We took off our coats and left them at the coat check, then waited for Pretty Putin to buy our tickets.
“What would you like to see?” he asked.
“Hmm,” Ingvill said indecisively.
“I’d like to see the Italian Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age,” Peter said. “About suffering they were never wrong / the old Masters . . . Isn’t that how the poem goes?”
Our guide bowed briefly to Peter.
“The old Masters,” Ingvill repeated, moving tentatively to stand beside Pretty Putin.
Then he looked to me, and I could feel his gaze trying to penetrate my skin and bones and all of me. Was this psychosomatic? I focused with all my might on blocking this out and wished I hadn’t used up so much of my strength on panic attacks in the last few months.
“And you?” he asked. “What kind of art are you interested in seeing?”
“The Golden Age.”
He nodded, sizing me up with his Putin eyes, and I swallowed again. In a panic. Because this wasn’t psychosomatic. This was Voight-Kampff, the test they give replicants that measures contractions of the iris and invisible particles emitted by the body, to determine whether the suspect’s response is empathic enough to tell if you’re dealing with a human or not.
Someone informs you that your mother just died. How do you react?
You’re at the Hermitage and are asked what kind of art you want to see. What do you say?
“Rembrandt and Brueghel,” I whispered.
He got a triumphant look in his eye and I wondered what I had revealed. I didn’t have time to think anymore about it, though, because now we were sweeping through the first floor at a whirlwind pace, up the ornate stairs and down three hallways, by niches and crannies, heading for the Golden Age.
I was grateful that Ingvill had laid claim to Pretty Putin. She was obviously a hundred thousand percent fascinated by everything he said, and he guided and gestured while she nodded, smiled, and giggled. At one point she even took his arm, but he wriggled free from her grasp by pointing at a painting.
Meanwhile Peter and I followed along behind, looking around at the paintings more or less at random.
“Why haven’t you said anything about the icon yet?”
“Because I think he’s giving us the Voight-Kampff test.”
“The what test?”
“All you need to do is to act like you care about your fellow humans and say as little as possible.”
“But I do care,” he said, insulted.
“You didn’t exactly give me the impression that you cared when I was the faculty coordinator, did you? Or when you forced me to be the bad cop? You act like you care, but you don’t actually give a hoot!”
“That’s—”
“Don’t act like you have no idea what I’m talking about. We both know that you’re mostly interested in covering your own ass.”
He grinned.
“I could have helped you, you know.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean, you don’t have to be the one who gets reassigned to the preschool-teacher education program.”
I stared him in the eye.
“If not me, then who?”
He surreptitiously nodded his head toward Ingvill, who was still trying to sneak her arm in under Pretty Putin’s.
I closed my eyes and turned my face to the ceiling.
“Fine,” I said. “If you guarantee that I won’t be transferred, I’ll do my best to clear up this icon business.”
We shook hands.
“Alea iacta est,” I said.
“Omnes mundum facimus,” Peter said.
“What does that mean?”
“We all make the world.”
We were standing in front of Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son, and I stared at it blankly. Looking at a father who believed he had lost his child forever. At a son, who finally found himself, in a space where he could raise his arms and stretch them into the air and feel free.
We all make the world.
My eyes filled with tears, until I could no longer see the son hugging his father tightly or the father receiving the son and saying that everything was OK.
Now you know who you are.
Now you have a center.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I told Peter.
He took me by the arm and said, “Remember what’s at stake. You can’t give in.”
I hurried through the grand rooms and down hallways that were so cold the grandmothers guarding the art had to wear coats, shawls, hats, and gloves. I didn’t pay much attention to my surroundings until I reached the bathroom and an intense ammonia smell hit my nose and eyes. Most of the other people in there had come prepared and were holding handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths, but I didn’t have anything, so I threw up into my mouth several times before I was done.
Nor did I realize that the reason for the smell was that the toilet paper couldn’t be thrown into the toilet, so I had to fish it out again using the toilet brush before depositing it in the open bin beside the toilet.
When I finally made it to the sink, there was no soap, but hopefully ice water would knock out the worst of the bacteria. My reflection made me think of the gulag again and how abysmal the toilet facilities there must be. I tried to distract myself with thoughts of unicorns and fields of wildflowers and had almost managed to pull it together by the time I found my group by da Vinci’s Benois Madonna, where they were waiting in line behind a group of schoolchildren who were all trying to preserve the artwork for perpetuity on their cell phones.
“Weird how famous paintings like this are always so small,” Ingvill said.
“You know so many things, Ingvill,” I said, a statement that resulted in her mumbling something that sounded suspiciously like slut.