taken Moffat’s car, but it was too risky. Traffic cops were on the make all over Moscow. They stopped you. They asked for money. I was guessing it was the reason nothing had been done about the traffic. Maybe the traffic cops’ union put up a fight. Maybe it was the only way they could feed their kids. I didn’t want to drive another guy’s car, not now.
My phone rang. A familiar voice was on the other end, but the line was blurry. I couldn’t make out who it was, and then the line went dead. I had my clothes and papers in my carry-on, I didn’t know where the hell I was going, but I wasn’t coming back here. I had cash, and I had the gun. Viktor Leven never took it off me.
I flagged down a cab. I made a deal with the driver for the trip out to the country, twenty kilometers, give or take, and he was willing, glad of the work, a chubby little cheerful Georgian with two teeth missing, who told me he loved Americans and for me he would make a deal. We did it in sign language, and the couple of words of Russian I admitted I knew.
I kept up the idea that I didn’t speak Russian much and that I was just a tourist, at least for a while, and then I gave it up.
From the rear-view mirror hung a little Georgian flag. I felt okay in his car. Georgians disliked the Russians plenty. There was going to be trouble, he said. South Ossieta, Russian army, the whole thing was going to blow up, and soon.
“What were you?”
“I was a history teacher,” he said. “I need the money,” he added, half turning to look at me.
I asked him to take me to Nikolina Gora, a village out in the Moscow countryside. He asked where exactly. I said I was looking for someone, I’d let him know.
His name was Eduard, and he was a shrewd guy. He said, if I was looking for information around Barvika, the town you came to before you got to Nikolina Gora, he would call his sister who cleaned houses nearby and heard all the gossip. It was all a Georgian girl with a dark complexion could get around Moscow. She cleans their fucking toilets, he said. I said, call her. He put his foot on the gas.
He got on his cell, he called his sister and they gabbled away for twenty minutes while we sat in traffic. I understood the sister had agreed to meet us. Eduard turned the radio up.
It was a hot windy day, sky sludge-colored, dust swirling across the windows of the crummy taxi, no air conditioning. From behind I could see the sweat streaming down my Georgian’s neck. He wiped it with a paper towel.
You think of Moscow as a winter city, its ugliness and sprawl disguised. In summer, you see it as it is. I remembered the summers now, dusty, everyone jamming into cars or on a train or a bus to get out of town.
I rolled down the window as we headed out of town on the highway, and Eduard chattered away, mostly in Russian, trying out his English and sign language, half turned towards me and grinning like a fool. I figured we were going to crash.
It was a long time since I’d come out here, the last time to Sverdloff’s parents’ dacha in Nikolina Gora.
The Rublevo-Uspenskoye highway was always the best road in the entire country, all eleven time zones of it. Big-time creeps had their official country houses out this way, right back to Stalin. Even now, where once the ZiL sirens blared, there were big Mercs and Range Rovers.
At the end of the turnoff to Putin’s place were two cop cars.
The driver mentioned Putin as if spitting and showed me his rough hand, thumb down.
He talked on and on, pointing out the building sites at the side of the road. He pulled over and invited me to join him in the front seat.
Under the seat, he had a bottle of Georgian wine, which was illegal in Moscow, more or less, the bastards have put a levy on it, he said. No love lost. Hates the fucking Russkis. Ed, he said I should call him, Ed, you say in West.
He passed me the bottle. I drank some of the thick heavy red. He drank. We toasted Georgia.
Out here, ten, fifteen miles from the center of Moscow where I remembered only countryside, huge stands of trees had been replaced by billboards and gated communities and shopping malls and ugly McMansions. You could hear the birds twitter and smell the exhaust as big cars slammed down the country road.
“Pricks,” said Ed. “Bastards. All. All same.”
We passed the billboards: German dental centers, Meissen china, Princess cruises, real estate, spas, all the billboards pushing capitalist pleasures.
Ed, who had worked as a tour guide for Georgians up to see Moscow, was in full flow, holding forth on the origins of the dacha, knocking back gulps of red wine.
Everybody has a dacha, said Ed, even workers and poor slobs, everybody has a little patch of land. The dacha meant escape.
My own parents had had a dacha for a while when my father was in the KGB, a cottage a few miles further out in the countryside. My father took me fishing, I swam in the river, friends came to eat.
Best of all, there was a huge Grundig radio my father had somehow managed to acquire. In those days there were only official radios and radio stations, nothing you wanted to listen to.
A foreign radio on which you could listen to foreign stations was an immense prize, only available to the privileged. Antennae sprouted from cottages all over the countryside.
My mother listened for news from Europe, my father, and his best friend, Gennadi-the man I called Uncle Gennadi-to jazz. Teenagers fiddled with the knobs on their parents’ radios, trying to get the BBC and the Beatles.
I knew all about the life in dachas outside Moscow, and it came back to me so powerfully I had to shake myself out of the memories.
“Luxury mall,” said Ed, and points out the window, then pulls up. “Come with me. Look, see what the new world has brought to us, here we are, a capitalist country with a peasant’s soul.” He looked around. “It’s to keep the wives busy shopping and away from Moscow, so men can be with their mistresses.”
The mall was exquisite, all sleek wood and glass, more Milan than Moscow. Every label in this label-mad country was here: Gucci, Bulgari, Graf, Bentley, Prada, Zegna, Armani, Ralph Lauren. But it was like Alphaville, empty, devoid of life, dystopic. Ed understood this.
“Everything is facade now,” he said, leading me to the far end of the mall where, in a Lada, a woman was waiting.
Ed’s sister was a small pretty women, about fifty, who got out of the battered car, embraced her brother, and said to me, “How can I help you?”
I asked her if she knew the way to a certain dacha in Nikolina Gora, and she got on her cellphone, made a few calls, and told me her husband’s cousin had worked nearby and would call Eduard with directions. She climbed in her car, and, waving, drove away.
Then, without warning, Eddie hustled me back in the car, and pulled back on the road, going at the legal speed. The police car he said he had seen didn’t stop us. I never noticed it. I was losing my focus.
“Russian cops,” Ed said, and spat.
When Ed got the call from his brother-in-law’s cousin, he found the right road to the dacha I was looking for. He gave me his cell number. I offered him extra money. He refused.
Georgians loved America, he told me sincerely, and he hoped we would remain eternal friends. We shook hands, and then he left me at the junction where the main road joined a dirt path to the Sverdloff place.
It was getting dark now, the sky purple with rain clouds. I started up the path. I could see the house clearly.
The garden sloped down to a stream that fed the river, but it was overgrown, weeds had pushed up through the grass. The hydrangea bushes, neon blue in the evening light, were in bloom. Fireflies glittered everywhere.
I had been here once before in the summer, a long time ago. Under an immense tree in the garden was an old trestle table where we had eaten dinner, me, Tolya, his parents, his cousin, Svetlana.
The dinner table had been surrounded by friends of the Sverdloffs, writers, artists.
Tolya’s father, almost as big as his son, sang songs from
Svetlana had been the beginning, it was Svetlana I saw in Valentina, at least a little. I realized that now.
