His breath was becoming thick with the strain of remaining civil. Sarcasm buckled to the surface of his voice, like the eruption of some long-suppressed subterranean substance. “As it is, in case you’re wondering, I am not run by your CIA. But if I were, they’d be a lot subtler about it than you are being.”
“So who is Nikolai?”
“He’s a well-regarded bureaucrat in our very legitimate government.”
“Oh.” I was getting it. “Okay.”
There was a pause in which Aleksandr resumed typing, and I wondered if our conversation had somehow come to a cryptic end. I tried to remember what I had been doing when Nikolai appeared at the café those weeks ago. Had I been doing something suspicious, something that denoted sinister and illegal activities? I didn’t see how I’d managed it without noticing. I could barely remember any moments of import in the last few weeks—and those that shuffled to the surface, when I groped for them, were small and personal and oddly sentimentaclass="underline" watching a snow flurry blur out the stars through my hostel window, buying pastries from a woman who always gave me an extra bialy “for my children,” walking around the Neva until my skin was raw and my eyes were leaking and my head was filled with a symphony of Russian poetry.
“I don’t understand this,” I said. “I don’t see how I got anybody’s attention. I don’t do anything. All I do is sit around in cafés and read.”
“Yes,” he said. “They don’t quite know what to make of you. But they think you’re a representative of the American government, if an unwitting one.”
“An unwitting one?” I was insulted now.
Aleksandr eyed me, and I could see him registering my half-open coat, my ill-fitting sweater, the gauzy bits of hair that flew away from my head as if they were fleeing political persecution.
“Yes,” he said.
I fingered the seam of my coat and looked down. I felt very tired. There’d been a bone-deep fatigue of late, coming in dark waves that made my eyes feel as if they were orbiting my skull. I didn’t know how to interpret it or how hard I should try to. It wasn’t a physical harbinger of onset—I’d read enough accounts to know—but it seemed a psychological readying, and I was mostly grateful for it.
“All of this,” he said, “creates some further difficulties for me. And for you, I might add. More for you, I would suppose. I have many bigger difficulties already.”
“So do I,” I said, still looking down.
Aleksandr sniffed. “I’m sure you didn’t have any intention of causing trouble.”
“I had no idea.”
“I wholeheartedly believe you did not.” He stared at me. He seemed to be keeping his eyes self-consciously wide and still, which was as good as rolling them. “If not for trouble,” he said, “why are you here?”
A good question, this.
“Do you remember,” I said carefully, “a letter from an American academic in the early eighties?”
He sat back in his chair. “I’ve received a lot of letters in my life.”
“I’m sure,” I said quickly. “I understand that. But it was a pretty odd letter.”
“Odd how?”
“It wasn’t about chess, exactly. The letter was asking you how you proceed when you know you’re losing.”
“When I’m losing?”
“Yes.”
“Am I known primarily for losing?”
I hadn’t expected him to be arrogant. It shouldn’t have been surprising—he was the best chess player of all time. The best hamster trainer of all time probably has an ego, too. But a part of me had been hoping that, upon my request, he would sit up straighter, reach into his coat pocket, and produce a typed manifesto. Here, he might say. I’ve been waiting for you. There is so much here that you need to know.
“No,” I said. “Of course not. It’s just that he knew that in your long career, there had certainly been … moments when you knew you must lose. And he wanted to know how you kept playing.”
“I can’t imagine I responded to such a letter,” he said. “If I got it.”
“You didn’t,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he took off his glasses and pinched the skin between his eyes. “When did he die, your father?”
I looked at him.
“You wouldn’t be here if he weren’t dead, right?” It was a challenging thing to say, I suppose, but he managed to say it kindly.
“He died in February,” I said. “But he’d been sick for a very long time.”
Bezetov nodded. He put his glasses back on. I tried to make myself say something politely admiring about the modern art on the walls, but my gaze faltered on the dark-coated men hulking in the doorway. “I notice you have a lot of security,” I said.
“I do,” he said, waving his arm at them. “They cost me tens of thousands of dollars, and they will probably fail me in the end anyway. I can minimize my risk, but it’s an ultimate futility. It’s only a question of time.”
“I know something about that,” I said. The radiator started to kick up, making spitting sounds and giving the room an overcooked smell. Aleksandr looked out that great picture window, even though there wasn’t much to see: in the late-afternoon dark, there was only the reflection of the gilded orbs of his lamps, the sharp glint of light on his computer, the frightful paleness of my own face.
“You mentioned you saw an old friend of mine,” said Aleksandr. “And which friend was that?”
“Elizabeta Nazarovna. Do you remember her? She lived in your building. She said you might not remember.”
He said nothing and kept looking out the window. I thought I noticed a minor tightening in his neck muscles. Out the window, a cascading wash of headlights filtered through the gloom.
“I remember something about her, I think.” He let the sentence sit, lightly buffered by silence. “And how is she doing now?”
I thought of the murderousness of her coughing, the way her hunched shoulders shook like trees in a cyclone. I thought, too, of the way her voice glinted; how listening to it was like looking down a hall of mirrors.
“She does not seem well.”
“I see.” He waited. I could feel him hoping for me to offer more, but I didn’t know what was expected. “She is alone?”
I thought of the clasp of her hand in mine, the nudity of her thin fingers. I thought of the size of the apartment, how the birdcage seemed to dominate the decor. I realized that there was no bedroom—just the cramped living room, the toy-sized kitchen. She must be sleeping on the couch.
“It seems so.” Then I understood, from the way Aleksandr clenched his jaw and the way he erased his eyes and the way his words seemed to shiver on a tightrope, that he had loved her. And I was struck by the unforgivable stupidity of refusing love. And I was further struck by the violence of my own mistake, and I felt lucky for the limited time I would have to live with it.
“You should see her,” I said. Then I felt presumptuous. “Maybe. If you want to.”
“Maybe. I’m very busy these days.”
“That I see,” I said. I realized that there was an approach I had not tried. “Maybe I could be of help to you?”
He stood, and I was struck again by the reality of his shortness. His authority came from his thick eyebrows and vigorous jaw, the muscled compactness of his shoulders, the tired intelligence of his eyes. He didn’t look like a man who’d spent a lifetime flitting toys across a board.
“You want a job,” he said brusquely.
I coughed. “Not a job. I just want to be of use.”
There was an impatient silence. I stood up, too, because it seemed the thing to do. He looked at me. “You are an academic at home, yes?” he said finally.
“Formerly.”