Red Sparrow

A poisonous, swaying ride in the closed van and the echo of the underground garage and they were in a prison, it had to be Lefortovo, not Butyrka, because this was political. She was pushed down an ill-lit corridor into a stinking anteroom. A man and a woman watched her step out of her skirt, shuck off her shoes, and reach behind to unclasp her brassiere. They expected her to hang her head, to turn away from their stares, to cover her nipples and mons, but she was Sparrow-trained and a graduate of the AVR. They could go to hell. Stark naked, she stood straight and stared back at them until they tossed her a stained cotton prison smock. It rasped against the mattress ticking in the dark cell, no windows, two cots, and she thought about her mother waiting for her with dinner, and silently called out to her father and then, surprising herself, to Nate.

They walked her down the corridors, but they never let her see another prisoner, to starve her spirit. Guards clicked their stamped steel crickets, and when two crickets clicked, silver barbed click-clack, click-clack at the same time, they shoved her into a wooden closet, one at the end of each corridor, wedged tight, black and heavy with the smell of prisoners long gone, until the other prisoner went by. A skylight showed inky black, or pale yellow, night still followed day, but the overhead lights in her cell never stopped humming and the Klaxon screeched on a regular basis.

Her father walked by her side and a smiling Nate was waiting for her in each of the different rooms, some hot, some cold, some dark, some bright. She shook her hair out of her eyes when they threw water on her and turned the blowers on. Nate sat beside her and held her hand, strapped to the arm of the chair, while she shivered. They didn’t speak to her, but it was enough to know they were with her, to feel their touch.

The investigators screamed or they laughed, very close to her face, and they asked about foreign contacts—the Frenchman Delon and the American Nash. Was she working for the Americans? It was no problem these days, by the way, détente and all. They said they wanted to hear her side of the story, then slapped her to shut her up and told her Marta Yelenova was dead, that Dominika had as good as killed her, men would be sent to do the same to her mother. They slapped her so her face was mottled and sore, all little Sparrows like a bit of that, don’t they?

They varied the days and the nights, and the screaming interrogations, and sometimes they strapped her flat on the stainless steel tables. It didn’t matter whether she was upright or whether her head hung down over the edge of the table. Dominika resisted with all her strength, all her will. It wasn’t hatred, because that would be too brittle. She cultivated disdain, she wouldn’t succumb to these beasts, she refused to let them exert their will on her.

They didn’t look smart enough to find all the nerve bundles—at the base of the coccyx, or above the elbow, or on the soles of her feet—but the light, questing fingers never missed, and the screaming pains rocketed up her body into her head, and she heard her own ragged breath in her throat.

The nerve pain was different from the tendon pain, which was different from the pain of a cable tie cinched tight around her head, across her open mouth. Dominika found that the anticipation of pain, waiting for what was next, was worse than the agonies they could generate. The glob of conductive lanolin slathered between her buttocks scared her more than the first nudge of the rounded aluminum peg they pushed into her, scared her more than feeling the electrical current, the bitter, pulsing pain, involuntary, back-arching pain, that left her limp when the current stopped.

One female jailer indulged in personal sport while conducting official business. Her strong hands and thick wrists were splotched by vitiligo, they lacked pigment. Strapped to a steel-and-canvas chair, Dominika watched the pinkish hands scuttle endlessly over her body, pressing, squeezing, pinching. The matron’s eyes—they were oval like a cat’s—watched Dominika’s face. One Appaloosa hand lingered low on Dominika’s belly, and the matron’s lips parted unconsciously in agitation.

The matron leaned close—her face was inches from Dominika’s, her eyes questing, looking for revulsion, or terror, or panic. Dominika kept her face still and looked back into the darting eyes, then opened her thighs.

“Go ahead, garpiya, harpy,” whispered Dominika in her face. “Go ahead and wet your sleeve.”

The matron straightened and slapped Dominika across the cheek. Sorry to ruin your soggy little game, Dominika thought.