When I was a baby, my father went to America, he was in New York during the Cuban Missile Crisis. My mother told me that during the crisis she had gone to bed some nights expecting not to wake up in the morning. My father was away from home. She was alone with me in the apartment in Moscow, and she kept me in her bed.
How I had adored him, my father who brought home chocolate candies wrapped in gold foil paper from a special store, and who took me fishing. He talked to me in English. We had a nice place to live, or that’s how it seemed to me back then, until things started going sour for us, my mother talking too loud, saying too much, telling people how pissed off she was at the failures of the USSR, especially after Brezhnev.
My father lost his job. We lost our apartment. We left Moscow for Israel.
My mother was still there, in a nursing home in Haifa. Alzheimer’s meant she didn’t know my name. But she still smoked secretly.
In our apartment in Moscow, I had once come into the living room to find the desk she used on fire. I poured water over it, and when she came home, my mother said, “What happened?” She admitted to me when she had a cigarette, she blew the smoke into the drawer. This last time, she had dropped the butt into the drawer, too. Some paper caught fire. After that we laughed and laughed about it. My mother’s “smoking drawer”, we called it.
Why did I think about it now? I thought about them both, her, my father. In Israel, he had been blown up on a bus by a bomb, a mistake, intended for another location.
Is it good? Do you like it? The girls twittered like high-pitched birds gathered at feeding time.
It’s good, I said. Very nice chocolate for sure, I said. Thank you. Yes, wonderful chocolate.
It is better than American? asked Kim who confided to me that her real name was Svetlana but everybody called her Kim after her grandmother whose name stood for Kommuni-stichesky International Molodezhny. It meant Communist Youth International, she explained and added that her great-grandmother had been called Vladlena, for Vladimir Ilych Lenin.
“First for the while we love Mars Bars, Snickers, my older sister who is now already thirty, she tells me everything is good if it comes from West. She loves this West. She wants everything West. But now we prefer our own candies,” said Kim. “It is much better. Higher percentage chocolate,” she explained, and mentioned that her grandmother had worked in the Red October factory, and had explained all of these things. Her grandmother, she added, had actually seen Comrade Stalin. The other girls sighed slightly.
Shut up! I wanted to shout at these hectic children: shut up. But I smiled and said, okay, you win, better than American candy bars. I like this chocolate very much, I said, speaking in the slow loud deliberate way Americans do when they’re in foreign countries, as if everybody around them is stupid or deaf. This seemed to make them happy and the girls smiled at each other knowingly. I was an okay kind of American.
Being in Moscow, looking out that window, seeing my father in the street, knowing it was a hallucination, it made me feel a little nuts. He was dead.
Maybe I had seen his ghost. In Moscow, you could believe in ghosts if you let go of your own present and let the past flood you.
Tall, tan, athletic, braces on her teeth, Kim, who was now chattering with the other girls, could have been European, American, Australian, except that she was in love with her president. And her expression, when she mentioned him, was a little bit crazy. Shining with devotion. She reminded me of a little girl I had been in the Komsomol with. I had been a young Pioneer, like everyone else, white shirt, red neckerchief.
My father had imposed it on me, and anyhow it was what everybody I knew did. In our group was one girl, very pale, blue eyes, hair the color and texture of corn-silk, braided and wound around her head, and when we sang patriotic songs, she was the one who always announced the concert by sounding out “Vladimir Ilych Lenin” in a piercing, shrill, high, zealous voice. She believed. She was a believer because she came from a working-class family, the father a drunk, the mother a factory cleaner, who had only their belief, and the bundles of dripping meat allocated to the mother at work.
A world long gone, replaced by one with easy access to food and chocolate, but admired by these girls, sentimentalized by them, and sometimes even their parents. In my time, at least when we went home, we took off our public faces. We made fun of the crappy culture and preferred the Beatles.
We hung out like young hoods in Pushkin Square, near the statue of the great Russian poet-hero, exchanging titbits of information about John, Paul, George and Ringo and wondering, as we examined forbidden pictures, which one was which. Tolya always said to me it was the Beatles who brought down communism.
“It caused us to defect internally from the system, Artyom,” he always said. “It made us flee from everything around us inside our souls.”
Where are you? I thought. Tolya, where are you for God’s sake?
“Say cheese!” Suddenly, Kim, picked up her phone and snapped my picture. The other girls followed. There was something about Kim of the little spy, taking pictures, hoarding them, as she chattered about the fatherland, the need to resettle internal immigrants back where they came from, especially if they came from the Caucasus.
One of the little girls—she was about nine—let off a stream of invective about the foreigners, as she called them, the Caucasians and the others who came to Moscow to work at the markets and clean the streets, and how dirty they were and how frightened her mother was of them.
Don’t talk to these dirty animals, her mother had told her. Don’t let them touch you.
I waited for the translation, but Kim told the girl she must not use nasty language, especially in front of foreigners, even if they didn’t understand, it wasn’t nice, and suddenly I got the feeling Kim knew I spoke Russian, that I understood. But she only smiled and we all smiled some more and I finished the chocolate bar to the amusement of all the little girls.
At the bus terminal, the girls said goodbye to me, and the tiny one with the big stuffed bear kissed my cheek. Kim handed me a second chocolate bar from her bag, and asked me to write down my name and my phone number and the hotel where I was staying. She planned on asking her mom if she could invite me to their house for tea. I said thanks and gave her a phony name—I became Max Fielding—and jotted down the National Hotel because it was all I could think of, and we all smiled some more, and then the girl who hated Caucasians turned around and snapped my photograph with her silver digital camera.
Snap snap. Suddenly all the girls got out their phones and little digital cameras and took more pictures of each other, and of me, each one posing with me, then posing in groups. Snap snap.
Come on, please, said Kim, one more, one more picture, so I can keep you. Okay, now with my mom, and she beckoned her mother, a good-looking woman with pale platinum hair who posed with me, and shook my hand and said I was welcome.
They tumbled into each other’s arms to say goodbye and waved at parents who were waiting and then they began to slip away; and I was alone, except for Kim who called out, “One more, please?” and held up her phone and with serious determination took a final picture as if to capture me for once and for all. I was now the official prisoner of little Russian girls in pink t-shirts. I ♥ Putin.
Moscow was hot and dusty. The National Hotel was full. I couldn’t remember any other hotels, only the National and the old Intourist, which had been replaced by a Ritz Carlton where they wanted twelve hundred bucks a night.
I didn’t have that kind of dough. I didn’t really want to stay in a hotel anyhow. It would make me too visible. I glanced around the lobby at the Ritz Carlton, and left.
I needed a place to stay.
As soon as I hit the streets, a fog of paranoia descended and clung to me like the humidity. I went towards Red Square. Everything in this place led to Red Square. I went on instinct, God knows why. I had to think of a place to stay, so I walked, trying to lose myself among the tourists.
There was a replica of Resurrection Gate that had gone up since I’d been here. I had heard about it as a kid. The sixteenth-century gate which had formed an entrance to Red Square was torn down by Stalin in l931 to make it easier for tanks to get through to the square. And just in front of the gate—it looked like cardboard—was a guy with some monkeys.
“Picture, picture, you want a picture?” shouted the monkey man.
He had two monkeys working the crowd for him, in fact. One of the monkeys looked like a little old man in a child’s outfit, little blue shorts, a jacket, a cap. The other was smaller, and had a skirt on.
“Fuck off,” I said.
Before I knew it, the man had tossed the monkeys at me, one into my arms, the big one on my back. He snapped my picture.
“Get them off of me,” I said, beginning to panic. “Get them fucking off me.”
The wall of noise from traffic was incredible, a million cars in gridlock. Hummers, Range Rovers, Mercs, Moscow money liked its cars big and loud. On the street a guy sidled up to me to offer me police kit for twenty grand, complete with flashing blue light, siren, special plates, which would get me out of traffic and into the VIP lane.
Was this Tolya’s alternative universe, this place where we had both grown up? Was this Tolya’s other planet, the place where he had disappeared? I barely recognized Moscow, the traffic, the stores, the signs, the neon, the crowds. I’d only been back once in the early 1990s. I looked around for a taxi.
Parched, I went into a grocery store to buy a bottle of water. It felt like a stage set, stocked like a fancy New York deli with salad, bread, meats, cheeses, imported canned goods, flowers, fresh fruit, cookies, wine, cake.
I walked some more. It was getting late now, sun going down, the Moscow night coming on. The whole city seemed about to explode, as if somebody had tossed a lighted match onto a sea of oil.
In the street, I held out my hand for a cab. A shabby beige Lada pulled up. The driver in jeans and a red t-shirt asked where I was going. I gave him the address of Tolya’s club. As he drove, he bent over the wheel in a weird contorted way. After a few minutes, I realized he was a hunchback.
The driver asked if I was a foreigner. He said did I need anything?
What was he offering? Girls? Drugs? I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about this place.
When the driver finally pulled up at the curb and turned around, I saw he had a soft young face, and I gave him extra cash.
For a few seconds, standing on the street, I fantasized that I’d find Tolya at Pravda222, find him behind the bar, cradling some thousand-dollar bottle of wine the way I had that morning in New York. But I knew he would be lying low, looking for Grisha Curtis. I had already called his apartment, his ex-wife’s dacha. I didn’t want to try anybody else. I was afraid my calling would get him into bad trouble.
If Tolya was hiding, I’d try for anonymity here. Nobody else at the club would know me. As I went in, and dropped my bag at the coat-check, I became Max Fielding, a travel writer, always making notes in my little notebook.
Pravda222 was pretty much exactly like Tolya’s other clubs.
“Branding, Artyom,” I could hear Tolya say. “This is how it works. Rich people like security, they like a name they know, you must have a brand.”
How excited he had been when he opened his club in Moscow, his third club, and now he was on his way to a global brand. But Moscow, this is special, Artyom, he had said. This is like coming home.
Mahogany paneling, old chandeliers, long bar, de-silvered mirrors that Tolya told me he picked up at the flea market in Paris, and which caught the light. On the walls were the Soviet posters he had collected: Mayakovsky, the Stenberg Brothers, Rodchenko, a painting by Malevich that must have cost millions. Waiters in white bistro aprons checked the tables, the linen, glass.
People were filtering in quietly, the early part of the evening, most coming for dinner.
A handsome guy in a beautiful black suit, the cut so perfect I knew it was custom-made, approached me and asked if he could help.
I needed help. I told him I knew Sverdloff through a friend. It worked like a charm. The guy offered me a table, I said I’d sit at the bar. He offered me a drink, I said Scotch, please.
Konstantin was the suit’s name, and I told him I was Max Fielding and gave him the information I’d given the kids on the bus. I didn’t know if he believed me or not, but he welcomed me to Moscow and said did I need anything, and excused himself to greet somebody who had arrived and had perched on a barstool four down from where I sat.
While I drank I read an English-language paper I’d picked up at the airport. Fifty-four per cent of Russians, according to a poll, consider money the most important thing as compared to eleven per cent of Americans, the piece said. Things were going to fall into an abyss, another columnist had written. Give it two months, give it until October, he said, and the price of oil would plunge, and everybody would be left high and dry, stranded, screwed. Putin announced, meanwhile, that everything would be wonderful for a hundred years.
A couple of men who had planted themselves at the bar began telling jokes. They were well dressed, nice clothes, good accents. I made out that they were a pair of Moscow architects.
After a couple of drinks, they started talking about people from the former Sov republics. Then one cracked a joke about Obama. They laughed. What a joke, one said to the other in Russian.
“I say to myself, hope?” he said. “I say, change? I see a black guy, and I say, okay, how much?”
I was slipping between planets. I didn’t bother telling them Obama was probably the only candidate who could help us out, and we needed help. I didn’t bother. They wouldn’t get it.
I sat and drank for a while until the suit—Konstantin—came over, and asked if I needed anything else, and I mentioned I was looking for a place to stay. An apartment, maybe, instead of a hotel, I said. I wanted to get the real feel of being in Moscow.