In the Garden of Beasts

friends, officially, and that makes it better, makes anything possible, doesn’t it?”
    Yes, but…
    There was another obstacle. Boris had been keeping a secret. Martha knew it but had not yet told him so. Now, facing him, she made her voice very quiet.
    “Also,” she said, “you are married.”
    Once again Boris stepped away. His complexion, already flushed from the cold, grew perceptibly redder. He moved to the railing and leaned on his elbows. His long frame formed a slender and graceful arc. Neither spoke.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you. I thought you knew. Forgive me.”
    She told him that she had not known at first, not until Armand and her parents showed her Boris’s entry in the diplomatic directory published by the German foreign office. Next to Boris’s name was a reference to his wife, who was
“abwesend.”
Meaning absent.
    “She is not ‘absent,’ ” Boris said. “We are separated. We have not been happy together for a long time. The next diplomatic listing will have nothing in that space.” He revealed as well that he had a daughter, whom he adored. It was only through her, he said, that he continued to have contact with his wife.
    Martha noticed tears in his eyes. He had cried in her presence before, and she always found it moving but also discomfiting. A crying man—this was new to her. In America, men did not cry. Not yet. Up until now she had seen her father with tears in his eyes only once, upon the death of Woodrow Wilson, whom he counted as a good friend. There would be one other occasion, but that was to come in a few years’ time.
    They went back into the restaurant, to their table. Boris ordered another vodka. He seemed relieved. They held hands across the table.
    But now Martha offered a revelation of her own.
    “I too am married,” she said.
    The intensity of his response startled her. His voice fell and darkened. “Martha, no!” He continued to hold her hands, but his expression changed to one of puzzlement and pain. “Why didn’t
you
tell me?”
    She explained that her marriage had been a secret from the start, to all but her family—that her husband was a banker in New York, she had loved him once, and deeply, but now they were legally separated, with only the technicalities of divorce remaining.
    Boris dropped his head to his arms. Under his breath he said something in Russian. She stroked his hair.
    He stood abruptly and walked back outside. Martha stayed seated. A few moments later, Boris returned.
    “
Ach
, dear God,” he said. He laughed. He kissed her head. “Oh, what a mess we’re in. A married woman, a banker, a foreign diplomat’s daughter—I don’t think it could be worse. But we’ll figure itout somehow. Communists are used to doing the impossible. But you must help me.”
    It was nearly sundown when they left the restaurant and began their drive back toward the city, the top still down. The day had been an important one. Martha recalled small details—the onrushing wind that tore her hair loose from its coil at the back of her head, and how Boris drove with his right arm over her shoulder, his hand cupping her breast, as was often his custom. The dense forests along the roads grew darker in the fading light and exuded a rich autumnal fragrance. Her hair flew behind her in tendrils of gold.
    Though neither said so directly, both understood that something fundamental had occurred. She had fallen deeply for this man and could no longer treat him in the same way she treated her other conquests. She had not wanted this to happen, but it had, and with a man whom the rest of the world saw as unsuitable in the extreme.

CHAPTER 26
The Little Press Ball
    E very November the Foreign Press Association in Berlin threw a dinner and ball at the Hotel Adlon, a glamorous affair to which many of the city’s most prominent officials, diplomats, and personalities were invited. The event was nicknamed the Little Press Ball because it was smaller and far less constrained than the annual banquet hosted by Germany’s domestic press, which had become even stuffier than usual due to the fact that the country’s newspapers were by now almost wholly under the control of Joseph Goebbels and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment. For the foreign correspondents the Little Press Ball had immense practical value. Wrote Sigrid Schultz, “It is always easier to pump a man for a story after he and his wife—if he has one—have been your guests and