'That's a donation to the American economy, ' Yuri said. He then pressed on the accelerator and sped away. In his rearview mirror he saw the businessman bending down and retrieving the money from the gutter. The image gave Yuri a modicum of satisfaction. It was heartening to see the man stoop for such a paltry sum. He couldn't believe how cheap some Americans were despite their ostentatious wealth.
Yuri's day had improved dramatically following the vain attempt to see Curt Rogers and Steve Henderson at the firehouse on Duane Street. As a treat and mini-celebration of his imminent return to rodina, he'd gone to a small Russian restaurant for a sit-down lunch with hot borscht and a glass of vodka. A conversation in Russian with the owner added to the experience even though speaking in his native tongue also made him feel a touch melancholy.
After lunch the fares had been okay and steady. They'd generally kept to themselves except for the last guy on the run in from La Guardia Airport.
Yuri stopped at a light on Park Avenue. He was intending to head over to Fifth in hopes of getting some of the upscale hotel work. Instead, an older woman in a babushka stepped between parked cars and raised her hand. When the light changed Yuri pulled alongside and the woman climbed in.
'Where to? ' Yuri asked while eyeing his new fare in the rearview mirror. Her clothes were functional and, although not threadbare, at least well worn. She looked like someone who should have been using the subway.
'One-oh-seven West Tenth Street, ' the woman said with an accent heavier than Yuri's. He recognized it immediately. It was Estonian, which brought mixed memories.
They drove in silence for a while. For the first time all day Yuri was the one tempted to speak. He glanced frequently at his passenger.
There was something about her that was familiar. She had settled herself comfortably with her large hands folded in her lap. Her relaxed, peasantlike features coupled with tiny, twinkling eyes and faintly smiling lips radiated an inner tranquillity.
'Are you Estonian? ' Yuri finally asked.
'I am, ' the woman said. 'Are you Russian? ' Yuri nodded and watched the woman's reaction. After years of occupation, there was a strong anti-Russian sentiment in Estonia. Yuri's feelings about Estonia weren't as negative as he feared this woman's might be about Russia.
Although he'd had difficulties there during his odyssey to America, he'd also met some friendly, generous, and helpful people.
'How long have you been here? ' the woman asked. Her voice was devoid of malice.
'Since 1994, ' Yuri said.
'Did you leave your motherland with your whole family? '
'No, ' Yuri managed. His throat had gone dry. 'I came by myself.'
'That must have been very difficult, ' the woman said empathe ically.
'And very lonely.' The woman's simple question and her reaction to Yuri's answer unleashed a flood of emotion in Yuri, including a strong sense of shame at having abandoned his family, although there'd been very little to leave behind. The tosta he'd struggled with earlier returned with a vengeance.
At the same time he realized why the woman looked familiar. She reminded Yuri of his own mother, even though their features were not at all similar. It was less the woman's appearance than her bearing, particularly her powerful serenity, that made Yuri think of his mother.
Yuri did not think often about her. It was much too painful. Nadya Davydov had loved Yuri and his younger brother Yegor and, to the best of her abilities, had protected her sons from the brutal beatings their father, Anatoly, gave them at the slightest provocation. Yuri still had scars on the back of his legs from a beating he got when he was eleven.
He was in the fourth grade at the time and had been recently inducted into the Young Pioneers. Part of the uniform was a red scoutlike tie worn with a red flag pin containing a tiny portrait of Lenin. Somehow Yuri had lost the pin on the way home from school, and when Anatoly found out about it that night, he went berserk. In a drunken stupor induced by his consumption of nearly a liter of vodka, he'd beaten Yuri until Yuri's pants were clotted with blood.
For the most part Nadya had been able to divert Anatoly's nightly drunken bursts of violence onto herself. The usual scenario was for Nadya stoically to withstand a few blows along with Anatoly's barbed ranting. Then she would stand defiantly between her husband and her children, sometimes with blood streaming down her face. Anatoly would continue to swear at her and threaten more blows. When she wouldn't move or even speak, he'd shake his fists at his kids and shout that if they ever committed the same transgression that had stimulated his outburst, he'd kill them. He'd then stagger off to pass out on the only couch in the apartment. It was a scene that repeated itself almost nightly until Yuri had reached the eighth grade.
In 1970, on the eve of May 1st, the major Soviet holiday, Anatoly drank more than double his usual quota of vodka. In a particularly foul mood, he chased the rest of his family from the apartment, locked the door, and then passed out. During the night, while Nadya, Yuri, and Yegor slept as best as they could on the benches in the communal kitchen, Anatoly aspirated his own vomit. In the morning he was found cold and stiff with rigor mortis.
It was difficult for the family after Anatoly's death. They were forced to move from their two-room second- floor apartment to a single room on the top floor of their tenement that was freezing cold in the winter and boiling hot in the summer. More problematic was the loss of Ana toly's income, although that difficulty was partially offset by significantly less expense for vodka.
Luckily, the following year Nadya received a promotion at the ceramics factory there she'd been employed since her graduation from vocational school. That meant that Yuri could stay in school through the tenth grade.
Unfortunately, Yuri developed into a withdrawn and belligerent teenager who got into frequent fights in response to teasing by fellow classmates.
As a consequence, his studies suffered. His final grades and test scores were not sufficient for the university where his mother had hoped he'd go. Instead, he enrolled in the local vocational college and studied to become a microbiological technician. He'd been advised there was a burgeoning demand for the field, especially in Sverdlovsk.
Conveniently for Yuri, the government had built a large pharmaccutical factory to produce vaccines for human and animal use.
'Have you been home to Russia since coming to America? ' the Estonian woman asked after they'd ridden for several blocks in silence.
'Not yet, ' Yuri said. He perked up at the thought of his imminent return. In fact he already had an open ticket to Moscow via Frankfurt and departing from Newark Airport. He'd chosen Newark since it was located to the west and south of Manhattan. He was planning on leaving the moment he finished the laydown of the bio-weapon in Central Park, and he didn't want to risk going east to JFK Airport. The wind invariably blew west to east. The last thing he wanted was to be victimized by his own terrorism.
Obtaining the airline ticket had not been without difficulty. Yuri had never been able to obtain a Russian international passport, and although he had an American green card from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, he still didn't have an American passport. At least not an authentic one. Yuri had had to pay to have a fake passport made. But it didn't have to be a particularly good one, since all he intended to use it for was to buy the airline ticket. As a patriot, he was confident he'd have no trouble getting into Russia without proper documents, and he certainly didn't intend to return to the United States.
'My husband and I went back to Estonia last year, ' the woman said.
'It was wonderful. Good things are happening in the Baltics. We might even eventually return to live in our hometown.'
'America is not the heaven it wants the world to believe it is, ' Yuri said.
'People must work very hard here, ' the woman concurred. 'And you must be careful. There are many thieves who want to take your money, like investment people and people wanting to sell you swampland in Florida.
' Yuri nodded in agreement, although to him the real thief was what Curt Rogers called the Zionist Occupied Government. It wasn't only in a metaphorical sense relating to the American Dream hoax, it was also quite literal.
