Games

Supply and Demand #5

She turns around. Aleksandr watches her from the doorway.

He isn’t wearing a shirt, which is—distracting.

Lili looks back to the books, tracing her hand over their spines. Still feeling unsteady on her feet, susceptible and soft

after the shower, she grasps for the safe distance of intellect.

“Did you hide the Friedman before I came over?” she asks.

He laughs. “You didn’t give me much warning.”

Lili flushes.

Footsteps, as he comes up behind her. Placing his hands on her waist, he presses a kiss to the side of her neck. Lili’s eyes

flutter closed for a second. Hesitation catches; she feels both fragile and safe, a foreign feeling.

“You’re a confounding mix of mischief and petulance when you’re drunk,” he murmurs.

“I am not,” she protests, turning in his arms.

“Demanding, too,” he adds.

Distracted by his proximity, she looks up at his mouth; his lips, grinning. She wants to—

Lili clears her throat, gesturing vaguely at the bookshelf. “Rilke?”

“He’s an excellent poet.”

She rolls her eyes. “He’s alright. A bit overwrought.”

“What do you prefer instead?”

“I really like Darwish.”

His grin broadens. “Of course, you do.”

“What does that mean?”

“You have an inexplicable affinity for communists.”

She scoffs. “There’s a lot more to him than that. Have you even read him? Memory for Forgetfulness, or ‘Out of my ignorance, I called you a homeland . . .’?”

“Christ, he languishes in his own romantics.”

“Don’t be reductive. It’s poetry,” she retorts. “That’s quite literally the point.”

“I prefer novels anyway.”

Lili folds her arms. “Fine. Regale me with the superiority of Tolstoy’s vision of history.”

Aleksandr makes a face. “I’m not a fan of Tolstoy.”

“No?”

“No. He doesn’t have a vision of history, just a mess of a work, but Westerners seem to think he’s the epitome of Russian

literature.”

“I mean, can you even really read Russian literature right now, with everything going on?”

“I wasn’t aware Akhmatova had invaded a country recently.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Blacklisting the work of dissidents from almost a century ago because you find their ethnicity intolerable is a symptom of

the same nationalist illness that leads to these invasions and wars.”

“Well, you took a few logical jumps there.”

“Do an autocrat’s actions define the people? Do you feel well represented by your government, these last few years?”

“You can protest. People aren’t exactly marching through the streets of Moscow right now.”

“That march leads right into penal colonies.”

“That sounds like an excuse for political complacency.”

“And you have no idea what type of freedom you have here.”

She shakes her head. “No, no—don’t give me that America-first bullshit. This place has deep-rooted, systemic issues. The U.S.

is responsible for more war crimes, more failed states, more shattered economies than you can count.”

“Are we burning Russian literature or tearing down American hegemony? I’m losing track.”

Lili scowls. “Fine, then. Literature: Which of your comrades do you support? Rand?”

He tilts his head towards the far end of the bookshelf, behind his desk. “Not quite.”

Drifting over, she examines the books in the corner. Unfamiliar language on the spines: foreign, Cyrillic.

“Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov,” he translates for her. “Actual literature.”

She’s about to push him on his choices when she spots the picture frames clustered on the end of the shelf. “That’s you?”

she asks.

“Yes.”

Faded snapshot, black and white. A nondescript room, maybe a kitchen or living room. Hint of a drab patterned tablecloth in

the corner, a few books open. An unplanned photograph.

He looks unhappy. In the picture, Aleksandr is maybe eleven or twelve, sitting at the table. Closed expression, stiff set

of his shoulders, challenging tilt of his chin, but hard sadness in his eyes.

Empathy stirs in Lili. Ignoring it, she examines the rest of the photograph: the woman’s hand on his shoulder, somewhat careless

but also protective. She’s stunning, yet severe. Long black hair, hollow cheekbones. The same mouth and eyes as Aleksandr.

Serious, defiant gaze.

Curiosity gathers. “And your mother?”

“Yes.”

“She’s beautiful. Is she, uh—is she still alive?”

“Oh, she’s alive. Still in Saint Petersburg, won’t leave the country.”

“Is she—ah, supportive of the regime?”

A hard exhale, close to a laugh. “No.”

It’s a dangerous interest, wanting to learn more about him, but she keeps toeing the line. “What does she do?”

“Makes my life miserable.”

Lili nudges him with her shoulder.

“A teacher,” he says. “She used to be a teacher.”

“And your father?”

“Heart surgeon. Died when I was fairly young.”

He sounds stiff, a bit reserved: It’s subtle, the sense that he doesn’t want to speak on it any further. Treading too close

to common territory—lost parents, personal histories—that she does not want to forfeit on her end, Lili looks at the other

photographs—and laughs. “That’s you?”

It’s the only color photograph: the lush greens of a park, a wooden bench, two young men sitting together.

He’s likely her age here, she realizes. Jeans, a dark green knit sweater.

Hair a bit longer than he wears it now. He’s already grown into his good looks, obviously from his mother.

His arm rests over the back of the bench, relaxed but with his vaguely protective stance oriented around the younger boy beside him, late teens or early twenties.

There’s a superficial easiness to Aleksandr, a smile on his face that doesn’t reach his serious gaze.

It contrasts with the genuine openness, the youthful smile, of his friend. A lack of trust, guardedness.

You can start to see it, she thinks: the man he’d become, already in his face.

“Is that your brother?” she asks. The two don’t look similar, but Aleksandr’s posture is familial.

“No, a friend from home. We both went to England for university. He’s followed me into work, too. I can’t quite shake him.”

“When was this?” she asks.

“’98, I think.”

“Great, the year before I was born.”

Aleksandr laughs, sitting down in the chair behind his desk. “I’d just graduated.” He pulls her into his lap, resting his

hand on her thigh as she settles against his chest. “Michael—Mikhail, he anglicized—had a few more years left, but he kept

wandering down to London like some stray dog, showing up on my doorstep. Thick Russian accent, too, completely bewildered

all my friends.”

Lili traces a nonsensical pattern into his chest. She sees a class photograph, too. Rows of faces, formal robes, grins. Firsts,

graduation, and success.

Why didn’t you anglicize? she wants to ask.

“What did you study?” she asks instead. “Econ?”

“I read history and politics.”

“Oh.”

“Is that surprising?”

“I guess not,” she grumbles.

“Don’t worry, Michael’s the one who studied business the moment they’d let him in the building.”

Lili considers the photo in the park again. The older man in the room with her, the younger man looking out at her. “Do the two of you speak Russian together, now?”

Aleksandr laughs. “Jesus, no.”

She frowns, looking at him. “Why not? Because of the war?”

“It’s always been better for Americans to hear the British. They don’t need the reminder of where I’m from.”

It’s ridiculous how fast her questions rise, wanting to know more about him.

He sees it, too. “You can ask me about it,” he says. “I’m not allergic to the specter of communism.”

“Why—why did you leave?”

She’s not imagining it: the slightly sad hint to his smile. “I couldn’t stay.”

Lili nestles closer into him. She’ll leave. She will. Just—just a few more minutes.

“What about your family?” he asks. “It was your birthday, do you have plans to see them?”

“Oh. I don’t really have any. My—um. My parents died when I was young. Car accident. My foster family’s busy.”

Aleksandr frowns. “Fostered?”

“I wasn’t adopted,” she replies, looking over the bookshelves again. She clears her throat. “What’s with the Gramsci? And

Foucault?”

“They have some intriguing ideas.”

“You agree with Gramsci and Foucault?”

“Don’t sound so alarmed.”

“They’re both sort of Marxists.”

“I was, both literally and figuratively, raised by Marxists.”

“Yes, and you’ve thrown it all out the window.”

“Just because I don’t agree with the entirety of their thinking doesn’t mean I should ignore their work—it’s a limited world,

if we only explored what compounded what we already believed. You need to test what you think, often. Our convictions and

beliefs need to hold up against argument, otherwise, we’re just grasping at blind faith.”

It’s uncomfortable, when he says things she can’t help but grudgingly agree with.

“Alright,” Lili concedes. “Tell me what you like about them.”

“Foucault offers interesting ways to look at power.”

“Yeah, alright, I suppose the Foucault makes sense. His obsession with power.”

Aleksandr smirks. “I thought you’d appreciate his goal of a Marxist anarchist utopia.”

“Will you stop?” she grumbles.

His hand squeezes her thigh, under his shirt she’s wearing. Lili’s stomach swoops. “I appreciate how he thinks about dominant

ideas and institutions,” he says. “The way he questions norms and narratives. He gave us a new way to interact with history,

to understand who we might be and why.”

“I mean, he did borrow a lot from Nietzsche.”

“Do you intentionally try to avoid agreeing with me, or are you naturally a brat?”

Her mouth falls open, caught between shock and outrage. Aleksandr grins. “As I was saying,” he continues, “Foucault had a

refreshing view on power. He didn’t deride it for existing. He looked at it neutrally, with nuance, beyond reductive ideas

of only explicit force, or capital—rather in terms of visibility, perpetuation, reinforcement in dominant cultural narratives.”

“Like Gramsci,” she interjects.

“Yes, Lili,” he says, smiling. “Like Gramsci.”

She will not examine the little thrill that runs through her with his approval. “Well, if you see all of that,” she says,

grasping for the comfort of contention again, “doesn’t it feel dishonest? To see all of it—the superstructure, cultural hegemony