The Winner Stands Alone

They had to adapt to these changed circumstances: they bought a beautiful house in Moscow, a house with every possible comfort. For reasons she didn't and preferred not to know, her husband's old associates ended up in prison. (These were the same associates who had made those initial loans, of which, despite the exorbitant interest rates, Igor had paid back every penny.) From then on, Igor began to be accompanied everywhere by bodyguards, only two at first--fellow veterans and friends from the Afghan war--but they were later joined by others as the small company grew into a multinational giant with branches in several countries in seven different time zones, making ever more and ever more diverse investments.

Ewa spent her days in shopping malls or having tea with friends, who always talked about the same things. Igor, of course, wanted to go further...and further. After all, he had only got where he was by dint of ambition and hard work. Whenever she asked if they had not gone far beyond what they had planned and if it wasn't time to realize their dream of living only on the love they felt for each other, he always asked for a little more time. And he began to drink more heavily. One night, he came home after a long supper with friends during which much wine and vodka had been drunk, and she could contain her feelings no longer. She said she couldn't stand the empty existence she was leading; if she didn't do something soon, she would go mad. Wasn't she satisfied with what she had, asked Igor.

"Yes, I'm satisfied, but the problem is you're not, and never will be. You're insecure, afraid of losing everything you've achieved; you don't know how to quit once you're ahead. You'll end up destroying yourself. You're killing our marriage and my love."

This wasn't the first time she had spoken thus to her husband; they had always been very honest with each other, but she felt she was reaching a limit. She had had enough of the shopping and the tea parties and the ghastly television programs that she watched while waiting for him to come home from work.

"Don't say that, don't say I'm killing our love. I promise that soon we'll leave all this behind us, just be patient. Perhaps you should start some project of your own because your life at the moment really must be pretty hellish."

At least he recognized that.

"What would you like to do?" he asked.

Yes, she thought, perhaps that would be a way out.

"I'd like to work with fashion. That's always been my dream."

Her husband immediately granted her wish. The following week, he turned up with the keys to a shop in one of the best shopping malls in Moscow. Ewa was thrilled. Her life took on new meaning; the long days and nights spent waiting would be over for good. She borrowed money, and Igor invested enough in the business for her to have a good chance of success.

Suppers and parties--where she had always felt like an outsider--took on a new interest for her. In just two years, thanks to contacts made at such social events, she was running the most successful haute-couture shop in Moscow. Although she had a joint account with her husband, and he never questioned how much she spent, she made a point of paying back the money he had lent her. She started going off on business trips alone, looking for new designs and exclusive brands. She took on staff, got to grips with the accounts, and became--to her own surprise--an excellent businesswoman.

Igor had taught her everything. He was a great role model, an example to be followed. And just as everything was going so well and her life had taken on new meaning, the Angel of Light that had lit her path began to waver.

THEY WERE IN A RESTAURANT in Irkutsk, after spending a weekend in a fishing village on the shores of Lake Baikal. By that stage, the company owned two planes and a helicopter, so that they could travel as far as they liked and be back on Monday to start all over again. Neither of them complained about spending so little time together, but it was clear that the many years of struggle were beginning to take their toll. Still, they knew that their love was stronger than everything else, and, as long as they were together, they would be all right.

In the middle of a candlelit supper, a drunken beggar came into the restaurant, walked over to their table, sat down, and began to talk, interrupting their precious moment alone, far from the hustle and bustle of Moscow. A minute later, the owner offered to remove him, but Igor said he would take care of it. The beggar grew animated, picked up their bottle of vodka and drank from it; then he started asking questions ("Who are you? How come you've got so much money, when we all live in such poverty here?") and generally complaining about life and about the government. Igor put up with this for a few more minutes.

Then he got to his feet, took the man by the arm, and led him outside (the restaurant was in an unpaved street). His two bodyguards were waiting for him. Ewa saw through the window that her husband barely spoke to them, apart from issuing some order along the lines of "Keep an eye on my wife" and headed off toward a small side street. He came back a few minutes later, smiling.

"Well, he won't bother anyone again," he said.

Ewa noticed a different light in his eyes; they seemed filled by an immense joy, far greater than any joy he had shown during the weekend they had spent together.

"What did you do?"

Igor did not reply, but simply called for more vodka. They both drank steadily into the night--he happy and smiling and she choosing to understand only what she wanted to understand. He had always been so generous with those less fortunate than himself, so perhaps he had given the man money to help him out of his poverty.

When they went back to the hotel, he said:

"It's something I learned in my youth, when I was fighting in an unjust war for an ideal I didn't believe in. There's always a way of putting an end to poverty."

NO, IGOR CAN'T BE HERE in Cannes. Hamid must have made a mistake. The two men had only met once before, in the foyer of the building where they lived in London, when Igor had found out their address and gone there to beg Ewa to come back. Hamid had spoken to him, but hadn't allowed him to come in, threatening to call the police. For a whole week, she had refused to leave their apartment, claiming to have a headache, but knowing that the Angel of Light had turned into Absolute Evil.

She looks at her phone again and rereads the message.

Katyusha. Only one person would call her by that name. The person who lives in her past and will terrorize her present for the rest of her life, however protected she feels, however far away she lives, and even though she inhabits a world to which he has no access. The same person who, on their return from Irkutsk--as if he had sloughed off an enormous weight--had begun to speak more freely about the shadows that inhabited his soul.

"No one, absolutely no one, can threaten our privacy. We've spent long enough creating a fairer, more humane society. Anyone who fails to respect our moments of freedom should be removed in such a way that they'll never even consider coming back."

Ewa was afraid to ask what "in such a way" meant. She had thought she knew her husband, but from one moment to the next, it seemed that a submerged volcano had begun to roar, and the shock waves were getting stronger and stronger. She remembered certain late-night conversations with him when he was still a young man and how he had told her that, during the war in Afghanistan, he had sometimes been forced to kill in self-defense. She had never seen regret or remorse in his eyes.

"I survived, and that's what matters. My life cou

ld have ended one sunny afternoon, or at dawn in the snow-covered mountains, or one night when we were playing cards in our tent, confident that the situation was under control. And if I had died, nothing would have changed in the world. I would have been just another statistic for the army and another medal for my family.

"But Jesus helped me, and I was blessed with quick reactions. And because I survived the hardest tests a man can face, fate has given me the two most important things in life: success at work and the person I love."

It was one thing killing in order to save your own life, but quite another to "remove for good" some poor drunk who had interrupted their supper and who could easily have been shepherded away by the restaurant owner. She couldn't get the idea out of her head. She started going ever earlier to the shop and, when she came home, sitting at her computer until late into the night. There was a question she wanted to avoid. She managed to carry on like this for some months, following the usual routine: business trips, parties, suppers, meetings, charity auctions. She even wondered if she had misunderstood what her husband had said in Irkutsk and blamed herself for making such a snap judgment.