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In Mexico, you are overheated and exhausted. You have met so many new people who don’t speak Russian that you have stopped assuming you’ll be able to make coherent conversation with anyone. But there is Frida. Frida, so much younger than you and so beautiful. Frida, who has propositioned you. And you, who have responded despite your marriage. There is nothing wrong with your wife, (wives, really), other than the fact that she is not historically relevant. Your children, two sons and two daughters, will become tragic and obscure figures mulled over by university students with stunted social lives. There is nothing wrong with your family. Just that they are not the focus here. They are only important in the periphery, a sense of obligation, a notion of respectability. It is hard to focus on them when you are dripping sweat and soaked in kisses.
Frida has eyes like tar and lips like fresh wounds. She is intentionally unimpressed. She touches the thick scruff on your chin and shakes her head. “You should shave.” Her Russian has a sharp yet rolling accent, like a series of mountain peaks, like the Urals, like the Alps, like whatever those mountains on the edge of town are called. You can’t possibly hope to pronounce them. When you try to speak Spanish, she laughs at you. You talk in English to her in front of her husband. Say things like “I love you” with a smile that says you are just talking politics. She holds your hand and fucks you in the house her husband bought for her sister.
This affair will last perhaps less than a year, but you are making a history. You know you are making a history. She adores you in the humid Mexican winter. You make love to her and wish for a cool breeze. She asks, “Who are you thinking about?” when you finish. “Your wife?”
“An old friend.”
“That’s flattering,” she says, and pulls herself off the bed, the muscles in her back pressing thin the skin of her back so sharply that you are afraid she will burst out of herself. “I’m less important than an old friend of the old man.”
You can only laugh while you watch her struggle into her dress. You weren’t old back then. You were so much younger than him. You were younger than Iosif, even. You were young and powerful and you wouldn’t say you loved him, just that you were friends. Such very good friends.
Lenin was never Lenin in private. He was Vladimir Ilich in formal conversation, then Vladilen in shorthand, and Volodya in sealed-off drawing rooms. Volodya with his papers and his reading glasses and the way that he could silence shouting with a single strong motion of his hand. Volodya with his beautiful wife, with his beautiful clothes, with his beautiful eyes. You aren’t sure if he was ever really handsome or if you remember him wrong, if you have been tainted by travel and exhaustion and more than a decade. If you were, then, when you were sure he was handsome, just swayed by charisma.
“You think you’re so much smarter than all of us,” Iosif had said, cornering you alone whenever he could. “You think you deserve so much.”
“And you think being a secretary makes you something important,” you had said, and brushed him off, but the joke was on you, ultimately, and sometimes you wake up from sleep these days in the sticky heat of Mexico City and find that you’ve been laughing. You are laughing now, in fact, and Frida is staring at you intently.
“Are you ill?” she asks, not blinking, not looking away from you as she pulls her hair back up, pinning it in place, her dress not buttoned in the back, the shining metal of her brace reflecting in the light peeking in through the curtains, “I swear…” She says something in Spanish and then kisses your cheek. “Tie me back up.”
You do, though your hands aren’t what they used to be. There is a heavy temptation to wax poetical about the hands of a man who brokered a peace treaty and managed the supervision of the Red Army. But you do not succumb. You do not say a thing until, “Thank you, Frida, darling,” as you make sure that she is properly covered.
“An old friend,” she says, turning around to face you. She stands while you sit. She says that the pain will strengthen her back in small doses. Once you pointed out that the pain would probably never go away and she had turned her face to you with an unreadable expression and told you that well, then, she would be immensely strong. She asks, now, “Were you being sarcastic?”
“Not that old friend,” you say, shaking your head. Not Iosif. So often in the papers now, now that the world is trying to figure out what to make of his stubbornness. He looks much the same as you remember him. He was older than you, though not by much. He was ambitious, though without much sense of direction. He was a boy, a brute, a bastard. And now he appears on front pages, accompanying stories of famine. His hair looks so well done.
“Ah,” Frida says, sitting next to you, looking you over as though she has not just seen you naked, as though your bones and aging flesh are eternally fascinating to her. “Our old friend.”
Not our you don’t say. Not our in that sense. Our old friend, our leader and our hero, of course. Our old friend our figurehead. But not her old friend. She is too young to have known him, too foreign to have truly appreciated him. You admire Frida and her husband and their friends. You respect the foreigners who have supported you and Vladimir Ilich. But they can’t really understand. They have never been to Siberia. They do not know the meaning of Revolution, the necessity, the catharsis, the joy.
He was your friend. In a way that she will never appreciate. In a way she just physically cannot appreciate. The way he looked when you came back to him, when you finally admitted that winning the war was more important (in the short term) than whatever theories you had, the way he touched the back of your neck, the way he kissed you. You swore you could taste gratitude. You would have gone to the ends of the Earth for him because that was what friendship was for men like you.
And a friendship like that was something that Iosif could never have. He was a petty, anti-intellectualist and by all reports has remained the same. You can imagine him, unchanged, his feet on his desk, a cigar between his lips. Those lips that should never have touched Volodya’s and yet somehow found their way there, somehow formed the right words to convince everyone that Volodya had approved of whatever great leaps of power Iosif was taking. Iosif never had friends. Only people it was convenient not to murder. And you wonder, now, how you have managed to stay inconvenient for so long.
“Yes,” you finally say, meeting Frida’s eyes, “Our old friend.”
“A funny thing to be thinking of in bed,” she says, standing again, walking in her stiff-legged way out the bedroom door, leaving you alone without your shirt.
-------------------------------------------
The affair is over by the end of the year. You retrieve your love-letters that you wrote her. They were hasty anyway. You burn them while your wife looks on, looks bored. You may feel slightly bad about this, but history will be hard pressed to remember that you even had a wife. Frida paints a portrait in your honor, tributes you in the acrylic letter in her two-dimensional hand. You are touched.
Mexico remains warm. You remain overheated and tired but now without Frida. And then the decade slips by until one afternoon you find yourself faced with a man and an icepick and there is so little time to protest and when you feel the metal in your skull, too painful to be recognized as pain, you know what’s coming. But you have a level, if split open, head on your shoulders, and you’ll make sure that whoever the damn brute is will pay. And then there is darkness.
You wake up once again in a hospital and you can hear a coyote outside. Your blood is on fire. You are as hot as Mexico, as Frida’s kisses, as your longing. The hospital is fading away and there is something wonderful about this. You are going to see an old friend, and it will be cool and familiar where he is waiting.