Page 86 of Ascendent
One night, Sasha asked Sergey if he knew aboutdedovshchina, the Russian military practice of hazing recruits during training.
“I’ve heard of it. I thought it had mostly stopped. That regulations had changed things.” His voice was guarded, wary.
Sasha shook his head. “At least, not when I went through.” He described the bullying, the torment, the ritualized brutality. The ceaseless violence. And then, his sergeant. The night he’d been woken up in the barracks in the middle of a snow storm. Taken to his sergeant’s office. The long nights that followed, what he’d been made to do. How his body still bore the scars. What Dr. Voronov had found.
Sergey sobbed, clinging to Sasha as he buried his face in Sasha’s hip, bunched the sheets in his hands and wailed. “I’m sorry,” he finally managed to whisper. His voice quaked, torn with rage and anguish. “I’m so sorry. As your lover. As the president. I should have stopped this. I am so, so sorry.” His touch was delicate, as if Sasha were made of ice. Like he’d shatter if he touched too hard.
“I’m okay now.” Sasha kept one hand on his bear tattoo and pulled Sergey close. He pressed their bodies together, a solid, hard presence. Grounding.Home. “I’m okay. There are some things I cannot do. But, Iamokay. And my old sergeant, and everyone who attacked me, they’re all dead. I’m alive, and I’m here with you. I’m happy.”
Sergey told him about growing up in Soviet Russia, and then transitioning to democracy, and then the slide back into authoritarianism under Putin. How he’d tried to maneuver and finagle his way into influence without rousing Putin’s attention. “I thought I was going to be killed at least fifteen times.”
He told Sasha about his first wife, Irina, whom he did love. They’d fallen apart over the years as he disappeared deeper into the twisted world of the FSB and Putin’s regime and she’d studied human rights in Europe and became a human rights lawyer at the United Nations, protesting against Russia’s changing government. “We were on opposite paths. We wanted the same things. We always have. But we traveled such different routes to get there.”
“Do you ever talk to her?” Sasha stroked his hair as they lay on the couch, two beers resting on the side table.
“No, I haven’t. But I wonder sometimes what she would think of me now.” Sergey grinned. “And you.”
“We’re still not telling anyone. Not yet.”
Sergey kissed his knuckles. “I know,zvezda moya.”
Sergey told him about his second wife, Natalia, the daughter of an army general Putin’s defense minister wanted to keep an eye on. It had been an arranged marriage, built in the political halls of the Kremlin. He’d been ordered to seduce her, charm her into his bed, woo and wed her. Befriend her father, the general, and figure out what secrets the general had shared with the Americans while he’d been deployed in Syria and in the Middle East.
Putin and his defense minister were certain Natalia’s father was a spy for the CIA.
They’d been right. Sergey had delivered the proof.
Three months later, Natalia’s father committed suicide, falling from a thirteen-story balcony in St. Petersburg after shooting himself twice in the head. There was no inquest, no investigation.
He turned a blind eye to Natalia’s fascination with her yoga instructor, ignored her dalliances. He took longer trips into the interior, worked more hours. When Natalia left him, he let her go graciously. “I’m not proud of what I did. It was my job. I either did it, or I was cut out, and I would have been suicided from my own balcony. But I tried to do right by Natalia.” He shrugged. “As much as I could.”
“Would you marry again?” Sasha held his breath after he asked.
“Would you marry at all?”
I already am conjoined to you. What the gods conjoin, only they can unjoin. Mountains and rivers. Sky and earth. Me and you.“Only to one person.”
“Well, for the right reason. And for the right person. I would. And it would be my last marriage. I can’t do four.” Sergey had kissed him, long and slow. “But that’s not a proposal,” he said with a wink, after. “You will know if I propose.”
Sasha told him about Norilsk, and Kayerkan, and growing up strange and gay and alone. About never finding his place, not in recruit training, not in flight school, not on his deployment to the Middle East or to Syria. His first friend, he’d thought, had been Grisha Utkin at Andreapol.
Yuri, Mikhail, Ruslan, and a handful of other guards were at the dacha as well, staying in guesthouses and camping nearby. They stayed back, giving Sergey and Sasha privacy, but came up to check on them every day. Yuri and Mikhail seemed to like Sasha, somehow, and they eked out a stubborn friendship. In the mornings, they jogged together. Every other afternoon, Mikhail and Sasha sparred as Yuri lifted weights. Mikhail and Sasha somehow started a pushup contest, every workout ending with who could do the most. Sergey laughed at them both.
They talked about NASA. About Sasha’s looming departure date. About what six weeks apart would mean. How they could stay in touch.
“What about when I go up there?” Sasha nodded to the stars, his arms around Sergey’s waist. They were tracking the international space station’s orbit, the streak of light that flashed overhead every ninety minutes. “What about when I’m just a speck of light?”
“Then I will see you every ninety minutes.” Sergey pointed out the ISS’s transit, the arc looping above them once again. “And I will wave to you every time.”
Sasha made love to him on the blanket on the riverbank, beneath the stars, beneath the moon, beneath the ISS. He felt the years of his life settle around him, the history of himself fold into place. The past was the past. The future was now.
With Sergey.
* * *
And then,it was time to go.
Sasha’s report date to Houston, Texas, to NASA, was September 1st. They headed back to Moscow and Sasha packed his bags. Sergey slipped him pictures of the two of them, from the dacha, from the apartment, from his own cell phone taking a selfie or two, a bad habit he’d picked up from Jack. A t-shirt that readI left my heart in Russia. A coffee cup with a cartoon of Sergey riding a polar bear, wielding a shotgun.
