Nine #3
“Why?”
“They are reclaiming what is rightfully Russian.”
“Ukraine is rightfully Russian?”
“Of course,” he said.
“But it’s not. You know it’s not, right?”
He ran a hand through his bristly hair. “For many of us, Ukraine is historical Russia. Many of us do not consider it a separate country. Many of us believe that efforts to create a separate Ukraine are part of a foreign plot, sponsored by NATO.”
“But that’s insane.”
“Is it?” Andrei asked. “It was an accident of history that Ukraine became independent in 1991. They had a referendum, but what does a referendum mean in a country with no infrastructure? With no understanding of what it means to be independent? When half the citizens are drunks?”
“Who says that?”
“Or they are corrupt, or they are Nazis. Or they are Russians themselves, and just don’t know it.”
“And you believe this?”
He shrugged. “I don’t care about Ukraine one way or the other,” he said. “I just didn’t want to get blown up in a ditch in Zaporizhzhia.”
“Right,” she said.
Again, the inscrutable shrug.
“So that’s why you’re in Tbilisi,” she finally said.
“That is why.”
“Are you able to work?”
“I am,” he said. “I can work from anywhere.”
“What do you do?”
“Coding for American tech companies. I test their security measures.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Why would I be kidding?”
“I didn’t know American tech companies hire Russians.”
“We do all the same work for half the price,” he said. “It’s why I can speak English. Didn’t you wonder why that was possible? Or do you just think everyone speaks English because that’s what you speak?”
“Oh come on,” she said. “That’s not fair.” Although she had, in fact, gotten used to everyone’s preternaturally good English.
He shrugged again, picked at his beer bottle’s label.
“So that’s what you’re doing all day, working on American websites?”
“Yes,” he said. “At night I usually take a walk, but it was very cold tonight. Tbilisi isn’t usually this cold.”
“It’s not so bad if you have a coat.”
“Unfortunately,” he said. “I do not.” He stopped picking at his beer bottle’s label. “And now I assume that you want to ask me why I don’t have a coat.”
She nodded.
“To get here, I had to drive my car to the Georgian border,” he said.
“Which is about a twenty-five hour drive, but with all the clogged highways… And then the line for cars to cross was three days, and I didn’t have enough petrol to last that long.
But I couldn’t drive to a petrol station because I’d lose my place in line.
And then it turned out not to matter, because someone on the line offered to buy my car for ninety thousand rubles, and I accepted. ”
“Was ninety thousand a fair price? How much is a ruble worth?”
“I needed the money,” he said. “It did not matter if the price was fair.”
She understood.
“So then I walked,” he said. “But, of course, I could not carry very much. And this is why I left my coat.”
“Jesus,” Amy said. “I’m so sorry.”
“You did not cause these problems.”
“It’s an expression,” she said. “I’m not actually apologizing.”
He lifted an eyebrow, possibly amused.
“Okay, this is what I don’t understand—why did you have to come here? Couldn’t you have stayed in Moscow?” she said. “Hidden from the draft? What’s the worst that could have happened?”
“The worst is very bad,” he said. “And it is hard to hide. If you get called up and don’t appear they come to your home. Or my wife would have turned me in anyway.”
Honestly his wife sounded like a bitch. “But what about your parents, couldn’t you stay with them?”
“My father’s dead,” he said. “My mother thinks I am a coward.”
“Because you don’t want to die.”
He lifted a finger. “Because I don’t want to die for the motherland.”
“But what about—” she had forgotten the daughter’s name. “What about your daughter?”
“What about her?”
“Wouldn’t they want you to stay alive for her?”
He shrugged. “Is it worse to have no father or to have a coward for a father?”
“Trust me,” she said, “it’s worse not to have a father.”
He remained expressionless.
“Does she know where you are?”
“She knows what she needs to know,” he said. “We want to protect her. That means that we are—we are careful with what we tell her. And of course my wife doesn’t want her to think her father is a deserter.”
“I’m sure she’d understand if you explained it to her.”
“She lives with her mother and she spends weekends with her grandmother,” he said.
“Okay.”
“She believes that Ukraine is part of the Russian homeland and that it is currently being overrun by Nazis,” he said. “She thinks that Vladimir Putin is wise and just and the protector of her country. She thinks NATO is an enemy collective set on the destruction of everyone she knows and loves.”
They were quiet for a minute. His large, scarred hands drew an aimless figure on the kitchen table. Sometimes, they were close to hers.
“I wish I could fix that sink,” she said.
“I’ve fixed it three times,” he said. “It never takes.”
The dripping sounded mathematical, or like a metronome. Or like it was conveying some sort of secret pattern that they could figure out if they listened hard enough. They listened, hard.
But then downstairs, a dog started to bark through the floorboards. “He probably needs to pee,” Amy said.
“Irine puts down—what is the word?” Andrei said. “She puts down pads.”
“Ew, gross,” Amy said. “I’ll let them out to the garden.”
“I’ll join you.”
“Don’t you need a coat?” Amy said.
“No,” Andrei said. “The beer has warmed me.”
She nodded because she wasn’t his mother, and they descended the creaky stairs to the ground floor. Before she could even flip on the light, the dogs roused, and started to whine, and then it was a pack of dogs scrambling at the gate.
“This way,” he said, opening the gates and then a door to the outside.
The dogs stood, some old and slow, others feisty, others barking.
They hurried outside, peed against the garden wall or humped each other or circled lazily under the stars.
The garden was large enough for a dilapidated swing in the corner, a picnic table in the other corner, and a huge tree in the middle, around which was planted a circle of small white stones.
“You must be freezing.”
Andrei lit a cigarette. “You want?”
She took the cigarette and they stood together, in the cold air, smoking erasing the need for conversation, as the dogs milled about, some shiny-coated under the stars, some almost invisible.
She could see an impossible number of stars in the sky.
The light pollution in Tbilisi wasn’t nearly as bad as at home.
She knew a few of the constellations, the ones everyone knew, the Big Dipper, Orion.
Here they seemed different, in the wrong position in the sky.
“Are you okay?” he asked her. Amy held an arm around her waist in a futile attempt to warm herself. Andrei was crouching down near one of the dogs.
“I could buy you a coat,” she said.
He laughed; his chipped teeth glinted. “Is that what you came here for? To fix our problems with your money?”
“No,” she said. Then: “I guess so. It’s what they expect of Americans, isn’t it?”
“People expect less of Americans,” he said. But he didn’t make it sound cruel.
The cigarette wasn’t as strong as the ones Irine smoked, or else she was getting used to them. Still, she felt herself grow lightheaded. She blew a stream of smoke toward Orion. She wondered which way Moscow was. She wondered if his daughter missed him. She wondered if his wife did.
She was so far away from her own home that she felt like she was on another planet entirely.
Impossible to imagine Judd, Le Coin, the cooks, the dishwashers, the delivery trucks, Meret, the East Village, the apartment.
Impossible to imagine that they could exist at all.
Roxy’s delicate trot down Fourth Street.
The intake desk at the shelter, the dog run at Tompkins Square Park.
That the cooks were cooking, that the traffic was honking, the subways were pulsing underneath the streets, none of it seemed real or even possible from this great distance. That the stars were in the right place.
“I think I will take my walk now,” Andrei said. “Maybe I’ll take one of these guys.” And he patted the dog in front of him on the head.
“You can’t go out like that, you’ll freeze,” she said. “You can borrow my coat.”
“I’m okay, Amy, truly.”
“No, just wait—” and she ground out her cigarette and hustled back inside and upstairs, found her green parka (oversized, it would almost certainly fit), but was unsurprised to find that by the time she returned downstairs, Andrei was gone.