Aleksandr was the third man I’d known. At that time, he’d just turned thirty. We’d met at a student party, without any particular expectations on either side. He helped me regularly when problems cropped up on my computer and gradually we became more intimate. Then, I went to France for the summer… He replaced me with ease. His new partner was never jealous. She had sixty-four bits, was called Komp’ Yuter and ran on Linux. According to him, Macs were for chicks or people who didn’t know how to use their hands. For him, a hacker on a Macintosh would be like Bill Gates driving about in a Fiat Uno. As for Windows, he hated it with a passion, except for games.
We hadn’t seen each other since I’d been back in Russia. We’d swapped a few emails, in which I’d told him a bit about my life in Franc
