The Free World

by David Bezmozgis

  —Looked like a nice fellow, Lyova said. You could almost imagine that Jesus Christ himself had had a hand in his election.

  They decided that they would go to see his inauguration, scheduled for the following week.

  —You still expect to be here? Alec asked.

  —Unfortunately, I’ve no reason to expect otherwise, Lyova said.

  —No action at the embassy?

  —Some Italian Communists showed up with anti-Zionist placards and offered to march in solidarity. We nearly came to blows. Despite what some people say, I still have my limits. I’m not so far gone yet that I’ll join up with a bunch of idiots who get a sexual thrill from shouting, Zionism is racism!

  —What happened to your enemy’s enemy?

  —Sometimes your enemy’s enemy is still your enemy. Incidentally, this is how my late grandmother used to refer to me and my sister. It was how she explained her boundless love. Do you know how come Grandmother loves you so much? How come, Grandmother? Because you’re the enemy of Grandmother’s enemy.

  —And the enemy?

  —My mother.

  —Her daughter-in-law?

  —No, daughter. They were very close, but always arguing. You’ve never heard it phrased this way? I always thought it was commonplace. It’s how my mother now refers to my son.

  At the mention of his son, Lyova grew morose. He was so often hustling, clowning, and crusading that Alec had assumed he was unaffected by the kind of loneliness and melancholy one would expect in a man who hadn’t seen his wife and son in more than a year. After all, as Polina hadn’t failed to point out, nothing tangible was stopping him from boarding a plane to Tel Aviv. That he chose not to do this suggested that he preferred the life he was leading in Rome. It occurred to Alec, not for the first time, that he had completely misread someone. At that moment, Lyova seemed to be defined precisely by the feelings to which Alec had believed him to be impervious.

  As Lyova brooded, Alec’s mind turned to Masha. He wondered what Masha would have made of Lyova in his state. Just as he’d wondered moments earlier if she’d have been amused by their conversation. Ever since he’d first seen her at the orientation he pictured her presiding in some upper gallery of his mind. He performed for her delectation. He noticed things he would have otherwise ignored, and saw with fresh eyes what was familiar to him.

  Though who she was and what she really thought about anything, Alec had no idea. He’d seen her only twice. Once during the orientation and once more in the lobby of the pensione. Both times he had been under the scrutiny of Masha’s mother and brother. A powerful neurotic force seemed to bind the three of them together.

  He’d confided this to Karl, with the hope that Karl might have a lead on an apartment or some job for the brother.

  Through some unspecified connection, Karl said that he knew of a good place coming available in Ostia.

  —How good is good?

  —You want a private tour?

  —A description would help. I have to tell them something.

  —Tell them. A separate bathroom. A separate kitchen. Clean, no bugs. In short, a palace.

  —You don’t know of anything in Ladispoli? Ladispoli would be more convenient, Alec said.

  —This is what I can do, Karl said. I’ll need an answer tomorrow.

  —I’ll ask.

  —Ask, Karl said. As a favor to you, I’ll reduce my commission. They’ll get a nice discount and you’ll get yourself another little chickadee.

  —She might be more than that.

  —It doesn’t matter to me, Karl said. Do as you like. Nobody ever accused you of good sense. The lunacy with Polina proved that. Although, there, I could almost see why. Anyway, if I didn’t know better, I’d recommend some self-restraint. Leave well enough alone. Particularly at a time like this.

  —When isn’t it a time like this?

  —Spoken like a proper imbecile.

  —You don’t think it’s true?

  —You talk a lot of shit, Karl said. Careful you don’t step in it.

  Alec saw no point in reminding Karl that he recalled a time, not all that long ago, when Karl was not too far removed from this sort of shit. In this respect, they were both their father’s sons. When they’d reached a certain age, they’d learned why their mother had spent so many nights sobbing behind the bedroom door. And if their parents had managed to conceal Samuil’s infidelities from them while they were young, the infidelities were common knowledge to almost everyone else. This was something Alec realized on the occasion of Samuil’s fifty-fifth birthday, when Yuli, their mother’s cousin, got drunk and, in a failed attempt at humor, made some inappropriate comments during his toast.

  At the factory, nobody ever mentioned it. People feared Samuil, and knew that he had a network of informants. But though Alec never heard anything said, he knew that strains of the gossip persisted. He inferred as much from the contemptuous smirks and glances directed at him when he chatted with some girl at work. There was more to those glances than simple resentment over his privileged status as the son of Samuil Leyzerovich. Implicit was that he’d inherited his libidinous appetite from his father, and the suggestion of something more odious, the libel of the rapacious, satyric Jew—which cast him and his father shoulder to shoulder, leering toothily, their trousers agape, members aloft, ready to defile the virginal daughters of the motherland.

  In reality, of course, such a thing would have been impossible, not least because Alec couldn’t remember the last time he and his father had exhibited anything resembling coordination of purpose. And beyond that, there was also the matter of the virginal daughters, who had few representatives among the female collective of the VEF radio-technical factory.

  Before he took up with Polina, he’d had a few desultory affairs. Without these, the boredom would have been unendurable. Other coworkers dealt with the same problem differently. For lunch three men would each throw in a ruble for the price of a bottle, but Alec didn’t have the right constitution for this. He resorted to persuading some Mila, Luba, or Luda to accompany him into a small utility room that smelled heavily of phenol.

  When he met Polina, however, an alternative to the phenol-smelling room had miraculously presented itself. After living under the strict regime of his in-laws for six years, Karl had succeeded in obtaining a separate apartment in a cooperative that was being built in Teika, within walking distance of VEF. For two years, as it was slowly being constructed, he had passed the building every day on his way to work. When it was finally completed, people received letters telling them that they could take possession. Vans and movers arrived. Curtains and lamps appeared in the windows of his future neighbors. Karl was impatient to join them, but Rosa refused to move until the apartment had been prepared to her taste. She and her mother hired an interior decorator and spent weeks deliberating over the wallpaper, carpets, furniture, and appliances. The decorator had come recommended in the typical way, as a resourceful person, capable of getting her hands on merchandise of incomparable scarcity. However, months elapsed between the deliberations and the arrival of the wallpaper, carpets, and furnishings. Rosa, her mother, and the interior decorator made intermittent visits to the apartment, which otherwise remained unoccupied. The glaring fact of this incensed Karl every time he passed the building to and from work. In retaliation, he began to use the apartment on his own. He invited friends to drink and play cards. He let Alec use it for his liaisons. On occasion, he brought women there himself.

  For Alec, it was in this apartment that much of his courtship with Polina transpired. Sometimes they would sneak away during the lunch break; other times Polina would invent an excuse delaying her after work.

  The apartment, which lacked a stove, chairs, carpets, and wallpaper, had almost everything else. There were two little beds in the children’s room, and there was a larger bed, albeit without linen, in what was to be Karl and Rosa’s bedroom. A velour couch and coffee table occupied the main room. Karl made some token effort to tidy
the place up, but there was usually an array of dirty ashtrays and empty wine bottles on the kitchen counter. To Rosa’s and his mother-in-law’s objections, Karl responded that he would resume living a normal family life when they moved into the apartment.

  Rosa refused to make what she considered a premature move. For months there was, between her and Karl, a rancorous impasse. It was finally breached when, one afternoon, Rosa, her mother, and the interior decorator arrived unexpectedly at the apartment. When Rosa opened the door she was confronted by a distressing tableau. The tableau featured Karl in the foreground, on the sofa with a uniformed policewoman in his lap; and in the background, Alec, with his shirt unbuttoned, framed in the doorway to the boys’ bedroom. Alec recalled the terrifically stunned expression on Rosa’s mother’s face, a look of total incomprehension, as if she were witnessing something altogether alien, which her mind simply couldn’t process.

  —Oh my God, Alec heard her say, he’s gotten himself involved with the police.

  Alec also recalled the scandalized expression on the face of the interior decorator, a tall middle-aged woman, prim and self-possessed, wearing a beige polyester pantsuit, the height of fashion. She looked at Karl and then Alec as if at moral garbage—coarse, low people.

  Rosa, meanwhile, turned white.

  Karl regarded her with the sublime equanimity of a Chinese.

  —You have only yourself to blame, he said.

  The policewoman extricated herself from Karl’s lap and smoothed her uniform. Also, Polina emerged quietly from the boys’ bedroom, and thus earned herself Rosa’s unwavering enmity.

  —Taking up with common sluts, Rosa said, the tears starting to flow. I’d expect this of your sex maniac brother, but never of you.

  —Now, now, Karl replied. No need for insults. Besides, Tatyana has recently been promoted to the rank of investigator, and Polina is a graduate of the polytechnic and a valued employee of the VEF mechanical engineering department. Hardly common.

  Alec couldn’t remember where or how Karl had met Tatyana, and that day in the apartment represented the first and last time he ever saw her. Still, because of her uniform, and the capricious, vindictive authority it represented, her role in the episode acquired a special prominence. Mostly, Alec felt, this was because of the way Rosa had behaved. An ordinary person would have been intimidated by the uniform but, to Rosa’s credit, she had been entirely unmoved. And despite the insults she directed at him, Alec admired her subversive integrity.

  —I’ll never forgive you for this, Rosa whispered. I wanted to make a beautiful home for us and instead of thanking me you’ve humiliated me in front of my mother, our children, and Alla Petrovna.

  —Look, don’t overdo it, Karl said. I told you a thousand times, I’ve had it living with your parents. We finally got an apartment and all I asked was that we move in. And what did I get instead? Alla Petrovna. By the way, Alla Petrovna, since you’re here, perhaps you could update me on the progress? Any word on our chairs? Our carpets? Our stove?

  Flustered, Alla Petrovna was slow to respond.

  Rosa’s mother spoke for her and alluded to the item Alla Petrovna was holding in her hands. Everyone turned to look and saw that, yes, in her hands was a thin sample roll of wallpaper. Alec noted a constellation of brown spheres on a pale yellow background.

  Considering it, Karl screwed up his face in disgust.

  —You’re telling me we waited three months for this revolting pattern? Looks like shit floating in piss.

  —What a despicable bastard you are, Rosa sobbed.

  Nobody spoke for some time. Karl shook his head ruefully and emptied the contents of a bottle of plum brandy. Everyone seemed to contemplate the next step. It was then that Alec decided to walk Polina out of the apartment. He started to button his shirt. As he did so, the policewoman broke the silence.

  Speaking in the declarative, forthright manner of her profession, she said, Karl, you are mistaken. It is a very attractive pattern.

  Three days later, Karl, Rosa, and the boys moved into the apartment. The fecal-motif wallpaper went up. A stove was procured. Someone donated a carpet; someone else, chairs. Karl stopped drinking, playing cards, and chasing after women. Finally the master of his own house, he devoted himself to home improvement, a preoccupation more arduous and demanding than fist-fighting or bodybuilding. Just to wangle ceramic tile for the bathroom, a man pitted himself against the mighty arsenal of the Soviet state. In effect, it was as if Leonid Ilyich was himself personally opposed to the tiling of a bathroom. It was the supreme challenge, eclipsing every other human endeavor—sport, sex, philosophy, art, and science. Karl, a pragmatist by nature, had always been inclined this way. And had he remained in Riga, his future would likely have been as a shady, jittery operator in the mold of Alter Schlamm. But instead Karl caught the break Schlamm never had. For the bargain price of five hundred rubles, the state allowed him to forfeit his citizenship and book passage to the fabled, capitalist West, where speculation was neither a dirty word nor an indictable offense. Where—had he not been confounded by history—a man of Schlamm’s considerable talents would have owned city blocks and factories, not to mention a limousine, a mansion, and a yacht.

  Alec didn’t doubt that Karl would attain all this. Though, at present, he was engaged in a lot of petty hustling. Boris the Bodybuilder had departed for San Francisco and bestowed his cart upon Karl as a parting gift. Thus Karl had succeeded Boris in the relocation industry. In the afternoons, Rosa could be seen taking a shift at Piazza Marescotti, holding Boris’s old sign: MOVING SERVICES. MAN WITH CART. Karl also acted as broker for some landlords in Ladispoli and Ostia. He made his mandatory appearance at the Americana on Sundays. And then there were additional involvements of a more abstruse nature, about which Alec knew no more than what he heard via rumor—of moneychanging, of used automobile sales, of an illicit traffic in icons.

  His brother was tireless and liable to appear anywhere, selling anything. On the day of the pope’s inauguration, Alec had expected to see him among the scores of peddlers dotting the streets leading to St. Peter’s Square. He saw other Russians, some familiar, who were taking advantage of the unique fiscal opportunity. As in the case of the papal funeral, there were many religious knickknacks on offer, as well as postcards depicting the outgoing and incoming popes. Their presence was drowsily tolerated by a cordon of green-clad policemen who ensured that the peddlers kept a prescribed distance from the square.

  Alec, Polina, and Lyova pressed forward as far as the crowd would allow. Lyova took the lead, banking on Christian goodwill, and tried to plow his way through the Catholics. When someone objected, Lyova pointed to Polina and delivered a short speech in Italian that caused everyone within earshot to gaze at her with a mixture of curiosity and sympathy.

  —What did you say to them? Polina asked, when they’d advanced moderately forward.

  —That you are pregnant and Russian and that you want to get near the pope so that he might bless your unborn child, whom you have liberated from a godless land.

  To his mischievous smile, Polina responded with a grim look that cast a pall over everything. Lyova stopped trying to press ahead. They hit the final marks reserved for them as minor players in the pageant, beside a skinny African priest, four Capuchin friars in their brown robes and knotted sashes, and two Irish girls with plump freckled shoulders against whose earthly allure the Church could never enlist enough priests.

  In the end, however, Alec didn’t remember the inauguration for the freckled Irish girls, or Polina’s injured mood, or his pinwheeling thoughts about Masha. He didn’t remember it for the opulence of the ceremony—the censers, and scepters, and the ranks of shuffling clergy. He remembered it for his father’s friend, Josef Roidman, whom he spied in the crowd sometime near the conclusion of the ceremony. Roidman had caught his eye accidentally, only because Alec happened to turn his head at a particular moment. Before he recognized Roidman’s face, he saw the gleam of the Soviet medals pinned to h
is blazer. From the medals, Alec raised his eyes to see the face. After the slightest pause, they both smiled in recognition. Roidman even waved genially with the top of his crutch.

  But by the time Alec gained Polina’s attention, Roidman was no longer there.

  —Who? Polina asked.

  Alec looked again but didn’t see him. Then he heard a sound, like a collective intake of breath. A second later, he spotted Roidman through the crowd, remarkably on the opposite side of the security barrier, hobbling onto the red-carpeted path that formed a straight line to the pope. Throughout the crowd, various cries rang out. Roidman didn’t slacken his pace. Swinging forward, he reached inside his jacket with his free hand and produced a small Canadian flag on a stick, the kind handed out by the Canadian embassy. He managed to wave it energetically a few times, and to shout something unintelligible, before he was scooped up by the police. He didn’t put up any resistance, and they carried him off like a little parcel. Just as quickly as he’d appeared, he’d disappeared. The entire incident hadn’t lasted more than a few seconds, and Alec wasn’t even sure how many, of the thousands present, had observed it. Or if it had caught the attention of the pope or of the dignitaries to his left, including the man for whom the display had been intended.

  Grinning proudly, Alec turned to Lyova and Polina, and said: Ours.

  SEPTEMBER

  1

  My dearest Lola,

  It’s always sad to see the summer end, but this year more than ever. That’s because it occurred to me that we will have now been parted for an entire season. Compared with a week or a month, an entire season sounds like a lot. Here the very first leaves are starting to turn and so I notice more that you are not around.

  I know you want to hear our news, but there isn’t very much to tell. Mama and Papa are about the same. The main difference is that Papa has been given a promotion. Well, I call it a promotion. He isn’t sailing anymore, but he is working at an administrative position within the ministry. So he is home all the time now and we get to see more of him. He’s still getting used to the change, but I think it’s for the best. He wasn’t going to sail forever.