I nodded.
“Omsk is in Siberia. It’s the worst place in the world. Practically the gulag. That’s why we contacted you guys in the first place. Ivan was familiar with your university because he attended a conference with someone from there, and we thought that if we could get a cooperation agreement in place, none of us would be relocated. We were the last three to be hired, and need some tangible results to show for ourselves. I mean, beyond our research. But then the icon went missing and since all three of us were in the room the last time it was seen, it pretty much guaranteed that one or all of us would be shipped off. We had to avoid that at all costs.”
“Relocated? But aren’t you a secret agent? Didn’t you threaten to send me to the gulag? And you got our visas extended?”
He grinned.
“Irina’s brother works in the visa office. All it took to get your visas extended was a bottle of vodka. And when it comes to threats . . .”
He came closer and looked down at me.
“You are a very irritating person. You laugh all the time, and you talk all the time, and you smile all the time. But it’s all just an act. You’re really sitting in a corner yelling jokes into the darkness. I don’t know why. Maybe you’re trying to distract the darkness. Maybe you’re trying to distract yourself.”
He ran his hand over my hair.
“Wisdom is better than folly, the way the light is better than the darkness.”
I cried. Like I’d been crying for many months. The way I’d been crying since I was twelve and I didn’t want to go home from school because I was afraid of what awaited me.
“You are a sparrow,” he said. “You use up your energy from one moment to the next. On folly. On fear. On people who don’t mean anything. What are you looking for?”
I cried even harder, but at the same time I began to feel irritated. He didn’t even know me, for Pete’s sake. And if I was going to be compared to a bird, it certainly wasn’t going to be a sparrow!
Until my irritation was replaced by a memory. I didn’t know where it came from. I hadn’t even known it was in there. But suddenly it rose up out of the darkness and into the light.
I was standing alone in the little store where I used to work on the weekends. Suddenly a sparrow flew in the open door. I didn’t really have time to react, but I remember that I was scared it wouldn’t get out. That it would fly into the window and hit its head. That it would attack and peck out my eyeballs. But it just swooped silently and elegantly above me through the room before it went back out, through the open door it had come in.
No one else saw it, and afterward I wondered if it might have been a dream. And I had forgotten it. Until now.
Pretty Putin looked into my eyes, abruptly put his arms around my waist, and pulled me to him. Soft lips met my own, and for a second there was nothing else. Just this kiss, which ensnared me, while the snowflakes danced around us. As if we were in a snow globe.
And then it was all over.
33
After a mechanical kiss at the airport, Bj?rnar and I spent the next week packing, moving, and cleaning out the old house. We took possession of the new house, but it didn’t really feel genuine. And once we were done transforming the old one into an empty, alien building, we stood motionless in what used to be our living room. There were a few things left on the floor that we didn’t have any boxes left for or that we didn’t want anymore—a lamp, a cutting board, a few pictures, some clothes hangers.
We had hardly said a word throughout the whole process, and we didn’t say anything now, either. Just looked around. At a loss, as if wondering where we really belonged.
The awareness that I was responsible for forcing us out of this house and into a new one where we had no bearings also sat between us. And even though it felt like I had worked through something in Russia, it all reverted when I returned home. The house still hadn’t sold. The iron fist still squeezed inside my chest. And I was probably still in danger of being transferred to the preschool-teacher education program, our own local version of Omsk.
Plus Bj?rnar seemed to increasingly regard me more like an annoying lab partner than a life partner. It was like he was Bobby Simone and I was Andy Sipowicz in NYPD Blue. Before they became good friends. Or after Sipowicz became an unpleasant alcoholic again. And before Simone found out that Sipowicz had been making out with Russians.
My first day back on the job there was a departmental meeting. I ran into Ingvill on my way down to the lecture hall. She was wearing a fluttering flannel cardigan, and had gone back to wearing her hair in pigtails. It was impossible to know if she planned to say anything to me, and I didn’t know if I should say anything, either.
“Hi,” I finally said.
“Whore,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Whore. You’re a W-H-O-R-E.”
“What’s wrong with you? Did you come down with Tourette’s? I know you’re trying to get me transferred to the preschool-teacher education program and I hate to tell you this, but mindfuck doesn’t mean what you think it does. It means messing around with people’s heads. It doesn’t have anything to do with sex, OK?”
I took a step closer and stared hard into her dull eyes with a look I hope resembled the secret-agent look Pretty Putin had given me.
And I won. She backed down and scurried off down the hallway. I slowly followed and found myself a seat way in the back so that I could sneak out just as soon as we had received our due recognition for having secured this gilt-edged cooperation agreement for the university.