I paused, trying to think up a good question.
“Is it worth it? Or, to put it another way, should we be—or not be? Am I right? For what is it that makes us bear those evils we have, instead of flying to others that we know not of? The heartache and the thousand natural shocks. That we all endure.”
As I enunciated the final sentence, I made another sweeping gesture to include the custodian and everyone else in the room, but the former merely watched me calmly with his dark eyes, his expression unchanging.
Still, there was no turning back now. So I kept going.
“Omnes mundum facimus,” I said slowly. “We all make the world. For there are ravens out there. They swoop down and ravage the land. But we aren’t ravens! We’re falcons! And when the falcon cannot hear the falconer, we’re all in big trouble. That’s when the indignant desert birds swoop down. That’s when darkness falls. But we are falcons and we will not let darkness fall. We all make the world.”
There was silence. For a long time.
For just as long as I’d spoken. And that was a long time, for a speech that didn’t consist of a single point beyond a few fragments ripped from Hamlet’s soliloquy, Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” and what I remembered from Prince Igor.
In the end the custodian walked over to the secretary who had been simultaneously interpreting my speech and mumbled something into her ear.
“Would you like to say anything else?” she asked me as she continued to jot down everything that was said in her notepad.
“Just that Norway and Russia have never been at war,” I said. “And you can’t say that about very many countries. We’re a team. In a way.”
I put my hand on my heart the same way the dean had done a few days earlier.
“Friendship,” I said loudly.
She translated yet again for the KGB custodian, who rolled his eyes and said three brief words in return.
Silence again.
“Isn’t she going to translate?” Peter whispered to me.
I wanted to say that she didn’t need to.
Because it was obvious what he’d said.
I glanced over at the cage and gulped.
So this was how it ended. No dignity and no hope. I should have known.
I bowed my head and prepared for the sword blow.
But then the silence was broken by applause. And the next moment the custodian was next to the whole useless Norwegian delegation, hugging and kissing Ingvill, Peter, and me, as he let out a long stream of words that the secretary struggled to interpret quickly enough.
She abridged it to, “He says that you have an agreement.”
“An agreement?” I asked, confused.
“A cooperation agreement,” she said with a stiff smile. “Congratulations. This has never happened before.”
“But who do we have a cooperation agreement with?”
She looked at me as if I were an idiot.
“University President Akady Morgarich approves the cooperative agreement between your university and Saint Petersburg State University. For the very first time we will enter a bilateral agreement with a Western university. This is a historic day. A day for friendship. And for happiness.”
“The custodian is also the university president?”
“Shut up,” Pretty Putin whispered into my ear.
“I’m shutting up now,” I said. “Do I need to sign something?”
“I’ll take care of that,” Peter said. “I mean, you’ve been sick. Go on back to the hotel, Ingrid. I’ll handle the rest of this.”
He gently pushed me away and I was too exhausted to protest.
I just said, “Fine,” and walked out into the hallway. Away from the courtroom, away from the custodian who was also the university president, and away from my two so-called teammates.
I stood there out in the hallway, feeling the adrenaline run out of my body and evaporate, to be replaced by . . . nothing.
Not anxiety. Not emptiness. Not numbness. Not depression.
Just nothing.
“I’ll drive you back to the hotel,” offered Pretty Putin, who was suddenly standing beside me. “Today I have a car.”
“All right,” I said.
32
I expected him to just drop me off, but instead he parked the car and came inside with me. Without a word, I headed for the stairs, walked up six flights, bent over, and with difficulty unstuck the icon bundle from the bottom of the sofa.
“Here it is,” I said. “It’s in here. It had some chocolate stains at one point, but I think I got them off. Sorry. We didn’t mean to take it. Peter thought it was a gift.”
“We knew you had it.”
“What will you do now?”
“Plant it in the dean’s office and pretend it was just overlooked somehow. We’ll probably try to blame it on one of the secretaries. He’s constantly replacing them, anyway. It doesn’t matter if they get reassigned.”
“And what will happen to us?”
“You’ll go home and start this cooperative agreement that you inexplicably managed to pull off.”
“I’m not going to be arrested?”
“Arrested?”
“For taking the icon?”
“This?”
“It’s extremely valuable from what I’ve understood.”
He chuckled in a deadpan way.
“The dean’s mistress gave it to him. She fancies herself an artist and painted it for him when they first started dating. She wouldn’t be happy if it went missing, and she is extremely powerful. Extremely powerful. It’s not the dean who decides when the secretaries will be replaced, if you catch my meaning.”
“But I thought . . .”
“Listen. We’re in the middle of a massive institutional restructuring process—course revisions, teaching resource reallocations, possible mergers. We don’t know much about this process, but what we do know, for sure, is that some of us will be relocated to the university in Omsk. Are you familiar with Omsk?”
I shook my head.
“Siberia?”