The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  “Later, I promise. Now I need to get to the stores before the lines get too long.”

  So much had changed in the last year. The specialty stores that served expatriates with foreign currency had mostly been shut down. The Insnab ration cards she and her friends enjoyed had been discontinued. A number of their acquaintances had found this reason enough to return home. It was obvious to Florence that these people had never really been committed to the enterprise of genuine equality. To jump ship, now, for lack of caviar and imported wine? She heard Sergey’s low warning voice in her head: “Go home, Flora.” She dressed hastily and stuffed her documents and keys into her purse.

  Leon sighed. “Do you have to go today? We never have the same day off.”

  “Don’t be sour. Somebody has to buy you that salty fish you love.”

  For a moment, his brows perked up with pleasure. “Maybe I’ll come with you.”

  “No, no, sleep in.”

  The fact was that she had to stop by at the OVIR before the lines got too long. Foreigners were now required to renew their residency permits every three months. It had become her private ordeal, her own little measure of renewed commitment. She could not admit to Leon that she wondered, each time, if this stamp would be her last. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” she said appeasingly before planting a kiss on his head.

  Outside, Florence flicked the lamb’s-wool collar up over her neck and crossed the leaf-strewn footpath that cut through the back courtyards of the 1st Samotechnaya Lane. She was grateful to be escaping the stuffy apartment and inhaling the raw air under the blue sky of Samotechniy Park, with its tidy pools of grass and flowers. From Samotechnaya Square, she crossed the wide avenue that turned onto Tsvetnoy Boulevard before heading down to the visa registration office. On the front steps of the OVIR, Florence patted down the errant strands of hair under her mohair kerchief and arranged her face in a vacant and submissive expression. Over the past two years, she had learned to dim down the challenging focus of her eyes whenever she entered a public office. She was enough of a Soviet now to know that the most dangerous bureaucrats were not the ones at the top but those patrolling their tiny corners of power at the bottom. She wanted no trouble with the heavyset woman behind the window.

  At the counter, Florence slid across her passport, helpfully opened to the page containing her well-thumbed visa. The woman abruptly shut the passport and opened it again to the photo page, then scrutinized Florence’s face. She wrote the passport information on a slip, made a second copy, and slid the paper back to Florence without the passport. “Come back next week for your residence permit,” she said in a tone just short of a command.

  “I’ll take that back,” Florence said, pointing through the glass to her passport.

  “We need to keep it to issue your propiska. You’ll get it when you come back.”

  “But you already wrote down all the information.”

  The clerk shut her eyes in irritation. “This can be anybody’s information. How do they know this isn’t some phantom’s information, or made up?”

  “I was told this isn’t necessary.” Florence smiled in perfect self-control. “If they want to check that I’m a real person, they should check with my housing committee. I am registered there.”

  “They told you one thing. They told me another. I am following orders. Those are the new rules for resident permits. I cannot issue you a new propiska without this document.”

  A line had formed behind Florence. The clerk glanced over Florence’s shoulder and called out, “Next!”

  “All right. When will I get it back?”

  “I told you: next week,” the clerk said. “We’ll have the propiska by Tuesday.”

  “You’ll have my passport back by Tuesday too?”

  But the woman behind the window was already absorbed in someone else’s bureaucratic conundrum. At last, Florence allowed herself to take a few steps backward. Her passport was still visible, right there, behind the glass, next to the woman’s fat elbow. Grab it! a voice pounded in her head. But her movements were already being governed by some other impulse—one so well learned that she no longer recognized it as a recently adopted habit—a wish not to buck the current, not to make a fuss. She took a final glance at the window, but there were too many people now blocking the view. She slowly retied her kerchief on her head and retreated into the morning cold.

  With an hour and a half to spare before my meeting at the L-Pet headquarters, I descended into the metro and surfaced in the part of Moscow I hate the most. Lubyanka. It’s impossible for me to cross it without the ghosts of previous visits haunting me. I can still feel the crick in my neck that I felt as a six-year-old staring up at the prison’s nine stories, feeling the morning sludge seep into my shoes and battling an urgent need to urinate. My mother would drag me out of my warm bed at five in the morning and cart me here while the sky was still dark. She hoped that having a child in tow would make it easier to jump the line that had been forming since midnight. The sun would rise on a human archipelago, bodies crouched or sleeping on their gripsacks and canvas bags. Many had traveled for hundreds of miles, all of us waiting to hear some word of loved ones in prison, or else waiting to pass along meager packages of chocolate, money, onions. Sometimes the packages were taken. Often they weren’t. Stubbornly, Mama continued coming long after any of the clerks would accept her parcels. And I would be there with her, reliving, each morning, the fresh humiliation of pulling my pants down to pee in the frozen snow.

  —

  THE PLACE WAS EASY to miss. It wasn’t around the corner from the Lubyanka Prison (now the administrative center of the FSB), as I’d been expecting, but farther down the hill, squeezed in among the glassed storefronts of Kuznetsky Most. I got there by crossing Dzerzhinsky Square, though of course it wasn’t called Dzerzhinsky Square anymore. The statue of Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky, the original Chekist, had been removed a while back. And whose cast-iron profile did President Putin replace it with? His mentor, Yuri Andropov, who gave the KGB its ingenious psychiatric diagnosis of “sluggishly progressive schizophrenia.” This allowed the state to fill up its asylums with anyone protesting its insanity. But, for the most part, Andropov’s philosophy was endearingly primitive: “destruction of dissent in all its forms.”

  Unlike the prison itself, the warehouse where I hoped to find my parents’ dossiers was barely marked. When I located it and at last pushed open the door, I found myself in a linoleum entry hall. The only furnishings, aside from a metal-detector gate, were a folding table and two plastic chairs, one of which was occupied by a pudgy FSB guard in a tan uniform. He rose slowly, as though it were his first physical act of the day. “Propusk,” he said, demanding my pass.

  It was my first visit. I didn’t have a pass. Was I supposed to? I gave him my passport and the letter explaining my intentions. He glanced at the American passport in its maroon Russian holder and handed it back, apparently satisfied. “You’ll have to wait for the administrator on duty.”

  “Is he the archivist?”

  “The archivist is out. You’ll have to make an appointment with his assistant.”

  He gestured to the other plastic chair, where, it seemed, I was to sit obediently until such time as the archivist, or the administrator, or his assistant, decided to show up.

  I checked my watch. My meeting at L-Pet was starting in twenty-five minutes. I sat down and wiped the sweat from my face. A place like this apparently didn’t merit air conditioning. I glanced through the metal detector down into the corridor and saw a few solitary bodies in the reading hall. They had the timeworn, impoverished look of Soviet intellectuals—old shoes, thin sweaters worn in summer and winter. They looked like historians or Ph.D. candidates, each pursuing his esoteric autopsy, whose results would be bound sooner or later in a cardboard portfolio and buried in a vault just like this one. I was suddenly overcome with the ridiculousness of what I was doing. There was something wholly pathetic in sifting for grains of gold in the ash h
eap of the past.

  The guard was picking up the phone— to call the assistant, I hoped. I took a sip from the L-Pet–branded water bottle I’d taken from the welcome package in my hotel room. The FSB guard took a furtive glance at my drink as he cradled the receiver. “Here,” I offered, stretching out my arm.

  He shook his head.

  “It’s only water. No radioactive substances, I promise.” I got up and set the bottle down on his desk. The L-Pet petroleum-drop logo must have reassured him, because he took a sip.

  “The assistant will be here soon,” the FSB man now said. “Or, if you don’t want to wait, you can drop your request letter in that box over there.”

  “Is that what you advise?”

  “You asking me?”

  “Who else?” I smiled.

  “I’d wait. Lots of crazies dropping their letters in that box.”

  I was curious what sort of beef others had with History. “What kind of crazies?”

  “The other day, someone came in looking for documentation on a flying saucer the air force shot down near Cheboksary,” the guard said. “The assistant has to go through all those letters himself. That’s why you’re better off handing him your request in person.”

  “I see.”

  “People always come in here looking for answers,” the FSB man said, leaning back in his chair.

  “So—do they get answers?”

  “Sure they do, just not to the questions they’re asking.”

  Just then, a rail-thin older man walked into the hall.

  “This fellow’s been waiting for you,” the FSB man said unnecessarily.

  “Yes. Can I help you?” The assistant spoke with the softly dejected voice of a scholar. I told him I was looking for files relating to my parents, and gave him the years of their arrests. He sighed. “You’ll have to write a letter and get it notarized.”

  “I have everything.” I showed him my notarized letter, passport, even a copy of my birth certificate.

  “The archivist won’t be here until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I’m only in Moscow for a few days,” I pleaded.

  The assistant glanced at the FSB guard, who’d been watching our exchange from behind his desk. “He’s come all the way from America,” my new friend urged him. His word held weight, it seemed, because the assistant reformed his earlier declaration. “All right, come back by four. You can try to catch the archivist before he takes off for his dacha.”

  —

  SLINGING AK-74S, THE COMMANDOS patrolling L____ Petroleum’s headquarters were substantially better armed than the pudgy FSB man assigned to protect the country’s once-secret files. One examined my laminated pass carefully while the other made phone calls from a special glass booth, returning with a second set of passes for me, printed and stamped three times.

  I was the last to show. The others (all but Kablukov) were inside, waiting for my arrival to slice open the envelopes with the contract bids. Valery did the honors with an elegant ivory letter opener. He placed each bid on a conference table varnished to such an expensive gleam that it resembled an amber skating rink. The afternoon sunlight filled lead-casement windows that were like lunettes in a French chapel. Were it not for the two-headed Russian eagle that hung over the fireplace, I might have thought the room a library in a venerable university.

  Our first order of business was to weed out the obvious losers. Gibkov, the most ostensibly neutral of us, began. “Murmansk Shipping?”

  “Solid Arctic experience. And they’re giving us the best rate,” said Tom.

  “But their financials are a mess,” said McGinnis. “They might not be in business five years from now.”

  There were no objections to cutting Murmansk Shipping—surprisingly, I thought, since it was one of L-Pet’s hundred or so daughter companies.

  McGinnis picked up another envelope. “Jessem. They’re Swedish. Can’t beat their safety record. Looks like they’re doing well, expanding.”

  Tom objected this time: “They’re building a lot of new ships; they’re already undercapitalized. We can admire their ambition, but, we all agreed, debt-to-capitalization ratio has to be in the standard range.”

  Neither of Kablukov’s two lieutenants—Serdyuk and Mukhov—had yet to speak. The talkative Mukhov was uncharacteristically quiet.

  “Okay. What about this one?” said Gibkov. “Sausen Petroleum. A new company. Based in Geneva. Former oil trader for L-Pet, still does some trading, but moving into shipping.”

  Mukhov perked up. “We have very good experience with them.”

  I leafed through the application packet, which didn’t take long, since it was about as thin as a communion wafer. “I don’t get it,” I said. “They have no experience. Let them apply once they’ve chartered a few ships.”

  Serdyuk shook his head disapprovingly at what I’d said. “Take a closer look. They have a very good reputation.”

  I lifted the bid and let it drop like a feather. “What reputation?”

  “They have never had one oil spill. No accidents. Clean record.”

  “I’ll tell you who else has a clean record,” I said. “A doctor that’s never operated on a single patient. Tell me what vessels they have in their fleet—a bulk carrier, a container ship, a cruise yacht, even? Anything?”

  “They have a very good relationship with the banks in Switzerland,” Mukhov put in authoritatively.

  “Like every commodity trader in Geneva.” Tom smiled.

  “The Swiss will give any yo-yo a credit line if they start trading oil,” I added, unnecessarily. I cast my eyes around the room for another ally. “And has anyone else noticed they want to charge us more than the others? Sixteen million more a year than the Swedes. What for, exactly?”

  Nobody answered.

  Serdyuk looked at Mukhov and shook his buzz-cut head like I still didn’t get it. “Sausen has a very good relationship with Mr. Abuskalayev.”

  The air seemed to grow a few degrees cooler at the mention of the name of L-Pet’s president. It was not, I knew, a name that got invoked very often, and when it did it was usually spoken solemnly, like one of the seventy-two names of God. It has been said that Abuskalayev, who is half Azeri and half Russian, keeps a Koran in the left drawer of his desk and an Orthodox Bible in the right. He started his business career as the first deputy oil minister of Soviet Azerbaijan, and used his political connections to be named the head of L-Pet. He’s not a young oligarch but an old Soviet, which goes a long way to explaining why L-Pet has never been raided or disemboweled. Abuskalayev’s balancing act of loyalty to President Putin was, as I saw it, his greatest achievement; in the press, he’s given to strategically self-effacing statements such as “On its own, a national company cannot enjoy greater respect abroad than the country itself.”

  Once more Serdyuk elaborated what a good relationship Sausen had with the CEO, how well they’d done by L-Pet as a broker—all at a subaudible volume that suggested it was our responsibility to pay heed, not his to persuade.

  “We understand they have been a loyal servant to L-Pet for many years,” Tom said diplomatically. “But you’ve done well by them, too, after all.”

  I checked my watch. Somehow it was already three.

  “Let’s keep them in the pool for now,” Gibkov suggested, sensing tension. “We’ve got a few other companies to look at.”

  But I couldn’t let the thing go. “Come on, people,” I said. “Who are these guys? Are they even real? We’ve never worked with them. We’ve never met them.” I’d spent three years of my life designing the ships in question. I wasn’t about to let a few well-connected amateurs steer them into an iceberg.

  “So you will meet them!” said Mukhov cheerfully.

  “I thought they were in Geneva.”

  “Geneva—so what’s the problem? We fly them in tomorrow! You meet them here, in this room, at ten o’clock.”

  Mukhov had a habit, like an actor, of saying something with a straight face, then suddenly
smiling, which he did now. “Nu?” he said in Russian. “Vsyo spokoyno?”

  —

  IT WAS TEN MINUTES past four o’clock when I resurfaced at the Lubyanka Station. White cottontail puffs from the topol trees swirled around me, rolling in waves down the cobbled street. At the office on Neglinnaya Street, the security guard was sitting exactly where I’d left him several hours earlier. He looked up at me with a clouded expression.

  “Is the archivist here?” I inquired.

  In ceremonial disappointment he turned his palms out at his sides. “You just missed him.”

  She returned to climb the steps of the OVIR the following week. This time she met a different woman at the window, one who handed Florence her renewed city-residence document and a receipt for the old documents. A pulse of panic, a tectonic quiver, passed through her.

  “Where is my passport?”

  But the new woman didn’t know anything about it. “Here!” She tapped a brittle yellowed nail on the square slip she’d given Florence. “We take your old documents, issue new ones!”

  “Yes, but I gave you my American passport.”

  With a facsimile of patience she reserved for the dim-witted, the woman pointed again to the top of the paper. Florence could see the typed-up number of her American passport. With a sensation she wasn’t fully sure was relief, she read her name (typed in Russian with a Cyrillic “tz” at the end), and the place and date of the passport’s issuance (Nyu Iork, 1933).

  “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “You take it to the embassy; they issue you a new one.”

  “What happened to my old one?”

  “How the devil do I know? I’m just giving you what they gave me!”

  —

  SHE DIDN’T SEE LEON until evening, when she returned from work. On the way to their room—the farthest down the hall—Florence nearly tripped over the brushes and tins of the old man who cleaned and shined his shoes in the hallway. All the fussy apparatuses of his shoe polishing seemed to have been arranged precisely to get in everyone’s way, and yet he had growled at Florence to watch where the hell she was going. Inside, Florence hung her coat on a peg in what Leon jokingly called their “foyer,” bounded by the doorjamb and the side of their commode. A tower of folded linens was stacked on the table where Leon stood over them in the act of ironing. With a gentle, almost motherly attention to the task, which Florence admired for having so little of it herself, he finished ironing a crease into his linen trousers and placed the pants in a suitcase that lay open on their folded daybed. “I can’t remember—am I supposed to drink sage tea if I get diarrhea, or chamomile?” he said by way of a greeting.