Last updated on 2024-12-12
Departure 2: Ksenia in the Air
Ten years ago, northwest of Astrakhan…
Write, write, write! I wanted to write something different tonight. Maybe I wouldn’t have written at all: my hands and heart would have been too busy, but eventually I’d have come up for air to scream on paper, O blessed Russian fate! We have been faithful, and you have brought us back to love!
Those words would have killed us. So will these words. So will any words revealing what I’ve done, and what I’ll probably do next, and for whom I’m doing it.
But here, alone in the sky, I must say it. I couldn’t say it to him… may I at least have the relief of telling myself? Just this once, this night, tell it all, then tear out the sheets and burn them, and never speak this story again.
Rudy is here. Below, behind, in Astrakhan, but here, in Russia. He never left. Ten years he has lived in Siberia, traveled the country, lived by his wits.
And he is the Repairman. The Ring Group’s Repairman. The man I came here to catch so Marko could kill him.
My mind reels at the thought. How did I fall into such work? How did Rudy?
Books saved us. We were both looking for something to read. Our eyes fell on the same novel, Ice (I shall never read it now), at the same time, then fell on each other.
We could go back to the bookstore. We could go back to the restaurant. I could call him right now. His number is still on my phone. I could call him, plead illness, beg forgiveness…
But no. If we could meet—and you know we can’t, not now, not ever again, but if we could—I would tell him the truth. I couldn’t do otherwise; the truth would burst out on its own. Rudy, I’m so sorry, I built the trap that brought you here, and now that I’ve warned you, they’ll kill me right alongside you, so come with me, or I’ll come with you, again on your motorbike…. He told me the bike, our bike, the very same, was parked at his hotel, and I had already pictured changing out of this damn dress into road clothes and riding around the city with him—O! Let’s ride just like that, ride away from here, because forget this plane, too easy to find, leave it at the airport and leave Marko and the others wondering, we need Rudy’s bike to get out of Astrakhan together, to ride down to Grozny, where fate will smile on us again and direct the fucking Chechens to leave us alone and kill any men who chase us, through the mountains of Georgia and Turkey to Istanbul, through Greece and Slovenia and the great patchwork mess between, then down through Italy all the way to Sicily—but no, we must run from the mafia, from ours, from every mafia, so we ride the Riviera to Spain, put the Caucasus and the Alps and the Pyrenees between us and Marko and my people and Rudy’s. We detour to Geneva to drain my accounts (and maybe his, too; his work must pay well), use our sack of cash to buy a country home, then live our lives as humble peasants, gardening and drinking the milk of our own goats by the sea.
Rudy left his life once; he can do it again. But could I? I have radically departed from who I thought I would be, but I am still here, in my homeland. Could I leave?
Of course I could. Call Rudy now. Tell Rudy, meet me at the airport. I can turn this plane around and land before he gets to the terminal. Rudy, meet me, I promise that I will not run away this time. Or, I will run away, but only with you.
Call him. Run.
Rudy held my hands at the table. He begrudged the menu for distracting our hands and our eyes. The moment the waitress left, he reached, Rudy reached, across the table and took my hands. He did not say—so much we did not say!—but I could tell, from the electricity in his hands, that he felt as if Suzdal and our ride to Galich, the falls in the park and our moonrise on the mountaintop, all of our time together was just yesterday and nothing that he had lived since mattered so much that he wouldn’t roll it all back to say this is how we should have ended, Sunday morning in Galich, this is how we should have begun.
I know the feeling. I feel it now, the certainty of one miraculous day with one miraculous man from outside my world, here again, here still, here all this time, ready for what we should have seen clearly then and not feared or foresworn but seized and let lead us to wherever.
If I asked Rudy, he’d run. With me.
But we’re not on the bike. Caspian, Black, Adriatic, Mediterranean… no. I’m flying, 10,000 meters above the Volga, 200 kilometers away and counting from Astrakhan and from the man I would have killed.
Why can’t I go back? Why can’t I tell him? Why can’t we—
—No. No such indulgence. I’m saving his life. I’m canceling the operation. Luring the Ring Group’s Repairman and launching an assault on their principals wastes our resources anyway, draws attention we do not need, overreacts to a threat we can contain by other means. The Ring Group—and Rudy, my Rudy, who builds this Ring of academics and other mostly harmless entities merely seeking refuge from the madness I stir—they are not our enemy. Their security does not prevent us from controlling what we need to control. The rubles the Ring Group takes do not stop rubles from flowing into our pockets.
The Astrakhan operation rose from Marko’s craving for constant and total war, which only leads to total ruin, for all parties. We can live, and live longer, by other means. I shall tell Marko this, and he will ignore me, again, as is his wont on matters of strategy and testosterone, and I shall have to press my case elsewhere, by other means.
Or I shall remove Marko.
Yeah, put that sentence on paper. Let it stand by itself. Let Marko see it and rub me out.
As long as Marko is in charge, Rudy is in danger. I can cancel this operation, and I can explain that away, but Marko will press his campaign. Marko will figure out what happened here, he’ll figure out whom I’m protecting, and I will die right along with Rudy. And what good is that?
Rudy will not be safe, and now I will not be safe, until Marko is gone. Until I get rid of Marko, the way he got rid of Andrei.
Get rid of Marko—I’ve said that to myself before. I’ve thought it for three years. This is the first time I’ve let the words out of my head.
Live by the sword, die by the sword—if I get rid of Marko, isn’t someone bound to get rid of me? There must be a better way, a better plan I can dream up staring out this window at the moonlit clouds.
The moon, full tonight, as it was over the lake… that explains it.
But I already see the pattern, the threads I must pull, tear out, replace and reweave. I cannot see Rudy. I cannot answer his texts. I must delete his messages, delete his number, delete my number, delete every channel by which he might hear me say his name again. Maybe I can tell Mama and Papa, but I must swear them to secrecy. They cannot tell him, and I cannot tell him. All I can do is save Rudy’s life, and never let Rudy know I’ve saved it.