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I overheard Igor speak to Sergei in his office later this morning. The door to my room wasn't fully closed.
"Can't you see that Paul merely filled a void that had existed in this house for decades," Igor said gently. "He filled a void that no one had bothered to address. The circle of his affection was wide enough to feel this void on the first day we set foot in this house together, and he was able deal with it in a manner that enriched our world with a new sense of honesty. You have no cause to be upset. You are upset because your affections never reached that far. I also know that you, too, are capable of that love, because you are a human being. You have demonstrated this in so many, many ways. You are just afraid to admit it, as I had been when we were all stuck together on the boat for six weeks. I even blamed Paul for my being afraid to love, can you imagine that? Now you are called upon to demonstrate this capacity as you have never been able before, because if your don't, you will never survive at the trial. You have bees set up. You have been framed. I don't know how you got into this mess, but you are in it, and we can help you with this if you let us."
Sergei became quiet after that. At the end, it appeared that he accused Igor of being cruel.
"No, I am your friend," Igor responded to him. "I am trying to break the yoke that will strangle you if nobody cares to take it from you. I am trying to open your eyes to a platform that allows you to live again as I was told you once lived. You must expand the circle of your affection to embrace the whole of humanity. That is what you were once known for. Don't be so pitifully selfish to take the easy way out by putting the blame for what happened onto Boris. Defend Russia; expose the real traitors with the truth! If you don't, your unspoken lies will kill you. Likewise, don't ever take the easy way out in your relationship to Laara, by putting a cage around her as you have done. Open your heart to relish the riches that she has to offer. Extend the circle of your love so wide that she feels welcome in it. If you don't do either of these things, what incentive do you have for protecting our world from the next nuclear war or something worse? What's there to protect, but an empty shell?"
Having said this, Igor simply walked out.
Laara told me that Sergei cried bitterly this evening. She told him that everyone of us, especially her and I, had spend practically the whole week wracking our brains to develop a higher level platform based on the principle of universal love that he could accept and utilize. She said that she told him that he needed this platform in order to uplift the trial to some level of truth, so that he wouldn't be beaten into the ground.
She came to me and threw her hands up, declaring that all our efforts might have been in vain. She asked for our help. "But what more can we do?" she said. "What more can anyone do?"
In the end, it was she, herself, who found the answer. She realized that the only answer Sergei would accept was one that he formulated for himself. Towards that, she alone could help. This she did in her usual, gentle and generously grand style. She requested Sergei that he would take her to several more of these cultural evenings, as the one in Moscow that had been aborted. To back up her demands she purchased six tickets for a performance of Schiller's Don Carlos, performed in Novosibirsk. She purchased six more tickets for Shakespeare's Hamlet, performed in English in Kiev. And for the greatest surprise, she purchased six tickets for a rare modern performance of the ancient trilogy, "Prometheus Bound" that had been written in the early part of the Greek Classical period.
Laara understood her task perfectly. She had to lift Sergei out of his political quagmire into a human world where truth and love are of greater importance than the games of manipulation, which defy them.
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