Just because he was a liar didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
He’d explained the language of violence to me on many occasions before: while reclining, or in repose, or poised on the very edge of his seat. Most people were wrong about it, he’d said, words unfurling with a wicked ease as he painted the air with his guttural vowels. Russian is an obscene language to me, always tripping over its own vulgarity, and far from my mother tongue. I speak English and French and Dutch; русский язык is an afterthought, though bizarrely beautiful in its harshness. I can’t, in all honesty, say the same of him.
“What did we speak fluently before we possessed words?” he’d begin. It was always the same and somehow I never tired of hearing it, how the rough cadence spilled into something more. We’d drink kvas and polugar and tiny gleaming bottles of vodka as the stars wheeled through his little dormer window, and in time I grew to become so familiar with him that I lost awareness of myself while in his presence. The most beautiful kind of friendship, I’d thought as a young child -- but then, I no longer had the apology of ignorance. “We had tooth and nail. We had strength; don’t ever let them tell you that strength isn’t the highest form of power.”
He wasn’t trying to convince me of anything, I realized. He wasn’t even trying to convince himself.
Sometimes we would argue, me in French and him in English, until neither of us knew what languages we were speaking any longer. The candles would gutter down to nothingness in their pools of wax; we would try on different tongues like shirts or jackets, slipping into birdsong or devolving into some Germanic snarl. I favor Dutch; he was a nationalist, and adored Russian.
At times, he spoke so rapidly and so urgently that I could barely keep up; my untrained ear wasn’t suited to Slavic subtleties. “Do you not see that the more civilized we become, the more animalistic our entertainments are? Do you understand that their violations are no more refined than my own?” I didn’t, but nodded anyway, balanced on the edge of my seat as I sipped at bread wine and the brilliant white darkness of a Moscow winter emerged sleepily at the edges of the world. That morning I left him half-asleep in his oxblood chair, the little bottle of fermented liqueur still grasped in his right hand, skin sallow in the molten light of dawn. It was the last time I ever saw him.
They found him the next day under a dimmed streetlight, sickly against the metallic gleam of snow, his left shoulder dislocated and his face an artful disfiguration. I stood in my kitchen mouthing the words before the politsiya spoke them: a senseless act of violence, inhuman, barbaric. Cruelty beyond comprehension.
I knew by then that there was no such thing.