In the Red (13 page)

T
hey were in the bar in the desert city, the bar with the sex show that happened downstairs in the dead of night. Irina could not help thinking of it, though it was daylight now. She wanted to ask Elena if she was thinking of the same thing. Maybe she would later, when they went to the bathroom together, away from the men. For now they listened as the men drank and talked about marriage. Not so much marriage as the wedding—not so much the wedding as the moment that makes the wedding an inevitability, that fabled moment when the man proposes. A pretty image from a fairy tale.

“It does not matter what film stock,” Dragos explained, “the image is always the same. It can be black and white, silent. It can be the most beautiful colors of the most expensive Hollywood production. It does not matter. There is always Vaseline on the lens. There are violins swelling. Even if the acting is bad, stiff like for a porno, the image is always the same. They are young, they are beautiful, the man and the girl, having dinner at a nice restaurant.”

“With a starched white tablecloth,” Andrei said, “and some candles.”

“Yes, and they look into each other's eyes as if they are asleep with love—”

“Catatonic is the word,” Andrei interrupted, “and they have just eaten some rich dessert with chocolate.”

“Yes,” Dragos continued, “the same chocolate dessert that will make the pretty girl into a fat wife in five years. And there is champagne too. And the girl laughs when the bubbles tickle her nose. And something hard hits her in the teeth when she takes a drink. She catches the thing in her hand and we know what comes next but, the silly girl, she does not. She almost faints when the man gets down in front of her on one knee. She opens her hand and he takes the ring from her, takes the ring from her palm and slips it on her small, dainty finger. The diamond is gigantic and perfect. The girl cries from joy.”

“What could be better?” Andrei laughed. “The man has finally made the girl a woman!”

“What a beautiful image, no? Is that how it was, Vasilii?” Dragos quipped. “Is that how it was when you made Elena your woman?”

“That beautiful image,” Vasilii answered placidly, “has a fray in the corner. Do you see? Pull a little and the music stops. Pull some more and you see that it is laid on top of something else, another image.”

Irina was waiting so intensely for Vasilii to finish his thought that she did not see that someone had come up to their table until Vasilii looked up at this person, nodding a curt greeting.

“Sorry it's a little late, Mr. Grigoriev,” the man said, handing over a black leather briefcase. The careful way he handled it made it look substantially heavy. His face was familiar. For several seconds, Irina could not place him. Then she remembered. He was from downstairs. He was the man with the dolphin tattoo who may or may not have winked at her before he finished his performance in his partner's mouth. Irina's blood rushed up to make her cheeks blaze. It had taken her several seconds to identify the man's face, but had he appeared before her naked, she would have recognized him immediately.

Irina looked at Elena to see her reaction, but there was none. The girl's face was blank. Vasilii grunted something like an assent after putting the briefcase on the table in front of him and waved the man off. The messenger excused himself with a small awkward bow.

“Good,” Dragos said. “I thought the delivery might have been held up again.”

The pebbled leather on the briefcase looked even more familiar than the face of the man with the dolphin tattoo. Was it the very same one that had been brought to the hotel suite on the day she had been given Vasilica Andreescu's passport?

Once again, Irina laid her hand on it. She was going to find out what was in there this time.

“I would not open that if I were you,” Vasilii said flatly.

“And why not?” Irina looked straight into his pale eyes, but it was Andrei who answered her question.

“So that when the judge asks you what was in the case, you will not have to lie when you tell him you do not know,” he said.

Dragos smiled as if this were all very amusing, while Vasilii remained stone-faced. Irina, undeterred, opened the latch on the briefcase with a loud snap. Nobody had time to respond before she had the briefcase open. It was packed tightly with bricks of white powder wrapped in cellophane. She saw them for only an instant before Vasilii's flat, angry hand quickly pushed the case shut on its silent silvery hinges. He nearly crushed her fingers in the mouth of the case.

The look on his face was unlike anything she had ever seen. The clear cold of the purest Arctic ice. No. It was beyond that. Purer and colder than anything of this earth. It was something from outer space. Absolute zero. For several heartbeats, nobody moved. Then Elena took Irina quickly by the shoulder and announced in an awkwardly loud voice, “Time for us ladies to visit the powder room!”

“Are you crazy?” Elena hissed once they were alone in the echoing, black marble bathroom. “Do you want to get us all killed?”

The bathroom had mirrors up to the ceiling. In all the repeated reflections of the two girls, their bodies looked small and vulnerable. Elena's hair had a vaguely electrified look, as if what Irina had done had literally shocked her.

“Well, now I know,” Irina said. “Drugs.”

She had seen what Andrei trafficked. There were luxury goods. Cars. Now drugs. She wondered if he also had a hand in the business of women.

“Did you see that guy who delivered the briefcase?” Irina asked.

“Irina, you must want to die.”

Elena looked up at her friend wearily, and for the first time that evening it struck Irina how tired she looked. The tender skin under her eyes had darkened to a bruise-like blue. Her pallor seemed starker than ever. But perhaps it was only the light in the bathroom that gave Elena's face its sepulchral appearance.

“Well, didn't you recognize him?”

“I am supposed to recognize him?” Elena answered, rooting around in her minuscule purse.

“It was the guy,” Irina explained. “From the sex show. With the dolphin tattoo. Elena, are you okay?”

“Why should I not be okay? My only friend tries to get us all killed and everything is okay.”

Irina didn't know how to answer. Elena's sarcastic anger was a red-hot flare. And yet she had also just told Irina that she was her only friend.

“How are things with Vasilii?” Irina ventured gently.

“He is my husband. He does not talk to me much except to give me orders.”

Irina had not thought before of Vasilii's long pianist's hand raised against her frail friend, but suddenly this seemed a possibility. If everyone became paralyzed with terror when some upstart orphan dared to openly flout him, what was he like in private with a woman that he owned? “He doesn't hurt you, does he?”

“Ha! No, not where you can see it.”

Irina looked Elena over for bruises not quite hidden by liquid makeup.

“Irina!” Elena said with some exasperation. “Don't look at me like that. He does not beat me. He is a fine husband. He is kind to me.”

The affirmation of Vasilii's kindness sounded so hollow that Irina winced. Of course Elena knew that Irina heard the falseness of it. Yet she was telling her friend in the only way she knew how to back off.

“You'd tell me now if something really bad was going on?” Irina said. It was the only way she knew how to tell her friend to come to her when she could, when she needed to.

Elena did not look into Irina's face when she nodded yes. Instead of making eye contact, she went back to rooting around in her purse. “Where is the damn lipstick? How could I lose anything in this stupid tiny bag?” she said. “It's no bigger than my fist!”

“Here, use mine,” Irina offered.

Elena accepted Irina's lipstick in her upturned hand. After she had reddened her mouth and pinched a paper towel with her lips to set the color, she asked Irina if Andrei would marry her one day.

“I don't know that he would ask me such a thing,” Irina answered. “I don't know if I would, even if he did.”

When the two girls came out of the bathroom, their mouths freshly glossed with the same berry shade, the men were hunched toward one another, speaking in hushed tones. When they saw the girls, they settled back into their seats. Dragos asked Vasilii with a fake casualness that embarrassed everybody, “So, what was the image?”

“What?”

“The image that was under the pretty proposal picture once you peeled it back.”

“Ah. I forget.” Vasilii shrugged. “Snow. Just snow.”

“White and cold and unmarred as the purest bride,” Dragos said, clinking the bottom of his glass of vodka against the top of Vasilii's, which was untouched on the table.

Irina pressed herself to Andrei on the booth seat. “Andrei,” she whispered urgently in his ear, “we are all of us criminals.”

“Now now, darling,” he answered quietly, gently squeezing her hand. “We are only capitalists.”

Then he turned to the other men, attempting another toast to distract Vasilii. “To capitalism!” he said with boozy gusto.

Dragos burst into laughter and raised his glass once again. “To American toilet paper!”

“What? What for?” Elena asked.

“Because,” Andrei explained, “Romanian toilet paper is worse than you can possibly imagine. Worse than even your Soviet husband can imagine. It is like wiping your ass with dry leaves and despair.”

This made Vasilii crack a small smile, and deign to respond with his own toast, “Yes, to America.” He clicked his glass against Irina's, which had been refilled in her absence. “To America, where you can wipe your ass with a cloud!”

Irina picked up her glass to take a drink as she was expected to, to accept what must have been Vasilii's gesture of reconciliation. She could have sworn, when she felt the clear heat of the alcohol flood her mouth, that Dragos—the bastard—winked at her with something like complicity, as if the two of them were about to play a fine trick on everyone.

W
hat is the image? There is no image yet. Only white. You notice it's ever so slightly frayed at the corner, see? Pull a little and it peels up. Pull some more, it makes a sound like tape being torn, and expose what is beneath, still dewy and crinkled and unsure of the light like a butterfly unfurling from its chrysalis. More white! Snow. Covering the ground as far as the eye can see, sometimes stirring itself in rising whorls when the wind breathes on it, and there, in the distance, galloping in from the horizon—a Phanariot. Does it matter which one? It hardly does. One of the thirty-three who ruled over Moldavia or one of the thirty-five who ruled over Wallachia. Perhaps he ruled over one and was moved to the other. It doesn't matter now, now that he rides alone through endless wastes of icy nothing. At least he was not one of the ones who were executed. Exile, for this one.

Not Moldavian and not Wallachian. Certainly not this thing that will not exist for at least another century, Romanian. He speaks several languages, but not whatever it is they speak. He is a Greek sent by Turks. Somehow both Byzantine and Ottoman. Touched by Russia. Sent in great pomp by the court barely two years before to rule over the principality he had purchased from the Porte. He owed many creditors for his great bribe. It is possible that the taxes he levied on the peasants to pay back this debt were too heavy. He does not think of this. It is not the peasants, after all, who cast him out. It was the machinations of the court, impatient with his tributes not being high enough. It was the boyars, only too glad to get rid of him, all of them dreaming of taking his place.

He is convinced that if he stops moving, he will die. His frozen body would never be found. They did not let him keep a proper coat against this stunningly bitter winter, not even a hat. A stable boy gave him a large scarf of rough, undyed wool on the way out. It is a pretty, deep cream color, but dirty. He has to wrap his head in it like a woman, against the cold. At least they let him keep a good horse. A young, strong animal—he can feel the life shivering through its limbs. The Phanariot is no stranger to riding. The wind has carved deltas by the eyes of his sun-browned face. Or are they lines from frowning at belligerents? Smiling at court entertainments? You'd have to look at his mouth to tell, to see whether it is sweet or sour, but you cannot see. It is covered by the scarf.

They called him hospodar. But they would not call him voivode. He is not very old at all, not as old as he looks.

Hunger drills him. He needs to find some small animal, pull out its steaming guts under the blank blue sky. He needs to eat tonight. But he has no gun. They left him only a knife. How can he get close enough to something to kill it? He takes out his knife; it flashes in the heatless sun. There are riders in the East who are known to cut tiny pieces of flesh from their horses' shoulders while mounted on them. He thinks of sucking a chunk of bloody, quivering meat from the edge of his blade. He cannot do it for now. He likes the horse too much. But if he does not feel something solid and warm in his mouth he will die.

How long has it been? Not very long at all. And yet it seems hard for his numbed brain to remember a time when the living was easy, when skin left unwrapped by furs did not hurt from the cold, turn black, turn dead. There must have been mildness and plenty but, already, he cannot be sure. The memory could be false. He might have dreamed it. He rides south, praying to get away from this winter. Will there be a place to sleep tonight? Will there be firelight?

He has not seen many women out here, and what women there are tell rough stories and dirty jokes in a language he can barely piece together, wear animal pelts and grainy wool, snap the necks of the animals they eat with their bare hands. The men must love them the same blunt way he loves his horse.

When they called him hospodar but never called him voivode, there was a girl with a gentle laugh and skin like milk who wore silks in more colors than he knew existed in our dim world. He could never pay enough for her garments, such miracles they were on her. She unfurled her dresses for him and preened, more satisfied with herself than the showiest male bird in the springtime—the springtime, he knows, does not come from above from the sun as they say. He knows it comes from below, when desire rises from the molten core of earth and the ice must yield, turn liquid. The ground cracks its own white carapace, pierces itself with green shoots—and the girl fits her dresses over her supple body, asking, aglow with the yearning to please, Do you like this one or this one?

Oh, they are both beautiful but please stay naked, my dear. Better this way.

What did they do with her? Did they slit her throat? Did they send her away? Did they take her for themselves? Did she cry for him? Or does it not matter which prince buys her the dresses?

Even out in this killing cold, there is beauty. The other night he emerged from dark bush to see the full moon enormous and white, rising low just over the bare trees. Its sudden appearance cut his breath—then just as his mouth rounded into a silent O, a wolf howled and howled and howled.

The girl had extraordinary hair that draped in lush wavy cascades over his plush pillows. A honeyed color not quite brown not quite blonde that gleamed red in the firelight. He liked the way she yelped when he gripped it while riding her. He knows that his yearning for the girl will make him suffer more than his evaporated gold coins, his pulverized titles, his vanished retinue. Lack of her will make him suffer more than the cold. He tells himself she does not exist. Or if she ever existed she is dead. From that time before, already he cannot remember. That time before the cataclysm, before the whiteout.

But he must ride on. If there is one thing life has taught him, it's that the only way out is through. Toward the spring. Toward the horizon. The vanishing line. Is the soft, blurry image of the girl what makes him want to go still and wait for death or is it the only thing pushing him on? Is the pain of not having her the only thing that can reach through the cold, and needle him alive?