“Right.”
He put the king facedown on the table. “Let me show you something.”
He got up and reached for a large cigar box on the shelf above the desk. He sat down again with the box between us. He opened it, and out popped papers. There must have been hundreds—some were yellow and weathered, others were crisp and white, others were the kind of heavy cream-colored papers that one might reserve for the most important of business transactions. Some of the papers had handwriting—chicken scratchings in faded pencil; bold inky strokes that blurred into smears; the labyrinthine swirling of cursive Cyrillic, almost indecipherable for a person used to reading print—and others were typewritten. A few, ominously, were done with text cut out from magazines.
“What is all this?”
“Death threats,” he said. “All for me.”
“Oh.” I looked at him. I understood that he wasn’t trying to make me feel better—or worse, for that matter—but that he was only sharing with me a common reality. It was the taciturn exchange of reminiscences by veterans of some unwinnable war. It was the acknowledgment of the truest and most terrible thing about us—not the only thing but the thing that everybody else tried to ignore. “May I?” I asked.
“Please,” he said. “Go ahead.” I started to paw through them. I will hunt you down in the night and cut off your balls, read one. You are a traitor to your people and to your country, read another. Some were subtle—hinting at people and places Aleksandr should probably think to avoid—and others were explicit, explaining in lurid detail exactly how Aleksandr should be killed. Some looked amateurish and unhinged, and I imagined unstable people with matted beards writing by candlelight. Others looked professional and purposeful, and it was easy to envision a different kind of person: a person in a black suit, a person with the money and means to turn threats into reality. A person who wrote what he meant.
“Amazing,” I said, because really, it was. And then I said, “Are you afraid?”
He nodded too quickly, and I wondered if, like me, he’d been waiting for somebody to ask.
“I am,” he said. “I really, really am.” He folded the notes back up and stuffed them into the box with a care that bordered on tenderness. “But there’s fear and then there’s fear, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we’re both afraid. But your fear is liberating. Mine is confining. Yours brought you here. Mine keeps me in this apartment.”
“It’s a nice apartment.”
He squinted at me. “Yes. A very nice apartment.”
“You go to your rallies. You go out. You take great risks.”
“I don’t fly. I don’t eat out. I talk to the Western press constantly, and why do you think that is? Not to give Larry King a good program, I promise. It’s because if I’m famous enough in the West, there will be annoying questions should anything happen to me.”
“That’s smart. That’s only smart.”
“And you?”
“And me what?”
“Whom do we tell if anything happens to you? Did you have anyone back home?”
I looked at him. I realized what he was asking. “Would I have left if I did?”
“Yes,” he said, and nodded slowly. “I am starting to think you would.”
That night it rained an unseasonable rain: mild and muddy, great sheets of water tearing from the sky. I took off my hat and then I took off my coat, and then, when I was halfway down the street of my hostel, I took off my shoes. Maybe I would get hepatitis. Maybe I would get pneumonia. For a moment I saw it as Aleksandr saw it: I saw the beauty, the nutty singular luck, of being alone and unaccounted for and barefoot, somewhere out in the enormous world. It was a blessing, perhaps, of a sort. It was like the free fall of the man with a broken parachute: we can’t know what he sees on the way down, when the sun angles in a certain way over the rolling landscape, and he reaches out to scrape the clouds. We can’t know what he learns in that otherworldly weightlessness.
But then I was in my bed, and I’d frozen myself thoroughly, and my situation seemed less romantic and more pitiful. I turned my face to the wall and folded all of my limbs into my body and tried to sleep. It was almost Christmas, I realized. Somewhere in the month behind me, I had turned thirty-one.
After that, Aleksandr and I were friends of a sort. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that there was a charge between us—an energy that was neither romantic nor sexual but was somehow more urgent than bland affection. We knew where the other person was standing in a room. We watched to see how the other person was taking certain information, certain jokes. We trusted each other all of a sudden, with our death threats and our diagnoses.
Of course, really, it was nothing more than this: both of us were marked for dead in different ways. And both of us had such big egos that it had never occurred to us, really, that anyone else had to die. And meeting somebody else who did was, in some ways, a revelation.
Whether this new understanding between us led to my having a greater role in the making of the film, I don’t know, though I would suspect so. My one and only credential was native English, though it was true that Aleksandr had adopted advisers based on less. Boris and Viktor, it seemed, had been plucked from a crowd of similar young men only because of some hardscrabble energy that Aleksandr thought he detected in them. For a man with so many people trying to kill him, Aleksandr was erratic in choosing his confidants—and I wondered about that, too. I wondered if that wasn’t his way of tempting fate or trying to deny it. It seemed, though, that he had not made any missteps yet.
The film Alternative Russia was producing was to be an investigation of the spate of bombings that had struck a few Russian cities in the fall of 1999. I remembered these events only vaguely from reality. They’d happened while I was writing my dissertation, and I had the faintest impression of having watched some of the coverage while pulling all-nighters. In America, they were the kind of news story that was covered only on specialty channels or in the pages of foreign affairs magazines. There was some vague tsking from newscasters with shiny hair. They stumbled over the cities’ names and arranged their faces into expressions that registered the public’s ambient, confused disapproval of bombing, generally, before moving on to stories about dead white children and dogs saving other dogs.
Viktor and Boris, whom I was beginning to think of as Aleksandr’s henchmen, were editing the footage for production. I was helping to fix the syntactical mistakes of the voice-over script. For days on end, we engaged in grueling, repetitive viewing of a string of gruesome images: the jagged maw of a building, smoldering red and black; a rivulet of tattered people, all looking assaulted and surprised; the steaming ruins of a highway. The film made the case that the bombings had been ordered—or at least tacitly endorsed—by Putin, in order to scare everybody into voting for him and acquiescing to his incursion into Chechnya. The film’s argument hinged primarily on two facts. First, the government had issued a statement expressing its extreme and bitter regret at the attacks in Buynaksk, two days before Buynaksk was attacked. Second, it was initially reported by the government that an explosive called hexogen, or RDX, was used in the bombings. Hexogen, according to the Russian government, was produced only at one heavily guarded military facility in Perm—an unlikely target for crazed Chechens, as Boris pointed out. After the media made note of the incredible hexogen coincidence, the government retracted its initial account.
Those first few weeks at Aleksandr’s, I began to feel more alive. I’d wake up in the mornings, the room smelling thickly of frost, and it was such an unexpected relief each day to know where I was going. I’d gear up in three coats and long underwear; I’d pack up my day’s worth of text and proofs and press releases. I’d scrabble over snow, lightly beveled by nocturnal wind. In the underpass outside the Vladimirsky Island metro stop, I’d trip over the vendors stacking their tables with DVDs and porn and souvenir thimbles. Waiting for the metro, I’d watch the damp-looking dogs and their own
ers, eyes blanked by ketamine. Sometimes it would still be dark out when I reached the outside of Aleksandr’s apartment building, and sometimes I’d wait, staring at the sky, admiring the clean brutality of the stars. Sometimes I thought about Jonathan. Sometimes I thought about my father. Sometimes I thought about Aleksandr’s death threats and the ways in which he was living the answer to my father’s questions. Most often I thought about myself: how grateful I was to have a few moments longer of wakefulness, and a task that merited those moments.
A few days before Boris and Viktor were to travel to Moscow, the apartment held a meeting to discuss the latest political outrages. One of Aleksandr’s rivals, an oppositional candidate who espoused a slightly more nationalistic brand of contrarianism than Aleksandr favored, had lately disappeared. His staff had not known where he was. His wife had not known where he was. He’d emerged after a week, wearing enormous black sunglasses and hanging on the arms of his bodyguards, and had immediately held a defensive press conference: “What?” he’d said. “Can’t a man get away for a week? Doesn’t a man deserve a little vacation, a little privacy?” His wife promptly left him. The rumor was he’d been taken to Kiev by the FSB, given psychotropic drugs until he spilled any bits of dirt or strategy, then brought back in an anonymous black car, retching, lolling his head, without any memory of what had happened. Then there was the human rights lawyer who, just that week, had been gunned down in the middle of a Moscow street. He’d been trying to prosecute the alleged rape of a Chechen woman by a Russian soldier. He died in the street in broad daylight, and afterward nobody had seen anything. Then there was the story of one of the country’s richest oligarchs—a man who’d gotten rich on oil but who’d fallen into the government’s disfavor when he’d gotten a bit too mouthy about rampant national corruption. He was said to be next in line for arrest, and as a response, he’d bought Nicholas II’s entire collection of Fabergé eggs on the international market so that they could once more belong to Russia. “For my homeland,” he’d said mistily into the camera.
“Things are going well in this country,” said Boris. There was a silence. I drew a border around my notes.
“So,” said Aleksandr. “You boys are excited about Moscow, I trust? You’ll be taking the car.”
“Right,” said Viktor.
“And the credit card.”
“Obviously.”
“And staying at the Moskovsko, of course. Stay away from the Gostinitsa Rossiya; they’ll try to poison you with breakfast.”
“Yes,” said Viktor, “of course.”
An amused expression was unfolding across Aleksandr’s face, as though he’d played a hilarious trick on all of us that we were about to discover. He nodded at me. “And Irina will, of course, be going with you.”
“What?” I said.
“What?” Boris said. He uncapped his pen, and for a moment I was afraid he was going to stab somebody with it.
“You’ll take her with you.”
Viktor smirked and Boris gaped.
“Really?” said Viktor. “Does she speak Russian?”
“Does she speak at all?”
“Nyet,” I said, to be funny.
“She can take notes for you.”
“We can take notes for ourselves,” said Viktor. “We are functionally literate now, have you noticed?”
“You two are clunky, and you’re twelve,” said Aleksandr. “It’s good to have an innocuous-looking woman with you—excuse me, Irina. It will make people comfortable. The soldier will talk to you more.”
“No,” said Boris. “I don’t think so, no.”
Aleksandr looked at me when he answered. “Yes,” he said firmly. “Yes.” There was a string of tension between Aleksandr and the two boys. Viktor’s neck tensed. Boris opened and released a fist. They were, it seemed, on the brink of mutiny.
But then Nina appeared in the doorway, head cocked to one side, red hair pulled back into a forbidding bun. “My mushroom,” she said. “The vegetables are ready.”
And with that Aleksandr was gone, and Viktor and Boris were abandoned—their mouths open, their eyes rolling back in their heads as far as they would go.
For the trip, Aleksandr loaned us a sleek black limousine the size of a boat. The seats were in a circle, so Viktor and Boris and I were forced to look at one another—or out the windows—the whole way. I opted mostly for the windows. We were meeting the soldier at a club, and Aleksandr had asked Nina to loan me a suitable garment for the excursion. What she’d given me was gauzy and orange and far too small; it stretched unbecomingly whenever I reached out my arms, so I kept them firmly at my sides. It was also too light for the weather, and I skimmed my thighs against the leather seats to keep them warm. Inside the car were bottles of high-end water, extracted from mysterious Siberian springs, and green bulbs of champagne. I felt alternately as though I were on my way to a wedding or a funeral. Viktor and Boris started to tell jokes somewhere around Novgorod Oblast.
“So Stalin comes to Putin in a dream,” said Viktor. “He says, ‘Putin, in order to maintain your power, you must do two things: paint the Kremlin green and kill all of your political enemies.’ Putin looks at him and says, ‘Why green?’ ”
“I’ve heard that one,” said Boris.
“You’ve heard them all, I suppose,” said Viktor.
“I think your mother told it to me in bed.”
The interviews that Viktor and Boris had collected so far had been wispy, insubstantial things—compelling for their human interest, but far from ironclad in their evidence. The interviewees told stories that had the haunting familiarity of myths, but in the end there was nothing terribly solid to be gained from them. We watched the interviews in the limousine’s DVD player as we drove. The first interview was with a skittish female university student who wore harsh glasses over her delicate features and kept pulling her skirt down over her knees. She had heard two men talking under her window on the night before the first bombing—a low, flat voice insisting that it be placed here, not there. There had been a sound of scraping, and at first she’d taken it for an animal of some kind, but then there was more talk, the congested sound of a heavy man breathing, the retch of a curse.
Was that all? Boris asked from behind the camera. You could hear the disappointment in his voice.
The young woman blinked and adjusted her glasses. Yes, she said. That was all.
In the explosion, she’d lost her mother and her little brother, and it wasn’t for a few weeks—until the ringing in her ears had dulled and the meat-colored burns on her thighs had started to heal—that she’d remembered the men and remembered that their accent had not been Chechen.
The next interview was with an enormously fat woman whose eldest son had overheard something at a bar on the night before the attack. “Going to be a big day tomorrow?” someone had said, and then somebody else had laughed a little too cruelly. The woman’s son had told her this while he was in bed, trying to recover from the crushing of his spinal column, which he never did. He’d been a gymnast. When he learned he’d be paraplegic for life, he’d wrestled himself into a homemade noose, in a final feat of athleticism, and hanged himself.
She stared down the camera as she talked about it. The camera zoomed in on her. Tears sprouted in the edges of her eyes, but they didn’t spill over onto her cheeks. It was an affecting moment, emotionally. But her story didn’t mean much once you’d thought about it for thirty seconds.
The final interview was with an older man who was spritely, almost elfin. When the camera zoomed in on him, he resembled nothing more than a half-starved arctic fox. He talked about something he’d seen during the attacks: in the melee, amid the running and screaming and the tearing off of smoldering clothes, he’d seen a man standing against a tree. He’d thought the man was in some kind of shock, and he’d started over to assist. But when he got closer, he’d seen that the man was smoking a cigarette and that his lips were twisted into an expression that could be interpreted as a smile. Our o
lder man had turned away and gone to help a woman who lay flattened underneath a piece of cement window ledge.
Later, he told the camera, he’d thought about the man standing under the tree. He’d been there during the explosion, though it took the journalists thirty minutes to arrive, and it took the police nearly an hour. He’d worn a dark coat, and the most striking thing about him was his indifference.
The image of the man dissolved into blue, and Viktor turned off the DVD player. “It’s not very convincing, is it?” he said.
“It’s moving,” I said. “It’s heartrending, that’s for sure.”
“That’s not worth much. We don’t need to rend any more hearts.”
“It’s convincing if you’re looking to be convinced.”
“That’s the mark of a weak argument.”
We passed villages with damp-looking wooden houses, and I could almost feel the chill dripping from their ceilings, the drafts coming through the blocky walls. There were a few snatches of the romantic East, what you’d imagine if you were the kind to imagine this sort of thing: the spires of Orthodox churches spiking out of wintry mists, a sense of foreignness that stemmed not only from a dislocation of place but also, somehow, of time. There was a feeling of traveling not back or away but out—out on some kind of a Z axis, into a fairy-tale time that never, in fact, was real. My face must have reflected a certain dreaminess, because I caught Boris looking at me with an expression I recognized as contempt. “You think this is kind of romantic, don’t you?”
“What?”
“You do. I can tell. You think you are having a little adventure. Well, let me tell you something. This isn’t romantic, okay? And it’s not an adventure. This is severed heads in alleyways. I don’t know why you’re here, but this isn’t study abroad, okay?”
I nodded. I was surprised and a little numb—it was like the moment after a burn or a wounding, before your body has registered its pain. Maybe I would be a help, maybe I would not be, and I could understand why my presence was resented. But I knew I was not on study abroad. This trip, whatever it was for, was not for the photographs or the postcards. It was not for anecdotes to tell on first dates, for souvenirs to show at dinner parties a decade in the future, for wisdom to tell to adult children going off on their own adventures. It wasn’t a matrix or a road map or a source of knowledge that would ever inform my future, as I didn’t seem likely to have one.
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