Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) (12 page)

“This is a very green area,” Anna Petrovna says. She lives nearby. “Many want to live here. Look at the trees.” The building is set back from a busy street, Profsoyuznaya, by half a block of asphalt and pipes and dumpsters. Down in the dirt yard out front, someone has built a homemade contraption for lifting weights. But there are clusters of tall trees all around, and from the fifth floor, if you only look out and not down, you see mostly foliage, and it glows. I try to ask them how to say
treehouse
, but the more I explain the more alarmed they look at the idea of kids living in trees.

“So what happened here, to your face?” Anna Petrovna asks Edik in the sweetest voice, pure curiosity.

He crinkles up his asymmetrical eyes. “Just a little accident, as a kid.” His voice is scuffed up at the edges.

Skeptical, she watches him, but decides to let it go. “I have to go now,” she says, kissing us on the cheeks. “But I’ll come back tomorrow and show you the neighborhood.”

Edik and I go in the other room and flop onto the couch, watching in silence as the afternoon sun moves across the room in trapezoids. It lights up the polished dining table, the small white bust of Lenin on the shelf, the dead little TV, the yellowing plastic radio perched on top of it. The dead man’s slippers are lined up by the door; his brush waits under the mirror. Before too long, when it gets colder, I’ll go ahead and use his bathrobe. I ask Edik how long it’s been since he went home to Tomsk for a visit. He says over a year. I ask about his family, but he just curves his lips into a false smile and shakes his head slightly. His eyes are deep brown and buggy, constant. His nose, clearly broken. His forehead is divided in two by a deep reddish scar that creeps down from his hairline. It picks up again in his pursed upper lip, and again on his throat, near the clavicle. He is a boy who takes you out of the loop of beauty, who makes beauty seem what it’s always been: arbitrary and cruel. Imagine a world without beautiful people. There’s something thrilling about it. I decide to run one thumb down the middle of his forehead, in that groove.

He rushes in like a middle-schooler to kiss me, as if the chance may never come again. But after a few seconds he pulls back and says, “You feel alone now? Is that the reason?”

It is and it isn’t, so I just pull him closer. When it comes to the more perplexing sentiments I’m handicapped by my meager vocabulary, still scared of botching every message. Like him, I’ve come to appreciate silence and gestures. His hip bones move against me and we’re both very thin these days so my hand slips easily up his shirt, down his pants, quick to remove the fabric that separates us.

The country no longer exists, but the city remains. A country is just an idea, its borders only visible in your mind and on maps. But the city is real, noisy and rank, covered in slush and transformed into one vast flea market. Every busy corner or underground crosswalk is jammed up with people selling whatever they can. Against the November cold they hold up blankets and coats, TVs and umbrellas—new products they were given instead of salaries, or old things they’ve decided they can live without. It’s the season of 300 percent inflation and disappearing pensions. The season of eighteen-hour-long nights. The season of
Bush’s legs
—huge American chicken legs processed and frozen in plastic, sold cheap from the U.S. as aid relief, because Americans prefer white meat. When Edik balks at their size I say, “We’ve got radioactive chickens,” and get a smile.

My American summer clothes are useless, so I’ve cobbled together an all-Russian wardrobe, which means uncomfortable pleather shoes and tight polyester sweaters in ghastly colors not found in nature. Short skirts, thick tights that bunch up at the ankles, and a broken-zippered coat that’s thin as a blanket. And even in this, people stare at me and know: I’m an imposter.

In the subway stations veterans, gypsies, and amputees have started planting themselves in the corridors to beg, clogging the already jammed traffic flow as people struggle not to step on them. Some reek of urine and alcohol; others have signs explaining their plight; others are cleanly dressed, with their uniforms on and their medals displayed on velvet pads as proof that they should not be penniless. The Russian word for them,
bomzhi,
comes from
our
word, bums. Like everyone else Edik walks past them with alarm and shame, and once they’re out of earshot he says to me, “I guess you’re used to this, but we never had this before.” They’ve all heard all about our hordes of homeless people.

Crime has arrived too, both petty and semiorganized. I still feel safer than in the U.S., but everyone here talks of pickpockets and street punks and mafiosos who demand payment from every kiosk owner or else burn the kiosks to the ground. They smolder along the sidewalks in the mornings.

What I do is throw parties. It’s the most unembarrassing way to feed people. I say, “Bring your friends, anybody you want,” and I load up the table and put on some music and they eat and fill the room with Russian words, and they teach me things like how not to piss off shop clerks. Tonight I’ve made grilled cheese sandwiches, deviled eggs, and fried potatoes. There are pickled vegetables, vodka and dollar-a-bottle champagne,
vafli
cookies and those awful little round
bubliki
. The custom here, at least right now, is not that the food goes together in any particular way, but that you fill the table, empty the cupboards, offer up everything you can find. I’m OK with that. I’m earning more money than I can manage to spend here. The stack of dollars on the top shelf of my armoire keeps growing as the ruble collapses and the supply lines for products seize up.

Tonight they’re asking about supply and demand, because I said something offhanded like, “The more rubles they print, the less they’ll be worth,” and a few of them looked at me like this was gibberish. Maybe I said it wrong.

“But a ruble’s a ruble,” says a girl at the end of the table.

She’s not an idiot, not completely naïve; she just hasn’t been taught, year in and year out, that greed is the only reliable rule on the planet. I hesitate. Do I want to be the person who teaches her that? But the lesson is already breaking out in the streets.

Edik changes the subject for me. “I read somewhere that in America you can tell what kind of person someone is by the type of car he drives.” Everyone laughs—it’s absurd—but then the relative truth of that rumor dawns on me. There are lots of things I can’t tell them about my country—things that embarrass me, things I don’t understand.

When the party’s over Edik sticks around and does what I’m told few Russian men do, the dishes. When I try to throw away some stale bread, he stops me and says that’s a sin. When everything’s cleaned up, we lean out the windows by the balcony so he can smoke, and I watch his lips kissing the black air, watch his bulbous Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “What’s the word for that, again?” I say, putting my fingers on it and feeling the hard ridges of his windpipe. I’ve taped vocabulary lists to the walls, and Edik just smiles and points at one of them.
Kadyk
.

To keep the cockroaches at bay I collect up the garbage and take it out to the stairwell, opening the creaking trash chute as quietly as possible. The walls are thin and I try to sneak around unnoticed.

But tonight I fail. My next-door neighbor unlatches his door with a fury and swings out. “You mustn’t throw those away!” he hisses.

I stare at the old man, terrified, holding my plastic bag like it’s a bomb.

“The bottles,” he says. “The bottles,” though I know the plastic bags are at least as valuable. He shuffles over and takes them.

Although I give money to almost all the beggars I pass, I haven’t yet given to him. This is because when I walk by him on the sidewalk—kneeling in his army uniform, with his rows of medals—he ducks his head or turns away, pretending not to see me, not to live next door to me. And I don’t want to steal this last illusion from him.

In the newsroom at the wire service I work the evening shift, and they pay me in dollars, not rubles. They hand us printouts of short articles, and we translate them into English as fast as possible, like machines. We learn all about the fighting in the Caucasus and the declarations of independence everywhere and the rise of new government officials in each former republic. When I meet up with terms I don’t know, which is often, I ask the guy next to me, who’s endlessly patient. Tall and thin, a Russian Mr. Rogers, he speaks English with such hard, curling, American R’s that everyone presumes he must have been a spy at some point. When we ask him, he just shrugs and says, “Well.”

Every hour or two we go out on the balcony for a smoke, where we gossip and look across the square at the huge lit-up statue of Mayakovsky, who looks as suave as a male model, with one hand pushing his suit coat back at the hip. Only Russians could make a poet look this powerful and sexy.

There’s such an excess of news to sell to the West that we can hardly keep up, so they bring on a new translator from Boston who just spent the past three months in Tbilisi, trying to scrap together a documentary about the civil war breaking out there. “It’s the most beautiful place in the world,” he says. “They have wine.” But when he and his crew broke their equipment and ran out of money, they came to Moscow to regroup. All kinds of makeshift explorers are touching down here; some call it the new Wild West—all resources, no laws. After work the new guy invites me to a party he’s going to. When you meet someone from your own country and they’re not an immediate asshole, you are friends.

I consider calling Edik to meet us, but the lure of speaking nothing but English for a whole night is too strong.

The apartment containing the party is a shock: no wallpaper, no gaudy lamps, no chintzy laminated entertainment center filled with china and lace. Just a plain off-white room with a futon and a stereo, some chairs. People move freely about, sip from their drinks whenever they want, no crazy toasts. No shots. It’s like going to Sweden for a night, or Finland at least. People don’t even take off their shoes at the door. There’s a handful of Americans and Canadians; a sleek, loud Italian woman; a German with slicked-back hair; a few Australians. Everyone in English, loud and fast. On the stereo it’s Sonic Youth, then some weird French rap, then Blondie. I’m transported.

Around ten a big blond American powers through the door. He says, “Youguysyouwillneverbelievewhatjusthappenedtome.”

In the snow outside, his taxi slid ever so slowly toward an old woman obliviously crossing the street. He and the driver started screaming, they bashed the horn, but of course it was broken. “By the time we hit her we must’ve been going just a couple miles an hour, but the buildup was horrible. This poor stooped lady. I thought we were going to kill her.”

His cheeks are pink and alcoholic, the sides of his neck lightly pickled in the manner of someone who had a good dermatologist as a teen. His yellow hair stands up in stiff tufts, his eyes are raw blue.

“Well?” someone says.

“She popped up and started banging on the hood, demanding we pay her something.” His face flashes between astonished and jubilant.

“What’d you do?”

“The cabbie started screaming at her, calling her a fraud. It was fucking horrible. I was like, hey, she’s a babushka. I wanted to take her to the hospital, but she just got this zloi look on her face and kept saying, twenty bucks, twenty bucks.”

Later I learn they’re all in on a running dare: who can catch the most unconventional gypsy cab. Apparently, in times of grave civic collapse, when no one knows exactly who’s in charge, you can flag down and get a ride from such things as a garbage truck, even a snowplow. The German by the window holds the record with an off-duty city bus. “It’s true,” the others vouch. I’ve been burrowing through the city by subway all these months; who knew?

I sit studying them from a corner of the futon. Part of me is revolted, but there’s another part, the groupless part. The language coming out of their mouths is perfect and swift and takes no effort to follow. They have normal food like potato chips and beer. I saw bananas and a box of Frosted Flakes in the kitchen.