May–June 1998
I sat on the veranda in Torrequebrada, guzzled mineral water, stared at the sea, screwed Liza after dinner, slept. We went to the beach once, neither of us liked it: deserted and stale. On the third day I got into golf with Yurik, who’d shown up to report: everything’s fine, the holding company’s chugging along, just relax.
I swung the driver, sending balls sailing wide of every hole in existence, and thought back on the generals’ hunting-and-fishing trips out in the middle of nowhere. Ah, if only they’d thought to knock balls around a trimmed lawn while discussing business not meant for wiretaps… Now that would’ve felt good! We ought to build a golf club in Khryakino for holding secret conversations! Flights out to Altai and Kamchatka had ground to a halt…
A week later Liza and I set off for Miami, to the dream mansion squeezed out of Dimas. A pointless mansion. I realized that on the second day, comparing it to living in Malibu.
The layout of the California bungalow now seemed incomparable: from any part of the house you could reach any other part in ten steps. The ocean view opened from exactly one spot: an armchair in the shade under a palm tree, a small table, a step to the bedroom, three steps to the study, seven steps to the kitchen with the fridge. A rock garden out front, a pool off to the side. The house fit into the surrounding landscape like it belonged there, and not a single corner of it was inconvenient. What more could a man need for happiness?
Alas. What we have, we don’t value; once it’s lost, we weep. In Florida I got a three-story building on the waterfront, counting the half-basement – the pinnacle of dreams, the height of what luxury housing was supposed to look like. The designer bungalow was a thing of the past now. In the present I hauled myself from one end of this oversized rectangular block to the other, five minutes each way, and up and down floors besides. Back in Khryakino, it had been Akhmed who ran up and down the floors, so that whatever I needed appeared at the snap of my fingers.
There was no beach with a yacht in front of the house after all. What there was instead: an eighth-of-an-acre lot with a lawn and a dock for a motorboat. I took the boat out onto the ocean a couple of times under a hired skipper’s direction. About as much fun as sitting in Moscow traffic. There was nothing to do but steer. After five days of wandering the floors, I was tired of it and decided to head back to Moscow.
I’d made my peace with the fact that I was only ever happy in the future I dreamed of, or in the past that had become a memory – which is to say, the same dream, just stamped «Fulfilled.»
The air was thick with a mix of drunken optimism, cocaine-fueled energy, and a premonition of an approaching end. The country had picked up speed and gone barreling off like a train with no engineer. There were no maps of the tracks. The route was unknown, but the passenger manifest had become clear enough. We hadn’t made it into the first carriage. Zhorik had put it right: «No room in the premier league, that’s where the top brass and their kids ride.» In the second carriage, they weren’t waiting for us either – a bunch of oddballs with no pedigree. Third, fourth, fifth carriage – same story. There was no room on the country’s economic map for commercial upstarts with no lineage. We rattled along in the last general-seating car, fidgeting, wondering what would become of the Motherland, and of us.
I thought back on Anton, who a couple of years earlier had found a million dollars in his personal account and decided life had worked out. He’d retired from business. Not for long. Some veteran who hadn’t stepped away himself had needed his mansion, or his apartment, or his fund, or maybe all three at once. And that was the end of Anton.
