“We have no good food, no decent bathrooms, not enough dressings or syringes or catheters. Nurses sell the clean needles to drug addicts so they can feed their own kids. Once, someone used dirty needles here. Four children who came in with brain tumors left with AIDS. We never have enough. So we choose who will die, by default.” Leading me down a hall, Viktor said, “This is paradise compared to Semipalatinsk. You would not want to see the babies born with two heads. I left because I couldn’t take it.”
As we walked the greasy corridor, a nurse waved her arms furiously at Viktor. “I have nothing. Nothing. The patient is human, not a dog.”
Viktor shrugged and examined a little boy who padded up to him in the corridor. Viktor prodded the boy’s head kindly and the boy was docile and kissed him.
I was impatient.
“I’ll go see,” he said, and came back in a few minutes, looking grim. “I’m sorry. Your aunt is pretty frail. It appears someone hit her with a blunt object. She has a blood clot. It may be she has also had a stroke. We have to wait. If we operate, she could die. She is old. She may revive, but I think she will lose her speech.”
“I want to see her.”
“No,” Viktor said. “Come tomorrow.”
He took us to the front entrance and shoved his hands in the pockets of his white coat and Svetlana kissed him. Viktor shook my hand.
“There is always a chance. Always. Perhaps your aunt will recover. God is strange. Everything is chance here,” Viktor said, leaving us in the dirty lobby. A little girl had attached herself to Svetlana’s hand. Viktor took the kid from her and held her in his arms. “Through one door is a fantastic surgeon, the next a fantastic bastard. In Russia, everything drops into the same bowl: diamonds, old shoes, cabbages, shit, pearls. Sometimes it is hard to find the pearls.”
10
At a cooperative in the north of Moscow where plastic limbs dangled from a rack like pots and pans, I tried to get a new leg for Kowalski. A pair of women—they were twins—sat at a large table painting these limbs the color of jaundiced flesh. “You will have to bring the patient for a fitting,” one of them said without looking up from her work, but before the leg could be fitted, the cops found Kowalski. He was strung up from the light fixture in his miserable apartment. The ruling was suicide, but who would care?
It was like falling down stairs in a bad dream on the way to hell. Everywhere I went, people died. Now it was Birdie. I had called the hospital a dozen times; there was no news. I went to the hospital and held her hand. I talked to Birdie. Her hand was dry and cold, she couldn’t speak or hear me. I didn’t know how to get the money to buy red mercury on Monday, but I had to get it. I was obsessed with it, to prove it, to get at it. But I knew I was running on empty.
I put in a call to Roy Pettus. It was still the middle of the night in New York, and I woke up his wife. Roy had gone to Wyoming unexpectedly; his dad was sick; he’d be back in a day or so. Did I want a number? Could she take a message?
“Come to the country for the weekend,” Tolya said. “You’ll feel better. You’ll meet some friends.” He shrugged. “Maybe some others not so friendly but useful.”
I went because I didn’t know what else to do.
“Come home with me. To New York,” I whispered to Svetlana as we left town. Ahead of us Tolya drove his dowager Zil; it had chrome bumpers and red plush seats and silk curtains in back; he claimed it had belonged to Andropov.
It was nearly dusk and I was silent, thinking about Birdie and my mother and the year we lived in a dacha in the country.
My mother never cared about material things, but she had longed for a dacha. Everyone who was anyone had some kind of country shack. The worst time, before we left, when my father had no work at all, someone, some kindly poet or musician, lent us a house in the country. So by the time my mother got her dacha, it wasn’t hers; it was a place of exile.
I hated the countryside. I hated the investment of some clod of earth with Tolstoyan meaning. Put two birch trees together and you’ll find a Russian near by weeping, they used to say. My mother made it better with her games. Early mornings, we’d go to the river to watch the fat men swim. In white rubber bathing caps, they floated for hours on their backs, cigarettes sticking straight up to the sky. Squatting on the beach behind some trees, we’d make up stories about them, high Party officials most of them, powerful whales who could arrange to have men killed.
“Some people think only the furniture here has changed,” said Svetlana, putting her hand in mine, reading my mind.
A flock of geese marched across the road with stolid indifference and she hit the brakes. The car stopped dead a mile from the little village; it refused to start. Tolya backed up, we got in the Zil and went for help.
“We’re home!” Tolya shouted, and his mother ran down the stairs. It turned out Tolya had a pack of younger sisters and brothers; there were gangs of rich, stylish, smiling cousins who lived near by. They all spoke English and they ran in and out of the house with tennis rackets. It was chilly for tennis, but they didn’t care; they were tall and breezy and self-confident.
It turned out my generation was mostly gone. Or dead. The “high lifeitsi” who stole cars, went abroad or drank themselves to death in their parents’ dacha. These new kids called out “Hi.” “Have a nice day,” they shouted at you.
That night I went to bed early and alone. Svetlana sat up with Tolya and the family, but I was exhausted. I didn’t know what I was looking for or at. I’d come to Moscow to find out who hurt Ricky Tae. Birdie couldn’t talk to me. There was no way I could get the money for the red mercury, if Tania had it, and if I did, what could I prove? Could I make the connections to Brighton Beach? Would anyone care?
In the other rooms, the lights were still on and the phones cackled into life; the dachniki of Nikolina Gora were gossiping after supper.
At three in the morning, I heard animals howl in the hills. I got out of bed and wandered into the garden. It was getting cold. Were there wolves? Maybe it was only local dogs. I missed New York. I went back to bed and slept badly and I was glad when the cocks started their incessant crowing before dawn. Soon came the reassuring noise of cement mixers from the road, and the smell of coffee, and then Svetlana tiptoed into my room. “Tomorrow, we will solve all problems,” she said laughing and jumped into my bed.
11
The next evening we sat on the porch, wrapped in sweaters, in the Russian twilight, eating sausages and caviar, bread and cheese and butter and drinking red wine, me and Tolya and Svetlana. “They say you cannot understand Russia without understanding the countryside. Everything here, all these dachas, behind the wall or the fence, are secret, like Russia,” Svetlana said.
“Bullshit,” said Tolya. “I’m Russian and I hate the countryside. The trouble with the countryside is there is no shopping.” He and Svetlana began singing show tunes; Tolya, it turned out, was a big fan of South Pacific. He liked doing Bloody Mary.
“In Peredelkino you would not be allowed to sing,” Tolya’s father said coming out of the door, a bottle of wine clutched in each hand. “In Peredelkino,” he said, laughing dismissively, “they’d be talking about Heidegger.”
We sat on the old porch chairs and he poured wine for us. Lara Sverdloff stood on the steps, hands on hips, laughing, looking amused at her husband. Tolya’s father, who was also Anatoly, was a well-known actor.
“I am feeling sorrowful,” he shouted, his belly hanging over his jeans. “My driver picked apples in his garden today and I got mine from the shop. That is inauthentic” He grinned. “They taste just as good, to tell you the truth. Have a drink.”
Svetlana and Tolya sang. Lara Sverdloff laughed. Anatoly Sr declaimed.
“This house, I built it, I put a nail in it, it is mine. You know how long I waited for a place in Nikolina Gora? You know how long? Eighteen years I waited, not like these new Russians with their kottedzh and marble fireplaces, the new aristocrats.” He snorted. “They are like Westerners, lik
e in the West, where a home means nothing, where it is easy to get and all you need is money. My house is my soul.”
An expansive man, Tolya’s father could, in a disarming way, discuss his soul, your house and cold cash in the same sentence. The whole neighborhood swam in his heated pool, and all day and night he would welcome them, saying, “So how much did that wine you brought me cost?”
Cats and dogs meandered through the Sverdloffs’ wild garden. Lara hurried in and out, her dark eyes glistening at the prospect of feeding so many people. The two Tolyas, father and son, built a bonfire. In every corner of the garden, we placed small stoves that gave off a warm glow.
Under the trees, a trestle table was laid with platters of food: pale pink tongue with baby peas and horseradish; rice pilaf with dates, apricots and pine-nuts; pickles; pickled tomatoes; smoked fish; vodka, wine and beer. Caviar, black, red and gold. Wine and beer. The roast pork had a crackly skin the color of caramel.
Svetlana, who had changed into a white sweater and black slacks, wrapped a red shawl around her shoulders. She had gold hoops in her ears. I held her hand and looked at her and the sun disappeared and Lara lit more candles and more guests arrived and we ate. In the house, Tolya put music on and it drifted out. He played old jazz standards I loved: Oscar Peterson, Django Reinhardt, Stan Getz. Chet Baker played “My Funny Valentine”.
A siren screamed through the woods, a light flashed; in an official car more people arrived.
“The presence of foreigners made him let us know how important he was,” Svetlana whispered.
“Am I a foreigner?”
Across from me, wearing a Harvard sweatshirt, was a professor of ethics; he was introduced as a man who once met Wittgenstein at a train station. In Munich, I think. Maybe Vienna. Gavin Crowe showed up in a hat. His wife was an angry silent Russian woman and their friend a desiccated German with a trace of a mustache. A lawyer, she was looking for the main chance in Moscow. A couple of American kids were there, too, in thrall to the pinched blonde who had been a famous actress. I couldn’t recall her name but I remembered her pictures. She and Anatoly Sr had been a famous acting duo for a while.
The actress picked at her fruit, her little eyes hard, mean and black as watermelon pits. Her husband was a physicist and she watched him closely but barely spoke except to spit out “Nye pravda” from time to time when she didn’t agree with him.
“Gorby’s science minister, a big deal guy,” Gavin Crowe whispered to me. That a creep like Crowe knew ministers and bigwigs told me Russia was still a provincial society: its privileged members all knew each other.
The desultory talk about art—eighteenth-century paintings were an obsession with this crowd—gave way to more animated conversation about money and guns. The physicist was bitter; he was leaving the country for a better job; there was no money for research any more, he said. Sverdloff Sr carried out a tray of brandies. A yellow moon came up over the slim white trees. Moonlight drenched the garden, candles flickered in glass jars in the thick grass, the leaves rustled in a fall breeze and kids splashed into the steaming pool. Someone had changed the music; Paul McCartney sang “Yesterday”. Svetlana looked at me and smiled.
“Why are you smiling?”
“From happiness.”
I loved her. But sitting in this lush country garden on a balmy fall night while Russians reminisced about their own history, I felt angry, confused, seduced. Angry because Birdie was dying and so was Ricky, both because of me. Angry because the self-regard around the table was thick as Lara Sverdloff’s cherry jam. And because I wanted to claim some of my own past from this place, but it was too late and I couldn’t. I was a foreigner.
Svetlana stirred jam into her tea like my mother used to. She saw me watching, then she came and sat close beside me and put her arm around my shoulders. “The scientist, Furmin, do you recognize him? From the film in the archive? Remember?”
Furmin walked with me towards the river. “You want to ask me questions? Ask me. I don’t care any more. I am leaving. Leaving.” He looked at the birch trees and made himself weep.
“Leaving?”
“My country. This.” He gestured at the woods and the river. “Everything has come too late. We are giving away our resources. No one listened to me. I said save the plutonium. There will be power for three generations to come, but we will give in to the Americans. Without it, we are nothing. A third world country. There is only one good American for us.” Suddenly, he sat down on a tree stump.
“Who is the good American?”
“Chaim Brodsky.”
“Why?”
“He understands we have the technology to build this new generation of power plants. Cheap electricity for a century. Brodsky understands. All we need is to persuade people. Why throw our plutonium away because Americans say so?”
I believed this bitter little man. He was leaving. He was free of all of it. He had nothing to lose.
“What is red mercury?” I asked. Through the trees I could see Svetlana in her red shawl. She was crossing the garden with a tray in her hands and the light from candles flickered across her face. I could see she was watching the kids in the swimming pool and laughing.
Furmin shook his head. His twisted face seized up in a sneer. Crouched on his tree stump, he took off his shoes and socks. He rubbed his gnarled feet, then sniffed one of them.
“It is nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. You want to know?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll tell you what it is. It is fear in a bottle. It is a thing some scientists invented long ago because production fell off. There was news from the West of a thermonuclear device. We were terrified. Our scientists thought if they invented something even more powerful, the West would lie down for us. So these scientists, in their labs, invented the secret substance. The Soviet marvel that blew up planes, could make radar disappear. With red mercury, anything was possible. It was the alchemist’s stone.”
“But the paperwork? The reports?”
“All manufactured. They gave the substance a formula. They made a paper trail, reports, official letters, contracts, bills of sale, certificates of verification. It never existed. It was one of the great hoaxes. Lethal but elusive. It has become a kind of legend. The aura around it is of John F. Kennedy’s assassination—one bullet, two, more, no one will ever know; all that remain are the theories. With red mercury, it is the same, people write theses, they make documentary films about it, novels even, even poetry. It has become metaphor. Lethal, but elusive. Poetry.”
I thought of Valya Golitzine and her precise, elaborate account of the stuff. I thought of Chaim Brodsky’s conviction that it was deadly. I thought of my own frantic pursuit of red mercury and I wanted to believe all of them, but I knew Furmin was telling the truth.
I followed Furmin to the edge of the river. “I’ll sit here.” He sat again and bathed his feet in the water.
“The legend was made. Red mercury. Quite a good name, don’t you think? And it became real. This is Russia.” Furmin watched me. “Do you think I want to leave my country? You think I want this?”
“Why do you go?”
“My wife wants diamond earrings,” He stood up and waded along the bank for a few yards.
“How do you know about red mercury?” I said.
“You don’t believe me, do you? I suppose you have been to the institute and talked to Valya Golitzine. Stupid whore.”
I was silent.
“She sells her information to anyone. She was always a whore,” he snapped. “Red mercury is nothing. Nothing. Gossip. A rumor of death. Golitzine sells it for money.”
“How do you know?” I took a cigarette from a crumpled pack in my pocket.
“Give me one.”
I gave him a cigarette. We smoked for a minute, then he tossed it in the river. He went back to his tree stump and found his shoes and socks and began putting them on.
“I was married to her once,” he said.
“I have very bad taste in women,”
“Please, it’s important. How do you know red mercury is a hoax? How do you know what these men invented is a lie? How?” I was confused. How was it Chaim Brodsky didn’t know the truth?
Putting his hand on my shoulder, Furmin got up wearily. He put his full weight on me and said, “I was one of them.”
12
Like a bear, Tolya crashed through the woods to the river.
“There is a phone call for you, Artyom,” he shouted. “From America. She left a number. You’re to call back.” He handed me a scrap of paper.
We left Furmin standing by the river and went back to the house. I kissed Svetlana. Tolya went to help his mother with a stove that had gone out.
I wrapped my arms around Svetlana and kissed her as hard as I could.
“What’s the matter?” she asked instinctively.
“Get Tolya back.”
The three of us stood on the porch. At the table the toasts were getting longer. Furmin returned and whispered to his wife and abruptly she got up and they left the garden. The moon sailed in the white trees.
“What is it?” Tolya said.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure. Something is wrong. I want you to disappear for tonight. Take Svetlana back to Moscow. Do it now. Go somewhere safe.”
“Safe?” He smiled.
“As safe as you can. Your car is fixed?” I asked Svetlana.
“Yes. At the garage in the village.”
I walked them quietly to the edge of the garden.
“Something’s going on. I don’t know what it is, but something. I want you to go to Moscow. Get your things. I can make arrangements. I want you to both come to New York.”
“I can’t,” said Tolya.
Red Mercury Blues Page 25