He sits and smokes. His heart feels constricted, and he takes deep breaths of tobacco, inhaling as much as he can, filling his chest with cigarette smoke, as if it could ease the pressure of the cage around his heart. He thinks of his father lying on the ground in front of the burning house, watching him with one eye, of the rage compressing his chest. He thinks of the forest in Ivanovo, the fire they made eleven years ago, the shell he placed into Marik’s hand. The guilt he never admitted to anyone. Sasha was the only one who knew. He thinks of Sasha, of her love for him, of his love for her. Of her, Sasha, who is now on her way to another life, while he is still here, being sucked deeper and deeper into the vortex of the past.
He fumbles in the inner pocket of his jacket, wraps his fingers around a small key, and opens the desk drawer. The revolver glares with a matte finish tarnished by time. He won it from his father-in-law’s NKVD friend on a bet, claiming he could down a glass of undiluted spirits twice as strong as vodka. It was May 9, 1965, the twentieth anniversary of Soviet victory over the Nazis, and they were all drinking at the dacha. The NKVD friend took his loss stoically, sliding the gun and a case with bullets across the table, although his jaw tightened and his Adam’s apple silently gasped. “Cherish it,” he said to Andrei in a dim voice. “This gun has a history.”
Thanks to his father-in-law, he now knows that history, and looking at the revolver makes him consider the irony. He owns a gun that killed hundreds of his compatriots who had the misfortune of living during Russia’s earlier, carnivorous times. Now, as his father-in-law often says, a rueful smile on his face, we live in vegetarian times, and the gun has been rendered useless. Or maybe it is simply on hiatus. With their motherland, where wars and revolutions happen with eerie regularity, one never knows. He glides his hand across the barrel, cold and a little rough; clicks the trigger; opens the case with bullets. They are pointed, made of brass. He pulls the hammer back and slides one in.
His wife will genuinely grieve, just as her mother and perhaps Vadim, who will be angered at seeing his daughter so devastated. And Sasha? She is gone from his life for good, vanished to the other side of the curtain. She is no longer here, within the confines of this reality. He has made sure of that.
A line from a poem floats to the surface of his mind: “Let’s part tonight and end this madness.” Mayakovsky, his favorite poet who has always been his lighthouse, his salvation. He scrunches his face and shakes his head. Mayakovsky, who ended up blowing his brains out. Some lighthouse. What a fucking joke.
He lifts the gun out of the drawer, weighs it on his palm. It feels too light to inflict such irreversible damage, too insignificantly small. He rubs the textured handle, presses the barrel against his temple, his forehead, his heart, as if trying to find a place most efficient for the bullet to inflict its ultimate damage, the place of certainty, the place of finality. He doesn’t want to wake up in a hospital, with relatives and friends around his bed casting him pitying glances. How did Mayakovsky do it? he wonders. He read about it somewhere, but not, of course, in the Soviet papers where everyone is too optimistic, too busy building a bright future. Then he slides the gun in his mouth and pushes the end of the barrel against his upper palate. Is this only a rehearsal? He will know soon enough. He holds the gun there for a few moments, his tongue finding its way to wrap around it: a warm, wet life embracing its cold opposite. It tastes of metal, dust, and time. The savage time, the squandered time. The time about to end.
48
She is twelve thousand meters in the air, trying to clear her mind and focus on her imminent future. Or is she trying to understand her past? Every time she glances at the overhead television screen that shows the position of her Aeroflot flight, Kolya and America get closer. The miniature airplane on the screen is like a needle over the Atlantic, stitching the two hemispheres together with the thread of their route.
What is waiting for her there, on the other end of this thread? She tries to imagine a New York airport, but all she has at her disposal are images of airports in Tbilisi, Kiev, and Baku, where her theater company has recently been on tour. She tries to conjure up Kolya’s face, but what rises before her eyes is the prewar photograph from their family album, of him in Grandpa’s garden, holding a branch of an apple tree, laughing.
Beneath is a heavy blanket of clouds, a curtain flipped horizontally that sets them closer to the sun and obscures the earth below. The first rays of light are just beginning to leak from under the clouds as the sun rises above the curtain, a stage light that in only a few minutes will flood the cabin and make everything pink. She looks out as a stewardess, her hand glowing in the streak of light from the window, hands her a US customs form. Her newly minted passport for foreign travel is in her handbag, ready to oblige, and, leafing through a pocket dictionary, she writes the answers to the stern American immigration questions.