Where They Always Meet

Good evening, I’m Stalin’s granddaughter. Putin is after me, wants me dead. You have to help me.”

________

it’s christmas eve, snowing outside, and Marina Orologitis is working the night shift at hnn.gr, the Hellenic News Network. It’s been quiet—a while ago she edited an item about a strange glow that appeared in the sky over Siberia, then put up photographs from Prince Harry’s Christmas trip to New York with his new girlfriend—and now she’s sunk back into her reading, surrounded by computer and TV screens, the hum of the air duct, and voices from the radio echoing in the empty, dimly lit room. She’s experienced in the art of reading, doesn’t let herself get distracted, because she knows that for a book to work its miracle the writer’s voice on the page has to become the reader’s voice in her head. She also knows that read ing means tossing an anchor into deep waters, that reading is the third dimen sion of a two-dimensional person.

The book before her is a biography of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States of America. Considered one of the worst American presidents in history, he died an alcoholic at sixty-four. His wife, Jane, who abhorred politics, was sickly and suffered from chronic depression. They had three sons. The first died when he was just a few days old, the second of typhus at age four, and the third, Benny, was killed in a train accident before his parents’ eyes when he was eleven years old. The couple never got over their grief. Franklin started drinking more than ever, and Jane, who wore black for the rest of her life, wrote letters to her poor Benny, begging his forgiveness for having failed as a mother to protect him. She died of consumption a decade later. Pierce, who’d left the White House by that time, told a friend, “There’s nothing left to do but get drunk.”

Marina lifts her eyes and looks out the window at the bluish snow, which is silently covering the sidewalks, the cars, the roofs of houses. She watches the flakes slowly twirling in the air—big white flakes, so big they seem to cast shadows as they fall. She wonders if everything she’s reading is true, if all that could possibly have happened to a predecessor of Trump, Bush, Nixon. Of course it’s been almost two centuries since then, but still. You don’t expect an American president to say that the only thing left for him to do is drink himself to death, or a First Lady to send letters to her dead son apologizing for not having been a good mother.

She watches the snow fall and wonders. Wonders and remembers. She remembers how she once believed, truly believed, that she’d never again have to work a night shift, and how twenty-five years ago—a quarter of a century, that is—she thought she wanted to become a journalist because it would allow her to do the two things she really loved in life: write and read. Her face, smiling wryly, with bitter wisdom in the breath-steamed windowpane, she remembers the days when people didn’t just read newspapers; they treated them as a kind of refuge. She remembers and wonders how it must feel for a mother to lose three children, one after another, and why there’s a word for a child who loses a parent, but not for a parent who loses a child. And as she’s thinking about all this, she sees out the corner of her eye a shadow moving between the empty desks. The shadow comes closer and takes the form of a woman, who stands in front of her and says, “Good evening, I’m Stalin’s granddaughter. Putin is after me, he wants me dead. You have to help me.”

The woman has a foreign accent, dark blonde hair, and eyes the color of ash. She...