We followed. Down some stairs and up some stairs and through doors and narrow and wide hallways and past groups of students and employees and old women who looked like they’d just found themselves a bench for the day. Ivan gave us a sort of tour, frantically opening doors to seemingly random rooms, his behavior not unlike that of the secretaries.
“Here,” he said as he opened the door of something that looked like a library.
“The library,” I said, nodding in recognition. “Wonderful.”
He scoffed and waved us on.
Eventually I started having a hard time making informed-sounding comments.
“Ah,” I said stupidly, “microphones.”
In the end we found ourselves in Ivan’s office, where he picked up a phone and started screaming into it.
“Is everything all right?” I asked when he hung up.
“That was my secretary,” Ivan complained, irritated. “She’s stuck in traffic on the highway, typical woman. I’ll chew her out later.”
“Why is it typical of a woman to be stuck in traffic?” I asked.
“I’m sure you know,” Ingvill said.
She’d sidled in and now stood behind Ivan, rubbing his shoulders. I tried to catch Peter’s eye so that we could exchange knowing glances, but he was just sitting there staring at his own knees. He did perk up, though, when some other people appeared. First in the door was a muscular man with short blond hair and light-blue eyes, wearing a turtleneck wool sweater and short dress pants. At the sight of him Ivan jumped up and started to bow, but changed his mind halfway through and pulled out a chair. Behind the muscleman came a young woman, who sat down in the corner with a notepad.
The latter was what caught Peter’s attention, although his low blood sugar was making everything tough for him. He tried to greet the newly arrived goddess, but she brushed him off, so instead he extended his hand to the man with the blue eyes, who took it with a slight bow, but without introducing himself to any of us.
I decided to call him Pretty Putin.
“Well,” said Ivan, “now you have seen the possibilities for cooperation.”
Peter and I exchanged a puzzled glance.
“Do you mean the meeting rooms?” I asked.
He gestured as if he were a spokesmodel.
“Yes,” Ingvill responded. “It looks great. What a wonderful place. I’d love to spend some time here.”
“But what are we supposed to use the rooms for?” I asked. “The ones you showed us, I mean.”
Everyone laughed long and hard at this question, but no one answered it. Instead Pretty Putin pulled out some small bags of chocolates and cookies and passed one to each of us.
“Present,” he said.
“Thank you very much,” I said as Peter ravaged his bag and inhaled his cookies.
“Good,” he muttered to himself.
It was starting to get hot in the overcrowded room, and I could feel my armpits sweating. Besides, Pretty Putin was making me nervous, sitting there staring at us with those pale-blue eyes of his. I wondered what his academic specialty was and was about to ask him when Irina arrived.
“Hi,” she said, nodding seriously and squeezing into the room.
“Hello,” said Peter, standing up and creating a shower of cookie crumbs before elbowing me in the head in his eagerness to make it over to Irina and kiss her hand.
“You were enchanting last night,” I heard him tell her.
“Thank you,” she said, and turned to Ivan. “The dean is waiting.”
Ivan leapt up and headed out the door with Ingvill, Peter, and me following. Pretty Putin, the woman taking notes, Irina, and a custodian-like guy who had just shown up presumably remained behind in the office.
We hurried past ferns, up the stairs, and squeezed through narrow hallways and past the old women who were still sitting idly on a bench. Ivan was moving so fast that Ingvill couldn’t keep up, and I could hear her panting, trailing a few yards behind us up the stairs. When we rounded the last corner, I was sure we’d lost her, but whether she’d put a GPS tracker on Ivan or was equipped with an unusually good sense of direction, she managed to turn up almost in unison with us at the overcrowded antechamber to the dean’s office, where the three secretaries were making a big show of our being way, way, way too late.
The dean’s office was dark green with big, gleaming, heavily polished furniture. The dean welcomed us. He was just as big and well polished, wearing a blue suit and a light-green shirt that matched the walls impeccably. He had lips the same color as the rest of his face, eyelashes, and hair. He also had no neck and looked like he could have killed everyone in the room with his bare hands. Without saying a word, he gestured lazily that we could sit down at the meeting table, where the three secretaries sat like stenographers, each with a notepad.
I sat down on the front edge of a chair and prepared to say something about how lovely the office was, but didn’t have a chance to open my mouth before Ivan inhaled and then launched into a speech that lasted a good half hour. The whole time he talked he kept watching his own reflection on the table below him. Every once in a while he waved his hand in our direction, which I responded to each time with a smile and a nod.
Ivan’s monotone mumbling settled like a membrane over the room. The shiny, polished desk reflected the sun and little motes of dust were suspended, motionless, in the light. The dean fell asleep after about ten minutes and ultimately his head lolled backward and he was snoring openly, while the three secretaries kept taking notes with such vigor that I almost suspected they were doing something else. Sleep tingled in my brain, and I glanced over at my two fellow travelers. Ingvill sat staring fixedly at Ivan, and Peter was slowly swaying back and forth looking like he was going into insulin shock.