38. Alexei #3
“Fedorov brought us here the morning after he had killed them all. He put guns to our heads and made us kneel amid the ashes of our own wives and children. He told us, in slow, graphic detail, exactly how they had died. When he was done, we both wished he would pull the triggers.”
He stares into the ruined space, his face bleak.
“After all we had done to escape the horrors of the gulag, it felt like the mud and darkness had come for us again. Like the gulag was no longer a place we’d left, but the one we had both been born into, that would hold us both prisoner until our deaths.
I remember Aleksander said exactly that when we left this place that day.
We went to the riverside and drank, as men only do when they cannot bear to see what lives in their own minds.
For many hours we didn’t speak. Finally, Aleksander said, ‘Maybe we cannot ever leave that gulag, my friend. Maybe it lives inside us, just waiting to swallow anyone we are foolish enough to love.’ I told him that perhaps he was right. ”
He flicks his cigarette into the rubble.
“Maybe by then we had both seen too much, lost too many people, because I do not recall either of us crying that night. I don’t recall feeling anything at all. What I do remember is the rage I felt when I woke the next day.
“Aleksander and I came back here, to this godforsaken graveyard. We knelt in the ashes, and we swore on the remains of our children and the women we loved that we would avenge their deaths. We promised them, and each other, that we would make Fedorov feel every last stab of the agony he had forced us to endure, in exactly the same way he had made us feel it.”
His voice is no longer bitter, just sad.
“We did not want Fedorov dead. We wanted him alive, as we had been left alive. We painted the ashes of our loved ones on each other’s faces, swore we would take from him all that he’d taken from us, and then we drank Graf vodka from the hip flask we had carried all the way across the steppe from Russia. ”
Reaching into his suit jacket, Papa pulls out a battered old silver hip flask. “Today you and I will drink from that flask, Alexei.” He unscrews the lid, takes a mouthful from it, then passes it to me. “Drink,” he says, and I do.
The familiar taste of Graf burns comfortingly down my throat.
“How long have you been having panic attacks?” His question takes me by surprise as much as the simple delivery. He does not look at me, just waits until I answer.
“Since I spent every night for a week staring at the faces of all the men I’ve ever killed.” I meet his questioning glance briefly. “I was looking for something.”
“Did you find it?”
“Da.” I take another mouthful of vodka, feeling his eyes on me.
“I see.” He nods with disquieting comprehension. “But you also found the worst parts of yourself.”
I don’t bother answering that.
“Do you know why I brought you here, Alexei?”
I twist my head resignedly. “Knowing you as I do, I imagine there is a lesson you want me to take.”
“Not a lesson, syn moy. Nyet.” He takes the flask and drinks, then inhales more smoke. “A warning,” he says, as he blows it out.
“Same thing, is it not?”
“No. It is not.”
I shrug a shoulder.
“When Aleksander and I left this place,” he says somberly, “we laid waste to Fedorov’s Paris.
Do not, for a moment, syn moy, mistake what I mean by that.
” He stares out over the rubble, drizzle running down his face like tears.
“We slaughtered every man, woman, and child connected to his organization. Burned every building, stole every centime he had ever made. We took back every Naryshkin treasure he had stolen—not because we cared about them, but because it was the task our fathers had entrusted to us. After all we had lost, returning the treasures to their rightful owners was the only purpose we had left. I know we both thought it was the last thing we would ever do. Return the treasures, then die, like the doomed men we knew ourselves to be.”
I take the flask from his hands and drink, deeply.
“I brought you here today because I think you, too, are living with a gulag inside you.” Papa’s voice cracks slightly. “The story I have told you today is the reason I wanted to spend time with you in Paris the last time we were here. Of course”—he smiles wryly—“events clearly overtook us.”
His smile fades. “But do not think this conversation is simply an old man’s bid for atonement,” he says quietly.
“I have known for many years that I failed you. In our last conversation, you accused me of showing more loyalty to Aleksander—and to Roman—than I have to you. The truth, Alexei, is that every time I have failed you, it is Aleksander’s voice I hear in my head.
Sometimes,” he says slowly, staring through the slow-rising smoke into the wreckage beyond, “even now, after all these years, Aleksander’s voice is more real to me than those who still live. ”
The last of his cigarette burns to ash in his fingers, unnoticed. “It is not a voice that demands loyalty, Alexei.” His eyes settle on mine. “It is the voice of my conscience, and of late, believe me, it has had a very great deal to say.”
His brief smile gives me a fleeting glimpse of my father as a much younger man.
“To have a true friend is the greatest blessing life can give us,” he says quietly.
“Equaled only by the love of a good woman. From the first day you and Lars stood before me in my office, I knew you had found such a friend.”
He grips my shoulder with one broad hand, turning me to face him. “And Ofelia is not only good—she is the best of all that is life. Which means that no man deserves her love more than you do, Alexei—my brave, beautiful son.”
I cannot speak. The world has shrunk to my father’s lined face, and the love and pain in his eyes on mine.
“I told you I brought you here as a warning,” Papa says quietly, “and not as a lesson. Now I will tell you what that warning is. Will you hear it?”
I nod.
“Justice means eliminating the threat to our family. In our world, that is just business.
“But vengeance, Alexei?” He shakes his head slowly, staring deep into the twisted metal of his past. “Vengeance is hatred—and hatred is a gulag. One that will hold you forever and then come for those you love. Even if they never deserved to be behind those walls in the first place.”
He places his hands on either side of my face, resting his forehead against my own.
“Leave your gulag here, today,” Papa says.
“Inside these walls. Leave it in the wreckage, where Aleksander and I should have left ours. Because no matter who built the gulag you are living in, Alexei, only you can choose to leave it behind. And if Lars and Ofelia are not reason enough for you to do that, then no man ever had reason at all.”