Leaving Katya - Hardcover

The more I undressed her, the more foreign Katya seemed. Beneath her clothes was a whole parallel universe of underwear. Garters and stockings made of an industrial material I'd never felt before snapped together and intertwined and were somehow caught up in a bra that appeared to want to come undone by releasing not one, not two, but three different catches on the front and the back.

Was this sexy or just Soviet?

I didn't know, but I fought with the stuff uselessly until she said in English:

"Oh, please. Just destroy all that."

The catches were poorly made and they popped off when I took a good pull at them. By the time I had undressed her completely there was a mound of ruined fabric lying on the floor just below her giant Bob Dylan poster.

Katya rolled under the covers and wrapped the blanket tightly around her, concealing her breasts like a lover in a PG-rated movie. She reached over and drew up a corner of the sheet, and for some reason I had the thought that unless I hurried she would seal the bedding up around her once more and order me to leave. I rolled in. I didn't manage to see her body before she flicked off the light. She took my far hand and pulled me around, over and in.

Katya barely stirred under me. Inside the glass curio cabinet in front of us a night-light illuminated an advertisement for a Finnish shipping company. The ad was one of those shifting, optical illusion things, and as I rocked back and forth on top of her, the oil tanker in the picture passed backward and forward across the Gulf of Finland between Helsinki and Leningrad.

I listened to Katya, my ear against her mouth, trying to detect some quickening, but her breath remained constant and her arms stayed fixed in an X across my back. When I tried to move us into a different position, she caught her foot between the bedstead and the wall and locked us in place. And before long the correctness of the angle, the blanket wrapped around us like a sheath, the whole grinding closeness of it all produced that familiar welling up.

"The oil tanker belongs to Finland," a nonsense voice in my head said, and I looked at the shipping company ad one more time. Katya sensed the change and locked her arms even more tightly around me. I opened my mouth and just as I did, she stuck one hand between my teeth and said-as I had heard other Russian women say to dogs and children-"Tiho!" Quiet!

I stayed there a moment and had another nonsense thought-that I was now as far inside the Soviet Union as I had ever been. The colors in the room seemed to fade. Gray light came in through the drawn lace curtains. The blood in my ears quelled and I began to make out the rumble of Katya's father snoring on the other side of the wall.

"Did you finish?" Katya asked in English.

"Finish?"

"Yes, finish. Are you satisfied?"

"Yes. I did. I am. Did you...finish?"

"In some way. Actually, it doesn't matter."

"Well-"

"Well, well," she said. "Time to go."

She turned back a corner of the blanket and let me out. Then she rolled on her side, away from me, and lay her body flat against the wall.

I pulled on my jeans. I put on a Soviet army shirt I'd got from a black marketeer in a swap. I reached in my pocket for my passport and my exit visa. Both documents were gone. Probably stolen. I checked again. Stolen. Definitely. I opened all the drawers. I lifted the carpet. I started sweating. I looked in the curio cabinet. I checked her bookshelves. I put my hand in the gap between her Russian authors and More Knots by Houdini, the first in her small collection of American books. Nothing. I felt hot tears in my eyes. I shook my slippers. The passport and the exit visa fell out of the right slipper onto the floor. The flutter passed. I sat back down on the bed and touched Katya's shoulder.

"Ty spyesh, Katya?" I asked her.

"Spish, not spyesh. Your Russian is a catastrophe. How long did you study it?"

"Until last year. All through college."

"Katastrofa."

"So," I said, "ty spish?,"

"No, I'm not sleeping."

"Should I call you?"

"That would be the honorable thing to do. A man should always call. But now it's time to go. Bye, bye." She closed her eyes and yawned. I gathered up her underwear, hid it in one of the open drawers, and walked out into the corridor.

--From Leaving Katya by Paul Greenberg, (c) January 2002, G. P. Putnam's Sons, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc. used by permission.