Shadow Man: A Novel by Jeffrey Fleishman Page B

exactly where her dispatches went, or how her syntax was parsed in a faraway office in Washington. She sent observations from the university, glimpses of life in the street, translations of articles she found interesting, and occasionally, after meeting them at a conference or university seminar, her thoughts on the communist politicians, so tight in their gray suits. Balloon men, she called them, fat and tense and tight, yet polished with the scrubbed pink skin of spas, except for the general in charge. He was pallid, a drab lanky gnome with a cigarette smile and black-circled eyes. She always had this fear that she’d be intercepted, unmasked; that men in long coats and tipped hats were watching her. It was hard to sleep and every creak and knock put a dreaded hollowness between the beats of her heart.
    Then Gdansk. Such a harsh punch of a word. She could feel a change through the shipyards. It happened, gradually, at first, then broke like an ocean tide rushing out to sea. Posters and marchers and rain, the land trembling.
    “That’s how we met, James. The Berlin Wall fell, and you chased the echo. We met in a bar in Gdansk. The CIA didn’t need my spying anymore. I needed a job. Remember? A guy from the Associated Press introduced us. I spoke five languages to you before you finished your beer. You looked at me, shook my hand, and said, ‘Let’s go.’ I’ll never forget that. So American. ‘Let’s go.’ We went that night and you filed a story, and night after night you wrote stories as we traipsed across Europe, me on a fake French passport.”
    The lady in bed with me stops talking. She is crying on my shoulder. The room seems to have been through a storm. It is relaxed now. The lady has slipped to my chest, and I think she is sleeping, her breaths slow and long. I want to get up and step to the window, but I don’t. I like the way she feels under my arm. I feel the length of her down my body. Stray clothes and towels lie rumpled on the floor. The light against the curtains is warm. It’s the kind of light in a café in winter, enticing you to come in. I hear the waves. I study the lady’s profile. Yes, I know her. I think. But she is evaporating from me; her story, like a movie, really, is dying too. Did I have such a life? I’m confused, but there is a body, a lady, alongside me, and even though I don’t know all that I should, it feels good to feel another, to lie in a bed in a room like this.
    I don’t think I live here. I hear waves and footsteps down the hall, distant voices, the sound of metal, a sliding key, a door opening, closing, more footsteps, but softer, solitary, cross through the light beneath our door. The painting over the desk is of a schooner in a swelling sea, the crew is bracing against the wind, clinging to ropes in black slickers. A huge wave rises above the schooner. The men don’t see it. They are facing the stern, battling other water. The scene is permanent, frozen in precise pencil and ink. The artist has left the crew’s fate to the viewer. I think the captain will see the wave at the last minute, and the schooner will turn and plow head-on into it and come out the other side. Maybe.
    What does Gdansk look like? If I was there I should know. If I wrote about a place, shouldn’t something of it be stored in me? I slide farther down in the bed. The lady’s face is next to mine on the pillow. Our noses touch. She sleeps pretty. I study her, but I do not know the things she wants me to know. I lift the covers a bit. Cool air rushes between our bodies. The lady doesn’t stir. I peek into the tunnel cover and see us facing each other in our nakedness. I trace her breast with my finger. It is like another world, the light of theroom, barely penetrating the covers. It is a still life, only we are not posed or arranged. I smooth the covers flat and close my eyes. I hear the waves, the same sound as all those years ago when Kurt and Vera and I took that road trip to the beach and