse; Svetochka will always be Feliks' little girl. Eventually her last pair of American stockings had gone into the garbage, and her tone had begun to change. The Potter took to waiting on a side street near the warehouse; friends slipped him an occasional American lipstick or eyebrow pencil, and Svetochka would throw her arms around his thick neck and make love to him that night the way she had when he had been the novator. But neither the lipsticks nor her ardent moods lasted very long.
    "Feliks!" Svetochka's high-pitched voice drifted up through the floorboards. "Can you hear me, Feliks? There's a phone call. Someone's asking for you. Feliks?"
    "He's coming," Svetochka assured the caller, afraid that he was one of Feliks' friends from the warehouse and might get impatient and hang up.
    "Only a moment."
    "So: I will wait," the voice said quietly.
    The Potter mumbled into the receiver. He had an instinctive distrust of telephones common to people who came to them relatively late in life.
    "What do you want?"
    A voice with an accent the Potter couldn't quite place replied, "So: if you please, note the number I will give you, yes? If you need a private taxi, dial it and one will come to your corner."
    The Potter's hand, suddenly damp with perspiration,