I remembered plenty, of course, but mostly what I remembered about Moscow was its emptiness compared to New York: so few cars and shops, no advertising. Not any more. My head jerked around. I thought I saw some Moscow cops in a blue and white Chevy.
I told the cabbie to drive around for a while. I saw two men behind the Slavianskaya Railroad Station dump a body wrapped in sheets. Seconds later, a couple kids with flashlights came to pick over the trash, and seagulls wheeled screaming overhead. In front of the Belorus Train Station a few women, old as Birdie, stood selling their possessions, motionless, garments held out in front of them. I noticed what other tourists had noticed; I was a tourist, too.
The cab stopped for a light, a little kid, a girl maybe five years old, pushed her face through the window and begged for change, offering a copy of Cosmopolitan in exchange. She had a clown’s face. For a few coins, she performed a little jig for me.
Poor Birdie.
I loved Birdie, but what did she know? How could she know? Everyone esteemed Brodsky. Everyone. If I suddenly announced he had paid assassins working for him, Willowbrook would be too good for me; they’d have to reinvent bedlam. I got to the hotel, too tired to notice much except that the theme music from Chariots of Fire played through a Muzak channel in the ceiling like a bad dream. I took a sleeping pill.
When I woke up it was morning. Svetlana was sitting at the foot of my bed, looking at me and smiling and watching Joe Witte read the weather forecast. I was pretty sure it was a dream. Witte was followed by Katie and Bryant standing in Rockefeller Center.
“You recognize these people?” she said.
I nodded. It was The Today Show from New York on the Superchannel. I was in Moscow twenty-five years after I left and I was watching The Today Show.
“How did you get in?” I said idiotically, groggy from the pill.
“I asked the chambermaid. I said I was your wife. I was very nice. She is called Irina, the maid,” she said.
“You are very nice,” I said. She stood up and took off her jacket. She took off her sweater and her jeans without any fuss and I got up and put my arms around her and we went back to bed. There was no small talk, no jokes, no self-conscious comedy, no foreplay. She was completely straightforward. She wanted me.
Later, we got dressed and went downstairs and ate breakfast. In the dining room, a woman in a black dress played Andrew Lloyd Webber on the piano, entertainment for the businessmen. As we left the hotel, I stopped at the desk and got a key for Svetlana.
Outside was her little yellow car. The lemon, Svetlana called the acid yellow Trabant. “A friend in East Berlin sold it to me. After the wall came down. He fixed it up for me for a joke.”
The used Trabbies were big with Moscow’s new money, the rockers and artists who considered Mercedes or Rolls uncool. My father would not have known if he should cry or laugh. My mother would have considered it very funny.
“My little lawnmower with engine.” Svetlana patted her car. “It breaks down all the time, but I like it.”
“Very chic.” I was grinning like a fool. She looked wonderful.
She wanted to buy some groceries, she said, and we walked around to the back of the hotel where there was a supermarket.
At the entrance, an elderly man stumbled up the steps. He had the face, the beard, the hat of an old Jew. A couple of kids with acne sprayed on their faces taunted him. They yelled at him: “Kike,” they yelled. “Get out of our country.” One kid knocked him over.
Svetlana helped the old man up, smiling, then turned on the boys and let them have it. She did it instinctively, not for show, and when she was done, she went into the store and started inspecting bags of fruit.
“That was very nice,” I said.
“What was nice?” She peered at some frozen fish.
I tried to figure out what was happening to me with Svetlana. I had been afraid of coming to Moscow for a quarter of a century. I arrived, I fell for this woman who was now reading labels on frozen fish dinners and laughing. I pushed the shopping cart for her and she filled it up slowly and we talked. I wanted her more than I’d ever wanted anyone, but I didn’t mind waiting either. There was no effort in any of it; she was somehow placid and passionate at the same time; I felt turned on and calm. While she was inspecting ice cream flavors, I put my arms around her and kissed her.
“Let’s go to your room,” she said, and simply abandoned the shopping cart that was piled high with groceries.
After Svetlana left, I finally unpacked and then I walked. In the Arbat, a band of men in clown suits played “Hava Nagila”. They played “Putting on the Ritz”. In a shop window, six TVs were tuned into Mexican soaps and people pressed their faces to watch The Rich Also Cry.
I crossed the city to the old Radio Moscow Building where Tolya worked.
Kiosks had sprouted everywhere. You could buy anything; I bought newspapers. Tons of them. I read while I walked. Headlines in the tabloids claimed that Attila the Hun, Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer had been unloaded by evil space aliens who wanted to infect the godly Russian people. I read how Chechens had learned the real value of intercepts and ham radios from the Charles and Di story.
“Imagine,” Tolya said when I found him and we were drinking coffee in the cafeteria in his building. “Imagine, I go to do a story in the Caucasus and I meet this bunch of mountain men. Real Chechen outlaws, you know? In a hut, in those coats made of hairy sheepskin. About six of them and pissed out of their skulls. They pass me the bottle and we all crouch over this ham radio. They’re laughing and listening. To what? Intercepts of Prince Charles and Princess Diana talking to their lovers. Prince Charles tells his lover he wishes to be her Tampax. The Chechen chief asks me: “What it is, this Tampax?” Their eyes bug out of their heads. They think, how wonderful to intercept any conversation, any information. They’re enthralled by the possibilities of ham radios.”
We went out through the main lobby. On the wall, a yellowed photograph showed a man in a cardigan and glasses reading behind a vintage microphone. It was the first broadcast from Radio Moscow, the caption noted; the man was speaking the words: “Workers of the World, Unite.” The triumph on his face was potent, I thought.
I was glad to see Tolya. The truth was I needed him. I could get around, even with the street names and subway stops changed, but I was scared.
“Are you OK?” Tolya peered at me.
Yeah sure, I thought, swell. Apart from the fact that I took a big whiff out of a killer suitcase on the beach in Brooklyn ten days ago and I might be about to drop dead from radiation poisoning, or find my dick on the floor one morning. At least Lev’s blood had tested negative for AIDS when they took a sample from his corpse. At least that. But it was completely surreal to be back in Moscow.
I had fallen in love with a Russian woman at first sight, but who could I tell? Ricky, poor bastard, was still in a coma, hanging onto the world by his fingernails. My Aunt Birdie, it seemed, had been keeping better records than the KGB for the last sixty years, and was either so crazy or so smart she could die of it. I still couldn’t prove the connection between Ustinov’s murder, the nuke spillage into New York, the dead dogs, Olga, Lev. Who hit Ricky if Lev didn’t? The evidence said he didn’t.
Also, I couldn’t see how anyone functioned in Moscow. All I saw was that Tolya’s own boss still had seven phones with rotary dials on his desk; all I saw was, in Moscow, the traffic lights were sporadic because rats had chewed through the cables.
“You’re looking at this like an American,” Tolya said as we started walking. “That is no logic here.”
The rumor mill in Moscow turned relentlessly, rumors of godfathers and crime bosses, rumors and half truths. Moscow was big with American kids who, playing at journalism, helped spread the rumors, Tolya said. They gathered in Trenmos for burgers or the Radisson Hotel for cappuccino or outside the Bolshoi for Ecstasy. On the side, they dealt in whatever was going, canned fruit or radiologicals. The rumors they spread for fun; the fuck-you
generation.
“Tell me more about this Red Mercury call-sign bullshit.” I told him about Rick and his cousin in Shanghai.
“Don is cousin to your friend, no kidding? It’s a small world. Comrade Don was one helluva great guy, we had some times in the old days, on the circuit. A groovy guy. He had fabulous bootleg Beatles albums.”
“Can we dispense with the good old commie rock and roll days nostalgia?”
“You like jazz, of course,” he said dismissively. “So. Red Mercury, sure, I made this my call sign for two reasons. Like I said, I was the nuclear DJ. The big explosion. The authorities went ballistic. People didn’t know about red mercury, so I told them. I was lethal but elusive, man. We had fun then, you know? You had to have fun or you died. Me, I was the Jesus of Cool.”
“What an asshole you were,” I said admiringly. “Can we get a drink somewhere, a beer maybe?”
“You need it bad?”
“Of course not.”
“Good. Because first we will make a stop. At Izvestia. To see a friend. My young friend Eduard is very offay with red mercury. People still say offay?”
“Mmm hmmm! I love that smell of napalm in the evening. I love that movie.” Eduard Skolnik looked at the poster of Apocalypse Now on the wall of his office at Izvestia. Skolnik was twenty-five, a hotshot young reporter who wore a flak jacket and a baseball cap backwards. He worked out of an office decorated with movie posters and beer bottles.
“Morning,” I said.
“What?”
“The smell of napalm in the morning.”
Eduard smiled. He reached into his desk. “Want some?” He held up a glassine bag filled with white powder and dangled it from his fingers. “Coke is extremely chic in Moscow; if Gorby was the sixties, this is the seventies. You wanna see Studio 54? I could take you, if you want. Only much wilder. Girls. Boys. Slave auctions. A club where American girls strip for Russian hoods. Whatever you want.” He made a show of sniffing and rubbing his gums.
Eduard and Tolya gossiped a while, then Eduard said idly, “Someone is buying a lot of newspapers. TV companies. Even Tass. Tass for Chrissake. Tass reports Armenians in Siberia kidnap the son of a reputed red mercury dealer, someone tries to buy Tass. A Czech reporter writes he buys red mercury on the black market in Vladivostok, someone tries to buy the reporter. Let me show you something.” Eduard’s English slang was a whole generation hipper than Tolya’s.
He popped a video into a VCR, hit the remote and Jimmy Swaggart came on apparently speaking perfect Russian. It was eerie, like religious karaoke.
“Sorry,” Eduard said and pushed fast forward. When he stopped, he was in the frame himself, in a room with a desk where a fat man sat. There was nothing else except a ham radio and a metal box. “I got a friend to shoot this undercover. Watch.”
The man opened the box and removed a steel rod. He took a hammer out of a desk drawer and knelt on the floor and began hitting the rod. He banged on it, mouthing disgust in the direction of the camera.
“He’s offering me a sample. Says it’s plutonium. Maybe it is.”
Dust flies. The man laughs.
“‘Don’t worry,’ he is saying,” Eduard picked up the narration. “It’s only detergent that’s spilling out. They put it in to counteract the radioactivity. The guy used to be a scientist. Now he’s a scrap merchant. He sells samples. Packed in detergent. Usually to what we call laundry men, guys who pass on small amounts of money for the big bankers. Packed in detergent.” Eduard giggled and rubbed a little more coke into his gums.
“It’s a two-way street, of course. You wanna smuggle cocaine, invent a myth about uranium. You want plutonium, make a legend about dope. I know people buying up poppy fields around Chernobyl; the flowers grow real big. The opium money is big. Hot poppies.” He laughed again. “You want more?”
I nodded.
“You want beer?”
I said yes and Skolnik rummaged in his desk and produced cans of Bud.
“Look. It’s out of control. And everyone knows. There’s no inventory on any of it. We aim to please, however. If some US State Department retard says all the nukes from Kazakhstan are safe in America, hey, we are happy to celebrate. We like parties. I met one Russian general who had an entire warhead ready to ship to the Libyans. So what? It’s the tip of the iceberg and I am talking the Titanic. You think I’m some conspiracy theorist? You bet I am. The only thing to do is get rid of all the plutonium. The Russians never will. So, bingo, mutually assured destruction. MAD. It’s a mad mad world. Mad Max. Dr Strangelove. Nuclear leaks. Terrorist spills. Slow death this time. Real slow, man. A million cases of dementia. A million mutants.
Let me show you something else.” He put a second video into the machine.
Snowy fields. Forests of birch trees. A Soviet city, broken apartment buildings, like Birdie’s, crumbling, the mud frozen solid, the statuary shattered. A stretch of clean snow followed, then a gate, a factory, steampipes.
“What am I looking at?”
Eduard Skolnik swallowed beer and froze the picture.
“This is one of the operations around Tomsk 7. You see? This is a plant that makes weapons-grade nuclear fuel. The same plant heats a town of half a million people. The Soviets linked their civil and weapons economy in a way that can never be taken apart. Never. You understand? Never? You see those pipes? They travel nineteen miles through virgin forest—the only virgin in the forest.” A joker, this Skolnik, a Tolya in the making. “All over the country, there are nuclear plants. The power that fuels them also fuels cities, factories, apartments, schools. You want to see footage of children born in Semipalatinsk? I got home horror movies.” He grabbed a few tapes off his desk. “You want me to take you? You want the tour? I can do plutonium buys. I can do Chernobyl, half day, whole day. What do you say?”
“I want a drink,” I said.
“You sure?”
“What, you’re my mother now? Yes, I’m sure. You want to come?” I asked, but Eduard was on the phone.
“Be careful,” Tolya said. “You could get killed.”
Eduard waved breezily. “Not!” he called out. “That would not be cool at all, man.”
“Let’s go to the Métropole.” Tolya buttoned his coat. “Maybe meet someone interesting. Maybe Svetlana will come.”
“Don’t you ever go home?”
Tolya shrugged. “My wife left me for a Jew. Rich guy. Smart. Who can blame her? She lets me see the babies when I want. We’re friends.”
It was the first time he ever let on he had troubles. I started to say something.
Tolya turned away. “It’s OK,” he said.
In the subway, we were jammed between bodies; the stink of sweat and perfume and Russia made me gag. Tolya towered over me. After a while he shouted, “You thinking of making it with my cousin?”
“This is your business?”
“It’s my business.”
“Fuck off.”
I felt his enormous fist close around my upper arm. “Listen to me, you American running dog imperialist piece of shit. She’s my cousin. I love her. You be good to her, or I’ll cut your heart out while it’s still ticking.”
“Let’s get out.” I was having trouble breathing.
“It’s our stop anyway,” Tolya said, and we squeezed out of the train. Tolya pinned me against a wall.
“I’m all she has. She likes you. I’m serious. Promise me, on your mother’s grave.”
“My mother isn’t dead.”
“Stop the crap. I want your word.”
This was old-fashioned stuff, but I was thrilled because it meant Svetlana did like me.
I looked up at Tolya and in Russian I said, “I promise.”
We walked to the end of Gorki Street which had been renamed Tverskaya. It is pretty fucking disorienting to discover the streets of your childhood have new names. Also, it had tourists and beggars and strip clubs that advertised nude dancers, legs spread, clits showing. At the corner was the old Intourist Hotel. I
remembered sneaking in once to sample the espresso coffee. I couldn’t actually remember the boy who did it, only the bitter taste of the coffee. Or maybe it had been some other hotel; things from the past blurred. Now, men in thin Italian shoes loitered on the pavement speaking into cellular phones. “Bizinessmen. The last great steal on earth,” Tolya mused.
In Red Square, the soldiers had simply vanished. The goose-stepping troops outside Lenin’s tomb were gone. A few tourists wandered in and out. A crew was filming an episode of NYPD Blue.
Red Square always frightened me, especially when we marched on May Day or pledged ourselves to the revolution at Lenin’s tomb. I was always sick before; my father always made me go.
The tomb itself was terrifying. The shrunken figure of Vladimir Ilyich, the backlighting, his syphilitic orange glow, my horror that I would be trapped inside.
The year we were in the same grade, Andrei Federov noticed Lenin’s ear had dropped off. He said so in the loud proud formal manner of the ass-licking top boy he was. The tomb was shut and we were held inside while guards, waving their AKs, grubbed around on the floor, looking for Lenin’s ear.
You’re a traitor, I would say to myself when my grade visited the tomb. Here is this great man who has invented a wonderful marvelous world just for boys like you and you are thinking about his ear and whether they had to pull his guts through his nose to embalm him, like the Egyptians did to make mummies of the Pharaohs.
All gone. Only tourists and a stiff wind bristling across the cobblestones.
“Russia always reminded me of the Air India pilot who flew a jumbo jet but believed the world was carried on the back of a turtle; he could hold both these things in his mind at the same time,” Tolya said.
“Spare me the philosophy.” I watched the tourists, the new Russians with video cameras and gold watches. An old man in a suit jacket stiff with dirt and war medals held up a picture of Stalin on a placard. A quartet of tall girls in miniskirts bounced across towards GUM.
Red Mercury Blues Page 20