Vladimir had spotted one of the benches that still stood amongst the greenhouses – or the commercial farm, as Sheremetev now understood them to be. Normally, he kept Vladimir walking on their morning outings, since the ex-president spent enough time sitting the rest of the day. But today he felt so demoralised that he didn’t care. It was a dereliction of his professional duty, but when they reached the bench, and Vladimir said that he wanted to stop, he let him sit.
Sheremetev stood beside him. Still muttering to himself, Vladimir hardly seemed aware of him. Sheremetev hesitated a moment longer, then sat.
Inside the greenhouse in front of them, silhouettes of labourers worked at the plants. Sheremetev glanced at Vladimir. The ex-president sat, arms folded, his gaze somewhere in the middle distance.
Sheremetev wondered if Vladimir’s hallucinations and imaginings were getting worse. Living with him day to day, it was hard to tell, as it is hard to tell if someone’s skin colour or weight is changing because of an illness when you’re constantly with them – much easier to tell if you see them six months apart, and then the change hits you like a bolt. He could remember once, as Karinka became really ill, coming across a picture of her that had been taken a year earlier, and suddenly realising how much she had deteriorated. It was a shock. Only a year?
He glanced at Vladimir again. The old man lived decades in the past. Sheremetev doubted that he recognised anyone at all in the dacha now, while only six months ago he had still been able to come up with a name from time to time. He tried to imagine what it must be like, to live surrounded entirely by people you took to be strangers. The idea was terrifying. But Vladimir at least felt a familiarity with him, Sheremetev was certain, and often mistook the other people who served him in the dacha for long-past friends – and enemies – so perhaps the world in which he was living, even if utterly distorted, was not as cold and alien as he imagined. True, it was fantasy, a memory confection that existed only in Vladimir’s head, but Vladimir no longer had any insight into that fact, so as far as he was concerned, it was real. In a sense, thought Sheremetev, it was as real as the world in which he or anyone else lived.
Goroviev appeared out of the greenhouse, pushing a long, flat barrow laden with seedlings. The gardener stopped when he saw them. He left the barrow and came over.
‘Good morning, Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ he said politely, as he always did.
Vladimir glanced at him and then looked away again.
‘Vladimir Vladimirovich is somewhat preoccupied this morning,’ explained Sheremetev.
Goroviev smiled. ‘Indeed? Affairs of state, no doubt. You have quite an injury to your face, Nikolai Ilyich.’
‘Just an accident,’ said Sheremetev. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’
‘I hope it heals quickly.’
‘Thank you.’
Sheremetev didn’t know what to make of Goroviev now. He had formed an impression of him as a good, gentle soul, and yet it turned out that he was taking his cut, just like everyone else.
The gardener continued to stand there.
‘I’m afraid Vladimir Vladimirovich isn’t in a great mood for conversation this morning,’ said Sheremetev eventually.
‘Nikolai Ilyich… may I sit?’
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
Sheremetev hesitated for a moment, then moved up along the bench, managing to preserve a sliver of space between himself and Vladimir. The gardener sat beside him.
‘I wanted…’ began Goroviev in a low voice, and then he paused, glancing at Vladimir, who was mumbling again. ‘I wanted to say how sorry I was to hear about your nephew.’
Sheremetev looked at him in surprise.
‘Everyone knows what’s happened. I read the blog, Nikolai Ilyich. It had been taken down, of course, by the time I found out about it, but there are ways to find things. Nothing ever really disappears from the internet, does it? It was a bold thing to write, I’ll say that much.’
‘And now they’re punishing him.’
‘Yes.’ The gardener sat silently for a moment. ‘Nikolai Ilyich… I suppose people have told you about me?’
‘Told me?’
‘About my past.’
‘No.’
The gardener looked at him knowingly.
‘Well, people say there was something,’ confessed Sheremetev, ‘but I don’t know more than that, and why should I want to? What may have happened isn’t any of my business, Arkady Maksimovich.’
Goroviev smiled. ‘I’m sure whatever you’re imagining I did is worse than the reality.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Shall I tell you?’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘When I was young, after I left university, I was a journalist. Things were different back then, of course. Your patient over there and his cronies hadn’t yet taken control of all the newspapers and television stations. Foolish as we were, we thought Russia had changed, become like every other civilised nation, and that this was the way it would be forever. We were wrong, of course. Some of us stuck our necks out too far. Some stuck them out so far they lost their heads.’
‘You?’ said Sheremetev. ‘Is that what happened?’
‘No. I mean, really – lost their heads, Nikolai Ilyich. Me, I lost my job and a few years of my life in prison. What does that amount to, by comparison? Some of us died. There was Anna Stepanovna, of course. Everyone remembers her, but there were others, plenty of others. In those days, to kill a journalist was like a sport. When I look back on it now, I realise that I was lucky to have got out alive.’
‘So you became a gardener?’
‘Not immediately. Things happened, but one way or another… the ins and outs don’t matter. The thing is, there’s something very peaceful and true about gardening, Nikolai Ilyich. Things live, things grow, things die. If you give them the right conditions, they thrive, if you give them the wrong ones, they wither. If you allow the weeds to grow, they’ll choke off everything, if you cut them back, there’s room for others. Isn’t that the truth of life? What other truths are there, after all?’
Vladimir murmured something. Goroviev listened. Then the ex-president was silent again.
‘I’d love to know what he’s thinking,’ said the gardener quietly. ‘I’ve always wondered what went on in his head. He was such a liar, to Russia, to the world. You wonder, a man who tells such lies, for so long, to so many people, in the end, does he even know the truth himself?’
Sheremetev glanced at Goroviev in astonishment, amazed to hear such things coming out of his mouth. And with Vladimir sitting only a metre away! The gardener was gazing across him at the old man, but instead of condemnation in Goroviev’s face, Sheremetev saw only curiosity, as if he really was pondering the question.
‘What did you write about when you were a journalist?’ asked Sheremetev, trying to change the subject.
Goroviev looked back at him. ‘All sorts of things. But the really big thing, the thing that did for me, was when he went after Trikovsky.’
‘Trikovsky!’ muttered Vladimir.
‘He was one of the oligarchs,’ explained the gardener to Sheremetev. ‘Look, Trikovsky wasn’t perfect, I’ll be the first to admit it. To become one of the oligarchs meant by definition that you had committed economic crimes. And personally, he was somewhat of an egomaniac. But I do think, by the time your patient here went after him, he had developed a kind of democratic vision, maybe some kind of personal conversion, and… who knows? Maybe, he could have made a difference. In any case, they had no right to do what they did to him. He wasn’t a saint, but he wasn’t the devil, either.’