Separate Kingdoms (P.S.)

by Valerie Laken

  The country no longer exists, but the city remains. A country is just an idea, its borders only visible in your mind and on maps. But the city is real, noisy and rank, covered in slush and transformed into one vast flea market. Every busy corner or underground crosswalk is jammed up with people selling whatever they can. Against the November cold they hold up blankets and coats, TVs and umbrellas—new products they were given instead of salaries, or old things they’ve decided they can live without. It’s the season of 300 percent inflation and disappearing pensions. The season of eighteen-hour-long nights. The season of Bush’s legs—huge American chicken legs processed and frozen in plastic, sold cheap from the U.S. as aid relief, because Americans prefer white meat. When Edik balks at their size I say, “We’ve got radioactive chickens,” and get a smile.

  My American summer clothes are useless, so I’ve cobbled together an all-Russian wardrobe, which means uncomfortable pleather shoes and tight polyester sweaters in ghastly colors not found in nature. Short skirts, thick tights that bunch up at the ankles, and a broken-zippered coat that’s thin as a blanket. And even in this, people stare at me and know: I’m an imposter.

  In the subway stations veterans, gypsies, and amputees have started planting themselves in the corridors to beg, clogging the already jammed traffic flow as people struggle not to step on them. Some reek of urine and alcohol; others have signs explaining their plight; others are cleanly dressed, with their uniforms on and their medals displayed on velvet pads as proof that they should not be penniless. The Russian word for them, bomzhi, comes from our word, bums. Like everyone else Edik walks past them with alarm and shame, and once they’re out of earshot he says to me, “I guess you’re used to this, but we never had this before.” They’ve all heard all about our hordes of homeless people.

  Crime has arrived too, both petty and semiorganized. I still feel safer than in the U.S., but everyone here talks of pickpockets and street punks and mafiosos who demand payment from every kiosk owner or else burn the kiosks to the ground. They smolder along the sidewalks in the mornings.

  What I do is throw parties. It’s the most unembarrassing way to feed people. I say, “Bring your friends, anybody you want,” and I load up the table and put on some music and they eat and fill the room with Russian words, and they teach me things like how not to piss off shop clerks. Tonight I’ve made grilled cheese sandwiches, deviled eggs, and fried potatoes. There are pickled vegetables, vodka and dollar-a-bottle champagne, vafli cookies and those awful little round bubliki. The custom here, at least right now, is not that the food goes together in any particular way, but that you fill the table, empty the cupboards, offer up everything you can find. I’m OK with that. I’m earning more money than I can manage to spend here. The stack of dollars on the top shelf of my armoire keeps growing as the ruble collapses and the supply lines for products seize up.

  Tonight they’re asking about supply and demand, because I said something offhanded like, “The more rubles they print, the less they’ll be worth,” and a few of them looked at me like this was gibberish. Maybe I said it wrong.

  “But a ruble’s a ruble,” says a girl at the end of the table.

  She’s not an idiot, not completely naïve; she just hasn’t been taught, year in and year out, that greed is the only reliable rule on the planet. I hesitate. Do I want to be the person who teaches her that? But the lesson is already breaking out in the streets.

  Edik changes the subject for me. “I read somewhere that in America you can tell what kind of person someone is by the type of car he drives.” Everyone laughs—it’s absurd—but then the relative truth of that rumor dawns on me. There are lots of things I can’t tell them about my country—things that embarrass me, things I don’t understand.

  When the party’s over Edik sticks around and does what I’m told few Russian men do, the dishes. When I try to throw away some stale bread, he stops me and says that’s a sin. When everything’s cleaned up, we lean out the windows by the balcony so he can smoke, and I watch his lips kissing the black air, watch his bulbous Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “What’s the word for that, again?” I say, putting my fingers on it and feeling the hard ridges of his windpipe. I’ve taped vocabulary lists to the walls, and Edik just smiles and points at one of them. Kadyk.

  To keep the cockroaches at bay I collect up the garbage and take it out to the stairwell, opening the creaking trash chute as quietly as possible. The walls are thin and I try to sneak around unnoticed.

  But tonight I fail. My next-door neighbor unlatches his door with a fury and swings out. “You mustn’t throw those away!” he hisses.

  I stare at the old man, terrified, holding my plastic bag like it’s a bomb.

  “The bottles,” he says. “The bottles,” though I know the plastic bags are at least as valuable. He shuffles over and takes them.

  Although I give money to almost all the beggars I pass, I haven’t yet given to him. This is because when I walk by him on the sidewalk—kneeling in his army uniform, with his rows of medals—he ducks his head or turns away, pretending not to see me, not to live next door to me. And I don’t want to steal this last illusion from him.

  In the newsroom at the wire service I work the evening shift, and they pay me in dollars, not rubles. They hand us printouts of short articles, and we translate them into English as fast as possible, like machines. We learn all about the fighting in the Caucasus and the declarations of independence everywhere and the rise of new government officials in each former republic. When I meet up with terms I don’t know, which is often, I ask the guy next to me, who’s endlessly patient. Tall and thin, a Russian Mr. Rogers, he speaks English with such hard, curling, American R’s that everyone presumes he must have been a spy at some point. When we ask him, he just shrugs and says, “Well.”

  Every hour or two we go out on the balcony for a smoke, where we gossip and look across the square at the huge lit-up statue of Mayakovsky, who looks as suave as a male model, with one hand pushing his suit coat back at the hip. Only Russians could make a poet look this powerful and sexy.

  There’s such an excess of news to sell to the West that we can hardly keep up, so they bring on a new translator from Boston who just spent the past three months in Tbilisi, trying to scrap together a documentary about the civil war breaking out there. “It’s the most beautiful place in the world,” he says. “They have wine.” But when he and his crew broke their equipment and ran out of money, they came to Moscow to regroup. All kinds of makeshift explorers are touching down here; some call it the new Wild West—all resources, no laws. After work the new guy invites me to a party he’s going to. When you meet someone from your own country and they’re not an immediate asshole, you are friends.

  I consider calling Edik to meet us, but the lure of speaking nothing but English for a whole night is too strong.

  The apartment containing the party is a shock: no wallpaper, no gaudy lamps, no chintzy laminated entertainment center filled with china and lace. Just a plain off-white room with a futon and a stereo, some chairs. People move freely about, sip from their drinks whenever they want, no crazy toasts. No shots. It’s like going to Sweden for a night, or Finland at least. People don’t even take off their shoes at the door. There’s a handful of Americans and Canadians; a sleek, loud Italian woman; a German with slicked-back hair; a few Australians. Everyone in English, loud and fast. On the stereo it’s Sonic Youth, then some weird French rap, then Blondie. I’m transported.

  Around ten a big blond American powers through the door. He says, “Youguysyouwillneverbelievewhatjusthappenedtome.”

  In the snow outside, his taxi slid ever so slowly toward an old woman obliviously crossing the street. He and the driver started screaming, they bashed the horn, but of course it was broken. “By the time we hit her we must’ve been going just a couple miles an hour, but the buildup was horrible. This poor stooped lady. I thought we were going to kill her.”

  His cheeks are pink and alcoholic, th
e sides of his neck lightly pickled in the manner of someone who had a good dermatologist as a teen. His yellow hair stands up in stiff tufts, his eyes are raw blue.

  “Well?” someone says.

  “She popped up and started banging on the hood, demanding we pay her something.” His face flashes between astonished and jubilant.

  “What’d you do?”

  “The cabbie started screaming at her, calling her a fraud. It was fucking horrible. I was like, hey, she’s a babushka. I wanted to take her to the hospital, but she just got this zloi look on her face and kept saying, twenty bucks, twenty bucks.”

  Later I learn they’re all in on a running dare: who can catch the most unconventional gypsy cab. Apparently, in times of grave civic collapse, when no one knows exactly who’s in charge, you can flag down and get a ride from such things as a garbage truck, even a snowplow. The German by the window holds the record with an off-duty city bus. “It’s true,” the others vouch. I’ve been burrowing through the city by subway all these months; who knew?

  I sit studying them from a corner of the futon. Part of me is revolted, but there’s another part, the groupless part. The language coming out of their mouths is perfect and swift and takes no effort to follow. They have normal food like potato chips and beer. I saw bananas and a box of Frosted Flakes in the kitchen.

  Last month, Edik and I were riding home on a train from a friend’s dacha, and the little bundled-up girl across the aisle fell asleep curled in her grandma’s lap. Touching. All of us lulled together by the bounce and clatter of the rails. Except all I could think was that this was his iconic memory of childhood travel, while mine took place in the back of a station wagon, locked in a private nuclear family, in a car unlike any he’d seen or would see. Memories so different they could never be fused. He reached for my hand, maybe sensing that I’d stopped breathing. It was nothing I could explain to him.

  Eventually the guy who hit the old lady bumbles drunkenly toward me and flops down. “You’re new.” His name is Jacob. From Miami. Really? Miami.

  He’s saying, just to me, “We should have gone after her. She was limping, you know? This is gonna dog me the rest of my life.” He’s looking at his lap, where his hands are twisting the hell out of his shirttails. Only after he’s done talking does he glance up, as if surprised to find me still here, listening. His eyes go all grateful as he takes me in, until something startles him and he laughs. “Wait, what is this you’re wearing? You’ve got sequins, even?”

  In the winter like this, when the light lasts only six hours a day, and Christmas is coming and you’re just twenty-one, this kind of talk can seduce you. For the first time you understand why the word language so often comes from the word tongue. Of course it’s this base, writhing thing you survive on, this thing that unfurls from your core, where you can’t see its origins. You can try to escape yourself, but you’re still here.

  Jacob has bath salts. A long, deep tub in a big, tiled bathroom with ceilings fifteen feet high. The place has been partially renovated for foreigners but retains the mysterious Soviet design trend of a transom window between the bathroom and the kitchen, so while I soak he calls to me from the stove, asking if I want pesto or red sauce. He wanders in and refills my wineglass, then leaves again. It’s that kind of life now, all through the spring. He has satellite TV; he buys cases of wine; he wears a grown-up overcoat, though he’s not yet twenty-five. We’re on the twelfth floor of the famous Kudrinskaya Ploshchad building, one of the seven glories Stalin built to embellish the city’s horizon. Everyone says the apartments are bugged, but we’re not sure who would be listening at this point. The place is smoky and not very clean, but there are big windows framing the city, and a piano, and french doors between the rooms. For work Jacob does some kind of trading for an American firm—iron and steel, I think—but he seems to work little, and more for amusement than money. He dresses in suits that were clearly once beautiful but are now dingy and loose, with a spot somewhere on every shirt. He keeps his face angled down most of the time, glancing up to make eye contact only in nervous rushes.

  He has an international phone line and lets me call my parents and friends. I expect thrilled, heartfelt conversations each time, but in reality our topics in common have dwindled. My friends from school are all on the verge of graduating, looking for jobs. My old roommate’s engaged and says, “Why are you talking that way? You sound Canadian or something.”

  Like Jacob and his friends I no longer fit there, but I don’t quite fit here, which would almost make us all fit together if we weren’t just misfits by nature. These are people who speak four or five languages, who drift from one country to another every year or two, who keep dog-eared How to Learn Welsh or Turkish textbooks on the floor next to their toilets. Jacob can sit for hours just reading a dictionary.

  With them I see another side of the city, the expat bars and hard-currency shops, where big guards check passports to keep out Russians because the only kind who would spend this sort of money would have to be mafia men or hookers—more trouble than they’re worth. I see inside all the grand hotels—the breathtaking art nouveau Metropol, the French bakery inside the Cosmos, the Spanish restaurant in the lobby of the Moskva, where one day we wind up next to former senator Gary Hart, who broke my spirit freshman year with his campaign scandals.

  We roam and roam. I have to jog every few steps to keep up as Jacob lopes absentmindedly through the city, chain smoking and occasionally stopping to point at a business and say, “Was this here last week?” I never know, but he’ll stop a stranger to ask, chat for ten minutes with any willing Russian about the history of a neighborhood. When our cabbies get lost he gives instructions so detailed they double take him suspiciously.

  Today we’re down by the river embankment, in front of a sleek new Italian clothes store on a brand-new, deserted street.

  “We should go get you something nonpolyester.”

  “Hey, I’m fine. Do you know how fast this stuff dries?” I’m still doing all my laundry by hand, in my bathtub.

  He draws me inside anyway, and the clerks greet him as if they know him already, but maybe they’ve been trained to do that. He makes odd humming sounds to himself as he picks his way through the store. Hovering over a stack of women’s sweaters, he says, “This color would be good on you.”

  To see merchandise displayed for us to fondle, instead of trapped behind counters guarded by babushkas, gives me an anxious giddiness, and I can tell that the shopkeepers, though trained to accept the practice, still rise up on the balls of their feet as they watch us making ourselves at home.

  I shake my head and twist away as he holds up a sweater to me. It’s soft as a rabbit, pale blue-gray, and simple, probably dry clean only.

  “You’re never going to blend in anyway,” he says, gesturing at my Russian ensemble. “Not like this, anyway.” He says to the shopgirl, “Guess where she’s from.”

  She’s model beautiful and blushes, shakes her head. “Davaite,” he says. Come on.

  She shrugs and smiles helplessly. “U.S.A.”

  I make a swift move for the door and lean against the wall outside, mortified for some reason.

  He saunters out and lights a fresh cigarette and reaches back for my hand as he starts to cross the street. I put my hands in my pockets and watch him go.

  He glances back just once, then heads through a vast construction zone toward the river. The truth is I’m all turned around, I’m lost, and there’s not a car or metro station in sight, not even a bus stop. What have I been doing? It’s a gray, drizzly day and the light is fading and his hulked-over figure is getting smaller and smaller. When I’m close enough that he can hear my footsteps he slows down and waits for me, stretches back a hand for me to take. At the far edge of the construction we have to climb a low fence to get to an old red wooden tugboat on the river that seems like something out of a Popeye cartoon. Onboard, there’s a beautiful mahogany bar inside, and we are the only foreigners. Again, the bartender
says hello as if he knows Jacob, and when I respond in Russian he smiles at me as if I’m a charming accessory. We sit in a small booth by a window, and the water outside brings me back to the vast, brown Mississippi.

  “So north is that way?” I point upriver, desperate to reclaim my bearings. “Does it run north and south?” Jacob laughs and pulls a battered map out of his coat, and I’m faced with the maze-like path of the river through the city. “It goes just about everywhere. It’s no kind of landmark to use. How can you not know this?”

  I tell him to quiz me on any part of the metro map, but he just shakes his head. “That’s easy. That’s tourist stuff.” He orders us some Dutch beer and then sets a bag on the table. It sits there, tissue paper and all, through three rounds.

  “You should try it on at least,” he says once we’re managing smiles again.

  The bartender’s drunk and glancing over conspiratorially. I peel off my glittery green and pink turtleneck and shiver in my dingy t-shirt for a second while Jacob bites the tags off the sweater and hands it over. He tilts his head to one side to take me in.

  “Well?”

  A slow smile spreads across his face. “What are you so afraid of?”

  I shrug. “Nothing.” But it comes out like a bluff.

  Suddenly Jacob straightens his posture. A lanky blonde is headed right toward us. She’s Russian; it’s obvious from every sleek move. He stubs out his cigarette but doesn’t stand up, and she surveys me with the briefest of glances as he introduces us.

  “That was fun the other night,” she says in Russian and starts to prattle about a dance club they apparently went to last week. She places one long slender hand on his shoulder, and he holds still. It’s hard not to be intimidated by the seemingly flawless Russian women who hover around foreign men, acting as though they’d do just about anything to get a ticket out of here. They’re gorgeous and smart and perfectly fluent—walking, breathing language coaches operating on their own turf. Jacob sighs and avoids looking at me. I focus on the water out the window.