* * *
One night I turn on the news and see, to my surprise, that they are broadcasting a speech by Putin in which he mentions Chersonesus by name. “It was in Crimea, in the ancient city of Chersonesus or Korsun, as ancient Russian chroniclers called it, that Grand Prince Vladimir was baptised before bringing Christianity to Rus,” he proclaims. “Crimea, Chersonesus, and Sevastopol have invaluable civilizational and even sacral importance for Russia, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers of Islam and Judaism.” Applause. When the speech is finished I turn the TV off and sit in the dark for several dazed minutes. The petty events of my own life have expanded to international importance, like a thin glass slide that splays its image against a white screen. It is late, too late to go downstairs to Alla’s. Recently I have been wondering if we should not be more careful. Are our neighbors keeping track of our comings and goings? Can they hear us through the walls? Alone, I imagine her movements mirroring mine as we go about in our separate flats, identical in layout and divided only by the thinness of my floorboards. This is a comfort to me.
* * *
I am not the only one at the museum to have seen Putin’s speech on TV. In the days that follow, it becomes the main stock of our office chatter. Will the foreign press cover us? Will there be journalists coming? Will we be interviewed? Photographed? Famous, even? The head of the conservation lab is the most positive among us. He is certain that a major Western newspaper will want to write about our museum’s steady conversion into propaganda. At Alla’s school, I know, similar changes have taken place since the annexation last spring: new textbooks that lean away from mentioning Ukraine, their gaze fixed firmly north. The conservator speaks with the exaggerated physicality of a silent film actor––a palace-stormer from Ten Days that Shook the World or a Battleship Potemkin mutineer. When the medievalist comes near our table, the conversation falls off abruptly.
* * *
The day before the museum is due to reopen, the most senior member of staff, a numismatist with the long thin face of a borzoi, takes me out to lunch and asks me to draft a letter of resignation. He has already written his own; he has convinced a number of others to do the same. At the end of the day he is going to deliver them to the office of the city governor along with an ultimatum. “Either the priest goes or we do,” he says. “And so what can they choose?” He injects his telling with optimism, but I have known him long enough to catch the places where his sureness frays. Weighing the decision before me, I can see which course of action would conventionally be called “right.” But sitting there, watching the sweat bead on my colleague’s upper lip, I am come unstuck from romanticism. It is very easy to imagine the ethical judgment of a distanced observer. Yet in the moment I am not at all sure that this distance should be called clarity.
* * *