After Ivan

I met Ivan in Cuba, three years before I quit kayaking and nearly a decade after my brother—Jack—and I found the man in the canal. We were in Havana to qualify for Worlds. It was 1989, and the sport had begun to sour for me in the heat of Jack’s glory, so instead of spending the night as I should have—watching film, visualizing—I took to wandering the halls, looking for something or someone to get lost in.

The hotel we stayed in was more of an apartment complex, a large private estate subdivided by the government. I followed the sharp smell of cooking tomatoes down the stairs. The bottom floor had been renovated into a long rectangular cafeteria, and at first glance I thought the room was empty. I was momentarily upset, not wanting to return to the suite I shared with Jack. Then I saw Ivan. He was the best kayaker in the world back then, and he was without his KGB handlers. I let the lady behind the counter serve me her slop.

I walked up to Ivan. I said hello.

He sat curved around his meal, elbows anchored to the splintered wood of the old table. It was early enough in the night that I didn’t feel like I was risking anything when it came to the next day’s races, and I wanted a distraction, so I sat. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him. The only sound in the room was the spoon on his lips.

We’d been taught not to trust the Soviets. They were funding the races that year, what turned out to be a last hurrah before the fall of the Wall, and their deficiency was apparent in every step: the dusty corners, the threadbare sheets, the murky water Jack and I dropped iodine tablets into. If I was lucky, the meat in the chili in front of me was horse. If I wasn’t, it was dog. I took a bite anyway, trying to impress him.

A sharp pain pricked my gum, and I pulled a small crooked bone from my mouth.

When Jack and I were boys in Hawai῾i, our mother fed us peanut-butter sandwiches, and sometimes the bread was moldy, green spots blooming over its uneven slices. She said it was good for us, a dose of penicillin.

I wanted to gag on the bone. I didn’t. Because of my mother, I can stomach almost anything.

Across from me, Ivan clenched his jaw. The dimple in his chin deepened. He looked at the bone, then at me. I noticed his blond hair, shorn close to his head, and wondered what it would feel like under my hand. He let his spoon clatter on the now-empty tray.

“Definitely foot,” he said. The arc of his pectoral muscles rose and fell through the thin nylon of his practice sweats. “From dog.”

I swallowed, and my mouth swam with the coppery taste of blood.

He held out his hand and told me his name like I didn’t know it. Like I hadn’t been watching him all these years. He asked what they called me.

“Jason,” I said, and took his dry, callused hand.

I remembered the first time I saw him, eight years earlier in France. He’d made it to the finals, and I watched as he approached the starting line in his boat, his eighteen-year-old body long and slim. His gaze had swept the shore and landed on me.

We talked about everything but the races that first night in Cuba. Ivan was fascinated by my descriptions of Hawai῾i’s seasons—summers spinning with hurricanes, nonexistent falls, wet winters that exploded into flowery springs. He had never lived in a place where even in winter it was warm and humid, swept with trade winds. He asked if it was like Cuba. I told him it was similar enough.

Ivan said he was from Volgograd, a city on a river, where the water ran so fast it didn’t freeze. He was so close that I could feel the air move as he gestured. His hands were huge, flying about, and when he got particularly excited, like he did when mentioning the river, the tips of his ears reddened.

I had no idea where Volgograd was. Jack and I had grown up next to the Ala Wai Canal, where we’d first learned to kayak. The canal was full of stench and tilapia, and threatened us with flesh-eating bacteria on the days the sewers burst open from the pressure of the rain.

The next day was hot, unbearably so. Jack and I were alone, the rest of the team still eating. After each drill, we splashed handfuls of water over ourselves. My entire body was slick with sweat. I had soaked through the navy neoprene of my shorts, and all I wanted was to be in the water, not paddling over it. Wrapping my legs around the boat to balance, I stuck my head in the canal, holding my sunglasses to keep them clean.

It was then that Ivan paddled past, leading the group of Soviets. When he saw me, he smiled and waved. “Jason.” He was even more beautiful in the sun.

In the hours since our conversation, I’d thought only of him. I had counted on spotting Ivan from afar, had hoped to prepare myself before he saw me. Tucking my legs into my kayak’s footwells, I waved back, knees shaky. Jack watched as I leaned on my paddle to steady myself, his brow an unreadable furrow. I reminded myself to breathe.

“You met Ivan?” Jack asked, once the Soviets had passed.

I shrugged, attempted indifference. My heart thumped in my chest. “I sat with him in the cafeteria last night.”

Jack looked at the receding Soviets. I knew he resented my secrets. My homosexuality was something he didn’t understand. And even if he had, telling Jack about Ivan would chip the gloss off the crush I had. It wouldn’t be mine. It would be just another thing I shared with Jack.

Our boats rose and fell in the Soviets’ wake. I watched Ivan’s form, how his blade entered the water. There was a beauty to his catch that I would never attain. He threw his hip forward in time with his arm, and the muscles in his body tensed, plumes of water flying as he propelled himself. Each stroke was timed perfectly, smooth.

“He’s going to beat us,” I murmured. “He’s going to win everything.”

Jack said nothing, but I was right.

All three of us made it to the finals. Ivan had the fastest time and sat in the middle, the best lane, with Jack and me on either side, our boats separated by yellow marker buoys. We held our paddles in the air, ready. When the starting gun went off, we were pulling, the first few strokes heavy as cement. Then the water was moving below us like a conveyor belt. Ivan worked his way to the front within the first hundred yards, Jack half a boat behind. I started strong but soon began to slow, the day’s races and my sleepless night catching up to me. Pulling too hard, the muscles in my neck strained, cramping into microtears. One of the Germans passed me, and then a Frenchman. I came in fifth, far behind Ivan and my brother. My lungs burned, my sinuses and throat molten. I slowly paddled over to Jack, who sat in his boat, bent at the waist.

“You okay?” I asked.

I put a hand on Jack’s back, but my eyes were on Ivan. He was already pulling himself out of the water.

An hour later, atop the podium, Ivan stood tall, not bowing for the gold. The man presenting it was forced to stand on the tips of his toes, creasing his black polished shoes to get the medal around Ivan’s neck. I snorted at the man’s clumsy effort, and Jack, ducking his head for the silver, glared. After the pictures were taken, I was able to approach the podium. I walked up to Ivan, who towered over me, and my body hummed, thrilled at being so close. We stood there, silent.

Jack came up to us, looking displeased.

“This is your brother?” Ivan asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “This is Jack.”

“They let you both kayak?”

Ivan’s gaze moved between us, and a familiar look settled into his eyes. He was looking for the identifying factor, the thing that would tell us apart. I swallowed past the rock in my throat and told him that the coaches liked having both of us on the team. Because we were identical, it was easier to teach us form. I wanted to tell him how different we were.

“Ah,” he said. “Same bodies, same twist, same catch.”

“Exactly,” I said.

Ivan raised his medal. I noticed then how old his jersey was. On television, the Soviets’ uniforms looked nice and clean, but in person I could see his was stained brown at the armpits and had a hole in the left sleeve.

“For my country,” he said wryly, then dropped the medal. “It will take care of my family.”

I wondered if what we’d heard about the Soviet athletes was true. I’d thought the rumors were a product of American nationalism, but Ivan seemed to be saying that it was as I’d been told—that the Soviets who competed were being kept against their will.

The men in suits appeared, and Ivan sighed.

“I must be going,” he said. “But I will see you both soon? In Florida?”

The races in Miami were six weeks away, which in that moment felt like forever. Ivan took the stairs down from the podium, one stride for every two steps. His blond head wove like a torch through the crowd.

While I packed, Jack drank on the roof with the Europeans. He’d lazily rolled his still-wet things into a ball in his duffel bag, and I knew they would stink, so I took them out and hung them from the window to dry.

Out of all the places Jack and I had traveled, Havana reminded me most of home. We’d flown here from California many times over the past few years, more than we’d returned to Hawai῾i, and while at first the scenery was a comfort—avenues lined with palms and littered with noni, window boxes stuffed with popcorn orchids, variegated bromeliads, and long smooth stalks of aloe—it had turned oppressive, reminding me of what we’d left. Looking out at the mango trees of the park below our window, I felt a tightening in my chest and decided to go for a walk. I wanted to find Ivan.

I discovered him sitting against the wall of our hotel. He scrambled up at the sound of the stairwell door opening. When he saw it was me, he relaxed.

“Ah, Jason,” he said. “Smoke?” He offered me a cigarette. In his left hand he held what looked like a sketchbook.

I tried to hide the rush I felt when he’d said my name, when he’d known it was me and not Jack. I took the cigarette from him and inhaled, then choked. “What is this shit?” I asked, coughing.

He laughed. “Pall Malls,” he said.

I took another drag and kept it in. I passed the cigarette back.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said, exhaling.

“We are not allowed,” he said. “They say it hurts our chance at competing.”

“They’re probably right,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed. “But right is not always good.”

I looked up at the sky, which had clouded over.

“You seem bothered,” Ivan said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, looking back at him.

“You are here, with me, smoking this”—he held up the cigarette—“instead of fancy Cuban cigars with the other Americans.”

“I needed some space,” I said.

We passed the cigarette back and forth. Down the alley and across the street, a large banyan tree grew in the park square, the ropes of its roots tethering it to the earth. I thought of the same trees that grew near the Ala Wai, how they’d been fruiting the morning Jack and I found the man, their fibrous figs smashed to red pulp beneath our feet.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Ivan braced the notebook against his chest, his pencil slashing the paper in quick, violent arcs. Tearing the page out, he handed it over.

It was me.

He stepped close. His elbow pressed against mine. “You have a mark there, on your ear,” he said.

“It’s from when I was a kid,” I told him.

“I wonder,” he said, “what cut you deep enough then to leave a scar?”

Just then, it began to rain. Hard, like it did back in the islands—breaking the sky open and soaking everything. I stuffed the drawing in my shorts pocket, hoping to keep it dry. Dropping Ivan’s cigarette, I ground it out as he looked through the dumpster. He pulled out a cardboard box and held it over us.

“We had no money for paint,” he said softly, “so my parents bought me chalk. I drew inside, on the walls of the apartment, where nobody could see.”

The raindrops splashed up from the cobbled ground and onto my bare legs. Guiltily, I remembered the colored paper my mother had brought home for Jack and me, the drawer of colored pencils that she’d scavenged from her job as a custodian at the art museum. We’d left them unused and locked up in the drawer of our shared desk.

I imagined Ivan as a little boy, scrawling furiously across the walls, desperate to make a mark.

When the rain stopped, Ivan dropped the soggy cardboard. He raised a hand, and for a moment I thought he was going to touch my cheek, but instead he wiped something from my lips with his thumb. “Ash,” he told me. And then he opened the door to the stairwell and left.

I spent the rest of the evening in the fountain across the street from the hotel, drunk and partying with the French. Jack sat on the top tier, his legs wrapped around the waterspout, a bottle of rum in one hand, cigar in the other. I sat in the basin, hands full of pennies, wondering if Ivan was alone in his room or if the KGB had already moved him to wherever they would train in the six weeks before Florida. The steady beat of techno rippled the fountain’s water, and around me people spun in varying stages of intoxication. At some point one of the Frenchmen pulled me up and we danced, splashing through the water. Cigar smoke spilled from Jack’s mouth and billowed around his ears as he watched. I leaned in to the man so we were hip to hip, trying to feel something. It was nothing like the jolt I’d gotten standing near Ivan. When the Cuban police came, Jack and I ran from them in nothing but our boxers. We nearly slipped on the cobblestones of the alley and sprinted up the stairs, fountain water streaming down our legs and dripping from our ankles. We collapsed, still wet, in our beds.

The next day, Jack was so hungover I had to push him through the airport in a wheelchair. We made it onto the plane, and the rest of the team pretended not to notice our smell—sweet liquor, chlorine, smoke, and the sour scent of sweat that had been left to dry. I helped Jack into his seat, where he fell asleep as I loaded our duffels into the overhead. Sitting in my own seat, I reached for a mint from my pocket.

Out came Ivan’s drawing, creased and water warped. As I smoothed it on the back of the seat in front of me, the plane rumbled down the strip and, moments later, took to the air.

Jack and I trained in California for the next six weeks. When we weren’t traveling, we lived in a mobile home in Newport, a few miles from the aquatic center. The fall of 1989 was warm, the driest Southern California had been in decades, and the grass of the trailer park was long, full of leaves and the deadheads of flowers. We kayaked in the morning, in the evening, in the middle of the day—any leftover time was spent asleep or studying for the college classes we took twice a week at Long Beach. Jack was thinking of becoming a lawyer. My goal was to move home and teach PE.

I thought often of Ivan: where he was, how his training was going, if he had flown home to the city by the river or if, for convenience, he and the other Soviets had stayed in Cuba. I thought of him when I was in the weight room, in class, on the water. Before bed I stared at the drawing I’d pinned up on the peeling wall of our mobile home. I thought of Ivan and wondered if he thought of me.

Jack and I flew to Miami in October. It was a red-eye, and though Jack and the rest of the team slept through the night, I couldn’t, too nervous to see Ivan again, and soon. I thought of how I might greet him, what he might say when he saw me. When we landed in Miami, I was a mess of nerves, convinced Ivan was around every corner. I worried he’d come upon me unexpectedly or, worse, that he’d have forgotten me and the moments we spent together in Cuba.

Jack could see I was nervous, but he thought it was about the races.

“Don’t worry,” he told me once we’d gotten to the hotel where we’d stay. “You’re going to qualify. It’ll be a breeze.”

I’d always hated Florida—its flatness, the women who called me dear, the gnats that buzzed in its dirty sand. I longed for the clean air of the Ko῾olau, the white sand of Makapu῾u Beach. I didn’t know it yet, but I was tired of chasing a dream I no longer believed. Jack had already qualified for Worlds that year, but I was just on the brink.

For the first five days we were in Miami, Jack partied. I spent much of that time pretending to train. Really, I was looking for Ivan, desperate, thinking maybe he’d changed his mind about competing in Florida, that the Soviets had decided to rest him for Worlds instead of having him enter a race he didn’t need to win.

On the day the trials began, Jack slept in, hungover from the night before. For an hour after breakfast I waited, thinking he’d wake, but he continued to snore, so I left him.

I jogged the half mile to the beach park. The rest of the team had already left to set up our tent and scope out the lanes. They wanted to see which ones were best, which way the wind blew, how the current was flowing. Before I got to the tent I saw Ivan standing on the jetty.

He wore his practice sweats, the same ones he had on when we met. He’d lost weight. His clothes hung off him, like sheets on a line. He was surrounded by other Soviet athletes and the KGB.

“Ivan,” I said, slowing my stride.

He turned. It was then that I saw the extent of his weight loss, the deep pits in his cheeks.

“Jason,” he said, and the skin of his face cracked into a smile. “How are you doing?”

I tried not to stare at how his collarbone peeked over the neck of his shirt like a broken bird wing. “Where have you been?” I asked. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“I’ve been training,” Ivan said, and glanced around.

One of the men in suits watched us. Ivan stepped closer. I could feel the heat coming off his body. I asked if he was okay. It wasn’t the right question. I should’ve asked how I could help, what it was that he needed from me.

He looked out at the wide canal where a white whaler idled, dropping race buoys.

“They do not hurt me,” he said, finally. “But it is hard to train, to race. I am hungry, you know?”

And I did know. There had been nights in our childhood when Jack and I went to bed with gnawing, hungry bellies. Once, in the middle of the night, I’d found my father pouring water into a milk carton to make it last.

I looked around. “We could go there,” I offered, pointing at a diner across the street. I had forgotten about the KGB.

Ivan slapped my hand down. “Do you not understand?” he hissed. “Are you trying to make them angry?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, and he shook his head.

The anger fell from his face, replaced by something else. Sadness, perhaps. Acceptance maybe.

“They will notice if I leave,” he told me, nodding to the man who had been watching. “Thank you, though.” Ivan put a hand on my shoulder. “That is very kind.”

I felt the weight of his fingers press through my sweaty shirt and thought of Cuba—his face close to mine, the steam of rain rising. He smiled sadly and removed his hand. I missed its presence immediately.

“I will see you on the water,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, and looked down, noticing his old, too-small shoes. The tops of them were cut open, his socked toes out for me to see. I measured his feet quickly with my eyes and realized he and I were the same size.

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

He said the motel only two blocks from where Jack and I had been put up with the rest of the American team. I asked him for his room number and he told me. Before he could ask why, I said goodbye. I jogged away from him, down the jetty, to where the rest of the American team had gathered, ready to race.

My heat was first. I warmed up on the water alone, Jack MIA. The water was murky, and every now and then I thought I saw a dark shape dart beneath me. When I got to the start, I didn’t feel ready, muscles still tight from seeing Ivan. I won all the same. Ivan’s heat was next, and I watched as he ripped through the water, so fast he left a wake. One of the other, slower kayakers got caught in it, flipped, and I hoped the darkness I’d seen was just a lack of light. When Jack finally appeared, it was ten minutes before his heat. His eyes were drawn with rings of sleep.

“What have you been doing?” I hissed, dragging him to his boat before the coaches could interrogate him. I didn’t want them to know he’d been drinking.

He yawned. “Sleeping.”

I shoved his paddle in his hands. “Get in the water. Your heat’s next.”

I helped him carry his boat and pushed him off the dock. I watched him paddle in tippy circles. But he was good when he needed to be. Once the racing gun went off, he was sure and speedy. His paddle moved across the water in a blur, moving him to first place, and I was momentarily jealous that he could drink all night and still win. Then I was grateful he hadn’t failed me. The rest of the day was more of the same, the three of us winning, none of us racing each other. By the end of the day, Jack looked about dead. We took the bus back and rode the elevator to our room in silence.

“What do you want to eat?” Jack asked, collapsing on the couch.

“You decide,” I said. “I have to do something.” I gathered three boxes of energy bars from our sponsors and picked up my extra pair of shoes by their laces. “I’ll be back later. Just order me whatever you’re getting.”

“Okay,” Jack said, eyes on the TV. “Where are you going?”

“To see a friend,” I said.

After a pause he asked, “Are you going to see Ivan?”

I turned, my hand on the doorknob. Jack’s face was drawn, uncharacteristically serious.

“Why?”

“If you are, it’s selfish,” Jack said. “Do you know what they do to Soviets who befriend Americans?”

I did.

“They shoot them,” he said. “When they see you with Ivan, they’ll think he’s defecting. Do you want that for him?”

I didn’t.

“We’re on the national team.” Jack was angry now. He shouted. “We’re going to make the Olympics! Isn’t this what you wanted?”

I had no answer to that. All I knew was what I wanted at that moment.

I was out the door and down the stairs before Jack could stop me. Then I walked the two blocks to the motel, counting each step, nervous and thinking of Ivan, wondering if he’d be alone, if he’d be there with the KGB, if he’d even want to see me, wondering if maybe Jack was right, and I was wrong to take the risk.

I rang the bell. Ivan answered the door, breathless.

“Jason? What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I brought you this.” I held out the shoes and the energy bars.

He checked to see if anyone had seen us. Then he waved me in.

The room was smoky, big, with a kitchen and dining room, the beds hidden behind doors. The tables and counters were covered in takeout boxes, pillows of the couch torn and thrown around the room. I could hear a TV playing somewhere. The only clean place was against the wall, where a sheet was laid across the floor, a towel rolled tightly into a cylinder. Beside it, a duffel bag lay open with nothing inside but some mismatched socks and a red racing jersey. I held the boxes and shoes in my arms, not wanting to put them on the dirty table.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“My comrades are out getting food,” Ivan said.

“And they left you?” I was surprised.

“They said they’d be back soon,” he said.

“What about the other athletes?”

“They are away, in other rooms,” he told me.

I looked around.

“My comrades are . . .” Ivan paused, embarrassed. “What is the word? Messy,” he said. “At least when they drink, which they have been doing much of recently.”

“Oh,” I said. I looked at him, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. I held out the shoes and the boxes of bars. “Here.”

He took them from me, measuring the shoes in his hands. “Thank you.” He looked at the couch, its cushions stained and covered in the crusted remains of food. “I would offer you to sit, but . . . I am afraid it is ruined.”

“That’s okay.” I looked again at the sheet and pillow. “Is that where you sleep?”

His face bloomed red. “Yes,” he said, and lowered his head.

“What about the bedroom?”

“My comrades sleep there,” he told me.

I thought of the KGB, out gorging themselves, coming in late and trashing the room, asleep in beds that Ivan should be sleeping in. I was angry at their selfishness, at their obvious disregard for Ivan’s humanity. They didn’t care about him like I did. I wanted to protect him. But I couldn’t. All I could be was mad, the hopeless kind that writhes and beats its wings.

We were quiet a moment, before he spoke again, raising his eyes to look in mine. “If you don’t mind, we can sit on the ground.”

I agreed, and we sat on his makeshift bed. He stared at the energy bars, then back at me, then at the bars again, and in spite of my anger, I smiled.

“Eat,” I said.

“Do you want?” He held a bar out to me.

“No, no.” I shook my head. “Those are for you.”

He shoved it in his mouth, biting nearly half off at once. “Very good,” he said, his cheeks swelling.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you more,” I said. The bars were chalky at best.

He finished the bar in two bites, then a second and a third, only stopping after he had eaten the first box. He leaned back into the wall, his legs stretched before him, long and straight, the hairs of them blond and curly. The wrappers lay in a silvery pile. I looked at his bare feet.

“Why don’t you try on the shoes?” I suggested.

He put on a pair of black socks and pulled on the shoes. He flexed his toes.

“Nice,” he said.

“You have to stand in them.” I motioned him up.

I felt his toes, like my mother had for Jack and me when we were young. I told him to walk across the room to be sure.

“These are the best shoes I’ve had,” he told me.

I wanted to say something, anything. I wanted to tell him how I felt, the thud of my heart in my chest. How I’d thought of him every day, every night in the six weeks since Cuba. How when I watched him race, the skill with which he moved across the water, it reminded me of why I loved kayaking. I opened my mouth to say all this, but before I could, Ivan was leaning down. He was kissing me.

And then the door opened.

Ivan pulled away. He turned to the door and backed me into the wall, arms out as if he could protect me. The KGB didn’t see us at first. They held the necks of beers in their hands and were drunk, eyes glassy as marbles. Then one of them spotted me.

He slammed his beer down. Foam spilled over its glass lip as he swept his hand across the table, knocking a box of half-eaten takeout to the floor. He shouted in Russian.

“I don’t understand,” I said, and his face splotched red.

“Who are you?” he asked, and I told him. “American?” he asked, and I said yes.

He wanted to know what I was doing there, and I tried to explain about the shoes and food, thinking the whole time about what Jack had said, how wrong I had been. When the Soviet man saw the wrappers, he grew redder, nearly apoplectic.

“You try to defect him?” he yelled. “Ivan will not defect. Ivan is best in world. He is Soviet forever.”

I felt my fear mix with anger at this notion of possession.

“Jason,” Ivan said, “please leave.”

I looked at him standing against the wall. One of his shoes had come untied. I didn’t want to leave him alone, but he was motioning to the door.

“I will see you tomorrow,” he said.

The suited men glared at me, mustaches bristling.

“Okay,” I said.

I walked out the door.

I wish I had been stronger, braver. I wish I had tried to help him, even if it had been something as stupid as fighting and losing to the KGB. Instead I left without even closing the door. Russian shouting followed me down the path and to the parking lot. Out of sight, I ran through the maze of parked cars, down the two blocks, thinking of Ivan the whole time, wondering what the KGB were saying, what they would do to him.

Jack was sitting on the couch when I opened the hotel-room door. He held a burger in his hands, and the greasy remains of fries lay beside him. On the TV, motorcycles circled a dirt track.

“Your face is red,” Jack said, his mouth padded with beef.

“I was running,” I said, expecting him to ask about the missing energy bars, the shoes. To bring up the conversation I’d left. My heart pounded in the roof of my mouth. My nostrils flared to hide my gasping breaths.

Jack swallowed and sat up.

I turned to the table, where another styrofoam box sat. “Is this for me?”

Opening the box, I wondered what he would say if I told him Ivan and I had just kissed. If I told him how much I’d liked it. I wondered if he’d be angry, righteous even, if he knew how Ivan and I’d been found.

I turned to face Jack. Behind him a commentator interviewed the winner of the race. The man said something about his wife back home, about the baby he’d just had, told the fans how much he loved them. I wondered what it would feel like to live a life as easy as that.

“Are you okay?” Jack asked.

I told him I was fine. He turned back to the TV.

In the bathroom, I locked the door. My face pulsed in the mirror. Stripping out of my clothes, I turned the shower as cold as I could and stood under its stream. Then I curled into a ball, hands on my head. Sitting on the floor, I thought of Ivan’s lips and waited for my heartbeat to retreat from my cheeks and back to my chest.

The next day I watched the last race from the jetty where Ivan and I had stood the day before. I had been beaten in the semifinals, losing to a heat full of Germans.

I knew something was wrong from the start. Jack was confident and cocky, winking at someone under the American tent. Ivan wouldn’t look up. His eyes should have been on the finish line, and instead they were on the water in front of him. My stomach bunched.

When the gun went off, Ivan cut through the water, and I thought at first that I’d been wrong. He was so far ahead that I let myself breathe, but then at the second-to-last buoy something broke. His elbows dropped, and the windmill of his arms slowed. Without the pressure of his strokes, his boat lifted in the water, and he lost even more speed. He tried to regain it, muscling his way through the sludge, but Jack had already passed. I grabbed the jetty’s railing.

At the finish line Jack’s boat crossed mere nanoseconds before Ivan’s did. A cheer ballooned from the American tent, bursting over the canal. Jack looked at me, pumping his paddle in the air. My teeth clenched as Ivan slumped over in his boat, head to his knees. He was crying.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” played as Jack stood atop the podium. My eyes were on Ivan, who stood on the second step. His head hung, not rising even for the medal. After the anthem stopped I tried to look for him, but Jack leaped off the podium and threw his arm around me. A camera’s flash took my sight, and by the time I regained it, the Soviets had left. The event’s staff had begun to pack up their tent. Ivan was gone. I wouldn’t see him again.

A few months later Jack and I took a train to Poland for Worlds. Miraculously, I had qualified, one of the other kayakers forfeiting his spot. Though I wasn’t sure about the race, I was anxious to see Ivan.

The train ride was five hours, from Berlin to a small city outside Warsaw, and for the first thirty minutes it was smooth. We chatted with the other paddlers, mostly French. They offered us cheese and fresh bread, and I forgot myself, laughing. One of them opened a bottle of wine, and we started to drink. Then a second and a third were opened, and soon we were drunk. I was unraveling, buzzed, the warmth spreading out from my chest. Stupidly, I decided to ask about Ivan, if they knew where he was, if he’d be at Worlds competing.

“You have not heard?” one of the Frenchmen said, waving his glass of wine like a paintbrush. Red sloshed and stained his white shirt. “Ivan is dead.”

I had just taken a bite of bread and felt it stick in my throat.

“They found him in Volgograd. He was in his boat, floating.”

I blinked, and we crossed where the Wall should have been. The tracks below us changed from the smooth steel of West Berlin to the grooved wood of the East. Wine spilled, food fell from the makeshift tables we had built from our knees. Around me, people dropped to theground, grabbing at the falling food and wine. I watched them, gripping my armrest. For a moment it felt as if the tracks had disappeared, as if there were nothing solid beneath us. I looked down to check that the floor was still there. When I looked up, Jack’s eyes were on me.

Ten years before Cuba, Jack and I wake before the sun. We run from the apartment, down Niu Street and across the bridge to the Ala Wai boathouse, in board shorts and barefoot, our soles thick and callused from the crumbling asphalt road. Pulling the kayaks from their racks, we balance the boats on our right and hold the paddles in our left hands. At the water, the plastic docks rock beneath our uneven steps.

We slip into our boats—me first, Jack next—and tighten our foot straps. Then we paddle slowly up the canal, warming our bodies. In the mangroves to our right, I hear the rustle of feathers. Mist rises from the water.

The summer sun hides behind Diamond Head, the gray light of predawn whispering through the coconut trees. In the water ahead of me, something bobs. I paddle toward it slowly and pull up beside, careful not to scratch my boat on the canal wall.

It is wrapped in a sheet and floats off-balance, one side weighed down. Reaching my paddle out, I hook it, tug at the heavy end with my hands. Jack calls out. A bag of something comes loose and zigzags down, sinking to the silty canal floor. The flotsam floats higher, and I pull the sheet from it. When it is finished unrolling, I squint, and it is a body. It is flesh. It is a man. His mouth rots in sores at the edges of his lips. His translucent eyelids stare at me, glowing and webbed with dark veins. I try to push myself away, and the blade of my paddle slices his soft water-soaked flesh.

I hear Jack beside me. He sculls, and the water below me moves. We look at each other as the smell of the man surrounds us.

Turning my kayak, I paddle away from the wall and the man. Jack follows. His stern scrapes against the lava rocks. We are fifteen years old. Above us, the sun rises, burning up the mist. We sit and watch the world wake up—tourists trace the path at the water’s edge, mopeds weave through morning traffic, ducks skim the water’s surface. An older man paddles past, under the bridge and out to the ocean. Jack looks at his watch.

“Ready?” he asks.

I am not ready, but I nod.

We sprint up and down the canal, again and again, the man’s face always just in front, just behind, chasing us. My heart pumps so hard I can feel it in my teeth. I think of the man with every stroke, as my paddle cuts the water. My terror makes me fast, and I beat Jack in every sprint.

We paddle under the bridge to cool down, following the water out to the ocean. At the channel, we stop, our flatwater kayaks too weak to brave the waves. Small children sail in the lagoon around us, jibing and tacking through the soupy, stagnant water. Moon jellies float. We wait for the kids to pass, then head back to the boathouse in silence.

The next morning we walk as we did the day before, down Niu, across the bridge, but when we get to the boathouse, there are police and yellow tape. Steam pools around a body that lies on the dock, and my stomach curls. It is the man.

Jack and I do not speak of the body. We do not speak of Ivan, of the night I came back breathless or my reaction on the train. I quit kayaking, do not teach as I had planned, choose instead to fly planes and move to Arizona, where long stretches of desert replace the waters of my youth. Jack wins in Barcelona, then, half a decade later, his talent burned up by partying, he returns to Hawai῾i and spends the rest of his days fishing. Sometimes in the cockpit, with his sketch propped against the instruments, I think of Ivan—dead and floating on the river—and wonder why they killed him. If it was because he lost in Florida. If it was because they suspected he’d defect. If it was because of what the KGB saw the night they walked in on us. If, like Jack said, it was because of me.

I’ll never know exactly what Ivan was thinking in the motel. I’ll never know exactly what Ivan thought of me. I know how I thought of Ivan. I know how selfishly and stupidly I dreamed of him leaving the Soviets. How, though he is gone, I return often to his memory: Ivan in his boat, framed by water and light; Ivan at the door, breathless as he answers; Ivan in my shoes, leaning in to kiss me.

Read more from Issue 19.1.