That night it rained an unseasonable rain: mild and muddy, great sheets of water tearing from the sky. I took off my hat and then I took off my coat, and then, when I was halfway down the street of my hostel, I took off my shoes. Maybe I would get hepatitis. Maybe I would get pneumonia. For a moment I saw it as Aleksandr saw it: I saw the beauty, the nutty singular luck, of being alone and unaccounted for and barefoot, somewhere out in the enormous world. It was a blessing, perhaps, of a sort. It was like the free fall of the man with a broken parachute: we can’t know what he sees on the way down, when the sun angles in a certain way over the rolling landscape, and he reaches out to scrape the clouds. We can’t know what he learns in that otherworldly weightlessness.
But then I was in my bed, and I’d frozen myself thoroughly, and my situation seemed less romantic and more pitiful. I turned my face to the wall and folded all of my limbs into my body and tried to sleep. It was almost Christmas, I realized. Somewhere in the month behind me, I had turned thirty-one.
After that, Aleksandr and I were friends of a sort. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that there was a charge between us—an energy that was neither romantic nor sexual but was somehow more urgent than bland affection. We knew where the other person was standing in a room. We watched to see how the other person was taking certain information, certain jokes. We trusted each other all of a sudden, with our death threats and our diagnoses.
Of course, really, it was nothing more than this: both of us were marked for dead in different ways. And both of us had such big egos that it had never occurred to us, really, that anyone else had to die. And meeting somebody else who did was, in some ways, a revelation.
Whether this new understanding between us led to my having a greater role in the making of the film, I don’t know, though I would suspect so. My one and only credential was native English, though it was true that Aleksandr had adopted advisers based on less. Boris and Viktor, it seemed, had been plucked from a crowd of similar young men only because of some hardscrabble energy that Aleksandr thought he detected in them. For a man with so many people trying to kill him, Aleksandr was erratic in choosing his confidants—and I wondered about that, too. I wondered if that wasn’t his way of tempting fate or trying to deny it. It seemed, though, that he had not made any missteps yet.
The film Alternative Russia was producing was to be an investigation of the spate of bombings that had struck a few Russian cities in the fall of 1999. I remembered these events only vaguely from reality. They’d happened while I was writing my dissertation, and I had the faintest impression of having watched some of the coverage while pulling all-nighters. In America, they were the kind of news story that was covered only on specialty channels or in the pages of foreign affairs magazines. There was some vague tsking from newscasters with shiny hair. They stumbled over the cities’ names and arranged their faces into expressions that registered the public’s ambient, confused disapproval of bombing, generally, before moving on to stories about dead white children and dogs saving other dogs.
Viktor and Boris, whom I was beginning to think of as Aleksandr’s henchmen, were editing the footage for production. I was helping to fix the syntactical mistakes of the voice-over script. For days on end, we engaged in grueling, repetitive viewing of a string of gruesome images: the jagged maw of a building, smoldering red and black; a rivulet of tattered people, all looking assaulted and surprised; the steaming ruins of a highway. The film made the case that the bombings had been ordered—or at least tacitly endorsed—by Putin, in order to scare everybody into voting for him and acquiescing to his incursion into Chechnya. The film’s argument hinged primarily on two facts. First, the government had issued a statement expressing its extreme and bitter regret at the attacks in Buynaksk, two days before Buynaksk was attacked. Second, it was initially reported by the government that an explosive called hexogen, or RDX, was used in the bombings. Hexogen, according to the Russian government, was produced only at one heavily guarded military facility in Perm—an unlikely target for crazed Chechens, as Boris pointed out. After the media made note of the incredible hexogen coincidence, the government retracted its initial account.
Those first few weeks at Aleksandr’s, I began to feel more alive. I’d wake up in the mornings, the room smelling thickly of frost, and it was such an unexpected relief each day to know where I was going. I’d gear up in three coats and long underwear; I’d pack up my day’s worth of text and proofs and press releases. I’d scrabble over snow, lightly beveled by nocturnal wind. In the underpass outside the Vladimirsky Island metro stop, I’d trip over the vendors stacking their tables with DVDs and porn and souvenir thimbles. Waiting for the metro, I’d watch the damp-looking dogs and their owners, eyes blanked by ketamine. Sometimes it would still be dark out when I reached the outside of Aleksandr’s apartment building, and sometimes I’d wait, staring at the sky, admiring the clean brutality of the stars. Sometimes I thought about Jonathan. Sometimes I thought about my father. Sometimes I thought about Aleksandr’s death threats and the ways in which he was living the answer to my father’s questions. Most often I thought about myself: how grateful I was to have a few moments longer of wakefulness, and a task that merited those moments.
A few days before Boris and Viktor were to travel to Moscow, the apartment held a meeting to discuss the latest political outrages. One of Aleksandr’s rivals, an oppositional candidate who espoused a slightly more nationalistic brand of contrarianism than Aleksandr favored, had lately disappeared. His staff had not known where he was. His wife had not known where he was. He’d emerged after a week, wearing enormous black sunglasses and hanging on the arms of his bodyguards, and had immediately held a defensive press conference: “What?” he’d said. “Can’t a man get away for a week? Doesn’t a man deserve a little vacation, a little privacy?” His wife promptly left him. The rumor was he’d been taken to Kiev by the FSB, given psychotropic drugs until he spilled any bits of dirt or strategy, then brought back in an anonymous black car, retching, lolling his head, without any memory of what had happened. Then there was the human rights lawyer who, just that week, had been gunned down in the middle of a Moscow street. He’d been trying to prosecute the alleged rape of a Chechen woman by a Russian soldier. He died in the street in broad daylight, and afterward nobody had seen anything. Then there was the story of one of the country’s richest oligarchs—a man who’d gotten rich on oil but who’d fallen into the government’s disfavor when he’d gotten a bit too mouthy about rampant national corruption. He was said to be next in line for arrest, and as a response, he’d bought Nicholas II’s entire collection of Fabergé eggs on the international market so that they could once more belong to Russia. “For my homeland,” he’d said mistily into the camera.
“Things are going well in this country,” said Boris. There was a silence. I drew a border around my notes.
“So,” said Aleksandr. “You boys are excited about Moscow, I trust? You’ll be taking the car.”
“Right,” said Viktor.
“And the credit card.”
“Obviously.”
“And staying at the Moskovsko, of course. Stay away from the Gostinitsa Rossiya; they’ll try to poison you with breakfast.”
“Yes,” said Viktor, “of course.”
An amused expression was unfolding across Aleksandr’s face, as though he’d played a hilarious trick on all of us that we were about to discover. He nodded at me. “And Irina will, of course, be going with you.”