A man like Malhaz probably had to pay some of his profits under the table to local Party officials. I was only slightly surprised at the admission. With glasnost, news of such “Socialist enterprise” arrangements was spreading. After I got to know Malhaz better, he dropped his pretenses and referred to his local Party patrons simply as “the Mafia.” At the time, I had thought this was a rather colorful aspect of the irrepressible Georgian character.
Malhaz picked us up in his shiny new Volga sedan the next afternoon and drove us to a seemingly run-down industrial quarter of the city. We stopped on a muddy lane past the railway switchyards, and he led us to a nondescript concrete-block warehouse. Inside the rusty steel door, we found an incredible stockpile of luxury goods. Half the warehouse was a “special” clothing store, owned and managed by two of Malhaz’s smiling relatives. There were racks of imported suits and dresses, piles of authentic American blue jeans, and British Reebok shoes. On the other side of the aisle, there were cases of canned Hungarian goulash and German chicken. Several locked glass display cases held perfume, imported televisions, and Japanese stereo sets.
Jana was stunned. I was impressed, but tried not to show it because I hoped to drive a reasonable bargain on anything we bought. As it turned out, I didn’t have to. The owner took us to a rack of stylish East German wedding dresses fringed with delicate lace. The first one he selected fit Jana perfectly. The smiling Georgian businessman threw in a silk floral wreath with the price of the dress, only 132 rubles.
The next day Malhaz took us to a similar private warehouse, this one near the smelly State stockyards. But the goods inside were unaffected by the odor of sheep and cattle. Jana selected white satin wedding shoes with stylish high heels, a luxury never seen in the Voyentorg. All told, her wedding dress, shoes and an attractive sundress with matching jacket for the honeymoon cost me less than 300 rubles. Malhaz was a genius.
“Perestroika,” he said, “is very good for business.”
That weekend Colonel Vladimir Prozukhin, the deputy division commander for political administration, paid a call on the Baglais while I was at their apartment. As chief zampolit, Prozukhin had more than a personal interest in our wedding. The marriage of a reasonably presentable and successful young fighter pilot to the beautiful daughter of a senior Air Force officer gave Prozukhin the chance to promote the virtues of Socialist morality in the Soviet military. And the occasion also presented him the opportunity to win favor with the pro-Gorbachev reformers in the Ministry of Defense. He planned to do so by staging a “sober” wedding reception at which no alcohol would be served.
“This is a great opportunity, Alexander Vasilyevich,” Prozukhin told Jana’s father, then turned to me. “Think of the example this would set, not only in the division but in the entire Air Force.”
He went on to explain that he could arrange a special photo feature in Aviation and Cosmonautics. It would be a great propaganda victory in Gorbachev’s sputtering anti-alcohol campaign, Prozukhin implied. If a MiG-29 pilot and his virile comrades drank only tea and mineral water at the wedding, Prozukhin argued, we would set a “splendid example” that would not go unnoticed in Moscow. Naturally Prozukhin’s role in the affair would not go unnoticed either.
This time I didn’t defer to Colonel Baglai before announcing my true feelings. “No,” I blurted out. “Absolutely not, Comrade Colonel, I would like to have spirits at my wedding party.”
Jana’s father nodded emphatically. He was known as a man who liked his brandy. “Out of the question, Prozukhin,” he said.
As things turned out, I wish I would have accepted this sycophant Prozukhin’s offer.
The following weeks were hectic. I flew during the day. At night and on weekends, I worked — slaved was more like it — on the tiny apartment the housing office had assigned me as a wedding present. The place was a shambles; the window with broken panes was jammed shut and the intact window would not open. Half the plaster had fallen down. The toilet backed up when it did flush, which was sporadic at best. And the electric wiring was like an elaborate booby trap. Slowly I made progress. But these home improvements were expensive. Even with Malhaz helping, the necessary plumbing, carpentry, and electrical supplies were damned expensive and difficult to find. I worked “like an Ethiopian,” as in the derisive Russian adage, and spent several hundred rubles just to make the apartment habitable. And I hadn’t even started looking for furniture.
“That, my friend,” Malhaz warned, “will be more difficult still.”
Then Colonel Baglai broke the cheery news on the cost of the wedding reception. There would be over 120 guests invited to the officers’ dining room. What with food, prezanty for the kitchen and serving staff, a stereo discotheque for music, and an ample supply of alcohol, my share of the expenses would be two thousand rubles. He may as well have hit me in the face with both fists. When I handed over the thick packet of bank notes, I had less than eight hundred rubles left in my savings account.
But Colonel Baglai assured me we were getting high quality at a bargain price. He had an Osobist friend at Vaziani who had a colleague in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where the State brandy factory was located. Baglai ordered forty liters of the best five-star Armenian cognac to be delivered for the reception.
“Don’t worry,” he assured me, “we won’t drink that much and you and I can split what’s left.”
By ordering in this volume, he explained, we were getting a bargain price. He had a point. Such high-quality Armenian cognac was extremely valuable. And by ordering through a KGB connection, we were buying at cost.
“Actually,” Jana’s father explained, smiling like a rug merchant in the bazaar, “we’re getting it well below cost.”
He elaborated. Apparently one of the plant foremen had constructed an actual secret pipeline directly from the aging room of the factory to a shed in the backyard of his small house just outside the distillery walls. While the casks were being filled for the aging process, a steady stream of this expensive brandy was trickling unnoticed through a copper pipe, across the factory grounds, through the wall, and into a collection vat. The man paid off the KGB with a portion of his product and sold the rest. No wonder good Armenian brandy was hard to find north of the Caucasus.
When I tallied up my savings account book that night, I also estimated that I would have at least five liters of good cognac left over to sell after the wedding, which might fetch forty or fifty rubles each. At least that would be some compensation.
My relations with the Baglai family remained cool, at best. After the first, formal visit to their apartment to discuss the wedding plans, I returned several times. These visits certainly were not formal occasions. But they were revealing of the family’s character. One day Jana’s mother asked if I was hungry, then simply said, “There’s food if you want to eat.”
She then returned from the kitchen with a pot of macaroni, slapped it down on the table, and proceeded to spread newspaper as a tablecloth. I was shocked. Even the bachelor officer pilots I had roomed with over the years had better manners than this. At first I thought she was staging some elaborate joke. But then I realized I was expected to eat this way. I politely declined.
A few minutes later Jana’s sister Marina and her little brother came home and went directly to the kitchen stove to eat standing there, spooning the food right from the same greasy pot Jana’s mother had presented me. Clearly that was their habitual practice. So much for close family life.
I could have dismissed these quirks as a minor irritation, but I knew they typified the home that had shaped Jana’s character. If a family didn’t care about properly forming their children’s manners and public behavior, what did they care about? I remembered Jana’s father’s action after the Chernobyl disaster. His calling a colleague in the Ukraine to make certain there was no problem with a perfunctory gesture. No father who loved his daughter would have accepted this.
A few nights later I had to wait at the Baglais’ apartment quite late because they had a phone and I was trying to get through to my mother at the Pearl Hotel in Sochi to verify some details of the wedding. Jana’s mother didn’t even offer me a cup of tea. She merely pointed to the couch, then tottered off to bed herself. I lay there for hours trying to get comfortable without a pillow, brooding on the irrevocable step I was about to take.
Then, two days later, I had a real blowup with Jana. I had finally gotten our apartment repaired and cleaned up. Although it was sparsely furnished, the walls were intact and nicely papered and everything was clean. While I was flying, Jana came over to spend the day to get ready for the Air Force Day dance that evening, which was going to be a kind of unofficial engagement party. When I got back from the base, it looked like the apartment had been ransacked. There were wet towels strewn on the bathroom floor, half-eaten plates of food on the floor of the small living room, and the kitchen was filthy. But Jana looked great, well scrubbed, her hair in long, loose curls, and her sleeveless summer dress beautifully pressed. She was ready to go to the dance.
I looked around the apartment and shook my head. She knew I had scrubbed the accumulated filth of years off the kitchen walls and tile floor, yet she had carelessly spilled food and tea and not even bothered to wipe up the
