Elliott Holt - You Are One of Them

“We should celebrate,” Corinne said that night.

“I guess.”

“If you really want to be a journalist, make it happen. Start as a copy editor, become a reporter. Things are more fluid here—you can move up fast. You’re welcome to stay here at my place for a few more months. Chip in a little for rent. Find your own apartment once you’re settled into the job. When are you going to get another chance like this? We’re on the vanguard here.”

“Vanguard or abyss?”

“Isn’t this what you came to Moscow for?” Corinne said.

I paused. I’d never told her about Jenny. The real reason I’d come to Moscow was too hard to explain, I thought, without sounding deranged. I liked Corinne, but she struck me as someone with no tolerance for ambiguity. She valued efficiency above all. She probably outsourced complicated emotions the way she sent out her dry cleaning. I could imagine her impatiently counseling friends through heartbreak, slamming the door on inconvenient feelings. You just have to get over him, she’d say, with a snap of her fingers. Time to move on. There are other fish in the sea.

Now she said, “You have to decide what you want.”

I wasn’t used to asking myself what I wanted. I was used to taking what was offered. What did I want? In what ways was I wanting? Wanting. Wanton. At times my behavior in college had certainly been wanton. I’d gone home with some guys just because they invited me. Just because it felt good to be desired, just because it was a chance to make heat on a cold night. For years I’d been replaying events in my head, looking for clues, for any foreshadowing of betrayal and abandonment. I should have known better, I’d tell myself after someone left me. I can’t believe I thought I mattered enough to make anyone stay. I’d spent years thinking that I was “sad” like some people are French. I’d been telling myself the same story, branding myself as damaged and disposable. Easy to leave.

I liked the idea of becoming an investigative journalist, though. I liked the idea of having my name in the papers, not as the quoted best friend but as the byline. Corinne was right. It was time to focus on my future instead of trying to resurrect the past.

“Dear Mom,” I wrote that night. “Most of the places Jenny visited don’t exist anymore. I think we should forget about the tenth-anniversary celebration. People want to look forward, not back.” I knew that her feelings would be hurt. She’d view this as a betrayal. But I couldn’t keep carrying Jenny’s legacy. I had to create my own. I tried to soften the blow. “Maybe you can find a new cause?” But I couldn’t hit SEND. I couldn’t take Jenny away from her.

I WAS IN THE KITCHEN making coffee one morning in late October when the phone rang. It was the short ring of a local call. Corinne was at her office, so I answered.

“ Allo? Sarah?” It was Svetlana’s voice on the other end. “Privyet,” she said in a giddy singsong. I realized I’d missed her.

“I’ve been trying to reach you,” I said. “Did you get my messages?”

“What messages?”

“There were a lot of messages.”

She had a surprise for me, she said. A very big surprise. Would I come to her office today at eleven o’clock? She would meet me in the lobby, she said, so that the armed guard didn’t bother me. I didn’t want to miss my Russian class. There were only a few days of the course left. That week we had been practicing the subjunctive mood. “I would have gone to the film if I had had a ticket,” our teacher, Irina, said. “I would have come to Moscow long ago,” I said, “if I had been invited.”

“What kind of surprise?” I asked Svetlana.

But she just said, “Eleven o’clock,” and hung up.

SVETLANA WAS WAITING when I arrived. She wore the same white blouse and gray skirt. I soon learned that most Russians wore the same thing to work every day. I produced my passport for the guard, but this time he returned it to me immediately and waved me past. On the way up the stairs, Svetlana said, “You brought your camera?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, you cannot use it. This is the top secret.”

In the office Svetlana led me to a door next to the kitchen. “Our conference room,” she said. Inside was a long table on which nine forlorn cans of Czar clustered in the center. There was no one there. Just a large mirror on one wall and a framed noirish black-and-white print of Red Square opposite it.

“What’s the surprise?” I said to Sveta.

“Focus groups,” she said.

Richard appeared in the doorway behind her. “Today,” he said, “we are doing consumer research. We’ve invited some people in for taste tests. A Czar challenge, if you will.”

“What does this have to do with me?” I said.

“I thought you might enjoy it,” he said. “Russian people your age ... listening to what they have to say. And we could use a young American perspective. The Yanks in our office are much older. Of course, you’ll need to sign an NDA. This is all highly confidential, but I know you’ve been helping Sveta with campaign ideas.”

Svetlana was distributing plastic cups, placing three in front of each seat at the table. “I told Richard how productive we were at our lunch,” she said, and gave me a knowing look.

“Yes, we were,” I said, playing along. I realized that Svetlana must have expensed our meal at the Metropol. “We’re full of ideas.”

“Consumer research is a challenge here,” Richard said. “Brits and Americans want to talk about themselves. Ask them one question about what laundry detergent they use and you get a whole monologue about their family. But Russians are tight-lipped. Afraid anything they say might be used against them. They’ll tell you what they think you want to hear. Hard to get honest responses. But Svetlana here is going to moderate the groups. We’ve been training her, haven’t we? Teaching her about market research.”

Svetlana nodded. She was folding paper napkins into triangles.

“I thought you had a surprise for me,” I said. “I assumed this was about our friend.”

She didn’t answer.

“I’m going to show you something,” said Richard, like a magician ready to pull a rabbit from a hat.

I followed him out of the conference room and through the adjoining door. We were in a small, dark room in which six chairs had been arranged in two rows of three. One wall was a window that looked into the conference room. We watched Svetlana through that window as she arranged cans of Pepsi and Coke next to the cans of Czar.

“A one-way mirror,” said Richard. “We can watch the groups, we can hear what the consumers say. They can’t see us.”

“Do they know they’re being watched?”

“They do not.” He crossed his arms over his chest. The gesture struck me as defiantly smug. “We’re not legally obligated to tell them.”

“You want Russians to get over their fear of being watched by watching them?”

“This is the way it’s done,” he said. “Advertising is about giving people choice. Consumers tell us what they want so that we can create products and campaigns that work for them.”

“That work on them, you mean,” I said. Through the glass, Svetlana was emptying a tube of Pringles onto a paper plate.

Andrei poked his head into the room. “Privyet,” he said in a tone that sounded like a taunt. He was wearing some kind of cologne with tangy citrus notes.

“Welcome to the front lines of the cola war,” said Richard.

Andrei collapsed into a chair and lit a cigarette. Richard waddled out of the room. Through the one-way mirror, I watched him lean close to Svetlana and whisper something in her ear. Svetlana nodded and then hid all the cans of cola with a red cloth.