Everything has a price, and now, in the spring of 2022, we are obligated to pay that price.
I stood at the stove with my back to my son, as if the morning were ordinary. He read from his phone: a “special military operation” had begun. I answered: “This is war. Eat.” Then I took down a pocket New Testament and read about the trumpet giving an uncertain sound. While the sound was uncertain, you could live between the lines. Now it will be clear, and you will have to speak.…
Mom, but we’ve been centralized for ages, I said. She looked at me as at a student who had missed the point. I smirked, deciding it was a figure of speech. Then we both understood it wasn’t a metaphor. When the time came, I went to the square, as my father once went to defend the Leningrad TV center.
I was nobody then, just a student. I came to stand at night as a living wall. I knew they could attack; I went, in essence, to be killed. And I was glad. I said I’d met many wonderful people.
He ends up at the state farm “For the Right Cause,” in a vegetable storage with egg cartons on the walls and a stream where the host calls things by their names. Beside him sits a guest in a mask of interview: the double the country knew as emperor. He sits with a cup of coffee so familiarly, so domestically.
Read the complete story in “Putin’s Double Exposes.” This page contains only a short excerpt; the book has the rest.
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