He came back smiling. “A friend will join us. She might help you in your search.”
Ana wondered if she should offer him money, if that was expected.
As if reading her thoughts, he smiled. “Think nothing. We have idle time, and are very curious to talk to Americans.”
Within minutes a striking blonde arrived. Tall, well dressed, with topaz eyes.
“This is Katya.”
“Hello, Ana!” She shook hands like a man, then asked Volodya for a whiskey.
While he was gone, she pulled high-tech baubles from her handbag. “Boyfriend calls me gadget-girl. Look what he brings me today! Mini cell phone. Mini-Walkman. Look, this lighter, voice-activated recorder, good for spies! Also wristwatch TV.”
She whipped out a sleek, little palm-sized camera. “Latest model Polaroid, tiny, excellent. Wait, I take your picture. Smile!”
She pressed a button, heard a click, then pointed it at Volodya, bringing out her drink. She had Ana take a picture of her and Volodya, then one of him with Ana. Within minutes they had a row of perfect prints.
Volodya laughed. “All hijacked. Sell everything. Before gangster-boyfriend is arrested.”
“Never arrested,” Katya said. “Will be shot to death. Pride thing with them.” She abruptly turned to Ana. “So. You are looking for Nikolai Volenko.”
She felt her heart beat. “You know him?”
“Maybe I have heard of him. Maybe he is out of Moscow. Making film.”
Ana leaned forward. “But where outside of Moscow? Do you have a phone number? Address?”
The woman shook her head. “Maybe he call my boyfriend when needing new video camera, black-market price. Maybe he went east. Novgorod. Yekaterinburg. Big cities. Weapons plants, going now to rust.”
Ana looked from one to the other. “Please. How can I get word to him?”
Katya shook her head. “I think … impossible. Why is so important for you to contact this man?”
“He’s sick. He will get sicker. I want to take him home, take care of him.”
Almost nonchalantly, Katya examined her long nails. “You know how hard for Russians to leave Russia now? Especially returning Russians. Why coming back? Very suspicious. Old Soviet passport no longer valid. New passport taking months, maybe years. Maybe never. How you would get him out?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. He told me anything could be bought. Passports, visas …”
“Da. Maybe. But you have first to find him, no?”
Ana sat up straight, refusing to break down in front of these tough Russians. “I’ll find him. However long it takes.”
Then she slumped a little. “The truth is, I wasn’t prepared for your country.”
Volodya leaned back and smiled. “Ahh, Russia. To understand us, you must listen closely to everything we say. Then, reverse it.”
“How far are these cities you mentioned? Could I get there by train?”
“Impossible. Novgorod, eight hours. Yekaterinburg, almost twenty-four hours. You don’t speak Russian. You would be robbed. Or, you would disappear.”
A dish of zakuski, little tasties, appeared—radishes, cucumbers, meats, and cheese, tiny pancakes filled with roe. Toying with the food, Volodya stabbed a radish with a sharp knife, and offered it to Katya. She swallowed her whiskey, then wet her lips and took the radish between her teeth, slowly sliding it off the blade.
Almost dusk now, a warm, summer dusk that would draw couples to linger over bridges, to sit together under linden trees. Vendors turned on electric lights. Something passed between Volodya and Katya.
He stood, offering his hand. “Ana. I must leave. I will make more calls. You will come again tomorrow? Katya now will drive you home.”
She jumped up and shook his hand. “Thank you. Thank you. I don’t know how …”
“Not problem! Maybe one day you do us favor.”
She followed Katya to a sleek new car, and while she struggled with the air conditioner, Ana studied her slim legs, her pale hair that fell seductively over her face. Except for a certain toughness, she was rather beautiful.
“Your boyfriend is lucky.”
Katya laughed. “Today gangsters like rock stars. Live hard, then die. He has many girls. I must be clever, get all I can. Liquidate. Then, get out of Russia.”
“What about your family?”
“Parents die-hard Soviets. No longer do we speak. Is sad. But life is sad, no?”
As they wheeled into traffic, she beat on the dashboard, cursing the faulty air-conditioning.
“I, too, was artist, Ana. Very avant, very good. No one buying. Now I am something else. I help other artists. Buy beef, fresh vegetables, so they are never starving.”
Ana watched entranced as she steered the wheel with her knees while working a lighter and holding a cigarette. Then she stabbed a cassette into the player. Asking Ana about her life, her work, she pulled out makeup and looked in the rearview, combing her hair, touching up her lipstick, then waved her fist out the window as they highballed across an intersection.
Searching for a business card, Katya dug deep into her handbag, throwing out all her gadgets. She emptied the glove compartment, tossing things to the floor. Then she reached over the backseat into a leather briefcase. Still steering with her knees, she carefully selected a card, wrote down a number, and ceremoniously handed it to Ana. As they skidded up to Ana’s hotel, she took Ana’s hand in both of hers.
“So. Ana! I see you tomorrow, yes?”
Then she drove off, hands busy lighting another cigarette, adjusting the rearview mirror. In the twenty-minute drive across the city, Ana had not seen the woman’s hands touch the steering wheel.
———
MOSCOW SEEMED TO HAVE ENTERED A HEAT WAVE; IN AN ALMOST trancelike state Ana threw open her windows. They were still in the ebb of Russia’s “White Nights.” At eight o’clock the sky was a pale, reverberating green like the dying light of a fluorescent bulb, making everything look ill. In spite of the city’s glittering façade, the air was filthy and polluted. Her shoes were covered with grime. Her mouth had the aftertaste of metal. Worrying about the effect on her child, she ran to the bathroom and heaved.
After a while she washed her face, then lay down, exhausted. She thought of the two Russians, how they had humored her, a silly American looking for her lover. And she began to pray for him, for what they had created. She prayed herself into a half sleep. When the phone rang she jumped up as if the thing had bit her.
“Ana? Is Raiza, your guide. We have been missing you. You are coming tonight? Our famous Moscow Circus! Bus is downstairs, forty minutes. We are waiting you with ticket.”
A CROWD OF HUNDREDS UNDER THE GLITTERING BIG TOP, THEIR faces upturned to the whirling iridescence of aerialists. Dwarfs rode in on elephants. Clowns threw white mice at the audience. Ten Siberian tigers entered, roaring at the crowd. Magnificent creatures, they snarled and tossed their heads like angry princes. The audience clapped wildly.
Then a girl appeared on a trapeze, soaring alone like a wandering star. The band struck up a waltz as she swung out in a lazy swoop and hung from the bar by her arms, legs stretched in a perfect arabesque. In a return swoop, she hung by the back of her bent knees, then only by one knee. The crowd applauded, calling out her name. She pulled off a bracelet and flung it to them. She threw them kisses and soared.
Ana closed her eyes.
… A small, graceful girl, a glittering moth lifting a young man’s eyes. He reaches up, surrendering … And they are happy for a while. And then he holds her, naked, until her face becomes the snow …
‘IMI, ‘IKE, MAOPOPO
To Seek, to Sense, to Understand
AT 6:00 A.M. HER PHONE RANG. “Good morning, ANA! I hAVE waked you?”
She sat up instantly alert. “Katya. Do you have any news?”
“Not yet. But we are asking. Meanwhile, I invite you to breakfast. I come at eight o’clock.”
Ana glanced at the day’s itinerary to s
ee what she would miss. Tretaykov Galleries. The Armory Museum—Imperial thrones, Fabergé eggs. The city was offering her everything but what she needed.
In the Iobby Katya stood flirting with a ponytailed security guard wearing a flowered shirt.
“You are looking very glasnostic,” she told him. “Molodets.” Good for you.
Guiding Ana to the car, she laughed. “Such peasant. Ponytail. Aloha shirt. This look went out with Andropov.”
On New Arbat Street she took Ana to a smart café. “Boyfriend is partner here.”
Bending over an American-style breakfast, Katya wolfed down the food with an endearing greediness, then sat back and sighed.
“Sorry. As girl I grew up on potato peels.”
Feeling exhausted, Ana sipped orange juice so fresh it bit her tongue. “How do you sleep in these White Nights?”
“I never sleep. You are tired, Ana?”
Katya’s behavior was different today, her voice softer, more intimate. Yet she seemed slightly nervous, apprehensive. Later, they turned onto Old Arbat Street, as artists yawned and hung their canvases.
“No government support for them,” she said. “No official recognition. Same as beggars in the streets. What will future civilizations find when digging up Russia. Poetry? Art? Nyet. Only bones. Eight thousand square miles of human bones.”
“… And Lenin’s mummy.” Volodya came up behind them with two men he introduced as Sandro and Ulan.
They were dark and swarthy, wearing black leather. As Ana shook their hands, their bodies gave off such heat she felt she was standing beside a panting locomotive.
“Don’t mind them,” Volodya said. “Hot weather makes their thick Siberian blood boil!”
“So,” he continued, taking her arm. “We inquire up, down the street like yesterday. Then have a coffee.”
As they moved along, she had the sense of Sandro and Ulan hovering, moving to either side of her so that she felt protected, or closely observed. Several artists recognized Ana from the day before, but no one had news for her.
“It’s too late,” she whispered. “I’ve wasted too much time.”
Volodya placed his hand on her shoulder. “Ana. I ask you to be patient. Today we invite you to lunch. An interesting place …”
She shook her head. “I’ve got three days left to find him. I’m sorry, I don’t have time to linger over lunch.”
He leaned down close. “Yes. You have time … to linger over lunch. Believe me.”
His voice was different now, it frightened her. He steered her to a side street, an ancient-looking restaurant whose dining room was underground. This is where I disappear, she thought.
It was called the Palace of Small Amusements, its interior perfectly preserved from the 1940s, what Volodya called Stalin Gothic.
“His favorite restaurant.”
Through a damp vestibule, they entered a cavernous dining room. Ana looked around amazed. Everything outsized, intimidating, the place looked designed in a delirium of fever. Wide, thick stone steps without balustrades climbed the walls, going nowhere, ending abruptly. Yet farther up, a second flight of steps, again ending abruptly as if on the brink of an abyss. Ana silently stared at the dark upper gloom.
“Yes … like a dungeon,” Volodya said. “Here, while Stalin dined, he watched his henchmen torture dissidents, ‘enemies of the state.’ Men. Women. He watched them tortured to death. The place was patterned after Ivan the Terrible’s ‘Palace of Amusements’ inside the Kremlin when it was a medieval fortress.”
As the waiter showed them to a table, Ana noticed a man in a corner dressed in a tuxedo, holding a stack of menus.
“The maître,” Katya said. “A little dusty.”
Ana moved closer, thinking the figure was plaster, but very realistic-looking, except for an eerie paste-gray face and glass eyes with the look of lobotomized bliss. A musty smell hit her with such force, she cringed. A mummified human.
“One of Stalin’s henchmen. His sin? One day during torture session, his electric prod accidentally set Stalin’s tablecloth on fire. Comrade thought this was deliberate attempt on his life.”
She stood there, disbelieving.
“If we had more time, would show you what happened to Stalin’s projectionist, who accidentally ruined his favorite Charlie Chaplin film.”
They told her that for decades these grotesqueries of Stalin’s were hidden from the public in underground vaults. Now they were collector’s items, selling for thousands of dollars. Ana sat in mild shock while they ordered from a menu written in Cyrillic. Hare stuffed with bloodberries from Tashkent. Roe from the Caspian. Deer-penis wine from Lapland. Red and very tart. Waiters passed silently. Trolleys with jellied pâtés went quivering by. From somewhere the soft strings of a guitar. Ana kept glancing at the mummy holding menus, wondering what would happen next.
“Forgive our black humor,” Volodya said. “Sometimes we Russians even scare ourselves.”
“I’m not really shocked,” she said. “That is … I’ve been in total shock since I arrived.”
“Very different from your United States, no?”
She looked round the table. “I don’t know the United States. I’d never been out of my islands till I got on that plane to come and look for Niki.”
“Not possible!” Katya said. “You don’t know Las Vegas? Miami?”
She shook her head.
“You did this just for Niki?”
“Yes.”
“My God. Volodya, tell her.”
“Shut up.” He leaned forward, refilling glasses.
“Tell me what? Why did you bring me here?”
“We know the owner. A safe place to talk.”
Ana pulled her wallet from her handbag. “Here. It’s all I have, maybe $400 American, $300 left in traveler’s checks and rubles. Take it. Please, tell me what you know.”
“Put it away. And listen. Your Niki … is okay. We are his friends. He is okay.”
She let out a moan.
“Calm down. We need you to be calm.”
Katya reached across the table, taking Ana’s wrist. “Ana. It is very serious. Yesterday we were not being sure of you. We show Polaroid pictures to Niki. He hear your voice on minirecorder. He is shocked. He wept. That you have come for him. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That is my Ana.’ ”
She tried to breathe evenly. “I need to see him … to talk to him.”
“There is trouble,” Volodya said. “May be dangerous for him. Officials promise him interviews with high-positioned scientists now sick from radiation. But no one will ever interview these men. World will never see them.”
While he talked Sandro and Ulan carefully watched the to-and-fro of waiters.
“Was a ploy. To get him back here with his tapes. No one, Yeltsin, future leaders, no one, wants world to see what Russian government did to own people. If such tapes are shown, world will see Russia as a joke. We already nuked ourselves!”
Ana looked from one to the other. “What happened to Niki?”
“There were meetings. They picked his brain about sickness and pollution in Pacific, in United States, wherever he shot films. They want to see all footage of such films. Good propaganda against U.S. Niki hid them, would not tell where. They said ‘Okay, you keep your word, we keep our word. We make exchange. You do interviews with scientists, then after, you show us tapes you have made, maybe give us copies for archives. They set up interviews. Niki never arrive. Afraid is trap to arrest him. Disappear him.”
Ana shook her head. “He doesn’t need what he brought back. He left copies of those tapes in Honolulu. Why didn’t he turn them over and get out?”
Volodya smiled. “Ana. Remember, this is Russia. Here, logic does not apply.”
“You understand?” Katya said. “Many journalists, cameramen now recording Russia’s devastation. Leaders telling them shut up. Want to keep our filthy history secret. So. They are rounding up such people.”
“You mean, they’re being shot.”
“Not so dramatic. Gulags are finished, yes. But we still have ‘penal colonies.’ Real nightmare prisons. Someone like Niki, little bit known, they would make of him example. Give him four-five years in prison. So he stop making films.”
Ana shook her head. “He would not survive four years in prison. He would die.”
“Exactly. So he is in hiding. Not knowing what to do.”
“Please. Let me see him,” she whispered.
“Wait. And listen. They come to Old Arbat looking for him. Posing as sympathetics, network officials offering to help him air such documentaries on TV. They are all assholes. ‘Uncles.’ ”
Katya interrupted. “Then, last week, different type comes. American. Clean-cut. He, too, is looking for Nikolai Volenko. Man named Eric Dancer.”
Ana sat back, letting the name resonate.
“This Dancer says he carries letter from American Consulate inviting Niki to America, to make his films. He says there is sponsor for him, someone guaranteeing Niki’s income. How do we know this man is not working with the ‘uncles’?”
One of the Siberians stood and stretched, then walked over to the draped vestibule, looking left and right.
“I know who he is.”
They didn’t seem to hear her.
Volodya continued. “I ask this American why such a favor for Volenko, who I pretend ‘I never heard of.’ He tells me is personal matter. Of the heart. ‘Suppose,’ I say, ‘this man you seek is not allowed to leave Russia, is accused of embarrassing government with “shocking” documentary films?’ ”
He shook his head and smiled. “This Dancer then names twelve officials, bureaucrats, whose signatures he can buy with blat. Illegal payoff. Real opportunistic shits. He tells me he can buy good passport and visa with such signatures. Can do it very fast.”
What he said next jolted Ana halfway to her feet.
“He said if he could find Volenko, could have him on plane for U.S. in twelve hours.”
Katya gently pushed Ana back into her chair. “He gave us card, but we are still not knowing who he is. Even Niki not knowing who he is. So we play dumb, avoiding him. Then this week, you come.”
House of Many Gods Page 33