13

ALEKSANDR

St. Petersburg, 1986–2006

The eighties melted into the nineties, and Aleksandr lost weight again. His currency among women strengthened, and there was something of a nationalistic uprising in his personal life. All of a sudden they were everywhere—thin-browed, thin-faced, pale, and long-limbed, pressing their warm asses against his thighs all through those long winters. They found his jokes hilarious, and his prominent nose distinguished, and his chess talk fascinating. When he started going on CNN, when he started being invited to speak at the elite American universities, it was an inundation: he nearly began to resent them for their beauty, for their unapologetic availability. He took to sleeping with women whose last names he did not know; then he took to sleeping with women whose first names he did not know. He didn’t ask, and he tried not to remember if they told him. Sex became tedious for a while; sometimes he longed for a woman to reject him just for a surprise.

He thought of how Elizabeta had left him back when he was deserving of love and it would not have been wasted on him. And now he was ruined for it, he knew, and did not warrant it.

In the other Leningrad—the one Aleksandr no longer lived in—the lines for toilet paper stretched around corners. On television, that smiling, simian American president kept making his demands. When the satellite countries broke away—with relative ease, as if the Soviet Union were a rotted thing that was more than ready to abandon its auxiliary elements—he sat up straight and allowed himself thirty seconds of optimism. He was an early supporter of Gorbachev; he waited in the cold until his ears were red, and he cried when he cast his vote for Yeltsin. The Museum of the History of Atheism and Religion turned back into Kazan Cathedral. The Communist Party was banned; the ruble became a convertible currency; confiscatory privatization overtook state-run concerns; inflation shot to 20 percent. The shelves at the markets filled back up, but no one could buy. Once prices tripled, people began to turn out their dogs, which roamed the streets like beggars, mangy and chagrined. The population was decreasing by six hundred thousand people a year. Shock therapy was hard on the common people, certainly, but it was the birth pangs of capitalism, the plinth upon which the towering new Russia would be built. And in the free-market economy, Aleksandr wrote a book on business and chess that made five million dollars. He intended to sink gratefully into the luxuriant wealth of the brand-new post-Communist oligarchy—hot tub, women, the kind of travel that comes with steaming face towels when you cross the international dateline.

He went to clubs. He never danced, he only watched. He encountered blondes. He encountered brunettes. He encountered Central Asians who turned out to have no pubic hair whatsoever. And one night when he was out late, five years after he’d become world champion, maybe, he encountered a redhead who was smiling a secret smile to herself.

“Hello,” he said. “What do you know that I don’t know?”

She shrugged, and at the time he believed that this meant there was something. Later, he knew that he should have taken her at face value.

“You’re the chess champion.”

“Yes.”

“But you already knew that.”

He ducked his head. “I suppose.”

She was drinking champagne. He wondered if she was celebrating something. She cocked her head to one side; her red hair was ineffably gorgeous in the light. No, he decided, she was not celebrating anything. She didn’t need to.

“And who are you?”

“Nina,” she said, extending a hand. Her wrist was impossibly delicate and feminine, tremendously well-made. She looked like a human to whom some attention had been given, whereas Aleksandr often remarked that God had made him (Aleksandr) in the dark, one hand tied behind His back, possibly drunk. Aleksandr didn’t really believe in God, of course, but he liked the joke, and told it often. He thought of telling it now but looked at the wrist again and decided against it.

She smiled at him then. “It was bold the way you made them resume play during the World Championships.”

“Bold?”

It had been a long time—too long—since someone had thought he was brave. No: maybe nobody ever had. Elizabeta might have once, for the paper, but that was ages ago, in another lifetime. Was this assessment from Nina undeserved? Maybe. The risk he’d taken with the FIDE had been more calculating, more clinically self-interested; after all, he wasn’t standing up to them because they were morally bankrupt—he was standing up to them because they’d wanted to screw him over, and he’d lost too much already to let them screw him over at that late date. So she admired him for an impulse that was as petty and shallow and reflexive as slapping someone’s hand away when he’s digging in your pocket.

“Yes,” she said. She clasped his hand. “It was courageous. Not everyone would have done such a thing.”

“Well,” said Aleksandr. He felt the thrum of social tables turning; he knew that he could take his time answering and that she would wait for him. “It was self-interested, you know.”

She laughed a little. He could smell the champagne she was drinking, vaguely vinegary; cheap, he thought. He wanted to buy her something better. “Rationally self-interested,” she said. Later, he’d look back and realize how, at the beginning, Nina would often say a catchphrase or a snippet of some academic or intellectual jargon, sometimes out of context and often obliquely; this kind of talk seemed to suggest deep understanding, vast knowledge. It soon proved that she’d internalized a certain number of terms that, when deployed alongside a knowing expression, could make men believe she had a brain, if they were already inclined to hope so.

“Yes,” he said. “Rationally self-interested. Don’t tell my handlers.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. That Rusayev. Tell me. Is he really as ugly up close as he looks on television?”

They laughed. He told her anecdotes, partially embellished, about Rusayev’s hygiene and habits and quirks and demands. He performed an extended impression of Rusayev’s tendency to learn forward and taunt you with the mad hope that he might be ready to make his move, then lean back again, then forward, then back, until you were beset with nervous exhaustion. He also tended to leave his finger on his piece for a comically long time, rolling his wrist, leaving one hand, then two fingers, then one finger, retreating more slowly than the Americans from Vietnam, he said, and Nina laughed. It was a lovely laugh—bell-like and clear. It wasn’t necessarily a laugh that seemed to reflect actual amusement, but that didn’t matter to Aleksandr just then.

At some point in the evening, he started looking at her harder. He realized she was someone whom he would need to remember meeting, and so he tried to make a mental note of what she was wearing, and how she looked, and what she’d first said to him. If this went somewhere, he’d want to remember those things.

At the end of the evening, he walked her to her door and gazed at her fondly but did not, for the moment, kiss her. He could have, he knew, he could have done anything he wanted; he did not fear rejection. But he wanted to be able to tell her later about how he’d wanted to kiss her and had been too shy. He wanted that to be part of the story they would tell each other.

The next night he did kiss her, and he took her home. And after that, they were a couple.

He took her to private clubs with private leashed-off balconies, with gleaming vats of vodka and fresh juices already waiting for them. He took her dancing. Her took her to the ballet. She wasn’t an intellectual, but neither was she a philistine—she loved visual art, she loved singing. She didn’t know art history or music history, but it didn’t keep her from responding to art and music; she wasn’t a theorist, and how refreshing that was. For her, he suffered through opera—twice—and it was worth it, almost, to see Nina rapt: the beautiful blankness on her stricken face.

She became interested in biorhythms, in energy fields. She liked to watch Kashpirovsky’s mass-healing séances on TV. She did not care for politics. She found public displays embarrassing. They watched the coup together on television, agog, but she did not want to go outside once it was all over and Yeltsin had saved the country. He tried dragging her down to Moscow for the Yuri Shevchuk concert, when 120,000 people swayed in Palace Square, but she rolled her eyes. She’d sooner cry in public, she said, than get sentimental about a pop singer in public. And that ended the conversation, since Aleksandr had never—not once—seen Nina cry, though he’d suspected her of secretive offstage crying once or twice over the months.

It didn’t matter. It did not matter. Here was a woman who could love him for what he was, not what he had tried—ineptly!—and failed—miserably!—at being. If this woman wanted competence, he had that to spare. If she wanted ruthlessness, he was learning. Better to be loved—or whatever—for our own actual sorry selves and not for some distorted version of who we might have been. It was that discrepancy that led to disappointment, among other things.

And then there was this: he was thirty-two. It didn’t have to be Nina in particular, but for decency’s sake, it had to be someone. He was still decent when it came to family: he’d rescued his mother and two of his sisters from their backward hovel in Okha (the third had married a semi-toothless sturgeon fisherman and had refused to come).

Nina and Aleksandr might have been mismatched, but their dual mismatch provided a kind of symmetry: she was so much more beautiful than he, he was so much more talented and accomplished than she, and was this not the trade-off made by most powerful men? It was a tenuous understanding, an uneasy policy of mutually assured destruction—either of them could wound the other with all the ways in which he or she was not what was wanted once. If he’d wanted to hurt her, he could have pointed out that there were countless gorgeous women in the world, and there was only one chess champion (currently: him). He could have pointed out that beauty was fleeting. But she could have pointed out that everything was fleeting—chess competency was only slightly more enduring than beauty; both, it turned out, were games that favored the young. Anyway, what was power on the chessboard vs. power in the bedroom? Chess was a metaphor for war, but sex wasn’t a metaphor for anything. So whose power was more real in the end?

They fell into a routine in which she was playfully critical of him, and he was eye-glazingly tolerant of her, and this seemed to flatten the unevenness of their relationship’s landscape. Aleksandr might be a chess champion, but he was also just a man and was thus deserving of the ambient scorn of beautiful, exacting women. He did not disagree; in fact, he felt he deserved more scorn than even Nina would be able to provide him, though for reasons he never discussed with her.

He bought them a gorgeous apartment overlooking Nevsky Prospekt (expensive). He bought them a high-maintenance little dog with a lazy eye (also expensive). After an appropriate interval, Nina and Aleksandr were married.

A decade passed in slow motion, then faster and faster. When Aleksandr looked back, it returned in snatches, on repeat, hiccupping and distorted sometimes, like a scratched record. There were some good times, of this he was sure—some nice nights with Nina, especially at the beginning, though in memory it became difficult to ascertain how many of the nights were actually nice. Was it one night or two or a half dozen or a dozen? Or was it typical, was it usual, for them to slow-dance in front of that enormous picture window, with St. Petersburg cracked open before them, backlit by the moon, shining with all the grandeur of ancient Rome? What you imagine is what you remember, and what you remember is what you’re left with. So why not decide to imagine it a little differently? It is possible that it wasn’t all a horrendous mistake from the outset. It is possible that they were happier than he sometimes suspected.

But when he tried to remember the good, most of what emerged was the mundane: there’s Nina in 1993, combing her hair in front of the mirror; there she is again in 1997, maybe, her hair slightly longer, her frown slightly deeper. He remembered her evolving sleepwear, the cyclical courses of her shoes—seasonal, astronomical, in their regularity. He remembered the things they acquired: the sound system that seemed to seethe in the dark, with an array of dials and knobs and buttons that looked to Aleksandr like the operational apparatus of a spaceship; the computers that began as looming presences, half the size of Aleksandr, and slowly shrank down to sleek nefarious objects, bafflingly unobtrusive. He remembered also the parade of Nina’s friends, wearing bright colors, talking conspiratorially. They came for lunch, they came for dinner, they came—eternally—for drinks. They were a rotating cast: he could never get their names straight and was always mixing one up with the other, and always being scolded, and always making a point to remember, and always, always, immediately forgetting again. The women often mocked one another for failings that Aleksandr couldn’t see or understand—anyone who missed the evening was considered fair game. No matter how thoroughly a particular woman had been eviscerated by the others in her absence, the next time she appeared, she would be greeted with the same breathless concern, the same false smiles, the same astonished arching of eyebrows at the same grim litanies of the outrageousness of children, the callousness of men. Then there was the same hearty agreement, the same clinking of glasses.

Aleksandr remembered also the halfhearted attempts at a baby. Over the years, Nina was on and then ambivalently off three different kinds of chemical birth control; in 1994 she went off again—this time earnestly, meaningfully—and they waited. Nothing happened. They waited longer. Still nothing happened. Aleksandr remembered the growing realization that it was taking longer than it should, then much longer than it should, and then the further realization—never articulated but shared, he was sure—that they were not as disappointed as they probably should have been. He watched Nina purse her lips at another negative test—the eleventh or twelfth—and he knew that she was nonplussed, slightly, but not distraught. The two of them with a baby: what the hell would they do with it? Nina was good at taking care of things—the stereo system, for example, and her ever growing collection of fussy silken clothing—but things were still and quiet and could be fairly easily kept clean. A pregnancy, a birth, a wailing baby with an always open maw—the whole thing sounded as embarrassing as it would be exhausting. After a year or two, the birth control pills reappeared in the cabinet, and Aleksandr never complained.

They did not fight. They never fought. They went days without speaking sometimes, but even that wasn’t really a fight—he’d sometimes just forget to talk to her. Their sex life began to die quietly, uncomplainingly, with all the meek gravity of a religious martyr: first sex became conventional, then infrequent, then brittle and harassed and, he thought resentfully, resentful. And then it became a fluke, a comet glimpsed blearily through a thicket of stars—it happened sometimes when she’d been drinking, or he’d been cajoling, or they’d been laughing (rarely, rarely). Sometimes he’d engage in self-conscious rituals designed to bring them back to whatever they’d once been, but that was when he most realized that he wasn’t sure what that was. Still, he tried: he’d put awful early-nineties love songs on the stereo system, the kind that they’d heard in their nights out on the town, back in the early days. It was meant to be ironic, but like all irony, it was also slightly sentimental—and since Nina was possessed of neither irony nor sentimentality, she pursed her lips and stared at Aleksandr and failed to smile.

In lieu of sex, Aleksandr began watching TV. He watched Yeltsin hiccup his way through a presidency, red-faced and drunk and increasingly incompetent: it was hard to believe that he was the man who’d shouted down a coup, who’d kept Russia from teetering into a total police state. The nation’s life expectancy for males was down to fifty-eight, mostly due to alcoholism and suicide. Half of the economy was run by organized crime. At night Aleksandr would pace the floors and think about his country, which seemed to have outlived its own relevance. In this, he felt that they had something in common.

Aleksandr still followed chess; at night, while Nina was sleeping, he’d sneak onto the ever smaller computers and ruthlessly beat the best insomniac chess minds of the world. Excitement ruffled through online forums as they recognized him from a defense or an opening, and he felt an echoing twist when he remembered how he’d once been at the promising opening gambit of his own career, and his own life. Now he’d fulfilled everyone’s highest hopes, and there was nothing left for him to do but haunt the communities of online enthusiasts. His chess successes seemed like the litany of accomplishments of some Soviet leader that he’d been made to learn about in school.

He rarely played in real life. Petr Pavlovich arranged a lackluster match in 1995 at the World Trade Center in New York. Aleksandr played an Indian champion and beat him handily. The win felt cheap, hollow, the afterthought of victory. Outside, the lemon-colored light sculpted the sky. The Twin Towers loomed with a fatal clarity through the crystalline windows.

After that, Aleksandr didn’t hear much from Petr Pavlovich. He had other people to manage, though fewer. The FIDE was less ensnared to the bureaucracy—no longer throttled by the corruption—and anyway, there was less at stake, less to prove, less hope that the Cold War could be won through cultural triumph, through withering superiority at the finest game in the world. It was a game of missiles in the end, and diplomacy, and national pride, yes, but mostly, it was a game about who had consistent access to toilet paper and cheap protein, and at this game, Russia had decidedly lost. They didn’t need a chess champion to be the standard-bearer; Aleksandr could no longer embarrass them the way he once could. They were already embarrassing themselves enough.

Occasionally, Nina and Aleksandr threw parties and Petr Pavlovich came, invariably resentful, usually alone. He stood in corners and grabbed at every single passing appetizer. Aleksandr’s feelings about Petr Pavlovich shifted depending on how he was feeling about his entire life that day. Sometimes he saw Petr Pavlovich as the necessary intermediary that had enabled Aleksandr’s own survival—their relationship was parasitic or symbiotic at best, and Aleksandr knew that he should feel grateful. Other days Aleksandr looked around his life—his huge apartment, his vacant heart, his shining trophy, dusted every other day by the maids—and he wondered if there was a more authentic life, a more authentic shadow self, that might have been possible. Though it was true that when he tried to envision such a life he came up blank—what else might he have done? Maybe they would have let him give chess lessons for a time, though likely not in Leningrad. He might have gone back to Okha to teach whatever promising talent the town was yielding these days; and he might have had some status as the boy who had gone off and done well, though the child who returns can never have quite the same currency as the child who stays away. His family would have been proud of him, no question, though there probably would have been some sense that he’d given away too much, and for what? For some vague principle that was as inarticulate as it was remote. Life was full of untenables, of insurmountables, of absurdities; the question wasn’t whether you could hammer your life into some kind of purity (you couldn’t) but whether you could live around the roadblocks and whether you could run with the premises (your government system, your current coordinates in place and time, your mortality) and make something of yourself anyhow. Aleksandr had done that for a while, and wasn’t that adulthood, and wasn’t that life? Wasn’t retreating from it retreating from reality? You could passively resist, sure; you could protest, of course. But wasn’t it a little like refusing to get out of bed in the morning, since you knew one day you were going to die?

But still and all, of course, of course, they would have been glad to have him back.

Petr Pavlovich called Aleksandr in January 1997. Aleksandr saw his name pop up on the caller ID—a new acquisition of Nina’s, which she used to avoid answering the calls of those lady friends of hers who’d fallen into disfavor that week. Aleksandr cringed and considered ignoring it, but he was ultimately defeated by curiosity. It had been many months since he’d spoken to Petr Pavlovich for any length of time. He wondered if the nasal polyps had ever gotten take care of.

“Hi there, Petr Pavlovich,” said Aleksandr, and enjoyed the momentary disoriented silence that followed.

“Caller ID,” said Petr Pavlovich finally.

“Right.”

“Very up-to-date of you.”

“It’s all the wife.”

“How is the wife?

“A joy, as always.”

Aleksandr tried to remember if Petr Pavlovich had married. There’d been a woman at a party some years ago, of this he was sure—he remembered that she was delicate and chain-smoking and smiling and seemed to make Pavlovich very happy. Aleksandr wasn’t sure whether that had been a wife or a mistress or a girlfriend or a friend whom Petr Pavlovich was trying and failing to woo. He’d guess the latter.

“Are you married, Petr Pavlovich?”

“I was. Thanks for asking. She died three years ago. Esophageal cancer. Quick.”

Aleksandr cringed. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure the card’s in the mail.”

Aleksandr coughed his voice into something gentler and more supplicating. “Did you have children?”

“Why, we didn’t, Aleksandr Kimovich. This outpouring of interested generosity on your part is unprecedented. I hope you’re not on antidepressants. They’ll mess with your game.”

“I’m not on antidepressants.”

“That’s a relief to hear.”

Petr Pavlovich sniffed, and Aleksandr feared mightily—and momentarily—that he was crying.

“And you, Aleksandr? Any plans for children? You and that beautiful wife of yours, what’s her name?”

“Nina.”

“Nina. Of course. And so?”

“Ah, no.” Aleksandr shifted the phone to the other ear. “No immediate plans.”

“I see. You’re much too busy, I’d imagine.”

“What are you calling about?”

“Well.” Aleksandr could hear Petr Pavlovich gearing up to make his pitch, stripping his voice of its endemic weary sarcasm. “I know you’re very into technology. Very up on the latest developments. The caller ID and so on.”

“Mmm,” said Aleksandr. He eyed the stereo system nervously.

“As you’re probably aware, IBM has been building a program that plays chess.”

“I know,” said Aleksadr eagerly. This he actually did know.

“Big Blue, Deep Blue Sea, something like that. It’s very good now. Been in testing for years. It beats everyone who plays it. They program all possible responses to all possible moves into its—whatever—its brain, I guess, and then they program it to know which ones are most likely to be successful in every possible scenario. It’s what your brain must do, essentially. You’re programmed for exactly the same kind of responses.”

“Yeah, but I have to think about them.”

“This thing thinks, right? It just thinks faster. It’s what—algorithms, right? I don’t know, it’s not my area. Anyway, they want you to play it.”

“Should I?”

“Of course. Can’t you beat it?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s a pile of tubes. You’re the greatest living chess player in the world. I’m sure these kids at MIT who made it are smart, but it’s going to be a game of Tetris for you, right?”

“Probably. How should I know?”

There was a pause. “When you were a younger man, you know, I don’t think you would have hesitated.”

Aleksandr went to the picture window. Outside, the St. Petersburg sky was ensconced in folds of blues and grays, masking all the new construction projects, the new billboards, the new fruits of what was fast becoming a new kleptocracy. It was the future. They wanted him to play a computer. Aleksandr would not have hesitated when he was a younger man, but he was no longer a younger man.

“It’ll be a disaster if I lose,” he said.

“It’ll be publicity if you lose. But you won’t lose.”

“I don’t know.”

“Aleksandr,” said Petr Pavlovich merrily. Aleksandr could almost hear him smiling. “You forget you’re the world champion. Have a little confidence.”

Aleksandr would remember the game much as he’d remember the entire decade, when he remembered it at all, which was rarely. It came back distorted, in fragments—the puckered cheeks of the man who stood in for the computer, inflating and deflating with distraught little breaths; the silence of the crowd—still, then suspenseful, then stunned. Afterward, there was the astonished grimace of Petr Pavlovich—he’d often been surprised by Aleksandr, but never this way. Then there was the gleeful chattering of the MIT people, the Internet enthusiasts, the tech reporters—the triumphalism, everybody buzzing happily about this brand-new kind of apocalypse. Aleksandr knew—even as he was playing, even as he was losing, even as he was taking the limousine back to his apartment—that he’d have to approach this evening in the same way that he’d approached his marriage. He would try not to think about it. He would try not to remember its details, its sequences, its accumulated humiliations.

Nina had been following online, and when he got home, he caught her, feet curled up under her, silk nightgown shimmering in the moonlight (Nina owned so much silk that he wondered whether she had an entire silkworm army somewhere in the closet)—and he knew that she’d been poring over the results, the analysis, the obsessive online speculation. She might not understand the details, but the tone—the headline, the upshot—was inevitably clear.

“I’m sorry, Aleksandr.” She closed the computer quickly.

“Yes.” He beelined for the cabinet and poured whiskey into a water glass.

“I really am.”

Aleksandr considered ice, then rejected it. “I really am, too.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

He did not want to tell her about it. He did not want to tell anyone about it. He did not even want to tell himself about it in his own head. The people who had watched had understood. What was there to say about it? Nobody would ever beat that thing. Nobody would ever again do sums on an abacus. And could he be sorry? What kind of person could be sorry to watch history march forward, and progress be attained, and problems be solved? Yes, yes, there was some romance lost when they mapped the entire globe, but still. You couldn’t root against it; that was like wishing that all the tiny villages of the world would keep their untranslatable, useless languages and their horrific hygiene practices just so we could all go and look and think that they were authentic and quaint. Aleksandr had an ego but not that kind of ego. He would not demand that the world know less so that he could know the most.

“You look awful,” said Nina.

He poured another whiskey. “I’m fine.”

“You look like you’re about to kill yourself.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“Or me.”

“Never fear.”

Nina went to the couch and produced a nail file from somewhere on her person. Aleksandr poured a third glass. On the couch, Nina commenced vigorous filing, and he watched her for a few moments. He never understood how she managed not to start filing her actual fingers. Aleksandr sat down at the computer.

Nina looked up. “You don’t need to look at that stuff about the game.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You really don’t.”

“I really wasn’t.

“There’s some stuff on there you don’t want to see.”

“Christ, Nina,” Aleksandr roared. “I know.”

She looked at him, eyes brimming with emotion. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Nina look sorry for him. He knew he did not like it.

“Really, Alyosha,” she said. “It’s only a game.”

There was a détente then—there must have been. Some benumbed years, an admission of estrangement that resulted, oddly, in more kindness. Once he stopped trying to make Nina his wife, he could better appreciate her as a friend of a sort; a person to enjoy spending money on and with. There are as many ways for a marriage to work as there are ways for a marriage to fail, and theirs, he thinks now, was working. He knows because he is sure—absolutely sure—that on the day of the bombing, he was gazing at Nina with fondness.

It was the tail end of August 1999, and they were spending the weekend in Moscow with some friends of Nina’s. He’d been waiting for Nina to finish trying on shoes at a store in Manezh. He was standing outside the shop and watching her through the window—he could see the slight sour curve of her frown as she pressed her porcelain heel into some punishing scrap of footwear—and he knows that things must have been going better for them because he remembers admiring her, thinking how beautiful she was, how proud he was to have an exacting wife who knew what she wanted in a shoe. Striated light came sieving through the big picture windows. Nearby, a little girl shrieked on a small plastic indoor ride—it was a blue bewhiskered walrus that moved slowly up and down—and Aleksandr felt that the world was well. They were headed out that night to a sushi dinner, followed by an evening at a club, and Aleksandr was already looking forward to his sashimi and his buzz. Inside the store, the light caught Nina’s red hair, and it glinted nearly gold. “Mama, Mama, Mama, it’s a walrus!” said the little girl on the ride.

And then somehow half the building was gone. The light was nuclear, the roar cyclonic—and all of it, all of it, seemed to come several moments after Aleksandr had shattered his clavicle on the ground. Nina staggered out of the store, still wearing her unpurchased shoe. Next to him, the little girl from the ride was missing most of her hand. Her mouth was open in what must have been a howl, and Aleksandr had crept halfway to her, his chest a crucible of pain, before he realized that he could not hear.

His hearing was restored within the day, and the little girl lived, and only one person died that day. They went back to St. Petersburg, and Aleksandr turned on the television to watch what would happen next.

Buynaksk was hit a week later, then Moscow once more, and Volgodonsk—malls, highways, apartment buildings. At the apartments, the timers went off at night to maximize civilian casualties. The government announced the Volgodonsk bombing two days before it happened, which Aleksandr found personally insulting: a government conspiracy, if indeed this was, should at least be executed with more care. “Are you watching this, Nina?” Aleksandr yelled from the couch, and winced. It still hurt to breathe. “Are you paying attention to this at all?”

“What is it, Aleksandr? Do you need more codeine?”

From the couch, Aleksandr’s collarbone healed, but he kept sitting, and he kept watching. He watched the blaming of the Chechens; he watched the commencement of the second Chechen war. He watched the pro-war party sail to the Duma, and Putin—Yeltsin’s invertebrate-smug prime minister, that mere lieutenant-colonel in the KGB—sail to the presidency. He watched the suspension of regional elections.

“Aleksandr.” Nina coughed. “Don’t you think you might like to get out for some exercise?”

Aleksandr hated Putin with a hatred that felt personal. When he remembered the others—Brezhnev and the decrepit, staggering parade of geriatrics thereafter—he didn’t remember a feeling so urgent as his hatred for Putin. Putin’s first act in office was to restore the Soviet national anthem. When Aleksandr heard the song again, after a nine-year gap, he saw Elizabeta walking down the aisle, applauded by bureaucrats, and he almost threw up.

“Aleksandr,” said Nina. “Do you think you’re taking all this a little too seriously?”

After the bombing—after seeing the little girl’s blue penguin shirt streaked with arterial blood, and after crawling to her across a ruined marble floor—he felt less tolerant of his own life. Nina cajoled him into returning to his old ways, but they didn’t take. The caviar stuck in his throat. The nights out seemed empty. He found himself thinking more and more about Ivan and how Ivan would have lived, if he’d lived. Ivan wouldn’t have spent a decade in strenuous appeasement of the regime. Ivan wouldn’t have spent the budding years of democracy slowly poaching in hot tubs, one indifferent young woman on each arm. Every morning Aleksandr arose and looked at himself in the mirror and tried to remember who he’d been when he’d been brave.

His friends—his rich friends, who still enjoyed their caviar—told him that if he was so bothered by it all, he should throw his weight behind the fledgling pro-reform movement. He was a national hero, after all, an icon of chess, which was purer than religion and more elegant than sport. He had money. If he had ideas, he might make himself a figure. Did he have ideas?

He did have ideas, though they were vague—he was pro-business, anti-corruption, pro-transparency, pro–civil liberties. He was a capitalist. He was a realist. But at first he wanted to support an umbrella network of oppositional groups—believing that a robust opposition was the initial and most necessary step—and he started by contacting anyone who was willing to be publicly defiant, including earnest reformers, conspiracy theorists, quacks, and leftist loonies. At early meetings, he’d regularly see pictures of Trotsky fluttering alongside posters quoting Milton Friedman. They called it Alternative Russia.

“I don’t like them smoking in the house,” said Nina.

At first, all they did was talk. They agreed that the post-Communist kleptocracy was only marginally better, in some ways, than the teetering incompetence of late-stage Communism—and in other ways, it was perhaps worse. They agreed that the regime’s indifference was so callous that it could hardly be called indifference at all. As time passed, Putin gave them more to talk about. After the bombings came the sailors abandoned on the Kursk, a nuclear submarine that sank quietly in the Barents Sea during Putin’s first summer in office. Later, it was clear from the notes they wrote on their bodies that some of them had lived for days, while the Kremlin insisted that they were already dead, while the offers of help from the Brits and the Norwegians were ignored, while Putin continued his vacation on the beach.

Then there were the theatergoers in the fall of 2002, dead in a horrifically botched hostage rescue attempt. They’d crawled out gagging from state-issued morphine and died in the snow when the Kremlin didn’t think to call any ambulances. Aleksandr talked about this in Alternative Russia meetings. He also talked about it quite a bit outside them.

“Stop talking about this stuff all the time,” said Nina. “You’re being morbid.”

“I’m not morbid. Life is morbid. Reality is morbid. Our governmental system is morbid.”

“If I hear you refer to our ‘governmental system’ one more time, I’m going to die of boredom.”

“Please don’t let me stop you.”

In 2004 came the school siege at Beslan: the children held hostage for days, then killed when the government stormed the school with tanks and thermobaric weapons. A year later, the parents of the dead children went to Moscow to demand their own arrest—they’d voted for Putin, they said, and thus were culpable for the murders of their children.

Though Aleksandr was keen at calculation—at weighing the consequences of rational self-interest—he could never quite understand any of it. What was in it for the state to watch hundreds vomit and die in the elegant Moscow streets, to let sailors write goodbyes on their bodies and choke to death on their own carbon dioxide? There was ineptitude, yes, but it was hard to believe that was all: it was a murderous apathy that amounted to sadism. It reminded Aleksandr of how, when the infant mortality rate had grown troubling under Communism, the Party had decided to simply subsidize more births.

Nina came and sat next to Aleksandr on the bed. “It’s sad, Aleksandr. Of course it’s sad. But it’s really none of our business.”

Then came the string of assassinations. There was Anna Politkovskaya from Novaya Gazeta, who’d survived poisoning and Chechnya only to be shot down in the stairwell of her own apartment building.

There was the ex-KGB man in London who’d been poisoned with radioactive sushi by men who had disappeared back into the teeming English mists; a man who’d turned colors people should never turn, who’d lain on his deathbed and pointed an accusatory finger back at the East.

There was a journalist for a Russian business magazine who’d been reporting on Putin’s attempts to illegally sell arms to Syria and Iran by routing them through Belarus. He’d had a son about to enter college and a daughter about to deliver his first grandchild. He’d gone out one day to buy oranges, come home, and thrown himself out his window, according to the official report.

“Are you seeing this, Nina? Are you reading this stuff?”

Nina rolled her eyes and flopped over in bed. But Aleksandr was thinking.

“Stop,” she said. “I can hear you thinking.”

Over the years, Aleksandr had come to view Putin as erratic and somewhat unpredictable. He wasn’t puritanical; he did not strike out every chord of dissent. He was tolerant, almost magnanimous, when it came to the papers. The token one, Novaya Gazeta, was especially mouthy—even after Anna Politkovskaya’s death—though Aleksandr fully believed that Putin allowed it in order to earn himself a faint glaze of democratic credibility. He liked being able to bring the paper to Brussels and say: See? See what I let them write about me? But Putin did crack down on what counted, and what counted was television. Aleksandr had once spoken at a conference alongside a deeply unpopular economist, and when he watched it on television, the unfortunate man had been digitally removed from existence—there’d been his hands, his ghostly shadow, but his head, his inconvenient words, were gone. And it hadn’t all been puerile hijinks. One time Aleksandr awoke to a peal of shattering glass and the sound of a sickening thud against the floor. Upon investigation, he found a plastic bag containing the oozing conch of a human ear.

After that, Nina told him to shut down Alternative Russia. Or at least, for the love of God, to move the headquarters out of the apartment.

“I know you’re doing this because of your involvement with the Party back in the day,” she said. She cupped his face in her hands and leaned toward him. He could see the flickering pulse in her neck. “And I want you to know you don’t have anything to feel guilty for.”

“Don’t I?”

“It was the times. It was the times. That’s all over now.”

“Is it?”

“You’ve made a nice life for us, Aleksandr.”

“Nice for whom?”

She leaned back. “Oh, please. Nice for both of us. You don’t like the apartment? You don’t like your gadgets?”

“They’re your gadgets.”

“You are a wealthy man. You are wealthy and you are influential and you are sought after.”

“By the FSB, maybe.”

“And if you’re not happy with your life, you have the means to go ahead and change it.” He could feel her radiating misery.

“That’s exactly what I’m proposing.”

“Are you having a midlife crisis?”

“Stop psychoanalyzing.”

“Is all this because you lost to the computer?”

At this he’d punched the wall, though not hard enough to do damage to either the wall or his hand.

Nina didn’t flinch. “If you break your hand, you know, the media is going to notice.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m not the only one who psychoanalyzes.”

“Shut the fuck up, please.” Nina didn’t stop filing her nails. He looked at her, and he marveled at the cognitive dissonance of knowing someone as intimately as he knew Nina—of knowing how her toes looked when her toenails grew too long (though, in fairness, Nina almost never let this happen), and how her coughs echoed in the shower when she was sick, and how her face looked when she was pale and haggard from sleeping—and really, really, not knowing her at all. He thought of times at parties or dinners or out in the world somewhere, moments when he’d glimpse her out of the corner of his eye, caught in light or shadow, and think what a mystery she was—this person who lived in the core of that coiled three pounds of neurons, whatever it was, whoever she was, inscrutable, unreachable, no less mysterious just because Aleksandr didn’t believe in the extraphysical.

“Clearly, something is bothering you lately.”

“Ninotchka,” he said. “You are criminally insane, criminally indifferent, if you are not bothered.”

“I don’t like Ninotchka, you know. It’s patronizing.”

One thing about Nina: she could still surprise him. Then again, he could still surprise himself, even after all the years of knowing himself (and maybe no one else; maybe no one else, ever).

Three weeks later, he announced his intention to seek the presidency of the Russian Federation.