Immigrant City

by David Bezmozgis

  Victor laughed out loud like a lunatic. It was possible that people at neighbouring benches turned and stared. He didn’t bother to check one way or the other. He had made his phone calls; he had knocked on the stonecutter’s door; he had sat and waited. It was now time to go and walk to the courthouse and continue the farce. He rose, crossed the park, and in a matter of minutes he had passed the train station, entered the courthouse, submitted to a metal detector and gone off in search of Ilya. He didn’t need to look very long. Unlike the Jewish Community Centre, the courthouse possessed an information window at which Victor was able to learn the number of Ilya’s courtroom. And, for what felt like the first time on his trip, he arrived somewhere at precisely the right moment. As he turned down the hallway, he saw two policemen escorting a handcuffed defendant into the courtroom followed by a small group of spectators: a young woman, a teenage boy and an older woman—presumably the defendant’s family. Victor attached himself to the end of the procession and found a seat inside the small courtroom.

  As opposed to most of the buildings Victor had seen in Riga, the courthouse was new and therefore outfitted with most of the contemporary trappings. The doors locked automatically when a session was in order, there was the faint cooling whir of air conditioning, and all of the courtroom furniture—though constructed from Latvian pine—had a vague Ikea-like quality. At the very back of the courtroom, to the right of the door, the accused sat on a bench inside a little gated prisoner’s dock. Along the wall, just ahead of him, the two policemen sat on their benches. They were both young men, in green uniforms, barely in their twenties but already possessing the dull, indolent posture common to all court officers. Victor had his place across the aisle from the policemen. Behind him were the younger woman and the teenage boy and ahead of him was the old woman.

  When Victor had entered the courtroom, there was no sight of the bailiff, judge or—more to the point—Ilya. Only the defence attorney, a tall, thin woman with tired, hound-like features, was present. Ilya did not appear until the bailiff emerged from the back door and called the session to order. All were made to rise while the judge mounted his podium. He was dressed in a burgundy robe and wore a chain of ornamental, golden medallions—evidently some folkloric symbol of Latvian authority. After the judge assumed his position, there followed the routine sequence of statements and exchanges—all of them in Latvian.

  Victor understood hardly anything that happened over the next hour. He had no idea what the man had done to warrant his confinement, and he couldn’t determine the purpose of the proceedings. He assumed they were preliminary, since, at one point, the defendant made a plea of not guilty. However, beyond that, the sense of things was impenetrable. And so, Victor paid attention only long enough to register that Ilya, in his suit and tie, seemed to be a good lawyer. He was organized, spoke succinctly and carried himself with an aloofness that bordered on menace. All of which probably didn’t bode well for the man in handcuffs, who sat in the prisoner’s dock looking not so much like a criminal but rather like a weary commuter waiting for the train. Victor assumed the same attitude of forbearance from the woman and the teenage boy as he heard not a sound behind him. The only person showing any sign of distress was the old woman in the front row. She had been in tears from the outset of the proceedings and, as time wore on, her breathing became shallower and more laboured. Though the air conditioning worked fine, Victor saw perspiration in the folds of her neck. She drank water from a plastic, teddy bear–shaped bottle—a kind manufactured to contain honey—and alternately wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and attempted to cool herself with a paper fan. But all to little effect, as, ultimately, her breathing seized up and Victor was convinced that she was on the verge of a heart attack. It was only at this point that the judge turned his attention to her and considered a pause in the proceedings, but, when she managed to collect herself, things resumed as before.

  The hearing was the last of the day for Ilya, and so, at its conclusion, he suggested that they go and have lunch. They stopped at a small cafeteria, where Victor bought half a dozen meat and cabbage buns and two bottles of Latvian beer. They then walked back to the municipal park where Victor had already spent much of his morning. On the way Ilya explained what had transpired in the courtroom.

  It was, as Victor had surmised, an arraignment. The man had already spent six months in custody waiting for the date. He would probably wait another several months before his next appearance. His crime was serious though not uncommon. He was charged with attempting to murder his boss. The man was a mechanic and had worked in an auto shop. He had been on the job for three months—the standard probationary period during which a new employee is paid poorly, if at all. After three months the boss is legally bound to either keep him on full-time or let him go. Generally, to avoid the higher taxes associated with having full-time employees, a boss will let the person go and find another—there being no shortage of people, desperate and willing to work for three months in the hopes that an employer might keep them on. In this case, the man claimed that his boss had promised to keep him. But when he came to work after his probationary period, he found someone else at his post. His boss told him to go to hell and so he stabbed him in the neck with a screwdriver.

  Ilya assumed that the boss probably had it coming, but he had no choice but to prosecute. If he didn’t, then every boss would be walking around with a screwdriver in his neck.

  “So what will he get for stabbing his boss in the neck?”

  “Hard to say. Ten years? Or nothing. He’ll say it was self-defence. The boss attacked him. He supports a wife, a younger brother. Nobody really wants to put him in jail. But who knows? Maybe things will turn out badly and he’ll be put away for a long time.”

  “Which will probably be the end of the old woman.”

  Ilya considered this and then confessed that he had his doubts about the old woman. It struck him as peculiar that while the rest of the family sat in the back, she had taken her place in the front. Obviously, the old woman was supposed to be the defendant’s mother, but this wasn’t something anyone had bothered to verify. So she could just as well have been any old woman off the street. Which meant that there was nothing to say that the family hadn’t scraped three lats together and paid her to come to the courthouse and act hysterically. Such things were not without precedent. Though, for an arraignment, Ilya believed, it was a waste of money. But one couldn’t blame the old woman. She probably received sixty lats a month as a pension, equivalent to $150. And, Ilya said, he didn’t need to describe to Victor what it was like to live on $150 a month.

  They entered the park and Ilya sought out a vacant bench in the shade. It was now early afternoon and much quieter than when Victor had been there in the morning. There were a few young mothers with children and strollers. Now and again, a businessman strode past speaking into a cellphone. A few tourists stopped to buy ice cream and study their maps. Victor sipped his beer and wondered if he should admit to Ilya that he had absolutely no idea what it meant to live on $150 a month in Riga. Judging from Ilya’s tone, he gathered that $150 a month was a pathetic sum. It certainly didn’t sound like a lot of money, but, then again, Latvia wasn’t Los Angeles and, had Ilya phrased things differently, Victor could just as easily have been convinced that, in Latvian terms, $150 was a fortune. And though Victor subscribed to a sober view of the world and of the forces that ruled it—forces for whom the financial welfare of old ladies was generally not a top priority—he was in a strange country and therefore prone to a higher level of credulity; liable, practically, to believe the opposite of everything he believed.

  “Do you want to know how much money I make?” Ilya said.

  Then he answered his own question before Victor had a chance to object.

  “Two hundred lats a month. This is considered a good salary. Just enough so that I will think twice before taking a bribe. My father made the same as a dermatologist with forty years’ experience. Salma, when she worked for the Amer
icans, made 250 lats. For a time, with three salaries, a total of 650 lats a month, we were relatively well off.”

  Ilya then proceeded to quote a litany of expenses, most of which, he said, were common to everyone in the city. Rent, food, transportation, miscellaneous items for children and the elderly. The figure he quoted for rent alone exhausted the total of the old woman’s pension. There was, Ilya said, really no such thing as disposable income. This was why, to cite an extreme example, most of Riga’s prostitutes had abandoned the city for points west. (And as for an explanation of the young mothers in the park, the businessmen, the pretty girls in summer dresses—in short, the reason Victor saw no squalor—well, it was Europe, after all. Not Africa. One good suit, one designer blouse—though second-hand from Germany—represented the difference between self-respect and despondency.)

  Ilya recited all of this information with detachment, as though he were addressing something merely statistical, academic, impersonal. His voice contained no resentment, which was why, when he asked Victor how much money he made, Victor felt less than his normal reticence to respond. However, he chopped fifty thousand off the number, which, given the context, still sounded obscenely excessive.

  “But,” Victor qualified, “I work for a large firm. We do most of our business with corporations. Someone doing your job would make less. And then you still have to adjust for the higher cost of living . . .”

  He realized that his was not a very persuasive argument. It was, even in terms of Los Angeles, not a very persuasive argument. He made a lot of money. Probably more than he deserved. But, then again, he knew of others who earned even more and deserved even less. (Though he didn’t expect that this was a rationalization Ilya would likely appreciate.)

  Ilya leaned back on the bench and regarded, as though with intense botanical interest, the leaves and branches of the shade tree.

  “I have some money saved up. Enough to send Salma and Brigitta to America. As I say, Salma is an accomplished programmer and her English is very good. And Brigitta is young and will easily learn the language. I am the only impediment. But I have my job here and am prepared to wait until they are ready for me.”

  Ilya then turned his attention from the tree and focused on Victor. As Ilya prepared to speak, Victor noted an inchoate defensiveness in the set of his features, as though Ilya, like a teenage suitor, was poised for imminent rejection; prepared, at any moment, to dismiss the proposition with “never mind.” Which was precisely what he said, but not before he said: “I’m not asking for money.” And not before Victor replied: “I do not practise that kind of law.”

  “But perhaps someone in your firm?”

  “We deal only with corporations. Trade issues. Never individual immigration cases.”

  Which—other than the exceptions made for the sons, nephews and mistresses of wealthy clients—was the truth. Immigration cases were frustrating and time-consuming. Victor had not personally been involved in any, but he knew that they entailed a morass of paperwork and almost always ended in recriminations. He couldn’t in good conscience agree to undertake any such thing. Given the choice, he would have actually preferred it if Ilya had asked for money.

  “And what about other means?”

  “What other means?”

  “Marriage.”

  “But you are already married.”

  “We could divorce. Temporarily, of course. I have heard it done.”

  “And then what?”

  “Salma could marry an American.”

  “Just like that?”

  “How else?”

  “And where would she find this American?”

  Which, immediately, Victor understood was a stupid question.

  “Never mind,” Ilya said. “I see that it is asking too much.”

  Victor considered explaining, so far as he knew, the problems inherent even in this option, to try and exonerate himself, to impress upon Ilya the impracticality, and, beyond that, he considered lying, consenting to fill out forms, marry the man’s wife, adopt his daughter, do whatever (since it was pitifully clear that between him and the stonecutter remained—even if only tenuously—Ilya), but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. Instead, he sat beside Ilya and resigned himself to a punitive silence.

  After some time, as if having reached a conclusion, Ilya repeated, “Never mind,” and ended the silence.

  “I realize that this isn’t why you came here,” Ilya said.

  With each word he distanced himself from the man who had, only moments before, offered Victor his wife and child.

  “Fortunately, your problem is easier to solve. I will call the stonecutter for you.”

  Ilya rose and went to the phone booth even though Victor was sure that he hadn’t said anything to him about his most recent frustrations. And when Victor approached the phone booth, Ilya was already dialing a number. Then, in a matter of moments, he was speaking in Latvian, exhibiting the same bloodless composure he had evinced in the courtroom. The conversation did not last very long and Ilya did most of the talking. Once again, as at the cemetery manager’s office, Victor felt himself excluded from considerations related to his own life. His input wasn’t requested except to establish the departure time of his flight the next day.

  When the conversation was over, Ilya exited the phone booth. “If you like, he can see us now,” he announced.

  “That was the stonecutter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he at the community centre?”

  “No.”

  “So, where is he?”

  “At his shop. In the Moskovsky farshtat. It’s possible to walk, although I would recommend a cab. A cab would get us there in ten minutes. We can get one easily on Brivibas Street.”

  Ilya half-turned in the direction of the street, ready to hail the cab, as if Victor’s consent was foregone and incidental.

  Angered by Ilya’s presumptuousness, and momentarily unsure of what he wanted, Victor said, “What if I don’t want to go?”

  “You don’t want to go?”

  “I don’t understand the rush.”

  “I thought you leave tomorrow.”

  “In the afternoon. I could see him in the morning.”

  “But he can see you now.”

  “I waited for him for two hours today. Where was he then?”

  Victor saw that Ilya regarded him as one might a child or a dog, as some thing ruled by impulse and deficient in reason.

  “I couldn’t say. Though I imagine if we went you could ask him yourself.”

  The flatness of Ilya’s tone discouraged Victor from asking anything further. Which was fine, since Victor no longer had anything to ask. He now recognized that he was in a situation that provided for only a binary choice. He could go with Ilya and see things through to their conclusion—whatever that might be—or he could refuse and claim the transitory pleasure of refusal. Those were his choices. There was nothing else. Calling the stonecutter and repeating his mistake at the cemetery was out of the question. And though he had misgivings about the likelihood of things turning out right, he also had an almost inexorable curiosity to finally meet the stonecutter. It seemed ridiculous—and likely a symptom of sleep deprivation and delirium—but he had begun to doubt the very fact of the stonecutter’s existence. And he entertained the thought—in some sub-rational recess—that meeting the stonecutter might be like meeting God or the President or the Wizard of Oz. Equal parts disappointment and reward, but that, at least, the truth would be revealed.

  * * *

  Victor followed Ilya out to Brivibas Street, where, as predicted, they had no trouble finding a cab. Ilya rode up front and directed the driver while Victor sat in the back seat. The driver navigated along streets now familiar to Victor. They passed through the medieval city, looped behind the central markets and train station, and followed a route that brought them to the courthouse and the limit of Victor’s knowledge. They then continued beyond the courthouse, south, into what generically could have be
en described as the “bad part of town.” The change was abrupt, as though the result of a civic consensus: no tourists expected beyond this point. The streets were grey and dingy. Old buildings deteriorated unchecked. Not infrequently, Victor saw listing, wooden hovels—seemingly anomalous in an urban setting—beside concrete apartment houses. People moved about the streets, tending to their everyday affairs, but there were also shadowy figures loitering in the doorways. In America, the place would have qualified as a slum, depressing and interesting only in a sordid way. Here it was different only because it was old. It had been a slum for generations. Nazis had commanded here and perpetrated horrific crimes. All of this invested a sense of historical gravity, which made the slum feel like more than just a slum. And, assuming he didn’t get mugged or clubbed to death, Victor thought it fitting that he should come here to get to the bottom of things.

  After driving for several more minutes, Ilya pointed to a dark-green cottage and instructed the driver to stop. Victor then paid the driver and joined Ilya at the cottage’s entrance. They stood there for a short while, but Ilya offered nothing in the way of explanation, not even a word to assure Victor that the dilapidated structure—bearing nothing to identify it as the stonecutter’s shop or as a place of business of any kind—was where they needed to be. Victor had expected to find heavy machinery and stacked rock, but there was only a peeling facade, drawn curtains, uncut grass, and a dirt path that turned ninety degrees at the front steps and wound around the side of the house. Taking this path, Ilya led Victor the length of the house and into a yard dominated by a Mitsubishi pickup truck with a sunken rear suspension. The truck had been backed into the yard so that its tailgate was only a few feet from the doors of a garage and from a large manual winch. The winch looked ancient, a relic from previous centuries, but Victor could see that it was still very much in use. By its heavy rope, it suspended a rough marble obelisk three feet in the air. The obelisk spun lazily, as though it had only recently been disturbed.