The Senility of Vladimir P

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He didn't know how
long he had been sitting there. Could have been two hours. Could have been two years.

Suddenly, a connection in his brain sparked to life and set off a chain of ignitions, like a momentary flickering of stars lighting up across a darkening, dying galaxy.

‘Why am I here?' he yelled angrily. ‘What am I doing?'

‘Waiting,' said Sheremetev, plumping up one of the pillows on his bed.

‘What for?'

‘For the meeting.'

Vladimir's eyes narrowed. ‘Have I been briefed?'

‘Of course,' replied Sheremetev calmly.

‘Good.' Vladimir nodded. His expression changed, losing its anger. Already, he was forgetting what he had been upset about. The connection, wherever it was in his brain, had been snuffed out, perhaps never to spark again, and the self-awareness that had erupted momentarily into his consciousness was gone. He sat quietly and watched Sheremetev work. Vladimir couldn't have said exactly who the other man was, but nonetheless he was at ease with him. Somehow, he knew that it was right for him to be making up the bed, and he had a feeling that it might even have happened before.

Sheremetev was a small man, dressed in a simple white shirt and a pair of dark trousers. He had never worn uniform when looking after Vladimir, but the deftness and economy of his movements as he tidied the bed betrayed a long career as a nurse. It was almost six years since Professor V N Kalin, the renowned neurologist, had asked him to become Vladimir's personal carer. That was shortly after Vladimir announced that he would be stepping down from the presidency. In those days, although the president's condition was evident to those who worked with him closely, he was still well enough to hold his own in tightly scripted public appearances for which he was carefully prepared. His successor, Gennadiy Sverkov, had even continued to have him wheeled out on occasion to try to draw some of the old wizard's magic onto his own increasingly lacklustre administration. Back then, Vladimir still had a valet to dress him and a pair of aides to keep him abreast of events, and ­Sheremetev's role had been limited, but as Vladimir's memory deterior­ated, so Sheremetev's responsibilities multiplied. Within a couple of years, Vladimir's public appearances had become so erratic that even Sverkov's people grew wary of parading him, and rumours of his condition – never confirmed – began to circulate. The appearances ceased. First the two aides were dispensed with, then the valet, and Sheremetev was left alone with him.

The nurse had never concerned himself with politics and had never kept track of who was doing what to whom in the Kremlin. To him, the whole business was a murky soup out of which names rose and sank without apparent rhyme or reason, and what was happening under the surface – and surely things must be happening, as everyone said – wasn't something he tried to understand. He hadn't been aware of the rumour that Vladimir had been forced out as his ageing cronies scrambled to hold on to their positions in the dying days of his power. All he knew was that the president announced that he was retiring – and a few weeks later Professor Kalin summoned him to his office.

‘Do you know my mother?' asked Vladimir, as Sheremetev plumped the last of the pillows and set it down on the bed.

‘No, Vladimir Vladimirovich. I never had the honour of meeting her.'

‘I'll introduce you. She'll be here later. I've sent a car for her.'

Sheremetev turned around. ‘It's time for your shower, Vladimir Vladimirovich. You'll have to get dressed in something special today. The new president is coming to see you.'

Vladimir looked at him in confusion. ‘The new president? Aren't I the president?'

‘Not any more, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Someone else is president now.'

Vladimir's eyes narrowed. In the early years, hearing that might have driven him into a rage. But the rages were less frequent now, and when they did occur, didn't last long. Nothing that Vladimir was told stuck for more than a minute or two in his mind. If he was agitated, it was probably because he was thinking about something that had happened twenty or thirty years ago.

‘Is someone coming?' asked Vladimir eventually. ‘Is that what you said?'

‘Yes. The new president, Constantin Mikhailovich Lebedev.'

Vladimir snorted. ‘Lebedev's the minister of finance!'

Sheremetev had no idea if Lebedev had ever been minister of finance, but he certainly wasn't now. ‘He's the new president, Vladimir Vladimirovich. He wants to get your blessing. That's good, isn't it? It shows how much he respects you.'

‘My blessing?' Vladimir frowned. ‘Am I priest?'

‘No.'

‘Then why does he want my blessing?'

‘It's a figure of speech, Vladimir Vladimirovich. In this case, you're as good as a priest.'

Vladimir watched Sheremetev suspiciously. ‘Where are we?'

‘At the dacha.'

‘Which dacha?'

‘Novo-Ogaryovo.'

‘Novo-Ogaryovo? Why am I meeting Lebedev here? Why not at my office?'

‘Today you're meeting him here.'

‘I'm going to fire that bastard. Have we got cameras?'

‘I think there'll be cameras there.'

‘Good. We'll see how he likes that!' Vladimir chuckled. He remembered getting rid of Admiral Alexei Gorky, the commander of the Northern Fleet, in front of the television cameras at Severomorsk. That had gone down a treat.

Suddenly Gorky was right there in front of him. The look on the admiral's face! The old peacock in his big peaked cap saw all the cameras pointing at him and thought Vladimir had come to pin another medal on his overdecorated chest, and now, before he knew it, he was getting the sack. ‘Didn't see that one coming, did you, Alexei Maximovich? Who's the boss, huh? Teach you to speak out about not having enough money for the fleet!' Vladimir laughed, banging the armrests with his fists.

Sheremetev had left him to go into Vladimir's dressing room. For the new president's visit, he was determined to make sure that his patient looked like a president as well. He took his time in front of the heavily stocked hanging rails and shelves, considering various options, until finally he settled on a dark blue suit, light blue shirt, a red tie with white dots, and a pair of black leather shoes. From Vladimir's impressive collection of watches, he chose what he considered to be a simple but elegant timepiece with a thin gold case, white face, gold hands and a leather band.

He brought everything back to the bedroom and laid out the clothes on the bed. ‘Come on, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Time for your shower. We have to get you spruced up.'

Vladimir gazed at him doubtfully. ‘Why?'

‘Constantin Mikhailovich is coming to see you.'

‘Lebedev? Is that who you mean? He should go to a priest.'

‘Why?' said Sheremetev.

Vladimir frowned. He had a feeling that Lebedev needed a priest, but he had no idea why. ‘His mother's dying,' he proposed.

The cameras had been
set up in a formal reception room on the ground floor of the dacha, which hadn't been opened for years but had been aired and cleaned that morning for the purpose. Two armchairs had been placed at forty-five degrees to each other on either side of an ornate fireplace, under a pair of studio lights. In the kitchen of the dacha, Viktor Stepanin, the chef, and his brigade had been working since dawn to produce a buffet of canapés and snacks that was now laid out on tables along one side of the room. Near the end of the tables stood a big man in a dark grey suit with an exuberant head of grey hair accompanied by two serious looking presidential aides. Other aides, television technicians and security men milled around behind the cameras.

As Sheremetev led Vladimir in, a hush descended on the room. Every eye turned on the old man in the blue suit who had stopped in the doorway. A few wisps of grey hair clung to his scalp, the face was wrinkled and jowly, and yet with its square chin, broad forehead, close-set and slightly slanting cold blue eyes, it was still immediately recognisable as the face that for thirty years had been the most photo­graphed in Russia.

Vladimir looked at Sheremetev in confusion.

‘It's alright, Vladimir Vladimirovich,' he whispered. ‘It's just the people who have come for the meeting.'

‘Am I going to a meeting?'

‘Yes.'

‘Have I been briefed?'

‘Of course.'

Vladimir looked around again, reassured now, taking in the lights and the cameras. Some last remaining instinct stirred within him of the leader that he had once been and he straightened his back, raised his chin, and a slight supercilious smile curled his lip.

‘Who am I meeting?' he whispered.

‘Lebedev,' replied Sheremetev.

‘Of course. Lebedev!' he muttered, and there was a note of combative relish in his voice as he glimpsed the big man standing with his aides on the other side of the room. ‘The time has come!'

Constantin Mikhailovich Lebedev had got his foot on the political ladder as mayor of Moscow, combining an ebullient public persona with a private, craven submissiveness to the Kremlin's commands that made him seem like the perfect placeman. In power, he rapidly became known for his insatiable corruption, more interested in money than power, the kind of politician who posed no threat and whom Vladimir was always happy to advance. But in retrospect, even in the early days there were signs that there was more to Lebedev than met the eyes. What he took in graft with one hand, he gave back – at least in part – with the other, cannily keeping the common Muscovite happy with a string of populist measures that did nothing for the city's future but cheered everyone up with a few extra kopecks in their pocket. Soon the media were calling him Uncle Kostya and he revelled in the moniker. A politician who craved money and wanted to be loved seemed even less of a threat, and Vladimir allowed him a second term as mayor. But Vladimir had to admit that he underestimated him, taken in by Lebedev's talent for playing the gladhanding buffoon. In reality, greater than Uncle Kostya's greed – gargantuan as it was – was his cunning. From the start he had his eyes on prizes more glittering than the mere mayor­alty of the capital. By the time Vladimir realised this, Lebedev had Moscow in his pocket and was a force to be reckoned with.

Vladimir set out to destroy him. He brought him into the federal government, only to sack him a year later on charges of incompe­tence and corruption. Lebedev crawled away wounded, but not mortally, having energetically used his government appointment to distribute the proceeds of a brief but monumental ministerial plundering to a group of influential supporters who had every reason to expect more from him if he could recover power in the future. He had also accumulated an impressive store of secrets that reached to the very top of the Kremlin – the
very
top – and shielded him from further attacks that might have finished him off. So back Vladimir brought him, keeping him close as he searched for another way to dispose of him. For the next decade, the cycle repeated itself – in and out of the government waltzed Uncle Kostya, shamelessly pillaging whatever ministry Vladimir handed him, skimming off even more wealth and spraying it around ever more liberally to entrench himself with another cohort of supporters before being ignominiously sacked, at each sacking playing on his avuncular reputation to portray himself as the innocent victim of Kremlin plotters. Vladimir loathed him with a gut hatred, the type of unbearable disgust that comes from knowing that the only reason this person exists is because of your own mistake in building him up and then not cutting him down when you still had the chance, an existential hatred that comes from looking at someone you despise . . . and finding that when you look past the appearances, what you see is a mirror.

Now he left Sheremetev and strode across the room towards him, as if all of this was happening twenty years ago and he was about to deliver the
coup de grâce
to this bugbear who had swung like an albatross around his neck for so long. ‘Constantin Mikhailovich!' he greeted him loudly.

One of Lebedev's aides rushed forward. ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, President Lebedev has come today to pay his respects and to ask you to say a few words for the Russian people on the auspicious occasion of his election. If you could, for example, say —'

‘Sit,' said Vladimir to Lebedev, pointing at one of the armchairs that had been prepared.

‘But Vladimir Vladimirovich . . .' said the aide.

Vladimir walked to the other chair, and then stood imperiously. Lebedev glanced at his aide. ‘I'll handle it,' he murmured.

A pair of makeup specialists hurried forward as the two men sat and proceeded to dab at their faces. Vladimir raised his chin, im­patient for them to be finished. After a minute or so he shooed them away. ‘That's it! Enough!'

The makeup specialists retreated.

‘Constantin Mikhailovich, are you ready?' said the producer behind the camera.

Lebedev nodded.

The lights went on. Suddenly, the scene was bright. Vladimir immediately thumped the armrest of his chair. ‘So? What have you come to report, Constantin Mikhailovich? I am not satisfied! The Ministry of Finance is a disgrace. You promised me a year ago that you would clean it up. Now it's worse than ever!'

‘Vladimir Vladimirovich —'

‘Well, Constantin Mikhailovich? What have you got to say?'

Lebedev turned briefly to his aides and rolled his eyes. Then he looked back at the ex-president. ‘You fired me from the Ministry of Finance once already, Vladimir Vladimirovich. It's the exact same speech. Are you going to do it again?'

‘Did I appoint you again?'

‘No,' said Lebedev.

‘Why are you here, then?'

‘For this.' Lebedev grabbed Vladimir's hand and turned to the cameras with a smile. ‘Look at the cameras and give us a smile, Vladimir Vladimirovich.'