The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [43]
“Let me give you one example of a Russian fairytale, OK?” he suggested, leaning over and stirring the champagne bubbles in her glass. “It is a true story.” Scooping up a spoonful of caviar, he swallowed and began to speak.
“One weekend last winter, I go cross-country skiing. It is perfect for this, the area around my dacha. I am gone for hours before I realize I am lost. And it is getting dark. Snow is falling, faster and faster. Then I hear these bells. The sound is, how you say, muffled by the snow? I follow the sound. And there in the middle of the forest is a village with a brand new church. This village is still full of old wooden houses, izbahs, we call them. Like gingerbread houses in old books. Except for the church, life is just as it was two centuries ago. There are women lined up at the well, helping each other put pails of water on wooden … on wooden …”
“Poles,” Charlotte whispered. “I think you mean poles.” She felt as if she’d been cast under a spell; touched in a way that made even her toes tingle. She wasn’t sure she liked it.
“Are you OK?” Pavel asked, brushing his fingers against her knees.
“Yes, I’m fine,” Charlotte replied. “Don’t stop.”
“So the men take me into a home and feed me by candlelight,” Pavel said, quietly resuming his story. “We drink vodka and talk about the church. Then they introduce me to this ninety-five-year-old woman. She saw the church in a dream, Charlotte. The dream went on for weeks. And she understood this was a message. So for three years, she took the train into Moscow every day, all alone, and begged for money to build it. One old poor woman, Charlotte, a widow from the forest made a dream come true. And thanks to her dream, I am saved by the bell! I found my way home. This is ironic, no? And a good fairytale?”
Charlotte had been so entranced, she’d drunk three glasses of Dom. Her head was spinning.
“Charlotte?” Pavel said, touching her knee again.
She blinked.
“Aha!” laughed Pavel. “You have surrendered to what we Russians call shamanstvo. It is like an enchantment.”
“I guess so. I mean, yes!” she said, hardly daring to look him in the eye. “I’m not used to drinking so much.”
Pavel chuckled. “Charlotte, how lucky you are. For us, this Dom is like sipping teardrops.”
“You’re a poet, Pavel.”
“No, Charlotte,” Pavel said, with a grimace as he sat suddenly rigid in his chair. “I am most definitely not a poet. There is a dark side to our fairytales, too.”
“I know. I’ve read …” Charlotte said, gently placing her glass on the table and glancing over at him.
Pavel shook his head. “I am not speaking of those nightmares that make it onto your televisions here, Charlotte.”
“So tell me, Pavel.” Charlotte said, gazing intently at his face. “Please.”
“In the village where I have my dacha, I am like a god. The peasants—and yes, we still call them peasants—love me and fear me. This terror and love is just as it was with the czars and the priests and the communists. They see me arrive in my black Mercedes and hear about my indoor swimming pool and my eight bathrooms. It makes them angry.”
“Well, of course, it makes them angry,” said Charlotte.
“It makes them so angry, they kill for a handful of rubles. Perhaps, not in my village, not yet, but in Moscow where poor men know that the rich are also killing for billions of American dollars.”
“Oligarchs, you mean?” Charlotte said, thinking of the Vanity Fair article she’d read about the guy who owned a yacht with its own submarine.
“Oligarchs, yes,” Pavel confirmed, with a wave of his hand. “And many others, too. The point is, the poor man and the rich man in Russia today are the same, Charlotte. They share the same rage, the same dead eyes, the same hunger. The rich men shop like the starving eat. The shopping is new for us. The killing is not. But we do both with a vengeance, believe me.”
“It’s not so different here, Pavel,” Charlotte added, eagerly. “The rich and the poor, the hostility.”
“It is not the same, Charlotte. Can you imagine your government dumping radioactive waste in the middle of New York City? This happened