The Winner Stands Alone

He couldn't understand what had happened. Shortly before Ewa left for a fashion show in London, they had spent a rare romantic holiday alone in Madrid. They had traveled there in the company jet and were staying in a hotel with every possible comfort, but they had decided to rediscover the world t

ogether. They didn't book tables at expensive restaurants, they stood in long queues outside museums, they took taxis rather than chauffeured limousines, they walked for miles and got thoroughly lost. They ate a lot and drank even more, and would arrive back at the hotel exhausted and contented, and make love every night as they used to do.

For both of them it took a real effort to stop themselves from turning on their laptops or their mobile phones, but they managed it. And they returned to Moscow with their hearts full of good memories and with smiles on their faces.

He plunged back into work, surprised to see that everything had continued to function perfectly well in his absence. She left for London the following week and never came back.

Igor employed one of the top private surveillance agencies--normally used for industrial or political espionage--which meant having to look at hundreds of photos in which his wife appeared hand in hand with her new companion. Using information provided by her husband, the detectives managed to provide her with a made-to-measure "friend." Ewa met her "by chance" in a department store; she was from Russia and had, she said, been abandoned by her husband, couldn't get work in Britain because she didn't have the right papers, and had barely enough money to feed herself. Ewa was distrustful at first, but then resolved to help her. She spoke to her new lover, who decided to take a risk and get the friend a job in one of his offices, even though she was an illegal worker.

She was Ewa's only Russian-speaking "friend." She was alone. She had marital problems. According to the psychologist employed by the surveillance agency, she was ideally placed to obtain the desired information. He knew that Ewa hadn't yet adapted to her new life, and what could be more natural than to share her intimate thoughts with another woman in similar circumstances, not in order to find a solution, but simply to unburden her soul.

The "friend" recorded all their conversations, and the tapes ended up on Igor's desk, where they took precedence over papers requiring his signature, invitations demanding his presence, and gifts waiting to be sent to customers, suppliers, politicians, and fellow businessmen.

The tapes were far more useful and far more painful than any photos. He discovered that her relationship with the famous couturier had begun two years earlier, at the Fashion Week in Milan, where they had met for professional reasons. Ewa resisted at first; after all, he lived surrounded by some of the most beautiful women in the world, and she, at the time, was thirty-eight. Nevertheless, they ended up going to bed with each other in Paris, the following week.

When Igor heard this, he realized that he felt sexually aroused and couldn't understand why his body should react in that way. Why did the simple fact of imagining his wife opening her legs and being penetrated by another man provoke in him an erection rather than a sense of revulsion?

This was the only time he feared he might be losing his mind, and he decided to make a kind of public confession in an attempt to diminish his sense of guilt. In conversation with colleagues, he mentioned that "a friend of his" had experienced sexual pleasure when he found out that his wife was having an extramarital affair. Then came the surprise.

His colleagues, most of them executives and politicians from various social classes and nationalities, at first expressed horror at the thought. Then, after the tenth glass of vodka, they all admitted that this was one of the most exciting things that could happen in a marriage. One of them always asked his wife to tell him all the sordid details and the words she and her lover used. Another declared that swingers' clubs--places frequented by couples interested in group sex--were the ideal therapy for an ailing marriage. A slight exaggeration perhaps, but Igor was glad to learn that he wasn't the only man who found it arousing to know that his wife had slept with someone else. He was equally glad that he knew so little about human beings, especially the male of the species. His conversations usually focused on business matters and rarely entered personal territory.

HE'S THINKING NOW ABOUT WHAT was on those tapes. During their week in London (the fashion weeks are held consecutively to make life easier for the professionals involved), the couturier declared himself to be in love with her; hardly surprising, given that he had met one of the most unusual women in the world. Ewa, for her part, was still filled with doubts. Hussein was only the second man with whom she had made love in her life; they worked in the same industry, but she felt immensely inferior to him. She would have to give up her dream of working in fashion because it would be impossible to compete with her future husband, and she would go back to being a mere housewife.

Worse, she couldn't understand why someone so powerful should be interested in a middle-aged Russian woman.

Igor could have explained this had she given him a chance: her mere presence awoke the light in all those around her; she made everyone want to give of their best and to emerge from the ashes of the past filled with renewed hope. That is what had happened to him as a young man returning from a bloody and pointless war.

TEMPTATION RETURNS. THE DEVIL TELLS him that this isn't exactly true. He himself had overcome his traumas by plunging into work. Psychiatrists might consider working too hard to be a psychological disorder, but for him it had been a way of healing his wounds through forgiveness and forgetting. Ewa wasn't really so very important. He must stop focusing all his emotions on a nonexistent relationship.

"You're not the first," said the Devil. "You're being led into doing evil deeds in the erroneous belief that this will somehow create good deeds."

IGOR IS STARTING TO FEEL nervous. He's a good man, and whenever he's been obliged to behave harshly, it has been in the name of a greater cause: serving his country, saving the marginalized from unnecessary suffering, following the example of his one role model in life, Jesus Christ, and, like him, using a combination of turning the cheek and wielding the whip.

He makes the sign of the cross in the hope that Temptation will leave him. He forces himself to remember the tapes and what Ewa had said: that however unhappy she might be with her new partner, she would never return to the past because her ex-husband was "unbalanced."

How absurd. It appeared she was being brainwashed by her new environment. She must be keeping very bad company. He's sure she was lying when she told her Russian "friend" that she had only got married again because she was afraid of being alone.

In her youth, she had always felt rejected by others and never able to be herself. She always had to pretend to be interested in the same things as her friends, playing the same games, going to parties, and looking for some handsome man to be a faithful husband and give her security, a home, and children. "It was all a lie," she said on the tapes.

In fact, she always dreamed of adventure and the unknown. If she could have chosen a profession when she was still an adolescent, it would have been that of artist. When she was a child, she had loved making collages from photos cut out of Communist Party magazines; she hated the photos, but enjoyed coloring in the drab figures. Dolls' clothes were so hard to find that her mother had to make them for her, and Ewa loved those outfits and said to herself that, one day, she would make clothes too.

There was no such thing as fashion in the former Soviet Union. They only found out what was going on in the rest of the world when the Berlin Wall was torn down and foreign magazines started flooding into the country. As an adolescent, she was able to use these magazines to make brighter and more interesting collages. Then, one day, she decided to tell her family that her dream was to be a fashion designer.

As soon as she finished school, her parents sent her to law school. They were very happy with their new-won freedom, but felt that certain capitalist ideas were threatening to destroy the country, distracting people from real art, replacing Tolstoy and Pushkin with spy novels, and corrupting classical ballet with modern aberrations. Their only daughter must be kept away from the moral degradation that had arrived along with Coca-Cola and flashy cars.

At university, she met a good-looking, ambitious young man who thought exactly as she did, that

they had to give up the idea that the old regime would return one day. It had gone for good, and it was time to start a new life.

She really liked this young man. They started going out together. She saw that he was intelligent and would go far in life, plus he seemed to understand her. He had, of course, fought in the Afghan war and been wounded in combat, but nothing very serious. He never complained about the past and never showed any signs of being unbalanced or traumatized.

One day, he brought her a bunch of roses and told her that he was leaving university to start his own business. He then proposed to her, and she accepted, even though she felt only admiration and friendship for him. Love, she believed, would grow over time as they became closer. Besides, the young man was the only one who really understood her and provided her with the intellectual stimulus she needed. If she let this chance slip, she might never find another person prepared to accept her as she was.

They got married with little fuss and without the support of their families. He obtained loans from people she considered dangerous, but she could do nothing to prevent the loans going ahead. Gradually, the company he had started began to grow. After almost four years together, she--shaking with fear--made her first demand: that he pay off the people who had lent him money in the past and who seemed suspiciously uninterested in recouping it. He followed her advice and often had reason to thank her for it later.

The years passed, there were the inevitable failures and sleepless nights, then things started to improve, and from then on, the ugly duckling began to follow the script of all those children's stories: it grew into a beautiful swan, admired by everyone.

Ewa complained about being trapped in her role as housewife. Instead of reacting like her friends' husbands, for whom a job was synonymous with a lack of femininity, he bought her a shop in one of the most sought-after areas of Moscow. She started selling clothes made by the world's great couturiers, but never tried to create her own designs. Her work had other compensations, though: she visited all the major fashion houses, met interesting people, and it was then that she first encountered Hamid. She still didn't know whether or not she loved him--possibly not--but she felt comfortable with him. When he had told her that he'd never met anyone like her and suggested they live together, she felt she had nothing to lose. She had no children, and her husband was so married to his work that he probably wouldn't even notice she was gone.