Red Sparrow

The light flickered on the ceiling beams twenty feet above her head. Could she last here for the duration? What would they expect her to do? What would they do if she got up and walked out of the room? Would she be dismissed from the Service? The hell with them. They wanted a Sparrow, they would get a Sparrow. No one knew she could see the colors. Mikhail had said she was the best student he ever had in seeing people. She would stay. She would learn.

She told herself this wasn’t love. This school, this mansion secluded behind walls topped with broken glass, was an engine of the State that institutionalized and dehumanized love. It didn’t count, it was physical sex, it was training, like ballet school. In the flickering light in the musty library Dominika told herself she was going to go through with this, to spite these vnebrachnyi rebyonoki, these bastards.

The lights came on and the students sat red-faced and embarrassed. Anya sniffled and wiped her eyes with the back of her fist. The matron addressed the students in a flat, hard voice. “You have had a long journey. Return to your rooms and get some rest. Instruction resumes tomorrow morning at oh-seven-hundred. Dismiss.” Nothing in her manner would have even remotely indicated that they had been watching a film of people engaged in coitus for the last ninety minutes. They filed out and up the grand staircase with the massive wooden banisters. Anya nodded good night before closing her door. Dominika wondered whether Anya or the others knew that tonight the as-yet-unseen staff of the Kon Institute, stuffed into the cabinets de voyeur between rooms, would be watching them undressing, bathing, and sleeping.

Dominika stood in front of the mirror, ran the long-handled brush through her hair, the only familiar token she had brought from home, and she looked at it in her hand, as if it could mock her. She stood and unbuttoned her blouse. She slipped the blouse on a bent wire hanger and nonchalantly hooked it on the frame of the mirror, covering one end of it. She set her little suitcase on the table and opened the lid against the mirror, blocking a further third. She stepped out of her skirt and pirouetted unconsciously to look at the curve of her back and the swell of her bottom in the nylon panties before casually flipping the skirt over the frame of the mirror, covering the last third. They would clear the mirror in the morning, perhaps speak sharply to her about it, but it was worth it tonight. Then she brushed her teeth, got under sheets in a disinfectant bloom of camphor and rose oil, and flipped off the light. She left the hairbrush on the dresser.

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The men were separated from the women and the days spilled into one another and they lost a sense of time. Soporific mornings were devoted to endless lectures on anatomy, physiology, the psychology of the human sexual response. A few new staff appeared. A female doctor droned endlessly about sexual practices in different cultures. Then came the classes on male anatomy, knowing how a man’s body works, how to excite a male. The techniques, positions, movements numbered in the hundreds. They were studied, repeated, memorized, an Upper Volga Kama Sutra. Dominika marveled at this monstrous encyclopedia, at the sticky epiphanies that ruined normality, that forever would rob Dominika of her innocence. Could she ever make love again?

Afternoons were reserved for “practical subjects,” as if they were training to be ice-skaters. They practiced walking, they practiced conversation, they practiced pulling the cork out of a champagne bottle. There were rooms of used clothes, scuffed shoes, sweat-stained lingerie. They dressed up and practiced talking to one another, learned to listen, to show interest, to make compliments and to flatter and, most important, to elicit information during conversation.

A rare afternoon of camaraderie, five of them sitting on the floor of the library in a circle, knees almost touching, laughing, chattering, practicing what they called “sex talk” from what they had heard in the nightly films.

“It’s like this,” said a dark-haired girl with the heavy accent of the Black Sea, and she closed her eyes and murmured in cast-iron English, “Yah, lovers, you are making me to come.” Gales of laughter, and Dominika looked at the blushing faces and wondered how soon some of them would find themselves in their underwear in the Intourist Hotel in Volgograd watching skinny Vietnamese trade reps shuck off their shoes.

“Katia, you try,” said the girl to Dominika. From the first night they had all sensed she was somehow different, somehow special. Beside her, Anya looked at her expectantly.