There was a pause. After a moment I couldn’t help myself; a bubble of laughter rose in my throat. “Come on,” I said hurriedly. “We are your friends, dear Yakov, whatever you think. Let’s go back. It’s too cold.”
Yakov nodded, deflated. He left me at the door of the hostel and went home.
A few days later I heard the whole story. The Salvation Army was setting up a branch in Voronezh and for some reason they had employed Yakov to install their telephone system. Why, the Lord only knows: Yakov was a mysterious answer to their prayers. He was hardly an electrician, although that was not the real problem.
The awkwardness emerged when the Salvation Army called Yakov in and spread half a million rubles on the table before him. Money for equipment, they told him. No doubt they arranged a date by which the system needed to be ready. Perhaps they suggested convenient times for installation, when the office would be empty. Being Christian soldiers, uninterested in money, they did not notice the expression on Yakov’s face as he gazed at half a million rubles in brand-new notes. He’d never seen so much cash before. He pocketed it and walked out of the building in a daze. Nina and he were no longer together, but he’d met a girl the week before, a beautiful girl, she’d been on his mind ever since. She’d been visiting Voronezh, but now she was back in her home in Minsk. Yakov found himself down by the station. Minsk, Minsk—there was a train in several hours. Ah, to hell with it, he thought, and got in a taxi.
“Take me to Minsk,” he announced, spilling half a million rubles onto the leatherette seat. Then he fell asleep and dreamed he was swimming in warm water.
In Minsk, one thousand kilometers later, Yakov waited for some hours outside an empty apartment building. Late that night, the girl came home with her boyfriend. She was less than pleased to find Yakov and the taxi driver, who happened to be called Brezhnev, on her doorstep. She let them stay the night on her floor, however, and cooked them fried eggs in the morning.
“Pretty girl,” said Brezhnev approvingly, when they left the apartment after breakfast. “So, chief, time to go home?”
Four days after the meeting with the Salvation Army, Yakov arrived back in Voronezh. Brezhnev dropped him off at the station.
“Mind if I leave you here, boss? You’ve worn me out with this trip of yours. I’m going home. My wife’ll give me hell! She’ll never believe that I’ve been to Minsk… Oh, here’s your change, colonel. Take it and good health to you!” He pressed fifty thousand rubles into Yakov’s hand and drove away.
Apart from his late night visit, I didn’t see Yakov for a time. The Salvation Army was understanding, I heard, and even carried on employing him. Perhaps they saw him as a prodigal son, although Yakov was not repentant. As he saw it, he had been spreading love in the world. It was just that we did not understand.
The shelves in the Gastronom filled up a little, but I continued to feel dizzy and light-headed. After a couple of weeks Mitya arranged for me to see his doctor. The waiting room was full and silent; even the children were subdued. An old lady was crying as she talked to the receptionist. Now and again a sob broke from her, and she repeated, “He’ll kill me! If I go back, he’ll kill me!”
“We can’t help you here, babulya, forgive us,” the receptionist said firmly.
I was beckoned into the doctor’s room at last, where she tapped my chest and asked me staccato questions. When she’d finished, she sighed and sat down.
“Half the population of this city is suffering from dizziness,” she said shortly. “They’re not eating enough fruit and vegetables, they’re not sleeping properly, their nerves are in a state of agitation, they’re exhausted. It’s the life we’re living these days. Just try and take better care of yourself, all right?”
A final example of inflation fever: Arkady had left Voronezh before I arrived, headed for Moscow, and found a job in a brand-new casino. I heard how he was working as a croupier, how he was promoted to one of the tills. Once he came down to visit, a lanky man with indecisive features. He described the casino to us matter-of-factly, the owners in three-piece suits, the customers with their blonds, security who gave a guy brain damage the week before. (The man had been messing about with the croupier, a girl. If his crime had been anything more serious they’d have killed him.) He seemed to me to be unimpressed by it all.
Impressed or otherwise, however, it made no difference. For Arkady was a gambler. One quiet afternoon, when the owners were out, Arkady put eight thousand dollars from his till into a bag, walked to a different casino where no one knew him, played—with a look on his face as though he was slipping in and out of sleep—and lost it all. The whole episode was caught on closed-circuit TV. Then he disappeared.
Eight thousand dollars was not a great deal for the owners of a casino in Moscow, particularly then, when Russians flocked joyfully to the tables as though the times demanded it. But no casino owner would let an employee rob him and go unpunished. The owners searched, and when, after a few weeks, they did not find Arkady they sent someone to drop in on his parents in Voronezh.
“You’ll have to pay us back,” he told them. “Plus interest.”
Arkady’s parents were elderly. They’d moved to Voronezh when they retired and now they were living on their pensions. So his father found a job as a watchman, and told the casino owners that he would pay them back, a few dollars a month. Don’t worry, he said, you’ll get your money.
But the casino owners were not happy with the arrangement. Again they sent their man to Voronezh.
“I said, you’ll have to pay us back,” he told the old couple. “Not some miserable few dollars a month. All of it, now.”
And he smashed up the place a bit, so that they understood. They sold their apartment and paid off the debt. Then they rented a room in a communal apartment, where they live still. They suffer from the lack of privacy and the cockroaches, but they suffer most for the loss of their son. Arkady has never reappeared, although there was a rumor that he’d gone to Amsterdam; some say he’s still in Moscow, hiding; others that he’s dead.
14
The Commission Shop
In February I started going out again at night. It was dark by half past four, and once the offices had emptied, the streets were soon quiet. The atmosphere in the city had changed since the autumn, when Mitya and I used to walk all evening. Now there were stories of muggers, and a friend of ours had been set upon by a group of drunken teenagers—young boys—and beaten up. I carried a tiny canister of Mace and only told Emily where I was going. Russians would just have made a fuss and tried to stop me.
One night with my hood up and a scarf covering half my face against the cold, I ran out of the hostel gates, through First of May Park, and across Petrovsky Square. Just past the statue of Peter the Great, I turned down a steep little alley and arrived at an iron door. My knock sounded too loud; I restrained myself from looking over my shoulder. An eye appeared at the peephole, and in a second filled with the jangle of padlock and bolts I was suddenly certain I’d walked into a trap. Then Mitya opened the door, grinning.