But Aleksandr doesn’t take the bait, transferring pancakes onto waiting plates. “He gets this sad, disapproving look that’s somehow much worse than if he was angry.Cancer, Sasha”—and Aleksandr’s voice runs rigid, clipped for a moment—“is a horrible way to die.”
Lili chokes on her coffee at the imitation. Aleksandr grins. “But what he doesn’t know won’t kill him. Come on, let’s eat.” He inclines his head towards the open living room, helping her off the counter. He sets their plates on the coffee table, and Lili follows with coffee. She sits on the floor, folding her legs under the table, while he settles on the couch.
Rain streams down the huge windows, cocooning. “Why did you pick Solzhenitsyn?” Aleksandr asks, cutting his food in sharp, crisp motions.
“I thought maybe I should expand beyond Marxists,” Lili quips, taking a bite of her pancakes, doused in maple syrup. Intellectual sparring feels familiar, and safe; a place to continue to gather herself, in the aftermath of what shifted inside her last night.
“How fickle is youth.”
She rolls her eyes, resting her head against his knee. “I was curious about his perspective. He’s supposed to be a genius.”
“And what have you found?” Aleksandr strokes her hair, gentle.
“Well, I’m not done yet, but there’s this sense of searching for meaning in suffering? This question of what life is worth, what’s worth enduring—like, what amount of suffering?”
“Meaning in suffering, or acceptance of suffering?”
“I’d say acceptance of suffering necessitates having found some meaning in it.”
“Not necessarily.”
“That’s a little nihilistic.”
“I’d make the case he thinks we need suffering to give our lives meaning, but suffering itself doesn’t have any real meaning. It’s not the suffering that’s bad or good, it’s our acceptance—or resistance—that makes it so.”
Lili frowns. “That presupposes suffering is inevitable.”
“Sufferingisinevitable.”
“No, it’s not,” she protests. “Maybe some pain, sure, but not suffering. Obviously, he’s speaking from a specific historical moment—a horrific one—but that doesn’t mean suffering is inevitable. We can minimize it.”
“Has your own life proven that out for you?”
It’s instinctive: the jump to push him away, assert that he knows nothing about her life.
But—the sound of his Russian earlier, a rasp at the back of his throat, both foreign and familiar; the quiet way he’d answered her questions, thescar on his face and the ring on his finger and the painting in his closet; the way he wasn’t touching her when she woke, only watching her; the kiss against her shoulder, skin against skin; the reassuring weight of his hand on her hip while he read.
Lili takes a little breath.
“No, but that’s... that’s the whole point,” she says, quiet. “Try and make it easier for others. So they don’t have to go through what you went through, you know?”
His fingers in her hair are soft, slowly working out a tangle. “Do you really think it’ll work?” he asks, looking down at her. “Trusting a state to do that, to protect us?”
“Well, yes. I do.”
He grins, affectionate. “How Hobbesian.”
“You know, Hobbes favored security over liberty,” Lili points out as she clambers onto the couch beside him. “That’s completely antithetical to what you believe.”
“And you think you have a firm grasp on my beliefs?” he teases, letting her swing her legs over his lap. His hand, warm and broad, settles on her knee.
Lili rolls her eyes. “I think it’s safe to say you abhor big government.”
“True. Obviously, I don’t agree with Hobbes in his entirety. But his view of human nature is realistic.”
She frowns. “You can’t just pick and choose what you agree with from different thinkers.”
Aleksandr raises an eyebrow. “That’s the entire point of thought. Otherwise, it’s just blind ideology.”
