The Leveling

Mark’s apartment in Baku, eight months earlier…


For the second night in a row, Daria made dinner.

For the first two weeks after arriving at his apartment to convalesce, all she had done was lie on her side in bed, with the window shades drawn and the door closed, agonizing in the semidarkness of his spare bedroom. Most of the food he’d brought to her bedside had gone uneaten. He’d tried to talk to her, to bring her back from the darkness, but his attempts had been clumsy and ineffective.

Yesterday morning, though, after falling in the shower, Daria had seemed to turn a corner.

“I’ve been too useless for too long,” she’d said.

Last night, instead of huddling in the darkness, she’d made an Iranian pomegranate-walnut stew. Tonight, she cooked a small roast chicken, rice and vegetable plov, and dovga yogurt soup. It had taken her most of the day, given her injuries, but she hadn’t complained or accepted help when Mark had offered.

They ate it all slowly, out on the balcony, with the sounds of Baku drifting up from the streets eight stories below them. The rumble of old Russian trucks mingled with the distant thuds of pile drivers pounding foundation supports for new skyscrapers deep into the ground. They drank a bottle of wine with dinner, then started in on another. As darkness fell, obscuring her scars, she grew cheerier, even elated at times.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, after finishing the last of her plov.

“Of?”

Daria got up from the little dinner table and sat down on a bench near the edge of the balcony.

“Of getting a master’s in international affairs.”

Daria already had a law degree from Georgetown but had joined the CIA before taking the bar.

“Oh?”

“I need to think about a career. With a master’s in international affairs, and a JD, and my language skills, I could get a job practicing international law at, like, the UN, or Amnesty International. I need to do something decent with my life.”

“You’d be good at that.” Those weren’t career options that appealed to Mark—he wasn’t much of a do-gooder—but he could see Daria enjoying that kind of work.

“If I don’t I’ll just go back to…”

Daria didn’t finish her sentence, but she didn’t have to—Mark knew what she meant.

She’d been born in Tehran some thirty years ago, as the Islamic revolution was raging. Her Iranian mother had been slaughtered by revolutionaries. Her American father had refused to care for her. Despite being raised in a wealthy Virginia suburb by well-intentioned adoptive parents, her inauspicious start in life, coupled with her own inclinations, had led her to a backstabbing underworld populated by spies and thieves. That underworld was what she didn’t want to go back to.

“I’d have to finish a master’s program in the States or Europe,” said Daria, “but I was thinking of taking some courses here at Western first. It’d be cheaper and the credits should transfer.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Maybe I could take one of your courses.”

Mark got up and sat next to her on the bench. “You wouldn’t learn much.”

She leaned into him. “Easy A, though.”

“Not necessarily. I am, however, receptive to bribes.”




The Glasnost restaurant was popular with retired Kazakh men who liked to sit at the plastic tables covered with plastic tablecloths, sip Derbes beer, and play toguz kumalaki, a popular board game. It was located on a potholed street lined with shops that sold little more than the bare necessities of life, reminding Mark of the neighborhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he’d grown up.

Daria appeared just after he’d started in on a Derbes. She was still wearing her InterContinental uniform, though she’d removed the name tag. Mark had meant to offer a brief explanation of why he was here, but instead he thought back to the last time he’d seen her naked, on his bed, after sex.

He wondered what the state of affairs was between her and Decker. None of his business, he knew. But he still wondered.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Mark pointed to his beer, and the one he’d bought for her. “Thought we could catch up over dinner.”

“I’m assuming you’re here about Deck?”

“Yeah.”

“Follow me. I don’t want to talk here.”

Daria started walking.