Nadia
The community event is a farmers market that sets up on Saturday mornings in a park three blocks from the apartment, and I go because Dara found it on her second day here and has since decided it is the best thing about New York, which tells you something about Dara's priorities and also about the quality of the market, which is genuinely excellent.
We go every Saturday that circumstances allow.
We buy vegetables we cook badly and bread we don't ruin and occasionally something from the honey stall run by a man named Gerald who has very strong opinions about buckwheat varieties and will share them at length if you make eye contact for more than two seconds.
It is the most ordinary thing I do in this city, and I have come to rely on it with a fervor that is probably disproportionate to its actual significance but which I think has something to do with the particular value of normalcy when most of what you do is not normal.
Dara is at the honey stall. Gerald has her. She will be there for a minimum of eight minutes and she knows it and accepts it as the cost of the honey, which is worth it.
I'm at the bread table when I feel it.
Not a sound. Not a movement I can identify.
Just the weight of being looked at by someone who knows how to look.
I've felt it twice before in this city and both times it was the same source, which tells me either my instincts are calibrated correctly or I've developed a specific sensitivity to one particular person's presence that I'm not going to examine right now in a farmers market on a Saturday morning.
I pick up a loaf of sourdough. I read the label with the focus of someone very interested in fermentation times. I say, without looking up: "You're going to need to buy something or the woman running this table is going to ask you to move."
A pause. Then he steps up beside me and picks up a loaf of his own.
"The rye," I tell him. "The sourdough is better but the rye will last longer if you're not going to eat it immediately."
"Who says I'm not going to eat it immediately."
"You don't look like someone who eats bread immediately.
" I set the sourdough down. I look at him.
He is in a coat that is marginally more appropriate for the neighborhood than his previous ones, which means either he noticed or someone told him.
He looks, in the flat grey morning light of a farmers market in November, like a man who has not been sleeping enough and has decided that this is simply his life now.
"You look like someone who puts it in a cabinet and forgets about it until it's developed a personality. "
Something moves at the corner of his mouth. "That's very specific."
"I'm a specific person."
He pays for the rye. I pay for the sourdough.
We move away from the table at the same time in the same direction, which is not coordinated and is therefore natural, which is somehow worse than if it had been coordinated because coordination would be a choice I could examine and this is just — happening.
The market is busy enough to provide the texture of a crowd without being busy enough to make conversation difficult.
We walk along the row of stalls — not together, exactly, but covering the same ground in the same direction.
I think about how I'd explain this to my handler if he had eyes on me.
And I find the explanation I'd give him isn't the one that's true.
"Your assistant was at the coffee cart on Wednesday morning," I say.
He looks at me. "What."
"The woman. Dark hair, tablet, very efficient posture.
She bought two coffees and waited for someone and then left when they didn't come.
" I look at a display of root vegetables without seeing them.
"She looked annoyed. She has a specific kind of annoyed face.
" I pause. "She looked at your building. "
A silence. "You've been watching my building."
"I watch most buildings." I pick up a parsnip and put it back. "She's in love with you."
"She's not—"
"She bought two coffees," I say. "She waited twenty minutes. She looked at your building the way people look at places where someone they want is and isn't coming out." I glance at him sideways. "It's not complicated."
He has the expression of a man receiving information he already had and was hoping no one else did. "That's not your concern."
"I'm not making it my concern. I'm making an observation." I stop at the cheese stall and look at the selection with genuine interest because I have strong feelings about cheese that have survived every other complication of this life intact. "Are you sleeping with her?"
"That is absolutely not—"
"I'm asking for operational reasons," I say, which is not true but is defensible. "If she's emotionally unstable in your direction it creates a vulnerability in your—"
"Nadia." He says my name for the first time, and the way he says it stops me in a way I don't immediately account for — flat, direct, carrying a weight that first names carry when someone has been using them privately for a while before they say them out loud.
He knows he's done it. I can see him register it.
He continues anyway. "It's not operational. Drop it."
I buy the cheese. The kind with the dark rind that I've been eating since I was a child and that somehow tastes exactly the same in New York as it does in Moscow, which is one of the more comforting pieces of consistency I've found in this city.
"She looks at you like you're not paying attention," I say, because I find I can't entirely stop. "And she's right. You're not."
He looks at me steadily. "And what does that have to do with you."
It doesn't. It has nothing to do with me. And the fact that I'm standing at a cheese stall on a Saturday morning pointing out how his assistant looks at him is a data point about my own behavior. I file it under the heading I haven't named yet, because naming it would require acknowledging it.
"Nothing," I say. "You're right. Drop it."
We walk.
"You're going to keep hitting the Italian supply routes," he says, after a moment. It isn't a question.
"I don't know what you mean."
"You do." His voice carries no accusation. Just a fact he'd rather weren't true. "The Bayonne yard. That was your work."
"I'm a dancer," I say.
"You're a great many things," he says. "Dancer is one of them.
" He looks ahead, at the end of the market row where it opens back onto the street.
"The Italians are not going to attribute it to coincidence for long.
When they start attributing it correctly, the pressure on me to act becomes significant. "
I look at him. "And what does significant pressure on you look like."
"It looks like me not being able to continue making the choices I've been making." He meets my eyes briefly. "You understand what I mean."
I understand. He means the patience he's been extending — not handing me over, not calling it in, not doing what his operational situation clearly requires — has a limit.
Defined by external pressure, not by him.
He's telling me this as a warning. He's also telling me, underneath, that the pressure is the threat and not his own inclination.
I file that in the unlabeled section. I keep walking.
"You put a tracker on me," I say.
He doesn't react. "You already knew that."
"I've known since the second day." I look at the bread in my bag, the sourdough I bought for the ordinary Saturday normalcy of it. "I found it during the fight. I moved it to my coat lining before I left the warehouse."
"I know," he says. "I figured it out when my man reported you'd shaken him. You were free-operating the whole time."
"Yes."
We stop at the edge of the market, where the stalls end and the park opens out into bare-limbed winter — melancholy or peaceful depending on what you bring to it.
A dog runs past with a ball in its mouth, a child in pursuit, and we both watch.
Neither of us sees much uncomplicated joy in our work. We recognize it when it shows up.
"You need to be careful," I say. "What they have planned — it's not just supply routes.
There's a scope to it that you haven't seen yet.
" I say this before I've decided to say it, which is becoming a pattern with him that I'm not managing as well as I'd like.
"I'm not telling you the specifics. But I'm telling you that what you're seeing is the surface. "
He looks at me. "Why."
It's the right question. It is exactly the right question and I don't have an answer that isn't also an admission, so I look at the bare trees and the dog and the child and the ordinary Saturday morning of it and I say: "Because you told me you're trying to choose differently.
And I find I'd prefer you stayed alive long enough to see how that goes. "
The silence that follows is the kind that has weight. He's looking at me the way he looks at everything, mapping the weight-bearing parts. I let him look. I've already said it. I can't take it back. I'm not sure I want to.
"What you said about Rina," I say, when the silence has gone on long enough. "In the studio. I need you to know — I know your history because they briefed me on your history. That's how I knew you'd let me go." I pause. "But the way you talked about it. That wasn't in any briefing."
"No," he says. "It wouldn't be."
"It's real."
"Yes."
I nod. "Okay." I pick up my bag. Dara will be finished with Gerald by now, and looking for me with the expression she uses when she's been looking for a while and has opinions about it.
"You have a tracker on me. I have been using it against you.
We're even." I look at him. "Don't put another one on me. "
"And if I need to find you."
"Then you'll need to be better about it than you have been." I start walking. "Or you could just come to the market on Saturday mornings. I'm always here."
I say it without looking back. I hear nothing behind me that tells me how he takes it, which is fine. I don't need to know how he takes it.
I find Dara near the honey stall with two jars and an expression that has several questions in it that she is deciding whether to ask.
"Don't," I say.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
She falls into step beside me. We walk out of the market and back toward the apartment and she is quiet for almost a full block before she says: "Gerald says the buckwheat this season is exceptional."
"Then we'll get the buckwheat," I say.
"I already did."
"Good."
We walk. The city moves around us. I think about bare trees and dogs with balls and a man at the edge of a farmers market on a Saturday morning holding a loaf of rye he's never going to eat. I think about what it means to prefer someone stayed alive.
I think about it for the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon, and at no point do I arrive at a conclusion I'm comfortable with, so I set it in the unlabeled section with the rest of it and go to the ballet studio and work on my hip until Petya tells me that's enough for today.
It is not, I think, enough for today. But it will have to do.