It's exactly six months today since my friend Tomas was assassinated. And there's not a day when I don't think of him.
I even have dreams in which he's still alive, waving hello as he walks up the steps of our dacha, or elaborating some new and complicated scheme in which he's finally going to make some money.
Sometimes he's in the background of the dream, as he liked to be in our family's life -- he'd come on weekends to read quietly in the garden or sleep in the sunshine on the veranda upstairs. Sometimes he's up close, involved in incredible plots and solutions -- as he was whenever Yelena and I needed something impossible, like a bus for a film crew at two hours' notice, or air tickets back from Yalta when there were none to be had for nine days.
Tomas was my family's court of the last resort -- and my daughter's godfather. He was a Georgian, a big man, a presence: soft-spoken, with a surprising gentleness of manner. He had a clear gaze, a wry, lopsided smile, and a face that seemed always ready to crumple into laughter. And he was generous -- almost insanely, it seemed to me.
When he got married, he gave his new brother-in-law his own apartment. When he separated from his wife, he moved out and gave her the place they'd shared. For a long time he had no place he could call his own, but lived in a room in a retirement home for film actors on the outskirts of the city.
Even so, he continued to support his ex-wife and her family -- as well as his own and that of his new common-law wife Yelena. He gave them money and food and clothes. He visited them in the hospital and paid for their stays. He once told me quietly that he sometimes got tired of it; there were simply too many people he had to take care of.
His idea of heaven, he said, would be to live in a dacha like ours, but in deep, deep forest, with only a babushka for company.
He didn't live to fulfill this modest ambition. In early April, he and his nephew drove after work to the apartment he'd just succeeded in getting. His mother had recently returned there from the hospital, and they were on their way to see her. They never arrived.
As they stepped out of the lift, a gunman was waiting for them. He came out of his hiding place and shot them both down.
It was a professional killing; Tomas' mother didn't hear a thing. Only an hour and a half later, when Yelena telephoned to find out where he was, did she go to the door. She couldn't open it.
Tomas's body was lying against it, and his blood was oozing through the crack beneath.
Who had him killed? I don't know. No one, I think, will ever really know. For Tomas was a biznesmen, a dangerous occupation.
His business, as it happens, was a legitimate one: He was the director of a joint venture that made and sold video cassettes under license from film companies abroad.
But he had many rivals, in all the street kiosks of the city that sell pirate videos. And the video merchants can't have taken kindly to someone who did things by the book and, more than that, had the nerve to go on television to argue for the strict enforcement of copyright laws.
Nor can the protection boys have been too happy when they came to his office only to be told by him, as I know happened on at least one occasion, to get the hell out.
But Tomas may have been involved in something else: some other deal that would help him find money for all his dependents and the dreamed-of dacha he'd finally started to build.
To most people, in any case, he's just a statistic. And even to many of his friends he seems to have entered some realm of uncertainty. Because of the manner of his death, they can no longer be sure of what he did and who he was.
I'm sure. Tomas was one of the most decent men I've met, a man who longed for the normal life he'd glimpsed abroad, and a man with that rarest of qualities: a small touch of magic.
On the six-month anniversary of his death, I shall go to his grave and feel once more, I know, a terrible wave of anger. Anger that this country denied him the normal life he looked for, and anger at him -- that he was not magical enough to escape an assassin's bullets.
I even have dreams in which he's still alive, waving hello as he walks up the steps of our dacha, or elaborating some new and complicated scheme in which he's finally going to make some money.
Sometimes he's in the background of the dream, as he liked to be in our family's life -- he'd come on weekends to read quietly in the garden or sleep in the sunshine on the veranda upstairs. Sometimes he's up close, involved in incredible plots and solutions -- as he was whenever Yelena and I needed something impossible, like a bus for a film crew at two hours' notice, or air tickets back from Yalta when there were none to be had for nine days.
Tomas was my family's court of the last resort -- and my daughter's godfather. He was a Georgian, a big man, a presence: soft-spoken, with a surprising gentleness of manner. He had a clear gaze, a wry, lopsided smile, and a face that seemed always ready to crumple into laughter. And he was generous -- almost insanely, it seemed to me.
When he got married, he gave his new brother-in-law his own apartment. When he separated from his wife, he moved out and gave her the place they'd shared. For a long time he had no place he could call his own, but lived in a room in a retirement home for film actors on the outskirts of the city.
Even so, he continued to support his ex-wife and her family -- as well as his own and that of his new common-law wife Yelena. He gave them money and food and clothes. He visited them in the hospital and paid for their stays. He once told me quietly that he sometimes got tired of it; there were simply too many people he had to take care of.
His idea of heaven, he said, would be to live in a dacha like ours, but in deep, deep forest, with only a babushka for company.
He didn't live to fulfill this modest ambition. In early April, he and his nephew drove after work to the apartment he'd just succeeded in getting. His mother had recently returned there from the hospital, and they were on their way to see her. They never arrived.
As they stepped out of the lift, a gunman was waiting for them. He came out of his hiding place and shot them both down.
It was a professional killing; Tomas' mother didn't hear a thing. Only an hour and a half later, when Yelena telephoned to find out where he was, did she go to the door. She couldn't open it.
Tomas's body was lying against it, and his blood was oozing through the crack beneath.
Who had him killed? I don't know. No one, I think, will ever really know. For Tomas was a biznesmen, a dangerous occupation.
His business, as it happens, was a legitimate one: He was the director of a joint venture that made and sold video cassettes under license from film companies abroad.
But he had many rivals, in all the street kiosks of the city that sell pirate videos. And the video merchants can't have taken kindly to someone who did things by the book and, more than that, had the nerve to go on television to argue for the strict enforcement of copyright laws.
Nor can the protection boys have been too happy when they came to his office only to be told by him, as I know happened on at least one occasion, to get the hell out.
But Tomas may have been involved in something else: some other deal that would help him find money for all his dependents and the dreamed-of dacha he'd finally started to build.
To most people, in any case, he's just a statistic. And even to many of his friends he seems to have entered some realm of uncertainty. Because of the manner of his death, they can no longer be sure of what he did and who he was.
I'm sure. Tomas was one of the most decent men I've met, a man who longed for the normal life he'd glimpsed abroad, and a man with that rarest of qualities: a small touch of magic.
On the six-month anniversary of his death, I shall go to his grave and feel once more, I know, a terrible wave of anger. Anger that this country denied him the normal life he looked for, and anger at him -- that he was not magical enough to escape an assassin's bullets.
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