And at breakfast the next morning, sitting up in white sheets eating a croissant, smoking a cigarette and with another glass of whiskey in her hand, she murmured softly, “I know the name of the country you won’t name,” she said, “and I also know the name of the city you won’t talk about.” She whispered the words into his ear.
“I think I’m in love with you,” he said. “But I want to know why you have a gun in the little table in the hall.”
“To shoot men who think they are in love with me,” she answered. “And maybe myself as well, but I haven’t made my mind up about that.”
“Don’t tell my father what you know,” he said, “or you probably won’t need to make that decision.”
I close my eyes and run the movie in my head. I open my eyes and write it down. Then, again, I close my eyes.
Here is Vasilisa, the Russian girl. She is striking. One might say she is astonishing. She has long dark hair. Her body is also long, and exceptional; she runs marathons, and is a fine gymnast, specializing in the ribbon element of rhythmic gymnastics. She says that in her youth she came close to the Russian Olympics team. She is twenty-eight years old. Her youth was when she was fifteen. Vasilisa Arsenyeva is her full name. Her region of origin is Siberia and she claims descent from the great explorer Vladimir Arsenyev himself, who wrote many books about the region, including the one that became a Kurosawa film, Dersu Uzala, but this line of descent is not confirmed because Vasilisa, as we will see, is a brilliant liar, accomplished in the arts of deceit. She says she was raised in the heart of the forest, the immense taiga forest that covers much of Siberia, and her family was of the tribe Nanai, whose menfolk worked as hunters, trappers and guides. She was born in the year of the Moscow Summer Olympics and her heroine, as she grew up, was the great gymnast Nelli Kim, half Korean, half Tatar. Sixty-five countries, including the United States, boycotted those Moscow games but in the depths of the forest she was far away from politics, though she did hear about the fall of the Berlin Wall when she was nine years old. She was happy because she had begun to look at a few magazines and wanted to go to America and be adored and send U.S. dollars back to her family at home.
This is what she has done. She has flown the coop. Here she is in America, in New York City and also, now and often, in Florida, and she is much admired, and making money doing the work the beautiful do. Many men desire her but she is not looking for a mere man. She wants a protector. A Tsar.
Here is Vasilisa. She owns a magic doll. When, as a child, an earlier Vasilisa was sent by her wicked stepmother to the house of Baba Yaga, the witch who ate children, who lived in the heart of the heart of the forest, it was the magic doll who helped her escape so that she could begin her search for her Tsar. So the story goes. But there are those who tell it differently, saying that Baba Yaga did eat Vasilisa, gobbled her up the way she gobbled up everyone, and when she did, the ugly old witch acquired all the young girl’s beauty—that she became, outwardly, the spitting image of Vasilisa the Fair, though she remained sharp-toothed Baba Yaga on the inside.
This is Vasilisa in Miami. She is blond now. She is about to meet her Tsar.
In the winter of 2010, a few days before Christmas, the four Golden men, alerted by menacing weather forecasts and accompanied by Fuss and Blather, Nero’s two trusted assistants, and me, flew south from Teterboro Airport aboard what I did not know until Apu told me was known to regular users of such aircraft as a P.J., and so we escaped the great blizzard. In the city we left behind, everyone would soon be complaining about the slowness of the snowplows and there would be allegations of a deliberate slowdown to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s budget cuts. Twenty inches of snow fell in Central Park, thirty-six inches in parts of New Jersey, and even in Miami it was the coldest December ever recorded, but that only meant it was sixty-one degrees, mean temperature, which wasn’t really that cold. The old man had rented a group of apartments in a large mansion on a private island off the tip of Miami Beach, and we were warm enough most of the time. Petya liked the island; its only point of contact with the mainland was a single ferry port and no outsiders were allowed to set foot on the charmed soil unless spoken for by residents. Peacocks, both bird and human, strutted here without fear of being observed by inappropriate eyes. The wealthy exposed their knees and their secrets and nobody ever told. So Petya was able to persuade himself that the island was an enclosed space and his fear of the outdoors retreated growling into the shadows.
—Oh, you don’t know what a P.J. is either? Private Jet, darling. You’re welcome.
Apu—sociable Apu, not my dark-clouded contemporary, D—had invited me to come with them, and “Go,” my mother told me, even though I’d be away from home for the holidays, “enjoy this, why not?” I didn’t then know that I would not be able to welcome the fictional baby Jesus or the actual new year with my parents ever again. I couldn’t have guessed what would happen, but I feel bitter regret.
Apu was in his element, schmoozing with the island’s rich salad of Russian billionaires and seducing their wives into having their portraits painted, preferably scantily clad. I padded along after him like his faithful dog. The billionaires’ wives did not notice my presence. That was fine; invisibility was a condition to which I was accustomed, and which, most of the time, I preferred.