Then they all left, and then new ones came. Once I overheard one of them asking the night manager about me. “The woman,” he said. “The older woman who’s been here the whole time. Who is she?”
I think he said “older woman.” He might have said “old woman.” And who could blame him? Who could say that I had not earned the title?
“Oh, her,” said the night manager. “We don’t know. She lives here.”
It was startling to hear, in a way, although of course I did live there—as much as I could be said to live anywhere, anymore.
At first, walking home from Aleksandr’s late at night had bothered me—rare was the night when I didn’t encounter a leering drunk or an aggressive panhandler or a person in clear need of hospitalization for one reason or another. I was a target for all kinds of harassment—I was visibly female, visibly foreign (especially at the beginning), and I walked around unaccompanied at all hours of the day and night. But at some point in the winter, the walk stopped alarming me. Maybe it was that something about me subtly changed—maybe something in my bearing started looking more comfortable, more aggressive, less afraid. Maybe it was that the cold made me believe, on any given night, that I was more at risk from the weather than from anything else. Or maybe it was that I started to feel—more acutely than I had felt before—that it didn’t matter what happened to me, and this indifference offered a quasi-ironic protection against any real trouble. Whatever the reason, on all my walks, on all the nights, nobody ever truly scared me until Nikolai found me again.
It was early evening in late March, the time of year when you feel absurdly grateful that the sky has started staying pallid into the late afternoon. It’s a time of counting the smallest of blessings, which is never something I’ve excelled at. But that day I was, perhaps, trying—I’d left Aleksandr’s apartment early and taken a long, lingering walk along the river, finally finding myself down by the Hermitage and, hours later, watching the night raising of the bridge. It wasn’t until late that I hopped on the metro, sailed underneath the Neva back to Vasilevsky Island, and picked my chilled way back to my neighborhood. When a man emerged from the shadowy side of one of the buildings on my street, I was almost too tired to jump.
“Irina?”
I felt a twist against my wrist, like the slithering of a dessicated eel. In my throat, an entire life cycle of a scream ran its course.
“Who is it?” I hissed.
He moved, and the synthetic light from the nonstop market caught a snatch of red-raw skin. I remembered.
“Young lady,” said Nikolai. “I believe we have met before.”
“I know you,” I said. I remembered him from the day at the café last fall, before I had properly met Aleksandr. It occurred to me, horribly, that he couldn’t have followed me all the way home—through the labyrinthine metro, along the three million art pieces of the Hermitage—without being noticed. It was worse than that. He had waited for me here.
“That’s a bit presumptuous,” he said. I stared at him and tried to figure out what was going on with his face. It looked like the epidermis had been pulled off, carefully, precisely, perhaps as part of some medical experiment.
“You’re working for Aleksandr Bezetov now,” he said.
“I’m not answering that.”
“I’m not asking.”
I looked away. A hunched old woman passed by us, muttering to herself. I tried to lock eyes with her, but she didn’t look up.
“Look,” said Nikolai. “I don’t know what you’re doing. Maybe the Americans have taken to spying on Bezetov, and if that’s the case, then by all means, carry on.”
I said nothing.
“But lately, I’ve been suspecting otherwise. We’ve been suspecting otherwise. We think you’re just sort of—an independent agent, might be the charitable way to put it? Or a loose cannon? It seems as though you really are just here on your own, for your own inscrutable reasons, as implausible as that still sounds. As such, we have to wonder if we might persuade you to reconsider your approach.”
I said nothing. I couldn’t believe that people talked like this, and I didn’t have any response—nobly indignant or otherwise—that wouldn’t sound canned.
“Not talking? All right,” said Nikolai. “You can buy most people, but I suppose it is true that you can’t buy everyone.”
I tried to move past him then, but he boxed me out with his sizable chest.
“Not yet,” he said. “We’re not done talking.”
That was when I got scared. It occurred to me that if Nikolai thought that what he wanted—whatever he wanted—wasn’t going to be gained through talking, he might try changing his tactics.
“You must think Aleksandr very brave, yes?” said Nikolai. “Living life in the rifle’s gaze? And all for his political ideals. Very poetic, yes? Very courageous? You admire him. And why he grants you this access, I don’t know. Maybe he’s fucking you, though I don’t know why he would. But for whatever reason, here you are. You respect this man. You find his moral judgment impeccable. You’d make sacrifices for him. Undoubtedly, you already have.”
I looked down. It wasn’t true, exactly. I hadn’t made sacrifices, at least not any that I hadn’t already been looking to make.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about Aleksandr. For example, his best friend from the seventies got himself hit by a bus. Did you know that? His best friend and colleague, the man who protected him, guided him through everything in his first days here. The man who got him interested in politics originally. The man who ran that journal originally. You knew that, right? You knew that Aleksandr was just a chess prodigy, right? He barely knew his left from right. He didn’t know what to do. All he did was shuffle these pieces around on a board and pine after this whore he knew from his building. It was pathetic by anyone’s standards. And then his best friend, Ivan, was killed by a night bus. Horrific accident. He was crossing the street carelessly, no doubt; terribly drunk, I shouldn’t wonder. The man was an incorrigible drunk.”
I stared at Nikolai.
“He never told you that, did he?” said Nikolai.
“What is your point.”
“Didn’t you ever find it odd that Aleksandr hasn’t had a similar accident yet? He’s been careless in his own way, nobody would argue.”