August 1, 1993
Sunday
7:40 AM
Zhorik woke me at the crack of dawn, bursting into the room like an infantry sergeant into the barracks:
– Company, up! It’s the first of the month.
– So what?
– Who’s going to pay the rent? Pushkin? We’re heading to the landlords with the rent money. And while we’re at it, we’ll get a whiff of what they’re breathing.
The drive was short, about an hour. The mansion beyond Kalchuga, which we pulled up to in the Bucephalus, was impressive: a sanatorium for high officials! But no — the house was occupied by a young playboy and a quiet old woman.
Zhorik told me the story of a successful Soviet family on the way there.
The grandfather, an NKVD-MGB veteran, had gotten his son a spot at the Foreign Ministry and then died with a clear conscience.
The son became a father. For two decades he plowed foreign horizons, pulled off some kind of scheme, got hold of a suitcase full of green cash, and left the diplomatic service. He vanished into America for good, never showed his face in Russia again. Every month he’d wire his offspring a grand for everyday expenses. On New Year’s he’d cover status purchases — for instance, a five-year-old Jeep Cherokee bought at auction in New Jersey for a bargain price, with delivery to St. Petersburg via an emigrant and papers processed right there.
And the mother?
The mother, back in the post-Brezhnev, pre-Gorbachev days, had a falling-out with her tattletale mother-in-law and took off for Paris to be with a lover. There she opened a boutique and sent her son a monthly stipend of a couple thousand francs to blow through.
The son wasn’t one to miss his chance either. Three years back he’d gone off to study at Harvard. He came back a year ago. Better to burn through life as a playboy in Moscow than gnaw at the granite of science in Massachusetts.
The hard currency his parents sent went straight down to zero on drinking, partying, and whores. What was left over for regular life was the rent from the apartment.
Zhorik shared this story of a successful Soviet family, from the ascetic commissar grandfather to the good-for-nothing sybarite of a grandson, first along Kutuzovsky Prospekt, then along the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye highway. I got to thinking: how would I feel if my own grandfather had been a red executioner, a pithecanthropus with hands bloody to the elbow, and my father a diplomat and smuggler? How would I feel about a fat, comfortable life handed to me by right of birth?
Simple enough! I wouldn’t have racked my brains over the squeaking from below. I’d have taken the windfall as harsh reality, richly deserved on my own merits, because I was born where I needed to be born. Full stop!
Eat your heart out, losers. Exclamation point!
Then again, it’s not my style.
I wouldn’t have come back to Russia — I’d have stayed a student in Massachusetts, but not at Harvard. MIT — now that’s the real deal, almost like MIFI!
Zhorik left me in the car, went off… came back. Sat down behind the wheel, furious, seething:
– Robik’s gotten too comfortable. Need to sort this out.
– Who’s gotten comfortable?
– Robert, the landlord. A month’s gone by and now he wants six hundred a month. Either he spotted the Bucephalus through the window, or the neighbors squealed that we did renovations and brought in furniture.
– What do we do?
– Same as always. Dekulakize him and put him out in the cold! Let’s go to the Terem.
