“Who bought you that pen, goluboi?” said Boris. “I’ve never seen such an affectation.”
“You’re just jealous of my literacy.”
Nina had thought he was crazy for taking in Viktor and Boris so readily. He often talked about how they’d kicked the energy of the outfit up a notch, and how he’d often thought that even if they were FSB, it might have been a fair trade. Aleksandr understood better—now that he was older than Ivan would ever be—how desperate Ivan must have been for a confidant in Nikolai, how greedy he’d been for reassurance. Aleksandr made Viktor and Boris work together because he knew they would fight; after having watched Nikolai’s slavish devotion to Ivan, Aleksandr believed in the importance of a certain standing hostility between co-workers. They were also young—too young to carry the weight of having behaved wrongly during Soviet times—and they annoyed everyone else with their entitled idealism, their freedom from a history of crushing moral calculations. But then, as Aleksandr often remarked, Alternative Russia needed a few people who hadn’t been ethically compromised. Among them were those who’d publicly sold out and those who quietly pretended they never had (himself among them); there were those who’d once believed and had officially come around; there were those who would always, always do whatever was most pragmatic, and who (today) found something practical in a contrarian stance. Then there were the types like Misha—Misha, who had gone ultranationalist in his old age, and who did nothing to discourage Right Russia’s more racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic edges, and who occasionally showed up at Aleksandr’s rallies to shout disruptive things and wave implausible signs.
“You seem to be taking your time there. Are you struggling with the spelling?” said Boris. The video game issued cheerful synthesizer sounds.
“Real men, you will find, can last longer than thirty seconds at their activities.”
Viktor kicked Boris’s chair leg and went back to drafting the itinerary for Moscow, where the two would be heading in a week. They’d already been to Volgodonsk and Buynaksk, and in Moscow they’d be interviewing an ex-soldier who was making money in ways that Aleksandr had agreed not to scrutinize on camera. The interviews were to compose the final and most important third of the film—following an analysis of Putin’s political gain from the attacks and a delineation of the discrepancies in the press reports—and Aleksandr badly envied their going. Aleksandr couldn’t go anywhere anymore.
Viktor and Boris went off to draft questions and follow-up questions, and the afternoon was swept quickly away. Vlad came in with a toothless death threat; one of the assistants came in with a speaking invitation at Yale University. At four o’clock sharp, just as Aleksandr was starting to lose energy, he was brought a perfect, tiny espresso that gave him the will to go on. Then the door opened and in walked Nina, a few steps ahead of the strange, startled-looking American. “Your visitor,” she said, and clicked out of the room.
“One moment,” said Aleksandr.
The American took off her hat, which made her hair stand straight up. “Zdryastvuytye,” she said poorly, which made Aleksandr wince.
“Please,” said Aleksandr. “I’ve been speaking Russian long enough that this hurts me.”
Later, he wouldn’t be sure what had made him hire her, exactly. It wasn’t pity, although he couldn’t help but feel an inexplicable lurch of empathy for her; it wasn’t that she was smart (although she was) or that she was beautiful (because she wasn’t). It was, he finally decided, the way she’d asked about Elizabeta, and the way she seemed to stumble her way into understanding something profound about him while he sat there and watched. He rationalized that it was a good quality in an employee: an ability to infer, to piece together a narrative, to take imaginative leaps into the psychology of others. And he had no doubt that she could competently fix the press releases (although Viktor, who’d studied at Oxford, could do just as well). But really, deep down, he hadn’t hired her for her fluent English. He hadn’t hired her to type or proofread or copyedit. He’d hired her to sit around and keep him company in his only undiscovered secret.
In the evening—once the army of typers and talkers had left, and Aleksandr had eaten his dinner of vegetables and high-end fish, and the sky out the living-room window had turned the color of a mostly healed bruise—Nina clacked against the oak floors and started up some tea. Aleksandr often came across Nina’s array of multicolored teas in the cupboards—strange tinctures beyond the realm of his understanding, usually involving obscure Latin American tubers—and they were the only evidence in the kitchen, he often thought, that Nina was a carbon-based life-form, requiring consumption for survival.
She waved a malodorous tea bag at his face. “Do you want some of this?” she said, although he had never once accepted her offer.
“No, thank you,” said Aleksandr. “What’s this one do?”
“It’s for digestion.”
“What do you have to digest? You don’t eat.”
“I eat plenty,” said Nina tiredly. “How was your meeting with the strange American?”
“It was fine.”
“Oh?”
“I hired her.”
“You what?”
“I hired her,” he said. “I’m going to coopt her, you know? It makes sense.”
Nina’s water started to boil, and she poured it over her tea leaves. A bitter smell flushed up, acrid and assaulting, and Aleksandr stepped away. “You’re going to pay her?” said Nina.
“She says she doesn’t need money. I’ll give her something nominally.”
“That’s very odd.” Nina took a sip of her tea. “What if she’s spying on you?”
Aleksandr had considered this. But after thirty years of paranoia—of seeing spies in corners, and ghosts in shadows, and murder in public transportation, and conspiracy in terrorism—he felt sure that she was not.
“What if you’re spying on me?” he said, and tugged at Nina’s hair.
“Grib, stop,” she said. “I just blow-dried it.”
That night—again, and he hoped it didn’t suggest a trend—Aleksandr couldn’t sleep. In bed, with Nina silent beside him, he tried to keep his legs from thrashing. He took deep breaths, but they caught somewhere behind his uvula, stirring little tides of anxiety, eddying over deep pools of energy. He wanted to go to Moscow. He wanted to run a marathon. He wanted, he realized, to get out of the apartment.
For a time, even in recent years, Aleksandr still occasionally went walking. But like American heads of state who insist on taking exercise outside, he was always trailed by a small army of his black-suited security staff. It was tiresome for him, and boring for them, and nothing in the way of freedom or reflection could be achieved. So in the last few years he’d mostly stopped. His universe had become this apartment—tastefully decorated (that was all Nina) and carefully managed, his toast and tea ready for him at five-fifteen in the morning, his afternoon espresso steaming hot at four, his laptop blinking an aquatic blue in the dark, whirling him into contact with the universe. Living in this apartment was like living in a museum, he sometimes thought, everything so immaculately clean, the objects chosen and placed with the care of a curator. Each room had a different unobtrusively pleasant smell—lemon in the kitchen, lavender in the bedroom, some sort of oceanic wind that made him sneeze in the bathroom. He walked the apartment end to end some nights, and when he put his foot down in that forgiving white carpeting, he could smell the rawness of Sakhalin dirt. In his sublime, epic, multilayered bed, he could feel the lethal cold of his room in the kommunalka.