The commandant smoothed his hair, drank his tea, rubbed his hands together as if intending to produce fire from his palms, and added, “To tell the truth, I am a bit sorry he will be leaving.”
We started readying ourselves for whatever might transpire. Misha might resurface in Moscow at any moment. In any event, it was 2001 before he reappeared. For a few weeks he bobbed around, again with nowhere to stay, his German forgotten, by now completely incapable of adapting to the new life.
I had known for a long time that he was in Moscow, but we met by chance on Tverskoy Boulevard. When our paths crossed, I barely recognized the features that had once been so familiar. We sat down on a bench and spoke for three hours or so without a break. He didn’t ask about my children, and I didn’t ask about his son. Misha simply needed someone to talk to, someone to hear him out.
He talked the whole time about choosing the right monastery. I looked closely at the man in front of me. Of the earlier Misha, or what he had been in his youth, almost nothing remained. He looked gray, old, and flabby. Of the talent you once could have seen in him, nothing remained. There was only a grudge against fate, and a lot of prison slang. In addition, Misha treated me to a lot of banal nonsense about the meaning of life, in the way it is written about in crude brochures for the barely literate. I realized the kind of library they must have had in the camp in Mordovia.
“Have you found a job?”
“Where? The pay is low everywhere, and they expect a lot.”
“Well, we’re all in that situation now. We just have to put up with it—” I began.
Misha interrupted me. “Well, I don’t want to be like everybody else.”
He certainly had that in spades.
“How are you getting on with the monastery?”
“They can’t take me for the time being. There’s a waiting list and you have to pull strings even for that. You have to know people. Having been in prison doesn’t help.”
“I suppose it’s understandable. You really haven’t been out of prison for long.”
“Well, I don’t understand it.” Misha became aggressive.
“What are you planning to do?”
“I shall go into that little church.” Misha gestured behind him, and there indeed stood one of the oldest churches in Moscow, solidly rooted in the years. “I’ll ask them to take me on as a watchman. They told me you need the right number of points in your resume to get into a monastery.”
We both laughed. Only someone born in the Soviet Union and who had spent a fair part of his conscious life there knew how typically Soviet that approach was to getting a good job when you couldn’t do it through string-pulling. And here we were, talking about a monastery, faith, religion, the rules of the church, which couldn’t be further removed from the everyday reality of the Soviet way of life. We fell to laughing at the idea.
“It’s weird,” Misha said, “how in the New Russia the ways of Orthodoxy and of Soviet life have suddenly come together.”
From beneath the dropsical eyelids of a man with kidney or heart trouble, the old Misha suddenly glanced at me, merry, on the ball, playful, gallant.
“Of course they have. Aren’t you afraid the church you are so keen to sign up with has turned into that local committee of the Young Communist League you once fled from? That everything has just been repainted in new colors, and when you finally get into the monastery you’ll be bitterly disappointed and…”
I bit my tongue. No glib words came to mind.
“You were going to say I would kill someone again, blaming my problems on them?”
“No, of course not,” I stammered, although that was indeed what I had been about to say. Misha and I seemed to be back on the same wavelength.
“That is exactly what you were going to say. I can only reply that I am afraid myself, of course, but I have nowhere else to go. If I stay here, I shall certainly end up in prison again. I felt better in prison, in a confined space. The monastery is like a labor camp, only with different guards. I need to live under guard. I can’t control myself, seeing the kind of life we have around us.”
“And what kind of life is that?”
“Cynical. I can’t bear cynicism. That is why I started drinking.”
“But why did you kill your woman friend? Was she cynical?”
“No, she was a very good person, and I can’t remember why I killed her. I was drunk.”
“So, at all events, you won’t stay in the world.”
“Under no circumstances. I couldn’t stand it.”
I didn’t meet Misha again, but I do know that he didn’t manage to get into a monastery. The paperwork dragged on. The Orthodox bureaucracy in Russia is much like the state bureaucracy, indifferent to anything that doesn’t affect it directly. Misha went along to the Patriarchate, submitting forms, working as a watchman, actually living in a church. He gradually started to drink again. He turned up at Lena’s a couple of times asking for money. The first time she gave him one hundred rubles; the second time she refused. She was quite right. She and her husband were not working to enable Misha to get drunk when he felt like it. Of course she was right.
Except that Misha threw himself under a Metro train. We heard about it much later, and only by chance. And we discovered that Misha, one of the most talented Russians I ever met, had been buried as homeless and unclaimed. More exactly, the authorities buried his ashes, because in such cases the remains are cremated. Nobody knows where his grave is.
Rinat
You can mount a frontal attack or you can make a detour. The compound of the Special Intelligence Regiment of the Ministry of Defense, its most elite unit, is not, of course, a place for civilians like me to be strolling around. Sometimes, however, it has to be done. I have been brought here by Rinat, one of the regimental officers. Rinat is a major. Nobody knows who his parents were. He was brought up in an orphanage. His face is Asian, with slanting eyes, and he speaks several Central Asian languages. His speciality was intelligence gathering. Rinat fought clandestinely in the Afghan war for years. He then infiltrated Tadjik armed bands in the mountains and on the Afghan-Tadjik border, catching drug smugglers red-handed. On behalf of the Russian government, he secretly helped some of the current presidents of former Soviet republics to come to power. Naturally, he spent a lot of time in Chechnya during both the first and the second wars. His chest is covered with medals.
Rinat and I are looking for a hole in the fence. He wants to show me the squalor in which, for all his medals, he lives in the officers’ barracks; he wants to show me, too, the house in the military village that he had hoped to move into but then found himself out of luck. Although this regiment is highly trained and very famous, we find the hole we are looking for. An impressive hole it is, too, not just big enough for the two of us to squeeze through; you could drive a tank through it.
We walk on for five minutes, and there it is, the village where the spies live. It is morning. Around us we see the unsmiling faces of officers on their day off. The weather is far from cheering. Churned-up clay squelches underfoot. We are not walking but slithering, looking down at the ground in order to maintain our footing.
I look up and, wondrous vision, see before me, like a mirage among the other dismal five-story buildings, a fine new gray-green multistory block of flats.
“That’s how it all started,” Rinat says. “Of course, I wanted a flat. I’ve had enough of wandering the world. My son is growing up, and I am constantly away in wars.”
The major falls silent in mid-sentence and suddenly embarks on a maneuver that puzzles me. He hides his face and doubles over as if we are being shot at and need to find a trench to shelter in. Rinat whispers quietly that we should pretend not to know each other; he also asks me not to look ahead and not to wave my arms or attract attention.