And whereas Grades One and Two might have to spend time in psychiatric wards, sedated by unspecified doses of drugs, Grade Three was more or less left to his own devices. For a time it had looked as if Edik would have to settle for a Two—all the Threes had been allocated for this year, according to the doctor—which would have been a little sticky, but still worth it, apparently. But at the last moment, Edik’s father managed to rustle up a few hundred extra, and the Three had come through after all. The deal was concluded just in time; by some sleight of hand, Edik had avoided the army before university, and while he was a student he was safe. But now he had finished his degree, and the recruitment officers were circling.
At Edik’s house, his mother, Polina Eduardovna, opened the door to us. Her hair was spun into a vast orange confection for the occasion. “Edichka!” She hugged him. “My little boy shall stay at home.”
Edik was at least two feet taller than his mother, but her thick black brow and gold-toothed grin were the visual expressions of a personality that towered above his. She whisked him about the hall in a stiff and jolly little gallop and sang “Edichka, Edichka, Edichka of mine, in the garden a little berry, a little raspberry of mine!” until she ran out of breath and came to a stop, laughing.
Edik looked reproachfully at both of us and said, “Shhh.”
“Now, Edik,” said Polina Eduardovna, pulling herself together. “Run out to the Gastronom and ask Maria Aleksandrovna for some sausage. Don’t be long.”
The Gastronom was just opposite, an echoing hall with counters displaying tins of pilchards. The meat department stood empty; a stocky blond leaned against the refrigeration unit and picked her teeth.
“Be so kind,” said Edik, “as to tell us where we might find Maria Aleksandrovna, young lady.”
The blond jerked her head backward and inspected some small object she’d retrieved from a molar.
“Do please be so charming as to inform her that Polina Eduardovna sent me to see her. I believe she is expecting us.”
For some moments the blond watched the object closely; then she popped it back into her mouth. She sighed, pushing herself off the unit with a thrust of her muscular behind, and disappeared into the cavernous storerooms out the back.
The Zelyony family had connections. Polina Eduardovna’s acquaintances numbered bureaucrats and psychiatrists, the manager of the Gastronom, and a lady who worked behind the shoe counter in the Univermag department store. Other acquaintances supplied car parts and gas, medicine and travel permits. In the Aeroflot office they greeted Edik by name, and every month or so he paid a visit to the railway station, where the signal controller would be holding a parcel for him from the Zelyony cousins in Moscow.
Maria Aleksandrovna appeared, large and stern, and beckoned to us to follow her. Everyone knew what went on in the back of the shop—the shelves stuffed with rare milk products, the stacks of fruit jellies and Birds’ Milk cakes made of marshmallow, the haunches of meat, all sold “on the left” to fortunate and wily folk such as the Zelyonys. The latter were admired as much as resented. Everyone was fixing “on the left” a little—but some were more talented than others.
“How is your mother keeping?” inquired Maria Aleksandrovna, leading us into an office that smelled of raw meat.
“She’s well, thank you.”
“And I hear we must congratulate you?”
“Oh, yes—”
“A little idiot!” She glanced skittishly at Edik and pressed a string of pallid sausages into his arms.
Edik blushed. “Thank you, Maria Aleksandrovna.”
He was quiet on the way back, holding the sausages away from his body with a look of disgust. Abroad, his look seemed to say, surely no one is forced to suffer such humiliation to buy a kilo of horse meat. Only in Russia does one have to be branded an imbecile to get by. “You see the kind of society one mixes with in Voronezh,” he said after a while, summoning a laugh. “You could not call it civilized.”
Polina Eduardovna laid a table in Edik’s room with champagne, cheese, salami, and all sorts of delicacies, followed by plates of sausages and slithery, steaming fried eggs. She refused to eat with us, laughing and smoothing her nice stout stomach. “I must think of my figure!” Then she left us, only popping her head back in to say to me, “Charlotte, Edik tells me you have a miraculous cure for his throat. You will tell me what it is, won’t you?”
We ate and drank champagne until we were pop-eyed and rosy. Even Edik’s pallor lifted, due in part to the red shirt that he had put on for the occasion. He put a finger to his lips and took a large volume of Steinbeck from the shelves. “Hidden from my father,” he hissed, pulling out a bottle of clear liquid from behind. “My aunt’s moonshine, samogon. She distills it herself; from beetroot. Here’s to the army, may they rot!”
We each drank a shot of the samogon and winced.
“It’s good for you. My mother says it cleans the gut. Can you imagine what they would think in St. Tropez if they were given a drink to clean the gut?”
“They don’t have gut in St. Tropez.”
Edik giggled. “You know, Valya has got rid of her boyfriend, the fat one? She might be going to America soon. They’ve got cousins there, of course.”
“But I thought she was in love.”
“It seems not. Mrs. Uvarova is thrilled.” Edik thought for a minute and then brightened. “Wait.”
He chose a record from the shelf and placed it on the gramophone. “Latin America,” he said in parenthesis. He took up a fork from the table and put it between his teeth, as the sound of applause from the sixties crackled and died away. Edik adjusted his glasses, put one hand behind his head, and pointed at the mirror with the other, assuming a fiery look. Then he pulled me up from the sofa and, with a pointy-toed kick, the tango began.
Foreign travel became easier under perestroika. Business and cultural exchanges were funded by well-meaning organizations in the West, and the embassies in Moscow were swamped by Russians with invitations from long-lost relatives and friends. Several people we knew had been abroad—a soft-voiced, bearded student called Sasha had spent a year at a university in Atlanta on a scholarship; Yuri had been invited to England by a friend.
The process was still tortuous, however, and the pitfalls were many. First you needed an external passport, a separate little red book from the internal passport you were required to carry at all times. If you spent your military service in an area of restricted access—anything from telecommunications or tanks to nuclear submarines—you could be refused a passport. Likewise if you had lived in a closed city, the scientific research city at Akademgorodok in Siberia, or cities that produced armaments, or the space city in Kazakhstan. Cosmonauts, for instance, could easily have been refused a passport to travel to Germany.
The invitation was the second step. A letter from a business in the West, offering to pay for its Russian guest, more or less guaranteed a visa.
Not many people had this option. Instead they tried with a personal invitation, although these applications were always met with suspicion. Somehow both the Interior Ministry and the British Home Office had boundless faith in the benefits of business travel, no matter how unsavory the trade that it generated (and some of it really was unsavory: during 1991, for example, two Chechens traveled to London to arrange an arms deal; they were murdered in their rented apartment and smuggled out in a freezer by their Armenian assassins). This faith was matched, however, by their distrust of invitations from friends, and above all friends of the opposite sex. In Voronezh around this time, a friend was sent an invitation in the post by an English girl. It never arrived; instead his father got a call from an officer of the KGB one day. “We’ve got an invitation here for your son from an anglichanka. What do you know about that?” The KGB and the Home Office, just like Mrs. Uvarova, concentrated on averting the disaster that any one of these personal invitations might conceaclass="underline" the Unsuitable Marriage.