In the Garden of Beasts

he said, “you and I together. Don’t you recall the night we were at Göring’s and were shown the secret passageway to the Reichstag?” This was an allusion to a widely believed theory that a team of Nazi incendiaries had secretly made their way from Göring’s palace to the Reichstag via an underground tunnel between the two buildings. Such a tunnel did, in fact, exist.
    All three laughed. This mock complicity in the Reichstag fire would remain a joke between Boris and Fritz, repeated often in varying forms to the great delight of Martha’s father—even though Fritz, Martha believed, was “almost surely an agent of the secret police.”
    Fritz returned with vodka. Boris poured himself a large drink and quickly downed it. Martha settled back in the couch. This time Boris sat beside her. He drank a second vodka but showed no obvious sign of its effect.
    “From the first moment I saw you—” he began. He hesitated, then said, “Can it be, I wonder?”
    She understood what he was trying to say and in fact she too felt a powerful, instant attraction, but she was not inclined to concede it this early in the game. She looked at him, blank.
    He grew serious. He launched into a lengthy interrogation. What did she do in Chicago? What were her parents like? What did she want to do in the future?
    The exchange had more in common with a newspaper interview than a first-date conversation. Martha found it vexing but answeredwith patience. For all she knew, this was how all Soviet men behaved. “I had never before met a
real
Communist, or a
Russian
for that matter,” she wrote, “so I imagined this must be their way of knowing someone.”
    As the conversation wore on, both consulted pocket dictionaries. Boris knew some English, but not much, and conversed mainly in German. Martha knew no Russian, so deployed a mix of German and English.
    Though it took a good deal of effort, she told Boris that her parents were both offspring of old southern landowning families, “each as well ancestored as the other, and almost pure British: Scotch-Irish, English, and Welsh.”
    Boris laughed. “That’s not so pure, is it?”
    With an unconscious note of pride in her voice, she added that both families had once owned slaves—“Mother’s about twelve or so, Father’s five or six.”
    Boris went quiet. His expression shifted abruptly to one of sorrow. “Martha,” he said, “surely you are not proud that your ancestors owned the lives of other human beings.”
    He took her hands and looked at her. Until this moment the fact that her parents’ ancestors had owned slaves had always seemed merely an interesting element of their personal history that testified to their deep roots in America. Now, suddenly, she saw it for what it was—a sad chapter to be regretted.
    “I didn’t mean to boast,” she said. “I suppose it sounded like that to you.” She apologized and immediately hated herself for it. She was, she conceded, “a combative girl.”
    “But we do have a long tradition in America,” she told him. “We are not newcomers.”
    Boris found her defensiveness hilarious and laughed with unrestrained delight.
    In the next instant, he adopted a look and tone that she recalled as being “solemn in the extreme.”
    “Congratulations, my noble, gracious, little Marta! I too am also of ancient lineage, even older than yours. I am a direct descendant of Neanderthal man. And pure? Yes,
pure human.
”
    They collapsed against each other with laughter.

    THEY BECAME REGULAR COMPANIONS , though they tried to keep their emerging relationship as discreet as possible. The United States had not yet recognized the Soviet Union (and would not do so until November 16, 1933). To have the daughter of the American ambassador openly consorting with a first secretary of the Soviet embassy at official functions would have constituted a breach of protocol that would have put both her father and Boris at risk of criticism from inside and outside their respective governments. She and Boris left diplomatic receptions early, then met for secret meals at such fine restaurants as Horcher’s, Pelzer, Habel, and Kempinski. To cut costs a bit, Boris also cultivated the chefs of small, inexpensive restaurants and instructed them on how to prepare foods he liked. After dinner he and Martha would go dancing at Ciro’s or at the club on the roof of the Eden Hotel, or to political cabarets such as the Kabarett der Komiker.
    Some nights Martha and