Fardwor, Russia!: A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin

XXXIX

THE JOURNALISTS WERE showed around the assisted living facility by the director himself. Yes, until that summer he really had worked in the Social-Conservative Center, but now he had decided to walk away from politics, and he was trying a new role for himself, and plus they pay better at the state corporation. “The terrible thing about the tabloids is that they mix the facts and lies, and it’s hard to separate the two,” he sighed, showing the journalists the living quarters, where children were sniffling in their small beds, real little children who didn’t look anything like forty-year-old men or thirty-year-old women. “Is there a Kostya Chernenko among them, seven years old?” someone asked. “No, no such kid,” the director sighed again. “When I read that, I checked our database to see if we had a boy by that name. No, and that’s the truth. Pass that along to that Becky!”

There were enough people seeking to pass something along to Becky, however, even without this. That same morning her editor called—the one who had the quote about the Biennale—and told her that they would obviously be opening a criminal case up against her, and if she could, then she should get away before she received the summons. She had been expecting something like this, she had even dreamt about it, and she wasn’t scared at all, although she had thought that it was better to take care of her backup plans before the publication than after.

However, there was someone who could stand up for her. Or not really to “stand up,” but at least to help her with advice—yes, there was one person. But the voice on the phone giggled, “The number you have dialed is temporarily unavailable, please try again,” and Becky suddenly felt terrified, and although ten minutes later she finally got through to Kirill, I want this episode with her dialed number not answering to remain so that you could understand what Becky was going through that morning.

When she and Kirill met at The Bridge restaurant at a party celebrating the hundredth anniversary of a certain newspaper, he told her right away that if she planned to marry an oligarch, then she should find someone else—he wasn’t going to marry, he already had children in America and Dagestan, and he hadn’t yet come up with how he was going to advise them to take care of his money in their inheritances. “My brother recently died, you probably heard about that,” he said, bending toward her, “Now I have to carry the weight of all that on my shoulders, and it is quite difficult.” She dabbed her eyes with a napkin—yes, she had heard about Mefody Magomedov’s sudden unexpected death, she had even wanted to write a report from the funeral, but she hadn’t been able to find out where and how he was buried; only later, a special press release from the Vremya-Kapital Corporation reported that Mefody had been buried in the family tomb in Derbent’s Russian cemetery. They were silent for a moment. Then she went to his place. After that they met—well, how many times, probably eight—but those dates were enough for her to feel happy. She was, seemingly, really in love.

Kirill listened to her silently and then laughed—yeah, you’ve gone and done it now—but she could see that he was proud of her. He called an assistant and said to move all of his meetings until five in the afternoon, and then drove her to Vnukovo-3 himself. Make way, peasants!

Within an hour that same Falcon 7X was carrying her off somewhere in the direction of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and after another several hours, she wrote on her Twitter that she was “laying around at a hacienda outside of London.” The next morning a printout of this tweet was lying on the table of the director of the FSB.