‘My father sacrificed everything for me but the accident was a rightful curse,’ he said at the Metropol. ‘A rightful curse.’
The minibus had belonged to the Martha and Mary Convent of Mercy. A century earlier the order had been founded to assist sick and wounded soldiers, as well as to provide for the needs of local poor. I learned later that the October Revolution had put paid to its good works, the Bolsheviks looting and desecrating its churches, turning one of them into a cinema. After the collapse of communism, the sisterhood was restored and a moneyed laywoman (in irreverent short skirt, Hermès silk scarf and with the right connections) had been appointed its prioress. But her mission had little to do with saving souls, and the one-and-a-half-hectare central Moscow site was sold for millions of roubles… on the very day that Sami was wheeled into its infirmary.
‘The nuns set my leg in plaster, then went on strike,’ he explained.
A sister convent – which Sami would not name – took him in. It was a much poorer outfit, its handful of malnourished novices squatting in an abandoned Young Pioneers dormitory in the suburbs with broken windows and rising damp. Its chapel was a converted garage. There was little food to eat. But it gave Sami the time and space to recuperate, as his tourist visa expired and he became an illegal. In exchange for doing odd jobs, the prioress promised to look after him, and to keep him hidden.
‘I worked hard for them, but they did not treat me with respect. That was a realisation for me.’
As the weeks passed and he regained his strength, the nuns – and their regular handyman – demanded more and more of Sami: ordering him to dig over the kitchen garden, to clear rubbish from the cellar, to repair the chapel (garage) roof. Once again he set about plotting his escape. He managed to contact the agent who was to have met him at the airport and arranged a new meeting point near to Red Square. But his conversation was overheard.
On his last evening at the convent he fell down the cellar steps. He didn’t see who pushed him and his new injuries were not severe, no more than a badly twisted ankle, but the nuns – and the handyman – insisted on his lying down, and then sedated him. Overnight he was strapped to the bed, a cloth stuffed in his mouth and one of his toes cut off. Sami’s labour had become valuable for them and, when he awoke, they threatened to call the police if he tried again to escape.
‘Bitches,’ he said.
Sami’s story sent a chill through me. I’d read somewhere that at any one time an estimated fifteen million migrants are passing through (or trying to settle in) Russia. Migrants often embellish – even invent – narratives in the belief that their chances for asylum increase with added drama. But Sami had no reason to spin me a yarn, unless he imagined that I could help him. He also had a limp.
In the rotten convent he’d played the nuns’ game for three more weeks – cowed, subservient and grateful – until one day when they were at vespers. He locked them into the former body shop and hobbled away. A few hours later I saw him on the metro.
‘That bird was a rightful sign for me,’ he said. ‘A sign.’
As he’d told his story, his voice had grown louder, prouder, until it drew the maître d’ to our table, with the bill. He explained that our table was reserved, even though there was hardly another soul in the restaurant. His arrogant air brought an immediate change in Sami. He seemed to shrink before my eyes, wrenching back his openness and rising to his feet obediently. He was anxious to avoid the attention of authority, and the bully had intimidated him.
As I paid, he hurried away with shoulders hunched once again, past Michael Jackson’s piano, around the marble fountain and beneath the hotel’s elaborate Princess of Dreams ceramic facade. The mosaic panels depicted the legend of a beautiful princess who fell in love with a traveller. When he died the princess renounced her worldly life and became a nun.
At the door Sami wouldn’t give me his mobile number. He told me that he’d said too much. He regretted letting down his guard. I scribbled my address on a page torn from my notebook and asked him to contact me in a few days.
‘Forget it, man,’ he said, then looked back at the panels and repeated, ‘Bitches.’
8
Beat It
I did want to help Sami and so went in search of Dmitri. He would have the means to get him back on his feet, so to speak. He might order his Learjet to fly him straight to London. At least that’s what I fancied. By good fortune Dmitri was also looking for me.
‘I have new offer you cannot say no,’ he said on the phone.
We met at VDNKh, pronounced ‘ve-de-en-kha’, Stalin’s tragi-comic Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy. VDNKh was a vestige of the worker’s paradise gone awry, created by the great dictator himself with triumphalist pavilions, earnest agricultural exhibitions and endless heroic statues of miners and farm labourers clutching pickaxes or sheaves of wheat to their swelling chests. Nothing was understated in its – or Dmitri’s – world.
‘Some people born great. Others make great, like me,’ he enthused, garbling Shakespeare. His self-importance remained as inflated as his hallucinogens. ‘Today great is coming to you.’
I knew where he was going so, as we strode together along the Alley of the Cosmonauts (shadowed by Vasya and a Range Rover), I sidestepped his ghost-writing proposal to tell him about Sami. He humoured me until I said that the nuns had cut off Sami’s toe.
‘Did they test for AIDS?’ he asked.
‘AIDS? Why on earth would they have tested him for AIDS?’
‘All Africans must test to keep Russia pure.’
I tried to explain that Sami wasn’t ill, that he had taken the chance – found the courage – to try to improve his life. ‘Just like you,’ I ventured.
Dmitri spat at the ground, shocking me. ‘But he is black, you say.’
‘Yes.’
‘Listen, I am not racist. I am realist. Business needs foreign workers. In my chicken factory were many Ukrainians and Moldovans. They were not so different. They worked for peanut. But black? Muslim? No, thank you,’ he said, working himself into a lather.
‘In Europe you let in too many foreigners,’ he went on before I could respond. ‘You know what will one day happen? Jesus and Madonna will go from church. Sharia law will become European law. But never in Russia. Never. We want purity so if you are not pure, get out.’
Millions of Russians have chosen to do just that, I pointed out. Over the last thirty years, emigration – which had been all but impossible during the communist era – has drained the country of its brightest and best. Since the fall of the Wall, more than three-quarters of Russia’s Jews have moved abroad. In the last couple of years alone a quarter of a million other Russians have applied for US green cards. Today there are as many holders of Soviet-era doctor of science degrees working in the United States as in Russia itself. And as the country nudges towards a nationalistic future, the Kremlin does not complain. Moscow seems happy to see the backs of freethinkers and potential protesters, who leave behind them a more compliant and passive population.
‘Sami also needs help to leave,’ I said, appealing to Dmitri’s humanity. ‘Can you at least suggest how he can get to the border?’
‘Chelovek bez rodiny, kak solovei bez pesni,’ he replied roughly. A man without a homeland is like a nightingale without a song.
Dmitri had been shaped by communism’s failure, and by the cut-throat cynicism that had succeeded it. He had fought to survive in a society where craftiness and ruthlessness were more vital than integrity. He wouldn’t help Sami but something I’d said had struck a chord.