AS TIME WENT ON, Ksenia and I retreated into our own bubble. For us, the outside world only existed to accentuate our isolation. But just beyond, out there, lay a city brimming with possibility. Every day a former classmate would come by with an idea for some business opportunity. And while most of them were ridiculous, they still succeeded. Before you knew it, your classmate would move on from the shop where he had his shoes resoled to the custom Falcon he’d bought to take his family skiing in the Alps. One day, a friend would show up at a meeting on his grandfather’s bicycle, the next in an armored Bentley with a phalanx of bodyguards.
That’s more or less what happened to a guy I sometimes ran into when I’d leave the bubble I’d created around myself in order to meet with a few friends from high school, who’d recently repurposed themselves as businessmen. Mikhail had been the leader of the Young Communists at engineering school, but that’s not to say he was a party apparatchik. In its final phase, the Komsomol attracted only the most cynical and ambitious guys, the ones who’d stop at nothing, the ones who wanted to make money. In the late 1980s, the only kind of company allowed in the Soviet Union was a students’ cooperative, and these cooperatives became the business school for Russian capitalism. That’s where most of our oligarchs got their education.
Mikhail belonged to this brash tribe. And though he tried several times to explain it to me, I never understood exactly what he was doing. He’d worked out a way to take a slice of the payments passing between state-owned companies. Basically, and I don’t know quite how, he’d made himself a middleman who facilitated exchanges, borrowing money from some and lending it to others. It was a kind of small bank, several years before real banks were legalized.
It goes without saying that Mikhail’s activities had little in common with those of a Swiss accountant. He took the capital he had access to and put it toward trafficking of every kind. He imported computers, manufactured souvenirs for tourists, opened factories for stonewashed jeans. He once told me that he’d come into a consignment of cognac bottles. At fifty dollars a bottle, he couldn’t find a buyer. So he raised the unit price to five hundred dollars, and people fell over each other to take them off his hands.
Moscow was like that in those days. And Mikhail was in his element. He’d moved in a short time from wearing the shapeless jackets found in Soviet department stores to dark-purple Hugo Boss suits and then to custom-tailored clothing from Savile Row. His boyish, bespectacled face started appearing in the glossy magazines that chronicled Moscow’s rapacious elite.
We would get together from time to time in the bar of the Radisson, the only luxury hotel in the capital at that time. I listened to his tales of adventure, vaguely thinking I might use them sometime for a play I wanted to write about people of his kind. One night, Ksenia came by to fetch me on our way somewhere. It was her first time meeting Mikhail. After the usual introductions, she stared at him for a moment: his little air of satisfaction, his piercing eyes behind the delicate titanium glasses, and his three-piece suit, in striking contrast with my slovenly sweatshirt.
“Where’d you get that awful tie?” she asked him point-blank.
I should have understood right then, from their first exchange, that my fate was sealed. That Ksenia was going to choose Mikhail, his vulgarity and his energy, his complicated watches and his English shoes. He knew straight off. He responded with a sarcastic smile and the name, I think, of a shop in Naples. I’ll take you there once you’re mine, his eyes said.
And I saw the whole thing. I saw it from the start. But for the longest time I refused to believe it. Ksenia was my goddess, capricious and vindictive. I lived in terror of her mood changes, and it never crossed my mind that a crocodile handbag and a suite at the Crillon were all that it took to win her favor. Each day, I laid at her feet the pearls I’d extracted from my painful delving in the realm of poetry, not realizing that a diamond bracelet would have had a more lasting effect. It’s odd to notice just how hard our brain sometimes works to hide the truth from us. The clues are right in front of our eyes, but our minds refuse to assemble the pieces. After this first meeting, Mikhail started to visit our house regularly. He’d arrive alone or accompanied by one of a succession of young women chosen from the four corners of the empire for their luminous complexion and symmetric features. We would all pile into his Bentley, or his Jaguar, or his enormous Mercedes, and he would drive us to the best Georgian restaurant in town. Or he’d arrive at the door with two waiters, who would set out oysters and caviar on the table of our small suburban apartment. One day he even brought a sushi chef, flown in direct from Japan, who spent the evening slicing fatty tuna and yellowtail in the tiny workspace of our ten-square-foot kitchen.
Mikhail laid all these marvels at our feet with the slightly guilty air of a tradesman lighting a candle in church. And all along I thought it reflected a residual deference to the art Ksenia and I had sacrificed our lives to—as if culture in those years still exercised the slightest authority over the real world. I was wrong, of course, and Mikhail knew it. He pretended to admire our pathetic cultural relics, somewhat in the way you admire a child’s drawings. I was blind, never noticing the condescension behind his gushing praise. Ksenia, as usual, noticed everything, and it pained her. She’d already started to suspect that culture was becoming a low-cost ornament, another gadget that the masters of the universe bought for themselves without a further thought. Mikhail’s arrival, and his attitude, now confirmed this. It had irritated her at first. She’d caught on immediately to the existential threat that Mikhail posed—not just to us as a couple but to our whole world. The small, humble things we made, the carefully planned arabesques, all destined to be swept away by the dreams and aspirations of millions of faceless men and women on the currents of the new Russia. We were like maharajas reveling in the luxury of trained elephants and embroidered blouses, of cherry syrup and rose-petal sorbets, while ships carrying cargoes of race cars and private jets, of heli-skiing vacations and five-star hotels, were already on the horizon. With our American books and contacts in Berlin, we thought ourselves at the leading edge of the movement, when in fact we were the last ragtag stragglers still following a dead star, our parents’. We had thoroughly despised them for their cowardice, but they’d managed to pass on their passion for books and ideas, and for endless discussions about both. Mikhail was perfectly aware of all this. He was a native in the smooth, gleaming world of money, whose fiery power he knew, and nothing could have made him go back to before. But he wanted Ksenia, so he was willing to linger in our company, among the ruins of the city of the dead.
With the passing months, Ksenia became more receptive to his tributes. She didn’t discuss it with me openly, but I sensed that she was growing increasingly nervous. My flaws, my lack of assertiveness, which she had initially attributed to a kind of old-fashioned Romanticism, she now felt as a chain constricting her growth and imprisoning her in a cramped world, just when she’d have liked to take full advantage of the possibilities of the new era. Mikhail showed up almost every day with new presents and new propositions. And though he tried to maintain the attitude of respectful humility he’d adopted when insinuating himself into our lives, I couldn’t help noticing that his manner had grown more self-assured. The lectures, concerts, and late-night discussions that had marked the first phase of our relationship had all but disappeared, replaced by activities whose monetary heft was substantially greater, and where it was harder for me to maintain an acceptable standing. There were gallery openings, discotheque kickoffs, dinners at the White Sun or the Ermitazh, afternoon shopping expeditions, one event quickly following another, and I was starting to have a real problem with the stultifying boredom of all this flitting around.
Meanwhile Ksenia was becoming more and more intoxicated with Mikhail’s lifestyle, to the point where it was hard for us to turn down even the most insignificant outings. All my attempts to slow the pace of our rendezvous met with sarcastic remarks and furious arguments. “Vadya has never liked going out,” Ksenia would say with a disgusted grimace. “All he likes is to lounge around at home.”
In truth, she was right. And sadly, Ksenia was neither pure enough nor corrupt enough to understand me.
I remember waking up one night and looking at her for a long time as she lay beside me, feeling that she had already moved on, a great distance away. To a place she’d return from only to deliver another contemptuous remark. I very much wanted her to come back. Look! It’s me! Can’t you see? But what had I to offer the vengeful goddess sprawled beside me, breathing quietly and regrouping her strength for the morning’s combat? I went through life taking notes, as though preparing for an exam that never came. I felt exhausted, yet I still hadn’t done anything. So many ideas flashed through my mind that taking any particular action seemed laughable. Every day my imagination suggested fifteen different lives to me, but nothing that I did in one ever proved useful in the next. So the only landing place that seemed worthy of my ambitions was the green velvet sofa in our apartment. At times, I managed to convince myself that Ksenia knew and saw my greatness. But day after day I could see that what at first had taken the form of irony was gradually turning into contempt.
It all brought me back to my childhood, to those autumn days in the country when the fog was so thick I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. “Go find the sun,” my grandfather would say. So I’d go out into the woods and climb a hill overlooking the valley. And as I walked, the air would grow brighter and brighter until, miraculously, the sun would push through the layers of white haze and reveal a world where the frost-covered trees and bushes glistened with diamonds. I would gather a few branches covered in jewels to bring back to the house, but somehow the ice would melt on the way home, and I’d arrive holding nothing but a silly bouquet of brown branches. I don’t have anything to prove, I told myself. But I was lying. I was running away. And Ksenia knew it. My longing for peace was perfectly sincere, but so far I’d done nothing to deserve it.
Suddenly Ksenia opened her ash-colored eyes, observing me. She showed not the least bit of surprise, as though it were perfectly normal to find me hunched over her as she slept, like a vulture at dawn. Nor did she show the least trace of friendliness. You’re stronger than I am, I thought at the time, because you don’t love me. To her, my suffering was just another annoyance.
One Saturday morning, we were in the country outside Moscow. Mikhail had organized an outing to an old dacha he was planning to buy. He’d brought along his latest trophy, I think her name was Marylène. She was French, worked for a big investment fund, and was cute, and she was also a good deal less flamboyant than the Circassian lovelies Mikhail generally had in tow. It looked to be a more serious relationship than usual. She, at any rate, seemed to think so.
The problem that day was that Marylène was not really used to the roads in provincial Russia. Or to Mikhail’s Cossack style of driving. After a half hour of acrobatics on the dirt tracks near Vladimir, she felt sick. And despite his objections, she forced Mikhail to stop and turn the wheel of the Porsche over to me, threatening to hitchhike back to Moscow if he didn’t. I tried talking her out of it, too, but couldn’t, so I wound up sitting in the driver’s seat with a comatose Marylène beside me, while Mikhail and Ksenia settled in the back seat behind us.
Not being used to driving a hundred-thousand-dollar car over sketchy gravel roads, I was a little nervous. And I was angry at myself for having landed again, for the umpteenth time, in a situation where I would show myself to disadvantage next to dashing Mikhail. He made fun of me: “OK, Vadya, show us what you can do. I’ll bet within five minutes, Marylène is begging me to take the wheel again.”
—Stop, Mikhail, said Ksenia, only seeming to defend me. Vadya drives perfectly well. You should see him on his grandfather’s tractor.
—His grandfather’s horse and buggy, you mean.
They were having a good time back there. Meanwhile, the Porsche moved along without much conviction in the direction I would indicate for it. Some aspect of the gearshift’s workings never became quite clear to me, and I resolved the difficulty by staying in fourth. At a certain point I needed to adjust the rearview mirror. As I clumsily changed the angle, I saw into the back seat. Mikhail had his hand on Ksenia’s knee. It sat there motionless, a giant snow crab.
It gave me a strange sensation. It’s hard to explain, but I felt both a shock of surprise and the confirmation of something I’d already known. A satisfaction, almost. In any case, I let nothing show. I kept driving and carried on for the rest of the day as though nothing had happened. When we got back to the house, I told Ksenia I was leaving. She tried to make a scene, and if memory serves, she broke a glass or two. But deep down she was as relieved as I, though for different reasons.