8
AS HE WATCHED HER get dressed, Jim reflected that not once since he woke up had he wanted Kaisa to leave: usually, after a night like this, he all but counted down the minutes until he could be alone and roll the situation around in his head for a while. This morning, however, he felt more ease and curiosity than awkwardness at the breakfast table. So, he surmised, did she, unless her beauty and the sheer surprise of her had completely impaired his judgment.
They headed out to the Metro, clasping their hands together in Jim’s pocket as they crunched over the tamped-down snow and ice that covered sidewalks along the broad, exhaust-heavy Triumfalnaya stretch of the Garden Ring between Jim’s apartment and the Metro station. Kaisa almost got blown off her feet when a dapper little man in a leather jacket and porkpie hat scurried through the rough-hewn wooden station door in front of them, sending it swinging with the heaviness and finality of a guillotine. The wooden escalator descended quickly enough to sweep distracted passengers off their feet, but the ride still took the better part of two minutes, plunging them deep into the world beneath Moscow.
They passed under ceiling mosaics depicting heroes of Soviet space flight, and waited for the train in a marble alcove beneath an ornate chandelier. Metro stations gleamed; they showcased the Russian genius for ornate, overstuffed coziness. The train screeched into the station and they squeezed into the front car, the previous night protecting them like a glorious secret from the dourness that prevailed among the other passengers.
At Teatralnaya he disembarked. She promised to call him later, after she had spoken to her grandfather. He leaned forward to kiss her but the commuter current carried him backward off the train.
HE EXITED THE STATION across from the Bolshoi Theatre, currently closed for “structural reforms” after it was found to be sinking into Moscow bedrock at the alarming rate of about three inches a year (left unchecked, in just a few years Putin’s head would be at about the level of Khrushchev’s knees). He turned around and passed along Mokhovaya, across from Red Square, whose sheer awesomeness—the riot and vibrancy of colors, the jarring contrast between the long, low Lenin mausoleum and Kazan’s onion domes, the huge expanse of space, the endless Kremlin walls—never ceased to amaze him. Then he turned up Tverskaya, built wide enough to accommodate tank parades, passing an ophthalmological institute, a tanning salon topped by a neon Nefertiti, and several buildings of the nondescript, heavily guarded variety.
Jim crossed Tverskaya via the perekhod: an underground pedestrian passageway beneath main roads too broad, and with too much traffic, to ford aboveground. Some were lined with stalls selling phone cards, flowers, video games, beer, dry goods, bolts of fabric, irons, laundry racks, cigarettes, meat pies; others, like this one, were eerily empty, lit by weak yellow sodium lights. Occasionally you’d hear of skinheads or muggers beating someone up in one of these passages. This morning, though, he traversed a three-person gauntlet comprising an old woman selling plastic bags of shriveled beets and potatoes, a bearded beggar who mumbled prayers with his eyes shut and hands clasped, and an unconscious drunk in a greasy blue parka that reeked of urine and homemade booze. Jim emerged unscathed.
He cut through a narrow alley between a parking lot—or rather a vacant lot that had become a parking lot—and a robin’s-egg-blue church. Old women in headscarves nattered at the church doors. At the alley corner, he passed a bilious-looking old man, leather cap on his head and cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth, sitting in his Zhigouli, reading Literaturnaya Gazeta. He looked up when he heard Jim crunch on some broken glass. This wasn’t unusual; sitting alone in cars seemed to be a hobby for some Russian men. Jim nodded at him—he was in an unshakably good mood this morning—but the man huffed, rolled his eyes, then started up his car and drove away. Who the man thought Jim—with his wool toggle coat, ratty boots, jeans, and backpack—could be was an open question; he was obviously not a Russian, nor anyone to be feared. Perhaps Jim simply disturbed the man’s alone time.
The Memory Foundation occupied two apartments in an otherwise residential building. On the staircase leading from the street to the front door, a steel-toothed babushka in a floral headscarf attacked the stairs with a crude broom, little more than a bunch of twigs tied to the end of a stick. Each Sisyphean sweep diffused a cloud of pebbles, sunflower-seed husks, cigarette butts, and debris that settled on the steps above and below. As Jim ascended the stairs, steering as clear as he could of her and her project, she looked at him with repressed, beady-eyed rage. His phone rang; he paused on a step to pull it out of his pocket, and the woman’s rage turned to savage glee: she finally found an infraction to punish.
“You uncultured young man!” she bellowed, loading the first word with ironic contempt. “Perhaps you believe these stairs were built just for you to flirt and gossip while honest people work, but I must inform you it is against regulations to talk on the telephone in front of the doorways to the building. You are impeding the entry of others; also, I must tell you that your filthy habit has consequences for the brain, for it has been proven . . .”
Jim turned on her and headed down the stairs, wishing her good day as she returned to her (doubtless self-appointed) duties, mumbling about foreigners as she attacked the butts and stones with newfound energy.
“Slushayu vas,” he said, flipping the receiver open. He loved the directness of that greeting: “I’m listening to you.” It contained a challenge; it reminded the caller of the imposition and obligation entailed by his call, while also promising attention. Get on with it, the greeting implied. I’m already listening to you.
“Jim, good morning, how are you?” asked a female American voice, not waiting for an answer. “This is Mina Haddad calling. Am I catching you at a bad time?”
“No, not at all, Mina,” he said, walking over to the side of the building and standing up straighter.
Even though Jim was three years older than Mina, she was one of those impeccably proper women who always made him watch his language, tuck his shirt in, and not slouch. She worked at the embassy; she and Jim had met at one of those painful, awkward home-away-from-home holiday parties embassies throw for their citizens abroad. This was on New Year’s Day; Jim had gone with the Willows to watch the bowl games in a dank, funereal four-hundred-seat conference room underneath the embassy. Jim had no interest in any of the games; Mina had long legs, brains, and wide onyx eyes that always seemed to be watching and evaluating.
She had grown up just across the river, in suburban Virginia, where her Lebanese father and Turkish mother, both optometrists, had a practice together. Nothing romantic ever developed, but she and Jim got along quite well: her buttoned-up, pin-striped, grind-it-out ambition concealed a wicked sense of humor and a keenly observing eye. She seemed happy to have a friend outside the embassy world, and even happier that the friend came from home. Each seemed to like the idea of the other a little more than the actual person, but that gap grew smaller with each interaction.
“Jim, I’m calling to confirm for this Saturday evening. Are you ‘in,’ as they say?” Education had driven Mina’s slang into irony long ago. She was an unsteady but avid poker player, and she had taken it upon herself to organize a game once every three weeks, mostly composed of embassy staff, with Jim thrown in as a reliable if token outsider.
“Of course I am. I’ll hope for a better showing than last time, but I’m looking forward to it.”
“Well, we’ll see what we can do about getting you some better cards.” Jim had to smile; at the last game he had suffered an inevitable off night, losing about two hundred dollars, mostly to the game’s other nonembassy player, a smarmy, frattish securities analyst with Citibank.
“Well, thanks, Meen. Where and when?”
“I’ve reserved one of those private-cabin things at Neftchilar. It’s an Azeri place near Krasnopresnenskaya. Do you need me to send you directions?”
“No, I’ll find it. Thanks.”
“What about a car? Do you want me to arrange for someone to pick you up?”
“No, no.” She always offered, but a polished hollowness in her tone made it seem pro forma, not to be accepted. “Metro and tram work for me. When do we start?”
“Eight o’clock, same as always.” She lowered her voice from professional to friend-level. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Me? Fine, why?”
“You just sound a little hoarse. A little tired.”
“Oh, that. I had a late night last night. The body doesn’t recover like it used to.”
“Tell me about it,” she said, with the forced, well-intentioned sympathy of the clean-living. “Anything interesting?”
“Nothing much.” Jim stalled, not wanting to discuss Kaisa with Mina. He wouldn’t have been able to say why, really; even if it hadn’t been the morning after, he wouldn’t have felt it was right. “One of those quick after-work drinks that ends up lasting until two. You know how it is.”
“I do. Of course I do,” she said unconvincingly. “We’ll see you there at eight on Saturday, okay? I need to run; I’m about knee-deep in visa reviews.”
“Get those ankle bracelets ready at the airport.”
“Who said we were letting them in in the first place?”
“My mistake. I’ll see you Saturday at eight.”
IN THE OFFICE THAT DAY—another sign of either aging or a lack of close friends at the office—there was no ribbing Jim about his departure the previous night, no Walk of Shame, or leering innuendos. In the kitchen at lunch, Kirsten asked him if everything had ended up as well as it looked like it was going to; he said yes, and she said she was glad.
All morning he jumped whenever the office phone rang and exhaled with frustration whenever anyone else answered. He felt jittery, awkward, pathetic, but, underneath it all, grateful to have those same familiar old feelings again. When his mobile phone finally rang he withdrew it from his shirt pocket so quickly he sent it clattering across his desk. Vassily tossed it back to him with a wink. He answered as casually as he could.
“Hi, Jim. It’s . . .”
“I know,” he said too eagerly, clenching his eyes shut in self-recrimination. But given that clipped and musical accent, that tintinnabular voice that always seemed about to break into laughter, and most of all knowing what the face and body that housed the voice looked like, Jim was all but congratulating himself for not trying to leap through his phone to grab her. “How are you?”
She giggled. “Fine. As I was four hours ago. Nothing has changed.” Jim started to speak but she cut in. “I’m sorry to interrupt. I don’t want to be rude but I just snuck into the bathroom to call you. I’m supposed to be doing a scene review. I wanted to tell you I talked to Grandfather this morning, and he has agreed to speak with you. If you still want to talk to him.”
“Yes. Yes, of course I do. Just tell me when and where.”
“Tonight, if that’s convenient?”
“Tonight is fine. I have no plans.”
“No? Then you can talk to him at his work. He is a security guard at Sporting Palace.”
“A security guard? At Sporting Palace? Your grandfather? How old is he?”
“You know this place?”
Jim did, of course. Housed in a former hard-currency shopping center on Arbat Street, Sporting Palace comprised two regular bars, three restaurants, a sports bar with international sports and an in-house bookie, a sushi bar with Russian chefs decked out like ninjas, an indoor driving range, a video-game room, an indoor firing range, a dance floor, and, at the back of the restaurant, a rather garish strip club with a spindly spiral staircase leading upstairs to an exceptionally expensive brothel. It catered to every foreign visitor’s fantasy of the Wild East. Rumor had it that certain diplomats made it their first stop on arrival, even before checking in to their hotel; after ten o’clock every evening, the surrounding stretch of Arbat Street looked like a Mercedes and Hummer dealership.
She laughed again. “He is not so young. But big. Huge. And healthy. A hearty old Ukrainian size. You will see.”
“Great. What’s his name?”
“Naumenko. Naumenko, Grigory,” she said, using the Russian convention of putting the first name last and pronouncing them staccato with pauses, as though each syllable were its own name. “You may ask for him, he said, at the bar, anytime after seven o’clock this evening, but before he becomes too busy at eleven o’clock.”
“My favorite place to ask for anything.”
“Yes, I know. I must . . .”
“Can I see you afterward? After I talk to him?”
There was a brief pause into which everything fell. Jim drew back from the edge. “If not, if you’re busy, no problem. We can . . .”
“No, I would like to. Very much. It just depends on what time I can leave my rehearsal here. Can we speak after?”
“Absolutely.”
“Or I can come to Sporting Palace, maybe?”
“That works, too. I’ll try to get there around eight.”
“Yes.” He couldn’t tell if she was agreeing to meet him or just processing information. “I will try.”
“And I will hope.”
She made an intimate little sound—somewhere between a sigh and a hum with an audible smile—that almost sent him to his knees. “Yes.”
“HEY, THERE, JIMMY, you taking a brief trip away from planet Earth? Never seen you looking like that before.” Dave Willow’s forced, reedy bonhomie brought him out of his reverie. He had paused between Jim’s and Birgitta’s desks on one of his rally-the-troops strolls through the office. Without warning, he put a hand on each desk and lifted himself off the ground, extending his legs straight out in front of him and holding them still, closing his eyes and exhaling. Vassily peered over the top of Argumenti y Fakti, then raised it to cover his face. Jim heard the chuckles from behind the pink tabloid.
“Sorry, Dave. Just thinking. Listen, do you have a minute?”
“Sure do.” He lowered himself back to the ground and rotated his arms in circles. How he kept a blazer unripped for more than a month was beyond Jim. “This a work thing or personal? Here, or . . .” He trailed off.
“Work, but let’s go into your office.”
Dave said that sounded good, really good, and beckoned him into the office. He waved Jim into a chair; he took the couch, kicking off his shoes, revealing his white tube socks with blue toes, and settling into a semireclining position in the corner. He never sat behind his desk; he wanted everyone to know he was not that kind of boss.
“What’s on your mind, Jimmy?”
“I have an interview with a survivor tonight.”
“Really? That’s great. Congrats. How’d you find him? Or her,” he added quickly.
“Him. He’s the grandfather of a friend.”
“So you need me to go over some standard questions?”
“No. No, I don’t. I think I’ve got it.”
“Well, I guess you do. Good for you.”
“Thanks, Dave. Months of striking out, and one just falls into my lap. Funny how it happens, isn’t it? Usually getting these old Russians to talk is like pulling teeth.”
Dave puffed air out through his cheeks and mussed his mousy thatch of hair. “It happens sometimes, you know. I mean, there’s never a line outside the door, but I’ve had a few reverse cold calls. They’ll hear about what we do from someone or another, and just call up. At the beginning we put a few ads in the big papers, you know, but about a year ago, about the same time Greenpeace got in trouble for those pipeline protests, they just stopped printing the ads.”
“I assume they didn’t stop taking the money, though.”
“No, no, you’re right. They took everything we sent. Anyway, we got a few dozen people with those ads.”
“A few dozen? Not bad.”
Dave slapped his thighs and stood up, prompting Jim to do the same. “Don’t get greedy, Jimmy. One at a time. And don’t feel bad about your cold streak. Everyone has one now and again. Why don’t you go ahead and think about it like this: you got yours out of the way first.”
BY THE TIME JIM LEFT the office, a little before seven p.m., pillowy, cornflake-sized snow had started to fall, making his walk down Tverskaya slippery, but more enjoyable: the snow and the cold bring Moscow to life. Heat makes the city’s imposing structures seem all the more oppressive; cold makes them seem safe, like points of refuge. The angular lines cast by the streetlights, the overcoats and fur hats, and the general air of purpose and seriousness made everybody look like protagonists in their own mystery novels.
His own mystery, however, had started out simply—how long would he have to stay in Moscow to make back what he owed Petey—but in just a few months, it had become more complicated: he loved it here. He felt challenged, alive, free from his past selves and his mistakes. He had worried that he might not feel at home, but he failed to see, never having lived off the East Coast before, that was the point: departures are calisthenics for the spirit.
SPORTING PALACE LOOMED over Novy Arbat Street in neon and concrete like a garish, fat old uncle in a Camaro. During Soviet times, Novy Arbat housed foreign-currency establishments open only to foreigners, and so had a certain exclusive cachet with Russians. The clubs and restaurants that occupied it now built on that cachet: they were some of the city’s most expensive visible establishments (as opposed to the truly exclusive establishments that fetishized their own secrecy), catering both to tourists and to Russians who wanted to rub shoulders with foreigners.
Next to the Palace an ironic, Soviet-kitsch beer hall called Big Brother Funtime—whose concrete walls were festooned with propaganda posters—served greasy salads, watery beer in chipped mugs, and blocks of processed cheese, but they charged six dollars per beer. Tourists eager to have their preconceptions confirmed packed the place every night. Across the street, at a sushi restaurant where dishes were floated to diners on an intricate network of table-height canals, the rich teenage children of Moscow’s political elite arrived in chauffeured SUVs, decked out in Prada and wielding rhinestone-studded cell phones. Jim had never been to either place. He couldn’t afford the sushi, and culinary irony is worth paying for only when the food actually tastes good.
At Sporting Palace, a security guard in military fatigues and Ray-Bans frisked Jim, searched his bag, opened the door, and shoved him roughly through. Jim turned and gave him a challenging glare; the guard just laughed and pulled the door shut behind him. Jim found himself dwarfed, standing at the foot of a cavernous room larger than an airplane hangar. The room’s varied activities reached him in echoes: clinking glasses and cutlery, electronic beeps and doinks, muffled pops, thumping Russkipop, and a soft wave of conversation.
All activities except the brothel took place in different corners of this single huge room with concrete walls and floor, lit by bare high-wattage bulbs dangling from the ceiling some five stories up and screwed into dangling, obviously improvised electrical outlets. It had all the aesthetic appeal of a displaced-persons camp. The hundreds of patrons milling around in various states of debauch could never come close to making the space feel anything but gloomy and underpopulated. The light gave everyone a ghoulish, hungry look, made their shadows shrink and expand as they teetered from one area to the next. Cinder-block partitions separated the various activities from one another, and uniformed security personnel, all holding submachine guns and wearing belts with pistols, Tasers, truncheons, and pepper spray, kept the patrons in line: no mean feat when some of those patrons were half-drunk and test-firing automatic rifles at the long, narrow range at the back of the room.
The barmaid, a tough-looking older woman wearing too few clothes and too much makeup, sauntered over with two menus, and asked him which he preferred, Russian or English. Jim chose English but he asked for it in Russian, figuring it was better to lower people’s expectations and surpass them than it was to pretend to be a native and get called out. He ordered a beer, a pork shashlik, and pickled tomatoes.
“Watchin’ your carbs, are you?” Jim turned his head to the right and saw looking amicably at him a scrawny bald man with the somber pin-stripes, desperate smile, ruined teeth, and bleary eyes of the English businessman at the end of a long night.
“Something like that, I guess.”
“Yeah,” he agreed into his glass. “Canadian, is it?”
“Sorry?”
“Are you Canadian? I can’t quite place your accent.”
“No, no. American.”
“I did actually think that, if you must know. But what I say is: always best to guess from the smaller country, know what I mean? Assume a Canadian’s American, or a Kiwi’s an Aussie, they’re like as not to take offense. But reverse it, you know, and no problem. Been here long?”
“What, in Moscow? No, about five months, give or take. You?”
“Near on ten years, if you can believe that. Came over just after the collapse, when everyone was running the other way. Mind you, I think that whole crisis was a bit of a whoopsy-doodle, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Jim agreed, in the purposefully mild way one talks to a stranger at a bar who has not yet proven his sanity. “What do you do over here?”
“I’m a commodities analyst. Work for one of the big British banks. Bit boring, to tell you the truth, but the pay’s good enough, and you can’t really complain, can you?”
“I guess not.”
“Long as you stay on the right side of the tax police, and keep bringing capital in so the bosses can keep taking it right back out again, you’ll be right.”
“The tax police? The tax police?” Jim had visions of nebbishy little accountants with calculators in their holsters trying to kick in a door and falling backward, hopping and clutching their feet.
The man emitted the weary chuckle experience gives to naïveté. “The tax police, my son, are the scariest blokes in town. The thing is, you see, the tax code here is so bollixed up that everyone—from the old babushka selling mushrooms and herbs in the underpass right up to the president—is guilty of something. Evasion, improper filing, what have you. The government keeps it that way on purpose: that way they can get who they like, when they like, with an excuse that smells sweet enough for anybody. And when they decide to get you, they send the tax police: big fucking OMON boys with even bigger guns, a dozen at a time in the middle of the night. Quite clever, really, when you think about it.”
“So how does a big English bank like yours stay in business?”
“Who, us? Like everyone else: we pay a special tax-police tax. We’re nice to everybody, and we hate every politician other than the ones we’re told to like. But you didn’t hear that from me.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“What, here? This bar?”
“This very bar.”
“Oh, yeah. Where else would you go, really? It has a bit of everything you might want.” He nodded significantly at a pneumatic blonde walking behind Jim, then violently drained his half-full glass.
“Same way again, love, if you would,” he said to the barmaid, running a bony finger across his top lip and jerking his head toward Jim. He had the bobbing motions and jangling limbs of a skittish, underfed primate. “And give another to my friend here.”
“Oh, no, that’s all right, I couldn’t . . .”
“Go on. Your first night here, by the looks of it. Still wide-eyed, not got your sea legs. Got to make you feel welcome, haven’t I?”
“Well, thanks. I appreciate it.”
“It is your first time here, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“Just here for the food, are you?” He jerked his head toward the waitress as his right arm flew up to his head to smooth the gray strands ringing his egg-shaped dome.
Jim nodded equivocally.
“Probably for the best. My wife hates it when I come here.”
Jim let that one pass without comment. “Actually, I’m supposed to meet someone here, but I’m not sure what he looks like.”
“Oh, yeah? Who’s that, then?”
“Grigory Naumenko’s his name.”
“Nah. Sorry, mate. Don’t know him. Mind you, a fair number of the great and the good come marching through here at one point or another,” he said, swiveling around in his stool and blessing the audience with a sweeping wave of his pint glass. “Russian, is he, your man? A friendly native?”
“Yes, he is. Why?”
“Well, you’re here on the right night for it. Our lot, foreigners, I should say, tend to keep their piss-ups to the weekend, don’t they? So earlier in the week, say, a Tuesday like today, for instance, you find a more local crowd out here. Mind you, by local I don’t mean the bloke at the vodka stand. I mean Russians with a bit of dosh to throw around. Speaking of which”—he pointed his chin toward the back of the room, where a quintet of heavily made-up young women who looked far too attractive to be sitting alone at a bar were, in fact, sitting purposefully alone, purposefully far apart from one another, looking gloomily downward as though waiting to be rescued, at a bar in the back—“I’ve got a bit to throw around myself. Word of advice: if you really are looking for someone, a smile and a twenty-dollar bill go a lot further than just a smile. Course you probably knew that. Cheers, then; I’m off.”
JIM DID AS the Englishman suggested: he tried asking the bartender, in his best Russian, whether she knew where he could find Grigory Naumenko. She gave him a stony glare and a slow shake of the head. He then apologized, in English, for his poor Russian, and asked again, in English, this time ordering another beer, paying with a twenty-dollar bill, and insisting she keep the change. She sighed, rolling her eyes and smiling sardonically, then walked over to the far end of the bar and spoke into a walkie-talkie she pulled off the wall. She nodded conspiratorially at Jim, then began to reapply her makeup, and he fell from her attention completely.
After ten minutes Jim began to suspect he’d been played. The barmaid wouldn’t look at him, even when he held up an empty glass and raised a hand. He’d noticed the outside door had opened and shut a few times without anyone entering, and he could swear that the guard gave him the fisheye each time. He was about to chalk tonight up for a loss and try again tomorrow, earlier in the evening, when he felt a huge paw on his shoulder press him back down into his stool. A bearish man in a navy-blue security guard jumpsuit lowered himself into the seat next to Jim’s. He looked like a healthier and more jovial Boris Yeltsin, with good-natured piggy eyes, a spider-veined nose, and fleshy lips beneath a shock of shiny gray hair. “Grigory Borisovitch,” he said, nodding curtly at Jim.
“Oh, right,” Jim stammered. “I’m glad . . .” Correcting himself, he switched to Russian. “You are Grigory Naumenko?”
The man nodded.
“I’m Jim Vilatzer.” He extended a hand, which the old man’s enveloped completely. “Kaisa told you I would be coming?”
He nodded, his lips clenched into a line as he stared straight down at the bar and shifted in his seat. “She said you find Russian history interesting.”
“I do,” Jim said as cheerfully as he could, realizing as he did how foolish, naïve, and American it sounded. “I want to thank you for speaking with me.” Of course, Naumenko had as yet done no such thing, and Jim retreated a half step, keeping his voice as even and accommodating as possible. “Do you want to talk to me about your past?”
He nodded again, this time more resolutely, and, laying his enormous hands flat on the bar, he turned to look at Jim directly. “Yes. Yes, I think it’s time. I don’t know who is interested in such stories, though.”
“Well, your granddaughter, for one.”
He chuckled sadly and waved his hand. “She has better things to think about. She has a much better life; she does not need me to drag her backward. To hear such things would . . .” He trailed off, working his hands against each other and breathing hard.
Jim wasn’t sure what to do. Having thought of the past five months as a string of failures, he had naturally considered this evening a success, but that was before he arrived, before he realized that what he did entailed poking a huge stick into the muck of someone else’s soul and memory, and stirring hard.
What right did he have to take such an interest in other people’s stories? Why was it his business—Dave’s business, Birgitta’s business, the Foundation’s business—if people who survived something he could not even begin to imagine chose to keep silent, to bury the past and move forward as best they could?
Naumenko exhaled loudly, his body sinking like a sad balloon. Jim thought he was preparing to stand up and leave; instead he made that quiet but piercing whistle that seems a special talent of the Russian male, and waved two fingers at the barmaid. “Excuse me,” he said. “I find I cannot talk unless I drink.”
“I’m the same way.”
He looked at Jim doubtfully. “Americans don’t drink,” he said firmly as the barmaid brought a small carafe of vodka, two stemmed cut-glass shot glasses, and a plate of pickled garlic cloves, sausage, and black bread. “But tonight the American will drink.” He poured vodka into both glasses until a token drop spilled over the edges. Somehow he managed to raise his without spilling any. Jim did the same and prepared for an extended, florid Russian toast. Instead Naumenko inclined his head slightly, gulped down his vodka, then picked up a slice of black bread and sniffed deeply. Jim knocked his back, coughing slightly.
“He cannot hold it,” said Naumenko, to everyone and no one, as a smile broke through. “You said you drink? You Americans drink beer that tastes like sour water and go jogging all the time. You have lawns for playing golf, but you never drink. You must first eat something, or at least smell the food, to keep from getting too drunk too quickly.” Jim took a pickled cherry tomato. “Now, one more for the American girl far from home.” He smiled slyly as he poured. His reserve melted; his jollity was, apparently, alcohol-soluble, and it was seeping out. Jim was starting to like him.
“So where are you from?” Jim asked, after he knocked back the second shot.
“Tiraspol. Tee-ras-pol.” Naumenko watched Jim write it down and nodded when he saw the spelling was correct. Jim reached into his bag and took out a digital voice recorder which he laid on the table. Naumenko eyed it dubiously.
“What is that?” he asked.
“It’s so I can record the interview. We’ll talk and I’ll take notes, then afterward I’ll transcribe everything we said. I’ll preserve it. Do you mind being recorded?”
Naumenko removed his cap, setting it squarely on the bar in front of him, and scratched his head with a look of discomfort. He sighed deeply, grimaced, then smacked a palm on the bar.
“No. No, I don’t mind. These devices can make someone like me very nervous, you understand. It means you can say that this happened or that happened and you have ‘proof,’ but maybe also you manipulated it. I am not saying that you do such things”—Naumenko laid a reassuring paw on Jim’s forearm—“only that you could. Evidence to condemn can come from anywhere,” he said, a distant look in his eyes. “From anybody, for anything.”
“I can just take notes by hand if you prefer. And you can watch me to see if I get it right.”
Naumenko turned down the corners of his mouth in consideration, bobbing his head to one side then the other. “No. We will make it official. Anyway, you are not the police. Correct?”
“I’m not.”
“Not any kind of police. Are you?”
“No.”
“American, Russian disguised as American, United Nations . . .”
“No, Grigory Borisovitch, I swear. I promise. I am an interviewer for the Memory Foundation and I am not a policeman of any kind, nor am I an agent of any government. I just want to hear your story.”
Naumenko considered Jim’s request, fixing him with his narrow, piggy eyes, running a hand across the fleshy ridge of his chin. Eventually he assented with a broad smile and a clap to Jim’s back. “Let’s go. Yes. You should hear it. Go: what would you like to hear?”
“Well, let’s start with where you were born. And when.”
“I was born in Tiraspol, as I said, in 1933. At that time it was a small city, but a proud one. My parents came from Transcarpathia: they were Ukrainian, but everybody was something. It was like Odessa. You understand? We had Ukrainians, Romanians, Russians, Moldovans, Jews, Turks, Poles. It was Soviet, sure, and during the Great Patriotic War it was Romanian, but it belonged to everybody. There was no such thing as a foreigner. This is what my parents told me, and this is what the Soviet Union was supposed to mean. All of us equal. Brothers. A union.” He poured them another two shots of vodka and pushed the plate across to Jim.
“But Stalin . . .” Jim coaxed.
“Josef Stalin was a strong leader,” Naumenko said firmly. “Perhaps too strong. But it was a difficult time, and the country made many advances because of him.”
“You don’t bear any ill will toward him for what he did to you?”
“What would be the point? If something happened, then it’s over, and now we are a stronger and more powerful country than we would have been without it. And my troubles began after him. I did my army service in Belomorsk, at the head of the Baltic Sea canal. You know where that is? On the White Sea, in Karelia?”
Jim nodded, and reminded himself to examine a map when he got back to the office.
“I was sent there when I was sixteen, and it was just army and prisoners, prisoners and army. One group built, the other group guarded them and ran the prison, but really we were all prisoners. There was nowhere to go. Just sea and pinewoods, endless woods. I remember sometimes when we would go cut wood for fires, I would shout, ‘Turn your back to the forest, and your front to me,’ because if Baba Yaga’s chicken-leg house existed anywhere, it would be in such a forest, in such a place.”
“I know these stories. I suppose the house never appeared?” Jim joked.
“No, no,” Naumenko replied with a rueful smile. “Would I have known what to do if it did? Sixteen, a city boy, surrounded by criminals? These were not politicals who worked in Belomorsk at that time; they were actual criminals. They were treated much better: better rations; occasional new clothes; twelve-hour days, not sixteen. Their guards—us—treated them with respect. This I know . . .” He trailed off, reached for the vodka carafe, and finding it empty, he lowered his head, took a deep breath, and plowed forward.
“This I know because in the political camp, in Solovetsky, I was on the other side. I was on the other side,” he repeated, looking at Jim directly, as though he expected to be disbelieved, or judged, or laughed at.
“What happened? How did you end up there?”
“During my fourth summer at Belomorsk, in 1953, some of us were granted two weeks’ leave, and sent to Tallinn. It was such a beautiful city, even then, after the war, you could see what it used to be.” Naumenko rolled his glass between his hands while staring at a point far above—and fifty years behind—the bar.
“After all that time with nine months of ice and three months of mosquitoes, we could not imagine there were still human beings in the world. And women! Estonian women, Finnish women!” He beamed, laughing to himself at something only he knew.
“The first few days we were there,” he began, speaking slowly and uncertainly as he narrowed his eyes, “we just felt dirty from our skin to our souls, like we had crawled up from the earth, or like we were creatures of . . . I don’t know how to explain it.” He rubbed his hand across the bar, staring down at it as though he were surprised to find it was still attached to his body.
“We just felt that we had been gone from this planet and now we came back to see that everything isn’t carving rocks and building shacks and trading favors one cigarette at a time.
“The fourth day, August fourth, I will never forget. I was fishing in Lake Ulemiste—alone; the others who came with me had bought some women for the day—when I saw just the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, crying by the side of the road. I asked her what was wrong. She was scared; she saw my uniform, my Soviet uniform, and she was Finnish, and had crossed the gulf in secret to buy some food for her family. They were starving, she said, and they could see the port and knew that in the Soviet Union there must be food. Now, I couldn’t stand to see a girl like that in such distress, so I used my military privileges to get her some food. Not much, of course. There wasn’t much to get. Just some bread, a few eggs, milk, but I also bought two live chickens. I thought she could eat the eggs, then perhaps breed them. And because she had nothing to carry them with but her own beautiful arms, I went back to the farm with her. The border was poorly guarded; nobody on either side really had anything, and anyway we all thought then that Finland would be part of the Soviet Union in a year, maybe two. I told my buddies I had met a girl, and I would see them back at Belomorsk. And, of course, you know how it ends.”
“Can you tell me?”
Naumenko shrugged heavily, smacked a palm on the bar. “One of them was Komsomol. He followed me and reported what I was doing. I was arrested for speculation. That is what they called selling something you didn’t have permission to sell, or buying something on the black market. Never mind what it was, or how important or how small. Never mind that everyone did it because everyone had to. I spent three years in a Solovetsky political camp. He was promoted to starshina, and then upward. But I won in the end, though.” He sniffed, nodded, and put his cap back on. “I won in the end. Because I am sitting here, with a job and a family and breath and life, and he was blown to pieces in Afghanistan. Now, I must . . .”
“I’m sorry; I don’t want to keep you. But could you tell me a little more about the camp itself? Where it was, who else was there, what you did?”
He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Other people can tell other stories. I can only tell you my own. It was in Solovetsky, as I told you,” Naumenko said, standing up. “The White Sea islands, so close to home. Ice and mosquitoes. We did what we were told to do: we cut wood, we built bricks, and we smoked and canned fish. I was a woodcutter; I was always strong. My camp was a small one for so-called foreign prisoners. Non-Russian Soviets. Now, I must go. The man behind me is watching.” With his hand below the bar, he jerked his thumb up and to the right; on the rafters Jim saw a shaven-headed man in sunglasses surveying the club with a handgun on one side of his belt and a walkie-talkie on the other.
“Can we speak again?”
“Of course.” He stood up and let out a heavy sigh that ended in a short laugh and a wink. “I feel much younger for having spoken to you. You will have to wait a few weeks, as I can’t afford to get a reputation for being lazy. I already have one for being old. If you want to talk to someone else sooner, find my friend Balderis. Vilis Balderis. He was in the camp when I arrived and stayed long after I was gone.”
“Will he speak with me?”
Naumenko bobbed his huge slab of a head back and forth, pulling the corners of his mouth down. “Perhaps. Vilya is not very talkative. Not like me,” he said with a wink. “But if you tell him you spoke with me he may.”
“How do I find him?”
“He sells things.” Naumenko mimed the giving and taking of money with his hands. “He has a stall at the Vernisazh, at Izmailovsky. I don’t know where, but you should go early in the morning. He is a serious fellow; whenever there is work to do, he does it. He was always this way.”
“Now,” said Naumenko, interlacing his fingers, cracking his knuckles, and stretching his arms out in front of him. “Do you mind?” He worked his head to one side and then the other like a boxer limbering up before a fight.
Before Jim knew what he was agreeing to, Naumenko had him in a headlock—a light but firm headlock—and was leading him to the door. “I have to look like I’m working,” he said quietly. “Just for the man upstairs; Nastya, behind the bar, is a friend. Perhaps struggle a little; it will make me look better. Balderis works at Izmailovsky Park, selling whatever he can find. Watch out for the table. I will tell him on my break to expect you tomorrow. You can go tomorrow? Good. Now, I know this is unconventional,” he said under his breath as he kicked the front door open, “but it really has been a pleasure.”
He shoved Jim past the security guard and into the biting Moscow night. “Fuck off!” he shouted. “This place is not for you!”
OUTSIDE, the winter night’s air had a biting, new, faintly smoky quality, as if it had just been forged in the North Pole and Moscow got first crack at it. Jim breathed in and felt, for what seemed like the first time in years, alive. He dialed Kaisa’s number and got voice mail: she was in rehearsal. Or maybe, he thought hopefully, she was on her way here: she was in the Metro. She knew he was talking to her grandfather; she knew when; why wouldn’t she come to see them both?
From behind him he heard a hissing, and turned to see one of the security guards outside Sporting Palace gesturing for him to move on. When Jim didn’t move fast enough the guard started to walk down the staircase toward him. Jim raised his hands in surrender and started walking away. When the guard turned around, he stopped, ducking into an arched entryway where he could watch and wait for Kaisa.
After ten minutes, he tried her phone again: nothing. After twenty his toes started to tingle: again nothing. He waited another fifteen minutes and gave up.
On the Metro ride home, Jim sat wedged between a sad-eyed teenage goth girl who would have looked at home in any American suburb and a strong-jawed old woman who looked like she had willed herself into existence, like she had never been a child. He pressed his eyes shut, clenched his fists, took a deep breath, and brought his teeth down on his tongue hard enough to taste blood. He found, despite his best intention to honor his promise to Vivek to keep his head down and return home with neither incident nor attachment, that he wanted Kaisa at his apartment so badly he could feel her at the back of his throat, taste the need on his lips.