The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  Then one day we fished just outside the city at Sabrony Bar, made a fire, and cooked the fish we caught. Two militiamen came to sternly lecture us on the rule against open fires. We offered them food and vodka, they accepted, shed their gray tunics, and joined us. We all got so drunk that we had to sleep it off on the side of the river that night.

  Though Russians tended to be standoffish with strangers, once their suspicious natures were satisfied they embraced friends as few people I had known.

  I wrote about many things in those early months after I forged friendships with my fellow anglers by the river, but I never wrote about the Anglo-Soviet Piscatorial Society. My fishing friends were mine alone.

  In August we were fishing off a barge on the southern fringe of the city. I had no idea how this had been arranged, but it had. Russians learned the art of personal networking before it became a buzzword in American business schools. It was a hot and humid night and my Russian friends had small torches burning along the gunwales. The captain of a river tug joined us, as did several Russian women. I had a small Japanese-made, portable eight-track player that we used to listen to the Beatles and Fats Domino as we drank and fished off the vessel. Georgi brought a balalaika and strummed and picked while we danced the gopak. One of the Russian women and I went skinny-dipping, then crawled onto a platform at the rear of the barge and made love frantically while the Piscatores jounced boisterously above us. I did not even know her name. She had bleached hair and brown eyes and a come-hither smile. When it suddenly went silent on the barge, I had a sense of foreboding. I climbed up to see what was going on and a powerful set of hands clamped onto my shoulders and hoisted me aboard, scraping me over the railing and dumping me unceremoniously onto the filthy wooden deck. The woman was nowhere to be seen.

  A heavy, rough blanket was pulled over my head and I was handcuffed and taken stumbling to an automobile and driven away. I could see nothing. I did not want to think about what lay ahead, but I had heard legions of stories about Westerners grabbed without warning by the security services; usually such events were intended only to harass or show official displeasure, but some such events ended badly with a foreigner’s expulsion or worse, an untimely and lethal accident, complete with witnesses and corroborating evidence.

  The car came to an abrupt halt. I was dragged from it into a building, shoved into a room, and left in the dark. I managed to get the blanket off. I felt the splinters from my slide along the deck of the barge. Pitch black. My heart pounded. Still naked. Jesus. It was common knowledge among Westerners that the KGB often stripped prisoners for interrogations. Why was this happening to me?

  Eventually the door opened. I was given trousers. The cuffs made it nearly impossible for me to use my hands. I stumbled around trying to put the pants on, then lay down. I was hauled into another room and shoved unceremoniously onto a chair.

  The man before me was immense. Most Russians I had met were short, but this man was tall and powerfully built. His hair was blond and cut close; a thick reddish brown mustache drooped over the corners of his mouth. He had gray eyes and dense eyebrows.

  “You have committed a crime against the Soviet people,” he said. His voice was deep and menacing, his English flawless, hinting of England rather than America.

  I thought of the willing flesh of the Russian woman and went cold. Had I been set up? The Soviet security services were famous for entrapments using women—enticements that spooks called honey traps.

  “I have nothing to say,” I told him. “I’ve done nothing illegal. I want to talk to my embassy.”

  He leaned close to my face. “You have violated a Soviet woman. This is not allowed.”

  “I didn’t violate anyone!”

  His voice modulated. “It will be to your advantage to cooperate.”

  “I am cooperating. I am telling the truth.”

  “Truth is determined by the state.”

  I countered. “Truth is determined by facts.”

  My interrogator said, “Facts, like numbers, can be assembled to support many conclusions.”

  I had just enough vodka lingering in my bloodstream to be combative. “I have nothing more to say, asshole.”

  “In our system silence is an admission of guilt,” my interrogator replied, glaring at me and holding up a beefy fist. His knuckles were streaked with scars, some of them looking very recent. I tried not to flinch.

  “Do you deny congress with a Soviet citizen?”

  “I’ve only slept with Brezhnev’s wife,” I said, lashing out. “I think he watched.”

  The giant looked appalled and stepped back. “That is a truly disgusting image,” he said, allowing a smile to creep onto his wide face.

  The doors to the room burst open and the members of the Anglo-Soviet Piscatorial Society tumbled in, smiling and jabbering, carrying bottles of vodka. The women were with them, including my swimming partner. A setup indeed.

  My interrogator poked me in the center of the chest with a finger as thick as a broomstick. “You are not afraid,” he bellowed. “You have balls!” He turned and said something to the others about courage. They nodded drunkenly and began to applaud in the peculiar rhythmic way Russians clapped.

  “What the hell is going on?” I was no longer afraid; I was embarrassed and more than a little infuriated by their practical joke.

  Misha unlocked my handcuffs. Ivan gave me a tumbler of vodka.

  The big man cocked his head to the side, crossed his arms, then grabbed my arms. “I am Viktor Andreyevich Valoretev.” He kissed me on both cheeks and gave me a playful shove that knocked me backward.

  “Our comrade,” Misha said happily.

  “A joke? You think this is a fucking joke?” I felt my temper flaring but before it could gain real intensity, I found myself laughing with the others. “You are all assholes,” I told them in Russian, which only made them laugh all the harder.

  We stayed at the cabin for two days. There was a lily-pad-choked lake a hundred yards away, but we were having too good a time to bother with fishing.

  My female companion was named Talia and she was a pediatrician. In fact, my colleagues were not simple working folk, but professionals and academics, and the dacha belonged to Misha’s family.

  The mysterious Valoretev and I talked nonstop about fishing. He said he wanted only to catch trout and that carp were the serfs of the fish world, bottom feeders like politicians and beneath his dignity.

  When I asked him if there were trout near Moscow, he shook his head and said, “Not close.” Then he asked, “Do you use a fly rod?”

  “Yes. Do you?”

  He did not answer and I had no chance to follow up because Misha appeared and pulled me away.

  “Only here are we truly free,” Misha confided. “The forest has no ears and Viktor Andreyevich is our sword and shield.”

  It would be some time before I came to understand that Viktor, who was in his midthirties, was in the KGB and that our lives would be inexorably linked. The KGB called itself the “sword and shield” of Mother Russia. The only thing it shielded was the truth and that from the Russian people more than from the outside world.

  •••

  There was no official Christmas in Russia, but the Russian people sidestepped this technicality and put up trees and decorated them for New Year’s. The happy days of fishing on the river had given way to crushing cold and blowing snow. The expatriate community felt isolated in the Soviet capital and tended to pounce on the slightest excuse to throw a party. These were not elegant affairs, but more like impromptu college dorm bashes with guests bringing whatever they had hoarded or brought back from the outside world during their most recent trip. I did not like such gatherings and avoided them to the extent I could. Ignoring them completely would have been unwise because there was always information and speculations to be had off the record. In the figurative sense Westerners i
n Moscow were all fishing for one thing or another and, like good anglers everywhere, we would trade and share some of our recent finds.

  Once summer fishing ended, I did not see much of my pals from the river. I was not invited to their homes. To invite a foreigner home was to invite the suspicion of the state—and worse. The government had informers everywhere. The Russians also nursed a curious national inferiority complex and I was sure they would not want me in their homes because they felt these would not measure up to the West.

  Moscow was a gray city filled with gray people. In winter the morning sun came late and left early, if it showed at all. People worked from dark to dark and in early evening the slushy streets were filled with people walking shoulder to shoulder, all dressed in heavy, dark overcoats, shuffling forward to keep from falling on the ice, all moving in the same direction, nobody speaking. The only sounds were coughing, from smoke or bugs, and in the street there were few vehicles. There was no life in the crowds, just motion. The city was only marginally lit, as if it were at war and keeping light low to not attract enemy attention. It was a sprawling, silent city filled with silent people and to walk among them as they went home from work was to feel their sullenness move into your flesh like a virus.

  In Stalin’s day the Soviets knew little about the West, but Khrushchev had opened the window and though Brezhnev was anything but liberal, information came in sporadically on contraband and homemade shortwave radios from Radio Free Europe and the BBC. Soviets lucky enough to travel outside the country on state business returned with wondrous tales. What they learned was turning them defensive. Paradise was showing its age and its incompetencies.

  I was alone on New Year’s Eve. I would’ve liked to have called Dr. Talia but she had made it clear that our dacha dalliance had to remain a one-time affair—for her protection. I couldn’t fault her for self-­preservation. To understand freedom required you to lose it. The Soviet Union had given me new appreciation for the things I had taken for granted. I could find company among expatriates, but I was in no mood for their ritualistic whining about the difficulties of life in the gray and ominous Soviet capital.

  I wanted to surprise Lilly and the gang in Grand Marais with a phone call. Before my arrival, reporters had been required to go to Moscow’s Central Telegraph Office in order to wire stories to the outside, but now we had telephones and I stopped by our office, which was connected to Susanna’s flat, but the phone service was down. The Soviets tried to disrupt us with planned technical interruptions and interminable red tape, but they underestimated our resolve. I could hear a loud party under way on the floor below Susanna’s and, to avoid the crowd, I took the back stairs down and went outside.

  I was barely out of the building when a black Pobeda swerved toward me and slid over to the curb through the slush. The passenger door swung open. I peeked in.

  “Get in,” Valoretev said in an anxious growl.

  As soon as I settled into the seat, Valoretev flashed a conspiratorial grin and handed me a bottle of vodka. “Tonight we celebrate.”

  I accepted the bottle willingly. “You have rescued me from the slag heap of boredom. Where are we going?”

  “State secret,” my huge companion declared, touching a finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

  Once out of the center of Moscow, it was virtually impossible for most Westerners to identify landmarks, and I was as incompetent as others. There was block upon block of housing tracts, all dark, all the same. We had ­driven more or less north, which was about the best I could place us.

  Eventually we pulled up to a garage. Valoretev blinked his lights twice and the door abruptly opened to admit us. Two bearded men with shotguns closed the door behind us and watched as Valoretev led us down a darkened stairwell to a steel door, which he hammered with a fist.

  There were six men inside, most of them in their thirties, like Valoretev. They were seated at a table that nearly sagged under the weight of food, bottles of vodka, and wine. There was cabbage soup and pelmeni, ravioli that looked like ears, cabbage leaves stuffed with diced meat, a huge salad of pink rice, gobs of butter, wheels of black bread, kasha, wooden bowls of pickled vegetables, and mushrooms. It had taken some effort to accumulate so much food, which was always in short supply in the city.

  “This is my friend Bowie Rhodes,” Valoretev announced. “He is a heartless capitalist pig.”

  One of the men tore off a hunk of bread, held it out to me, and said brightly, “Welcome, capitalist pig.”

  Another of the men filled tall, thin glasses with vodka and distributed them.

  Valoretev said to me, “Make a toast to peace and friendship between our countries.”

  “To peace and friendship between our countries,” I said. We drained our glasses. Refills all around.

  Valoretev said, “May rivers never run out of fish.” Drained all around, more refills.

  I saw the others grab for food between toasts, especially the heavy bread, and I did the same. With Russians you had to learn the art of defensive drinking.

  One of the men said something in Russian I couldn’t quite decipher. “He toasts to vodka that will make you blind,” Valoretev said. The drill.

  And yet another, each speaking in Russian, Valoretev translating, though I could follow most of it.

  “This man wishes to have carnal knowledge of your sister,” Valoretev said. Then a whispered aside, “The green snake has him,” meaning he was crocked.

  “My sister accepts in the spirit of Soviet-American friendship,” I said. The men hooted and drained their glasses.

  The last man’s toast was short. “He says, ‘Drink to Robin Hood,’” Valoretev said. My head was spinning. A succession of shots of vodka Russian style was a fast and unforgiving high.

  “What the hell does that mean?” I asked, then added, “Robin Hood was English.”

  Valoretev growled and chucked my shoulder. “You are wrong! He was nobleman who joined the Party to take from royalty for serfs. Robinevich of Locksky . . . a true Russian hero.”

  I laughed out loud.

  “Eat!” Valoretev commanded and we all obeyed, piling our plates high with the abundant food.

  The toasts stopped, but the alcohol flow didn’t. We had sweet Georgian champagne and Armenian red wine and more vodka. Empty bottles were tossed over our shoulders. Some shattered. I was yelling in English and Russian. Valoretev was roaring in Russian and English. The rest were just roaring. I knew none of them. I was having a great time.

  At some point Valoretev got up and clapped his hands on the table. “Okay, now we fish.”

  To the extent that I could think at all, I thought he was crazy and wondered if I was hallucinating. We went into another room that stank of gasoline and oil. The men picked up brocaded valises and knelt down to open them.

  I was weaving. What the hell were they doing?

  “You must judge now,” Valoretev said. One of the men handed him what I thought was an antenna. Valoretev held it out to me. I squinted. Not an aerial. A fly rod, made of wood, light and well balanced, about seven and a half feet long.

  “Good?” Valoretev asked.

  “It’s fantastic. Where did you get it?”

  Valoretev thumped his chest. “We each made our own. They are ­Russian!” I noted that he did not say Soviet. “We got plans from books. Tonkin cane is from our socialist brothers in China.” The big Russian then lowered his voice and grinned. “Na lyevo, da?” The black market.

  Each of the rods was a work of art.

  Valoretev gave me a reel. It was crude, but sturdy. We pulled the line through. I whipped it back and forth with false casts. “Perfect,” I said. “Have you used these?”

  “You will teach us!” Valoretev thundered gleefully.

  “Now?”

  “Da! Tonight. Now!”

  I spent nearly five hours with them, teaching them a roll cas
t and a reach cast and what I called a sidearm curl. Most of my students were a little clumsy. All but Valoretev, who picked it up almost naturally, grinning the whole time. We had no real fly lines, which was a problem, but they had heavy braided line and for the distances they were working it served well enough to approximate the action of a weighted fly line.

  When the beautiful rods were put away, we returned to eating and drinking and I talked about fly lines and leaders and fly sizes and nymphs and dry flies and streamers. I wanted to share everything I knew with them and talked like a machine gun until we were all too tired and too filled with booze. The men left one by one, each bidding me farewell with wet kisses on my cheeks.

  Valoretev and I were the last to leave. We could barely get up the stairs.

  “What the hell was that about?” I asked him.

  He grabbed my shirt, nearly lifting me off the ground. “All America is private?”

  “No.”

  “Fish belong to the regime?”

  “No, to the people.” In a manner of speaking.

  “We are communist,” he said. “We own everything equally. And we own nothing.” He sounded forlorn. “Bastards,” he added. “The czar owned all. Now the Kremlin owns all.” He stared at me. “Where do you fish?”

  “Rivers.”

  “The people own them?”

  “The water and the fish in the water. Some of the land is private, some is public.”

  “The owners can forbid you to fish?”

  “No. We have laws. All citizens may fish in navigable water. But you can’t get out on private land. You have to stay in the water and wade.”

  He grinned. “You have balls.”

  His tone suggested trouble.

  “I don’t fish with them.”

  He grinned maniacally. “Here you must!”

  No more was said. I was delivered to my flat and I slept all that day and the next night.

  •••

  I had gone my own way the first time I asked for an interview with Brezhnev. This time I enlisted Susanna’s help.