by Shamim Sarif
“That’s the other thing.”
He looks up at her, waiting.
“One of the last things he admitted was that he loved Katya.”
At his core, he understands the full implication of this statement at once, but there is something in his mind which prevents him from acknowledging it. The betrayal so far, all the revelations, have been so spectacular that he almost wills this one to be a mistake.
“He was her best friend,” he says, with exaggerated calm. “He should have loved her.”
She hesitates. “No, I mean he was in love with her.”
He looks at Lauren, sadly, helplessly.
“He’d always loved her, for years. And I think watching you and Katya together, so happy, drove him crazy.”
Alexander is thinking back – there are so many years to cross, so many later memories to push through – to any time when he could ever have had the slightest clue that Misha was in love with Katya. He can recall many vague situations. Words, gestures, glances, smiles, that come to his mind. Misha was always physically demonstrative with both of them, but perhaps Alexander had never wanted to consider the fact that his hugs and friendly teasing of his wife hid a deeper passion. He cannot pick out details – this part of his past is so far away and his memory is simply not good enough – but somehow, all of this revelation about Misha is not quite as surprising as it should be. Just as Katya’s confession of her betrayal had allowed him to feel a certain, parallel reality clicking into place, even as it shocked him.
“Why didn’t he go after her himself?”
“Because she never wanted him. She just wasn’t interested, and he wouldn’t chase any woman. They chased him, apparently.”
Alexander nods his assent.
“She was never interested in anyone except for you, and he hated that. He tried to keep her on track, to push her to marry you just to spy on you, but all the time she was falling more and more in love with you, and turning away from the work he had trained her to do, that she had always wanted to do. After you got married, she refused to do it any more, and he ended up having to blackmail her into it.”
“She told me she had been blackmailed, but I never knew it was him.”
“Yes. He had made her steal papers from you when you first met, and he held that over her. She was so scared she’d lose you that it worked, for a while anyway. But he never counted on her loving you enough to confess everything. It drove him crazy that any man could have this effect on her, especially when it wasn’t him. He resented you horribly by the time you defected. There was something she said to him, in the last moments, he can’t even remember what exactly, something about you, and he felt again how much she adored you, and he says he just felt a blind rage, and it helped him to… to do it.”
Alexander is crying again, silently, except for a slight choking noise. She feels she should stop speaking, but there is one more thing that she hasn’t told him, that she knows must be said.
“Her last words were about you, Uncle Alex. She said ‘I love you, Sasha.’That was the last thing he heard her say.”
Her own eyes are so full that her uncle is a blur to her for a moment. She grips his hand, and feels him shuddering. His tears are falling in round drops onto the bare wood of the table where they sit, heavy and pooled, as though they will never soak away.
After a week, Lauren calls the doctor. During this time, Alexander has been in his bed; he has hardly eaten and hardly spoken. The doctor’s tests, as much as Alexander will allow them, show him to be healthy. Lauren sees the doctor out, and goes back upstairs with some soup. Her uncle is sleeping again, has been sleeping most of the days. She hears him sometimes at night, padding about the house. She sits on the edge of the bed and strokes his head. Then she shakes him gently awake, and offers him the soup.
“Thank you,” he says, and he sits up.
“Why don’t you go and freshen up, and then come downstairs and eat with me?”
“Okay.” He nods, and gets out of the bed. Pleased with herself, she carries the soup downstairs, and hears him running the shower. But when, forty minutes later, he has not joined her, she runs back up again to find that he is back in bed, asleep. He has changed his pyjamas and combed his damp hair, but has not bothered to shave. With a sigh she checks her watch. She will wake him again in an hour and try to get him to eat.
“And Estelle? Where is she through all this?” Lauren asks. She is walking with Melissa towards the car, on their way out to dinner.
“In Concord. Not far. She’s always loved the little inn there, and that’s where she’s been staying.”
“Does your father know?”
“Sure. She’s been calling him now and then to check in.” Melissa gives a wry smile. “She can’t even leave him properly.”
“Are you sure about that? What if she does leave? What if he ends up losing her?”
“That’s the risk he’s always taken, I guess. How long can you treat someone off-handedly and get away with it? Maybe forever.”
“Maybe not,” replies Lauren sharply.
Melissa knows that her father misses her mother, but his routines of living are so defined, and involve Estelle so little, that he can continue practising them with very little disruption. Melissa has been buying for him the type of cold food that needs little preparation – she knows that eventually, when he becomes hungry enough, he will remember to come out to the kitchen and eat it. She has felt a chill, standing there in the deserted kitchen of the silent apartment, her father sequestered in his study, unable to reach out for her mother, or even to say anything about what is occurring to his daughter. During the time she was growing up, her father’s path always struck her as containing an element of nobility – that devotion to his books, to vast study, to the delineating of original thought; the passion that was not circumscribed in any way, even by wife and family. But in the last few days, it has appeared to her as a cold, self-absorbed existence, filled with a kind of ultimate loneliness. Perhaps that is simply her own projection, and something of which he is not even aware, but nevertheless the sense of it lies strongly within her, and she finds that she dislikes it intensely.
Lauren gets into the car.
“Can you do me a favour?” she asks. “Call up Uncle Alex and get him back into working on this deal with you.”
“I hate to push him on that after what he’s been through. The deal will wait.”
Lauren is grateful for this, for she knows Melissa has been working closely with her uncle just before the trip to Moscow and is impatient to complete this sale – but she is also wondering if a reminder of his other life, his working life, would not be a kind of relief to Alexander at this point.
“He’s becoming more and more depressed. I just think it could help. Even a short meeting, here and there.”
“He probably needs more time. But if you want me to, I’ll try.”
“Please,” says Lauren. “He’ll be reluctant at first. You’ll have to be aggressive about it. Pushy, even.”
“Pushy? Moi?” smiles Melissa. Lauren leans over to kiss her.
“I know. Hard to imagine,” she says dryly. “But give it your best shot.”
Alexander has always wondered whether leaving the Soviet Union with that delegation, leaving Katya behind to try and follow him, was the greatest mistake of his life. He cannot be sure, no-one can about such things, because he can never know for certain what the alternative outcome would have been, what would have happened had he stayed. Would they both have been captured and killed, or imprisoned? Would she have been tortured? Would Katya have somehow pulled Misha over to their side and would they have escaped together? The possibilities, likely or unlikely, unfold themselves in his overwrought imagination, forming ever-lengthening, tangled strands. What he does know is that he would have liked to have been there with her, would have felt less helpless, more able to try and protect her from harm. To be in America was not simply to be in a separate country than the Soviet Union; rather it w
as like being in another universe. There could be no contact, no communication, no news, nothing. Just silence, and then smuggled information filtering slowly and unreliably outwards. Such isolation he felt when he learned of her death; not only was she gone, but there was no detail, no body for him to grieve over and nobody to tell him the terrible story of what had happened. Until now.
Over the years he has imagined countless deaths for her. In his mind he has watched her lose her life over and over and over again, in different ways, all of them violent, all of them terrifying. He has been haunted by her last moments, even though he has never known what they were. The most bearable versions of this sickening torture that he has put himself through show her death to be quick. A surprising bullet that she did not know was coming. The idea that she might be aware, caught, tortured – that she would have to wait, knowing what was going to happen to her is intolerable to him, and yet he has forced himself to tolerate it, day after day, year after year. But now he knows. He knows the details of those last, long minutes, and the idea of it, of Misha, and of Katya’s misery and fear is all he dreams of now, and what he thinks of most often when he is awake.
He spends long hours in the night sitting in the dark under the cool gaze of Katya’s portrait. It is a refinement of the agony for him to think about these things while he sees her face right before him, and her eyes looking into his. It makes the pain almost unendurable, but not quite; for in the end, he is able to sit there, enduring it. He talks to her sometimes, always reverting to the Russian language that he has not used for so many years, and after a while he begins to hear her reply to him, and her replies are always kind, and well thought out. It is as if he has trained himself to think and feel as she would, so that he can have some semblance of the dialogue that he has craved for so long. He begs her forgiveness and she accepts his plea, but then he remembers her letter, that last, beautiful letter, and he knows that she does not want his apologies. He knows every word by heart, knows the curve and fall of the letters that her hand wrote; he has traced the lines with his eyes and fingers so many times that he cannot remember ever not knowing the words. There is much in that letter that has made him cry over what she gave up and what she lost – I am so full of hope for our new baby… I live to be with you again… But there is also enough within it to begin to remind him during these dark, silent days and nights that she wrote it for a reason. For him to keep and to live by if she were to fail in her attempt to reach him. It is harder for him to recall and consider these parts: we can tell the truth about our country… I rely on you to live the life we dreamed of.
Has he lived that life well? He tells her, during the nights that pass, of everything he has done with his business. How he has built a career from cooking and food, from the things that he always loved and was good at. How he has set up foundations to help others to do the same thing. That he is as a father to Lauren, and how proud of her he is and how happy. It has been a good, full life, but he is conscious now that he has always avoided Katya’s death and the reasons for it. He has tried to keep everything that happened to her, and everything associated with their old lives at a distance. He has not told the truth. He has not lied, but he has never been prepared to face up to the reality of the world he came from and to speak about it openly and widely. Rather he has kept quietly within him that void where Katya should have been. That this void exists and has always existed is simply the case, as far as he has always known. For forty years he has assumed it to be an unchangeable fact, like the relentless spinning of the earth. But now for the first time, in the light of his wife’s words, he begins to understand that he has not continued the work she was so driven to do, and he begins to consider whether she would be happy to see his heart still sealed off and guilty and unspoken, so many years later.
He is far from ready to return to work. In truth, his business, and its sale mean comparatively little to him at this time, and he tells Melissa this directly and honestly. He cannot imagine a time in the near future when he will feel able to think of it; and so he suggests that she continue working out a deal with Lauren, and to Lauren he repeats the same thing, assuring her that his finance officers and directors will help her.
“What do you think?” Lauren asks Melissa.
“I think, forget about it.”
“You don’t want the company any more?”
“Oh, I want it all right,” Melissa tells her. “But in any negotiation, I will eat you alive. And the directors. You won’t get a good deal.”
Lauren cannot help but smile. “So why not just give me a fair deal? It’s up to you.”
Melissa tries to explain. Her business success up until now has been based on making a series of deals which were weighted in her favour, so that the risk was always lower than usual. Throughout it all she has always prided herself on never taking anyone for a ride. She has always been upfront about the deal she requires, and if the other side accepts it, at least they know what they’re signing. This preamble confuses Lauren somewhat.
“Why would anyone sign a deal that was bad for them?”
“I’m not saying bad, just not great.”
“Whatever. Why would they?”
“Usually desperation. A company might be on the verge of bankruptcy for example, so they need to sell fast. Occasionally it can be ignorance. Someone might not recognise that you’re offering below the odds.”
Melissa watches Lauren’s face. Her reaction is uncertain, but has a definite edge of distaste to it. For that is what I do, Melissa thinks. Something that is distasteful; at least it feels that way to her here and now, with Lauren.
“Anyway,” she continues. “I don’t want to work like that any more. I don’t think it’s wrong, necessarily, but I want to try something new. I think maybe it would be nice to look at a company as a business to build and grow, instead of a stack of pieces that can be dismantled and sold for more than the sum of the parts. And in this case, because you both are insisting on things like the charity stuff, there is really no other way to do it.”
Lauren looks relieved. “Good. Then we can work this thing out, right?”
“No. We can talk about scenarios. Especially how we can keep the philanthropy going, without me losing too much of my margins. Maybe you or Alexander should maintain a stake. I’m not sure. But we’ll talk. And then we’ll wait. When your uncle is ready to do this, or when he appoints someone as good as he is to advise you, then we’ll complete.” Melissa smiles. “I have no intention of giving you a bad deal, Lauren. But this is business, and I don’t ever want you to wonder one day if you really did get the best deal. I don’t want what happens here to get between us personally. I’d rather lose the company.”
It is perhaps the least romantic declaration Lauren has ever heard in her life, but she knows it represents a huge step forward for Melissa, in every way.
“Thank you,” Lauren tells her, and she smiles.
The courtyard feels surprisingly familiar and comforting. He had assumed that the many weeks that he has been away, and the violent emotional storms that he has been through would have made his old offices and the business that he is preparing to sell seem alien and unimportant to him. Alexander pauses and looks up at the glass and steel structures that rise up from the paved slabs, up at the windows that used to be his, the boardroom from which he did so much of his work. A glance at his watch propels him forward, to his meeting with Melissa, and he strides into the building and up to the banks of elevators.
“Glad you could make it,” Melissa says, when he knocks on the open door of the boardroom, and she takes the hand that he holds out, but also leans to kiss him on the cheek.
“It’s good to be back,” he says, without thinking. It is an automatic, unconsidered reply, but he finds to his surprise, that it is suddenly true. The hum of conversations and computers, the relaxed air of the staff – he has missed all this, at least a little, and it is good, after all, to be out of the house and thinking of something else.
&nbs
p; His afternoon passes quickly, for Melissa has piled up an agenda for him that leaves no room for more than a snatched cup of coffee along the way. But the progress they make is good, and to his relief, he comes to the end of the day with the realisation that he has not thought about Katya for much of the time.
“What’s next?” he asks Melissa, as they leave another meeting.
“Nothing. Home time,” she replies.
He smiles. “And tell me, have you ever gone home at five thirty?”
She shrugs. “Not that I can remember, but then I’m hardly your role model.” She walks with him to the exit. “Go on home,” she says. “If you feel like it, I’d love to meet you back here tomorrow. But only if you’re up for it.”
“What sort of time?” he asks, stepping into the glass elevator.
“Since you ask, nine sharp,” she says, with a smile, and the doors close.
He follows the same routine the next day, and the next, and when he leaves for the week on Friday evening, he stops and breathes deeply of the cool courtyard air. There are a lot of people walking purposefully past him, and around him, hurrying home for the weekend. He wonders if any of them see that the fading light has a crispness about it, a patina of life that hints at the coming springtime. He stops under the huge tree that dominates the centre of the paved area, and notes the sticky, ripe buds that are already clinging to its upper branches.
“It looked a lot of different the last time we were here, didn’t it?”
He turns immediately to the bench behind him. Estelle’s eyes hold a mischievous smile, a familiar look that he has tried hard to forget. They look at each other for a long moment. He is collecting himself, trying to repress the unseemly crashing of his heart inside his chest. When at last he takes the few steps towards her, she shifts over on the bench and waits for him to sit down. Now that he is so close to her, she finds she cannot quite look at his eyes. Not just yet.