The Deceit of Riches Page 6

  “I’m pretty sure that even the University has a shadow administration. I saw it in action earlier this week. I understand that my tuition, paid in cash, won’t make it on the University’s balance sheet,” I said between bites. On saying this I knew I probably shouldn’t have and moved quickly to change the topic. “So, what brings the two of you to Nizhniy?” I asked trying to mask the embarrassment caused by my big mouth.

  “Del is the project manager for the planning of a new hotel here in the old town,” Els answered for him.

  “A decent hotel I hope because the one down the street near Minin Square looks like it is filled with roaches and the other types of bugs — the ones with microphones. It reminded me of the Intourist on Red Square,” I chuckled as I remembered the horrid, dirty hotel in Moscow.

  “You stayed in the Intourist? You are a brave lad aren’t you?” Del chuckled with me.

  “When I was there it was all thugs and hookers. Nothing too dangerous.” I remarked.

  “Haaah! The thugs AND the hookers were all probably KGB. That’s what they do these days,” Del pointed out.

  “So what hotel is it going to be? Something American or are you working for a European group?” I asked truly interested.

  “Well, we don’t know what the marquis will say yet. We’re more the ground workers who get the permissions, the land, and set up organizations to build for the most interested hotel chain. We have our hopeful buyers of course, but right now we’re just putting in the ground work,” Del explained in a serious voice, “It will be a good one though, at least four stars with a state of the art business centre where a guy can make a call, check emails and send faxes without having somebody read his notes over his shoulder. A place with some privacy. We succeeded in Moscow a few years back and so now they sent me here because Nizhniy has become interesting for foreign investors, and they’ll all need some place to sleep while they're here.”

  “Well, I did find this today at the roach hotel,” I pulled the new copy of The Economist out of my school bag and showed it with pride.

  Del looked delighted at my revelation. “Can you get us one too?”

  “I paid the concierge twenty dollars to reserve me one each week, on top of the cover price of course. I can pick it up each Friday afternoon,” I said gloating a bit.

  “Do you think he’ll set two of those aside?” Del reached for his wallet and handed me another Andrew Jackson.

  “And when you deliver it you can come for dinner and keep us up to date with your research,” Els kindly invited.

  4. Babushka & Raiya

  It took me another week to convince Valentina Petrovna to allow me to move out of the student accommodations and into a privately rented room. During the back and forth with her I was suspicious that somebody behind the scenes didn’t want to let go of my monthly fee paid in dollars for room and board. In the end, the local police department settled the argument and confirmed it was legal for me to live wherever I wished.

  Yulia placed an advertisement in a local newspaper where she was interning and within a few days had a telephone call from a landlord offering a room in a communal apartment on the other side of the Oka river in the Lenninskiy district. Yulia joined me and Hans for our fried chicken Friday ritual in the old city. She had just come from viewing the apartment which was not far from her own.

  “It’s right on the metro line and a bus line so getting to school won’t be a problem, and then you’re just two metro stops from my place. Nice and easy to get together!” She seemed pleased her new found talent as a real-estate agent.

  She continued, “It's on the ground floor, it's rather dirty inside, we’ll have to clean it. It hasn’t any furniture, but the owner will bring some. The cost is twenty dollars, cash, each month. I think it is the best we will find. You can always move if you don’t like it after one month.” She was already convinced I would live there happily, close to her.

  “Well, it couldn’t be any worse than what I am suffering through right now. That’s for sure!” I replied enthusiastically. “I can’t take another night of drunken snoring and that infernal radiator. It's like trying to sleep in a sauna.”

  Hans was washing down a chicken thigh with the locally brewed lemonade. He screwed up his face as if he had bitten into a concentrated lemon. “It’s great to have your own space!” he said rasping as he battled the strong after effect of the homemade soft drink.

  Yulia picked up a chicken bone and threw it at him in jest, but also in disgust of his manners. She demanded manners from the men around her and never hid her disapproval.

  “It’s settled then!” I said glancing back and forth between my two friends looking for moral support and getting none, “I’ll take the room. When can I move in?”

  “Tomorrow at two o’clock,” Yulia said turning her shoulder and looking away from Frank who continued to inhale the chicken on his plate.

  The next morning early, I shook hands with my roommates sober enough to be awake and headed for the trolley-bus stop on Gagarin Street carrying my bags like a pack mule. I felt like a convict walking away from the jail house after a long incarceration.

  The bus took a sharp dive down the river bluff switchbacks down to the bridge over the Oka River and into the Zarechniy and Leninskiy districts, where the factory workers of the city lived, void of the old and ancient. Built up after the Great Patriotic War in the 1940s and 1950s for the mass production needed for the victorious Soviet war machine, it was a centrally planned neighborhood with identical five story apartment blocks street after street, with groves of birch trees, benches, and playgrounds between them. Now cars parked haphazardly between the trees, on curbs and sidewalks and in front of doors taking up the planned natural spaces for rest and repose after a hard day at the factory. Gone was the worker’s paradise!

  “You should leave your money, passport and plane ticket with us here. This apartment is much safer than where you will be living. You’ll be on the ground floor with windows on the street. Anybody could break in and take all your things. Here on the fifth floor, it would be the last place a thief would think to break in, if he’s sober enough to climb the stairs,” was Yulia’s mother’s advice to me about living alone.

  “Ok, but I must have my passport and visa with me at all times, but maybe you are right about the money stash and the plane ticket. Those would be impossible to replace,” I conceded.

  “Will you have a telephone in your apartment?” Olya asked further.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I looked to Yulia who shook her head no.

  “If not, you will have to use the public phones at the metro station. You should not hold long conversations on the telephone. Keep your calls short and maybe even speak English when you can so nobody understands what you’re saying. Somebody is always listening and you never know what they will do,” she babbled on.

  “No, he shouldn’t speak English because that will call too much attention, people will hear he is a foreigner and then target him,” Yulia contradicted her mother’s advice.

  “No, I am talking about the people on the telephone line listening to him talk. People in the metro station won’t be able to hear what he is saying in Russian or English.” she rebutted her daughter. Turning back to me she continued, “You’ll want to use code words, like, the usual place, the usual time, etc. but never actually talk about specifics.”

  I sat dumbfounded as I listened to this conversation between mother and daughter go on longer and longer and actually get quieter and quieter the more animated it got. Olga was looking suspiciously around her own living room to make sure nobody else was there hearing this subversive information to the unwitting foreigner. At one point, she stood up and turned on the kitchen radio to create some background noise and static so she couldn’t be overheard. The state radio station was chiming eleven o’clock. It was all just a bit surreal.

  “Also, don’t talk to people on the bus or the metro. People around here are not used to having foreigners in the neig
hborhood. You might get unwanted attention from people who don’t like foreigners — and worse Americans!” Olga was bordering on paranoia.

  “I’ve never had a problem in any part of Russia being seen and known as a foreigner. Everybody can hear it in my accent,” I said hoping to defuse the rhetoric going around the room.

  “Yes, but don’t forget that the Soviet Union has many accents of Russian. You look and sound like you could be from one of the Baltic republics, Estonia maybe? And that’s okay for people, but to hear that you are a westerner, and American could cause you some trouble,” she said adamantly.

  Leaving my money belt and my return plane ticket with Olga for safe keeping, Yulia and I headed down the five flights stairs to the bus stop for the short ride from Zarachenaya to Proletarskaya for our one o’clock appointment with my new landlord.

  “It’s really just a simple room,” the landlord apologized as he opened the room from the corridor fumbling with the keys he obviously hadn’t used much himself.

  The room was empty except for a rickety cot with a musty mattress, a wooden table with two chairs and a filthy free-standing cabinet, table top height, with drawers. My heart sank on seeing the filthy, naked state of the room.

  “Of course, we will bring back the furniture that belongs in the room,” he continued after a dramatic pause. “After some cleaning, it should be livable again.”

  “How soon can the furniture be brought?” Yulia asked in a confrontational voice, feeling somewhat mislead from the conversation on the telephone a few days earlier.

  “We can bring a sofa-bed and a coat and hat rack, a wardrobe and a large cupboard, and a larger table and two more chairs in three weeks, because we have to borrow my brother’s delivery bus and he driving with it on a job now,” he replied with apology in his voice.

  “It’s good enough,” I said with some doubt in my head, “I can camp here for a few weeks. It will be alright. I will work to fix it up.”

  “It’s an inexpensive room without a land lady to clean or cook. The kitchen and bathrooms are shared with the others that live here,” was his justification for offering a dusty, empty room to rent.

  “I don’t see any problem with that,” I said off hand.

  “Yes, but the neighbors are Tatars. That’s why nobody else wants to rent the room,” he added cautiously.

  The apartment was on the ground floor of the building and my window looked out on to Prospect Lenina, a four-lane highway leading to and from the factories on its southern extremity. Gratefully there was a pleasant strip of snow-covered grass and a grove of frosted birch trees that buffered the view from my window and the sounds and smells of the broad avenue. The entrance to the apartment was dark and cavernous as the light bulbs in the lamps in the stairwell were stolen one by one within two days of being replaced. In short order, I learned how to lock and unlock my doors by touch after I had memorized every step, chip and uneven slope on the concrete floor and just had to hope that nobody was lurking in the dark waiting for me.

  The corridor, kitchen, bathroom, and WC were shared facilities. The bathroom was just that, a small room just big enough for a bathtub, the gas heater for the water and a washbasin with a scratchy mirror hanging above it and one dim light bulb hanging from its cord. The kitchen was very basic; it had a sink, a hot water heater a gas oven and range. I found out quickly that the oven was a gas leak danger so I bought a pot, a frying pan, one kitchen knife and cutting board for cooking on the gas range. The others in the flat had a small half-size refrigerator with a small ice box, which doubled as a preparation counter. There were no cupboards or drawers so I hung my pans and utensils on nails high on the kitchen wall.

  With some good sweeping, scrubbing, some well-hung curtains and a light shade over the bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling, the room started to become a home. A cold home, but nonetheless, it was my space. I discovered that the space between the two window panes was cold enough to keep foods frozen for over a week and so I had no need for a refrigerator. For the first three weeks, I slept on the floor next to the radiator with the mattress and blankets from the rickety old cot. Most nights I slept with my big wool coat wrapped around my feet and my black mink shapka on my head to stay warm enough. Some nights in February were cold enough in my room that by morning a thin layer of ice would form on a pot of boiling water I would place under my bed to help get warm enough to drift off to sleep.

  My new neighbors and flat mates were two women, an aunt and niece combination. The aunt, Natasha, who I simply called Babushka (Grandma) was nearly seventy years old and her niece, Raiya was in her early forties. These women were indeed both Tatars, not Russians. Babushka’s parents settled in Nizhniy before the communist revolution, from Kazan, the cultural center of the Muslim Tatar nation just down river from Nizhniy. The two ladies shared one room that was the same size as the one I lived in alone.

  When I first moved into my room my neighbors were very distrustful of me and each evening they made a point of closing their door with a slam and very loud and obvious turn of the deadbolt, once, twice, thrice. This went on for about two weeks before they realized that I was not a threat. It took about three weeks of living around each other before they were willing to open up and have any type of ‘get to know you’ conversation.

  “A few years ago, I had my own two-bedroom apartment and lived in the old city where I worked as a secretary at a trading company, but now my salary doesn’t even pay for a room by myself,” Raiya complained to me as we prepared our separate dinners in the kitchen, “All the prices went up about three years ago. In three months, my entire savings was used just to feed myself! No more holidays, no more birthday presents for the nephew and niece, and don’t even talk about Babushka’s pension. She can hardly buy a loaf of bread with it since Yeltsin raised all the prices. With Gorbachev, we were all hungry together. With Yeltsin, we see the others eating while we scrape crumbs off the table now.”

  Babushka pouted on her stool in the corner of the kitchen looking sour and bitter mulling, “…and the factory used to give me new boots every winter as part of my pension, but now they don’t even do that. The army doctors all want a bribe and then we have to pay for the medicines they prescribe to us. What is fifty years of service to the Red Army good for anymore? Nothing! My pension buys me one week of food. If I didn’t own my room, I’d be on the streets already like Raiya.”

  By mid-February, I started recognizing the locals: faces in shops, at the bus and metro stations. I knew where a few of them lived specifically, knew who their families were and their free roaming pets. One of the faces and routines that I came to notice most often was that of a woman who always walked her dog at the oddest times, but usually around the same time every day—twice a day no matter how cold or hard the snow was falling. She was very devoted to the care of her dog. Several times a week I would see her outside my window in the stretch of snow and trees between my ground floor window and the street.

  Some bus drivers and shop keepers even started recognizing me too. The fellow at the newspaper kiosk at the metro station when saw me at the window would have my preferred newspaper ready for me with me and I paid him usually just once a week. Despite the ever freezing temperatures I was slowly warming up to the neighborhood and life in the workers’ district.

  5. When the Shark Bites

  “Yulia, what’s wrong? Why are you crying? What’s happened?” I whispered into the telephone hanging in the metro station.

  Yulia had missed our lunch date that Sunday morning, bright and bone chilling cold. I called to hear if she had fallen ill or if something else had come up. Not having a telephone, I seemed to always need to call around to hear the details when plans changed.

  “He’s dead, Peter. They killed him!” she whimpered on her side of the line. “They killed him in front of his children and wife right on the street. It’s just horrible,” she sobbed and excused herself and hung up the phone.

  I rode the metro to the Zarachenaya stati
on to Yulia’s apartment and found her there alone curled up on the sofa with the television on. The serious and shocked tones of the newscasters coupled with the gruesome camera footage of a corpse under a blanket laying on top of a crimson ice pack on a frozen Moscow street chilled my blood.

  “Yulia, who is that? Who is dead there under that blanket?” I asked quietly, not taking my eyes from the television screen.

  “Bolshakov, Dmitri Bolshakov,” she replied with the voice of a mouse, nearly catatonic.

  “You mean the journalist Bolshakov?” I asked shocked. She nodded again and tears rolled down her cheeks. She held her face in her hands. I tried my best to comfort her but could only put my arm around her shoulders and sit with her quietly on the sofa.

  “I read some of his articles at the library this week. He is a brazen reporter, that is for sure,” I commented in praise of his fearless reporting on corruption and criminals.

  After nearly an hour of saying very little and watching the same footage play on a loop, Yulia turned off the television set and tried to collect herself.

  “Please excuse me. I don’t like people to see me this way. I will go clean myself up,” she apologized.

  “Yulia, sit down. You don't need to apologize. Tell me more about Bolshakov. Tell me why you think he was murdered. I am very interested to understand what has happened,” I said quietly inviting her to sit down again and talk about it.

  Yulia sat down again on the sofa and pulled her blanket up over her legs and up around her neck, leaving only her face and hair exposed to the afternoon sun, which poured in from the frozen outside.

  “Bolshakov was the most important investigative journalist in the whole country. He was working to expose the corruption that Gorbachev was working to root out of the government before Yeltsin took over. So many other journalists and newspapers are too afraid to report on the things he reports on and now for sure, nobody else will go after the corrupt ministers and criminals when they see this on the television and in the newspapers today. They control us with fear, Peter, and they get away with it because they can kill anybody, anywhere and keep stealing from us and the government doesn’t do anything about it.” The fire in her eyes began to burn again as she talked.