Chapter ALEXEI #2
He hangs up. I put the phone on the console, and I’m as tense as if I’d just come out of a fight, not a conversation. Sweaty hands, jaw clenched. I hate that Ivan can affect me so much. I hate even more that Vasily, even absent, is still capable of manipulating the lines of force in my days.
I turn into the mansion’s driveway. The security cameras flash at regular intervals, the facial recognition system activates before I even think of getting out of the car. The gate opens.
The mansion was built with the sole purpose of impressing. The architect hand-picked by my father scoured Russian Baroque references, mixed them with post-war Italian concrete, injected marble columns and bulletproof glass panels. It’s ugly, but impressive. Like everything our family built.
I park the car in the usual spot, under the covered porch.
Wet earth, lawnmower gasoline, flowers that only bloom under the ultraviolet lamp installed in the garden.
The guards open my door, one hands me a new surgical mask, another already has the metal scanner ready.
I roll my eyes. The same thing every time.
I leave two pistols at the entrance. My father insists. He wants his approach to become a ritual, for the visit to inspire fear, respect, and, above all, the feeling that everything can be ended at the next meeting. Even for relatives. Especially for relatives.
I enter the mansion. Every surface shines. Cleanliness is a matter of life or death—my father is terrified of stains, fingerprints, anything that betrays the passage of time. The horror of knowing that objects, too, decay.
The floor is slippery from being so waxed. The first thing I see is the maid Anna, small and bony, operating an industrial polisher. She sees me and freezes: her shoulders rise, her face melts red, and the polisher almost rips off her arm.
“M-Mr. Malakov!” she exclaims. “I… I didn’t… didn’t hear you… arri… arriving! S-Sorry, I’ll finish… I… quickly, sir, I promise!”
She stutters, trembling so much she looks like she’s going to faint on top of the equipment.
Her reaction is not a surprise. Employee training here follows its own manual, a bible of micro-rules written by successive generations of paranoid bosses, and rule number one is: disappear before being noticed. The presence of a Malakov is like a fire drill.
I check my watch. I am punctual, same time as always. She, one minute late.
“One minute, Anna.”
She stares at me. She opens her mouth, closes it. Her hands tremble. She breathes in panic, trying to combine promises of efficiency with the demand to disappear. “I… I… I didn’t mean to… it’s just… I…” She stumbles, literally and metaphorically.
I sigh.
“It’s fine. Finish, then.”
Two hurried figures blur in the side corridor: employees cleaning the glass panels, now vanishing like lizards through cracks. I wonder how many of them have their real names on file, how many managed to avoid the heavy hand of the family HR, how many survived more than a month.
Anna’s polisher bumps against the baseboards. I remember reading, in some report, that she was hired on Angélica’s recommendation, probably to keep someone trustworthy among my father’s eyes and ears. But what Anna sees, she never speaks. You learn quickly in this ecosystem.
It is only when I reach the staircase that Dimitri appears. He is a tragicomic figure of loyalty: always dressed like a Soviet spy, hair slicked back, navy blue tie. The butler who has served this house longer than I’ve been alive.
“Mr. Alexei.” He bows his head. “It’s good to see you.”
“Where is he?” I ask.
“In the master bedroom, sir. With the medical team. Mrs. Malakov asked you to wait for him in the blue salon.”
“Mrs. Malakov” grates on my ear. He refers to Angélica with a title she didn’t earn.
I nod. Dimitri vanishes into thin air, delighted not to have to prolong the conversation.
I walk down the hallway, ignoring the family portraits that adorn the wall: all forged, all posed, all lies.
In one of them, my father poses with his first wife.
Both already hated themselves and the son they had together, but on screen, they are all smiles and champagne flutes.
An artist was paid extra to hide the bruise on my father’s left eye, the result of a fight with a Swiss banker. Tradition.
The corridor goes to the end of the hall, where cobalt blue double wooden doors separate the rest of the house from the “blue salon,” a name that never stuck, despite my stepmother’s efforts to rename everything in here.
I push the door. All the furniture came from Italy, except for the velvet armchair that occupies the center of the salon and which, they say, was taken from Moscow before the revolution. I find it unlikely: it’s too intact.
The coffee table is set with coffee, tea, and two types of biscuits. A pose of civility. No one in this house consumes sugar or gluten.
Angélica glides into the salon with a glass of white wine in her hand. She holds the glass by the stem, her nails painted the most expensive shade the beauty market could invent.
She is twenty-six. She looks even younger. Her blonde hair is impeccable and her blue cashmere dress hugs a body that the gym and genetics have kept perfect. She is beautiful, an expensive work of art that my father acquired when she was twenty and he, sixty-five.
“Alyosha, dear. You’ve arrived.”
What a joke. Alyosha. As if, by pronouncing the diminutive, she could rewrite the entire logic of our relationship—who commands, who obeys, who is blood, who is satellite. “You don’t speak Russian, Angélica,” I say. “You don’t even know what you’re saying. Don’t use that name.”
She ignores my order. “Don’t be so formal,” she says, stopping in front of me. “I’ve told you you can call me mother.”
I make a point of looking at her as if she were a stranger. “I am sixteen years older than you.”
She sighs, theatrically. A martyr. “You and your brother are impossible. I’m just trying to keep this family intact, but no one cooperates.
” She takes a sip of wine, sits in the armchair my father chose as his throne decades ago.
The scene was staged by her, I’m sure: the arrangement of objects, the color of the wine, the type of biscuit no one will eat.
“Speaking of which, has your cousin confirmed if he’s coming?
We need to discuss the costs of the new physical therapy team. ”
“I will pay,” I cut her off.
“It’s not just about the money, Alyosha.” She corrects herself with minimal force. “It’s about responsibility. About who is here, making the day-to-day decisions, while others only show up once a month.”
“I show up once a month,” I say, “because I’m the one paying for your wine, the nurses, the doctors, the hydrolyzed collagen you mix into your green juice and post on Instagram. If anyone supports this house, Angélica, it’s me. So, yes, in the end, it is about money.”
“You don’t understand anything, Lyosha. Money is the least of our problems. What matters is keeping this place going, functioning, while your father—” She hesitates. “While your father—”
“What? Dies?”
I feel nothing. The humanity someone might have expected from me was lost somewhere between childhood and the first nights I spent outside this house.
Her face contorts into something that could be sadness. I doubt it is.
In the first years, she tried to win me over. Then, she tried to sabotage me. Now, she just wants to ensure my father dies with as little humiliation as possible, and that the inventory isn’t a public carnage. But, in the end, she still hates me because I control the finances.
For me, I despise her because she is a vulture.
She finishes the wine in one gulp, her composure breaking for an instant. She places the glass on the table.
“I didn’t come to steal anything from you, Alexei,” she says. “But I won’t apologize for existing.”
“Then exist in silence.”
She takes a deep breath.
“…You are just like your father.”
Perhaps the comparison would have affected me when I was twenty-two. Now, it’s just a confirmation of what I already know. I am what he always wanted: immune, practical, impossible to drown in cheap sentimentality.
“I am worse,” I say.
Angélica stares. Then, she stands up and adjusts her dress.
Her perfume, expensive and invasive, fills the air wherever she goes.
She takes the glass to the bar and leaves it there, right in the center, like a trophy.
She doesn’t look back. She likes to exit the scene silently, pretending she could force me to go after her. It never works.
The clock strikes four o’clock and two minutes.
The house protocol is inflexible—no one enters the patriarch’s room without the team’s consent.
Angélica is, officially, the guardian of access to the deathbed.
I imagine she revels in the temporary power, knowing that afterward, everything will turn to dust and it won’t be her who decides every item of the inventory.
Exactly three minutes later, Dimitri appears. He gestures to me, and I stand up. Finally.
My father’s bedroom door is ajar. A nurse, seeing me, nods and discreetly withdraws, closing it behind her and leaving us alone.
The heavy blue velvet curtains are the same, the walls paneled with mahogany darkened by smoke and decades are also the same. But now the air is dry with pressurized oxygen, and with each step, tubes, monitors, drippers mounted on steel stands clash with the excessive classicism.
My memory of my father is a sequence of epic frames: bursting through double doors, crushing adversaries, laughing and speaking loudly.
Now, it is this man lying on an imported Swiss hospital bed, wrapped in thermal blankets and surrounded by an arsenal of medical devices making specific noises in the rhythm of slow death.
The bones of his face are already marked, his mouth already has deep fissures, the little white hair is stuck in tufts to his forehead.