Liberation Movements Read Free Page B

duty-free shop, he spots the woman again. She’s speaking with a tall, mustached man who’s holding a black briefcase and sweating. He’s visibly nervous, though the woman is calm, her smile serene.
    In the shop he finds one other customer—the woman’s big companion—also buying cigarettes. The oaf smokes Moskwa-Volga. He ignores Libarid as he leaves.
    A little before one o’clock, they board, and Libarid takes his window seat in the twentieth row. He’s relieved, as they all are, to finally be on the plane. Across the aisle from him, the nervous mustached man with the briefcase is sitting down. Then Libarid hears a voice.
    “This is me.”
    It’s the woman, settling into the seat next to him.
    Her companion is nearer the front of the plane, unaware that she’s passed him, but then he figures it out. He pushes through people to get back to her. Without speaking, she shows him her boarding pass. The man looks dumbly up at the seat numbers, then holds out his own boarding pass to Libarid. He says, “I need to switch seats with you.” He has the clotted voice of a deaf person.
    “I’m comfortable here,” says Libarid.
    The man leans closer, forcing the woman back into her seat. He could break most of the people on the plane in half. “I insist.”
    “So do I,” says Libarid.
    The man places a big hand on Libarid’s headrest. “Don’t be a nuisance, comrade. Not unless you want the Ministry for State Security on you. I’m here to protect this woman.”
    Libarid pauses, unsure, but then the woman touches his thigh with the side of her hand, just briefly, and it strengthens him. He says, “I’m a lieutenant in the People’s Militia. That tough-guy talk may work for the peasants you usually run into, but not with me.”
    The man recoils slightly, maybe surprised, then looks at the woman. “I’ll be seven seats up.”
    “I know,” she says.
    Once he’s gone, Libarid, flushed, asks if he’s really from Yalta Boulevard.
    “Don’t worry about him,” she says.
    Libarid stops worrying. “He’s protecting you?”
    “Protecting, watching—it’s all the same, isn’t it?”
    Libarid points out that it’s strange for the Ministry to send a deaf man to watch over someone; it doesn’t make much sense. The woman smiles, her pale eyes slits, and eludes him with a question. “When did the Ministry ever make sense?”
    The lights dim, and they take off. She closes her eyes as Libarid takes the opportunity to look closely at her face. He lights another cigarette and feels the old pull of his checkered youth, when he had many women, before he settled down. He wonders if he’ll return to that checkered youth.
    Probably.
    Though he’s leaving his family, something in him believes it’s immoral to try anything yet. It’s too soon. It would prove with scientific accuracy that he never had any respect for his wife, his marriage, or his family in the first place.
    So Libarid peers past her to the nervous man. He’s worse now that the vibrating plane is airborne: sweaty and pale, wiping his mustache and staring at a book he’s obviously not reading. Libarid notices that on the cover are the squiggly characters of his own native language. The Bible. Libarid leans over the dozing woman and gives a high whisper. “Parev!”
    The man looks up at him, almost terrified.
    “Nice to see another Armenian face,” says Libarid. “And don’t worry. The pilot may be a Turk, but he knows what he’s doing.”
    The man nods, a little stunned. “ Aayo —yes, I’m sure he does.”
    Then he goes back to his Bible, and Libarid looks out the window at blackness.
    Eyes still shut, the woman says, “He’s not afraid of flying. He’s afraid of dying. Everyone’s afraid of that.”
    Libarid turns to her. “Just trying to help him out.”
    “It’s ironic.”
    “What is?”
    She doesn’t answer. She opens her eyes. “Are you happy?”
    “That’s a strange question.”
    “You’re married. You have a son. I’m