“Oh, I’m quite sure it was him.”
Hamid notices that his wife is not in the mood to talk. He has been brought up to respect the privacy of those he loves, and so he makes himself think of something else.
Having first asked Ewa’s permission, he makes the obligatory phone call to his stockbroker in New York. He listens patiently for two or three sentences, then politely interrupts any further news on market trends. The whole call lasts no more than two minutes.
He makes another call to the director he has chosen for his first film. The director is on his way to the boat to meet with the Star, and yes, a young actress has been chosen and should be joining them shortly.
He turns to Ewa again, but she still seems disinclined to talk, her gaze absent, staring out of the limousine windows at nothing. Perhaps she’s worried because she’ll have so little time at the hotel. She’ll have to change immediately and go straight to a rather insignificant fashion show by a Belgian designer, where Hamid wants to see for himself the young African model, Jasmine, whom his assistants tell him will be the ideal face for his next collection.
He wants to know how the girl will survive the pressures of an event in Cannes. If everything goes to plan, she’ll be one of his star models at the Fashion Week in Paris set for October.
EWA KEEPS HER EYES FIXED on the window, not that she’s interested in what’s going on outside. She knows the gentle, creative, determined, well-dressed man by her side very well. She knows that he desires her as no man has ever desired a woman, apart, that is, from the man she left. She can trust him, even though he lives surrounded by some of the most beautiful women in the world. He’s an honest, hardworking man who has met and overcome many challenges in order to be chauffeured around in that limo and to be able to offer her a glass of champagne or her favorite mineral water. He is powerful and capable of protecting her from any danger, except one, the worst of all. Her ex-husband.
She doesn’t want to arouse suspicions now by picking up her phone again to reread the message; she knows the message by heart.
“I have destroyed a world for you, Katyusha.”
She has no idea what these words mean, but no one else would call her by that name.
She has taught herself to love Hamid, although she detests the life he leads, the parties they go to, and his friends. She doesn’t know yet if she has succeeded in making herself love him; there are moments when she feels almost suicidal with despair. All she knows is that he was her salvation at a time when she thought she was lost forever, incapable of escaping the trap of her marriage.
MANY YEARS BEFORE, SHE HAD fallen in love with an angel with a sad childhood, who had been called up into the Soviet army to fight in an absurd war in Afghanistan only to return to a country verging on collapse. Despite this, he had overcome all difficulties to succeed. He began to work very hard, getting loans from some very shady people, then lying awake at night, worrying about the risk he was taking and wondering how he could ever repay those loans. He put up uncomplainingly with the endemic corruption, accepting that he would have to bribe a government official each time he needed a new license for a product that would improve the quality of life of his own people. He was idealistic and affectionate. By day, his leadership went unquestioned because life had taught him how to lead, and military service had helped him understand exactly how hierarchies work. At night, he would cling to her and ask her to protect and advise him, to pray for everything to go well and for him to avoid the many traps that lay in his path each day.
Ewa would stroke his hair and assure him that everything was fine, that he was a good man, and that God always rewarded the just.
Gradually, the difficulties gave way to opportunities. The small business he had started—after almost begging people to sign contracts—began to grow because he was one of the few to have invested in something that no one believed could work in a country still plagued by near-obsolete communication networks. The government changed and corruption diminished. Money began to come in, slowly at first, then in vast quantities. However, they never forgot the difficult times they had been through and never wasted a penny. They made contributions to charities and to associations for ex-soldiers; they lived unostentatiously, dreaming of the day when they could put it all behind them and go and live in a house away from the world. When that happened, they would forget that they had once been obliged to have dealings with people who had no ethics and no dignity. They spent much of their time in airports, planes, and hotels; they worked eighteen hours a day, and for years never managed to take a month’s holiday together.
They nurtured the same dream: the moment would come when that frenetic pace of life would be but a distant memory. The scars from that period would be like medals won in a war waged in the name of faith and dreams. After all, each human being—or so she believed then—had been born to love and to live with their beloved.
The whole process of finding work was suddenly turned on its head. Instead of them having to hunt down contracts, they began to appear spontaneously. Her husband was featured on the front cover of an important business magazine, and the local bigwigs started sending them invitations to parties and events. They began to be treated like royalty, and ever greater quantities of money flowed in.
They had to adapt to these changed circumstances: they bought a beautiful house in Moscow, a house with every possible comfort. For reasons she didn’t and preferred not to know, her husband’s old associates ended up in prison. (These were the same associates who had made those initial loans, of which, despite the exorbitant interest rates, Igor had paid back every penny.) From then on, Igor began to be accompanied everywhere by bodyguards, only two at first—fellow veterans and friends from the Afghan war—but they were later joined by others as the small company grew into a multinational giant with branches in several countries in seven different time zones, making ever more and ever more diverse investments.
Ewa spent her days in shopping malls or having tea with friends, who always talked about the same things. Igor, of course, wanted to go further…and further. After all, he had only got where he was by dint of ambition and hard work. Whenever she asked if they had not gone far beyond what they had planned and if it wasn’t time to realize their dream of living only on the love they felt for each other, he always asked for a little more time. And he began to drink more heavily. One night, he came home after a long supper with friends during which much wine and vodka had been drunk, and she could contain her feelings no longer. She said she couldn’t stand the empty existence she was leading; if she didn’t do something soon, she would go mad. Wasn’t she satisfied with what she had, asked Igor.
“Yes, I’m satisfied, but the problem is you’re not, and never will be. You’re insecure, afraid of losing everything you’ve achieved; you don’t know how to quit once you’re ahead. You’ll end up destroying yourself. You’re killing our marriage and my love.”
This wasn’t the first time she had spoken thus to her husband; they had always been very honest with each other, but she felt she was reaching a limit. She had had enough of the shopping and the tea parties and the ghastly television programs that she watched while waiting for him to come home from work.
“Don’t say that, don’t say I’m killing our love. I promise that soon we’ll leave all this behind us, just be patient. Perhaps you should start some project of your own because your life at the moment really must be pretty hellish.”
At least he recognized that.
“What would you like to do?” he asked.
Yes, she thought, perhaps that would be a way out.
“I’d like to work with fashion. That’s always been my dream.”
Her husband immediately granted her wish. The following week, he turned up with the keys to a shop in one of the best shopping malls in Moscow. Ewa was thrilled. Her life took on new meaning; the long days and nights spent waiting would be over for good. She borrowed money, and Igor invested enough in the business for her to have
a good chance of success.
Suppers and parties—where she had always felt like an outsider—took on a new interest for her. In just two years, thanks to contacts made at such social events, she was running the most successful haute-couture shop in Moscow. Although she had a joint account with her husband, and he never questioned how much she spent, she made a point of paying back the money he had lent her. She started going off on business trips alone, looking for new designs and exclusive brands. She took on staff, got to grips with the accounts, and became—to her own surprise—an excellent businesswoman.
Igor had taught her everything. He was a great role model, an example to be followed. And just as everything was going so well and her life had taken on new meaning, the Angel of Light that had lit her path began to waver.
THEY WERE IN A RESTAURANT in Irkutsk, after spending a weekend in a fishing village on the shores of Lake Baikal. By that stage, the company owned two planes and a helicopter, so that they could travel as far as they liked and be back on Monday to start all over again. Neither of them complained about spending so little time together, but it was clear that the many years of struggle were beginning to take their toll. Still, they knew that their love was stronger than everything else, and, as long as they were together, they would be all right.
In the middle of a candlelit supper, a drunken beggar came into the restaurant, walked over to their table, sat down, and began to talk, interrupting their precious moment alone, far from the hustle and bustle of Moscow. A minute later, the owner offered to remove him, but Igor said he would take care of it. The beggar grew animated, picked up their bottle of vodka and drank from it; then he started asking questions (“Who are you? How come you’ve got so much money, when we all live in such poverty here?”) and generally complaining about life and about the government. Igor put up with this for a few more minutes.
Then he got to his feet, took the man by the arm, and led him outside (the restaurant was in an unpaved street). His two bodyguards were waiting for him. Ewa saw through the window that her husband barely spoke to them, apart from issuing some order along the lines of “Keep an eye on my wife” and headed off toward a small side street. He came back a few minutes later, smiling.
“Well, he won’t bother anyone again,” he said.
Ewa noticed a different light in his eyes; they seemed filled by an immense joy, far greater than any joy he had shown during the weekend they had spent together.
“What did you do?”
Igor did not reply, but simply called for more vodka. They both drank steadily into the night—he happy and smiling and she choosing to understand only what she wanted to understand. He had always been so generous with those less fortunate than himself, so perhaps he had given the man money to help him out of his poverty.
When they went back to the hotel, he said:
“It’s something I learned in my youth, when I was fighting in an unjust war for an ideal I didn’t believe in. There’s always a way of putting an end to poverty.”
NO, IGOR CAN’T BE HERE in Cannes. Hamid must have made a mistake. The two men had only met once before, in the foyer of the building where they lived in London, when Igor had found out their address and gone there to beg Ewa to come back. Hamid had spoken to him, but hadn’t allowed him to come in, threatening to call the police. For a whole week, she had refused to leave their apartment, claiming to have a headache, but knowing that the Angel of Light had turned into Absolute Evil.
She looks at her phone again and rereads the message.
Katyusha. Only one person would call her by that name. The person who lives in her past and will terrorize her present for the rest of her life, however protected she feels, however far away she lives, and even though she inhabits a world to which he has no access. The same person who, on their return from Irkutsk—as if he had sloughed off an enormous weight—had begun to speak more freely about the shadows that inhabited his soul.
“No one, absolutely no one, can threaten our privacy. We’ve spent long enough creating a fairer, more humane society. Anyone who fails to respect our moments of freedom should be removed in such a way that they’ll never even consider coming back.”
Ewa was afraid to ask what “in such a way” meant. She had thought she knew her husband, but from one moment to the next, it seemed that a submerged volcano had begun to roar, and the shock waves were getting stronger and stronger. She remembered certain late-night conversations with him when he was still a young man and how he had told her that, during the war in Afghanistan, he had sometimes been forced to kill in self-defense. She had never seen regret or remorse in his eyes.
“I survived, and that’s what matters. My life could have ended one sunny afternoon, or at dawn in the snow-covered mountains, or one night when we were playing cards in our tent, confident that the situation was under control. And if I had died, nothing would have changed in the world. I would have been just another statistic for the army and another medal for my family.
“But Jesus helped me, and I was blessed with quick reactions. And because I survived the hardest tests a man can face, fate has given me the two most important things in life: success at work and the person I love.”
It was one thing killing in order to save your own life, but quite another to “remove for good” some poor drunk who had interrupted their supper and who could easily have been shepherded away by the restaurant owner. She couldn’t get the idea out of her head. She started going ever earlier to the shop and, when she came home, sitting at her computer until late into the night. There was a question she wanted to avoid. She managed to carry on like this for some months, following the usual routine: business trips, parties, suppers, meetings, charity auctions. She even wondered if she had misunderstood what her husband had said in Irkutsk and blamed herself for making such a snap judgment.
Time passed, and the question became less important, until the night they attended a gala supper–cum–charity auction at one of the most expensive restaurants in Milan. They were both there for different reasons: Igor in order to firm up the details of a contract with an Italian firm, and Ewa in order to attend the Fashion Week, where she intended to make a few purchases for her Moscow shop.
And what had happened in the middle of Siberia was repeated in one of the most sophisticated cities in the world. This time, a friend of theirs, rather the worse for wear, sat down at their table uninvited and started joking and making inappropriate remarks. Ewa saw Igor’s hand grip the handle of his knife more tightly. As tactfully and politely as possible, she asked the friend to go away. By then, she had already drunk several glasses of Asti Spumante, as the Italians refer to what used to be called champagne because the use of the word “champagne” was banned under the so-called Protected Designation of Origin. Champagne simply means a white wine made using a particular bacteria which, when rigorously controlled, begins to generate gases inside the bottle as the wine ages over a period of at least fifteen months. The name refers to the region where it’s produced. Spumante is exactly the same thing, but European law doesn’t allow it to be known by the French name, since the vineyards are in Italy and not in the Champagne region of France.
They started talking about champagne and about the laws governing names, while she tried to drive from her head the question she had tried to suppress and which was now returning in full force. While they were talking, she kept drinking, until there came a moment when she could hold back no longer.
“What does it matter if someone gets a little drunk and comes over to talk to us?”
When he answered, Igor’s voice had changed.
“Because we so rarely travel together. Besides, you know what I think about the world we live in: that we’re being suffocated by lies, encouraged to put our faith in science rather than in spiritual values and to feed our souls with the things society tells us are important, when, in reality, we’re slowly dying because we know what’s going on around us, that we’re being forced to do things we never planned t
o do, and yet even so, are incapable of giving it all up and devoting our days and nights to true happiness, to family, nature, love. And why is that? Because we feel obliged to finish what we started, so that we can achieve the financial stability we need in order to enjoy the rest of our lives devoting ourselves to each other because we’re responsible people. I know you sometimes think I work too much, but it’s not true. I’m building our future and soon we’ll be free to dream and to live out our dreams.”
Financial stability was hardly something they lacked. They had no debts and they could have got up from that table there and then with just their credit cards and simply left behind them the world Igor apparently hated and start all over again, and never have to worry about money. She had often spoken to him about this, and Igor always said the same thing: “It won’t be much longer.” Besides, this wasn’t the moment to discuss their future as a couple.
“God thought of everything,” he went on. “We are together because he decided we should be. You may not fully appreciate your importance in my life, but without you, I would never have got where I am today. He placed us side by side and lent me his power to defend you whenever necessary. He taught me that everything is part of a plan, and I must respect that plan down to the last detail. If hadn’t done so, I would either be dead in Kabul or living in poverty in Moscow.”
And it was then that the Spumante or champagne revealed what it was capable of, regardless of what it was called.
“What happened to that beggar in Siberia?” she asked.
Igor didn’t at first know what she was talking about. Ewa reminded him of what had happened in the restaurant there.
“I’d like to know what you did.”
“I saved him.”
She gave a sigh of relief.
“I saved him from a filthy, hopeless life in those freezing winters, with his body being slowly destroyed by booze. I let his soul depart toward the light because the moment he came into that restaurant to destroy our happiness, I knew that his spirit was inhabited by the Evil One.”
The Winner Stands Alone Page 10
