The Secrets We Kept

“I didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear: that the novel was critical of the revolution. That Boris had rejected socialist realism in favor of writing characters who lived and loved by their hearts’ intent, independent of the State’s influence.”

The “East” parts of the novel center around the elements in this quote. The State puts pressure on Olga to punish Boris, who has written a novel portraying the suffering caused by the State and the heart-led people who experience and witness it.

“I found myself preferring things as one fuzzy whole, not broken down by their clear parts, and so rarely wore my glasses. Or maybe I was just stubborn—I had an idea about how the world was, and anything contrary made me uneasy.”

Irina characterizes herself this way. Though her fuzzy vision does not come into play in the story, the part about being uneasy when the world doesn’t match her concept of it does, especially in terms of how men and Sally see her.

“I preferred fading into the background. Life was easier being unnoticed—without the whistles that trailed other women, the comments that made them cover their chest with their purse, the eyes that followed them everywhere.”

The male gaze does not sit well with Irina. She either discounts that they find her attractive or she notices the harassment that comes from being found attractive.

“It’d be two years before the Agency would be created—two years before a home would be given to wayward OSS officers who’d grown tired of raking in the dough at their New York law firms and brokerage houses and wanted, even more than to serve their country again, the power that came from being a keeper of secrets. It was a power that some, myself included, found more intoxicating than any drug, sex, or other means of quickening one’s heartbeat.”

Sally, along with many other former OSS agents, has found civilian life dull. Unlike her former male colleagues, women of that era were rarely allowed to advance to high levels in interesting, exciting fields; thus they try to find equivalent work with the CIA.

“We bonded over the belief that a life of adventure wasn’t reserved for men, and we set out to claim our piece of it.”

Sally says this of her friend Bev, who also served in the OSS. It is Bev who invites her to the party on the Miss Christin so that she may find appropriate work with the CIA.

“I burned with an anger I still have not yet begun to process. Have you felt such an anger, Anatoli? An anger burning somewhere inside you that you can’t pinpoint but that can overtake you like a match to petrol? Does it come for you at night, as it comes for me? Is that why you’re in the position you are in now? Is power, no matter the cost, the only cure?”

Olga writes this to her interrogator after another round of humiliating, violating probes. The anger springs from the injustice of the situation and her powerlessness to change it.

“It was well known that Stalin had enjoyed Boris’s poetry. And what did it mean to have such a man find kinship through his words? To what had the Red Tsar connected? It was a hard truth, knowing he no longer owned his words once they were in the world. Once published, they were available for anyone to claim, even a madman.”

Boris grapples with the fact that once a piece of art is in the world, the creator has no control over who consumes it, how it affects the audience, or what will come of its existence. What was once so personal is now exposed to the public.

“I wondered: Is this what it’s like to have an affair, to have a secret? I felt a rush and could see why Teddy Helms had told me that one could get addicted to this line of work. I already was.”

Irina’s first test of field work thrills her. Her life prior to joining SR was likely not very exciting, but now she can make herself into a new person and feel the thrill of “cloak-and-dagger” missions.

“He’d say Russians valued literature as Americans valued freedom: ‘Washington has its statues of Lincoln and Jefferson,’ he said, ‘while Moscow pays tribute to Pushkin and Gogol.’ Teddy wanted the Soviets to understand that their own government was hindering their ability to produce the next Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky—that art could thrive only in a free nation, that the West had become the king of letters.”

Teddy points out a paradox: Russia seems to value its serious artists more than the United States, yet the oppressive nature of the regime now squelches such art from being created.

“The initial internal memo described Zhivago as ‘the most heretical literary work by a Soviet author since Stalin’s death,’ saying it had ‘great propaganda value’ for its ‘passive but piercing exposition of the effect of the Soviet system on the life of a sensitive, intelligent citizen.’ In other words, it was perfect.”

Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, a love story, makes for perfect propaganda, according to the CIA. They hope to get it into the hands of Soviet citizens and make them wonder why their government would ban such a thing of beauty.

“You are hereby invited to my execution!”

These are the actual words Boris Pasternak said when he handed the manuscript over to Sergio D’Angelo. The quote captures Pasternak’s seeming levity in the face of threats.

“I wanted to dig into that space between the contradictions.”

Sally fascinates Irina, not just because of her beauty and sophistication but also because of her multifaceted personality. In this instance, Irina is impressed that the glamorous Sally dreams of owning a bookstore.

“But my favorite part has always been the space between when the lights go down and the film begins to flicker—that brief moment when the whole world feels like it’s on the verge of something.”

This is Sally’s favorite part of going to see a movie. It shows that she is thrilled with the potential, not just of movies but also in other situations. Oftentimes the reality is disappointing, but in that brief moment, a person can imagine amazing things.

“I’d had friends who were picked up during their late-night walks in Lafayette Square, locked up, their names printed in the newspaper. I’d had friends who were fired from their government jobs, their reputations destroyed, disowned by their families. I’d had friends who convinced themselves the only way out was to step off a chair, a noose wrapped around their neck. The Red Scare had dwindled, but a new one had taken its place.”

The Red Scare was the anti-communist movement in the US. Here, Sally compares that to gay and lesbian people being forcibly outed and paying heavy consequences. Knowing this, she tries to be more cautious around Irina, or at least tries to distract herself with missions.

“I closed my eyes and thought of the L-Pills from our survival kits back in Kandy—white and oval, in a thin glass vial encased in brown rubber. If need be, we were to bite down, crushing the glass and releasing the poison. When the poison is released, the heartbeat stops within minutes; death is fast and supposedly painless. It never crossed my mind that I might be captured so far from the battlefield.”

This is Sally’s thought after Henry rapes her. The “capture” is both that he trapped her in a closet at a big party to assault her and that he suspects she is a lesbian, The dual meaning speaks to the layers in Sally’s hidden identities—as a spy and as a closeted lesbian in a heteronormative society.

“A double is a bit of a misnomer: one person doesn’t become two. Rather, one loses a part of herself in order to exist in two worlds, never fully existing in either.”

When Sally becomes a double agent, she doesn’t do so out of belief in the Soviet system; she does so out of revenge. Therefore, she has minimized or entirely conceded the part of her that had loyalty to her country.

“I knew what people called it: an abomination, a perversion, a deviance, an immorality, a depravity, a sin. But I didn’t know what to call it—what to call us.”

Irina knows how homosexual relationships are viewed in this era. However, she does not feel that her love for Sally fits any of those descriptions. She can’t put a label on it, though, because Sally sends mixed signals.

“Everything was about the book, and nothing mattered more—not the fame the international editions had brought him, nor the looming threat from the State, nor his family, nor mine. He even put it above his own life. His book came first and always would, and I felt like a fool for not having realized that sooner.”

Olga says this after Boris responds to her concerns about security and surveillance by asking about the translation of Doctor Zhivago. At various points, she has accused him of selfishness, but here it is more about total absorption.

“But he can’t imagine not accepting. His life has led to this precipice; how can he not take this final step, even if into the abyss? If he retreats now, each time his beloved smiles, he will see the chip in her tooth from her days in the camps and will be reminded that it was all in vain.”

Boris has won the Nobel Prize, the highest honor in literature. He must decide between accepting it and putting his loved ones in jeopardy, or refusing it and making all the work and suffering they have been through be for nothing.

“They called him a Judas, a pawn who’d sold himself for thirty pieces of silver, an ally of those who hated our country, a malicious snob whose artistic merit was modest at best. They deemed Doctor Zhivago a weapon heralded by enemies of the State, and the Prize a reward from the West.”

For as much as Boris loves his country and sought to portray it in a realist way, he is regarded as a traitor. Not content to leave it at that, the Central Committee found people willing to decry his work and accuse him of being a puppet of the West.

“All this time, he’d been pretending the roaring whispers of condemnation weren’t upsetting him—that the microphones we suspected were planted in his house and mine were something to laugh about, that the negative reviews had no merit. He’d been focusing on a speck of white light at the tunnel’s end that, with the latest blow from the Writers’ Union, had faded to black.”

Olga was bothered by Boris’s somewhat breezy attitude toward the surveillance, denouncements, and threats of arrest. However, once the Writers’ Union, of which several of his friends are members, expel him, he suggests that he and Olga kill themselves to end the pain.

“Anger is a poor replacement for sadness; like cotton candy, the sweetness of revenge disintegrates immediately. And now that it was gone, what did I have left to keep me going?”

Sally has enacted revenge against Henry for raping her. However, it is not wholly satisfying because it can only sustain someone up to the point of completion. Now that it is over, she must find a way to move into the future.

“The air hadn’t changed, my heart kept beating, the earth kept spinning, and the realization that everything would go on, that the world was ever ongoing, felt like a horse’s kick to the chest.”

Olga is stunned and saddened by Boris’s death. It is a tremendous loss, but she notices how life continues when it has been completely altered for her. This echoes Zinaida’s response to Boris not tending the garden when Olga was sent to Potma.