But she was wrong about him. When he lifted his eyes again, they were dry. “Florence, listen to me carefully.” He squeezed her hand. “Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place.”
Pines and roadside shrubs and the steel latticework of rural stations streaked by my window on the eastbound train to Alabino. During my hour’s commute I’d resolved to come clean to Lenny about my indiscretions with Kablukov. It was for the best. My humbling confession might succeed where other inducements had failed. And yet, when I spotted Lenny in his striped T-shirt, innocently waving his hand from the driver’s window of a rusted Lada, I lost all my prepared speeches. The morning seemed too fresh, his smile too genuine to spoil so quickly. Lenny came out to help me with my bag; he looked surprised that I’d actually come. “Get ready to meet the freak parade,” he happily warned me as we pulled out onto the empty town road. “There’s Alyosha Alcoholic, and Zhorik the Georgian Lothario. One is Aunt Valya’s nephew, the other’s her husband. They’re the same age.”
“Are those their formal titles?”
“Zhorik’s official title is ‘invalid.’ Don’t ask me how Valya arranged that. Forty-four years old, and he already collects a monthly pension. His informal title is ‘househusband.’ We’re just over down this way.”
The house we pulled up to was not the patched-up shack I would have imagined from Lenny’s car and dress, but a neat three-story clapboard, with a new coat of cinnamon-colored paint. We entered through the back of the wraparound veranda into the kitchen, where we encountered a towheaded and unshaven young man in rubber slippers. A bony chest was exposed through a mostly unbuttoned shirt. “Alexei, meet my father, Yuliy Leontevich,” Lenny said by way of introduction.
Alexei nodded formally. “A little eye-opener for our American guest?” A bottle of Russian Standard stood half empty on the kitchen table.
“Thank you,” I told him. “I prefer to start my mornings with cognac.”
“Cognac it is.” Alexei found a fresh bottle in the cupboard and opened it for me. “The girls have gone mushrooming in the woods, and Zhorik is out getting the meat for our shashlik. Enjoy the quiet while you can.”
I adjusted myself to his definition of “quiet.” On the counter, a miniature radio was tuned at top volume to a news program. We listened to the righteous-voiced female radio host denouncing the continued imprisonment of another Yukos oil executive rumored to have been denied medical treatments until he signed a confession.
“What station is this?” I asked.
“Ekho Moskvy. The one our gracious president allows us to operate so we can claim to the world that we have a free press.”
“Alyosha never turns the radio off,” said Lenny.
“You ought to know all about this,” said Alyosha. “Aren’t you an oilman?”
“I see only the engineering side,” I said. “What line of work are you in, Alexei?”
“Work? I don’t work. I’m a freeloader. My occupation is sitting on my mother’s neck.”
“Well, that’s work too.”
“He’s being modest,” Lenny informed me. “Alyosha is a bona-fide money launderer. Just last week, the local police came and raided his office.”
“Those crooks overstepped their bounds,” the skinny man muttered. “They took five hundred thousand rubles, so I had to call the precinct militzia—my guy there. He sorted it out with a phone call. Ten thousand I might have let pass, but the pigs got greedy.”
“So unofficially you’re an entrepreneur, and officially you’re a derelict,” I said.
“I’m a nonperson,” Alyosha proclaimed proudly. “They have no record of me. I’m not written in anywhere.”
“Is that legal?”
“Having no legitimate employment is no longer a crime. All they can do to me is deny me a pension. And I don’t need their stinking five hundred rubles a month.”
“And, naturally, you don’t vote,” said Lenny, smiling at me as he needled Alyosha with the reliable bait.
“Voting is a profanation,” Alexei replied on cue. “The voters—what are they? There to play the role of the audience who claps.”
“Ask him who his hero is,” Lenny said, then answered his own question. “Ralph Ellison.”
“The Invisible Man is a cipher,” Alyosha resumed madly. “He lives in a basement full of lightbulbs, siphoning off electricity from the monopolized energy company. The utility company is unaware of his existence, as is the fraudulent state whose authority he does not recognize. Like the invisible Negro, I choose to have no existence in the eyes of our illegitimate state.”
“Show him how you did it, Alyosha.”
Alyosha walked to the plug socket above the sink. “It’s very easy. You ought to know this as an engineer—you run half the current through a wire attached to a piece of sheet metal, and ground it by sticking it in the earth. I stuck it out there—see?—in the vegetable garden. The electricity runs all year round, without adding a single watt to Valya’s meter.”
It seemed that, on top of his gifts of oratory and barter, Alyosha had the Russian alcoholic’s talent for fixing anything with his hands. “With the heat it’s even easier. I just go out into the yard in the winter and pour a kettle of boiling water over the heat meter, and the thing freezes right up. You can heat all three stories of the house without paying a kopek.” His voice resounded with pride. “In Russia, we are all thieves,” he now declared in English, and then, a few decibels louder than before: “They steal from us big! I steal back little!”
“So pleased with himself—the great philosopher.” A voice sounded from the hall. A plump bottle-redhead of about sixty entered the kitchen, carrying a large zinc bucket of mushrooms with a curved blade laid on top. She wore sandals and a pair of shorts over heroic thighs that might have belonged to some mythological kolhoznitsa gathering sheaves of grain in a Soviet mural. This had to be Valentina, the famous Aunt Valya, Katya’s mother’s cousin. Behind her trotted Katya, in tight jeans and rubber galoshes.
“So you’ve met our resident Socrates,” Valentina said, spreading a newspaper on the table and dumping out the contents of her and Katya’s buckets. She began rapidly sorting the fungi on the newspaper, rejecting the very bad or very dirty ones and tossing them back in the bucket.
“Did you find some good ones?” I inquired.
“A few chernushki, and all those little foxes.”
“We would’ve gotten more, but now everyone’s discovered our sweet spot,” said Katya with her gentle, orthodontal lisp.
“That one’s a toadstool,” Alyosha pointed out.
“It’s a ryzhik. You don’t know anything.”
“Can’t you see the thin stem? It’s inedible. You’ll poison us all, woman.”
“Look who’s talking! I didn’t see you out this morning, poking from glade to glade, bending, picking.”
“You’re not a mushroomer, Alexei?” I said.
Alyosha reclined in his chair and looked away, like such nonsense was beneath him. “It’s too easy here. Last time I went, I got five baskets in one hour. There isn’t any challenge. What’s the point?”
“Alyosha’s enjoyment is complete only when it involves suffering,” Lenny said.
I turned to Valentina. “A very nice home you have, Valya. Did your family build it?”
“No, I bought it from the former ambassador to Denmark. The family dacha my papa left to my sister, Nina—this genius’s mother. It’s down a ways, in Aprelevka. But Nina’s vacationing this week on the Black Sea. That’s why this one’s hanging around here like a stray dog.”
“Aprelevka?” I was surprised. “That’s where the old military dachas are, or were. Was your father a general?”
“A komdiv. Division commander. But there’s no trace of the old Genshtab anymore. It’s been taken over by our new Brahmins. Alyosha! Haven’t you shown Yuliy Leontevic
h to his room yet? Well, what kind of hosts are you? Come along,” she said, getting up. “You’ll get the tour.”
I followed Valya upstairs, with Alyosha carrying my bag like a valet while I admired the furniture. “Sure, I got a few of Papa’s things,” Valya admitted when I asked her about the carved wood antiques. “Including that little watch,” Alyosha said, pointing to a mahogany grandfather clock on the landing. “A real Teutonic treasure, not like the fakes the Germans palmed off after the war on every dumb Vanya in combat boots.”
“Your father was an important man if he managed to bring that into the country,” I said.
“I can’t complain about the way I grew up.”
“Regular vacations in Crimea?”
“Yalta. Sochi.”
“A family driver.”
“You bet. He’d drive Nina and me to our classes at MGIMO. I was so embarrassed by it.”
For all my resplendent grades as a boy, I had never even entertained the notion of being admitted to a school like the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, where only the high-ranking Party people could place their sons and daughters, in preparation for diplomatic posts all over the world. The school was not even listed in the regular handbook of Soviet institutions of higher learning. “You couldn’t have been the only two students at MGIMO who got driven to class.”
“That was more Nina’s style. I couldn’t stomach that whole clubby atmosphere.”
“Is that why you didn’t end up a diplomat like your sister?”
“This delegation, that delegation. Not for me. I sat quietly at Vneshtorg.”
I was getting a clearer picture of Valya, who, for all her Party pedigree, had the heart of a speculator. I couldn’t help admiring her for eschewing the advantages she’d been born into, turning her back on the Soviet career ladder, and instead quietly staking out a mid-level position at the less prestigious Ministry of Foreign Trade, which nonetheless afforded her plenty of opportunities to travel to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and return with suitcases full of nightgowns, shoes, and pantyhose that she could peddle, at a profit, among her acquaintances.
Alyosha had set my bag in the guest room.
“You’ll sleep like a baby tonight,” Valya said. “I’ve never slept on a better mattress. This bed is better than the one Putin sleeps on. Not because he can’t afford it, but because his ass wouldn’t know the difference.”
Alyosha winced as if in pain. “I told you not to speak that devil’s name around me!” And then the two of them left me alone.
After visiting the bathroom, I took a look at the music collection on the shelves (Andrea Bocelli, Enrico Caruso, Adelina Patti), as well as the many foreign books. I was certain this was the room Alyosha’s mother, Nina, slept in when she spent nights at Valya’s. On the small writing desk were notes written in a looping feminine hand. On the wall hung an enlarged black-and-white photograph of a beautiful, bright-eyed angelic boy of five or six. After a moment of looking at the photo I experienced a strange jolt of recognition: it was Alyosha Alcoholic.
I stared at the photo for a long time, thinking, until Valya’s auctioneer voice called everyone down to lunch. I followed the smell of grilled meat out through the veranda to the side of the house, where Lenny and Alyosha were standing around a square grill being loaded with pork chops by a broad-shouldered Georgian in a jogging suit. This was evidently Zhorik, in the grip of some ebullient argument with Lenny over the best way to marinate meat. Zhorik was taking the position that the best results came from marinating in vinegar, and Lenny insisted on a concoction of kefir and lemon juice. “What kind of Jew are you?” Zhorik challenged. “Don’t you know your people don’t marinate meat in milk? It degrades the fibers!”
“Here he is, our honored guest!” Zhorik said, spotting me. He shook my hand heartily with his right while holding on to the handle of the weighty grill cage with his left. If he really was an “invalid,” then he was the most robust and vigorous of the breed I’d ever met. Valya came out onto the porch. “Alyosha, come in and help me move this table.”
But her nephew didn’t hear her, or pretended not to. He’d inserted his earbuds deep into his ear canal in order to keep listening to Ekho Moskvy on his portable. “Look at him!” she shouted at the others. “A normal person listens to one, maybe two favorite programs! But this one can’t take those things out of his ears. The personality of an addict!”
“Darling, don’t be upset; the meat is almost ready,” said Zhorik.
Lunch was laid out banquet-style in the dining room. I noticed that Katya was doing all the serving for Lenny, sprinkling dill on his potatoes, refilling his shot glass. He seemed to take for granted that he should be so serviced. He had swallowed down an entire bowl of pelmeni dumplings, which Valya had set out as the starter, and was already halfway through another. Whenever Katya heard some subtle grunt of hunger from Lenny’s direction, she responded by loading another eight dumplings onto his plate. He caught me looking at him and said, “What?”
I couldn’t help myself. “Maybe you should pace yourself,” I suggested.
“It’s all healthy, it’s all natural,” Valya objected. “Why aren’t you eating? What, you don’t like it?”
“It’s all delicious. I’m just not very hungry.”
“What are you, an animal, that you only eat when you’re hungry?”
I caught Lenny’s eye again. You’re letting them stuff you like a goose, I wanted to tell him. But even if I could, there would be no point. In some kind of protest against me, he seemed to be aggressively plowing through his second portion of dumplings. Then he dropped his eyes and made a few meager coughs to suggest he wasn’t feeling well. “Poor fellow, you must have caught a cold in your night in the lockup,” said Valya. She turned to me. “It’s a crime, the way they can throw a person in jail for nothing.”
“Well, whoever fucked up and put me there is probably paying for it now,” said Lenny.
“What you need for a cold is a little black pepper with your vodka,” said Alyosha. He reached over and sprinkled some black flakes into Lenny’s shot glass. “Down the hatch—this’ll cure everything.”
“How do you know it was a mistake?” I said.
“What else was it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone wanted to teach you a lesson,” I hinted, and thought, What the hell am I doing?
Lenny stared at me. “What are you talking about?” He sneezed again.
“Poor pet, let’s get you some tea,” Valentina said, and Katya was instantly up and on her way to the kitchen for a kettle. Not a moment later, she set a steaming mug before Lenny and began to stir in an ample spoonful of sugar. My God, I thought, he doesn’t even stir his own tea.
“The danger may not be over,” I said. “Maybe it’s a little early to celebrate.”
“A father worries,” said Valentina. “That’s the way it should be.”
“What are we drinking to?” Zhorik said, lifting his glass.
“To family!” said Valentina. “Lenny is part of our family, and now we are happy to welcome into our home his charming father—Yuliy Leontevich.”
I nodded and drank down my vodka. I had come to terms with the fact that I couldn’t spend a week in this country without having my liver held up at gunpoint. We all had two more shots once Zhorik brought the pork chops. First we drank to the women at the table, then to happiness and prosperity—“in this life,” Alyosha added mysteriously.
“Alyosha believes in reincarnation,” said Zhorik. “He’s thrown in his cards on this lifetime.”
Alyosha looked down, accustomed to the eternal abuse. “In my next life, I’ll come back as a Siamese cat.”
“Why wait until your next life to come back an animal?” Valya said. “Turn your jacket inside out and walk into a zoo. The kids will throw candy at you.”
“A toast!” Zhorik announced. “For those who are not with us.” We raised our glasses and held them without clinking for this most somber of to
asts. Not for the first time I noticed how joylessly an alcoholic drinks. Alyosha seemed to take no pleasure in the shot that had been poured for him. He stared at it for a while, like a person staring at a spoonful of bitter medicine, then swallowed it grimly.
I glimpsed Lenny reaching across Katya for a pork chop. “Here, Katusha, give him this one,” Valya said, picking out the biggest, best-glazed piece of meat. There were obviously two roles for men at the dacha: browbeaten little boy or pampered pasha. Alyosha was the first, Lenny the second. Each, in its own way, infantilized.
Lenny murmured that it was stuffy, and Katya leaped up instantly to open a window. I had believed that my son did not come home because he was ashamed to return a failure. I hadn’t taken into account the sumptuous passivity to which he’d become accustomed, the voluptuous pampering at which Russian women were so adept.
“Take those things out of your damn ears,” Valya shouted spontaneously. Alyosha was again listening to his Ekho Moskvy through earbuds. “Can’t you see we have company?” Alyosha reluctantly took out his right earbud, and continued listening to Ekho through his left. “I’m going out for a smoke,” he said, getting up, in a posture that said, To hell with you all. Just at that moment, Zhorik refilled Alyosha’s glass and glanced at me mischievously. Like a marionette whose strings had been released, Alyosha sat back down and swallowed. “You see that!” Zhorik said triumphantly. “Bet you don’t have alcoholics like ours in your America!”
“You can’t judge by American standards,” I answered. “In America, an alcoholic is someone who hasn’t picked up a drink in ten years.”
Valya looked at me curiously. I did my best to explain to the table the concept of AA. “We had a party, and I offered some cognac to our neighbor, Jim,” I said. “He declined. When I asked why, he told me: ‘Julian, I’m an alcoholic.’ I said, ‘Jim, I admire your abstemiousness under the circumstances. How long has it been?’ ‘Twenty years,’ he said.”
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