Risk Tolerance #4
It’s like he’s thinking out loud, and she doesn’t want to look away.
Aleksandr sighs. “I suppose I was grasping at so much, the stench of my own ambition disgusted me. Or rather, it was exhausting—how
far there was to go between who I was, where I was, and what I wanted to be. In those churches, I wanted to feel small again,
but not anonymous—not insignificant, which is typical to feel in Paris, I suppose.”
“In what sense?” Lili asks.
Aleksandr runs his finger over the edge of his fork. “Paris has a weight to it. It exists in the shadow of our memories, expectations.
The city is heavy with the responsibility to be profound, life-changing, heart-stopping. Every street is named after some
significance—person, event, place. I felt burdened with needing it all to mean something to me, while I felt like nothing
had much meaning at all, at the time. There was this sense of never being able to relax into anything, any sense of rest or
understanding—everything was constantly moving under my feet, growing up, and I didn’t trust it. I was lucky, I’d gotten out,
but, I don’t know . . .”
Laughter from another table rises, a bottle of champagne uncorked. Aleksandr glances over at the sound. His expression is
calm, as if at peace with these memories that make her feel things—a yearning towards him, a kinship of experience, this desire
to smooth away that furrow of recollection at his brow—that she shouldn’t.
A few moments pass, quiet between them.
“Does it feel like home, now?” she asks, soft. “New York?”
“As much as anything could.”
“What do you mean?”
Aleksandr pauses. “I sometimes feel like home, or whatever I experienced that could constitute it, that could have that sense of history and meaning—it isn’t really there, anymore. A different city, with a different name.”
“Do you mean Saint Petersburg? Or rather, Leningrad?”
“Yes, but for any of us, really. Home’s a bit of an illusion, no? Something we say to make ourselves feel better. The idea
of something we’re moving towards, something we can return to, when we’ve actually left years ago.”
A different coast, the sound of parrots and cable cars in the morning. Ocean for miles, rushing air, the crash of clean waves,
familiar laughter. A place that recedes further away with every day she steps forward.
“What about you?” Aleksandr asks, looking at her. “Does this feel like home?”
“Best city in the world,” she quips.
He raises an eyebrow.
Lili lets out a sigh. “I feel like there’s so much here, that I don’t have to worry about whether I think of it as home,”
she admits. “It’s the center of something, it means a lot to so many people—it’s nice to get caught up in that. To feel like
you’re somewhere that matters, somewhere with meaning. Like, years spent here couldn’t have been wasted? Millions of people,
crawling over this island—I guess I thought if I was going to be alone anywhere, I’d feel the least alone here.”
Concentrating on the insulating buzz of noise, dozens of other dinners around them, she’s able to share words that feel like
giving voice to nameless, buried things; what she used to scrawl in her journal when she’d first arrived in the city, and
felt that panic settling in again: that she hadn’t outrun it, hadn’t caught up to it—or rather, her.
Hadn’t outrun or caught up to herself.
At the thought, familiar pain rises. Lili feels the instinct to shy away, but instead, she breathes; able—somehow—to hold
it at arm’s length, look at it.
The chance to sit with that agony, and not become it.
She continues. “At first, I did think I would feel at home here.” Her voice is quiet under the restaurant chatter.
“That if I would feel at home anywhere in the world, it would be here, with so many different people . . . I think I invested it with too much meaning. It disappointed me. And then I started thinking about other cities, where I might maybe feel not so alone. The next place, other lives. But that—that doesn’t actually ever happen.
You never actually catch up to or escape loneliness, I think.
Just like that sense of home,” she adds, rueful, glancing at Aleksandr.
And he’s watching her. Gaze steady, calm.
The way he looks at her: It feels like a memory. Cold salt air, the scent of an orange.
Before she can give any credence to that stirred feeling, sense of a misplaced memory—she moves on. “What do you think, when
you look at Russia now?”
A pause—a beat passes—before he says: “I see a country throwing the last handful of dirt onto its own grave.”
She raises her eyebrows, taken aback. “Do you mean in terms of the regime, Putin? What he’s done to the country?”
“Yes, but the country was rotting long before him.”
“So, what do you think can change it?”
He gives a hard laugh. “I wouldn’t say change is on the table in Russia.”
“What? Why not? Don’t you think democracy—a free society, a better future, progress—is worth fighting for, there?”
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“I’d say it is. You need to fight for the future you want.”
Aleksandr sighs. Lili bristles at first, but it’s not a patronizing sound. “You can’t understand Russia through a Western
lens,” he says.
“Isn’t that just an excuse to stand by while horrors persist? War crimes, human rights violations?”
“I’m not defending, Lili. I’m explaining.”
Habitual resistance rises again, but she lets it pass; seeking understanding, rather than compromise. “Okay.” She nods. “Tell
me. I want to listen.”
“Russia has never—not once—had a conception of its own national identity that didn’t center on greatness.
It’s always had a predilection for strongman rulers, Putin is nothing new.
This rallying for Western ideals, activism in the streets, America’s support for dissidents—it doesn’t actually have much to do with empowering the Russian people.
America will never want a strong Russia.
But it also fundamentally misunderstands the people’s psychology.
After almost a hundred years of living in a near-constant state of terror, that totalizing fear?
That irrevocably changes how you think about the world, your conceptions of self, the possibilities of political imagination, of what the future might bring.
You can’t import Western ideals wholesale into that. ”
“Well, but some values aren’t just Western anymore, they’re universal. Democracy, freedom of speech. Things anyone, anywhere,
would want.”
“Yes, but no country—certainly not America—is trying to bring democracy and freedom to other countries out of the goodness
of their hearts.”
“Isn’t that a bit defeatist?”
Aleksandr shrugs. “Optimism is a young trait. Young countries, young people. It’s a different psyche, a different collective
mentality in Russia. Not apathy, per se, but some sense of collective historical exhaustion. History was repressed for so
long, so many decades . . . There’s a caustic sort of bitter humor, dragged out and gray, after having lived through decades
of desperation and repression.”
“It sounds like you’re describing complacency. It’s our responsibility to fight for change, elect the government that will
help create it!”
“This endless agitation to have your government exactly reflect your own views—isn’t it exhausting?”
“What is government for, then, Sasha?” she asks, voice raising.
Aleksandr grins. She realizes what she’s said a moment too late.
“Sasha, is it, now?” he says.
Lili flushes; she’s only called him that when he’s fucking her to the point of incoherence. “Don’t look so self-satisfied,”
she grumbles, fiddling with her napkin. “I just mean, it’s a dangerous line. That disillusionment with government, you get
apathetic . . . it’s great if you can stand on your own two feet, but if you can’t—and if you’re not just white, cisgendered,
straight, things get complicated. And human rights are important, no matter where you are—I hear what you’re saying, different
historical contexts, but some things should endure across it all, under it all? Like, say—shit, sorry—”
Gesturing wildly, Lili nearly knocks her wine over. Aleksandr laughs, catching the glass before it spills. He kisses her cheek
as he rights it, and her face burns. “Thanks,” she mumbles.
He puts his arm around her, pulling her close as they settle back against the banquette. “I hear what you’re saying,” he says. “I’m just not waiting around for it to pass. Not in Russia, not now.”
There’s a buzz in her bag, insistent.
“Sorry,” Lili says, pulling out her phone. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
She excuses herself to the bathroom, where she ignores dozens of muted alerts from the group chat, quickly scanning the new
text messages direct from Jackie.
(8:35 p.m.) lili!!!
(8:35 p.m.) lili is he back
(8:36 p.m.) liiiiiiiiillllllllllllllllllliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
(8:51 p.m.) okay jamie just got here, he says you’re getting laid
(8:55 p.m.) cheering you on!!!!
(9:46 p.m.) hour check-in
(9:46 p.m.) update pls
(9:46 p.m.) screw the gc, but update me
(9:46 p.m.) i’m your favorite li come on
(9:48 p.m.) i’m good, i’ll see you tmr! he got back early, sorry. love you lots
Putting her phone on Do Not Disturb, Lili glances at herself in the mirror. Her eyes gleam, and there’s some warmth in her
smile, some argumentative electricity in her blood.
She missed this; she really missed this.
Weaving her way back to their table, Lili spies Aleksandr standing. He’s speaking to someone, a blond woman, with sleek hair
that brushes her collarbones, a bright green dress. Earlier, Lili had seen her sitting at another table with a group of friends.
Over the woman’s shoulder, Aleksandr sees Lili approaching.
A smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth.
Lili frowns.
Absolutely not.
“—of course, London in the summer can be beautiful, so much milder than New York,” the woman’s saying. “We were just saying,
Goldman has been hiring like crazy there, practically wading into the Cam with their grad schemes—”
“Thanks for waiting,” Lili says. She beams up at Aleksandr as she winds her hands around his arm, pressing herself into his
side.