9
JIM WAS DRESSED and out the door by seven o’clock the next morning. The streetlights were still on; dawn wasn’t even threatening to break, and the Garden Road’s ten lanes of traffic were only just starting to sludge up. People’s faces were still morning-shut, automatic, expressionless, their eyes staring grimly forward as they trudged along the icy gray sidewalks to the Metro. Jim held Mayakovskaya’s heavy station door open for a trio of club wraiths leaving the station, presumably heading home. They were pasty-faced and leather-jacketed, drawn, wild-eyed but clearly exhausted, beautiful and life-drinking in a way that left Jim wondering if he’d ever been that young, if he ever had that much stamina.
As he touched his Metro card to the top of the automatic turnstiles, though, he had a sudden thought: there were hundreds of vendors at Izmailovsky Park. He had no idea what Balderis sold or where he sold it.
Jim let the Metro gates swing open, but remained still as they swung back shut, hard—Jim learned from experience that if you failed to hurry through the doors, or if, say, you were walking quickly enough so that your bag passed through the doors before you did, you wound up with a pair of meaty bruises from midchest to thigh on either side. He turned around and took out his phone.
At the top of the stairs he bought a cup of tea from a kiosk that was just opening. There was something so sweet, so human, so maternal about the process: the kiosk matron, a kind-eyed woman with a hesitant, sorrowful smile just past middle age filled an electric kettle from a ten-gallon container of water, plugged it in, and showed him an array of cardboard tea boxes behind her. There was no focus-group chosen music; she was not a moonlighting actress or an undiscovered genius; she wore neither a uniform nor an insincere smile. Just a kindly woman trying to earn some cash on a bitter winter morning. Jim wondered—as he often did—if this would have been his aunt or grandmother had the latter not headed west.
He sipped it at one of the stand-up tables outside her stall, watching the morning slowly groan to life, summoning an endless stream of long coats and pancake faces and the occasional hard-won nod of recognition from one commuter to another. He caught the quickest, most fleeting glimpse of a sliver of a face that reminded him, in the square jaw and the way a smile so obviously wanted to break out from beneath the stern visage, of his father, and a wrecking ball of homesickness crashed into his chest. He cadged a cigarette (a noxious brown little Prima) from the kiosk matron, smiled his thanks, and, as he had done for most of his life, waited out an emotion with tobacco. When his mind was clear and his heart was easy, he pulled out his phone.
“I’m listening to you,” said Yuri curtly.
“And I’m talking to you. Yuri, it’s Jim. I hope I’m not waking you.”
“Hello, Dzheem,” Yuri said cheerfully. He took immense pride in having become a Shakespeare completist (and Jonson, and Beckett, and Synge, and so on) without ever having learned to speak modern English. “Of course you aren’t waking us. We do our real work before coming into the office.”
“Real work” meant a history PhD for Kirsten, and plays for Yuri: he was working on what he called “The Brezhnev Decalogue,” a series of ten plays about stagnation and calcification. Not surprisingly, he found it hard going.
The Memory Foundation supported him and Kirsten financially, but they were entirely their own: artists and thinkers in the soul-deep sense that seemed to Jim increasingly inaccessible at home, where even poets had to know how to play departmental politics. The evening he had spent at their house had revealed to him the full-throated, unironic, cozy, and slightly desperate nature of Russian fun, and he had been in affectionate awe of the two of them ever since. He knew if he called them out of the blue at seven thirty one weekday morning with a question of Moscow logistics, they would be neither surprised nor unprepared, and possibly even helpful.
“Well, I’m hoping I’ll be better after I talk to you. I have a sort of strange question for you.”
“Strange questions so early in the morning? You’ve called the right place. We answer only strange questions. What is it?”
“I need to know how to find someone at Izmailovsky Park.”
A beat of silence. “How to find just anyone? You mean where can you meet someone, or how do you find something specific to buy, or something else?”
“No, no. I think it’s someone who works there. Well, let’s start from the assumption that it’s someone who works there, I guess. That’s easiest.”
“The assumption that it’s somebody who works there? What do you mean? Do you know the person you are going to meet?”
Jim told him about Naumenko and Balderis.
“So,” Yuri said when he finished. “It seems you tapped a vein. Congratulations. You must feel relieved.”
“Very.”
“Yes. You were so worried before. It isn’t uncommon, especially for a foreigner, to find nobody to speak with.”
“So why doesn’t a Russian do my job?”
“Well, this Russian doesn’t want to. Too much work, too much prying. I prefer seeing what happens, writing down what happens, to making something happen. As for other Russians, I suppose Dave just finds it easier to approach people like him. Anyway, there’s no guarantee that survivors would be any more inclined to talk to Russians. In front of foreigners we worry about making our country look bad; in front of natives we worry about making ourselves look bad. Our chosen solution: shut up and drink. Let me confer with Kirsten for a moment.”
Yuri laughed ruefully as he put the phone down, but Jim kept quiet. Laughing at the foibles of one’s own family, group, nation, or self was one thing; joining that derision from outside the group was piling on.
Back home, Jim would never have thought to call a playwright day-jobbing as a historical researcher to find someone who might have a stall selling Soviet kitsch at an open-air market in outer Moscow. At home he would have found the municipal organization that oversaw the market, found some public relations flak, and asked for a list of vendors: simple as that. In Russia, though, the front door was always locked, if you could even find it. He had no idea who oversaw the vendors at the park; if he did know, there was no way they would have shared any information with him, because who was he, and what was he going to use it for, and why should they help someone with obscure motives and no standing? What’s more, if he did somehow manage to find Vilis Balderis, and just walked up to a stall and introduced himself, he would want to know how Jim found him, and with whose help, and why; if the answers didn’t satisfy him, he’d clam up. Here everything was done through connections; all solutions were personal, because those attachments—family, friends, friends of trusted friends, relatives of friends, friends of the family—were the only links one could trust. Whether Yuri had the connections to help him was still an open question, but better to try this route than to poke around blindly by asking officials or other vendors without an introduction.
“Good news, Jim,” said Yuri, picking up the phone. “At least I hope we have good news. Do you remember Anya, who was over at dinner with you last month? The composer, she spoke French with Kirsten, brown cigarettes?”
“Yes, sure. Of course. The Ellington fan.”
“Exactly. Ellington and Boulez and that garbage. That’s this month’s list, anyway. Her brother has a stall at Izmailovsky selling instruments and music. If he doesn’t know the person you’re trying to find, at least he might know how to find him.”
“Really? And he’s there today?”
“I don’t know. I need to call Anya and see.”
“Look, I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” Jim said, very much wanting to put Yuri to just a little more trouble.
“No, of course it’s no trouble. I know Anya was very interested to meet you, and I think she’d be happy to help. I’ll just call her and see if her brother’s working, and if he is I’ll have her call him and mention your name. No trouble at all.”
“Listen, Yuri, I really appreciate this. Tell Anya . . .”
“We do not believe in obligations among friends,” said Yuri. “Bring wine and a lively spirit to the next dinner; that’s all we ask.”
Jim had to change Metro trains twice to reach Izmailovsky’s Vernisazh market, in the city’s eastern suburbs. He had come out here once before, after Kirsten recommended it with an eye-roll but also a smile, the way an American might recommend Las Vegas: as something to see, something to laugh at knowingly, but also, beneath the reflexive irony, something to enjoy, too. This wasn’t one of those outdoor markets wedged into an old parking lot outside a Metro station; it occupied several square miles next to Peter the Great’s Izmailovo estate. For tourists, it specialized in kitsch—matrioshka dolls depicting everything from Survivor contestants to American presidents, Soviet and faux-Soviet knickknacks, brass chess sets pitting Brezhnev’s Kremlin against Nix-on’s cabinet (the pawns, of course, were grumpy little men in fur hats on the white side; fat, shirtless hayseeds in overalls on the black). Many of these items were sold by overeager hawkers shouting at the passersby amid the din of street performers wreathed in meat-scented smoke from the shashlik stands—and this was why Kirsten rolled her eyes. An intrepid shopper could also find surprisingly good original paintings, Tatar furs, intricate Central Asian pottery, indestructible old Lomo cameras, traditional Russian handicrafts,Turkmen rugs, carved Chechen daggers, and Baltic amber.
He walked north from the station, until he saw across a small patch of scrub the wooden gates at the market entrance. Much of the market—the prime real estate, anyway—was surrounded by a fake wooden fortress ringed by statues of animals and Russian mythological figures: Grandfather Frost loomed over the Snow Maiden with paternal concern; only when Jim drew close to the statues did he see that someone had carved pupils into Grandfather Frost’s eyes to make him appear to be looking right down her dress.
When crowds thronged the market it was charming, but now, in the dawn light, the stallholders were just starting to set up; a handful of dusty green vans unloaded beer, meat, and onions for the food kiosks, and everyone worked in silence.
“Good morning. Your documents, please?”
This came not from the pasty-faced teenage guards flanking the market’s entrance, but from a plainclothesman who looked to be around forty, and had the bored and sour imperiousness of the lifelong desk rider.
Instinctively the two guards put out their cigarettes, picked their Kalashnikovs up from the ground, stood up straight, and brushed imaginary lint from their uniforms. The plainclothesman held one hand out, palm up, to Jim and tapped it with the other, miming where the foreigner should put his passport.
“Of course,” Jim said, reaching into his coat. “And may I see your documents, please? In accordance with the law?” He would never have deigned to ask the average spot checker for his documents—they were usually too inclined to violence and too sensitive to their lowly position, and hence very quick with an elbow to the jaw—but the plainclothesman appeared more confident in his authority.
The man sighed, and wearily pulled out a battered passport that identified him as Lyakov, Igor Ivanovich, a senior investigator with the Interior Ministry.
Lyakov scrutinized Jim’s passport, turning each page slowly, reading each as though it were a novel. “Your OVIR stamp places you in central Moscow. That is where you live?”
“It is.”
“And what business do you have out here so early? The market won’t open for another hour.”
“My work.”
“And what work do you do for . . . let me see . . . for the Ulmera Corporation?”
Ulmera, of course, didn’t exist. It was one of the new Russia’s legal illegalities: to get a business visa, you had to be invited by an actual business. To be invited by an actual business, you had to show that you had some vital skill or attribute that couldn’t be found in Russia: you had to have a reason to be there. So visa agencies, with offices in both Russia and the West, in accordance with the law’s hypertrophied letter rather than its atrophied spirit, created shell companies like Ulmera. Its sole function was to issue letters of invitation; Jim’s needed attribute was the possession, six months ago, of $250 in ready cash to exchange for a letter of invitation. Most foreigners got their visas this way. It was common practice but, as with the registration visa, it may have been just as illegal as the authorities wanted: legal enough to remain a plausible and effective source revenue, but illegal enough to provide a pretext when required.
“I actually work for the Memory Foundation,” Jim said with a polished smile. “We record interviews with people who were imprisoned for political reasons in the Soviet Union.”
“Imprisoned for political reasons in the Soviet Union,” Lyakov parroted. “You are stirring up trouble for people.” Jim took a deep breath and prepared to defend himself, but Lyakov handed his passport back. “Nonetheless, this is perfectly legal. Dangerous, perhaps”—he gave a shark’s smile—“but legal.”
IT WAS QUIET ENOUGH so not only did Jim jump when his cell phone rang, a few of the loaders turned and stared at him, too.
“Jim, this is Yuri calling. I couldn’t reach you earlier.”
“I was on the Metro. I’m actually out at Izmailovo now.”
“Are you near the Vernisazh market?”
“Yes, just near.”
“Ah. Perhaps I would have told you to wait a little. Anya said she is not certain whether her brother would be in this early, but you should look. She said he definitely will sell today; he has his stall Wednesday to Sunday, but maybe he will not show up until later.”
“That’s great, Yuri. Thank you. I don’t mind waiting if he isn’t here.”
“She says you must enter the wooden gates and walk down the main road that sells wooden bowls and spoons until you reach a statue of a smiling bear. His music stall is just on the other side of that statue.”
“Sounds easy. I’ll go take a look now.”
“You should mention her name. Her brother is called Sergei.”
“SERGEI?” JIM ASKED HESITANTLY. He had done as instructed, walking down an aisle of stalls selling wooden kitchenware painted red, black, and gold with pastoral designs—about a dozen stalls, all of whose wares looked, to Jim’s eyes, utterly indistinguishable—until he passed the cartoonish bear. Now he stood before an array of battered violins and violas, tarnished trumpets in tattered cases, the inevitable balalaikas and wooden flutes, and, on shelves along the stall’s sides, hundreds of folders of sheet music. An elvish young man with a mop of brown hair, a patchy beard, sparkly gray eyes behind steel granny glasses, and entirely too much energy for this hour of the morning hailed Jim good-naturedly in return, before reigning in his ebullience and asking how Jim knew his name.
“I know your sister, Anya. We met at one of Yuri and Kirsten’s dinners.”
“Ah, those two!” he exclaimed, clapping his hands together as a broad grin relit his face. “Yes, Anya’s taken me to a couple of those nights, too. They last, you know . . .” He puffed out some air and made a fluttery, swiveling gesture with his hand. “They really can talk. And drink. And talk, and drink, and talk, and drink. Very civilized people. Cultured, as we would say.”
“Very. Your sister, too. And you, too, it looks like.”
Sergei flipped the suggestion away with a diffident half nod. “Our parents were both musicians in the Leningrad State Orchestra. A conductor and the first violinist. They were cultured. I am just one more failing biznisman. ” His wiry energy and indomitable smile said otherwise, though: failure was obviously alien to him, whatever his material circumstances.
“ ‘A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.’ That’ll be your father’s testament,” Rosie used to say, when at the end of a long day she barely had enough energy to drive home while Sam was still joking with the dishwashers in gutter Spanish as he rotated the produce in the walk-in.
“Are you looking for music? Or maybe for an instrument?” Sergei asked, straightening the sheet music and aligning the edges of the instruments with twitchy, darting movements.
“Not just now, I don’t think. I’m actually looking for someone. I think he’s also a vendor, but I’m not sure, and I didn’t know who else to ask. Anya said you might be able to help me.”
“If I can, I certainly will. As a friend of Anya’s, Yuri’s, and Kirsten’s, I can trust you, I think. You aren’t police, and you don’t look like mafiya. You don’t sound Russian, even.”
“No. American.”
Sergei merely raised his eyes with interest. “Welcome, then, from America. What is the name? Who are you looking for?”
“Vilis Balderis.”
“Balderis. Bal-de-rees. A Latvian. There can’t be many of those. I don’t know him myself, but I know who does. Come.”
Sergei stepped out from behind his counter and started striding away. Jim stood about a head taller, and probably had a good thirty pounds on him, but Sergei outpaced him easily.
“Are you just leaving your stall like that?” Jim asked, almost jogging to keep up.
Sergei pirouetted on his heel, walking backward just as quickly as he walked forward. He stuck two fingers in his mouth and gave a window-shattering whistle. “Grisha!” he called behind him. A stooped and simian old man stepped out from the kitchenware stall across from Sergei’s. “I’ll be gone for maybe fifteen minutes. Watch my music, would you?”
The man waved and nodded at Jim, then hobbled back behind his counter. Sergei turned down another alley, leading Jim deeper into the market.
“Not much of a guard, is he?”
Sergei laughed. “You would never believe it, but Grisha was a boxing champion in the Soviet Navy. Of course, that was fifty years ago. Still, he can move quickly if he needs to. But really he uses shame. This is our culture. All I expect him to do is call out if he sees someone try to steal from me. Nine times out of ten—no, ninety-nine times out of one hundred—whoever it is will take off. The one exception would probably steal from me in front of my face.”
“That’s very trusting of you. Very optimistic.”
Sergei gave another of his jerky, avian shrugs, accompanied by a smile and a shake of his shaggy hair. “I choose to stay that way. Perhaps I could be tougher, you know, more ruthless. Try to pressure the other music sellers in the market out as I’ve been pressured. But I choose not to live in that way.”
“And the people who’ve tried to get you to leave . . .”
“Ach, them I don’t worry about. We all pay protection to the same krysha, you know. The same roof. The same policeman. The same gangsters. They only have muscle in their minds. They talk tough, maybe push me a few times. I smile and push back. I know if it gets serious I won’t be the one who’s hurt. Besides,” he said with a sly wink, “I give violin lessons to the big boss’s daughter. Free, of course. Here we are.”
They stopped in front of an aluminum trailer parked against one of the wooden city walls. Jim noticed security cameras above the trailer’s door, windows, and back entrance. Sergei knocked on the door, and it opened to reveal his opposite: a tall, barrel-chested, swarthy, unsmiling man, with a whale-fin mustache, a glint of gold on his teeth, and a smell of garlic, smoke, and coffee hanging around him like a cloud. He nodded reluctantly at Sergei.
“Hey, Sulyasha. How are things?” The man took a deep drag on an unfiltered cigarette, and kept his dead, hooded eyes steadily on Sergei. Sergei blinked rapidly, his hands in his pockets, shifting his weight from side to side. After two seconds, though, something broke, and a broad smile split the big man’s face wide open.
“Seryozha, what have I always told you about keeping still? Too much music is your problem! Too much music has made your blood unsteady. Aisha loves you, though, so I suppose I must, too. What’s the matter this morning?”
“The matter? Sulyasha, have I ever bothered you with . . .” Just then a soccer ball whizzed between Sergei and Jim, smacking off the front of the trailer next to Sulyasha. Two guys with Slavic hatchet-faces who looked barely old enough to shave, wearing the orange uniforms of Moscow trash collectors, had been kicking the ball around. Now they froze where they stood, their carefree smiles turning into rictuses of fear.
Sulyasha leaned down and picked up the ball, holding it out to the garbagemen with an indulgent smile. They looked at each other, each urging his companion to retrieve their ball. Neither made a move. Finally the bigger one shoved the smaller forward. He wiped his hands on his trousers, turned his chin up, and fixed his bravest look on his face.
When he was almost to the trailer, Sulyasha pulled a butterfly knife from his front pocket and stabbed the soccer ball with five little jackhammer jabs. His expression never changed; his smile even broadened when he handed the floppy hunk of black-and-white leather back to the boy. The boy hurried away from the trailer and began emptying rubbish bins as if his life depended on it—which, Jim thought, it just might have. Sulyasha spat on a handkerchief and wiped the ball’s imaginary stain off his trailer.
“What did you say you needed?” he asked.
“We just want to know if someone works here,” Sergei said. He still smiled, but Jim noticed he stood stock-still. “A name, and you can tell us . . .”
“Who’s we? Who’s this?”
“A friend of mine. An American. Not any sort of concern.”
“Oh? Probably not. If he is, though, I’ll certainly remember he’s a friend of yours.”
Sergei nodded significantly at Jim. “Vilis Balderis,” Jim said.
“Balderis,” he grumbled. “Not your class, Seryozha. He sells that fake Soviet shit over in the annex. If you really need to find him, you go out the back gate, then pass twelve tables on your right and eleven on your left, turn right, and pass six tables on your right and seven on your left, then turn left and he’s the fourth table down on your left.”
“How did you do that?” Jim asked. Sulyasha didn’t answer; he didn’t even look at Jim.
“Sulyasha’s memory—Suleiman’s, I should say; that is his given name—works in mysterious ways,” Sergei said, leaning toward Jim. “He has a gift for dimensions, construction, sequence. His uncle built this fake wooden city, but he designed it.” He spoke quietly enough to imply he was letting Jim in on a secret, but loudly enough so Sulyasha could hear the compliment.
“Does he play cards?”
“Only when he can win,” Sulyasha said, grinning sardonically. He winked at Jim and shut the door to his trailer.
SERGEI LED JIM to the back gates, shook his hand heartily, kissed him three times in the traditional alternate-cheek manner, and headed back to his stall. Jim promised to stop by on his way out.
Outside the gates the market dwindled into second-class repetitive-ness. Vendors stood behind long tables rather than stalls. Down the first aisle, all the vendors on the right sold Soviet film posters that looked suspiciously new; all the vendors on the left sold metalworks—flasks, clocks, key rings—with Soviet insignias.
Jim passed one table whose poster advertised, in English, THE AUTHENTIC GOODS OF SOVIET NAVY SHIPS. Beneath it, the vendor was gluing a red star onto a blank pewter flask. He glared darkly at Jim as he walked past. He turned right down the pirated CD and DVD aisle, then left, and he was in another Soviet surplus store.
At the fourth table on his left, a tall, wiry man with gray hair, a few days’ growth of beard, and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth was arranging clocks and flasks on the table in front of him. He moved slowly, wincingly, with Sisyphean resignation and imperturbability; he carried his defeat around him like a gray cloud that would never burst into rain.
“Vilis Balderis?” Jim asked.
The man nodded. He grabbed another box, this one filled with key chains and picture frames, and started unloading.
“Do you know a Grigory Naumenko?”
He nodded again but kept his back to Jim as he laid out his Lenin, CCCP, and Red Army key chains. Jim pulled a box of Winstons from his pocket. He lit one and laid the box—open, with the cigarettes facing Balderis—on the table.
“Did he by any chance tell you I would be coming by this morning?”
Balderis turned back around and shrugged. It was a shrug of indifference, not dismissal. Jim couldn’t tell if that meant Naumenko never called, or he did and Balderis didn’t especially care. He reached for the cigarettes, looked questioningly at Jim, who nodded. He pulled one out of the box, sniffed it, smiled, tore the filter off, and lit it, sliding the box into his shirt pocket. He nodded for Jim to start speaking.
“I work for the Memory Foundation. It’s an organization that interviews people who served time in prison camps in Eastern Europe. Have you heard of it?”
He placed the last picture frame upright against a small wooden clock with the Hotel Ukraina carved into it. Whether the clock was meant to commemorate the Stalinist-Baroque structure or whether it had actually been stolen was unclear. Balderis exhaled a plume of smoke at Jim’s lapel. “I have heard of such organizations, yes.”
“Can you spare a few minutes to speak with me?”
“Why?”
“Grigory Naumenko told me you spent time in the same camp.”
“No. You misunderstand me. I know why you want to speak to me. I don’t know why I should talk to you.”
Jim had to admit, it was a good question. “Because it is important that we know what happened, from the survivors themselves. Your story will help shed light on a dark period of Russian history. We want . . .”
Balderis gave a quiet, bitter laugh. “You want, you want, you want.” He shrugged again and grabbed a small folding table that was leaning against a crumbling brick pillar. “It’s early,” he said, yanking open the legs with a hideous creak. “I have to work. Stand and talk if you like.”
“I can come back.”
“Better now than later.” He grabbed another box from under the first table and started unloading. Pewter bookends, this time, with Socialist-Realist etchings in red.
Jim preferred Naumenko’s erratic garrulousness, although Balderis’s reticence, he had to admit, felt more real, less strange. He realized this was because Balderis acted more like Jim assumed he himself would act were he a survivor, which is to say: were he arbitrarily arrested, ripped from his family, stuffed on a train heading to an unknown destination, forced to break rocks or gut fish for the economic benefit of the very system that imprisoned him, and then released as suddenly as he was arrested. But why did this constitute reality? Is what we call real nothing more than the confirmation of ourselves and our expectations by the visible world? And more important: had he brought his voice recorder? He had.
“Do you mind if I use this?” Jim asked Balderis, knowing what the answer would be. Shrug. “Understood. Good. Now, can I ask you: were you in a labor camp on the Solovetsky islands?”
Balderis pressed his lips together in a pained imitation of a smile. “Labor? Is that what it was? Yes, I was in Solovetsky.”
“Can you tell me when you were there?”
“From March of 1955 until the winter solstice of 1961. Almost seven years.” He knocked a bookend to the ground, causing the two on either side to fall as well. His fist clenched, his face contorted in a mask of fury, and he had even drawn his leg back to kick the table before he got control of himself. He apologized to Jim after two deep breaths. “I don’t like talking about this. I’m sorry.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes (Belomorsk: a cigarette brand named for the putatively heroic undertaking of Soviet labor that nearly killed Balderis, and thousands of other lucky near misses like him. A cancerous irony in almost every way) and lit one. The Winstons, apparently, didn’t make the cut: too mild.
“Can I ask why you were sent there?”
He took a deep breath, exhaling dragon cones of smoke through his nose as he tilted his chin up and pressed his lips together. “Spying,” he said at last. “I was sent to the camps as an enemy of the Soviet people.”
“Who did you . . .”
“I didn’t. I went to a neighbor’s house for dinner, and he had a German father. A Russian mother, of course, but a German father. My neighbor never knew his father. He went back to Germany after the war. The mother had no pictures, no souvenirs, not even an address. All he left was his German last name.”
Jim waited for Balderis to continue, but that was the end of the story. A young man lost seven years of his life because of a neighbor’s ancestry.
“Where was this?” Jim asked.
“Kaliningrad. You know where this is?” Jim nodded: a little chunk of territory wedged between Lithuania and Poland that remained a non-contiguous piece of Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed. “So you must know, too, that it was also called Konigsberg? And that it used to be German?” Balderis’s arms went rigid by his sides and his voice grew louder and faster. He was yelling at someone else, fifty years ago. “And that we Latvians, along with Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans, were there long before the Russians? And that . . .” He cut himself off, turned his back to Jim, and raised the back of his hand to his face. Jim kept quiet. After half a fresh cigarette he collected himself and turned around.
“Do you know why I work here?”
“At Izmailovsky?”
“No. I work at Izmailovsky because I have the right connections and it pays well enough. I mean over here, in this part.”
Jim shook his head.
“Then I shall tell you,” he said, smiling bitterly. “And I will speak clearly, into your recorder, so you know what it means to be haunted. I used to have a stall inside. Not a shitty pair of tables like this, that you have to fight to set up in the mornings and carry away at night, but a stall that was mine, where I could lock up my goods every night and return to find them in the morning. For eight years I had it. From 1992 to 1999, when the place expanded. You understand?”
“How did you get it?” Jim asked quickly, in a fit of bravery. “At first, I mean. To make the story complete. How did you get it? Does it have any connection . . .”
“Everything has a connection,” Balderis said sadly, definitively. “Nothing before, and everything after. The official in charge of giving out permits in the early 1990s, Yasha Luzhin, his uncle and I go back. He sold me the right to stand here. I was good enough at it that when after he got hit and the Bibirevo Boys took over, I could afford to buy the permit again. So. To return to what I was saying: I had a stall inside, where I sold, sometimes, some more expensive items. Harder to find. You understand?”
“Like what?”
“Like more expensive,” Balderis said, a steel blade in his voice. “And also harder to find. Clear?”
“As water.” Stolen items sometimes turned up at the market, not so much at the stalls as under them or behind them, available to those who knew how to ask.
“But what happened was this: when they expanded, next to my stall they put a beer kiosk. And with the beer kiosk, of course, came tables, and with the tables, in summer, came the fish girls. You understand? Salted, dried fish to go with beer. Understand? You’ve tasted?”
“I do. I have.”
He nodded grimly. “So. They would come around in the summer, and people would buy. Or not. But even if not the girls would take their breaks on a bench behind my stall. With their fish. And the smell, when the sun would heat the fish and the wind would blow it toward me, the smell would remind me of the cannery at Solovetsky. I would close my eyes and I could hear the commander. I could feel the sting on my hands where the salt got into my cuts. It took me right back to those years, those seven negative years in the middle of my life.”
He looked right at Jim, tears in his eyes, his lips clenched tight, fists balled, one foot back and the other forward, knees bent in a boxing stance. “And do you say that makes me less of a man? That I ran from a smell, or that I cry, without even drinking, to remember it? Do you say that?”
“No,” Jim said. “No, of course not. I don’t know what I would have done, what I would have become, if I had been you, and gone through what you did.”
“That’s right. You don’t know. You don’t know what they did to Latvians, to their Baltic socialist brothers there. If you were never there, you will never know. And I am one of the healthy ones, one of the better ones. I could show you some men, you couldn’t even say they were men anymore. Do you want to see one of them? Is that what you want? Would that make you happy, asking about the past, which should be past and gone?” He balled his fists up again. Jim couldn’t follow his chain of hurt and assumptions.
“Can I ask . . .”
“Not now,” he said firmly but quietly. He finished arranging his goods on the table, tucked the boxes underneath, and lit another cigarette. “I am sorry. I have no more energy for this. If you want to see what the camps can do, don’t talk to me. I work. I don’t drink more than I should. I am healthy enough to thank God, and I even have a wife. My story is not the real story. You should talk to Dato.”
“Where can I find him?” Jim asked, guilty that he was even asking.
“He only ever goes to one place. I don’t even know where he lives anymore. Maybe on the street. Maybe, if he has children, with them. The only place you are one hundred percent guaranteed to see him is at the Super Slots, up by the university. The game room by the station. He’s there every day until they carry him out.”
“Is Dato his family name or his first name?”
“His first. He’s Georgian. Tsepereli is his family.”
“How does he get money?”
“People give it to him. I used to. I could never help myself; I knew what he had gone through.”
“He’ll be there today?”
“Every day. Every morning, every afternoon. Playing the kopeck machines. But look”—Balderis pointed over Jim’s head toward the main market. A few intrepid shoppers were milling around: they were open for business. “It’s time. I’m sorry if I was rude to you.”
“You weren’t. I’m sorry if I upset you asking about such things.”
“You did. But being upset is not always bad. Lancing a wound hurts more than letting it fester, but it’s better for the body.” With that, he turned and walked back to his stall. His plume of cigarette smoke waved good-bye to Jim before evanescing.