My wife, Tatiana Sergeyevna Boroda, and I live in a magnificent if decaying structure that proudly wears the Russian Revival swaddling of its centenarian birth. Designed as a residence for Moscow’s most illustrious stratum of citizenry, it served for many years following the Revolution as a communalka, a Glorious Proletarian Stew, a human borscht roiling with unsavory ingredients. Our six-room apartment bears traces of hundreds of former tenants: parquet floors are scarred where flimsy walls lent scant privacy; sealed pipes in the kitchen once leaked gas into the vicinity of five stoves; etched into the bathroom tile is the scurrilous directive of a former dweller troubled by fellow residents, who were evidently not possessed with enough Stakhanovist fervor in fulfilling their cleaning plan. By the sixties, suitable workers’ palaces had been lashed together in the suburbs to host the masses, and the flat was renovated. We moved here in 1975, after our wedding trip to Sparrow Hills.
Sometimes at night I awake, thinking I hear our apartment’s onetime tenants shouting at each other to turn out lights or remove muddy boots from the hall, and then believe I hear vicious curses in response. When the bones of our arthritic home snap in and out of place, my imagination runs mad, and I detect in those creaks and groans the crash of doors underfoot and the howls of past residents dragged away once again to answer for their crimes. I do not think such reveries unusual, for all walls in Moscow scream in the night.
Come morning, I see outstretched hands at our bedroom window. Unlike so many such hands in our city, these belong neither to beggars nor to robbers. On either side of the window are statues of goddesses, although Tanya perceives little of classical heritage in their lissome charms. More cynical than I, she believes the naked women to be the architect’s favorite whores. Years ago a government theorist extolled the glories of our Soviet atmosphere, proclaiming its cleanliness to be greater than that of Arctic ice, its essential ethers more healthy for children than the purest oxygen. Our window’s sad defenders belie his hyperbole. One has lost a breast to the corrosive air and the other a buttock; their faces and arms are pitted as if by smallpox. Both are black with soot, suggesting that they spend their long nights stuck in chimneys. Yet even in disarray, the goddesses hearten me each morning; like all that is Russian, they retain their beauty, however thick the palimpsest of filth.
It grieves me to tell you that the view past the goddesses is not as seductive. Allow me to describe the vista with which I am confronted each morning. During the thirties, at the command of Stalin, the Transformer of Nature, Tverskaya Street—Gorky, then—was widened to allow the free passage of tanks in the event their presence proved advantageous. In front of our apartment house another building was constructed, one larger, in Stalin Gothic style. (If you knew nothing of Stalin, the architecture could tell you.) Stalin Gothic expropriated the most grandiose features from each architectural school and employed them simultaneously. The resulting designs were made more inspiring by the copious use of party symbols worked into the carved iconography. Our building proffers sylphs to the appreciative gaze of passersby; the other, dead-eyed workers fettered with bonds of wheat.
Separating the structures is a courtyard, in which residents of both buildings walk their dogs, disassemble their cars, and make essential private arrangements. Our bedroom faces a man’s bedroom—if he has a wife, we’ve never seen her, and heaven knows no woman should be so unfortunate. He is fat and in his sixties, I would say. He chooses to drape himself in the manner of the goddesses when he rises, and in that state I see him every morning.
Imagine greeting each day seeing Khrushchev naked. To encounter such a hallucination in the banya, or bath, where one steams away the woes of the world, is expected if not desirable. But this! He moved in last spring and at once began continually parading in his dawn attire; I cannot imagine him clothed. In deepest winter, frost covers the window with ice ferns, and I am usually spared this brain-fogging sight; but this January’s weather had been unnaturally warm, and there was no frost. As he appeared this morning he opened the fortochka, the small inset window within a window. Taking his rod in hand, he aimed carefully before firing. His stream arced down to the muddy snow below.
Tanya was in the kitchen preparing breakfast. “He’s pissing out the window!” I shouted, unable to believe the scene playing before my eyes.
“Who? Khrushchev?”
“Like a horse.” I judged him to be a rural lout who’d amassed riches through disreputable agencies and who now aspired to a lush life in deluxe surroundings while remaining willfully ignorant of city ways—but this was too much. Could he not use the sink if his toilet was broken? These days the whole of public Moscow is inhabitated by the raw and uncultured, but being forced to confront the farm behavior of peasants in my own bedroom was more than I could bear. Opening my own fortochka, I berated him. “Hey!” I yelled through the small opening. “You’re not in a barn! I’ll call the authorities.” Khrushchev, startled, peered up as he finished his business. Then, leaning down, he screamed back at me through his urinal, across the courtyard.
“Suck a foreskin!”
The old bastard’s cheek was astonishing. It is not pleasant to admit it, but I descended to his level. “You’re fucking my brains!” I shouted back. “Bydlo! Dolt!”
“I’ll go up your ass with soap!” he replied. People below employed their own rich phrases as they contributed to the clamor, demanding that we shut our mouths.
“Stupid bastards!” they shouted up to us. “Communists!”
“Fuck a pig,” he said to me, making crude gestures as we continued our stimulating debate. “I need you like a prick needs an alarm clock!”
“Kulak! Fucking peasant! I hope yours freezes off in your hand!”
“Max!” Tanya said, appearing as if by magic beside me, closing the fortochka. “What is this foolishness? Don’t you know everyone in Moscow can hear you?”
“Did you hear what he called me?”
“I heard what you called him,” she said, drawing my necktie tight with hangman’s grace as she knotted it for me. “You’re both uncultured. Come and eat, unless you’re going to stand here all day chatting with your friend.”
“That lousy peasant.”
“What difference is it to you what he does with his thing?” she said, working my gold cuff links into my sleeves. “He wants to stick it out the window, let him. Hungry crows will peck it off.”
“He acts like a dog in the street,” I continued, following her into the kitchen.
“Men and dogs always stick their things where they don’t belong,” she replied, examining me as if I were suitable for vivisection. Her look subdued my anger enough so that I might feel fear. I carefully studied Tanya’s impassive countenance as she ladled eggs and sausage onto our plates, feeling anxious rather than saddened that her emotions were so masked. She was asleep when I came home, the past evening. Often she was awake when I crept home after nights of erotic pleasure, but so far my ever-believable excuses had forestalled discovery, if not suspicion. Still, I often worried that through overuse I had honed too sharp an edge onto my invention and that someday, called upon without warning to employ my swordsmanship, I would swing my weapon too recklessly and cut off my own head.
“You came in late last night, didn’t you?” she asked, her eyes as opaque as the eggs before me. A favorite song of Sonya’s blared over the radio, its tune perfunctory, its message incomprehensible.
“When I returned to the office countless problems faced me,” I told her, deafening myself to the song’s incoherent, evocative words, blinding myself to the images of Sonya they conjured. “Once I start working, it’s impossible to stop.” She sat sphinxlike. “Your beauty stirs me this morning,” I said. “I tremble.”
Tanya glared at me again, but then accepted my compliments for what they were and smiled. She adjusted with unwrinkled hands a Chanel scarf that encircled her unlined neck. I wore another of my fine suits, and she too was attired in splendid business wear: a deep blue blazer, a gray wool skirt, black leather boots as soft as my car’s upholstery. She’d had her hair done at an expensive pavilion the day before, and white no longer threaded her russet tresses. My wife’s beauty was a mature woman’s beauty, but none the less glorious for that. If it had only been in her nature to more freely express the emotions in her soul, and so respond to me as I could have responded to her, perhaps others of her sex would not have had the luck they so often did, employing their crafty wiles.
“Save your flattery for Khrushchev,” she said, spreading jam on a thin slice of bread. “What problems can’t your worthless staff handle? Fire them all and get new ones. So many good people need work.”
“My workers are irreplaceable specialists,” I reminded her. “If they fail me, I apply an iron hand.” She laughed. I happily let her delight in taunting me; it distracted her and caused me no harm. “Call me Stalin,” I said. Tanya laughed again, although long-ingrained conditioning caused her to at once lift a finger to her lips to shush me.
“Some dictator,” she said, retrieving business documents so she could examine them before going to work. Reassured that my crimes had again escaped detection, I opened the Moscow News and pored over enthralling accounts of the spectacular accomplishments of the world’s most progressive society. The Brain Institute denied that it held Anastasia’s. A parliamentarian was gunned down in the Metro by persons unknown, and the city militia assured the public they would track down the assassin as if he were a filthy rat. Ufa’s citizens were sickened by mysterious fumes; the populace suspected the Army of burning chemical weapons nearby, though the Army denied responsibility. Throughout the near abroad, in Chechnya, in Tadzhikistan, in Nagorno-Karabakh, parched hates continued to be quenched with new blood. If I wished to have pizzas delivered to my office, Pizza Hut would now charge me only forty hard dollars. There was a photo of Michael Jackson and a suggestion that he is perhaps an alien brought to earth by one of the UFOs that always are seen only in the provinces. I never imagined that one day I should miss finding in the morning journals the masterful oratory of Chernenko, photographs of women holding corn, and long essays celebrating the overfulfillment of steel plans in Magnitogorsk.
Without taking her eyes from her papers, Tanya asked a question. “What do you think about the girl?”
“Girl?” I repeated, as if the word were unfamiliar to me. I lifted my own newspaper higher, cloaking my face. “What girl?”
“Little coma girl,” Tanya said. “In Ekaterinburg. Heartbreaking.”
I lowered my newspaper. “What happened to her?”
“Her dog ran away and can’t be found.” I found the article and an accompanying photograph. The little girl posed with her dog, a boxer. The uncredited photographer demonstrated his mastery of light by giving them numinous haloes, as if girl and dog had been beatified, or at least awarded extraordinary prizes by the former Politburo. “She evidently loves her dog very much. Her sadness is so great that she went into a coma.”
“How is that possible?”
“Who comprehends mysteries of the mind? I am no psychologist. The dog’s been gone for four days, and she’s been in her coma three.” She turned down the radio until we were no longer at the mercy of its idiot prattlings. “The whole city devotes its attentions to being of service to her family.”
“What else have they to do in Ekaterinburg?”
Tanya frowned. “Hunting parties are searching for her pet.”
“There can be a lot of meat on a dog,” I remarked, certain the beast had already been thrown by rustics into the stewpot.
“It’s a tragic situation,” Tanya said. “You shouldn’t make jokes. Psychics are applying their talents to the search round the clock.” I saw that it was nine, and I laid aside my paper, preparing to leave. “There’s something I need to ask you.”
“It’s late. I should be at work.”
“Sit here and talk to me,” she said, raising her voice. “This is important.”
Her harsh look revealed her intent. Too late, I perceived the trap. With cunning worthy of our harsher rulers she’d waited until I’d lulled myself into a fool’s notion of security before producing the list of my crimes. How could I imagine I would constantly outfox her? I would never have said so, but Tanya knew me even more intimately than did my mother. Myriad questions set my mind aflame. How had we been discovered? A note, slipped into a pocket and forgotten? An overheard phone call? An informant, perhaps one of my employees? Or possibly something more evanescent? I thoroughly washed my face and hands last night before coming home, as always, so that Tanya would not detect Sonya’s personal fragrances. But had she smelled Sonya on me even in her sleep? It no longer mattered. I was captured; there was nothing to do but confess. “I understand,” I said, accepting that my skull would shortly receive her bullet.
“There’s a problem at my workplace, and I need your advice,” she told me. “What is the matter now? You look as if you’re about to faint.”
“A moment of light-headedness,” I muttered, disbelieving my good fortune but readily accepting the whims of fate. “The air. So stuffy inside.”
“The window’s open,” she said. “If you ate breakfast you wouldn’t feel bad.”
“The tale of the little girl so disturbed me, I was unable to finish,” I explained, with my fork shoveling what I hadn’t eaten into my mouth. “Her dog. So tragic.”
“Don’t eat so fast,” she said, slapping my arm.
“Of course,” I said, slowing my movements, edging more closely to her that I might listen attentively to her words. My reprieve came so unexpectedly that throughout our conversation I had fantasies that I’d entered into a sustaining coma of my own and was only enjoying soothing dreams before rudely reawakening into our gray, muddlesome world. “What is the problem, my small bird?”
“We’ve contracted with a new group of investors who are driving us mad,” she told me. “No matter what we suggest they put their money into, they find fault and refuse. All the same, they make it crystal clear they want to do business. What are we to do?” Tanya ran a consulting company, which I financed for her. With reliable friends with whom she had worked for years in the Ministry of Foreign Trade, she advised businessmen who wished to invest hard currency in our prospering country. Once her clients selected an investment program, Tanya and her staff facilitated necessary arrangements with essential agencies and departments. Her approach in dealing with institutional fiends was not unlike mine, for she had learned her most subtle and effective techniques from me. “We’re running out of ideas,” she continued. “We offer imports, exports, steel, agriculture, retail. They turn up their noses and tell us find something else, please.”
“Do they continue paying your consultation fees?” She nodded. We smiled.
“It arrives by messenger every Monday,” she said. “Only Iosif has met with them directly; he knew someone who knew them.”
The name was unfamiliar. “Who is Iosif?”
“A new employee. Very promising, I think.”
“Does the political situation disturb them?” I asked. It amazes me that so many investors are struck dumb with fear when offered the chance to put money into our nation. Intelligent financiers from the far abroad whose opinions I respect rarely comprehend that it does not matter how our political situation turns out, if it ever does. There is no reason to believe that the solid business practices we have long employed in Russia throughout all regimes would be more than momentarily disrupted. Sometimes we Russians are so straightforward in our actions that outsiders cannot help but misunderstand us, I think—our honesty confounds them.
“Perhaps, but if so they think it impolite to mention,” she said.
“Why would they show such courtesy?”
“Do you ever read anything but business chronicles? Science has proven that Asian brains are structured differently from ours. The frontal lobes, of course.”
I stood corrected. “What are they, Japanese? Korean?”
“Representatives of the Sultan of Brunei,” she said. “All necessary documentation has been provided.”
“Brunei?”
“Would you talk to my associates and advise them on how to proceed?”
“Of course.” As I shut my eyes a heavenly vision worthy of the mystics came to my mind: a rushing torrent of money, and I leaping salmonlike through it. From my wide reading I understood that the wealth of the Sultan of Brunei is limitless. Patriotic fervor gripped me. I comprehended at once that his representatives should under no circumstances depart from our struggling Motherland without leaving something of themselves behind. “Perhaps I can make safe recommendations for investments.”
She arched her eyebrows. “Safe for whom?”
“For everyone,” I assured her, kissing her on the cheek. She grabbed my face between her hands as if to tear it off, digging her fingernails into my skin before kissing me, glancingly, on the lips.
“Thank you, Max,” she said.
“My dove,” I told her. “Anything for you.”
Then I left my happy home, breathing cold, refreshing air as I stepped outside, my soul warmed by the love of two women. On such pleasant mornings I walk to work, strolling down Tverskaya before turning east onto what was Marx Prospekt and is now Mokhovaya, although the signs remain unchanged. Khrushchev’s apartment block has a grand public archway that gives access to our muddy court. As I transversed the gloomy portal I found the building manager’s wife taking a broom to drunken beggars as she defended her rampart of trash containers.
“Idlers!” she shouted, swinging her knout. “Crawl back in your holes!”
Most of the sots were too pickled in alcohol to make a coherent reply. An older one tried, but his tongue lolled too loosely in his toothless maw to allow him to form words. “Kyuhy—k’hui—kyuhh!” he mumbled.
“Parasites! Drunks!” She swatted him on the head, a teacher correcting an egregious student, and chastened the others. “I’ll call the militia!” But the squalid are as inventive as they are eternal. The one struck dumb by drink tried to scratch insults into the passageway’s marble with an empty tin of pork roll. Making my way to the boulevard, I exited this drama as unimpressed as the most demanding critic.
By daylight Tverskaya teemed with a multitude of sovoks—human dustpans—as our great helmsmen once, in private, called the proud Soviet people. Throngs of provincial shoppers, and not a few Muscovites, muscled their way along the broad sidewalks. Capitalists—not people who line the street selling treasured heirlooms purchased for resale the week before but machines so named, a tractor whose two crab arms pinch up and carry away snow—were clearing the boulevard to allow motor traffic to pass unhindered. In my golden youth stilyagi, or hooligans, rechristened Tverskaya Broadway. (Stilyagi wore pegged pants, Elvis hair; their coats were so padded you could shoot them and they’d not know. They listened to rock and roll on the bones, as I did, and were always arrested, as I never was.) Tverskaya, Moscow’s central boulevard, is beautiful beyond measure but has nothing of Broadway about it. I have never visited New York but I have seen photographs, and I feel assured in saying nothing in Moscow resembles New York.
One of my banks was parked outside the Central Telegraph Office. There are dozens of new financial institutions in Moscow—DialogBank, Tokobank, Rosselkhozbank, to name but a few competitors (Menatep, of course, is far above us all in terms of power and reach, but considering the background of its operators that should come as no surprise). Many are run solely to satisfy criminal designs, but not the Comrades’ Bank, which I own with two colleagues once employed by the competent organs. Our seven mobile facilities make loans, exchange foreign currency, and provide invaluable services for resident and tourist alike. The guards recognized me and didn’t aim as I approached. Most of our stalwarts are Afghanistan veterans, battle-hardened and impervious to temptations that enemies of productive people may offer.
My co-investors and I know who to bribe and how often, and thus far we had avoided the random assaults that so often beset even the most corrupt financial institutions. Too, word circulates freely throughout criminal circles regarding prophylactic measures we have taken to safeguard our banks. If mercenary brigands were to attempt to rob one of our facilities, you see, the entire van would blow up the instant the teller pressed his foot against the alarm button in the floor. For reasons of security, of course, we never arm our tellers with a complete understanding of our advanced antitheft technology.
Waiting for me was my day-to-day supervisor Arteim, an Armenian. The main reason Muscovites hold irrational prejudices against those sharp southern entrepreneurs is because there are no better businessmen. Arteim and I met in the late seventies; we had mutual acquaintances involved in what was afterward called the Fishy Business. Ministry of Fisheries bureaucrats had formulated a scheme using fruits of the sea as items of barter and bribery, enabling themselves to fatten for years on the spoils. The cabal dissolved in frenzied finger-pointing and tearful confession after keen-eyed customs officials accidentally discovered thousands of tins of Sevruga labeled for export as low-grade herring, in brine, for cats.
Arteim and I were innocent of provable involvement with the plot and so escaped the accusations of all but the most suspicious. It saddened us to watch our associates be snatched so unexpectedly from public life, but we consoled ourselves afterward with knowledge that could not have been gained except through experience and have since enjoyed fifteen years of profitable friendship.
He stood with an unfamiliar man beneath a framed photograph of Milton Friedman. Our associate Telman (who is also Armenian) insists that the economist’s troubled mien be hung in all our facilities to reassure American customers—I suspect most of them think it a photograph of Lenin they haven’t seen before. When he greeted me, Arteim showed not as much chrome as he generally reveals when he smiles. The stranger was tall and wide and wore an orange jacket fabricated of leather so laughably false it would not be used for insulating apartment doors. It gleamed as if buttered, and one worn elbow was patched with electrical tape. I observed sizable bulges at his sides and took comfort in the proximity of our guards. “We have a problem, Max,” Arteim said.
I introduced myself. “Ivan Ivanovich,” the stranger replied, the tone of his voice suggestive of a broken oboe. It was all I could do to contain my hilarity, hearing such a pseudonymous name. He looked as if he came from the Far East, or at least from some distance beyond Irkutsk. We shook hands. Ivan Ivan’s paw was damp, as if he kept it beneath rocks when not using it.
“Let us enjoy frank and open debate regarding our concerns,” I said, opening a drawer in Arteim’s desk, taking out glasses and a bottle of ten-year-old Noyag brandy. “Shall we toast our desire to attain mutual satisfaction?”
“Too early,” Ivan Ivan said, his reeds squeaking. I placed the bottle and glasses back on the desk. It was unfortunate that he abstained; drink so often has a soothing effect on uncultured hooligans, so long as their superiors provide limitless amounts of essential nectar. “Celebrate later. Your associate and I disagree. I think you can settle this matter.”
“What’s the problem?”
“It is complex,” Ivan Ivan said, slouching against the wall. I wondered if he would leave a greasy spot on the paneling. His jacket’s leatherette was as squeaky as his voice. “Our monthly collections. It is shameful to deal always in cash, don’t you think? Such disreputable light is cast upon our great friendship.”
“Money doesn’t smell,” Arteim interjected. I saw that his own sidearm was in handy reach, which troubled me. He carried it always but never used it, and if the spirit of the Wild East suddenly seized him I doubted he could remember which was the right end to hold. “Valera never suffered such humiliation, seeing us. Is that why he no longer comes? Was the shame too great for him to bear?”
“Where is Valera?” I asked. In the prison without walls that Russia has become, it is often difficult to remember with which criminal gang one is dealing unless its members have given you reason to never, ever forget. Valera, and now Ivan Ivan, represented one of the more reasonable mafias. Valera was an affable lout who could not refuse a proffered drink. Thinking of him, I recalled his nose, or should I say the half that hadn’t been cut off. “Promoted?”
Ivan Ivan lowered his eyes. “Death arising from a chronic ailment.”
“Who shot him?”
Before our visitor could avoid telling me, Arteim interrupted to make a more plaintive inquiry. “Why will you not take our money?”
“It cheapens our friendly relations,” Ivan Ivan claimed. “I’m not saying no money ever; that would be foolish. But there is more in life than money.”
“A remarkable thesis,” I said.
“This is not my belief alone. Our entire group is concerned.”
“Are you in a spiritual crisis?” Arteim asked, sneering. “Troubled with the fate of art in a degenerate world?”
I raised my hand; my partner fell silent.
“May I be forthright?” Ivan Ivan asked. “Life is filled with enough humiliations. At present there is something we need more than money. We know you have great access to many things.”
“Do you mean strategic resources?” I asked, inferring without exertion that he sought electric samovars or refrigerators or other such consumer opiates. He carefully slid his hand beneath his jacket, moving with caution so as not to alarm our alert guards. Instead of armament, he drew forth a doll.
“You recognize?” he asked, as though without his kind prompting we would be at a loss to identify the small mannequin. When Moscow’s numberless prostitutes fail at disguising themselves as Madonna they try to look like Barbie, with as much success. The doll he clasped in his fist was no less scuffed and bedraggled than her impersonators, as though she had been recently taking pleasure with her male doll compatriots or possibly with Ivan Ivan himself. “Some desirable items money cannot buy, as even you prosperous gentlemen know.”
“You need Barbies?”
“Do you not believe our dealings would be more soul-rewarding if sometimes we traded for what enriches the drab lives of our families instead of mere common currency?” His eyes grew wet, as if he stood facing the wind. “We do what we can in these hard times. My colleagues are not as wealthy as I may appear.”
For the first time I noticed an ugly wen on the side of his head and found it impossible to take my eyes away. “You want dolls for your families?”
“Our little girls,” he said. “They cry themselves to sleep.”
It disheartens me to tell you that Arteim’s expression softened at once. Southerners jerk like puppets when emotional strings are pulled. “I have two little girls,” he said.
“I hope yours don’t weep their nights away,” said Ivan Ivan. Even his wen appeared to be throbbing with pain. This masterstroke eroded our position of strength; upon hearing such a deeply felt sentiment Arteim toppled squarely onto the side of the little girls.
“How could I know your situation?” he asked. “You didn’t tell us until now.”
“Sadness froze my lips,” said Ivan Ivan.
“Probably we can create the right conditions,” I interrupted, anxious to assuage this heartbreak. Arteim was so overcome he excused himself, walking away to find a cloth with which to wipe his brimming eyes. “How many do you need?”
“Not many,” Ivan Ivan said, recovering with breathtaking speed. “Four–five hundred.” He scratched his wen. “Even now I can hear them crying.”
“You must fear drowning in a flood of tears,” I said. Barbies sell on the street for fifty dollars, in stores for eighty; I could buy them for ten. Thanks to Arteim’s soft heart and head, I would soon see five thousand dollars fly through my window en route to this cadre of thugs and their illusory little girls. Possibly the dolls were to be stuffed with heroin and exported, and that irritated me; I had never sought deliberate involvement with would-be pharmacists of the people. “Something can be done, I’m sure. But I am no wonder-worker.”
“I know you’ll do everything possible.” He returned Moscow Barbie to his pocket, pulling open his jacket and allowing me to better glimpse his unimpressive weaponry.
“Without question.” For a moment I wished that I could direct my guard to shoot him on the spot—however, a rash businessman is a dead one, soon enough. “For now, why don’t we use traditional cash stipends?”
“I think that would be all right.”
“Let me leave you with a happy memory,” I told him, stepping over to the teller’s compartment. Taking two hundred-dollar bills, I held them against the light to make certain they were genuine. Of late, two-thirds of the dollars passing through Moscow are counterfeit. “You’re sure you don’t find it too demeaning to accept this in lieu of Barbies?” Ivan Ivan shook his head and hastily stuffed the cash into his pants. “Good-bye, then.”
Arteim returned as Ivan Ivan, his wen, and his squeaking jacket made their exit. “How could you suck up such idiotic lies?” I asked him, infuriated.
“Why are you berating me, Max? Think of those poor children. Have you no emotions?”
“That lout makes a sucker out of you while I’m standing before you. How could you be such a fool?”
“How can you deny small girls simple joys?”
“Five hundred small girls?” I said. Arteim frowned. “He and his colleagues are evidently national heroes of production.”
“The fucking swindler,” he said. “Using small children to take advantage.”
“How many times have I told you? Keep emotion separate from business. Do you ever listen? My God!” In keeping with my advice, my anger speedily cooled. We have been through so much that on those infrequent occasions when his business sense is not what it should be, I can always find it in my heart to forgive him.
“I’m sorry, Max,” Arteim said, plainly abashed. “Should we kill him?”
The emotional strings to which Southerners jump are as often made of razor wire as of silk. “To what end?” I inquired, and of course he did not answer me. Not once had I found it necessary to have anyone murdered; not every Russian businessman can make such a claim. “Possibly we can turn this deal to our benefit. Let us think how to satisfy the lousy peasant without losing our shirts.”
“Should I track the Barbie market?” Arteim asked.
“Go ahead,” I said. “We’ll undoubtedly find the solution to this needless problem.” He grimaced, fearing my anger, and I was contented enough by his appropriate reaction to say no more. “Look into something else for me. A crematorium called Glow of Life at Nicholas Archangel, in Reutov. There are troubling things going on there, I think. Find out who the investors are, if you can.”
“Is it a market with potential?”
“Limitless.”
My office was a short distance away on Nikolskaya Street in Kitai-Gorod. From trustworthy officials I rent the third floor of a six-story building once used to house superfluous files of the Ministry of Agriculture. The structure was put up in 1963 and has aged as well as any constructed during that era of giants. Windows streak with rust, concrete erodes into sand, the roof retains so much water that mushrooms could sprout from its asphalt. There is an ever-widening gap between the outer wall and the floor in my office; I can drop a pencil into the gap, and it will reach the basement in seconds. Last autumn a steel panel fell from the facade, crushing two strollers and decapitating another (partially, vertically). Since then, I waste no time lingering at the doorway of the building. But office space is in short supply, and sometimes you must leave yourself in the hands of merciless fate.
Allow me an advertisement (an infomercial, I believe they are now called in America) for my central operation, founded four years ago. The Universal Manufacturing Company supplies a demanding public with needed documents. My trained specialists are accomplished at preparing notarized reports, business contracts, banking records, panegyrics issued by long-dead worthies, audits of production achievements worthy of material reward—in short, any paper that eases citizen life and warms bureaucratic hearts (excepting those aforementioned funerary officials, who are difficult). We can produce historic Soviet documents drawn to suit the demanding specifications of foreign journalists or officials. Prices are on a sliding scale; we would not charge a poor grandmother the same as the BBC or MTV. For now, the Universal Manufacturing Company deals strictly on a hard-currency basis. We use all modern overnight-express shipping services.
“Good morning, all,” I said, walking in. My well-paid staff joyfully responded, raising their heads from their desks, some for the moment pushing aside their lights and tools and engraving equipment. The long row of gentle babushki I keep busy preparing the small red folders in which internal passports are housed clucked and fluttered when I walked by them, as if they were hens and I a potent rooster. My senior workers smiled at my approach, and I gave them hearty greetings, stopping sometimes to inquire about a few long-term projects. “How’s it going?” I asked Fyodor, who worked on a project that held great interest for British researchers.
“Mr. Philby has outwitted his superiors left and right,” Fyodor said, riffling a sheaf of superb-looking documents, “but now he wishes to atone for his errors.”
I clapped him heartily on the back. Tomas, an excellent scribe who for many years worked in the competent organs in Nizhni Novgorod, raised his hand as I walked by, calling for my attention.
“Max?” he asked, showing me KGB documents to which he’d devoted unwavering attention for days. “I need only appropriate signatures.”
“Pass it to Mischa, he can do them in his sleep,” I said, studying the paper; it was perfect. Tomas’s assignment necessitated his producing a host of documents suggesting that CIA agents in Minsk foiled KGB attempts to brainwash Lee Harvey Oswald during the noted assassin’s stay in our all-welcoming country. These documents were intended to eventually reach a well-known Chicago scholar, or so our middleman informed us. History can be so much more flexible than Lenin ever supposed; last May, Tomas supplied a California researcher with papers proving the precise opposite.
“The stamps are correct?” he asked.
“Reconfirm with Valentina.” In our contemporary world, past events are nothing more than zakuski, from which one selects delicious appetizers according to one’s particular taste, and it pleases us to cater. The Universal Manufacturing Company can prove John Kennedy shot himself, as long as we are paid in advance.
When I stepped into my office suite my administrative assistant, Ludmilla, was already there. An aggressively responsible woman in her sixties, she believes deeply in her heart—as we all of us do here at Universal Manufacturing—that disturbing facts should never be too long hidden and thus relays unpleasant news every morning before I can even say hello.
“You have visitors and you’ll not want to see them,” she told me.
“Who are they?”
“Evgeny, for one.”
My younger brother. “Why is he here?”
“It would be beneath him to tell me, or so he seems to believe,” she said, making a sour face. “Impress upon him that I am no public lackey. He’s in your office.”
“He won’t be for long. Who else?”
“Dmitry Mikhailovich Gubin.”
Sonya’s husband. “Where is he?”
“He went for a walk when I told him you hadn’t yet arrived. Said he’ll return at ten. He must talk to you, he insists. I told him he has no appointment and therefore it will depend on your discretion.”
“Did he say what he wanted?”
She shook her head. “He appeared nervous.”
As any man might appear, coming to shoot his wife’s lover. That, of course, was my initial unfounded reaction. For a moment I almost took my bulletproof vest out of the closet, but aging amateurs such as Dmitry rarely aim for the head, at least not on the first shot. I tried to throw off my gnawing fears. He could never have discovered our situation on his own, and Sonya would never confess. But what if he had? What if she did? At once my suspicions returned and began feeding on themselves. No emotion is so gaily self-cannibalistic as paranoia. I glanced behind me, in case he had crept back into the office, intent on revenge.
“Send him in when he returns,” I said, and stepped into my office. Evgeny sat in my comfortable chair, resting muddy shoes on my mahogany desk and perusing an issue of The Economist. With brusque motions I shoved his feet back to the floor where they belonged.
“Max!” he exclaimed, quickly rising so that I might take the seat he so courteously warmed for me. “A great opportunity presents itself.”
“Stop treating Ludmilla as if she were your lickspittle,” I said. “We have no serfs here. Do you fancy yourself one of the false Romanovs?”
“She doesn’t like me, Max. I have done nothing to her. She stares at me as if I were a spider, as if I’m evil personified.”
“Stupidity personified, perhaps. What do you want? It’s too early to listen to your mad ideas.”
“Investors are interested in my park,” he said. “It could mean big money for both of us. Is that too mad for you to hear?”
Evgeny is our family’s holy fool. My brother will always be dear to me, but since childhood he has done all he can to test my love. For inexplicable reasons he perceives himself to be a master businessman, a financial whiz, my entrepreneurial equal. Evgeny could funnel money into a penned goose and never see a kopeck of it again. During the Brezhnev years, when even the little coma girl could have made millions of rubles while lying unconscious in her bed of trauma, Evgeny lost money in harebrained schemes. Under perestroika, when the lowest zug could get a handout from intelligent Westerners as long as an acceptable hatred of communism was feigned, Evgeny landed himself repeatedly into debt. Yet I must be fair and admit that he is not so much stupid as merely cursed with a soul innocent of guile. As a child he took too closely to heart our mother’s fairy tales, and if today you were to tell him you had a magic hen for sale, he would open my wallet without a second’s hesitation. “Who is crazy enough?” I asked.
“Americans,” he said, almost hopping up and down with excitement. I must also admit that his most recent idea is not without merit. For two years he had devoted unstinting effort to developing a Western-style theme park to be located outside of Moscow. From a Polish consortium he borrowed money to purchase the land, and I had interest enough in the concept to sink seventy thousand dollars into preliminary construction. As of that morning, of course, only one building had been partially built.
“Were they on a tour bus?” I asked.
“They’re from Texas,” he said, and then, in English, “Howdy, partners.” Before hearing his call to the world of high finance, Evgeny wanted to be a cowboy. So often I wished that our parents had given him the horse he beseeched St. Nicholas and the Snow Queen to bring him. “They want to invest much money.”
“How did you meet them? What references do they have?” Proportionately, there are as many criminal Americans in Russia at present as there are criminal Russians, but not even the most respectable are here because of altruistic desires to assist our hard-beset people. Americans are our main competitors, uninterested in Russian prosperity and might unless it serves their purposes; only a fool denies it. Their business acumen is rarely as sharp as they think it to be, but Evgeny is perhaps the only Russian who could be constantly outwitted by Americans.
“Through your friend Gyorgi Ilyich,” he said, mentioning the name of a friend in the Ministry of Foreign Trade whose judgment I trusted. He had an unfortunate tendency to pass along information he thought useful to Evgeny without warning me beforehand. Granted, in the hands of anyone other than Evgeny the information could probably prove fruitful. “I haven’t met them. We spoke by phone. They stay at the Metropole and are utterly reliable, he says.”
“I want to meet them as well. I should assist in your presentation, I suppose?” My beloved brother nodded his head so rapidly I feared it would shake loose of his shoulders. I no longer allowed him to face wolves alone when they came seeking fresh lamb. “When is a meeting scheduled?”
“In a few days.”
“You can’t tell me?”
“I left my appointment book at my office.”
“All right,” I said, sighing. Always, I am encircled by fires onto which I must piss unending streams of money. Ludmilla appeared at the door.
“Mr. Gubin has returned,” she said.
“Have him come in. Good-bye, Evgeny. Use the side exit.”
“Thank you again, Max.” As he bolted from the room, Dmitry Gubin entered. At a glance I saw he was unarmed and so at least felt assured of my physical security. To look at Dmitry, you would not have guessed he was incomparably more prosperous than he had been when he worked at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He was flamboyantly nondescript. His old Hungarian suit was so stiff it might have been lined with cardboard, and his shoes had never come into proximity with leather. Dmitry’s hair, what there was of it, was a greenish-gray blond. His hands, speckled with liver spots, showed nails bitten to the quick. It was lucky for him he had as much money as he did, for otherwise Sonya would not have looked twice at him except to laugh the louder.
“Come in, Dmitry Mikhailovich,” I said, although he had already sat down. There is no excuse to forget one’s manners, however base the behavior of those around you, but most of my countrymen will never learn this. “How can I help?”
I braced myself to suffer, and thereafter deny, a torrent of accusations; but fate continued to be kind, and it soon became apparent to me that he had not come to discuss any unfortunate discoveries he might have made. “I need to retain your specialists for an assignment, if you are willing to take me on as a client,” he said. “Is your office secure, Maxim?”
“Absolutely,” I said. Every day two of my experts swept the office, protecting against electronic infiltration by malcontents, or spies wishing access to our trade secrets. “Talk freely to me, as if you were in your own apartment.”
Judging from his expression, that was perhaps not so assuring a thought as I might have intended. “Three friends and myself are setting up a new operation,” he began. “They worked in the old Department for Combating Theft of Socialist Property.” I smiled. Dmitry may as well have confessed the crimes they’d not yet committed. The aforementioned department was corrupt even by Soviet standards; volunteers for such combat uniformly left the battlefield burdened by the fruits of victorious pillage while at arms. “We will export souvenirs from Russia to Brighton Beach, New York, in exchange for hard currency.”
“Souvenirs?” I repeated. “How many surplus medals and balalaikas does the world need?”
“A host of available markets remain,” Dmitry said, his mask as solemn as before. “Our group is funding the operation, with some assistance by silent partners. We intend to work in partnership with another group responsible for oversight.”
“One of the more dependable mafias?” I asked, but he made no direct reply.
“Single representatives from our two groups are presently hammering out specifics of our partnership. These negotiations will conclude by the end of February. What I need done needs to be done before then.”
“Broader investigations will be undertaken at the conclusion of negotiations?” Such was standard procedure; one can be no less careful in choosing partners for business than for marriage—should be more careful, in most cases.
“Exactly,” he said. “The representatives will exchange complete membership information and afterward will make background checks of all participants. Once the reliability of those involved is assured, the contract will be signed, we’ll meet for formal celebrations, the program goes forth. Standard procedure.”
There was of course a great deal Dmitry was not telling me, but that was as it should be. “I congratulate you on your initiative, but you’ve not come to boast of your marketing prowess. What do you want us to do?” I paused long enough to give him a most necessary caveat. “Don’t relate information which doesn’t directly bear upon the proposed assignment.”
By making that statement and preserving it on tape, I could later defend myself against charges of conspiracy, if charges were for any reason ever filed—my lawyer assured me that it is a foolproof procedure. (I have a new lawyer, now.) Dmitry stared at me for an interminable time before speaking. Again, I felt a disconcerting chill along my spine; this was prelude, I thought anew, a distraction before his attack began—but I was wrong. Leaning forward, whispering, he said, “I will have to give you some background. You remember the railroad scandal?”
“Of course.” The railroad scandal was, I think, the most breathtaking swindle perpetrated during the Brezhnev regime; granted, the competition is fierce. A railroad through Georgia was proposed and designed. The go-ahead was given. Every kopeck of the millions of rubles allocated for the project was siphoned off during the four-year period of so-called construction. In most of the world, secrets known to more than one are no longer secrets; but in our incomparable land, millions know secrets and they remain secrets. The multitude eventually involved in the scheme not only conspired to pretend that the railroad was being built, continuing after its theoretical completion to claim that the railroad truly existed, but went one step—a staircase!—beyond by providing and forwarding to the unsuspecting agencies solid proof that the imaginary railroad was one of the most productive in the Soviet Union. I have read much in western magazines recently concerning the supposed new field of virtual reality; has there ever been any other kind in Russia? “You were involved?”
“Very much so,” he said, his eyes wary as a cornered rabbit’s.
“This casts a shadow over present situations?”
“Very much so,” he repeated, sighing as if guilt caused him physical pain. “When deputy ministers are themselves involved, is it so shocking that those under them would also be? I was no mastermind, no Napoleon of crime, but if advantage could be taken, you took it.” Unexpectedly his face lost its lines of care, and I could not imagine what elation seized his heart until I realized he was under the impression he was confessing to one who in spirit, if not in act, was but another stalwart in corruption. “You remember those years, Max. The most of the most.”
“I am not threatening you with the gulag, Dmitry. What is your point?”
From his brow he wiped fear’s morning dew. “I am telling you I was but one of many semi-innocents, that is all. Unlike most of the idiots involved, some of us saved our money so that when Andropov’s dogs came sniffing, we could buy needed influence. But money wasn’t enough, sometimes. It’s been all I could do to live with my conscience, since.”
“Lived well, I’d say.”
He ignored my remark. “Pressure was put upon us by the competent organs. We were given an opportunity to redeem ourselves by serving our nation patriotically through the sharing of information. I did what I could, several of us did. We passed along potentially useful facts regarding a key cadre of plotters in Tbilisi, of whose existence the authorities were unaware. Its members were prosecuted and convicted and shipped to Archangel, excepting the one who was executed. My God, Max, you wouldn’t expect Georgians to thrive in such cold country.” He shuddered as if he too had for too long been flash-frozen.
“They survived and have returned?” I asked.
“Understand that my present associates, who were innocent of involvement in the railroad scandal, were the ones who initiated our current deal. Once it was under way, what could I do?”
“You’re telling me the group with whom you’ll be in partnership includes the same Georgians you helped send to prison?”
“Some of them.”
“Are they aware of your guilt?” I asked. “If not, they’ll ascertain your complicity when they look into the records.”
“Precisely my point,” he said. “They don’t know me yet; I would have been nothing to them at the time. It was only a happy accident that I knew of their involvement. Not so happy, now. I was told the reports I made were entered anonymously, but who knows for sure? When the Georgians make their search, they may find suggestive material. It would be only human for them to leap to conclusions.”
“Why don’t you make new deals, with safer partners?” I asked. “That’s my recommendation.”
“This deal is unmatchable, Maxim,” he said. “An astonishing opportunity.”
“To peddle souvenirs like a pensioner in street markets?”
“Blyad!” he shouted, and hot words erupted like lava from his mouth. “There’s money enough in this deal to enable Sonya and me to leave this insane country!”
“That’s your intention?” I asked, knowing I revealed no disconcertion in my features. Sonya had told me nothing of any plans to emigrate.
“What kind of life are we living here, Max? We are prosperous, sure. We command respect. We enjoy business success, we own fine apartments, we possess priceless treasures. We live like kings, but we live in a pigsty. Here shit, there shit. What kind of life is that for human beings?”
“These are Russia’s most difficult hours, Dmitry, but—”
“But what? Wait till the future? How long have we heard such lies about our radiant future? Look out your window, tell me what our future will be.”
“What I was going to tell you is we should make what we can of the present,” I said. “Let’s put the future behind us.”
“I am trying to make everything I can of the present,” he told me. “You say not to tell you more than is necessary. Very well, it is necessary that I be in on this deal, whatever the dangers. It is necessary that the records are corrected. The world waits for me, and I want to go there.” Dmitry halted his tirade and paused, gasping for breath. “Can you do the job?”
“Of course, but it is complex,” I said. “Several thousand documents will be involved in such a case as you describe. They must be found, destroyed, replaced. Plus checks in KGB records. Maybe in SVRR, or even the GRU. All this to be done in a month and a half. And I don’t have to tell you, the bureaucrats with whom we deal will have to be greased until they’re slippery as eels.”
“That doesn’t fuck me,” he said. “No one but you can even grasp the enormity of the problem, much less solve it.”
“The problem itself is not my sole concern. Georgians are dangerous. The idea of working with them even at a distance troubles me.”
“Certainly I sympathize with your fear,” Dmitry said.
“Then you understand why I cannot—”
“One million dollars, American. Three hundred now, the remainder once our deal is concluded. Would this sum bolster your courage?”
Though usually I am as adept as Tanya at cloaking honest emotions beneath a facade of cool impassiveness, I feel sure Dmitry discerned the shock I felt, hearing him name his sum. “Why do you need money to move if you can provide such a fee for our services?”
“For our project my group, not I, have funding sufficient for our needs. What do you say, Max?”
The pashas and beys of the Sultan were yet waiting to be greeted. But who could predict how they might respond to my enticements? One million dollars, and I could hear every bill rustling like leaves in the wind. “Give me until tomorrow to decide.”
“He has whispered these dreams in my ears before. Why should I believe him?” Sonya asked me that evening, in the tiny apartment off Arbat Street I rent specifically to assure undisturbed privacy for our evening trysts. “My darling, it’s too ridiculous to warrant consideration. He and I are not leaving Russia, don’t worry. You and I are capable people, sure, but what would Dmitry do, anywhere else?”
“He has his talents,” I noted, but I remained unconvinced that I could enumerate them, if called upon to do so. She stroked my arms with feather’s touch and rubbed her legs against mine as if to set them ablaze. There aren’t words enough for me to say how dearly I love my wife, for all our trials, but I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that when I was with Sonya I wished to be nowhere else. Already once that evening we had made mad love, and now she bided her time while I regained my strength.
“Just to smuggle his priceless treasures out of Russia would cost him the money he is already busy counting,” she said. “Dmitry is so smart, he is stupid. And these partners of his are no wiser, I assure you.”
“He’s told you nothing about this project?” I asked again. “Not even a hint?”
She shook her head. I felt unspeakable delight, marveling at my goddess’s gold hair gleaming in the room’s winter moonlight. “Why should it matter that you know what they’re up to? Isn’t it written in your contracts that you should know nothing about nothing?”
“This is different,” I said. “Too many uncertainties. There’s this involvement with Georgians. His cagey references to silent partners. And so much money. There is something dark under way, I think.”
“If Dmitry wants to give you this mountain of money, take it,” she said. “I would prefer that you were the one so burdened with wealth.”
“If he’s involved in malfeasance you’re involved as well, my angel.” Embracing me, she raked her fingernails along my sides. The stimulating pain she inflicted with her talons made me more aware of my apprehension. “You may be burned if he’s juggling fire.” It was difficult to speak with an extra tongue in my mouth; I pulled away from her. “This project may keep him in such proximity to me that it may be harder for us to see each other. Have you thought of that?” Striking with astonishing speed, she hit her target with unerring accuracy, once more fastening her lips onto mine. We kissed as if to inhale each other’s souls. “Look, if his plan succeeds, and he’s serious, he’ll leave and take you with him. And I’ll have helped him take you from me.”
“Why should I leave unless I want to?” she asked, bringing her face so close to mine that I thought I glimpsed ball lightning leaping between our eyes. “I’ll go nowhere I don’t want to go. He can juggle whatever he wants.”
“It could be dangerous.”
Sonya stopped my mouth with a nipple, quieting her infant. As she bade me suck she pushed my head and shoulders against our bed’s headboard. A small matryoshka doll tumbled onto the mattress. “There is danger walking down any street,” she said. “Danger here with you too, I think.”
As she took my ear in her mouth she carefully replaced her doll on the headboard, which was lined with our room’s poshlaia, an army of matryoshkas. Matryoshkas are Russia’s own Barbies, small wooden dolls that hold, nestling within them, a series of progressively smaller wooden dolls: open the first and find another, and then another. Traditionally, each doll is a replica of the one that encases it, but in recent years the artists are perhaps reacting as artists often subconsciously do to transformations in their societies, as the peasant smells the storm in the wind. When you open a matryoshka of contemporary vintage, there is no foretelling what pleasant or unpleasant discoveries may be found within.
“Mutual danger,” I said.
Sonya revealed her teeth and then turned away, crawling serpentlike to the foot of our bed. She curled over the edge, placing her hands on the floor. My eyes were drawn to the end of Sonya that conveys the purest and most essential expression. She wriggled her backside, as if her unseen front half were helplessly caught. My response to that particular action of hers was Pavlovian: my well-worn implement rose up to beg unconditionally for its honeyed treat. “Decadent Western music should accompany our sins, don’t you think?” she said, switching on her tape player. I grimaced as she added her own atonal purr to those deafening American yodels. Backing up, lifting her hips, she spread her long legs so I could better focus on the apex of her pyramid.
“Come pin your butterfly.”
“Koshka!” I exclaimed. Making a great leap forward, I buried my face in her underbeard, and as I lapped up her sweet nectar, tasting of mushrooms and honey, her feral moans counterpointed those of her favored artists. Rolling onto her back, she seized my neck with her hands as if to break it, arched her spine, and clamped her legs around me, pinching my sides in an iron grip. During our maniacal storm of passion she gasped, shrieked, wept, and gnashed her teeth. She flailed her arms so wildly she left bruises where she struck me, but I barely noticed and couldn’t have cared less (I would take pains later to be sure Tanya did not see them). It was hot work in the sweatshop. The Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai (whom romantic if wrong-headed revisionists have recently called Lenin’s mistress) is notorious for having said that in our unprecedented revolutionary society sexual intercourse should be no less necessary, or more remarkable, than the act of drinking a glass of water. I could not imagine that Sonya’s thirst would ever be slaked.
Afterward we lay on damp sheets, clasped tightly, as if we could burrow beneath each other’s skin. Her music, mercifully, came to an end. We listened instead to the argument of the couple who lived next door and to trucks grinding gears as their drivers sped down the lanes of the nearby Garden Ring.
“Tell him you’ll do it.” Her voice was a moist whisper.
One million dollars. “I don’t know.”
“Tell him. Believe me, I won’t go with him if he emigrates. And if there’s danger in what he does, who better to protect me from danger than you?”
Hundreds, perhaps thousands would be better equipped; that is, after all, what security forces are for. “He’ll be constantly lurking around. Even the blindest hog finds truffles.”
“Dmitry could be in the next room now and never know we were in here together, naked. He is too preoccupied with his grand schemes. With his treasures. Tell me, how could he ever know of our love?”
“If you tell him.”
Sonya ran angel’s fingers along the length of me. “One raven never pecks out the eyes of another.”
“I’ll speak to him tomorrow,” I said, as she started to lick my neck. Gunshots, outside, sounded as celebratory fireworks. What a joyous city is Moscow.