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The Barcelona Review

Author Bio

imagePAUL MANDELBAUM

SOCHI, 2014


Day two of the games, Putin spied a potential threat across the luge: a brunette who kept fiddling with her ski vest, its odd bulge suggesting hidden explosives. Maybe that was paranoid. After all, she had good Slavic cheekbones. On the other hand, nothing got a man blown to bits faster in this world than thinking with his khuy. He was about to signal his nearest FSB officer, when the woman’s bosom began to quiver and there emerged, from her zipper’s cleft, the whiskered snout of a small dog.
      Who would dare smuggle an animal past presidential security? So brazen was the act, it could hardly fail to impress him. Only after the danger had passed did his pulse begin to race, and he smiled at the response she’d provoked in him, she with her little dog. Wasn’t there a Chekhov story about a lady with a lapdog at a seaside resort, where she awakens the heart of a distinguished older man? He should probably read it again.
      A sled shot past, but he ignored it to study the woman’s mouth. She plucked at her lower lip, and her expression played the edge between hope and despair, which became for Putin the more interesting competition. Each time another pair of lugers rushed by, she rose on the balls of her feet, a habit he found charming, until she appeared to take special interest in the Ukrainian national team.
      At that point, having other events to attend, he left. But the woman with the dog stayed until every last sled had run its course. She then strolled to a Tatar café, where she offered bits of dumpling to the animal still sheltered against her breast before returning to the Radisson Lazurnaya at precisely 17:49.

*

The next day, as he waited to learn whether she would join him for tea, Putin faced a number of decisions only he could make. With all eyes on Sochi, Russia could ill afford missteps that would be amplified by the world media. The producer of Friday’s opening ceremonies was led into the room, his tailored shirt dark with sweat. Putin had yet to forgive that fifth Olympic ring, whose faulty pyrotechnics failed to make it bloom. Such humiliation for the Motherland, a global declaration of impotence. I’m very sorry, Mr. President, a damaged wire, Mr. President— “If you do that again …” Here Putin paused, savoring the man’s discomfort, until finally proposing a solution: “If you do that again on the final night, the world will appreciate our sense of humor.” The producer laughed, but with such strangled pain, it was clear he had no idea whether Putin was joking.
      On the phone, his finance minister whimpered about the Ukrainian bailout. Of course, Mr. President, you’re correct to maintain our influence, but 15 billion — “Then link it to their gas debt.” Putin had promised Kiev aid enough to quell the growing unrest in its public Maidan, all that hatred toward its leader, and, more importantly, toward neighboring Russia. It was the very last turmoil he needed right now.
      Throughout the morning, he kept thinking about Sonia from the luge. That was her name, according to a hastily assembled dossier: Sonia Ivanovna Shevchenko — 33 years, 165 centimeters, Peter-born but married to a Ukrainian. No history of political tendencies or even a single vote. She’d earned half the units toward a mathematics degree, but worked as a bookkeeper in her husband’s family business, a cannery in the Crimean town of Kerch. They had no children.
      The married part was problematic, but Putin could not stop pondering her outrageous display of cheek, and fantasized she might offer something beyond the blind obedience women assumed he wanted. Indeed, when she arrived at the compound later that afternoon, her dog perched on one hip, Sonia Ivanovna demanded whether it had been strictly necessary, moments earlier by the entrance, to subject the animal to a full-body scan.
      “I’m afraid,” he replied, “my security chief tends to err on the side of caution.” Having a way with dogs, he presented his fingertips, and Maxim, as the creature was named, licked them. “We have tea and blinis. Also water,” added Putin, who had thought to provide a bowl. “Please, make yourself comfortable.” Dismissing his aide, he poured Sonia and himself each a cup of tea, then joined her on the deerskin couch.
      She’d removed the infamous vest that had got his heart racing yesterday. Without the padding of her dog, her bosom lay almost flat and yet still exerted a theatrical pull on his imagination. She wore no jewelry, beyond a plain wedding band so thin it could have been a toy. Glancing downward, she accepted a sugar cube from the dish he held out to her, then hid it against the inside of her cheek. Putin did likewise.
      “Naughty boy,” she mumbled, as she tried to shoo Maxim off the couch, then explained, “He has separation anxiety and refuses to be alone.”
      “It’s fine.” Patting his lap, Putin persuaded the dog to nest there, then asked a question whose answer he already knew: Where were her people from? “Peter, like yourself,” she said, having since moved to Crimea to be with her husband. And had he joined her on this trip? No, Mykola stayed behind to run his parents’ cannery, a business he’d grown from almost nothing and now obsessed over. Did she herself work there? Until recently, she’d managed the front office, but was making herself “take a break.”
      “A break.” He spoke around the bit of sweetness in his mouth and asked if she planned to return home right after the games. “Or will your break extend beyond?”
      “I’m not sure.”
      “Well, I’m grateful you chose to spend some of your break at our Olympics.” Putin could not stop saying the word break, which had begun to sound like code for something fragile about her marriage.
      “The games seemed a good place to watch people trying their best,” she said, and this too sounded like a veiled comment on her husband and their life in Crimea.
      “I couldn’t help notice, you were rooting for the Ukrainian lugers.”
      She straightened against the cushions. “What makes you say so?”
      “It could not have been more obvious! Do you no longer think of yourself as Russian first?”
      “To be honest, I don’t know whom I’m supposed to root for.” Her eyes softened, and so bereft did she appear in that moment, he tried to cheer her with a little joke.
      “That’s a shame,” he said. “I myself am rooting for Russia.”
      It was a good simple joke, and he’d managed not to overdo it. Another woman might have blinked dumbly or howled like a loon, but Sonia Ivanovna rewarded him with a knowing smile, and he was impressed by the perfect scale of her response. He would probe a little deeper into her politics. “What do you make of the ruckus in your so-called capital, that circus overtaking the public Maidan?”
      “I have no stomach for conflict.” She seemed sad to admit this, and yet her steady gaze challenged him.
      “You must realize,” he said, “joining the EU would hardly fix all Ukraine’s problems.”
      “Maybe so,” she allowed, but the ambiguity of her reply frustrated him.
      “Sonia Ivanovna, surely you don’t wish to become a pawn of the West?”
      “Whose pawn would you have me be?” She blurted this with an asperity that felt, much to his delight, like a fingernail drawn along the length of his spine. Meanwhile, however, a look of mortification had befallen her. “Please forgive my rudeness.”
      “There’s nothing to forgive,” he insisted, her apology of no use to him. “By all means, speak your mind.” But having grown shy, she just smoothed the hem of her dress. “Yesterday you were so bold,” he reminded her, “smuggling your dog past a security cordon. May I ask what for?”
      “Honestly, I couldn’t say. My heart was pounding. So maybe that.”
      “Would joining me tomorrow as my guest seem anticlimactic?” He tried to wink, but his lid clenched, as though a gnat had flown into his eye, and the joke was spoiled.
      “I probably shouldn’t,” she murmured, a private thought spoken out loud. “My husband might be watching on television.”
      “Along with the rest of the world!” He resented her insinuation that some moral line had been crossed, and a silence grew between them. Before long, he summoned his aide to escort her out. “It’s been a pleasure,” Putin said, handing back her dog.
      Sonia Ivanovna remained silent until they reached the door to his study, at which point she said, “I would like to join you tomorrow. If the invitation still holds.”
      Did she suddenly favor the idea of making her husband jealous? That was not the role Putin envisioned for himself, but rescinding the offer would lack class. “Very well,” he said. “Be sure to bring Maxim, since he refuses to be alone.”

*

The next day he took her to the biathlon, where they enjoyed a view of the shooting range obstructed by nothing more than 50 millimeters of German-made glass. Even that modest barrier he felt a sudden impulse to remove, and not just because it came from the West. While he understood his duty to stay safe for the Russian people, what about his right to enjoy life? Standing close to Sonia Ivanovna, he inhaled the scent of her skin and tried to identify its pleasing zest. Like caraway. As he extolled the technology and sheer human will required to ensure an adequate snowpack, she gave him another of those knowing smiles he’d already developed a taste for. Naturally, she had brought Maxim. No longer obliged to hide him beneath her vest, she maybe should have, because the animal grew more fidgety with each gunshot.
      “Wouldn’t your husband have looked after him back home?”
      “Mykola? No, my husband is always vowing to get rid of him. Never trust a man who doesn’t like dogs.”
      Putin realized he’d been fishing for a fuller sense of her marriage, and in fact the union did not seem healthy. Maybe even in its last days. Maxim meanwhile continued to squirm against her grasp. Just as the lead skiers unsheathed their rifles and commenced another round of shots, the little dog leapt from her arms and immediately slipped through a gap in the bleacher boards. Unable to pursue him, Sonia pressed her forehead against the bulletproof glass, the helpless sight of which roused in Putin a protective impulse, as her dog barreled through the snow toward the rifle range.
      “Maxim!” she called, rapping with her toy ring.
      “Please calm yourself, Sonia Ivanovna.”
      With a tight nod, Putin signaled his lead man on the field, who in three strides reached the little dog and scooped him up. Within seconds, Maxim was returned to his frantic owner, who swaddled him under her vest and gently scolded him, her head bent at such an intimate angle she appeared to address herself. “Naughty thing. Stirring trouble.”
      “You see,” Putin said, “everything’s been made fine.”
      She wheeled to face him, her expression wavering once again between hope and despair, and asked if they could leave.
      “As you like,” he said, the biathlon having lost its luster. “Should I drop you at the Radisson?” But Sonia Ivanovna would sooner, she at last made clear, return with him to the presidential compound, where they might be alone. Though his common sense raged against it, Putin enjoyed a delicious sense of anticipation.

*

As soon as they entered his study, she leaned against him, closed her eyes, and pointed her mouth toward his. How conscious was she of herself in that moment, or of him? Sometimes Putin wondered if true consent were even possible toward someone as formidable as he. Did it matter to anyone who he was inside, or had his own power made access to that man impossible?
      “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Don’t you want to kiss me?”
      “Sonia Ivanovna.” He proceeded to crack open a door that maybe should have remained closed: “What about your husband?”
      Noticing Maxim against her hip, she set him down in order to shed her vest, after which she described a marriage full of regrets, akin to prison. She should never have dropped out of school for her husband’s sake, and last month she’d found him in bed with a girl from the cannery line. “Barely 17, this girl. Still pimpled on her backside. Also, pink toenails.” Each demeaning detail made Sonia wilt.
      “Are you seeking a way out?” Maybe she just needed a benefactor to arrange a soft landing. If so, he would help, but only if she asked.
      Fatigued, she slumped onto the deerskin couch. “It’s all so complicated.”
      Was it really though? His own divorce had been perfectly civil, as he’d stressed to the media. Of course, that didn’t mean it had left him unscathed. Having known his former wife through most of adulthood, he felt as though an entire side of his experience had calved from him like a glacier. Sometimes he forgot whose idea it had first been to part.
      “Eat something,” he urged.
      “Better you should take me to bed,” she said, in a voice less bold than her words.
Putin thought a moment, then led her by the hand to his private quarters. Once there, however, he opened the bureau dresser and withdrew a pair of his own flannel pajamas.
      “When you awake,” he said, handing them to her, “we’ll see how badly you still want to kiss me.”

*  

Back in his study, he took a call from Yanukovych, his beleaguered counterpart in Ukraine, who pretended to thank him for the announced debt relief but suggested a cash show of support might do more to stop the tire fires in Maidan square.
      “I’ll tap another billion or two,” said Putin. “Don’t dare spend it on yourself.”
      “I’ve learned my lesson, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
      “Let’s hope your people don’t rip it from your chest.”
      Yanukovych brayed like he’d just heard the best joke in the world. Idiot, Putin muttered soon after hanging up. Curled nearby on the deerskin couch, Maxim lifted his head to nibble a dab of sour cream from Putin’s fingertip. In the two hours Sonia had been napping, he’d taught the dog to roll over, fetch a presidential pen, and balance a paperback biography of Ivan the so-called Terrible. A voice now chimed from the doorway. “Again he escaped?” Looking up, Putin saw she still wore his pajamas and, though he might have wished the arms to hang longer on her, he otherwise found the sight endearing. Her nap had done her good. She seemed calmer now, no longer so at odds with herself.
      “I required his presence for an important phone call with your president.”
      “Is that so?” she said with flirtatious ease.
      Putin was wondering if she even considered Yanukovych her president at all, or just a placeholder until Crimea could be someday restored to Mother Russia. Then he noticed her face closing in on his. Her lips, slightly chapped, pressed against him with insistence, and her tongue ranged back and forth over his.
      Soon they repaired to his private quarters. After settling Maxim on a blanket in the anteroom, the two of them undressed each other, shy all of a sudden. Though he kept in shape, the age difference was stark and prompted him to suggest they climb beneath the covers. Kissing her navel, he sought the source of her caraway scent, as she clutched his hand, her lips arranging a constellation of little chapped kisses across his palm. Only as he entered her did Putin wonder if he hadn’t made a naive error, though surely at this point in his career, no blackmail threat could touch him. He opened his eyes to see tears glazing her cheeks.
      “What’s the matter?”
      “I’m fine,” she said, clearly not. Withdrawing, he spooned behind her and stroked her belly in a soothing manner. At least, he found it so himself. He hadn’t simply lain with a woman, in stillness like this, for ages. He spoke into her hair: “Why don’t you stay for supper?”
      “I’d like that, but I should return to the hotel. My husband expects to Skype.”
      “The two of you Skype?”
      Apologetically she said, “Each evening, at six.”
      How had his people neglected to inform him? The status of her marriage seemed more ambiguous all of a sudden, wooing her quite ill-advised. And yet, as he watched her step into her own clothes, withdrawing her nakedness, he heard himself ask to see her the next day.
      “Please think about it,” he said, entrusting her with the number to his private line.

*

Insomnia spun him like a top, as he wondered what she wanted of him, or he of her. At this point in life, he hardly expected grand romance. Those were the fantasies of a schoolboy, not the leader of a great nation. In his mind all of a sudden rang the offensive phrase leader of the free world. By what right, he often wondered, did Americans call their president such a thing? As though Russians would only follow a master, with no real love for him in their hearts. How superior Obama had sounded, voicing his hope for a Ukrainian government “with greater legitimacy and unity,” since the present one, disposed toward Moscow, could not possibly claim either.
      The next day, circles under his eyes, Putin spent a glum morning listening to his advisers peddle frantic predictions should Russia lose control over its partner-state, as though Ukraine were a disloyal spouse. Such an insult could not be tolerated, everyone agreed, but the solution was left to him. In fairness, that’s what he preferred, though just then it gave him a stabbing headache. Keen to clear his mind, Putin left to make an appearance at the men’s speed skating. The event was so dominated by Dutchmen, however, his gloom only deepened. Not until the ride back, just as his motorcade pulled into the driveway and he’d written off ever hearing from Sonia Ivanovna, did she finally call.
      “Well, you missed some tremendous skating,” he chided, before extending another invitation to supper. “Or will you have to rush off again like Cinderella?”
      “No, I can stay,” she said with great solemnity, as though she’d weighed the matter all day. “Mykola never rang last night, so to hell with that.”
      Putin was delighted. “I’ll have a car come round at six sharp,” he proposed, adding, “you may rely on it.”

*

During supper, they shared the stories of their day. With more candor this time, Putin vented his frustration over the afternoon’s skating when, to his surprise, she picked a fight about it. “Must Russia win all the medals?” she argued. “Is international esteem not the bigger prize?” She was right, of course, and her sympathetic intelligence he found at once attractive and a little unnerving. Beneath the table, he slipped Maxim a morsel of hake. Meanwhile, Sonia recounted an afternoon of writing postcards to her parents and cousins. Putin nodded, having already been briefed as much, when suddenly she said,
      “Don’t worry. I didn’t mention you.”
      Only now did he think to worry. “What would you have written?” he asked. “Were you to describe me as a man.”
      She studied him across the table. “I’d tell everyone how gentle you can be.”
      Her appraisal astonished him. Had she recognized a truth so few had cared to, or did she simply bring it out in him? When they retired to bed that evening, he took extra care to live up to her assessment and managed this time not to make her weep. More encouraging yet, come morning she remained in his embrace. Gazing down, he saw, sprouted from her left areola, a lone brown hair, and found himself deeply moved. He blew on it, watching it flutter, until she awoke and plucked it from herself with a sigh of distaste.
      “But why?” he asked, sorry to have shamed her.
      “My body shouldn’t have more hair than yours.” As she ran a hand across his chest, he couldn’t tell if she’d meant to mock him. But just then he hoped so, determined to take it as a sign of familiarity and hence affection.

*

 “The larger the better,” he told Yanukovych, urging the Ukrainian president to honor an impending prisoner amnesty. “Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day, so-called.”
      “I don’t follow. St. Valentine?”
      “Why not make a big-hearted gesture, Viktor Fedorovych?” With rare patience, Putin took pity on his dense interlocutor. “Before it’s too late.”
      Just as he hung up, Sonia returned from the lavatory. “Too late for what?”
      “For your president to keep his job.” Putin had planned to take the morning flurry of calls in private, but decided at the last minute to avail himself of her company. She had spent the night again, having returned to the Radisson just long enough to pick up clean clothes, and now lay her head in his lap, Maxim curled atop hers.
      She said, “I have such dark feelings about that man.”
      Though it pleased him to hear her views, Putin felt obliged to mention, in terms she might appreciate, that as long as her Crimean town remained under Ukrainian control — the unforeseen consequence, he’d remind her, of internal Soviet-era deal-making — it was vital to keep an ally in charge. “Where would you have us dock our Black Sea fleet, if not Sevastopol?”
      “Your ally,” she countered, “seems poised to butcher everyone.”
      “And whom might you prefer in the job?” Putin asked, steering their talk away from butchery. “Tymoshenko? Or do you like the Chocolate King?”
      “That part makes no difference to me. Mykola likes the Chocolate King. As a businessman, I think, my husband admires him.”
      “Sonia Ivanovna, would it be too much if I asked you to not mention him so often?”
      She glanced up. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. Believe me, my situation makes me uncomfortable, too.”
      “And yet it needn’t be your situation,” he pointed out. “You are in no actual prison. You’re free to leave at any time.”
      “I don’t feel particularly free.” She closed her eyes, and Putin stroked her hair as he watched her drift into a nap. Minsk was on the line, but he told his aide to take a message.

*

As a Valentine’s Day surprise, Putin had vetted a Tatar chef and brought the man over just to fry Sonia a plate of chiburekkis. She gasped at their flakiness, as though Putin had performed a magic trick, and was so touched by his gesture, the moment they returned to his personal quarters, she cornered him against the bath doorway and peppered his neck and ear with kisses. In the few days since their first coupling, they’d achieved a gradual comfort with each other’s body, and he now lay her across the heated marble floor. Later, while soaking together in the tub, he mused, “We should christen every room in the compound.”
      “So many rooms.” She sighed with seeming contentment, and the following afternoon decided to collect a few more of her things from the Radisson, including some of Maxim’s toys. “He can’t live without his Super-Ball.”
      Impulsively, Putin asked if she wouldn’t just prefer to check out of the hotel altogether. “It’s such an unnecessary expense for you.”
      “Mykola can pay with his last dime!” A scowl of fury had overtaken her, and she seemed as alarmed by it as he. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to say his name again.”
      “Please, dear Sonia. Let my staff fetch your things.”
      But she resisted, as though the offer impugned her liberty to come and go. And Putin, not wishing to make demands, dropped it and had a car brought around for her.

*

Meetings. Phone calls. Decision upon decision, each an emergency Putin alone could resolve. Ukraine’s prisoner amnesty having done little to calm the hatred flaring in Kiev, Putin felt obliged to throw more cash at the economy. And what of those St. George-ists? his defense minister asked. Recently a group of counterprotesters, wearing the Russian military ribbon of St. George and calling themselves “Kievans for a Clean City,” had begun overturning the Maidan barricades. We don’t want anyone, his minister fretted, to think they’re acting on our behalf.
      “As though we police the world’s taste in ribbons!” At moments like these, when the minutest event threatened global embarrassment, Putin wondered why any sane person would be in charge. So, it came as a relief when he was asked to the east vestibule to settle a conflict that in no likely way concerned the fate of nations. Sonia Ivanovna, having returned to the compound, refused this time to subject Maxim to the body scanner. Six FSB agents had gathered to address this crisis, including Levkov himself.
      “Mr. President, I keep telling her it’s perfectly safe.” The portly chief meandered back and forth across the machine’s threshold, as though it were a fashion runway.
      “It’s senseless and harmful,” she cried. “Would you scan an infant?”
      “Mr. President, please,” cautioned Levkov. “I urge you not to make exceptions.”
      They waited for him to speak, and Putin, weary suddenly from years of constant vigilance, reached around the scanner’s side so she could pass him her dog. The small creature was trembling, as was Sonia herself and, most noticeably of all, poor Levkov, who no doubt feared going down in history for failing to perform his duty.
      “A life without exceptions,” Putin tried to assure everyone, not least of all himself, “is hardly worth living.”

*

Over the next 48 hours, their intimacy only deepened. It was a time of relative peace, domestic and abroad, though of course that couldn’t last, tranquility being willing to pay no more than brief visits to the restive human soul. On Tuesday, riot erupted on Kiev’s Maidan. The images were shocking, for Putin none so much as that of a young girl prying bricks from Hrushevskoho Street. He pictured such a scene unfolding in Red Square someday, Muscovites dismantling the city to hurl at the very authorities who’d kept it safe and clean. Anxious to replace this image with one more pleasant, Putin went to check on Sonia in the hope they might christen a new room with their lovemaking. Instead, he found her dressing to leave again.
      “What now?” He tried to sound playful. “Are we out of those little chew treats?”
      Sonia insisted on returning to the hotel in order to Skype with her husband. “Not for long,” she promised. “To make sure he’s safe.”
      “The man’s far from danger. Crimea’s barely in Ukraine.”
      “Exactly right, he’s a Ukrainian surrounded by Russians.”
      She would not listen to reason. Putin even offered to enable her cell phone to Skype from the compound. But she seemed driven to proceed on her own terms.
      “Is there nothing,” she asked, “you can do to make it stop?”
      “Alas, those protesters are very stubborn.”
      “I mean,” she said, “the snipers.”
      There had in fact been reports of rooftop snipers opening fire on the Maidan below, but Putin could discuss only so much with her. He vowed to look into it, then tried to mollify her with a kiss, but she would not be detained.

*

The moment she drove off, he experienced a fist in his chest, foolish jealousy posing as angina. Determined to focus, he returned some calls. Warsaw and Bucharest, as well as the chairman of his own Duma, all sought reassurance Russia was not calling the shots, so to speak, at Maidan. Germany and France wanted a word. One by one he spoke to all the major heads of state, as well as some who hadn’t bothered to make contact since his last inauguration. Everybody brimmed with advice and judgment. On and on they went. The Olympics not even done, the world could hardly wait to deny Russia her moment of glory. Humanity’s ill will — sometimes he feared nothing would survive it. At one point, Obama himself deigned to phone, during which the American president threatened the West’s intention to sanction Ukraine come morning.
      “We must each follow the demands of his conscience,” said Putin, fiercely squeezing Maxim’s Super-Ball. Looking up, he saw one of his aides roll a luggage cart toward the private quarters, and soon Sonia stood in the doorway, her dog tucked under one arm, at which point Putin cut short his exchange with the leader of the so-called free world in order to greet this far more attractive development.
      “So!” Feeling victorious, even a bit cocksure, he said, “You decamped the Radisson.”
      “I wanted to make the most of our time.” She smiled, but an incisor caught along her lip, and there lurked a subtext to her words, an emphasis on the transient.
      “Can I assume your husband is alright, protected by only his child-mistress?”
      Ignoring his sarcasm, she confessed, “I offered to fly home early. It feels wrong to desert him at a time like this. But he insists I’m safer here in Sochi.”
      “Of course you are! You could not possibly be safer.” Jealousy again squeezed his chest, and after they’d retired to the private quarters, he steeled himself to ask, “Dear Sonia, how are you viewing our —” Here he clasped his hands together. “Connection?”
      “What about you?” Her smile was sweet but tentative. “It’s hard to suppose you’ve imagined our happiness lasting more than a few days.”
      “And if I were to imagine it?”
      Turning toward the window, she appeared in profile genuinely confused. She dragged her teeth across her lower lip, as though to gather the right words. “I had just been thinking, on my way back here, how the sweetness between us has made life bearable. Including the prospect of my marriage.”
      “Oh? How so?”
      “Because the balance between Mykola and myself was broken. And therefore had to be restored.”
      “Ah, to square accounts.” At last he grasped her meaning. Trying to project an impassive face, he must have failed, because she reached over to clasp his hand.
      “Complicated, I tried to warn you.” She kissed his palm, then placed it on her cheek.
      “Would it simplify matters were your husband, say, out of the picture?”
      Immediately he regretted the joke. She looked at him, her eyes flickering with something he had seen on the faces of other women, but never before on hers, namely fear.

*

The following day, 12 more protesters joined the Maidan body count, and Yanukovych, unable to modify his grip on power, seemed destined to lose it. His replacement would almost certainly indulge the West’s overtures at the expense of Russian honor. Just then, however, Putin faced an altogether different headache.
      Those hooligan minstrels Pussy Riot had chosen that very moment to descend on Sochi and perform their latest cacophony, “Putin Will Teach You to Love the Motherland.”
      Their public whipping, by incensed Cossacks, had gone viral — the girls could not have planned it any better — and now his deputies argued which side to prosecute. Boxed into a corner, Putin ordered an inquest, then changed his mind and, though it was unlike him, put off making a decision. He tabled the meeting and left, still fuming about Pussy Riot, their garish neon balaclavas. How stupid to have freed them, right before the Olympics, since no one gave him credit. He should have let them rot.
      Back in the private quarters, he found Sonia listening to his shortwave radio, a broadcast about Maidan. Noticing him in the doorway, she shut it off.
      “You are allowed to use my things, Sonia,” he said, irritated by the show of servility.
      “So many people,” she murmured. “Is there really nothing you can do?”
      She squinted at him, seedlings of fear since grown from the day before, and he berated himself for having planted them. Taking her hand, he led her to the bed, determined to repair the damage. “Sonia Ivanovna,” he said, cradling her chin and running his thumb along her chapped lower lip. “I’ve just gotten off the phone with Viktor Fedorovych.”
      “Really? You spoke to President Yanukovych?”
      “Demanding an end to the violence.”
      How her eyes sparkled! As though he had given her the world’s largest diamond, only better. She began pulling at his clothes and smothering him with kisses. Before long, she’d climbed on top and was grinding against him. Never had she given herself with such abandon, painting him with sweat, and for the first time, she allowed herself to be gratified. It thrilled him to feel her thighs shudder against his ribs, beyond all self-control, and the moment she pressed her lips against his ear and whispered, “Volodya,” he dissolved into helpless shivers of his own.
      “But how can you love him,” he asked, the moment he’d caught his breath, “when you call your marriage a prison?”
      Startled, she blinked. “Because I do love him,” she said, “that’s my prison.”
      Maybe he should have let her revelation stand for what it was, an intimacy freely given, though a gift Putin didn’t want. Instead, he said, “Let me take care of you.”
      “Even if I summoned the will to divorce,” she said, “how are you and I to find balance together, what with your agents watching every postcard I write?”
      Balance, again, her relentless measure. With his return to Moscow just days away, he should be disengaging from her, not arguing, in the clumsiest language possible, that love surely created its own balance. At this point, her eyes grew moist, with pity, he assumed, as though she’d been debating with a pimply adolescent, unschooled in the realpolitik of emotion, when suddenly she confessed, “Of course, I have feelings for you. Of course I do,” she repeated, as though in response to the look of surprise on his face. “And in another time and place, who knows? Our world could be different.”
      Putin remained quiet, elated to have won such a meaningful concession and afraid to add anything that might curse it. Once again she fell asleep in his arms, and much as he wished to lie like that with her indefinitely, he’d left a great deal of work undone.
      Stealing away, he would not see her again till the next afternoon.
      Then, while presiding over a meeting — his advisers still arguing over Pussy Riot — he saw, past the guard now opening the conference room door, Sonia Ivanovna standing on tiptoe.
      “Excuse me a moment, gentlemen,” he said, rising from the table. In the hallway, he asked, “What is it, Sonia?”
      “I thought you spoke to Yanukovych.” Apparently she’d been listening once again to the shortwave.
      “Sonia, this will have to wait.”
      “Another 50!” Her bloodshot eyes seemed to accuse him of complicity, at the very least indifference. “Innocent people are dying!”
      Which, he wondered, was the less damning admission one could make to a lover? That one’s power sometimes led to terrible events, or that it had its limits? Remembering the watchful eyes of his staff, he snapped, “If they’re so innocent, why aren’t they home with their families?”
      That last word, families, seemed to strike her with the same force as if he’d used his hand.
      “Madame is not well,” he explained to the nearby guard. “Escort her back to the private quarters.”
      “No, I wish to go home,” she said, being led away.
      “Please get some rest, Sonia.” Putin turned to his aide. “She is to have absolute peace and quiet. Until I return, understood?”
      “Yes, Mr. President.”
      “And make sure the dog gets walked.”

*

Barely pausing to eat, he immersed himself in work. Yanukovych, soon banished by his own parliament, needed asylum, which Putin felt duty-bound to grant. The fleet at Sevastopol also required his attention, so too the many ethnic Russians stranded beyond the national embrace. After the games — by a matter of hours, probably — he should go ahead and repatriate Crimea. Were the operation executed carefully enough, he foresaw the entire peninsula reabsorbed without a single shot.
      He longed in that moment to go reassure Sonia, this time in all sincerity. Did any part of her still have feelings for him, he wondered, and what would it resemble, this life of so-called “balance,” in which he’d be expected to answer for every little thing? The idea threatened something deep within his person, and not just as head of state, but why would anyone, even the lowliest ragpicker, yield control to another if he didn’t absolutely have to? In the final analysis, it seemed unfathomable. And yet, he thought, recalling her touch, what if?
      Mr. President, sir. His aide startled him from the doorway. Sorry to interrupt.
      Putin glared at his desk. “What is so important?”
      Mr. President needs to ready himself for the closing ceremonies, sir.
      Ah yes, he’d almost forgotten. As he neared the private quarters, he hoped, now that Kiev had finally managed to calm itself, so had Sonia. He asked the posted guard, “How is she?”
      “Sleeping, Mr. President.”
      In the anteroom he passed her luggage, all packed and ready, then entered the bedchamber, nearly tripping over the dog’s ball. The air smelled stale, suggesting he’d been away much longer than he’d thought. Sonia’s chest rose and fell, with the innocent breath of slumber, beneath the flag of his pajama top. What if, he wondered, what if?
      Leaning over, Putin blew against her cheek. Her lashes fluttered, but her eyes remained shut. In a whisper, he promoted the closing ceremonies, and expressed the hope she might join him. “There’ll be another fireworks show, with a wonderful joke about the fifth Olympic ring,” he promised. “Once again, it will seem to fail. Then, at the last possible moment, just as the world assumes the worst of us, dear Sonia, this time the ring will bloom.”
      But she continued to sleep, or pretend, absolute in her silence. Maxim, on the other hand, whimpered by his feet with excitement. Reaching for the Super-Ball, Putin lobbed it across his suite and watched the little dog give chase then return it to his hand, licking his fingers with such instinctual affection one could only marvel at its purity. Putin threw the ball again, shattering a candy dish, and once more, this time a lamp. Her eyes still closed, Sonia seemed to flinch, but the dog could not be happier.
      Mr. President, said his aide, the closing ceremonies.
      “Of course,” conceded Putin, then threw the ball a little harder. “Soon.”

© Paul Mandelbaum

 This electronic version of “Sochi, 2014” originally appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal.

The Barcelona Review is a registered non-profit organization

Author Bio
Paul MandelbaumPaul Mandelbaum is the author of two volumes of linked stories, Adriane on the Edge (an excerpt from which appeared in TBR 50) and Garrett in Wedlock, and the editor of two literary anthologies, most recently 12 Short Stories and Their Making. Part of Emerson College’s Los Angeles faculty, he also teaches short story writing in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.