Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [76]
That fatherly talk and familiar face from his old life calmed him down. He started eating, and he started thinking.
“I tried to sort out why I was there. Should I consider myself guilty or innocent? Formally I was innocent of course, because the charges were all fabricated. But I had seen people who were imprisoned for nothing, because of an error or a setup, and I was not one of them. I was in for what I’d done: the press conference. I did it, it can’t be denied. I’d committed a premeditated press conference. Having a press conference is not a crime. But I cannot say that I did not know that I could go to jail for it. I even discussed it with my wife: would or wouldn’t I be arrested? If you ask around, most people would say, ‘Serves him right, what business had he staging a press conference?’” And so on, endlessly.
It was during these first weeks at Lefortovo that he realized there was a connection between his revolt and his relationship with Marina. Before he met her, his bond with his service and his adherence to its code of loyalty were absolute. Being disapproved of by his commanders, or disowned by Kontora, was the worst imaginable thing that could happen to him. But not any more. Losing her would be worse.
“You know, Marina changed the title of ownership,” he explained to me later on. “She came and claimed me. Had they put me on a polygraph before I knew her and asked what comes to my mind at the word ‘love,’ I would have said ‘Motherland.’ If they said ‘faithful,’ I would have said ‘My oath.’ If they said ‘obey,’ I would say ‘My orders.’ It wouldn’t have even crossed my mind to think otherwise. Because I belonged to them. Like a child to his parents, whom I had really never had.”
But Marina changed it all in an instant. From the moment he saw her, he belonged to her, and therefore he could not belong to anybody else. It was not like this with Natalia, his first wife. But Marina somehow found the key to the lock even he did not know he had.
“Had I gotten to URPO before her, I would have done whatever I was told, like a robot. But she broke that grip and allowed me to think. Then Boris came along, and he finished the job. Because he explained things. Not like my bosses, who could only bark ‘Because I told you so!’”
Lying with his eyes to the ceiling in Lefortovo, he was consumed by guilt about his two families. He did not have any savings. Hopefully Marina would have the good sense to go to Boris and ask for help. But then, surely, they would find a way to present even that request in a bad light, using some dirty trick, like they did with Natalia, his first wife. They had called Natalia in to Internal Affairs, taken away all records of her child support, and made her sign a statement claiming that Sasha was threatening her.
Back in November, at the peak of the scandal, Putin himself had claimed on TV that Sasha was not paying child support: “The wife of one of the press conference participants appealed to me.”
“Why did you do it?” Sasha yelled at her at the time. “Do you understand that you are endangering yourself? They will knock you off and pin it on me.”
“I didn’t know,” she cried. “I’m a silly woman. They frightened me.”
Such a dirty trick was to be expected from an oper. But for the FSB director to lower himself to this level! Kovalev or Barsukov would never have done that.
Sasha now had all the time in the world for rumination, but Marina did not have much opportunity to adjust to the shock. She learned about the arrest from Ponkin and the rest of his crew, who came to her workplace in the evening and tried to comfort her. Suddenly she had to take care of a thousand things. In the morning, Boris’s office called. Berezovsky is abroad, they said, but we found a lawyer for you. An investigator from the prosecutor’s office wanted to see her. Arrangements had to be made for Tolik to stay with his grandparents for a few days.
She went to see the lawyer. He was a veteran of military justice, who said from the outset