Eight Pieces of Empire (5 page)

He moved uneasily, stiffly, like a rusted robot, as he led me down the hall and into a comfortable room with leather sofas. There was also a coffee table carefully laid out with coveted “Misha the Intoed Bear” chocolates from the Red October factory, sundry cookies imported from abroad, Beluga caviar in a crystal bowl, and a bottle of Ararat “export” cognac from Soviet Armenia. Shchemyakin motioned to me to sit down, sat down himself, and handed me my passport and visa with a smile.

“Everything’s fine with your documents,” he cooed, as if being two days in “major violation” of the Soviet Foreign Registration Law had been a joke.

“Spasibo,”
I said, standing. “Thanks.”

“But before you go, there is someone who wants to meet you.”

THE AMERICAN IMAGE
of Soviet KGB officers was reinforced by dozens of late-Communist-period B films made by, of course, Americans. Usually, the pristine Yanqui is snapped off the streets of the USSR and flung into the Gulag as if it’s just for sport. The physical appearance of the KGB man was a constant as well: KGB men were almost invariably portrayed as sadistic, shabbily dressed, and paranoid, and as projecting zero humanity, whether feigned or otherwise.

In reality, most Russians knew the MO of the
chekist
, especially middle- and higher-ranking ones, to have been different, at least in the post-Stalin era, when there was less bloodletting. A solid career in the KGB was among the more prestigious Soviet occupations, like it or not.

AN ATHLETIC-LOOKING MAN
of about fifty years of age entered the room and strode toward me with hand outstretched to clasp mine.

He was gracious, almost glib, and introduced himself as “Valery,” though I have no idea if that was his real name. He acted like a stage actor emoting at a theater-in-the-parks summer fest, where you had to belt out every consonant and vowel. He wore a black leather jacket of high quality, a stereotypical KGB getup.

“Tak!”
exclaimed my new friend, uncorking the bottle of export cognac and pouring us out two shots; Scar-face Shchemyakin hovered in the background, timidly following along with the ritual.

The first toast was to my arrival in the USSR. The second was a throwaway about the
druzhba narodov
, a standard trope about the supposed “friendship among nations” of the USSR, or in this case between the USSR and the USA. After some more chitchat about the need for international understanding and other gracious goo, Valery poured a third toast and dedicated it to “our work.” This seemed odd,
but I downed it anyway and was preparing to make my own when Valery put down his
ryumochka
, or shot glass, and looked straight into my eyes.

“So,” he asked, without a hint of a blink of his steely eyes, but with a face still glowingly warm and smiling. “Who sent you?”

“Sent me?”

“Yes.” He grinned. “What is the purpose of your visit?”

I must have looked dumb. I didn’t know what Valery was talking about and said so.

“I have no purpose,” I responded, using the Russian
“U menya net tseli”
and sounding far too existential. Valery rolled his eyes slightly, and Shchemyakin’s pasted-on grin started to fade.

“I mean, I’ve come to improve my Russian. To see friends.”

“And why is it you’ve chosen to study Russian?”

I’d heard this question dozens of times, from Americans as often as Russians. Many Russians assumed there was something innately dubious and possibly nefarious about foreigners wanting to learn the language of Pushkin. Many Americans, by contrast, automatically assumed students of Russian to be Commie sympathizers or wannabe spies for the CIA, thus reinforcing the Soviet assumption.

“But Russian is a beautiful language,” I said.

“But there are many beautiful languages,” countered Valery. “What about Italian? What about French or German?”

Then for some reason Lenin popped into my head, specifically a flashback from the monument at Finland Station, where I had seen off Nina Nikolaevna.

“But look at Lenin—he knew so many languages …,” I said.

Valery rolled his eyes again and poured us another cognac.

“Yes, languages are important,” he reflected.

“But tell me,” he said after a slight pause. “It must be quite uncomfortable for you to live in that communal apartment. I mean, to my knowledge Americans aren’t used to such conditions.”

I replied that I found the experience interesting, and that, at any rate,
I had no money for anything more luxurious. I was a student, in other words. I had saved up for the airfare while working as a waiter and also studying at university, and was not paying a cent to stay at Nina Nikolaevna’s (unless you consider “rent” the two tins of hard-to-find cinnamon and some other simple gifts brought from the United States). Food and other staples in 1989 Leningrad were dirt cheap by Western standards. In other words, I could probably live more economically in the USSR (including airfare) for a summer doing nothing than working and renting a flat in the States doing some summer job.

“Perhaps we could help you?” smiled Valery. “I mean, it is very expensive to visit the USSR. Perhaps next summer, you could work with us? You could even work here, in the OVIR office?”

I stammered something incoherent, wanting to disbelieve what was happening. Valery the KGB man, who insinuated that I was on some deep-cover mission posing as an indigent American student without the brains to register his residency on time, was now trying to recruit me as a double-agent mole, implausible as it was. Or at least he believed I was valuable enough to recruit as a KGB mole, though I could offer nothing in the way of information or contacts. I was dressed in sneakers and had no job and not much money. I was living in a rundown communal, and not out of some hippie let’s-all-be-poor wish. I had no connections, no ties to any government, real or imagined. The whole scene was too ridiculous to be true. I pinched myself, hoping that it was just the cognac, gone to my head.

It wasn’t. I was being interviewed by a suave Soviet state security man who, after befuddling my brain, was now getting down to the real point.

“Tell us about the exiles,” Valery gently prodded. “You know, the daughter and son-in-law of the woman you are staying with.”

“Who?”

“Aw, you know!” exclaimed Valery with a smile. “Viktor and Mila, your teachers in the United States. “How are they? What do they say about the Soviet Union these days?”

I could not deny that I knew them—it was Mila who had arranged for me to stay in her mother’s communal room.

“They recall with pleasure their days in the Soviet Union,” I blurted, sounding ridiculous even to myself. The sentence was as clumsily bookish as it was absurd. Eight years after being exiled, Viktor only mentioned Communists in tandem with expletives.

“Really, with pleasure?” said Valery with a knowing smile, while twisting his shot glass slowly with his fingertips. “This is odd, because as you must know, their departure from here was rather … bitter.”

BITTER? THE SELF-DESTRUCTIVE
dissident Viktor had to be practically pried out of the empire because he refused to leave the same place that many other dissidents were desperate to get out of. One day in 1981, Viktor and Mila were summoned to the same OVIR office, where a lady clerk handed them a stack of forms.

“Your poor auntie in Israel is sick. Of course, you need to go help your poor auntie in Israel,” said the clerk. “We are going to arrange exit visas for you both at once.” Viktor shook his head in the negative. “We don’t have any relatives in Israel.” He laughed at the incredulous clerk, who acted like she was speaking to a man turning down a winning lottery jackpot.

“You’re the first ones to laugh about this,” remarked the clerk.

“Just fill out the paperwork and get it back to us by tomorrow,” she insisted, shoving the forms at Viktor.

Once they arrived back at the communal, Viktor realized that he didn’t even have the name of his nonexistent Israeli “auntie.” He had the gall to ring the clerk up on the telephone.

“
Devushka
[young lady], what’s the name of our Israeli auntie?” he asked.

“Are you screwing around, fool?” came the clerk’s response.

“Well maybe we won’t be going to Israel after all …,” answered Viktor laconically.

“Ummm … Just bring the damn documents yourselves. We’ll take care of your aunt’s name ourselves,” came the clerk’s irritated reply.

FOR WHAT SEEMED
like an eternity, I pretended to be fascinated with staring at a nondescript office clock mounted on a wall.

“Well,” I said at last, breaking the silence about Viktor and Mila’s present attitudes about the USSR.

“Last we spoke, they said that they were really excited about Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika reforms,” I told the KGB man.

This was either a pathetic faux pas or my saving grace, because few words uttered by Americans evoked more nausea from KGB-type Russians. Our naive smiles and adoration of Gorbachev, a man at best grudgingly tolerated by most Russians at the time, evoked a sensation similar to the regurgitation of curdled milk among many of them. It wasn’t that they were against reform, but Gorbachev’s Communist-style vernacular led many to doubt his sincerity.

“Glasnost and Perestroika, yes,” Valery said, still smiling but barely able to contain himself. “Interesting, of course. Tell me, is there anything else that Americans can discuss about Russia other than Glasnost and Perestroika?”

I did not need to answer but tried to make a rational assessment of my situation and found it wanting, pathetic.

Fact:
I was drinking cognac and eating caviar after business hours with a KGB man who wanted information about my Russian teachers-in-exile Viktor and Mila. Both were acid-tongued critics of the Soviet regime. Before his exile, Viktor was so reckless in his denunciations of the party that some of his closest friends thought he might have even been KGB himself, acting as an agent provocateur. He had been a contributor to a well-known underground
(samizdat)
publication,
Tridtsat-Sem
(“Thirty-Seven”). (Or
Tridtsat Semitov
, meaning “Thirty Semites,” as Viktor jokingly referred to it.) Mila, meanwhile, was in with a dissident women’s group and trade union activists, which the KGB was
particularly nervous about in light of the “Solidarity” events in Poland. Even eight years after their departure, when Communism, if not the empire itself, was clearly collapsing, the KGB man was still following them. Valery had personally handled their expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1981, a fact Viktor confirmed when I described Valery to him. Possibly there had been some internal squabble over whether a labor camp or exile fit their crimes. Perhaps Valery had come down on the losing side of the argument and was still bitter; who knew?

Second stupid fact:
I had dredged up the already worn-out “Glasnost and Perestroika” theme. Even ordinary Russians were often disgusted by Americans’ naiveté, assuming that reforming the USSR would be a painless matter of injecting a little democracy. It must have been especially galling for a KGB type like Valery to have to listen to twaddle coming from the toothy smile of a silly American who in his estimation didn’t understand a thing about the consequences of an imploding empire.

Last and most embarrassing fact:
I had failed to react to Valery’s recruitment offer, if indeed the offer made to a clueless American kid in battered sneakers who was living in a communal associated with unspeakable dissidents had been made in earnest at all.

Another uncomfortable pause descended on us, which was finally broken by Valery.

“Tell me, my young American friend,” he asked rhetorically. “Do you know what it is to spend your entire life building a house, just to watch a gang of vandals come and try to tear it down?”

I listened to his bitter soliloquy.

“Let us presume that the house wasn’t a perfect house. Some of the beams were weak. Many mistakes were made in building this house. A fool designed the fireplace; it fills the rooms with smoke sometimes. A relative got electrocuted rigging up the electricity. But gradually, we learn. Yes, the house is not perfect. It leans to one side. But we live in this house, you see. It is our house.”

I said nothing. Nothing needed to be said.

“Is it better to let the vandals tear it down with a bulldozer and kill all the inhabitants? Or is it better to move some of the bricks gradually, fix
the beams one by one, rebuild the fireplace while keeping a kettle of soup on a little stove nearby?”

Valery’s voice trailed off, and his glibness took on a paler hue. His eyes remained fixed and steely, but his lips turned up at a slightly weaker angle.

The tears of a KGB man.

*
Those with a grasp of Russian phonology will appreciate the onomatopoeic sound of “Sh-che-MYAK-in.” It emits a grating melody akin to the yap of a small dog or an old woman’s scold.

A BIGAMIST BANDIT AND A BUTTON MAKER

L
eading a life of
crime isn’t easy.” Vova laughed slightly at his self-evaluation. It was part justification, and part plea for sympathy.

We were just emerging from a brief and thankfully bloodless altercation with two men on a small bridge near the Kirov Theater. They had been walking toward us and slowed as Vova and I approached. It was just after dusk on a foggy evening. The combination of darkness and mist produced a disorienting effect, reducing real visibility to a few yards. Vova and the two men recognized each others’ faces with difficulty. Once they did, all three pranced like nervous cats circling for a scrap. There was a long pause while menacing glances were exchanged, followed by a string of profanities uttered in quick, quiet succession. One of the men spit forcefully into the ground and muttered something to the other. Then the pair swaggered on into the gloom, as if they’d just benevolently granted us a stay of execution.