“Then New York for school?”
Lili nods. “How about you?” she asks. She is approaching the limits of what she wants to share. “Why New York? You’re barely here, it seems.”
“Headquarters are here.”
“Right, but you could easily live in London. Closer to Europe, and you have offices everywhere.”
Aleksandr shrugs. “I suppose I love this country, somewhat. It respects hunger. It let me take what I could never reach for, back home.”
“This country engenders the hunger—spiritual, emotional,physical—of millions of people.”
“I have no illusions about the brutality of America. But there’s room to dream here.”
“More like room to fall.”
“Yes, but the inverse of that is having so much further to climb. Even the potential of that—it’s a privilege.”
“You’re fetishizing the American dream.”
“There’s a reason the idea persists,” he says. “There’s a reason we keep washing up on this shore.”
“Your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” Lili recites.
Aleksandr huffs—not quite a laugh but something similar. “That poem makes Michael cry. He drags me out to Liberty Island at least once every year.”
“Huh. He doesn’t strike me as the sentimental type.”
“I don’t think it is sentimental, actually. Sometimes, I wonder if only immigrants can really love America.”
“In what sense?”
“If this is all you’ve ever known, if your family roots stretch back generations here, you can’t see it for what it is,” Aleksandr says, looking over the bustling dining room; a city and its wealth. “That sense of liberty, I suppose. You can’t appreciate it without having experienced its absence.”
Again, the shadow of the personal and the past in his words. Her curiosity about his past is uncomfortable—what it means, what it says about what’s becoming important to her. She ignores the concern. “Could you—could you tell me more about it?” she asks. “Russia?”
“What would you like to know?” She hears stiffness in his voice: not put off, not defensive, but rather, the sense of an instinct to hide melting under the decision to reveal.
“When did you leave?”
“’93. A few months before the coup.”
“How? Or—I mean, I guess, why?”
“School.”
“And your mother stayed behind?”
Aleksandr laughs, once. “Oh, yes, she stayed.”
“Why?”
“I think she called me a defector for a good decade afterwards,” he says.
Lili frowns. “Was she supportive of the state, when you were growing up?”
“No, not at all. She was a fairly vocal critic, but when you’ve spent your entire life living in reaction to something, you can’t just leave it. Or so she claims. Her priorities were always clear.”
Lili watches him, as he watches the restaurant; he’s not meeting her gaze. “Did you ever think about moving back?” she asks.
