Hotel Moscow (9 page)

T
HE SCREAMS THAT
woke Olga came at the wrong time of night and from the wrong wall. Usually it was their neighbor to the right who brutalized his wife in the evenings until the vodka knocked him out. The charcoal-gray stripes breaking through the shutters meant it was predawn. And instead of the slamming of a body against the shared wall and the cries of a woman’s pleading, the screams sounded like the prolonged bellow of a tortured animal.

She nudged her husband. “Viktor, wake up.”

He grunted, but didn’t move.

A far but distinct shriek pierced the wall, jerking Olga to full consciousness. Angry male voices, garbled like the sound from a public announcement system, came from the left.

“Did you hear that?” She pinched Viktor’s arm. Of course he heard. Their building, a
Khrushchoby,
Khrushchev’s slum, had thin prefabricated walls and single-pane glass windows that obstructed neither sound nor temperature.

Viktor turned onto his stomach. “It’s none of our business.”

She coughed, switched on the night lamp, and forced her legs off the bed. Her stiff, aching joints warned her of a coming harsh winter. She pushed herself up off the mattress, shivering. The building cooperative would not begin turning on the heat for another month, and then only for one hour in the morning and two in the evening.

Olga’s feet skimmed the floor in search of her slippers. Another scream rang out. She ran to the kitchen barefoot. Through the window from which she chatted with her neighbors, she had a view of the wing perpendicular to hers. With horror, she distinguished the screams as coming from her friend Vera’s apartment, one floor below her and diagonally across. In Vera’s lit communal kitchen, Olga saw the lower halves of three pairs of legs, two in jogging suits and American sneakers, and a woman’s bare feet below the edges of the baby-blue nightgown.

Her friend leaped closer to the window. A rip down the middle of her nightgown exposed her olive-skinned breasts and stomach.

Olga’s trembling fingers struggled with the window latch. As soon as she released it, one of the men waved a steam iron at Vera. A scream traveled up Olga’s throat, but she slammed her hand against her mouth as comprehension ripped through her. The mafia! No mistaking their tactics. Thank God she hadn’t turned on the light.

“You didn’t sign the papers,” the man shouted. “We’ll teach you a lesson, so all the dumb bitches will know we’re serious.”

“I will! I will sign anything!” Vera cried. “Please don’t hurt me.”

Olga ran back to the bedroom and shook her husband. “Viktor! Get up! They’re torturing Vera.”

Viktor leaned on one elbow and flipped on his reading lamp. His face, sleep puffed, drooped from its own weight, and a tuft of silver hair sprouted from his scalp. “Shhhh. Come back to bed.”

“Get up,” she whispered. “We must go over there!”

“Don’t be crazy.”

She stubbed her toe on the door frame running back to the kitchen, and to her spot at the window. One of the men now held Vera in a vise hold. With one hand he twisted and wrenched her waist-length dark hair, locking her head backward, while his other hand pinned her arms, arching her naked torso as a third man materialized, grabbed a handful of Vera’s luscious hair, and hacked at it with scissors. Vera kicked at him as her tresses, too thick, resisted. He yanked harder, causing her body to jerk. Clumps of hair fell to the floor.

“No!” Vera struggled to twist away.

The man brandishing the iron reached down toward her middle, and the hot iron hissed, branding flesh. Olga smelled the sickening sweetness of charred skin, then realized it must be in her imagination; Vera’s apartment was too far away for the smell to waft over. A fit of coughing seized her. She collapsed into a chair and dropped her face into her hands.

What could she, an old woman, do? Yet, how could she sit by idly?

Viktor stumbled in just as the refrigerator compressor kicked on with a thud, jolting Olga before it settled into a steady hum
that muted the voices across the way. Tears of fury and helplessness rolled down Olga’s cheeks. She pushed herself away from the table and marched back to the bedroom.

“You are not going anywhere.” Viktor followed, grabbed her arm, and forced her to sit down on the bed. His hand rifled blindly through the clutter on the night table for the pack of Dukat. Finding it, he offered it to her. She ignored him, stood up again, and yanked open the armoire door. He pressed himself between her and the closet. “Don’t even think of it.”

“How can I not?” Reaching around him, she sifted through her clothes.

“If you interrupt them, they might take Vera with them, and then you’ll never see her again. Or, they might take you, a witness.” He lit a cigarette and put it between her lips. “Anyway, they’ve already done what they wanted to do to her.”

Olga’s body shook. In staccato drags, she drew hard on the cigarette. The K.G.B. era, with its free rein of torture and cruelty, was supposed to be over. She stared blankly at the wallpaper. The once delicate yellow roses sported water stains in meandering shapes of islands and continents. How she despised being unable to do something—anything—for her friend.

“It’s cold. Cover up.” Viktor held up her robe. The bright pink of thirty years before had long acquired a grayish hue.

The cigarette burned her fingertips. She crushed the smoldering end and went back to the armoire. All her clothes hung neatly layered on only two hangers; Viktor needed a strong wire to finish the third he’d been fashioning from a piece of cedar. Olga freed her brown skirt and flowered blouse from the tangle
of loops and sleeves and got dressed. Since climbing up the five floors back to the apartment would be too much, she dressed for the day in her good sweater under a blazer.

“Olga Leonidovna, I know you.” Viktor’s fingers gathered the stretched-open fly of his striped pajamas and rearranged the fabric to cover himself, as if she cared if he looked dignified. “You think you can fight the whole Russian mafia single-handedly.”

“Not single-handedly, but with all of Russia’s women behind me.” Olga thought of what that young American, Brooke, had said about people uniting.

“We’re almost fifty, too old for new struggles.” Viktor sat on the bed and hung his head. “You’ve done your share with your
samizdat.
”

“You knew about the newsletter?”

“The K.G.B. interrogated me, too.”

“I didn’t tell you, for your own protection.”

He shrugged.

Olga felt the blood slamming in her temples. “I’m going to Vera. Her mother’s there. They might kill the old woman—if watching them torture her child didn’t kill her first.”

“Wait.” Viktor made a move to get up. “Don’t go yet. Olga, what can you do for Vera? What can anyone do about anything in this forsaken country?” The weary sweep of his arm encompassed the world outside.

“You expect me to sit by when Vera, and women like her, are being driven out of their businesses by torture?” Olga glanced at the photograph on her night table, where, even in the dim light, the blond hair of her granddaughter shone like hers had when
she was young. “Russia has been given a second chance. I want a better future for Galina.”

Short puffs of smoke swirled over Viktor’s head in the lamplight before dissolving into the shadows. “She’s Mikhail’s responsibility, not yours.” His tone was tired. “You raised him to be a good, modern man.”

“A man nevertheless, and men don’t make the world a better place.”

“And women can without our help?” He leaned forward, and his pajama top strained over his protruding belly. His skin was the color of an eggshell. “Get it into your head. You can change nothing. Nothing.”

He was wrong. Her
samizdat
had given women hope, even if it brought no change. He was right, though, that they were all worse off now, after the fall of communism, having lost their quota in the parliament along with the safety net of services guaranteed by laws, laws that were now wiped out. Outrageously, Yeltsin’s new directive was to give all available jobs to men. As the old saying went, “It is easier for the donkey when a woman gets off the cart.”

Olga stepped to the door, thinking of her conversation with Brooke. It did not matter that Brooke didn’t understand Russia and had no idea what was not possible here. The confidence Brooke exuded and her professional stature proved that women could gain rights and be successful in the business world.

Back in the kitchen, she peered out the window. A man in a jogging suit stood by Vera’s kitchen window, smoking. Olga couldn’t see his face. There was no sign of Vera or her mother. Olga’s heart pounded. Wait, she told herself. Viktor was right
that rushing in would only get her or Vera—or both—into trouble.

Bile climbed up her throat. She walked to the bathroom to rinse her mouth with baking soda, and steadied herself at the sink. Cold water trickled from the faucet. In the mirror, blue irises peeked at her through the delicate folds of weary eyes. She probed the faint web of infinitesimal lines crisscrossing her cheeks.

Still shaking, Olga returned to the kitchen and opened the box of diced tea leaves saved for special occasions. Measuring a spoonful, she folded it into a torn piece of newspaper, and wrapped two spoonfuls of sugar in another newspaper piece.

She peered again through the window. All seemed quiet at Vera’s apartment. The men must have left.

As Olga descended the five flights of stairs, her knees rebelled with stabs of pain. It was a relief to walk through the foyer even as the stench of urine and rotting potatoes caused her to gag. Exiting her building, she followed the well-trodden mud path to the street. After last night’s rain, the concrete slabs were covered in mud, and the galoshes protecting her shoes made squishing sounds as she crossed the long block.

Rounding the corner, she was whipped by a gust of wind, almost knocking her off balance. She tightened the wool scarf around her head and neck. The coming winter would be long and harsh.

In the adjacent wing of the building, Vera’s stairwell gaped, its door long stolen. Along the concrete wall in the building’s foyer, Olga’s fingers groped for the timed light switch. She tried to climb fast; in one minute, the light would run out.

An eerie silence shrouded the stairwell. Olga stopped on each landing to catch her breath, to wait out the last seconds of the timed light switch and press it again. Her joints screamed, but she hated to use her small cache of aspirin. Viktor had bought it at an inflated price from a colleague at the Academy of Sciences who had returned from a conference abroad, and she had been saving it for the long winter months, or for emergencies; a wrapped tablet for Vera now hid in her pocket. Olga felt eyes peering at her from behind the peepholes of the dozens of doors on each floor. The neighbors must have heard everything, must have watched the men bounding up, then later thumping down the stairs. No one could have missed the Mercedes that must have parked out front, the mark of a mafia gang.

Vera’s mother fell into Olga’s arms with deep, rasping sobs. Olga hugged the old woman, then stepped inside the cubicle that was their home. Vera’s groans—guttural, tortured, animal-like—filled the room. She lay in the only bed, her long, thin abdomen naked except for soaked rags, and her heavy dark hair, cropped at odd angles like a logged forest, sticking out unevenly around her face. The sour smells of sweat and burned flesh saturated the air.

Olga bit her lower lip. Rage filled her: rage at what Russia was doing to her people, at what it permitted to be done to her people. Rage at herself for her own helplessness. “I brought you a
tabletka
of aspirin.” She propped up Vera’s head and made her swallow the pill with water.

“I used all our butter for her burn.” The old woman pointed at the soaked rags.

“Ice is much better. See if you can get some.” Few refrigerators came with freezers. Olga handed her the tea and sugar. “Can you also make her
mannaya kasha
?” Boiling semolina would occupy the old woman and give her a way to help her daughter.

Vera’s mother shuffled out of the room. Olga sat at the edge of the bed. Vera moaned. “It hurts so much.”

“I’m so sorry. So sorry.” Olga brushed aside sweat-soaked wisps of hair that clung to Vera’s forehead. “Shhhhhhh. Shhhhhhh.” She sat quietly, stroking the chopped hair, waiting for the pill to take whatever effect it could offer. Vera needed morphine, not an aspirin.

Vera fingered Olga’s plastic beads. “Why are you dressed up?”

“I have a meeting with my boss, Chestikov, about the Tuesday symposium with the American women.” She stopped. “I’ll tell you another time.”

“Tell me now. It’ll take my mind off everything. Are the Americans exploited by their capitalist bosses?”

“Some are the bosses. And they seem happy.” Olga heard the wonder in her own voice as she uttered the words. “And they are not even aware of it. They think they know how good things are for them, but they can’t really, because they have no idea how bad things can be.”

Vera shook her head and groaned. “No Russian woman is happy.”

“Aren’t we sometimes happy in very small ways? We find fresh mushrooms in the forest and we’re happy. We see a friend, and we’re happy. A young woman buys a pair of jeans, and for three years she can be happy just looking at them. But it’s true: We’re not life happy.”

Vera lay silent for a short while. “It hurt so much. You know important people. Can you find a doctor?”

Olga cradled her friend’s hand. “As soon as morning comes, I’ll get someone I know. She doesn’t have a phone.” There was no question of taking Vera to a hospital. With no personal connections, she would be denied treatment.

“They came on payday and confiscated the payroll.” Vera’s lips were dry and cracked. “Just stole all our cash.”

“You don’t have to talk now.”

“I want to, in case I die.”

Olga touched Vera’s lips with a water-soaked sponge. “You will not die; it may just feel like it now.” Nevertheless, she knew that without antibiotics, infection of the exposed flesh might get into Vera’s bloodstream and brain.