by Val M Karren
“Hmmm…yes, Friday afternoon I had a bit of a, well, let’s just say I had to stop being Russian for an afternoon, and be more myself. With my exams done and my research paper approved and with the good weather,” I accentuated the good weather, “I just felt like running through a grassy park and kissing all the pretty girls.”
Olya laughed “You are a funny boy, Peter.”
“And you are a mysterious girl, Olya,” I replied with a mysterious voice.
“Mysterious? What means mysterious?” she asked for translation.
“In Russian?” I offered.
“No, explain me in English, please, for practice,” she requested.
“It means I don’t know very much about you, but yet you seem to be somebody that knows a lot but never says anything about what you know. You keep secrets, maybe,” I offered.
“Hmmm, very good thoughts about me,” she said pensively.
“So, do you study somewhere on Pokrovka? I didn’t know there were university buildings on that street,” I was sincerely interested.
“No, I was working,” she replied shortly.
“Working? I didn’t think students were allowed to have jobs. Oh, are you working in a private shop there on the street?” I was excited to meet somebody who worked in one of the newly privatized retails shops.
“No, I was …,” she tried to explain before I stopped her short.
“Let me guess, you selling your rubbish at the flea market in front of the creative arts museum?” I was teasing her.
At this remark, she became very perturbed and denied being a gypsy girl in some very unambiguous and un-ladylike terms.
“Then tell me what you do. Maybe I could stop by on some days and say hello while you’re working,” I suggested.
“That would not be possible,” she answered quickly and resolutely.
“Why not? I could always buy something from you,” I proposed.
“No, it’s not like that,” she turned and looked behind her and continued in a hushed voice “Can you keep a secret?”
“Secrets are dangerous things to have in Russia, I understand,” I whispered back.
“Can you keep a secret?” she asked again emphatically raising the tone of her hushed voice.
“Yes, yes, I can keep a secret,” I mumbled back. I wondered if she was drunk already too.
“I work in the TT building at the top of Pokrovka,” she revealed with shifting eyes.
“Really? I’ve been in there a few times to call my mother in the USA. What do you do there?” I asked naively.
She switched into Russian to quickly explain her vocation “I’m not a telephone operator Peter, I work for the FSB. l listen to telephone calls in and out of the city,” she said looking over my shoulder this time.
I found this such a preposterous idea that I laughed out loud a deep belly laugh and couldn’t stop for a few moments. When I finally got my composure back I started poking fun at her.
“Did you hear my last call to my mother? That was a funny conversation!”
“Nyet, but I know somebody listened and there is a transcript of that call. All foreigners are recorded and reviewed, and especially the Americans are watched very carefully,” she stressed the word ‘especially.’
“Well, y’all must not be doing a very good job because there is definitely nobody watching me, except for maybe Valentina Petronva,” I said in English in a lazy, casual way. I thought for a few seconds, but then swatted this idea out of the air. “Naah, I hardly even talk to her anymore.”
“No, I know you are watched and they must do good job if you are not knowing you are being listened to and watched,” Olya affirmed.
“C’mon. That’s all in the past now. The communists are all gone now. Nobody’s watching me or listening to my phone calls,” I replied again in English.
“Peter, what do you think happened to KGB on the day Soviet Union went away? Do you think they go to home and said “Hey, dorogaya maya, communist party collapsed today, so now we are all good guys and they don’t need me anymore?” You don’t think new Russian government don’t have need for secret police? You think that all departments of KGB just stopped existing? They changed the name to FSB and everybody keep their jobs. That’s it. We do the same thing, Peter. Listen, I like you. You are a nice guy and you like living in Russia. You go to classes, you study a lot, you aren’t involved with the mafia — well maybe tonight you are — and you don’t call anybody but your mother, but be careful who you talk to, what you say, what you do. You don’t want anybody to misunderstand you,” her tone was professional, not drunk.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” I asked flabbergasted.
“Yes, and you promised to keep a secret,” she smiled and took a sip of her cocktail.
“Well, I didn’t think it would be that kind of secret. Okay, if you really are who you say you are, what was the last conversation you listened to on the telephone?” I had begun to be curious.
“Medical student from Turkey called his father,” she answered with clarity.
“Do you speak Turkish too?” I was surprised.
“No, I almost fell asleep for forty minutes. I recorded it and interpreter made Russian transcript on same day. There is transcripts of your calls too,” she reported.
“I would love to have that for posterity!” I commented sarcastically.
“Sorry, I cannot give those to you,” she was dead serious.
“You’re really serious, aren’t you? You’re not even a student, are you? You just come to the English club to watch everybody and hear what people are thinking. Do you write reports about that too?” I asked somewhat offended.
“Da, of course,” she answered without apology.
“Geez, C’mon Olya. Is Olya your real name?” I asked, expecting a denial.
“No, it’s not,” she said taking a drag from her cigarette.
“Wow, I just don’t know what to say,” I sighed. An awkward pause hung in the air between us.
“Do you want to dance with me?” Olya asked switching into Russian, “I’m still a girl, and you are still a boy and I have a job at FSB. It’s nothing bad. It’s Russia.”
“Sure, let’s go dance. The night couldn’t get any more surreal!” and off we went back into the club and joined the moshing crowd of very drunk students dancing to techno-trash Russian tracks that all sounded the same. Exams were over and nobody had use for their brains until Monday morning, so why not? My mind was already blown by the revelations of the evening so what else did I have to lose? My colleagues are family of the local mafia boss and my acquaintances are KGB operatives. What else could go wrong?
At eleven o’clock the music stopped and the spotlights swiveled in unison and turned to light up the stage in the nave. The big act was about to start. Mr P. took to the stage and riled up the crowd, wanting to hear how excited they were to know who was playing in the club tonight. The crowd responded with increasingly louder shouts of “DAAAAAAAA!” when asked if they were excited three different times—a spectacle not seen since high school pep rallies. Behind Mr. P. the spotlights had lit up the backdrop of the act to come. There was a ruby red outline of the Moscow kremlin towers with three red flags on poles displayed on either side of the closed gate of the Spaskiy Tower. The laurel branches of the Soviet Union’s seal extended to either side of the stages in an upward bending fashion, all against a backdrop of a city night scape of apartment buildings. It had a very nationalistic feel to it. I was intrigued about what we might see here. I was severely disappointed.
After a drunken introduction and Mr. P.’s stumbling from the stage, the members of the band came skipping out from under the Spaskiy gate tower cut-out dressed all in black leather, with leather cowboy hats. They took up their positions on the stage with a keyboard, drums and a single electric guitar. They didn’t look young, and they did not look cool. One had a beer belly! The lead singer came skipping out as well from behind the Kremlin cut-outs dressed like a feminine, over
weight pirate with a scruffy beard and long brown hair and gyrated his hips in a way that made me cringe. He was wearing black spandex, a flowing white blouse with a gold embroidered black vest and black knee-high boots. The crowd of students knew who the group was and cheered as if Bruce Springsteen had just taken the stage. The music of the first number sounded just like what the DJ had been playing. I couldn’t stay and watch. I think they were lip-synching as well, but who would really know, being so inebriated. When you’re that drunk nobodies’ words match the mouth movements, not even your own.
I found Hans at one of the bars listing a bit on a bar stool, smiling with a glazed over look. He had a glass of something in his hand, half gone. I took a stool next to him and leaned my back up against the bar and faced the dance floor and joined Hans’s gaze at all the ‘girlz’. As I settled on to my bar stool and propped my dazed friend up by the shoulder, a very tall and curvy woman walked passed us in very tight pants and a sheer blouse with her bra fully visible through the gauzy material in front and back. I’m sure she was a trophy of one gangster in the room, but she was eye candy for the rest of us. Trying to move through the crowd she had to pause directly in front of Hans and turn her back, with her backside to him to let others pass through the narrow side aisles.
I saw it happening in slow motion, like a train wreck about to happen but could do nothing to stop it. Hans’s drunken arm slowly rose and his hand reached for the underside of her leather clad buns and squeezed with vigor and intent and said in his German accented Russian.
“Syadeese, dvevuchka, Syadeese!” (Please, girl, sit down here!)
The slap came so fast that it made my head spin! Hans dropped his drink and fell off his bar stool and everybody around us laughed uncontrollably. The woman was so incensed that she kicked him a few times and spat on him while he was trying to get back onto his wobbly legs. With the last kick, he fell again and hit his head against another bar stool. Before another kick or slap could come I jumped between the two of them, holding my hands in front of me, facing her with my hands visible to sign “enough is enough.” Hans stood up behind me completely dazed, but a bit more sober. The woman had fire in her eyes and Gucci platform shoes on her feet. Over her shoulder I could see a beefy body guard making his way through the crowd to her.
“Oh, Hans! You had better run!” I muttered to him in English from the side of my mouth with my eyes fixed on Brutus moving quickly towards us.
As Hans tried to get out the bar he stumbled on his drunk legs and was collared by the bouncer and thrown out of the club on his face by both of the thugs with a violent shove. He was lucky not to have gotten a beating before he was ejected.
11. Hangover
I helped Hans stagger home. He wasn’t moving very swiftly after being kicked and hitting his head, as well as being wasted from vodka. It was eleven-thirty on Saturday night and I wish I had brought a hat with me to the club. The wind was sharp and cold again after two warmish days. My ears were burning with the night’s wind chill.
Sitting at Hans’s kitchen table under a dim light with a mug of hot Nescafe and some ‘tabletki’ for his aching head, we sat in silence and listened to the pendulum on the living room wall swing and click, swing and click.
“It vas vorth it!” Hans smiled. ”it felt so good in my hand . . .” He held out the offending hand and squeezed the air slowly.
“Shut up you idiot,” I quipped, “You could have gotten us both pretty badly beat up.”
“Yes, maybe you are right. I heard Mr. P. had been in jail for beating somebody dead in somebody else’s night club,” Hans commented through his drunken slurring.
“Really!?” I asked intrigued.
“This iz what ze students say,” he confirmed.
I looked away from Hans’s stupid expression in disgust and also to avoid his rank breath. Why did Russian alcohol have to smell so bad?
Hans was snoring and sweating at two in the morning. I could hear him and smell him and made me think back to Vitaly, my roommate from the dorms. Why did it have to smell so bad? Between the clock hanging over the couch above me, Hans snoring in the next room and my mind swimming in everything I learned that evening before at The Monastery, certainly a place I would never want to return to, there was little chance of me sleeping for at least another hour. I tossed and turned as I mulled over Olya’s revelation that she knew I was being watched. What concerned me more was her warning not to do things that would be misunderstood by those watching me. Was Mr. P. really an ex-convict or just a wannabe? What had the Dean wanted me to pay attention to in particular last night? What had I missed that I should have been looking for? Who was my personal tail, my perverse guardian angel, from the city secret police? What had I really said to mother on the telephone the last time I spoke to her? Would Mr. P. beat me to death if was to learn what the Dean was suggesting I do? What was the Dean suggesting I do, expose him and his thug friends in a university publication? Why? Why would the Dean ask me to do that? Maybe Mr. P. can’t read? What specifically was his racket anyway? Why should I be interested in a local thug anyway? I was more interested in exposing the swindles with the privatization process more than the rise of a local crime boss. What influence was Mr. P. trying to build up locally, I wondered. It seemed to me he was just an overgrown pimp. Just an alpha hooligan with a protection racket in town. Probably didn’t even control the drugs being used in his own club.
Trying to sleep I could only see all those ‘girlz’ behind my eyelids dancing and twirling their dresses on the dance floor. They all had looked very pretty tonight! Indeed, all of them.
I returned home on Sunday afternoon after brunch at Hans’ place. He hadn’t remembered much of the night and he cringed when I told him what had happened. He rubbed the back of his head as perhaps some of the more poignant moments were coming back to him. What a fool.
Babushka was up and busy in the early afternoon in our apartment when I turned the locks and shuffled in from the dark stair well. The hall light was on. She could see that I had slept about as well as Hans had looked that morning and offered to make me some tea.
“Nu shto?” was Babushka’s only question as we sat silently around her stunted refrigerator in the kitchen.
“Nothing, really nothing. I slept very poorly that’s all,” I tried to justify my ashen face.
“Drank too much did you?" she accused.
“Baba - you know I don’t drink,” I puffed my breath at her for her to smell.
“Good boy, Golden boy”. she nodded and rubbed her hands on her apron.
I smiled warmly at this woman who had assumed the role of my real grandmother.
“Yulia came to visit last night,” Baba commented.
“Yulia, she was here?” I asked pleased, hoping that the ice had thawed.
“Pretty girl! I had to tell her that you were away for the night. She seemed sad that you weren’t home. Been a long time since she has been here. You should be careful,” was the matchmaker's advice, “said she would come back today sometime to find you, but today our family is coming to visit. My niece and her children, Raiya’s older sister,” she informed me.
“I will be very quiet in my room. I promise,” I said accommodatingly.
“Da, nyet. The children will have to be quiet. Children should be quiet and obedient,” she said as she twirled her hands continually through her apron hem.
Moments later the bell on the door rang and Babushka shuffled to the door in her tapochki. With the door open I heard the voice of children greeting their great aunt. Kisses on the cheeks and the youngest, a girl, maybe six years old could be heard squirming away from the old lady’s kisses with a giggle. The nephew, nine years old was a bit more formal and respectful, being the only man in the group.
Everybody was dressed in their Sunday best and the children brought flowers, not a bouquet, but a few scrawny flowers for Aunt Natasha and Aunt Raiya. The conversation between the three ladies didn’t have a single pause in it. I couldn’t understan
d a word of it. Were they speaking Tatar?
I put on some soft music to drown out the chatter of the Tatar trio next door, found a clean page in my writing block behind my other research notes, dug through my school bag for a pen and started to sketch out what I had learned about Mr. P. the night before. I wrote down every detail I could remember about the club, the cars, the appearance of the drivers, the bars, those in attendance who were not from the student body of the university. The woman Hans groped was certainly not from the school! Who was she? Imports from Germany and Korea, the body guards, the bouncers, the drugs, the booze and the young prostitutes. I wrote it all down in as much detail as I could remember. When I finished I had about three pages filled with scribbles of handwriting. On rereading it and reflecting on it I started asking questions. I started with, “Why open the night club up for free, free drinks, free drugs, free girls? Why?”
Deep in thought and a bit parched I reached for a bottle behind the curtains in my window sill, chilling nicely next to the window. As I swatted the curtains open to reach my bottle without having to stand up, I could see the bright afternoon sunshine, and for the first time, grass in front of my window. I stood up to look at it. While I could still see the breath of people passing by my ground floor window, and there were still patches of snow on the ground outside in the trees, I was so thrilled to see that indeed there was green grass showing from under the snow! Much to my annoyance too, there also was the neighborhood dog there doing his business on the grass and his owner standing between the birches, looking the other direction while smoking. It always annoyed me in Russia how nobody understood the practice of conservation. It seems that as soon as the grass shows the people think: Quick! let a dog leave a pile on it! As soon as there are new light bulbs installed in the stairwells, somebody has already nicked them before night fall. The examples go on and on. As the lady with the stupid expression saw what must have been my disapproving look regarding her dog she threw her cigarette away and whistled to her dog and walked off out of sight toward the metro station.