Red Sparrow

Anya knocked softly at her door late one night, and Dominika opened it a crack and told her to go away. “I can’t help you anymore,” she said, and Anya turned and disappeared down the darkened hallway. It isn’t my problem, thought Dominika. It’s enough that I’m fighting for my own sanity.

Then the bus came with the military cadets, the ones who had scored at the top of their class. The women waited for them in their rooms, and sat on the beds and watched the skinny, bruised bodies as the boys ripped off their tunic shirts and boots and trousers, and held on tight as they rutted like stoats until time was up. The cadets left without looking back at the women, and the bus swayed as it went out through the gate into the pine forest.

The next morning in the curtained, darkened library the projector began, but instead of the usual film, they saw their classmate in room number five on the single bed with a skinny, shaved-headed cadet from the day before. The women could barely look at the screen. This was shame, this was indignity, seeing yourself with legs hooked around a pimply back, hands formed into claws on bony shoulders. The doctor would freeze-frame the films to add commentary, suggest improvements. Worse, they all now guessed that the films would come in order—rooms five, six, seven, and so on. Anya’s head was down, her face in her hands. She was in room eleven and would have to endure not only the films, but also the wait. She ran from the room weeping as her segment ended. The doctor let her flee. She prattled on about what had been done wrong, how it could be improved.

Dominika was in room number twelve, at the end of the hall. The filmed segment of the interlude with her cadet therefore was the last. Disembodied, she watched herself, surprised at her slack face, how mechanically she had grasped the young man and guided him, how she had pulled his ear to get him off when he collapsed on top of her. Her head was spinning, yet she felt no shame, no embarrassment. She looked at the images on the screen without feeling and kept telling herself that she was a member of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation.

The next morning Anya did not come down to breakfast, and two girls found her in her room. They had to push the door open with their shoulders. She had knotted panty hose around her neck, wrapped the end around a coat hook on the back of the door, and simply had drawn her legs up and strangled herself. She had had the strength to keep her feet off the floor until she blacked out. The weight of her lolling body had kept the noose tight. In the garden, Dominika heard the screams. She raced upstairs, pushed the others aside, and lifted Anya off the hook and laid her on the floor. She felt guilt and anger. What did the little twit expect from her anyway? How could she have had the courage to choke to death, she thought, but not to lie with a man for thirty minutes?

There barely was a reaction. The bear sniffed at the body, then turned its back. Anya was carried out of the mansion on a canvas stretcher, covered by a blanket, her blond hair sticking out from under. Nothing was mentioned, by anybody. The day’s instruction continued as before.

The course was coming to an end. The six Sparrows watched as the four young men filed back into the dining room. They were fledgling “Ravens” now, trained in a smaller villa down the road, three of them expert in the art of seducing the vulnerable and lonely women targeted by the SVR—the minister’s spinster secretary, the ambassador’s frustrated wife, the underappreciated female aide of a general. The fourth young man had learned another specialty: befriending the sensitive, fearful men—cipher clerks, military attachés, sometimes senior diplomats—who secretly yearned for male friendship, companionship, love, but who were heart-piercingly vulnerable to the threat of exposure. The Ravens loftily declared that they had suffered during their training. Training partners were not readily available, whispered Dmitri; they practiced on unwashed girls from nearby villages, made love to sallow slatterns bused from factories in Kazan. Dominika did not ask about the fourth boy, how and with whom he had practiced. “But now we’re trained to excel in love,” said Dmitri. “We are experts.” He opened his arms and stared at them through his eyelashes.

The women looked back at him wordlessly. Dominika saw the women’s faces were closed down, saw the skepticism and fatalism and mistrust. These were like the vacant faces of the hookers on Tverskaya Ulitsa in Moscow. The fruits of Sparrow School, thought Dominika. Anya’s empty place at the table was not the only cost.