“Next time say that first.”
Then he called one of his engineers and asked for the term.
After the meeting, he told the senior interpreter:
“Keep the girl.”
That became three summers of occasional work.
Not constant.
Whenever the patriarch came to New York for medical treatment, investment meetings, or legal discussions, the agency sometimes sent her.
He liked her because she did not flatter him.
She liked him because he paid attention to words.
He taught her Russian idioms that professors avoided.
She corrected his English articles.
He pretended to be offended.
During one trip, he asked:
“Why do Americans say ‘the Ukraine’ sometimes?”
She explained why many people now avoided it.
He argued for twenty minutes.
Then later corrected himself in front of someone else without acknowledging she had won.
That was him.
And sometimes his son came too.
The man now sitting at the restaurant table had been in his late forties then.
Already powerful.
Already impatient.
He rarely spoke to the young interpreter.
Why would he?
She was nineteen.
Then twenty.
Then twenty-one.
A temporary employee beside his father.
He looked past her even then.
But she remembered his father calling him one thing no one else used.
“Misha.”
Not in meetings.
Not in front of outsiders.
Only during private moments.
Sometimes affectionate.
Sometimes disappointed.
Sometimes furious.
Once, after the son had left a conference room during an argument over factory layoffs, the patriarch sat silently for several minutes.
The young interpreter gathered papers.
He said in Russian:
“Миша думает, что если люди его боятся, значит, они его уважают.”
Misha thinks that if people fear him, it means they respect him.
She should have pretended not to hear.
Instead she said:
“Maybe he knows the difference.”
The patriarch looked at her.
Then smiled.
“You are young.”
She thought that meant he disagreed.
Years later, she wondered whether it meant he hoped she was right.
Now, standing in the Manhattan restaurant, she looked at the billionaire again.
Older.
More powerful.
His father dead for nearly a decade.
The son still seemed to think fear and respect were interchangeable.