House of Many Gods (44 page)

S
TILL SLEEPLESS IN HER BUNK
, A
NA WATCHED A STAND OF TREES
jump out like a forest of white fires. For a moment the train jolted as if sidestepping a giant pothole. Around her, people groaned. She looked at her watch, 2:00
A.M.
, then struggled out to the passageway, where gamblers squatted in the aisle, drinking vodka and throwing dice.

A massive man in yellow silk pajamas sat on a jumpseat like a Buddha, reading. She worked her way past him, found the lavatory and knocked. When no one answered, she pushed her weight against the door and it flew open. A man sat on the toilet with his pants down. He was holding a large handgun, and a clip of ammunition.

He looked up, grinning.
“Privyet! … Kak Dila?”
Hello. How are you.

Ana turned and fled, scattering the gamblers and their dice, then stood trembling over the man in yellow silk pajamas. “Do you speak English? There … there’s a man with a gun.”

The fat man laughed and closed his book. “He is your protection. What you pay extra for when boarding train. So no one rob you, slice you open in your sleep.”

Her hand went to her heart.

He laughed again and smoothed his silk pajamas. “Hey, you are Americans. Cash cows of Western world. Besides, all part of Russian adventure, no?”

The gunman appeared, zipping up his pants, calling out to her in broken English. It sounded as if he were asking if she wanted her back
shaved. She found another lavatory, and then stepped out onto a connecting platform, inhaling grit and coal dust, the taste and smell of Russia. From the next carriage, she heard singing that lured her on.

At first she was struck by the dimness, then the sorrowful smell of humans and clothes inadequately washed. It was a “hard-class” carriage, without compartments, an open barracks on wheels. Two long tiers of bunks on either side of a narrow aisle down the center. There were perhaps eighty people in the car, each bunk crammed with luggage and a human surrounded by voluminous, plastic sacks. She saw mothers changing diapers, men lined up for a stinking toilet. Seeing her, the singing died. They rolled over in their bunks and stared.

“Dobraye utra,”
she cried. Good morning.

A couple laughed, for it was night, not morning. The man leaned forward from his bunk. “You are from … what country, please?”

“Hawai‘i,” she said. “The USA.”

They grinned, waving her forward. “USA … okay! We practice English.”

And so she met Viktor and Darya Patrovich, pensioners in their seventies. Sitting on their bunk, Ana stared fascinated at Darya’s row of flashing metal teeth.

“
Da!
Smile of knives so beautiful I marry her,” Viktor said. He had wide Mongol cheekbones, the cheeks themselves were frostbite-scarred.

His wife slapped him playfully and smiled as people gathered near the bunk, chattering in Russian and broken English, asking did Ana drive a Chevrolet? Did gangsters still run Chicago? They asked about her family, how many children did she have?

Darya filled tiny cups with tepid tea and as they drank, she pointed to a window. “You see outside … beautiful Russian
taiga?
Rich soil from centuries of human bones. Now history coming back again. For us.”

“You understand?” Viktor tapped Ana’s knee. “New capitalist Russia bringing terrible inflation. No jobs, no care for old ones. Government ignore us. Our children ignore us. Old, backward Soviets, we remind them of bad past!”

In spite of their shabbiness, they seemed tough, resilient.

“Forgive,” Darya said. “We wanting nothing. Only you … listen. No one listening no more.”

They explained how, with sixteen dollars a month pension, they were one step from begging. They lived in an abandoned building soon to be demolished. The cost of water, lanterns, and batteries took all of
their pension. For ten years they had each owned one pair of shoes, which they continually mended. Viktor turned their shoes over, proudly showing the soles.

“Linoleum, from rubble pile!”

At night they stood behind restaurants waiting for thrown-out food. Or they scrounged around abandoned farms on the city’s outskirts, raiding root cellars.

“We eat very slowly,” Viktor said, “so saliva fill us up. Cannot remember feeling full. Russians cannot even cry. Tears very precious, they have salt.”

They had sold everything they owned for this trip to Moscow, where a cousin worked at the Salvation Army.

“We will scrub floors, guarantee one good meal a day.”

Darya pointed to the window again. “In villages is mass starvation. Millions dead. No produce anymore, no grain, no food. You see torches? People stand by tracks? They hoping you throw anything from train. One bread slice. Even garbage. Even … human shit. Dried, can use as fuel in winter.”

Ana recalled the flickering blue lights, how she had waved to them.

Now Darya sighed and laid her head against her husband’s shoulder. “Leaders say Communism dead. We now free humans. But no one feeding us. No one teaching us what human is. Freedom very cruel.”

She thought of the poverty on her Wai‘anae Coast, the sickness, the struggles. In spite of that, elders were cherished, loved, revered. They would never be thrust out on the streets to beg, to live in abandoned buildings. For the first time in her life, she was suddenly deeply conscious of what being Hawaiian truly meant.

And she was beginning to understand why Russians seemed a little crazy, with a violent largeness that knocked things down. They were people who did not know, had never known, what their future was. They could not even see a future. It left them deeply sundered, deeply vulnerable, and helped explain why they committed such noble, honorable, and unfathomably bestial acts. Perhaps she had never understood Niki until now.

She looked at her watch and struggled to her feet. “I’m sorry, I have to go.”

She dug down in her handbag, pulling out a wad of
rubles
, folding them within her hand.

“Thank you for listen,” Viktor said. “Remember Viktor and his Darya … tell your people of.”

“I won’t forget you.” Fearing she was going to cry, Ana pressed the wad into Viktor’s pocket. “Won’t you take this please …”

He jumped back, shocked. “
Nyet!
Not wanting anything from you. Just to be talking.”

She clasped her hands before her, begging. “You have shared your food, your lives with me. Please. Take this little gift. For
friendship
. It will make me very happy.”

They hesitated, then reached out and hugged her, rubbing their wet faces against hers. “
Spasibo!
Thank you, Ana American!”

At the door, she looked back at where they stood holding hands, waving like children.

S
HE HAD SEEN OLD PHOTOS OF
M
OSCOW WITH ITS UGLY
, S
OVIET
drabness, so this “New Moscow” stunned her. The heart of the city had been transformed into a glittering showcase for entrepreneurs. Towering skyscrapers, hygienic streets with lime-green parks. Monuments so bright they looked shellacked. Ana looked up astonished as they passed under neon banners advertising CHANEL. PORSCHE. ROLEX. Yet, here and there down dingy side streets, old posters of Stalin were viciously slashed with red paint. Statues of Lenin lay toppled in vacant lots.

At the Alpha Hotel, she glanced round the lobby expectantly, but no one was waiting for her. In her room she picked up the phone and asked to be connected to Niki’s number. The operator said there was no such number, and no listing for him on Gogolny Street. There was no such street. She put in another call to San Francisco and shouted into an answering machine.

“I’m in Moscow. Your friend has not contacted me. I don’t know what to do …” Her voice began to break. “I don’t know what to do.”

Out on the streets, she trembled with impatience, waiting for an opportunity to break from her group. They drifted up a hill of vast cobblestones, Red Square, and past St. Basil’s Cathedral, with its schizophrenic onion domes, cupolas covered with gilded and enameled copper, its multicolored bricks and recessed tiles all thrown together by a seemingly mad architect. They stopped at Lenin’s Tomb, wherein his body lay embalmed. It was something of a letdown—a lone red granite slab fronted with wreaths. The crypt was closed to the public now, rumors flying that Lenin’s body had been “retired” to the countryside.

Ana studied their Moscow guide, a young woman named Raiza who
wore jeans and Nike running shoes and looked rather hip. She thought of asking her for help, but she began to notice that wherever the group went, they seemed to be “escorted” by men in white shirts, black pants, and vests, and tinted shades.

A woman in her group said they were “uncles,” old, retired KGB, keeping tabs on tourists.

“I thought that the KGB was dead.”

The woman laughed. “They just call it something else now. You don’t wipe out five hundred years of paranoia in three-four years.”

Ana’s attention was caught by the crowds themselves, the “New Moscow” where poverty seemed nonexistent. Flashy cars. Swaggering kids of the newly rich posturing with cell phones. They sat at bistros in designer-scruff, throwing peanuts at waiters. No beggars in the streets. But Ana knew from Viktor and Darya that only a few blocks away from downtown Moscow, thousands of hungry, disenfranchised people were scavenging at dump sites, sleeping in drainage pipes.

On the second day she casually broke off from the group and made her way across several boulevards and then through twisting streets to what—according to her map—should have been Gogolny Street. Instead she faced a veritable river of girders and cranes, earthmovers, swinging iron balls. A lone building tottered, its façade veiled in soft green nets like an old coquette. Crumbled bricks hurtled down metal chutes, exploding in tornadoes of dust. She breathed in acrid soot of sulfur, diesel oil, and then the rusty smell of blood. A black-market dealer had slid open the door of his van.

“Gogolny Street?” Ana shouted. “Is this Gogolny Street?”

Waving
rubles
, hard-hatted workers shoved her aside, hoisting upon their shoulders whole carcasses of marbled beef.

That afternoon, she crossed Marx Prospekt and entered the Arbat district, home for decades to artists, writers, dissidents. New Arbat was modern, an outdoor mall with galleries and cafés catering to tourists. Old Arbat Street stood behind the modern shops—more like a wide alley where vendors set up carts, selling souvenirs and lace. Menus hung yellow and faded outside ancient-looking restaurants, and up and down the street, artists hung their canvases on walls and in small, vacant parking lots.

Breathless, feeling faint with apprehension, Ana walked the length of the street, then doubled back. She bought a lace doily from a vendor while watching a group of artists who had hung their canvases in an empty courtyard—sentimental scenes of Imperialist Russia that tourists
seemed to love. But one canvas drew her attention, a naked body wrapped in barbed wire that even encircled the face and mouth. “Dissident art,” off-putting to most tourists, but the artist’s use of light, the shimmering skin of the body had the subtle glow of a Vermeer.

A woman approached her. “You like it?” She turned the painting around. “Done on plywood. Some on tin, even plaster. We have no money for canvas.”

“I wish I could afford it,” Ana said.

“No need to buy. Please look, just look, and see our talent. We have talent.”

Ana moved round the courtyard, then turned to one of the artists, a man with a goatee. “Excuse me. Do you speak English?”

He smiled. “A little.”

“I am looking for a friend, Nikolai Volenko, a filmmaker. Have you heard of him?”

He frowned. “Very common name. I will ask.”

He moved to a group of artists who looked at her and shook their heads. Ana thanked him and moved on. She stopped several times, asking for Niki, explaining that she was his friend, that it was urgent, that she had only five more days in Moscow. Each time she stopped, she volunteered a little more, casting her net a little wider. Niki was her fiancé, he had returned to Russia to finish a film. He was ill, she wanted to take him back to the U.S., where he could get medical attention.

She began to feel foolish, embarrassed at how they looked at her. She imagined them thinking that here was a woman who could afford to travel halfway round the world looking for her lover. Most of them wore threadbare jeans, cheap vinyl shoes. But even poorly dressed, the women were vivacious; the men had a seedy magnetism.

Hours passed while she moved up and down the street, then she sat at a coffee shop, exhausted. After a while a man passed and glanced at her, then looked back at an artist who nodded. He bought a pack of cigarettes, watching as she continued down the street, querying artists who shook their heads. Finally, she paused before a large red painting. Someone beside her cleared his throat.

“You like painting? It is of Georgian monastery. You know state of Georgia?”

Ana looked up startled. He was big and broad with a rather serene virility. Thick black hair and eyebrows, thick mustache.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s my first time in Russia.”

“So. I am Volodya Tavashvili.”

She shook his hand. “Ana Kapakahi.”

“You are buying art?”

“Oh, no. I’m looking for a friend.”

“He is here? Old Arbat?”

“I don’t know. Have you ever heard of Nikolai Volenko?”

Very casually, he lit a cigarette. “I know several Nikolai … but different surnames.”

Ana moved closer. “Do you know any independent filmmakers? One of them might know him.”

“Ho!” He laughed. “Today any Russian with video camera calls self filmmaker. Look … come have a beer. Just over there.”

She shook her head. “Thank you. But … I don’t have much time.”

He reached out and took her by the elbow, gently, but firmly. “Come, sit down. We all know each other here. I will try to help you.”

She sat at a small, sidewalk café while he went inside. She watched him make a phone call, then carry out two beers.

“Someone might know. Be patient. Cheers.”