She’s silent for a while. Then, “Did you pick Manhattan for its name?”
“Of course,” I say. “But it was wrong. Too sweet. A cherry in it. Not right.”
Again she sips. Faraway eyes. Marveling over the taste, perhaps.
“You’re a million times more beautiful than Taylor Swift.”
She frowns. “Were we there to kill somebody?”
“Just scare,” I say. “We followed them to their room and did a push-in.”
“We hurt them?”
I pause, but I won’t lie to her. “There were four others in the room we didn’t expect.”
“What happened?”
“We handled them.”
“Six against two?”
“Numbers like that were never a problem for us.” I keep my eyes on the fire as she sips again. “Remember that colorful cube I gave you at the picnic yesterday?”
She says nothing, but I can see she remembers. She itched to finish it. She probably still does.
I swirl the liquid in the glass. “We used to love the Rubik’s Cube. We each had one. We’d do them side by side, up on the Borodinsky Bridge. We’d race. We came to see scenarios as Rubik’s Cubes—planes of action moving this way and that. Our thinking was very aligned in this way. We could hold even a large group when we went to it as a Rubik’s Cube. Five men and a woman in a hotel room. That was nothing to us.”
“Did we hurt them?”
“Just one. But not so badly.”
She hurt one, actually. A man. She dislocated his shoulder while I held the others at gunpoint. That was always a bit of icing on the Tanechka cake, to have her do the hurting, delivering both pain and emasculation. “They were very bad people,” I say. “Worse than us. They needed a message from our superiors.”
The story troubles her. She drinks some more.
“Just a message,” I say.
“Great.”
“Afterwards we walked through the square, window-shopping, pretending to be these newlyweds still.”
“You can’t keep me chained up.”
“Maybe I like you chained up.”
She looks at me wistfully.
I take the volume of Vartov from the table. “I understand you have requested the Bible to read.”
She takes another lemon wedge.
“Too bad.” I open to “Cages.” “This poem, you loved it so much.”
She shakes her head. “This will not work.”
“You clung to this poem. You’d think of it when terrible things happened to you. So many people, when they have terrible things happen to them, they become small. Not you. You became fiercer. More loving. You turned to art. This poem, it spoke to your heart. It’s about a man in prison, but he’s able to see such beauty. His heart’s utterly free. You would read this poem over and over, and you’d weep.” I run my finger over the Cyrillic letters, so much more elegant and dramatic than English. It’s not the edition she had, but it’s similar. A bit older than the one she had. Just as beat up.
She swirls her champagne, watching the play of light, mesmerized. It is nearly gone.
“Americans have such a different relationship with art,” I say, concentrating on the book, giving her the space to enjoy the champagne without my watching over her. “You haven’t been here long, but you’ll see. They’re like bees, going from one thing to another, tasting widely, always seeking the next thing. Not like us Russians, standing in front of one picture at the museum for hours, wild with feeling for it, standing there until they have to drag us from the place. Or reading a poem over and over. We are never content with the surface. We could live a whole lifetime caught in the spell of a beautiful poem.” Out the corner of my eye I see her drink again. “That’s how you are. You like the other poems. But ‘Cages’ is your heart’s poem.”
I feel her watching me. Feel her interest. She really was obsessed with this poem. Tanechka was nothing if not obsessive.
Discreetly I refill her glass, and then I begin to read the poem in the original Russian, speaking her favorite lines slowly and with feeling. It’s a long poem—many pages.
“So sad and beautiful,” she says when I pause partway in. The drink is beginning to affect her—I can feel the bright quickness of her.
“Maybe you don’t remember with your mind, but you remember with your heart.” I scoot back to sit on the floor against the end of the bed. I reach out. “Come.”
She stays put.
“I should make you?”
Her glare hardens. Right then, I recognize the terrifying stare of Tanechka, as if she is in there, trying to break out.
“I’ll pull you over and make you sit with me,” I growl. “You think I won’t? Comply with me, Tanechka, or I’ll make you comply.”
She deliberates, then comes and sits next to me against the end of the bed. I read on. The poem is melancholy. I pause and lean over to her. I speak into her hair. “You liked me to read it to you over and over.”
“I did?”
“Yes.”