Straightening for a moment, she turns and sees him. He hasn’t promised to be here, nor acknowledged anything at all, yet she doesn’t seem surprised, only pleased. The pleasure is as clean and lucid as the ice. He returns the smile, sensing that his own expression exercises nearly every muscle and tissue in his body. While Ira completes the document, the bespectacled matron behind the cashier’s counter offers him a glance that is friendly and congratulatory. For what, Vasya doesn’t wonder. Then, without saying a word, Ira hands him her suitcase, puts her arm in the crook of his and they step from the building, their strides long.
Nine
The cries, shouts, threats, sighs, and moans, the mayhem and the lovemaking, are translated into Russian and voiced over by a single announcer. The English sound track murmurs on underneath.
The video player runs all day in the darkened bedroom, regardless of whether anyone is watching it. Vasya and Ira enter sleep with the films’ reflections flickering on the walls and in their dreams.
They own nine videocassettes, each of which they have watched scores or even hundreds of times, attenuating the recording so that the drama is played now against a staticky, ethereal landscape. But Vasya rarely sees a film from beginning to end. Rather, he glimpses it in fragments, its scenes out of order, the violence seeming to operate without cause and effect, just as it does in real life.
Waiting List
Vsevolod Vsevolodovich’s death leaves Ira’s mother alone in a tottery, battered two-room house with a monthly pension of about 200,000 rubles. For years the house’s roof has leaked, streaking the walls first green, then a kind of grayish blue, then an intimately organic yellowwhite, and it seems that the walls’ decomposing paint and plaster will pass through all the shades of the rainbow before enough money is collected for a remont. Then a raging late-winter storm tears off a chunk of the roof and the ceiling below collapses onto the bed. At the time, Ira’s mother is taking refuge at a neighbor’s.
Having worked with crude, ready material and even less adequate skill, Vasya knows that his repairs won’t survive a summer downpour. Ira’s mother moves into her other room, and she once again fidgets in her place on the queue for new housing. Ira’s parents had applied for an apartment in one of the already decrepit five-story khrushchevkas in the year of Brezhnev’s death.
Vasya is sent to the chemical factory to plead with the chief to use his influence to help her jump her place on the list. It’s a matter of justice, he’s been instructed to say. He brings with him an envelope jammed with documents, including Vesevolod’s Party card, his twentyeight —twenty-eight!—letters of commendation for dedicated work, and, in a small black case, laid on purple velvet, his war medals. The chief refuses to meet him. In the overbright anteroom, Vasya is made aware of the tenuousness of the material that comprises his slacks and the constraining fit of his sports jacket. He smiles dimly at the chief’s bosomy middle-aged secretary.
Incredibly, she doesn’t remember his father-in-law, but she attends the particulars of Ira’s mother’s plight with sympathy. Suddenly, in a rush of emotion, Vasya begins telling her about matters that have nothing to do with the waiting list. He can’t check himself. He’s still talking twenty minutes later, trying to explain the situation, when the chief steps from his office on his way to lunch. Vasya hurriedly shuffles to within his field of vision. The chief’s a grim young man not much older than Vasya. Frowning, not looking Vasya in the eye, he replies that there is nothing he can do, times have changed, and he goes on his way. Vasya is embarrassed and, without another word to the secretary, he too leaves. He heads down the corridor in the opposite direction as fast as he can move without running.
He returns home, where Ira and her mother stand vigil. A minute later, her face empurpled, Ira’s mother is threatening a stroke. Her rage is directed not at the chief, but at Vasya. She doubts he has pleaded her case properly, presented all the documents, especially the twenty-eight letters of commendation, or shown the chief the necessary deference. She suspects that Vasya has not even gone to the factory, that he has spent the afternoon in the park. Indeed, Vasya’s breath testifies that he has recently shared a bottle with some acquaintances, but that was on the way home. And she accuses him of not really wishing to help, his supposed reluctance born from resentment of her late husband’s rectitude. And it is true that, despite his initial discomfort, Vasya has taken a modest, delicious pleasure in having failed. And though the next storm will blow the miserable witch into Ira and Vasya’s apartment for good, this predicament conspires to work in his favor, because she’s Ira’s mother, another weapon to use against Ira.
His search for weapons suddenly leaves him fatigued. He flexes his fist again.
Ira
“So, that’s agreed,” Chernomyrdin is saying. “Now, Vasily Yegorevich, I propose that we begin by discussing the situation in its entirety—”
Vasya cuts him off.
“I want a bus.”
The prime minister is silent for a moment.
“A bus?”
“And not one of your shitty army buses, either. A good one, with a full tank of gas.”
Chernomyrdin’s hand covers his mouthpiece, blanketing some quick, urgent interrogatives. Then, with a burst of static, the hand is removed.
“This can be arranged,” Chernomyrdin says.
“No tricks,” Vasya warns.
“No tricks.”
“And I want safe passage.”
“Yes, that’s agreed. But to where?”
Now it’s Vasya’s turn to fall silent. This choice is some kind of sophisticated Moscow treachery, invented by the security organs. Without a map, forced to make a decision on the spot, Vasya won’t be able to formulate the correct response. And how can he think in this furnace of a kitchen, with his shirt stinking like a corpse’s, with bombs exploding and bullets flying in the next room? He curses himself for his inability to plan ahead. Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Zhezkazgan: place-names tumble through his head like chunks of concrete.
His wife has looked away, showing no interest in the conversation. She gazes through the window at the impossibly empty blue sky. Her face turned so that he cannot see the bruise, Vasya is reminded of it.
He blurts: “Portugal.”
“That’s impossible,” Chernomyrdin replies at once. “Portugal is a member of NATO.”
Vasya wonders if he is right. The prime minister is known to be poorly advised, especially about foreign affairs. But he sounds very sure of himself.
“Portugal,” Vasya repeats. “Or there’s no deal.”
Chernomyrdin is gone from the phone a long time. Vasya bitterly regrets that he has chosen Portugal, but if he compromises now, Chernomyrdin will think he’s weak.
Ira says, “I want a bus too.”
Vasya smothers the receiver with his chest and whispers furiously, “Don’t interfere, these are sensitive negotiations.”
She scowls. Chernomyrdin comes back on the line.
“It’s agreed,” he says. “But we will issue a statement denying that our agreement involves any political concessions.”
“And I need a hostage, for my own safety.”
“What, you don’t trust me?” Chernomyrdin sounds hurt.
“I’m sorry, Viktor Stepanovich,” Vasya says tactfully, “The state and the governmental organs have lost large measures of public confidence. In general, this reflects society’s loss of faith in established institutions and traditions.”