Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [12]
“Well, so long, see you again,” Sasha called from the window as his train departed.
Lena gave her a sly look. “Just remember that you can only be serious with this guy. He’s incapable of quick affairs. So don’t even think about it.”
“I wasn’t even considering it,” Marina said.
Sasha showed up again about three weeks later. He had asked his wife, Natasha, for a divorce.
Slowly and shyly, he began courting Marina. “Suddenly he would show up at my door with flowers, then vanish for a few days, only to unexpectedly call and invite me to the movies.” She wasn’t sure why she put up with it, but she was as hesitant to reject as to encourage him. He too was in no hurry to rush the situation.
“Sasha knew how to wait, but he never gave up on what he wanted.”
Once, when he asked her for a date, she told him she had already made plans with a girlfriend to go to a concert. Just before the intermission, when the applause had died out, she felt a light tap on her shoulder: Sasha sat right behind her, smiling, with a plastic bag full of bananas in his hands.
“I must go away for a while, so I wanted to leave you with a supply,” he explained. On their first date, she had told him that she loved bananas.
Sasha had been transferred to the Anti-Terrorist Center and this was his first trip for the new job. With his boss, he was heading to the North Caucasus republic of Adygeya to hunt a major gangster, the local mob king, whose gang was responsible for several killings and kidnappings in Moscow.
“After the concert, he walked me home and said that he did not want to go. I knew that he meant because of me, and that made me feel good. I didn’t want him to go either. Gradually I grew accustomed to him being around. He exuded reliability and comfort. I may not have been looking for that, but when he left, I realized that I missed him.”
Sasha called from the airport when he got back. He spent that night at her place and never left. It was early August. Her parents were at their country dacha. Sasha and Marina had the apartment all to themselves. When her parents came back, he said that he would move into an apartment owned by the FSB, but Marina’s mother insisted that he move in with them; she “had accepted him as a son from the start.”
“When I think about why we were so happy, it’s because we could be ourselves. No need to pretend, to worry about being attractive, there was nothing to conquer and nothing to prove. That was obvious to us from the first day, and it was so natural. Neither of us had ever thought this was possible, and we were amazed by it to our last day together.”
In October, Marina announced that she was pregnant. It was one more miracle from Sasha: this was her very first pregnancy, after a previous marriage and medical advice that she needed fertility treatment. Sasha was thrilled by the news. “Now I can be sure that you won’t leave me,” he said.
“Usually you hear that kind of reasoning from women,” Marina retorted, with a smile.
As she later explained, “The traditional roles in our family were often reversed: he allowed me to be the boss in most things, perhaps as compensation for his overly ‘masculine’ work.”
But she could always sense that he had another side of him, very hard, which he tried not to show her and which, she said, “turned on in extraordinary situations, like the auxiliary shift in a four-wheel drive.” He would leave to her all decisions about their apartment renovation, yet when he planned their escape from Russia, she did not have a hint of what was going on until the very last moment; he took it all upon himself, and when he finally told her about it there was no point in arguing, and no time to try.
The first time she saw the other side of him was when she went to a driving school not long after he had moved in. As the classes came to an end, the instructor announced that those who did not want to bother taking the actual driving test could bring in $200 and give it to him “for the cops,” and then drop by the school to pick up their license soon thereafter. Marina was