“This is no joking matter, Ingrid,” Peter said. “Who knows what they’re going to do to us now? I did say you should return it. And this whole time I’ve been trying to convince—”
I slapped him in the face.
“Now you listen up, you British eel! All I’ve done is protect you! I didn’t even need to touch that stupid icon. But I helped you, and hid it for you. I was on your team. And this is the thanks I get?”
I stood up, raised my hands in the air, and yelled, “PEOPLE SUCK!”
A hush came over the busy hallway. People turned to see where the outburst had come from, the outburst that had echoed from the outermost corners made of plaster slathered with layers of asbestos-ridden paint, the outburst that appeared to have come from an almost forty-year-old woman wearing her best black outfit with her hair up and mascara and lipstick. Why was she wearing that? Not because she wanted to look pretty, because she needed a suit of armor.
Because I was scared. Scared of the past, of the future, of the other people, that love would end, that I would be alone, that death was something dreadful, and that I would never, ever, ever have a home.
That this was the end. My own true, final, and completely personalized apocalypse, which I’d been waiting for all along.
But they couldn’t see any of this.
Partially because of the suit of armor, which guaranteed me a semblance of normality.
Partially because right at this moment, in this brief instant in the infinitely long time span of the universe, I didn’t feel scared, but angry.
Which in turn scared me even more since I remembered the end of Star Wars Episode VI and knew that anger is a step toward the dark side, which made me even angrier. Because I was also tired of movies scaring me. Tired of worrying that someday I would wake up in a Matrix pod. Tired of remaining vigilant, on the lookout for men who might be walking around wanting to make a woman suit out of my skin. Tired of being afraid of suddenly realizing that for years I’d been repressing the murder of my family.
Tired of being afraid of feeling all right in the event that not feeling so all right might be what created the magical shield that would protect me from things really going downhill, in which case doing fine would sadly open me up to all kinds of horrible and awful occurrences and experiences that the universe could decide to fling at me.
“MOTHERFUCKING ASSHOLES!” I screamed so loudly it felt like my jaw might snap.
And that included the movies, books, comics, the universe, Tehom, and myself.
I was sick of it!
So terribly and infinitely sick of it all.
Someone took me by the arm.
“LET GO OF ME!” I yelled, turning around.
“Be quiet,” Pretty Putin said through his teeth.
“You be quiet.”
He slapped me. Not hard, but enough to sting, and the shock of it brought tears to my eyes. I tried to hit him back, but he grabbed my arm.
“You have to be faster than that if you’re going to hit anyone other than the cowboy there,” he said with a nod in Peter’s direction.
“It’s not a cowboy hat, I told—”
As usual Pretty Putin waved the words away with a hand gesture.
“The president is ready now.”
We slowly rose and marched in, Ingvill first, then Peter, then me, and finally Pretty Putin and Irina.
As we crossed the threshold, I gasped.
This whole time I had envisioned the meeting taking place in the president’s office.
But what we were looking into now was very clearly a courtroom.
Row after row of benches. Two long tables next to each other. A raised desk at the front, with two witness boxes on either side and along the wall to the right. Incontrovertible.
Indisputable.
A cage.
A trap.
And I realized that if I walked into it, I would never come out again.
So I took an automatic step back, which resulted in my walking smack into Pretty Putin.
I turned around to face him.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
He gestured with his hand that I should move farther into the room.
“Peter did it,” I said. “It was him the whole time.”
Irina took my arm and shoved me into the room.
“I don’t want to,” I said.
“I don’t want to go to Omsk,” she said, nudging me in farther. She kept going until they signaled us to take a seat at the oval table at the very front.
“I’m not going into the cage,” I said.
She laughed briefly and sat down on the bench behind the table, along with Pretty Putin and Ivan.
Ingvill, Peter, and I sat down at the long table in silence. And waited. Well, Ingvill typed something into her phone. It seemed like she’d had Internet access most of the time. Either that or she was playing Candy Crush.
A few moments later a strange procession of people turned up. First a whole bevy of secretaries, carrying stacks of paper and folders and writing implements. After that came the dean and five other men I thought I’d seen on Ivan’s tour, but whom I couldn’t quite place. I was very sure that one of them was the custodian, who seemed to keep turning up in the university’s numerous rooms and lecture halls the day we’d taken our tour. Although today for some unknown reason he was wearing a suit. Stalin style. Maybe this was actually his day off, but he’d been called in for jury duty?
My head was pounding. I thought about the cough syrup, which was sitting on my nightstand. I thought about Sunny von Bülow. If your name was Sunny von Bülow and you could strut around wearing Chanel, an opiate addiction wasn’t so bad, but for the rest of the world’s population it was just ugly and pathetic. I shouldn’t have taken so much, and I certainly shouldn’t have called Bjørnar.
Suddenly I thought about the cough-syrup lady from the open house. What if she had actually been a future version of myself, who had been sent back in time to warn me of my boozy, drug-dependent future? Sent back to the very beginning, to the moment when I made the wrong choice.
I tried to tell myself that I was standing in a golden forest and ahead of me there were two paths. Two paths that diverged. Sometimes there was a right path and a wrong path, one that was overgrown and narrow and one that was wide open, but from where I stood, it was hard to see which one led where.
The question was only if I’d already made my choice.
If the path was buying the house.
If the path was the cough syrup.
If the path was the art heist.
If I was still standing in the forest, contemplating the paths.
The pounding in my head and the cold, clammy feeling increased and were amplified by the custodian, who had taken a seat in the judge’s chair and was now slapping the table in front of him repeatedly with the palm of his hand. Weirdly enough it seemed like the people up front were goofing around, because they were all smiling and laughing, and the four other men joined in on the playful banter as well. They seemed like they were about to whip out a tray of smoked trout and vodka and have a party.
But the gaiety did not extend to Ivan, Irina, or Pretty Putin. When I turned around, I saw that they were all sitting stone-faced, staring straight ahead.
This was very clearly psychological warfare. And when was the university president actually going to arrive?
Suddenly I understood the game plan. Of course! He wasn’t coming. The only one coming was the so-called janitor who was clearly KGB and whom Pretty Putin, Ivan, and Irina had no doubt been reporting our movements to for ages. And now he would sit as judge in this ridiculous courtroom, which was probably used as a law-school lecture hall, but which could also be used for real if someone played punk-rock music in a church or stole a priceless artifact or something.
I closed my eyes, put my head in my hands, and prepared to have a panic attack of epic proportions. But it didn’t happen. The seconds ticked by, but to my surprise I wasn’t predomina
ntly scared. Actually, I was still angry. More importantly, I felt no need to contemplate this any further or gauge whether it was some kind of side effect of the cough syrup that had caused me to walk around giggling and seeing fairies. Instead I had the overwhelming sense of having had enough.
And the next instant, I was standing up and slapping the table as hard as I could with my hand. So hard, actually, that I was worried I might have broken something. But the anger deadened the pain.
“Enough!” I shouted. “Enough already! I can’t take any more! Are we bad guests who didn’t bring hostess gifts? Yes. Are we clueless about what you consider the fundamental ground rules of politeness? Yes. Was this committee put together without any consideration for whether its members actually knew anything about internationalization mechanisms or bilateral cooperative agreements between public universities? Yes. Are we here primarily because we’re scared of being reassigned to the preschool-teacher education program and/or because we’re trying to get each other reassigned? Yes. Did we somehow misinterpret the gesture of being shown a valuable icon? YES!”
No one had interrupted me yet, so I took a breath and continued.
“But we’re all human beings. Look at us!” I flung my arms out to the sides in a dramatic gesture meant to also include the custodian and all his secretaries. “What is the question that we must all ask ourselves? The question is . . .”
I paused, trying to think up a good question.
“Is it worth it? Or, to put it another way, should we be—or not be? Am I right? For what is it that makes us bear those evils we have, instead of flying to others that we know not of? The heartache and the thousand natural shocks. That we all endure.”
As I enunciated the final sentence, I made another sweeping gesture to include the custodian and everyone else in the room, but the former merely watched me calmly with his dark eyes, his expression unchanging.
Still, there was no turning back now. So I kept going.
“Omnes mundum facimus,” I said slowly. “We all make the world. For there are ravens out there. They swoop down and ravage the land. But we aren’t ravens! We’re falcons! And when the falcon cannot hear the falconer, we’re all in big trouble. That’s when the indignant desert birds swoop down. That’s when darkness falls. But we are falcons and we will not let darkness fall. We all make the world.”
There was silence. For a long time.
For just as long as I’d spoken. And that was a long time, for a speech that didn’t consist of a single point beyond a few fragments ripped from Hamlet’s soliloquy, Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” and what I remembered from Prince Igor.
In the end the custodian walked over to the secretary who had been simultaneously interpreting my speech and mumbled something into her ear.
“Would you like to say anything else?” she asked me as she continued to jot down everything that was said in her notepad.
“Just that Norway and Russia have never been at war,” I said. “And you can’t say that about very many countries. We’re a team. In a way.”
I put my hand on my heart the same way the dean had done a few days earlier.
“Friendship,” I said loudly.
She translated yet again for the KGB custodian, who rolled his eyes and said three brief words in return.
Silence again.
“Isn’t she going to translate?” Peter whispered to me.
I wanted to say that she didn’t need to.
Because it was obvious what he’d said.
I glanced over at the cage and gulped.
So this was how it ended. No dignity and no hope. I should have known.
I bowed my head and prepared for the sword blow.
But then the silence was broken by applause. And the next moment the custodian was next to the whole useless Norwegian delegation, hugging and kissing Ingvill, Peter, and me, as he let out a long stream of words that the secretary struggled to interpret quickly enough.
She abridged it to, “He says that you have an agreement.”
“An agreement?” I asked, confused.
“A cooperation agreement,” she said with a stiff smile. “Congratulations. This has never happened before.”
“But who do we have a cooperation agreement with?”
She looked at me as if I were an idiot.
“University President Akady Morgarich approves the cooperative agreement between your university and Saint Petersburg State University. For the very first time we will enter a bilateral agreement with a Western university. This is a historic day. A day for friendship. And for happiness.”
“The custodian is also the university president?”
“Shut up,” Pretty Putin whispered into my ear.
“I’m shutting up now,” I said. “Do I need to sign something?”
“I’ll take care of that,” Peter said. “I mean, you’ve been sick. Go on back to the hotel, Ingrid. I’ll handle the rest of this.”
He gently pushed me away and I was too exhausted to protest.
I just said, “Fine,” and walked out into the hallway. Away from the courtroom, away from the custodian who was also the university president, and away from my two so-called teammates.
I stood there out in the hallway, feeling the adrenaline run out of my body and evaporate, to be replaced by . . . nothing.
Not anxiety. Not emptiness. Not numbness. Not depression.
Just nothing.
“I’ll drive you back to the hotel,” offered Pretty Putin, who was suddenly standing beside me. “Today I have a car.”
“All right,” I said.
32
I expected him to just drop me off, but instead he parked the car and came inside with me. Without a word, I headed for the stairs, walked up six flights, bent over, and with difficulty unstuck the icon bundle from the bottom of the sofa.
“Here it is,” I said. “It’s in here. It had some chocolate stains at one point, but I think I got them off. Sorry. We didn’t mean to take it. Peter thought it was a gift.”
“We knew you had it.”
“What will you do now?”
“Plant it in the dean’s office and pretend it was just overlooked somehow. We’ll probably try to blame it on one of the secretaries. He’s constantly replacing them, anyway. It doesn’t matter if they get reassigned.”
“And what will happen to us?”
“You’ll go home and start this cooperative agreement that you inexplicably managed to pull off.”
“I’m not going to be arrested?”
“Arrested?”
“For taking the icon?”
“This?”
“It’s extremely valuable from what I’ve understood.”
He chuckled in a deadpan way.
“The dean’s mistress gave it to him. She fancies herself an artist and painted it for him when they first started dating. She wouldn’t be happy if it went missing, and she is extremely powerful. Extremely powerful. It’s not the dean who decides when the secretaries will be replaced, if you catch my meaning.”
“But I thought . . .”
“Listen. We’re in the middle of a massive institutional restructuring process—course revisions, teaching resource reallocations, possible mergers. We don’t know much about this process, but what we do know, for sure, is that some of us will be relocated to the university in Omsk. Are you familiar with Omsk?”
I shook my head.
“Siberia?”
I nodded.
“Omsk is in Siberia. It’s the worst place in the world. Practically the gulag. That’s why we contacted you guys in the first place. Ivan was familiar with your university because he attended a conference with someone from there, and we thought that if we could get a cooperation agreement in place, none of us would be relocated. We were the last three to be hired, and need some tangible results to show for ourselves. I mean, beyond our research. But then the icon went missing and since all three of us were in the room the last time it was seen, it pretty much
guaranteed that one or all of us would be shipped off. We had to avoid that at all costs.”
“Relocated? But aren’t you a secret agent? Didn’t you threaten to send me to the gulag? And you got our visas extended?”
He grinned.
“Irina’s brother works in the visa office. All it took to get your visas extended was a bottle of vodka. And when it comes to threats . . .”
He came closer and looked down at me.
“You are a very irritating person. You laugh all the time, and you talk all the time, and you smile all the time. But it’s all just an act. You’re really sitting in a corner yelling jokes into the darkness. I don’t know why. Maybe you’re trying to distract the darkness. Maybe you’re trying to distract yourself.”
He ran his hand over my hair.
“Wisdom is better than folly, the way the light is better than the darkness.”
I cried. Like I’d been crying for many months. The way I’d been crying since I was twelve and I didn’t want to go home from school because I was afraid of what awaited me.
“You are a sparrow,” he said. “You use up your energy from one moment to the next. On folly. On fear. On people who don’t mean anything. What are you looking for?”
I cried even harder, but at the same time I began to feel irritated. He didn’t even know me, for Pete’s sake. And if I was going to be compared to a bird, it certainly wasn’t going to be a sparrow!
Until my irritation was replaced by a memory. I didn’t know where it came from. I hadn’t even known it was in there. But suddenly it rose up out of the darkness and into the light.
I was standing alone in the little store where I used to work on the weekends. Suddenly a sparrow flew in the open door. I didn’t really have time to react, but I remember that I was scared it wouldn’t get out. That it would fly into the window and hit its head. That it would attack and peck out my eyeballs. But it just swooped silently and elegantly above me through the room before it went back out, through the open door it had come in.
No one else saw it, and afterward I wondered if it might have been a dream. And I had forgotten it. Until now.
Pretty Putin looked into my eyes, abruptly put his arms around my waist, and pulled me to him. Soft lips met my own, and for a second there was nothing else. Just this kiss, which ensnared me, while the snowflakes danced around us. As if we were in a snow globe.
The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter (The Ingrid Winter Misadventure Series) Page 17