Twenty minutes later, Aleksandr stumbled to the Saigon, where the bartender eyed him skeptically but said nothing. As usual, the café was filled to the rafters with smoke and conspiracy. The man in the wheelchair had positioned himself near the doorway this time; patrons picked their careful way around him and scurried past his dark pronouncements. When Aleksandr walked past, he saw that the man’s hair was flecked sparsely with bits of bread. Nobody asked him to leave. It was an unjust world.
When he saw Aleksandr, the man turned gray with excitement and leaned close, opening the black globe of his mouth. “Leonid Ilyich is here, oh, God, he’s here,” he shrieked, and Aleksandr tried hard not to stumble in surprise. He’d been expecting a whisper, some secret insane confidence, not a shriek, and the man’s shouting voice was unexpectedly shrill. It turned Aleksandr’s heart inside out in the way of ancient, irrational fears—the sight of things that crawl and skitter, the feel of a presence behind your neck.
“What?” said Aleksandr. He tried elbowing past the man, who groped for Aleksandr’s hands and missed. Aleksandr wondered momentarily whether the man could still see.
“Brezhnev. He’s right there.” The man gestured toward the depression in the wall where Ivan and Nikolai were sitting, their smoke unfurling into dust-colored fronds. “He’s here. I promise you that. He’s everywhere.”
Aleksandr disentangled himself from the man’s searching hands, from his long fingers that fluttered through the air as though playing an enormous pipe organ, and scrambled away in revulsion. At their usual table, Nikolai and Ivan were sitting with an enormous stack of newspapers between them. Blue overheard lights caught their vodka and splashed marine onto the table. Nikolai was scratching into an enormous notebook and laughing, his legume face contorting into strange creases. He was wearing a new leather jacket. Aleksandr was not sure he’d ever seen Nikolai laugh.
“That man,” said Nikolai, gesturing to the man in the wheelchair, who still sat shrieking at his invisible audience, “is clinically insane.”
“He’s a prophet, maybe,” said Ivan. “Descended from Rasputin. What say you, Aleksandr? Do you believe that stuff in the east?”
“Please,” said Nikolai. “Give the boy a break. He’s important now, you know.” He stubbed his Iskra into the ashtray. It curled like a giardia against the others.
“In the great Soviet states,” said Ivan, “no man is more important than another. So what’s the story with you, Aleksandr? Aren’t you famous yet? Shouldn’t you be off knocking back shots with Party officials? Getting to know a better class of prostitute?”
“Okay,” said Aleksandr. Fuck Andronov. Fuck, quite possibly, everybody. “I’ll leave, then.”
“Stay, stay,” said Nikolai solicitously. “Ivan, you must be gentler with the boy.”
“You’re getting to be a pretty big deal, yes?” said Ivan blithely, ruffling the newspapers. “We just saw something about you. Nikolai, didn’t we just see something? In Literaturnaya Gazeta, yes? Is that possible, Aleksandr?”
“I don’t know,” said Aleksandr. He hadn’t meant to sound as miserable as he felt. He found himself putting his head on the table, letting his forehead absorb the cool of the wood. He imagined the tree that the wood came from—in a great forest on the Black Sea, maybe, its roots strangled by salt water, its pale green leaves shifting savagely in the wind. Maybe it came from the north. Maybe it was a small tree, demented by the lacerations of tundra gales, standing shriveled and bent against the odds. Aleksandr squinted and saw the bottles above the bar make a smear of watery gemstones.
“Are you drunk?” said Nikolai. He turned to Ivan. “Is he drunk?”
“That would be unprecedented. He’s clearly just lost his mind. Aleksandr, have you perhaps lost your mind?” In Ivan’s voice, Aleksandr noted a certain hapless tenderness, as though Ivan were an awkward father trying to handle a sickly baby. Aleksandr could hear Nikolai’s jowls stirring in curiosity.
“I got expelled from the academy,” Alexandr whispered into the wood. He wanted to keep his face on the tabletop as long as he could. It was possible, he realized with horror, that he was crying.
“I told you,” said Nikolai. He lowered his voice to a solemn baritone rasp. “I told you he was a bit unstable. I told you he didn’t warrant confidences.”
“I’m fine,” said Aleksandr. “I am completely fine.” But his neck felt unbearably heavy, as though filled with sand or guilt. Had he been arrogant? He hadn’t thought so; he’d always been the one with an extended hand left out after his opponent had turned away in an odd swirl of disappointment and derision. But when he tried to think of going back to Okha—to live among his chickens and his sisters, to let Leningrad and chess become the ever fading memory of a dream or hallucination—he couldn’t quite stand it. He had to admit to himself that he’d liked the feeling of winning. He’d liked having something to be humble and gracious about.
“I thought you didn’t like the academy,” said Ivan. “I thought you were bored by it.”
Aleksandr dug his chin harder into the table. Above him, he could hear words mouthed and a head vigorously shaken. Finally, he felt an anonymous hand on his shoulder; from its fleshy coarseness, he figured that it had to be Nikolai’s.
“I didn’t, really,” said Aleksandr. “I was bored.” The wood was cooler now; its surface seemed to provoke small eddies in the air, and he could feel himself falling into a pleasing emptiness. “I just don’t really know what I’m going to do now.”
Another pause—filled with some sort of silent negotiation and punctuated by a guttural grunt from Nikolai—concluded with Ivan saying, “You’ll come and work for us, I suppose.”
Aleksandr’s head filled back up, and he saw his life turn precariously on its axle and round a corner. Sprigs of sweat burst out on his skin, and he gulped hard at the redness consuming his throat. He was afraid to look up.
“Nikolai, honestly,” said Ivan. “Please give this man your vodka.”
Ivan and Nikolai, it turned out, wrote a monthly pamphlet, and they brought Aleksandr over to show it off to him. Ivan’s room was tiny, the floor covered wall-to-wall with imbricate books and papers and bits of trash. In certain corners, Aleksandr caught the faintly arctic smell of mold. A typewriter sat atop a stack of books in the center of the room. Above the television, Brigitte Bardot gazed knowingly out of a poster, her midsection creased from multiple moves. Ivan had been a lecturer at a university before he’d been fired for anti-Soviet agitation—“the dissidents are the only unemployed in the Soviet Union,” he said as he poured Aleksandr a tumbler of kvass. He’d only just moved into this apartment after five years of waiting for a propiska, and he was convinced that it wasn’t bugged yet. Ivan had an enormous number of books, though the quotas meant he had to buy five political tracts for every one Turgenev. They stood in great multicolored stacks, arranged as carefully as tables and chairs. A one-eyed tortoiseshell cat stood among them, assailing them with nuzzles and purrs.
“That’s Natasha,” said Ivan, petting the cat with his toe. “My one true friend in this life.” He set down a plate of shashlik on a stack of old Sovetskaya Kultura and winked at the cat. Nikolai crouched on the carpet and busied himself with the shashlik, and Aleksandr did the same. It was odd to see Nikolai and Ivan outside the café—in broad daylight, squatting, smacking their lips, eating sausage—when he’d only ever known them at the café, haloed by smoke and illegal ideas. Above them, the typewriter loomed. It seemed like the chassis on which the entire apartment was holding itself up.