He handed me a scrap of newsprint and went on. “Rymar will meet you. Easy to recognize – he’s got the face of an idiot and an orange sweater. I’ll be there after ten minutes. Everything will be OK!”
“But I don’t speak Finnish.”
“That doesn’t matter. The important thing is to smile. I’d go myself, but they know me here…” Fred suddenly grabbed my hand. “There they are! Go to it!”
And he disappeared into the bushes.
I went to meet the two women, feeling terribly nervous. They looked like peasants, with broad, tanned faces. They were wearing light raincoats, elegant shoes and bright kerchiefs. Each carried a shopping bag as swollen as a soccer ball.
Gesticulating wildly, I finally led the women to the taxi stand. There was no line. I kept repeating, “Mr Fred, Mr Fred,” and plucked at one woman’s sleeve.
“Where is that guy?” the woman said angrily. “Where the hell is he? What’s he trying to pull?”
“You speak Russian?”
“My mama was Russian.”
I said, “Mr Fred will be coming a bit later. Mr Fred asked me to take you to his house.”
A car pulled up. I gave the address. Then I started looking out the window. I hadn’t realized how many policemen there could be in a crowd of pedestrians.
The women spoke Finnish to each other. They were clearly unhappy about something. Then they laughed and I felt better.
A man in a fiery sweater was waiting for us on the sidewalk. He said to me with a wink, “What a couple of dogs!”
“Take a look in the mirror,” Ilona said angrily. She was the younger one.
“They speak Russian,” I said.
“Terrific,” Rymar said without skipping a beat, “marvellous. Brings us closer. How do you like Leningrad?”
“Not bad,” Maria said.
“Have you been to the Hermitage?”
“Not yet. What is it?”
“They have paintings, souvenirs, and so on. Before that, tsars lived in it,” said Rymar.
“We should take a look,” Ilona said.
“You haven’t been to the Hermitage!” Rymar was shocked. He even slowed his pace a bit, as if being with such uncultured people was dragging him down.
We went up to the second floor. Rymar pushed open the door, which wasn’t locked. There were dirty dishes everywhere. The walls were covered with photographs. Colourful dust jackets of foreign records lay on the couch. The bed wasn’t made.
Rymar put on the light and quickly neatened up. Then he said, “What have you brought?”
“Why don’t you tell us where your pal with the money is?”
There were footsteps at that moment, and Fred Kolesnikov appeared. He was carrying a newspaper that had been in his mailbox. He looked calm, even indifferent.
“
Terve
,” he said to the Finns. “Hello.”
Then he turned to Rymar. “Boy, they look pissed. Have you been hitting on them?”
“Me?” said Rymar indignantly. “We were talking about Art! By the way, they speak Russian.”
“Wonderful,” said Fred. “Good evening, Madame Lenart; how are you, Mademoiselle Ilona?”
“All right, thanks.”
“Why did you hide the fact that you speak Russian?”
“No one asked.”
“We should have a drink first,” Rymar said.
He took a bottle of Cuban rum from the closet. The Finns drank with pleasure. Rymar poured another round. When the guests went to use the bathroom, he said, “All these Laplanders look alike.”
“Especially since they’re sisters,” Fred explained.
“Just as I thought… By the way, that mug of Mrs Lenart’s doesn’t inspire confidence in me.”
Fred yelled at Rymar, “And whose mug does inspire confidence in you, besides the mug of a police investigator?”
The Finns soon returned. Fred gave them a clean towel. They raised their glasses and smiled – the second time that day. They kept their shopping bags on their laps.
“Cheers!” Rymar said. “To victory over the Germans!”
We drank, and so did the Finns. A phonograph stood on the floor, and Fred turned it on with his foot. The black disc bobbed slightly.
“Who’s your favourite writer?” Rymar was bugging the Finns.
The women consulted each other. Then Ilona said, “Karjalainen, perhaps?”*
Rymar smiled condescendingly to indicate that he approved of the named candidate – but also that he himself had higher pretensions.
“I see,” he said. “What are your wares?”
“Socks,” Maria said.
“Nothing else?”
“What else would you like?”
“How much?” Fred inquired.
“Four hundred thirty-two roubles,” barked Ilona, the younger one.
“
Mein Gott
!” Rymar exclaimed. “The bared fangs of capitalism!”
“I want to know how much you brought. How many pairs?” Fred demanded.
“Seven hundred and twenty.”
“Nylon crêpe?” Rymar demanded.
“Synthetic,” Ilona replied. “Sixty copecks the pair. Total, four hundred thirty-two roubles.”
Here I have to make a small mathematical digression. Crêpe socks were in fashion then. Soviet industry did not manufacture them, so you could buy them only on the black market. A pair of Finnish socks cost six roubles. The Finns were offering them for one tenth that amount. Nine hundred per cent pure profit…
Fred took out his wallet and counted out the money.
“Here,” he said, “an extra twenty roubles. Leave the goods right in the shopping bags.”
“We have to drink to the peaceful resolution of the Suez crisis! To the annexation of Lotharingia!” said Rymar.
Ilona shifted the money to her left hand. She picked up her glass, which was filled to the brim.
“Let’s ball these Finns,” Rymar whispered, “in the name of international unity.”
Fred turned to me. “See what I have to work with?”
I felt anxious and scared. I wanted to leave as quickly as possible.
“Who’s your favourite artist?” Rymar asked Ilona.
And he put his hand on her back.
“Maybe Mantere,”* Ilona said, moving away.
Rymar lifted his brows in reproach, as if his aesthetic sense had been offended.
Fred said to me, “The women have to be seen off and the driver given seven roubles. I’d send Rymar, but he’ll filch part of the money.”
“Me?!” Rymar was incensed. “With my crystal-clear honesty?”
When I got back, there were coloured cellophane packages everywhere. Rymar looked slightly crazed.
“Piastres, krona, dollars,” he mumbled, “francs…”
Suddenly he calmed down and took out a notebook and felt-tip pen. He made some calculations and said, “Exactly seven hundred and twenty pairs. The Finns are an honest people. That’s what you get with an underdeveloped state.”
“Multiply by three,” Fred told him.
“Why by three?”
“The socks will go for three roubles if we sell them wholesale. Fifteen hundred plus of pure profit.”
Rymar immediately arrived at the precise figure. “One thousand seven hundred twenty-eight roubles.” Madness and practicality coexisted in him.
“Five hundred something for each of us,” Fred added.
“Five hundred seventy-six,” Rymar specified.
Later Fred and I were in a shashlik restaurant. The oilcloth on the table was sticky. The air was filled with a greasy fog. People floated past like fish in an aquarium.
Fred looked distracted and gloomy. I said, “That much money in five minutes!”
I had to say something.
“You still have to wait forty minutes to get some greasy pies cooked in margarine,” Fred replied.
Then I asked, “What do you need me for?”
“I don’t trust Rymar. Not because Rymar might cheat a client, though that’s not out of the question. And not because Rymar can stick a client with old certificates instead of money. And not even because he tends to put his hands on the clients. But because Rymar is stupid. What destroys fools? A longing for Art and Beauty, and Rymar has this longing. Despite his historical limitations, he wants a Japanese portable radio. Rymar goes to the hard-currency store and hands the cashier forty dollars. With his face! Even in the most ordinary grocery store, when he hands the cashier a rouble, the cashier is sure the rouble’s stolen. And here he has forty dollars! A clear violation of the hard-currency regulations. Sooner or later he’ll wind up in jail.”
“What about me?”
“You won’t. You’ll have other problems.”
I didn’t ask which ones.
Taking his leave, Fred added, “You’ll get your share on Thursday.”
I went home feeling a strange mixture of anxiety and elation. There must be some vile power in crazy money.
I didn’t tell Asya about my adventure. I wanted to amaze her. To turn suddenly into a rich and expansive man.
Meanwhile, things were growing worse with her. I kept asking her questions. Even when I was putting down her friends, I used the interrogative form: “Don’t you think that Arik Shulman is a jerk?” I wanted to compromise Shulman in Asya’s eyes and achieved just the opposite, of course.
I’ll tell you, running ahead of my story, that we broke up in the fall. For sooner or later a person who keeps asking questions is going to learn to give answers…
Fred called on Thursday. “A catastrophe!”
I thought Rymar had been arrested.
“Worse,” said Fred. “Go into the nearest clothing store.”
“Why?”
“All the stores are flooded with crêpe socks. Soviet crêpe socks. Eighty copecks a pair. Quality no worse than the Finnish ones. The same synthetic shit.”
“What can we do?”
“Nothing. What could we do? Who would have expected a low blow like this from a socialist economy? Who can I give Finnish socks to now? They won’t take them for a rouble now!
I
know our damned industry. First they screw around for twenty years and then – bam! And all the stores are filled with some crap or other.
Once they get a production line going, that’s it. They’ll stamp out millions of those crêpe socks a minute.”
We divided up the socks. Each of us got two hundred forty pairs. Two hundred forty pairs of identical, ugly, pea-green-coloured socks. The only consolation was the “Made in Finland” label.
After that, many things happened. The operation with the Italian raincoats. The resale of six German stereos. A brawl in the Cosmos Hotel over a case of American cigarettes. Carrying a load of Japanese cameras and fleeing a police squad. And lots of other things.
I paid off my debts. Bought myself some decent clothes. Changed departments at college. Met the girl I eventually married. Went to the Baltics for a month when Rymar and Fred were arrested. Began my feeble literary attempts. Became a father. Got into trouble with the authorities. Lost my job. Spent a month in Kalyayevo Prison.
And only one thing did not change: for twenty years I paraded around in pea-coloured socks. I gave them to all my friends. Wrapped Christmas ornaments in them. Dusted with them. Stuck them into the cracks of window frames. And still the number of those lousy socks barely diminished.
And so I left, leaving a pile of Finnish crêpe socks in the empty apartment. I shoved three pairs in my suitcase.
They reminded me of my criminal youth, my first love and my old friends. Fred served his two years and then was killed in a motorcycle accident on his Chezet. Rymar served one year and now works as a dispatcher in a meat-packing plant. Asya emigrated and teaches lexicology at Stanford – which is a strange comment on American scholarship.
The Nomenklatura Half-boots
I
MUST BEGIN WITH A CONFESSION. I practically stole these shoes…
Two hundred years ago the historian Nikolai Karamzin* visited France. Russian émigrés there asked him, “What’s happening back at home, in two words?”
Karamzin didn’t even need two words. “Stealing,” he replied.
And they really are stealing. On a broader scale every year.
People carry off beef carcasses from meat-packing plants. Carders from textile factories. Lenses from photographic firms. They swipe everything – tiles, gypsum, polyethylene, electric motors, bolts, screws, radio tubes, thread, glass.
Often this takes on a metaphysical character. I’m talking about completely mysterious thefts without any rational goal. That can happen only in the Russian state, I’m convinced.
I knew a refined, noble and educated man who stole a pail of concrete from his job. Along the way the concrete set, of course. The thief threw away the rock-hard lump not far from his house. Another friend broke into a propaganda office and removed the ballot box. He brought it home and promptly lost all interest in it. A third friend stole a fire extinguisher. A fourth stole a bust of Paul Robeson* from his boss’s office. A fifth, the poster column from Shkapin Street. And a sixth, a lectern from an amateur theatre club.
I, as you will see, acted much more practically: I stole good-quality Soviet shoes, intended for export. Of course, I didn’t steal them from a store. Soviet stores don’t carry shoes like that. I swiped them from the chairman of the Leningrad City Executive Committee – otherwise known as the mayor of Leningrad. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
After the army, I took a job with a factory newsletter. I spent three years there. I realized that ideological work was not for me. I wanted something more direct, posing fewer moral doubts.
I remembered that I had attended art school a long time before (the same one, incidentally, which graduated the famous artist Shemyakin).* I had retained a few skills.
Friends with pull got me into a DPI, a decorative and applied arts studio. I became an apprentice stone-cutter. I decided to “find myself” in monumental sculpture.
Alas, monumental sculpture is a very conservative genre. The cause is the monumentality itself. You can secretly write novels and symphonies. You can secretly experiment on canvas. But just try to hide a twelve-foot-high sculpture!