Once I was Igor. That name is still in a passport somewhere, maybe in a drawer in Moscow, maybe in a basement I will never see again. Igor had a business — imports, then distribution, then whatever else looked profitable that year. It was the nineties, then the two-thousands. Nobody asked too many questions.
Igor had a wife. Russian. She wanted Paris - not to move there, just to visit, to have the photos, to come back and tell people she had been. She had good taste and no patience. She was not wrong about me.
We had an apartment with a view of the ring road. Not the center - nobody I knew could afford the center. But the apartment was ours, and the view was real, and at night the traffic looked like a river of red and white lights going nowhere fast. I used to stand at the window and watch it like it was television. Some nights I did not go to bed. Just stood there.
The business grew. Not because I was a genius — because the country was on fire and everything was growing. I hired people. I fired people. I signed contracts I did not read and drank to deals I did not believe in. Every New Year I told myself this was the year I would slow down. Every New Year I was in a restaurant at 4 AM with people whose names I cannot remember now.
I had a dog. He liked the wife more than me, which should have told me something. When we split, he went with her. I did not fight for him. I should have.
There is a photograph I remember - I do not have it, but I remember it - of the three of us in the apartment, before things got complicated. Igor, the wife, the dog. Everyone is smiling. Real smiles. That was a real evening. We were happy in the way people are happy when they do not yet know what is coming.
I look at that evening sometimes, in my head. I do not feel sad. I feel - surprise. That man in the photograph, Igor, in a clean shirt and no idea what was ahead of him. He was kind. He was tired. He was in love with his wife. He was proud of his business. He was standing in a warm apartment that belonged to him.
He was also, though he did not know it, already on his way out.
The end did not come from outside. Nothing dramatic. No disaster, no betrayal, no state. It came from inside. It came slowly, the way these things do - a smaller deal one year, a bigger office another, a wife who started to look at me like I was a stranger, a man who no longer knew why he was doing any of it.
There is a moment I remember clearly. I came home late. The wife was already asleep. The dog lifted his head, looked at me, and put it back down. I stood in the hallway with my coat still on and thought: I have everything.
And then, right after that thought, without any warning, another one: I do not want it.
That was the beginning of the end. Everything after that - the smaller deals, the colder evenings, the apartment that started to feel like a hotel room - was just arithmetic. Subtraction. One number going down after another, until the number was me.
