Red Sparrow

Marta padded barefoot into the kitchen to draw a glass of water. It would clear her head so she could sleep. She returned to the bedroom and felt an arm snake around her neck from behind. She had heard nothing. The man held tight against her throat. She grabbed his arm with both hands to relieve the pressure. The person behind her didn’t feel big; in fact, he felt somewhat thin. The breath on her neck was steady; he wasn’t scared. He did not overly tighten his grip on her throat—he was just holding her. Marta thought maybe a pervert, a molestation? She got ready to reach behind to twist his testicles off.

It wasn’t until he had frog-marched her sideways to stand in front of the mirror that she knew this wasn’t a Finnish delivery boy with a wet spot on the front of his apron. She smelled ammonia and sweat. Then something else. A voice in her ear like a beetle walking across rice paper. One word in Russian. “Molchat.” Silence. In a horrified flash she knew. It was Them.

There was a creature looking out over her shoulder into the mirror. Their eyes met. More specifically, her eyes met his single eye. The other, a chalky marble in its socket, stared obliquely. In the dim light of her bedroom, Marta could not see his body, just his disembodied arm and pocked, scarred face behind her, floating over her shoulder. His voice started scuttling again.

“Good evening, Comrade Yelenova. May I call you Marta? Or perhaps ‘my little Sparrow’?” Marta’s nightshirt was slightly open. The gold highlights in the shirt were vibrating, picking up the trembling in Marta’s body. Her pubic delta was visible between the folds of the slightly opened shirt. The monster pulled her a little straighter, Marta was lifted to her toes. “My little Sparrow,” the man whispered. “What have you been doing?” He moved her, still up on her toes, a step closer to the mirror. Marta looked in the mirror and saw her own terrified eyes looking back at her.

“Will you share your bed with me, little Sparrow?” the man said. “I have come a long way.” A second hand, black-gloved and holding a two-foot-long knife with a curved handle, came from behind and crossed her body. The man flicked one side of her shirt farther open with the tip of the knife. Her breast was heaving in fright. The floating head behind her smiled, tucked his chin into the crook of her neck, and tightened his grip. Marta’s vision of herself in the mirror was going gray at the edges. A rushing noise in her head grew louder. She heard the devil say, “Pokazat gde raki zimuyut.” I will show you where the crayfish spend winter. She knew this phrase, its deadly portent. Then the rushing noise got louder and she passed out.

Marta regained consciousness quickly, like a surfacing rush, coming back up to the light. She was naked on her back, on her narrow, bitter little bed. She felt the pull of tape over her mouth. Her hands were tied behind her, the knots on her wrists dug into her back. The familiar bedside lamp with its faded, gauzy pink shade cast a mild light on the bedspread. Her legs were tied together at the ankles. She pulled and tested each knot, but there was no give.

She heard a noise, turned her head, and her heart stopped. It was the most terrifying thing she had ever seen. The man was wearing her India shirt. He was dancing around the little room, rocking his body forward and back. The knife was in his hand, and he occasionally twirled it above his head as he pirouetted. Marta began weeping silently.

Sergey Matorin was forty-five hundred kilometers away on a head trip to the Panjshir Valley. He contemplated the shadows cast by the little pink lamp in Marta’s bedroom. He was in his Alpha Group’s sandbag bunker built into the hill with the hissing gas lantern casting green light into the corners of the shelter. Marta’s trussed-up body became the body of the wife of the village headman, taken hostage during a dawn raid as punishment for sheltering insurgents. The Helsinki rain pattering against the window was the howling Hundred Nights Wind that carried the sands of the northern desert up and over the Kush in billowing clouds and shook the bunker’s corrugated tin door. “Khyber” was home again.

The Afghan woman had died sometime in the early evening, too much excitement, or too much handling by a succession of his troopers, or perhaps the ammo belt around her neck, stapled to the plywood wall, had gotten too tight across her throat. She was upright against the wall, chin up as if in pride, held by the collar, her dead eyes flashing green from the lantern. She kept Khyber company. He was sitting, swaying to tinny Afghan music from a tape deck, but the batteries were fading and the music kept slowing down and speeding up.