Misha offered me his hand with that surgeon's firmness, that pianist's sensitivity. He was very close to me, but I was not afraid of him. Perhaps all the movies I had seen about hit men have hardened me just as Afghanistan hardened him. I cannot imagine his victims as real men. Yet his very calmness and tranquillity chilled me. I had expected a swaggering Mafioso with rings on his fingers, not this scientist of death.
I wonder if his matter-of-factness is the "banality of evil" which Hannah Arendt noted in Nazi war criminals. As he shook my hand, I found it difficult to see him as evil. He was more like a laboratory assistant, conducting a boring list of humdrum experiments on faceless androids.
But in his cool practicality, I glimpsed the mythical power of the executioner that is such a potent psychological idea: Is he the Ferryman? If so, what is on the other side? And I found myself staring into his plain eyes, searching for where all the elephants lie buried, seeking the secrets of our existence, as if Misha might know something only Gods and dead men know. But he just stared evenly back at me, and I realized that he knows even less about life and death than I. That is why he finds it so easy.
