Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

His head jerked up swiftly. “That’s not why the police came.”

“I’m not talking about why the police came.”

He looked me in the eye for a long moment. We had never exchanged such a look, not in that way. His irises were dark, the darkest I’d ever seen, and I was suddenly, almost dizzyingly reminded that I was talking to a man who was twelve years older than I was, who had traveled the world, whose simple words were probably meant to soften an intelligence that would otherwise be overwhelming; who would, in the ordinary course of life, never have been sitting here, never have ventured anywhere near here, never have found himself in this place having a conversation with someone like me.

I dropped my gaze, tucking my hands into the front pocket of my sweatshirt. Despite his absurdity, his awkwardness, I was in awe of him. There was no denying it. And even though there was still something unreal about the fact that the two of us were sitting here, facing one another under the slowly revolving ceiling fans and dim lights of a highway diner, I had to admit that he had brought something to my days, something that had been missing. I was fine on my own; I had long ago learned how to make do with my own company. But it was true that his arrival had thrown the previous months, and even years, into a different light. I would never have told him so; I would never have told anyone. And yet when I thought of those days, I now felt as if I stood on the edge of something. They hadn’t been a wasteland, I told myself. They hadn’t been barren. But they had been different, and, if I were being honest, I wasn’t so sure I was ready to go back to them. Not just yet.

“I betrayed people,” he said softly, breaking into my thoughts.

I looked back at him with a start. He was gazing at the empty place in the middle of the table.

“You what?”

He didn’t reply.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

He started to speak again and then stopped.

“You mean you think you let someone down?”

Clearing his throat, he wrapped his fingers around his mug. “No.” He considered his words. “I mean I betrayed people. That’s what I did.”

The fan spun overhead.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Of course,” he sighed. “I keep forgetting that you’ve never left this place.”

I must have winced, because he added quickly, “I mean to say you live in a place where these things don’t happen.”

He fell silent for a minute, then two. The waitress appeared, refilled our coffee cups while he stared at his plate, and disappeared.

“I can explain,” he said eventually. “But I need you to understand that these are things I wish I hadn’t done.”

I reached for my mug and held it.

“Okay,” I said.

He coughed, leaning forward.

“In my city, in Tashkent, about ten years ago—not quite ten years, but nearly—there were bombings. Six car bombs in one day. It was horrible. So many people were injured. I was at my office, and I felt one of them. I came down to look and there was just…” He opened his hands. “Pieces of metal and glass. Blood everywhere. It’s impossible to describe—you see things like that on the news, but when you’re there, you see the people, you hear screaming, you smell—” He shook his head, as if to clear the memory away.

“Most people in Uzbekistan—I mean the Uzbeks, not Russian people like me—are Muslim. Not the kind who pray a lot; usually more laid-back. When I was younger, during Soviet times, the government kept a close eye on things—not just mosques, but churches and everything else, too. It controlled the kind of religion people could have, more or less, so nobody was very religious. Not really.” Briefly, his face took on an exasperated look. “Things were so much better then, let me tell you.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but let him go on.

He sank slightly in his seat, focusing on the fake flowers in the middle of the table. “When the bombings happened, the government blamed the Muslims—the religious ones. So, of course, a lot of other people did the same thing.” He made a helpless gesture. “I believed it. Almost everyone believed it. It was only later that people started asking questions. Asking whether the government itself might have…” He drew a breath and let it out. “Well. It doesn’t matter. We’ll never know.”

For a moment, he paused. Then he said, “I was a lawyer, as I mentioned.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“I had—” He faltered. His hair had fallen in front of his eyes. “I had clients, of course. People told me many things. And I knew a lot of people from my university. I was…always a friendly person.”

Fingering his coffee spoon, he wiped it on his napkin and began scraping it lightly against the edge of the table.

“All right,” I said.

“One day I received a call on my phone, my mobile phone, telling me I was invited.”

His eyes were fixed on the spoon.

“Invited?”

“That’s what they call it. They ‘invite’ you.” A corner of his mouth twitched into a dry, fleeting half-smile. “As if it were a dinner party.”

“‘They’? The—the secret police, like you said before?”

“Yes, but a different kind of them. A more serious kind.” He leaned back against the orange vinyl cushion of the booth.

“Of course, when you’re invited, you can’t refuse. So I went.” He glanced up at the light that hung over our table. “I took the bus, and I still remember everything about it, that ride. The people around me seemed to know where I was going. No one would look at me. It was very strange.

“When I arrived, there were two of them, just like in the movies. One of them was tall and strong-looking, and the other one was shorter and rather fat. Their faces were similar, though, like they could have been cousins. They were both very light, as if they didn’t spend much time in the sun.

“I came in, and they poured some glasses of vodka, one for me and one for each of them. They made small talk with me for a while, about my work, my family, a class I was teaching at the university. Then they asked.” He paused. “They asked me what I had heard.”

Taking a breath, he let it out slowly. “You have to understand,” he said, “that I was frightened, and angry about the bombs. Many of us were. And I believe in a—what would you call it?—a secular society. After independence, many of us were already worried that things would change too much, that everything around us would become unrecognizable. And I…”

He looked down into his cup.

“I was persuaded,” he said. “I started…giving names. Not just anybody, but the people I knew, or had heard of, that were activists. Those were the ones I mentioned, at first. In most cases, they were names I was sure the government already had. I thought I couldn’t be doing any harm.”

His voice grew softer.

“The thing about that kind of police is that they know more about you than you do about yourself. It’s not that they’re especially intelligent. In fact, they’re often the men who didn’t do well in school. But they know what to say.” He glanced at me briefly. “They kept wanting…well, they wanted to know what I’d heard. What people were saying. More names.

“And I wanted to leave,” he said. “They knew that. They knew I’d studied languages at university, that I wanted something different for myself.” He swallowed. “And of course, there’s always a threat hanging behind what they say, even if they never actually come out with the words. I’d been in prison once before, like I told you—my father was trying to get someone to pay a debt, and he made the wrong kind of people angry. I didn’t want…I couldn’t bear to go through that ever again. When people go into prison in Uzbekistan, things sometimes happen…”