Fulcrum

by Alexander Mikhaylovich Zuyev

  I saw that there was no sense arguing with a woman like this. It was clear from the determined glint in her eye that the opulent wedding reception of their oldest daughter to a successful fighter pilot would be Yevgenia Vasilyevna’s crowning achievement at Tskhakaya; they could depart for Syria at a high point, the perfect Air Force family.

  I was already deeply worried about the expense of all this empty ceremony, and had to hold back from speaking my mind. The Baglais’ apartment gave me some indication of the kind of family I was joining. They had inherited the flat from the former division commander, General Anosov, who had “hijacked” an additional room from the next-door unit by ripping down a wall when the other apartment was temporarily empty. Jana’s mother boasted of Anosov’s clever ploy, oblivious to the hardship it placed on their neighbors, a hapless maintenance captain and his wife who had to share a small room with two children, while the Baglais enjoyed the luxury of a storage room.

  With a sinking feeling, I suddenly knew that this spacious apartment and the shelves of decorative books epitomized the Baglais’ heartless materialism. Jana and my wedding would be just another decoration; acquiring an Air Force captain with a promising career would be one more enviable possession.

  This was not a good way to begin married life.

  But I had no choice in the matter. The wedding date was set for August 15, 1987, and the ceremony would be in the big hall of the ZAGS State Wedding Palace in the city. Colonel Baglai was inviting friends and colleagues from all over the military district and from several Soviet bases in eastern Europe. Jana’s mother gave her a list of wedding clothes. It was my responsibility to locate these scarce items and, of course, to pay for them.

  Naturally the Voyentorg had nothing we could use. They could hardly provide milk and eggs, so it was unrealistic to imagine they stocked full-length wedding gowns with lace veils, silk stockings, or satin shoes.

  Instead, I turned to my resourceful Georgian friend, Malhaz. He ran an unofficial private shop, among other profitable enterprises. His small store was stacked with imported Dresden china, Polish and Romanian sport clothes, and a good collection of Japanese electronics and videocassettes. We had become friends the year before, when I greeted him in the shop with the formal Georgian salutation, “Gamargoba,” a courtesy few Russian soldiers ever learned.

  When I had asked Malhaz how he managed to obtain all the import permits for his rich selection of goods, he’d replied silently with a gold-toothed grin, rubbing his right index finger and thumb together briskly. There was a large framed photo of Gorbachev prominently displayed on his wall. Then he had added: “Our Party leaders are very reasonable men.” Under Gorbachev a man like Malhaz got along “like a cheese rolling over in sour cream,” as the old Russian saying went.

  A man like Malhaz probably had to pay some of his profits under the table to local Party officials. I was only slightly surprised at the admission. With glasnost, news of such “Socialist enterprise” arrangements was spreading. After I got to know Malhaz better, he dropped his pretenses and referred to his local Party patrons simply as “the Mafia.” At the time, I had thought this was a rather colorful aspect of the irrepressible Georgian character.

  Malhaz picked us up in his shiny new Volga sedan the next afternoon and drove us to a seemingly run-down industrial quarter of the city. We stopped on a muddy lane past the railway switchyards, and he led us to a nondescript concrete-block warehouse. Inside the rusty steel door, we found an incredible stockpile of luxury goods. Half the warehouse was a “special” clothing store, owned and managed by two of Malhaz’s smiling relatives. There were racks of imported suits and dresses, piles of authentic American blue jeans, and British Reebok shoes. On the other side of the aisle, there were cases of canned Hungarian goulash and German chicken. Several locked glass display cases held perfume, imported televisions, and Japanese stereo sets.

  Jana was stunned. I was impressed, but tried not to show it because I hoped to drive a reasonable bargain on anything we bought. As it turned out, I didn’t have to. The owner took us to a rack of stylish East German wedding dresses fringed with delicate lace. The first one he selected fit Jana perfectly. The smiling Georgian businessman threw in a silk floral wreath with the price of the dress, only 132 rubles.

  The next day Malhaz took us to a similar private warehouse, this one near the smelly State stockyards. But the goods inside were unaffected by the odor of sheep and cattle. Jana selected white satin wedding shoes with stylish high heels, a luxury never seen in the Voyentorg. All told, her wedding dress, shoes and an attractive sundress with matching jacket for the honeymoon cost me less than 300 rubles. Malhaz was a genius.

  “Perestroika,” he said, “is very good for business.”

  That weekend Colonel Vladimir Prozukhin, the deputy division commander for political administration, paid a call on the Baglais while I was at their apartment. As chief zampolit, Prozukhin had more than a personal interest in our wedding. The marriage of a reasonably presentable and successful young fighter pilot to the beautiful daughter of a senior Air Force officer gave Prozukhin the chance to promote the virtues of Socialist morality in the Soviet military. And the occasion also presented him the opportunity to win favor with the pro-Gorbachev reformers in the Ministry of Defense. He planned to do so by staging a “sober” wedding reception at which no alcohol would be served.

  “This is a great opportunity, Alexander Vasilyevich,” Prozukhin told Jana’s father, then turned to me. “Think of the example this would set, not only in the division but in the entire Air Force.”

  He went on to explain that he could arrange a special photo feature in Aviation and Cosmonautics. It would be a great propaganda victory in Gorbachev’s sputtering anti-alcohol campaign, Prozukhin implied. If a MiG-29 pilot and his virile comrades drank only tea and mineral water at the wedding, Prozukhin argued, we would set a “splendid example” that would not go unnoticed in Moscow. Naturally Prozukhin’s role in the affair would not go unnoticed either.

  This time I didn’t defer to Colonel Baglai before announcing my true feelings. “No,” I blurted out. “Absolutely not, Comrade Colonel, I would like to have spirits at my wedding party.”

  Jana’s father nodded emphatically. He was known as a man who liked his brandy. “Out of the question, Prozukhin,” he said.

  As things turned out, I wish I would have accepted this sycophant Prozukhin’s offer.

  The following weeks were hectic. I flew during the day. At night and on weekends, I worked — slaved was more like it — on the tiny apartment the housing office had assigned me as a wedding present. The place was a shambles; the window with broken panes was jammed shut and the intact window would not open. Half the plaster had fallen down. The toilet backed up when it did flush, which was sporadic at best. And the electric wiring was like an elaborate booby trap. Slowly I made progress. But these home improvements were expensive. Even with Malhaz helping, the necessary plumbing, carpentry, and electrical supplies were damned expensive and difficult to find. I worked “like an Ethiopian,” as in the derisive Russian adage, and spent several hundred rubles just to make the apartment habitable. And I hadn’t even started looking for furniture.

  “That, my friend,” Malhaz warned, “will be more difficult still.”

  Then Colonel Baglai broke the cheery news on the cost of the wedding reception. There would be over 120 guests invited to the officers’ dining room. What with food, prezanty for the kitchen and serving staff, a stereo discotheque for music, and an ample supply of alcohol, my share of the expenses would be two thousand rubles. He may as well have hit me in the face with both fists. When I handed over the thick packet of bank notes, I had less than eight hundred rubles left in my savings account.

  But Colonel Baglai assured me we were getting high quality at a bargain price. He had an Osobist friend at Vaziani who had a colleague in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where the State brandy factory was located. Baglai ordered forty liters of the best five-sta
r Armenian cognac to be delivered for the reception.

  “Don’t worry,” he assured me, “we won’t drink that much and you and I can split what’s left.”

  By ordering in this volume, he explained, we were getting a bargain price. He had a point. Such high-quality Armenian cognac was extremely valuable. And by ordering through a KGB connection, we were buying at cost.

  “Actually,” Jana’s father explained, smiling like a rug merchant in the bazaar, “we’re getting it well below cost.”

  He elaborated. Apparently one of the plant foremen had constructed an actual secret pipeline directly from the aging room of the factory to a shed in the backyard of his small house just outside the distillery walls. While the casks were being filled for the aging process, a steady stream of this expensive brandy was trickling unnoticed through a copper pipe, across the factory grounds, through the wall, and into a collection vat. The man paid off the KGB with a portion of his product and sold the rest. No wonder good Armenian brandy was hard to find north of the Caucasus.

  When I tallied up my savings account book that night, I also estimated that I would have at least five liters of good cognac left over to sell after the wedding, which might fetch forty or fifty rubles each. At least that would be some compensation.

  My relations with the Baglai family remained cool, at best. After the first, formal visit to their apartment to discuss the wedding plans, I returned several times. These visits certainly were not formal occasions. But they were revealing of the family’s character. One day Jana’s mother asked if I was hungry, then simply said, “There’s food if you want to eat.”

  She then returned from the kitchen with a pot of macaroni, slapped it down on the table, and proceeded to spread newspaper as a tablecloth. I was shocked. Even the bachelor officer pilots I had roomed with over the years had better manners than this. At first I thought she was staging some elaborate joke. But then I realized I was expected to eat this way. I politely declined.

  A few minutes later Jana’s sister Marina and her little brother came home and went directly to the kitchen stove to eat standing there, spooning the food right from the same greasy pot Jana’s mother had presented me. Clearly that was their habitual practice. So much for close family life.

  I could have dismissed these quirks as a minor irritation, but I knew they typified the home that had shaped Jana’s character. If a family didn’t care about properly forming their children’s manners and public behavior, what did they care about? I remembered Jana’s father’s action after the Chernobyl disaster. His calling a colleague in the Ukraine to make certain there was no problem with a perfunctory gesture. No father who loved his daughter would have accepted this.

  A few nights later I had to wait at the Baglais’ apartment quite late because they had a phone and I was trying to get through to my mother at the Pearl Hotel in Sochi to verify some details of the wedding. Jana’s mother didn’t even offer me a cup of tea. She merely pointed to the couch, then tottered off to bed herself. I lay there for hours trying to get comfortable without a pillow, brooding on the irrevocable step I was about to take.

  Then, two days later, I had a real blowup with Jana. I had finally gotten our apartment repaired and cleaned up. Although it was sparsely furnished, the walls were intact and nicely papered and everything was clean. While I was flying, Jana came over to spend the day to get ready for the Air Force Day dance that evening, which was going to be a kind of unofficial engagement party. When I got back from the base, it looked like the apartment had been ransacked. There were wet towels strewn on the bathroom floor, half-eaten plates of food on the floor of the small living room, and the kitchen was filthy. But Jana looked great, well scrubbed, her hair in long, loose curls, and her sleeveless summer dress beautifully pressed. She was ready to go to the dance.

  I looked around the apartment and shook my head. She knew I had scrubbed the accumulated filth of years off the kitchen walls and tile floor, yet she had carelessly spilled food and tea and not even bothered to wipe up the mess.

  “Hurry, Sasha,” she said. “We don’t want to be late.”

  I glared at her. “You go ahead without me.”

  Her young face clouded. She was genuinely confused. “Why, Sasha?”

  I clenched my teeth to keep from shouting. It had been a long day. “I have to clean up this apartment.”

  She came back around eleven, a few minutes after I had finally wrung out the mop and put away the broom. I didn’t hesitate. “Jana,” I said, “I think we should wait. I think we should postpone the wedding at least one year.”

  Her lovely, suntanned face lost its color. “Why?” she gasped.

  “I don’t think you’re ready to be married.”

  Finally she realized what had happened. She came and sobbed on my chest. “Oh, Sasha,” she moaned, “I’m so sorry…”

  But I remained noncommittal, saying only that I needed time to consider the matter of our engagement. Because I was still so angry, it wasn’t wise to keep talking. Maybe her sloppiness had just been a fluke, or perhaps it was a clear indication that she was impossibly self-centered. I was torn between desire for this beautiful young girl and a nagging inner voice that told me we were completely unsuited for each other.

  When my mother returned from her vacation on the Black Sea on August 13, she still seemed tired and strangely subdued, although Misha was deeply suntanned and merry. On an impulse, I told her of the fight with Jana, then expressed my revulsion for the Baglai family. “I want to just cancel the whole thing,” I finally admitted.

  Mother was standing at the window, fingering the clean gauze curtains I’d hung there. Her face was strained. “No, Sasha,” she whispered. “We can’t have another canceled wedding.” She reminded me of the embarrassing uproar when I had spurned the blatantly engineered “engagement” with Svetlana in 1983.

  “Sasha,” she said, turning to face me, “you can’t escape this time. The plans have gone too far. Be patient. Jana is young and her parents are leaving. You can change her.”

  I remained silent for a moment. Maybe she was right. Finally I nodded agreement.

  The wedding was certainly everything the Baglai family wanted. Saturday, August 15, was a rainy southern day, with drizzle and low overcast. Colonel Baglai’s colleagues provided the shiny Volga and Skoda sedans for the entourage. The cars were decorated with bright balloons, and everyone was smiling. Jana looked fantastic in her lace wedding dress, which her mother brazenly implied she had selected.

  In the grand hall of the ZAGS State Wedding Palace, the woman registrar solemnly read the official vows, then pronounced us husband and wife, “in the name of the Soviet people and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” When I kissed Jana, I looked up at the huge realistic mural on the wall above, the Ideal Socialist Family, handsome, burly husband, demure wife, and radiant blond children, all nicely dressed, surrounded by the bounty of the Workers’ Paradise. Turning, I faced Jana’s own, somewhat less than ideal family. They looked plump and content, as if they had just eaten a satisfying meal. It was not as if they had gained a son, but that they had just managed to legally abandon the responsibility for their oldest daughter. The bust of Lenin gazed down on us, silent and aloof.

  The motorcade to the base was boisterous, even by Georgian standards. The citizens of Tskhakaya, like all Georgians, knew much more about the Russians in the military than we knew about them. They always crowded the streets when a senior officer’s family held a wedding, as if to demonstrate their deep affection for their protectors. By tradition, the crowds would block the road until the best man-my squadron mate, Sergei Rastvorov- showered the kids with handfuls of kopeks and hard candy.

  The staff of the officers’ dining room had done their best to provide a true banquet for the deputy division commander. I certainly couldn’t complain about the quality of the food, the wine, or naturally, the brandy. Even the DJ who ran the stereo discotheque had some brand-new Western music.

  But our wedd
ing night was grim. Jana and I counted the pitiful contents of the gift envelopes, less than eight hundred rubles, not even enough to buy a proper set of dishes. So much for the presents that Jana’s father had assured me would replenish my empty savings account. One of the deputy regimental commanders had set the tone by presenting his own lavish gift: a book bound in imitation leather with thirty or so color pictures of antique china and place settings at the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. It was the kind of giveaway volume presented as tokens to visiting official delegations, handsome but virtually worthless. Jana and I did not need pictures of plates and serving bowls, we needed the actual items.

  Some guests had given us five single-ruble notes, no more. But they certainly hadn’t held back at the buffet table or the bar. And I had seen Jana’s father slipping full bottles of the precious cognac to the sleek clutch of senior men from military district headquarters. This expensive party was just a way to cement his blat connected to these big shots.

  “Jana,” I said, shaking my head, “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to skip our honeymoon.”

  She nodded soberly, also stunned by the poor selection of presents. “I know,” she whispered.

  Late that night I lay on our improvised wedding bed-two soldiers’ cots I had lashed together-watching the breeze billow the moonlit curtains. Somehow I still had to find the money to furnish this apartment.

  The week before Jana was scheduled to return to the university in Kiev, she finally transferred all of her belongings to our apartment from her parents’ flat. Helping her unpack, I noticed she had no winter clothes.

  “Where are your boots and your heavy coat?”

  “Oh,” she said, “Mother kept them for Marina. I’ll need money to buy new things.”

  By the time we finished yet another shopping spree through Malhaz’s warehouse, my savings account was completely empty. For the first time in my life, I had to borrow money from friends. It was a disgusting experience.