“My friends,” he said. The teeming crowd ruffled in appreciation at the thrill of such familiar address. “We have no chance of winning.” Miraculously, the crowd cheered.
I squinted through the wintry mist, the heaving people, the multicolored flags popping like firing guns. I compared this man to the man I’d watched with my father all those years ago. This Bezetov was sturdy around the middle and durable, whereas he’d been thin in that match, cracking his knobby knuckles. But there were the same hooded eyelids, the fleshy nose that was the shape of a rejected potato. The mouth, which looked too lazy and inarticulate for the rigors of the game.
“There is nothing to be gained by pretending we have a chance of winning,” he said. “To do so would be a lie. We are not running to win.” The crowd cheered more loudly—the red-cheeked, pale-browed young women with those tremendously angled bone structures, the fuzzy-faced men who must have been aging, relatively minor dissidents. On the horizon were reams of police, stern and barrel-chested and not meant to be missed, even though Bezetov surely had a permit for this event.
“We are running to lose,” said Bezetov. “And in the losing, we are running to be noticed. We are running to be blocked. We are running to be opposed.” The crowd was growing louder; Bezetov’s voice was growing hoarser.
“We are running to be suppressed,” he shouted. “We are running to be systematically ignored, legally erased. We are running to be assassinated.” The crowd erupted again. “We are running so that when we are … suppressed, ignored, killed, the world will take notice. We are running so that there might be a record. We are running so that there might be a memory.”
The crowd shouted and waved their flags. A woman behind me issued a coloratura shriek that made me wince. The crowd had a surface-level patina of triumph, but there was a suggestion of submerged mania, too, as though they were just about to produce pitchforks and storm the Bastille. Next to me, a child jumped up and down in one spot. A man careened a woman around, both of them shouting nonsense. A young man stood alone, shivering and smiling so hard that I thought he would break into pieces and go skittering across the square. I pulled out a notebook and pretended to be absorbed in it. I was registering for the first time that I was deeply uncomfortable with outpourings of genuine political emotion.
At the edge of the crowd, near the podium, stood a woman who was watching Aleksandr and looking bored. She was thin and light and her efficacious manner gave her the air of a business envelope. She looked too indifferent to be in charge but too efficient not to be involved. She had red hair. She was Nina. I crept in her direction—getting one toe smashed by a surprisingly heavy child, getting one breast groped by an old man who looked at the sky when I turned around. When I reached the woman, she looked at everything around me—the shearing sun, the hard-packed snow, the clumps of young men hooting and hurling chips of ice—before I could get her attention.
“Excuse me,” I said, waving my hand.
“Yes?” she said. She looked surprised, as though she actually hadn’t seen me standing there.
“My name is Irina Ellison,” I said. “I was wondering if I could get a meeting with Mr. Bezetov.”
She looked me up and down with unapologetic frankness, as if she were assessing me for physical fitness and finding me wanting. “And who are you, Irina Ellison?”
“Nobody,” I said eagerly. Nina’s gaze grew cloudy. “I’m an American lecturer,” I amended. “At a university.”
She remained silent. Tiny furrows appeared next to her mouth. She looked as if she was sucking very hard on something bitter. “Is that all?”
“That’s all.” I didn’t know exactly what she meant, but I knew that—absolutely—was all. “Can I get a meeting, do you think?”
“Probably not. He’s very busy.”
Nina was turning away from me, her attention drawn by the backfiring of a motorcycle in the square. I should have proposed some research, I realized, some feigned academic pretext for this pursuit. Maybe there would have been some tolerance for that.
“Please,” I said. “My father and Mr. Bezetov were correspondents.”
“Then have your father arrange a meeting.”
“He’s dead now,” I said. “My father.” In English, I always say “passed away,” as a courtesy to whomever I’m talking with. It’s not because I believe that “passed away” is the right term—away to where? one wonders, passed to what? It’s because “dead” feels too confrontational, too vulgar. But in Russian I didn’t know any other word.
Nina cocked her head toward me, but I couldn’t tell where she was looking. “I’m sorry,” she said. If the edge in her voice was relenting, I couldn’t hear it. “But Aleksandr has corresponded with a lot of different people.”
She looked behind her at an enormous man with sunglasses who was standing a few feet away. He gave a slight nod. I had the feeling that I was on the verge of being escorted away.
“If you could just ask him,” I said. “I came a long way.”
She inclined her head once more, and abruptly I could see myself in her vision: red-nosed, with messy hair and a bewildered aspect, speaking the kind of American-accented Russian that is alternately viewed as comic, tragic, or an automatic indicator of stupidity.
“Who’s your customer?” she said finally.
“My customer?” This had been Nikolai’s question, too, and I wondered if some translational mismatch kept producing this problem.
The woman pressed her lips together as though dealing with the faked idiocy of an unwilling student. “Whom do you work for?”
“Nobody anymore.”
“Anymore?”
“I had a job at a university,” I said, although for a moment I couldn’t remember if that was true. “This was a while ago now.”
“I see,” she said, looking at me with an expression of incomprehension. “So you’re a tourist, then?”
“Sort of,” I said. “Yes.”
She stared at me hard, then shrugged. “Perhaps it is possible,” she said. “He has Wednesday off. He might have fifteen minutes for you. You will not be alone, of course.”
“Of course,” I said, although I couldn’t quite sort out in that moment what this meant.
“Come to this address Wednesday morning, and we will see. Okay? You’ll have to wait. I’m not promising anything.” She slipped me a business card, from which I promptly sustained a paper cut.
“Okay,” I said. “I can wait.” These days, that was my expert activity, my major accomplishment. I was a champion, grade-A, world-class waiter, unchallenged, unrivaled. I was confident in my waiting abilities.
“Fine.” She sniffed. “You are an odd young woman.”
Something about this—the pronouncement of judgment issued by a quasi-hostile European—made me miss Lars so much that I almost started to cry. I rarely cry—finding it an activity I can consider and then reject engaging in, typically for lack of energy—but there are occasional seizures of emotion that grab me at strange moments: in parking lots, in supermarkets, elicited by old couples picking out fruit or little children grabbing at a mother’s dress. The woman looked alarmed.
“I know,” I said. “Thank you for your help.”
She sniffed and turned away, for which I was grateful, because the vista before me—the roiling crowds with their tiny flags and their indecipherable shouts and their enormous gall—was starting to smear, and I didn’t want anybody watching me as I tried to make my way through.
I took the long way home—across the embankment, past the cannon at the Peter and Paul Fortress, the sphinx’s humped crown a misshapen shadow in the distance, before heading across Dvortsovvy Proezd to my island. My mind streaked with war and revolution. I thought of the assault on Nicholas II—the murderous clawing at the palace doors, the shots sailing through the sternums of the men, the women crumpling and crying in their taffeta. I thought of Stalin’s purges—the shivering red-faced intellectuals, the ones who wept, the ones who spat at their captors. I thought of the lines of Jews waiting for their exit visas in the eighties, turning around to look at the bleak landscape that once was their home; I thought of Yeltsin on a tank, screaming down a military coup; I thought of the school siege, the terrorism, the brinkmanship, the bluffs, of the last decade. And then I thought of Aleksandr’s rally, the way a thousand heads turned if he pointed and another thousand shouted if he spoke.