David Bezmozgis - The Free World

— Me personally? Dmitri derided.

— All of you, Alec said.

—”All of us,” Dmitri mimicked. I know who you remembered.

As Riva Davidovna opened the door, Minka asked Alec about the apartment. Where it was; how he’d found it.

— Ah yes, your brother, Minka said meaningfully. He’s very adept.

Minka pointed two fingers at Dmitri and continued, in a tone more menacing than admiring, He and his brother, Dimka, these guys know how to get ahead.

These last words Alec barely heard, because the door had been opened and he was looking at Masha. She seemed slightly disoriented, as she smoothed her dark hair and her peach-colored cotton dress. They had woken her. She had been sleeping in the afternoon heat. Her eyes drifted from her mother to her brother to him and finally to Minka the thief. Alec worked to tease out some meaning from the moment her eyes had come to rest upon him. But if he was to be honest with himself, she’d paid him no special regard. If anything, her eyes had brushed quickly over him, and lingered, if anywhere, on Minka.

Tonelessly, Riva Davidovna thanked him again and shut the door behind her. Dmitri and Minka turned for the stairwell with barely a parting glance. Left alone, Alec waited thirty seconds, long enough for Dmitri and Minka to reach the street, before taking the stairs down into the worn-out little room that served as the lobby. He was about to leave and make his way back to Viale Regina Margherita and the briefing department, when he heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Wishful thinking, reinforced by the pace and lightness of the steps, caused him to turn back. Nearing the bottom of the steps, he saw dark hair and a peach-colored dress. Whether she was there by accident or by design, he couldn’t yet tell, but whatever the case, he felt instantly vivified.

Masha reached the bottom of the steps and made it clear that her appearance was not accidental. Looking at him directly, she said, I’m glad you’re still here.

Two émigrés shoved past them coming up the stairs. Above their heads was a squalling of infants to rival a nursery.

— I’m sorry, Alec said, better over here.

He took Masha by the arm and led her to a spot at the base of the banister. She allowed herself to be touched and led.

— My mother said you found us an apartment, Masha said.

— I did, but it seems your brother found you a better one.

— Where is the one you found?

— In Ostia.

— And the one my brother found?

— Ladispoli.

— And why is Ladispoli better?

A strange question, Alec thought, if only because it seemed that all émigrés, including little children, seemed to apprehend the difference almost preternaturally.

— Some people prefer one, some the other, he said.

— What about you?

— What do I prefer?

— Yes.

— Neither.

— So where do you live? — In Rome. — Near to here? — Not really. — How far?

— Do you know the city?

— You think I would know the city if I don’t know the difference between Ostia and Ladispoli?

— I don’t know what you know.

— Not much. But don’t worry, I’ll learn. I’m a quick study. — I don’t doubt it. — So where do you live?

— Across the river from the Jewish ghetto. The neighborhood is called Trastevere. Do you want the name of the street? — Is there anything special about the street? — Other than that I live there? — Yes. — No.

— Who do you live with?

— A guy named Lyova who rents the apartment, and a woman.

— A woman or your wife?

— Both.

The admission didn’t appear to faze her.

— Is your place far from Ladispoli?

— About an hour, depending on how the trains are running.

— And from Ostia?

— About the same.

— If Ostia is so far from you, why did you find us an apartment there?

— It’s the only apartment I knew of.

— And how did you expect we would see each other?

There was no flirtation in the way she’d put the question. It was of a piece with everything else — assertive, declarative, and either extraordinarily candid or extraordinarily cunning. In any case, she’d made the leap and all that remained was for him to follow.

— I imagined I’d take the train, Alec said, precisely as he’d imagined it.

— How often?

— As often as I could.

— The train costs money.

— My work issues me a pass.

— And the time?

— I’d figure a way.

— The same for Ladispoli?

— Ladispoli is a little easier. My parents live there with my brother.

— Easier because of what you would tell your wife?

— Yes.

— How long have you been married?

— A year.

— That’s not very long.

— No.

Alec couldn’t tell if her implication was that a marriage of such short duration warranted a higher or lower standard of fidelity.

Masha didn’t inquire further about his wife. She wanted to know when they would meet again, and then went back upstairs to her mother.

Compared with what he saw around him, Alec believed that he might have had the most honorable of marriages. It had been founded on an act of kindness, whereas boredom, impulsiveness, and desperation seemed to be the foundations of too many others. Too many wives and husbands acted as if they wanted to annihilate each other. Incidents began as early as Vienna, with tales of wives running wild, abandoning their husbands. And in Ostia and Ladispoli, there were the common occurrences of one man leaving his wife for that of a friend. This was then typically followed by threats and imprecations and the obligatory loopy fistfight — the whole sorry spectacle played out before somebody’s distraught five-year-old.

Some couples would have divorced years earlier if not for the complications inherent in divorcing and then leaving the Soviet Union. They’d remained together just long enough to get to the free world — whose freedom they’d defined in no small measure as freedom from each other. Their stories, at least in spirit, were the negative impressions of his own.

When he started seeing Polina, he had no thought of leaving Riga. It was the summer of 1976, and most of the people leaving Riga were Zionists. These were the sorts of people who organized surreptitious Hebrew classes. They were the ones who took jobs baking matzoh in Riga’s last remaining synagogue, and who demonstrated at Rumbuli and Bikerniki forests — gathering on the anniversaries of the massacres to collect and bury loose bones, recite prayers, and sing the Israeli national anthem. Alec had joined them once, out of curiosity — his grandmother was among the dead, her bones jumbled anonymously somewhere under the stiff November grass. This was a fact that Samuil had never tried to conceal from him and Karl. He laid flowers twice a year. He never spoke about it except to say that he was going — once to mark the anniversary of his mother’s death, and again on the anniversary of the death of his brother, whose actual grave, deep in Russia, was too far away to visit. Besides the fact that they were dead, Alec knew almost nothing about them.

It wasn’t much of a surprise to Alec that the one time he had attended the memorial service, organized by the putative Zionist agitators, the information had gotten back to his father. When the KGB didn’t send uniformed officers equipped with megaphones to disperse the participants, they sent plainclothes officers to take photographs and record names. Or just their informants.

If he’d expected sympathy — and in truth, he had — Samuil granted him none. In one motion, Samuil had opened and shut his case. Alec was a fool for gambling with his future.