by Val M Karren
“So, if I am going to do my own research here locally, and put a provincial spin on it, I need to locate a little shark, even a petty shark who is trying to become a bigger shark — you know shark eat shark, and who is trying to make the next step up by trying to ingratiate himself with the politicians and business class, or trying to become an elected official himself.”
Dean Karamzin scratched his face somewhat dumbfounded and shocked with no words.
“You learned all this in my library?” He asked again with a befuddled expression I had never seen on his face before.
“Yes, and more,” and sat tight lipped and waited.
The dean leaned back in his chair and whistled a low thoughtful whistle, which to do indoors in Russia is akin to throwing money, but perhaps in this case, caution, right out the window. He sat up straight in his chair, leaning over his desk and looked me straight in the eyes and asked, “Will you be attending the university event at night club tomorrow night?” he asked, assuming I would attend.
“Yes, why?” I inquired.
“Keep your eyes open there and come see me on Monday after our history lecture.”
“Why, what am I looking for?” I asked still wound up and on high receive.
“How did you say it? A small shark who is swimming with some big daddies…,” the Dean smiled a mysterious smile.
“Say what? You’re sending me into the shark tank to take photographs?” I was quickly sobering up.
“I would leave the camera at home, but certainly go and take mental notes. We’ll talk in depth about it and I’ll fill in the details that you haven’t already figured out. You’re a sharp student. I think you’ll be able to figure it all out rather quickly.”
He stood up to bid me goodbye. We shook hands over his desk as the telephone there started to buzz. He shouted “Halloah” into the handset as I pulled the door carefully closed behind me. The man was always in demand.
As I emerged from the dark tunnel from the inner courtyard on to the street in front of the history faculty the sky was surprisingly bright and blue and the air was…warm! I stopped in my tracks and looked about to make sure I was really on Minin Square. Somehow, I had missed the fact that almost all the snow on the pavements and street had melted away into the gutters and sewers. What used to be fields of dirty grey snow were now pavements, muddy flower beds and dark green, trampled grass.
A warm wind from the south had come up the river the night before and the early afternoon was bright, the mercury had risen to six degrees on the digital thermometer on the front of the Sberbank branch at the bottom of Pokrovka. I wandered in wonder like a man who had just regained his vision after months of blindness, in awe of the colors that the sunlight contained. What was dirty and grey was now all shades and subtitles of red, blue and yellow. A freshly washed candy-apple red Volkswagen Passat with clean alloy rims passed in front of me as I waited under the shadow of the kremlin wall to cross the street. How it danced, how it glided in slow motion over the asphalt, quiet, luxurious! I removed my wool overcoat to feel the sunshine.
As I strolled onto Pokrovka an odd sensation overcame me. Liberated from the fur shapka and the wool overcoat with the sunshine on my face I turned my green felt cap backwards, put a pen behind my ear and in just my blazer for warmth bulldozed my way up through the shopping throngs to the snack bar and movie theatre where I met Hans to take in a film at the Kino-house.
I was told several times that when I was dressed in my own winter coat, black mink hat and boots that I surprisingly resembled Mikhail Gorbechev in his own winter get-up. For me these types of comments and observations were as good as gold in my quest to blend in and be considered as just part of the scenery. I had never before tried to make a scene or reveal myself to a group that I was anything but Russian. The wrong comment though at the wrong moment can create a reaction deep down inside, an irrational panic with the possibility that perhaps one has come too close to the edge of “going native” and perhaps have become too much like the locals.
After months of hard studying and research, and especially after the last month of being a hermit in the library, today with the sun on my back I needed to break free from being Russian for the afternoon. As I moved purposefully up Pokrovka I looked straight ahead, not at the ground in front of my feet like the throngs. I looked people in the eyes and smiled and even waved at a few particularly pretty girls who had also shed the heavy coats and bulky snow boots. They looked better than ever today; tall lean, shapely with bright smiles! I refused to speak Russian with the teller behind the window at the currency exchange bureau as I exchanged forty dollars for rubles. A number of the street vendors tried their best to speak broken English with me, one of them tried to communicate with me in German, but I just blinked at him incredulously. I bought a bottle of Pepsi and drank it as I walked, just like in the TV commercials with my head tipped way back and the bottle straight up in the air, guzzling the soda-pop in one breath.
I became immediately self-conscious of my bravado and remembered with a start and a shock that just a month earlier that I had run through the snow away from corrupt cops and gangsters who knew that I had seen their handiwork. Despite the sun and blue sky, I put my coat and scarf on again and resumed the afternoon as a local face. I wondered if Yulia was ready to speak to me again. I needed to be more careful.
10. The Monastery
On Saturday evening, after a day of sleeping-in, watching the TV, and fried chicken, Hans and I put on our cleanest casuals and ventured out to the upper embankment to the night club called The Monastery for what had been hyped up to be one of the best events for the University students for a number of years already. Everybody was excited. Big act names from Moscow and St. Petersburg were usually on the stage; groups or artists that would otherwise never perform in the provinces.
Neither Hans nor I had been to the club yet and so it took us a bit of looking to find the right street. It wasn’t where I had imagined it would be from the descriptions of the other students.
“Any idea why it’s called the The Monastery, Hans?” I puzzled.
“No, because I hope zat zere vill be lots of girlz zhere. No girlz? No Hans!” he proclaimed with a put-on over-zealous German accent.
I stood still to click my heels in and shouted his proclamation to all the passersby. “Achtung! Keine Meidschen, Keine Hans!”
“I did not know that you can speak German, Peter,” he looked so shocked and surprised.
“Eh! A little bit of this, a little bit of that,” I replied shrugging my shoulders.
As we were coming to the end of the street and very near the edge of the bluff overlooking the Volga there was nothing to see but a large old church with three green domes sitting in a church yard surrounded with several outbuildings. There was still some snow in the shade of the trees as the twilight turned to dusk.
“That can’t be it, can it?” we asked each other simultaneously and then laughed at ourselves.
Then a door to the church opened and some stage hands dressed in black moved some crates into the building. Out of the door poured a stream of deep electronic bass drum thuds and other sounds of electronic dance music. As we approached we could hear the music coming from inside the church and heard a group milling out behind in a courtyard between the chapel and the outbuildings. Yes, this was the place.
“Now I know why it’s called The Monastery,” Hans said slapping me in the chest with a backhand.
“This can’t be real! This is wrong on so many levels,” I stood mute and glued to my place on the ground looking around with disgust and disapproval.
Throughout the church yard were parked several very gaudy automobiles, with their drivers milling around smoking, some wiping mud and dust off of fenders and doors with damp rags. The cars were mostly German with a long, chunky Mercedes being the model of choice from different years. There were some older BMW 5 series with random body damage in an unfinished state of repair, but also what looked to be there in the dark
, a pristine stretch 7 series BMW with all the trimmings, its parking lights on. Its paint shined even in the dark. There were some Range Rovers and other luxury sport utility trucks, but they looked Asian, not European. The drivers were dressed like models from a BOSS commercial with the hair to match. These were no sloughs taking on a driving job at night. They looked more like bodyguards the closer I tried not to look. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out they were all armed, packing heat of one sort or another in a belt or a holster under the arm, as many of the Mercedes were the bullet-proof kind. The license plates were all from Moscow. As I took all this in, I remembered the instructions of the Dean on Friday afternoon, “keep your eyes open….” A little shark was holding an open house for all to see.
Hans and I made our way to the courtyard where the students were gathering under a suspended awning with heat lamps. There were stand tables where drinks were being served for the reception. As we came closer a bouncer appeared from the shadows and asked to see our student cards. With no further questions, we joined the reception and were served drinks of our choice by skinny waitresses in black short skirts and heels as tall as their own tibulas were long, with hair pulled back into a tight, slick ponytail. They walked like they were on stilts made of toothpicks.
The group was already near one hundred, maybe more. Many of the faces I recognized but certainly not by how they were dressed. Being used to seeing them in bulky sweaters, scarves and boots, tussled hair in the thralls of winter weather, I barely recognized many of them as they looked so formal and professional with little black dresses or dark suits on, hair beautifully done in feminine curls or slicked back with oil. The atmosphere was light, but also felt false. These didn’t look like the same people I studied with, as if they were actors on a set. The night was getting a bit cold, even under the awning and heat lamps. This was still Russia and it wasn’t April yet!
After a short speech by somebody I didn’t recognize from the university’s administration, thanking this person and that, a short, stocky man dressed in a very fine suit and shoes, head shaved smooth, was introduced: Mr. P., the proprietor of The Monastery and tonight’s host. A round of polite applause came up from the crowd. I recognized him immediately.
“Ladies and Gents, I welcome you to The Monastery as my guests tonight. You are very welcome. Please come and dance and drink with me and my friends and none of you can go home earlier than three o’clock! Your exams are done. You have no lessons to finish before Monday. Tonight, we have a lot of ********** fun!” A round of barbaric cheers swelled up from the crowd of students, like heathens who had just been given the order to fall on their foes and to pull them from limb to limb until the sun came up.
With the host leading the chorus, the crowd chanted, “one…two…three!” On three, the doors of the chapel-club were pulled open by thuggish bouncers in gaudy, what looked to be iridescent suits that shimmered in the disco lights like in some sort of perverted theme park way. The sight was so surreal and unexpected that I laughed out loud at the sheer folly of what seemed to be the purposefully overdone effects. There was no was frivolity in this pageant. Everybody was taking themselves very seriously, almost solemnly, as the students rushed in to their own Pleasure Island, for a night of uninhibited, unsupervised vice.
The interior of the chapel had not been renovated much at all. The ceiling paintings were still visible, in poor repair after seventy-five years of communism’s neglect, but even in the black lights of the disco floor one could see the saints and patriarchs looking down giving a scornful scowl at the revelers below. There was in the center of the church, directly under the church’s central dome which is crowned with three onion shaped copulas, the DJ had set up his tools of the trade. The crowd was already encircling the raised stage set up with mixing tables and blaring speakers, and bobbing up and down. Behind the stage into the apse where an altar would have been, another stage was ready for a live performance of a mystery guest who had yet to be announced. It was a tradition to leave that a secret until performance time leaving the guests in suspense until the last minute. The bars were set up in the side aisles and the music worshipers were left to dance and frolic in the space where the pews for the faithful had once stood now void of prayer books and sacraments. I didn’t even want to know what happened inside the confessionals.
As I pushed my way through the crowd from the narthex into the nave I bumped into Pasha’s back and pushed him into Marina who was already dancing up a small storm. When I turned to apologize to Pasha for having bumped into him and he recognized my face, his lit up as well as Marina’s and we laughed off the collision in the dark. After some spoken greetings Marina took my hand and said that she would like to introduce me to somebody. I let her guide me through the crowd to one of the side chapels which had been filled with tables and benches along the curved walls. Sitting at these tables, drinking their drinks surrounded by very well-dressed women of exceptional figures and faces, were undoubtedly the owners of the fleet of luxury cars parked in the church yard. Marina, almost skipping through the crowd brought me directly to the host of the night, Mr. P., and introduced me as her ‘American friend.”
In the split second that I realized who I was standing with and just about to shake hands, I remembered the fury in his black eyes I had seen that frightening evening at his restaurant on Valentine’s Day. Not being able to help myself when I came face to face with him again I looked again into his eyes. This time there was no blackness, just a glazed over blurry eyeball. He was already drunk. The relief quickly spread through my system.
“Very pleased. You are very welcome tonight. You are a student in Nizhniy?” Mr. P. asked.
“Yes, I study with Dean Karamzin,” I replied politely
“Ah, my good friend….how is Roman Sergeiyevich?" he inquired.
“He is certainly healthy!” I informed him.
“You are American? You speak very good Russian,” he said over-complimenting me as drunks regularly do.
“Thank you, I have studied it for years,” I informed him.
Turning to his comrades in crime still sitting at the table and yelling louder than needed.
“Guys, we have a spy with us tonight from USA. Maybe he is FBI or CIA?"
Marina came to my defense with a pout at Mr. P., “Da Nyet, Peter is a very good boy! Very kind!”
“Maybe we talk later together, Peter. Maybe you come see me another day for lunch and you can tell me about yourself, why you come to Russia,” Mr. P. proposed.
“That would be …cool,” was my purposefully dumbed down answer.
We clasped hands in a brutish manner, like how I imagine kick-boxers greet each other, but we didn’t shake, just slapped.
Mr. P. turned back to his guests and I quickly disappeared into the crowd with Marina, before Mr. P’s brain cells, slowed by alcohol, made the connection with me and where I’d been seen earlier.
After we were a safe distance to be out of sight, I leaned down to Marina’s ear to ask, “How do you know Mr. P?”
“He is friend of my uncle. They do biznis together,” she happily chirped flipping her head and hair to the techno beats.
“Really? Is this what we call ‘biznis' in Russia?” I asked ironically indicating everything unholy going on around us in a house of worship.
“Da, Nyet, Peter. He runs private ‘biznises’ in Nizhniy. Restaurants, shops, kiosks. He buys and sells lots of import products from Germany and Korea, you know, cars and T.V.’s,” she told me.
“Yes, I’ll bet he buys and sells the girls too from the looks of it. What else does he import? Anything from Afghanistan or Columbia?” I was sarcastic bordering on a bit angry.
“I don’t know what you are talking about…,” Marina looked confused.
Just then I saw a very skanky-looking, overdone young woman in fish net stockings and heels pull a young man into the confessional booth by his tie and pull the door closed behind her. His friends stood in the corner gawking and jabbing each o
ther, already half drunk. Were they seeking privacy for blowing a line of cocaine or was she providing another service? I stepped outside to the courtyard to get some air after my unexpected and undesired brush with the past I was trying to avoid. The heat lamps were still warm and a number of students were outside smoking cigarettes in the cold, hanging around the stand tables in groups of two and three. A familiar voice called to me.
“Peter. Hello. Come join us.” An acquaintance of mine from the English club, Olya, was summoning me to her table and offered me a cigarette. I politely refused with an upheld hand of temperance.
“Olya, I hardly recognized you dressed all fancy,” I commented with a smile and an intended compliment as she looked very attractive.
Olya was an interesting young lady who I had become acquainted with through the English club. She seemed a bit older than the other students and not an academic at all. She seemed to have more street smarts than book smarts. She wasn’t in any of my other lectures and I had never seen her anywhere but at the English club, but she wasn’t the only one who fell into that category. The university had a wide range of schools under its umbrella. Even though I had never asked her what she studied, apart from English, I had figured that she was in an engineering focus of some sort, being more practical than studious.
As I approached the table to stand opposite Olya, her friend gave me a polite smile, and touching Olya’s arm took her leave and went back into the church as she extinguished her cigarette in the ash tray on the table, dropping ashes on the deep purple velvet table wrap. When we were alone Olya replied, “You didn’t recognize me? It is me who did not recognize you yesterday on Prokovka.”
“Oh, I didn’t even see you yesterday. I’m sorry I didn’t notice you,” I apologized.
“That’s okay. You did not see me on the street. It was many moments before I recognized you, dressed in the funny way, and then you were very far away to call to you. You looked different,” she mentioned.