Page 15 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“You know painting, too!”

“Just my mom’s. Butyourstuff—what are they pictures of?”

She tossed her head back, smoothed out her hair, then shook her head. A delaying tactic while she thought. “So it’s ordinary people—no, that’s not right, I mean the sort of people you don’t notice on the street. People you don’t look at.”

“Portraits?”

“Sort of. Usually in broad daylight.” She gave a little twist of a shy smile. “I’m a happy person, so I shoot unhappy scenes.”

“Are they unhappy, really?”

“No, not really. I mean, they’re glimpses of people who live hard lives. And I like to think I take their pictures with empathy. I get to know them. So it’s different from a lot of other photographers who sort of condescend to their subjects. I feel like I get them.”

Later that evening, the moment came when they left the bar. They kissed on the street. “I’d invite you over for a nightcap if my place weren’t such a mess,” he said.

“So come to mine,” she said.

9

Her apartment was in the East Village, a fourth-floor walk-up in a rundown-looking redbrick building on East Seventh Street, off St. Mark’s Place. Kind of a funky neighborhood and perfect for an artist or photographer. It was between a vintage clothing shop and a smokes-and-beer convenience store.

As she unlocked the door, Paul heard a canine whining. When the door opened, a little dog came up to them, standing on two legs, pawing the air with the other two. A tiny, ugly dog that looked like a mix of bulldog and Chihuahua.

“This is Pushkin. He’s a rescue.” She picked the dog up and massaged his erect ears. “Oh, Aleksandr Sergeyevich! Pushok! You sweet beautiful thing,” she said. “He was in a kill shelter in Alabama, and nobody wanted him, and he was just days away from being killed.”

“You love dogs, huh?”

“I do. How about you?”

“For sure.”

“Do you have one?”

“I can’t. I’m always at work. It would be cruel.”

Her apartment wasn’t big—maybe eight hundred square feet—but comfortable and nicely decorated, with an artist’s touch. The walls were painted in an earth tone, the color of a clay pot. The furniture was a mix of rummage sale items, the kind of things you find discarded in alleys, that all seemed to work together. As for the utilities, there were old-fashioned radiators that had been painted over a thousand times and a window air-conditioning unit. The floor was that kind of parquet you see in lots of New York City apartments, quite scuffed. Tatyana switched on a series of lamps until the lighting was perfect.

“How long have you had Pushkin?”

“About two years, I think? I’ll get us some drinks. Scotch okay?”

“That’d be great.”

While she poured drinks, Paul looked at the black-framed photographs lining the walls in the living room and kitchen. Color photos of old ladies. When he looked closer, he saw that the women looked foreign, appeared to be Russian, because most of them wore headscarves, babushkas. He looked at one portrait of a very wrinkled woman with a sweet smile and light in her eyes. She was missing some front teeth, and some of them were gold. Some of the women had sunken mouths and stern or wary expressions. One of them was walking her dog in a park; another was cutting up beets. Another was sitting at a table outside a metro entrance selling cucumbers and parsley, smiling broadly with steel teeth.

“These are terrific,” Paul said.

“Oh, that’s my old stuff. My new stuff is totally different. You’ll see at the gallery. I mean, if you go.” She handed him a Scotch on the rocks, poured a white wine for herself.

“What makes these pictures so . . . painterly? Is that the word?”

“So many things. It’s the lens you choose, the focal distance. The time of day when you capture the picture. The light. And I spend a lot of time editing my pictures. And I have a great printing guy. He’s expensive, but really good.”

“They’re really intense. What makes them so intense?”

“Because I’m not staring at my subjects. I mean, I the photographer. I get to know them until I feel an intimacy with them, even though they’re strangers. I establish a connection, a—”

“Rapport.”

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