“Look at this,” he said instantly, pulling me inside. “There’s a Jacuzzi—Chinese potato chips—and here, food for cosmonauts!”
Mitya had taken on the post of night watchman in a commission shop to earn some extra money. The job made him the envy of many; not only was it unusual to find part-time employment that actually paid, but he could spend all evening inspecting the strange and exotic goods that appeared on the shelves. There really was spacemen’s food, for example: vacuum-packed yellow tablets like dog biscuits, which described themselves as “High-nutrition sustenance for a gravity-free environment.”
“People buy them for the vitamins,” said Mitya gleefully. “Let’s try one.”
“No—”
“OK. Let’s try the Chinese potato chips then. I didn’t think they ate potato chips in China.”
“For goodness’ sake—” But he was already ripping open the packet. I don’t know why I felt so nervous. It was partly that the flutter of fear as I ran through the park hadn’t quite left me. But I was also wary of the owners of this shop, men who wore creaky leather jackets and looked their customers up and down with leaden aggression before serving them. They’d been drinking before they left for the night; a couple of empty brandy bottles and three smeared glasses stood behind the counter, along with two or three videos: Casanova in Russia, Schoolgirls’ Excursion. I couldn’t shake the thought that they were still there, watching Mitya make free with their property. Then I realized: the shop smelled of them, of old cigarettes and leather, overlaid by a powerful waft of aftershave.
The owners were making money that winter; they had all the right friends, who were also making money. The basic business plan was simple. You imported cheap goods from China, Poland, Romania—anywhere with an affordable economy—and you pegged the prices to the dollar. People still bought them. What else were they to do, if they needed a winter coat and Soviet goods had disappeared from the shops?
There was a thrill in this random, brightly colored array. Banana-flavored liqueur, books on acupuncture, marbled chocolate cakes in shiny wrappers, purple suspender belts, and marital aids in the shape of Elvis Presley—no one had ever seen anything like it. They poured in off the sludgy February streets, out of their fusty, cracked-Formica offices and the neon-lit crush on the trolleybus that stank of mildew and sweat; they crowded in to stare at the goods and to ask, timidly, if they might inspect a pair of boots made in India with a rubber logo on the ankle saying “Kikkers.” And in return the thug lounging against the shelves would narrow his eyes and expel a lungful of smoke in their direction, wondering whether, really, it was worth the effort to stretch his arm even the six inches necessary to fulfil their request.
“What are you looking like that for?” said Mitya, taking my hand. “Don’t worry, they’ve gone for the evening. Sit down, have some vodka.”
“I don’t want vodka, thanks.”
“All right, have a beer. Look, here’s what I’m going to get you as a present.”
On the counter was a pile of women’s underwear in various colors. A daisy with huge eyes and a pink dress decorated the packages.
“They’re made in North Korea,” Mitya told me. “I bet you don’t know anyone else who wears North Korean lingerie.”
I laughed. Mitya went on. “God, they’re going to be jealous!
Look at this: ‘firm support,’ ‘imparts silky texture to skin,’ ‘treated with herb medicine to increase size of ladies’ chest.’”
“No!”
“Yes—look. How do you know what size to buy, I wonder?”
We giggled, drank beer, and ate the picnic Mitya’s mother had packed for him: black bread, sausage, and two slices of salty white salo, pig fat. We balanced ourselves on the broken-down sun lounger that was Mitya’s bed and watched the crackly old video of Hair that Lapochka had lent us. And it was only much later, looking around at the shelves crowded with useless, expensive gimmicks, with plastic boxes three times as large as their contents, with piles of clothes and knickknacks and chemical drinks, that it all struck me as pitiful.
“You know what this reminds me of,” Mitya said, trying to cheer me up. “It’s what Sveta’s flat will be like one day, with all her hoard stacked up all around her.”
I laughed. Sveta was a student from the hostel. “Of course!” I agreed. “That’s what she’s planning. A shop selling empty shampoo bottles—”
“—and old clothes and saucepans with no handles. She’ll make her fortune.”
“Yes she will, sooner or later, I’m certain.”
If this were a Soviet novel, Sveta would surely be the heroine. She carried her beauty as though it were a mild disability; if anyone stared at her in the street or, in the Russian way, murmured compliments (“Your eyebrows are the wings of birds!”), she tossed her head and tutted. The practicalities of life were her concern. She had astonishing aquamarine eyes that looked out of her smooth, high-cheeked face with a matter-of-fact expression. Her nose was pretty and her chin was determined. The abundant tawny hair that glittered in sunlight was usually scraped back into a bun, and every muscle in her sturdy body was set to work scrubbing the floor, wringing her clothes dry, or slicing vegetables double-speed. She was always busy.
Only that afternoon, Emily and I had been lolling on our beds when we heard a rustling and clinking from the other end of the room. Looking closer, we found Sveta under the table collecting empty bottles for the deposit.
“Go ahead,” we snapped. “Don’t mind us.”
Sveta, like most people, was concentrating on surviving the winter. She didn’t collect only bottles. Under her bed were her savings, year after year of presents and castoffs from English students that she had seized upon, cleaned, and arranged neatly in boxes. Slivers of old soap, medicine, half-used notebooks, knives and forks, all tied together with little pieces of string.
“Do you want this?” she was always asking casually, picking up a bottle of shampoo with a couple of drips left in the bottom or an old pen. Viktor teased her that she was putting together her trousseau.
“Take me, Sveta. I can bring a knife and fork and half a towel to the union!”
But Sveta just tossed her head and turned away from him, smiling. She had already chosen her man. He was called Sasha, a quiet, clever boy with a soft beard who sat out in the hostel corridor. Their courtship was lengthy. Months passed while they drank tea together; Sveta’s beautiful eyes glittered and Sasha blushed. This continued until even the hostel gossips lost interest. One day, however, we noticed that Sasha no longer sat in the corridor but instead in Sveta’s room, having removed his shoes and left them neatly at the door. Sveta’s room was always spick and span and the stirrings of passion were certainly not going to interfere with hygiene.
After this, things moved more quickly. While walking home from university one evening, Sveta spotted a job advertisement among the notices on the lampposts. Sveta was a connoisseur of the notices and she saw straight away that this was something out of the ordinary. Within a week Sasha, in a neatly pressed suit, had applied for the post of assistant to an American entrepreneur and had been accepted.
A decade or so earlier, Sasha’s new employer, Mr. Jackson, was a millionaire businessman in Texas when he had a dream telling him to follow the path of spirituality or die. Mr. Jackson was so struck by the dream that he sold everything and went to India, where he spent seven years at the feet of a guru in the mountains. He was in his midseventies when the guru finally told him that only in Russia would he become truly spiritual. Upon which Mr. Jackson stuck a pin in a map of the USSR and promptly began negotiations to buy a huge farm in the Voronezh region. The idea was to found a sort of Happy Valley of plenty and communal living, combining American technology with the area’s rich black earth.