Page 82 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“But you were so young when you left.”

“I know, I know. But it’s in my . . .maya dusha. You know what I mean?”

It meant “my soul.” He understood. She was an American, had lived most of her life outside Russia. But she was at heart a Russian.

“Did you have a chance to take any pictures?” he asked.

She beckoned him over to her laptop and showed him some photographs she’d taken. An old lady in a black coat and gray knit cap squatting before an array of junk spread out on the ground, probably her life’s possessions. A lineup of street vendors in front of a train station. A young man standing in the middle of a dump, garbage as far as the eye could see, birds flying just overhead.

“Remarkable,” he said.

She smiled shyly. “You didn’t see any of these people, did you? In the center of the city, they hide the homeless and the poor. You have to know where to look.” Glancing at her watch, she said, “I should get dressed.”

Half an hour later, they were walking across the opulent lobby and saw her father sitting in one of the plush armchairs, looking impatient. Tatyana hurried over to him and put a hand on his shoulder; he got up, and they hugged. Paul hung back so the two could talk.

A man in a cheap blue suit, clearly security or a driver, approached Galkin and said, in Russian, “Very sorry, sir, very sorry.”

“Let’s go,” Galkin replied sourly. The driver appeared to be late, which Galkin detested.

“Right away, sir,” the driver said.

“Come on,” Galkin said brusquely to him. He hugged his daughter again and then walked with the driver out the front doors. Where Galkin was going, Paul had no idea. Paul had been invited to dinner with his colleagues but had had to pass, for family reasons, he said.

In the car—this one a new Mercedes S-Class that smelled of rich leather—he and Tatyana talked quietly. “Where’s your father going tonight?” Paul asked.

Tatyana shrugged. “He never tells me. Business meetings.”

The driver took Kutuzovsky Prospekt all the way to its end, marking the beginning of a residential area, the Rublyovka. This was no ordinary residential area. It was lined with immense mansions, and some, probably even more immense, hidden behind trees and gates. This was where the Russian elite—oligarchs, generals, celebrities, politicians—either lived full time or kept their weekend dachas.

Galina Belkina’s dacha was at the end of a long, tree-lined dirt road. It was a low, rambling wooden house, its cedar shingles weathered to gray. It looked a hundred years old at least. Galina emerged from the green-painted front door just as the Mercedes limo pulled up, her arms outstretched theatrically. She was wearing a beige quilted jacket with a Burberry lining. “Come, let’s walk,” she said in English. “Are you ready for a . . .pro-gulka po prirode? ‘A walk in nature’? We will get fresh air.”

Tatyana was wearing flats, which she knew wouldn’t do for a walk in the woods, so she slipped into an old pair of green rubber wellies that had been left on the porch. Paul, who was wearing street shoes, put on a pair of brick-red wellies from the jumble that was probably there for guests.

Galina had several acres of land on the edge of which the forest began. They entered the forest, Galina leading the way through a dense copse of trees, birch and pine and spruce. It reminded Paul of the forests in Bellingham, Washington, where his father would take him on nature walks. She seemed to know the woods well, leading them along paths and well-maintained trails that wound around the trees. Much of the way was shaded by the thick canopy. Galina and Tatyana talked for a minute or two in Russian, then Galina said to Paul, “You see a little bit of Moscow today?”

“Not yet. I think tomorrow we’ll have a little time. I want to see St. Basil’s Cathedral.”

“Inside, it’s nothing. But the domes—do you know why they’re so brightly colored?”

He shook his head.

“It was built during Ivan the Terrible, when churches were painted in bright colors and intricate patterns. You know, St. Basil’s was modeled after the Book of Revelation—it’s what it says the Kingdom of Heaven will look like. They say that Ivan was so pleased with the cathedral that he blinded its architect.”

“Why?”

“So that its design would never be replicated.”

“Some payday,” Paul said.

“Tanya tells me you now work for Arkady Viktorovich?”

Paul nodded.

“You are an investments manager?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I just know he has a lot of money. He takes care of me, but only because he has to.” She gave a short, scornful bark of a laugh. “He’s not exactly generous.”

---