Liberty

The 1990s are behind us. Gaidar’s shock therapy, the first hard currency exchange points, the first trade kiosks—all of this already seems a distant memory. Ten years ago, Russians were like trusting kittens, thrown into the deep waves of wild capitalism. Some kittens swam to the surface and became sharks of business. Others—most, in fact—drowned, their dead bodies a pontoon bridge paving the way for future generations. Or so we were led to believe …

The tumultuous late 1980s and early 1990s is the subject of Mikhail Butov’s novel Svoboda (“Liberty”)—see profile, page 33. Butov looks back on an era dominated by the infectious excitement of new freedoms—with a sympathetic, yet concerned, eye. It is the eye of a 30- or 40-something, Soviet-born intellectual, one who was never happy under the Soviet regime, with all of its socio-economic constraints and political austerity, but one who was also caught off-guard by the crude and savage realities of the free market. Butov’s generation was both the last Soviet generation and the first generation of the new Russia: they had stolen their first kiss under Leonid Brezhnev, bought their first samizdat book (now legal) under Mikhail Gorbachev and got married and began raising kids under Boris Yeltsin.

This excerpt from Svoboda represents the final pages of the Booker Prize-winning novel. The protagonist, a computer programmer, recounts a bender with his long-time friend “Andryukha” (colloquial for Andrei) and then segues into some serendipitous events that occurred when he was apartment sitting for an adventurer friend who has gone off to explore distant lands.

Butov’s style is conversational—as if the protagonist is retelling his story late at night, over a kitchen table littered with sticky shot glasses and half-empty plates of zakuski. The result is a finely-layered snapshot of the texture of life in Russia in the 1990s.

— The Editors

We found the night window at the store near Tishinskaya market boarded up—the sales point had been abolished. Trade was still going on in the Krasnaya Presnaya area, but when Andryukha put a $10 note on the counter, the saleslady gave a quiet nod in the direction of two patrolmen who were passing a one liter pack of kefir* back and forth near the broken coffee/expresso machines—forbidden. Andryukha established that we had no reason to be desperate. Private kiosks now lined the Arbat and were filled with all kinds of things—at least one of them will be open at night. But shopping there is extremely expensive, so we’ll flog a few greenbacks and return here on the way home.

The appearance of unexpected guests—and money—pumped up my adrenaline: I had already forgotten about being tired, and was even enjoying this nighttime promenade—all the more so since Andryukha was not annoying me with his talking. I wasn’t even upset when it turned out we had gone to the Arbat in vain: we combed the street from end to end—the kiosks were all shuttered and idle. Andryukha put forward the hypothesis of the Smolensky grocery store—it was conceivable they would have a 24-hour section there. We didn’t meet anyone on our way. In some places, only every second streetlamp was lit and, in some places—none at all; in a dark spot, I tripped over a paving stone taken out of the road and badly hurt my knee. I hobbled up to the nearest kiosk—to lean on something while the pain subsided. Suddenly someone asked me for matches.

There, sitting on a thimble-shaped plastic pedestal from the café, swinging the half-open door of the kiosk with his foot, a meaty-lipped guy flicked his empty lighter.

Andryukha threw him a box of matches.

“Watching over the kiosk, are you? Keep ‘em …”

The guy thanked us, for otherwise, he said, he would have languished there until morning without a smoke.

“That’s lousy,” nodded Andryukha.

“And, on top of that, the candle in the kiosk went out.”

No, he was not interested in buying dollars. But then he was not against talking and killing time. In order to keep us from leaving, he offered us each a can of beer. Then he and Andryukha struck up a debate about different brands of canned beer. I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut, for, when it came to canned beer (excluding the cans used for drinking in old pivnayas, when glass mugs were in deficit), I had only once sampled our domestic “Golden Ring,” during the 1980 Olympics.

After the Tuborg, with its picture of a fat guy rubbing his bald spot, we took down some weaker Dutch beer for comparison. Andryukha concluded that, without question, all of this stuff was not bad, but hardly top of the line. Indeed, nobody pours premium beer into cans, only into glass. And then he listed some brands. The guy wondered whether we were Muscovites and what we were up to. I was flustered, almost like Jim Morrison (a famous episode, shot in the London airport).

“We’re hanging about,” Andryukha answered meaningfully, “here and there, with mixed success.”

In short, you won’t impress us with beer. The guy disappeared into the kiosk then came out with a weighty bottle of Smirnoff vodka. We squatted on the curb around the pedestal, with the candle in the middle, reflecting off the ubiquitous plastic glasses—this time blue. It was quite cozy. The guy said he was born in Udmurtiya, and that he came to Moscow after the army. The kiosk belonged to his Caucasian comrades-in-arms.

They were true buddies—everything that was theirs, he was free to use as if it were his own. To make the point stronger, he displayed a bottle of Armenian cognac in a nice cardboard gift box. While he was busy looking for that box, lighting his way with a match, I had spied many different items in the kiosk, including a student’s telescope on a tripod.

“Stop,” Andryukha announced. “We simply cannot take it straight. It’s been a hard day. We want to have something to munch on.”

In no time, a tin of canned crabs appeared—anything can be had in the country of wonders. But even with this snack worthy of a tsar, I could not drink any more. Yet, to get up and say goodbye would be awkward, and I didn’t want to offend our guy. So I whispered to Andryukha, “You take mine.”

“Are you gonna carry me home then?”

“Well, I’ll try.”

The guy was making toasts. To you and me and to hell with them. To the goat which I have the possibility—but no desire—to buy. Then his quantitative changes abruptly turned qualitative. The brakes were off—his good nature was spreading its wings. He pushed on us a pack of each cigarette brand on sale in the kiosk. When I carelessly asked how much the telescope was, he leapt up to give it to me. Of course, I didn’t take it—a fact I recall with sadness even today. Nevertheless, he took the telescope from out of the kiosk and pointed it at some of the few windows in distant buildings, in the hope of peeping at you know what (but he only succeeded—thanks to the boring logic of geometrical optics—in seeing some fragments of chandeliers, a carpet or a framed still life …) He treated us to caviar from those glass jars—but we still had to figure out how to cope with it. We tried to get the eggs out with the blade of Andryukha’s knife, but without any success. Then we had the better idea of scooping it up with chocolate wafers. The caviar had been on the shelf too long—it had a musty taste.

Our host “switched off” after throwing down a half-glass of almond liqueur, though Andryukha tried to dissuade him. A minute later, he slipped down the wall, twisted up like a screw on the pavement and shut his lids. We dragged him by his arms and legs into the kiosk and put two “tens” into his shirt pocket—just in case his Caucasian brothers presented him with a bill. We propped the pedestal against the kiosk door from the outside.

At first, Andryukha was still strong, but then he too went foggy, unable to climb the stairs leading up through the arch and onto the avenue. We sat for a spell. He lost his glasses, then blundered when he tried to pick them up, gravely mumbling something to himself. It looked like we would have to hang out here for the three hours until dawn, so that Andryukha could more or less come to his senses. I had already dozed off when he suddenly stopped mumbling and stunned me with a rather meaningful question:

“You think we will die too?”

“Right now?” I quipped.

A warm evening, a tense silence uncharacteristic for the heart of the city, even in the middle of the night, a bird that fell asleep on the handrail. For the most part, I may be simply inventing the right ambiance—but from this distance, it is hard to tell the difference between memory and fantasy.

“If we don’t die now, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then in old age.” He was making an effort to speak distinctly, articulating like an alien in a bad science fiction movie. “What difference does it make anyway? All the same, I don’t understand what it all means …”

Always primed for drunken speeches, I replied jokingly: “Maybe it is not worth staying for too long on this Earth, otherwise nothing around us will be preserved.” ….

Those times are gone and I don’t regret their passing. Ever since a child of my own making smiled at me, I have known that you can love different things in different ways. So now I am looking for safe havens, should another red wave roll over our country—and beyond.

They say the turn of the millennium promises great changes: they are already in the offing. The new truths seem to be beyond words; the word is giving way to the language of images; the ideas which my friend used to pursue alone and impassioned on the white fields of the Antarctic have long since become common themes in salons and parties. They say there is the logic of a plague in all of this.

I am philosophizing just like an old woman who keeps losing and then finding things: her glasses, her set of keys. But I am ready to concede that my own life, if I put it bombastically, has rarely been marked by well-formed ideas or great accomplishments, but rather by landscapes, pictures and staging … I began this narration as a chain of amusing stories. I didn’t expect it to spread, to turn into a farewell to my youth.

In mid-May, when, by all counts, the return of the apartment owner—together with his girlfriend, a true polar beard and a stuffed penguin under his arm—-was to be expected any day, I received my first honorarium for computer work, though I was far from being on a first name basis with the equipment of the future. Still in need of advice, I bothered this or that acquaintance who knew anything related to these things. When someone would invite me over, I wasn’t picky. I was now living in the open, to the extent it was even possible with three mandatory working days: I would go to work at nine at night and return home at lunch time, so as to avoid the morning rush hour on public transport.

I was also lucky in finding a place to move to. Each spring I would visit an aging relative at her dacha in Nemchinovka village, not far from Moscow. She stayed there year-round, since she was never seriously sick and the house was warm. She had long since left her Moscow apartment to her not-so-young single daughter. En route to Nemchinovka for the May holidays, I decided to inquire with the daughter whether there were any changes and whether I needed to bring along anything in addition to the cake and flowers. But I learned that this winter the old woman had moved back to Moscow—her health no longer allowed her to be far from pharmacies or her special institutional polyclinic.

I was invited over for homemade pies. I liked their place—lamps with lampshades, weighty old books and gleaming porcelain. I could finally engage in a little small talk—the kind of conversation you have with good fellow travelers in a train, those lovely people you will never see again. I talked about myself. I explained that a computer was not a robotic-killer, but rather more like a TV set. I also mentioned in passing that I urgently had to find a new place to live. And then they began discussing between themselves—I could occupy their now-empty dacha. They feared leaving it for long periods without someone to keep an eye on it. For now, I would have the whole house to myself; then, if by summer they ventured to rent it out to some family of the intelligentsia with small children, then I could watch over it from the spacious attic, which had a separate entrance. Of course, I said yes.

I should not have delayed the move to the dacha, but then I let things drag on, as I was still hoping not to have to move out of the apartment—waiting for God knows what …

So one day I got a call from the cousin of the apartment owner. She had arrived in Moscow from Riga. She was quite surprised to find out about her brother’s trip. It was not that she didn’t have any relations with her relatives, but just that during these five months the news somehow never reached her. I offered that, as long as my company did not bother her, she could stay here in the apartment just as before.

We had become friends a year ago: she was working as an archives editor at Riga Radio and had been sent on business to Moscow. In the afternoon, she would dig through the archives’ films; in the evenings the three of us would go visit something: rowdy theater performances or live piano accompaniments of Die Niebelungen or Doctor Mabuse at the Cinema Museum. Or we would just take a riverboat ride on the river. I had squeezed into the sequence of cultural events a low-key birthday party. Other than her and her brother, I talked a former institute buddy into coming over for something to eat and drink—we had met the night before at the theater. He was not such a sociable guy, yet he was interesting enough, if only because he was the only one of my institute friends whose true vocation was to be an engineer—he kept slaving away at the institute, not tempted by fine arts, by the now-permissible commerce, nor by the positions and salaries offered in the new firms. He and the girl from Riga clearly fell for each other. Yet the engineer—the lout—didn’t even ask her out! But then, later, each of them began to ask me about the other …

In general, I am indifferent to the happiness of others. Yet I do have a taste for coincidences. She had called just two hours before the engineer and I were to get together—he had copied some desktop publishing manuals for me. I had a hard time catching him at work, as I was referred from one telephone to another. In the room where he picked up the phone, something was peeping over and over desperately—like a wounded mouse.

I told him who was going to come today.

“Can I come then?” he asked.

I gave the address.

“What does your place look like? Like a den?”

“Why like a den?” I said in a vexed tone. “It’s quite a decent place. True, the faucet leaks. I replaced the gasket, but it didn’t help.”

Of course, I knew that my institute mate was a born handyman. But I didn’t foresee that he would rush over with a set of tools and an electric drill and, in a fury, bore out the valves of the faucet with something that looked like an instrument of torture. He even fixed the flush of the toilet. The muse from the Baltics found him on his knees with screwdriver in hand, kneeling before a sparking electrical outlet.

We were graced by an unforgettable night. We truly enjoyed ourselves. The engineer was at his best, miming a trigger with a multivibrator and play-acting funny scenes from three generations of the life in his somewhat odd family. We reminisced about our institute days, about the eccentricities of our teachers; she talked about Tartu University, which she quit in her second year. We drank in moderation.

Close to morning, it suddenly occurred to me that it was time for me to leave the two of them alone. I said I was going for a walk to buy some instant coffee for breakfast. It is all so convenient now—at least a dozen night kiosks had opened on the square by the railway station. I walked through the courtyards; dawn was breaking. On the benches around the little square, in twos and threes, having tucked their shoes under their heads so as to show off the holes in their socks to the world, slept the people who came to sell things at the local tolkuchka,* near the railway station, at Tishinsky market, or on the nearby streets. They smacked their lips in their sleep and groped their loads: bags, bundles, sacks.

At the kiosk, I got a box of coffee and a can of Yugoslavian ham. For myself, I picked up a chekushka**—to have something to sit with in the kitchen after my two lovers fell asleep.

It began to drizzle—it was just about the first rain this spring, and threatened to turn into a rainstorm (like a newly-born grass snake, which, so as to scare curious boys, jumps about and spreads his mouth wide open, pretending to be a viper)—yet in five minutes the rain stopped. I feared arriving back too early, so I made some detours on my way back. The heavy can of ham weighed down my pocket and banged against my liver. I took a smoke in a sandbox, then had a go on the children’s swing. I arrived home from the rear, skirting the small asphalt road and walking right under the windows.

Someone called out from behind:

“Hey, you!”

From the corner window, disheveled and in a t-shirt, my dollar-rich neighbor was bent out over the window sill.

“I see you are pacing.” He rolled his fingers around his ear. “Thinking thoughts which won’t leave you alone?”

“Am I annoying you or something?”

“How can you annoy me? More like the opposite.”

He disappeared for a moment, then reemerged and showed me a brand new, narrow bottle of White Stork cognac. “Wanna join me?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“With pleasure. Open the door.”

“No, wait. My wife is sleeping in the next room. She is high-strung. If she hears the lock, she will wake up.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Let’s forget it then …”

“Do you see the pipe?”

A piece of cast iron pipe leaned against the wall at just the right place. In all likelihood, the neighbor had already put it to good use today. I chuckled, pulled up my pants, and climbed up.

The kitchen looked just like mine, just a bit cleaner and with a more modern refrigerator. The wallpaper was tiled. On the refrigerator, a double-cassette tape player quietly voiced Deep Purple. The neighbor put the dirty dishes in the sink. He dumped out a glass with some red wine into a pot, just under the root of a waxy-leaved tree. Then he searched around in the little cupboard and pulled out for me a large mug without a handle.

“I haven’t any small glasses. They are in the next room too ... This OK?”

I put the ham on the table.

“Do you,” he asked while turning his can opener, “need an apartment by chance?”

“Well, yes. What do you mean?”

“Buy mine.”

I burst into laughter.

“Understood,” the neighbor said. “OK, down the hatch.”

We downed them. And snacked. And he became very talkative.

“We got an answer from the embassy yesterday morning. It’s done—a positive conclusion. So it goes. No later than August we will flit …”

“To America?”

“Yeah, sure! America will let you in, just wait and see! First we tried Germany—pointless. What’s left for the Russian? Palestine …”

“Your questionnaire allows this?”

“My wife’s does. She has relatives in Haifa. They have a store, selling office stuff. Sic transit gloria mundi—I will sell erasers. Just imagine: she is Jewish enough to live in Israel, but not enough to live in Germany! Hitler is spinning in his grave!

He poured some water from the teapot into his glass.

“Our child has allergies. It’s not likely he would be able to go to the local school here. If he smells paint or inhales dust, it gets difficult for him to breathe.  Plus, he has a hard time pronouncing the ‘r’. The other kids will harass him! And he is not capable of rebuffing them—-he gets a spasm, gets scared, panics and almost faints ... The wife says we must provide him with a normal environment and health care. We must know that he is safe. She says she is tired of thinking that there will come a time when she will not be able to protect him … How old are you?”

I told him.

“Me, I am almost forty. I had a business when this word was unheard of here. And I never went to jail. Which means I have a flair for it. I’ll tell you something ...” And then he suddenly leaned on the table with all his weight, betraying the significant quantities of liquor he had drunk before I came, though he still looked quite fit. “I’ll tell you what: she is right. All this fussing about, democracy, the collapse of the system—it’s a bunch of hooey! If anything has changed, it is only on the surface. In this country, too many people still don’t question—they never did—their right to climb up on your back and drive you about like cattle. No one has touched them. And if they do, then it’s no big deal—the Earth will bring forth new ones. Just wait—They will drag us all into another mess.

I confessed I had no interest in comparing the different political forces or their conflicts. Quite naturally, some are preferable, others inadmissible; I might even join one group because of what it is against. But then I could not consider their goals mine. For I don’t believe in universal solutions. And thus, behind all their words there is nothing, just a void. In my opinion, each of us has his own space ahead of him, his own time, his own huge field to cross, with sacrifices to make and things to leave behind along the way. And what that all is specifically, one has to decide anew each time. This is just what it is all about …

But then we are in different categories: he has someone to care for, to be responsible for. As for me, I’m invulnerable; fire doesn’t scare the poor man.

If his prognosis comes to pass, I will just wait and see, and somehow get away.

“Child’s talk.” He reached for the cognac. “A man always has something that can be taken away from him. They may need you to be working with a pick and shovel. Or to take up arms.”

The corridor was behind me, so I didn’t see the woman enter, dressed in a robe decorated with dragons, covering a light-blue nightgown. She turned the volume on the tape recorder all the way down, took a tube of cream from the refrigerator and squeezed some cream into her palm. She said firmly, but without irritation:

“Six o’clock. Take off.”

“Through the window?”

“Through the door.”

I got up. She looked younger than her husband. Her cheek still showed the crease from her pillow. The neighbor threw up his hands:

“I won’t mix it up with her now, OK? Take the bottle if you like …”

I turned the key in the lock as carefully as a thief. But my discretion was pointless: the engineer and the archivist were spending their time differently than I had supposed. In a half-dark room, having unexpectedly found some three-fourth’s time music on the radio, they were waltzing, enchanted, smiling at each other. They didn’t see me. Nor did they see another pair of eyes watching them with languor and delight through the loosely closed curtains. Stretching her chicken-neck upward, hanging on to the zinc windowsill, her face pressed against the other side of the window glass, was the crazy janitor’s daughter.  RL