“Misha, Misha,” she repeated over and over again, sobbing loudly, quite unlike her usual self and seemingly unaware of where she was or of the people around her.
The children had woken up by now and came quietly out of their room. They stood by Lena, spellbound by an anguish they could not understand. Lena finally noticed them, pulled herself together, took a tranquilizer with a glass of water, and began to explain what had happened.
Misha had been away from home for three nights in a row. Lena wasn’t really expecting him back. She had gotten used to his drinking bouts and his absences, and so she went to bed. She had to go to the institute early in the morning. Shortly after midnight, however, Misha suddenly turned up. This was unusual.
This time he came straight in through the door and, just as he was, in his winter coat and dirty shoes, unwashed and stinking, walked into the bedroom and stood over Lena in menacing silence, staring at her in the semidarkness. He seemed out of his mind. His black eyes were shining unnaturally, and there was a silvery gleam on his cheeks. His once handsome face was contorted in a grimace. Lena pulled the covers up and said nothing. She knew from bitter experience of living with an incipient alcoholic that it was pointless to say anything. Despite appearances, you were talking to someone who could not hear. You just had to wait for him to fall asleep.
Misha moved closer to the bed and said, “That’s it…. It’s all your fault… that I drink… and now I am going to kill you.”
Lena heard a note of quiet determination in Misha’s voice that left no room for doubt. She jumped up and rushed around the room. At first, Misha cornered her on the balcony, and she thought she’d had it, but drunks are clumsy and she was able to slip past him, grab some things by the front door, and run out across the snow to the nearest refuge, my block of flats.
After that they got divorced, and although neither was at all maudlin by nature, they would both come to sob in my kitchen and tell me how much they loved each other but how they could never live together again.
I continued to see Misha, although increasingly less often. He would drop by once in a while, mainly to ask for money, because he was continuing to drink and very hard up. He had only the occasional translation to make ends meet.
On his rare sober visits, he told me he was trying to stop drinking and start a new life. He had developed an interest in Orthodox Christianity, was reading religious books, had been baptized, had found a confessor whom he trusted, and was going to confession and communion and finding solace in doing so. He was convinced that redemption was possible. Misha’s outward appearance was not, however, that of someone on the road to salvation. He was in a bad way, his hair greasy and unkempt. He wore a threadbare, obviously secondhand black coat that was much too short for him, and when I asked where he was living, blurted out some nonsense to the effect that nobody understood him and it was difficult to live anywhere when nobody understands you.
Under Yeltsin this was not a particularly unusual or surprising sight. A lot of penniless people were wandering the streets, people who had been well educated, respectable citizens who had lost their jobs and taken to drink when they could find no place for themselves in the new reality. It was precisely on this fertile ground of general dissatisfaction, unemployment, and the laying off of many who had been members of the professions in the Soviet period that Orthodoxy became fashionable, and the failures who had lost their work, their spouses, or their reasons for being ran to the church, although not all of them, certainly, were genuine believers.
Accordingly, Misha was one of many people on that path. He came to see me one time, sober and yet joyful, and invited me to congratulate him. He had become a father the day before; he had a son. We hastened to say how pleased we were: at last his dream had come true. For some reason, however, Misha was not in the seventh heaven we expected.
The boy was named Nikita. A long time before, when Misha was still married to Lena, he had often mused that if he had a son, he would name him Nikita.
“Who is Nikita’s mother?” I asked cautiously.
“A young girl.”
“Do you live with her? Are you married… or going to get married?”
“No. Her parents don’t like me.”
“Then rent a flat and live with your son. That is so important.”
“I haven’t got any money.”
“Start earning some.”
“I don’t want to and I can’t. I just can’t—it’s simply not possible.”
He cut off any further attempts at conversation.
More than a year passed. Yeltsin abdicated power, nominating Putin as his successor. The second Chechen war started. Putin was constantly on television. One moment he was flying a military aircraft, the next issuing instructions in Chechnya. The election, a foregone conclusion, was approaching.
Late one night Lena called. “Do you know what?” she said in a barely recognizable voice, hoarse, like the voice of a singer after a concert. “I have just had a phone call. Misha has killed the woman he was living with. She has left a fourteen-year-old son from her first marriage. The boy was in the flat when it happened. Misha got drunk. Apparently the woman was older than he, felt sorry for him and drank with him so he wouldn’t feel so lonely. Anyway, they were drinking together yesterday when Misha took a knife and said what he said to me: ‘I am going to kill you.’”
Lena burst into tears. “It could have been me,” she said. “Do you remember? You were all trying to persuade me not to get divorced. You said he would sort himself out, that he needed treatment. But he would just have killed me.”
The court was lenient on Misha, especially after the story of his life was related. He was sentenced to four and a half years. Not much for a murder. The court held that he was not mentally ill or suffering from diminished responsibility, despite his alcoholism.
Misha was sent to a labor camp in Mordovia, in the depths of the forests. Six months later, the commandant of the camp came to see Lena in her Moscow flat, where by now she was living with a new husband and the son she had finally had. The commandant was not the brightest of men but evidently had a kind heart. The decision to visit Lena was his own. He considered it his duty, as he was in the capital on business, to find her, despite the fact that she was divorced from Misha, and tell her that “her Michael” (as the commandant described him, to the horror of her new husband) was the best prisoner he had ever met, the most literate and hardest-working person in the camp. The commandant, who evidently had a pedagogical bent, had appointed him to look after the prisoners’ library, and Misha had reorganized it. He was reading a lot himself and working with the other criminals in the role of psychologist. Misha had single-handedly constructed a wooden church inside the camp’s barbed wire and was preparing to become a monk. He was corresponding with a monastery to find guidance on his chosen path. The commandant also informed Lena that he supported Misha’s monastic inclinations, since he could see only good coming from them for his contingent of murderers, rapists, and old convicts. At Misha’s request, he was going to buy a church plate in the Moscow Patriarchate shop and take it back to the camp.
The jailer ended by promising he that would intercede to have Misha’s sentence reduced on the grounds of exemplary conduct.
“Lena, are you not glad?” he asked the divorced wife, noticing that she was practically in tears.
“I am frightened,” she replied.
“There’s no need for that,” Misha’s commandant replied. “He has changed a lot. He isn’t dangerous. He doesn’t drink anymore, and he won’t kill anyone else. At least, I don’t think so.”