“So what happened?”
“The nineties were hardest of all on Alyosha’s generation. Everything collapsed just as they were getting on their feet, and the foreign companies only wanted to hire kids right out of university—before they’d been spoiled by our Soviet system. The ones like Alyosha, who were in their thirties and forties when it all fell down—it was discouraging to watch some of them flounder.”
“You’re older,” I said, “and you’ve done all right.”
“I’d do all right anywhere.” And I knew this was true.
It occurred to me that what Valya had inherited from her high-Soviet upbringing might be what my son lacked: a sense of discretion, an instinct for keeping her mouth shut. I decided to risk it and ask if among the people she knew there might be a worker at the FSB archives.
“That little place on Neglinnaya?” Valya said, raising a brow. “What do you need there?”
“I want to find my parents’ dossiers.”
“That’s right—weren’t they ‘enthusiasts’?”
Lenny had clearly briefed her on our family history.
I told her about the trouble I’d run into. “I leave Tuesday morning,” I said.
“You can always ask your son to get them on your behalf, can’t you? Just go to a notary.”
She certainly knew the rules of the place, but it wasn’t the response I was hoping for. I didn’t want to tell her that I still held out hope that Lenny would be out of the country before I was.
“I don’t need to burden him with another task,” I said. “He’s too busy for that sort of thing. He won’t even inform us when he plans to come home for a visit.”
“Uh-hm.”
Perhaps I did protest too much, because Valya said, “Or maybe you don’t want him snooping around what he won’t understand. People didn’t exactly show their best side in those interrogation rooms, did they?”
I smiled.
“Understood,” she said. “Aren’t you worried that I’ll read them?”
“I’d expect nothing less. What honest Russian wouldn’t read someone else’s file?”
“You’re a mean one. Give me your letter; I’ll inquire.”
“I’ll see that you won’t take a loss on it,” I said, gratefully.
For a while we walked in pleasant silence. And soon, with the sun low but the evening still bright, we were back on the road that led to the house. “I like you, Yuliy,” she said, when we passed the sign announcing Alabino, “so I’ll be frank. Lenny told me what you’ve come to talk to him about. It’s none of my business, but I know how these arrangements work. If he leaves, it’ll be the end of him and Katya. I’m not very objective, I know. I don’t want my niece’s heart broken. She’s a good girl.”
“What he decides is up to him,” I said.
“But I know what you’re thinking: Why is he being so stubborn, why doesn’t he take your help?”
I said nothing.
Valya sighed. “I suppose my family thought I was squandering my inheritance too. And now look—my lack of grand ambitions is what saved me.”
“I don’t want him to blame me for his regrets,” I said, and realized it was true.
“Then it’s just yourself you’re worried about.”
“Valya, you’ve been very hospitable to my son. I want him to feel as at home…with his family.”
“People feel at home around those who like them,” she objected.
Maybe as a provocation, or maybe to downplay Lenny as such a prize for her Katya, or maybe because I was curious, I said, “Tell me what you like about him.” (Aside from his American passport, I wanted to add, but did not.)
“I like that, in spite of his best efforts, he’s a decent guy. There’s not enough kindness in our world. Nine years in this country hasn’t ruined him. Now that’s something.”
Decency. Kindness. Things that in our household were taken seriously but not dwelled on as pious notions.
“He was a kind child,” I said, looking ahead to Valya’s driveway. “Sensitive. It used to upset him visibly when another youngster was crying. The teachers had a nickname for him in preschool: ‘the gentleman.’ Maybe, if he’d been different,” I said, “I wouldn’t have warned him about coming to do business here. His mother and I warned him a dozen times.”
“Well, aren’t you smart for warning him,” Valya said. She stopped walking in the road. She looked impatient and exasperated. “Anybody can do that. You’re in this racket too. You warned him—so what! But you didn’t prepare him, did you?”
—
IN MY ROOM, I LAY on the firm bed that was too excellent even for Putin to appreciate. Outside the light had grown dim. I took a few deep, restoring breaths of the pine-scented air. The insects chirped their summer noises. On the writing table, my now charged phone was blinking its green message light.
There was a single message, from Tom.
“It’s me. Don’t want to rain out your dacha plans, but Kablukov is back in the city. Wants to see us tomorrow afternoon at the Sanduny Baths. Can’t imagine what might be on his mind. I’ll see you there at noon.”
Some choice for a board meeting, I thought—the old city banya. All the better to impress us with his prison tattoos. What angle did this old enforcer plan to take now to convince us to rubber-stamp his little kickback scheme?
It meant I would have only tonight with my son, and have to leave in the morning.
I sat and stared for a while at the soft-focus photograph of young Alyosha—the angelic, bright-eyed boy who would evolve into the acrid, afflicted creature downstairs. A nonperson, as he said. It was making me recall a similarly posed photograph of myself that my mother had framed and kept in her room in the communal apartment. The picture had obviously been taken before her arrest. I didn’t know how she’d managed to hold on to it during her years of imprisonment, though to me it had always been an emblem of her tight grip on illusions, signifying her inability to see me for who I had become. For this reason, I kept no enlarged angelic photographs of my own children within view.
All these years I had been certain that someday Lenny would have to return home to his family. What I had not accounted for, and what was suddenly plain to me at this dacha with its drunks and misfits, was that Lenny had a family—if family meant people who accepted you as you were.
—
I HEARD A KNOCKING on the door.
“It opens,” I called.
It was Lenny, hair moist and combed, in a clean shirt rolled to his elbows. He looked about the room uncertainly. “Did you fall asleep or something?” He looked me in the eye and turned his palms out at his sides. “Come on, everyone’s waiting. The shashlik is ready.” His lip was curled into a half-smile, which I took as a signal that, at least for the sake of the shashliks, he was willing to put down his weapons.
“Let’s eat,” I said, putting down mine.