The Winner Stands Alone Page 10

  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 cou
ld 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 to 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."

  Ewa felt her heart begin to pound. She didn't need him to say outright: "I killed him." It was clear that he had.

  "Without you I don't exist. Anything and anyone who tries to separate us or to destroy the little time we have together at this particular moment of our lives gets the treatment they deserve."

  Meaning perhaps that they deserved to be killed? Could such a thing have happened before without her noticing? She drank and drank some more, and Igor began to relax again. Since he never opened his heart to anyone else, he loved their conversations.

  "We speak the same language," he went on. "We see the world in the same way. We complete each other with a perfection that is granted only to those who put love above all else. As I said, without you I don't exist.

  "Look at the Superclass around us. They think they're so important, so socially aware, because they're willing to pay a fortune for some useless item at a charity auction or to attend a supper organized to raise funds to help the homeless in Rwanda or to save the pandas in China. Pandas and the homeless are all one to them. They feel special, superior to the average person, because they're doing something useful. Have they ever fought in a war? No. They create wars, but they don't fight in them. If the war turns out well, they get all the credit. If not, others get the blame. They're in love with themselves."

  "My love, I'd like to ask you something else..."

  At that point, a presenter climbed onto the stage and thanked everyone for being there that night. The money raised would go toward buying medicine for refugee camps in Africa.

  "What he doesn't say," Igor went on, as if he hadn't heard her, "is that only ten percent of the total amount raised will reach its destination. The rest will be used to pay for this event, for the cost of this supper, for the publicity and the organizers, in short, for the people who had the 'brilliant idea' in the first place, and all at an exorbitant price. They use poverty as a way to get even richer."

  "So why are we here?"

  "Because we need to be. It's part of my work. I have no intention of saving Rwanda or sending medicine to refugees, but at least I know that I don't. The other guests here tonight are using their money to wash their consciences and their souls clean of guilt. When the genocide was going on in Rwanda, I financed a small army of friends, who prevented more than two thousand deaths. Did you know that?"

  "No, you never told me."

  "I didn't need to. You know that I care about other people."

  The auction began with a small Louis Vuitton travel bag. It sold for ten times its retail price. Igor watched the auction impassively, while she drank another glass of Spumante and wondered whether she should or shouldn't ask that question.

  An artist danced to a so
undtrack provided by Marilyn Monroe and simultaneously painted a picture. The bids for the finished work of art were sky-high--the price of a small apartment in Moscow.

  Another glass of wine. Another item sold. For an equally absurd price.

  She drank so much that night that she had to be carried back to the hotel. Before he put her into bed and before she fell asleep, she finally got up the courage to ask:

  "And what if I were to leave you?"

  "Drink less next time."

  "Answer me."

  "That could never happen. Our marriage is perfect."

  Common sense returned, but she knew she had an excuse now and so pretended to be drunker than she was.

  "Yes, but what if I did?"

  "I'd make you come back, and I'm good at getting what I want, even if that means destroying whole worlds."

  "And what if I met another man?"

  He looked at her without rancor, almost benevolently.

  "Even if you slept with every man on Earth, my love would still survive."

  AND SINCE THEN, WHAT HAD seemed a blessing began to turn into a nightmare. She was married to a monster, an assassin. What was that story about financing an army of mercenaries to intervene in a tribal war? How many other men had he killed to keep them from troubling their marital peace? She could blame the war, the traumas he had suffered, the hard times he had been through, but many other men had endured the same experiences, without emerging from them convinced that they were the instrument of Divine Justice, carrying out some Grand Plan.

  "I'm not jealous," Igor used to say whenever he or she set off on a business trip, "because you know how much I love you, and I know how much you love me. Nothing will ever happen to destabilize our marriage."

  She was more convinced than ever that this was not love. It was something sick and morbid, which she would either have to accept and live the rest of her life a prisoner to fear, or else free herself as soon as possible, at the first opportunity.