PRIMORDIA

by Sarah Crysl Akhtar

"Of all the fairy stories we tell our children," said Arkady, "The Tale of the Greater Good is by far the most wicked."

"You sound like the fifth Karamazov brother."

Outside, the cold reduced everything to elemental purity. Traces of urine on the snow glittered like citrine quartz.

Arkady poured a little vodka into my glass of mors. I'm no drinker but "if you speak to me like that," he said, "then you must sit at the grownups' table."

He'd shrunk in his own skin like a spring bear but he was still a big man. His laugh shook the floorboards, a deep rumbling cough the chaser.

And he'd managed, even here, to maintain the elevated sensibilities of a Gorokhovaya Street apartment. The room smelled of honey and ginger but not of regret. The rough-sawn shelves had been filled with first editions. The urbane country gentleman, with his adoring dog to share his solitude.

This would be worst for her.

I tried to control my anger. It was horrible to me that Arkady should suffer yet monstrous he'd escaped accountability — that someone who'd savaged the rights of so many could choose the time and place and manner of his own end.

"Tolstoy misspoke," I said. "Intellectuals are all alike. With a hard nut of self-delusion at their core. That touching faith in Mother Russia's sacred destiny, no matter what's required to achieve it. But the innocent vanities of small harmless people enraged them."

"The Americans are equally sentimental," said Arkady, "but their writers are amateurs."

He got up to bring some hot thick smoky tea.

"I forgot what happens when spirits go to your head. Have another pryanik."

Alcohol loosens too much in me.

"Why weren't you immune to all that poison?"

"Delusion fuels the passions of policemen too," Arkady said.

He refilled his own glass with icy clear liquid fire.

"Don't misunderstand; it is not a mitigation. The stain cannot be diminished. Free will has its cost."

Lisichka shifted anxiously at Arkady's feet. She hated this sort of talk. He bent to rub her ears.

"It is one of the great ironies. Every liberator thinks he carries a gentler choke collar. But never mind. It's not important now."

"It was important to them — those people broken and killed — and their children and their mothers and fathers, without even a grave to cry over sometimes — they deserve more than your elegant allusions."

His eyes sparked — the same feral flash prisoners saw when he conducted interrogations in his beautiful cultured voice. Then he damped down the fire.

"Yes," he said, "that is the purpose of philosophy. To distract us from truth."

He opened another bottle of Siwucha and tilted it at me, a mock toast. "One more heresy. Keep this secret too."

***