Fantasy: The Best of 2001 Read online

  “I bet I’m going to like working for you,” March said. “You’re a right interesting fellow.”

  “Nobody likes working for me. If you doubt this, ask Viktor.” Polutin locked his hands behind his head, thrusting out his belly so that it overlapped the edge of the table; he looked with unwavering disapproval at Chemayev. “Now you may go. When you’ve regained your self-control, come back and drink some more. I’m told the entertainment this evening will be wonderful.”

  The countertop of the bar in the lounge adjoining the theater was overlaid with a mosaic depicting a party attended by guests from every decade of the Twentieth Century, all with cunningly rendered faces done in caricature, most unknown to Chemayev, but a few clearly recognizable. There was Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, the bloody-handed director of the KVD under Stalin, his doughy, peasant features lent a genteel air by rimless pince-nez. He was standing with a man wearing a Party armband and a woman in a green dress—Beria was glancing up as if he sensed someone overhead was watching him. Elsewhere, a uniformed Josef Stalin held conversation with his old pal Kruschev. Lenin and Gorbachev and Dobrynin stood at the center of small groups. Even old Yeltsin was there, mopping his sweaty brow with a handkerchief. Looking at it, Chemayev, sick with worry, felt he was being viewed with suspicion not only by his boss, but by these historical personages as well. It wasn’t possible, he thought, that Polutin could know what he was planning; yet everything he’d said indicated that he did know something. Why else all his talk of disappearances, of Larissa and vulnerability? And who was the Irishman with him? A paid assassin. That much was for sure. No other occupation produced that kind of soulless lizard. Chemayev’s heart labored, as if it were pumping something heavier than blood. All his plans, so painstakingly crafted, were falling apart at the moment of success. He touched his money belt, the airline tickets in his suit pocket, half-expecting them to be missing. Finding them in place acted to soothe him. It’s all right, he told himself. Whatever Polutin knew, and perhaps it was nothing, perhaps all his bullshit had been designed to impress his new pet snake . . . whatever he thought he knew, things had progressed too far for him to pose a real threat.

  He ordered a vodka from the bartender, a slender man with dyed white hair and a pleasant country face, wearing a white sweater and slacks. The room was almost empty of customers, just two couples chattering at a distant table. It was decorated in the style of an upscale watering hole—deep comfortable chairs, padded stools, paneled walls—but the ambiance was more exotic than one might expect. White leather upholstery, thick white carpeting. The paneling was fashioned of what appeared to be ivory planks, though they were patterned with a decidedly univory-like grain reminiscent of the markings on moths’ wings; the bar itself was constructed of a similar material, albeit of a creamier hue, like wood petrified to marble. The edging of the glass tabletops and the frame of the mirror against which the bottled spirits were arrayed—indeed, every filigree and decorative conceit—were of silver, and there were glints of silver, too, visible among the crystal mysteries of the chandeliers. In great limestone fireplaces at opposite ends of the room burned pearly logs that yielded chemical blue flames, and the light from the chandeliers was also blue, casting glimmers and reflections from every surface, drenching the whiteness of the place in an arctic glamour.

  Mounted above the bar was a television set, its volume turned so low that the voices proceeding from it were scarcely more than murmurs; on the screen Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was holding forth on his weekly talk show, preaching the need for moral reform to a worshipful guest. Amused to find the image of the Nobel Laureate in a place whose moral foundation he would vehemently decry, Chemayev moved closer to the set and ordered another vodka. The old bastard had written great novels, he thought. But his sermons needed an editor. Some liked them, of course. The relics who lived in the krushovas sucked up his spiritual blah blah blah. Hearing this crap flow from such a wise mouth ennobled their stubborn endurance in the face of food shortages, violent crime, and unemployment. It validated their mulelike tolerance, it gave lyric tongue to their drunken, docile complaining. Solzhenitsyn was their papa, their pope, the guru of their hopelessness. He knew their suffering, he praised their dazed stolidity as a virtue, he restored their threadbare souls. His words comforted them because they were imbued with the same numbing authority, the same dull stench of official truth, as the windbag belches of the old party lions with dead eyes and poisoned livers whom they had been conditioned to obey. You had to respect Solzhenitsyn. He had once been a Voice. Now he was merely an echo. And a distorted one at that. His years in exile might not have cut him off from the essence of the Russian spirit, but they had decayed his understanding of Russian stupidity. People listened, sure. But they heard just enough to make them reach for a bottle and toast him. The brand of snake oil he was trying to sell was suited only for cutting cheap vodka.

  “Old Man Russia.” Chemayev waved disparagingly at the screen as the bartender served him, setting the glass down to cover Beria’s upturned face. The bartender laughed and said, “Maybe . . . but he’s sure as shit not Old Man Moscow.” He reached for a remote and flipped through the channels, settling on a music video. A black man with a sullen, arrogant face was singing to tinny music, creating voluptuous shapes in the air with his hands—Chemayev had the idea that he was preparing to make love to a female version of himself. “MTV,” said the bartender with satisfaction and sidled off along the counter.

  Chemayev checked his watch. Still nearly three-quarters of an hour to go. He fingered his glass, thinking he’d already had too much. But he felt fine. Anger had burned off the alcohol he’d consumed at Polutin’s table. He drank the vodka in a single gulp. Then, in the mirror, he saw Larissa approaching.

  As often happened the sight of her shut him down for an instant. She seemed like an exotic form of weather, a column of energy gliding across the room, drawing the light to her. Wearing a blue silk dress that revealed her legs to the mid-thigh. Her dark hair was pinned high and in spite of heavy makeup and eyebrows plucked into severe arches, the naturalness of her beauty shone through. Her face was broad at the cheekbones, tapering to the chin, its shape resembling that of an inverted spearhead, and her generous features—the hazel eyes a bit large for proportion—could one moment look soft, maternal, the next girlish and seductive. In repose, her lips touched by a smile, eyes half-lidded, she reminded him of the painted figurehead on his Uncle Arkady’s boat, which had carried cargo along the Dvina when he was a child. Unlike most figureheads this one had not been carved with eyes wide-open so as to appear intent upon the course ahead, but displayed a look of dreamy, sleek contentment. When he asked why it was different from the rest his uncle told him he hadn’t wanted a lookout on his prow, but a woman whose gaze would bless the waters. Chemayev learned that the man who carved the figurehead had been a drunk embittered by lost love, and as a consequence—or so Chemayev assumed—he had created an image that embodied the kind of mystical serenity with which men who are forced to endure much for love tend to imbue their women, a quality that serves to mythologize their actions and make them immune to masculine judgments.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked as she came into his arms.

  “They told me I don’t have to work tonight. You know . . . because you’re paying.” She sat on the adjoining stool, her expression troubled; he asked what was wrong. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just I can’t quite believe it. It’s all so difficult to believe, you know.” She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth—lightly so as not to smear her lipstick.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Everything’s taken care of.”

  “I know. I’m just nervous.” Her smile flickered on and off. “I wonder what it’ll be like . . . America.”

  He cupped the swell of her cheek, and she leaned into his hand. “It’ll be strange,” he said. “But we’ll be in the mountains to begin with. Just the two of us. We’ll be able to make sense of it all before we decide where we
want to end up.”

  “How will we do that?”

  “We’ll learn all about the place from magazines . . . newspapers. TV.”

  She laughed. “I can’t picture us doing much reading if we’re alone in a cabin.”

  “We’ll leave the TV on. Pick things up subliminally.” He grinned, nudged his glass with a finger. “Want a drink?”

  “No, I have to go back in a minute. I haven’t finished packing. And there’s something I have to sign.”

  That worried him. “What is it?”

  “A release. It says I haven’t contracted any diseases or been physically abused.” She laughed again, a single note clear and bright as a piano tone. “As if anyone would sue Eternity.” She took his face in her hands and studied him. Then she kissed his brow. “I love you so much,” she said, her lips still pressed to his skin. He was too dizzy to speak.

  She settled back, holding his right hand in her lap. “Do you know what I want most. I want to talk. I want to talk with you for hours and hours.”

  Chemayev loved to hear her talk—she wove events and objects and ideas together into textures of such palpable solidity that he could lie back against them, grasped by their resilient contours, and needed only to say “Yes” and “Really” and “Uh huh” every so often, providing a minor structural component that enabled her to extend and deepen her impromptu creations. The prospect that he might have to contribute more than this was daunting. “What will we talk about?” he asked.

  “About you, for one thing. I hardly know anything about your family, your childhood.”

  “We talk,” he said. “Just this morning . . . .”

  “Yes, sure. But only when you’re driving me to school, and you’re so busy dodging traffic you can’t say much. And when we’re at your apartment there’s never time. Not that I’m complaining.” She gave his hand a squeeze. “We’ll make love for hours, then we’ll talk. I want you to reveal all your secrets before I start to bore you.”

  He saw her then as she looked each morning in the car, face scrubbed clean of makeup, the sweetly sad pragmatist of their five hundred days on her way to the university, almost ordinary in her jeans and cloth jacket, ready to spend hours listening to tired astronomers, hungover geographers, talentless poets, trying to find in their listless words some residue of truth, some glint of promise, a fact still empowered by its original energy, something that would bring her a glimpse of possibility beyond that which she knew. For the first time he wondered how America and freedom would change her. Not much, he decided. Not in any essential way. She would open like a flower to the sun, she would bloom, but she would not change. The naiveté of this notion did not bother him. He believed in her. Sometimes it seemed he believed in her even more than he loved her.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked, and smiled slyly as if she knew the answer.

  “Evil things,” he told her.

  “Is that so?” She drew him close and slid his hand beneath her skirt. Then she edged forward on the stool, encouraging him. He touched her sex with a fingertip and she let out a gasp. Her head drooped, rested on his shoulder. He thrust aside the material of her panties. All her warmth was open to him. But then she pushed his hand away and whispered, “No, no! I can’t!” She re­mained leaning against him, her body tense and trembling. “I’m not ashamed, you understand,” she said, the words muffled by his shoulder. “I can’t bear the idea of doing anything here.” She let out a soft, cluttered sound—another laugh, he thought. “But there’s no shame in me. I’ll prove it to you tonight. On the plane.”

  He stroked her hair. “You’ll be asleep ten minutes after take-off. You always sleep when we travel. Like a little baby.”

  “Not tonight.” She broke from the embrace. Her face was grave, as if she were stating a vow. “I’m not going to sleep at all. Not until I absolutely have to.”

  “If you say so. But I bet I’m right.” He checked his watch again.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “Less than half an hour. But I don’t know how long I’ll be with . . . with whoever it is I’m meeting.”

  “One of the doubles. There must be a dozen of them. I can’t be sure, but I think I can tell most of them apart. They vary slightly in height. In weight. A couple have moles.”

  “What do you call them?”

  “Yuri.” She shrugged. “What else? Some of the girls invent funny names for them. But I guess I don’t find them funny.”

  He looked down at the counter. “You know, we’ve never spoken about what it’s like for you here. I know some of it, of course. But your life, the way you spend your days . . . .”

  “I didn’t think you wanted to talk about it.”

  “I guess I didn’t. It just seems strange . . . but it’s not important.”

  “We can talk about it if you want.” She wrapped a loose curl around her forefinger. “It isn’t so bad, really. When I’m not at school I like to sit in the theater morn­ings and read. There’s nobody about, and it’s quiet. Peaceful. Like an empty church. Every two weeks the doctor comes to examine us. She’s very nice. She brings us chocolates. Otherwise, we’re left pretty much to our own devices. Most of the girls are so young, it’s almost possible to believe I’m at boarding school. But then . . . .” Her mouth twisted into an unhappy shape. “There’s not much else to tell.”

  Something gave way in Chemayev. The pressures of the preceding months, the subterfuge, the planning, and now this pitiful recitation with its obvious omissions—his inner defenses collapsed under the weight of these separate travails, conjoined in a flood of stale emotion. Old suffocated panics, soured desires, yellowed griefs, lumps of mummified terror . . . the terror he had felt sitting alone at night, certain that he would lose her, his head close to bursting with despair. His eyes teared. He linked his hands behind her neck and drew her to him so that their foreheads touched. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry it took so long.”

  “It wasn’t long! It’s so much money! And you got it all in less than a year!”

  “Every day I see enough money to choke the world. I could have fixed the books, I could have done something.”

  “Yes . . . and then what? Polutin would have had you killed. God, Viktor! You amazed me! Don’t you understand? You were completely unexpected. I never thought anyone would care enough about me to do what you’ve done.” She kissed his eyes, applied delicate kisses all over his face. “When you told me what you were up to, I felt like a princess imprisoned in a high tower. And you were the prince trying to save me. You know me. I’m not one to believe in fairy tales. But I liked this one—it was a nice fantasy, and I needed a fantasy. I was certain you were lying to me . . . or to yourself. I prepared for the inevitable. But you turned out to be a real prince.” She rubbed his stubbly head. “A prince with a terrible haircut.”

  He tried to smile, but emotion was still strong in him and his facial muscles wouldn’t work properly.

  “Don’t punish yourself. Can’t you see how happy I am? It’s almost over now. Please, Viktor! I want you to be happy, too.”

  He gathered himself, swallowed back the tight feeling in his throat. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I just . . . I can’t . . . .”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s been hard for both of us. I know.” She lifted his wrist so she could see his watch. “I have to go. I don’t want to, but I have to. Are you sure you’re all right?

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Go ahead . . . go.”

  “Should I wait for you here?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, wait here, and we’ll ride up together. As soon as I’m through with Yuri I’ll call my security people. They’ll meet us at the entrance.”

  She kissed him again, her tongue flirting with his, a lush contact that left him muddled. “I’ll see you soon,” she said, trailing her hand across his cheek; then she walked off toward a recessed door next to the fireplace at the far end of the room—the same door that led to Yuri Lebedev’s
office and, ultimately, to the inscrutable heart of Eternity.

  Without Larissa beside him Chemayev felt adrift, cut off from energy and purpose. His thoughts seemed to be circling, slowly eddying, as the surface of a stream might eddy after the sudden twisting submergence of a silvery fish. They seemed less thoughts than shadows of the moment just ended. On the television screen above the bar a child was sitting in a swing hung from the limb of an oak tree, spied on by an evil androgynous creature with a painted white face and wearing a lime green body stocking, who lurked in the shadows at the edge of a forest. All this underscored by an anxious, throbbing music. Chemayev watched the video without critical or aesthetic bias, satisfied by color and movement alone, and he was given a start when the bartender came over and offered him a drink in a glass with the silver initial L on its side.

  “What’s this?” Chemayev asked, and the bartender said, “Yuri’s private booze. Everybody gets one. Everybody who meets with him.” He set down the glass, and Chemayev viewed it with suspicion. The liquid appeared to be vodka.

  “You don’t have to drink,” the bartender said. “But it’s Yuri’s custom.”

  Chemayev wondered if he was being tested. The courageous thing to do, the courteous thing, would be to drink. But abstinence might prove the wiser course.

  “I can pour you another if you’d like. I can open a new bottle.” The bartender produced an unopened bottle; it, too, was embossed with a silver L.

  “Why don’t you do that?” Chemayev told him. “I could use a drink, but . . . uh . . . .”

  “As you like.” The bartender stripped the seal from the bottle and poured. He did not appear in the least disturbed and Chemayev supposed that he had been through this process before.

  The vodka was excellent and Chemayev was relieved when, after several minutes, he remained conscious and his stomach gave no sign that he had ingested poison.