“You can write in English, yes?”
“Yes.”
“You will not be speaking any more with our friend Nikolai?”
“No.”
“Very well,” he said. “You can help us with the American press. You can send them e-mails. Okay? You can type things up. Okay? Not sexy, not glamorous.”
“I don’t need sexy.”
“Good, then,” he said. “Since they already think you’re causing trouble, you might as well, right? You can come in on Monday. How long will you be expecting to stay in the country?”
I thought about how to answer. “I don’t know yet,” I said. “But probably not that long.”
“All right,” he said, orienting me toward the door. “We’ll use you while we can.” He opened the door for me, and I was confronted again with the smell of gourmet coffee and a beach of white carpeting stretching door-to-door. I held out my hand to Aleksandr. He took it.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome. And Irina?” He was ushering me out. “When you know you’re losing, I am told it is sensible to resign.”
The next week dissolved in much the same way as the others had: in a dreamy, almost drunken suspended animation, impinged upon by the faintest fragments of memory and hallucination. Often I felt clinically numb, and I watched myself with the third-person detachment of a person on heavy painkillers. Occasionally, I felt strangely exhilarated, my head filling with snatches of speech and irrelevant images. Out of nowhere, I remembered the cartoon skunk on the cover of a coloring book from the late seventies; one day at an apple orchard with a boy I loved in middle school; the yellow dog across the street from my childhood day care that had one day mysteriously disappeared. And I marveled over the mind’s ability to record so much information that it would never, ever need.
I wrote more to Jonathan, more unsendable, unreadable, unforgivable letters. I told him I knew these past months were months I’d lost with him. I told him I knew I’d missed dinners and walks and sex and laughter and showers and earnest, whispered discussions and the kind of fights you pick because you think it’s sexy when the other person is a little bit mad at you. But then I told him about the other thing I was missing, the other thing I was making him miss. The first jerk of an elbow or a hand. The spiraling loss of competencies. My brain’s grim retreat across a sealed border. I told him about his mounting resentment, and the way he’d feel guilty for it, and the way it would consume him. It would consume him, I told him, whether he ever believed me about this or not. The living always resent the claims of the dead, especially when the dead are still living. I told him I spoke with authority. I told him I knew I’d made the right decision, even if I would have to know it for the both of us.
Through my window in the mornings came pink light: if I woke up at a certain time, the whole room would be infused with the pink of the Sistine Chapel, the pink of a face brought back from the dead. I’d sit and wait to hear the plucking of harps, the stirring choir, and when I heard nothing, I would roll over and try again to sleep. I was always struck by how unafraid I was of sleep, even though it was the closest approximation.
Strange things were starting to happen with time. The moments started to bunch and buckle; whole hours could disappear into staring fits from which I’d emerge lost and unstrung. Then there would be an agonizing eon distilled into the stirring of a coffee, the turning of a page.
Nights became restless and feverish. I’d skim the edge of sleep, hearing the echoes of sarcastic laughter and the clicking of keys. On the wall, shadows made filaments and lace. I’d wake up muttering, recovering from dreams that followed me around in the day. In them there were more mute memories: my mother and father leaning against a tree, surrounded by leaves, slow-falling and yellow. There were chessboards from Boston, melting into the chessboards of my childhood. I remembered the triumph of my father’s ever conquering queen. I remembered the crack of the skull of my father’s king against the board.
Then, too, I remembered the crack of my father’s arm against the stove, his head against the bathroom tile.
When I went back to Aleksandr’s apartment the following week, Viktor was there. He eyes flitted to me momentarily. Then he went back to shaking his head savagely at what a shorter man was writing in a notebook. “Nashi will kill that,” said Viktor. “They’ll surround us. You need a better layout.”
“Hush,” said the other.
“Look what they did at G8. You’re wasting your fancy pen.”
“Please hush.”
Viktor glanced at me, then nodded to the sitting man. “Assistant,” he mouthed.
I immediately retreated to the foyer and busied myself by looking at the prints. Though I’d been told to come by, I was aware of how lost I looked. I had a flash of myself at fourteen, my first day of ninth grade, wandering the halls in a hopeless quest for the geometry classroom. On the wall, I squinted into an amber-colored Nevsky Prospekt and tried to look engrossed.
A moment later, something changed in the air. Aleksandr was behind me. “You like those?” he said.
“I do,” I said, turning around.
“They were done by a friend of ours. A very rich man. He was in oil. He did printmaking to civilize himself.”
“Is he here?” I said.
“He’s in a penal colony in Siberia for eight years,” said Aleksandr. “He was funding us. But Putin has a sharp sense of how to prioritize. He’s not interested in stopping everybody. Only everybody who he thinks might actually count. This friend of mine, the printmaker, he was very, very rich. He had billions. Do you know how rich you have to be to put a billionaire in jail?”
“Pretty rich,” I said.
“Yes,” said Aleksandr. “Pretty rich. Nobody ever talks about how indecently rich Putin is, but I like to bring it up a lot. Do you how many billionaires we have in Russia?”
“How many?”
“Sixty-one. Sixty-one billionaires, and Putin could put every last one of them in jail if they threatened his business interests. That’s what people don’t understand about him. He’s not an ideologue. He’s just pragmatic. He’s just greedy. He could be liberal or conservative—he doesn’t care. He supports Syria and Iran because tension brings up oil prices. And you let him get away with it.”
“Me?”
“The West. You’re easily impressed by staged democracy. We have something here we call an election, after all. But that doesn’t mean we’re not a police state. And there’s money here now. So the West lets our oligarchs export their questionable assets, and they grant Putin democratic credentials in order to do it. If the U.S. was serious about restraining Putin, they’d start denying visas. The oligarchy can’t afford a new Cold War.”
I looked at him. “What would you do about it as president?”
He waved his hand. “It’s not a campaign the way you’re thinking of it—like, oh, I’d support this and that legislation. I’m not winning. I want to coordinate a broad platform, not promote my own ambitions.”
“That’s a little vague, isn’t it?”
He raised his eyebrows at me, and I knew then, if I hadn’t before, that the way to get him to like me was to push back at him. “Since you asked, then. Extreme caution must be used when assessing the components of the existing mechanism that may still be used in establishing the new state. Otherwise, chaos would ensue.”
I took a breath and plunged forward. “Existing mechanism? That all sounds very prudent.”
“It is prudent.”
“Do your supporters know it’s prudent? Do they know it’s extremely cautious? They don’t seem like the most cautious of people, from an observer’s perspective.”