“Please don’t let me stop you.”
In 2004 came the school siege at Beslan: the children held hostage for days, then killed when the government stormed the school with tanks and thermobaric weapons. A year later, the parents of the dead children went to Moscow to demand their own arrest—they’d voted for Putin, they said, and thus were culpable for the murders of their children.
Though Aleksandr was keen at calculation—at weighing the consequences of rational self-interest—he could never quite understand any of it. What was in it for the state to watch hundreds vomit and die in the elegant Moscow streets, to let sailors write goodbyes on their bodies and choke to death on their own carbon dioxide? There was ineptitude, yes, but it was hard to believe that was alclass="underline" it was a murderous apathy that amounted to sadism. It reminded Aleksandr of how, when the infant mortality rate had grown troubling under Communism, the Party had decided to simply subsidize more births.
Nina came and sat next to Aleksandr on the bed. “It’s sad, Aleksandr. Of course it’s sad. But it’s really none of our business.”
Then came the string of assassinations. There was Anna Politkovskaya from Novaya Gazeta, who’d survived poisoning and Chechnya only to be shot down in the stairwell of her own apartment building.
There was the ex-KGB man in London who’d been poisoned with radioactive sushi by men who had disappeared back into the teeming English mists; a man who’d turned colors people should never turn, who’d lain on his deathbed and pointed an accusatory finger back at the East.
There was a journalist for a Russian business magazine who’d been reporting on Putin’s attempts to illegally sell arms to Syria and Iran by routing them through Belarus. He’d had a son about to enter college and a daughter about to deliver his first grandchild. He’d gone out one day to buy oranges, come home, and thrown himself out his window, according to the official report.
“Are you seeing this, Nina? Are you reading this stuff?”
Nina rolled her eyes and flopped over in bed. But Aleksandr was thinking.
“Stop,” she said. “I can hear you thinking.”
Over the years, Aleksandr had come to view Putin as erratic and somewhat unpredictable. He wasn’t puritanical; he did not strike out every chord of dissent. He was tolerant, almost magnanimous, when it came to the papers. The token one, Novaya Gazeta, was especially mouthy—even after Anna Politkovskaya’s death—though Aleksandr fully believed that Putin allowed it in order to earn himself a faint glaze of democratic credibility. He liked being able to bring the paper to Brussels and say: See? See what I let them write about me? But Putin did crack down on what counted, and what counted was television. Aleksandr had once spoken at a conference alongside a deeply unpopular economist, and when he watched it on television, the unfortunate man had been digitally removed from existence—there’d been his hands, his ghostly shadow, but his head, his inconvenient words, were gone. And it hadn’t all been puerile hijinks. One time Aleksandr awoke to a peal of shattering glass and the sound of a sickening thud against the floor. Upon investigation, he found a plastic bag containing the oozing conch of a human ear.
After that, Nina told him to shut down Alternative Russia. Or at least, for the love of God, to move the headquarters out of the apartment.
“I know you’re doing this because of your involvement with the Party back in the day,” she said. She cupped his face in her hands and leaned toward him. He could see the flickering pulse in her neck. “And I want you to know you don’t have anything to feel guilty for.”
“Don’t I?”
“It was the times. It was the times. That’s all over now.”
“Is it?”
“You’ve made a nice life for us, Aleksandr.”
“Nice for whom?”
She leaned back. “Oh, please. Nice for both of us. You don’t like the apartment? You don’t like your gadgets?”
“They’re your gadgets.”
“You are a wealthy man. You are wealthy and you are influential and you are sought after.”
“By the FSB, maybe.”
“And if you’re not happy with your life, you have the means to go ahead and change it.” He could feel her radiating misery.
“That’s exactly what I’m proposing.”
“Are you having a midlife crisis?”
“Stop psychoanalyzing.”
“Is all this because you lost to the computer?”
At this he’d punched the wall, though not hard enough to do damage to either the wall or his hand.
Nina didn’t flinch. “If you break your hand, you know, the media is going to notice.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m not the only one who psychoanalyzes.”
“Shut the fuck up, please.” Nina didn’t stop filing her nails. He looked at her, and he marveled at the cognitive dissonance of knowing someone as intimately as he knew Nina—of knowing how her toes looked when her toenails grew too long (though, in fairness, Nina almost never let this happen), and how her coughs echoed in the shower when she was sick, and how her face looked when she was pale and haggard from sleeping—and really, really, not knowing her at all. He thought of times at parties or dinners or out in the world somewhere, moments when he’d glimpse her out of the corner of his eye, caught in light or shadow, and think what a mystery she was—this person who lived in the core of that coiled three pounds of neurons, whatever it was, whoever she was, inscrutable, unreachable, no less mysterious just because Aleksandr didn’t believe in the extraphysical.
“Clearly, something is bothering you lately.”
“Ninotchka,” he said. “You are criminally insane, criminally indifferent, if you are not bothered.”
“I don’t like Ninotchka, you know. It’s patronizing.”
One thing about Nina: she could still surprise him. Then again, he could still surprise himself, even after all the years of knowing himself (and maybe no one else; maybe no one else, ever).
Three weeks later, he announced his intention to seek the presidency of the Russian Federation.
14
IRINA
St. Petersburg, December 2006
On Saturday I took the metro downtown. A terse, tinny voice coming out of the loudspeakers admonished everyone to stay away from Gostiny Dvor, so I knew I was going in the right direction. Aboveground, I encountered a surprising mass: thousands, I think, maybe ten thousand, standing in the square underneath pale yellow buildings that looked like frosted cakes. Red flags snapped against the mass of brown coats, all dense and woolly and dark, like an army of seething otters. A smattering of different flags with their stark Cyrillic—there were ultranationalists, it seemed, radical lefties, Trotskyites. There were the true Communists, sick with their nostalgia. Somebody handed me a flag, and I waggled it mildly. Somewhere behind me, I overheard a low smattering of American English, but when I turned to look—my eyes overflowing, no doubt, with idiot eagerness at finding a fellow traveler—it stopped, and its origins remained mysterious. I looked around but did not see Viktor anywhere.
On a box, in the center of the crowd, was Aleksandr Bezetov. I’d seen pictures of him, and he looked much the same. So I don’t know why I was surprised. Maybe a part of me imagined he’d have some sort of an aura—the otherworldly signifier of a person with an inexplicable connection to the future or the dead. Instead, he looked even more ordinary than average; he was shorter than I thought he’d be—I thought of his overreliance on head shots—and his nose was an unbecoming red. His breath came in frost-colored puffs as he spoke.