Red Sparrow

She had reached for her towel on the hook outside the shower stall in the gang bathroom late one night. It was gone. Then a knuckly classmate with sandy hair, the burly one from Novosibirsk, stepped into the stall with her, crowding behind her, his arms around her waist. She could feel he was naked as he pushed her face against the wall of the shower and nuzzled her wet hair from behind. He was whispering something she couldn’t understand; she couldn’t see the colors. He pressed up against her harder and one hand drifted from around her waist to her breasts. As he squeezed her, she wondered if he could feel her heartbeat, if he could feel her breathing. Her cheek was pressed against the white tiles of the stall, she could feel them changing like prisms hung in sunlight, they were turning dark red.

The tapered, three-inch faucet handle for the cold water had always been loose, and Dominika wiggled it back and forth until it came off in her hand. She turned slippery and breathy to face him, breasts now crushed against his chest, and said, “Stojat,” wait, wait a second, through a constricted throat. He was smiling as Dominika drove the pointed end of the faucet handle into his left eye up to her knuckle and his vomit-green scream of pain and terror washed over her as he slid down the wall clutching his face, his knees pulled up tight. “Stojat,” she said again, looking down at him, “I asked you to wait a second.”

“Attempted rape and justifiable self-defense” was the secret AVR review board’s judgment, and Novosibirsk gained a one-eyed bus conductor and the board recommended that Dominika be separated from Academy training. She told them she had done nothing to cause the incident, and the panel—a woman and two men—looked her up and down and kept straight faces. They were going to do it to her again. Ballet school, Ustinov, now the AVR, and Dominika told the panel she would lodge a formal complaint. To whom would she complain? But word of the incident got back to Yasenevo and Deputy Director Egorov cursed so foully over the phone that Dominika would have seen brown treacle flowing out of the earpiece, and they told her the decision had been made to give her another chance, under probationary status. From then on the rest of her class ignored her, avoided her, a klikusha walking between the buildings in the Forest, an impossibly straight back and long elegant steps with the faintest hitch in her stride.

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The start of the third block of AVR. They filed into classrooms with plastic chairs, and pebbled acoustic tiles on the walls, and clunky projectors hanging from the ceiling. Dead flies lay in piles between the double windowpanes. Now came instruction in world economies, energy, politics, the Third World, international affairs, and “global problems.” And America. No longer referred to as the Main Enemy, the United States nevertheless was her country’s main competitor. It was all Russia could do to maintain superpower parity. Lectures on the subject took on an edge.

The Americans took them for granted, they ignored Russia, they tried to manipulate Russia. Washington had interfered in recent elections, thankfully to no avail. America supported Russian dissidents and encouraged disruptive behavior in this delicate period of Russian reconstruction. American military forces challenged Russian sovereignty, from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan. The recent “reset” policy was an insult, nothing needed to be reset. It was simply that Russia deserved respect, the Rodina deserved respect. Well, if, as an SVR officer, Dominika ever met an American, she would show him that Russia deserved respect.

The irony was that America was in decline, said the lecturers, no longer the high-and-mighty US. Overextended in wars, struggling economically, the supposed birthplace of equality was now divided by class warfare and the poisonous politics of conflicting ideologies. And the foolish Americans didn’t yet realize they would soon need Russia to hem in a galloping China, they would need Russia as an ally in a future war.

But if Americans chose to pit themselves against Russia, thinking she was feeble and weak, they would be surprised. A student in the class disagreed. He suggested that yesterday’s notions of “East and West” were antiquated. Besides, Russia had lost the Cold War, get over it. There was a hush in the classroom. Another classmate stood, eyes flashing. “Russia most certainly did not lose the Cold War,” he said. “It never ended.” Dominika watched the scarlet letters ascend to the ceiling. Good words, strong words. Interesting. The Cold War never ended.

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