Noel Hynd - Countdown in Cairo

Sometimes it seemed as if all of the humanity had been sucked out of her over the last year. This was a crazy way that she was going through life, she knew, and yet she didn’t know how to throw the switch to reverse courses, to go in any other direction.

She searched herself and the sum of all knowledge she had learned to date. She still had her faith, but she knew she sometimes wrestled with it. She knew she probably always would. Like a cathedral, it was never complete, never finished.

She searched the literature she had read over a lifetime. She didn’t know whether it was because Russians were on her mind, but here in this aircraft the metaphor that she kept returning to was that of a train.

Long ago she had read Anna Karenina, the same as Federov had done on his deathbed. The story had started with children playing with a toy train and then ended with a train wreck and a conversion to deep Christian spirituality.

Well, that Tolstoy had obviously known a few things about the hazards of travel, she mused with a smile, as well as the comforts of spirituality.

She thought back to the train ride she had taken just a few months earlier across central Spain, and how from a window she had seen a small rural funeral that had reminded her of the funeral of her grandmother in Mexico many years ago. She thought about the first time she had flown into Kiev and the last time she had flown out. Then she was ten years into the past, a more innocent time, when she was playing soccer at UCLA. Then there was the summer she had spent in France and the summer she had spent in Russia, the experience that had taught her Russian and paved the way for her being assigned to a spiritual shell of a man named Yuri Federov.

The aircraft banked left at Greenland. The flight became bumpy and the seat belt signs came on. She ordered another whiskey, her third, sipped it, and then, exhausted, slipped easily into a short dream at thirty-five thousand feet. She drifted farther into the Russian psyche.

It would have been absurd to suggest that she had any inklings of love for Yuri Federov. So what was it that she felt?

A strange Christian sense of compassion?

The forgiveness that was a foundation of her faith?

The notion that within every human being there is some shred of decency, even if one sometimes needed to search hard to find it?

She supposed that might have been it.

Could she bring herself to say a prayer for his soul?

Silly question: she had already said many.

In time could she forgive Federov, as he had begged her?

In time, she decided, maybe she could forgive anything. But no one ever said it would be easy.