“Okay, okay,” said Viktor. “You have a name for us?”
“There is a man out there,” he said. “The lieutenant running Perm. Andrei Simonov. I am sure he knows. But I have no idea how you’ll get him to talk to you. I don’t think you can buy him. I don’t think you can blackmail him. But then you people are charmers. Especially that one.” He pointed at me. “She’s a dream.”
“Enough,” said Viktor.
“You know,” said Gogunov. “I am not a fan of your Bezetov, particularly. I don’t like his face.”
“You’ve mentioned,” I said.
“He’d probably do better with this country than Putin, but that’s not much of a compliment. And I don’t think he’s going to win this election. But there’s this. Even if the town madman kills the dragon, the people will cheer. They will celebrate him. They will make him their king.” He winked at me. “It’s an aphorism. It’s a metaphor. Putin is the dragon, in this case, and Bezetov—”
“I get it.”
“Think about it.”
“I will,” I said.
“I bet you will. You must have gotten here by thinking, yes? Since it wasn’t by sitting around looking pretty, that’s for sure.”
“Enough,” said Viktor, and I looked at him.
“You are free to stay,” Gogunov said. “But I’m going to order up a lap dance now.”
“We’ll go,” said Boris, and we did—retreating down the stairs, underneath the cerulean light of the aquarium, past the box of emaciated women miming fellatio. Silver pixels caught in my coat, and I held on to Viktor’s shoulder to keep from drowning.
Outside, the car was waiting for us. Viktor packed the equipment into the back. We drove away from the club. I turned and looked out the window again as we whirred through the city. As Gogunov had instructed, I thought about what he had said. And all around us, lights wavered like undiscovered civilizations across an ocean, and music pounded out into the street, and drunk girls collapsed silently into the snow.
17
ALEKSANDR
St. Petersburg, 2007
For New Year’s, Nina insisted on a party. She wanted it catered, though Aleksandr had said that the risk was too high; instead, she’d bought everything separately and spent the afternoon watching the servants assemble great plates of appetizers—herring soaking in cream, boiled beef tongue, salmon caviar, salads drowning in mayonnaise, pickled cucumbers to go with the vodka. Vlad stood at the door wearing a suit, pretending to welcome the guests and eyeing them up and down—for forbidden faces, for pocket bulges, for eyelid twitches. He had a list, and he checked their names and IDs against it, and when he’d found the guest’s name—and only then—did he smile and nod at one of the servants to offer a plate of hors d’oeuvres.
Nina stood nodding magnanimously at anyone who entered. She took jackets, then covertly handed them to one of her women attendants. Aleksandr stood off to the side—out of the line of vision of the doorway, out of the line of fire of the doorway—and greeted his guests. Mostly, they were friends and friends of friends and close colleagues, though there were a few other, more distant people, too. Aleksandr ducked into a linen closet and pretended to look for napkins when he saw Misha enter. In recent years, Aleksandr had tried to avoid being in the same room alone with Misha. Over the months, Right Russia had only grown shriller; Misha tolerated ever meaner elements in its ambit, and Aleksandr tried to keep his dealings with them to a minimum. Aleksandr had even asked Vlad to keep the wingnuts away from him so that he wouldn’t have to talk to them socially, though Vlad had said that was really not his job.
At any rate, Aleksandr had to admit that Nina had done well with the party. The lights were low, the tables were decorated with vases of some sort of pale winter flower, and tiny tea candles lined the windowsills. Outside, St. Petersburg was twinkling and delirious, done up in its New Year’s finery, illuminated by the adamantine windows of fifteen thousand fraying mansions. In the corner, Irina stood drinking a glass of white wine and talking to Viktor and Boris, who seemed to be tolerating her presence better since their return from Moscow with the interview. At eleven-thirty, the staff came around with chilled bottles of champagne. Aleksandr rarely drank, and when he did, he almost always drank alone. Alcohol was too easy a target; it was hard to taste something acrid in it, and the early effects of a poisoning could be too easily confused with intoxication. But it was New Year’s, and Aleksandr was feeling a tad reckless—it wasn’t a feeling of celebration, exactly, it was the kind of subdued, bittersweet tenderness that takes you into rooms to look out over your gorgeous nocturnal city, alone. So he took a glass of the champagne and went into the study. Through the window, he could see the glowing onion domes, the angular business offices, the indigo fold of the sky, the splashes of neon light from the clubs. From the living room came the trill of a woman’s laughter; the gruff arpeggio of a man telling a story. Aleksandr liked having these sounds in his apartment, but he also liked walking away from them and into an empty room.
Irina and the boys had come back from Moscow earlier in the week, and he’d listened and felt childishly jealous when they talked about riding through the streets, watching the women, gazing at the capitalistic vigor of the Arbat, even if they couldn’t shop there. They’d encountered some difficulties—hotels that knew who they were wouldn’t accommodate them; restaurants that knew who they were wouldn’t serve them—but they were protected by a veil of some anonymity, and they were stopped only when rumors went running out ahead of them. They could still go to museums mostly unmolested; they could watch the great Muscovite nightlife from a car in the street.
Aleksandr shivered. Out the window, the preemptive fireworks flashed icy silver against blue sky; the starlight skimmed across the river, making it glitter like the eyes of animals in the dark woods.
Sometimes, though he wasn’t proud to admit it, he had to wonder how it would end for him. He hoped—when he hoped for anything—that it would be a shooting or a quick shove out a high window. He mightily feared a poisoning, although a high-end poison—polonium, for example, something that would be impossible to trace back concretely, something that would be impossible to treat (unlike thallium, which was cheaper but could be combated with a dose of Prussian Blue)—was expensive: two or three million dollars in cash for enough to kill a man. So he had economics on his side, at any rate.
Aleksandr was approaching the nation’s average life expectancy for a male, anyway, and sometimes he wondered if it weren’t a little presumptuous, a little elitist, to wish for more time. When he’d traveled across the country, he’d seen entire villages—the detritus of state-sponsored farm cooperatives—that were composed almost entirely of drunks, dying, disabled, the young people all gone to the cities, the barns left unpainted, the vegetables rotting in rows, the old people treating their heart attacks with swigs of fetid homemade hooch. Who was Aleksandr to live when other people lived like this?
When a finger grazed the side of Aleksandr’s shoulder, he just about leaped through the window.
“Don’t be so jumpy,” a voice said.
Aleksandr turned around. Misha’s head was cocked to one side, his shirttails falling out of the back of his suit. He was holding a tumbler of vodka between his fingers, and he was letting it tilt so far to the side that Aleksandr was sure it was going to fall from his hand and stain the carpet.
“Misha. How are you?” Aleksandr offered his hand, although he didn’t like touching Misha. The years had not been kind to him—there was still that persistent sickliness, the sense that the contours of his face refracted the light unnaturally, in defiance of physics.
“How am I?” Misha sneered. He did not take Aleksandr’s hand.
“Yes, Mikhail. It’s a polite question. It’s what polite people ask each other.” Aleksandr wasn’t sure how Misha had gotten invited. Nina must have been looking at an old list.
“Well, if that’s what the polite people are saying. Thank you for teaching the peasant your
ways.”
Aleksandr stared at Misha. He’d had to train himself to look at Misha when was first back from the psikhushka—he’d had to force himself to hold Misha’s gaze and talk straight to his face. Misha had seemed so horrifying then; he’d been a monstrous anti-prophet, and his message was as terrifying as his face. Now he struck Aleksandr as merely reduced. He was no uglier or more paranoid than most people. “What do you want today?” said Aleksandr.
“Why do you assume I want something? Why can’t I just be saying hello to my old friend?”
“We were never friends.”
“I can’t argue with that, I suppose.” Misha ran his hand along Aleksandr’s desk. Trapeziums of artificial light sifted through the picture window and went wheeling across the carpet. In the distance, Aleksandr could hear the blare of premature noisemakers. “I do want something, come to think of it, Aleksandr. Now that you mention it.”
“Yes?”
“You’re doing a movie, I understand.”
“This is not a secret.”
“I want Right Russia included.”
“Included?” Aleksandr laughed a strategic, mirthless laugh. He wondered if anybody ever laughed like this involuntarily.
“Affiliated. I want us affiliated. I think this film sounds like a good idea.”
“I sure appreciate that, Misha.”
“So?”
“Do I have to point out that you’ve done nothing for us?”
“Not for lack of trying. You don’t ask us to participate in your rallies, your little conferences. I know you’re embarrassed of us.” He produced a cigarette from somewhere in his pants pocket and started to light it.
“Could you put that out?”
“You don’t smoke now?”
Aleksandr squirmed. “Nina doesn’t like it.”
“To think! The messiah of the Slavs doesn’t smoke because his scary wife tells him not to!”
“Honestly, Misha.”
Misha squinted at Aleksandr, then took a puff. “In all these years,” he said. “In all your panels, your assemblies, your full-page ads, you’ve offered us nothing. It’s time for some cooperation.”
“Cooperation? Misha, don’t be nonsensical. I need to have some credibility. Right Russia is—you’re not credible, let’s say. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“And you are?”
Aleksandr looked back out the window. All across the city, people were popping open bottles, edging closer to the person they wanted most to kiss at midnight. And here he was, standing with a jaundiced belligerent, slack-jawed and accusatory. Aleksandr closed his eyes. “Misha,” he said, gearing up to sound ludicrous. “It’s not you, you know, I don’t think this about you. But some of your guys are a little unhinged. ‘Russia is for Russians’ and all that?”
“It’s just a slogan.”
“It’s just a slogan? A quarter of the population thinks it’s fascist.”
Misha took another breath of cigarette, and Aleksandr could hear the halting effort of his lungs. “You want to make policies based on the polls? You know what kind of a country we’d have then?”
“It’s a criminally xenophobic philosophy. People get killed for it.”
“You’re accusing us of murder now?”
“Don’t be hysterical. I’m accusing you of stupidity. And bad marketing. I don’t want it near my film.”
Misha sucked at his cigarette contemplatively and arranged his face into an expression of overdone admiration. He looked down at the carpet. He gazed out the window. He offered a low whoosh of appreciation. “You have a lovely apartment. Have I told you that?”
Aleksandr said nothing. There was no right answer.
“Quite different from that old place you were in, right? Funny, isn’t it, Aleksandr? How far you’ve come?”
Aleksandr took a gulp of his champagne.
“Where is it you’re from again? Where your sister still is? Irkutsk, is it?”
“Okha. Sakhalin.”
“Right. That’s right. Sakhalin.” Misha was silent for a moment, tracing the tip of his shoe along the floor. Corpuscles of dirt fell off, and he ground them into the carpet. “I think,” he said finally, “that you owe me this much.”
“Owe you? Owe you what? Owe you how?”
Misha raised his eyebrows. “You will remember, I’m sure, that I know about what happened to Ivan.”
Aleksandr stared. “Know what about what happened to Ivan?”
“I’m surprised you’ve forgotten. I know that you let him die.”
Aleksandr thought of Ivan—his painful thinness, the way he bent against the snow when he walked, the way he believed in his own limitless capacity to outrun and outwit. Aleksandr could look back and see that Ivan had been fragile, although at the time he’d seemed invincible. He was the person who’d seemed able to see the symbols and know what they stood for; he’d seemed to have the capacity to intuit the reality that ran underneath the fictions like subterranean reservoirs beneath a city. But if Ivan had been fragile, Aleksandr had been barely standing upright—he could look back and see how naive, how outrageously vulnerable, he had been. He hadn’t let Ivan die. He’d spent half his life thinking about it, and he was sure. You could let something happen only if you knew it was coming; you could let something happen only if you had any idea how to stop it.
“I didn’t,” said Aleksandr.
“But you did. You must have. They came after him and not you? They left you alone all those years for no reason? It’s not like Nikolai didn’t know where you lived, even before you became their precious national chess baby and went to live in the woods. No, I don’t think so. I think you must have done them a favor. I think you must have made them a compromise. Even before you made all those other compromises. It took me a long time to figure this out, but now I have.” Misha smiled a weirdly good-natured smile. “And so now I think you owe me.”
Aleksandr took a breath. “I don’t know, Misha,” he said. “I do not know. I’ve thought about it a lot. I don’t know why they went for Ivan and not me. Probably because I wasn’t important enough to bother with. I was only distribution. They probably tried, and missed, and figured that the point had been sufficiently made.”
Misha looked at him strangely. “No. I am sure they did not try and miss.”
“Or maybe I was too important,” said Aleksandr. He was starting to hear the pleading tone in his voice. “Maybe my relative fame afforded me some protection. And my game made me a credit to Russia. Everyone said so. Maybe they didn’t want to lose me because of that. Maybe they knew even then they were going to sponsor me. And yes, you’re right, maybe they knew even then that I’d let them. There was no explicit compromise, Misha. There wasn’t. But maybe they thought my death would be noticed.”
“Noticed? Aleksandr, since when do they care what people notice? Maybe now this is your protection—your fame, such as it is. Maybe now they don’t want to try anything too obvious, anything that will cause a stir at Western universities. But then? No, friend. I don’t think that was it, either.”
Aleksandr thought back to the night when Nikolai came barging into his apartment, his eyes carved out and terrified, his hands shaking as if recoiling from the blowback of a gunshot. Aleksandr should have known then. Of course he should have known.
“I don’t know,” said Aleksandr. “I don’t know. I don’t know. It probably should have been me.”
“There we can agree, then.”
They were quiet for a moment. On his darker nights, it was true, Aleksandr had trouble believing that there was anything he’d done—anything—that Ivan wouldn’t have done, and done better, if he’d lived. No matter how famous or powerful or applauded he was, no matter how much the Western press fawned over him, no matter how ugly and crazed Misha got, and no matter how stigmatized his group became, there would always be the fact that Misha knew something that nobody else did. He knew that when they’d come for Ivan, they’d come for the better man.
“
In any case,” said Aleksandr, “this doesn’t change that you can’t be affiliated with the film. I’m sorry, Misha.”
“Yes,” said Misha. He grinned boyishly. “Yes, I imagine you will be.”
Misha left, and when he opened the door, Aleksandr could hear the tidal rise and fall of voices in flirtation, in playful argument. He caught a glimpse of Nina, skeins of her red hair tumbling down her back. Her arm was on the arm of a rebel economist, her head tilted backward in amusement. Misha closed the door behind him.
In the dark, Aleksandr went back to the window and rested his forehead against the cool of the frosted glass. Through the door, he could hear the counting down, the shouts, the pop and fizz of champagne opened and poured. He raised his glass and toasted 2007.
At the end of January, Aleksandr was invited to a book-and-chessboard signing at a university library. “A little small, don’t you think?” Aleksandr had said when he looked at a description of the venue. Nina had raised her eyebrows at him and asked if he wanted to squander an opportunity to lecture to a group of sympathetic young people because the venue was too small. Then she’d rolled her eyes and tapped her fingers on the table, slowly, and he could almost hear her wondering who he thought he was these days, although he had no idea when she’d become the defender of the masses. So he’d gone, and stood at the podium, and watched as security checked IDs at the door and patted everyone down for weaponry. Vlad and the rest of the security stood near the exits, sturdy and still as Greek columns. Once a sluggish line of students had shuffled in—and once Aleksandr felt sure that even though the hall was only half full, no one else was coming—he pulled on his glasses and took out his notes and started to speak.
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