“Andy,” she calls without anxiety. Instead of Iamskoy another woman appears in shorts and T-shirt. Then another. A fourth is dressed in a long nightgown done up firmly at the neck. “Is this a bust?” the first woman asks, more with curiosity than concern.
“I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. “I want to speak to Andreev.”
Eventually Iamskoy appears from among the small crowd of females. He is tall and gangly and has kept most of his hair, which makes him seem younger than the fifty and some years he has spent in this body. He does a double take, then grins broadly. I think he has absorbed just the right amount of alcohol when he says: “Sonchai! So long it’s been! Come in, my good friend, come in.”
I’m checking Jones’ face as we enter, thinking she’ll be surprised, because apart from the collection of women this is not like the home of a pimp at all. It is very untidy and a major contributor to the untidiness are the books. They are everywhere, on shelves on the walls, on the carpet, stacked up in corners, under the legs of collapsing armchairs.
Jones is fairly wide-eyed, but mainly because of the women, who seem to be unnerving her with their glares and snippets of harsh-sounding Russian. In my humble opinion Jones is a lot more attractive than any of them, which could explain the glares. I don’t think she has seen the books at all, so I point them out. “Andreev is the most obsessive bookworm you’ll ever meet. Look at them! French novels, Russian, American, Italian, but that’s just light reading. Physics is his subject. He still keeps up with the latest developments, right, Andreev?”
This is not a diplomatic question on my part. His expression turns to bitterness for a moment, then he recovers and puts a forgiving arm around me.
“Thais are actually not sensitive at all, they just have this way of covering up through ritual politeness,” he explains to Jones. “If you cut away the wais and the other formalities, you find a people who really don’t give a damn.” His accent is thick, the grammar perfect.
“I think I’m finding that,” Jones says. She’s looking at the books now and, as I expected, warming to Iamskoy, whose eccentricities are so much more comprehensible than my own. She has read books about this stereotype, perhaps seen him in movies. Gently: “Are you really a retired physicist?”
“Unemployed. Sacked. Kicked out. Let’s not mince words. The boot was looking for me even while Gorbachev was in power, that world-class loser. It got me right up the ass when the economy collapsed under the terminal drunk Yeltsin. We pick our leaders, we really pick them.”
He leads us, still moaning about Gorbachev and Yeltsin, into the living room, where chaos has all but defeated order. The only unambiguous landmarks are three vodka bottles, partially consumed with the tops left off, on a large plain glass coffee table. From my last visit I remember the Russian tradition of opening more than one bottle. One bottle may be spiced, another flavored with apricot or apple; it is similar to the Thai habit of providing dipping sauces to flavor a meal. Of course, vodka is not food unless one is Russian.
Apart from the vodka, you have to spend a moment before you can visually disentangle one object from another. Books are not the only culprits. There are pieces of women’s underwear, shoes, ashtrays, a vacuum cleaner with its tube snaked around the coffee table, crushed beer cans, some unopened bottles of wine, and on a side dresser such a heap of makeup products it’s like a miniature rock pile. Nothing is horizontal or vertical, everything is resting crookedly on something else. And yet it is a huge apartment with five bedrooms, easily enough to accommodate twenty neat Thai girls who would surely keep the place spotless.
Two of the women have followed us into the room, the others are having an argument in the corridor. Muttering to himself in Russian, Iamskoy starts picking things up off one of the sofas and chucking them in a pile in a corner: a black bra, a volume of an encyclopedia, a bottle of shampoo, books which he examines curiously like long-lost friends before condemning them to the new pile. It takes a few minutes before we can sit down. He sits on the floor with his back resting on another sofa which has not been emptied of junk and says something to the woman in the short black dress, who finds some plastic mugs. She pours some vodka into the mugs and hands the mugs to us, without asking if we want any or not. She hands Iamskoy the bottle, then pours herself a drink from one of the other bottles. Meanwhile, the other woman leaves the room.
“Zoya has an appointment with an army general,” he explains. “He’s a first-time customer and she’s slightly nervous. Only slightly, though. That’s why she’s only drinking slightly.” We watch as Zoya pours more vodka into her cup and knocks it back. She says something in Russian to Iamskoy, who waves her out of the room. “Amazing, isn’t it?” he asks Jones.
“What?”
“Did you see her figure under that dress? Power legs, fat ass, short strong torso, round shoulders-a form evolved over many thousands of years to survive the steppe and work the land-but the General finds her exotic. With all these brown-skinned goddesses around, he actually pays more than ten times for Zoya.”
The front door slams.
“Perhaps it’s love,” Jones says.
Startled for a moment, Iamskoy looks at her, then breaks into a broad grin. “That’s good. That’s very good. Excuse me.” He puts the bottle to his lips to knock the vodka back. I watch his Adam’s apple move twice in full-throated swallows. “I think I must seem even more of a wreck to an American than I do to myself, no?”
“I guess I don’t know how much of a wreck you seem to yourself,” Jones replies. I realize that Iamskoy and I are both watching to see if she will sip any of her vodka. I take a sip of mine by way of provocation and I’m pleased to find it is from the spiced bottle. She catches me looking at her and puts the mug on the arm of the sofa.
“To myself I look more than a wreck. I’m atomized. I was a nuclear physicist so I should know. Nobody knew where my master the great Sakharov was leading us when he took his stand. He was like Christ pitting himself against the Roman Empire. How many put their money on Christ at the time? He must have drawn the longest odds in the ancient world. But then they weren’t Russians. Russians love a bad bet.”
“You worked with Sakharov?”
“Let’s not exaggerate. I was an assistant to his assistant. More properly, an assistant to the assistant of his assistant. Communism was strangely hierarchical toward the end, a point which has been made many times.” Another swig. “It’s really ironic, isn’t it, that the transformation in Russian society largely provoked by Sakharov the nuclear physicist has led to our atomization? It’s like reality imitating a bad pun. Of course, nobody told us that’s where it was all leading. We knew that capitalism makes whores of everyone, but not atomized whores. That was something we could not conceive in our theoretically logical universe. Since the fall of the Soviet Union I have become the proud owner of at least twenty different personalities. This is necessary in the global economy. I’m a burned-out physicist, an intellectual snob, a drunk, a failed poet, a renegade husband, absent father, a master of unfinished novels, an incompetent businessman, a fan of Russian ballet, a bankrupt and a pimp. It is impossible to be all these things at the same time, so I must decide, moment to moment, which of these many Iamskoys I should wear. In America you must be adept at such rapid costume changes, you’ve had more practice. For a Russian, it’s still hard.”