Thank you to Genevieve Koski's May 4, 2016, review of The Americans, written about 'The Magic of David Copperfield', season 4 episode 8. Many of the ideas below are lifted from Koski's incisive observations.
THE LIMIT
Why did we do it?
Because we were ordered to. The only variable was to make sure we were sure - verify that Natalie Granholm of Newton, Massachusetts, was in fact Anna Prokopchuk, a wartime Nazi collaborator from Dyatkovo.
All Claudia had given us was an old black-and-white wartime photo of some random girl from Dyatkovo, taken some 40 years previous. The Centre, it had ordered us to kill her in America - it was Elizabeth and me who'd agreed that we wouldn't do it unless sure of her identity.
So far, that was the limit of our 'push back' on our orders. Me, I was to the point where these old scores - they probably, simply should not be settled. Elizabeth, she was wavering. For her, that was saying something.
I relate this not to ask for absolution, because I don't believe in that shit anyway.
Whoever Anna Prokopchuck had been - when she had been sixteen, in 1942 her village had been captured by the Nazis. She and her family had been shot, she survived - only to be forced to dig graves for her own loved ones. She was then given drink, and forced to shoot Russian soldiers, 100s of them, her own countrymen on the pain of herself being executed.
Who knows what other indignities she suffered at the hands of fascists.
When her American husband vouched for her - begged for her - he saw her as a good woman, that's what he'd said to her, not to us. Me, I hesitated to shoot either of them.
Elizabeth, briefly reminded herself that she was bound by duty and following orders - ever loyal to The Party - so when I didn't, she dispatched them quickly.
That, it was that which was one of many last straws for both of us. Perhaps I'd got to that point first, but still….. Walking back to our car, you could see it on her face.
On the long, dark night drive back to Falls Church, a seven hour drive, we at first did not speak. It took two hours for us to break the silence. What would we have said? Then I saw Elizabeth turn to me, silently assessing what had just happened behind us, and the role each of us had played.
The silence and the dark road ahead was the only 'talk' we could manage. Until Elizabeth spoke.
EMJ: I want to get out of here. - long silence - We should just go. - longer silence, looking at me - I mean it.
Me, I was vacant. I'd lost words for this shit long ago. I was no help for her. It was hard to compare what we'd just done with any other 'mission' we'd had, this being 1984 marking our 19th year in America. Most assuredly, the toll that things like the Granholm mission took was cumulative. I mean, Claudia had just confirmed for us what I'd learned on the Breland tapes - that our own military, the Red Army, had weaponized the Lassa virus sample we'd taken from William Crandall's dead body, and had used it against the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
Our bloody hands were on that.
Indeed, Elizabeth had found out from Benjamin Stobert of Agri-Corp, that Americans were not trying to poison Soviet wheat - instead, they were developing a disease-resistant strain which threatened to feed the world, including us.
It's not that Elizabeth ever got to the place that I'd been in 1981 - that was for later. So far it had been me fitting in with Americans - it was me line-dancing. She's only gone to Mary Kay Cosmetics as a cover to get at Young Hee. It was that by 1984 we found out that the two of us, we were complicit in… what? Atrocities? By blindly following orders?
EMJ: We should just go. - longer silence - I mean it. - silence - Let's go home.
Elizabeth, it had been she who said it, not me. Me, back in 1981 three years previous to the Granholm's, I'd envisioned a life of wealth by defecting, by giving to the FBI what Nicolai Timoshev had given them. Three years previous to Natalie Granholm, I hadn't even been particularly disgusted with my own government.
Now, in 1984, it was Elizabeth speaking the words. Just wanting to leave. Wanting to go home.
Why did we do it? Why did we kill the Granholms, both of them? On that drive home from Massachusetts, I didn't know why anymore.
Apparently now, neither did Elizabeth.
Later, Elizabeth said, "it's me, I'm making you stay. It just keeps getting worse for you. I don't want to see you like this anymore."
Yeah, right, Elizabeth. What it's doing 'to me'? What is it doing to you?
Elizabeth did say that back in Russia she'd look forward to be out of the Directorate S business, but that…. she said this one far more quietly, almost inaudibly, she would miss her dress-boots and shoes.
MEANWHILE, ELIZABETH HAD GONE TO EST
PMJ: What made you do that?
EMJ: I told you I was going to go, I see why you like it. - pause - Things that are hard to talk about. That hurt too much. Maybe it's good that someone makes you look at those things.
PMJ: - since when did Elizabeth care about any of that? - Yeah, it's weird talking in front of strangers, but….
EMJ: … but they don't let you just stand there and say anything you want. They question it, make you question it. It helps. I can see that.
Really? Elizabeth could 'see that'? None of that had ever been part of her internal 'exploration', if she even knew what that was. She'd just recently accused Paige of being 'precious', that the real thing was not to feel something, it was to do something. Was Elizabeth really 'getting' EST? So I called her out on it.
PMJ: But…
EMJ: They just try so hard to get you to sign up for more. Spend more money, bring in your friends….
PMJ: That's not the point.
EMJ: I think that is the point, they manipulate you to get at your wallet. It's very American, the whole thing.
PMJ: You don't get it. - for real, she didn't get it -
EMJ: That's what they say when you don't go along with it, 'you don't get it'. It's when you spend the money, then they say that you 'get it'. - pause - Are you getting anything from it? From what I see, you're not sleeping, you're not eating….
I told her that there were reasons for my anxiety. She said that I was beating myself up for 'putting Martha on a plane'. I said firmly, "isn't that enough to put someone into a spin?"
EMJ: It happens, Philip, we lose agents. That is what she was.
PMJ: She is a human being.
EMJ: At least she's alive. - getting animated - You didn't have to send her out into the street to get mowed down.
Jesus, she was throwing Gregory Thomas at me.
PMJ: You want to talk about Gregory now!
EMJ: I have not said a word about Gregory all this time.
PMJ: - yelling - But you still think about him!
EMJ: - returning fire - Of course I still think about him!
PMJ: I'm sorry that he died and you're stuck with me!
EMJ: I'm stuck with you because I took you back! AFTER YOU SLEPT WITH A WOMAN WHO'D HAD YOUR SON, AND YOU LIED ABOUT IT TO MY FACE! - silence, then calm - Apparently, you need a bunch of strangers in a hotel room to listen to you. And I'm the one not in touch with my feelings!
SEEKING COUNSEL
So, who was it that we turned to?
I've yet to mention Pastor Tim in any these remembrances. There's quite a story with him - we risked alienating Paige forever if we'd done to him and his wife what we'd done to the Granholm's. (We'd once got THAT order from The Centre, and our own brush with the Lassa virus made us frantically call it off. Like I wrote, that's a whole different chapter!)
Sure enough, we sought counsel from a man who was now departing for South America, who thought we had been industrial spies….
….. and man oh man, he gave us good counsel. American counsel. Soon, the decision on whether or not to take the kids to Russia, would not be ours to make. It was a rare time when we'd met a truth-teller like him, someone who knew who we actually were. Maybe that's why even Elizabeth listened to him.
Sort of.
THEN THE BRELAND TAPE
Elizabeth, she was trying. She was doing her best to walk in my shoes. Except those times when that pulsating vein of rage broke out on her forehead. I knew lying to her about Irina would come back at me.
She was trying, trying to accommodate to me at EST, to Paige at church. Elizabeth is many things, both good and not so good, but there is one thing that she is most certainly not.
An American. This American thing, of being a slave to your feelings - that's what she does not get. She thinks that EST manipulates me because I share my feelings, 'with strangers'. Paige tells her, 'I can't control how I feel' about her church, but Elizabeth barks back, 'you can control what you do.'
Elizabeth has suffered - I know she knows that. She still pines for Gregory, damn her. But she's never lost that strength to do her job. It's what Gregory loved about her. Why?
She's a Russian. She has no sympathy for American sentiment, not from me, not from Paige.
It's a Catch-22, if that American meme means anything. For her, it's her mission, her beliefs, her Russianness, that keeps her going mission after mission. She'd just terminated Lisa - her Alcoholics Anonymous friend/mark at Northrup. But would she have those hardships without her mission, her beliefs? Chicken, meet egg.
She expects others to have that same strength - me, I wonder if that strength is enough to see her through what must eventually happen with Young Hee.
Who exactly are we after 19 years in America? What exactly are we capable of? I sure as hell don't know.
IT NEVER ENDS
So, one last trip to see Kimmy, me telling her that 'James' was moving to Japan. Then me going home with one last Isaac Breland tape, taken from his briefcase.
What I heard floored me, doomed me. Isaac Breland - he was now to be promoted to head the CIA's Soviet Division. Yes, the Soviet division. I should have thrown that tape into the Potomac, loaded up my family and headed for Montreal.
Yet Elizabeth, as always, was right. Elizabeth, as always, thought first of her duty to The Party. "Having daily intelligence," she said, "on the head of the CIA's Soviet Division, that was the reason we were sent here, to America!"
AFTERWARD
So me, I quit. All except for the Breland mission. That was 1984. Eventually even Kimmy moved to Michigan for University. We got our info about the Soviet Division of the CIA differently.
So we decided. Elizabeth would carry on the work. Me, I'd run DuPont Circle Travel. It turned out all I managed was to run it into the ground.
Elizabeth said that she didn't want to witness the toll this work had been taking on me.
This time I did not reciprocate - meaning, what was the 'work' doing to her? She started smoking again. Like a chimney.
NINETEEN EIGHTY-SEVEN
There is so much I've left out.
Elizabeth going to one session of EST, to see what it was. When I asked her, "did you get anything out of it?" she replied that she hadn't.
"But I can see why it appeals to you," she observed.
Me, I was now The American.