Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [153]
Marina shot me an angry glance.
“Give me a mirror,” Sasha said.
She went out to look for a mirror.
“What are my chances?” he asked, using the moment alone.
“They give you fifty-fifty, but you are a strong—”
“I know, I know,” he interrupted. “Look, I want to write a statement, in case I don’t make it. Name the bastard. Anya [Politkovskaya] did not do it, so I will, for both of us. You put it in good English, and I will sign. And you’ll keep it, just in case.”
“Okay, I will, but we will tear it up together when you get out of here.”
“Sure we will.”
He had trouble speaking. Still, as he was dictating his statement I could sense something very new in his tone. For the first time, I was receiving instructions from him, and in a manner that left no room for discussion. Through our whole relationship there had been a certain boyishness in him. He had assigned me the role of a grown-up, from whom he expected to get approval. Now he had grown up, sure of himself, talking while I took notes. It was as if the venom that aged him twenty years in three weeks had also made him wise and confident. Later, when Marina told me about the “other Sasha” who had revealed his hard edge to her only rarely, I recognized this side of him.
Marina returned with the mirror. For a minute he studied himself. He was satisfied—he looked terrible.
The next day, his image, a compression of suffering and defiance, flashed on millions of TV screens around the world. Meanwhile his would-be posthumous J’accuse, signed in the presence of Marina and another witness, lay sealed in an envelope in my hotel safe.
I brought him the newspapers. His photo was on every front page.
“Good,” he said. “Now he won’t get away.”
Those were his last words to me.
Moscow, November 21: Several Duma deputies allege that Boris Berezovsky and Akhmed Zakayev are behind the Litvinenko poisoning. “Berezovsky’s close links to Chechen terrorists [suggest] they could have organized both the murder of Politkovskaya and the poisoning of Litvinenko,” says the former FSB chief Nikolai Kovalev. The next day, Tom Parfitt, the Moscow correspondent of the Guardian writes, “The idea that the Kremlin gave an order to eliminate Mr Litvinenko seems highly unlikely. He just wasn’t worth it … [but] Berezovsky’s position is looking increasingly shaky—along with the positions of other individuals whose extradition Russia is demanding…. They need evidence to back up their claims that they’ll face retribution if they’re sent back to Russia. The death of a liberal journalist and the poisoning of an ‘enemy of the FSB’ ought to satisfy Judge Timothy Workman.”
For the next twenty-four hours, Sasha was heavily sedated, and he slipped in and out of consciousness. Most of the day on Wednesday, November 22, I was dealing with the press in an endless succession of interviews in the propaganda war with the Kremlin that was now in full swing. I finally came to the hospital in the afternoon. I looked at him through the glass from an adjoining cubicle. He had aged more in the past day; he now looked like a seventy-year-old man, bald, gaunt, skin over bones. He had not eaten for twenty-two days. He had had several visitors: George Menzies, his solicitor; Andrei Nekrasov, the filmmaker; Akhmed Zakayev’s entire family; Boris with Lena. Valter Litvinenko, his father, had flown in from Russia, and he and Marina alternated holding vigil at his bedside: he at night, she in the daytime.
Before Marina left for the night on Wednesday, Sasha suddenly woke up and looked at her. “I am going home, darling,” she said. “I will be back in the morning.”
“Marina, I love you so much.” They were his last words to her.
That night he went into cardiac arrest and was put on a respirator. He never regained consciousness, dying at 9:21 p.m. the next day, Thursday, November 23. His father was at his bedside. The staff at the hospital phoned Marina just as she returned home from her day shift. She picked up Tolik and they went back to the hospital.
London, November 24, 2006: Sasha’s statement is released to reporters outside